most GPL code, including most of Linux, was simply taken from BSD sources and relicensed GPL. What you would do better to look at are clean GPL implementations
Conjecture
Er no, experience rather, from having worked with both GPL and BSD code for many years.
I am not aware of wholesale re-licensing just for the sake of it.
Where BSD code HAS been incorporated into GPL it has been done to comply with the BSD license, exactly as intended by the author
That's a novel way of looking at it, but it doesn't really hold water. The Atheros developers certainly did not want their work published under the more restrictive GPL. They, like myself, want all developers to benefit from our code, not only those who agree to publish deltas under the GPL exclusively. But then the GPL never has been about giving.
Conjecture!;-) The resentment is in your assumption, it was neither intended in nor implied by the original message. So go ahead and downmod (again) anything critical of the GPL, just be aware that when you do you move Slashdot further from the facts and closer to a popularity contest.
Well thats the theory, but GPL software tends to be more widely used then BSD.
You know why that is don't you? It is because most GPL code, including most of Linux, was simply taken from BSD sources and relicensed GPL. What you would do better to look at are clean GPL implementations i.e., those not based on non-GPL code. From that measure you will find BSD and BSD-like licenses (MPL, Apache, MIT, etc) are the source of far more code than GPL. It good code too.
So while it is true that "GPL software tends to be more widely used", if BSD code was restricted from GPL licensing it would be the other way around.
people don't liked to be watched (even though they have posted the info on the Intertubes for anyone to see). But I don't particularly care. I'm a bleeding heart liberal
If you care more about yourself than the greater good then you are, by definition, not a liberal, bleeding heart or otherwise.
With regards to the greater good, the reason citizens place limits on government investigation is because those investigative powers have been so frequently abused. Richard Nixon's Watergate, Joseph McCarthy's inquisitions and media blacklists, network television firing of the most popular entertainers (Smother's Brothers) for speaking out against Vietnam... the list is a long one, and anyone who does not care is either ignorant, liberatarian, or an anarchist.
The reality is any downside of open source is inherently in closed source as well
Agreed, but this (Drupal) really isn't about open vs closed source, it's more about well audited code vs not. Can't believe someone even equated more vulnerability announcements with more secure! If that were the case then Microsoft would be the most secure OS and OpenBSD the least.
Secure code takes a lot of auditing, both internal and external. It also takes a set of design guidelines and their enforcement. Limewire did and Frostwire does a really good job of this, and they use a secure language (Java) as well. Drupal scores relatively poorly on all of these counts.
A more secure site would have to run something that can be pre-compiled, is statically typed, and has so many compile-time checks that runtime errors are few. That basically means Java and of the Java CMS I'm familiar with Vignette has the edge. It is, unfortunatley, not open source. It is also complex and expensive. But for a site like whitehouse.gov it would have meant far, far better security and far less management overhead than Drupal.
So go ahead and mod me down for even suggesting a non-OSS solution is better. Before you do though, please point out where, aside from price, Drupal is better.
Security is most certainly not an afterthought for Drupal.... The upcoming Drupal 7 has SSL login support in core.
Equating SSL with security is emblematic of the Drupal code base. It is, in my experience, the least secure CMS available. Just look at how regular and often Drupal vulnerabilities are announced. Even the Apache configuration requires you to enable FollowSymLinks!. The website says this was a security workaround but it is also as big a hole as the one it fixed. RewriteEngine also cannot be disabled. And the database load is far, far greater than any well designed CMSs. Pile PHP on top of that and you have, well, a pretty insecure webapp (to be diplomatic). I'm sure the Feds will do all sorts of extra stuff to monitor and patch this particular site, and I hope they contribute patches back, but I would not recommend Drupal to anyone who does not have a relatively extensive background in system monitoring, PHP, MySQL or Postgres, and Apache.
If MS ever adopted ZFS, they'd change a bunch of things just to make it intentionally incompatible.
