Even with CBC, I still see a vulnerability. If you inject a pattern in the file with foreknowledge that it will be encrypted with a CBC system, then you can probably influence both the encrypted pattern of bits on the output of the first block and the injected pattern of bits on the second block to create a knowable pattern of encrypted bits on the second block.
I don't think that will work with any respectable block cipher system. Put simply, you can't make any predictions about patterns within a block if the block cipher is of any value whatsoever. Within a given block you're combining with a key and, in CBC mode an IV. Both of those are effectively completely random. The simple XORing with a random IV at the start of the process should eliminate predictability, and thus your ability to propogate a pattern through CBC.
The only reason you can find patterns in ECB mode is that the patterns extend much larger than the block size.
A decent block cipher in CBC mode is going to be safe from fingerprinting unless the MPAA has the key and IV (which, given that it is a symmetric cipher, you're going to have to transmit in some fashion).
Firstly the very nature of encryption with a system like DES means you'd really have to a complete dictionary of all possible encipherings of each signature.
That depends on how you're doing the encryption and fingerprinting. If you're using a block cipher (any block cipher) in ECB mode with a small(ish) block size and the fingerprinting is based on patterns of repeated blocks (presuming that there are repeating blocks in the files you want a fingerprint of) then the orginal poster is correct in that you will actually be able to detect fingerprinted files regardless of the encryption. Of course the simple solution for those trying to avoid the fingerprint is to use CBC mode instead, which would easily avoid such issues.
Thirdly a new p2p system would hardly use an old algorithm like DES, they'd be more likely to use something like AES which doesn't share some of the known flaws in DES.
The issue is not actually with DES but with block ciphers in ECB mode in general. AES will suffer the same problems if you're silly enough to leave it in ECB mode for encrypting somethign with a lot of repeating blocks.
If the image contained large expanses of pixels of an indentical value, the outline of the image appeared in the bits of the DES-encrypted output.
Depends on the mode of DES used, CBC (Chipher Block Chaining) or ECB (Electronic CodeBook). Wikipedia has a decent description of how such block cipher modes work here. The point is that in CBC mode you wouldn't get this problem occuring, and it's easy enough to select that mode for avoiding fingerprinting.
I've always wanted to see a Linux distribution that doesn't include network or modem drivers in its default kernel. It can then happily proclaim "No remote holes in the default install EVER. period."
Image and font rendering isn't as good as pango/xorg.
That's just a big old heaping pile of crap. There is no better on-screen graphics system than Quartz 2D. There just isn't. Everything is antialiased, everything is color-calibrated... hell, the fonts are even optically kerned in real time! You're just out of your mind.
I believe pango provides better rendering of multilingual text, particularly for the more interesting scripts. If you're doing all your work in Farsi or Bengali then perhaps pango might be better.
Hopefully the Linux community can move forward with SELinux, or some other system that has mandatory access controls. Once that is properly in place Linux will have a significant tangible security advantage over Windows.
Yes Fedora currently has SELinux in the default install. Unfortunately they have had to use a fairly permissive policy because too many applications and libraries don't properly respect the sort of security bounds that ought to be in place. Right now SELinux on Fedora is like user account permissions on Windows. While it is technically there, the majority of applications simply aren't written with it in mind (eg. all those Windows apps that need to run as Administrator), so in practice it doesn't do much.
SELinux is done though, and Fedora has integrated it in nicely (including into the rpm system). What is needed now is for all those open source developers out there to realise that there is a new level of security, other than just filem permissions, that they need to consider and respect. If they can just restrict where they write files to, and what files they want to access to the minimum required that would be great. If they can compartmentalize operations so that each can run as a seperate process with least privilege all the better. This is work that needs to be done though.
Once such things are seriously in place all this harping by Microsoft about "Windows being more secure" will be so obviously the hot air that it is that we won't even have to worry about it anymore.
Well, let's see. We've had two columnists paid off, party plants in the Presidential press pool, and 200 scientists now reporting they've been pressured to alter results. Yeah, those red staters really are so much smarter than those of us in the blue states. They memorize the propaganda more easily.
Nice non sequitur. How about you leave your preconceived pointless artificial "Republican/Democrat" dichotomy out of it and actually consider the issue instead of making random partisan cheapshots. You're as bad as this guy trying to exonerate Bush and blame Clinton and the "liberals".
Stangely not every issue can be immediately cast as a Liberal vs. Conservative one. In fact, a wide variety of issues benefit from not being discussed in such a way.
-- Fisher's Deduction: "The more issues a person tries to artificially shoehorn down into a Liberal/Conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American"
Let the Bush bashing begin!...even though in the last 15 years, the majority of most of these scientist's time has been spend under a Democratic president;
Because as we all know, every single issue can and should be immediately broken down into a Republican/Democrat, Conservative/Liberal dichotomy. Once you have the dichotomy you can then immediately discern what everyone's views on the issue must be based solely on which side of the Republican/Conservative dichotomy they fall on any other issue.
There's a saying:
"The more issues a person tries to arbitrarily shoehorn down into a Liberal/Conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American."
Once you're done with the pointless partisan bickering that, frankly, has no real bearing on the issue at hand, feel free to actually get back to discussing the topic.
Egypt is not a democracy, unless you count the "one candidate" kind of election a democracy. Mubarak is working on his sixth term as "president". It's a dictatorship, and everyone knows it.
