"I think the idea behind keeping the law secret is that it would prevent a terrorist organization from analyzing it to figure out a weakness and exploit it. It's analogous to source code in that a law is essentially a script followed by civic employees. There's a reason why the word 'code' is used in both cases.
I'm inclined to agree with you on the reason- the problem is that it requires the rule/law to actually DO something productive towards prevention of a problem even before you can consider security through obscurity. Not to mention the fact that just because it's obscured to the public, doesn't mean that the people that ARE obscured couldn't be subborned to reveal the law and any apparent weaknesses. In the case of the "must show ID" regulation (it's NOT a law, mind...) the possession of an ID that maps to the alleged identity for the tickets and boarding passes does NOT mean in any way, shape, or form that the ID is even valid. Bam, there goes the reason for the regulation right there- it doesn't do anything useful against even the least determined attacker. It'd not have prevented or deterred 9/11. It won't prevent or deter another similar attack. So, why in the hell have it in the first place?
If you're gunning for something like learning by rote, then yes, the library and Internet might be a good replacement for schools. That part, unfortunately, won't teach anyone to think for themselves (sadly, neither does the public and most of the other "High Schools"...). The elementary schools can't really teach more than the basics, because most people aren't quite ready for the needed teaching for reasoning things out.
So, what do you do? You try to fix the High School level teaching to emphasise less rote learning and more reasoning education. By this, I don't mean brainwashing the kids to think a certain way- hell, they're doing that right now in the public schools. I mean that they should be teaching them how to learn on their own (sorry, the basics alone won't get you there...) and to be able to develop knowlege without just memorizing things.
Most of those drivers happen to be written by the hardware vendors. How can MS extinguish here? By not allowing access to driver development info?
Here's a clue for Johnny-boy: They pretty much already do this stupidity and you can bet your bottom dollar that if it came to be known with real evidence that they've arranged this, there'd be another anti-trust suit filed against them in most of the G8 at that point. 'sides, many of the drivers are reverse engineered anyway.
You know, I don't know why I'm even bothering- John's just another talking head that practically nobody listens to because he doesn't have the foggiest about what he's talking about most of the time.
The stated goal is to prevent them. One can largely prevent them from happing by raising the bar on the overall cost to achive their goals so that they'll pick easier targets other than the US. What the DHS is currently doing doesn't even touch on making soft targets hard ones. And they seem to be overly focused on things that plain flat don't matter in the overall scheme of things. It's disturbing to say the least that they're worrying about a "virtual border" and pissing away 2 billion on this boondoggle that won't do anything to deter attacks. What would happen if they, say struck at an oil refinery instead- pretty damn spectacular and high overall payoff for a low cost to them right at the moment- and these places tend to have security like the Keystone Kops. You don't see the DHS worrying about those sorts of things right at them moment.
Stallman working for the Patent Office would be preventing stupid software and business process Patents- it wouldn't be preventing Patents in general.
The better analogies would be putting a fox in charge of the henhouse or of putting the wolf to shepherding the sheep- if you're talking about the Spyware people in charge of privacy and private information security.
Isn't this like putting a fox in charge of the security for a henhouse?
Honestly... DHS doesn't need to be worrying about this sort of tripe- they've got bigger fish to fry. Why in the HELL are they bothering with this when the things they're doing right at the moment wouldn't have done a damn thing to prevent 9/11 from occuring and wouldn't prevent a repeat?
...is that the tards at Ultracade don't understand that the original MAME people can successfully sue their asses over the Trademark and successfully get it and court costs. It happened with Linux, it can most definitely happen in this case.
They wasted the filing fees and they've opened themselves to ridicule and agony that they just didn't have to dish out to themselves.
"Interesting you are saying there is an organized conspiracy by scientists to commit fraud upon the entire planet. It's amazing how these scientists have been able to co-operate on such a massive scale. All over the world the scientists are working hard to carry out their conspiracy and are doing it very effectively."
