Bob's point is that the OSS groupies should stop being quite so smug about how innovative they are being and start doing somthing innovative.
The Web was an OSS project, in fact ultra-open source, we put the code in the public domain. So why has nothing else come along in the past 10 years?
I think he is also reacting to the somewhat overly smug 'UNIX is advanced technology' crowd who completely fail to understand that almost everything that they think of as 'UNIX' appeared in Multics first and much of the rest appeared in Genera, VMS etc. before comming to the UNIX world
The fact that UNIX is 95% derivative of other systems would not be so bad if UNIX folk were not so fond of complaining that Windows is 95% derivative.
The shot at the IETF is interesting. They have certainly become as slow to react.
Tell that to the folks at VISA, MasterCard, American Express, the major airlines... who are all processing tens of thousands of transactions per second, all day, every day, with uptimes measured in years. They're all doing it on mainframes.
You can be pretty certain that the people who run those systems would be pretty contemptuous of a database that takes 20 minutes to drop 4000 records on any modern hardware platform.
There are still uses for big iron. But your understanding of how the credit card majors work is very much behind the times. Mastercard and Visa are the card associations, not the processors. Some processors do use mainframes, several do not.
Mainframe systems are a very specific class of machines. There are banks, airlines and insurance companies that have not had a mainframe on their site for 20 years. There are some that still rely on them today.
If you have the right architecture you can run a scalable system on any modern computing system. Take a look at Google, VeriSign, Akamai, all run vast computing systems with incredible load without a single mainframe in sight.
Although the "average user" won't be using the various plugins, Microsoft will still point to this as one more reason to say that FireFox isn't secure. Sure, FireFox has it's bugs. We need to get fixing them.
And the winner of the Slashdot "Who can be the first to blame Microsoft for a bug in FOSS is..."
The problem is not bugs, the problem is that nobody designed their systems to deal with the real security threats presented in the Internet today.
The principle cause of Microsoft's security problems today was their addiction to 'featuritis' in the 1990s. If you think that the open source community does not have the same problem you need to take a serious look at some FOSS programs.
There is nothing that can't be fixed but first people have to realize that FOSS has just as much need to fix them. Everyone in the security community will tell you that making the source code available does not guarantee that your code will be secured. We have enough trouble getting engineers to review their own code.
We need a new approach to writing secure code. Before that can happen a lot of FOSS people need to loose their complacency. Microsoft is not the enemy here, the criminal gangs are the enemy.
I beg to differ. We have some pretty kickass pSeries machines and they don't come close to what our old Multiprise could turn out. Got to drop some students for non-payment? 2,000 to 4,000 records dropped in 20 min on mainframe vs 3-4 hours on the big UNIX Box.
Err what exactly are you using there, a PDP/11? an original IBM/360?
I coded a database system running on a BBC micro that had better response times than you seem to think are state of the art.
The idea that that kind of response time is due to anything other than crap programming is very mainframe. In fact I have repeatedly found mainframe folk who are overly proud of their transaction systems to be way behind the curve in expectations.
I have designed and run very big iron that genuinely performs thousands of transactions a second. The fact that a UNIX box runs you clapped out legacy code even slower than the mainfrasme it was designed for is entirely irrelevant.
I don't think moving to Sealand will accomplish much, and in fact, I'm not sure that HavenCo'd even accept you as a customer.
Regardless of whether you believe in their pretend country they don't have the bandwidth to support anything remotely like wayback...
The problem here is not copyright law, there is no court decision and the lawyers I have seen comment on the issue seem to think that there is a fair use issue. The DMCA is certainly inapplicable unless at a minimum the plaintifs can show that there was intent to ignore the robots.txt file. An access control measure that can be disabled by an unintentional programming error cannot be called 'effective'.
The problem is that you can sue anyone over anything. SCO could sue Karl Rove claiming that he divulged their proprietary source code to Bernie Ebbers. It does not mean the claim is true or that they have a case if the facts as stated are true.
Someone drives around, looking for networks where their credentials will be accepted. Once accepted, the person gets online and is subsequently arrested, even though he had every right to be on that network from a technical prespective.
Read the whole of the article on that incident. It is not clear to me that the guy was arrested for just the WiFi use. There have been several guys arested for 'wardriving' who were wearing no pants and were surfing kiddie porn sites...
I doubt that wayback would save the robots file, that was never the idea, its like saving the http headers, its just an ephemeral protocol datum.
To sum it up, the plaintifs are claiming that the Wayback Machine didn't obey the robots.txt at their site and are calling it breach of contract.
It seems rather more likely that the plaintifs fucked up their robots.txt file entries and that is why they were spidered.
At the risk of receiving yet another deposition I was part of the conversations that led to robots.txt. It was never intended to be an access control mechanism or an effective content control mechanism within the meaning of the DMCA. The objective was simply to allow sites with automatically generated content to tell the robots that parts of their site are not suitable for spidering.
So now it looks like we are going to have revisit the business model for the way back machine and work out how to float a littigation fund.
Actually one way that it could be done is to sign and timestamp material on receipt and offer the signatures as a premium service.
Dvorak keyboards have only won in tests administered by Dvorak himself.. The truth is that he was looking to make money off of his patented configuration.
Yes but you should reject Lieberwitz and Margolis's efforts for the same reason - their 'research' is not disinterested either. What they are intent on doing is 'disproving' the existence of network effects. The 'Independent institute' is a Washington crank-tank funded by corporations to grind the axes they have to be ground.