Egypt regularly holds multiparty elections. Yes there are certainly complaints about potential interference, and they are justified to some extent. That doesn't make it "not a democracy". There were complaints about interference in the US elections. That doesn't suddenly make it (as some loopy Democrats like to claim) a dictatorship. Egypt is certainly not a model democracy, but it is one. If you want an arab democracy you would have done far better weeding out the issues an existing one instead of trying to impose one where it didn't previously exist.
That's what the six-party talks, initiated by the Bush Administration, is all about. North Korea is amenable to political and economic pressure, and the military options are not attractive. Pentagon wargames project 6 million dead within the first 48 hours or so of a Korean War II. It is mountainous, a veritable fortress on either side of the DMZ, and nearly 4 million troops stare at each other across no-man's land. Comparing Iraq to North Korea is comparing apples to oranges.
In practical terms, yes. I am not suggesting the current approach to NK is the wrong one. I am certainly not suggesting invasion is the right approach. What I am suggesting is that NK can, via the rhetoric and actions of the current administration, make some somewhat credible claims that they are "under threat" and should be "allowed to provide for their own defense". Reality is not relevant when we're discussing diplomatic rhetoric, and unfortunately the current administration has walked right in to providing NK with some good excuses for doing what they're doing.
Honestly, no I don't think they have anything to fear. While they are a brutal dictatorship ( I really expected someone to try to refute that, by the way) what reason would we go there for?
Whether the US would in reality or not is somewhat of a side point. Current rhetoric is that all brutal dictators and enemies of democracy need to be afraid - whether threats come in the form of diplomatic cajoling, sanctions or military action, Bush has stated that they will be going after non-democratic states. As far as NK is concerned that gives them the right to defend themselves.
Similarly one could ask why should the US fear NK havign nuclear weapons. Its not like they'd actually use them - any efforts to do so would see NK utterly destroyed: I don't think you'd find any objectors to military action against NK in the world community if NK actually used nuclear weapons against SK or Japan. So for what reason would NK use nuclear weapons? And if they're just going to sit on them as a Mutuall Assured Destruction threat against invasion, and the US isn't going to invade... why should the US worry?
There's simply no real upside, unlike in Iraq, where (agree or disagree) the possibility for something completely new (a real arab democracy) finally exists.
A real arab democracy other than Egypt you mean? Or, for that matter, the new arab democracy of Afghanistan? Two real arab democracies not enough?
What equivalent exists in N Korea?
Ridding the world of a brutal dictator who has killed (through both malice, and incompetence) many many more innocent people than Hussein could aspire to? Eliminating an unpredictable foreign dictator in possession of WMD? Okay, so clearly those were not the reasons for Iraq. You're claiming the reason for Iraq was to add yet another democracy to the already growing list of arab democracies. How about disarming the continuing simmering tension that is affecting the entire asian region? SK, Japan, China, and Taiwan are all being made to feel a little nervous by NK and their brutal dictatorship. If Iraq was about stability in the middle-east, how about providing stability for asia?
In the end, regardless of the reality of the US intentions, NK can make a fairly reasonable case that they feel threatened, and that they have some legitimate fears. In the end it is Bush's rhetoric that has helped back NK here, and whether Bush really meant it or not doesn't matter any more.
If "that other country" could have shelled Tel Aviv, Riyadh, or Kuwait City, etc back to the stone age using only conventional artillery, then everyone's favorite deposed dictator would not have been found literally hiding in a hole in the ground.
Which, given the Inauguration and State of the Union speeches with comments about "spreading freedom and democracy" combined with the display of willingness to use military might to do so (Iraq), pretty much says to any world dictator:
"Get yourself some bargaining firepower fast. You don't need to be able to stop an invasion, you just need to be able kill a lot of innocent people"
Given Bush's comments about Syria, do you think they might be doing precisely what you suggest and setting up as much conventional military firepower aimed at Tel Aviv as they can manage?
Not entirely, this admission raises the spectre of a Japan having to develope nukes to protect themselves from a nuclear N. Korea.
Simply not going to happen. Japan is, I believe, constitutionally bound to not develop nuclear weapons, so it would require pretty fundamental change, for which there would be huge public opposition.
Japan is the only country in the world to have been attacked with nuclear weapons. Their aversion and hatred of such weapons is pretty much unparalleled. There is simply no way the Japanese public would consent to such a thing, and last time I checked Japan was still a Democracy.
Visit the peace museum in Hiroshima and then discuss the likelihood of Japan developing nuclear weapons.
Forget the nukes. NK has a massive amount of conventional weaponry locked, loaded, and pointed at Seoul.
Indeed. NK has enough conventional fixed artillery that they can, right now, lob shells into central Seoul at the rate of several thousand shells an hour. Then they have short range rocket batteries that can hit Seoul. Would you believe they have the largest arsenal of short range rockets in the world? They basically bought up the entire Soviet rocket arsenal when it was going cheap. NK would be saving the Nukes for Tokyo and Osaka.
This statement is idiotic. North Korea had nothing to fear until they developed nukes.... Of course, N Korea is ALSO a brutal dictatorship with no respect for human rights.
So presuming for a minute that the US war in Iraq was solely to promote freedom around the world by removing a brutal dictator with no respect for human rights, and remembering Bush's recent promise to promote freedom throughout the world... Don't you think Korea does have reason to fear, independent of the Nuclear weapons? The country is run by an unpredictable dictator with no interest in human rights or democracy. According to Bush's recent speeches such countires are target number one for this administration, and they've already shown a willingness to use military means to achieve these ends.
Yes North Korea was developing nuclear weapons before Bush was making such speeches, but from their point of view they could simply say they had particularly good foresight.
