There's a big difference between supporting a general movement (like anti-Soviet guerilla fighting) which happens to include someone who later becomes a major-league bad guy, and directly supporting that same bad guy.
At the time opposing the Soviets was our main priority. I think that allowing the Soviets to go unopposed in Afghanistan because opposing them might contribute to a terrorist attack 20 years later would have been a rather difficult position to defend.
Nuclear weapons are a horrid and nasty thing. We've been lucky that they haven't been used since Nagasaki...
No, we haven't been "lucky", the US has been working damned hard to see that they haven't been used, despite the destrutive aspirations of petty dictators and superpowers alike.
Communism isn't an inherently evil and nasty system.. The communist governments of Russia and China were/are vicious and corrupt, but that's more a statement about the people that lead them than of the basic systems themselves.
Wrong. Show me one single large-scale implementation of communism that's actually worked. That's right, there aren't any. The _concept_ of communism isn't evil, but it's absolutely impossible to make it work without coercion and force. It's based on the compulsory sacrifice of the individual for the greater good, and, as much as some people might pretend otherwise, humans don't work that way.
It's not like the US is a whole lot better with it's support of people like Agusto Pinochet, Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden -- all in the name of so-called 'democracy'. We sometimes forget that these 'evil nasty people' are a product of our own government's support system.
Some of them are, at least indirectly, but most of them are not. (No credible source indicates any US support of Bin Laden, for example.) In foreign policy the US, like all other nations, is ultimately pragmatic. Short of moving in and taking over completely (which while perhaps practical is usually frowned upon) one sometimes one must choose between supporting the lesser of two local evils. To claim that the US "isn't much better" only demonstrates how unfamilar you are with the horrific abuses that were (and are) a part of daily life within those other regimes you idealize.
Einstein 'agitated' for peace. He had ideas that were different than those who were in power at the time. These should never be considered crimes in a truly democratic system.
They weren't crimes. He wasn't arrested. He was investigated by the FBI for what they considered suspicious activities and to make sure he wasn't sharing classified information with people that would not share his idealistic bent. The purpose of the FBI is to investigate, and many, many prominent and obscure people of all occupations and political stripes were investigated. Was it right? Was it necessary? At the time it was very hard to say.
The idea behind democracy is that an idea should either stand or fall on it's own merits -- not based on the fact that someone hates the label that some intolerent extremist attaches to it (like Hoover, McCarthy or even Nixon).
They weren't really concerned about ideas, they were concerned about actions. Hoover and McCarthy were often paranoid, but spies are real, and sometimes spying results in the deaths of large numbers of people. The threats posed by the USSR and China at the time were also very real, and a country where memories of WWII and Korea were still fresh was far more willing to take those threats seriously than we are from our vantage point 50 years removed.
This is nothing new, as the article itself points out. Newspapers and wire services have been doing the same thing for decades. New facts come in, stories change, mistakes are fixed. This has nothing to do with Orwell or other nebulous conspiracies.
There's no obligation for a news source to keep around old versions of their articles/broadcasts/whatever in a publically accessible form. If something in the article is wrong or incomplete, then fix it, post the corrected version, and zap the old version.
Besides, why would someone want to deliberately link to a version of the story that's deemed incorrect by the news source presenting the story? It's hard enough to get people to pay attention to corrections and retractions--why, aside from historical curiosity, should we deliberately perpetuate a flawed story?
I'd be pretty annoyed if I got all worked up over a story only to find that I was being given bad information (not that that ever happens on Slashdot, of course;)
Deliberately disengaging a realtime discussion thread from the most recent developments on the topic under discussion seems like a bad idea to me.
The problem with that is that people don't read the corrections, or don't remember them, or confuse them with the uncorrected version. Once a mistake is fixed then it's counterproductive to keep the incorrect version around in and presented as news.
Localization is sometimes a good thing, but IMHO using the domain name system to enforce it is really not a smart idea. Search engines and directories are far better suited to that complex task.
"there is not enough checking of the validity of peoples claims to them, e.g..com's and.co.uk's can be owned by anybody, not necessarily real businesses (though at least the ".ltd.uk" domain is meant to be only available to registered limited companies) "
Er, what's a "real business"? A registered corporation? A consultancy? A mom-and-pop store? A hobby that makes a little money on the side? A private non-profit? Would you have to have a tax ID or something to prove that you're "real"? And why should the domain name system care about that? The reason that the original guidelines on.com,.org, and.net were scrapped was that they rapidly became unworkable when exposed to the real world. It's not gonna work any better today than it did then.