For their work to be credible they would have to do some actual tests of their own to disprove the Dvorak benefits. They don't of course, they just write pages and pages of spin on existing work.
The fact is that one of the main reasons for the lack of evidence on Dvorak is that the network effects are so effective everyone knows that the costs of making a change are prohibitive.
And yes I know that they claim that they don't quite say this, but that is the spin the chief of their crank-tank puts on their 'research'. Like Soviet era propaganda its what they indent to say, not the painfully parsed words and the meaning of 'is' that counts as far as I am concerned.
I love this post. I honestly do. This is the poster child of the new Slashdot, where assertions replace fact, and are moded up for it.
New? Silly Republican sausage. Not been round here very long have you?
It is dangerous to extrapolate from exponentials unless you understand the underlying dynamic. In China's case the dynamic is simple, it is much easier for a third world economy to catch up with the industrialized economies than for an industrialized economy to grow. No industrial economy has ever grown at a sustained rate above 4%. But plenty of developing economies have maintained double digit growth rates for several decades.
China is going to end up with a bigger economy than the US. But this does not mean that it will automatically become the world hegemnon as the Republican party fears.
There is a very sinple step that can be taken to prevent it, a step that every US President of the 20th Century understood. It is called multilateralism. Instead of insulting allies and bullying them you treat them with the same respect you expect from them.
NATO will be stronger than China until at least 2050. NATO plus India is 2 billion vs 1.3 billion.
Bush is a weak and incompetent President which is why he is unable to compromise with his allies. As a result he is likely to end up being forced to compromise with America's enemies.
Linux has always been a much bigger competative threat to UNIX vendors than to Mr Softy in Redmond.
SGI had a ringside seat for the Web revolution, all the Netscape stuff was written on SGI. Sun trounced them because SGI made the mistake of concentrating on the 'high end' and abandoning the comodity computing area. Also all that Java mumbo jumbo somehow led people in the Internet world to think that everything had to run on Sun.
DEC also disappeared, rmember the days when they were second only to IBM and growing faster? IBM is no longer in the PC business and its mainframe business is all but dead. They are now a consulting company that makes a few unix boxes.
Clark predicted that SGI was on the road to ruin back in 1994 when he quit. They have been a shell for years. Pretty much all the former SGI offices off Shoreline and Charleston were taken over in the 90s.
This is like the death of Cray or Symbolics, by the time the company finaly disappears its ten years later.
And the two have a direct relationship. That is, but-for JFK's starting the program, the USSR would not have fallen. More probably, it was the sudden military build-up during the 1980s that forced the Soviets to compete. It wasn't the space-race that beat the Soviets, it was the military-sprint.
Actually this is Republican party mythology. The USSR did not respond to the Reagan arms build-up. During the entire Reagan presidency they were dismantling nuclear weapons under SALT and SALT-2. They also broke up a large number of conventional weapons under treaties agreed with Reagan.
What Reagan did was to combine JFK's spend them into the ground strategy with Carter's strategy of claiming the moral high ground of commitment to human rights. What Reagan did was much less important that what he said, "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall".
Of course it serves the need of the Republican party to tell the fairy story version in which the cold war took place in 1980 rather than the 1960s and in which the USSR would have survived without intervention. The opposite is the case, the USSR was a basket case in 1980, their command economy failed because communism is a crap economic system.
One other factoid, population below the poverty line. China 10%, USA 12%.
That is from the CIA world fact book, admitedly the poverty line definition is probably different. But China does not suffer from mass starvation as many in the US seem to think.
India is not nearly as well off. 25% below the poverty line and only 3 Trillion in GDP. That could change rapidly however since the economy has been very much damaged by the autarky policies of previous governments that are being unwound.
With 2B people to feed, China has much more pressing issues that saving the Earth from comets. And messing with cometary orbits is too risky for even space programs with decades of cautious experience.
You illustrate the point of the program precisely, to educate people with reactionary views like your own. China does not want to be seen as a technically and military inferior country that can be pushed around by the worlds last superpower. The population of China is generally estimated to be 1.3B, not 2B.
They are spending the money on this project for exactly the same reason that JFK launched the moon shot - political prestige translates directly into power. The idea of going to the moon was to spend the USSR into the ground. JFK started the program in 1962, a quarter century later the USSR was kaput.
For example at the moment there is a sizable faction of the Republican party that spends its time talking about the need to start a trade war with China. Some of them even want to go further and instigate a new cold war. In that type of political environment it makes good sense to invest a few billion dollars pointing out that the economy of China is not stagnant and declining and that it has more than enough capacity to support a military sector that is more than sufficient for national defense.
According to the CIA world fact book China's economy is worth 7.2 trillion and is growing at 9.1%, the Us economy is worth 11.8 trillion and is growing at 4.4%. At that rate China overtakes the US in 10 years time. That is not even taking acount of the fact that the US economy is mature and the typical growth rates of mature economies are much less than 4%. Plus the US has a massive balance of payments deficit that is only being financed by China buying US bonds.
So even if the US was to try a cold war strategy at this stage as the neanderthal wing of the GOP would like it is simply too damned late. China has more economic leverage over the US than the US could hope to gain over China.
The US is currently facing the same problem that hit the British Empire. In the 1920s a bunch of politicians got into power who were really into the whole imperialism thing, they swaggered about holding 'empire days' and such. All the time completely oblivious to the fact that the empire was slipping away and their behaviour was one of the main reasons that it was happening.
China and India are becoming world powers. The US is not going to be the worlds only super power in the future. That is a good thing if people would only realize it. The US is not going to be able to pursue a unilateral foreign policy, but why on earth does the Bush administration want to?