And the same would occur if ZFS ever went GPL i.e., RMS would fork it and introduce meaningless incompatibilities, as was done with make, pgp, sort, and numerous other utilities. It's the same reason Postifx, Apache, MPL, and ISC licenses were worded the way they are.
So let Apple develop their own ZFS-alike. It's unlikely to be adopted outside of Apple, and unlikely to influence any other filesystem's developer or end-user momentum.
Curious about the choice of OS, given that Linux security, especially the kernel, is known to be inferior to BSD, OpenBSD in particular. Also curious about the choice of programming language, Ruby, when Python is known to be more readable, and more easily audited. Shouldn't the most important feature of a voting system, aside from useability and accesibility, be its auditability? Why would anyone choose a system that is known to be less auditable and less secure?
If Japan's citizens did not want to be nuked, then they should have stopped their government from killing millions of Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asian neighbors.
Yes and no. Journalists in major (US) media outlets write the stories their editors tell them to write, and they write them from the perspective their editors tell them to as well. Senior editors, in turn, are pressured by accounting to cater to the perspective of major advertisers. Nothing new here.
In most newspapers land use and autos are the primary advertising, so, it should be no surprise that these two special interest groups are treated favorably by local print media. These hidden agendas are evident, for example, in the San Francisco Chronicle's full-time support for real-estate development. You'll never read a letter to the editor criticizing any development in the SF Chron (since Herb Caen died, and his column was edited before printing on many occasions). The San Jose Mercury News is just as biased with regards to automobiles. They pan mass transit and pump road construction at every opportunity.
For these reasons I no longer read either paper, not even their Sunday editions. I figure that if they apply such biases for direct advertisers they probably favor other special interests for other (monitarized) incentives.
With regards to fact checking, it is incidents like this that make it possible to distinguish between reliable and unreliable news sources. The quantity and quality of false reporting drives my search for quality and accuracy in blogs, print, and podcasts (forget anything video-based, that's a lost cause). It will all work out in the end as discerning readers will end up with a list of RSS feeds that are both more accurate and less biased than any of the traditional, commercial news sources (including NPR, which has no competent tech reports thanks to Microsoft's "sponsorship").
Grandma will upgrade to IPv6 when her ISP says your modem needs to be replaced
Now this is the stuff of Ivory Towers. In reality Grandma will find a new ISP when her grandkids warn her that IPv6 addresses will only be able to connect to 10% of the Internet.
Your argument makes it sound like you're just a lazy network engineer
Not lazy, just smart. Smart enough to understand that the transition to IPv6 will not happen as long as people are too "lazy" to think things through. You don't have to be a network engineer to see that partial net access is a non-starter. Think instead of the consumer backlash when they discover A) they won't have 100% network accessibility, B) all of their internal addresses will be owed by their ISP (thanks to ILECs blocking IPv6 NAT), and C) all of their IP addresses, internal and external, will be trackable by Google and DHS. In reality the ILECs don't care, they don't have to as long as the lack of government regulation allows them to profit from this wholly artificial shortage (very much like Enron did from energy deregulation, with helpless consumers sucking up the same exponential price increases).
Bottom line is that IPv6 is and will remain a non-starter until network engineers and, wanna-be engineers like aztektum, understand that every node will have to communicate with every other node regardless of IP version. That means servers will need both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses, and clients will need either the same 1 to 1 mapping or NAT, for the duration of the transition.
The people who came up with IPv6 seemed to be too ivory tower: they forgot about the reality on the ground. Few ISPs are even thinking about IPv6.
Amen to that. But I don't see an academic angle so much as an ILEC angle i.e., IPv6 is being handicapped by large telcos, large ISPs, legacy netblock owners and their proxies in order to drive up fees for IPv4 addresses. The threads on new fee structures, in mailing lists like arin-ppml, make this obscenely clear. IPv4 netblock owners are salivating over the potential for profit from what should be a public resource.
