Nearly everyone else working on it is a volunteer doing it in their spare time. We're working on it, I assure you. If a bug report exists, that's important to know. If there's a workaround, it may still be that there's a usability issue and that's valid. If it's a problem with your hardware, what on earth do you expect them to do about it? If you can live without your shiny 3D eye-candy (or buying an Intel graphics card), you don't run into the evil-hardware-company issue.
And lastly, the quickest way to fix an issue is to provide a patch. That's not really fair, but, given that you're not paying anyone for the software, that's the way it is. (That doesn't mean that someone who tells you that the only reason you're not a happy user is that you haven't written enough patches isn't a tremendous jerk.) I've gone from filing bugs, to confirming and testing them, to writing my own patches and testcases. It's rewarding, in its own way, to make the system better, bit by bit.
Honestly, the situation on the Ubuntu tracker isn't that bad. Yes, there are still people who drop into ignored bug reports, ask "Is it still present?" and set the bug to expire if someone doesn't write back that, yes, the bug is still present in the current version, as (in plenty of cases) the owner could see if they just took five minutes to test it. Yes, there's no good way to escalate a bug or get it triaged with a quickness, even if it's something that's really damned important. Given how bad things are at the GNOME bugzilla (bugs wait forever there), I'm pleased in comparison.
Given all this, it's understandable that Linux isn't for everyone. Hell, look at the state of audio support. It's a damned tragedy. You have to really love it at this point. I'm motivated by the fact that it's worlds better than it was only a few years ago: suspend/resume actually works sometimes, a major vendor (Intel) actually maintains bleeding-edge open-source video drivers as part of the X.org distribution, and there's a lot more polish on things--all the little usability details that sound like nitpicking when you enumerate them, but add up to a good or bad user experience, in the final evaluation. You may have left Linux--and, really, if you're not willing to put up with quite a bit at this point, it's not for you--but it's not a failure.
It sounds like the default configuration uses screenshots as input for the various screensavers. This is not a good default, if it's really set up like this. On the other hand, there's a reported bug where nVidia drivers cause the screensaver to be transparent--the desktop is visible behind it. So maybe it's that particular issue. (If it is, someone who's seeing it should confirm that it's still present.)
People arrive and leave. Even if the number of stable users stays static, or grows at a rate slower than that of new people arriving, the proportion of active users will drop. Hell, look at Slashdot--total contribution volume by commenters is larger than it was, but the vast majority of accounts are dead.
You may as well say that the percentage of dead projects on SourceForge and Freshmeat mean that nobody's contributing to those sites.
If you took all editors of an article over all time, there would be a completely different consensus than the momentary ones that occur when a single dissenter arrives.
Well, yes. That's what consensus means. People who join Wikipedia and intend to "fix" an article that they see as unfairly slanted are invariably disappointed, as I think you were.
No bank is going to get a cert from RapidSSL or the like. (At least, I hope not--given the security practices I've seen at banks, I'd be surprised if they didn't
This is, supposedly, what EV certificates provide, apart from a fat new revenue stream for selling those expensive bits (quick, someone explain why wildcard certs cost a single damned penny more than single-domain certs) and making anyone who can't afford them into second-class citizens.
There is, however, an attack which goes around that; as Dan Bernstein proposed in 1999, if you set up your fake server for hugebank.com, and have it serve up redirects to your newly registered (and certified!) hugebank.secure-banking.dom site, then the user will see a validated site that they got to by typing in their bank's address or following an email link.
Given that my current bank requires me to accept javascript served from akamai.net in order for me to pay bills, and other banks use plenty of weird domains for user interaction (see pages 11--13), I don't believe that this would set off any alarms.
I complained to my bank back in August about the site requiring javascript from untrusted domains--I didn't even get to complaining about their use of various domain names. Unfortunately, there's no better alternative where I live, and they seem completely uninterested in responding to me.
It's a bit depressing how nobody takes the security implications of the internet seriously, and acts surprised when they're reminded of them.
Email is not secure. Using SSL for your POP/SMTP/IMAP connections secures your login to the server, but the mail itself is still transmitted in the clear. And people act surprised when you tell them that people can and likely do scan their email?
It got worse. Most Internet commerce transactions are encrypted. The encryption is provided by companies like VeriSign. Online vendors visit the VeriSign site and buy the encryption; customers can then be confident that their transactions are secure.
But not anymore. Kaminsky's exploit would allow an attacker to redirect VeriSign's Web traffic to an exact functioning replica of the VeriSign site.
I was going to write about how clearly the built-in CA certs in the user's browser would throw up a flag and note that the cert wasn't actually signed by the folks at Verisign or whatever... but then I realized that, hey, given the abysmal state of security compliance, it's probable that nobody would even notice.
