I saunter into Slashdot and what do I see, a bio-warfare threat! I am alarmed and wait for the rest of the article to load.. looky here, it's a stupid lawsuit.
Slashdot's not a yellow journalism zone (or is it) and shouldn't use such titles. People have been dying from bio warfare.
you could build a box with 50,000 monkeys in it to go get your CDs too, or hire an orchestra to recreate your music full-time, too.
on those, cost would also be prohibitive.
a "comparable" solution will have cd quality and mp3 cost.
The freedom to swing your fist
on
Freedom or Power?
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
ends where my face begins.
The fundamental problem with anarchism lies in this statement. Open Source's GPL itself requires a heirarchy to maintain it, although it was designed to fight a heirarchy.
You need a body of people who act similarly to the RIAA or whomever, investigating people's GPL licenses and behaviors with Open Source software and its derivatives.
Of course, the "GPL police" would wind up chasing large corporations or developers who wish to appropriate GPL'd tech in closed source projects. This would make them rather ineffective, due to the financial disparities between the OSS movement and corporations.
So, OSS is going to have to do what M$ does, and that is buy into the government through a lobbying system.
1) Donate money to charity and give your friend the card saying you did it in his/her name. Charities other than the Red Cross, please, 9/11 has drained many "regular" charity coffers.
2) Help, recommendations, and hookups in finding a job.
I don't think we want to make video fones cheap and plentiful in the world.
The U.S. bombed Al-Jazeera in Kabul so the uninformed masses wouldn't get upset when the Northern Alliance, which is nasty but doesn't harbor terrorists at least, sacked Kabul, murdered, raped and pillaged.
Al-Jazeera used mobile videophones to broadcast anyway, removing the utility of our $2 million bomb.
At least their phones cost thousands of dollars.
Cheap, easily obtained, anonymous videophones by Nokia would remove any governmental ability to block out journalistic broadcast from an area for national security purposes.
We should regulate, register or restrict video telephony to address the government's need to do this.
In his interview he proved to be sensitive in demeanor, kind, and humorous. Wil Wheaton is a gracious net celebrity who has internalized his own Trek character more elegantly than have most former Trek stars.
His humor is postmodern - his funny is based on the fact that Deliverance and Trek star Wil Wheaton is making the jokes. That doesn't make it bad humor - just self-referential.
If you're gonna release some shit for purely knowledge reasons, then why are you advertising your intention to release it before releasing it?
Knowledge is knowledge. If you want to propagate effective computer security, don't badger and pressure corporations to cow to your wishes with publicity stunts like this one.
Instead, just release the hole, and let the damage be done. The damage itself will be far more instructive to the company. It will also be a better influence on computer security as a whole -- damaging releases will, perhaps, induce large corporations to practice better preventative security.
We have been able to transfer a lot of our daily consumer power needs off the grid for years.
Unfotunately, any large scale production of alternative energy using consumables would require a massive capital investment by government and private enterprise that they have been postponing later and later.
We could have hydrogen powered cars and solar powered houses right now, if 40 years ago somebody had started a small factory making consumer goods that used these energy sources. By now, there would be lots of factories making the goods, and cheaper production methods would have resulted.
The short term planning orientation of energy companies and their associated enterprises is what keeps us dependent on fossil fuels today.
Only now are corps like BP investing in alternative energy. And BP isn't advancing the field much, it seems to be buying up small alternatives industry firms and keeping them in a technological and marketing holding pattern.
In my opinion, private enterprise and government won't invest the massive amounts required to scale alternatives production until the cost of fossil fuels is so prohibitive that they are (short-term) forced to do so.
Why do people want to read jokes about their work?
Every programmer, sys-admin, developer, designer, de-bugger, support-desk jockey, etc. that I know DESPISES their job and can't wait to get home.
This may consist of them popping onto IRC again 45 minutes later from a home workstation, but one thing is clear: they DON'T want to read jokes about their work.
My guess is that User Friendly's readership comes primarily from wanna-bes and the unemployed; people who, due to ignorance or poverty, actually want to have one of these drudge jobs.
If this is Microsoft's unviersal security solution, I can';t believe they'd put out something that can be so easily cracked without knowing it.
Is it concievable that M$FT is deliberately designing holes, staging exploits and publicizing them in order to get popular support for federally controlled security systems and universal elimination of anonymity?
The anthrax could be the same thing.. government allowing it to spread, or spreading it themselves, to pressure Congress to pass the USA PATRIOT act, which they did, and to pressure us to accept strictures on our behavior?
In both cases, ask: Quo bono? In the current climate, who benefits from these activities?
