But that defeats the purpose of shell commands that use binaries that are part of a stock *nix installation. An awful lot of people who have an account on a Unix box can't just throw gcc on it and compile their own binaries. As hard as it is to believe, some administrators actually frown on such things.
I'm usually writing shell scripts that invoke tools like sed/awk/grep that are built into all the flavors of Unix I have to work with. I often have to access a machine over a 9600 bps modem connection.
My most popular utility tarball weighs in at 44K (LZW) compressed, or 127K uncompressed. If I had to upload a 50K gzip binary and a 184K gnu tar just to be able to uncompress my tarball, I'd be more than doubling the time it takes to do the install. The improved compression from gzip (about 7% compared to LZH under SCO compress -H, or 25% compared to LZW from SCO/AIX compress would take a long time to pay back.
A recent project is working with much larger tarballs, so it might be a good idea to pursue getting GNU tools out to the point that they become the norm. If my employer would install them on all systems we have to support, it would be a different situation; I'd use all GNU goodness and love every minute of it. I'd also probably go back to writing utilities in perl, which is what I used to do at a prior job where I had only a handful of local systems to support instead of thousands across the whole country. But since that isn't likely to happen any time soon, I'm sticking with what is truly portable, as POSIXly correct as I can, with the absolute minimum of quirk adjustments.
You should be using gzcat, not zcat, anyhow. zcat is only portably able to be compress -d.
Unfortunately, in the context of Unix, there's nothing 'portable' about using gzipped files. At work, I spend most of my time working with SCO OpenServer 5.0.x (I know), a little bit with AIX 4-5, and rarely get to do anything with Linux. The first two don't ship with gzip, leaving as the common denominator of all three the LZW of compress. On all three of those flavors of *nix, zcat <filename handles those files with no problems. Therefore, when I build a tarball of shell scripts designed to run portably, that's the format I'm using to package it, and the scripts are written to the LCD with some case `uname`... constructs where necessary.
Some people call me a 'Grammar Nazi' for being so picky about how people use English. I get frustrated about things like commmercials that say "check us out on the web at dubya dubya dubya dot ${COMPANY} dot com backslash ${PRODUCT}", the inability to distinguish single quotes, double quotes, and backticks; or parentheses, square brackets, and curly braces. As a tech-support person, I expect non-techinical people to make that sort of mistake, but in technical writing it's inexcusable. Calling something by the wrong name is where we get VerizonMath, or crash a space probe because someone didn't convert between feet and meters.
there HAS to be something about German culture that allowed the Nazi's to be so successfull
The irony is that when the Inquisition was literally torturing Jews to death, the states of what eventually became Germany were the most hospitable to Jews. I think this is due to the fact that the Catholic/Protestant schism kept any one religious organization from gaining the political power that could empower an Inquisition.
I really do think that just about any country is capable of becoming a totalitarian dictatorship, given the proper conditioning. If Germans have any built-in cultural proclivity here, it's the value placed on order. That creates a certain amount of inertia to overcome before one questions the orders being given. "I was just following orders" wasn't just a lame excuse.
Q) What did you want to be when you grew up?
A) A lawyer.
That's interesting. When I saw what Gates said, I immediately thought of the old SNL Unfrozen Caveman Lawyer sketches
Chairman: Go ahead, Mr. G-rock.
G-rock: It's just 'G-rock', Mr. Chairman... Ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, I'm just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes when I'm playing a song on my Zune, I wonder "Are little demons inside playing the music? " I don't know! My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts. But there's one thing I do know - when someone builds a computer without paying for a Windows license, that's piracy, and my company is entitled to no less than two hundred dollars in compensatory damages, and eight hundred in punitive damages. Thank you.
The password cracking program has a 0.0N% chance of guessing a password for every second that it runs. If it has to start over with a new password hash, it still has the same chance per second.
That's assuming you have the hashed password. And on a decent OS, in order to get that, you either already have root, or you have physical control over the media.