He's probably not being so bold as to say that exact thing. However, I can point to one instance of bad science that they keep perpetuating to the whole world's detriment. Freon. R-12 is a heavier than air compound, alleged to damage the Ozone layer. Mount Penitubo pumped more Chlorine into the upper atmosphere than we ever might have with Freons and in an even more reactive form that should have wiped the Ozone layer completely out. Didn't happen did it. Now, has anyone thought about that "ozone hole" in Antartica? It seems to build back up towards the end of the sunny season there (There's a clue there boys and girls...)- and seems to ebb down (as in reappear...) during the nighttime season. Clue for you all: Ozone is produced by UV irradiation, something that doesn't happen during nighttime and the poles are subjected to a six month night!
This is not to say that Freons aren't a problem- but they're definitely NOT the issue everyone made them out to be. And nobody will go back through and re-evaluate the conclusions because "everyone knows Freons are the culprits"... Bad science through and through.
Now, what does this all have to do with globval warming? Loads. The same kinds of stupid things are being done with this stuff.
"There was an uptrun in tempratures. Species are suffering, the ice caps are melting, the glaciers have all but gone away. I guess none of that qualifies as a calamity in your book though."
How do you know the species "suffering" aren't due to a host of other factors? Got proof?
How do you know that the ice cap melting and glaciers going away isn't just part of a cycle? There's tons of evidence there were times in this planet's life that there pretty much wasn't ice caps or glaciers.
The upturn in temperatures: To the best of my knowlege most of the measurements have been inside of urban areas. What does Concrete and Asphalt do with thermal energy? Holds it in, sort of like a storage battery. This allows more thermal energy to be applied to an area and be hotter. Cities are notoriously hotter than the countryside- by as much as 15 or so degrees except in desert areas where there's as much sand and stone (also thermal storage batteries) as there is the other about.
Unless a study accounts for this, it's data is so horribly flawed to be effectively useless- it needs to be redone before anyone can rely on it as a basis for any statement than "Cities are hotter now than they were in the past because they got larger and have lots more concrete and asphalt present.".
If you base your arguments on flawed data you don't really HAVE one.
"It's a private website, specifically designed to support software people have BOUGHT.
Which is all well and good. However, one should note that it's decidedly NOT private as it was publicly accessable to anyone that wanted to download upates and all up until recently. I know, I've hit it many times with a Linux browser to snag updates for other people- which IS a legit activity even to Microsoft as the people in question couldn't get to the site for varying reasons and I was acting on their behalf.
...I'd be surprised if it wasn't spyware free in 12 months.
Keep in mind that you're claiming the "popularity" argument here. A quck comparison between IIS and Apache will show that most of the Website defacements and exploits seem to be on IIS boxes, even heavily secured and properly patched ones. Which one's the more popular web server platform?
In a situation where you're faced with trying to catch a small amount of groupers or a large amount of pihrana by hand or net, which do you go for?
Everyone goes for the easier target, no matter how many of them there are.
They'd stil have a burn rate somewhere in the 3-4 billion range unless they axed all their support and engineering operations (Betcha didn't know they had stuff here in Dalas (Quite a big campus, really)- betcha didn't know they had others elsewhere...).
1 decade does mean it'd take decades, but it's not quite what people think.
Proportionate to their size, they have as much as Apple does. Don't just look at total cash. Look at what type of burn rate they have. People keep talking like that 50-60 billion's a big deal. They could go approximately 5-10 years if they stopped bringing in any cash and all the outstanding stock and options don't get cashed in over that time. If there's a run to dump their stock for any reason or all of the employees happen to cash in all their stock and options, they'll last all of 2-3 unless they have astronomical revenues coming in (a hell of a lot more than they have right now...) because they will have to prop up the share price with that cash warchest in the form of buybacks.
Microsoft's in a more precarious position than most think it is.