Only thing more disappointing than ARIN's failure to either reclaim unused IPv4 netblocks (and there are plenty of those, both large and small) or speed the adoption of IPv6 is the DOC and FCC's failure to foresee the damage, both economic and to communications, which the coming address shortage will cause.
OpenBSD I would love to recommend, but the impossibility of building automated updates
What version of OpenBSD are you referring to? The one I use has a package management system that is more secure than anything available on CentOS, SuSE, or Debian (yum*/yast/apt*). It also does not require the use of pre-built packages, so OpenBSD users who chose to compile from source can build applications without unnecessary dependencies. This feature alone makes it more secure than a non-Gentoo Linux system could be. Most importantly, for security, OpenBSD has a stable kernel which will not need to be upgraded every few months due to security vulnerabilities, will not break all sorts of things from wifi drivers to VMware due to ABI changes every time it is upgraded, and will not need to be protected by anti-virus software like SELinux. On the downside there is no GUI package manager.
and the lack of role based access control
If the Tibetan government could manage RBAC they would probably not be using Windows in the first place. Take the complexity of SELinux to the power of two and you have RBAC. Would never work in this environment (which is decidedly not high-tech nor authoritarian).
Is that really a NAT problem or is it a SIP (VOIP) problem? SIP certainly could have been designed better IMO. Wonder who first conceived of embedding the IP address, normally only a part of the IP header, in the application data, as a security measure no less! This is not only ineffective security it also ignores the ISO seven layer stack. That's why SIP doesn't play well with NAT. Has nothing to do with NAT itself, IMO.
It's also the reason we haven't transitioned to IPv6.
IPv6 won't happen until it has standardized IPv6 NAT and NAPT (v6-v6 and v4-v6). Unfortunately, telcos are giddy about owning all of our internal address space and a few protocol developers are tired of having to poke holes in NAT (and dismissive of the security implications).
Be that as it may the business case for NAT long predates address space limitations (and RFC1918). Businesses require private and non-routable addresses for their internal networks. This isn't going to change. Globally routable IP address are fine for gateways, but unrealistic for the devices behind those gateways. Looked at from a different perspective, what if your city decided to switch to 8 digit street addresses and demanded that you assign an address to every room in your house. Of course it'll never happen, nor will IPv6 without NAT and NAPT.
The elephant in the room is all the organizations who still "own" large blocks (/16s and/8s, 65,536 and 16,777,216 IPs respectively) and don't use or need a fraction of the IPs they have allocated. ARIN does nothing about these large blocks (other than bill for them, sound familiar?), even as they hand out the last remaining/16s (to ILECs like Verizon and ATT, no surprise there).
IPv6 illustrates the dysfunction of ARIN in the same way the proposal to unregulate domain names illustrates the dysfunction of ICANN, and OOXML illustrates the dysfunction of ISO. Dysfunction and corruption, largely due to lobbying and technically undereducated legislators, with no resolution in sight. How long will we continue sit on our hands while another Enron's energy crisis and another Lehman Brother's mortgage crisis spreads to the Internet?
That's what I've been wondering. Bash is fine for the command-line but not such a good choice for scripts due to compatibility issues. It certainly isn't a good choice of scripting language compared to/bin/sh. Given the number of changes bash has had over the years it would seem to be a kitchen sink of every feature anyone wanted to add (though not necessarily use). POSIX is protecting/bin/sh from this sort of feature creep but there are still several bugs in "bash --posix" (sh mode).
I also wonder about feaures like associative arrays in shells. Obviously someone wanted to code it, but a shell seems like the wrong tool for any job needing an array. Is Bash's feature creep just bloat, motivated by some shell programmer's fears of learning a more appropriate scripting language like Python or Perl? I have to say it seems that way given that +99% of Bash scripts are simply the result of the script writer's lack of familiarity with the differences between bash and sh.
From the screenshot it doesn't appear there was anything to ask, as it was disabled. Installed but not enabled would seem to be as opt-in as plugins or extensions get. It is certainly better than the ones Mozilla installs that you can't even uninstall. Not different from what Ubuntu and MS are doing. What we need now is an open repository for plugins. The current Mozilla-managed repo is a bit too Google-friendly for my tastes, especially when I'm looking for the Scroogle plugin.
