And (Open|Star)Office knows it quite well. Note that one of its main features is the ability to import and export MS Word files. Without this ability it would go exactly nowhere.
but I also think that a profit margin is not a reasonable justification for a society to allow Union Carbide to kill 8,000 Indians with impunity
A profit margin is not a reasonable justification in the Union Carbide case, but what does it have to do with the profit margin, anyway?
Our current level of technology dictates that we have chemical plants. Running chemical plants is a risky business, but the society (or different societies) decides on what the acceptable level of risk is through making laws about industrial safety. Sometimes you have industrial accidents and a few (or a lot) of people get killed. But this is a side-effect of the technology level, not of socio-political construct like corporations.
For example, the late Soviet Union had no corporations, zero, zilch, nada. Yet, there was horrible pollution and industrial accidents were actually more frequent than in the West with its "evil" corporations.
When a company can poison an entire town, something's wrong.
Would you feel better if a government-owned plant poisons an entire town? The Chernobyl nuclear plant wasn't owned by a corporation...
I understand your concerns, but that's where the Kaa's Second Law comes into play: "There are no fucking attractive alternatives".
The history of the XX century shows that governments have the capability to screw up on a much, much gigantic scale than a corporation could even hope for...
Therefore, the investors ARE shielded from wrongdoing by the corporate mechanism that was ultimately acting to fulfill their demands.
Yes, of course.
However the original post claimed that "corporate decision makers" are shielded from the consequences of their actions by the corporate structure, and that's not true. In fact one of the common, though not necessary, attributes of a corporation is the sharp distinction between the owners (aka shareholders) and the "corporate decision makers" (aka officers of the company).
Owners are shielded -- their risk is limited to the amount they've invested into the corporation. Officers are not (or, rather, not to any greater degree than any other employee).
The difference between you and a corporation is that your sole purpose is not to make money. A corporation exists only to make money.
Um, no. The corporation's purpose is whatever its chapter says. Ever heard of the expression "non-profit corporation"? That's a corporation, too. I can set up a corporation with the sole purpose of breeding penguins and releasing them into the wild, can't I?
What you probably mean is that corporations have a duty to their shareholders and in case of public corporations that's usually interpreted to mean a duty to provide the best return on the investors' money possible. I don't see anything wrong with that.
corporations were created for the sole purpose of distancing corporate decision makers from the consequences of their actions.
Umm... you got it completely wrong. The point of the corporation is to distance the INVESTORS (aka shareholders) from the risks the corporation takes. This makes it possible for people to buy some shares of, say, Worldcom without losing their house (and other assets) when Worldcom goes bankrupt.
"Corporate decision makers" are employees hired and fired by the corporation's board. I really don't see how they are isolated from the consequences of their actions except by the fact that they operate with other people's money. However you can make the same argument for the guys who were managing estates of the ancient Roman senators -- it's called the agency problem and has nothing to do with corporations...
Me? I can't wait to use Gmail, and if I don't like it then I will stop using it. See how simple it is?
It may be too late then. When all your email has been subpoenaed in a lawsuit against you and has been turned over to hostile lawyers, stopping using Gmail won't help much.
In each of my examples though, notice that nothing physical was stolen, yet in every case, you're taking something you didn't earn, didn't pay for, and thus, don't deserve. If you can justify one, you can justify them all.
You have a very strange worldview.
Did you earn or pay for the air you breathe? You don't deserve it. Did you earn or pay for the ocean you swim in? For the view (in extremely high resolution and full 3D, no less!) of a very pretty girl who just passed you on the street? For that open-source program you've downloaded recently? Did you earn or pay for reading Slashdot?
If you don't film the movie with a camcorder, you will not be dragged off to prison from the theatre.
It was my impression that the law punishes POSESSION of a video recording device inside a movie theater. Like, for example, my Nokia 3650 cell phone which can record video.
Does anyone honestely believe that this is a privacy issue?
In the good old days movie theaters were a good place to make out. Now with projectionists wearing night vision goggles...
