> You obviously have a very high self-worth to think...
Nah. What this sounds like is that they'll set up affiliates of all the phone companies and atuomatically get "pen registers" of all call made by everyone. These files will be analyzed by software that looks for interesting patterns. The customers that the software flags as "interesting" will then be examined in more detail.
All of it legal; all without any pesky court orders.
This means that now all any government agency needs to do is set up a dummy corporation that's an "affiliate", and my phone company will give them unlimited access to all the data about me.
Ya gotta admit, it's a neat end run around the laws that restrict government surveillance.
Oh, well, I suppose as a known computer programmer, I'm already on all the lists of suspected terrorists.
One thing that keeps putting me off from seriously thinking about OS-X is that, wandering around Apple's web site, I see lots of iCandy touting all these entertaining apps, but I don't see much mention of lots of things that, as a linux/unix programmer, I'm accustomed to having.
So, do they just use gcc, or does it come with the box? I can't tell. Do they include perl, tcl/tk, and python? I'd feel crippled without all of these. Do they include xterm, or do I have to use their clumsy "user friendly" terminal emulator?
Perhaps more to the point; is there some place at apple.com that I can go to find answers to this sort of question? Asking on/. is fun and probably even entertaining, but it's not an efficient way to get answers to such questions.
In the past, I've generally avoided Macs, because, well, I'm a programmer. A computer is something that I can program. Macs traditionally aren't computers; they are appliances for non-programmers.
Macs have not only lacked tools for programmers, but they've charged you a lot to get a development package. (And the results only run on a Mac.) Linux comes with lots of fancy - and portable - programming tools, so a programmer can jump right in and be productive without putting out big bucks for a "development" package.
So where can I read a list of the normal unix things that I'll find on OS-X?
You may be right; I've never seen what I'd call reliable statistics about online ordering or online banking. I suspect that you can't get reliable statistics because "that's proprietary".
And, I suppose, the main effect of anti-encryption laws will be to make it easy for ISPs to spy on both sorts of commercial traffic. All it would take would be a few bribes to the right person in your local ISP, and you could get the credit card or bank account numbers of all their customers.
Of course, considering some of the recent financial scandals in the US, it might not be long before we have anti-cryptography laws passed to that this sort of interception is possible. I wonder how much it would cost per senator to make commercial encryption illegal?
The main way that most people use encryption is when they order something from a web site, and the traffic is encrypted to protect credit-card numbers. I've been wondering how well the various restrictive governments police this.
Consider that most users aren't even really aware that they are encrypting their internet traffic. It's done by behind-the-scene transactions between their browser and the remote web site. The user never invokes any encryption software, and never sees the keys.
Will we eventually see cases where a poor baffled user is arrested and charged with illegal encryption, when what they really did was order a pair of socks from llbean.com?
Of course, sensible users of browsers will have turned off javascript and all other scripting tools.
Ya gotta be really innocent to allow random strangers to run code on your machine.
Yeah, it's true that some web pages won't work without javascript or vbscript. But do you really want such pages running on your machine? Those are exactly the sites that you should be blocking.
Also, there are a number of cases of "mediaeval" being converted to "mediareview". So it's not just the medical review people who are affected by this, but also anyone reviewing the media.
I wonder if Senator Hollings or the RIAA have heard about this?
Also, do you think we could get Yahoo classified as terrorists for hacking the contents of email messages with medical effects? Note that some of these effects will be long-term (chronic), due to the thousands of web pages that are already infected.
> 've blocked images from Slashdot. There's not an ad in sight.
Blocking ads is pretty easy when you're doing a lot of work from one machine. It's not as easy when you find yourself working on a motley collection of machines scattered around the landscape, with God knows what configured into the gateways and firewalls. It's also not easy when you don't have (and don't want) root permission on a lot of those machines.
> The only way the typical/.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift.
Oh, I dunno. Some time back, a friend asked me to take care of his pair of cockatiels while he was away for a few weeks. It turned out that they came with five chicks that were just fledging. At around 80-90 grams, they weren't at all hard to pick up. One of them is now living with me full time. She's a real cutie.
Well, there's plenty of precedent for this. For example, I'm typing this into a mozilla browser window. Now, mozilla is Open Source, but this page and nearly every other has an ad at the top.