The good thing about the current system is that Bob down the street can promote his weekend lawnmowing business just as effectively as any corporation. The guy working out of his basement selling woodworking projects can sell just as easily to the UK as to his next door neighbor.
Forcing people to use an awkward, hierarchal backwater domain space that most folks cannot properly remember and which artificially limits their apparent scope of business to an arbitrary geographical location is completely counterproductive.
Re:Id like to see him try to stor the elements....
on
Periodic Table Table
·
· Score: 2
Good point. I bet most people don't realize that sodium is so volatile. The shocking lack of sodium taught at schools today is shocking.
Be very cautious when adopting acceptable use policies originally developed for other state and county agencies. It's usually a bad idea.
The needs of an educational evironment are quite different from those of a standard workplace. A policy designed for an office full of adults doing a rather limited set of tasks will not be a good fit for a K-12 institution filled with teachers and kids. And once you've given that policy your blessing you may find yourself stuck with it for a very long time, especially if you've appealed to a higher power to enforce rules on your co-workers that you cannot. By that point you're as bound by it as anyone else, and those same co-workers are unlikely to forget that.
If your goal is strictly to "stay out of trouble" by preventing people from doing as many things as possible then yeah, this'll probably do it. But if you're actually trying to craft workable policies and put them into practice then it'll call for some forethought, compromise, and -unavoidably - actually sitting down and talking to people about what you're trying to accomplish and why. No short cuts.
In my mind, this is actually more damning, because it intimates that he knows what they are doing could get them in trouble.
Taken out of context it's hard to say what he meant. Perhaps he's just sensible enough to realize that the conversation could easily be misrepresented by other parties.
Haven't you ever decided that it might be preferable to continue a sensitive discussion offline, rather than in email?
Yeah, same here. Quicktime, RealPlayer, and WMP all installed with no conflicts whatsoever, along with a couple other misc audio and video applications. Any of those apps will attempt to comandeer various filetypes during their default installs if you let them. Blindly clicking "OK" is never a good idea.
You seem to know a lot more about this than me. What about whistleblower statutes? Don't they protect employees who report potentally illegal conduct, regardless of the status of NDA's/confidentiality agreements, etc? Doesn't seem like they'd be much good if they didn't. Not all potentally illegal situations would be protected under these laws, of course, (I think the report of wrongdoing must be done in the public interest) but the most egregious and dangerous might be. I dunno.
In the end I guess it all comes down to ethics. No one's ever said that doing the right thing is easy. Personally, I'm uncomfortable with the whole concept and that's why I don't sign NDA's, non-compete, or confidentality agreements with employers (beyond those required by state and federal law.) I'm sure I'll miss out on some jobs, but, hey, that's life.
I have. Many times: it's why I now use Mozilla (well, that and the tabbed browsing and...and...and...) and Ad Aware.
Regardless of which browser anyone chooses to use, I'd hope they're more dilligent about updgrading and/or patching than the people in this article were. All browsers have weaknesses and vulnerabilities, both known and unknown.
I've never had anything infect or self-install on my machines, even when I ran without virus scanner for a while. About the worst I've seen are cookies, and they're easy enough to deal with.
Unfortunately, I don't think that Replay has a leg to stand on in terms of their "show-sharing" feature since everything recorded from broadcast television (including PBS, it's worth noting) is covered by copyright.
Er, what difference does that make? Have you ever exchanged videotapes with someone, or asked someone else to record a show for you while you're away on vacation? How is this any different?
The failure of the Patriots to intercept scuds (and the fact that the media never mentions this) has grave implications for our anti ballistic missle shield.
I'm pretty sure the media has mentioned this, beyond those two media links you already posted, I mean. The issue has been debated since the first Patriot experiences during the Gulf War.
But I don't really see how this has "grave implications" for an anti-ballistic missile shield. The effectiveness of the Patriot missile used during the Gulf War era is in doubt, but a that does nothing to invalidate the general concept of destroying a ballistic missile with another interceptor missile. It certainly isn't easy to do, and there may be better ways to accomplish the same goal or things more worthy of our limited resources, but to claim that it's somehow physically impossible is both disingenuous and incorrect.
