The main use will probably be in other things that are free. Such as wikipedia, and preloaded on OLPCs (which actually has happened to Musopen's music). If you're making dubstep commercially, it would cost you very little to get a Chopin recording you could sample anyway, so no change expected there.
Are the binaries stripped? If they ship with debugging symbols (and why shouldn't they?) I don't envy the job of the NSA guy who's supposed to sneak a back door into it.
I don't think this should be much of a concern. Corrupting stuff at that level, in an area with so much scrutiny, costs more than it's worth for NSA. It's hard, and detectable.
They can still go up to the head of the open source organization and says "you must include this back-door in your program, or go to jail".
And what happens if he refuses? Is he "disappeared"? A public prosecution would be risky, of course, since then they would have to reveal (at the very least) that they tried to force him to do something bad.
And what if he complies? He inserts the line, it's immediately spotted by his co-developers and they say "no way that goes in, it's an obvious security hole!". Project maintainer says "Um. I'll just keep it in my tree if it's all the same to you. Maybe you can leave it out in your trees."
Life isn't nearly as easy for NSA as you would believe. Especially not these days. Thank God.
Also, Silent Circle offers something currently very few or no one else offers: encrypted calls and videoconferencing from your cell phone. I'm sure Bruce Schneier would have recommended the mature, well-examined open source alternative, if it existed.
Thanks for not being one of the posters who keep bleating about Darwin and IQ. However...
Home cooked meals are over 3x more dangerous than Chicken Pox in a nation that does not vaccinate against it. If the number in the summary is correct, Measles is only about 1 1/2 times as dangerous as home cooked meals.
... but you left out "in a nation that does not vaccinate against it" on that last phrase, and with good reason, because it isn't true. Measles is much worse that chickenpox (which is not vaccinated against in my country).
There are two things you leave out, though, which would matter anyway: human suffering and economic impact. Getting measles, rubella or mumps isn't likely to kill or permanently harm you (although it can), but it will be extremely unpleasant. You will also need some medical care. Before vaccines against these became common in the west, working parents would have to take considerable time off when their children got this - or it would mean considerably more work for the stay at home mom.
But as I said, chickenpox isn't vaccinated against in my country currently, probably because of the same cost/benefit analysis you make.
Democracy - meaning practical political equality of all citizens - is the hard bit. Even in the best case, with everything public, people will not be well informed of government's activities, because we just don't have time to be. This is true whether it's a presidental system or not, whether there's proportional representation, or even whether there's referenda all the time as in Switzerland or California.
Secrecy makes a state less democratic, but never forget, it isn't all that democratic to begin with.
It isn't even that. At the very worst, it's creating a pan-islamic state elsewhere. More commonly, it's something like "get your soldiers out of our country!"
But it could be that Chrisq thinks having a strong military prescence in foreign countries is an essential part of his "civilization". In a sense, it's even true.
The UK is a region where many terrorists come from, Lots of other people who can potentially cause trouble, too.
This isn't like spying on dictators or the Soviet Union. This is mass surveillance of the citizens of a state. The privacy of regular citizens is not respected. Unless you believe in some sort of inherent racial superiority or something, a regular citizen is equally entitled to privacy whether he was born in the UK or in Egypt.
Given that, could you please send me your mail password? No need to be impolite about it, after all.
You have bigger problems with car fatalities, much as any other country.
Governments don't hate terrorism for moral reasons. It's not because it's violence, or innocents die. No, the great powers tolerate and use violence themselves that is equally bad or worse.
The reason is that it threatens their power to do as they please, since it messes with public opinion in unpredictable ways.
The "Mars is warming too! And Pluto" thing was a transparent wink wink, nudge nudge argument to suggest that increased solar input was the explanation for warming both on Earth and there. Which is totally ridiculous - the increased solar input to warm Pluto half a degree would totally fry earth, no atmospheric modelling needed.
In practice though, our bodies have evolved to try *really* hard to extract as much energy as possible from the food we digest. To our detriment today, eating 500 kcals/day too much wouldn't matter if the body would just take "what it needs" and poop the rest.
But there are still differences here. For instance, descendants of islanders get diabetes B more easily.
It's not a given that lack of food was the primary driver of selection in our ancestors. Today's hunter-gatherers, who live in far more marginal areas than most of our ancestors did, still don't live at the edge of starvation by any means.
Now I don't know very much about nutrition. But I think these reports of weight gain in marmosets are awfully convenient for the industry. We know they model us exquisitely to get us to eat as much as possible, yet we're supposed to believe that has no effect, and it's really just chemicals in our environment or something which makes us fat?
What this reminds me of is the bullshit claims about global warming on Mars and Pluto. As it happens I knew enough physics to immediately see that as bullshit (Mars receives half as much sunlight as Earth and Pluto less that 1/1000), but I wouldn't know enough about nutrition to immediately make the same call here. It just sounds awfully convenient for the people who are fighting our sense of satiation with all means.
