My dear boy, "organic" was a word before chemistry even existed, let alone organic chemistry.
Anyway, in chemistry there are well-defined inorganic carbon compounds - as a non-chemist, I'd suggest organic compound = contains C + H, not just C, but a chemist will probably give me a better definition. Consider CaCO3. If you had graduated high school, you would know this.
Words are overloaded with meaning distinguishable from context. Welcome to human communication. Or C++. It's not that hard.
the idea that there is a gigantic pool of people qualified to catch backdoors in something as relatively simple as a web browser-- let alone an OS-- is absurd.
I think you're one of those stupid libertarians, so it'll be hard to argue with you as you assume everyone works only for money despite all evidence to the contrary. But there are lots of new eyes on Linux and the BSDs either as contributors or interested students, and they will be "qualified" to catch backdoors of varying subtlety. Indeed, various universities and government organisations and corporate and unaffiliated contributors report on potential problems in Linux all the time - even if you were to remove all the "altruistic" people you'd still have kernel developers employed by Red Hat etc. doing this job. So you have everything you get from closed source and more.
Just because you can look at the source doesnt mean you can do a remotely competent job of auditing it;
Duh really? There was me thinking everyone was equally competent or incompetent.
the idea that a single person could somehow audit hundreds of thousands of lines of code for security "on a whim" is even more absurd.
Indeed - this is one reason why closed source is never going to be as secure. The other is the need to trust a corporation when it says "yup, checked as secure and no backdoors added".
So I suppose the whole potential IPSEC backdoor in freeBSD [marc.info] thing was just my imagination, then?
That's it? A single allegation from 13 years ago? Seems like open source is doing really well, then.
Consider that OpenSSL is widely considered a horrendously complex pile of spaghetti code, which I believe has had its share of security issues, and yet we still use it. Is it because we're lazy? No, its because sometimes some of this security stuff is phenomenally complicated, and it would take a horrendous number of man-hours from incredibly talented people to refactor or replace it.
Indeed. Thank goodness it's audited from time to time and random people find bugs.
One of the benefits of paid software is that, if theyre competent, they can devote a lot of time to it because they are paid.
Highly competent people have enough time to earn a lot of money doing very little, and this gives them sufficient free time to code. But the less competent certainly benefit from having the opportunity to code during the day, no doubt. In this there is no difference between Linux as GPL software and Windows as closed source software, though.
Im gonna go out on a limb here and say that one of the biggest helpers to good code in a lot of OSS projects are the paid volunteers,
They are of course of benefit.
not the mere fact that its "open" as if that dash of pixie dust makes a project magically better.
"mere" "pixie dust" "magic" Your rhetorical skills are poor. Language like this doesn't actually make you more convincing, you know?
Face it: Linux has all the paid-eyes advantages of closed source development and more from being open source.
Yes, but the brightest people won't choose to work at MS. Well, they might, but they'll be in MS research labs, not churning out Windows.
A competitive commercial environment does not gain you the best people - merely the people who thrive in a competitive commercial environment. And the people who just want capitalistic success are up there in finance, not dicking around as code monkeys.
The most intelligent people I knew from school are today either academic researchers or investment bankers. Anything else is compromise.
How many students actually evaluate the source in any detail?
How many of those universities oversee the MS build servers?
I run Windows on some machines, but I assume that anyone with unfettered network access to the machine will be able to obtain whatever's on it. Don't you?
I don't really understand how anyone can care whether a closed source operating system is secure.
No matter how few people actually read through the Linux kernel code, it's sufficiently open that blatant backdoors are not going to be inserted. Why would I assume the same of Windows or (yet worse, because they have some quasi-religious thing going on) OS X?
Look at your links. Concerned about the effects of limited liability is not the same as concern about corporate personhood.
So what else is there about corporate personhood which is of significant concern?
What's the point of bringing up a counterexample that you know is wrong and readily admit in the very same sentence?
Eh? From a system PoV, it's faulty for the same reason that limited liability shareholding is faulty: investors are not being rewarded for choosing a portfolio of net profitable investments. Instead they can invest stupidly knowing that they're not fully responsible for what they own.
