Indeed, Why are people suddenly against reverse-engeneering and freedom of choice?
Because there just aren't any parallels. The situations are completely different.
[The Samba Team/Real] reverse engineered [SMB/Fairplay] so that they could serve [Files/Music] from [Linux/Real's Store] to [Windows/iPod Users] but still have it be compatible. Clearly [The Samba Team/Real] are [Good/Evil], as such reverse engineering is [Required for compatibilty/Theft].
The poor [Windows/iPod] users are having choice [Offered to/Forced upon] them, and clearly that is [Right/Wrong].
This is true, a decentralized systems weathers change better. However the number of decision making individuals in the American system is pretty slim as well.
Yup, and that's why US style corporatism is almost as bad a system. The less centralization the better, and corporatism massively promotes centralization. Especially when you can then used that centralized power base to manipulate legislation into directions that serve you.
But communism does work so long as the decision making is prudent.
Which is basically saying "It works until an error in decision making occurs", which, inevitably, given human failings, is not that far away. I would prefer a system that accepted and was robust against human imperfection, rather than one that requires eternal perfection.
And as for "working", well, it doesn't work "well" - no matter how smart the central planners are, they can't know everything, and can't find the optimal distribution of work to produce the most value. On the other hand, a decentralized system will tend towards optimal equilibrium points naturally. The catch is of course that a centrally planned system can make near instant transitions, while an equilibrium/free market system has to let the system adjust itself.
Give me stability and robustness in a system anyday though.
In general I much prefer fre-market capitalism, but it isn't without a few pitfalls.
Give me an example of those with the largest amount of property "calling the shots" when there is no government protection of businesses allowed. I often hear the example of someone buying up the entire country and charging high rent. It is a ridiculous example, because it assumes everyone will sell their houses to one person or group of people.
Advertising. The key is advertising. Consider Microsoft, not as a corporation, but just as company. They can, using the massive cash reserves they have, market their way to success. Just make sure that their name is everywhere, and is the name everyone knows. Produce nice misinformation campaigns against any competitors that you can't buy out. If the majority of consumers are restricted in the information available to them (by being flooded by advertising from one company) they will make restricted choices.
Via a scheme like this Microsoft (or Coca-Cola) could conceivably artificially prop up their business for a very long time. Sure, it's not 100% fool proof - it may fail, but it is a means where it is entirely possible for those with the largest amount of property to "call the shots". Consumers are only as intelligent in their buying decisions as their available information. Control the information, and you control their buying decisions.
Of course it is media companies that stand to have the greatest degree of control here, but then we knew that already.
Many Capatalists corporations couldn't either. they over commited to certain methods of production and died. They went bankrupt. The decision makers took the wrong choice. Thats what happened to the USSR. They mad a choice to try and match military output with the US and it bankrupted them.
That's the point though - the capitalist system spread things out over many competing interests. If one of those interests made a poor decision it would indeed fall behind and eventually fail. The failure of one competing interest simply makes way for the sucess of others who chose a different path, and the system as a whole survives.
In the centralized communist system everything is determined from one central point, and hence one bad decision that leads to failure causes the whole system to fall behind and fail. The system does not adapt efficiently.
Think of it as the difference between an ecosystem that adapts to changes - some species wax, while others wane, but the system reacts to and balances for any changes - compared to an attempt to ccentrally manage an ecosystem: humans have tried to create managed ecosystems in the past, and they mostly lead to collapse. We are far better off letting the system be free to adapt itself than expecting some all knowing central organisation structure to accurately predict all required changes and adaptations.
I used to get together with friends and rent 4 or 5 really bad films from the Horror, Fantasy, or Science Fiction sections of the local video store. We had some remarkably good laughs over the years - there is some classicaly bad stuff that sneaks out in the direct to video category. Classic include the likes of "Deathstalker III: The Warriors from Hell", "The Unnammable (sic)", and the all time classic "Raiders of the Living Dead". In the end we stopped though. We hit a roadblock when we rented one particular film which was, quite simply, so bad it just wasn't funny anymore. The film quickly gained a cult status amongst our friends, and word of it slowly spread until I was seeing references to it from people I didn't know but had clearly heard of it through friends of frtiends etc. I still see mention of it every now and then. That film was "The Rollerblade Seven", and it is quite simply so bad that few comparisons can be made. It is incoherent (go on, rent it see it and then try and explain the plot!), mind numbing (no, literally!), and just.. well... I don't think there are quite words for it. I have never seen a film quite as bad. A few, such as "Zombie vs. the Mardi Gras" come close, but really, "The Rollerblade Seven" truly is another level of bad beyond anything you could quite imagine - you just have to actually watch it to understand.
