I'm pretty sure that you can build a Linux using a standards-compliant third-party compiler such as the one sold by Intel. Which would immensely complicate the lives of any people trying to slip backdoors into the toolchain, since then they'd have to also sabotage the Intel compiler. AND make sure that if the Inter compiler was used to create a gcc compiler that it, too got properly sabotaged!
Stallman overlooks the fact that various foreign governments already have access to the Windows source.
I doubt he does. But the Windows source is not posted on open archives under independent control around the world. If Microsoft licenses Windows source code to China, all they have to do is omit the China backdoors from the code they send to China.
It's not like various foreign governments are posting their copies of the source for each other to compare against.
... [A]nyone can [ verify the code], and... someone is likely to have done so.
Yes. The NSA guy who wrote the patch, and three of his astroturfing friends.
The "Many Eyes" fallacy is important here. Unless you can verify the authenticity of the code yourself, you need to verify the authenticity of the person verifying the code. Do you know all of the kernel devs personally? How about the X / Mir / $module devs? How many people actually write code for kernelspace? How many modify it for their particular distribution of choice? Do you trust those people?
Old proverb: "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead."
We see that proven time and again by things such as Watergate, WikiLeaks and the Snowden affair among many, many others.
Few people have read every part of the OS source, but quite a few people have read individual parts of various OS components in detail and more have dipped into them superficially, for example when doing in-depth debugging. This makes it extremely difficult for a conspiracy to hold together very long.
And that's not counting the complexity that comes from the heterogeneous mix of apps, processors and peripherals that make up the world-wide set of users. Stuff like that tends to break things that are operating on the sly.
What I respect about Stallman is his persistence. He just keeps hammering home the same message, over and over again, decade after decade. As opposed to politicians or talking-heads, he doesn't budge nor compromise. And then, ten or twenty years later, people realise he was right all along. And what does he do? He keeps hammering on the same message still, because people still didn't act, even when they know exactly what they ought to do. I think that is what makes him unusual.
I wouldn't go that far. Plenty of people still willing to argue in favor of trickle-down economics, etc.etc.etc.
Being uncompromising isn't as big a virtue as it's made out to be. We recently suffered through a president whose closes approach to "flip-flopping" was to say that "IF mistakes were made, they were my fault". We have a useless Congress because certain minority groups won't compromise in anything whatsoever.
Then again, Stallman isn't trying to control things, he's trying to be the "voice in the wilderness". It's far more virtuous to be constant when you are serving as a reference point than it is to be constant when you are in the thick of managing things. The doers, however, need reference points - even wrong ones. And Stallman may be unrealistic at times, but his core beliefs have proven to be sound.
Are you kidding? The cloud is just a rebranding of networked systems. If you fear the cloud you might as well disconnect your networks.
No it isn't. Cloud servers - excepting the in-house clouds - are owned and operated by third parties. Who can be silently descended on by grim suit-wearing individuals with badges and pried open without your permission. Or your knowledge, since many of these programs make it a criminal offense to even mention the prying.
You don't even have to be the primary target, since you are sharing the resources with who knows what other questionable characters. More than one innocent business has been bitten because it turned out the next rack over leased space to Arab charities or hosted some sort of downloading service.
It all depends on your thread scenario. Most of the smaller side-projects I work on are of no interest to any entity able to intercept the data transfers, so I don't mind storing stuff in, say, Evernote or Dropbox where it is more convenient to do so.
The stuff that the survival of my small company depends on, running my own servers is worth the effort. For my holiday pictures, iCloud is perfectly acceptable.
I might go along with that except for the fact that the US Government is heavily involved with metadata. Metadata is still data and there are things that can be done with that data or they wouldn't be be collecting it. You may not like some of the things they do with that data.
And, for your sake, I hope that your holidays were all spent in good solid loyal patriotic places in the USA so that there's nothing treasonous that they can infer from the pictures once they use the metadata to get a FISA warrant to look at the actual data.
In an era when almost everyone either deals with offshore companies or has immigrant friends or neighbours, the assurance that "only foreign communications are examined" doesn't give much comfort.
Looking at your posting history, I'm guessing that you are a Microsoft employee. If this is true, then you really should be disclosing this fact. If not, then you are a very passionate Microsoft fan, and should be getting paid for your constant adulation!
