Actually, (couldn't resist) any linguist who knows his business will tell you dictionaries describe a language, not define it. A dictionary only tells you what the common, accepted use of a word was when the dictionary was published.
Since we're on annoying grammatical habits, anybody read "What Color is Your Parachute", or whatever it's called. I read about the first half of the first chapter. The guy writes a warning about how, he knows, he doesn't use commas correctly, but rather, he uses them, wherever he would put, a pause, during speaking. I found it, really, really, hard, to read. Feh. I don't care if the guy doesn't know how to use commas, but why the heck did he feel compelled to require the editors to leave that mess?
IANAL, of course, but I find this a stretch. RFCs are nothing more than a loose agreement. Everyone's life is easier when we adhere to them, but it's certainly common enough to have people, organizations, and products which don't. I'll buy this when I see prosecutions for negligence for every host which doesn't have postmaster@ routed to a real, live human. RFCs are also full of wiggle room. Lotsa SHOULD, not a lot of MUST. In this case reporters SHOULD everything, vendors mostly MUST. I can see software vendors backing away from this because it places the burden entirely on them while allowing reporters to decide for themselves whether they should follow the process or not.
How much of a stretch is it to see M$ declare that they don't agree with the RFC, that it's an irresponsible process, so they're not going to play? I'd be surprised if they did anything else.
Sorry, but I see this as a weak claim. Sadly, law often seems to work counter to how rational people would expect, so we'll see.
Communism: A theoretical economic system characterized by the collective ownership of property and by the organization of labor for the common advantage of all members. (from dictonary.com)
So yes, oddly enough, I criticise an economic system on its economic failings.
Most Americans are, in fact, absolutely ignorant of just about everything political and historical. We applaud the post 9/11 proposed stripping of civil liberties and a blatant assault on free speech called campaign finance reform. Too many people think they have a "right" to whatever they happen to want, and a "right" to confiscate the property of others to achieve those rights.
You don't "sell" your work for a grade. You pay a university to provide a service, instruction, and to evaluate your work to determine if you've learned the material. It's perfectly clear, however some universities like to muddy the waters by claiming the money and ownership of the students' intellectual property. Your example is extremely different as the engineers were paid by the company to create software. My college certainly didn't pay me for my work.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it is hardly true that people only riot for good cause. Notable poor causes in the U.S. include your college team winning a sporting event. Woo hoo, we won, let's go flip someone's car over and set something on fire!
If it's not you, but someone else like your professor or the academic institution "giving" a copy and turnitin.com keeping a copy, they're in violation of copyright. More annoying, they're violating your copyright in order to make money by using your work. This is no different than Sun loaning me a copy of the MS Win XP CDs and my making a copy to keep, then giving the CDs back. Aside from some vague handwaving where universities often claim rights over student's work, which is truly bizarre. I'm paying you to teach me, therefore all I create in the process belongs to you. Hmm. No.
I think the general principle is devolving to "Everything is copyrighted. Everyone's copyright is inviolate. Oh, except yours."
Americans aren't communists (communism is too open to corruption, as evidenced by history.)
That's just one of the problems with communism. Communism also divorces reward from effort. If you want more stuff, you can't work harder to get it. There's a society wide depression of effort, just like we have in our welfare population. Why work hard when you don't get more for your effort? This is why I'll always favor a capitalist society. If you want something, you have the opportunity to work for it, and get it. In the process, the overall productivity of society is increased leading to more available "stuff" for everyone. Everyone, that is, who's willing to put forth some effort to get what they want.
Yes, it matters. The court's opinion seems to be that the facts don't matter because the defendant couldn't be bothered to come in and defend his actions. Hence, a default judgement. Facts, *do* matter, but only if there's someone there to present them.
It's just like the time I got a traffic ticket and the police officer didn't show. I, and about 30 others, got off because the accuser didn't appear to present any facts. The fact that I really was speeding and would have admitted to doing so had there been anyone to accuse me of it didn't matter in that case.
The issue of him never receiving notice of the case is a separate issue.