Come to think of it they claim a Window Manager is an integral part of an OS. Strange that... guess all those systems with no console don't run an OS.
No, MS is claiming that a window manager is an integral part of _their_ OS. Which it is, both philosophically and technologically.
That said, there's nothing stopping you from running NT/2000/XP in a command-line-only mode with console apps if you really want to.
And, as others have already pointed out, there are other window managers and alternate shells available for MS Windows, and there have been for quite some time.
I'm discouraged that their list of "contributions from the community" doesn't include anything at all about decent documentation. The fact that the first item is "cool graphics" isn't very promising, either.
Accurate, well-written, and current documentation is absolutely vital. They apparently plan to link to "full online documentation", which are probably the cobbled-together FAQs and HOWTOs that are already available, and that's not likely to be adequate.
You said it. Among other things, I doubt that a print from a "mummified" thumb would look much like the original print. (I understand that medical examiners need to rehydrate dessicated corpses to obtain usable fingerprints for identification.)
Even if the print was good, it seems unlikely that the clerks would be trained in fingerprint matching for the benefit of the occasional hundred-year-old, illiterate pensioner.
It used to be that OEMs like HP would provide all sorts of user-friendly tools to help new users orient to their computer. These tools would occasionaly replace various bit of Windows functionality in some cases. An example might be a specialized "Start" button that would pop up a friendly menu tailored for the software that HP chose to install. HP might include a registration wizard that popped up the first time a person hit the Start button, etc.
Microsoft rewrote its OEM contracts to forbid such behavior, publically claiming that it hurt the integrety of the "consistent" (their word, not mine;-) Windows "look-and-feel".
Microsoft was absolutely correct in this case. While it wasn't a bad idea in concept, the extra software wedged in by most vendors was horrible. It often interfered with third-party software, made it very difficult to troubleshoot problems over the phone, and they often made it deliberately difficult to get rid of the damn stuff. And when beginning computer users had problems with those "user-friendly" programs they unfairly blamed Windows.
I did some work as a college computer lab support technician during the heyday of vendor-customized installs. From the useless registration wizards that bugged you incessantly to the "dial home" tech support remote control junk that gobbled up system resources and offered no uninstallation option, we and our customers were glad to be rid of it all.
To suggest that, given the current laws protecting intellectual property, we should then turn around and ignore them when it comes to enforcement, is going about it all wrong.
No, until we reach that day when IP laws are stricken down from the books forever (I propose a new Amendment!), we must do our utmost to defend these laws, for they are the very things which make this country good.
I hate feeding trolls, but here goes. The problem with that argument is that laws which are actively enforced and widely obeyed are seldom stricken from the books, no matter how dumb they are. Once a law becomes a viable source of revenue or a means to power it gains a larger base of support.
I agree that the ultimate answer is to remove or change the laws. Though IMHO no Amendment is necessary, simply a return to the original intent of the protections already in the Constitution.
In the meantime, however, passive resistance is the best offense. The RIAA and MPAA can't possibly lock up everyone that offends them, no matter how many bad laws they buy or how many IP G-Men they conjur up. Heretofore all they've gotten for their troubles are a massive public backlash and a lot of people closely examining industry practicies that they'd have preferred to keep in the dark. The tighter their grasp becomes, the more power will slip through their fingers.
You're kind of making my point yourself. The only way Microsoft could really catch up with Netscape was by giving away a product for free.
You're forgetting that Netscape Navigator was also, for all practical purposes, free. IIRC, only corporate users had to buy licenses. It was free for educational institutions and for personal use. By the time IE began to make a respectable showing in the browser wars Netscape's real cash cow was the server market, not the browser. There were also other completely free web browsers on the market at the time.
Why don't Dell, HP, Compaq etc. put StarOffice as default on their PCs? I'm sure Sun would love that. Many customers would probably love it too. But Microsoft will do whatever they can to prevent PC manufacturers from doing this.
Hmm. This doesn't have much to do with browser integration, but vendors I've used bundle all sorts of third-party non-MS software with their boxes. Do you know of any instances where MS has forbidden a vendor from installing Star Office on their machines? Not anecdotal FUD, or "they're too scared to tell us" conspiratorial stuff, but a real documented instance?
