Why would you "port" an app over to a new langauge, or even a new version of an existing language?
Here's how you update a perl4 program when perl5 comes out.
#!/usr/bin/perl4
Wow, hard isn't it. Now it runs off of the old interpretter and never changes.
Would you rather that good ideas were never rolled into an existing project? That it never gets easier or better? All your new programs get to take advantage of the new system while your old programs carry on untouched, exactly as if development froze years ago.
I had initially thought you meant Arabs, and were just lumping the whole area together. Racism towards Indians, as in, from India? Weird. If anything I see Slashdot as being divided between hating the Arabs/Muslims (not Indians) and the USA/Israel.
And all of the anti-outsourcing anger I've seen has been directed at the companies, not the recipients. Some people imply the work is of lower quality, but that's (imho) because support people lack cultural context and programmers aren't available for discussion, etc. Same reasons that outsourcing locally fails.
Re:Sonuvabitch!
on
Debugging
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
Racism against Indians, or general disgust with dangerous religious fundamentalists?
Fundamentalist religious people who preach killing non-believers all scare me, regardless of being Muslim, Christian, Indian, white, or whatever.
Tell that to Steve Jackson Games. If the FBI really wanted to get in get the info and get out, they'd shut down everything, image every hard drive in the company, and leave.
Instead, they confiscate everything and make you wait months or years to get it back, if you ever do.
My "fantasy world", as you so nicely put it, does exist. The USA has nukes, and huge bunker busters, but when they bomb something they try to use a smart bomb and take out a specific building instead of just leveling a city. Considering the public coverage of civilians deaths, don't you think (even assuming that NOBODY in the military cares one bit about civilians) that they'll try to limit wanton destruction.
As for the smarts of the current USA administration, I can't really say. Dubya looks dumb, but all politicians have handlers and advisors who only present the alternatives they want, so who knows how much impact Dubya has personally.
They did state a policy for the government of Iraq, and Afghanistan, if you'd notice. They said they wanted to remove a terrorist leadership (believe that if you wish) and setup a government of the people. As you say, it costs a lot to be there, and a lot more if they were there for years and people got even angrier. Why would they want to stay? It makes sense that they want to get in and out. I haven't seen anything that suggests they want to rule some piss-hole country half a world away, so I'm inclined to believe them when they say they don't want to.
On the racism topic, can you honestly equate extra security checks (by the private airline, not the government) with official government policy statements like the Secretary-General of the Arab League declaring, "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
The USA is largely christian, yet people freely and openly practice many religions there, without any government interference. Try that in Iran, or Jordan, or Egypt, or Syria, etc. Ask your wife if she wishes to live there, despite being your property and unable to show her face in public, let alone vote.
Consider that Israel's citizens are 18% arab, and they can vote. Compare to the surrounding countries where a jew is risking his life to simply mention his lineage. Israel is tolerant of gays and palestinian gays have actually fled to Israel to avoid being killed.
Can you honestly say that the USA is the racist country in this scenario? Where are the stonings of non-believers, the public outcry against another race and the government declarations of intent to wipe an entire race out. These are all fairly common acts today in Muslim countries.
There's a difference between being agressive and being racist.
So, you're saying that the christian religion is a violent one (look at the modern believers I say, but whatever) and you're trying to say that the USA is a christian country. Despite the fact that there's no state religion and members of all religions are free to openly practice. Yeah, the USA sure is a terribly religious dictatorship.
Does any of this even register with you? Can you understand that women aren't allowed basic human rights in fundamentalist islamic countries. Can you understand that the crazy people running these countries actually base their decisions on their bible. Sheesh! Religion is bad enough when it's practiced casually, but these people actually believe that their religious books are word-for-word correct. Freaking imbeciles. Like Dubya, but WORSE! Imagine if every USA politician was just the same. Imagine if the USA government called for the death of philosophers and authors from other countries for the simple act of questioning the state religion.
Do you begin to understand? The muslim countries in the middle east are racist, they have sworn to destroy the WHOLE JEWISH RACE, down to every last man, woman, and child. Not just Israel, not just the Israeli army, but EVERY LAST JEW!