Ignoring the few privilege elevation exploits we've seen over the years, why in the world would anyone install an untrustworthy program as root?
Well if Fedora ever gets their SELinux policy straightened out enough to have it in the default install it well remedy the problem even for those who do install untrustworthy programs as "root" (for as much as root makes sense on SELinux) unless they go and muck with the policy files too (which is rather unlikely). Roll SELinux I say. Let's actually have Linux live up to the sort of security the fan boys claim it has now.
On the other hand, what do MI-5 and MI-6 have to say about this codec? I've heard NSA has derailed certain technologies in the past.
Pure drivel. An open source video codec is of no interest to such organisations. Why would they care?
Jedidiah
Re:Story was debunked
on
Linux vs. Windows
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Well, not debunked so much as it far overstated Linux's market share vs the Mac. They were counting sales, so many PCs are sold with Linux but a pirated version of Windows quickly replaces it, etc. Looking at Google Zeitgeist shows that the Mac is still well into the lead for desktop usage(for now)
True, I think they overstated. I think the presumption that most PCs sold with Linux get a pirated version of Windows on it is guesswork though. Equally, there are a lot of PCs sold with Windows that have a legitimate version of Linux put on it.
In the end that leaves Google as our best measure, and as you say, that puts Mac at 3% and Linux at 1%. It also has "Other" at 5%. I would be interested to know the make up of "Other" as it may well contain a few unidentified Linux boxes - I mean, your options of rother are (realistically) Solaris, *BSD, or possibly BeOS (with a smattering of other bits and pieces like Syllable, Zeta etc.), and to be honest I would be surprised if a combined Solaris, *BSD desktop market share (presumably not too many google searches are run from servers) totals to anything near 5% (I would guess around 2% maybe). That leaves some space for a lot of unknown. Note that I'm not trying to claim that this is all Linux, not that Linux has a bigger share than Apple (I strongly suspect it doesn't), just that Zeitgeist isn't all that helpful when we're dealing with the smaller market share OSs.
Thanks for pointing this out. I agree, most of these "immoral" acts are deemed immoral in various religious codes mostly for the reasons you cited and reasons akin to them. A lot of religious "law" is, if you look at it, sensible precautions to take given limited real knowledge and understanding of how things really work.
It is not false, however, that the laws are about consent, otherwise sex with underage boys would be permissible. I think you'll find that while the laws started as you suggest (as various religios codes), in the last century or two the legal profession has done some reasonable work to try and bring some sense, clarity, and consistency to such laws (they are good for something!), and in this day and age consent is what you will find cited. The fact that this cleaning up of antiquated and potentially prejudiced law is still ongoing (like legalising homosexual marriage) shows both how ingrained the prejudices introduced by various religions are, and that we are seeking to move to a more consistent and rational moral code (albeit with some opposition).
You're trying the "slippery slope" argument, but we can discuss all of cannibalism, necrophilia, incest, paedophilia, beastiality as seperate issues:
Let's start with incest, paedophila, and beastiality, because they all come down to the same principal: informed consent. In our society it is generally believed that sex should be consensual (rape is illegal) as otherwise we would be infringing on anothers rights. The problem is, to be able to consent, the other party has to understand what it is they are consenting to. That's more than just understanding the physical process involved, but (in our society anyway) understanding the emotional issues attached to such things. This is why paedophila is considered criminal - it is harmful to the children, because the children (even if they do "consent") don't really understand the full implications of what they would be consenting to. My understanding is that beastiality falls into the same category. It is interesting that we extend this protection to animals where otherwise we would not, but that's how it is. The other issue with beastiality is a "cleanliness" issue. Mostly this the same sort of "cleanliness" that directs the finer points of a kosher diet, but there are some remaining issues (transferring diseases across species, which has been known to happen through beastiality and related pursuits can definitely be problematic). Still going with holdover taboos we come to incest - a large part of our reaction to incest is based on an old taboo which centers around the issues of inbreeding. All very reasonable and sensible. The issues with incest do extend beyond this though - we're essentially back to the informed consent: most incestuous relationships involve exploiting the familial relationship into something more, and at least one party is usually not in a position to give informed consent.