> hardest thing for scientists to admit is that we simply don't know, even when that's the honest answer...
On the contrary, scientists admit this all the time. It just that they express it in slightly different words.
Some time back, I saw the advice that the most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that start with "... more research is needed..."
Scientists make their living pointing out that there are many things that we don't yet know, and asking funding agencies to pay them to learn about some of those things.
NPR just had an interview with them, too. Their main point seems to be that there is a serious lack of scientific research on the subject. The US government guidelines historically were based on little scientific evidence, and more on the political power of various agricultural organizations. People voice opinions loudly, but they don't fund the research.
So, yes, it's true that they weren't particularly supportive of Atkins' theories. They weren't supportive of anybody's theories. They were calling for actual scientific studies of the question.
I suspect that one of the things that triggered this sudden debate was the recent Consumers Report article on weight-loss diets. They actually described some controlled studies that they did, comparing several kinds of diets. Their results? The ones that followed the Atkins diet were the only ones who lost weight and didn't regain it after stopping the diet. And they commented on the lack of real scientific studies of the issue.
Of course, few research agencies are likely to lower themselves by paying attention to a commercial consumer-oriented publication. So maybe we should ask them why they aren't doing the research themselves.
From a scientific viewpoint, it's kinda embarrassing to listen to a debate among people who can't be bothered to do a proper study...
libraries are also the targets
on
RIAA to Sue You Now
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
> How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does?
Here and there in the midst of all this discussion, I've occasionally run across an estimate from the publishing industry that each book sold is read on the average four times. One of their interests is cutting this number down and making people pay for the books they read.
Now, I have very few books that I've ever loaded out to anyone, and I doubt if any of my couple hundred books have been read by three other people. So where could all these extra readers be coming from?
Right. Libraries. The publishing industry doesn't make much of a public fuss of it, but one of the goals that they are starting to consider reachable is using the growing copyright restrictions to shut down public libraries. In the eyes of publishers, libraries are nothing but open copyright violations. All the arguments being made about "piracy" apply directly to libraries.
In the 1800's, the development of the public library system was one of the really significant advances in public education. We are seeing an attempt to end this social experiment, and to restrict education to those who can afford the publishers' price.
While we can all applaud John Cage for this attempt to introduce even more surrealism to the copyright debate, I might also mention that back in the 80's AT&T made, in all seriousness, a copyright claim on blank lines.
This was in the/bin/true program, which along with/bin/false is part of every unix system library. It's a bit of trivia, but these commands are needed for some scripting applications. The "true" command is a command that merely exits with a successful (zero) status. Its most common use was for a "while true do..." infinite loop.
The script actually contained no code, since its behavior is the default action of a shell script if there is no code. However, it did contain two significant pieces of text.
It contained a blank line, and an AT&T copyright notice.
I had a bit of fun at the time posting the program in its entirety to several newsgroups, pointing out that I was openly and knowingly publishing the full source code for an AT&T copyrighted program, and I challenged their lawyers to sue me for infringment.
I never heard from them. This is a bit strange, since, although they might not have been following any of the tech newsgroups, they almost certainly would have received copies of my message from a lot of readers.
We had several good discussions of whether we should go through all our files and delete all the blank lines to comply with the AT&T copyright.
It wasn't clear whether AT&T was claiming ownership of only the blank lines in shell scripts, all programs, all files, or all documents (on disk or paper). If I'd ever heard from any AT&T lawyers, I would have asked them.
Maybe we can actually get such things resolved now. I'll predict that the Cage folks will be happy to discuss the issue with us...
The moon's not under US jurisdiction? I thought that George W & Co had declared that everything everywhere was under US jurisdiction.
Re:Market forces
on
Version Fatigue
·
· Score: 5, Informative
In fact, there's a name for this phenomenon: "churning". It's a well-known term in some parts of the commercial worls. Ask any real-estate agent or stockbroker if they know the term.
Us techies know how to deal with it ...
on
Version Fatigue
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
> This is something that tech designers seem insensitive to, but that drives users crazy.
