Watch how fast https becomes ubiquitous. When everyone is encrypting everything, the RIAA will be utterly powerless.
This will also create more motivation to move toward IPsec and IPv6 and increase use of Freenet, Tor, and other darknet technologies. All our communications should be encrypted anyway as a matter of privacy and confidentiality.
I agree. Frankly, KDE 4 sucks. KDE 3.5 was polished and efficient. KDE 4.1 is well, not even close to where KDE 3.5 was. To pick one example, panel hiding is still buggy. Sometimes it hides, sometimes it doesn't. The number of options on panel hiding are now yes or no rather than a gradation of possibilities. I'm wondering if we'll get to KDE 4.5 where things are good again, and then we'll come to some screwy KDE 5.
I agree with most of your rants. The focus should be on the basics plus some important applications such as understanding one's finances.
I'm not sure about leaving the federal government out of it. Does it really make sense to have 50 or 5000 different policies? I suppose that is better than having one bad one that everyone has to follow. Naturally, taking advantage of how other countries succeed seems to be beneath us.
The United States for a long period of time discouraged the use of encryption, labelling it as a munition. The result is that the vast majority of computer data and internet communication is not encrypted. This situation has been a benefit to police and intelligence agencies because unencrypted information is much easier to analyze for evidence of crimes and terrorism in comparison to encrypted information. However, unencrypted information is much easier for criminals and terrorists to use as well. For example, if our laptops and USB keys were encrypted as a matter of normal practice, many data leaks would have been prevented.
As you might guess, I view encryption as a necessary (but not sufficient) tool for protecting information. Do you? Where do you place yourself in the tradeoff between encouraging encryption as part of protecting information from criminals and discouraging encryption as part of surveillance for criminals?
Another issue is the near-incomprehensible make files that go with any serious C and C++ software. The complexity of the make files, include files, and #defines make for ugly and maintenance-resistant software, along with the buffer overruns, memory leaks, and pointer arithmetic.
As for licensing software, I always explain to my students that they should make their projects free software to have the most impact. I discuss the options with my students, but generally let the lead student on a project select the particular license, ideally with rough consensus of all involved. So yes, even though the university might own their work, my students are free to continue using it and building on it in perpetuity.
This is the best idea I've seen here. Let the university own it, but give the software a free software license so anyone else can own it, too.
Did Rip van Winkle wake up from the neural network craze 20 years ago? We have next to zero clue about how memory and learning are done at the neural level and now someone arrogant is going to solve the problem? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
And somehow you managed to miss the creative ways that subprime mortgages were turned into high-quality investments.
No, I mentioned that regarding the using of the subprime mortgages as a "base" collateral underneath certain securities, which were then used as collateral on other securities, and so on. The idea (as I'm sure you'd know if you'd actually read the article or had a solid grounding in economics) was that the banks were, in fact, deliberately trying to hide the actual backing of the securities.
That was in the middle of your rant somehow blaming the SOX reforms rather than the out-of-control subprime lending. Maybe you should read your own stuff.
You should also include an SEC rule change that allowed Lehman and the rest of the gang to overleverage themselves.
It appears you are speaking of the 12:1 rule, also known as the "net capital rule" - which was not the real problem so much as the OTHER portion of the issue...
I don't think Lehman would have gone under if they had stayed at 12:1 rather than 30+:1. Well, maybe they eventually would anyway, but not so spectacularly.
Anyone (or any group) that is knowledgable enough can learn to understand the software.
What makes anything easier to understand? Good teachers/documentation, good organization, and good semantics (in this case, the correspondence between the components of the software and the components of the task domain).
Until intellectual property law is forced to conform to the same expectations that private property has, it will never have universal legitimacy in the culture the way that physical property has (except with thieves and Socialists; I repeat myself...) IP should not have the same expectations. Otherwise, we would still be paying the estate of Aristotle. We need keep it possible to build on the achievements of previous generations. This won't work if we have to pay fees to the many thousands (millions?) that have added their intellectual work to our technology and culture.
And I think you mean "real property" instead of "private property".
Copyright, at least in the US, was not established just for making
money, but "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Most
progress in science is based on previous results. Many creations in
the arts are based on previous art.
The stories of Hans Christian Andersen, to pick one famous
Scandinavian, are no longer under copyright. As a result, his stories
have been used for a large number of creative activities (see
Wikipedia for a list). These creations would have been hindered if
copyright fees had to be negotiated with the estate (or with some
corporation owning the rights).