Why? Because of some mythical Israeli oppression? Fuck no. Before the forming of Israel there were already more Jews living in the area than Arabs, the Arabs having come largely because of all the industry the Jews were bringing. Those Arabs even became full voting citizens in the new country of Israel. The Jews were good neighbors for the most part. No, the muslim countries hated the Jews simply because their religious leaders told them to, based on the Koran. For a thousand years the muslims have hated the Jews simply because of a book.
That's racist you fucking simpleton.
Let's sum this up. USA = No official religion, tolerant of other races and religions, sometimes a bully. Muslim Nations = Religious fanatics, hatred of certain WHOLE RACES and religions, opressors of women, etc. Capiche?
You've got an internet full of information, quit believing everything you're told and go read. Everything I've told you is easily verifiable, from wikipedia and a ton of other sites.
"Wah wah wah, we like our cushy oil deals, don't remove Saddam. He's also a great military customer."
The USA lied about its reason to invade Iraq, but the rest of the world lied about their reasons for not going. It's politics, it's a dirty game and "you" are just as dirty as "us".
In the end, Saddam, a bad man by anyone's definition, was removed from power. Should he have been there in the first place? No, but he was, and everyone seemed happy to deal with him while bitching about the USA putting him there.
But, at least he was secular... Now the religious nutjobs over there are going to drag everyone back to the 1200s.
Religious fanatics. The same ones who have been dedicated to destroying jews (not Israel, jews, the entire race) for over a thousand years. Yeah, we should definately try to placate the religious nutjobs.
Just embrace everything they stand for and they might tolerate you as a subhuman. Subjugate your women, mutilate your baby girls, live completely at the command of the church. They're really easy to get along with.
I'm not from the USA, but I can't see what they could do better without giving in completely. They aren't hated because of their policies, but because they're associated with the jews (whom most of the Arab world has declared their intent to kill - before the forming of the state of Israel even) and because of their relaxed views on sex (yeah, the USA, relaxed about sex - just think what the Muslim fanatics would think if they got around to thinking about you)! You can't compromise with someone who hates you for your skin color, or your freedom. No more than the blacks should have compromised with the KKK and only been slaves half the time.
Re:Sorta agree with both points of view
on
Singularity Sky
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· Score: 1
The bad guys get better towards the end of the (currently written) series.
They are quite pathetic early on, but they seem fairly realistic. Just pay attention of modern politics for examples of creeps who'd vote to kill their own mothers simply to spite the other party. The only unrealistic thing is that Honor's side seems honestly motivated by good, which is quite unlike modern politics where both sides are almost exactly the same.
Which countries are the most racist today? That's right, the Muslim states. They're the ones whose leaders have continually publically declared their intent to drive every last jew into the ocean, destroying their race, and then to destroy the great Satan, the USA.
Yeah, it certainly sounds like the USA (a recent participant in the thousand years of hatred of Jews by the Muslims) started that...
If N. Korea (or China, etc) invaded Iraq do you really think they'd be preparing to move out after setting up a government of locals?
Further, the point of space based weapons, in most plans I've seen, is small tactical strikes. Instead of dropping a daisy-cutter to remove a tank you drop a tiny smart-weapon on it, taking out just the tank and not the civilians a building away.
Part of the confusion is that 'stable' refers to the interfaces, as well as to the code maturity and crash-proofness.
There's no guarantee a module from 2.5.x will work on 2.5.x+1, where a module (ignoring bugs) from 2.6.0 will work in 2.6.60.
If you want crash-proof, wait for RedHat or Suse or someone to package the kernel for you. If you want stable interfaces so you can begin to develop your kernel module, or whatever, then grab 2.6.0 straight off the presses, but maybe don't put your valuable data on it right away.
It's your responsibility to save your work too, but if I turned your power off and lost even 15-minutes of work for every employee at your company you'd all of a sudden be calculating the damages I'd caused.
Unless you've got a constant-running save process that saves multiple levels of undo, and your backup process mirrors this to two seperate locations, on the fly, you're going to lose data if your drive dies. Backing up simply changes this from months to days, or at best, hours.