Instead, the humans worked out the obvious solution: since anything could now be duplicated, the only thing that has value is unique originals, and the way to make a living is to design and create unique originals of things.
Which is pretty much an extension of the way it works today, I suppose. I can buy a lovely print of virtually any piece of important artwork in existence, but the museums haven't started trashing the originals, and the artists haven't stopped creating new art.
"The difference is that the *nix admins aren't being paid to know how to admin Windows."
Well, that depends, doesn't it? Some of them might prefer not to admin Windows systems, but if their employers expect otherwise then it is, indeed, exactly what they're paid for. Someone who's administering Windows 2000 DNS servers on the job, for example, should probably know that a full reboot is unnecessary.
"There's nothing wrong with not knowing something - it's when you're supposed to know it (either because it's your job, or because you tell someone you know) that's bad."
You're absolutely right. No one can know everything. Willful ignorance is another matter. I just get frustrated when people make statements of fact that are incorrect rather than admit inexperience or lack of knowledge. There's nothing shameful about saying "I don't know."
Slashdot Mirror
There's a big difference between supporting a general movement (like anti-Soviet guerilla fighting) which happens to include someone who later becomes a major-league bad guy, and directly supporting that same bad guy.
At the time opposing the Soviets was our main priority. I think that allowing the Soviets to go unopposed in Afghanistan because opposing them might contribute to a terrorist attack 20 years later would have been a rather difficult position to defend.
No, we haven't been "lucky", the US has been working damned hard to see that they haven't been used, despite the destrutive aspirations of petty dictators and superpowers alike.
Wrong. Show me one single large-scale implementation of communism that's actually worked. That's right, there aren't any. The _concept_ of communism isn't evil, but it's absolutely impossible to make it work without coercion and force. It's based on the compulsory sacrifice of the individual for the greater good, and, as much as some people might pretend otherwise, humans don't work that way.
Some of them are, at least indirectly, but most of them are not. (No credible source indicates any US support of Bin Laden, for example.) In foreign policy the US, like all other nations, is ultimately pragmatic. Short of moving in and taking over completely (which while perhaps practical is usually frowned upon) one sometimes one must choose between supporting the lesser of two local evils. To claim that the US "isn't much better" only demonstrates how unfamilar you are with the horrific abuses that were (and are) a part of daily life within those other regimes you idealize.
They weren't crimes. He wasn't arrested. He was investigated by the FBI for what they considered suspicious activities and to make sure he wasn't sharing classified information with people that would not share his idealistic bent. The purpose of the FBI is to investigate, and many, many prominent and obscure people of all occupations and political stripes were investigated. Was it right? Was it necessary? At the time it was very hard to say.
They weren't really concerned about ideas, they were concerned about actions. Hoover and McCarthy were often paranoid, but spies are real, and sometimes spying results in the deaths of large numbers of people. The threats posed by the USSR and China at the time were also very real, and a country where memories of WWII and Korea were still fresh was far more willing to take those threats seriously than we are from our vantage point 50 years removed.
No, ballot counting by hand is Bad. See US elections.
This is nothing new, as the article itself points out. Newspapers and wire services have been doing the same thing for decades. New facts come in, stories change, mistakes are fixed. This has nothing to do with Orwell or other nebulous conspiracies.
;)
There's no obligation for a news source to keep around old versions of their articles/broadcasts/whatever in a publically accessible form. If something in the article is wrong or incomplete, then fix it, post the corrected version, and zap the old version.
Besides, why would someone want to deliberately link to a version of the story that's deemed incorrect by the news source presenting the story? It's hard enough to get people to pay attention to corrections and retractions--why, aside from historical curiosity, should we deliberately perpetuate a flawed story?
I'd be pretty annoyed if I got all worked up over a story only to find that I was being given bad information (not that that ever happens on Slashdot, of course
Deliberately disengaging a realtime discussion thread from the most recent developments on the topic under discussion seems like a bad idea to me.
The problem with that is that people don't read the corrections, or don't remember them, or confuse them with the uncorrected version. Once a mistake is fixed then it's counterproductive to keep the incorrect version around in and presented as news.