It is clear that you cannot directly negotiate with a terrorist movement. Even when you reach an agreement, Al Qaeda cannot stop terrorism. It has a momentum of its own.
I don't spend my time trying to get into these people's heads in order to negotiate with them. The objective is to defeat them, in particular working out ways to cut them off from their support bases, create and exploit divisions within the movement etc.
When the RAF started they had a very large body of support amongst the left. As the bodies piled they were rejected. Same thing happened in Italy with the right wing Gladio fascist group behind the Blogna bombing.
The INLA was at one time the second largest republican terrorist group in Ireland. Their leadership literally mudered each other after an MI5 disinformation campaign. Today the group is completely defunct.
I thought that Ken Livingstone's statement on the London attacks was very good, he did not rely on any of the empty puffery that US politicians use. Instead he said that Al Aqaeda will loose because they want to tell people how they are to live and no matter how many people they kill we refuse to obey them.
The aspect of the Bush administration's rhetoric that is counterproductive is that they keep trying to score trite political points instead of saying that 99.9% of americans are utterly opposed to Al Qaeda. It is only playing into Al Qaeda's hands when they imply that only the republican party is seriously committed to fighting terrorism. When Rove attacks democrats for being weak on terror he is saying that Americans are weak. That is utterly not true, everyone is opposed to Al Qaeda.
Chuchill said 'WE will fight them on the beaches', not 'Conservatives will fight them'. He also formed a coalition government because he knew that forming a united front was important. Instead Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to ram through his own agendas that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.
So "I'd question the business case for moving Fuji" is a damned good answer. But, be aware that your interviewer will smile slyly, lean back in his or her chair, and say "OK. Why would you question it? What's the basis for your conclusion? What alternatives can you see, and how would you market them?"
I got the same question when I interviewed for what was then Austin Rover, what eventually became MG Rover.
I asked what the objectives were, got the job and fortunately told them to stuff it...
the simplest way to move the mountain would be to redefine the prime meridian of longitude.
Easiest way to do that would be to get a fork lift truck and resite the GPS zero point that is situated in Cambridge MA.
Yes. And the US also slipped up in 1996 as well, and allowed Osama Bin Laden to escape to Afghanistan. It's easy to see what should've been done, in hindsight...
Read the article you link to. It is not clear that there ever was that option on the table. Bin Laden married into the Sudanese government clan. The idea that they would have handed over a member of the family is not very credible.
Moreover Bin Laden was one of them. The government of Sudan is only one step away from Talibanism. They are currently conducting a genocide in Darfur.
There is also a major difference in failing to act before 9/11 and failing to act afterwards. It was only after Bin Laden moved to Afghanistan that the Embassy and Cole bombings occurred.
If you care to look at any of my previous posts you will find that I have been entirely consistent here - as is almost all of the left. We think that it was and is a mistake to start any action in Iraq before both Bin Laden and al-Zawahri are eliminated. I said that before the invasion and I said it again when Chamberlain was holding his victory parade on that air craft carrier.
He may be lying, of course, but it is a much more plausible explanation than "hating freedom" and nonsense like that. Besides, if you terrorize people into doing what you want, you will have to explain to them what you want. From 9/11 onwards the "war" has carried its own momentum; A single solution to it no longer exists.
The 'hating freedom' rhetoric is off the mark but it is also in some ways true.
It is a mistake to think that cults like al Qaeda are entirely rational or irrational. They are rational insofar as they do actually have a political program of sorts. But their behavior is also highly irrational and frequently borders on insanity.
In the case of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof gang) the second generation recruits were actually certified as insane. They were recruited from a mental asylum by a psycharatrist who 'diagnosed' the cause of their mental illness to be capitalism (the sanity of the psychiatrist...).
One thing that almost all terrorist groups share is a complete inability to put themselves in the shoes of their opponents. The IRA had that they were going to bomb the Brits out of northern ireland, they don't seem to have heard about Adolph Hitler or the London blitz.
Al Qaeda is not a completely rational group, they are really a sort of cult. But pretending that they do not have political goals does not help the situation, nor does pretending that the entire Islamic world supports them. Al Qaeda does have very specific political goals that include establishing the 'Caliphate' to rule all the former Islamic territories including and in particular Palestine and Saudi Arabia.
Support for Al-Qaeda in the islamic world is pretty thin. For a start they consider muslims who don't follow the Sunni Whahabi sect to be apostate. Iraq is mostly Shia and only a small minority of the Sunnis are Whahabi. Support for Al Qaeda amongst the Palestinians is pretty thin as well - that is why after 9/11 both Hamas and Arafat condemned the attack. Still CNN repeatedly showed a clip of 8 people celebrating the attack.
You mean al-Zarqawi been terrorist since he was 13 years old? Well, as far as I know he was indoctrined in 1996 and in 1999 he joined Afghanistan liberation war. Thereafter he traveled to iraq when "war on terror" attacked it.
al-Zawahri is the one time leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, now the ideological leader of Al Qaeda.
al-Zarqawi was a small time criminal operating in Iraq who pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda after the US invasion.
They are two completely different people. al-Zawahri is the one who was behind the assasination of Saddat and 9/11.
You are a forgiver and enabler of terrorists plain and simple. Make all the excuses and rationalizations you like, but you are forgiving the horrors carrier out by racist, mysogonist monsters. You are filth even lower than a child molester.
So saying that Bush should have killed Bin Laden when it had the chance is forgiving him?