Armchair investors don't care because they're not the ones doing the work, and they're not the ones suffering when businessmen have to close businesses and workers lose their jobs because people who owe them money don't have to pay.
Well, name that other country which has people protesting about corporate personhood. As far as I can tell, this is strictly a US affair even though the US is not unusual in how it treats corporations.
You mean "as far as my knowledge reaches". Those on the left (and there are far more of them without the US than within) argue it all the time, but to confirm that it's not just hippies, ultra-conservative groups have been arguing against corporate personhood since forever. The question is sufficiently unsettled that it's a fairly standard question for law students.
t helps lots of people. It helps the people who create or grow businesses. It helps the people who are employed by these businesses. It helps everyone who depends on one of the above or who trades with them. They pay taxes which helps people dependent on those taxes.
So does my holding a gun to rich people's heads and forcing them to give over money for my business ventures - except that it doesn't, because investments are supposed to be wise, not based on arbitrary whim.
The US has been slowly declining for many decades due in large part to its suicidal attitude concerning business.
Indeed. I miss businessmen who knew their business.
Having said this, I'm of the fairly unusual opinion that anyone who subjectively recklessly profits from someone with should be jointly liable. Put another way, if you accept a gain from someone who you think may be misbehaving, you accept the risk of loss too.
Two studies reported significantly lower urinary pesticide levels among children consuming organic versus conventional diets, but studies of biomarker and nutrient levels in serum, urine, breast milk, and semen in adults did not identify clinically meaningful differences. (emph mine)
nutrient levels in serum, urine, breast milk, and semen in adults
I think trying to minimize the damage in less futile ways is a better solution.
Going after mere possession is probably a waste of time, but what about publication? What is a better solution than stopping publication? Sale?
What if someone is offended by someone's speech or behavior?
I think this is why you can't phrase such infractions in terms of "causing offence" but in terms of privacy rights. If you want to make something criminal, you would probably include an element of intent or subjective recklessness, providing various defences. So, on the two extremes, someone trying to publish the public interest (defence) is going to be regarded very differently from someone intending to cause distress. Somewhere in the middle you have those who didn't aim to cause harm but knew they could have caused harm and behaved with no justification.
What if someone feels 'violated' by the images of them circulating around on the Internet?
If you mean ones which involve people acting in public in a way that they later regret, more factors are at work. For example, it could be argued that walking around in public is implied consent to have your photograph taken. Maybe that's not always true, but it's simply not relevant to the case of a photograph taken of a child being abused.
Some types of emotional harm are arbitrarily (no escaping that) regarded as worse than other types of emotional harm, and this is such a case.
In this case it's ongoing harm which can only be caused as a result of an initial crime. That's not arbitrary at all. "Happy slapping" videos would be a less emotionally charged example - perhaps even better, as then the very aim is to spread the video of the assault.
I say it's a futile endeavor, and as we've seen, it is.
No it isn't. I and many people in the UK exercise our Data Protection rights. Are you in an EU country?
Okay. I disagree with them, too. Was there a reason you mentioned a large number of people disagree with me?
Because you may be in a country which doesn't recognise the idea of rights over personally identifiable information. I was helping you by illustrating that there is a large, powerful bloc of nations which successfully and willingly employs laws such as I have described.
I think it's clear that I don't agree with your definition of "harmful."
I expect so. It worries me that your definition may be based on harm to some quasi-religious ideal rather than harm to individuals. To me, there is only one sort of harm that can occur: harm to living beings. There is potential harm, such as that caused by processes which may cause environmental destruction, but that's still not quite harm.
I didn't say that it was. Copyright exists, after all.
Indeed. So does land ownership. It's all about the government arbitrarily protecting what nature couldn't give two hoots about, after all. I think land ownership is slightly more silly than copyright, however - at least man was occasionally involved in the creation of whatever's protected by the latter.
There are NICE guidelines which provide lots of treatment pathways and set standards on what must be available+funded and, on the other end, what cannot be provided without the patient being expected to contribute (though strawmen frequently argue that a socialised health service is unacceptable because it won't pay $1,000,000s/year for treatment which has little or no proven benefit). The guidelines usually provide or admit alternatives, but it's worth noting that there are so many routine conditions where you're fooling yourself if you think medicine provides a selection of equally useful alternatives.