Sadly, the pay scale for "useful idiots" has never been that good, no matter what cause they espouse. It's why so many people who protest in favor of benefits for the wealthy couldn't themselves be mistaken for wealthy in a windowless coal cellar at midnight.
Except that Apple doesn't have proprietary connectors. The problem is that MS is aping what Apple is doing way after it has become clear that it was a huge success. Apple also has lots of failures, Microsoft is just very risk averse and they don't want to take any risk in order to innovate.
More Coke on the keyboard!
Apple doesn't have "proprietary connectors" simply because Apple's self-designed connectors are proprietary solely to Apple devices.
I've never been in a Foxconn plant, but I wonder how many of these so-called robots are just dumb 2- or 3-axis pick-and-place gadgets. "Robot" sounds more impressive to journalists and investors, but among industrial automation professionals the term has specific meanings. Of course, to the layperson a self-basting turkey could be called "robotic" by colloquial usage.
You do what's cost-effective. Automated assembly lines have even less freedom of movement than that, but they handle a lot of the labor at bakeries and breweries. If you can get by with conveyor-belt stations and 2/3-axis dumb machines in most of the plant, it just frees up capital to buy a handful of Da Vinci-style smart robots for the really touchy stuff.
One of my most needed feature is quick multi-tasking ala alt-tab.
Are these versions of android having some support for that? Do they have a custom launcher that shows something like a taskbar? Or is it more like the gnome shell mess?
On my phone, it's press and hold the Home button. Which could definitely be mapped to alt-tab.
Android has some good ideas in it, but is primarily designed for small handheld computers that comes with modems. Gnome 3 is at least designed for the desktop.
Most complaints about Gnome 3 stem from the fact that it doesn't appear to be designed for the desktop - it was designed apparently for tablet devices. And "modems"????
Gnome 2 was a desktop UI. Gnome 3 was so horrible I removed it within 2 weeks, replaced it with Cinnamon and have never looked back.
^^^warning: this is what they mean by a jury of your peers.^^^ Even if you use it a full octave above your previous usage, what you really need is a spell checker.
Eubonics is being replaced by Moronics.
a tough road to hoe. smoking mirrors. all intensive purposes.
Spell checkers don't help for stuff like this. All of the above are spelled correctly, and none of them are semantically correct. Although they are more or less homophonically correct. Correction. Almost all of the above are spelled correctly. It's "Ebonics", not "Eubonics".
Computers tend to validate these kinds of mistakes. Not only do most systems not highlight them, I'm pretty sure that some of the howlers I've typed myself came from auto-suggests of the wrong word when I wasn't paying attention.
So:
A tough row to hoe. (Farmers typically plant in rows). Smoke and mirrors. (Magicians use these to distract people while doing tricks). All intents and purposes.
Don't even get me started on "free reign". It sounds credible, but "free rein" is what you give horses and that's the original phrase. And if you "loose" your lose change, you won't have Coke money.
Yes, COBOL is wordy, but for the most part you can accomplish the same thing in the same number of lines. Unless of course you write C or C++ where you are packing as much as you can into a line. Yes, I wish I could do "running_total =+ current_val" instead of "compute running-total = running-total + current-val", or do "last_val = current_val" instead of "move current-val to last-val". My real issue being 'verbose' is when it causes extra lines, which makes logic harder to follow.
ADD CURRENT_VAL TO RUNNING_TOTAL.
Which doesn't excuse 1001 other ways of inducing COBOL inflicted carpal-tunnel syndrome, but at least there's that.
Although one of the most horrible programs I ever saw included a 3-page "IF" statement. Since the "ENDIF" for the original COBOL is a miniscule dot, that's just a disaster looking for ways to happen.
Neither are the words, "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
What the USA is is not defined solely by the Constitution and strictly legalistic definitions are for the courts, not the government. George Washington himself shot down the idea that the President should be treated as a monarch, notwithstanding what some of his successor may have felt.
The Commander In Chief is a military office, and like all military officers, subject ultimately to his or her superiors, as MacArthur found out in Korea. In the case of the Commander in Chief, his superiors are the American people. He is not a dictator no matter who may think otherwise. His choices of degree and manner of protection are subject ultimately to the approval of the citizenry. And a considerable number of citizens are concerned that the level of protection they are being subjected to is too expensive.
it is possible to aggressively pursue terrorists without compromising the constitutional rights of ordinary Americans
My gut says this is plausible, but we don't really know - it's never been tried.