The US Government doesn't mandate speed limits or the drunk driving limits. If you were paying attention (or even around...) the US Government had mandated 55MPH as a National Speed Limit and the states that didn't honor that didn't get Highway Funds from the US Federal Government. When the law requiring the same expired, that very month, the speed limits jumped to as high a 75 MPH through relatively uninhabited areas.
Sorry, but you're going to have to come up with something else, say like those highway info signs or the big-brother cams they're putting up in Metropolitan areas, ostensibly to monitor traffic congestion conditions...
...they're using lame excuses to control our lives or they're THAT stupid, not realizing that all this BS they're spouting (i.e. the stupid crap Davis spouted off about...) is just that- BS.
I'm not 100% sure how to fix the situation, or if it's even fixable at this point. Basically, we desperately need to fire the people that voted "YES" on this thing as they're NOT serving the citizenry's best interests, only the government's.
The states typically issue ID's in the same format as driver's licenses- they have varying forms of means of providing the fact that it's an ID, that the state certifies that you're who you claime to be, but that you've not met the requirements for legally operating a vehicle.
Being a woman in the role doesn't excuse poor, inept performance- and Carly's certainly guilty of that. If you're worrying about the fact that she's a woman in the top position of a major corp, you're worrying about the wrong things.
C'mon, Games don't often fail because they use the hardware directly- in fact they don't. They use DirectX in most cases. Just because MS claims that the versions of DX are backwards compatible, doesn't mean that they ARE so. And just to close you off, DOS based games do not count as they weren't Windows games- sorry, no traction there.
Applications don't 100% work- YOUR applications might do that, but not all of them. I can guarantee you with a 100% certainty that that GDI calls for the desktop and for printing are not even close to consistent across Win 95, Win NT4, and Win2K. I can guarantee you that the API interfaces may be "consistent" but what in the hell they do isn't. And there's broken stuff in the API's from Win 3.11 to NT/95, and better yet there's horrifically inconsistent stuff across their API's (There's been three different, utterly and radically incompatible methodologies for thunking in the last decade- and one invented way that I came up with to support some cross version document imaging components back in the 96 timeframe.)
You either have done minimally complex coding or no coding at all- or else you'd not be making these claims you make about the Windows API.
On the other hand, I can expect code made for the major version numbers and properly linked against the generic instead of the specific.so files to work 100% of the time. And, for the large part, as long as the kernel interfaces don't radically change on you, a statically linked app will just simply run. I've got apps from the '95 timeframe that still work fine- having said this, there's newer versions that work better. In fact, I can guarantee you with a 100% certainty that the applications I've written will run on pretty much any distribution to date.
When I can get a perfectly capable, relatively modern Athlon XP+ box for $199 at Fry's that uses decent components, Linux, etc. there is NO reason whatsoever for someone to put up with this crap. But seeing as that they're perfectly happy to spend twice for Windows...well...I can actually see a reason.:->
Um, I believe that the data was encoded in the same manner as the "optimized" format, it's just that now you have to put it at the end in a MIME encapsulated formatting. Zero doesn't factor into this in the first place. Now, concerns of accidentally closing a tag might play into things, but the likelihood of this actually happening is slim to none as the coincidence of "" in a base 64 stream is going to be an astronomical feat. However, I buy into that as a reason (can't have accidental data loss that way...) but to call it "optimized" is really, really counter-intuitive as it's NOT optimal.
Ooookay... Let's go through the problems of this, shall we?
PPC doesn't allow for Win32 codecs. ARM doesn't allow for Win32 codecs. IA64 won't do Win32 codecs very well. AMD64 might do Win32 codecs, but there's likely to be issues as you'd have to compile MPlayer to be a 32-bit only app.
Simply put, MPlayer's NOT the answer for any of this.
Considering that there's a group of the community that runs on PPC hardware (and ARM hardware, etc...) you can't just glibly assume that they can play the stuff with MPlayer. How hard is it to understand that there's a comparable codec/transport framework and there's players that can act as a plugin, etc.?