NICE is a bit of an oddity, though. Thatcher tried to break up the health service by getting it competing within itself ("internal market"), creating a postcode lottery with varying opportunities for treatment depending on where you live. The aim was to restore national standards. Lansley's now done a similar divide-and-conquer thing with the Health & Social Care Act, and I am not sure how the NHS will get through that one, but I hope it will. It's not that the Tories hate the NHS so much as that they like to milk it by introducing middlemen everywhere - Lansley himself received generous donations from people who stood to benefit from his "reforms".
Perhaps English is not your first language. Does someone raping your mother "demand" sanctions against the rapist?
Besides, I don't believe that we should try resorting to censorship once it's already out there.
That's just Might Makes Right. You're essentially saying that anyone can publish anything about anyone. The extent to which this is/isn't done will then depend on the relative strengths of the subject and the publisher.
It's a complete and utter waste of time and resources to me.
OK. The democratic representatives of 400 million people, at least, disagree with you, since EU Data Protection law is quite clear that people do have rights over personally identifying data, and many EU countries have laws of varying strengths concerning likeness. And, having stayed in both the UK and the US, I'm very glad in the UK to enjoy the laws.
As to CP, that's obviously dealt with by far harsher laws today. But, if we're going to (rightly) move away from CP = child rape angle, then we must identify what principles continue to apply to CP.
Sure, if someone actually harms you, I believe they should be punished.
What is "actual harm"? The moment you distribute a photo of me at the age of 7 being raped, even after I've asked you not to, you are harming me.
But I don't believe that you have some magical ownership over pictures/videos of yourself that's reason enough to resort to censorship.
It's no less "magical" than any form of ownership. All property is a human social convenience.
No. It's futile.
I figured that much. At least you haven't argued that the copyright in CP belongs to the photographer.
And the word "when" may not be 'just a normal word' to someone; it might be extremely offensive. But that fact that it might be offensive to them or cause them great stress doesn't mean it should be censored.
Not relevant. The word "when" has no characteristics demanding ownership or privacy. Someone's likeness does have characteristics demanding ownership or privacy.
It is not the fact that the person is offended that is relevant, but the fact that a person reasonably has rights over personally identifying information and/or their likeness. They may have voluntarily given up certain rights to their likeness if they are walking around in the street, but they have not given up their right when they are abused against their will (this includes abuse as children).
It's really not that complicated. If I break into your house with a weapon, force you to strip and distribute a photo of you crying while i'm holding a lighter to your floppy dick, other people don't have a right to post fifty foot high posters of this image across the country just to taunt and ridicule you.
It's not "sexual assault" or "making an indecent image" or however the law tries to paint it, but it most certainly is immoral to benefit from such pictures. Do you understand?
Ordinary people, unfortunately, are mostly ignorant self-righteous fools.
Why does everyone think they're smarter than average?
Ordinary people routinely had sex with who we'd now consider as children. Now we panic at the thought of 15 year old butt but salivate when he/she's 16 (in the UK, anyway). Why is that? It's not "self-righteous fool"ishness, it's clever manipulation - just the sort of manipulation which has caused people like you to think that everyone is an idiot and doesn't really deserve the vote anyway.
The problem is not an excess of democracy, but a lack of democracy. More involvement and more responsibility, please.
Also, CP is not "just bits" when you are the girl or boy having your image distributed around the web. Whatever the opinion of possession of CP as "sexual abuse", EU Data Protection laws should absolutely regulate CP in the interests of the subject except perhaps in the unusual case where the adult consents to images of themselves being abused as a child.
Chabenisky is one of those odd fellows who doesn't seem to have done anything at all of any interest yet has ended up very rich. He seems to have repeatedly started up and sold uninteresting firms for a lot of money.
Slashdot Mirror
But.l. but... look at the infection rate in Somalia!
As usual, the free market wins. I'm moving there tomorrow.
It's possible to identify final contributions to the Linux kernel.
So, like I asked, how many at least report to MS on bugs in Windows source?
Yeah, I used to compile my own kernel on my OS X machines. Insufficient, but better than nothing.
My dear boy, "organic" was a word before chemistry even existed, let alone organic chemistry.