You can say that again. The problem is the people living 10 miles below, and the noise they have to deal with.
I really feel sorry for people living around airports today. We have noise pollution laws for everything but aircraft. The reason for this is the FAA, which has historically been more very receptive to air industry lobbying, and so more interested in promoting air travel than in limiting the consequences of air travel (a de-facto tax on those of us who have to listen to jets takeoff and land from 10s of miles away, night and day).
That same FAA disregard for anything that might negatively impact total air passenger miles got us 9/11 and continues to cause well documented health and mortality effects in areas around major airports. Enlightened governments are re-locating their airports away from population centers and building fast and convenient light rail to make it convenient to get to them. Hong Kong is an excellent example of how to do airports right. Los Angeles and San Francisco are equally good examples of how not to.
Another thing government could be doing to balance the substantial subsidies air industries have enjoyed is divert some of those dollars to rail and R&D into quieter and more efficient aircraft. If the lobbying is any indication, however, nothing has changed. Airlines are still focused overwhelmingly on the next quarter and the FAA doesn't care.
The "freedom" that Stallman refers to has nothing to do with developer freedom
This is true to a point. But note that Stallman is really consistent about only one thing, the GPL. He goes on about free code but it's a one-way freedom. As an example look how much GPL code is simply ripped off from the BSD codebase. Stallman thinks nothing of this nor does he contribute back into BSD or other projects which help Linux and the GPL. Freedom as in free to take but not free to give back is not true freedom in my book. It'd more like an agenda.
the alternatives really don't have much compelling to offer
This is what I have been wondering about. One of the alternatives, Mercurial, does seem to be a compelling alternative to GIT. Would love to hear from anyone who has used both, especially WRT migrations from CVS and integration with Trac. We've been leaning towards Mercurial as it is mostly written in Python (vs C), implements much the same functionality in 1/3rd as many lines of code (according to http://www.infoq.com/articles/dvcs-guide), and is used by Mozilla, Sun, etc.
These comparisons matter now, but may not be so relevant in the future if either Git or Mercurial garners substantially more mindshare than the other. We would, ideally, like to stay ahead of the trends...
Negative PR it may be for some, but for others it is a reminder not to do business with Amazon. Many of us avoid Amazon for refusing to stop sending unsolicited advertising via email, for not affording us a choice in how our purchases are tracked, and for not giving us a choice in their retention of our data (credit card and other).
Um, no thank you. If you don't want a company storing your card, then don't use them.
Isn't this the same excuse some of the same companies use for spamming their own customers?
To clarify: it's not a matter of whether Amazon stores your credit card or not, the issue here is whether you, the consumer, have the right to prohibit vendors from storing your credit card data. Good consumer protection law should require the vendor to ask the consumer for permission, just as the same law should require explicit/double opt-in if the vendor wants to send unsolicited advertising email in the future.
That'd be at least 5 years after Lotus Magellin did it, and IMO, did it better than anything MS or Apple does today.
Lotus dropped Magellin when Windows 3 came along, so most of today's techs don't know about it, but it is still surprising their legal research overlooked it.
Slashdot Mirror
most GPL code, including most of Linux, was simply taken from BSD sources and relicensed GPL. What you would do better to look at are clean GPL implementations
Conjecture
Er no, experience rather, from having worked with both GPL and BSD code for many years.
I am not aware of wholesale re-licensing just for the sake of it.