I believe that leaves us with cannibalism and necrophilia. With these certainly no obvious harm is being done (presuming it is post-mortem cannabilism, and the person isn't being killed to e eaten) to the immediate parties, however, our society generally holds that a person (and their immediate kin) has rights over their remains - refer to organ donation, leaving your body to science, what have you: there are plenty of laws that consider damage done post death to still be harm to the individual. Based on that, necrophilia is out, as a dead person cannot give consent. Likewise cannibalism. That, of course, leaves the possibility that a person could will their remains to be used for such purposes. Why they would choose to do that I do not know, but that is their choice. In that case, personally, I don't think I would stand in the way of such thigns. Cannibalism, on some level, makes sense (read Stranger in a Strange Land).
And then homosexuality - well, that's sexual intercourse between two consenting adults who have full knowledge and understanding of what they are entering into. No harm to either party, so I don't see the problem there.
The vast majority of users have no idea what HTML, CSS, PNG, or almost any other 'computer thingie' is. All they know is that Internet Explorer is The Internet.
Sure, but if IE 7 comes out with great CSS and PNG support and sites start exploiting that then those users will either get sites that say "Upgrade to IE7 to use this site" or just think "the Internet is broken" without the newest IE. They will upgrade one way or another.
Also I'm wondering (I don't actually know, this isn't a smart-arsed answer) what happens when you just put a single character before or after the dictionary word. (say Total8) Surely the dictionary checkers don't check this...
Most password cracking programs these days run several rounds. The first round runs through a straight dictionary, then there are various rounds of variations on dictionary words. These usually variations include:
Appending or prepending a number to the word Writing words backwards Plurals, etc. of words Odd capitalisations (capitalise consonants, lower case vowels etc. Traditional misspellings (z for s, j for g, that sort of thing) Leet speek.
Appending or prepending a single digit is, quite literally, the FIRST thing that is tried after straight dictionary words. Don't expect it to work.
You're only thinking in terms of existing hash algorithms. My ancient PIII can compute several million MD5 hashes a second, so it's not surprising that I can brute-force an 8-character password in a day or so.
MD5 hashed passwords (at least on UNIX) use salts, so it's not that easy. If it is a common dictionary word, you may get it in a day if you're lucky.
As for covering the whole 8-character space, well, not likely. Assuming upper and lower case alphanumeric, you're looking at 218340105584896 passwords to try. Assuming you can do say 10 million per second, you'll cover the space in about 7 years. Beefing that up to 100 million a second, it will still take you about 8 months.
Oh, that'll be just great. Chopping off fingers and plucking out eyeballs will be the new definition of "social engineering".
No need for that. I saw a presentation at AsiaCrypt a couple of years ago where a guy sucessfully managed to create an artificial fingerprint good enough to fool pretty much all the commercial fingerprint scanners tested using only a fingerprint left begind on a glass, and pretty much commodity hardware (he did use one somewhat obscure device but that was still only a couple thousand dollars). This wasn't spy movie crap - this was an actual research project. Current fingerprint scanners are, quite simply, complete crap.
Notably several people posted responses they got from here. They were all exactly that. I would suggest that it is a form response, probably prepared by her lawyer. To test that theory out, I sent an email that essentially said "I understand it's Penguin's fault, but you (presonally, and separate from Penguin) could always make an honest offer to buy the domain of Katie Jones". I have received no response to this - notable because most people that got responses got them promptly.
I think the idea was, as you point out, installing software is different in every single distro
And the examples you list are: Slackware, Gentoo, Redhat, and Debian.
Both Redhat (Fedora) and Debian use Synaptic quite happily, which is a very nice GTK+ frontend to apt. Slackware and Gentoo are a long way from your standard commercial distros.
Until there is a real method of packaging and installing/removing software for Linux, the operating system will never move past where Windows was circa version 3.1. RPM has dependancy issues, and apt-get is something past most people.
I suggest you look at synaptic. Unfortunately they haven't updated their screenshots recently, the interface is now much cleaner and simpler than that presented in the screenshots (which was still quite nice).
With Windows, you just download a binary installer and run it as either the admin or not. If it's admin, it'll install it system-wide; if not, it'll install per user. If'll bring any extra libraries in needs for its private use.
I suggest you check out autopackage. Any parties that package with autopackage instead of rpm or deb create a downloadable binary installer that asks for the root password. If you give it it will install systemwide, if you pass, you can install it just for you. Of course it goes one better and checks for dependencies and resolves them, just like apt (though dependency checking is more in the style of the configure stage of a compilation rather than looking for installed packages, so it is much more robust).
No current Linux technology immitates this. There is no way I can currently download a self-executing shellscript wrapper or otherwise binary program that will install either system-wide or to ~/bin/$appname, with care taken to provide its own libraries, and giving me an easy link so I can remove the application folder, the installed support libraries, and any config files separately.
