I think this adequately illustrates the point made a few days ago questioning Why so many terrorists are engineers? Technical people seem to think that their beliefs are correct and everyone else is wrong far more often than other professional classes. Anonymous is just an expression of that. They believe they are right and are justified in attacking others based on their belief.
It's truly bizarre in my mind. What drives people to such black and white thinking?
Perhaps they view ethics and morality as formula or algorithm in which there is only a single correct answer, and then somehow translate an inappropriate response to it.
To be fair, most open source projects are eternally in "developer release" and the only way you'll ever get to use them is to use them in whatever state they are in.
Indeed. Everyone knows they got $200k, so why would anyone want to work on it for free when they're being paid to work on it?
It's interesting, but the very idea of social networking is to "share" information. As such, the concept of security is often lost in the frenzy of sharing. This is what leads to crap like Buzz.
Huh? My consoles are as wide as the screen. Use a real one, like PowerShell. I also use TortoiseSVN a lot, and find it to work quite well, but it's a GUI tool. The command line svn works just like Linux.
Putty is not a port of a Linux app. It's a windows only app. There are lots of much better (though not free as in beer or speech) ssh clients.
My laptop has a longer battery life with Windows than Linux because Linux does piss poor power management. I have never seen anyone honestly claim otherwise, and there are LOTS of reviews that illustrate that point, particularly in regards to netbooks.
Actually, I believe the reason so many terrorists are engineers is that engineers always think they are right, and they tend to get very emotional about their beliefs (maybe because so many of them are somewhat socially challenged and don't have other outlets for their emotions).
I mean, why are so many people in Anonymous engineers? I dislike scientology as much as anyone, but I don't feel the need to attack them over it. Many engineers do, it seems.
No, i'm not (directly) equating Anonymous with terrorism, but they do share some common traits, most markedly the belief that they are right, and the willingness to risk (possibly even their lives) to express that belief.
I think engineering (be it mechanical, software, civil, whatever) requires a willingness to believe you know the right way to do things for the beneit others. In other words, a know it all.
In fact, being an engineer myself, I know that everything I've said is true and unquestionable. And if you don't agree, you should be flogged.
It's like for me - I can't see myself switching to Windows because I have a lot of those "one applications" that work far better under a *nix environment.
Such as?
I'm serious. You do realize that virtually all Unix apps have been ported to Windows (the reverse is nowhere near true), and there are some damn fine Unix emulation environments for Windows if you don't like the way Windows works? (Microsoft even provides one, called Services for Unix).
Now certainly, personal preference can come into play. Maybe you don't like the way Windows works, or any number of other reasons, but "the apps work better"? Do you have any examples?
I find it particularly funny how you try to use Ajax as a weapon against Microsoft. They invented it.
Also, Firefox has nothing to do with removing the ie-only stuff of yesteryear. Html has grown since then. All those plug-ins and extensions were there because HTML wasn't good enough for desktop apps. Now it's getting a lot closer and those features are going away (like Flash Video).
I'm also scratching my head as to what you are referring to when you say Microsoft tried to control the server side protocols of the web server. IIS has never used any proprietary protocol, it's always been HTTP, FTP, SMTP, with stuff like WebDav (another standard) and other standard protocols. What exactly are you referring to?
And I might consider replacing Windows if Ubuntu ever manages to work right out of the box. It has never done so for me. Even 10.04 gives me screwed up video because it can't figure out my multiple monitors properly, and the sound doesn't work. In fact, the sound has NEVER worked in any version of Linux i've ever tried. Multiple monitors is not an obscure configuration. I've been using them for 10 years. Most of the programmers and graphics artists and web designers I know also use them.
I read these reviews and I wonder what mythical hardware the reviewer must have to make everythng work.. Linux on the server? Rock solid. Linux on the desktop? Always problems to deal with. Always.
Seriously, this is the same thinking that says people can read scripts to do tech support, and while it works to a point.. it fails badly at another point.
That only works to a point. A database is only as good as the human using it. And databases are notoriously wrong, either with the patients data or the drugs themselves.
As I said in another thread. I think patent submitters should have to "show their work". They would have to prove it wasn't just something that happened during the development of a product, which they later discovered they could patent. It would have to be pre-meditated, developed, and worked into a real "invention" rather than "Hey look, nobody has patented sneezing on a handkerchief yet, let's grab that".