What really pissed me off about this is that when I called to return the drive to IBM I spoke to, supposedly, the manager of that department (Mario) and he crossed his heart and swore that the GXPs were great drives and that he hadn't heard of any defect in the line, etc. I even quoted articles on StorageReview and cnet he held to his lies. Just admit it and replace it - don't make me jump through hoops and blame me, then finally only replace it with another decative 75GXP. Fuckers.
Exactly. There are a lot of things that make sense if you examine only one side of the issue. Theft is great, until you see it from the side of the victim.
What we need is a law against abuse of the commons. Against taking more than your fair share of any public resource. Not only would it point out to people that the commons are valuable resources, not to be squandered, but we'd also have a way to punish the greedy - those who will take *everything* they can, regardless of the consequences.
The greed of most people is sickening. If you suggest that something is available to someone they'll walk over their own family in order to club a nun holding an orphan and get the free upgrade that technically was only meant for someone else. (People who buy and break items to return for warranty replacement because they know they'll get the model up in replacement for their discontinued item.)
The problem is that any centralized accounting is going to require not only a ton of paperwork, but an oversite agency monitoring every email sent. Obviously they can't trust the sender to report it, or the receiver (you'd blame the spammer for a hundred email for every one received), so they need to be the only legal mailserver. Then we'd need unspoofable IDs so that we could be billed. Have you considered how fascist you'd have to be to make this work?
The solution to spam, like all other technically legal acts that hurt others, is vigilante justice. It's what you'd do if some bastard raped your sister and got off because the cops made an error on the arrest form which let him get away. Seems that spammers need to "interact" with the community that they exploit. They do what they do because nothing bad happens to them, even after they forge your domain and slashdot your business for a week under bounces and flames. Explain to them, in terms they understand, how their actions are hurtful and they'll stop.
Why do you imply that a corporate user would care if there's a requirement that the distro be 100% GPL? The GPL doesn't affect end-users. The only problem is ungrounded implications (such as yours) that using GPLed software is somehow worse than using any other software.
Then you suggest that there's a difference between GW Bush saying "with us or against us" and demanding that people change, and the Linux community's simple decision to not associate with people they feel are taking advantage of them. You don't need to embrace the GPL at all, just don't expect me to want to accept your program over a free program.
Part of the reason old systems don't get new OSes is that they don't need them enough to justify the cost.
You can download RedHat 9 (10?) and upgrade some or all of your ailing RedHat 5.0 box. Either upgrade the whole thing (RH9 would do slim installs suitable for old machines) or just upgrade the old service.
Call Microsoft and ask them if they allow free upgrades to WinXP from older OSes to fix security problems. Ask if they mind if you grab some WinXP DLLs from a friend and use them on your WinNT machine. That is, if they would work. Services in RedHat would probably work on an older machine, though they may require a parallel install of some libraries.
Then there's the issue that even for outdated versions of software that aren't patched directly, a moderately skilled coder (perl - barely any C - like many junior unix admins) can usually adapt the fix for an older version, or use the information provided to script some firewall rules to avoid it.
Then there's simply the fact that it's available. Even if you can't do it internally, you can pay a coder for a day of work ($250 tops - about the cost of a trouble call with big software companies) who can go grab all the source code (no NDAs required) and do the fix for you.
If this IE5.0 fix was critical for you to have, how could you go about getting it before Microsoft got around to fixing it? Turn off images?
This isn't about getting energy from ethanol, this is about storing hydrogen in a dense and safe form that doesn't require extreme temperatures or pressures. With an infrastructure much like the one we have now for gasoline we could distribute hydrogen in ethanol form.
The "reactor" is a 2-foot cube, small enough to be part of a car or fueling station. You'd have the fuel-cell benefits, without having to store hydrogen.
Besides, ethanol can come from a lot of crops, not just corn. The reason we use corn is that it's a handy farm subsidy - if you're going to pay the farmers anyways, might as well get something from it. Ethanol production could come from bamboo, hemp, algae, or even urban bio-waste. Waste wood from sawmills, grass clippings, etc.
While biomass -> ethanol -> hydrogen -> electricity may not be as efficient as gasoline, it's renewable and eventually that's going to be really important.
But Microsoft has never tried to succeed on their own merits. They've sabotaged competitors, stolen code, lied, sued innocent companies, made proprietary changes to protocols, spoken out about open source being communist and unamerican, etc.