The theory is that if I set up a security regime that locks a user out after X consecutive failed login attempts, then the cracker has to try X-1 times, then wait for the user to log in correctly without fail. If the user fat-fingers the password and gets locked out, and has to get an admin to unlock their account, they'll get a new temporary passsword and be forced to change it again.
Better make that X-2 times just to be safe. So X is 5, you get 3 chances per day to guess a password, if the user logs in once a day. And you better not try to log in while that user is on vacation or out sick for a few days. If I make users change their passwords every 3 months, you'll have at most 195 chances to guess the password before it isn't the password anymore.
LIS, that's the theory. In practice, what I do at work is use a 'base' password that includes at least one each of punctuation symbols, capital and lower-case letters, and a numeric portion that increments every time the IT department makes me change the password. Since their system only prevents me from reusing the entire password, I can get away with this, and all I have to write down is the number that changes every few months. Since you don't know if the numeric part is at the beginning, the end, or somewhere in the middle, knowing just that much won't help you, even if you do find where I have it written down.
But the GPP was right that a regime that is so tight that it prevents me from reusing any portion of a prior password would be really bad, especially because to do that they'd either have to store all my old passwords in the clear, or hashes of small enough portions as to make the entire password database particularly vulnerable to the kind of attack you describe above.
They take our money as federal tax and then ransom it back to us to make us do things we don't want to do.
And that is due to the twin abominations ratified in 1913, the 16th and 17th Amendments, which gave the national government the power to extract huge sums of money directly from the people, and took from the state legislatures their delegates in the Senate.
Imagine that you are a US Senator, elected to that position by the legislature of your state. A bill is proposed that will demand that the same legislature enact a certain law, and the state executive branch enforce it to the satisfaction of some national executive agency, or have funds withheld. Now imagine you want to be re-elected by that legislature. How do you think you're going to vote?
The result of these changes is that more and more decisions are being made in the US Congress and by the faceless mass of bureaucrats in national agencies, rather than in state capitals, county courthouses, and city halls. The concentration of power favors well-funded lobbyists who represent powerful interests, for whom the return on their investment can be huge; against diffuse interests of common citizens.
Instead of 50 different 'distros' of government, with the chance to learn from each other and merge improvements that succeeded elsewhere, we get stuck with a single implementation. Any flaws in that monoculture are global and potentially catastrophic.
I have never understood how making people change their passwords so often that they have to write them down like the school secretary in War Games, or use weak passwords that are easy to remember.
I understand the theory that it makes it tough on the crackers, of course, but that theory presumes that all other things are equal. I don't believe they are.
If access to child porn reduces attacks, why are people charged with possession of child porn discovered after they're charged with molesting a child? Shouldn't those charged with abuse be the least likely to have a kiddie porn collection if your argument is valid?
The people least likely to have a kiddie porn collection are the people who don't desire to see kids in a sexual context. Those most likely are the ones who do. Of those who desire to see it, some are able to satisfy that desire without actually touching kids, and others aren't. The cause, both of viewing porn and abusing kids, is the fact that the perv is a perv. There is no evidence that keeping a perv from looking at pictures makes him less likely to abuse a kid.
There are arguments that assume a cause-effect relationship, but other arguments to counter it. The counter-arguments are generally shouted down by people like Bill O'Reilly and Nancy Grace as apologia for pervs, often with the implication that the apologist must himself be perverted.
I figure that every minute a perv spends looking at pictures is a minute he's not abusing a kid.
If that's the case, why has paedophilia been on a statistical rise for the past decade or so?
Increased reporting. It used to be that kids were too ashamed to report being victimized, in a lot of cases because the people molesting them would mind-fsck them into thinking that the kid was in fact guilty. Some of the increased reporting comes from mothers indoctrinating their kids to claim that the ex molestered them so she doesn't have to give him visitation.
We're talking about child porn that tries to play games with legal loopholes about whether a child is actually harmed. It encourages the direct physical abuse of real children by conditioning the paedophile to consider their lustful and abusive mentality "acceptable" or "normal".