Ogg Theora's in the same basic class as most of this stuff and there's pretty much at least one player that can act as a plugin on each platform that matters and can have the same situation for the edge case platforms.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm inclined to agree with you on the reason- the problem is that it requires the rule/law to actually DO something productive towards prevention of a problem even before you can consider security through obscurity. Not to mention the fact that just because it's obscured to the public, doesn't mean that the people that ARE obscured couldn't be subborned to reveal the law and any apparent weaknesses. In the case of the "must show ID" regulation (it's NOT a law, mind...) the possession of an ID that maps to the alleged identity for the tickets and boarding passes does NOT mean in any way, shape, or form that the ID is even valid. Bam, there goes the reason for the regulation right there- it doesn't do anything useful against even the least determined attacker. It'd not have prevented or deterred 9/11. It won't prevent or deter another similar attack. So, why in the hell have it in the first place?
If you're gunning for something like learning by rote, then yes, the library and Internet might be a good replacement for schools. That part, unfortunately, won't teach anyone to think for themselves (sadly, neither does the public and most of the other "High Schools"...). The elementary schools can't really teach more than the basics, because most people aren't quite ready for the needed teaching for reasoning things out.
So, what do you do? You try to fix the High School level teaching to emphasise less rote learning and more reasoning education. By this, I don't mean brainwashing the kids to think a certain way- hell, they're doing that right now in the public schools. I mean that they should be teaching them how to learn on their own (sorry, the basics alone won't get you there...) and to be able to develop knowlege without just memorizing things.
Most of those drivers happen to be written by the hardware vendors. How can MS extinguish here? By not allowing access to driver development info?
Here's a clue for Johnny-boy: They pretty much already do this stupidity and you can bet your bottom dollar that if it came to be known with real evidence that they've arranged this, there'd be another anti-trust suit filed against them in most of the G8 at that point. 'sides, many of the drivers are reverse engineered anyway.
You know, I don't know why I'm even bothering- John's just another talking head that practically nobody listens to because he doesn't have the foggiest about what he's talking about most of the time.
A fox in the henhouse is one thing.
Putting it in charge of it is a completely different ballgame.
If you can't tell the difference, I suggest you leave off posting because you're not smart enough for it.
The stated goal is to prevent them. One can largely prevent them from happing by raising the bar on the overall cost to achive their goals so that they'll pick easier targets other than the US. What the DHS is currently doing doesn't even touch on making soft targets hard ones. And they seem to be overly focused on things that plain flat don't matter in the overall scheme of things. It's disturbing to say the least that they're worrying about a "virtual border" and pissing away 2 billion on this boondoggle that won't do anything to deter attacks. What would happen if they, say struck at an oil refinery instead- pretty damn spectacular and high overall payoff for a low cost to them right at the moment- and these places tend to have security like the Keystone Kops. You don't see the DHS worrying about those sorts of things right at them moment.
Stallman working for the Patent Office would be preventing stupid software and business process Patents- it wouldn't be preventing Patents in general.
The better analogies would be putting a fox in charge of the henhouse or of putting the wolf to shepherding the sheep- if you're talking about the Spyware people in charge of privacy and private information security.
Isn't this like putting a fox in charge of the security for a henhouse?
Honestly... DHS doesn't need to be worrying about this sort of tripe- they've got bigger fish to fry. Why in the HELL are they bothering with this when the things they're doing right at the moment wouldn't have done a damn thing to prevent 9/11 from occuring and wouldn't prevent a repeat?
Don't forget this business based off of really, really sucking.
I move to call him an "asswipe", myself...
...is that the tards at Ultracade don't understand that the original MAME people can successfully sue their asses over the Trademark and successfully get it and court costs. It happened with Linux, it can most definitely happen in this case.
They wasted the filing fees and they've opened themselves to ridicule and agony that they just didn't have to dish out to themselves.