You're not aware of the Atheros relicensing then?
http://kerneltrap.org/OpenBSD/Atheros_Driver_Developments
Where BSD code HAS been incorporated into GPL it has been done to comply with the BSD license, exactly as intended by the author
That's a novel way of looking at it, but it doesn't really hold water. The Atheros developers certainly did not want their work published under the more restrictive GPL. They, like myself, want all developers to benefit from our code, not only those who agree to publish deltas under the GPL exclusively. But then the GPL never has been about giving.
http://lwn.net/Articles/247872/
I don't get where the resentment comes from
Conjecture! ;-) The resentment is in your assumption, it was neither intended in nor implied by the original message. So go ahead and downmod (again) anything critical of the GPL, just be aware that when you do you move Slashdot further from the facts and closer to a popularity contest.
Well thats the theory, but GPL software tends to be more widely used then BSD.
You know why that is don't you? It is because most GPL code, including most of Linux, was simply taken from BSD sources and relicensed GPL. What you would do better to look at are clean GPL implementations i.e., those not based on non-GPL code. From that measure you will find BSD and BSD-like licenses (MPL, Apache, MIT, etc) are the source of far more code than GPL. It good code too.
So while it is true that "GPL software tends to be more widely used", if BSD code was restricted from GPL licensing it would be the other way around.
people don't liked to be watched (even though they have posted the info on the Intertubes for anyone to see). But I don't particularly care. I'm a bleeding heart liberal
If you care more about yourself than the greater good then you are, by definition, not a liberal, bleeding heart or otherwise.
With regards to the greater good, the reason citizens place limits on government investigation is because those investigative powers have been so frequently abused. Richard Nixon's Watergate, Joseph McCarthy's inquisitions and media blacklists, network television firing of the most popular entertainers (Smother's Brothers) for speaking out against Vietnam... the list is a long one, and anyone who does not care is either ignorant, liberatarian, or an anarchist.
The reality is any downside of open source is inherently in closed source as well
Agreed, but this (Drupal) really isn't about open vs closed source, it's more about well audited code vs not. Can't believe someone even equated more vulnerability announcements with more secure! If that were the case then Microsoft would be the most secure OS and OpenBSD the least.
Secure code takes a lot of auditing, both internal and external. It also takes a set of design guidelines and their enforcement. Limewire did and Frostwire does a really good job of this, and they use a secure language (Java) as well. Drupal scores relatively poorly on all of these counts.
A more secure site would have to run something that can be pre-compiled, is statically typed, and has so many compile-time checks that runtime errors are few. That basically means Java and of the Java CMS I'm familiar with Vignette has the edge. It is, unfortunatley, not open source. It is also complex and expensive. But for a site like whitehouse.gov it would have meant far, far better security and far less management overhead than Drupal.
So go ahead and mod me down for even suggesting a non-OSS solution is better. Before you do though, please point out where, aside from price, Drupal is better.
Security is most certainly not an afterthought for Drupal. ... The upcoming Drupal 7 has SSL login support in core.
Equating SSL with security is emblematic of the Drupal code base. It is, in my experience, the least secure CMS available. Just look at how regular and often Drupal vulnerabilities are announced. Even the Apache configuration requires you to enable FollowSymLinks!. The website says this was a security workaround but it is also as big a hole as the one it fixed. RewriteEngine also cannot be disabled. And the database load is far, far greater than any well designed CMSs. Pile PHP on top of that and you have, well, a pretty insecure webapp (to be diplomatic). I'm sure the Feds will do all sorts of extra stuff to monitor and patch this particular site, and I hope they contribute patches back, but I would not recommend Drupal to anyone who does not have a relatively extensive background in system monitoring, PHP, MySQL or Postgres, and Apache.
If MS ever adopted ZFS, they'd change a bunch of things just to make it intentionally incompatible.
And the same would occur if ZFS ever went GPL i.e., RMS would fork it and introduce meaningless incompatibilities, as was done with make, pgp, sort, and numerous other utilities. It's the same reason Postifx, Apache, MPL, and ISC licenses were worded the way they are.
So let Apple develop their own ZFS-alike. It's unlikely to be adopted outside of Apple, and unlikely to influence any other filesystem's developer or end-user momentum.
