Mod parent up. This is Slashdot, not Huffington Post. We should expect a higher level of accuracy in the details we know most about.
Regarding the labeling, Stallman cleared up that confusion decades ago, by insisting that the complete OS be called GNU/Linux. More recently, in 2011, he also made the Android naming clear:
"Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel. People who erroneously think "Linux" refers to the entire GNU/Linux combination get tied in knots by these facts, and make paradoxical statements such as "Android contains Linux, but it isn't Linux". If we avoid starting from the confusion, the situation is simple: Android contains Linux, but not GNU; thus, Android and GNU/Linux are mostly different."
True, in politics that has always been the case. Postman talks about a different facet of the problem of entertainment, though. Where entertainment, and especially images and fast clips out of context is taking up all our attention. Furthermore, were entertainment and advertisement is intermingled with the institutions of politics, religion, and education.
There has never been an age where an endless stream of impressions has been so easy to come by. You see it everywhere: People are so preoccupied by their phones and chats and streams that they hardly look up. And the stream we're fed is full of non-sense, out of context useless pieces of information with little relation to our own lives.
Postman compares the lengthy articles and speeches presidents and politicians would publish and give in 18th and 19th century America. The sitting president won by Twitter lines. That says a lot.
In "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman (1985), he describes and analyses exactly this kind of problem. Politics, religion, and education is transformed into entertainment, and thus loses its original context, value and meaning. Instead, entertainment serves its own purpose - to entertain and keep distracted. Often, or most of the time in today's media world, it also serves the purpose of showing advertisement, as is described in this summary. Your teacher is no longer there to give you an education, but to sell her own brand and promote others.
No, the government collecting your data is not the same as when private corporations do.
When Google knows what you click on, they'll show you some adds. The FBI, local SWAT or sheriff on the other hand, will kick down your door, shoot your dog, beat you to shit. If you're lucky, they go to the wrong house, and it is your neighbor who gets the treatment.
Losing privacy to advertising companies can be annoying and frustrating. Losing privacy to your government is by definition a surveillance state, and quickly becomes a police state. If you live in the USofA, you just have to look out the window to see it unfolding in front of your eyes.
The 80s called - they want their "wire transfer" back.
In the various countries and banks I've been with over the last 17 years, international transfer have been as easy as domestic payment. The main difference is the length of the account number vs. SWIFT / IBAN, and the slickness of the web form to fill out. Typing in the address of the receiving bank is a bit daft, if you ask me.
If you have to show up with papers to make a small transfer (and below $10.000 is small in today's money), then somebody's doing it wrong. Might not be your fault, maybe it's the other side who is stuck in the past. But international transfer has been a solved problem since the turn of the century.
I do care. It means the continuous build system will finish my merge request compile & test faster. And if the numbers from those benchmarks hold water, I figure I'd have to wait about 2 minutes less for every commit.
Now, what will I do with two more minutes in my life? You're staring at the answer.
You jest, but you are right on point. The laws are already in place, the technical implementations are already in place. Now it's just a matter of taking the next step into full totalitarian dictatorship.
In fact, if it wasn't for Theresa May being so utterly repulsive, she would have managed this backed by a landslide elected victory. If UK ever gets a charming leader, like Putin or Hitler (both also initially elected and with high approval ratings), it'll be a slam dunk.
The slippery slope of censorship and surveillance in the UK is continuing at a disturbingly predictable path. The ISP level blocking mechanisms are already implemented and in production. Now it's just a matter of adding more sites, and control more of what citizens are allow to watch. Theresa May wants government back-doors in social network and communication apps. Not revealing your encryption key and password can land you in jail for years.
First they filtered child molestation. Then they came for the pirate sites. Then they blocked communication of terrorists. Then it was any mature content.
Next? Opposing political opinions? Full ban on naked body images of any kind? All encrypted communication blocked and illegal without a back-door?
Of course the computer science discipline builds upon many others, however, for just plonking down some code, you need very little.