I'm almost tempted.. almost.. to say that they even should need to prove that they would not be able to develop the idea without patent protection. That is to say, if the invention was created in response to market needs and provided plenty of market compensation, then patent protection is unnecessary. Patent protection should only extend to inventions that need patents in order to be profitable.
I don't think it's comparable at all. You're talking about financial professionals reviewing cases of normal people. We're talkinga bout medical professionals reviewing the actions of other medical people. There will always be a conflict of interest there because the medical professionals, even if not practicing, may remember a time when they did something like that and be biased because of it.
This is why even appeals courts concentrate on re-reviewing the details of the case, rather than (in most cases) analyzing the behavior or actions of the previous court. Unless there was gross misconduct, the appeals process will typically say something like "The previous court erred in determining this or that" and that's about it.
I think a better system would one in which the "jury" was made up of equal parts professional and non-professional "peers".
No surgery is trivial. If you're opening someone up, that requires a great deal of skill and traiing. Do you really want someone that hasn't had years of anatomy training digging around in your organs? "Hey, that looks like it might be it, let's cut it out and see!"
Even something as routine as prescribing medication can have a huge backlash if the person isn't up to date on all the latest research (that's not tto say that all doctors do keep up to date, but that's supposed to be part of their job, and what we pay them for). You often need a LOT of education for that, and is why pharmacists are nearly as well educated as doctors.
That's not to say that I don't agree with you at some level. I see no reason why a doctor should be prescribing medication. I think they should diagnose the problem, then the doctor should work with a pharmacist to develop a treatment plan. That way the specialist (the pharmacist) can be the one that specializes in medication and the doctor can specialize in the diagnosis.
Dude. Shatter is completely "fixed". It was partially fixed in 2002... years before Vista came out, but that was a patch. Vista eliminates shatter by providing beefed up security for windows messages, and forcing services to run in a different Terminal screen from the interactive user. The article you reference talks about the way Vista addressed the issue.
In other words, Shatter hasn't been an issue since about 2004. Please stop regurgitating 7 10 year old exploits as if they were valid today.
Dude. Not one of your citations mentions.NET being vulnerable to anything, they all refer to Windows flaws in native components.
You also don't seem to understand what the firefox plugin is, and i'm scratching my head as this was an issue 2 or 3 *YEARS* ago, and there was no "patch" this summer to address it as you keep claiming.
The firefox plugin was added in the only way that Firefox allowed system-wide plug-ins to be added. Java, and several other plug-ins use the same mechanism.
Firefox has since been patched to allow disabling of those components if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that there is no other way to enable system-wide plug-ins in FF. That's a FF limitation that some might call a flaw.
What the plug-in did was provide a URI handler for click-once applications. Click-once apps install in the users home directory, and run with user privileges. There is no flaw there, or else Linux would also be flawed for allowing apps to be installed in users home directories. Of course, an administrator can disable it in either case, but default installation is to allow it in every OS I know of.
You keep blabbering about.NET being a security flaw, but you have not provided any shred of evidence to support your claim.
WTF are you prattling on about?.NET insecure? Seriously? Do you even know what you're talking about? You are making vague claims that make little sense. Like calling the Firefox plug-in a security flaw.. It's using the mechanism that Firefox provided for machine wide-plugins. Firefox has since improved on that, but it wasn't MS's fault nor was it a security flaw.
Please, point me to some evidence of any severe unpatched.net flaws or exploits. I don't know of any. I think you are confused and simply applying catchphrases you've heard and pretending you know what you're talking about.
You want privacy, but on the other hand, you want people to know how to find you, which means breaching privacy.
Actually, my problem with Facebook is that it tells all your friends who your other friends are. Let's say you have friends you don't want the rest of your friends to know about, or maybe you have acquaintences that don't need to know what your family members are doing.
Privacy is about choosing to give information to people, not having it revealed without your consent. It has nothing to do with "doing something wrong" (although you may in fact be doing something wrong), it's about choice. Yes, you can choose not to be a member of the service, and you can choose who to add as friends, but it's kind of an all or nothing proposition...
What makes you think Microsoft pays retailers to exclude Linux? Big box retailers are all about catering to the majority, not the minority. What's worse, Linux distro's go out of date so fast that stock can't keep up. That's why, when you do see Linux on the shelves of those places, it's usually old and out of date, or a distro that isn't revved very frequently.