Terrorists don't benefit from the anthrax, and OSS doesn't benefit from these Passport exploits. In both cases, the government benefits.
This is applied research, the type that may have direct and positive effects on improving security and efficiency in the immediate future.
Unlike dark matter research, Mars colonization, and subatomic research, this stuff is the kind of thing that should attract wide funding from business. Immediate payoffs are likely.
Basic research is fine, but I wish that the money poured into it would go towards immediate business applications. More available cash would make those venture capitalists a lot nicer and less demanding of unrealistic profits in an unrealistic period of time.
Unless there are gonna be self regenerating clothes that draw solar power, I would think that it's not a good idea to buy clothes that are going to require expensive repair and maintenance. Or, to create a social or economic environment where such clothes were required.
What's wrong with simple, renewable fiber clothes, which can be produced relatively cheaply and even without much damage in the environment?Of course some textile production methods are incredibly damaging and should be stopped.
I appreciate your business and computing problem, and I hope it's solved.. but let's look at the implications of there being nobody to send an RFP to for a minute.
Absolute anonymity online doesn't currently exist; not for registering a domain and not for a computer program.
I have read science fiction novels in which there are technologies that nobody remembers the origins of.. nobody knows who's responsible for it.
The implications of open source programs without any responsible author base or group of authors would be interesting.
Like a virus, the program would be propagated everywhere, branching and forking all the time as people modified it without releasing code back to an original developer group.
Like a virus, the program may also evolve more quickly.. adapting to new situations, without the tight control of a politically powerful developer core.
There's no problem with writing version-optimized drivers.
The update or improvement of such software is probably intended, first, for the new Quake buyers. It's a company that occasionally serves a fan base, it's not enslaved to the fan base that has all previous versions.
It's like a new model of a car with a beautiful v-8 engine that previous models have always used. If the new model is configured to optimize engine performance, it's not discrimination against collectors of previous models.
Think of it this way. What happens when a software project is more maintainable, more self-managing? When geography is less important? When companies need fewer buildings, less energy and have more choice in the labor market? What would happen if all software projects were built on more robust, maintainable architectures? Those sound a lot like things that lead to cost savings.
This is just like open source politics/economics (socialism).
I really like socialism and spread the virus wherever I go, since I think bottom-up control of stuff by the people who design things is a good idea.
Unfortunately, for a world socialist society, its proponents would have to wage a war against the entrenched interests of capitalism.
A very chaotic, damaging, bloody war.
Similarly, the Open Source Monopoly would enforce rigorous peer review on all software while encouraging long-term profitability trends. It's a damn good idea!
The problem with the idea isn't the IDEA, it's the fact that large corporations think on the short term and don't want to risk losing the "asset" they think they have built up with their closed source technologies.
They don't care about the long term future of the software industry, they care about the need to compete with voracious rivals in THIS economy!
Open Sourcers, they won't listen to your reason, your arguments, or your technology benchmarks.
They will cast a chill over your free speech and beer with intellectually unsupportable, unconstitutional laws because they can. Despite the irrationality of their actions. They'll do it every time.
This law sucks, but don't condemn the effort of the government to establish an acceptable level of security. Has the open source community offered an alternative, partial security solution?
Open Source, and its constituent community, has encountered many political drawbacks in fighting for a free Net of independent, sovereign boxes.
You don't have the money to buy the politicians.
You don't have the political clout to motivate votes away from this.
People, afraid of terrorism, John Ashcroft, and closed profiteers have the money and the votes.
Slashdot and its ilk, unfortunately, have not succeeded in giving free software a moral legitimacy among mainstream intellectuals.
So there is a single choice left- to redefine what open source means.
Open source technology is meant to allow individuals with technical skill to improve software and debate technical means and methods.
The software often has the same purposes as closed source software. Security is one of those purposes.
As/. rightfully proposes, there is no reason why an effective security technology in any application - from the protection of a server to the anonymization of a Net user's free speech, to the protection of confidential information - need have a closed source.
However, the more people have access to the code, the more compromised security technology may be.
This poses a threat to law enforcement, which must combat relatively common hacking knowledge in the society.
Sort of like the homemade anthrax appearing all over the United States and the world, the level of security that hackers encounter when they steal software and music or commit industrial espionage is relatively low-level.
The open source software development community itself must work to make finding security holes harder to master.
There are two ways of doing this. One is to license the knowledge instead of the computers - to make every student of security register and submit to constant surveillance. This is what is done with some military technology, and advanced germ warfare.
Another way is to let the government in on your knowledge - and to allow the government to support an independent agency practicing advanced, superior level of security, watching over the major U.S. systems.