He's probably not being so bold as to say that exact thing. However, I can point to one instance of bad science that they keep perpetuating to the whole world's detriment. Freon. R-12 is a heavier than air compound, alleged to damage the Ozone layer. Mount Penitubo pumped more Chlorine into the upper atmosphere than we ever might have with Freons and in an even more reactive form that should have wiped the Ozone layer completely out. Didn't happen did it. Now, has anyone thought about that "ozone hole" in Antartica? It seems to build back up towards the end of the sunny season there (There's a clue there boys and girls...)- and seems to ebb down (as in reappear...) during the nighttime season. Clue for you all: Ozone is produced by UV irradiation, something that doesn't happen during nighttime and the poles are subjected to a six month night!
This is not to say that Freons aren't a problem- but they're definitely NOT the issue everyone made them out to be. And nobody will go back through and re-evaluate the conclusions because "everyone knows Freons are the culprits"... Bad science through and through.
Now, what does this all have to do with globval warming? Loads. The same kinds of stupid things are being done with this stuff.
How do you know the species "suffering" aren't due to a host of other factors? Got proof?
How do you know that the ice cap melting and glaciers going away isn't just part of a cycle? There's tons of evidence there were times in this planet's life that there pretty much wasn't ice caps or glaciers.
The upturn in temperatures: To the best of my knowlege most of the measurements have been inside of urban areas. What does Concrete and Asphalt do with thermal energy? Holds it in, sort of like a storage battery. This allows more thermal energy to be applied to an area and be hotter. Cities are notoriously hotter than the countryside- by as much as 15 or so degrees except in desert areas where there's as much sand and stone (also thermal storage batteries) as there is the other about.
Unless a study accounts for this, it's data is so horribly flawed to be effectively useless - it needs to be redone before anyone can rely on it as a basis for any statement than "Cities are hotter now than they were in the past because they got larger and have lots more concrete and asphalt present.".
If you base your arguments on flawed data you don't really HAVE one.
Which is all well and good. However, one should note that it's decidedly NOT private as it was publicly accessable to anyone that wanted to download upates and all up until recently. I know, I've hit it many times with a Linux browser to snag updates for other people- which IS a legit activity even to Microsoft as the people in question couldn't get to the site for varying reasons and I was acting on their behalf.
This is a bad idea for Microsoft. Really, it is.
...I'd be surprised if it wasn't spyware free in 12 months.
Keep in mind that you're claiming the "popularity" argument here. A quck comparison between IIS and Apache will show that most of the Website defacements and exploits seem to be on IIS boxes, even heavily secured and properly patched ones. Which one's the more popular web server platform?
In a situation where you're faced with trying to catch a small amount of groupers or a large amount of pihrana by hand or net, which do you go for?
Everyone goes for the easier target, no matter how many of them there are.
They'd stil have a burn rate somewhere in the 3-4 billion range unless they axed all their support and engineering operations (Betcha didn't know they had stuff here in Dalas (Quite a big campus, really)- betcha didn't know they had others elsewhere...).
1 decade does mean it'd take decades, but it's not quite what people think.
Proportionate to their size, they have as much as Apple does. Don't just look at total cash. Look at what type of burn rate they have. People keep talking like that 50-60 billion's a big deal. They could go approximately 5-10 years if they stopped bringing in any cash and all the outstanding stock and options don't get cashed in over that time. If there's a run to dump their stock for any reason or all of the employees happen to cash in all their stock and options, they'll last all of 2-3 unless they have astronomical revenues coming in (a hell of a lot more than they have right now...) because they will have to prop up the share price with that cash warchest in the form of buybacks.
Microsoft's in a more precarious position than most think it is.
The US Government doesn't mandate speed limits or the drunk driving limits. If you were paying attention (or even around...) the US Government had mandated 55MPH as a National Speed Limit and the states that didn't honor that didn't get Highway Funds from the US Federal Government. When the law requiring the same expired, that very month, the speed limits jumped to as high a 75 MPH through relatively uninhabited areas.
