this just doesn't completely jive. I thought that Microsoft was a big propenent of screwing the little guy over
Microsoft would be delighted with this proposal if they could control it. Consider that they might have been told (informally) that it's politically untenable for them to be allowed to run the proposed scheme (with the juicy big monopoly protection that brings).
you would trust The East Bumblefuck County sheriff to work with the NY state police to find someone related to the attack on the WTC
As opposed to how many found by the FBI? YES I'd rather trust locally accountable law enforcement to do this. I'd assume that they were grown ups. And I'd give them the FBI's budget.
Re:Centralized network means single point of failu
on
FBI Wants to Tap The Net
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
It's unthinkable that terrorists would dare to target such a potent symbol of US power and authority.
No... wait... that was before September 11th.
This proposal is vile and ahborent in moral, technical and security terms. Three for three.
Why would you need to do that? The idea is just to route every packet through a couple of points, then you look for packets to or from a.b.c.d.
It seems achievable (or at least sellable to a gullible legislature). The funny ha ha is that it introduces insane vulnerabilities into the 'net. Picture the effect of taking out one of these monster router farms.
If the FBI were to have to crack even 2-5% of the billions of packets
If even 2-5% of active voters wrote to their elected representatives telling them to knock this on the head, it would get stopped and stopped hard. That might be a more achievable goal.
Re:Interesting comment in related news...
on
Microsoft's Future
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· Score: 0, Offtopic
OK, I'm open to persuasion. The people who we are killing in Afghanistan right now, military, paramilitary and civilian, how will we convince their grieving friends and relatives not to retaliate in the months and years and generations to come?
Will we do it by winning their hearts and minds? If so, how? When a child's first contact with the USA is watching his mother being blown to pieces by a mis-targetted bomb, how are you going to persuade him not to hate you? "Sorry, kid." isn't going to cut it, not that we will ever apologise for anything we do in a Just Cause. When we are killing either innocent civilians, or (in their own minds) soldiers fighting a holy war, how do we persuade their relatives that the US really is the good guy? Repeated assertion won't do it. We are the Great Satan, remember, and - from the point of view of ground zero, with no access to independent news sources - we're certainly acting like it right now.
OK, let's posit that if we mounted only very surgical strikes to kill or capture only those who actually attack or threaten us, we could avoid retaliation (I don't believe this, but clearly you do). Do you honestly think that we will do that? That we would risk one US serviceman's life if the alternative is dropping another few hundren tons of bombs? We show no sign of that so far. If our aim was actually to take out Osama bin Laden then we'd have smothered Afghanistan not with bombs but with humanitarian aid, then we'd have watched and waited, patiently, patiently, then when bin Laden emerged from his cave, we'd have blown the evil motherfucker's nuts off and brought his head home in a bag. We'll probably still do that, but in the mean time, we've chosen to kill (directly and indirectly) of a lot of people who weren't our enemies before the bombs started falling and the food convoys stopped rolling.
Your argument that we can make a difference by smashing the organisations is valid. But it doesn't take a big organisation or a lot of people to commit an appalling number of murders. Timothy McVeigh got 168 all by himself. And McVeigh also highlights the other problem with the "kill 'em all" argument. Who are "they"? How do you spot "them"? How deep do you cut to excise them? How hard do you crack down on anyone who disagrees with the party line, and how many McVeigh's do you create for every Waco, how many bin Laden's for every Just Cause? How do we create fewer fanatics by using more force?
I do think that we can win the "War on Terrorism". I think that we can make a great start by not projecting military power all across the world, and by not killing civilans through sanctions. We can do it by not using land mines, or cluster bomblets that linger and kill and maim civilians for years, and by not using depleted uranium rounds that cause cancer and birth defects. Basically, I think we can win by doing exactly the opposite of what we are doing right now.