I don't believe this. I think you've got cause and effect reversed. There's plenty of empirical evidence that suggests that letting people look at porn diffuses their 'lustful mentality' so that they are not as likely to commit an act of physical abuse. That some people's appetites cannot be satisfied by the porn does not equate to the porn causing the appetite itself.
Let's suppose that you're chosen for a jury in a kiddie porn case. In order to render a verdict against the accused, you'll have to look at the porn. Will this make you go out and rape kids? No, it won't. That's because porn doesn't make normal people commit physical acts against others.
But even if it were true, it wouldn't matter. Making pictures that 'encurage' activities is the expression of an idea, which isn't the same thing as the activities themselves. If someone abuses a child, they have committed an act against an actual person, which is justly punished. If all they're doing is looking at pictures and thinking about it, no one has been harmed, so there is no justification for sending Men With Badges And Guns to stop it.
...We don't base our morality on law."
-- Linus Torvalds
Apparently our morality is simple pragmatism?
That does not follow. We would hope that our laws are based on some theory of what constitutes moral behavior toward others, but it is naive to assume that all of them are. As we all know, laws can be bought (See *AA).
Take a peek at a history book: It used to be legal for one man to own another. Did that make it moral? Hardly.
You really should get out more. Make a sign that says that a candy bar costs "$.40", and ask 20 people at random to say out loud the price of the candy bar. I predict that at least 15 of them will say "forty cents"; You might get one person who says "point four dollars" or "four-tenths of a dollar", but I doubt it. Now, ask the same people how much ten candy bars cost, and they should all agree that it's 4 dollars (plus sales tax). That's because the amount moved to the left of the decimal, and is now 'dollars' instead of 'cents'.
For extra credit, if your sign also said that m&m's cost $.002 each (not per bag), I bet some of them would read that as "point oh oh two cents". This is why I never liked the game show Family Feud, where it doesn't matter if an answer is right or not, only whether it's popular. The survey says that people think the stuff on the right of the decimal point is 'cents'.
Your misunderstanding is that they did not say ".002 dollars", they said ".002 cents." Over and over when asking the rate, the word "dollar" was never used by the Verizon reps, it was always "cents." The point is, they quoted.002 cents and charged 100 times more on the bill.
I misunderstand nothing. To repeat my point, the mathematically challenged see a money figure that includes a decimal point, and refer to the portion to the left of that decimal as 'dollars', and that to the right as 'cents'. If you listen to the conversation, that is exactly what the Verizon people did. They started with '.002 cents per kb', multiplied by the number of kb, and came up with a figure that had digits on both sides of the decimal point, which they then called 'dollars' and 'cents' respectively.
For what I hope is the last time, I do not believe this is correct. It is, however, far more common in the general population than in Slashdot readers. It may even be more common in judges, more's the pity.
From time to time, I'll see a pricetag in a store that says something like ".79c", and I always cringe when I see that, because I know that it's wrong. But if I tried to purchase the item in question for a fraction of a penny, when the clerk insisted that ".79c" is "seventy-nine cents", if I called up the Attorney General's office and said it was deceptive advertising, I'd probably not get anywhere.
The reason, of course, is that "everyone knows what they mean" by ".79c". In the case of Verizon, precisely because the customer normally pays even less than $.00002/kb, that argument holds no water. We computer geeks are used to communicating with a machine that takes what we say literally. John Q. Public expects humans to be smarter than that.
You can read it as either 'ten cents' or 'point one oh dollars', not 'point one oh cents' as you claim.
But of course it can be read that way. And it is read that way. That is exactly what mathematically-challenged people do when they think that anything to the right side of the decimal point is called 'cents' instead of 'dollars'.
This last one is wrong and is the reason for all of the problems.
Exactly. That is why I entitled the GP "The problem is simple".
It doesn't help that we have people around here saying "sure, it's perfectly alright to say it" when it is completely and totally wrong.
Please show where I said it was alright to say it. I did not. You have demonstrated that, just as the CSRs are math-challenged, slashdot readers can be English-challenged.