Plus, does she not have a right to live just because she'll lose her mother sooner than other people?
No, not when you're talking about potential people rather than actual people who already exist. The question is, should this family endeavour to create a child who is destined to suffer the early loss of a mother. The question is not should a pregnant mother in such a case abort. Attributing a right to live to potential people quickly becomes ridiculous as we must consider every menstruation of every woman on the planet every month as carrying a fertilizable egg which had a "right to live".
Of course we all die, but most of us don't have a decent estimate of how much time we have left. If I had 10 years left, I think I'd opt to spare my potential children the terrible trauma of losing a parent.
You do an excellent job of pointing out, unintentionally, I'm sure, the silliness of the "diversity" crowd. Diversity is absolutely not, on its own, a good thing. We're not a better world because we have people with AIDS and people without, people starving to death and people with enough to eat, terrorists and pacifists, and the list goes on. Better we cure aids, end hunger, and get rid of the crackpots. Nope, thanks, but I feel confident you'd have to search quite a long way to find someone (aside from abused kids) who thought the death of a parent during childhood was a good thing.
Having a standard document will allow mature parties to avoid being branded crackers if they can follow a published disclosure protocol.
I'd have to disagree with that statement. The terms "blackhat" and "cracker" are inappropriate if applied to people who break into equipment they own or are otherwise authorized to compromise. I've broken into systems on which I had authority to do so, and never otherwise. For example, a box where those who knew the root password were long gone and no bootable media was available. That didn't make me a "blackhat", it made me a system administrator with a job to do, that being restoring legitimate access to our equipment. Similarly, if I have an IIS box and perform a security audit on it with the goal of insuring my IIS box is reasonably safe from compromise, I'm not a blackhat. Of course, a number of other terms come to mind if I were to be running IIS with any intention of being secure.
It'll be interesting what's said of vendors who don't follow this proposed standard. That in itself might be more useful. "Not only does Foo Corp. produce buggy, insecure software, they don't even follow the disclosure protocol!":) It might serve to reinforce the full disclosure argument.
FIPS 140-1 is Federal Information Processing Standard 140-1. It's a document describing how the U.S. Government requires itself to do things. Read it here You can be certified compliant, but the process is done by independent labs, not NIST (home of FIPS).
TCSEC is also not a company. TCSEC, or Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, is a book. "The Orange Book", to be specific. It can be found here as well.
The orignal poster's point is well taken, though. Whichever companies provided the certification might consider examining their process.
That reminds me of the line "If Microsoft is the solution, can I please have the problem back?"
Anyone who believes lawsuits are an acceptable solution either hasn't done it or has a corporation with big pockets and a looong time scale. It can be quite a long process.
So, once again, Brin's solution is just fine, as long as you don't apply it to the real world. Yeah, we're going to make lawsuits the solution where you can actually sue McD's and win because you spill coffee in your lap and it's "too hot". Where convicted, imprisoned criminals sue the state for cable TV (and win). No, no, no, no. Stick to writing science fiction, not public policy.:)
The cart goes in front of the horse?
on
David Brin on Privacy
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I'd like to split Brin's ideal society down the middle. The first half is greater oversight of government activities. The second is dropping our privacy. Mr. Brin's assertion is that the second is fine as long as the first happens. I don't happen to agree with that, but let me suggest that those of you who do accept that the government oversight is a prerequisite to the second and go about achieving it. You'll be happy pursuing your goal. I'll be happy knowing you'll never break the black curtain surrounding "private" government activities and I'll not be bothered with people asking me to sacrifice my privacy for a Utopia which will not come to exist.
Think about it. Greater insight into what our government is doing, supposedly on our behalf, is a Good Thing(tm) independent of Brin's transparent society ideal.