I think there are many reasons why everyone, not just open source developers, would want MS to fail.
Hell, I can't think of any reason why they should stay in business. Some people point to Bill's success in a sort of Randian justification, as if success makes right, but this ignores all the crimes he's been part of. If we respect him for success we need to respect Ken Lay for his success. I don't know of anyone who knows that MS has done and who supports them, except for shareholders. Money makes people a bit hypocritical - if those crimes were committed against them they'd be up in arms, but they're willing to share the spoils.
Well, leaving out the job opportunities and such from having more open source and Linux projects needing sysadmins and techs...
Two main reasons.
1) Having an open solution means you can't proprietize the protocols. You can't lock people out of information like DVDs, network card drivers, etc. At least not if you want these things to be used by businesses who are worried about compatibility. I look forward to the day when people refuse to use IE-only html because it locks out a significant (even 10%) of their customers on other platforms. Once this starts I can be relatively sure that I won't wake up one day and find that while having Linux is legal I can't connect to the 'net without proprietary signed drivers from MS, for my security of course. That I won't be unable to watch DVDs because the BIOS of the computer has been modified to require a net connection and a permissions server every time you try to access certain tracks of a DVD, etc. It means I'll be able to own my computer and my data - without having to buy approved hardware and software from the monopoly.
2) Learning. I worked on an Apple2 in school and my first programming ever was to read the source for some trivial game that came on the system disk and customize something. I then learned ASM because the system came with an assembler in ROM. Today, without free software (something under a "communist" license), how can you learn to program? Javascript maybe. You certainly don't get a pro-level language and compiler on Microsoft's systems. Even if you did though, what comes with source? You could download javascript snippets I guess, but god forbid you wanted to know what made the OS tick. Under the DMCA it's illegal to reverse-engineer access-control measures. You could get thrown in jail and bankrupted for disassembling your OS. When I was a teen the BBSes were full of (Apple sanctioned) OS mods to speed up disk access, add features, etc. The manuals came with source code for the ROMs and circuit diagrams for the computer.
3 -> 99) Computers for poor countries. Software for minorities (bi-directional language support, etc). Microsoft's just rewards. Secure systems. Trustworthy (for the users) computing.
A ton of reasons, but the first two are the big reasons. Those are the ones worth me convincing you to use open source. Another Mozilla user means less IE-only sites. Another open-source system with Perl means another kid grows up with the tools to learn. If the price of this is helping people install Apache as an IIS replacement, so be it.
You may not be used to this, but in real computing land our web browsers aren't part of the OS kernel. We can change a line or two of source in sshd and recompile it, leaving the rest of the system untouched. Have you ever wondered why so many IE "critical updates" require a reboot?
He's talking about how there's less code in the F22 than in Windows or Linux and how it (done as a military project and supposedly to high standards) is buggy, implying that large projects are just going to have bugs.
But that's not necessarily true, if you think of a large project being made of small testable components.
That was my point. I feel that OSes can be very nearly bug free, if they're designed for it. You can't retrofit security in because it requires small modules that work together through documented interfaces, so Windows may never be secure, but a project with ten times the complexity easily could be if it was a goal from the beginning.
LOC isn't a valid metric. And not just that it's different between languages, but that it's dependent on programming style. An old-style monolithic program has a lot more interdependencies than one composed of a bunch of seperate modules.
You have the camera sign the hash and date it with the number of seconds since the camera was created as well as the date entered by the user when configuring the camera. (Prevent the cops from rolling back the date and taking another picture of doctored physical evidence.)
Then you've reduced the problem to one of smart-card security.
Real security though will come from constantly running cameras on the cars and on the cops themselves - so you can match footage of the cops at the scene from their badge-cams with the high-res photos they take of the evidence. You'll be able to see them discover the evidence and take a picture, providing much more evidence that it wasn't tampered with because you've got the signed and dated photo that you just saw the cop taking.
Not correct. You can do what many people have done. Purchase or download high-quality transfers of the original movies from Laser Disc instead of replacing the VHS tapes yet again and never deal with Lucas again.
And there's not one damn thing he can do about it.