A group of us had been experimenting with news and analysis stuff, on other sites and on a separate website. Then, someone offered a domain he owned for use.
Everything just came together. We had a vague, open idea (a news website with a particular editorial style) and we all loved it so much that we did, piecemeal, the practical work needed to get the thing up.
we found hosting, modified scoop in order to make a closed editorial queue, found an opening cadre of users.
we worked so hard, and made so many compromises, because we were all motivated by a reward -- getting the site up -- and we didn't have too much invested in each little idea individuals had about the site.
if you stop your motion, your dynamic excitement, and try to boringly work out principles, you will get dragged down.
if the nature of the technology you are working with allows it, do NOT stop. discover principles of structure for your idea as you go.
They will use substandard manufactoring processes, open chip plants in third world dictatorships, and provide less customer outreach and support.
Good!
Poor countries will get chipmaking infrastructure, and chip manufacturers will produce more cheaply. This part of the information economy is the part that can reach the poorest countries first; a factory job making chips is the first step towards participation in a western style net economy.
VIA won't advertise with idiotic pitches like the Blue Men. Perhaps it will take another tack -- selling to budget computer makers.
The chip cost is a big part of computer cost, so a cheaper chip will enable more companies to produce cheap computers, improving competition in this market sector.
This is like spurring a housing market with a revolution in pre-fabricated housing. It makes possibilities available to an entirely new group of potential buyers.
We developed archaeology without any carbon dating. We had to use anthropological methods tofigure out what the meaning of a bunch of stuff in a dig was, and where it came from.
Carbon dating is a wonderful technology - it dates stuff within a range of a century or so. It enables us to confirm hypothesis made by other methods.
A more rigid and absolute dating technology would probably enable archaeologists to fill in many of the gaps in current knowledge.
I worry about too much reliance on an absolute technology, though. Even if you take a bore of soil and can tell the exact day when each item fell into it, you still learn nothing about trade routes, cultures, mythologies, ancient lifestyles, etc.
This is where anthropology, an inexact science, must take the lead.
Slashdot Mirror
I saunter into Slashdot and what do I see, a bio-warfare threat! I am alarmed and wait for the rest of the article to load.. looky here, it's a stupid lawsuit.
Slashdot's not a yellow journalism zone (or is it) and shouldn't use such titles. People have been dying from bio warfare.
this is not.
you could build a box with 50,000 monkeys in it to go get your CDs too, or hire an orchestra to recreate your music full-time, too.
on those, cost would also be prohibitive.
a "comparable" solution will have cd quality and mp3 cost.
ends where my face begins.
The fundamental problem with anarchism lies in this statement. Open Source's GPL itself requires a heirarchy to maintain it, although it was designed to fight a heirarchy.
You need a body of people who act similarly to the RIAA or whomever, investigating people's GPL licenses and behaviors with Open Source software and its derivatives.
Of course, the "GPL police" would wind up chasing large corporations or developers who wish to appropriate GPL'd tech in closed source projects. This would make them rather ineffective, due to the financial disparities between the OSS movement and corporations.
So, OSS is going to have to do what M$ does, and that is buy into the government through a lobbying system.
of the case against Microsoft by disgruntled federal employees.
Mail-virus attachments are best contracted via Outlook or web mail clients; anybody with advanced security will not have a problem here.
Unless the government starts persecuting people on Linux and *BSD systems, because they are inimical to the FBI's spying methods.
Foucault's Panopticon, here we come..
1) Donate money to charity and give your friend the card saying you did it in his/her name. Charities other than the Red Cross, please, 9/11 has drained many "regular" charity coffers.
2) Help, recommendations, and hookups in finding a job.
3) Prayer.
I don't think we want to make video fones cheap and plentiful in the world.
The U.S. bombed Al-Jazeera in Kabul so the uninformed masses wouldn't get upset when the Northern Alliance, which is nasty but doesn't harbor terrorists at least, sacked Kabul, murdered, raped and pillaged.
Al-Jazeera used mobile videophones to broadcast anyway, removing the utility of our $2 million bomb.
At least their phones cost thousands of dollars.
Cheap, easily obtained, anonymous videophones by Nokia would remove any governmental ability to block out journalistic broadcast from an area for national security purposes.
We should regulate, register or restrict video telephony to address the government's need to do this.
His humor is postmodern - his funny is based on the fact that Deliverance and Trek star Wil Wheaton is making the jokes. That doesn't make it bad humor - just self-referential.
They can't sell any full workstations anymore, so they're selling peripherals instead.
If you're gonna release some shit for purely knowledge reasons, then why are you advertising your intention to release it before releasing it?
Knowledge is knowledge. If you want to propagate effective computer security, don't badger and pressure corporations to cow to your wishes with publicity stunts like this one.