What a curious crackpot ideology you appear to believe in.
Or maybe you are just used to calling everyone who disagrees with you for any reason a terrorist because that is easier than thinking.
I don't think Bush is on the terrorists side. I just think that he is the US equivalent of Neville Chamberlain, a weak incompetent leader who had to be removed before there could be any real hope of success in the war. Churchill was not unpatriotic when he said that Chamberlin's appeasement policy had failled. Lloyd George was not unpatriotic when he said the country had lost confidence in him.
Congratulations, you have been successfully brainwashed by the Democrats. Bush never claimed Saddam was involved with 9/11. But you go right on ahead and keep spouting that idiocy to brainwash some more lefties.
That is the impression he intentionally created and maintained. He had other people tell the lies for him of course but there is absolutely no difference between doing that and telling the lie yourself.
Bush has certainly linked 9/11 to the need to eliminate Saddam in repeated speeches. He certainly did so in a manner that was intended to cause listeners to come to that conclusion. He did not take any steps to clarify his statements after his political party and its surrogates made that interpretation.
Strictly speaking it is also true that the administration never said that Saddam had a nuclear bomb, but Rice did say 'we don't want the first hard evidence to be a mushroom cloud over an American city'.
When people play rhetorical games and doublespeak the way the Bush administration has it is entirely reasonable to call them on the interpretation they intended people to make.
At the root of everything is that the country had the will to defeat Germany, and Japan,
If the country lacks the necessary will the fault lies in its leadership.
The problem is that it is not possible to trust what Bush and his administration say any more. They deliberately misled the country over the strength of their WMD intelligence. They have not even appologised for doing so.
It is also rather hard to see how the administration can win the war on terror while the US military are busy creating more terrorists in Abu Grhaib and Guantanamo. Nobody in the chain of command has been held accountable for that blunder.
Of course, we're not going to start drafting people, because it's not necessary. I was making the point that America has the capabilities to start pumping out more warships and drafting marines at a moments notice.
The military has cut its recruitment targets in half and is still having problems meeting them. There are no marines sitting around waiting for something to do as you appear to believe.
I trust that you understand what our country is capable of, you're just using talking points that were targeted at ignorant fools who would believe that our military is stretched so thin as to make our homeland vulnerable to attack, but I don't think you're a fool.
It not what your country is capable of that I am worried about. it is what the leadership of that country is capable of. They do not appear to be capable of recognizing a mistake let alone admitting one. They have started a war based on faulty intelligence and utterly failed to make any planning for the occupation. Remember when we were being told that the invasion might 'be a cakewalk' and that the troops might 'be greeted with flowers'.
I do not have a lot of respect for 'leaders' who hold victory parades before the war is over.
I think you know less about Al Qaeda than I do, and that is not much! I know Al Qaeda #2 met with Saddam a number of years ago, I know Al Queda's stated purpose is to destroy all infidels (zionists).
Your 'facts' are way off. First off Dick Cheney has met with Saddam several times so a mere meeting does not say much. Second the aledged contact between Iraq and Al Qaeda was between an Iraqi diplomat, a suspected member of their secret service and a man who may have had links to Al Qaeda. The source of that allegation turns out to be on Ahmed Chalabai who is an Iranian agent known for fabricating all sorts of claims.
Second the purpose of al-Qaeda is to restore the Caliphate and impose Sharia law on all the former Islamic territories. Hence the attack in Spain. Third a Zionist is someone who believes in the establishment of a Jewish state (Zion) in the area now known as Israel. An infidel is either any non-muslim or someone who is not a muslim, Christian or Jew depending on the definition you want to use.
Also you might want to note that the Cold War took place in the time of Eisenhower and Kennedy. Nobody ever blamed Reagan for starting it.
Look at desktop commander here, making up military strategy. America has had the ability to fight wars on many different fronts for quite some time. We helped defeat Germany while single handedly defeating Japan, a 10x greater effort (or more) than what we have here.
Actually there is a very large number of senior US military officers who have said the exact same thing. Several of the serving officers were forced to retire for saying that it was a mistake to leave Afghanistan with the job unfinished.
WWII was a very different situation for several reasons. In the first place Roosevelt ordered both a draft and a general mobilization putting the entire economy on a war footing. From the invasion of Pearl Harbor to V-J day the entire focus of the economy was supporting the military actions.
Needless to say that has not happened, nor is it politically possible to do so at this point. The country simply does not have enough confidence in Bush's management of the invasion of Iraq to allow their kids to be drafted.
You just can't say how things would be different if we had never gone into Iraq. It's quite possible that Saddam could be undermining our efforts in Afghanistan, he probably would have given us plenty of reason to go in there, and Afghanistan would be even uglier than Iraq right now but they would be all juiced up for an invasion in Iraq.
Saddam was a secular leader, precisely the type of leader that the Islamists object to. The whole point of Al Qaeda was to replace 'apostates' like Saddam. There is no more proof of the claims of Saddam's involvement in 9/11 than there is of Saddam's WMD. The Sudan government attempted to set up an alliance but Saddam's people did not bother to show up to even talk to them.
It is obvious that the US would have a lot more military options today if the US army was not stuck in the quagmire of Iraq. Equally the British army would have a lot more options if it did not have 9,000 troops engaged in Iraq. It is not possible to say exactly what Saddam might have been up to in Afghanistan if there had been no invasion just as it is not possible to say with precision what the North Koreans, the Russians or the French might be up to. But the overwhelming balance of probabilities is that the answer would be either 'nothing at all' or 'helping bring down the Taleban'.