Your analogy of software security to (presumably) physical world "invasion" tools (e.g., lock picks, etc.) causes me to make a prediction. The prediction is that, like lock picks, the use and possession of software security tools may in the future be licensed and regulated. Just as the unlicensed possession and use of "burlar tools" is in some jurisdictions criminal, we may get to the point that the unlicensed use or possession of "software entry" tools is regulated and licensed.
Like, for example, a compiler?
Not that I am a big fan of RMS, but his rants keep on looking less and less like paranoia and more and more like a no-rose-glasses view of the future...
9. The way to set up a remote X session is clear and straightforward, and doesn't involve lots of poking at cryptic pages on google and headscratching trying to remember where you have to run Xauth or other such and whether you have forwarding enabled in your ssh_config , etc...
9a. No one ever gets the error message "Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1", for any reason, ever. That's just not descriptive as an error, and it doesn't give you any indication what to do to fix it.
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 91 15:35:46 -0800 From: David Chapman To: UNIX-HATERS Subject: MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1
For the first time today I tried to use X for the purpose for which it was intended, namely cross-network display. So I got a telnet window from boris, where I was logged in and running X, to akbar, where my program runs. Ran the program and it dumped core. Oh. No doubt there's some magic I have to do to turn cross-network X on. That's stupid. OK, ask the unix wizard. You say "setenv DISPLAY boris:0". Presumably this means that X is too stupid to figure out where you are coming from, or unix is too stupid to tell it. Well, that's unix for you. (Better not speculate about what the 0 is for.) Run the program again. Now it tells me that the server is not authorized to talk to the client. Talk to the unix wizard again. Oh, yes, you have have to run xauth, to tell it that it's OK for boris to talk to akbar. This is done on a per-user basis for some reason. I give this ten seconds of thought: what sort of security violation is this going to help with? Can't come up with any model. Oh, well, just run xauth and don't worry about it. xauth has a command processor and wants to have a long talk with you. It manipulates a.Xauthority file, apparently. OK, presumably we want to add an entry for boris. Do:
xauth> help add
add dpyname protoname hexkey add entry
Well, that's not very helpful. Presumably dpy is unix for "display" and protoname must be... uh... right, protocol name. What the hell protocol am I supposed to use? Why should I have to know? Well, maybe it will default sensibly. Since we set the DISPLAY variable to "boris:0", maybe that's a dpyname.
xauth> add boris:0
xauth: (stdin):4 bad "add" command line
Great. I suppose I'll need to know what a hexkey is, too. I thought that was the tool I used for locking the strings into the Floyd Rose on my guitar. Oh, well, let's look at the man page.
I won't include the whole man page here; you might want to man xauth yourself, for a good joke. Here's the explanation of the add command:
add displayname protocolname hexkey
An authorization entry for the indicated display using the given protocol and key data is added to the authorization file. The data is specified as an even-lengthed string of hexadecimal digits, each pair representing one octet. The first digit gives the most significant 4 bits of the octet and the second digit gives the least significant 4 bits. A protocol name consisting of just a single period is treated as an abbreviation for MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1.
This is obviously totally out of control. In order to run a program across the fucking network I'm supposed to be typing in strings of hexadecimal digits which do god knows what using a program that has a special abbreviation for MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1?? And what the hell kind of a name for a network protocol is THAT? Why is it so important that it's the default protocol name?
Fuck this shit.
Obviously it is Allah's will that I throw the unix box out the window. I submit to the will of Allah.
(a) It creates yet another layer of rat-bastards with rights to control when, where, and what you watch or listen to.
(b) Let's say I created something (e.g. a short video) and released it with no restrictions on copying (under a Creative Commons license, for example). I want it to be freely copied. Why in the world would a broadcaster get a right to forbid people to record a copy of my video?
messaging services are frequently used, easy to log and data-mine (no speech recognition necessary) systems that provide no end-to-end encryption that pass through a single point -- in the United States.
Trillian (a universal AIM/ICQ/Yahoo/MSN/etc. client) provides end-to-end encryption using 128-bit Blowfish and, I think, Diffie-Hellman key exchange. I cannot vouch for the quality of implementation, though...
Unfortunately, for the encryption to work, the client must be Trillian at both ends.
Sun has a fundamental problem, one it shares with Microsoft. Both firms live by selling a premium product in a commodity market. Operating systems are no longer rare and valuable enough to pay for.