This doesn't sound like the techies I know. I've worked in the computer biz for three decades, and as long as I can remember, there has been a standard excuse for not upgrading to the latest release: "I've learned to use the old one. It's working fine for me. I've got work to do, and I don't want to waste time learning to use the latest version. Maybe when I find I need some of the new features, I'll consider upgrading."
This has always been a fact of life in the "tech" sector, to the frustration of the Customer Support people who are always dealing with people who are 30 revs behind. You don't hear about it much because techies don't make a fuss over it. We just quietly listen to the hype for the latest versions, and we ignore it, unless we hear something that we think will be useful enough to justify the time lost in an upgrade.
There are some linux systems that have been running continuously for around a decade now, without any upgrades at all...
>... the only exception that I can think of would be if you need to make a web application on a server that you don't admin...
You hit the nail on the head.
I run web sites on four machines. The one sitting in my home office is the only one where I'm the admin, and the ISP blocks port 80 on that one (not that this is a real problem, but...).
After experiments with PHP and Python, I've pretty much settled on perl for almost everything, with a few C programs as helpers. My perl CGI scripts run on all the machines without any changes, as do my C programs. With PHP and Python, I've found that every new machine requires a debug session to get anything to work, and I have to maintain huge sets of diffs for the different machines.
But with perl, I can drop a new script in all my directories, and they just work. I have exactly one "per-machine" file CGI file, which lists the directories in which things are installed. Even that isn't necessary, but it's faster than the code to discover where things are.
On one of my web sites, they still have perl 4, and my CGI scripts work fine. I can't install a current perl release, because my disk space there isn't enough to hold the unpacked perl source.
Also, all the timing tests I've been able to run have given perl a substantial edge over everything else except C. But this is a small sample set, due to the difficulties in matching perl's capabilities in PHP (and the difficulties getting a recent Python version installed;-).
It would be nice to be able to depend on mod_perl, but the admins on several of these machines don't see the need for it. Even at several requests per second, my perl CGI scripts are an unmeasurable load on the machine. So why should the admins waste their time installing mod_perl for me, when it would only save a few seconds of cpu time per day?
There will be several "competing" giants, but in your neighborhood, you'll only be able to subscribe to one of them. They'll tell you the price, take it or leave it. All ports will be blocked on your end, so you won't be able to put up your own "content". It will only exist so that you can connect to commercial sites.
Also, as in the first century of the phone system (and most current cable TV systems), it will be illegal to connect anything not on the approved list. This list will include the latest releases from Microsoft, and nothing else.
If you don't like it, well, you don't have to use it. Connectivity is a privilege, not a right.
Then, after maybe a century, we'll have some new laws making it legal to connect your own equipment that runs unapproved software. At that time, we'll see a huge expansion of the Internet, as the first innovations in many decades hit the market and the companies upgrade the lines to more than 100KB.
Remind yourself that if the old Bell monopoly were still in place, we'd still be using the old black rotary phones, one per customer unless you pay a surcharge for an extension line. Also, note that right now most of the cable companies are blocking port 80, preventing customers from being "producers" and limiting them to a "consumer" status. And we've read the reports that MSN has been buying up ISPs and blocking email access to everyone but Windows users.
> it would be easier (and much cooler!) to gengineer bugs that do eat our waste.
Actually, this has already happened. There have been a number of reports of bacteria that can degrade and consume several of the more common kinds of plastic. Most plastics are organic polymers, after all, and they contain a lot of food and energy, if you can find the enzymes to break the right bonds.
Of course, there are only a few cases known so far, and they probably aren't terribly efficient. But we can expect them to improve as our newfangled wastes accumulate in the environment.
Many people have lamented the fact that American students are educated in a school system that refers to students learning to cooperate on a task as "cheating".
Slashdot Mirror
> You obviously have a very high self-worth to think ...
Nah. What this sounds like is that they'll set up affiliates of all the phone companies and atuomatically get "pen registers" of all call made by everyone. These files will be analyzed by software that looks for interesting patterns. The customers that the software flags as "interesting" will then be examined in more detail.
All of it legal; all without any pesky court orders.
This means that now all any government agency needs to do is set up a dummy corporation that's an "affiliate", and my phone company will give them unlimited access to all the data about me.
Ya gotta admit, it's a neat end run around the laws that restrict government surveillance.