In a more ideal world, we'd all exchange encrypted and signed email and access any site that involved a login using valid SSL certificates and secure-only cookies. But we're not there.
Civilization existed for thousands of years before the modern regulatory and welfare state.
Yes, and it was, where larger than a simple tribal band, pyramid-shaped, with a wealthy few atop masses of exploited laborers.
The market did not "fail miserably". What problems there were with meatpacking, for example, were well on their way to being remedied when the Pure Food and Drug Act came about. The only thing the Pure Food and Drug Act did was limit competition at the behest of big meatpacking firms, representatives of such firms being the ones who wrote and oversaw the regulations.
That's quite an assertion. Care to back it up?
So where are all the rats?
Well, there's been a sharp uptick in meat recalls due to contamination--that's "shit in the meat", in the vernacular--recently. Please do explain how there's not actually shit in the meat, though; I'd like to hear this.
But there are still people selling snake oil. Yet most people see through their scams.
There are laws regulating how these things can be labeled and what they can contain, which is why people aren't overdosing their kids on unlabeled laudanum.
Rice and beans and other basic foods are cheap and widely available, and would continue to be if WIC were eliminated. WIC exerts no downward pressure on their prices. What the US government does do however, is exert upward pressure on food prices through tariffs and agricultural policy.
Wait, you're pointing to US agricultural subsidies as something which makes basic staple foods expensive? How?
If capitalism causes shanty towns, we should expect to see more shanty towns in more capitalist places, instead of less capitalist places. We do not in fact see that.
Please, please tell that to the inhabitants of those things-which-are-not-shanty-towns outside any major city where globalization has taken hold.
And, again, I'm pointing out that Section 8 and the like are keeping people out of shantytowns, and you're responding that we don't have shantytowns here in the United States. Do you think you're arguing against my point?
You keep throwing out the bull but fail to back it up. Show me any solid evidence that the McCain/Palin camp was pandering to racists or get a fucking life.
The whole point of coded appeals to racists is that they're deniable. Their effect, however, is not. For instance, the "Obama's not a real American, if you know what I mean" line of attack coincided with a surge in threats reported by the Secret Service.
The hate on both sides has created a very serious divide in this country, and the propaganda about Obama somehow being Arab or the next Antichrist from the Far Right is just as bad as the Far Left throwing around propaganda that the GOP is the party of racists and that they will do anything to make sure a Black man does not get into office.
Oh, please. "From both sides"? This is the false balance that makes David Broder such a baleful influence on American politics. I'm pointing out a very real pattern which has been part of Republican politics for decades, and you're comparing that to trivially-disproved rapture-compliant fantasies.
But I guess attacks on Obama because of his relationship with his former Pastor were all about race, right? They couldn't have had to do with a man (his Reverend) who obviously hated his own country and the fact that despite the constant barrage of hate this man spewed in his church, that Obama attended the church for longer than a decade.
It might give one pause that Obama was apparently a radical Christian and a Muslim and a (presumably secular) communist. But if the point is to make him out to be some kind of scary Other (and black people are this country's standard scary Other), it makes more sense.
Feel free to read the entire "God Damn America" sermon; if you think patriotism requires that people bow and scrape before a nation that has grievously wronged them, even as they try to reform their little piece of it, then that's your business.
As far as my comments about accidentally appealing to racists, what I meant (and what you tried so hard to distort) is that you can appeal to people who are racist without trying to do so.
If it only happened occasionally, the it's-a-coincidence argument might hold water. But it's been a consistent pattern lasting decades, long enough to enable profound shifts in the nation's political map.
In other words, many southern white racists happen to be pro-gun rights. So, if you as a candidate are pro-gun rights, is it fair to then call you a racist?
Whoa, there. Perhaps I should explain in more detail. Sending coded appeals to racists doesn't make the people doing so racists. It just makes them craven political opportunists bereft of principle.
You simply think blindly that the GOP is the party of white biggots and will spin the debate as you see fit to try and fit that argument, all while bringing zero facts and plenty of FUD to the debate.
Zero facts? The explicit Southern Strategy, the demographic shift in Republican voters, the specific loss of the Latino vote in recent years--these aren't facts?
Look, again, before you get your shorts in a knot. I'm not saying that being Republican makes you a racist. I am saying that the Republican Party has become the party of white racists.
Oh, and by the way, people who illegally enter this country are referred to as illegal aliens because they, you know, illegally circumvented the immigration process [... snip...] but that doesn't make it right to break the rules and hop the fence, so to speak. I guess because of the high number of people who are having trouble
I was referring more to today's politics rather than the politics of the 60's where there were quite a few open racists still around. I think in most circles it is realized that in this day and age, you can't openly or quietly attempt to appeal to racists.
Yes. I said that. Open racism is no longer acceptable. Which is why strategies to appeal to racism without explicitly doing so have become the norm.