I don't buy it. Things which shouldn't be done shouldn't be legalized, period. The problem I have with abortion is that the line drawn is highly arbitrary. A 42 week gestation fetus/baby/whichever is no different than a 2 week old born at 40th week. Birth isn't the dividing line between a life and not. Viability is a useful measure of our medical advances only. Today 24 weeks, tomorrow 20. Until someone can show me a line where life begins I can't support ending them. We extend legal protection to adults, children, and infants. I haven't yet heard an argument why those who haven't been born yet should be any different. For that matter, some women (and men) want to "abort" their children after birth (specially in the later teen years). Let's just legalize it because they're going to do it anyway and might botch it. Better done cleanly, right?
It is not the role of government to insure equal service to everyone. I have a nicer car than you, or maybe you have to take the bus. You have a nicer house than I. Healthcare is a service provided by people just like you and I who have to pay their own bills with the money we pay them for the service. Your argument leads to the obvious converse. Why don't we we "socialize" everything? Abolish farms and supermarkets in favor of government food production and distribution? Oh, that's right. Because it's been tried and it doesn't work. When you divorce reward from work less work happens, surprisingly enough, because there's no reward to it. I'd take small comfort knowing we'd all get an equal share of a much smaller pie.
The poverty issue is a thorny one. Of the two people I've known to be uninsured lately (sure, I probably know more, I just don't ask everyone if they're insured), one was by choice. Unwise, sure, but don't ask me to pick up the tab for people who choose to not to do it for themselves. The other just couldn't get a decent job with insurance because he'd chosen to create a work history that wouldn't persuade prospective employers to give him a decent job.
Keep reading.:) I know that's not everyone. My point is I want charity carried out by 1) someone not violating their Constitutionally defined powers to do so and 2) who is small enough to evaluate each individual case to see whether the person has just fallen on hard times, or whether they've persistently failed to advance themselves when opportunities present. How many times do you give before you decide your charity is better given to someone who'll make good use of it? Letting the government do it gave us a welfare culture, nothing more than a cycle of dependency.
Now, since the EULA has no hold over me, what's allowing me to use the software? Standard copyright law, that's what. I am bound by the limits of copyright law, which doesn't say anything about using the software (copyright only deals with distributing copies.)
Yes, and IIRC, some blockheaded judge bought the argument that copying the software from disk to RAM constituded making an illegal copy according to copyright law. You're not allowed to do that. The license grants you the right to do that. So congratulations. If the EULA is invalidated you simply have no legal way to use the software.
Ridiculous, of course, but it makes a bizarre sort of sense if you accept the premise that copying the software to RAM is "copying". It is, but only as much as your reading these words is making a copy on your retina. Time for an entrance exam for judges, IMO.
Good point, but I am prochoice because these loud mouth religious ethicists have conflicting morals.
Then you have no real stand of your own. A pro-life/pro-choice belief stands on its own. For you to say you're pro-choice because *some* pro-life people don't meet your definition of consistency is a cop out.
Just for fun I'm "antihealthcare" solely because I think the government has no appropriate role taking money from one person to pay for another's freebies. I stand by that whether I'm on the giving or receiving end. I also know from personal experience that there are a lot of very generous people out there who are willing to help. There's no necessity for Uncle Sam to coerce cash from our pockets. I don't believe anyone's "antipoor", although some of us would say that being "pro-poor" means something other than handing out free money, which sadly, is often exactly what is meant.
They're delivering exactly what they promise. What you seem to want is unlimited forever. Right now, my provider doesn't impose limits. They can choose to change that in the future, and I can choose not to continue to be a customer if I have a problem with it. Since they provide what I want, which is the performance equivalent of a T-1 to my door when I need it (which is rare), at a cost much, much lower than that of actually getting a T-1 to my house, I'm not likely to jump ship. Not for that reason, anyway. The 4 day response time for an outage is unacceptable, though.:)
I concur. (For the AOLers in the audience, that means "Me too!") There wasn't a hint of racism. Once upon a time I saw a TV show in which some researcher had taken worldwide demographics and built a composite image of what a uniformly blended population would be. It was actually predominantly Asian. Personally, I think it makes little difference.
