Can you point to where he discourages people from using non-FSF licenses, or tries to prevent people from licensing their code as they will?
The FSF as an organization takes a dim view of non-free software; one would think that joining its board is sufficient evidence of his approval of this viewpoint. Or is that not enough evidence for you?
There's no substitute for a secure box. But what's lost on a lot of people is that security through obscurity is only bad if it's your only security method. True security doesn't mean that you paint a bull's eye on your forehead and taunt the crackers to come after you.
If cracking tools are widely available, they will be used to more quickly exploit whatever vulnerabilities exist, giving the author less time to patch. It's better for everyone if these tools are hard to come by.
Thanks for posting the first "bah, humbug" post. I'll take my shot at the first "Jane, you ignorant slut" post.
You don't have to take visible-light pictures only. You could do something else cool, like bombard the surface with neutrons, looking for hydrogen (= water).
Actually, if you put pretty much any vehicle in the vicinity of the moon, you will probably find a scientist who will want to do an interesting experiment with it. Scientists are ingenious that way.
There was also a story not long ago about an effort to deliberately crash things into the moon to liberate clouds of debris, which could be analyzed by ground instruments. In that case the useful payload could be nothing but bricks.
And a "burst resistant container" may be useful if you want to do science in the millisecond that the probe has to survive on the surface. Seriously! A recent Mars mission had a couple of probes that were supposed to work this way (they failed).
Unfortunately, it seems like the only thing he is being charged with is assault (on the police). The cops were unsure as to the legality of spam; they were looking for evidence of fraud. They may have found it if they had been able to examine his computer, but if the guy had kept his cool, he would probably still be spamming today.
Flashmobs are to the 2000's as streaking was to the 70's; merely the obnoxious fad of the times. Thirty years from now, flashmobs will be footnote of history, dragged out of archival footage whenever news shows (or whatever replaces news shows) want to give context to the time.
So, as a watershed event, I find flashmob computing to be lacking.
Re:How about the article itself?
on
Why PHBs Fear Linux
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
I think he pretty identified the primary reason Linux has been slow to catch on in mainstream business.
Too bad for him that he lost me (and unintentionally made a different point) in the second sentence (emphasis mine):
Simply try to remember, next time you run into users who think Microsoft invented computing, that they got those beliefs from their textbooks -- meaning that they aren't necessarily as moronic as their opinions and that you can hope to reeducate at least some of them.
This is the reason why most bosses are slow to pick up on Linux -- because most IT professionals treat it like a club rather than a serious operating system. If you don't get it, you are one of the morons, and you are excluded.
A manager might see Linux on the same lines as s/he sees this or this, products designed to exclude the general public from the IT fraternity. The IT people think they are cool; the general public just sees nerds with toys.
Are you sure you want ads subsidising the publication of scientific research, especially in medicine?
This paper entitled, "Viagra causes withered genitals," is brought to you by the makers of Cialis.
Better yet, there were two separate instances at the University of Toronto where two separate researchers were pressured into suppressing their research when it was unfavorable to one of the university's sponsors. The investigator in one case was Dr. Nancy Olivieri, who faced a possible lawsuit and discipline when she spoke out against Apotex; the other one involved Dr. David Healey, who had a job offer rescinded when he spoke against Prozac.
So what's left? Author-pay, government-pay and donation-based systems all have disadvantages.
It's only bad because in Canada it's treated as a national religion.
A recent report on the future of health care basically said that maintaining the status quo would take every spare dollar from the federal budget for the forseeable future. That is, no new spending on any future program, and all we're doing is keeping health care where it is.
Yet if you propose even mild reforms to health care -- such as user co-payments, or private health care delivery (not private insurance) -- the public screams bloody murder. Never mind that many other nations with public health insurance have made such reforms; even Sweden has co-payments.
My favorite is the opposition to so-called "two tier health care". Basically, this means a scenario in which doctors and patients could opt out of the public system, in effect paying extra for faster care. Most Canadians reject this idea loudly. Yet two-tier health care is already with us; it's called "get in your car and drive to the nearest American hospital". Besides, we already tolerate two-tier education (i.e., private schools), and civilization has yet to collapse.