Anyway, in chemistry there are well-defined inorganic carbon compounds - as a non-chemist, I'd suggest organic compound = contains C + H, not just C, but a chemist will probably give me a better definition. Consider CaCO3. If you had graduated high school, you would know this.
Words are overloaded with meaning distinguishable from context. Welcome to human communication. Or C++. It's not that hard.
the idea that there is a gigantic pool of people qualified to catch backdoors in something as relatively simple as a web browser-- let alone an OS-- is absurd.
I think you're one of those stupid libertarians, so it'll be hard to argue with you as you assume everyone works only for money despite all evidence to the contrary. But there are lots of new eyes on Linux and the BSDs either as contributors or interested students, and they will be "qualified" to catch backdoors of varying subtlety. Indeed, various universities and government organisations and corporate and unaffiliated contributors report on potential problems in Linux all the time - even if you were to remove all the "altruistic" people you'd still have kernel developers employed by Red Hat etc. doing this job. So you have everything you get from closed source and more.
Just because you can look at the source doesnt mean you can do a remotely competent job of auditing it;
Duh really? There was me thinking everyone was equally competent or incompetent.
the idea that a single person could somehow audit hundreds of thousands of lines of code for security "on a whim" is even more absurd.
Indeed - this is one reason why closed source is never going to be as secure. The other is the need to trust a corporation when it says "yup, checked as secure and no backdoors added".
So I suppose the whole potential IPSEC backdoor in freeBSD [marc.info] thing was just my imagination, then?
That's it? A single allegation from 13 years ago? Seems like open source is doing really well, then.
Consider that OpenSSL is widely considered a horrendously complex pile of spaghetti code, which I believe has had its share of security issues, and yet we still use it. Is it because we're lazy? No, its because sometimes some of this security stuff is phenomenally complicated, and it would take a horrendous number of man-hours from incredibly talented people to refactor or replace it.
Indeed. Thank goodness it's audited from time to time and random people find bugs.
One of the benefits of paid software is that, if theyre competent, they can devote a lot of time to it because they are paid.
Highly competent people have enough time to earn a lot of money doing very little, and this gives them sufficient free time to code. But the less competent certainly benefit from having the opportunity to code during the day, no doubt. In this there is no difference between Linux as GPL software and Windows as closed source software, though.
Im gonna go out on a limb here and say that one of the biggest helpers to good code in a lot of OSS projects are the paid volunteers,
They are of course of benefit.
not the mere fact that its "open" as if that dash of pixie dust makes a project magically better.
"mere" "pixie dust" "magic" Your rhetorical skills are poor. Language like this doesn't actually make you more convincing, you know?
Face it: Linux has all the paid-eyes advantages of closed source development and more from being open source.
Yes, but the brightest people won't choose to work at MS. Well, they might, but they'll be in MS research labs, not churning out Windows.
A competitive commercial environment does not gain you the best people - merely the people who thrive in a competitive commercial environment. And the people who just want capitalistic success are up there in finance, not dicking around as code monkeys.
The most intelligent people I knew from school are today either academic researchers or investment bankers. Anything else is compromise.
thousands
You sure?
How many students actually evaluate the source in any detail?
How many of those universities oversee the MS build servers?
I run Windows on some machines, but I assume that anyone with unfettered network access to the machine will be able to obtain whatever's on it. Don't you?
I don't really understand how anyone can care whether a closed source operating system is secure.
No matter how few people actually read through the Linux kernel code, it's sufficiently open that blatant backdoors are not going to be inserted. Why would I assume the same of Windows or (yet worse, because they have some quasi-religious thing going on) OS X?
This is you, you laughable throwback.
Look at your links. Concerned about the effects of limited liability is not the same as concern about corporate personhood.
So what else is there about corporate personhood which is of significant concern?
What's the point of bringing up a counterexample that you know is wrong and readily admit in the very same sentence?
Eh? From a system PoV, it's faulty for the same reason that limited liability shareholding is faulty: investors are not being rewarded for choosing a portfolio of net profitable investments. Instead they can invest stupidly knowing that they're not fully responsible for what they own.
Armchair investors don't care because they're not the ones doing the work, and they're not the ones suffering when businessmen have to close businesses and workers lose their jobs because people who owe them money don't have to pay.