I'm not naive enough to think that we can fix things overnight. It's taken the British government and the IRA 85 years to reach the stage of (today!) agreeing not to be such dicks, and to stop killing each other. But it can be done, if we have the courage, and the fortitude, and the love of liberty and freedom for all that you bandy so lightly. It will mean acknowledging that while our military actions have been justifiable, our punishment of civilian populations is wrong, and that we are sorry. And by "we" I mean us as represented by the Executive. Say it with us, George: "We don't like having done to us as we have done unto others. We've learned our lesson, and we're sorry for being such dicks."
Here's the core of my argument; the US government (not the US people, damn it!) are stone cold evil motherfuckers. They (not you, not we, but they) kill and oppress civilians both domestic and foreign, and they are hated and feared for it. Convince me that the fear can be escalated faster than the hatred, because right now, I can't see any sign of us saying "Hey! Wouldn't it be neat if people hated us less? How could we achieve that?"
Have you read the list yourself? There's nothing there that anyone at "the retail / desktop" level is going to care about
My point is that there is a list (and a README). As a card carrying nerd, I want to know this stuff, but I can also see that it hurts GNU/Linux versus Windows. I never used to care, but WinXP really pisses me off and I'd love to see M$ get reamed right now.
So I'm still waiting hopefully for a true one-button and no readme GNU/Linux install. No manuals, no "what you need to know about LILO", no mention even of disc partitions or X desktop flavours, or the consequences of getting your refresh rate wrong, just put in the CD, and click "Damn the torpedoes".
OK, you and I wouldn't use that sort of installer, but you and I aren't who GNU/Linux needs to appeal to now. Our hearts and minds are already won.
I also collected some used computer parts in the US [...] Most of them were 486 DX2 models and some Pentium I models, with Window 95 and Microsoft Office 97
Better send a little extra for their legal fund, or an external CD-ROM drive and a Linux distro.
The sad thing is, this isn't levity. We know M$'s track record on this issue.:(
Re:don't understand the need for constant upgradin
on
Red Hat 7.2 Released
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· Score: 2
I'm still running 6.2 w/ any patches that concern me. What's the big deal?
That's a good question. I still run one machine at home with Win95 first edition plus a shitload of patches (all backed to CD). Friends scoff, but when I ask them what the functional difference is between my install and WinME (aka Win95 5th Edition), they don't generally have a convincing answer.
I have to agree with the "what's the big deal?" sentiment. Is there some reason why we turn every release of every open source OS distro into a big event (or at least a big discussion)?
Honest question: who is this announcement aimed at? The people who are likely to upgrade already know. Those who aren't likely to upgrade don't really care. Casual/non nerd buyers will grab whatever the latest version is off of a shelf.
I can't in all honesty see why this is any more newsworthy than any of the Win95 evolutions. Instead of modding me as a troll, can you consider explaining to my poor addled brain why this announcement will surprise or excite anyone?
Red Hat 7.2 isn't quite a knife in the heart of Windows yet. However, we can't help but feel that it will certainly nick a major artery.
Uh, wait. Without wishing to troll, have you read the list of "things you should know" above? At the retail / desktop/ even OEM level, this is not what people want to hear. They want to hear "Put the CD in the drive. Switch on the machine. Select your language and time zone. Wait."
I think that WinXP has goofed big time with its registration requirements. Now is a great opportunity for GNU/Linux distros to make a big play for the desktop, but they'll gain share only by being idiot proof, because (let's be honest) if we're talking about "knifing the heart" of the Windows market, we're really talking about people who are terrified of anything that comes with a README.
Re:The huge difference between the two
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 1
But did you know that IBM still puts out more patents than any other corporation in the world (per year)? They're still a company that innovates.
Uh... what's the connection between those two sentences? I'm not disagreeing with your insightful post, but let's be careful about equating volume of patents with innovation./p>
Re:Interesting comment in related news...
on
Microsoft's Future
·
· Score: 3, Troll
Microsoft is also gearing up for battle against foes as diverse as open-source software
Ah, the War on Open Source. About as winnable as the War on Terror, or War on Drugs, I'd suggest.
How about when hackers stole some of the source code from Microsoft?
To what are you referring? I know of nothing of the sort.