I love socialized medicine, but sometimes it seems like the Canada Health Act is more like a suicide pact: we all die together.
How long can Canada do this before they get pressured to follow in their oppressive neighbors' lead?
I'm sorry... who's oppressive now?
Canadian broadcasting law includes Canadian content restrictions. Fully 35% of all music broadcast on Canadian radio must be CanCon, meaning at least two of the composer, performer, recording venue, and lyric writer must be Canadian. For television the fraction is 50%.
Sounds pretty benign, until you realize that it is therefore illegal for US stations to broacast in Canada, which includes satellite broadcasts. It is illegal to receive US-based satellite signals in Canada, and doing so could result in a visit from the RCMP and confiscation of your satellite equipment. All this for simply watching HBO, MTV, or even the Superbowl commercials (local stations rebroadcasting the Superbowl in Canada substitute their own ads).
In spite of this, Canadian television has yet to produce a domestic hit television series, and virtually all our recording artists flee to the states.
I think point 4 is important. One of the most annoying things about HTML are pages that require you to side-scroll to read text. This text probably looked just fine to the person who wrote the file. With PDF, I know everyone sees it just like I do.
Also, though your point was made from cutting-and-pasting my comment, PDF is far from an obscure format.
Mod parent up. Also:
on
Free Culture
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
More than that:
Are the 40+ million plus fileswapping pirates winning, or are the draconian laws crushing our creativity like a jackboot?
Apart from being inflammatory, this question sets up a false dichotomy, which presupposes that fileswappers help innovation. Yet this is far from proven, given that almost all of the files shared by fileswappers are the same pop culture materials produced by the conglomerates.
The reading of the review is not terribly critical, and is more like a rant.
Re:Why PDF?
on
Free Culture
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Why PDF?
1. Almost everyone knows what PDF is and has the reader. 2. It's better than sharing Word files. 3. Reader is available for most platforms. Open source readers are available for those not officially supported. 4. It preserves the look of documents across hardware and platforms.
In other words it's the most practical of the popular formats. Everything I make available online is in PDF. Maybe it doesn't have some pet feature that you have in mind, but that's no reason to go with some obscure format that is probably broken in other ways.
Because many distros will not ship non-free software by default. This greatly limits the usefulness of Java as a general development language for Linux applications.
Doesn't that say more about Linux than it does about Sun?
If this is true, and those rocks truly are sedimentary, they should be full of bacterial fossils. All we have to do is get one of them under a microscope to confirm life on Mars.
This is the original definition of Murphy's Law: If it is possible to do something in more than one way, and one of those ways leads to catastrophe, someone will inevitably do it the wrong way.
In fact the original inspiration for Murphy's Law was a G-force meter that was installed backwards, thereby taking meaningless readings. (It probably didn't go below zero.)
Another example is the 1969 gearbox fire on the Canadian navy ship, HMCS Kootenay. A gearbox bearing was installed backwards, which restricted its flow of lubrication oil (on a naval vessel, the gearbox is the size of a car and absorbs tremendous loads). Apparently it did say which way to install it, but the installation was made in a foreign shipyard where the workers could not read English. The poorly lubricated bearing overheated and caused an explosion during a full-power trial; nine sailors were killed and dozens injured.
The moral of all these stories is: if it's important which way something is installed, make it asymmetric so that it's physically impossible to install it the wrong way. Labels are not enough.
What's amusing/irconic about the spam debate is that any possible solution is always shot down for technical/philosophical/OSS reasons. I have yet to see a solution advocated that gets more than 25% support.
That's because the quickest way to look smart is to poke holes in someone else's idea. And the slashbots love to have themselves look smart and others look stupid.
The philosophical grounds are a catch-all for anly solutions that have technical merit, usually because such solutions are proposed by organizations that the slashbots hate.
It's not like people immediately forget who they vote for. If the exit polls were plagued by problems, and the result still seems fishy, a new poll can be devised.