Well, to be fair, most of those complaints are from users of the GIMP on Windows. If X11 window managers handle the GIMP less than perfectly, Windows handles it horribly.
Very true. Realistically GIMP for Windows just isn't quite there yet. In the same way that Photoshop for Mac and Photoshop for Windows really are quite different applications, GIMP for Windows really needs significant changes to deal with all the particulars of Windows.
Final Cut Pro has one of the best user interfaces for its task. Just the basic way windows work is great. Put two windows next to each other: they snap in place. You can grab the edge between them where they meet and drag it: both windows resize. Arrange four windows so they meet at a common corner, and you can drag just the corner point. All four windows resize.
All it would take is for X11 WM developers to write the WM code to allow that. Simply define a window class that behaves that way, and allow applications to hint whether a window should be of that class or normal. Fairly simple. Not even close to being done.
The real issue here is that X11 window managers actually suck. The metacity mentality that "everything is bloat and feature crack" just doesn't help. Here's a perfectly good feature, used to good effect on the Mac, but it won't be implemented for X11 because it will be considered pointless bloat.
I can't believe people keep blaming the apps when it is the WMs failing to implement the required featuresets that are causing the real problems.
You keep passing the blame off to the WM, but that's not the right place to put it: the X11 specification doesn't describe windows in enough detail for the WM to handle it as intelligently as (for example) Photoshop handles its internally-managed floating palettes. A window which displays 2d document data has different grouping/moving needs from one that contains tool buttons or a time-series indicator, but to X11, they're all just drawable surfaces.
As far as the X11 protocol is concerned that's all it needs to know. If applications were capable of passing a window hint to the WM telling it "this is a palette window not a document data window", and the WM were capable of understanding this and handling it sensibly then all would be fine. The EWMH spec has some material on this, but that mostly relates to whether a window is considered a transient or not. All that has to be done is include sme concepts of window grouping in the EWMH spec and things could move along. No changes need to be made to X11. X11 is just there to draw windows to the screen - what those windows do, whether they behave in groups, understand application hints as to what type of window it is, and how it should be handled, is entirely the responsibility of the WM. Blaming X11 for this is like blaming Windows GDI for the fact that sub windows in an MDI interface behave weirdly.
Welcome to the problem! We really ought to be complaining to Metacity developers that they need to implement such simple features as smart maximising and (at least basic) window groups. These are basic features and once they are available most of these issues with GIMP (and several other applications) start to disappear (not to mention new and useful things that become possible).
My push has been for powerful window grouping features, though I started with slightly less mainstream WMs in my lobbying. I've had some success. The more people that take up the call for these basic features, the better off we will be.
The Mac is a very special case, because it's non-multitasking origins left it an application-centric legacy, so that today it's possible to interact with a program that has ZERO windows open... a situation ludicrous to a Microsoft Windows or X11 user.
Sure, but the fact remains: this is the situation you have on a Mac with Photoshop, but you hear very few (if any) complaints that Photoshop on the Mac has a fundamentally broken UI. The reason for this is that the Mac has good window handling for such things. All X11 has to do is provide good window handling for such things. Window managers like Enlightenment, FVWM2, and others all have window handlign capable of dealing with this, so it is far from impossible. Rather, the issue is that current mainstream X11 window managers fail to implement the basic required functionality to make such a situation easy to handle elegantly. We ought to be demanding such functionality.
That's no valid as either an excuse or an explanation. The authors of The Gimp knew how X11 WMs worked 10 years ago, and they know they haven't changed too much in the meantime.
Two points:
(1) 10 years ago window managers did actually have such features - witness FVWM, Enlightenment, Blackbox, etc. It has been the recent "new" window managers that have ignored such useful things as "maximise to available area" and window grouping.
(2) I'm not really apologising for GIMP so much as criticising the current mainstream window managers for having fundamentally broken/incomplete behaviour. As I said, such things were available in many window managers for a long time - we should be demanding these features in the mainstream WMs.
So you can't have any windows from other applications onscreen at all. Not a great solution. And what do you do when you'd like to minimize The Gimp and look at something else? Minimize 6 different palettes individually?
I can have several other windows on screen if I want. Check out how Enlightenment handles "maximise to available area": if the window being maximised already overlaps another window, it can maximise beyond it. Besides I can just iconify any other windows out of the way to do the maximise if the smart maximising won't be enough.
What do I do when I want to iconify all the GIMP windows? I just iconify the toolbox. Seeign as all the GIMP windows belong to a window group they automatically iconify as well. You see, the issue is that current mainstream window managers are poor at real window handling. We really ought to be demanding our features back.
Both those problems can be worked-around by assigning a desktop space that's for The Gimp only- but the existence of workarounds doesn't absolve the designer.
You criticise GIMP for knowing what features WMs had but not adjusting to it, and now for knowing what features WMs have, and taking advantage of it. Multiple desktops are one of the few features that has survived unscathed. If proper maximisation and window groups had also managed to survive (and hopefully be improved upon) you wouldn't have anything to complain about. If WMs would just get around to implementing these features a great many people (who apparently never even realised that this was their real problem) will undoubtedly be a lot happier.
but a major problem that many people have with The GIMP is that even when they're working on just a single document, there are still two separate windows out there. The separate and unattachable button palette can be either awkward or confusing for many users.