Microsoft got infected with the QAZ notepad virus (as did my own company) which installs a backdoor on the compromised machine. However, it doesn't actively tunnel out through firewalls, so it's vanishingly unlikely that any machine on the M$ LAN was hit. For the source to have been compromised, it would have had to have been on an employee's home machine, and that employee would have had to not be running a firewall.
It's possible that the source was ripped from an M$ machine, but there are softer targets out there;.edu's and.mil's can get access to M$ source, for example.
Re:Rubbish. Ignore this foolish troll.
on
Coder or Architect?
·
· Score: 1, Troll
never let the prejudices such as those stated by this troll to sway your judgment
Ah, the irrational and instinctive belitting of a person who makes a valid point that you disagree with. I'd say you're ready for management.
Almost every 2nd person on the public transport in London is listening to a MD player
Mmm, to balance this view, I see a mix of CD/MD/MP3 players, a smaller selection of MD in shops and online (only the current chart), and my friends who use MD only listen to compilations copied from CD to blank media.
It's true that MD is popular in the UK, but it's still second fiddle to CD. Sure, it's better than CD, but anyone who upgraded to MD is probably going to go to MP3 players (as my MD using chums have already done) unless they've got a monster MD collection.
You're not going to find many places in Europe that are sympathetic to Osama bin Laden either
The relevance to a discussion about the USA being...?
Oh, wait, I forgot: This is a war of good against evil. bin Laden is clearly evil, but if you think that immediately qualifies the USA as the good guys, then you've been watching too many 1930's cowboy flicks. This is evil against evil.
Incidentally, the Welsh National Party (Welsh pride, not anti-Welsh hatred) Plaid Cymru has unequivocably denounced the UK participation in military action in Afghanistan. Don't judge all of Europe based on Mr Tony Blair's sycophantic fawning and posturing.
Britney Spears. And who's going to remember her in 20 months, let alone 20 years?;-) Other than that, a not implausible scenario. Gave me the shivers, anyway.
Some of our most valuable guys are borderline insane. These are the guys you put on the graphics engine behind a well-defined interface, and with a video game, these are the guys you turn loose on optimization toward the end of the project
Ah, the heady world of games development. I agree that (original) games development absolutely requires incredibly talented people. You can't just throw a horde of so-so hackers at it and hope that they'll muddle through. Also, if you're having discussions about how you should be working, you're already screwed. Games programmers either produce the goods then burn out, or fail to produce the goods, then burn out.
On the other hand... I've seen games "gurus" that almost exactly mirror the story above. They shuffle from job to job, badly dressed socially incompetent and spouting the correct arcane incantations. You can't give them a technical interview, because if you knew how to do the stuff they (apparently) know, you wouldn't need them. Then as the days and weeks go by, the awful realisation dawns that they are fuckwits. They probably could do the work, but they're waiting, always waiting, for you to get the code to a stage where they can "make a difference". They'll tell you where you're going wrong, but they won't dirty their hand making it right. Oh, if you want tiny toy programs that demonstrate how to solve a completely different problem, these guys are great.
The trouble is that it's only really possible to tell the genius from the goon by looking at their results. And by the time you realise that you're not going to get any results, you're screwed, because you needed them to be a genius.
God damn, but I miss the mix of fun and loathing that is games development.;-)
Allow me a measured retort: you're a fuckwit. I'd clarify, but I'm sure you'd delight in picking holes in the semantics of any expounded argument, while ignoring the clear veracity of it.
Let us not forget that these will be distributed in the land of conformity and social obligation [...] this would not work in the U.S., but it just might in Nippon
That's a pretty piece of ethnocentricity you're peddling there. Got any evidence to back that up, or are you just reenforcing comfortable US-A-OK stereotypes?
Have a look at consume.net to see a practical start on encouraging wireless neighbourhood peering through boosted 802.11b antennae in the UK. They host a database of active and potential nodes, so you can get an idea of whether you'll have anybody to peer with when you put your pole up.
consume.net is aimed more at connecting people over hundreds or thousands rather than tens of metres, and the recommended kit reflects that at £500/$750. But once you've got your mighty 802.11b antenna and lightning rod up, there's nothing to stop you talking to your neighbours on their wimpy little PCMCIA cards as well.