Oh, well, I suppose as a known computer programmer, I'm already on all the lists of suspected terrorists.
One thing that keeps putting me off from seriously thinking about OS-X is that, wandering around Apple's web site, I see lots of iCandy touting all these entertaining apps, but I don't see much mention of lots of things that, as a linux/unix programmer, I'm accustomed to having.
/. is fun and probably even entertaining, but it's not an efficient way to get answers to such questions.
So, do they just use gcc, or does it come with the box? I can't tell. Do they include perl, tcl/tk, and python? I'd feel crippled without all of these. Do they include xterm, or do I have to use their clumsy "user friendly" terminal emulator?
Perhaps more to the point; is there some place at apple.com that I can go to find answers to this sort of question? Asking on
In the past, I've generally avoided Macs, because, well, I'm a programmer. A computer is something that I can program. Macs traditionally aren't computers; they are appliances for non-programmers.
Macs have not only lacked tools for programmers, but they've charged you a lot to get a development package. (And the results only run on a Mac.) Linux comes with lots of fancy - and portable - programming tools, so a programmer can jump right in and be productive without putting out big bucks for a "development" package.
So where can I read a list of the normal unix things that I'll find on OS-X?
You may be right; I've never seen what I'd call reliable statistics about online ordering or online banking. I suspect that you can't get reliable statistics because "that's proprietary".
... ;-)
And, I suppose, the main effect of anti-encryption laws will be to make it easy for ISPs to spy on both sorts of commercial traffic. All it would take would be a few bribes to the right person in your local ISP, and you could get the credit card or bank account numbers of all their customers.
Of course, considering some of the recent financial scandals in the US, it might not be long before we have anti-cryptography laws passed to that this sort of interception is possible. I wonder how much it would cost per senator to make commercial encryption illegal?
(I hope I'm just joking
The main way that most people use encryption is when they order something from a web site, and the traffic is encrypted to protect credit-card numbers. I've been wondering how well the various restrictive governments police this.
Consider that most users aren't even really aware that they are encrypting their internet traffic. It's done by behind-the-scene transactions between their browser and the remote web site. The user never invokes any encryption software, and never sees the keys.
Will we eventually see cases where a poor baffled user is arrested and charged with illegal encryption, when what they really did was order a pair of socks from llbean.com?
Of course, sensible users of browsers will have turned off javascript and all other scripting tools.
Ya gotta be really innocent to allow random strangers to run code on your machine.
Yeah, it's true that some web pages won't work without javascript or vbscript. But do you really want such pages running on your machine? Those are exactly the sites that you should be blocking.
> ... actually spelled "medieval" correctly
Also, there are a number of cases of "mediaeval" being converted to "mediareview". So it's not just the medical review people who are affected by this, but also anyone reviewing the media.
I wonder if Senator Hollings or the RIAA have heard about this?
Also, do you think we could get Yahoo classified as terrorists for hacking the contents of email messages with medical effects? Note that some of these effects will be long-term (chronic), due to the thousands of web pages that are already infected.
> ... maybe medireview is a real word?
Maybe not, but MediReview is a real trademark.
I wonder what they think of all the free advertising they're getting?
> 've blocked images from Slashdot. There's not an ad in sight.
/.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift.
Blocking ads is pretty easy when you're doing a lot of work from one machine. It's not as easy when you find yourself working on a motley collection of machines scattered around the landscape, with God knows what configured into the gateways and firewalls. It's also not easy when you don't have (and don't want) root permission on a lot of those machines.
> The only way the typical
Oh, I dunno. Some time back, a friend asked me to take care of his pair of cockatiels while he was away for a few weeks. It turned out that they came with five chicks that were just fledging. At around 80-90 grams, they weren't at all hard to pick up. One of them is now living with me full time. She's a real cutie.
Jeez, guys; don't you recognize tongue-in-cheek humor based on cluelessness when you see it?
Do I have to include smileys with everything I write?
I thought at least this one time it wouldn't be necessary. Now I can expect the moderators to mod it to troll status or something silly like that.
Oh, well, it fixes the ongoing problem with the karma cap.