I wish the officers joy in explaining why he thought these items were "evidence in criminal proceedings" or were relevant to a "deportation order".
-Mr. officer, can you... -National security! -Yes, but please explain how... -National security! -I can't see how this qualifies as... -National security!
(journalist gives up, goes to speak with MP instead)
-Mr. representative, can you expl... -National security! Trust us, we know best!
Little to no capital gains tax, and little or no wealth tax. It won't help your income tax at all.
But do you really want that anyway? You have to actually lose money and be able to document it in order to get the pity tax rebate. Isn't it better to not lose the money?
I guarantee there are Bitcoin PR people planting stories here and they are goaled on how many stories they get out.
Heh, that's not how it works. How it works is that a lot of people bought bitcoin not to use as currency, but to use as speculation object. They expect it to rise in value, and plan to sell when it does.
Since there is a finite supply of bitcoin, if more people want it, it's going to increase in value. So anyone holding bitcoin has an interest in pushing it. No goaling necessary.
This deflationary structure is inherently bubble-prone. Any event that causes a hit to the bitcoin price risks sending it into a super-fast downward spiral, as holders realize that it will be a long time (if ever) that they can get as much for it as they can now.
No, they're more anonymous. They're homogenous and they don't smell (except literally - don't sniff your coins). Neither are true for bitcoin.
But if you have a large amount of cash, you face problems when trying to use it, unless you can explain how you got your hands on it. Same with bitcoin - except that there, there is actually a lot of public information about how you got your hands on it.
They don't have to, the block chain is public by design. You have to make great efforts to not link your identity to your bitcoin addresses - and if you at any time bought bitcoins at a public exchange, or used them to buy legal services (such as web hosting) the cat's out of the bag.
Yes, well, unlike kickstarter, indiegogo has an option to keep the money collected even if it doesn't reach the goal.
Ah yes, the box that turns it from a propoer treshold pledge scheme to scammy "I want the money anyway" begging.
That checkbox may superficially sound like a good deal for project starters, but it's a rotten deal for supporters. Ubuntu would NOT get to the amount they have if they checked that box.
The only reason Kickstarter's competitors offer that box at all is that they're desperate to get projects. So desperate that they'll accept the dumb and greedy ones. This also sends a rotten signal to buyers (if you though there were many dodgy projects on Kickstarter, it's nothing to its smaller competitors!) but the attitude of competitiors is that "we'll worry about that later, once we have projects". Which makes a certain perverse business sense.
Also, I would not be surprised if Shuttleworth makes up the difference at the last minute and goes forward anyway.
If it's ten thousand dollars short, maybe. Maybe even if it's a a hundred thousand dollars short. But when it's 2/3 short of the goal, don't count on it.
Slashdot Mirror
The main use will probably be in other things that are free. Such as wikipedia, and preloaded on OLPCs (which actually has happened to Musopen's music). If you're making dubstep commercially, it would cost you very little to get a Chopin recording you could sample anyway, so no change expected there.
Please do not try to come up with your own cryptographic protocols! Odds are there are easier and safer ways to achieve what you're trying to achieve.
Are the binaries stripped? If they ship with debugging symbols (and why shouldn't they?) I don't envy the job of the NSA guy who's supposed to sneak a back door into it.
I don't think this should be much of a concern. Corrupting stuff at that level, in an area with so much scrutiny, costs more than it's worth for NSA. It's hard, and detectable.
And what happens if he refuses? Is he "disappeared"? A public prosecution would be risky, of course, since then they would have to reveal (at the very least) that they tried to force him to do something bad.
And what if he complies? He inserts the line, it's immediately spotted by his co-developers and they say "no way that goes in, it's an obvious security hole!". Project maintainer says "Um. I'll just keep it in my tree if it's all the same to you. Maybe you can leave it out in your trees."
Life isn't nearly as easy for NSA as you would believe. Especially not these days. Thank God.
Also, Silent Circle offers something currently very few or no one else offers: encrypted calls and videoconferencing from your cell phone. I'm sure Bruce Schneier would have recommended the mature, well-examined open source alternative, if it existed.
This thread would be a charnel house.
Even if it was just killing stupid kids, would that make it OK? Slashdot is pretty disgusting at times.
Thanks for not being one of the posters who keep bleating about Darwin and IQ. However...
There are two things you leave out, though, which would matter anyway: human suffering and economic impact. Getting measles, rubella or mumps isn't likely to kill or permanently harm you (although it can), but it will be extremely unpleasant. You will also need some medical care. Before vaccines against these became common in the west, working parents would have to take considerable time off when their children got this - or it would mean considerably more work for the stay at home mom.
But as I said, chickenpox isn't vaccinated against in my country currently, probably because of the same cost/benefit analysis you make.
Heritable does not mean what you think it means. Speaking spanish is strongly heritable, but it'd be foolish to think it was genetic.
Thinking about that can serve as a good starting point for the ignorance in your post, but I'm not going to waste more time on it.