And yet it is exactly what the user will be presented with when they deal with Photoshop on a Macintosh: multiple windows, even for a single document. The main difference is that window management on Macs are designed to treat such a situation elegantly (there are suitable window types to allow the palettes and toolbox to be grouped with the image windows). No one complains that Photoshop is fundamentally broken on the Mac.
In the end I am not so much apologising for GIMP as I am criticising the poor state of window management in X. There are very good window managers for X that can handle such things, but the popular mainstream WMs simply fail to even come close to addressing these issues. I am baffled that so many people have an issue with to poor quality of WMs on X (just witness all the complaints about GIMPs window handling on every single thread that mentions GIMP), yet so few people are actually demanding improvements in the places where it is important.
Yes, it is hard to use. Figuring it out is not the problem. The biggest problem for me is that I like to edit the images maximized. All those tool windows and dialogs disappear the instant you click on the image, or you can set them always on top and they get in the way of your image.
Yes, that's annoying, but as with many complaints about GIMP it is an issue of window handling, which comes down to window management, which, because GIMP was designed to run on X, is the responsibility of the window manager, not GIMP. I don't tend to have the issue you describe. I use the "maximise to available area" feature in the window manager I use to maximise the image window to be as large as possible without overlapping any of the palettes. Combine that with the docking of palettes to each other, and the toolbox available in 2.0 onward and there really is no problem whatsoever.
That, of course, doesn't mean you don't have a problem (only that I don't). My point is that if you are using GIMP on X then you should be complaining to the window manager coders that they need to implement a more complete feature set. If you are using GIMP on Microsoft Windows... unfortunatelty GIMP is targeted at X11, and development of the Windows version is only really starting to kick into gear. Handling all the issues with things working differently on Windows is a huge task indeed. You need to accept that GIMP on Microsoft Windows is a young project and will continue to have issues for quite some time.
Is getting the GIMP's UI to standardize on "NOT SUCKING"
I'd be interested to see a good discussion of what exactly it is about GIMP's interface that makes it suck. I've seen lots of complaints that "It sucks!" but less in the way of explanations of what the problems actually are. Certainly there are some minor quirks (discoverability of drawing straight lines for instance), but almost all programs as complex as GIMP have similar quirks. Besides, many of those elements are just that: quirks and minor issues that are being corrected. It doesn't explain the "fundamental suckiness" of the UI.
The most common fundamental complaint about GIMP that I've heard is to do with window handling. This is certainly somewhat of a problem in the Microsoft Windows port, but the port is just that: a port of an application that isn't being developed for that platform. You'll get issues like that in such ports. I have heard that there are patches/plugins that allow GIMP to operate with a root window MDI interface on Windows anyway.
So then we're down to the issue of window handling on X. The complaint seems to be that GIMP doesn't have an MDI interface, and that that is fundamentally bad. Realistically however GIMP is doing things the right way. It delegates window handling to the window manager. The problem with MDIs in applications like GIMP is this: GIMP then has to write its own (usually remarkably inferior) window managing code. This is silly when, on X, we already have a seperate application that is supposed to do all the management of windows. The problem is not, as so many complain, with GIMP, but rather with X window managers. Choose a good window manager that implements window groups and the GIMP interface issues that people describe suddenly vanish. The problem is that few window managers implement window groups, and the ones that do are often lacking in other areas. If you have a problem with window handling for GIMP you should be complaining loud and long to the Metacity and KWin and *box developers that they need to implement a good powerful window group management facility (preferably one that is hintable from applications). That's where the real problem lies.
You see that's interesting because the reason CEOs are paid such large sums of money, and receive large bonuses is because of "the value they generate for the company". When a CEO receives a vast bonus (many millions of dollars) it is claimed that this is reasonable because during their tenure the companies market cap rose by, say, a billion dollars - if 5% of that goes to the CEO for the value they added to the company, then great. That's the claim.
Yet here we see that, as you say, Ms. Fiorina is worth negative $7 billion. That's quite a loss for the company while she was CEO. Rather than generating money, she was holding them back, apparently. The question that is rarely asked is: how much would this company have grown, how much would the market cap have increased, if we had just left a monkey at the helm. If the answer is a billion or three, then maybe the CEO doesn't deserve a generous remuneration package after all. Of course guessing how a company would have performed with a monkey, or a random number generator at the helm is, well... not possible. Which is what the CEO club reply on.
Given the bonuses for good performance, I wonder if HP is going to bill Ms. Fiorina for the apparently poor performance under her leadership?
These things keep getting reduced to false dichotomies. They had an option other than "give away anti-virus for free" and "charge for anti virus". That was to not get int the anti virus business. Now you point out they would be castigated for failing to tackle the problem: "get into the anti virus business" or "be criticised for not dealing with viruses". You do, however, note the real solution:
to release products without so many security holes.
And that doesn't mean just squashing bugs. If they were serious about this they would mandate software companies to allow user programs to run without Adminstrator rights, enforce a policy where Administrator accounts are locked out. Allow the whole system to be Administrated with "Run As" and eventually eliminate the Administrator account. Start getting mandatory access controls into place, and start demanding software developers code in a way that will respect them. etc.
There's lots of purely architectural, going forward things that Microsoft could do other than just "squashing bugs". Such actions would drastically reduce the effect of those bugs and buffer overflows that do slip through.
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Even with CBC, I still see a vulnerability. If you inject a pattern in the file with foreknowledge that it will be encrypted with a CBC system, then you can probably influence both the encrypted pattern of bits on the output of the first block and the injected pattern of bits on the second block to create a knowable pattern of encrypted bits on the second block.