Almost correct. You forgot that Sun is primarily a HARDWARE vendor. Your paragraph should have said:
Sun has a fundamental problem, one it used to share with Compaq. Both firms live by selling a premium product in a commodity market. Hardware for PCs/workstations is no longer rare and valuable enough to pay for.
Previously mentoned on/. about how some gears were in backwards yet never broke is an example of how tough the specs are.
Mmm... no. That's not about specs, it's an example of how NOT to design mechanical parts.
These gears could be put in two ways, the right way was non-obvious, and when put in the wrong way, the gears more-or-less work (so the problem doesn't show up during testing) until the time of unusual stress.
This really should be a textbook case of how not to do things.
Imagine being able to just push your cart through a metal detector & have everything scanned in seconds.
Imagine having a small piece of electronics that works on two AA batteries and burns out all RFIDs within a, say, one foot radius. Shouldn't be hard to make, really.
Now imagine running a store. Are you sure you want to charge your customers only for items with intact RFIDs?
Gimp... for home users it will do anything you could possibly want, especially when it comes to digital photography.
Umm... No.
Unless your idea of digital photography is to look at point-and-shoot JPG shapshots, that is.
Specifically, Gimp lacks the following absolute necessities for decent digital photography:
(1) Color management.
(2) 16-bit color channels.
(3) RAW file conversion.
Yes, Gimp is a nice image editor, good for scripting and web graphics, and the price can't be beat. But digital photography? Sorry, not the same league...
use of game controllers... for tomororow's "drive by wire" automobiles which will hopefully greatly reduce the accident rate, especially for a generation of drivers already trained and honed on video games.
Ah, but you have to ask yourself: WHICH video games?
Do you really want the guy in the next car to drive on the basis of instincts and reflexes he developed playing Ultimate Demolition Derby or Monster Truck Racing?
One of the very basic parts of morality is following the laws where you live to the best of your ability.
Err... no.
You've got it backwards: laws have to reflect morality, not vice versa. If a law conflicts with individual ethics, individual ethics should win (within reason, of course).
Consider two things: (1) If I move to another country, say to work for a couple of years in Hong Kong, should my personal morality change? and (2) How about people who live in, say, North Korea? or used to live in the Soviet Union?
No, it has NOT "long been known" that genius is in bed with madness. IQ has never significantly correleated with any mental disorders.... And any correleation between mental illness and creativity is clearly and demostratably false.
Whoa, slow down. You are not making sense. First, IQ *does* correlate with certain mental illnesses -- negatively. For example people with a Down's syndrome have very low IQ.
However that's neither here, nor there. We are talking about *geniuses* -- the far right tail of the IQ curve, nothing to do with averages. We are talking about people whose brains are *abnormal* by most definitions of normality. And some of them do walk a fine line between being a genius and being a crazy psycho.
Note that doesn't imply that all geniuses are crazy. And it most definitely doesn't imply that all crazy people are geniuses. But to state in such strong terms that there is (and can not be) any connection between genius and madness is umm.. misleading, to put it mildly.
Anyone interested in the subject should google for the name Delgado. The guy worked back in the 60s and implanted electrodes in animals' brains to see what stimulating certain regions does.
One of his most well-known umm... party tricks involved him getting into a bull-fighting arena with a bull. The bull had an electrode implanted in its brain, and Delgado had a wireless transmitter in his hands. The bull charged, Delgado pressed a button, and the bull came to a screeching halt.
Slashdot Mirror
MicroSoft won the Word (editor) war?
Yes, it did. Deal with it.
And (Open|Star)Office knows it quite well. Note that one of its main features is the ability to import and export MS Word files. Without this ability it would go exactly nowhere.
In this case, lack of evidence is evidence--as one Biblical archeologist put it, "If it had actually happened, we would have found something."
This, of course, if complete bullshit. Lack of evidence is NOT evidence, at least not in this case.
Note that before Schlieman dug up Troy the whole Trojan war was considered to be the product of Homer's overactive imagination...
So did Mail.ru.
:-)
That's already TWO Russian webmail providers which offer unlimited email storage... Take that, Yankee imperialists!