It is difficult to make progress if creators need to track down
copyrights, negotiate fees, and pay for any and all previous creations
they are building upon. For example, the cost of technology has
reached the point where reasonable movie-making can be done by
amateurs. A movie might be based on many creations: the author of the
story, quotations from other authors, music in the movie, any image of
text or photos or paintings or videos that might be shown in passing,
etc. Should it be next to impossible for amateurs to produce and
distribute home-made movies? If such a creation happens to make some
money, the movie-maker would likely be bankrupted by numerous
copyright holders. In the US, copyright violations can cost over
$100,000 for each infringement with many infringements for each copy
of the movie.
It should be noted that our system would be unable to handle large
number of amateurs to find, request, and obtain permission from
multiple copyright holders.
This has ended up a ways from the privacy issue, but your MP should
think about the consequences for creators of any laws that are made.
I am impressed by Freenet's devotion to freedom of speech, but if my computer is hosting content, I should have the freedom to choose what that content is. Freedom of speech does not mean I should have to provide any resources to help you. This is where Freenet goes overboard. Freedom of speech is not an absolute.
I say yes, sabotage the botnet with friendly worms/bots. The owners of the infected computers don't know about the problem, don't care or don't know how to fix it.
I say vigilante action is okay, to protect ourselves (the people in the know adminning the networks and computers being attacked). Why couldn't this be a Windows update? In a sense, Windows update is a friendly bot, and it's not vigilante. A different approach would be to set up a web site of programs to get rid of specific infections. Yes, I know that general anti-virus/spy-/adware software is already supposed to do this, but apparently it's not working so well.
Why just add an optional exchange of public keys to the HTTP protocol (and others)? This would be susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks, but I don't the ISPs would ever have the compute power to do this for all their customers.
Slashdot Mirror
Watch how fast https becomes ubiquitous. When everyone is encrypting everything, the RIAA will be utterly powerless.
This will also create more motivation to move toward IPsec and IPv6 and increase use of Freenet, Tor, and other darknet technologies. All our communications should be encrypted anyway as a matter of privacy and confidentiality.
Is ext2 a better choice because it limits the number of writes, or is that a silly worry?
I agree. Frankly, KDE 4 sucks. KDE 3.5 was polished and efficient. KDE 4.1 is well, not even close to where KDE 3.5 was. To pick one example, panel hiding is still buggy. Sometimes it hides, sometimes it doesn't. The number of options on panel hiding are now yes or no rather than a gradation of possibilities. I'm wondering if we'll get to KDE 4.5 where things are good again, and then we'll come to some screwy KDE 5.
I agree with most of your rants. The focus should be on the basics plus some important applications such as understanding one's finances.
I'm not sure about leaving the federal government out of it. Does it really make sense to have 50 or 5000 different policies? I suppose that is better than having one bad one that everyone has to follow. Naturally, taking advantage of how other countries succeed seems to be beneath us.
The United States for a long period of time discouraged the use of encryption, labelling it as a munition. The result is that the vast majority of computer data and internet communication is not encrypted. This situation has been a benefit to police and intelligence agencies because unencrypted information is much easier to analyze for evidence of crimes and terrorism in comparison to encrypted information. However, unencrypted information is much easier for criminals and terrorists to use as well. For example, if our laptops and USB keys were encrypted as a matter of normal practice, many data leaks would have been prevented.
As you might guess, I view encryption as a necessary (but not sufficient) tool for protecting information. Do you? Where do you place yourself in the tradeoff between encouraging encryption as part of protecting information from criminals and discouraging encryption as part of surveillance for criminals?
Another issue is the near-incomprehensible make files that go with any serious C and C++ software. The complexity of the make files, include files, and #defines make for ugly and maintenance-resistant software, along with the buffer overruns, memory leaks, and pointer arithmetic.
As for licensing software, I always explain to my students that they should make their projects free software to have the most impact. I discuss the options with my students, but generally let the lead student on a project select the particular license, ideally with rough consensus of all involved. So yes, even though the university might own their work, my students are free to continue using it and building on it in perpetuity.
This is the best idea I've seen here. Let the university own it, but give the software a free software license so anyone else can own it, too.
Did Rip van Winkle wake up from the neural network craze 20 years ago? We have next to zero clue about how memory and learning are done at the neural level and now someone arrogant is going to solve the problem? HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
Vista is barely slower than XP on hardware bought within the last 2 years.