Saddam's people had been fighting Al Zarqawi before the US invasion, that is why Al Zarqawi was hiding in the north where he was protected by US air power.
No: Islamists are Muslim supremacists. Condeming Islamist terror groups is no different than condemning racism.
If you replace your words with Jews it sounds awfully like the anti-semetic propaganda of pre-WWII
If you replace the word NAZI with Jew in pretty much any speech of Winston Churchill you have the same result, so what? The more appropriate analogy would be to replace Islamist with Zionist. You can oppose Zionism without being anti-semitic.
There is a big difference between being a member of a religious group and beleiving that that religious group should dominate others.
I do not dispute the fact that there is little to distinguish between the Islamic fascists like Bin Laden and white Christian Fascists like Rudolf and Timothy McVeigh. But that does not affect the fact that the term 'Islamist' has a very specific meaning in English and it is not the meaning that you attempted to attach to it.
And what the *hell* would motivate hundreds of thousands of users to change the default action that Microsoft recommends and keep a piece of crap like Claria? Especially considering that these are people who are clueless enough to have installed Claria in the first place.
I think you pretty much answer your own question there.
Oh, come on. Microsoft may take feedback into consideration, but surely it's not the only factor in selecting the default action.
Claria have certainly made legal threats in the past, but the whole point of having the feedback from users is that it gives Microsoft a solid set of empirical facts that they can refer to in court if they are challenged by a spyware provider. That would be significantly weakened if they were to start applying subjective criteria and blown entirely if they were to consider commercial advantage.
I think it would be very unlikely that the M&A team would want to involve the protection division in their discussions if they were in fact planning an acquisition of Claria.
Slashdot Mirror
The Web was an OSS project, in fact ultra-open source, we put the code in the public domain. So why has nothing else come along in the past 10 years?
I think he is also reacting to the somewhat overly smug 'UNIX is advanced technology' crowd who completely fail to understand that almost everything that they think of as 'UNIX' appeared in Multics first and much of the rest appeared in Genera, VMS etc. before comming to the UNIX world
The fact that UNIX is 95% derivative of other systems would not be so bad if UNIX folk were not so fond of complaining that Windows is 95% derivative.
The shot at the IETF is interesting. They have certainly become as slow to react.
You can be pretty certain that the people who run those systems would be pretty contemptuous of a database that takes 20 minutes to drop 4000 records on any modern hardware platform.
There are still uses for big iron. But your understanding of how the credit card majors work is very much behind the times. Mastercard and Visa are the card associations, not the processors. Some processors do use mainframes, several do not.
Mainframe systems are a very specific class of machines. There are banks, airlines and insurance companies that have not had a mainframe on their site for 20 years. There are some that still rely on them today.
If you have the right architecture you can run a scalable system on any modern computing system. Take a look at Google, VeriSign, Akamai, all run vast computing systems with incredible load without a single mainframe in sight.
And the winner of the Slashdot "Who can be the first to blame Microsoft for a bug in FOSS is..."
The problem is not bugs, the problem is that nobody designed their systems to deal with the real security threats presented in the Internet today.
The principle cause of Microsoft's security problems today was their addiction to 'featuritis' in the 1990s. If you think that the open source community does not have the same problem you need to take a serious look at some FOSS programs.
There is nothing that can't be fixed but first people have to realize that FOSS has just as much need to fix them. Everyone in the security community will tell you that making the source code available does not guarantee that your code will be secured. We have enough trouble getting engineers to review their own code.
We need a new approach to writing secure code. Before that can happen a lot of FOSS people need to loose their complacency. Microsoft is not the enemy here, the criminal gangs are the enemy.
Err what exactly are you using there, a PDP/11? an original IBM/360?
I coded a database system running on a BBC micro that had better response times than you seem to think are state of the art.
The idea that that kind of response time is due to anything other than crap programming is very mainframe. In fact I have repeatedly found mainframe folk who are overly proud of their transaction systems to be way behind the curve in expectations.
I have designed and run very big iron that genuinely performs thousands of transactions a second. The fact that a UNIX box runs you clapped out legacy code even slower than the mainfrasme it was designed for is entirely irrelevant.
Regardless of whether you believe in their pretend country they don't have the bandwidth to support anything remotely like wayback...
The problem here is not copyright law, there is no court decision and the lawyers I have seen comment on the issue seem to think that there is a fair use issue. The DMCA is certainly inapplicable unless at a minimum the plaintifs can show that there was intent to ignore the robots.txt file. An access control measure that can be disabled by an unintentional programming error cannot be called 'effective'.
The problem is that you can sue anyone over anything. SCO could sue Karl Rove claiming that he divulged their proprietary source code to Bernie Ebbers. It does not mean the claim is true or that they have a case if the facts as stated are true.
Read the whole of the article on that incident. It is not clear to me that the guy was arrested for just the WiFi use. There have been several guys arested for 'wardriving' who were wearing no pants and were surfing kiddie porn sites...
I doubt that wayback would save the robots file, that was never the idea, its like saving the http headers, its just an ephemeral protocol datum.
It seems rather more likely that the plaintifs fucked up their robots.txt file entries and that is why they were spidered.
At the risk of receiving yet another deposition I was part of the conversations that led to robots.txt. It was never intended to be an access control mechanism or an effective content control mechanism within the meaning of the DMCA. The objective was simply to allow sites with automatically generated content to tell the robots that parts of their site are not suitable for spidering.
So now it looks like we are going to have revisit the business model for the way back machine and work out how to float a littigation fund.