Everything to the left of the decimal point is 'dollars', and everything to the right 'cents'. Thus "$.10' can be read as 'ten cents', or 'point one oh cents' by the CSR. I'm afraid that when you try to explain this to the general public, you'll get a 'No Coke, Pepsi!' kind of response.
That's because USB is designed to be hot-pluggable. The drivers assume that devices will be (dis)connected at arbitrary times, and deal with the fact. That isn't the case for a lot of other devices. The drivers would have to include a call to re-initialize the hardware coming out of hibernation. I don't know if that has been universally done yet or not.
Nothing Moglen said suggests he wants to take from the rich and give to the poor.
Go back and listen to him again. Several times he referred to 'Social Justice' requiring 'too much coercion' that resulted in more harm than good being done. This suggests that he finds a certain amount of such coercion in the name of 'Social Justice' is all right, so long as enough 'Social Justice' is produced to counteract the injustices perpetrated in the process.
At this point, as the old joke goes, we've established what he is; we're just haggling over price.
No argument you can't win by throwing in a dig at religion, huh?:] I mean, it's not like that was some lame attempt at making people stop thinking critically and go "creationism is bad! I'll believe this other guy!" or something.
Actually, it's not a dig at religion, but at those who believe that a complex eco(logical)system can spring out of random, with nothing controlling it, and be perfect and holy, not to be messed up by men; but insist that a complex economic system must have a creator. I guess I was just too clever for the room.
Then again, it seems oddly appropriate to have you posting such a thing with a name like "The Monster"
I'm 6'6", 300#, and there's some similarity to my name, which is why the nick got hung on me. You should go look up the etymology of 'monster', and you might understand why I like it.
As to the rest of your rant, the free market is not opposed to cooperation. In fact, cooperation is the basis of a free economy. Every time you buy or sell something, you're cooperating with your business partners. Government uses Men With Badges And Guns to enforce its dictates, to prevent such cooperation. That's good when it's cooperation between Mafia enforcers, who are themselves using coercive force against others, but not so good when it's done to distrubute wealth in accord with 'Social Justice'.
And there's always the issue about changing it when you make changes to your system: update the OS, Virus Scanner, etc.
That's not a particularly difficult thing to handle. A boot loader such as grub or ntloader can have its configuration file updated to force a full boot of the OS, which would include as its last step the creation of the new memory/register image file.
The biggest problem of booting up like this is that the contents of memory and cpu registers isn't enough. The hardware has to be properly initialized as well. Since the internal state of the drivers indicates that has already been done, a consistent mechanism to force re-initialization of all hardware has to be in place after the system reloads the image. That might take as long as a normal boot does.
We've hit a really low point as a society, when "Social Justice" are dirty words. How long will those of you who believe that absolutely unfettered economic darwinism ("Free Market") think you can throw out a word like "socialism" and think that Americans are going to drool on command?
I'm always mystified by the people who, thinking that 'economic darwinism' is a Bad Thing, advocate 'economic creationism' in its stead. The reason why phrases like 'Social Justice' cause me to react is that they're used by the Clever Kids to try to redefine, and thus win, arguments.
The term seems to suggest that if A has sufficiently greater wealth than B, the situation is 'socially unjust', without considering the actions that led to the situation. If the disparity of wealth is due to A having worked harder to produce his wealth, it would be the antithesis of justice to 'correct' the imbalance by coercive force.
How long will we have to watch cultures diminish as a powerful few use "capitalism" to enrich themselves while constantly greater numbers of our fellow humans fall into poverty.
It's good that you use scare quotes there, because politically-connected people using their connections to gain advantage in the market is not what I call "capitalism"; it's more like "mercantilism". But consider this: The nations with the poorest citizens are precisely those where coercive force dominates economic transactions; those where the lowest economic classes do the best are where force (and the threat thereof) is kept to a minimum.
We did an experiment last century, where we divided a country between capitalism and socialism. In order to maintain the experiment, the subjects in the socialist part of the experiment had to be confined by a wall, manned by guards with orders to kill anyone who tried to get out. But, hey, as long as all the inmates are equally poor, it's 'Social Justice', right?