What Dershowitz doesn't get, surprisingly, is that they never ask us to give up much on any particular occasion, but it adds up to a great deal over time
Yup. If you drop a frog in a pan of hot water, it will jump out. Put it in cool water, then heat it up very slowly, and it will sit there until it cooks.
I'd conjecture that if you put a lot of frogs in cool water and heat it up, then most of them would sit there croaking "Well, sure, it feels a little warmer, but not much more than the last time I thought about it." The frog that actually wants to be cooler is written off a paranoid subversive. Warmth is progress, you see. It kills parasites. Warmth is security.
Slashdot Mirror
Who provides the bigger campaign contributions, and who provides them in small unmarked non-sequential notes?
Microsoft would be delighted with this proposal if they could control it. Consider that they might have been told (informally) that it's politically untenable for them to be allowed to run the proposed scheme (with the juicy big monopoly protection that brings).
Make more sense now?
As opposed to how many found by the FBI? YES I'd rather trust locally accountable law enforcement to do this. I'd assume that they were grown ups. And I'd give them the FBI's budget.
It's unthinkable that terrorists would dare to target such a potent symbol of US power and authority.
No... wait... that was before September 11th.
This proposal is vile and ahborent in moral, technical and security terms. Three for three.
Why would you need to do that? The idea is just to route every packet through a couple of points, then you look for packets to or from a.b.c.d.
It seems achievable (or at least sellable to a gullible legislature). The funny ha ha is that it introduces insane vulnerabilities into the 'net. Picture the effect of taking out one of these monster router farms.
If even 2-5% of active voters wrote to their elected representatives telling them to knock this on the head, it would get stopped and stopped hard. That might be a more achievable goal.
OK, I'm open to persuasion. The people who we are killing in Afghanistan right now, military, paramilitary and civilian, how will we convince their grieving friends and relatives not to retaliate in the months and years and generations to come?
Will we do it by winning their hearts and minds? If so, how? When a child's first contact with the USA is watching his mother being blown to pieces by a mis-targetted bomb, how are you going to persuade him not to hate you? "Sorry, kid." isn't going to cut it, not that we will ever apologise for anything we do in a Just Cause. When we are killing either innocent civilians, or (in their own minds) soldiers fighting a holy war, how do we persuade their relatives that the US really is the good guy? Repeated assertion won't do it. We are the Great Satan, remember, and - from the point of view of ground zero, with no access to independent news sources - we're certainly acting like it right now.
OK, let's posit that if we mounted only very surgical strikes to kill or capture only those who actually attack or threaten us, we could avoid retaliation (I don't believe this, but clearly you do). Do you honestly think that we will do that? That we would risk one US serviceman's life if the alternative is dropping another few hundren tons of bombs? We show no sign of that so far. If our aim was actually to take out Osama bin Laden then we'd have smothered Afghanistan not with bombs but with humanitarian aid, then we'd have watched and waited, patiently, patiently, then when bin Laden emerged from his cave, we'd have blown the evil motherfucker's nuts off and brought his head home in a bag. We'll probably still do that, but in the mean time, we've chosen to kill (directly and indirectly) of a lot of people who weren't our enemies before the bombs started falling and the food convoys stopped rolling.
Your argument that we can make a difference by smashing the organisations is valid. But it doesn't take a big organisation or a lot of people to commit an appalling number of murders. Timothy McVeigh got 168 all by himself. And McVeigh also highlights the other problem with the "kill 'em all" argument. Who are "they"? How do you spot "them"? How deep do you cut to excise them? How hard do you crack down on anyone who disagrees with the party line, and how many McVeigh's do you create for every Waco, how many bin Laden's for every Just Cause? How do we create fewer fanatics by using more force?