You're not going to see Linux on computers at BestBuy or whatever for very real logistical reasons, not anyone paying them to exclude it.
While that's true, commecial artists still get paid for the final product. Regardless of whether or not they had to create 10 of them to get paid. There was always the idea that if you work with the customer, at some point you get paid.
They will make the same amount of profit from the pile whether you pick the nice ones or someone else does.
Not necessarily. If you only have 10 good apples, and the rest are mediocre, you don't want the first 10 people to buy the only good apples. You want people to buy the mediocre ones and leave the good apples to attract more buyers. This way maybe you can sell 50 apples instead of 10.
You're forgetting, there's basically a 12 year difference between IE6 and IE8. Most of the standards you are probably thinking of either didn't exist back then, or were very new and not proven or even implemented by the competitors at the time.
IE8 is part of an ongoing work to modernize the browser to support most of those standards you say are missing. Standards conformance isn't a switch that you turn on, it's a lot of work, and you can't wait to release your product until all standards are supported or no browser would ever be released.
Technically, they were convicted, it was just overturned later. Of course the latter part of the case was a sham.
You're the one with "creative interpretations". One cannot be "convicted" in a civil trial. The mere terminology you use is intended to deceptively imply criminal actions. Why not try using, you know, stuff that's actually true, and you know, stuff that's actually reality rather than what you want it to be.
They were found by judge jackson to engage in browser tying (among other things, none of which had anything to do with your claim) They were *NOT* found to be deliberately breaking browser standards).
The term "embrace and extend" goes back further, the DOJ simply added the "extinguish" part, or rather one of the witnesses did, and when cross-examined that witness acknowledged that the phrase wasn't in his notes. In fact, there is no evidence the "extinguish" phrase actually existed, other than his testimony.
But, in any event...
That's a very, umm, creative interpretation. I'll let the memo stand on it's own. Anyone that wants to read it and believes your interpretation, well, they must be equally... creative. You're a sad sack.
Sad sack? Who's the one that's making things up to validate his point? That would be you.
It should be quite easy for you to quote the section of the memo that talks about violating internet standards if it truly says what you claim it does. How about a few sentences? No? Didn't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
I think this adequately illustrates the point made a few days ago questioning Why so many terrorists are engineers? Technical people seem to think that their beliefs are correct and everyone else is wrong far more often than other professional classes. Anonymous is just an expression of that. They believe they are right and are justified in attacking others based on their belief.
It's truly bizarre in my mind. What drives people to such black and white thinking?
Perhaps they view ethics and morality as formula or algorithm in which there is only a single correct answer, and then somehow translate an inappropriate response to it.
To be fair, most open source projects are eternally in "developer release" and the only way you'll ever get to use them is to use them in whatever state they are in.
Indeed. Everyone knows they got $200k, so why would anyone want to work on it for free when they're being paid to work on it?
It's interesting, but the very idea of social networking is to "share" information. As such, the concept of security is often lost in the frenzy of sharing. This is what leads to crap like Buzz.
Huh? My consoles are as wide as the screen. Use a real one, like PowerShell. I also use TortoiseSVN a lot, and find it to work quite well, but it's a GUI tool. The command line svn works just like Linux.
Putty is not a port of a Linux app. It's a windows only app. There are lots of much better (though not free as in beer or speech) ssh clients.
My laptop has a longer battery life with Windows than Linux because Linux does piss poor power management. I have never seen anyone honestly claim otherwise, and there are LOTS of reviews that illustrate that point, particularly in regards to netbooks.
The top of your head seems to be quite buggy.
Actually, I believe the reason so many terrorists are engineers is that engineers always think they are right, and they tend to get very emotional about their beliefs (maybe because so many of them are somewhat socially challenged and don't have other outlets for their emotions).
I mean, why are so many people in Anonymous engineers? I dislike scientology as much as anyone, but I don't feel the need to attack them over it. Many engineers do, it seems.
No, i'm not (directly) equating Anonymous with terrorism, but they do share some common traits, most markedly the belief that they are right, and the willingness to risk (possibly even their lives) to express that belief.
I think engineering (be it mechanical, software, civil, whatever) requires a willingness to believe you know the right way to do things for the beneit others. In other words, a know it all.
In fact, being an engineer myself, I know that everything I've said is true and unquestionable. And if you don't agree, you should be flogged.
Which apps? Other than, say desktop environments?