Slashdot Mirror
Why would you "port" an app over to a new langauge, or even a new version of an existing language?
Here's how you update a perl4 program when perl5 comes out.
#!/usr/bin/perl4
Wow, hard isn't it. Now it runs off of the old interpretter and never changes.
Would you rather that good ideas were never rolled into an existing project? That it never gets easier or better? All your new programs get to take advantage of the new system while your old programs carry on untouched, exactly as if development froze years ago.
I had initially thought you meant Arabs, and were just lumping the whole area together. Racism towards Indians, as in, from India? Weird. If anything I see Slashdot as being divided between hating the Arabs/Muslims (not Indians) and the USA/Israel.
And all of the anti-outsourcing anger I've seen has been directed at the companies, not the recipients. Some people imply the work is of lower quality, but that's (imho) because support people lack cultural context and programmers aren't available for discussion, etc. Same reasons that outsourcing locally fails.
Racism against Indians, or general disgust with dangerous religious fundamentalists?
Fundamentalist religious people who preach killing non-believers all scare me, regardless of being Muslim, Christian, Indian, white, or whatever.
Tell that to Steve Jackson Games. If the FBI really wanted to get in get the info and get out, they'd shut down everything, image every hard drive in the company, and leave.
Instead, they confiscate everything and make you wait months or years to get it back, if you ever do.
My "fantasy world", as you so nicely put it, does exist. The USA has nukes, and huge bunker busters, but when they bomb something they try to use a smart bomb and take out a specific building instead of just leveling a city. Considering the public coverage of civilians deaths, don't you think (even assuming that NOBODY in the military cares one bit about civilians) that they'll try to limit wanton destruction.
As for the smarts of the current USA administration, I can't really say. Dubya looks dumb, but all politicians have handlers and advisors who only present the alternatives they want, so who knows how much impact Dubya has personally.
They did state a policy for the government of Iraq, and Afghanistan, if you'd notice. They said they wanted to remove a terrorist leadership (believe that if you wish) and setup a government of the people. As you say, it costs a lot to be there, and a lot more if they were there for years and people got even angrier. Why would they want to stay? It makes sense that they want to get in and out. I haven't seen anything that suggests they want to rule some piss-hole country half a world away, so I'm inclined to believe them when they say they don't want to.
On the racism topic, can you honestly equate extra security checks (by the private airline, not the government) with official government policy statements like the Secretary-General of the Arab League declaring, "This will be a war of extermination and a momentous massacre which will be spoken of like the Mongolian massacres and the Crusades."
The USA is largely christian, yet people freely and openly practice many religions there, without any government interference. Try that in Iran, or Jordan, or Egypt, or Syria, etc. Ask your wife if she wishes to live there, despite being your property and unable to show her face in public, let alone vote.
Consider that Israel's citizens are 18% arab, and they can vote. Compare to the surrounding countries where a jew is risking his life to simply mention his lineage. Israel is tolerant of gays and palestinian gays have actually fled to Israel to avoid being killed.
Can you honestly say that the USA is the racist country in this scenario? Where are the stonings of non-believers, the public outcry against another race and the government declarations of intent to wipe an entire race out. These are all fairly common acts today in Muslim countries.
There's a difference between being agressive and being racist.
So, you're saying that the christian religion is a violent one (look at the modern believers I say, but whatever) and you're trying to say that the USA is a christian country. Despite the fact that there's no state religion and members of all religions are free to openly practice. Yeah, the USA sure is a terribly religious dictatorship.
Does any of this even register with you? Can you understand that women aren't allowed basic human rights in fundamentalist islamic countries. Can you understand that the crazy people running these countries actually base their decisions on their bible. Sheesh! Religion is bad enough when it's practiced casually, but these people actually believe that their religious books are word-for-word correct. Freaking imbeciles. Like Dubya, but WORSE! Imagine if every USA politician was just the same. Imagine if the USA government called for the death of philosophers and authors from other countries for the simple act of questioning the state religion.
Do you begin to understand? The muslim countries in the middle east are racist, they have sworn to destroy the WHOLE JEWISH RACE, down to every last man, woman, and child. Not just Israel, not just the Israeli army, but EVERY LAST JEW!