Actually one way that it could be done is to sign and timestamp material on receipt and offer the signatures as a premium service.
Yes but you should reject Lieberwitz and Margolis's efforts for the same reason - their 'research' is not disinterested either. What they are intent on doing is 'disproving' the existence of network effects. The 'Independent institute' is a Washington crank-tank funded by corporations to grind the axes they have to be ground.
For their work to be credible they would have to do some actual tests of their own to disprove the Dvorak benefits. They don't of course, they just write pages and pages of spin on existing work.
The fact is that one of the main reasons for the lack of evidence on Dvorak is that the network effects are so effective everyone knows that the costs of making a change are prohibitive.
And yes I know that they claim that they don't quite say this, but that is the spin the chief of their crank-tank puts on their 'research'. Like Soviet era propaganda its what they indent to say, not the painfully parsed words and the meaning of 'is' that counts as far as I am concerned.
New? Silly Republican sausage. Not been round here very long have you?
It is dangerous to extrapolate from exponentials unless you understand the underlying dynamic. In China's case the dynamic is simple, it is much easier for a third world economy to catch up with the industrialized economies than for an industrialized economy to grow. No industrial economy has ever grown at a sustained rate above 4%. But plenty of developing economies have maintained double digit growth rates for several decades.
China is going to end up with a bigger economy than the US. But this does not mean that it will automatically become the world hegemnon as the Republican party fears.
There is a very sinple step that can be taken to prevent it, a step that every US President of the 20th Century understood. It is called multilateralism. Instead of insulting allies and bullying them you treat them with the same respect you expect from them.
NATO will be stronger than China until at least 2050. NATO plus India is 2 billion vs 1.3 billion.
Bush is a weak and incompetent President which is why he is unable to compromise with his allies. As a result he is likely to end up being forced to compromise with America's enemies.
Linux has always been a much bigger competative threat to UNIX vendors than to Mr Softy in Redmond.
SGI had a ringside seat for the Web revolution, all the Netscape stuff was written on SGI. Sun trounced them because SGI made the mistake of concentrating on the 'high end' and abandoning the comodity computing area. Also all that Java mumbo jumbo somehow led people in the Internet world to think that everything had to run on Sun.
DEC also disappeared, rmember the days when they were second only to IBM and growing faster? IBM is no longer in the PC business and its mainframe business is all but dead. They are now a consulting company that makes a few unix boxes.
Clark predicted that SGI was on the road to ruin back in 1994 when he quit. They have been a shell for years. Pretty much all the former SGI offices off Shoreline and Charleston were taken over in the 90s.
This is like the death of Cray or Symbolics, by the time the company finaly disappears its ten years later.
Actually this is Republican party mythology. The USSR did not respond to the Reagan arms build-up. During the entire Reagan presidency they were dismantling nuclear weapons under SALT and SALT-2. They also broke up a large number of conventional weapons under treaties agreed with Reagan.
What Reagan did was to combine JFK's spend them into the ground strategy with Carter's strategy of claiming the moral high ground of commitment to human rights. What Reagan did was much less important that what he said, "Mr Gorbachev, tear down this wall".
Of course it serves the need of the Republican party to tell the fairy story version in which the cold war took place in 1980 rather than the 1960s and in which the USSR would have survived without intervention. The opposite is the case, the USSR was a basket case in 1980, their command economy failed because communism is a crap economic system.
That is from the CIA world fact book, admitedly the poverty line definition is probably different. But China does not suffer from mass starvation as many in the US seem to think.
India is not nearly as well off. 25% below the poverty line and only 3 Trillion in GDP. That could change rapidly however since the economy has been very much damaged by the autarky policies of previous governments that are being unwound.
You illustrate the point of the program precisely, to educate people with reactionary views like your own. China does not want to be seen as a technically and military inferior country that can be pushed around by the worlds last superpower. The population of China is generally estimated to be 1.3B, not 2B.
They are spending the money on this project for exactly the same reason that JFK launched the moon shot - political prestige translates directly into power. The idea of going to the moon was to spend the USSR into the ground. JFK started the program in 1962, a quarter century later the USSR was kaput.
For example at the moment there is a sizable faction of the Republican party that spends its time talking about the need to start a trade war with China. Some of them even want to go further and instigate a new cold war. In that type of political environment it makes good sense to invest a few billion dollars pointing out that the economy of China is not stagnant and declining and that it has more than enough capacity to support a military sector that is more than sufficient for national defense.
According to the CIA world fact book China's economy is worth 7.2 trillion and is growing at 9.1%, the Us economy is worth 11.8 trillion and is growing at 4.4%. At that rate China overtakes the US in 10 years time. That is not even taking acount of the fact that the US economy is mature and the typical growth rates of mature economies are much less than 4%. Plus the US has a massive balance of payments deficit that is only being financed by China buying US bonds.
So even if the US was to try a cold war strategy at this stage as the neanderthal wing of the GOP would like it is simply too damned late. China has more economic leverage over the US than the US could hope to gain over China.
The US is currently facing the same problem that hit the British Empire. In the 1920s a bunch of politicians got into power who were really into the whole imperialism thing, they swaggered about holding 'empire days' and such. All the time completely oblivious to the fact that the empire was slipping away and their behaviour was one of the main reasons that it was happening.
China and India are becoming world powers. The US is not going to be the worlds only super power in the future. That is a good thing if people would only realize it. The US is not going to be able to pursue a unilateral foreign policy, but why on earth does the Bush administration want to?