Instead, just release the hole, and let the damage be done. The damage itself will be far more instructive to the company. It will also be a better influence on computer security as a whole -- damaging releases will, perhaps, induce large corporations to practice better preventative security.
We have been able to transfer a lot of our daily consumer power needs off the grid for years.
Unfotunately, any large scale production of alternative energy using consumables would require a massive capital investment by government and private enterprise that they have been postponing later and later.
We could have hydrogen powered cars and solar powered houses right now, if 40 years ago somebody had started a small factory making consumer goods that used these energy sources. By now, there would be lots of factories making the goods, and cheaper production methods would have resulted.
The short term planning orientation of energy companies and their associated enterprises is what keeps us dependent on fossil fuels today.
Only now are corps like BP investing in alternative energy. And BP isn't advancing the field much, it seems to be buying up small alternatives industry firms and keeping them in a technological and marketing holding pattern.
In my opinion, private enterprise and government won't invest the massive amounts required to scale alternatives production until the cost of fossil fuels is so prohibitive that they are (short-term) forced to do so.
By then, it will be too late.
I wish I knew what to do about this.
I never got this.
Why do people want to read jokes about their work?
Every programmer, sys-admin, developer, designer, de-bugger, support-desk jockey, etc. that I know DESPISES their job and can't wait to get home.
This may consist of them popping onto IRC again 45 minutes later from a home workstation, but one thing is clear: they DON'T want to read jokes about their work.
My guess is that User Friendly's readership comes primarily from wanna-bes and the unemployed; people who, due to ignorance or poverty, actually want to have one of these drudge jobs.
If this is Microsoft's unviersal security solution, I can';t believe they'd put out something that can be so easily cracked without knowing it.
Is it concievable that M$FT is deliberately designing holes, staging exploits and publicizing them in order to get popular support for federally controlled security systems and universal elimination of anonymity?
The anthrax could be the same thing.. government allowing it to spread, or spreading it themselves, to pressure Congress to pass the USA PATRIOT act, which they did, and to pressure us to accept strictures on our behavior?
In both cases, ask: Quo bono? In the current climate, who benefits from these activities?
Terrorists don't benefit from the anthrax, and OSS doesn't benefit from these Passport exploits. In both cases, the government benefits.
This is applied research, the type that may have direct and positive effects on improving security and efficiency in the immediate future.
Unlike dark matter research, Mars colonization, and subatomic research, this stuff is the kind of thing that should attract wide funding from business. Immediate payoffs are likely.
Basic research is fine, but I wish that the money poured into it would go towards immediate business applications. More available cash would make those venture capitalists a lot nicer and less demanding of unrealistic profits in an unrealistic period of time.
Unless there are gonna be self regenerating clothes that draw solar power, I would think that it's not a good idea to buy clothes that are going to require expensive repair and maintenance. Or, to create a social or economic environment where such clothes were required.
What's wrong with simple, renewable fiber clothes, which can be produced relatively cheaply and even without much damage in the environment?Of course some textile production methods are incredibly damaging and should be stopped.
people post at default 3?
If this were all closed source (proprietary) tech, then there would be no such thing as a changelog, or it would be internal, and also proprietary.
I appreciate your business and computing problem, and I hope it's solved.. but let's look at the implications of there being nobody to send an RFP to for a minute.
Absolute anonymity online doesn't currently exist; not for registering a domain and not for a computer program.
I have read science fiction novels in which there are technologies that nobody remembers the origins of.. nobody knows who's responsible for it.
The implications of open source programs without any responsible author base or group of authors would be interesting.
Like a virus, the program would be propagated everywhere, branching and forking all the time as people modified it without releasing code back to an original developer group.
Like a virus, the program may also evolve more quickly.. adapting to new situations, without the tight control of a politically powerful developer core.
There's no problem with writing version-optimized drivers.
The update or improvement of such software is probably intended, first, for the new Quake buyers. It's a company that occasionally serves a fan base, it's not enslaved to the fan base that has all previous versions.
It's like a new model of a car with a beautiful v-8 engine that previous models have always used. If the new model is configured to optimize engine performance, it's not discrimination against collectors of previous models.
This is just like open source politics/economics (socialism).
I really like socialism and spread the virus wherever I go, since I think bottom-up control of stuff by the people who design things is a good idea.
Unfortunately, for a world socialist society, its proponents would have to wage a war against the entrenched interests of capitalism.
A very chaotic, damaging, bloody war.
Similarly, the Open Source Monopoly would enforce rigorous peer review on all software while encouraging long-term profitability trends. It's a damn good idea!