:-)
but I also think that a profit margin is not a reasonable justification for a society to allow Union Carbide to kill 8,000 Indians with impunity
A profit margin is not a reasonable justification in the Union Carbide case, but what does it have to do with the profit margin, anyway?
Our current level of technology dictates that we have chemical plants. Running chemical plants is a risky business, but the society (or different societies) decides on what the acceptable level of risk is through making laws about industrial safety. Sometimes you have industrial accidents and a few (or a lot) of people get killed. But this is a side-effect of the technology level, not of socio-political construct like corporations.
For example, the late Soviet Union had no corporations, zero, zilch, nada. Yet, there was horrible pollution and industrial accidents were actually more frequent than in the West with its "evil" corporations.
When a company can poison an entire town, something's wrong.
Would you feel better if a government-owned plant poisons an entire town? The Chernobyl nuclear plant wasn't owned by a corporation...
I understand your concerns, but that's where the Kaa's Second Law comes into play: "There are no fucking attractive alternatives".
The history of the XX century shows that governments have the capability to screw up on a much, much gigantic scale than a corporation could even hope for...
Therefore, the investors ARE shielded from wrongdoing by the corporate mechanism that was ultimately acting to fulfill their demands.
Yes, of course.
However the original post claimed that "corporate decision makers" are shielded from the consequences of their actions by the corporate structure, and that's not true. In fact one of the common, though not necessary, attributes of a corporation is the sharp distinction between the owners (aka shareholders) and the "corporate decision makers" (aka officers of the company).
Owners are shielded -- their risk is limited to the amount they've invested into the corporation. Officers are not (or, rather, not to any greater degree than any other employee).
The difference between you and a corporation is that your sole purpose is not to make money. A corporation exists only to make money.
Um, no. The corporation's purpose is whatever its chapter says. Ever heard of the expression "non-profit corporation"? That's a corporation, too. I can set up a corporation with the sole purpose of breeding penguins and releasing them into the wild, can't I?
What you probably mean is that corporations have a duty to their shareholders and in case of public corporations that's usually interpreted to mean a duty to provide the best return on the investors' money possible. I don't see anything wrong with that.
corporations were created for the sole purpose of distancing corporate decision makers from the consequences of their actions.
Umm... you got it completely wrong. The point of the corporation is to distance the INVESTORS (aka shareholders) from the risks the corporation takes. This makes it possible for people to buy some shares of, say, Worldcom without losing their house (and other assets) when Worldcom goes bankrupt.
"Corporate decision makers" are employees hired and fired by the corporation's board. I really don't see how they are isolated from the consequences of their actions except by the fact that they operate with other people's money. However you can make the same argument for the guys who were managing estates of the ancient Roman senators -- it's called the agency problem and has nothing to do with corporations...
Me? I can't wait to use Gmail, and if I don't like it then I will stop using it. See how simple it is?
It may be too late then. When all your email has been subpoenaed in a lawsuit against you and has been turned over to hostile lawyers, stopping using Gmail won't help much.
In each of my examples though, notice that nothing physical was stolen, yet in every case, you're taking something you didn't earn, didn't pay for, and thus, don't deserve. If you can justify one, you can justify them all.
You have a very strange worldview.
Did you earn or pay for the air you breathe? You don't deserve it. Did you earn or pay for the ocean you swim in? For the view (in extremely high resolution and full 3D, no less!) of a very pretty girl who just passed you on the street? For that open-source program you've downloaded recently? Did you earn or pay for reading Slashdot?
OK, the guy claims to have invented something that will produce 3.3 watts of energy for every watt put into it.
Well, what would you do if you invented it?
Bzzzzt, wrong answer. The right answer is sell 40,000 fans to a Japanese convenience store. ROTFL.
Sigh. In the age of Google, can't people even bother to look up the history of all these "over unity" machines...
If you don't film the movie with a camcorder, you will not be dragged off to prison from the theatre.
It was my impression that the law punishes POSESSION of a video recording device inside a movie theater. Like, for example, my Nokia 3650 cell phone which can record video.
Does anyone honestely believe that this is a privacy issue?
In the good old days movie theaters were a good place to make out. Now with projectionists wearing night vision goggles...