Well, there's plenty of precedent for this. For example, I'm typing this into a mozilla browser window. Now, mozilla is Open Source, but this page and nearly every other has an ad at the top.
> hardest thing for scientists to admit is that we simply don't know, even when that's the honest answer...
..."
On the contrary, scientists admit this all the time. It just that they express it in slightly different words.
Some time back, I saw the advice that the most important part of a scientific paper is the paragraph near the end that start with "... more research is needed
Scientists make their living pointing out that there are many things that we don't yet know, and asking funding agencies to pay them to learn about some of those things.
NPR just had an interview with them, too. Their main point seems to be that there is a serious lack of scientific research on the subject. The US government guidelines historically were based on little scientific evidence, and more on the political power of various agricultural organizations. People voice opinions loudly, but they don't fund the research.
...
So, yes, it's true that they weren't particularly supportive of Atkins' theories. They weren't supportive of anybody's theories. They were calling for actual scientific studies of the question.
I suspect that one of the things that triggered this sudden debate was the recent Consumers Report article on weight-loss diets. They actually described some controlled studies that they did, comparing several kinds of diets. Their results? The ones that followed the Atkins diet were the only ones who lost weight and didn't regain it after stopping the diet. And they commented on the lack of real scientific studies of the issue.
Of course, few research agencies are likely to lower themselves by paying attention to a commercial consumer-oriented publication. So maybe we should ask them why they aren't doing the research themselves.
From a scientific viewpoint, it's kinda embarrassing to listen to a debate among people who can't be bothered to do a proper study
> How is offering them over napster servers any more illegal then what a library does?
Here and there in the midst of all this discussion, I've occasionally run across an estimate from the publishing industry that each book sold is read on the average four times. One of their interests is cutting this number down and making people pay for the books they read.
Now, I have very few books that I've ever loaded out to anyone, and I doubt if any of my couple hundred books have been read by three other people. So where could all these extra readers be coming from?
Right. Libraries. The publishing industry doesn't make much of a public fuss of it, but one of the goals that they are starting to consider reachable is using the growing copyright restrictions to shut down public libraries. In the eyes of publishers, libraries are nothing but open copyright violations. All the arguments being made about "piracy" apply directly to libraries.
In the 1800's, the development of the public library system was one of the really significant advances in public education. We are seeing an attempt to end this social experiment, and to restrict education to those who can afford the publishers' price.
> ... Their stated goal is `a new computing platform for the next century ...
Doesn't this make their intent clear? The next century starts in either the year 2100 or 2101, depending on your theory of century boundaries.
So this is the most extreme vaporware yet: It won't be functional for about 98 years.
Man, was I ever disappointed. I typed in my URL, and it said "NOT LISTED". Jeez; what's a guy gotta do to get on such a list?
While we can all applaud John Cage for this attempt to introduce even more surrealism to the copyright debate, I might also mention that back in the 80's AT&T made, in all seriousness, a copyright claim on blank lines.
/bin/true program, which along with /bin/false is part of every unix system library. It's a bit of trivia, but these commands are needed for some scripting applications. The "true" command is a command that merely exits with a successful (zero) status. Its most common use was for a "while true do ..." infinite loop.
...
This was in the
The script actually contained no code, since its behavior is the default action of a shell script if there is no code. However, it did contain two significant pieces of text.
It contained a blank line, and an AT&T copyright notice.
I had a bit of fun at the time posting the program in its entirety to several newsgroups, pointing out that I was openly and knowingly publishing the full source code for an AT&T copyrighted program, and I challenged their lawyers to sue me for infringment.
I never heard from them. This is a bit strange, since, although they might not have been following any of the tech newsgroups, they almost certainly would have received copies of my message from a lot of readers.
We had several good discussions of whether we should go through all our files and delete all the blank lines to comply with the AT&T copyright.
It wasn't clear whether AT&T was claiming ownership of only the blank lines in shell scripts, all programs, all files, or all documents (on disk or paper). If I'd ever heard from any AT&T lawyers, I would have asked them.
Maybe we can actually get such things resolved now. I'll predict that the Cage folks will be happy to discuss the issue with us
The moon's not under US jurisdiction? I thought that George W & Co had declared that everything everywhere was under US jurisdiction.