Sure they do. That's why all those internet applicances were so successful, right?
Localization is sometimes a good thing, but IMHO using the domain name system to enforce it is really not a smart idea. Search engines and directories are far better suited to that complex task.
.com's and .co.uk's can be owned by anybody, not necessarily real businesses (though at least the ".ltd.uk" domain is meant to be only available to registered limited companies) "
.com, .org, and .net were scrapped was that they rapidly became unworkable when exposed to the real world. It's not gonna work any better today than it did then.
"there is not enough checking of the validity of peoples claims to them, e.g.
Er, what's a "real business"? A registered corporation? A consultancy? A mom-and-pop store? A hobby that makes a little money on the side? A private non-profit? Would you have to have a tax ID or something to prove that you're "real"? And why should the domain name system care about that? The reason that the original guidelines on
The good thing about the current system is that Bob down the street can promote his weekend lawnmowing business just as effectively as any corporation. The guy working out of his basement selling woodworking projects can sell just as easily to the UK as to his next door neighbor.
Forcing people to use an awkward, hierarchal backwater domain space that most folks cannot properly remember and which artificially limits their apparent scope of business to an arbitrary geographical location is completely counterproductive.
Good point. I bet most people don't realize that sodium is so volatile. The shocking lack of sodium taught at schools today is shocking.
Be very cautious when adopting acceptable use policies originally developed for other state and county agencies. It's usually a bad idea.
The needs of an educational evironment are quite different from those of a standard workplace. A policy designed for an office full of adults doing a rather limited set of tasks will not be a good fit for a K-12 institution filled with teachers and kids. And once you've given that policy your blessing you may find yourself stuck with it for a very long time, especially if you've appealed to a higher power to enforce rules on your co-workers that you cannot. By that point you're as bound by it as anyone else, and those same co-workers are unlikely to forget that.
If your goal is strictly to "stay out of trouble" by preventing people from doing as many things as possible then yeah, this'll probably do it. But if you're actually trying to craft workable policies and put them into practice then it'll call for some forethought, compromise, and -unavoidably - actually sitting down and talking to people about what you're trying to accomplish and why. No short cuts.
Taken out of context it's hard to say what he meant. Perhaps he's just sensible enough to realize that the conversation could easily be misrepresented by other parties.
Haven't you ever decided that it might be preferable to continue a sensitive discussion offline, rather than in email?
Yeah, same here. Quicktime, RealPlayer, and WMP all installed with no conflicts whatsoever, along with a couple other misc audio and video applications. Any of those apps will attempt to comandeer various filetypes during their default installs if you let them. Blindly clicking "OK" is never a good idea.
You seem to know a lot more about this than me. What about whistleblower statutes? Don't they protect employees who report potentally illegal conduct, regardless of the status of NDA's/confidentiality agreements, etc? Doesn't seem like they'd be much good if they didn't. Not all potentally illegal situations would be protected under these laws, of course, (I think the report of wrongdoing must be done in the public interest) but the most egregious and dangerous might be. I dunno.
In the end I guess it all comes down to ethics. No one's ever said that doing the right thing is easy. Personally, I'm uncomfortable with the whole concept and that's why I don't sign NDA's, non-compete, or confidentality agreements with employers (beyond those required by state and federal law.) I'm sure I'll miss out on some jobs, but, hey, that's life.
Regardless of which browser anyone chooses to use, I'd hope they're more dilligent about updgrading and/or patching than the people in this article were. All browsers have weaknesses and vulnerabilities, both known and unknown.
I've never had anything infect or self-install on my machines, even when I ran without virus scanner for a while. About the worst I've seen are cookies, and they're easy enough to deal with.
Er, what difference does that make? Have you ever exchanged videotapes with someone, or asked someone else to record a show for you while you're away on vacation? How is this any different?
What exactly is your point? We also lived for thousands of years without:
- Antibiotics
- Sanitation
- Refrigeration
- Wheels
Nothing's biologically "essential" except food, water, and shelter. If you want a civilization, however, you need to set your standards a bit higher.
I'm pretty sure the media has mentioned this, beyond those two media links you already posted, I mean. The issue has been debated since the first Patriot experiences during the Gulf War.