Your analogy of software security to (presumably) physical world "invasion" tools (e.g., lock picks, etc.) causes me to make a prediction. The prediction is that, like lock picks, the use and possession of software security tools may in the future be licensed and regulated. Just as the unlicensed possession and use of "burlar tools" is in some jurisdictions criminal, we may get to the point that the unlicensed use or possession of "software entry" tools is regulated and licensed.
Like, for example, a compiler?
Not that I am a big fan of RMS, but his rants keep on looking less and less like paranoia and more and more like a no-rose-glasses view of the future...
Yes, Intel x86 can handle many of the tasks that only Unix machines used to be able to handle.
:-)
Umm... you know, processor architectures and operating systems are really quite different things...
Er, didn't Wal-Mart announce last week that they were selling computers with the Linux Sun Java Desktop installed?
Yes, and how does that change the fact of Sun being fucked?
They are striving to be what now, Packard Bell?
The Unix-haters handbook!
.Xauthority file, apparently. OK, presumably we want to add an entry for boris. Do:
9. The way to set up a remote X session is clear and straightforward, and doesn't involve lots of poking at cryptic pages on google and headscratching trying to remember where you have to run Xauth or other such and whether you have forwarding enabled in your ssh_config , etc...
9a. No one ever gets the error message "Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1", for any reason, ever. That's just not descriptive as an error, and it doesn't give you any indication what to do to fix it.
Date: Wed, 30 Jan 91 15:35:46 -0800
From: David Chapman
To: UNIX-HATERS
Subject: MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1
For the first time today I tried to use X for the purpose for which it was intended, namely cross-network display. So I got a telnet window from boris, where I was logged in and running X, to akbar, where my program runs. Ran the program and it dumped core. Oh. No doubt there's some magic I have to do to turn cross-network X on. That's stupid. OK, ask the unix wizard. You say "setenv DISPLAY boris:0". Presumably this means that X is too stupid to figure out where you are coming from, or unix is too stupid to tell it. Well, that's unix for you. (Better not speculate about what the 0 is for.)
Run the program again. Now it tells me that the server is not authorized to talk to the client. Talk to the unix wizard again. Oh, yes, you have have to run xauth, to tell it that it's OK for boris to talk to akbar. This is done on a per-user basis for some reason. I give this ten seconds of thought: what sort of security violation is this going to help with? Can't come up with any model. Oh, well, just run xauth and don't worry about it. xauth has a command processor and wants to have a long talk with you. It manipulates a
xauth> help add
add dpyname protoname hexkey add entry
Well, that's not very helpful. Presumably dpy is unix for "display" and protoname must be... uh... right, protocol name. What the hell protocol am I supposed to use? Why should I have to know? Well, maybe it will default sensibly. Since we set the DISPLAY variable to "boris:0", maybe that's a dpyname.
xauth> add boris:0
xauth: (stdin):4 bad "add" command line
Great. I suppose I'll need to know what a hexkey is, too. I thought that was the tool I used for locking the strings into the Floyd Rose on my guitar. Oh, well, let's look at the man page.
I won't include the whole man page here; you might want to man xauth yourself, for a good joke. Here's the explanation of the add command:
add displayname protocolname hexkey
An authorization entry for the indicated display using the given protocol and key data is added to the authorization file. The data is specified as an even-lengthed string of hexadecimal digits, each pair representing one octet. The first digit gives the most significant 4 bits of the octet and the second digit gives the least significant 4 bits. A protocol name consisting of just a single period is treated as an abbreviation for MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1.
This is obviously totally out of control. In order to run a program across the fucking network I'm supposed to be typing in strings of hexadecimal digits which do god knows what using a program that has a special abbreviation for MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1?? And what the hell kind of a name for a network protocol is THAT? Why is it so important that it's the default protocol name?
Fuck this shit.
Obviously it is Allah's will that I throw the unix box out the window. I submit to the will of Allah.
Big surprise -- suing your customers and generally pissing them off does not lead to increased sales... Who could have thought!
(a) It creates yet another layer of rat-bastards with rights to control when, where, and what you watch or listen to.