Well, name that other country which has people protesting about corporate personhood. As far as I can tell, this is strictly a US affair even though the US is not unusual in how it treats corporations.
You mean "as far as my knowledge reaches". Those on the left (and there are far more of them without the US than within) argue it all the time, but to confirm that it's not just hippies, ultra-conservative groups have been arguing against corporate personhood since forever. The question is sufficiently unsettled that it's a fairly standard question for law students.
t helps lots of people. It helps the people who create or grow businesses. It helps the people who are employed by these businesses. It helps everyone who depends on one of the above or who trades with them. They pay taxes which helps people dependent on those taxes.
So does my holding a gun to rich people's heads and forcing them to give over money for my business ventures - except that it doesn't, because investments are supposed to be wise, not based on arbitrary whim.
The US has been slowly declining for many decades due in large part to its suicidal attitude concerning business.
Indeed. I miss businessmen who knew their business.
You spelled "freedom fighter" wrongly.
Almost all enabling crimes require intent.
Having said this, I'm of the fairly unusual opinion that anyone who subjectively recklessly profits from someone with should be jointly liable. Put another way, if you accept a gain from someone who you think may be misbehaving, you accept the risk of loss too.
This is how Daily Mail readers really think.
Two studies reported significantly lower urinary pesticide levels among children consuming organic versus conventional diets, but studies of biomarker and nutrient levels in serum, urine, breast milk, and semen in adults did not identify clinically meaningful differences. (emph mine)
nutrient levels in serum, urine, breast milk, and semen in adults
And I thought my diet was non-conventional...
Fresh subtropical minibananas - south of Spain - are fucking marvellous.
I think trying to minimize the damage in less futile ways is a better solution.
Going after mere possession is probably a waste of time, but what about publication? What is a better solution than stopping publication? Sale?
What if someone is offended by someone's speech or behavior?
I think this is why you can't phrase such infractions in terms of "causing offence" but in terms of privacy rights. If you want to make something criminal, you would probably include an element of intent or subjective recklessness, providing various defences. So, on the two extremes, someone trying to publish the public interest (defence) is going to be regarded very differently from someone intending to cause distress. Somewhere in the middle you have those who didn't aim to cause harm but knew they could have caused harm and behaved with no justification.
What if someone feels 'violated' by the images of them circulating around on the Internet?
If you mean ones which involve people acting in public in a way that they later regret, more factors are at work. For example, it could be argued that walking around in public is implied consent to have your photograph taken. Maybe that's not always true, but it's simply not relevant to the case of a photograph taken of a child being abused.
Some types of emotional harm are arbitrarily (no escaping that) regarded as worse than other types of emotional harm, and this is such a case.
In this case it's ongoing harm which can only be caused as a result of an initial crime. That's not arbitrary at all. "Happy slapping" videos would be a less emotionally charged example - perhaps even better, as then the very aim is to spread the video of the assault.
I say it's a futile endeavor, and as we've seen, it is.
No it isn't. I and many people in the UK exercise our Data Protection rights. Are you in an EU country?
Okay. I disagree with them, too. Was there a reason you mentioned a large number of people disagree with me?
Because you may be in a country which doesn't recognise the idea of rights over personally identifiable information. I was helping you by illustrating that there is a large, powerful bloc of nations which successfully and willingly employs laws such as I have described.
I think it's clear that I don't agree with your definition of "harmful."
I expect so. It worries me that your definition may be based on harm to some quasi-religious ideal rather than harm to individuals. To me, there is only one sort of harm that can occur: harm to living beings. There is potential harm, such as that caused by processes which may cause environmental destruction, but that's still not quite harm.
I didn't say that it was. Copyright exists, after all.
Indeed. So does land ownership. It's all about the government arbitrarily protecting what nature couldn't give two hoots about, after all. I think land ownership is slightly more silly than copyright, however - at least man was occasionally involved in the creation of whatever's protected by the latter.
There are NICE guidelines which provide lots of treatment pathways and set standards on what must be available+funded and, on the other end, what cannot be provided without the patient being expected to contribute (though strawmen frequently argue that a socialised health service is unacceptable because it won't pay $1,000,000s/year for treatment which has little or no proven benefit). The guidelines usually provide or admit alternatives, but it's worth noting that there are so many routine conditions where you're fooling yourself if you think medicine provides a selection of equally useful alternatives.