Did Pravda ever have pictorials of Britney Spears pregnant?
Xinhua is a supermarket tabloid.
Now would The Examiner be more or less accurate if run by the State?
I don't spend my time trying to get into these people's heads in order to negotiate with them. The objective is to defeat them, in particular working out ways to cut them off from their support bases, create and exploit divisions within the movement etc.
When the RAF started they had a very large body of support amongst the left. As the bodies piled they were rejected. Same thing happened in Italy with the right wing Gladio fascist group behind the Blogna bombing.
The INLA was at one time the second largest republican terrorist group in Ireland. Their leadership literally mudered each other after an MI5 disinformation campaign. Today the group is completely defunct.
I thought that Ken Livingstone's statement on the London attacks was very good, he did not rely on any of the empty puffery that US politicians use. Instead he said that Al Aqaeda will loose because they want to tell people how they are to live and no matter how many people they kill we refuse to obey them.
The aspect of the Bush administration's rhetoric that is counterproductive is that they keep trying to score trite political points instead of saying that 99.9% of americans are utterly opposed to Al Qaeda. It is only playing into Al Qaeda's hands when they imply that only the republican party is seriously committed to fighting terrorism. When Rove attacks democrats for being weak on terror he is saying that Americans are weak. That is utterly not true, everyone is opposed to Al Qaeda.
Chuchill said 'WE will fight them on the beaches', not 'Conservatives will fight them'. He also formed a coalition government because he knew that forming a united front was important. Instead Bush used 9/11 as an excuse to ram through his own agendas that had nothing to do with Al Qaeda.
I got the same question when I interviewed for what was then Austin Rover, what eventually became MG Rover.
I asked what the objectives were, got the job and fortunately told them to stuff it...
the simplest way to move the mountain would be to redefine the prime meridian of longitude.
Easiest way to do that would be to get a fork lift truck and resite the GPS zero point that is situated in Cambridge MA.
Read the article you link to. It is not clear that there ever was that option on the table. Bin Laden married into the Sudanese government clan. The idea that they would have handed over a member of the family is not very credible.
Moreover Bin Laden was one of them. The government of Sudan is only one step away from Talibanism. They are currently conducting a genocide in Darfur.
There is also a major difference in failing to act before 9/11 and failing to act afterwards. It was only after Bin Laden moved to Afghanistan that the Embassy and Cole bombings occurred.
If you care to look at any of my previous posts you will find that I have been entirely consistent here - as is almost all of the left. We think that it was and is a mistake to start any action in Iraq before both Bin Laden and al-Zawahri are eliminated. I said that before the invasion and I said it again when Chamberlain was holding his victory parade on that air craft carrier.
The 'hating freedom' rhetoric is off the mark but it is also in some ways true.
It is a mistake to think that cults like al Qaeda are entirely rational or irrational. They are rational insofar as they do actually have a political program of sorts. But their behavior is also highly irrational and frequently borders on insanity.
In the case of the Red Army Faction (Baader-Meinhof gang) the second generation recruits were actually certified as insane. They were recruited from a mental asylum by a psycharatrist who 'diagnosed' the cause of their mental illness to be capitalism (the sanity of the psychiatrist...).
One thing that almost all terrorist groups share is a complete inability to put themselves in the shoes of their opponents. The IRA had that they were going to bomb the Brits out of northern ireland, they don't seem to have heard about Adolph Hitler or the London blitz.
Al Qaeda is not a completely rational group, they are really a sort of cult. But pretending that they do not have political goals does not help the situation, nor does pretending that the entire Islamic world supports them. Al Qaeda does have very specific political goals that include establishing the 'Caliphate' to rule all the former Islamic territories including and in particular Palestine and Saudi Arabia.
Support for Al-Qaeda in the islamic world is pretty thin. For a start they consider muslims who don't follow the Sunni Whahabi sect to be apostate. Iraq is mostly Shia and only a small minority of the Sunnis are Whahabi. Support for Al Qaeda amongst the Palestinians is pretty thin as well - that is why after 9/11 both Hamas and Arafat condemned the attack. Still CNN repeatedly showed a clip of 8 people celebrating the attack.
al-Zawahri is the one time leader of Egyptian Islamic Jihad, now the ideological leader of Al Qaeda.
al-Zarqawi was a small time criminal operating in Iraq who pledged allegiance to Al-Qaeda after the US invasion.
They are two completely different people. al-Zawahri is the one who was behind the assasination of Saddat and 9/11.
So saying that Bush should have killed Bin Laden when it had the chance is forgiving him?
What a curious crackpot ideology you appear to believe in.
Or maybe you are just used to calling everyone who disagrees with you for any reason a terrorist because that is easier than thinking.
I don't think Bush is on the terrorists side. I just think that he is the US equivalent of Neville Chamberlain, a weak incompetent leader who had to be removed before there could be any real hope of success in the war. Churchill was not unpatriotic when he said that Chamberlin's appeasement policy had failled. Lloyd George was not unpatriotic when he said the country had lost confidence in him.
That is the impression he intentionally created and maintained. He had other people tell the lies for him of course but there is absolutely no difference between doing that and telling the lie yourself.
Bush has certainly linked 9/11 to the need to eliminate Saddam in repeated speeches. He certainly did so in a manner that was intended to cause listeners to come to that conclusion. He did not take any steps to clarify his statements after his political party and its surrogates made that interpretation.
Strictly speaking it is also true that the administration never said that Saddam had a nuclear bomb, but Rice did say 'we don't want the first hard evidence to be a mushroom cloud over an American city'.