In any case, all I'm saying is that to commit e-vote fraud, you have to be more clever than making the vote 99% in favor of the candidate of your choice. I'm not saying fraud is impossible or even implausible. In fact, to have a real debate about the reliability of e-voting, I'd love for some hacker to "elect" Lyndon LaRouche president.
That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that exit polls are a check on the system, so you couldn't reasonably make Ralph Nader win with 70% of the vote. The 2000 situation is particularly ripe for fraud given the closeness of the election, because exit polls would be inconclusive.
if you want to fund life search, you have to GO THERE
I was reading a NASA report on the prospects for interstellar travel. Basically, you would have to create a self-contained biosphere that would function for hundreds or even thousands of years; construct an enclosure that would last that long under erosion from particles with relative velocities that are a significant fraction of the speed of light; find a power source that would last that long and provide propulsion to accellerate such an enormous vehicle to a significant fraction of light speed; find a way to accurately navigate interstellar space, when our knowledge of stellar positions is imperfect; and find volunteers who would not only have no chance of returning to Earth, but who would have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who would never live anywhere except the spacecraft, in total dedication to the mission. Even assuming the technical hurdles could be overcome (which the report said are beyond existing or forseeable technology), the report noted that this last point would require extreme devotion that challenges the most stringent religions on Earth.
To solve the human factor, I think it's inevitable that interstellar astronauts will have to be genetically altered humans, possibly with qualities such as extremely long lifespan, low food requirements, devoted obedience, and hibernation.
Sending a probe to another star system is probably also beyond existing technology, but would probably be possible within the next century or so. The device would have to weigh at most a few pounds (by comparison, the Cassini probe weighs about a ton), again withstand interstellar pounding, and yet have enough energy to communicate its findings back to Earth (not at all trivial -- remember the inverse square law; with existing technology, Voyager's data rates at Pluto's distance are a few hundred bits per second).
So until about the year 2100, listening is about all we got.
Slashdot Mirror
Can you point to where he discourages people from using non-FSF licenses, or tries to prevent people from licensing their code as they will?
The FSF as an organization takes a dim view of non-free software; one would think that joining its board is sufficient evidence of his approval of this viewpoint. Or is that not enough evidence for you?
There's no substitute for a secure box. But what's lost on a lot of people is that security through obscurity is only bad if it's your only security method. True security doesn't mean that you paint a bull's eye on your forehead and taunt the crackers to come after you.
If cracking tools are widely available, they will be used to more quickly exploit whatever vulnerabilities exist, giving the author less time to patch. It's better for everyone if these tools are hard to come by.
Thanks for posting the first "bah, humbug" post. I'll take my shot at the first "Jane, you ignorant slut" post.
You don't have to take visible-light pictures only. You could do something else cool, like bombard the surface with neutrons, looking for hydrogen (= water).
Actually, if you put pretty much any vehicle in the vicinity of the moon, you will probably find a scientist who will want to do an interesting experiment with it. Scientists are ingenious that way.
There was also a story not long ago about an effort to deliberately crash things into the moon to liberate clouds of debris, which could be analyzed by ground instruments. In that case the useful payload could be nothing but bricks.
And a "burst resistant container" may be useful if you want to do science in the millisecond that the probe has to survive on the surface. Seriously! A recent Mars mission had a couple of probes that were supposed to work this way (they failed).
Unfortunately, it seems like the only thing he is being charged with is assault (on the police). The cops were unsure as to the legality of spam; they were looking for evidence of fraud. They may have found it if they had been able to examine his computer, but if the guy had kept his cool, he would probably still be spamming today.
That's bizarre logic. By your argument, shoplifting is the fault of the store for charging too much.
Flashmobs are to the 2000's as streaking was to the 70's; merely the obnoxious fad of the times. Thirty years from now, flashmobs will be footnote of history, dragged out of archival footage whenever news shows (or whatever replaces news shows) want to give context to the time.
So, as a watershed event, I find flashmob computing to be lacking.
I think he pretty identified the primary reason Linux has been slow to catch on in mainstream business.