Personally, I started in BASIC before I could read in my native language, so my parents had to read the one instruction book we had to me. Then I went off pondering. It took years before I actually understood the literal meaning of the English keywords like FOR, GOTO, RETURN, etc. I just knew how they behaved in code.
Granted, this required endless trail and error, and a level of patience very few could ever endure. So yeah, not for a classroom setting.
That problem will be addressed in a follow-up paper, with more complicated equations. In layman's terms, it comes down to: the level of fascism of the location you're at; the trigger happiness of the police; the color of your skin; and finally the day of the week. It's already a well known fact that more people are shot by the coppers on Fridays - it spices up an otherwise boring weekend.
Google's Assistant should really offer the full range of services required. From insulting your boss; planting a time bomb in the accounting DB; sending off a last desperate attempt to hook with Sally in marketing.
All with Clippy / Smart Reply options, of course: So, I see you are are about to leave your current job. What resignation letter would you like to send?
"Nixon Style"
"Give me more money now!"
"I want my stapler back".
Ah, give them a break. The editors have already been fired. Their last days of the notice period is now being spent training the AI which will replace them.
Ah, yes, the "let the police and authorities deal with it" solution. How is that working out for you? A shot in the back seems about right for a missing break light or a misparked delivery truck, right? What could possibly go wrong.
This is the right answer. However, the "legal problem" for FOSS he talks about still persists (even it it's probably a made-up story). Because of this misunderstanding, Linux, FOSS has lost mind-share and goodwill. He and his team could have been proponents of free software, but instead they're now disappointed and muttering about some GPL license clause they don't understand the first thing about.
The solution is better information and education. However, FOSS has a long way to go here. Even within the community, there's ludicrous claims as to what the various licenses means, and what developers and users are entitled to. Richard Stallman's "Free Software, Free Society" is probably some of the better layman's texts on the topic. In addition to actually reading the license in question itself - they are usually no more than 10 pages of rather clear language.
Various FOSS components and systems have reached tremendous market share over the last 15 years. However, when it comes to this "legal problem", we're still in the early 90s as far as developer understanding and opinion goes.
As far as I can tell, Amber Rudd is trying to force her policy through by appealing to emotions and fear. She is willing to use the act of violence (admittedly, somebody else took care of the dirty work for her) to further her agenda. Now, isn't that the very definition of a terrorist?
Then again, perhaps it's a moot point. The word "terrorist" has lost most of its meaning, and simply means enemy or opponent by now. So you could call her an enemy of the people, I suppose. That goes for a lot of people in power in our so called democracies these days, though.
Security is not an absolute, or a single point target.
HTTPS everywhere protects against the mass surveillance and mass man-in-the-middle attacks which have become all too common these days. It will not protect against a targeted attack by the CIA, but it will challenge the NSA dragnet programs and Phorm ad injections.
Security is always a cat and mouse game ad infinitum. The attacker comes up with a better weapon, so you raise your fence, so he brings a trebuchet...
HTTPS everywhere protects against the mass surveillance and mass man-in-the-middle attacks which have become all too common these days. Relying on a firewall to do virus / malware scanning (as opposed to IP / site blocking) also seems terribly inefficient. And even if the firewall does the scanning, you'd have to re-do it on the local device anyway, since there's always a way to get around the firewall.
> most of the people I have interviewed for programming positions I would put in the "can't program" category too. Not 95%, but probably 60%.
Same here. At least half of those I've interviewed over the years, of all nationalities, fail on a simple questions like "in your favorite language, open and read a text file, and sort the words", or a similar easy task. And I'm not going for syntax perfection, but just to get a feel for if they know at least the essence of the programming language they claim to be most proficient in. These are software engineer candidates at a software company. You'd think they could at least attempt to write some software themselves before they show up?
I agree that "The Cube" should be high on the list. However, I'm just not sure if it's on the sci-fi list. I feel it's more philosophical and political, drawing on Kafka and Borges. E.g. "The trial" and "The Library of Babel". It is more about the human condition than it is about science and technology.