Here is one benchmark where XP is nearly twice as fast as Vista.
http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/windows-xp-sp3-yields-performance-gains.htm
And somehow you managed to miss the creative ways that subprime mortgages were turned into high-quality investments.
No, I mentioned that regarding the using of the subprime mortgages as a "base" collateral underneath certain securities, which were then used as collateral on other securities, and so on. The idea (as I'm sure you'd know if you'd actually read the article or had a solid grounding in economics) was that the banks were, in fact, deliberately trying to hide the actual backing of the securities.
That was in the middle of your rant somehow blaming the SOX reforms rather than the out-of-control subprime lending. Maybe you should read your own stuff.
You should also include an SEC rule change that allowed Lehman and the rest of the gang to overleverage themselves.
It appears you are speaking of the 12:1 rule, also known as the "net capital rule" - which was not the real problem so much as the OTHER portion of the issue ...
I don't think Lehman would have gone under if they had stayed at 12:1 rather than 30+:1. Well, maybe they eventually would anyway, but not so spectacularly.
You should also include an SEC rule change that allowed Lehman and the rest of the gang to overleverage themselves. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/10/03/business/03sec.html.
And somehow you managed to miss the creative ways that subprime mortgages were turned into high-quality investments. See http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/27/magazine/27Credit-t.html.
Amazingly, both of those happened on Bush's watch. No wonder you missed them.
The US has already ruled you can't be forced to give out an encryption key.
I believe that is only a ruling by a federal judge, not any higher courts (federal appeals courts or SCOTUS).
http://techdirt.com/articles/20071216/163110.shtml
Nothing could be worse than IBM manuals in the old days. Even man pages are revelations in clarity compared to those.
Someone (or some group) understands the software.
Anyone (or any group) that is knowledgable enough can learn to understand the software.
What makes anything easier to understand? Good teachers/documentation, good organization, and good semantics (in this case, the correspondence between the components of the software and the components of the task domain).
And I think you mean "real property" instead of "private property".
Copyright, at least in the US, was not established just for making money, but "to promote the progress of science and useful arts". Most progress in science is based on previous results. Many creations in the arts are based on previous art. The stories of Hans Christian Andersen, to pick one famous Scandinavian, are no longer under copyright. As a result, his stories have been used for a large number of creative activities (see Wikipedia for a list). These creations would have been hindered if copyright fees had to be negotiated with the estate (or with some corporation owning the rights).
It is difficult to make progress if creators need to track down copyrights, negotiate fees, and pay for any and all previous creations they are building upon. For example, the cost of technology has reached the point where reasonable movie-making can be done by amateurs. A movie might be based on many creations: the author of the story, quotations from other authors, music in the movie, any image of text or photos or paintings or videos that might be shown in passing, etc. Should it be next to impossible for amateurs to produce and distribute home-made movies? If such a creation happens to make some money, the movie-maker would likely be bankrupted by numerous copyright holders. In the US, copyright violations can cost over $100,000 for each infringement with many infringements for each copy of the movie.
It should be noted that our system would be unable to handle large number of amateurs to find, request, and obtain permission from multiple copyright holders.
This has ended up a ways from the privacy issue, but your MP should think about the consequences for creators of any laws that are made.
I am impressed by Freenet's devotion to freedom of speech, but if my computer is hosting content, I should have the freedom to choose what that content is. Freedom of speech does not mean I should have to provide any resources to help you. This is where Freenet goes overboard. Freedom of speech is not an absolute.
I say vigilante action is okay, to protect ourselves (the people in the know adminning the networks and computers being attacked). Why couldn't this be a Windows update? In a sense, Windows update is a friendly bot, and it's not vigilante. A different approach would be to set up a web site of programs to get rid of specific infections. Yes, I know that general anti-virus/spy-/adware software is already supposed to do this, but apparently it's not working so well.
Take out that gratuitous swipe at the Democrats, and I agree completely.
I would think MITM attacks by your ISP would be too easy to detect for them to do this on a regular basis without getting bad PR.
Anything involving misbehaving NULLs excites old LISP programmers.
iSoldout! Oops, wrong company!
Your company was run by idiots.
achieving backward compatibility != keeping legacy code
Why just add an optional exchange of public keys to the HTTP protocol (and others)? This would be susceptible to man-in-the-middle attacks, but I don't the ISPs would ever have the compute power to do this for all their customers.
One reason Vista is a dog on many laptops is because the GDI graphics interface has been redesigned in Vista to be slow http://www.regdeveloper.co.uk/2007/12/04/vista_vs_xp_tests/.