I don't think that will work with any respectable block cipher system. Put simply, you can't make any predictions about patterns within a block if the block cipher is of any value whatsoever. Within a given block you're combining with a key and, in CBC mode an IV. Both of those are effectively completely random. The simple XORing with a random IV at the start of the process should eliminate predictability, and thus your ability to propogate a pattern through CBC.
The only reason you can find patterns in ECB mode is that the patterns extend much larger than the block size.
A decent block cipher in CBC mode is going to be safe from fingerprinting unless the MPAA has the key and IV (which, given that it is a symmetric cipher, you're going to have to transmit in some fashion).
Jedidiah.
Firstly the very nature of encryption with a system like DES means you'd really have to a complete dictionary of all possible encipherings of each signature.
That depends on how you're doing the encryption and fingerprinting. If you're using a block cipher (any block cipher) in ECB mode with a small(ish) block size and the fingerprinting is based on patterns of repeated blocks (presuming that there are repeating blocks in the files you want a fingerprint of) then the orginal poster is correct in that you will actually be able to detect fingerprinted files regardless of the encryption. Of course the simple solution for those trying to avoid the fingerprint is to use CBC mode instead, which would easily avoid such issues.
Information on block cipher modes here
Thirdly a new p2p system would hardly use an old algorithm like DES, they'd be more likely to use something like AES which doesn't share some of the known flaws in DES.
The issue is not actually with DES but with block ciphers in ECB mode in general. AES will suffer the same problems if you're silly enough to leave it in ECB mode for encrypting somethign with a lot of repeating blocks.
Jedidiah.
If the image contained large expanses of pixels of an indentical value, the outline of the image appeared in the bits of the DES-encrypted output.
Depends on the mode of DES used, CBC (Chipher Block Chaining) or ECB (Electronic CodeBook). Wikipedia has a decent description of how such block cipher modes work here. The point is that in CBC mode you wouldn't get this problem occuring, and it's easy enough to select that mode for avoiding fingerprinting.
Jedidiah.
I've always wanted to see a Linux distribution that doesn't include network or modem drivers in its default kernel. It can then happily proclaim "No remote holes in the default install EVER. period."
Jedidiah.
I believe pango provides better rendering of multilingual text, particularly for the more interesting scripts. If you're doing all your work in Farsi or Bengali then perhaps pango might be better.
Jedidiah.
Hopefully the Linux community can move forward with SELinux, or some other system that has mandatory access controls. Once that is properly in place Linux will have a significant tangible security advantage over Windows.
Yes Fedora currently has SELinux in the default install. Unfortunately they have had to use a fairly permissive policy because too many applications and libraries don't properly respect the sort of security bounds that ought to be in place. Right now SELinux on Fedora is like user account permissions on Windows. While it is technically there, the majority of applications simply aren't written with it in mind (eg. all those Windows apps that need to run as Administrator), so in practice it doesn't do much.
SELinux is done though, and Fedora has integrated it in nicely (including into the rpm system). What is needed now is for all those open source developers out there to realise that there is a new level of security, other than just filem permissions, that they need to consider and respect. If they can just restrict where they write files to, and what files they want to access to the minimum required that would be great. If they can compartmentalize operations so that each can run as a seperate process with least privilege all the better. This is work that needs to be done though.
Once such things are seriously in place all this harping by Microsoft about "Windows being more secure" will be so obviously the hot air that it is that we won't even have to worry about it anymore.
Jedidiah.
Well, let's see. We've had two columnists paid off, party plants in the Presidential press pool, and 200 scientists now reporting they've been pressured to alter results. Yeah, those red staters really are so much smarter than those of us in the blue states. They memorize the propaganda more easily.
Nice non sequitur. How about you leave your preconceived pointless artificial "Republican/Democrat" dichotomy out of it and actually consider the issue instead of making random partisan cheapshots. You're as bad as this guy trying to exonerate Bush and blame Clinton and the "liberals".
Stangely not every issue can be immediately cast as a Liberal vs. Conservative one. In fact, a wide variety of issues benefit from not being discussed in such a way.
--
Fisher's Deduction: "The more issues a person tries to artificially shoehorn down into a Liberal/Conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American"
Let the Bush bashing begin! ...even though in the last 15 years, the majority of most of these scientist's time has been spend under a Democratic president;
Because as we all know, every single issue can and should be immediately broken down into a Republican/Democrat, Conservative/Liberal dichotomy. Once you have the dichotomy you can then immediately discern what everyone's views on the issue must be based solely on which side of the Republican/Conservative dichotomy they fall on any other issue.
There's a saying:
"The more issues a person tries to arbitrarily shoehorn down into a Liberal/Conservative dichotomy, the more certain you can be that the person is an American."
Once you're done with the pointless partisan bickering that, frankly, has no real bearing on the issue at hand, feel free to actually get back to discussing the topic.
Jedidiah.
Egypt is not a democracy, unless you count the "one candidate" kind of election a democracy. Mubarak is working on his sixth term as "president". It's a dictatorship, and everyone knows it.
Egypt regularly holds multiparty elections. Yes there are certainly complaints about potential interference, and they are justified to some extent. That doesn't make it "not a democracy". There were complaints about interference in the US elections. That doesn't suddenly make it (as some loopy Democrats like to claim) a dictatorship. Egypt is certainly not a model democracy, but it is one. If you want an arab democracy you would have done far better weeding out the issues an existing one instead of trying to impose one where it didn't previously exist.