My favorite themes from the movie includes: 1) The emergent construction of the torture charmers through bureaucracy without oversight - one of the characters had drawn the blueprints for the outer shell of the cube, without knowing what it really was. 2) The absolute corruption of authority, portrayed by the policeman who ends up killing and trying to kill several of the others.
I just love it for the brilliant hack it is. And on several levels: First, there's the obvious spam of the Burger King attention grab. Yet, it is clever and innovative - nobody has done it before. Then there's the finger-pointing at Google, and ultimately any gadget that is constantly listening and sending your conversations off to some cloud warehouse. Did they come up with the idea after the latest CIA Wikileaks? Finally, there's the loss of innocence and naivete in the sound triggered implementation. BK's ad agency must have realized that once this cat is out of the sack, there's no turning back. Now everybody will try to hack sound triggered devices. It renders them useless, which is great, since it was such a pathetic interface in the first place. Everybody just seems totally retarded trying to speak to their phone, saluted by "OK, Google". Usually, they have to try a couple of times before it works. Good riddance!
I love it. I'll definitely have a Burger King Four Cheese, Ultimate Bacon, Whopper tonight! Love it!
"Intellectual property" is a misnomer, simply because there is no IP law, nor property. Rather, there are at least three separate and very different laws: Patent law; Copyright law; Trademark law. Each specify certain rights and limitations on creative work and how it can be used and licensed. Although, property does not come into the picture with any of them. Furthermore, regarding the right to (or not to) modify devices and break digital locks is yet another separate US act.
The summary spoke about the patent system in China and US. It has nothing to do with copyright law.
Slashdot Mirror
Mod parent up. This is Slashdot, not Huffington Post. We should expect a higher level of accuracy in the details we know most about.
Regarding the labeling, Stallman cleared up that confusion decades ago, by insisting that the complete OS be called GNU/Linux. More recently, in 2011, he also made the Android naming clear:
"Android is very different from the GNU/Linux operating system because it contains very little of GNU. Indeed, just about the only component in common between Android and GNU/Linux is Linux, the kernel. People who erroneously think "Linux" refers to the entire GNU/Linux combination get tied in knots by these facts, and make paradoxical statements such as "Android contains Linux, but it isn't Linux". If we avoid starting from the confusion, the situation is simple: Android contains Linux, but not GNU; thus, Android and GNU/Linux are mostly different."
Source:
https://www.theguardian.com/te...
True, in politics that has always been the case. Postman talks about a different facet of the problem of entertainment, though. Where entertainment, and especially images and fast clips out of context is taking up all our attention. Furthermore, were entertainment and advertisement is intermingled with the institutions of politics, religion, and education.
There has never been an age where an endless stream of impressions has been so easy to come by. You see it everywhere: People are so preoccupied by their phones and chats and streams that they hardly look up. And the stream we're fed is full of non-sense, out of context useless pieces of information with little relation to our own lives.
Postman compares the lengthy articles and speeches presidents and politicians would publish and give in 18th and 19th century America. The sitting president won by Twitter lines. That says a lot.
In "Amusing Ourselves to Death" by Neil Postman (1985), he describes and analyses exactly this kind of problem. Politics, religion, and education is transformed into entertainment, and thus loses its original context, value and meaning. Instead, entertainment serves its own purpose - to entertain and keep distracted. Often, or most of the time in today's media world, it also serves the purpose of showing advertisement, as is described in this summary. Your teacher is no longer there to give you an education, but to sell her own brand and promote others.
No, the government collecting your data is not the same as when private corporations do.
When Google knows what you click on, they'll show you some adds. The FBI, local SWAT or sheriff on the other hand, will kick down your door, shoot your dog, beat you to shit. If you're lucky, they go to the wrong house, and it is your neighbor who gets the treatment.