Here in the Great U.S. and A. we're seeing a level (by percentage, yes) of poverty that would have made the victims of the Great Depression nod in recognition.
The 'poor' under the definition of 'poverty' in the US of A would be considered wealthy in any country on the planet a century ago. By embracing 'social justice', you can feel smug about spreading misery equally.
I am a proponent of Free Software precisely because it's about freedom. The pursuit of 'social justice' by coercive force is incompatible with freedom.
BTW, wasn't Moglen wearing a NICE suit? I don't suppose Starvin' Marvin can afford a fancy lawyer suit like that.
Every time he said 'Social Justice' he fed the perception that Free Software is a communist plot. I suspect a lot of people will miss the part where he said that it is no longer necessary for a revolution of the have-nots to dispossess the haves.
I wouldn't mind so much if it were 90% realistic, but it isn't even close. And it affects people when they actually try to use computers.
I work in Level 2 tech support. I occasionally have other techs ask me to help them figure out why they can't mount a CD on a customer's server they're dialed into. I always start by asking them to check with the customer to see if the CD is in the drive SHINY SIDE DOWN. You'd be surprised how often the disk is upside down in the drive. I don't blame the non-techies, when every single TV show or movie that shows someone using a computer's {C|DV}D drive shows it shiny side up.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm usually writing shell scripts that invoke tools like sed/awk/grep that are built into all the flavors of Unix I have to work with. I often have to access a machine over a 9600 bps modem connection.
My most popular utility tarball weighs in at 44K (LZW) compressed, or 127K uncompressed. If I had to upload a 50K gzip binary and a 184K gnu tar just to be able to uncompress my tarball, I'd be more than doubling the time it takes to do the install. The improved compression from gzip (about 7% compared to LZH under SCO compress -H , or 25% compared to LZW from SCO/AIX compress would take a long time to pay back.
A recent project is working with much larger tarballs, so it might be a good idea to pursue getting GNU tools out to the point that they become the norm. If my employer would install them on all systems we have to support, it would be a different situation; I'd use all GNU goodness and love every minute of it. I'd also probably go back to writing utilities in perl, which is what I used to do at a prior job where I had only a handful of local systems to support instead of thousands across the whole country. But since that isn't likely to happen any time soon, I'm sticking with what is truly portable, as POSIXly correct as I can, with the absolute minimum of quirk adjustments.
clearly there wouldn't be a arc.tar.gz.Z file
Fortunately, there's an easy fix for that: Use redirected stdin rather than a filename for zcat :
zcat <arc.tar.gz | ssh user@foo 'cd tmp/a/b/c ; tar xvf -'
Some people call me a 'Grammar Nazi' for being so picky about how people use English. I get frustrated about things like commmercials that say "check us out on the web at dubya dubya dubya dot ${COMPANY} dot com backslash ${PRODUCT}", the inability to distinguish single quotes, double quotes, and backticks; or parentheses, square brackets, and curly braces. As a tech-support person, I expect non-techinical people to make that sort of mistake, but in technical writing it's inexcusable. Calling something by the wrong name is where we get VerizonMath, or crash a space probe because someone didn't convert between feet and meters.
I really do think that just about any country is capable of becoming a totalitarian dictatorship, given the proper conditioning. If Germans have any built-in cultural proclivity here, it's the value placed on order. That creates a certain amount of inertia to overcome before one questions the orders being given. "I was just following orders" wasn't just a lame excuse.
Chairman: Go ahead, Mr. G-rock.
G-rock: It's just 'G-rock', Mr. Chairman... Ladies and gentlemen of the Congress, I'm just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes when I'm playing a song on my Zune, I wonder "Are little demons inside playing the music? " I don't know! My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts. But there's one thing I do know - when someone builds a computer without paying for a Windows license, that's piracy, and my company is entitled to no less than two hundred dollars in compensatory damages, and eight hundred in punitive damages. Thank you.