Why? Because of some mythical Israeli oppression? Fuck no. Before the forming of Israel there were already more Jews living in the area than Arabs, the Arabs having come largely because of all the industry the Jews were bringing. Those Arabs even became full voting citizens in the new country of Israel. The Jews were good neighbors for the most part. No, the muslim countries hated the Jews simply because their religious leaders told them to, based on the Koran. For a thousand years the muslims have hated the Jews simply because of a book.
That's racist you fucking simpleton.
Let's sum this up. USA = No official religion, tolerant of other races and religions, sometimes a bully. Muslim Nations = Religious fanatics, hatred of certain WHOLE RACES and religions, opressors of women, etc. Capiche?
You've got an internet full of information, quit believing everything you're told and go read. Everything I've told you is easily verifiable, from wikipedia and a ton of other sites.
"Wah wah wah, we like our cushy oil deals, don't remove Saddam. He's also a great military customer."
The USA lied about its reason to invade Iraq, but the rest of the world lied about their reasons for not going. It's politics, it's a dirty game and "you" are just as dirty as "us".
In the end, Saddam, a bad man by anyone's definition, was removed from power. Should he have been there in the first place? No, but he was, and everyone seemed happy to deal with him while bitching about the USA putting him there.
But, at least he was secular... Now the religious nutjobs over there are going to drag everyone back to the 1200s.
Religious fanatics. The same ones who have been dedicated to destroying jews (not Israel, jews, the entire race) for over a thousand years. Yeah, we should definately try to placate the religious nutjobs.
Just embrace everything they stand for and they might tolerate you as a subhuman. Subjugate your women, mutilate your baby girls, live completely at the command of the church. They're really easy to get along with.
I'm not from the USA, but I can't see what they could do better without giving in completely. They aren't hated because of their policies, but because they're associated with the jews (whom most of the Arab world has declared their intent to kill - before the forming of the state of Israel even) and because of their relaxed views on sex (yeah, the USA, relaxed about sex - just think what the Muslim fanatics would think if they got around to thinking about you)! You can't compromise with someone who hates you for your skin color, or your freedom. No more than the blacks should have compromised with the KKK and only been slaves half the time.
The bad guys get better towards the end of the (currently written) series.
They are quite pathetic early on, but they seem fairly realistic. Just pay attention of modern politics for examples of creeps who'd vote to kill their own mothers simply to spite the other party. The only unrealistic thing is that Honor's side seems honestly motivated by good, which is quite unlike modern politics where both sides are almost exactly the same.
Which countries are the most racist today? That's right, the Muslim states. They're the ones whose leaders have continually publically declared their intent to drive every last jew into the ocean, destroying their race, and then to destroy the great Satan, the USA.
Yeah, it certainly sounds like the USA (a recent participant in the thousand years of hatred of Jews by the Muslims) started that...
If N. Korea (or China, etc) invaded Iraq do you really think they'd be preparing to move out after setting up a government of locals?
Further, the point of space based weapons, in most plans I've seen, is small tactical strikes. Instead of dropping a daisy-cutter to remove a tank you drop a tiny smart-weapon on it, taking out just the tank and not the civilians a building away.
Part of the confusion is that 'stable' refers to the interfaces, as well as to the code maturity and crash-proofness.
There's no guarantee a module from 2.5.x will work on 2.5.x+1, where a module (ignoring bugs) from 2.6.0 will work in 2.6.60.
If you want crash-proof, wait for RedHat or Suse or someone to package the kernel for you. If you want stable interfaces so you can begin to develop your kernel module, or whatever, then grab 2.6.0 straight off the presses, but maybe don't put your valuable data on it right away.
It's your responsibility to save your work too, but if I turned your power off and lost even 15-minutes of work for every employee at your company you'd all of a sudden be calculating the damages I'd caused.
Unless you've got a constant-running save process that saves multiple levels of undo, and your backup process mirrors this to two seperate locations, on the fly, you're going to lose data if your drive dies. Backing up simply changes this from months to days, or at best, hours.