I do think that we can win the "War on Terrorism". I think that we can make a great start by not projecting military power all across the world, and by not killing civilans through sanctions. We can do it by not using land mines, or cluster bomblets that linger and kill and maim civilians for years, and by not using depleted uranium rounds that cause cancer and birth defects. Basically, I think we can win by doing exactly the opposite of what we are doing right now.
I'm not naive enough to think that we can fix things overnight. It's taken the British government and the IRA 85 years to reach the stage of (today!) agreeing not to be such dicks, and to stop killing each other. But it can be done, if we have the courage, and the fortitude, and the love of liberty and freedom for all that you bandy so lightly. It will mean acknowledging that while our military actions have been justifiable, our punishment of civilian populations is wrong, and that we are sorry. And by "we" I mean us as represented by the Executive. Say it with us, George: "We don't like having done to us as we have done unto others. We've learned our lesson, and we're sorry for being such dicks."
Here's the core of my argument; the US government (not the US people, damn it!) are stone cold evil motherfuckers. They (not you, not we, but they) kill and oppress civilians both domestic and foreign, and they are hated and feared for it. Convince me that the fear can be escalated faster than the hatred, because right now, I can't see any sign of us saying "Hey! Wouldn't it be neat if people hated us less? How could we achieve that?"
My point is that there is a list (and a README). As a card carrying nerd, I want to know this stuff, but I can also see that it hurts GNU/Linux versus Windows. I never used to care, but WinXP really pisses me off and I'd love to see M$ get reamed right now.
So I'm still waiting hopefully for a true one-button and no readme GNU/Linux install. No manuals, no "what you need to know about LILO", no mention even of disc partitions or X desktop flavours, or the consequences of getting your refresh rate wrong, just put in the CD, and click "Damn the torpedoes".
OK, you and I wouldn't use that sort of installer, but you and I aren't who GNU/Linux needs to appeal to now. Our hearts and minds are already won.
Better send a little extra for their legal fund, or an external CD-ROM drive and a Linux distro.
The sad thing is, this isn't levity. We know M$'s track record on this issue. :(
That's a good question. I still run one machine at home with Win95 first edition plus a shitload of patches (all backed to CD). Friends scoff, but when I ask them what the functional difference is between my install and WinME (aka Win95 5th Edition), they don't generally have a convincing answer.
I have to agree with the "what's the big deal?" sentiment. Is there some reason why we turn every release of every open source OS distro into a big event (or at least a big discussion)?
Honest question: who is this announcement aimed at? The people who are likely to upgrade already know. Those who aren't likely to upgrade don't really care. Casual/non nerd buyers will grab whatever the latest version is off of a shelf.
I can't in all honesty see why this is any more newsworthy than any of the Win95 evolutions. Instead of modding me as a troll, can you consider explaining to my poor addled brain why this announcement will surprise or excite anyone?
Uh, wait. Without wishing to troll, have you read the list of "things you should know" above? At the retail / desktop/ even OEM level, this is not what people want to hear. They want to hear "Put the CD in the drive. Switch on the machine. Select your language and time zone. Wait."
I think that WinXP has goofed big time with its registration requirements. Now is a great opportunity for GNU/Linux distros to make a big play for the desktop, but they'll gain share only by being idiot proof, because (let's be honest) if we're talking about "knifing the heart" of the Windows market, we're really talking about people who are terrified of anything that comes with a README.
Uh... what's the connection between those two sentences? I'm not disagreeing with your insightful post, but let's be careful about equating volume of patents with innovation./p>
Ah, the War on Open Source. About as winnable as the War on Terror, or War on Drugs, I'd suggest.
- How about when hackers stole some of the source code from Microsoft?
To what are you referring? I know of nothing of the sort.Microsoft got infected with the QAZ notepad virus (as did my own company) which installs a backdoor on the compromised machine. However, it doesn't actively tunnel out through firewalls, so it's vanishingly unlikely that any machine on the M$ LAN was hit. For the source to have been compromised, it would have had to have been on an employee's home machine, and that employee would have had to not be running a firewall.
It's possible that the source was ripped from an M$ machine, but there are softer targets out there; .edu's and .mil's can get access to M$ source, for example.