Curious about the choice of OS, given that Linux security, especially the kernel, is known to be inferior to BSD, OpenBSD in particular. Also curious about the choice of programming language, Ruby, when Python is known to be more readable, and more easily audited. Shouldn't the most important feature of a voting system, aside from useability and accesibility, be its auditability? Why would anyone choose a system that is known to be less auditable and less secure?
If Japan's citizens did not want to be nuked, then they should have stopped their government from killing millions of Chinese, Filipinos, and other Asian neighbors.
Hate to think of the implications of this for the US, who just 35 years earlier had killed more Filipinos than Japan ever would.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippine%E2%80%93American_War#American_atrocities
Does being the world's number one arms seller factor into this too?
Ouch.
The best Internet journalism that I follow is http://www.democracynow.org/ Notice how Democracy Now interviews people on the other side all the time.
Don't forget the Columbia Review of Journalism, http://www.cjr.org/
Isn't this every journalists job description?
Yes and no. Journalists in major (US) media outlets write the stories their editors tell them to write, and they write them from the perspective their editors tell them to as well. Senior editors, in turn, are pressured by accounting to cater to the perspective of major advertisers. Nothing new here.
In most newspapers land use and autos are the primary advertising, so, it should be no surprise that these two special interest groups are treated favorably by local print media. These hidden agendas are evident, for example, in the San Francisco Chronicle's full-time support for real-estate development. You'll never read a letter to the editor criticizing any development in the SF Chron (since Herb Caen died, and his column was edited before printing on many occasions). The San Jose Mercury News is just as biased with regards to automobiles. They pan mass transit and pump road construction at every opportunity.
For these reasons I no longer read either paper, not even their Sunday editions. I figure that if they apply such biases for direct advertisers they probably favor other special interests for other (monitarized) incentives.
With regards to fact checking, it is incidents like this that make it possible to distinguish between reliable and unreliable news sources. The quantity and quality of false reporting drives my search for quality and accuracy in blogs, print, and podcasts (forget anything video-based, that's a lost cause). It will all work out in the end as discerning readers will end up with a list of RSS feeds that are both more accurate and less biased than any of the traditional, commercial news sources (including NPR, which has no competent tech reports thanks to Microsoft's "sponsorship").
Grandma will upgrade to IPv6 when her ISP says your modem needs to be replaced
Now this is the stuff of Ivory Towers. In reality Grandma will find a new ISP when her grandkids warn her that IPv6 addresses will only be able to connect to 10% of the Internet.
Your argument makes it sound like you're just a lazy network engineer
Not lazy, just smart. Smart enough to understand that the transition to IPv6 will not happen as long as people are too "lazy" to think things through. You don't have to be a network engineer to see that partial net access is a non-starter. Think instead of the consumer backlash when they discover A) they won't have 100% network accessibility, B) all of their internal addresses will be owed by their ISP (thanks to ILECs blocking IPv6 NAT), and C) all of their IP addresses, internal and external, will be trackable by Google and DHS. In reality the ILECs don't care, they don't have to as long as the lack of government regulation allows them to profit from this wholly artificial shortage (very much like Enron did from energy deregulation, with helpless consumers sucking up the same exponential price increases).
Bottom line is that IPv6 is and will remain a non-starter until network engineers and, wanna-be engineers like aztektum, understand that every node will have to communicate with every other node regardless of IP version. That means servers will need both IPv6 and IPv4 addresses, and clients will need either the same 1 to 1 mapping or NAT, for the duration of the transition.
The people who came up with IPv6 seemed to be too ivory tower: they forgot about
the reality on the ground. Few ISPs are even thinking about IPv6.
Amen to that. But I don't see an academic angle so much as an ILEC angle i.e., IPv6 is being handicapped by large telcos, large ISPs, legacy netblock owners and their proxies in order to drive up fees for IPv4 addresses. The threads on new fee structures, in mailing lists like arin-ppml, make this obscenely clear. IPv4 netblock owners are salivating over the potential for profit from what should be a public resource.