The theory is that if I set up a security regime that locks a user out after X consecutive failed login attempts, then the cracker has to try X-1 times, then wait for the user to log in correctly without fail. If the user fat-fingers the password and gets locked out, and has to get an admin to unlock their account, they'll get a new temporary passsword and be forced to change it again.
Better make that X-2 times just to be safe. So X is 5, you get 3 chances per day to guess a password, if the user logs in once a day. And you better not try to log in while that user is on vacation or out sick for a few days. If I make users change their passwords every 3 months, you'll have at most 195 chances to guess the password before it isn't the password anymore.
LIS, that's the theory. In practice, what I do at work is use a 'base' password that includes at least one each of punctuation symbols, capital and lower-case letters, and a numeric portion that increments every time the IT department makes me change the password. Since their system only prevents me from reusing the entire password, I can get away with this, and all I have to write down is the number that changes every few months. Since you don't know if the numeric part is at the beginning, the end, or somewhere in the middle, knowing just that much won't help you, even if you do find where I have it written down.
But the GPP was right that a regime that is so tight that it prevents me from reusing any portion of a prior password would be really bad, especially because to do that they'd either have to store all my old passwords in the clear, or hashes of small enough portions as to make the entire password database particularly vulnerable to the kind of attack you describe above.
Which makes Carter a Nukey-er Engineer.
Imagine that you are a US Senator, elected to that position by the legislature of your state. A bill is proposed that will demand that the same legislature enact a certain law, and the state executive branch enforce it to the satisfaction of some national executive agency, or have funds withheld. Now imagine you want to be re-elected by that legislature. How do you think you're going to vote?
The result of these changes is that more and more decisions are being made in the US Congress and by the faceless mass of bureaucrats in national agencies, rather than in state capitals, county courthouses, and city halls. The concentration of power favors well-funded lobbyists who represent powerful interests, for whom the return on their investment can be huge; against diffuse interests of common citizens.
Instead of 50 different 'distros' of government, with the chance to learn from each other and merge improvements that succeeded elsewhere, we get stuck with a single implementation. Any flaws in that monoculture are global and potentially catastrophic.
I understand the theory that it makes it tough on the crackers, of course, but that theory presumes that all other things are equal. I don't believe they are.
There are arguments that assume a cause-effect relationship, but other arguments to counter it. The counter-arguments are generally shouted down by people like Bill O'Reilly and Nancy Grace as apologia for pervs, often with the implication that the apologist must himself be perverted.
I figure that every minute a perv spends looking at pictures is a minute he's not abusing a kid.
Let's suppose that you're chosen for a jury in a kiddie porn case. In order to render a verdict against the accused, you'll have to look at the porn. Will this make you go out and rape kids? No, it won't. That's because porn doesn't make normal people commit physical acts against others.
But even if it were true, it wouldn't matter. Making pictures that 'encurage' activities is the expression of an idea, which isn't the same thing as the activities themselves. If someone abuses a child, they have committed an act against an actual person, which is justly punished. If all they're doing is looking at pictures and thinking about it, no one has been harmed, so there is no justification for sending Men With Badges And Guns to stop it.
Got that, pervs? Look, but don't touch, m'kay?
Take a peek at a history book: It used to be legal for one man to own another. Did that make it moral? Hardly.
For extra credit, if your sign also said that m&m's cost $.002 each (not per bag), I bet some of them would read that as "point oh oh two cents". This is why I never liked the game show Family Feud, where it doesn't matter if an answer is right or not, only whether it's popular. The survey says that people think the stuff on the right of the decimal point is 'cents'.
I misunderstand nothing. To repeat my point, the mathematically challenged see a money figure that includes a decimal point, and refer to the portion to the left of that decimal as 'dollars', and that to the right as 'cents'. If you listen to the conversation, that is exactly what the Verizon people did. They started with '.002 cents per kb', multiplied by the number of kb, and came up with a figure that had digits on both sides of the decimal point, which they then called 'dollars' and 'cents' respectively.For what I hope is the last time, I do not believe this is correct. It is, however, far more common in the general population than in Slashdot readers. It may even be more common in judges, more's the pity.