Ah, the irrational and instinctive belitting of a person who makes a valid point that you disagree with. I'd say you're ready for management.
This is a troll. Do you see the difference?
Mmm, to balance this view, I see a mix of CD/MD/MP3 players, a smaller selection of MD in shops and online (only the current chart), and my friends who use MD only listen to compilations copied from CD to blank media.
It's true that MD is popular in the UK, but it's still second fiddle to CD. Sure, it's better than CD, but anyone who upgraded to MD is probably going to go to MP3 players (as my MD using chums have already done) unless they've got a monster MD collection.
Isn't all that foam and nylon a fire hazard in a crowded theatre? ;-)
I shouldn't tweak though; no doubt some of my lot will be going in kit. But I'll be pecked to death by crebain before I call it "garb". ;-p
The relevance to a discussion about the USA being...?
Oh, wait, I forgot: This is a war of good against evil. bin Laden is clearly evil, but if you think that immediately qualifies the USA as the good guys, then you've been watching too many 1930's cowboy flicks. This is evil against evil.
Incidentally, the Welsh National Party (Welsh pride, not anti-Welsh hatred) Plaid Cymru has unequivocably denounced the UK participation in military action in Afghanistan. Don't judge all of Europe based on Mr Tony Blair's sycophantic fawning and posturing.
Did someone get out of bed the wrong side this morning? It's a silly, funny, throwaway article. Join in the fun!
Britney Spears. And who's going to remember her in 20 months, let alone 20 years? ;-) Other than that, a not implausible scenario. Gave me the shivers, anyway.
Ah, the heady world of games development. I agree that (original) games development absolutely requires incredibly talented people. You can't just throw a horde of so-so hackers at it and hope that they'll muddle through. Also, if you're having discussions about how you should be working, you're already screwed. Games programmers either produce the goods then burn out, or fail to produce the goods, then burn out.
On the other hand... I've seen games "gurus" that almost exactly mirror the story above. They shuffle from job to job, badly dressed socially incompetent and spouting the correct arcane incantations. You can't give them a technical interview, because if you knew how to do the stuff they (apparently) know, you wouldn't need them. Then as the days and weeks go by, the awful realisation dawns that they are fuckwits. They probably could do the work, but they're waiting, always waiting, for you to get the code to a stage where they can "make a difference". They'll tell you where you're going wrong, but they won't dirty their hand making it right. Oh, if you want tiny toy programs that demonstrate how to solve a completely different problem, these guys are great.
The trouble is that it's only really possible to tell the genius from the goon by looking at their results. And by the time you realise that you're not going to get any results, you're screwed, because you needed them to be a genius.
God damn, but I miss the mix of fun and loathing that is games development. ;-)
Allow me a measured retort: you're a fuckwit. I'd clarify, but I'm sure you'd delight in picking holes in the semantics of any expounded argument, while ignoring the clear veracity of it.
That's a pretty piece of ethnocentricity you're peddling there. Got any evidence to back that up, or are you just reenforcing comfortable US-A-OK stereotypes?
Have a look at consume.net to see a practical start on encouraging wireless neighbourhood peering through boosted 802.11b antennae in the UK. They host a database of active and potential nodes, so you can get an idea of whether you'll have anybody to peer with when you put your pole up.
consume.net is aimed more at connecting people over hundreds or thousands rather than tens of metres, and the recommended kit reflects that at £500/$750. But once you've got your mighty 802.11b antenna and lightning rod up, there's nothing to stop you talking to your neighbours on their wimpy little PCMCIA cards as well.
Yup. If you drop a frog in a pan of hot water, it will jump out. Put it in cool water, then heat it up very slowly, and it will sit there until it cooks.
I'd conjecture that if you put a lot of frogs in cool water and heat it up, then most of them would sit there croaking "Well, sure, it feels a little warmer, but not much more than the last time I thought about it." The frog that actually wants to be cooler is written off a paranoid subversive. Warmth is progress, you see. It kills parasites. Warmth is security.