Only thing more disappointing than ARIN's failure to either reclaim unused IPv4 netblocks (and there are plenty of those, both large and small) or speed the adoption of IPv6 is the DOC and FCC's failure to foresee the damage, both economic and to communications, which the coming address shortage will cause.
OpenBSD I would love to recommend, but the impossibility of building automated updates
What version of OpenBSD are you referring to? The one I use has a package management system that is more secure than anything available on CentOS, SuSE, or Debian (yum*/yast/apt*). It also does not require the use of pre-built packages, so OpenBSD users who chose to compile from source can build applications without unnecessary dependencies. This feature alone makes it more secure than a non-Gentoo Linux system could be. Most importantly, for security, OpenBSD has a stable kernel which will not need to be upgraded every few months due to security vulnerabilities, will not break all sorts of things from wifi drivers to VMware due to ABI changes every time it is upgraded, and will not need to be protected by anti-virus software like SELinux. On the downside there is no GUI package manager.
and the lack of role based access control
If the Tibetan government could manage RBAC they would probably not be using Windows in the first place. Take the complexity of SELinux to the power of two and you have RBAC. Would never work in this environment (which is decidedly not high-tech nor authoritarian).
NAT does present a problem, for example in VoIP
Is that really a NAT problem or is it a SIP (VOIP) problem? SIP certainly could have been designed better IMO. Wonder who first conceived of embedding the IP address, normally only a part of the IP header, in the application data, as a security measure no less!
This is not only ineffective security it also ignores the ISO seven layer stack. That's why SIP doesn't play well with NAT. Has nothing to do with NAT itself, IMO.
NAT is the only reason we still have ipv4
It's also the reason we haven't transitioned to IPv6.
IPv6 won't happen until it has standardized IPv6 NAT and NAPT (v6-v6 and v4-v6). Unfortunately, telcos are giddy about owning all of our internal address space and a few protocol developers are tired of having to poke holes in NAT (and dismissive of the security implications).
Be that as it may the business case for NAT long predates address space limitations (and RFC1918). Businesses require private and non-routable addresses for their internal networks. This isn't going to change. Globally routable IP address are fine for gateways, but unrealistic for the devices behind those gateways. Looked at from a different perspective, what if your city decided to switch to 8 digit street addresses and demanded that you assign an address to every room in your house. Of course it'll never happen, nor will IPv6 without NAT and NAPT.
The elephant in the room is all the organizations who still "own" large blocks (/16s and /8s, 65,536 and 16,777,216 IPs respectively) and don't use or need a fraction of the IPs they have allocated. ARIN does nothing about these large blocks (other than bill for them, sound familiar?), even as they hand out the last remaining /16s (to ILECs like Verizon and ATT, no surprise there).
IPv6 illustrates the dysfunction of ARIN in the same way the proposal to unregulate domain names illustrates the dysfunction of ICANN, and OOXML illustrates the dysfunction of ISO. Dysfunction and corruption, largely due to lobbying and technically undereducated legislators, with no resolution in sight. How long will we continue sit on our hands while another Enron's energy crisis and another Lehman Brother's mortgage crisis spreads to the Internet?
use a better scripting language
That's what I've been wondering. Bash is fine for the command-line but not such a good choice for scripts due to compatibility issues. It certainly isn't a good choice of scripting language compared to /bin/sh. Given the number of changes bash has had over the years it would seem to be a kitchen sink of every feature anyone wanted to add (though not necessarily use). POSIX is protecting /bin/sh from this sort of feature creep but there are still several bugs in "bash --posix" (sh mode).
I also wonder about feaures like associative arrays in shells. Obviously someone wanted to code it, but a shell seems like the wrong tool for any job needing an array. Is Bash's feature creep just bloat, motivated by some shell programmer's fears of learning a more appropriate scripting language like Python or Perl? I have to say it seems that way given that +99% of Bash scripts are simply the result of the script writer's lack of familiarity with the differences between bash and sh.