Too bad for him that he lost me (and unintentionally made a different point) in the second sentence (emphasis mine):
Simply try to remember, next time you run into users who think Microsoft invented computing, that they got those beliefs from their textbooks -- meaning that they aren't necessarily as moronic as their opinions and that you can hope to reeducate at least some of them.
This is the reason why most bosses are slow to pick up on Linux -- because most IT professionals treat it like a club rather than a serious operating system. If you don't get it, you are one of the morons, and you are excluded.
A manager might see Linux on the same lines as s/he sees this or this, products designed to exclude the general public from the IT fraternity. The IT people think they are cool; the general public just sees nerds with toys.
Are you sure you want ads subsidising the publication of scientific research, especially in medicine?
This paper entitled, "Viagra causes withered genitals," is brought to you by the makers of Cialis.
Better yet, there were two separate instances at the University of Toronto where two separate researchers were pressured into suppressing their research when it was unfavorable to one of the university's sponsors. The investigator in one case was Dr. Nancy Olivieri, who faced a possible lawsuit and discipline when she spoke out against Apotex; the other one involved Dr. David Healey, who had a job offer rescinded when he spoke against Prozac.
So what's left? Author-pay, government-pay and donation-based systems all have disadvantages.
"I'm sorry about Attack of the Clones. I'm so sorry. Oh, what was I thinking? Sorry."
Fortunately, my comment about Quebec applies to both.
It's only bad because in Canada it's treated as a national religion.
A recent report on the future of health care basically said that maintaining the status quo would take every spare dollar from the federal budget for the forseeable future. That is, no new spending on any future program, and all we're doing is keeping health care where it is.
Yet if you propose even mild reforms to health care -- such as user co-payments, or private health care delivery (not private insurance) -- the public screams bloody murder. Never mind that many other nations with public health insurance have made such reforms; even Sweden has co-payments.
My favorite is the opposition to so-called "two tier health care". Basically, this means a scenario in which doctors and patients could opt out of the public system, in effect paying extra for faster care. Most Canadians reject this idea loudly. Yet two-tier health care is already with us; it's called "get in your car and drive to the nearest American hospital". Besides, we already tolerate two-tier education (i.e., private schools), and civilization has yet to collapse.
I love socialized medicine, but sometimes it seems like the Canada Health Act is more like a suicide pact: we all die together.
How long can Canada do this before they get pressured to follow in their oppressive neighbors' lead?
... who's oppressive now?
I'm sorry
Canadian broadcasting law includes Canadian content restrictions. Fully 35% of all music broadcast on Canadian radio must be CanCon, meaning at least two of the composer, performer, recording venue, and lyric writer must be Canadian. For television the fraction is 50%.
Sounds pretty benign, until you realize that it is therefore illegal for US stations to broacast in Canada, which includes satellite broadcasts. It is illegal to receive US-based satellite signals in Canada, and doing so could result in a visit from the RCMP and confiscation of your satellite equipment. All this for simply watching HBO, MTV, or even the Superbowl commercials (local stations rebroadcasting the Superbowl in Canada substitute their own ads).
In spite of this, Canadian television has yet to produce a domestic hit television series, and virtually all our recording artists flee to the states.
The people at the wheel seem saner, more composed and less twitchy
I guess you don't live in Quebec, then?
I think point 4 is important. One of the most annoying things about HTML are pages that require you to side-scroll to read text. This text probably looked just fine to the person who wrote the file. With PDF, I know everyone sees it just like I do.
Also, though your point was made from cutting-and-pasting my comment, PDF is far from an obscure format.
More than that:
Are the 40+ million plus fileswapping pirates winning, or are the draconian laws crushing our creativity like a jackboot?
Apart from being inflammatory, this question sets up a false dichotomy, which presupposes that fileswappers help innovation. Yet this is far from proven, given that almost all of the files shared by fileswappers are the same pop culture materials produced by the conglomerates.
The reading of the review is not terribly critical, and is more like a rant.
Why PDF?