But I don't really see how this has "grave implications" for an anti-ballistic missile shield. The effectiveness of the Patriot missile used during the Gulf War era is in doubt, but a that does nothing to invalidate the general concept of destroying a ballistic missile with another interceptor missile. It certainly isn't easy to do, and there may be better ways to accomplish the same goal or things more worthy of our limited resources, but to claim that it's somehow physically impossible is both disingenuous and incorrect.
No, MS is claiming that a window manager is an integral part of _their_ OS. Which it is, both philosophically and technologically.
That said, there's nothing stopping you from running NT/2000/XP in a command-line-only mode with console apps if you really want to.
And, as others have already pointed out, there are other window managers and alternate shells available for MS Windows, and there have been for quite some time.
I'm discouraged that their list of "contributions from the community" doesn't include anything at all about decent documentation. The fact that the first item is "cool graphics" isn't very promising, either.
Accurate, well-written, and current documentation is absolutely vital. They apparently plan to link to "full online documentation", which are probably the cobbled-together FAQs and HOWTOs that are already available, and that's not likely to be adequate.
You said it. Among other things, I doubt that a print from a "mummified" thumb would look much like the original print. (I understand that medical examiners need to rehydrate dessicated corpses to obtain usable fingerprints for identification.)
Even if the print was good, it seems unlikely that the clerks would be trained in fingerprint matching for the benefit of the occasional hundred-year-old, illiterate pensioner.
Microsoft was absolutely correct in this case. While it wasn't a bad idea in concept, the extra software wedged in by most vendors was horrible. It often interfered with third-party software, made it very difficult to troubleshoot problems over the phone, and they often made it deliberately difficult to get rid of the damn stuff. And when beginning computer users had problems with those "user-friendly" programs they unfairly blamed Windows.
I did some work as a college computer lab support technician during the heyday of vendor-customized installs. From the useless registration wizards that bugged you incessantly to the "dial home" tech support remote control junk that gobbled up system resources and offered no uninstallation option, we and our customers were glad to be rid of it all.
I hate feeding trolls, but here goes. The problem with that argument is that laws which are actively enforced and widely obeyed are seldom stricken from the books, no matter how dumb they are. Once a law becomes a viable source of revenue or a means to power it gains a larger base of support.
I agree that the ultimate answer is to remove or change the laws. Though IMHO no Amendment is necessary, simply a return to the original intent of the protections already in the Constitution.
In the meantime, however, passive resistance is the best offense. The RIAA and MPAA can't possibly lock up everyone that offends them, no matter how many bad laws they buy or how many IP G-Men they conjur up. Heretofore all they've gotten for their troubles are a massive public backlash and a lot of people closely examining industry practicies that they'd have preferred to keep in the dark. The tighter their grasp becomes, the more power will slip through their fingers.
I've never been to Wisconsin. How many months of the year are icy sidewalks a problem?
You're forgetting that Netscape Navigator was also, for all practical purposes, free. IIRC, only corporate users had to buy licenses. It was free for educational institutions and for personal use. By the time IE began to make a respectable showing in the browser wars Netscape's real cash cow was the server market, not the browser. There were also other completely free web browsers on the market at the time.
Hmm. This doesn't have much to do with browser integration, but vendors I've used bundle all sorts of third-party non-MS software with their boxes. Do you know of any instances where MS has forbidden a vendor from installing Star Office on their machines? Not anecdotal FUD, or "they're too scared to tell us" conspiratorial stuff, but a real documented instance?
Which is pretty much an extension of the way it works today, I suppose. I can buy a lovely print of virtually any piece of important artwork in existence, but the museums haven't started trashing the originals, and the artists haven't stopped creating new art.
Good points.
"The difference is that the *nix admins aren't being paid to know how to admin Windows."
Well, that depends, doesn't it? Some of them might prefer not to admin Windows systems, but if their employers expect otherwise then it is, indeed, exactly what they're paid for. Someone who's administering Windows 2000 DNS servers on the job, for example, should probably know that a full reboot is unnecessary.
"There's nothing wrong with not knowing something - it's when you're supposed to know it (either because it's your job, or because you tell someone you know) that's bad."
You're absolutely right. No one can know everything. Willful ignorance is another matter. I just get frustrated when people make statements of fact that are incorrect rather than admit inexperience or lack of knowledge. There's nothing shameful about saying "I don't know."