(b) Let's say I created something (e.g. a short video) and released it with no restrictions on copying (under a Creative Commons license, for example). I want it to be freely copied. Why in the world would a broadcaster get a right to forbid people to record a copy of my video?
messaging services are frequently used, easy to log and data-mine (no speech recognition necessary) systems that provide no end-to-end encryption that pass through a single point -- in the United States.
Trillian (a universal AIM/ICQ/Yahoo/MSN/etc. client) provides end-to-end encryption using 128-bit Blowfish and, I think, Diffie-Hellman key exchange. I cannot vouch for the quality of implementation, though...
Unfortunately, for the encryption to work, the client must be Trillian at both ends.
Sun has a fundamental problem, one it shares with Microsoft. Both firms live by selling a premium product in a commodity market. Operating systems are no longer rare and valuable enough to pay for.
Almost correct. You forgot that Sun is primarily a HARDWARE vendor. Your paragraph should have said:
Sun has a fundamental problem, one it used to share with Compaq. Both firms live by selling a premium product in a commodity market. Hardware for PCs/workstations is no longer rare and valuable enough to pay for.
Previously mentoned on /. about how some gears were in backwards yet never broke is an example of how tough the specs are.
Mmm... no. That's not about specs, it's an example of how NOT to design mechanical parts.
These gears could be put in two ways, the right way was non-obvious, and when put in the wrong way, the gears more-or-less work (so the problem doesn't show up during testing) until the time of unusual stress.
This really should be a textbook case of how not to do things.
Imagine being able to just push your cart through a metal detector & have everything scanned in seconds.
Imagine having a small piece of electronics that works on two AA batteries and burns out all RFIDs within a, say, one foot radius. Shouldn't be hard to make, really.
Now imagine running a store. Are you sure you want to charge your customers only for items with intact RFIDs?
Gimp ... for home users it will do anything you could possibly want, especially when it comes to digital photography.
Umm... No.
Unless your idea of digital photography is to look at point-and-shoot JPG shapshots, that is.
Specifically, Gimp lacks the following absolute necessities for decent digital photography:
(1) Color management.
(2) 16-bit color channels.
(3) RAW file conversion.
Yes, Gimp is a nice image editor, good for scripting and web graphics, and the price can't be beat. But digital photography? Sorry, not the same league...
use of game controllers ... for tomororow's "drive by wire" automobiles which will hopefully greatly reduce the accident rate, especially for a generation of drivers already trained and honed on video games.
Ah, but you have to ask yourself: WHICH video games?
Do you really want the guy in the next car to drive on the basis of instincts and reflexes he developed playing Ultimate Demolition Derby or Monster Truck Racing?
One of the very basic parts of morality is following the laws where you live to the best of your ability.
Err... no.
You've got it backwards: laws have to reflect morality, not vice versa. If a law conflicts with individual ethics, individual ethics should win (within reason, of course).
Consider two things: (1) If I move to another country, say to work for a couple of years in Hong Kong, should my personal morality change? and (2) How about people who live in, say, North Korea? or used to live in the Soviet Union?
No, it has NOT "long been known" that genius is in bed with madness. IQ has never significantly correleated with any mental disorders. ... And any correleation between mental illness and creativity is clearly and demostratably false.
Whoa, slow down. You are not making sense. First, IQ *does* correlate with certain mental illnesses -- negatively. For example people with a Down's syndrome have very low IQ.
However that's neither here, nor there. We are talking about *geniuses* -- the far right tail of the IQ curve, nothing to do with averages. We are talking about people whose brains are *abnormal* by most definitions of normality. And some of them do walk a fine line between being a genius and being a crazy psycho.
Note that doesn't imply that all geniuses are crazy. And it most definitely doesn't imply that all crazy people are geniuses. But to state in such strong terms that there is (and can not be) any connection between genius and madness is umm.. misleading, to put it mildly.
Anyone interested in the subject should google for the name Delgado. The guy worked back in the 60s and implanted electrodes in animals' brains to see what stimulating certain regions does.
One of his most well-known umm... party tricks involved him getting into a bull-fighting arena with a bull. The bull had an electrode implanted in its brain, and Delgado had a wireless transmitter in his hands. The bull charged, Delgado pressed a button, and the bull came to a screeching halt.