Democracy - meaning practical political equality of all citizens - is the hard bit. Even in the best case, with everything public, people will not be well informed of government's activities, because we just don't have time to be. This is true whether it's a presidental system or not, whether there's proportional representation, or even whether there's referenda all the time as in Switzerland or California.
Secrecy makes a state less democratic, but never forget, it isn't all that democratic to begin with.
It isn't even that. At the very worst, it's creating a pan-islamic state elsewhere. More commonly, it's something like "get your soldiers out of our country!"
But it could be that Chrisq thinks having a strong military prescence in foreign countries is an essential part of his "civilization". In a sense, it's even true.
The UK is a region where many terrorists come from, Lots of other people who can potentially cause trouble, too.
This isn't like spying on dictators or the Soviet Union. This is mass surveillance of the citizens of a state. The privacy of regular citizens is not respected. Unless you believe in some sort of inherent racial superiority or something, a regular citizen is equally entitled to privacy whether he was born in the UK or in Egypt.
Given that, could you please send me your mail password? No need to be impolite about it, after all.
You have bigger problems with car fatalities, much as any other country.
Governments don't hate terrorism for moral reasons. It's not because it's violence, or innocents die. No, the great powers tolerate and use violence themselves that is equally bad or worse.
The reason is that it threatens their power to do as they please, since it messes with public opinion in unpredictable ways.
The "Mars is warming too! And Pluto" thing was a transparent wink wink, nudge nudge argument to suggest that increased solar input was the explanation for warming both on Earth and there. Which is totally ridiculous - the increased solar input to warm Pluto half a degree would totally fry earth, no atmospheric modelling needed.
But there are still differences here. For instance, descendants of islanders get diabetes B more easily.
It's not a given that lack of food was the primary driver of selection in our ancestors. Today's hunter-gatherers, who live in far more marginal areas than most of our ancestors did, still don't live at the edge of starvation by any means.
Now I don't know very much about nutrition. But I think these reports of weight gain in marmosets are awfully convenient for the industry. We know they model us exquisitely to get us to eat as much as possible, yet we're supposed to believe that has no effect, and it's really just chemicals in our environment or something which makes us fat?
What this reminds me of is the bullshit claims about global warming on Mars and Pluto. As it happens I knew enough physics to immediately see that as bullshit (Mars receives half as much sunlight as Earth and Pluto less that 1/1000), but I wouldn't know enough about nutrition to immediately make the same call here. It just sounds awfully convenient for the people who are fighting our sense of satiation with all means.
-Mr. officer, can you... ...
-National security!
-Yes, but please explain how...
-National security!
-I can't see how this qualifies as
-National security!
(journalist gives up, goes to speak with MP instead)
-Mr. representative, can you expl...
-National security! Trust us, we know best!
Little to no capital gains tax, and little or no wealth tax. It won't help your income tax at all.
But do you really want that anyway? You have to actually lose money and be able to document it in order to get the pity tax rebate. Isn't it better to not lose the money?
Heh, that's not how it works. How it works is that a lot of people bought bitcoin not to use as currency, but to use as speculation object. They expect it to rise in value, and plan to sell when it does.
Since there is a finite supply of bitcoin, if more people want it, it's going to increase in value. So anyone holding bitcoin has an interest in pushing it. No goaling necessary.
This deflationary structure is inherently bubble-prone. Any event that causes a hit to the bitcoin price risks sending it into a super-fast downward spiral, as holders realize that it will be a long time (if ever) that they can get as much for it as they can now.
No, they're more anonymous. They're homogenous and they don't smell (except literally - don't sniff your coins). Neither are true for bitcoin.
But if you have a large amount of cash, you face problems when trying to use it, unless you can explain how you got your hands on it. Same with bitcoin - except that there, there is actually a lot of public information about how you got your hands on it.
Well yes, but so am I. It's very easy since all transactions are public forever.
They don't have to, the block chain is public by design. You have to make great efforts to not link your identity to your bitcoin addresses - and if you at any time bought bitcoins at a public exchange, or used them to buy legal services (such as web hosting) the cat's out of the bag.
Except cash doesn't come with a full history of whose hands it's passed through.
Ah yes, the box that turns it from a propoer treshold pledge scheme to scammy "I want the money anyway" begging.
That checkbox may superficially sound like a good deal for project starters, but it's a rotten deal for supporters. Ubuntu would NOT get to the amount they have if they checked that box.
The only reason Kickstarter's competitors offer that box at all is that they're desperate to get projects. So desperate that they'll accept the dumb and greedy ones. This also sends a rotten signal to buyers (if you though there were many dodgy projects on Kickstarter, it's nothing to its smaller competitors!) but the attitude of competitiors is that "we'll worry about that later, once we have projects". Which makes a certain perverse business sense.
If it's ten thousand dollars short, maybe. Maybe even if it's a a hundred thousand dollars short. But when it's 2/3 short of the goal, don't count on it.