That's what the six-party talks, initiated by the Bush Administration, is all about. North Korea is amenable to political and economic pressure, and the military options are not attractive. Pentagon wargames project 6 million dead within the first 48 hours or so of a Korean War II. It is mountainous, a veritable fortress on either side of the DMZ, and nearly 4 million troops stare at each other across no-man's land. Comparing Iraq to North Korea is comparing apples to oranges.
In practical terms, yes. I am not suggesting the current approach to NK is the wrong one. I am certainly not suggesting invasion is the right approach. What I am suggesting is that NK can, via the rhetoric and actions of the current administration, make some somewhat credible claims that they are "under threat" and should be "allowed to provide for their own defense". Reality is not relevant when we're discussing diplomatic rhetoric, and unfortunately the current administration has walked right in to providing NK with some good excuses for doing what they're doing.
Jedidiah.
Honestly, no I don't think they have anything to fear. While they are a brutal dictatorship ( I really expected someone to try to refute that, by the way) what reason would we go there for?
Whether the US would in reality or not is somewhat of a side point. Current rhetoric is that all brutal dictators and enemies of democracy need to be afraid - whether threats come in the form of diplomatic cajoling, sanctions or military action, Bush has stated that they will be going after non-democratic states. As far as NK is concerned that gives them the right to defend themselves.
Similarly one could ask why should the US fear NK havign nuclear weapons. Its not like they'd actually use them - any efforts to do so would see NK utterly destroyed: I don't think you'd find any objectors to military action against NK in the world community if NK actually used nuclear weapons against SK or Japan. So for what reason would NK use nuclear weapons? And if they're just going to sit on them as a Mutuall Assured Destruction threat against invasion, and the US isn't going to invade... why should the US worry?
There's simply no real upside, unlike in Iraq, where (agree or disagree) the possibility for something completely new (a real arab democracy) finally exists.
A real arab democracy other than Egypt you mean? Or, for that matter, the new arab democracy of Afghanistan? Two real arab democracies not enough?
What equivalent exists in N Korea?
Ridding the world of a brutal dictator who has killed (through both malice, and incompetence) many many more innocent people than Hussein could aspire to? Eliminating an unpredictable foreign dictator in possession of WMD? Okay, so clearly those were not the reasons for Iraq. You're claiming the reason for Iraq was to add yet another democracy to the already growing list of arab democracies. How about disarming the continuing simmering tension that is affecting the entire asian region? SK, Japan, China, and Taiwan are all being made to feel a little nervous by NK and their brutal dictatorship. If Iraq was about stability in the middle-east, how about providing stability for asia?
In the end, regardless of the reality of the US intentions, NK can make a fairly reasonable case that they feel threatened, and that they have some legitimate fears. In the end it is Bush's rhetoric that has helped back NK here, and whether Bush really meant it or not doesn't matter any more.
Jedidiah.
If "that other country" could have shelled Tel Aviv, Riyadh, or Kuwait City, etc back to the stone age using only conventional artillery, then everyone's favorite deposed dictator would not have been found literally hiding in a hole in the ground.
Which, given the Inauguration and State of the Union speeches with comments about "spreading freedom and democracy" combined with the display of willingness to use military might to do so (Iraq), pretty much says to any world dictator:
"Get yourself some bargaining firepower fast. You don't need to be able to stop an invasion, you just need to be able kill a lot of innocent people"
Given Bush's comments about Syria, do you think they might be doing precisely what you suggest and setting up as much conventional military firepower aimed at Tel Aviv as they can manage?
Jedidiah.
Not entirely, this admission raises the spectre of a Japan having to develope nukes to protect themselves from a nuclear N. Korea.
Simply not going to happen. Japan is, I believe, constitutionally bound to not develop nuclear weapons, so it would require pretty fundamental change, for which there would be huge public opposition.
Japan is the only country in the world to have been attacked with nuclear weapons. Their aversion and hatred of such weapons is pretty much unparalleled. There is simply no way the Japanese public would consent to such a thing, and last time I checked Japan was still a Democracy.
Visit the peace museum in Hiroshima and then discuss the likelihood of Japan developing nuclear weapons.
Jedidiah.
Forget the nukes. NK has a massive amount of conventional weaponry locked, loaded, and pointed at Seoul.
Indeed. NK has enough conventional fixed artillery that they can, right now, lob shells into central Seoul at the rate of several thousand shells an hour. Then they have short range rocket batteries that can hit Seoul. Would you believe they have the largest arsenal of short range rockets in the world? They basically bought up the entire Soviet rocket arsenal when it was going cheap. NK would be saving the Nukes for Tokyo and Osaka.
Jedidiah.
This statement is idiotic. North Korea had nothing to fear until they developed nukes. ...
Of course, N Korea is ALSO a brutal dictatorship with no respect for human rights.
So presuming for a minute that the US war in Iraq was solely to promote freedom around the world by removing a brutal dictator with no respect for human rights, and remembering Bush's recent promise to promote freedom throughout the world... Don't you think Korea does have reason to fear, independent of the Nuclear weapons? The country is run by an unpredictable dictator with no interest in human rights or democracy. According to Bush's recent speeches such countires are target number one for this administration, and they've already shown a willingness to use military means to achieve these ends.
Yes North Korea was developing nuclear weapons before Bush was making such speeches, but from their point of view they could simply say they had particularly good foresight.
Jedidiah.
Well, to be fair, most of those complaints are from users of the GIMP on Windows. If X11 window managers handle the GIMP less than perfectly, Windows handles it horribly.