Sorry, but you're going to have to come up with something else, say like those highway info signs or the big-brother cams they're putting up in Metropolitan areas, ostensibly to monitor traffic congestion conditions...
...they're using lame excuses to control our lives or they're THAT stupid, not realizing that all this BS they're spouting (i.e. the stupid crap Davis spouted off about...) is just that- BS.
I'm not 100% sure how to fix the situation, or if it's even fixable at this point. Basically, we desperately need to fire the people that voted "YES" on this thing as they're NOT serving the citizenry's best interests, only the government's.
The states typically issue ID's in the same format as driver's licenses- they have varying forms of means of providing the fact that it's an ID, that the state certifies that you're who you claime to be, but that you've not met the requirements for legally operating a vehicle.
Being a woman in the role doesn't excuse poor, inept performance- and Carly's certainly guilty of that. If you're worrying about the fact that she's a woman in the top position of a major corp, you're worrying about the wrong things.
I call him and his lieutenants that all the time.
C'mon, Games don't often fail because they use the hardware directly- in fact they don't. They use DirectX in most cases. Just because MS claims that the versions of DX are backwards compatible, doesn't mean that they ARE so. And just to close you off, DOS based games do not count as they weren't Windows games- sorry, no traction there.
.so files to work 100% of the time. And, for the large part, as long as the kernel interfaces don't radically change on you, a statically linked app will just simply run. I've got apps from the '95 timeframe that still work fine- having said this, there's newer versions that work better. In fact, I can guarantee you with a 100% certainty that the applications I've written will run on pretty much any distribution to date.
Applications don't 100% work- YOUR applications might do that, but not all of them. I can guarantee you with a 100% certainty that that GDI calls for the desktop and for printing are not even close to consistent across Win 95, Win NT4, and Win2K. I can guarantee you that the API interfaces may be "consistent" but what in the hell they do isn't. And there's broken stuff in the API's from Win 3.11 to NT/95, and better yet there's horrifically inconsistent stuff across their API's (There's been three different, utterly and radically incompatible methodologies for thunking in the last decade- and one invented way that I came up with to support some cross version document imaging components back in the 96 timeframe.)
You either have done minimally complex coding or no coding at all- or else you'd not be making these claims you make about the Windows API.
On the other hand, I can expect code made for the major version numbers and properly linked against the generic instead of the specific
When I can get a perfectly capable, relatively modern Athlon XP+ box for $199 at Fry's that uses decent components, Linux, etc. there is NO reason whatsoever for someone to put up with this crap. But seeing as that they're perfectly happy to spend twice for Windows...well...I can actually see a reason. :->
Um, I believe that the data was encoded in the same manner as the "optimized" format, it's just that now you have to put it at the end in a MIME encapsulated formatting. Zero doesn't factor into this in the first place. Now, concerns of accidentally closing a tag might play into things, but the likelihood of this actually happening is slim to none as the coincidence of "" in a base 64 stream is going to be an astronomical feat. However, I buy into that as a reason (can't have accidental data loss that way...) but to call it "optimized" is really, really counter-intuitive as it's NOT optimal.
Ooookay... Let's go through the problems of this, shall we?
PPC doesn't allow for Win32 codecs.
ARM doesn't allow for Win32 codecs.
IA64 won't do Win32 codecs very well.
AMD64 might do Win32 codecs, but there's likely to be issues as you'd have to compile MPlayer to be a 32-bit only app.
Simply put, MPlayer's NOT the answer for any of this.
Considering that there's a group of the community that runs on PPC hardware (and ARM hardware, etc...) you can't just glibly assume that they can play the stuff with MPlayer. How hard is it to understand that there's a comparable codec/transport framework and there's players that can act as a plugin, etc.?
Ogg Theora's in the same basic class as most of this stuff and there's pretty much at least one player that can act as a plugin on each platform that matters and can have the same situation for the edge case platforms.