I do disagree about lighter skin being genetically weak. It seems to have been selected for in latitudes with weaker sunlight. Actually, I'd say neither is weak (or strong). Light skin is advantageous in some circumstances, dark skin in others. Why some people are so hung up on it is a thornier question.
No, I don't work for a telecom or ISP of any sort. I've just tired of seeing stories and comments which basically whine about actually being held to the terms of a deal. If, as you assert, there's nothing in the deal to prevent you using NAT, then I fail to understand why any Comcast users care about this other then to tell Comcast where to go when they hear anything about using NAT. We get rabid when anyone even hints about not obeying the letter and spirit of the GPL, but we're ready to throw everyone else's equally binding agreements out the window. If using NAT is permissible under Comcast, I don't see a problem and fail to see the point of Comcast bothering to determine who's using it if they can't do anything about it.
Sorry, no sympathy from me. If you sign up for a service which prohibits you from hooking multiple systems to your net connection, then violate that contract, expect to pay the price.
Now, do I think it's reasonable for them to say you can have only one computer on the network rather than, say, capping your monthly bandwidth usage? No, I don't, but what you should do in this case is find an ISP which provides what you want rather than defraud (by falsely agreeing to use one class of service when you're really using one which they provide at a higher price) an ISP which doesn't. I'll never understand what's so hard about sticking to the terms of an agreement you made voluntarily.
I've yet to see a proper use of that word. I like the "progressive" tax, where the more progress you make, the more value you provide to society, the harder Uncle Sam shakes you to get the money out of your pockets. Double your salary quintuple your tax.
I used to think the opposite of progress was Congress, but progressive's pretty near opposite as well.
The guy's electrically sensitive, and yet he carries around sensors to tell him when he's in fields he's sensitive to.:) Funny, I'm thermally sensitive (anything over a couple hundred degrees causes intense burning pains), but I don't carry around a thermometer to tell me when I've stepped in the campfire.
This is so outrageously ridiculous a tactic (that you correctly point out they *do* use) that it needs an equally outrageous response. Henceforth, I'll always have a minor on hand (who can't legally enter into a contract) to push stupid buttons like this for me.
"I don't care what your EULA says. I didn't agree to it. I didn't install the software." -- Me
Of course it won't work, but then neither should their EULA garbage if it ever gets in front of a halfway intelligent judge.
Slashdot Mirror
Since we're on annoying grammatical habits, anybody read "What Color is Your Parachute", or whatever it's called. I read about the first half of the first chapter. The guy writes a warning about how, he knows, he doesn't use commas correctly, but rather, he uses them, wherever he would put, a pause, during speaking. I found it, really, really, hard, to read. Feh. I don't care if the guy doesn't know how to use commas, but why the heck did he feel compelled to require the editors to leave that mess?
Gotta be inventing the Internet! How could you top that?
How much of a stretch is it to see M$ declare that they don't agree with the RFC, that it's an irresponsible process, so they're not going to play? I'd be surprised if they did anything else.
Sorry, but I see this as a weak claim. Sadly, law often seems to work counter to how rational people would expect, so we'll see.
So yes, oddly enough, I criticise an economic system on its economic failings.
Most Americans are, in fact, absolutely ignorant of just about everything political and historical. We applaud the post 9/11 proposed stripping of civil liberties and a blatant assault on free speech called campaign finance reform. Too many people think they have a "right" to whatever they happen to want, and a "right" to confiscate the property of others to achieve those rights.
You don't "sell" your work for a grade. You pay a university to provide a service, instruction, and to evaluate your work to determine if you've learned the material. It's perfectly clear, however some universities like to muddy the waters by claiming the money and ownership of the students' intellectual property. Your example is extremely different as the engineers were paid by the company to create software. My college certainly didn't pay me for my work.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but it is hardly true that people only riot for good cause. Notable poor causes in the U.S. include your college team winning a sporting event. Woo hoo, we won, let's go flip someone's car over and set something on fire!
I think the general principle is devolving to "Everything is copyrighted. Everyone's copyright is inviolate. Oh, except yours."