Very true. Realistically GIMP for Windows just isn't quite there yet. In the same way that Photoshop for Mac and Photoshop for Windows really are quite different applications, GIMP for Windows really needs significant changes to deal with all the particulars of Windows.
Jedidiah.
Final Cut Pro has one of the best user interfaces for its task. Just the basic way windows work is great. Put two windows next to each other: they snap in place. You can grab the edge between them where they meet and drag it: both windows resize. Arrange four windows so they meet at a common corner, and you can drag just the corner point. All four windows resize.
All it would take is for X11 WM developers to write the WM code to allow that. Simply define a window class that behaves that way, and allow applications to hint whether a window should be of that class or normal. Fairly simple. Not even close to being done.
The real issue here is that X11 window managers actually suck. The metacity mentality that "everything is bloat and feature crack" just doesn't help. Here's a perfectly good feature, used to good effect on the Mac, but it won't be implemented for X11 because it will be considered pointless bloat.
I can't believe people keep blaming the apps when it is the WMs failing to implement the required featuresets that are causing the real problems.
Jedidiah.
You keep passing the blame off to the WM, but that's not the right place to put it: the X11 specification doesn't describe windows in enough detail for the WM to handle it as intelligently as (for example) Photoshop handles its internally-managed floating palettes. A window which displays 2d document data has different grouping/moving needs from one that contains tool buttons or a time-series indicator, but to X11, they're all just drawable surfaces.
As far as the X11 protocol is concerned that's all it needs to know. If applications were capable of passing a window hint to the WM telling it "this is a palette window not a document data window", and the WM were capable of understanding this and handling it sensibly then all would be fine. The EWMH spec has some material on this, but that mostly relates to whether a window is considered a transient or not. All that has to be done is include sme concepts of window grouping in the EWMH spec and things could move along. No changes need to be made to X11. X11 is just there to draw windows to the screen - what those windows do, whether they behave in groups, understand application hints as to what type of window it is, and how it should be handled, is entirely the responsibility of the WM. Blaming X11 for this is like blaming Windows GDI for the fact that sub windows in an MDI interface behave weirdly.
Jedidiah.
Now, if only Metacity had such a feature! :(
Welcome to the problem! We really ought to be complaining to Metacity developers that they need to implement such simple features as smart maximising and (at least basic) window groups. These are basic features and once they are available most of these issues with GIMP (and several other applications) start to disappear (not to mention new and useful things that become possible).
My push has been for powerful window grouping features, though I started with slightly less mainstream WMs in my lobbying. I've had some success. The more people that take up the call for these basic features, the better off we will be.
Jedidiah.
The Mac is a very special case, because it's non-multitasking origins left it an application-centric legacy, so that today it's possible to interact with a program that has ZERO windows open... a situation ludicrous to a Microsoft Windows or X11 user.
Sure, but the fact remains: this is the situation you have on a Mac with Photoshop, but you hear very few (if any) complaints that Photoshop on the Mac has a fundamentally broken UI. The reason for this is that the Mac has good window handling for such things. All X11 has to do is provide good window handling for such things. Window managers like Enlightenment, FVWM2, and others all have window handlign capable of dealing with this, so it is far from impossible. Rather, the issue is that current mainstream X11 window managers fail to implement the basic required functionality to make such a situation easy to handle elegantly. We ought to be demanding such functionality.
Jedidiah.
That's no valid as either an excuse or an explanation. The authors of The Gimp knew how X11 WMs worked 10 years ago, and they know they haven't changed too much in the meantime.
Two points:
(1) 10 years ago window managers did actually have such features - witness FVWM, Enlightenment, Blackbox, etc. It has been the recent "new" window managers that have ignored such useful things as "maximise to available area" and window grouping.
(2) I'm not really apologising for GIMP so much as criticising the current mainstream window managers for having fundamentally broken/incomplete behaviour. As I said, such things were available in many window managers for a long time - we should be demanding these features in the mainstream WMs.
So you can't have any windows from other applications onscreen at all. Not a great solution. And what do you do when you'd like to minimize The Gimp and look at something else? Minimize 6 different palettes individually?
I can have several other windows on screen if I want. Check out how Enlightenment handles "maximise to available area": if the window being maximised already overlaps another window, it can maximise beyond it. Besides I can just iconify any other windows out of the way to do the maximise if the smart maximising won't be enough.
What do I do when I want to iconify all the GIMP windows? I just iconify the toolbox. Seeign as all the GIMP windows belong to a window group they automatically iconify as well. You see, the issue is that current mainstream window managers are poor at real window handling. We really ought to be demanding our features back.
Both those problems can be worked-around by assigning a desktop space that's for The Gimp only- but the existence of workarounds doesn't absolve the designer.
You criticise GIMP for knowing what features WMs had but not adjusting to it, and now for knowing what features WMs have, and taking advantage of it. Multiple desktops are one of the few features that has survived unscathed. If proper maximisation and window groups had also managed to survive (and hopefully be improved upon) you wouldn't have anything to complain about. If WMs would just get around to implementing these features a great many people (who apparently never even realised that this was their real problem) will undoubtedly be a lot happier.
Jedidiah.
but a major problem that many people have with The GIMP is that even when they're working on just a single document, there are still two separate windows out there. The separate and unattachable button palette can be either awkward or confusing for many users.
And yet it is exactly what the user will be presented with when they deal with Photoshop on a Macintosh: multiple windows, even for a single document. The main difference is that window management on Macs are designed to treat such a situation elegantly (there are suitable window types to allow the palettes and toolbox to be grouped with the image windows). No one complains that Photoshop is fundamentally broken on the Mac.