That would be autopackage. Okay, it's still at 0.5, and isn't completely API stable yet, but it is progressign quickly, and already has several applications (inkscape for instance) which you can fully install via autopackage.
You father who is a mathematics lecturer (I assume at least high-school) and has a use for TeX is NOT the typical parent.
Ah yes, but it was my computer-phobic mother who did the install. My father just watched. Besides, does it matter when all they had to do was clock "next, next, next" to end up with a workign system?
His Myth 1: Linux is just as easy to install as Windows. -- My mom can install Windows (without any help from me -- I just tell her "If you don't know what to do, just click Next" -- and when she's done, she has a fully functional OS. The linux installation experience is dramatically more complicated, and it's unlikely the end-product will work right if it was done by a novice (he pretty much admits this).
Uh, I had my parents install RH9 by themselves with only the advice you gave "If you don't know what to do, just click Next" and when they were done they had a fully functional OS, Office suite, paint program, web and email applications, and (for my Dad, who is a math lecturer) complete working TeX system, complete with editors desgined to work with LaTeX.
The end product worked fine, and they continue to use it very happily.
Really, everything beyond Gentoo and Debian (though I hear the new Debian in staller is much better) can be installed by just clicking "next" when you don't know what to do, and it pretty much always results in a perfectly functional system. The only time it presents difficulty is if you are trying to preserve an existing Windows install, but then you can't install an existing Linux install when installing Windows by "just clicking next", so...
So linux isn't ready because if you choose to use software distributed as source you have to use the commandline? It's not even a terribly hard sequence of commands, and they are almost always described in the INSTALL document.
That aside though, the main issue with source installs is that you end up with a mess - files all over the place. You can't remove what you just installed unless the Makefile happened to include an "uninstall".
Up until now I've been very happily avoiding this issue by using stow, but recently I found checkinstall which you run instead of make install. Checkinstall creates a package (.deb, or.rpm based on your system) containing all the files getting installed by the make install step, and installs that for you. That means that everything, source installs included, can be conveniently managed from whatever package management application you use (I prefer synaptic myself, it works for anything that supports apt, which includes rpm).
"That's still too hard!" you say? Yes, quite possibly - but then the only real reason to be installing from source is if you have very particular needs (special configure options) or a need to be on the bleeding edge. Pretty much anyone who thinks compiling is too hard should be happy with binary installs. With things like synaptic, redcarpet, up2date, etc. around installing distro provided packages is a breeze. If you have to go outside your distro try autopackage. Yes, autopackage isn't finished yet, but they're at the stage where they have some test packages (install the latest version of inkscape via autopackage for instance), and what they do have is fantastic - think of it as installshield with advanced dependency checking resolution. All those third parties currently supplying distro specific rpms ought to shift their project to supplying autopackages, and certainly autopackage looks to be the way to go for any commercial vendor who wants to create a linux installer for their software.
Installs are still a little tricky, but the issues have been spotted, and are being worked on - and the solutions look better than anything Windows provides.
Certainly these minor push backs on SP2 are largely irrelevant, but Longhorn delays are an issue. Microsoft is worried about Longhorn delays - I beleive they have started dropping proposed features to get it out the door earlier. Sure, no one is going to wipe windows and install Linux instead of waiting for Longhorn, but if Longhorn is too long coming and the Linux desktop starts looking attractive enough you might get a few more OEMs loading it on (HP now has Linux laptops for instance). Should that actually happen you'll get people "converting" to linux simply by upgrding their computer, and to be frank, if all they do is browse the web, write email, and use Word for trivial things occasionally, they aren't really going to notice a whole lot of difference. Should anything other than Windows get much of a real foothold Microsoft will have cause to worry. It's all about "mindshare" not market share. Once other options are widely seen to be both available and viable some serious rebalancing of market share could occur quickly. Sure, Microsoft will still be dominant in such a shakeup, but we might be looking more at 70% to 30% split between Microsoft and everything else. Once that happens they really will have to compete and compete hard.
There are things to worry about for Microsoft. For now things are under control, but it only requires some small slips for things to get away from them.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed, Why are people suddenly against reverse-engeneering and freedom of choice?
Because there just aren't any parallels. The situations are completely different.
[The Samba Team/Real] reverse engineered [SMB/Fairplay] so that they could serve [Files/Music] from [Linux/Real's Store] to [Windows/iPod Users] but still have it be compatible. Clearly [The Samba Team/Real] are [Good/Evil], as such reverse engineering is [Required for compatibilty/Theft].