1. Almost everyone knows what PDF is and has the reader.
2. It's better than sharing Word files.
3. Reader is available for most platforms. Open source readers are available for those not officially supported.
4. It preserves the look of documents across hardware and platforms.
In other words it's the most practical of the popular formats. Everything I make available online is in PDF. Maybe it doesn't have some pet feature that you have in mind, but that's no reason to go with some obscure format that is probably broken in other ways.
Because many distros will not ship non-free software by default. This greatly limits the usefulness of Java as a general development language for Linux applications.
Doesn't that say more about Linux than it does about Sun?
Acidophiles.
There is no environment on Earth too extreme for life, as long as there is liquid water.
If this is true, and those rocks truly are sedimentary, they should be full of bacterial fossils. All we have to do is get one of them under a microscope to confirm life on Mars.
This is the original definition of Murphy's Law: If it is possible to do something in more than one way, and one of those ways leads to catastrophe, someone will inevitably do it the wrong way.
In fact the original inspiration for Murphy's Law was a G-force meter that was installed backwards, thereby taking meaningless readings. (It probably didn't go below zero.)
Another example is the 1969 gearbox fire on the Canadian navy ship, HMCS Kootenay. A gearbox bearing was installed backwards, which restricted its flow of lubrication oil (on a naval vessel, the gearbox is the size of a car and absorbs tremendous loads). Apparently it did say which way to install it, but the installation was made in a foreign shipyard where the workers could not read English. The poorly lubricated bearing overheated and caused an explosion during a full-power trial; nine sailors were killed and dozens injured.
The moral of all these stories is: if it's important which way something is installed, make it asymmetric so that it's physically impossible to install it the wrong way. Labels are not enough.
What's amusing/irconic about the spam debate is that any possible solution is always shot down for technical/philosophical/OSS reasons. I have yet to see a solution advocated that gets more than 25% support.
That's because the quickest way to look smart is to poke holes in someone else's idea. And the slashbots love to have themselves look smart and others look stupid.
The philosophical grounds are a catch-all for anly solutions that have technical merit, usually because such solutions are proposed by organizations that the slashbots hate.
It's not like people immediately forget who they vote for. If the exit polls were plagued by problems, and the result still seems fishy, a new poll can be devised.
In any case, all I'm saying is that to commit e-vote fraud, you have to be more clever than making the vote 99% in favor of the candidate of your choice. I'm not saying fraud is impossible or even implausible. In fact, to have a real debate about the reliability of e-voting, I'd love for some hacker to "elect" Lyndon LaRouche president.
That's not what I'm saying at all. What I'm saying is that exit polls are a check on the system, so you couldn't reasonably make Ralph Nader win with 70% of the vote. The 2000 situation is particularly ripe for fraud given the closeness of the election, because exit polls would be inconclusive.
Too bad it's not going anywhere interesting.
if you want to fund life search, you have to GO THERE
I was reading a NASA report on the prospects for interstellar travel. Basically, you would have to create a self-contained biosphere that would function for hundreds or even thousands of years; construct an enclosure that would last that long under erosion from particles with relative velocities that are a significant fraction of the speed of light; find a power source that would last that long and provide propulsion to accellerate such an enormous vehicle to a significant fraction of light speed; find a way to accurately navigate interstellar space, when our knowledge of stellar positions is imperfect; and find volunteers who would not only have no chance of returning to Earth, but who would have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who would never live anywhere except the spacecraft, in total dedication to the mission. Even assuming the technical hurdles could be overcome (which the report said are beyond existing or forseeable technology), the report noted that this last point would require extreme devotion that challenges the most stringent religions on Earth.
To solve the human factor, I think it's inevitable that interstellar astronauts will have to be genetically altered humans, possibly with qualities such as extremely long lifespan, low food requirements, devoted obedience, and hibernation.
Sending a probe to another star system is probably also beyond existing technology, but would probably be possible within the next century or so. The device would have to weigh at most a few pounds (by comparison, the Cassini probe weighs about a ton), again withstand interstellar pounding, and yet have enough energy to communicate its findings back to Earth (not at all trivial -- remember the inverse square law; with existing technology, Voyager's data rates at Pluto's distance are a few hundred bits per second).
So until about the year 2100, listening is about all we got.