From time to time, I'll see a pricetag in a store that says something like ".79c", and I always cringe when I see that, because I know that it's wrong. But if I tried to purchase the item in question for a fraction of a penny, when the clerk insisted that ".79c" is "seventy-nine cents", if I called up the Attorney General's office and said it was deceptive advertising, I'd probably not get anywhere.
The reason, of course, is that "everyone knows what they mean" by ".79c". In the case of Verizon, precisely because the customer normally pays even less than $.00002/kb, that argument holds no water. We computer geeks are used to communicating with a machine that takes what we say literally. John Q. Public expects humans to be smarter than that.
dollars.cents
Everything to the left of the decimal point is 'dollars', and everything to the right 'cents'. Thus "$.10' can be read as 'ten cents', or 'point one oh cents' by the CSR. I'm afraid that when you try to explain this to the general public, you'll get a 'No Coke, Pepsi!' kind of response.
That's because USB is designed to be hot-pluggable. The drivers assume that devices will be (dis)connected at arbitrary times, and deal with the fact. That isn't the case for a lot of other devices. The drivers would have to include a call to re-initialize the hardware coming out of hibernation. I don't know if that has been universally done yet or not.
At this point, as the old joke goes, we've established what he is; we're just haggling over price.
As to the rest of your rant, the free market is not opposed to cooperation. In fact, cooperation is the basis of a free economy. Every time you buy or sell something, you're cooperating with your business partners. Government uses Men With Badges And Guns to enforce its dictates, to prevent such cooperation. That's good when it's cooperation between Mafia enforcers, who are themselves using coercive force against others, but not so good when it's done to distrubute wealth in accord with 'Social Justice'.
The biggest problem of booting up like this is that the contents of memory and cpu registers isn't enough. The hardware has to be properly initialized as well. Since the internal state of the drivers indicates that has already been done, a consistent mechanism to force re-initialization of all hardware has to be in place after the system reloads the image. That might take as long as a normal boot does.
The term seems to suggest that if A has sufficiently greater wealth than B, the situation is 'socially unjust', without considering the actions that led to the situation. If the disparity of wealth is due to A having worked harder to produce his wealth, it would be the antithesis of justice to 'correct' the imbalance by coercive force.
It's good that you use scare quotes there, because politically-connected people using their connections to gain advantage in the market is not what I call "capitalism"; it's more like "mercantilism". But consider this: The nations with the poorest citizens are precisely those where coercive force dominates economic transactions; those where the lowest economic classes do the best are where force (and the threat thereof) is kept to a minimum.We did an experiment last century, where we divided a country between capitalism and socialism. In order to maintain the experiment, the subjects in the socialist part of the experiment had to be confined by a wall, manned by guards with orders to kill anyone who tried to get out. But, hey, as long as all the inmates are equally poor, it's 'Social Justice', right?
The 'poor' under the definition of 'poverty' in the US of A would be considered wealthy in any country on the planet a century ago. By embracing 'social justice', you can feel smug about spreading misery equally.I am a proponent of Free Software precisely because it's about freedom. The pursuit of 'social justice' by coercive force is incompatible with freedom.
BTW, wasn't Moglen wearing a NICE suit? I don't suppose Starvin' Marvin can afford a fancy lawyer suit like that.
Every time he said 'Social Justice' he fed the perception that Free Software is a communist plot. I suspect a lot of people will miss the part where he said that it is no longer necessary for a revolution of the have-nots to dispossess the haves.
I work in Level 2 tech support. I occasionally have other techs ask me to help them figure out why they can't mount a CD on a customer's server they're dialed into. I always start by asking them to check with the customer to see if the CD is in the drive SHINY SIDE DOWN. You'd be surprised how often the disk is upside down in the drive. I don't blame the non-techies, when every single TV show or movie that shows someone using a computer's {C|DV}D drive shows it shiny side up.