The poor [Windows/iPod] users are having choice [Offered to/Forced upon] them, and clearly that is [Right/Wrong].
Jedidiah.
This is true, a decentralized systems weathers change better. However the number of decision making individuals in the American system is pretty slim as well.
Yup, and that's why US style corporatism is almost as bad a system. The less centralization the better, and corporatism massively promotes centralization. Especially when you can then used that centralized power base to manipulate legislation into directions that serve you.
But communism does work so long as the decision making is prudent.
Which is basically saying "It works until an error in decision making occurs", which, inevitably, given human failings, is not that far away. I would prefer a system that accepted and was robust against human imperfection, rather than one that requires eternal perfection.
And as for "working", well, it doesn't work "well" - no matter how smart the central planners are, they can't know everything, and can't find the optimal distribution of work to produce the most value. On the other hand, a decentralized system will tend towards optimal equilibrium points naturally. The catch is of course that a centrally planned system can make near instant transitions, while an equilibrium/free market system has to let the system adjust itself.
Give me stability and robustness in a system anyday though.
Jedidiah.
In general I much prefer fre-market capitalism, but it isn't without a few pitfalls.
Give me an example of those with the largest amount of property "calling the shots" when there is no government protection of businesses allowed. I often hear the example of someone buying up the entire country and charging high rent. It is a ridiculous example, because it assumes everyone will sell their houses to one person or group of people.
Advertising. The key is advertising. Consider Microsoft, not as a corporation, but just as company. They can, using the massive cash reserves they have, market their way to success. Just make sure that their name is everywhere, and is the name everyone knows. Produce nice misinformation campaigns against any competitors that you can't buy out. If the majority of consumers are restricted in the information available to them (by being flooded by advertising from one company) they will make restricted choices.
Via a scheme like this Microsoft (or Coca-Cola) could conceivably artificially prop up their business for a very long time. Sure, it's not 100% fool proof - it may fail, but it is a means where it is entirely possible for those with the largest amount of property to "call the shots". Consumers are only as intelligent in their buying decisions as their available information. Control the information, and you control their buying decisions.
Of course it is media companies that stand to have the greatest degree of control here, but then we knew that already.
Jedidiah.
Many Capatalists corporations couldn't either. they over commited to certain methods of production and died. They went bankrupt. The decision makers took the wrong choice. Thats what happened to the USSR. They mad a choice to try and match military output with the US and it bankrupted them.
That's the point though - the capitalist system spread things out over many competing interests. If one of those interests made a poor decision it would indeed fall behind and eventually fail. The failure of one competing interest simply makes way for the sucess of others who chose a different path, and the system as a whole survives.
In the centralized communist system everything is determined from one central point, and hence one bad decision that leads to failure causes the whole system to fall behind and fail. The system does not adapt efficiently.
Think of it as the difference between an ecosystem that adapts to changes - some species wax, while others wane, but the system reacts to and balances for any changes - compared to an attempt to ccentrally manage an ecosystem: humans have tried to create managed ecosystems in the past, and they mostly lead to collapse. We are far better off letting the system be free to adapt itself than expecting some all knowing central organisation structure to accurately predict all required changes and adaptations.
Jedidiah.
Yup, it's quite been good lately (well, the open source linux client anyway). You can download it here
HTH
Jedidiah
I used to get together with friends and rent 4 or 5 really bad films from the Horror, Fantasy, or Science Fiction sections of the local video store. We had some remarkably good laughs over the years - there is some classicaly bad stuff that sneaks out in the direct to video category. Classic include the likes of "Deathstalker III: The Warriors from Hell", "The Unnammable (sic)", and the all time classic "Raiders of the Living Dead". In the end we stopped though. We hit a roadblock when we rented one particular film which was, quite simply, so bad it just wasn't funny anymore. The film quickly gained a cult status amongst our friends, and word of it slowly spread until I was seeing references to it from people I didn't know but had clearly heard of it through friends of frtiends etc. I still see mention of it every now and then. That film was "The Rollerblade Seven", and it is quite simply so bad that few comparisons can be made. It is incoherent (go on, rent it see it and then try and explain the plot!), mind numbing (no, literally!), and just.. well... I don't think there are quite words for it. I have never seen a film quite as bad. A few, such as "Zombie vs. the Mardi Gras" come close, but really, "The Rollerblade Seven" truly is another level of bad beyond anything you could quite imagine - you just have to actually watch it to understand.
Jedidiah.
Ignoring the few privilege elevation exploits we've seen over the years, why in the world would anyone install an untrustworthy program as root?