Let's look at history.
Unlike the Soviet Union and other historical threats to the USA, "the terrorists" are not some big nation with a big military that we can "go to war against". We can't "invade Terrorstan" and "show them johnnies what's what" because (and I hate to break it to my common-sense neighbors), there's no such country as Terrorstan to invade.
"The terrorists" are not a single country or alliance, they're hundreds of mostly-small groups, many of which hate each other even more than they hate us. They're not exclusively conveniently far-off, and they use "unfair" and barbaric methods of attack.
Now when has anything like that ever been a problem for the USA? Well, how about right about the time it was founded? Only the name we gave them back then was "Indians". Dark-skinned peoples with a foreign culture who would swoop down on communities and wreak havoc with little or no warning. Sometimes they would be friendly and sometimes they'd turn on us for what they considered injustices.
So did we set up checkpoints on all the highways and make travellers take their shoes off? Appoint officials in Franklin's Post Office to examine all the mails of the new-formed Republic? Hire people to audit businesses for possible Indian sympathizers? Peer over farmers fences for hints at who might be deviating from the official policy?
No we didn't. "Home of the Brave" wasn't just a cynical joke back then. Nor was "Land of the Free". You can't be the second if you aren't the first.
But when they go home and they go to bing.com do do their searching there, or they change the default search engine on the family computer because "that's what we use at school" then it opens Microsoft up for more visits.
Oh yeah. Because that's what kids do. Use stuff they make them use at school on their free time.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure that you can build a Linux using a standards-compliant third-party compiler such as the one sold by Intel. Which would immensely complicate the lives of any people trying to slip backdoors into the toolchain, since then they'd have to also sabotage the Intel compiler. AND make sure that if the Inter compiler was used to create a gcc compiler that it, too got properly sabotaged!
Stallman overlooks the fact that various foreign governments already have access to the Windows source.
I doubt he does. But the Windows source is not posted on open archives under independent control around the world. If Microsoft licenses Windows source code to China, all they have to do is omit the China backdoors from the code they send to China.
It's not like various foreign governments are posting their copies of the source for each other to compare against.
... [A]nyone can [ verify the code], and ... someone is likely to have done so.
Yes. The NSA guy who wrote the patch, and three of his astroturfing friends.
The "Many Eyes" fallacy is important here. Unless you can verify the authenticity of the code yourself, you need to verify the authenticity of the person verifying the code. Do you know all of the kernel devs personally? How about the X / Mir / $module devs? How many people actually write code for kernelspace? How many modify it for their particular distribution of choice? Do you trust those people?
Old proverb: "Three people can keep a secret if two of them are dead."
We see that proven time and again by things such as Watergate, WikiLeaks and the Snowden affair among many, many others.
Few people have read every part of the OS source, but quite a few people have read individual parts of various OS components in detail and more have dipped into them superficially, for example when doing in-depth debugging. This makes it extremely difficult for a conspiracy to hold together very long.
And that's not counting the complexity that comes from the heterogeneous mix of apps, processors and peripherals that make up the world-wide set of users. Stuff like that tends to break things that are operating on the sly.
And how do you know that mind control isn't perfected by the government?
How do you know that you are actually alive and not just dreaming?
You aren't. Your cat is the one dreaming you.
What I respect about Stallman is his persistence. He just keeps hammering home the same message, over and over again, decade after decade. As opposed to politicians or talking-heads, he doesn't budge nor compromise. And then, ten or twenty years later, people realise he was right all along. And what does he do? He keeps hammering on the same message still, because people still didn't act, even when they know exactly what they ought to do. I think that is what makes him unusual.
I wouldn't go that far. Plenty of people still willing to argue in favor of trickle-down economics, etc. etc. etc.
Being uncompromising isn't as big a virtue as it's made out to be. We recently suffered through a president whose closes approach to "flip-flopping" was to say that "IF mistakes were made, they were my fault". We have a useless Congress because certain minority groups won't compromise in anything whatsoever.
Then again, Stallman isn't trying to control things, he's trying to be the "voice in the wilderness". It's far more virtuous to be constant when you are serving as a reference point than it is to be constant when you are in the thick of managing things. The doers, however, need reference points - even wrong ones. And Stallman may be unrealistic at times, but his core beliefs have proven to be sound.
Are you kidding? The cloud is just a rebranding of networked systems. If you fear the cloud you might as well disconnect your networks.