And of course if it asked you
From the screenshot it doesn't appear there was anything to ask, as it was disabled. Installed but not enabled would seem to be as opt-in as plugins or extensions get. It is certainly better than the ones Mozilla installs that you can't even uninstall. Not different from what Ubuntu and MS are doing.
What we need now is an open repository for plugins. The current Mozilla-managed repo is a bit too Google-friendly for my tastes, especially when I'm looking for the Scroogle plugin.
It really doesn't care what's ten miles below it
You can say that again. The problem is the people living 10 miles below, and the noise they have to deal with.
I really feel sorry for people living around airports today. We have noise pollution laws for everything but aircraft. The reason for this is the FAA, which has historically been more very receptive to air industry lobbying, and so more interested in promoting air travel than in limiting the consequences of air travel (a de-facto tax on those of us who have to listen to jets takeoff and land from 10s of miles away, night and day).
That same FAA disregard for anything that might negatively impact total air passenger miles got us 9/11 and continues to cause well documented health and mortality effects in areas around major airports. Enlightened governments are re-locating their airports away from population centers and building fast and convenient light rail to make it convenient to get to them. Hong Kong is an excellent example of how to do airports right. Los Angeles and San Francisco are equally good examples of how not to.
Another thing government could be doing to balance the substantial subsidies air industries have enjoyed is divert some of those dollars to rail and R&D into quieter and more efficient aircraft. If the lobbying is any indication, however, nothing has changed. Airlines are still focused overwhelmingly on the next quarter and the FAA doesn't care.
The problem with supersonic passenger planes was that they could not fly at those speed over land, rendering most speed advantage moot.
Sonic booms were one one of many problems. The high cost, poor efficiency, and impact on ozone layer depletion were also factors.
The "freedom" that Stallman refers to has nothing to do with developer freedom
This is true to a point. But note that Stallman is really consistent about only one thing, the GPL. He goes on about free code but it's a one-way freedom. As an example look how much GPL code is simply ripped off from the BSD codebase. Stallman thinks nothing of this nor does he contribute back into BSD or other projects which help Linux and the GPL. Freedom as in free to take but not free to give back is not true freedom in my book. It'd more like an agenda.
Mercurial makes it harder for you to do something "bad" like re-write history too far
I've always considered history re-writing to be a black hat's dream and a manager's nightmare. What, if any, are the benefits to history re-writing?
the alternatives really don't have much compelling to offer
This is what I have been wondering about. One of the alternatives, Mercurial, does seem to be a compelling alternative to GIT. Would love to hear from anyone who has used both, especially WRT migrations from CVS and integration with Trac. We've been leaning towards Mercurial as it is mostly written in Python (vs C), implements much the same functionality in 1/3rd as many lines of code (according to http://www.infoq.com/articles/dvcs-guide), and is used by Mozilla, Sun, etc.
These comparisons matter now, but may not be so relevant in the future if either Git or Mercurial garners substantially more mindshare than the other. We would, ideally, like to stay ahead of the trends...
Negative PR it may be for some, but for others it is a reminder not to do business with Amazon. Many of us avoid Amazon for refusing to stop sending unsolicited advertising via email, for not affording us a choice in how our purchases are tracked, and for not giving us a choice in their retention of our data (credit card and other).
Um, no thank you. If you don't want a company storing your card, then don't use them.
Isn't this the same excuse some of the same companies use for spamming their own customers?
To clarify: it's not a matter of whether Amazon stores your credit card or not, the issue here is whether you, the consumer, have the right to prohibit vendors from storing your credit card data. Good consumer protection law should require the vendor to ask the consumer for permission, just as the same law should require explicit/double opt-in if the vendor wants to send unsolicited advertising email in the future.
It was originally applied for in 1998
That'd be at least 5 years after Lotus Magellin did it, and IMO, did it better than anything MS or Apple does today.
Lotus dropped Magellin when Windows 3 came along, so most of today's techs don't know about it, but it is still
surprising their legal research overlooked it.