Well if Fedora ever gets their SELinux policy straightened out enough to have it in the default install it well remedy the problem even for those who do install untrustworthy programs as "root" (for as much as root makes sense on SELinux) unless they go and muck with the policy files too (which is rather unlikely). Roll SELinux I say. Let's actually have Linux live up to the sort of security the fan boys claim it has now.
Jedidiah.
On the other hand, what do MI-5 and MI-6 have to say about this codec? I've heard NSA has derailed certain technologies in the past.
Pure drivel. An open source video codec is of no interest to such organisations. Why would they care?
Jedidiah
Well, not debunked so much as it far overstated Linux's market share vs the Mac. They were counting sales, so many PCs are sold with Linux but a pirated version of Windows quickly replaces it, etc. Looking at Google Zeitgeist shows that the Mac is still well into the lead for desktop usage(for now)
True, I think they overstated. I think the presumption that most PCs sold with Linux get a pirated version of Windows on it is guesswork though. Equally, there are a lot of PCs sold with Windows that have a legitimate version of Linux put on it.
In the end that leaves Google as our best measure, and as you say, that puts Mac at 3% and Linux at 1%. It also has "Other" at 5%. I would be interested to know the make up of "Other" as it may well contain a few unidentified Linux boxes - I mean, your options of rother are (realistically) Solaris, *BSD, or possibly BeOS (with a smattering of other bits and pieces like Syllable, Zeta etc.), and to be honest I would be surprised if a combined Solaris, *BSD desktop market share (presumably not too many google searches are run from servers) totals to anything near 5% (I would guess around 2% maybe). That leaves some space for a lot of unknown. Note that I'm not trying to claim that this is all Linux, not that Linux has a bigger share than Apple (I strongly suspect it doesn't), just that Zeitgeist isn't all that helpful when we're dealing with the smaller market share OSs.
Jedidiah.
Thanks for pointing this out. I agree, most of these "immoral" acts are deemed immoral in various religious codes mostly for the reasons you cited and reasons akin to them. A lot of religious "law" is, if you look at it, sensible precautions to take given limited real knowledge and understanding of how things really work.
It is not false, however, that the laws are about consent, otherwise sex with underage boys would be permissible. I think you'll find that while the laws started as you suggest (as various religios codes), in the last century or two the legal profession has done some reasonable work to try and bring some sense, clarity, and consistency to such laws (they are good for something!), and in this day and age consent is what you will find cited. The fact that this cleaning up of antiquated and potentially prejudiced law is still ongoing (like legalising homosexual marriage) shows both how ingrained the prejudices introduced by various religions are, and that we are seeking to move to a more consistent and rational moral code (albeit with some opposition).
Jedidiah.
You're trying the "slippery slope" argument, but we can discuss all of cannibalism, necrophilia, incest, paedophilia, beastiality as seperate issues:
Let's start with incest, paedophila, and beastiality, because they all come down to the same principal: informed consent. In our society it is generally believed that sex should be consensual (rape is illegal) as otherwise we would be infringing on anothers rights. The problem is, to be able to consent, the other party has to understand what it is they are consenting to. That's more than just understanding the physical process involved, but (in our society anyway) understanding the emotional issues attached to such things. This is why paedophila is considered criminal - it is harmful to the children, because the children (even if they do "consent") don't really understand the full implications of what they would be consenting to. My understanding is that beastiality falls into the same category. It is interesting that we extend this protection to animals where otherwise we would not, but that's how it is. The other issue with beastiality is a "cleanliness" issue. Mostly this the same sort of "cleanliness" that directs the finer points of a kosher diet, but there are some remaining issues (transferring diseases across species, which has been known to happen through beastiality and related pursuits can definitely be problematic). Still going with holdover taboos we come to incest - a large part of our reaction to incest is based on an old taboo which centers around the issues of inbreeding. All very reasonable and sensible. The issues with incest do extend beyond this though - we're essentially back to the informed consent: most incestuous relationships involve exploiting the familial relationship into something more, and at least one party is usually not in a position to give informed consent.
I believe that leaves us with cannibalism and necrophilia. With these certainly no obvious harm is being done (presuming it is post-mortem cannabilism, and the person isn't being killed to e eaten) to the immediate parties, however, our society generally holds that a person (and their immediate kin) has rights over their remains - refer to organ donation, leaving your body to science, what have you: there are plenty of laws that consider damage done post death to still be harm to the individual. Based on that, necrophilia is out, as a dead person cannot give consent. Likewise cannibalism. That, of course, leaves the possibility that a person could will their remains to be used for such purposes. Why they would choose to do that I do not know, but that is their choice. In that case, personally, I don't think I would stand in the way of such thigns. Cannibalism, on some level, makes sense (read Stranger in a Strange Land).