What really pissed me off about this is that when I called to return the drive to IBM I spoke to, supposedly, the manager of that department (Mario) and he crossed his heart and swore that the GXPs were great drives and that he hadn't heard of any defect in the line, etc. I even quoted articles on StorageReview and cnet he held to his lies. Just admit it and replace it - don't make me jump through hoops and blame me, then finally only replace it with another decative 75GXP. Fuckers.
Exactly. There are a lot of things that make sense if you examine only one side of the issue. Theft is great, until you see it from the side of the victim.
What we need is a law against abuse of the commons. Against taking more than your fair share of any public resource. Not only would it point out to people that the commons are valuable resources, not to be squandered, but we'd also have a way to punish the greedy - those who will take *everything* they can, regardless of the consequences.
The greed of most people is sickening. If you suggest that something is available to someone they'll walk over their own family in order to club a nun holding an orphan and get the free upgrade that technically was only meant for someone else. (People who buy and break items to return for warranty replacement because they know they'll get the model up in replacement for their discontinued item.)
The problem is that any centralized accounting is going to require not only a ton of paperwork, but an oversite agency monitoring every email sent. Obviously they can't trust the sender to report it, or the receiver (you'd blame the spammer for a hundred email for every one received), so they need to be the only legal mailserver. Then we'd need unspoofable IDs so that we could be billed. Have you considered how fascist you'd have to be to make this work?
The solution to spam, like all other technically legal acts that hurt others, is vigilante justice. It's what you'd do if some bastard raped your sister and got off because the cops made an error on the arrest form which let him get away. Seems that spammers need to "interact" with the community that they exploit. They do what they do because nothing bad happens to them, even after they forge your domain and slashdot your business for a week under bounces and flames. Explain to them, in terms they understand, how their actions are hurtful and they'll stop.
Why do you imply that a corporate user would care if there's a requirement that the distro be 100% GPL? The GPL doesn't affect end-users. The only problem is ungrounded implications (such as yours) that using GPLed software is somehow worse than using any other software.
Then you suggest that there's a difference between GW Bush saying "with us or against us" and demanding that people change, and the Linux community's simple decision to not associate with people they feel are taking advantage of them. You don't need to embrace the GPL at all, just don't expect me to want to accept your program over a free program.
Part of the reason old systems don't get new OSes is that they don't need them enough to justify the cost.
You can download RedHat 9 (10?) and upgrade some or all of your ailing RedHat 5.0 box. Either upgrade the whole thing (RH9 would do slim installs suitable for old machines) or just upgrade the old service.
Call Microsoft and ask them if they allow free upgrades to WinXP from older OSes to fix security problems. Ask if they mind if you grab some WinXP DLLs from a friend and use them on your WinNT machine. That is, if they would work. Services in RedHat would probably work on an older machine, though they may require a parallel install of some libraries.
Then there's the issue that even for outdated versions of software that aren't patched directly, a moderately skilled coder (perl - barely any C - like many junior unix admins) can usually adapt the fix for an older version, or use the information provided to script some firewall rules to avoid it.
Then there's simply the fact that it's available. Even if you can't do it internally, you can pay a coder for a day of work ($250 tops - about the cost of a trouble call with big software companies) who can go grab all the source code (no NDAs required) and do the fix for you.
If this IE5.0 fix was critical for you to have, how could you go about getting it before Microsoft got around to fixing it? Turn off images?
This isn't about getting energy from ethanol, this is about storing hydrogen in a dense and safe form that doesn't require extreme temperatures or pressures. With an infrastructure much like the one we have now for gasoline we could distribute hydrogen in ethanol form.
The "reactor" is a 2-foot cube, small enough to be part of a car or fueling station. You'd have the fuel-cell benefits, without having to store hydrogen.
Besides, ethanol can come from a lot of crops, not just corn. The reason we use corn is that it's a handy farm subsidy - if you're going to pay the farmers anyways, might as well get something from it. Ethanol production could come from bamboo, hemp, algae, or even urban bio-waste. Waste wood from sawmills, grass clippings, etc.
While biomass -> ethanol -> hydrogen -> electricity may not be as efficient as gasoline, it's renewable and eventually that's going to be really important.
But Microsoft has never tried to succeed on their own merits. They've sabotaged competitors, stolen code, lied, sued innocent companies, made proprietary changes to protocols, spoken out about open source being communist and unamerican, etc.