Losing privacy to advertising companies can be annoying and frustrating. Losing privacy to your government is by definition a surveillance state, and quickly becomes a police state. If you live in the USofA, you just have to look out the window to see it unfolding in front of your eyes.
The 80s called - they want their "wire transfer" back.
In the various countries and banks I've been with over the last 17 years, international transfer have been as easy as domestic payment. The main difference is the length of the account number vs. SWIFT / IBAN, and the slickness of the web form to fill out. Typing in the address of the receiving bank is a bit daft, if you ask me.
If you have to show up with papers to make a small transfer (and below $10.000 is small in today's money), then somebody's doing it wrong. Might not be your fault, maybe it's the other side who is stuck in the past. But international transfer has been a solved problem since the turn of the century.
I do care. It means the continuous build system will finish my merge request compile & test faster. And if the numbers from those benchmarks hold water, I figure I'd have to wait about 2 minutes less for every commit.
Now, what will I do with two more minutes in my life? You're staring at the answer.
You jest, but you are right on point. The laws are already in place, the technical implementations are already in place. Now it's just a matter of taking the next step into full totalitarian dictatorship.
In fact, if it wasn't for Theresa May being so utterly repulsive, she would have managed this backed by a landslide elected victory. If UK ever gets a charming leader, like Putin or Hitler (both also initially elected and with high approval ratings), it'll be a slam dunk.
The slippery slope of censorship and surveillance in the UK is continuing at a disturbingly predictable path. The ISP level blocking mechanisms are already implemented and in production. Now it's just a matter of adding more sites, and control more of what citizens are allow to watch. Theresa May wants government back-doors in social network and communication apps. Not revealing your encryption key and password can land you in jail for years.
First they filtered child molestation.
Then they came for the pirate sites.
Then they blocked communication of terrorists.
Then it was any mature content.
Next? Opposing political opinions? Full ban on naked body images of any kind? All encrypted communication blocked and illegal without a back-door?
Of course the computer science discipline builds upon many others, however, for just plonking down some code, you need very little.
Personally, I started in BASIC before I could read in my native language, so my parents had to read the one instruction book we had to me. Then I went off pondering. It took years before I actually understood the literal meaning of the English keywords like FOR, GOTO, RETURN, etc. I just knew how they behaved in code.
Granted, this required endless trail and error, and a level of patience very few could ever endure. So yeah, not for a classroom setting.
That problem will be addressed in a follow-up paper, with more complicated equations. In layman's terms, it comes down to: the level of fascism of the location you're at; the trigger happiness of the police; the color of your skin; and finally the day of the week.
It's already a well known fact that more people are shot by the coppers on Fridays - it spices up an otherwise boring weekend.
Google's Assistant should really offer the full range of services required. From insulting your boss; planting a time bomb in the accounting DB; sending off a last desperate attempt to hook with Sally in marketing.
All with Clippy / Smart Reply options, of course:
So, I see you are are about to leave your current job. What resignation letter would you like to send?
"Nixon Style"
"Give me more money now!"
"I want my stapler back".
Ah, give them a break. The editors have already been fired. Their last days of the notice period is now being spent training the AI which will replace them.
The future will be bright, I promise!
> Companies will sometimes hire an 'axe man'
Ah, "Up in the air", with George Clooney. Love that movie!
The good old 927. Anybody who've been in IT for a few years probably know that number by heart by now.
Ah, yes, the "let the police and authorities deal with it" solution. How is that working out for you? A shot in the back seems about right for a missing break light or a misparked delivery truck, right? What could possibly go wrong.
This is the right answer. However, the "legal problem" for FOSS he talks about still persists (even it it's probably a made-up story). Because of this misunderstanding, Linux, FOSS has lost mind-share and goodwill. He and his team could have been proponents of free software, but instead they're now disappointed and muttering about some GPL license clause they don't understand the first thing about.