That's just one of the problems with communism. Communism also divorces reward from effort. If you want more stuff, you can't work harder to get it. There's a society wide depression of effort, just like we have in our welfare population. Why work hard when you don't get more for your effort? This is why I'll always favor a capitalist society. If you want something, you have the opportunity to work for it, and get it. In the process, the overall productivity of society is increased leading to more available "stuff" for everyone. Everyone, that is, who's willing to put forth some effort to get what they want.
It's just like the time I got a traffic ticket and the police officer didn't show. I, and about 30 others, got off because the accuser didn't appear to present any facts. The fact that I really was speeding and would have admitted to doing so had there been anyone to accuse me of it didn't matter in that case.
The issue of him never receiving notice of the case is a separate issue.
No, not when you're talking about potential people rather than actual people who already exist. The question is, should this family endeavour to create a child who is destined to suffer the early loss of a mother. The question is not should a pregnant mother in such a case abort. Attributing a right to live to potential people quickly becomes ridiculous as we must consider every menstruation of every woman on the planet every month as carrying a fertilizable egg which had a "right to live".
Of course we all die, but most of us don't have a decent estimate of how much time we have left. If I had 10 years left, I think I'd opt to spare my potential children the terrible trauma of losing a parent.
You do an excellent job of pointing out, unintentionally, I'm sure, the silliness of the "diversity" crowd. Diversity is absolutely not, on its own, a good thing. We're not a better world because we have people with AIDS and people without, people starving to death and people with enough to eat, terrorists and pacifists, and the list goes on. Better we cure aids, end hunger, and get rid of the crackpots. Nope, thanks, but I feel confident you'd have to search quite a long way to find someone (aside from abused kids) who thought the death of a parent during childhood was a good thing.
I can't wait till they make the switch to McDNS so the bloody site will spare me the hassle of resolving at all.
I'd have to disagree with that statement. The terms "blackhat" and "cracker" are inappropriate if applied to people who break into equipment they own or are otherwise authorized to compromise. I've broken into systems on which I had authority to do so, and never otherwise. For example, a box where those who knew the root password were long gone and no bootable media was available. That didn't make me a "blackhat", it made me a system administrator with a job to do, that being restoring legitimate access to our equipment. Similarly, if I have an IIS box and perform a security audit on it with the goal of insuring my IIS box is reasonably safe from compromise, I'm not a blackhat. Of course, a number of other terms come to mind if I were to be running IIS with any intention of being secure.
It'll be interesting what's said of vendors who don't follow this proposed standard. That in itself might be more useful. "Not only does Foo Corp. produce buggy, insecure software, they don't even follow the disclosure protocol!"
FIPS 140-1 is Federal Information Processing Standard 140-1. It's a document describing how the U.S. Government requires itself to do things. Read it here You can be certified compliant, but the process is done by independent labs, not NIST (home of FIPS).
TCSEC is also not a company. TCSEC, or Trusted Computer System Evaluation Criteria, is a book. "The Orange Book", to be specific. It can be found here as well.
The orignal poster's point is well taken, though. Whichever companies provided the certification might consider examining their process.
Anyone who believes lawsuits are an acceptable solution either hasn't done it or has a corporation with big pockets and a looong time scale. It can be quite a long process.
So, once again, Brin's solution is just fine, as long as you don't apply it to the real world. Yeah, we're going to make lawsuits the solution where you can actually sue McD's and win because you spill coffee in your lap and it's "too hot". Where convicted, imprisoned criminals sue the state for cable TV (and win). No, no, no, no. Stick to writing science fiction, not public policy.
Think about it. Greater insight into what our government is doing, supposedly on our behalf, is a Good Thing(tm) independent of Brin's transparent society ideal.