And then homosexuality - well, that's sexual intercourse between two consenting adults who have full knowledge and understanding of what they are entering into. No harm to either party, so I don't see the problem there.
Jedidiah.
but right now there are just too many people willing to vote for the lesser of two evils.
Why choose the lesser evil? Vote Cthulhu!
Jedidiah.
The vast majority of users have no idea what HTML, CSS, PNG, or almost any other 'computer thingie' is. All they know is that Internet Explorer is The Internet.
Sure, but if IE 7 comes out with great CSS and PNG support and sites start exploiting that then those users will either get sites that say "Upgrade to IE7 to use this site" or just think "the Internet is broken" without the newest IE. They will upgrade one way or another.
Jedidiah.
Also I'm wondering (I don't actually know, this isn't a smart-arsed answer) what happens when you just put a single character before or after the dictionary word. (say Total8) Surely the dictionary checkers don't check this...
Most password cracking programs these days run several rounds. The first round runs through a straight dictionary, then there are various rounds of variations on dictionary words. These usually variations include:
Appending or prepending a number to the word
Writing words backwards
Plurals, etc. of words
Odd capitalisations (capitalise consonants, lower case vowels etc.
Traditional misspellings (z for s, j for g, that sort of thing)
Leet speek.
Appending or prepending a single digit is, quite literally, the FIRST thing that is tried after straight dictionary words. Don't expect it to work.
Jedidiah.
You're only thinking in terms of existing hash algorithms. My ancient PIII can compute several million MD5 hashes a second, so it's not surprising that I can brute-force an 8-character password in a day or so.
MD5 hashed passwords (at least on UNIX) use salts, so it's not that easy. If it is a common dictionary word, you may get it in a day if you're lucky.
As for covering the whole 8-character space, well, not likely. Assuming upper and lower case alphanumeric, you're looking at 218340105584896 passwords to try. Assuming you can do say 10 million per second, you'll cover the space in about 7 years. Beefing that up to 100 million a second, it will still take you about 8 months.
Jedidiah
Oh, that'll be just great. Chopping off fingers and plucking out eyeballs will be the new definition of "social engineering".
No need for that. I saw a presentation at AsiaCrypt a couple of years ago where a guy sucessfully managed to create an artificial fingerprint good enough to fool pretty much all the commercial fingerprint scanners tested using only a fingerprint left begind on a glass, and pretty much commodity hardware (he did use one somewhat obscure device but that was still only a couple thousand dollars). This wasn't spy movie crap - this was an actual research project. Current fingerprint scanners are, quite simply, complete crap.
Jedidiah.
Curl is indeed available on Cygwin.
Have fun.
Jedidiah.
I will now proceed to fire up Opera and set it to reload the page every 30 seconds.
/dev/null; done
Why not
$ while true; do curl http://www.aftab.com >
It would seem more efficient.
Jedidiah.
Notably several people posted responses they got from here. They were all exactly that. I would suggest that it is a form response, probably prepared by her lawyer. To test that theory out, I sent an email that essentially said "I understand it's Penguin's fault, but you (presonally, and separate from Penguin) could always make an honest offer to buy the domain of Katie Jones". I have received no response to this - notable because most people that got responses got them promptly.
Jedidiah.
I think the idea was, as you point out, installing software is different in every single distro
And the examples you list are: Slackware, Gentoo, Redhat, and Debian.
Both Redhat (Fedora) and Debian use Synaptic quite happily, which is a very nice GTK+ frontend to apt. Slackware and Gentoo are a long way from your standard commercial distros.
Jedidiah.
Until there is a real method of packaging and installing/removing software for Linux, the operating system will never move past where Windows was circa version 3.1. RPM has dependancy issues, and apt-get is something past most people.
I suggest you look at synaptic. Unfortunately they haven't updated their screenshots recently, the interface is now much cleaner and simpler than that presented in the screenshots (which was still quite nice).
With Windows, you just download a binary installer and run it as either the admin or not. If it's admin, it'll install it system-wide; if not, it'll install per user. If'll bring any extra libraries in needs for its private use.
I suggest you check out autopackage. Any parties that package with autopackage instead of rpm or deb create a downloadable binary installer that asks for the root password. If you give it it will install systemwide, if you pass, you can install it just for you. Of course it goes one better and checks for dependencies and resolves them, just like apt (though dependency checking is more in the style of the configure stage of a compilation rather than looking for installed packages, so it is much more robust).