The solution is better information and education. However, FOSS has a long way to go here. Even within the community, there's ludicrous claims as to what the various licenses means, and what developers and users are entitled to. Richard Stallman's "Free Software, Free Society" is probably some of the better layman's texts on the topic. In addition to actually reading the license in question itself - they are usually no more than 10 pages of rather clear language.
Various FOSS components and systems have reached tremendous market share over the last 15 years. However, when it comes to this "legal problem", we're still in the early 90s as far as developer understanding and opinion goes.
As far as I can tell, Amber Rudd is trying to force her policy through by appealing to emotions and fear. She is willing to use the act of violence (admittedly, somebody else took care of the dirty work for her) to further her agenda. Now, isn't that the very definition of a terrorist?
Then again, perhaps it's a moot point. The word "terrorist" has lost most of its meaning, and simply means enemy or opponent by now. So you could call her an enemy of the people, I suppose. That goes for a lot of people in power in our so called democracies these days, though.
Security is not an absolute, or a single point target.
HTTPS everywhere protects against the mass surveillance and mass man-in-the-middle attacks which have become all too common these days. It will not protect against a targeted attack by the CIA, but it will challenge the NSA dragnet programs and Phorm ad injections.
Security is always a cat and mouse game ad infinitum. The attacker comes up with a better weapon, so you raise your fence, so he brings a trebuchet...
HTTPS everywhere protects against the mass surveillance and mass man-in-the-middle attacks which have become all too common these days.
Relying on a firewall to do virus / malware scanning (as opposed to IP / site blocking) also seems terribly inefficient. And even if the firewall does the scanning, you'd have to re-do it on the local device anyway, since there's always a way to get around the firewall.
So, just like in real life, in other words.
> most of the people I have interviewed for programming positions I would put in the "can't program" category too. Not 95%, but probably 60%.
Same here. At least half of those I've interviewed over the years, of all nationalities, fail on a simple questions like "in your favorite language, open and read a text file, and sort the words", or a similar easy task. And I'm not going for syntax perfection, but just to get a feel for if they know at least the essence of the programming language they claim to be most proficient in. These are software engineer candidates at a software company. You'd think they could at least attempt to write some software themselves before they show up?
Irony: Morissette, Alanis; Rain on your wedding day.
I agree that "The Cube" should be high on the list. However, I'm just not sure if it's on the sci-fi list. I feel it's more philosophical and political, drawing on Kafka and Borges. E.g. "The trial" and "The Library of Babel". It is more about the human condition than it is about science and technology.
My favorite themes from the movie includes: 1) The emergent construction of the torture charmers through bureaucracy without oversight - one of the characters had drawn the blueprints for the outer shell of the cube, without knowing what it really was. 2) The absolute corruption of authority, portrayed by the policeman who ends up killing and trying to kill several of the others.
I just love it for the brilliant hack it is. And on several levels: First, there's the obvious spam of the Burger King attention grab. Yet, it is clever and innovative - nobody has done it before. Then there's the finger-pointing at Google, and ultimately any gadget that is constantly listening and sending your conversations off to some cloud warehouse. Did they come up with the idea after the latest CIA Wikileaks? Finally, there's the loss of innocence and naivete in the sound triggered implementation. BK's ad agency must have realized that once this cat is out of the sack, there's no turning back. Now everybody will try to hack sound triggered devices. It renders them useless, which is great, since it was such a pathetic interface in the first place. Everybody just seems totally retarded trying to speak to their phone, saluted by "OK, Google". Usually, they have to try a couple of times before it works. Good riddance!
I love it. I'll definitely have a Burger King Four Cheese, Ultimate Bacon, Whopper tonight! Love it!
"Intellectual property" is a misnomer, simply because there is no IP law, nor property. Rather, there are at least three separate and very different laws: Patent law; Copyright law; Trademark law. Each specify certain rights and limitations on creative work and how it can be used and licensed. Although, property does not come into the picture with any of them. Furthermore, regarding the right to (or not to) modify devices and break digital locks is yet another separate US act.
The summary spoke about the patent system in China and US. It has nothing to do with copyright law.