Such as?
I'm serious. You do realize that virtually all Unix apps have been ported to Windows (the reverse is nowhere near true), and there are some damn fine Unix emulation environments for Windows if you don't like the way Windows works? (Microsoft even provides one, called Services for Unix).
Now certainly, personal preference can come into play. Maybe you don't like the way Windows works, or any number of other reasons, but "the apps work better"? Do you have any examples?
Why is Sun dead because they invented a wildly successful programming language and virtual machine that they couldn't figure out how to profit from?
There, fixed that for you.
She bought an x64 laptop just to run Picasa? Sounds strange to me.
Yes, because that's what overworked, underpaid software developers want to do, give themselves twice as much work.
You SO have your finger on the pulse fo teh game developer community.
Dude. You have some odd concepts.
I find it particularly funny how you try to use Ajax as a weapon against Microsoft. They invented it.
Also, Firefox has nothing to do with removing the ie-only stuff of yesteryear. Html has grown since then. All those plug-ins and extensions were there because HTML wasn't good enough for desktop apps. Now it's getting a lot closer and those features are going away (like Flash Video).
I'm also scratching my head as to what you are referring to when you say Microsoft tried to control the server side protocols of the web server. IIS has never used any proprietary protocol, it's always been HTTP, FTP, SMTP, with stuff like WebDav (another standard) and other standard protocols. What exactly are you referring to?
And I might consider replacing Windows if Ubuntu ever manages to work right out of the box. It has never done so for me. Even 10.04 gives me screwed up video because it can't figure out my multiple monitors properly, and the sound doesn't work. In fact, the sound has NEVER worked in any version of Linux i've ever tried. Multiple monitors is not an obscure configuration. I've been using them for 10 years. Most of the programmers and graphics artists and web designers I know also use them.
I read these reviews and I wonder what mythical hardware the reviewer must have to make everythng work.. Linux on the server? Rock solid. Linux on the desktop? Always problems to deal with. Always.
Yes, let's ship the surgery off to india!
Oh... wait...
Seriously, this is the same thinking that says people can read scripts to do tech support, and while it works to a point.. it fails badly at another point.
That only works to a point. A database is only as good as the human using it. And databases are notoriously wrong, either with the patients data or the drugs themselves.
As I said in another thread. I think patent submitters should have to "show their work". They would have to prove it wasn't just something that happened during the development of a product, which they later discovered they could patent. It would have to be pre-meditated, developed, and worked into a real "invention" rather than "Hey look, nobody has patented sneezing on a handkerchief yet, let's grab that".
I'm almost tempted.. almost.. to say that they even should need to prove that they would not be able to develop the idea without patent protection. That is to say, if the invention was created in response to market needs and provided plenty of market compensation, then patent protection is unnecessary. Patent protection should only extend to inventions that need patents in order to be profitable.
I don't think it's comparable at all. You're talking about financial professionals reviewing cases of normal people. We're talkinga bout medical professionals reviewing the actions of other medical people. There will always be a conflict of interest there because the medical professionals, even if not practicing, may remember a time when they did something like that and be biased because of it.
This is why even appeals courts concentrate on re-reviewing the details of the case, rather than (in most cases) analyzing the behavior or actions of the previous court. Unless there was gross misconduct, the appeals process will typically say something like "The previous court erred in determining this or that" and that's about it.
I think a better system would one in which the "jury" was made up of equal parts professional and non-professional "peers".
No surgery is trivial. If you're opening someone up, that requires a great deal of skill and traiing. Do you really want someone that hasn't had years of anatomy training digging around in your organs? "Hey, that looks like it might be it, let's cut it out and see!"
Even something as routine as prescribing medication can have a huge backlash if the person isn't up to date on all the latest research (that's not tto say that all doctors do keep up to date, but that's supposed to be part of their job, and what we pay them for). You often need a LOT of education for that, and is why pharmacists are nearly as well educated as doctors.
That's not to say that I don't agree with you at some level. I see no reason why a doctor should be prescribing medication. I think they should diagnose the problem, then the doctor should work with a pharmacist to develop a treatment plan. That way the specialist (the pharmacist) can be the one that specializes in medication and the doctor can specialize in the diagnosis.
Dude. Shatter is completely "fixed". It was partially fixed in 2002... years before Vista came out, but that was a patch. Vista eliminates shatter by providing beefed up security for windows messages, and forcing services to run in a different Terminal screen from the interactive user. The article you reference talks about the way Vista addressed the issue.