I think there are many reasons why everyone, not just open source developers, would want MS to fail.
Hell, I can't think of any reason why they should stay in business. Some people point to Bill's success in a sort of Randian justification, as if success makes right, but this ignores all the crimes he's been part of. If we respect him for success we need to respect Ken Lay for his success. I don't know of anyone who knows that MS has done and who supports them, except for shareholders. Money makes people a bit hypocritical - if those crimes were committed against them they'd be up in arms, but they're willing to share the spoils.
Well, leaving out the job opportunities and such from having more open source and Linux projects needing sysadmins and techs...
Two main reasons.
1) Having an open solution means you can't proprietize the protocols. You can't lock people out of information like DVDs, network card drivers, etc. At least not if you want these things to be used by businesses who are worried about compatibility. I look forward to the day when people refuse to use IE-only html because it locks out a significant (even 10%) of their customers on other platforms. Once this starts I can be relatively sure that I won't wake up one day and find that while having Linux is legal I can't connect to the 'net without proprietary signed drivers from MS, for my security of course. That I won't be unable to watch DVDs because the BIOS of the computer has been modified to require a net connection and a permissions server every time you try to access certain tracks of a DVD, etc. It means I'll be able to own my computer and my data - without having to buy approved hardware and software from the monopoly.
2) Learning. I worked on an Apple2 in school and my first programming ever was to read the source for some trivial game that came on the system disk and customize something. I then learned ASM because the system came with an assembler in ROM. Today, without free software (something under a "communist" license), how can you learn to program? Javascript maybe. You certainly don't get a pro-level language and compiler on Microsoft's systems. Even if you did though, what comes with source? You could download javascript snippets I guess, but god forbid you wanted to know what made the OS tick. Under the DMCA it's illegal to reverse-engineer access-control measures. You could get thrown in jail and bankrupted for disassembling your OS. When I was a teen the BBSes were full of (Apple sanctioned) OS mods to speed up disk access, add features, etc. The manuals came with source code for the ROMs and circuit diagrams for the computer.
3 -> 99) Computers for poor countries. Software for minorities (bi-directional language support, etc). Microsoft's just rewards. Secure systems. Trustworthy (for the users) computing.
A ton of reasons, but the first two are the big reasons. Those are the ones worth me convincing you to use open source. Another Mozilla user means less IE-only sites. Another open-source system with Perl means another kid grows up with the tools to learn. If the price of this is helping people install Apache as an IIS replacement, so be it.
You may not be used to this, but in real computing land our web browsers aren't part of the OS kernel. We can change a line or two of source in sshd and recompile it, leaving the rest of the system untouched. Have you ever wondered why so many IE "critical updates" require a reboot?
He's talking about how there's less code in the F22 than in Windows or Linux and how it (done as a military project and supposedly to high standards) is buggy, implying that large projects are just going to have bugs.
But that's not necessarily true, if you think of a large project being made of small testable components.
That was my point. I feel that OSes can be very nearly bug free, if they're designed for it. You can't retrofit security in because it requires small modules that work together through documented interfaces, so Windows may never be secure, but a project with ten times the complexity easily could be if it was a goal from the beginning.
LOC isn't a valid metric. And not just that it's different between languages, but that it's dependent on programming style. An old-style monolithic program has a lot more interdependencies than one composed of a bunch of seperate modules.
You have the camera sign the hash and date it with the number of seconds since the camera was created as well as the date entered by the user when configuring the camera. (Prevent the cops from rolling back the date and taking another picture of doctored physical evidence.)
Then you've reduced the problem to one of smart-card security.
Real security though will come from constantly running cameras on the cars and on the cops themselves - so you can match footage of the cops at the scene from their badge-cams with the high-res photos they take of the evidence. You'll be able to see them discover the evidence and take a picture, providing much more evidence that it wasn't tampered with because you've got the signed and dated photo that you just saw the cop taking.
What's different compared to physical evidence? Cops have been placing small bags of drugs on suspects for years.
Not correct. You can do what many people have done. Purchase or download high-quality transfers of the original movies from Laser Disc instead of replacing the VHS tapes yet again and never deal with Lucas again.
And there's not one damn thing he can do about it.