In the end I am not so much apologising for GIMP as I am criticising the poor state of window management in X. There are very good window managers for X that can handle such things, but the popular mainstream WMs simply fail to even come close to addressing these issues. I am baffled that so many people have an issue with to poor quality of WMs on X (just witness all the complaints about GIMPs window handling on every single thread that mentions GIMP), yet so few people are actually demanding improvements in the places where it is important.
Jedidiah.
Yes, it is hard to use. Figuring it out is not the problem. The biggest problem for me is that I like to edit the images maximized. All those tool windows and dialogs disappear the instant you click on the image, or you can set them always on top and they get in the way of your image.
Yes, that's annoying, but as with many complaints about GIMP it is an issue of window handling, which comes down to window management, which, because GIMP was designed to run on X, is the responsibility of the window manager, not GIMP. I don't tend to have the issue you describe. I use the "maximise to available area" feature in the window manager I use to maximise the image window to be as large as possible without overlapping any of the palettes. Combine that with the docking of palettes to each other, and the toolbox available in 2.0 onward and there really is no problem whatsoever.
That, of course, doesn't mean you don't have a problem (only that I don't). My point is that if you are using GIMP on X then you should be complaining to the window manager coders that they need to implement a more complete feature set. If you are using GIMP on Microsoft Windows... unfortunatelty GIMP is targeted at X11, and development of the Windows version is only really starting to kick into gear. Handling all the issues with things working differently on Windows is a huge task indeed. You need to accept that GIMP on Microsoft Windows is a young project and will continue to have issues for quite some time.
Jedidiah.
Is getting the GIMP's UI to standardize on "NOT SUCKING"
I'd be interested to see a good discussion of what exactly it is about GIMP's interface that makes it suck. I've seen lots of complaints that "It sucks!" but less in the way of explanations of what the problems actually are. Certainly there are some minor quirks (discoverability of drawing straight lines for instance), but almost all programs as complex as GIMP have similar quirks. Besides, many of those elements are just that: quirks and minor issues that are being corrected. It doesn't explain the "fundamental suckiness" of the UI.
The most common fundamental complaint about GIMP that I've heard is to do with window handling. This is certainly somewhat of a problem in the Microsoft Windows port, but the port is just that: a port of an application that isn't being developed for that platform. You'll get issues like that in such ports. I have heard that there are patches/plugins that allow GIMP to operate with a root window MDI interface on Windows anyway.
So then we're down to the issue of window handling on X. The complaint seems to be that GIMP doesn't have an MDI interface, and that that is fundamentally bad. Realistically however GIMP is doing things the right way. It delegates window handling to the window manager. The problem with MDIs in applications like GIMP is this: GIMP then has to write its own (usually remarkably inferior) window managing code. This is silly when, on X, we already have a seperate application that is supposed to do all the management of windows. The problem is not, as so many complain, with GIMP, but rather with X window managers. Choose a good window manager that implements window groups and the GIMP interface issues that people describe suddenly vanish. The problem is that few window managers implement window groups, and the ones that do are often lacking in other areas. If you have a problem with window handling for GIMP you should be complaining loud and long to the Metacity and KWin and *box developers that they need to implement a good powerful window group management facility (preferably one that is hintable from applications). That's where the real problem lies.
I've written a description of a particularly power user oriented (extract the greatest power and flexibility out of the concept) window group system. It's still relatively simple to use, and if only a subset of this functionality was implemented it would be entirely possible to have a simple easy to use window group system that would eliminate most of these complaints. The problem is getting such a system implemented by mainstream window managers.
Jedidiah.
You see that's interesting because the reason CEOs are paid such large sums of money, and receive large bonuses is because of "the value they generate for the company". When a CEO receives a vast bonus (many millions of dollars) it is claimed that this is reasonable because during their tenure the companies market cap rose by, say, a billion dollars - if 5% of that goes to the CEO for the value they added to the company, then great. That's the claim.
Yet here we see that, as you say, Ms. Fiorina is worth negative $7 billion. That's quite a loss for the company while she was CEO. Rather than generating money, she was holding them back, apparently. The question that is rarely asked is: how much would this company have grown, how much would the market cap have increased, if we had just left a monkey at the helm. If the answer is a billion or three, then maybe the CEO doesn't deserve a generous remuneration package after all. Of course guessing how a company would have performed with a monkey, or a random number generator at the helm is, well... not possible. Which is what the CEO club reply on.
Given the bonuses for good performance, I wonder if HP is going to bill Ms. Fiorina for the apparently poor performance under her leadership?
Jedidiah.
These things keep getting reduced to false dichotomies. They had an option other than "give away anti-virus for free" and "charge for anti virus". That was to not get int the anti virus business. Now you point out they would be castigated for failing to tackle the problem: "get into the anti virus business" or "be criticised for not dealing with viruses". You do, however, note the real solution:
to release products without so many security holes.
And that doesn't mean just squashing bugs. If they were serious about this they would mandate software companies to allow user programs to run without Adminstrator rights, enforce a policy where Administrator accounts are locked out. Allow the whole system to be Administrated with "Run As" and eventually eliminate the Administrator account. Start getting mandatory access controls into place, and start demanding software developers code in a way that will respect them. etc.
There's lots of purely architectural, going forward things that Microsoft could do other than just "squashing bugs". Such actions would drastically reduce the effect of those bugs and buffer overflows that do slip through.
Jedidiah.