In fact, there's a name for this phenomenon: "churning". It's a well-known term in some parts of the commercial worls. Ask any real-estate agent or stockbroker if they know the term.
> This is something that tech designers seem insensitive to, but that drives users crazy.
...
This doesn't sound like the techies I know. I've worked in the computer biz for three decades, and as long as I can remember, there has been a standard excuse for not upgrading to the latest release: "I've learned to use the old one. It's working fine for me. I've got work to do, and I don't want to waste time learning to use the latest version. Maybe when I find I need some of the new features, I'll consider upgrading."
This has always been a fact of life in the "tech" sector, to the frustration of the Customer Support people who are always dealing with people who are 30 revs behind. You don't hear about it much because techies don't make a fuss over it. We just quietly listen to the hype for the latest versions, and we ignore it, unless we hear something that we think will be useful enough to justify the time lost in an upgrade.
There are some linux systems that have been running continuously for around a decade now, without any upgrades at all
> ... from now only provide songs for which the copyright holder has specifically given permission.
Have they really agreed to not broadcast any songs that are out of copyright? If so, the RIAA has really won something significant.
> ... the only exception that I can think of would be if you need to make a web application on a server that you don't admin ...
...).
;-).
You hit the nail on the head.
I run web sites on four machines. The one sitting in my home office is the only one where I'm the admin, and the ISP blocks port 80 on that one (not that this is a real problem, but
After experiments with PHP and Python, I've pretty much settled on perl for almost everything, with a few C programs as helpers. My perl CGI scripts run on all the machines without any changes, as do my C programs. With PHP and Python, I've found that every new machine requires a debug session to get anything to work, and I have to maintain huge sets of diffs for the different machines.
But with perl, I can drop a new script in all my directories, and they just work. I have exactly one "per-machine" file CGI file, which lists the directories in which things are installed. Even that isn't necessary, but it's faster than the code to discover where things are.
On one of my web sites, they still have perl 4, and my CGI scripts work fine. I can't install a current perl release, because my disk space there isn't enough to hold the unpacked perl source.
Also, all the timing tests I've been able to run have given perl a substantial edge over everything else except C. But this is a small sample set, due to the difficulties in matching perl's capabilities in PHP (and the difficulties getting a recent Python version installed
It would be nice to be able to depend on mod_perl, but the admins on several of these machines don't see the need for it. Even at several requests per second, my perl CGI scripts are an unmeasurable load on the machine. So why should the admins waste their time installing mod_perl for me, when it would only save a few seconds of cpu time per day?
There will be several "competing" giants, but in your neighborhood, you'll only be able to subscribe to one of them. They'll tell you the price, take it or leave it. All ports will be blocked on your end, so you won't be able to put up your own "content". It will only exist so that you can connect to commercial sites.
Also, as in the first century of the phone system (and most current cable TV systems), it will be illegal to connect anything not on the approved list. This list will include the latest releases from Microsoft, and nothing else.
If you don't like it, well, you don't have to use it. Connectivity is a privilege, not a right.
Then, after maybe a century, we'll have some new laws making it legal to connect your own equipment that runs unapproved software. At that time, we'll see a huge expansion of the Internet, as the first innovations in many decades hit the market and the companies upgrade the lines to more than 100KB.
Remind yourself that if the old Bell monopoly were still in place, we'd still be using the old black rotary phones, one per customer unless you pay a surcharge for an extension line. Also, note that right now most of the cable companies are blocking port 80, preventing customers from being "producers" and limiting them to a "consumer" status. And we've read the reports that MSN has been buying up ISPs and blocking email access to everyone but Windows users.
> it would be easier (and much cooler!) to gengineer bugs that do eat our waste.
Actually, this has already happened. There have been a number of reports of bacteria that can degrade and consume several of the more common kinds of plastic. Most plastics are organic polymers, after all, and they contain a lot of food and energy, if you can find the enzymes to break the right bonds.
Of course, there are only a few cases known so far, and they probably aren't terribly efficient. But we can expect them to improve as our newfangled wastes accumulate in the environment.
Many people have lamented the fact that American students are educated in a school system that refers to students learning to cooperate on a task as "cheating".
Maybe we'll have one exception now.
Yeah, right.