When people play rhetorical games and doublespeak the way the Bush administration has it is entirely reasonable to call them on the interpretation they intended people to make.
If the country lacks the necessary will the fault lies in its leadership.
The problem is that it is not possible to trust what Bush and his administration say any more. They deliberately misled the country over the strength of their WMD intelligence. They have not even appologised for doing so.
It is also rather hard to see how the administration can win the war on terror while the US military are busy creating more terrorists in Abu Grhaib and Guantanamo. Nobody in the chain of command has been held accountable for that blunder.
Of course, we're not going to start drafting people, because it's not necessary. I was making the point that America has the capabilities to start pumping out more warships and drafting marines at a moments notice.
The military has cut its recruitment targets in half and is still having problems meeting them. There are no marines sitting around waiting for something to do as you appear to believe.
I trust that you understand what our country is capable of, you're just using talking points that were targeted at ignorant fools who would believe that our military is stretched so thin as to make our homeland vulnerable to attack, but I don't think you're a fool.
It not what your country is capable of that I am worried about. it is what the leadership of that country is capable of. They do not appear to be capable of recognizing a mistake let alone admitting one. They have started a war based on faulty intelligence and utterly failed to make any planning for the occupation. Remember when we were being told that the invasion might 'be a cakewalk' and that the troops might 'be greeted with flowers'.
I do not have a lot of respect for 'leaders' who hold victory parades before the war is over.
I think you know less about Al Qaeda than I do, and that is not much! I know Al Qaeda #2 met with Saddam a number of years ago, I know Al Queda's stated purpose is to destroy all infidels (zionists).
Your 'facts' are way off. First off Dick Cheney has met with Saddam several times so a mere meeting does not say much. Second the aledged contact between Iraq and Al Qaeda was between an Iraqi diplomat, a suspected member of their secret service and a man who may have had links to Al Qaeda. The source of that allegation turns out to be on Ahmed Chalabai who is an Iranian agent known for fabricating all sorts of claims.
Second the purpose of al-Qaeda is to restore the Caliphate and impose Sharia law on all the former Islamic territories. Hence the attack in Spain. Third a Zionist is someone who believes in the establishment of a Jewish state (Zion) in the area now known as Israel. An infidel is either any non-muslim or someone who is not a muslim, Christian or Jew depending on the definition you want to use.
Also you might want to note that the Cold War took place in the time of Eisenhower and Kennedy. Nobody ever blamed Reagan for starting it.
Actually there is a very large number of senior US military officers who have said the exact same thing. Several of the serving officers were forced to retire for saying that it was a mistake to leave Afghanistan with the job unfinished.
WWII was a very different situation for several reasons. In the first place Roosevelt ordered both a draft and a general mobilization putting the entire economy on a war footing. From the invasion of Pearl Harbor to V-J day the entire focus of the economy was supporting the military actions.
Needless to say that has not happened, nor is it politically possible to do so at this point. The country simply does not have enough confidence in Bush's management of the invasion of Iraq to allow their kids to be drafted.
You just can't say how things would be different if we had never gone into Iraq. It's quite possible that Saddam could be undermining our efforts in Afghanistan, he probably would have given us plenty of reason to go in there, and Afghanistan would be even uglier than Iraq right now but they would be all juiced up for an invasion in Iraq.
Saddam was a secular leader, precisely the type of leader that the Islamists object to. The whole point of Al Qaeda was to replace 'apostates' like Saddam. There is no more proof of the claims of Saddam's involvement in 9/11 than there is of Saddam's WMD. The Sudan government attempted to set up an alliance but Saddam's people did not bother to show up to even talk to them.
It is obvious that the US would have a lot more military options today if the US army was not stuck in the quagmire of Iraq. Equally the British army would have a lot more options if it did not have 9,000 troops engaged in Iraq. It is not possible to say exactly what Saddam might have been up to in Afghanistan if there had been no invasion just as it is not possible to say with precision what the North Koreans, the Russians or the French might be up to. But the overwhelming balance of probabilities is that the answer would be either 'nothing at all' or 'helping bring down the Taleban'.
Saddam's people had been fighting Al Zarqawi before the US invasion, that is why Al Zarqawi was hiding in the north where he was protected by US air power.
No: Islamists are Muslim supremacists. Condeming Islamist terror groups is no different than condemning racism.
If you replace your words with Jews it sounds awfully like the anti-semetic propaganda of pre-WWII
If you replace the word NAZI with Jew in pretty much any speech of Winston Churchill you have the same result, so what? The more appropriate analogy would be to replace Islamist with Zionist. You can oppose Zionism without being anti-semitic.
There is a big difference between being a member of a religious group and beleiving that that religious group should dominate others.
I do not dispute the fact that there is little to distinguish between the Islamic fascists like Bin Laden and white Christian Fascists like Rudolf and Timothy McVeigh. But that does not affect the fact that the term 'Islamist' has a very specific meaning in English and it is not the meaning that you attempted to attach to it.
I think you pretty much answer your own question there.
Oh, come on. Microsoft may take feedback into consideration, but surely it's not the only factor in selecting the default action.
Claria have certainly made legal threats in the past, but the whole point of having the feedback from users is that it gives Microsoft a solid set of empirical facts that they can refer to in court if they are challenged by a spyware provider. That would be significantly weakened if they were to start applying subjective criteria and blown entirely if they were to consider commercial advantage.
I think it would be very unlikely that the M&A team would want to involve the protection division in their discussions if they were in fact planning an acquisition of Claria.