No it isn't. Cloud servers - excepting the in-house clouds - are owned and operated by third parties. Who can be silently descended on by grim suit-wearing individuals with badges and pried open without your permission. Or your knowledge, since many of these programs make it a criminal offense to even mention the prying.
You don't even have to be the primary target, since you are sharing the resources with who knows what other questionable characters. More than one innocent business has been bitten because it turned out the next rack over leased space to Arab charities or hosted some sort of downloading service.
Disclaimer: I am an IT Security professional.
It all depends on your thread scenario. Most of the smaller side-projects I work on are of no interest to any entity able to intercept the data transfers, so I don't mind storing stuff in, say, Evernote or Dropbox where it is more convenient to do so.
The stuff that the survival of my small company depends on, running my own servers is worth the effort. For my holiday pictures, iCloud is perfectly acceptable.
I might go along with that except for the fact that the US Government is heavily involved with metadata. Metadata is still data and there are things that can be done with that data or they wouldn't be be collecting it. You may not like some of the things they do with that data.
And, for your sake, I hope that your holidays were all spent in good solid loyal patriotic places in the USA so that there's nothing treasonous that they can infer from the pictures once they use the metadata to get a FISA warrant to look at the actual data.
In an era when almost everyone either deals with offshore companies or has immigrant friends or neighbours, the assurance that "only foreign communications are examined" doesn't give much comfort.
$7.5 million is "huge"?
Who wrote this article? Dr. Evil?
They probably spent more than that on the executive Xmas party.
Looking at your posting history, I'm guessing that you are a Microsoft employee. If this is true, then you really should be disclosing this fact. If not, then you are a very passionate Microsoft fan, and should be getting paid for your constant adulation!
Sadly, the pay scale for "useful idiots" has never been that good, no matter what cause they espouse. It's why so many people who protest in favor of benefits for the wealthy couldn't themselves be mistaken for wealthy in a windowless coal cellar at midnight.
Except that Apple doesn't have proprietary connectors. The problem is that MS is aping what Apple is doing way after it has become clear that it was a huge success. Apple also has lots of failures, Microsoft is just very risk averse and they don't want to take any risk in order to innovate.
More Coke on the keyboard!
Apple doesn't have "proprietary connectors" simply because Apple's self-designed connectors are proprietary solely to Apple devices.
Yes, there always is the source, but that's hardly ideal^W readable.
... At least if it's anything like most Javascript libraries I've seen.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.
My first rule in software design. And the second one is:
Simple things should be simple and complex things should be possible.
Alan Kay
I've never been in a Foxconn plant, but I wonder how many of these so-called robots are just dumb 2- or 3-axis pick-and-place gadgets. "Robot" sounds more impressive to journalists and investors, but among industrial automation professionals the term has specific meanings. Of course, to the layperson a self-basting turkey could be called "robotic" by colloquial usage.
You do what's cost-effective. Automated assembly lines have even less freedom of movement than that, but they handle a lot of the labor at bakeries and breweries. If you can get by with conveyor-belt stations and 2/3-axis dumb machines in most of the plant, it just frees up capital to buy a handful of Da Vinci-style smart robots for the really touchy stuff.
Robots are far less likely to jump of buildings if you treat them like crap.
(On the other hand, a robot revolt could get ugly.)
Just ask Rossum!
FTFY
Unlikely. Automation has not lead to mass unemployment in the past, and there is little reason to think this time will be any different.
As they say on Wall Street, "Past Performance is not guarantee of future results".
One of my most needed feature is quick multi-tasking ala alt-tab.
Are these versions of android having some support for that? Do they have a custom launcher that shows something like a taskbar? Or is it more like the gnome shell mess?
On my phone, it's press and hold the Home button. Which could definitely be mapped to alt-tab.
Android has some good ideas in it, but is primarily designed for small handheld computers that comes with modems. Gnome 3 is at least designed for the desktop.
Most complaints about Gnome 3 stem from the fact that it doesn't appear to be designed for the desktop - it was designed apparently for tablet devices. And "modems"????
Gnome 2 was a desktop UI. Gnome 3 was so horrible I removed it within 2 weeks, replaced it with Cinnamon and have never looked back.
^^^warning: this is what they mean by a jury of your peers.^^^
Even if you use it a full octave above your previous usage, what you really need is a spell checker.