It is not the role of government to insure equal service to everyone. I have a nicer car than you, or maybe you have to take the bus. You have a nicer house than I. Healthcare is a service provided by people just like you and I who have to pay their own bills with the money we pay them for the service. Your argument leads to the obvious converse. Why don't we we "socialize" everything? Abolish farms and supermarkets in favor of government food production and distribution? Oh, that's right. Because it's been tried and it doesn't work. When you divorce reward from work less work happens, surprisingly enough, because there's no reward to it. I'd take small comfort knowing we'd all get an equal share of a much smaller pie.
The poverty issue is a thorny one. Of the two people I've known to be uninsured lately (sure, I probably know more, I just don't ask everyone if they're insured), one was by choice. Unwise, sure, but don't ask me to pick up the tab for people who choose to not to do it for themselves. The other just couldn't get a decent job with insurance because he'd chosen to create a work history that wouldn't persuade prospective employers to give him a decent job.
Keep reading.
Yes, and IIRC, some blockheaded judge bought the argument that copying the software from disk to RAM constituded making an illegal copy according to copyright law. You're not allowed to do that. The license grants you the right to do that. So congratulations. If the EULA is invalidated you simply have no legal way to use the software.
Ridiculous, of course, but it makes a bizarre sort of sense if you accept the premise that copying the software to RAM is "copying". It is, but only as much as your reading these words is making a copy on your retina. Time for an entrance exam for judges, IMO.
Then you have no real stand of your own. A pro-life/pro-choice belief stands on its own. For you to say you're pro-choice because *some* pro-life people don't meet your definition of consistency is a cop out.
Just for fun I'm "antihealthcare" solely because I think the government has no appropriate role taking money from one person to pay for another's freebies. I stand by that whether I'm on the giving or receiving end. I also know from personal experience that there are a lot of very generous people out there who are willing to help. There's no necessity for Uncle Sam to coerce cash from our pockets. I don't believe anyone's "antipoor", although some of us would say that being "pro-poor" means something other than handing out free money, which sadly, is often exactly what is meant.
They're delivering exactly what they promise. What you seem to want is unlimited forever. Right now, my provider doesn't impose limits. They can choose to change that in the future, and I can choose not to continue to be a customer if I have a problem with it. Since they provide what I want, which is the performance equivalent of a T-1 to my door when I need it (which is rare), at a cost much, much lower than that of actually getting a T-1 to my house, I'm not likely to jump ship. Not for that reason, anyway. The 4 day response time for an outage is unacceptable, though. :)
I do disagree about lighter skin being genetically weak. It seems to have been selected for in latitudes with weaker sunlight. Actually, I'd say neither is weak (or strong). Light skin is advantageous in some circumstances, dark skin in others. Why some people are so hung up on it is a thornier question.
No, I don't work for a telecom or ISP of any sort. I've just tired of seeing stories and comments which basically whine about actually being held to the terms of a deal. If, as you assert, there's nothing in the deal to prevent you using NAT, then I fail to understand why any Comcast users care about this other then to tell Comcast where to go when they hear anything about using NAT. We get rabid when anyone even hints about not obeying the letter and spirit of the GPL, but we're ready to throw everyone else's equally binding agreements out the window. If using NAT is permissible under Comcast, I don't see a problem and fail to see the point of Comcast bothering to determine who's using it if they can't do anything about it.
Now, do I think it's reasonable for them to say you can have only one computer on the network rather than, say, capping your monthly bandwidth usage? No, I don't, but what you should do in this case is find an ISP which provides what you want rather than defraud (by falsely agreeing to use one class of service when you're really using one which they provide at a higher price) an ISP which doesn't. I'll never understand what's so hard about sticking to the terms of an agreement you made voluntarily.
I used to think the opposite of progress was Congress, but progressive's pretty near opposite as well.
The guy's electrically sensitive, and yet he carries around sensors to tell him when he's in fields he's sensitive to. :) Funny, I'm thermally sensitive (anything over a couple hundred degrees causes intense burning pains), but I don't carry around a thermometer to tell me when I've stepped in the campfire.
"I don't care what your EULA says. I didn't agree to it. I didn't install the software." -- Me
Of course it won't work, but then neither should their EULA garbage if it ever gets in front of a halfway intelligent judge.