No current Linux technology immitates this. There is no way I can currently download a self-executing shellscript wrapper or otherwise binary program that will install either system-wide or to ~/bin/$appname, with care taken to provide its own libraries, and giving me an easy link so I can remove the application folder, the installed support libraries, and any config files separately.
That would be autopackage. Okay, it's still at 0.5, and isn't completely API stable yet, but it is progressign quickly, and already has several applications (inkscape for instance) which you can fully install via autopackage.
Jedidiah.
You father who is a mathematics lecturer (I assume at least high-school) and has a use for TeX is NOT the typical parent.
Ah yes, but it was my computer-phobic mother who did the install. My father just watched. Besides, does it matter when all they had to do was clock "next, next, next" to end up with a workign system?
Jedidiah
His Myth 1: Linux is just as easy to install as Windows. -- My mom can install Windows (without any help from me -- I just tell her "If you don't know what to do, just click Next" -- and when she's done, she has a fully functional OS. The linux installation experience is dramatically more complicated, and it's unlikely the end-product will work right if it was done by a novice (he pretty much admits this).
Uh, I had my parents install RH9 by themselves with only the advice you gave "If you don't know what to do, just click Next" and when they were done they had a fully functional OS, Office suite, paint program, web and email applications, and (for my Dad, who is a math lecturer) complete working TeX system, complete with editors desgined to work with LaTeX.
The end product worked fine, and they continue to use it very happily.
Really, everything beyond Gentoo and Debian (though I hear the new Debian in staller is much better) can be installed by just clicking "next" when you don't know what to do, and it pretty much always results in a perfectly functional system. The only time it presents difficulty is if you are trying to preserve an existing Windows install, but then you can't install an existing Linux install when installing Windows by "just clicking next", so...
Jedidiah.
So linux isn't ready because if you choose to use software distributed as source you have to use the commandline? It's not even a terribly hard sequence of commands, and they are almost always described in the INSTALL document.
.rpm based on your system) containing all the files getting installed by the make install step, and installs that for you. That means that everything, source installs included, can be conveniently managed from whatever package management application you use (I prefer synaptic myself, it works for anything that supports apt, which includes rpm).
That aside though, the main issue with source installs is that you end up with a mess - files all over the place. You can't remove what you just installed unless the Makefile happened to include an "uninstall".
Up until now I've been very happily avoiding this issue by using stow, but recently I found checkinstall which you run instead of make install. Checkinstall creates a package (.deb, or
"That's still too hard!" you say? Yes, quite possibly - but then the only real reason to be installing from source is if you have very particular needs (special configure options) or a need to be on the bleeding edge. Pretty much anyone who thinks compiling is too hard should be happy with binary installs. With things like synaptic, redcarpet, up2date, etc. around installing distro provided packages is a breeze. If you have to go outside your distro try autopackage. Yes, autopackage isn't finished yet, but they're at the stage where they have some test packages (install the latest version of inkscape via autopackage for instance), and what they do have is fantastic - think of it as installshield with advanced dependency checking resolution. All those third parties currently supplying distro specific rpms ought to shift their project to supplying autopackages, and certainly autopackage looks to be the way to go for any commercial vendor who wants to create a linux installer for their software.
Installs are still a little tricky, but the issues have been spotted, and are being worked on - and the solutions look better than anything Windows provides.
Jedidiah
Certainly these minor push backs on SP2 are largely irrelevant, but Longhorn delays are an issue. Microsoft is worried about Longhorn delays - I beleive they have started dropping proposed features to get it out the door earlier. Sure, no one is going to wipe windows and install Linux instead of waiting for Longhorn, but if Longhorn is too long coming and the Linux desktop starts looking attractive enough you might get a few more OEMs loading it on (HP now has Linux laptops for instance). Should that actually happen you'll get people "converting" to linux simply by upgrding their computer, and to be frank, if all they do is browse the web, write email, and use Word for trivial things occasionally, they aren't really going to notice a whole lot of difference. Should anything other than Windows get much of a real foothold Microsoft will have cause to worry. It's all about "mindshare" not market share. Once other options are widely seen to be both available and viable some serious rebalancing of market share could occur quickly. Sure, Microsoft will still be dominant in such a shakeup, but we might be looking more at 70% to 30% split between Microsoft and everything else. Once that happens they really will have to compete and compete hard.
There are things to worry about for Microsoft. For now things are under control, but it only requires some small slips for things to get away from them.
Jedidiah.