Eubonics is being replaced by Moronics.
a tough road to hoe.
smoking mirrors.
all intensive purposes.
Spell checkers don't help for stuff like this. All of the above are spelled correctly, and none of them are semantically correct. Although they are more or less homophonically correct. Correction. Almost all of the above are spelled correctly. It's "Ebonics", not "Eubonics".
Computers tend to validate these kinds of mistakes. Not only do most systems not highlight them, I'm pretty sure that some of the howlers I've typed myself came from auto-suggests of the wrong word when I wasn't paying attention.
So:
A tough row to hoe. (Farmers typically plant in rows).
Smoke and mirrors. (Magicians use these to distract people while doing tricks).
All intents and purposes.
Don't even get me started on "free reign". It sounds credible, but "free rein" is what you give horses and that's the original phrase. And if you "loose" your lose change, you won't have Coke money.
it's pretty easy to have enough money for retirement before the grey hair shows up.
I had it since I was still in college. Bit early, no?
What is this "hair" you speak of?
Yes, COBOL is wordy, but for the most part you can accomplish the same thing in the same number of lines. Unless of course you write C or C++ where you are packing as much as you can into a line. Yes, I wish I could do "running_total =+ current_val" instead of "compute running-total = running-total + current-val", or do "last_val = current_val" instead of "move current-val to last-val". My real issue being 'verbose' is when it causes extra lines, which makes logic harder to follow.
ADD CURRENT_VAL TO RUNNING_TOTAL.
Which doesn't excuse 1001 other ways of inducing COBOL inflicted carpal-tunnel syndrome, but at least there's that.
Although one of the most horrible programs I ever saw included a 3-page "IF" statement. Since the "ENDIF" for the original COBOL is a miniscule dot, that's just a disaster looking for ways to happen.
Have you even read the Constitution?
The word 'serve' isn't even in it.
Neither are the words, "Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness".
What the USA is is not defined solely by the Constitution and strictly legalistic definitions are for the courts, not the government. George Washington himself shot down the idea that the President should be treated as a monarch, notwithstanding what some of his successor may have felt.
The Commander In Chief is a military office, and like all military officers, subject ultimately to his or her superiors, as MacArthur found out in Korea. In the case of the Commander in Chief, his superiors are the American people. He is not a dictator no matter who may think otherwise. His choices of degree and manner of protection are subject ultimately to the approval of the citizenry. And a considerable number of citizens are concerned that the level of protection they are being subjected to is too expensive.
Since when did /. become an aggregate of the Daily Show? News for nerds... stuff that matters?
It's very difficult to screw around with the Internet/technology/communications without it being news for nerds or stuff that matters.
The senators said, in part,
My gut says this is plausible, but we don't really know - it's never been tried.
Let's look at history.
Unlike the Soviet Union and other historical threats to the USA, "the terrorists" are not some big nation with a big military that we can "go to war against". We can't "invade Terrorstan" and "show them johnnies what's what" because (and I hate to break it to my common-sense neighbors), there's no such country as Terrorstan to invade.
"The terrorists" are not a single country or alliance, they're hundreds of mostly-small groups, many of which hate each other even more than they hate us. They're not exclusively conveniently far-off, and they use "unfair" and barbaric methods of attack.
Now when has anything like that ever been a problem for the USA? Well, how about right about the time it was founded? Only the name we gave them back then was "Indians". Dark-skinned peoples with a foreign culture who would swoop down on communities and wreak havoc with little or no warning. Sometimes they would be friendly and sometimes they'd turn on us for what they considered injustices.
So did we set up checkpoints on all the highways and make travellers take their shoes off? Appoint officials in Franklin's Post Office to examine all the mails of the new-formed Republic? Hire people to audit businesses for possible Indian sympathizers? Peer over farmers fences for hints at who might be deviating from the official policy?
No we didn't. "Home of the Brave" wasn't just a cynical joke back then. Nor was "Land of the Free". You can't be the second if you aren't the first.
And Obama repeatedly states at every interview and speech that his "first priority and duty as president" is "to protect the American people".
Allegedly, the job of the US President was to serve the American people.
Which is not the same thing at all.
But when they go home and they go to bing.com do do their searching there, or they change the default search engine on the family computer because "that's what we use at school" then it opens Microsoft up for more visits.
Oh yeah. Because that's what kids do. Use stuff they make them use at school on their free time.