The problem with the idea isn't the IDEA, it's the fact that large corporations think on the short term and don't want to risk losing the "asset" they think they have built up with their closed source technologies.
They don't care about the long term future of the software industry, they care about the need to compete with voracious rivals in THIS economy!
Open Sourcers, they won't listen to your reason, your arguments, or your technology benchmarks.
They will cast a chill over your free speech and beer with intellectually unsupportable, unconstitutional laws because they can. Despite the irrationality of their actions. They'll do it every time.
We already have overloaded emergency response teams all over the country with anthrax fears every time we see a white powder.
Now, we'll overload them with automatic notifications from desktop detectors that are miscalibrated, malfunctioning, or 0wned.
Good idea.
This law sucks, but don't condemn the effort of the government to establish an acceptable level of security. Has the open source community offered an alternative, partial security solution?
/. rightfully proposes, there is no reason why an effective security technology in any application - from the protection of a server to the anonymization of a Net user's free speech, to the protection of confidential information - need have a closed source.
Open Source, and its constituent community, has encountered many political drawbacks in fighting for a free Net of independent, sovereign boxes.
You don't have the money to buy the politicians.
You don't have the political clout to motivate votes away from this.
People, afraid of terrorism, John Ashcroft, and closed profiteers have the money and the votes.
Slashdot and its ilk, unfortunately, have not succeeded in giving free software a moral legitimacy among mainstream intellectuals.
So there is a single choice left- to redefine what open source means.
Open source technology is meant to allow individuals with technical skill to improve software and debate technical means and methods.
The software often has the same purposes as closed source software. Security is one of those purposes.
As
However, the more people have access to the code, the more compromised security technology may be.
This poses a threat to law enforcement, which must combat relatively common hacking knowledge in the society.
Sort of like the homemade anthrax appearing all over the United States and the world, the level of security that hackers encounter when they steal software and music or commit industrial espionage is relatively low-level.
The open source software development community itself must work to make finding security holes harder to master.
There are two ways of doing this. One is to license the knowledge instead of the computers - to make every student of security register and submit to constant surveillance. This is what is done with some military technology, and advanced germ warfare.
Another way is to let the government in on your knowledge - and to allow the government to support an independent agency practicing advanced, superior level of security, watching over the major U.S. systems.
Which do you prefer?
to concentrate on VIA cloning their chips.
I can imagine the commercials now... someone injects some blue blood into a test tube, and comes out with a warped and deformed Blue Man.
Then, as the scientist shoots the miserable spawn, a caption appears:
"Intel P4: Accept No Substitutes."
Our website developed along a bazaar model.
A group of us had been experimenting with news and analysis stuff, on other sites and on a separate website. Then, someone offered a domain he owned for use.
Everything just came together. We had a vague, open idea (a news website with a particular editorial style) and we all loved it so much that we did, piecemeal, the practical work needed to get the thing up.
we found hosting, modified scoop in order to make a closed editorial queue, found an opening cadre of users.
we worked so hard, and made so many compromises, because we were all motivated by a reward -- getting the site up -- and we didn't have too much invested in each little idea individuals had about the site.
if you stop your motion, your dynamic excitement, and try to boringly work out principles, you will get dragged down.
if the nature of the technology you are working with allows it, do NOT stop. discover principles of structure for your idea as you go.
How will VIA have a competitive advantage?
They will use substandard manufactoring processes, open chip plants in third world dictatorships, and provide less customer outreach and support.
Good!
Poor countries will get chipmaking infrastructure, and chip manufacturers will produce more cheaply. This part of the information economy is the part that can reach the poorest countries first; a factory job making chips is the first step towards participation in a western style net economy.
VIA won't advertise with idiotic pitches like the Blue Men. Perhaps it will take another tack -- selling to budget computer makers.
The chip cost is a big part of computer cost, so a cheaper chip will enable more companies to produce cheap computers, improving competition in this market sector.
This is like spurring a housing market with a revolution in pre-fabricated housing. It makes possibilities available to an entirely new group of potential buyers.
We developed archaeology without any carbon dating. We had to use anthropological methods tofigure out what the meaning of a bunch of stuff in a dig was, and where it came from.
Carbon dating is a wonderful technology - it dates stuff within a range of a century or so. It enables us to confirm hypothesis made by other methods.
A more rigid and absolute dating technology would probably enable archaeologists to fill in many of the gaps in current knowledge.
I worry about too much reliance on an absolute technology, though. Even if you take a bore of soil and can tell the exact day when each item fell into it, you still learn nothing about trade routes, cultures, mythologies, ancient lifestyles, etc.
This is where anthropology, an inexact science, must take the lead.