NICE is a bit of an oddity, though. Thatcher tried to break up the health service by getting it competing within itself ("internal market"), creating a postcode lottery with varying opportunities for treatment depending on where you live. The aim was to restore national standards. Lansley's now done a similar divide-and-conquer thing with the Health & Social Care Act, and I am not sure how the NHS will get through that one, but I hope it will. It's not that the Tories hate the NHS so much as that they like to milk it by introducing middlemen everywhere - Lansley himself received generous donations from people who stood to benefit from his "reforms".
There's nothing demanding anything.
Perhaps English is not your first language. Does someone raping your mother "demand" sanctions against the rapist?
Besides, I don't believe that we should try resorting to censorship once it's already out there.
That's just Might Makes Right. You're essentially saying that anyone can publish anything about anyone. The extent to which this is/isn't done will then depend on the relative strengths of the subject and the publisher.
It's a complete and utter waste of time and resources to me.
OK. The democratic representatives of 400 million people, at least, disagree with you, since EU Data Protection law is quite clear that people do have rights over personally identifying data, and many EU countries have laws of varying strengths concerning likeness. And, having stayed in both the UK and the US, I'm very glad in the UK to enjoy the laws.
As to CP, that's obviously dealt with by far harsher laws today. But, if we're going to (rightly) move away from CP = child rape angle, then we must identify what principles continue to apply to CP.
Sure, if someone actually harms you, I believe they should be punished.
What is "actual harm"? The moment you distribute a photo of me at the age of 7 being raped, even after I've asked you not to, you are harming me.
But I don't believe that you have some magical ownership over pictures/videos of yourself that's reason enough to resort to censorship.
It's no less "magical" than any form of ownership. All property is a human social convenience.
No. It's futile.
I figured that much. At least you haven't argued that the copyright in CP belongs to the photographer.
And the word "when" may not be 'just a normal word' to someone; it might be extremely offensive. But that fact that it might be offensive to them or cause them great stress doesn't mean it should be censored.
Not relevant. The word "when" has no characteristics demanding ownership or privacy. Someone's likeness does have characteristics demanding ownership or privacy.
It is not the fact that the person is offended that is relevant, but the fact that a person reasonably has rights over personally identifying information and/or their likeness. They may have voluntarily given up certain rights to their likeness if they are walking around in the street, but they have not given up their right when they are abused against their will (this includes abuse as children).
It's really not that complicated. If I break into your house with a weapon, force you to strip and distribute a photo of you crying while i'm holding a lighter to your floppy dick, other people don't have a right to post fifty foot high posters of this image across the country just to taunt and ridicule you.
It's not "sexual assault" or "making an indecent image" or however the law tries to paint it, but it most certainly is immoral to benefit from such pictures. Do you understand?
Ordinary people, unfortunately, are mostly ignorant self-righteous fools.
Why does everyone think they're smarter than average?
Ordinary people routinely had sex with who we'd now consider as children. Now we panic at the thought of 15 year old butt but salivate when he/she's 16 (in the UK, anyway). Why is that? It's not "self-righteous fool"ishness, it's clever manipulation - just the sort of manipulation which has caused people like you to think that everyone is an idiot and doesn't really deserve the vote anyway.
The problem is not an excess of democracy, but a lack of democracy. More involvement and more responsibility, please.
Also, CP is not "just bits" when you are the girl or boy having your image distributed around the web. Whatever the opinion of possession of CP as "sexual abuse", EU Data Protection laws should absolutely regulate CP in the interests of the subject except perhaps in the unusual case where the adult consents to images of themselves being abused as a child.
This is the second time you've responded to me and both times I haven't been able to figure out what you're talking about.
Most people on Slashdot are much clearer, even if I disagree with them.
Please try harder, if you can.
Chabenisky is one of those odd fellows who doesn't seem to have done anything at all of any interest yet has ended up very rich. He seems to have repeatedly started up and sold uninteresting firms for a lot of money.
I expect he is just a fucking brilliant salesman.
But that doesn't make him a good investor.
That argument is awful.