In other words, Shatter hasn't been an issue since about 2004. Please stop regurgitating 7 10 year old exploits as if they were valid today.
Dude. Not one of your citations mentions .NET being vulnerable to anything, they all refer to Windows flaws in native components.
You also don't seem to understand what the firefox plugin is, and i'm scratching my head as this was an issue 2 or 3 *YEARS* ago, and there was no "patch" this summer to address it as you keep claiming.
The firefox plugin was added in the only way that Firefox allowed system-wide plug-ins to be added. Java, and several other plug-ins use the same mechanism.
Firefox has since been patched to allow disabling of those components if you want, but that doesn't change the fact that there is no other way to enable system-wide plug-ins in FF. That's a FF limitation that some might call a flaw.
What the plug-in did was provide a URI handler for click-once applications. Click-once apps install in the users home directory, and run with user privileges. There is no flaw there, or else Linux would also be flawed for allowing apps to be installed in users home directories. Of course, an administrator can disable it in either case, but default installation is to allow it in every OS I know of.
You keep blabbering about .NET being a security flaw, but you have not provided any shred of evidence to support your claim.
You're clueless.
WTF are you prattling on about? .NET insecure? Seriously? Do you even know what you're talking about? You are making vague claims that make little sense. Like calling the Firefox plug-in a security flaw.. It's using the mechanism that Firefox provided for machine wide-plugins. Firefox has since improved on that, but it wasn't MS's fault nor was it a security flaw.
Please, point me to some evidence of any severe unpatched .net flaws or exploits. I don't know of any. I think you are confused and simply applying catchphrases you've heard and pretending you know what you're talking about.
Actually, my problem with Facebook is that it tells all your friends who your other friends are. Let's say you have friends you don't want the rest of your friends to know about, or maybe you have acquaintences that don't need to know what your family members are doing.
Privacy is about choosing to give information to people, not having it revealed without your consent. It has nothing to do with "doing something wrong" (although you may in fact be doing something wrong), it's about choice. Yes, you can choose not to be a member of the service, and you can choose who to add as friends, but it's kind of an all or nothing proposition...
What makes you think Microsoft pays retailers to exclude Linux? Big box retailers are all about catering to the majority, not the minority. What's worse, Linux distro's go out of date so fast that stock can't keep up. That's why, when you do see Linux on the shelves of those places, it's usually old and out of date, or a distro that isn't revved very frequently.
You're not going to see Linux on computers at BestBuy or whatever for very real logistical reasons, not anyone paying them to exclude it.
While that's true, commecial artists still get paid for the final product. Regardless of whether or not they had to create 10 of them to get paid. There was always the idea that if you work with the customer, at some point you get paid.
With crowdsourcing, you don't even have that.
Not necessarily. If you only have 10 good apples, and the rest are mediocre, you don't want the first 10 people to buy the only good apples. You want people to buy the mediocre ones and leave the good apples to attract more buyers. This way maybe you can sell 50 apples instead of 10.
You're forgetting, there's basically a 12 year difference between IE6 and IE8. Most of the standards you are probably thinking of either didn't exist back then, or were very new and not proven or even implemented by the competitors at the time.
IE8 is part of an ongoing work to modernize the browser to support most of those standards you say are missing. Standards conformance isn't a switch that you turn on, it's a lot of work, and you can't wait to release your product until all standards are supported or no browser would ever be released.
You're the one with "creative interpretations". One cannot be "convicted" in a civil trial. The mere terminology you use is intended to deceptively imply criminal actions. Why not try using, you know, stuff that's actually true, and you know, stuff that's actually reality rather than what you want it to be.
They were found by judge jackson to engage in browser tying (among other things, none of which had anything to do with your claim) They were *NOT* found to be deliberately breaking browser standards).
The term "embrace and extend" goes back further, the DOJ simply added the "extinguish" part, or rather one of the witnesses did, and when cross-examined that witness acknowledged that the phrase wasn't in his notes. In fact, there is no evidence the "extinguish" phrase actually existed, other than his testimony.
But, in any event...
Sad sack? Who's the one that's making things up to validate his point? That would be you.
It should be quite easy for you to quote the section of the memo that talks about violating internet standards if it truly says what you claim it does. How about a few sentences? No? Didn't think so.