That doesn't mean that you won't by chance appeal to people who are racist because of other stances that you hold, but that by no means indicates that someone who appeals to people who happen to be racist are in any way trying to appeal to those sort of people.
No. Absolutely wrong. Nixon's Southern Strategy was a calculated move. Reagan followed in this path, as have Republican candidates since then. It is not an accident. (How do you accidentally appeal to racists, anyway?)
Far the opposite, in my estimation, I'd say many people, especially in the GOP, try their hardest to distance themselves from racists.
Which is why they've built their base around racists--because they were trying so hard to distance themselves?
Maybe not always successfully, but I honestly (and maybe naively) believe that racism is not dead but is not healthy and vigorous anymore, in many legit political circles.
Overt racism is dead. This does not mean that racism in general is gone. This is what I keep trying to explain, and you keep sailing on by.
I think the anti-immigration movement does have some racist elements, but the people who were architects of this movement didn't exactly have this as their intention.
Do you think that you, who didn't notice that the GOP was the party of white racism, should really be judging people based on what you'd like to think their intentions are? How wishful can your thinking get?
It was more of an issue where people are getting displaced out of their lines of work in groves [...]
Yeah, that's pretty much the exact party line put forth by VDARE and their ilk--they'll take our jobs, they're violent gang members, they're going to have anchor babies, and they're probably lepers as well.
In any case, anyone who had a real practical interest in reducing migration would have much better luck reducing the demand for under-the-table labor than reducing the supply. But that wouldn't let people demonize Latinos.
An income of $250,000 per year does not make one "ridiculously wealthy".
According to the Current Population Survey, less than two percent of households make over a quarter million per year. That's less than one in fifty. (Note that this is households, not individuals, as well.) It's a tiny, tiny slice. These people are the few, the elite, and it's insane to hold our nation hostage to their whims.
Obama was called a socialist based on his comment about "spread(ing) the wealth around".
Here, I'll quote McCain in 2000, arguing that people who make more should pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes, which is by definition a leveling of income.
McCain: So, look, here's what I really believe, that when you are -- reach a certain level of comfort, there's nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.
Ooh, looks like we dodged a socialist bullet there.
Who believes that a 35% tax rate on income over 300 some odd thousand dollars is "rugged individualism"?
Wasn't Bush an avatar of rugged individualism, an incarnation of the free market itself?
None of that is infrastructure, it's government regulation and welfare.
They're vital components of the civilization you live in. They're things that everyone benefits from, whether or not they paid for them individually.
There's no reason why the market cannot take care of all of those things.
Except that it's been tried, and failed miserably. The unexpected tragedy-farce of an era in which these problems no longer exist is that we apparently forget why the solutions we put in place were created.
Who wants to put mushed-up rats into the food they sell?
If it's cheaper to fire the ratcatcher, they will. They did, in the early 20th century. This is why we have the FDA and the USDA. (Both of which have been cut back so far that they can't reasonably inspect this country's food supply at this point.)
The government isn't preventing snake oil from being sold, basic foods are cheap and widely available, and the only places where homelessness is a problem are those places with strict rent-control and "anti-slumlord" laws.
Try and sell laudanum as a cure for cancer, and see how far you get. (I suppose the DEA would get you before the FDA did, but they'd both want a piece.) Basic foods are cheap and widely available largely because of programs like WIC and we don't have massive shantytowns because of Section 8.
If you're attempting to make an argument for libertarianism by pointing out the problems that we don't currently have, you're doing a terrible job of it.
Show me evidence of the Republican party trying to court racists. I'd love to see this.
Did you not notice my mention of the Southern Strategy? The whole point is that Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1980 could appeal to racist whites without appearing racist to anyone else. When Goldwater tried appealing to racists in 1964, the results were catastrophic outside the deep South; thus, later conservative attempts to court racists were coded and deniable, but nevertheless effective.
And Immigration Control has nothing to do with race. It has everything to do with preventing people who haven't obtained the right to come live in our country to just waltz in.
Issues which have "nothing to do with race" usually don't attract racists like free bags of Cheetos attract bloggers. David Neiwert has done plenty of legwork on this question. I'm sure you're a perfectly nice not-at-all-racist king of person, but the anti-immigration movement is rife with prejudice. When you have talking heads on Fox explaining how these folks aren't really looking for work, but are an army trying to complete "the Reconquista" and turn part of the U.S. into "AztlÃn", it becomes a little harder to deny.
Even if you can't see that, the Latino electorate here certainly could, and that was borne out in the vote.
This sounds like you'd need to add bone marrow, rather than replace it. As I understand it, bone marrow transplants are performed in leukemia because the marrow itself is cancerous, and so destroying it is important. But that's not the case here, so it's at least possible that it's not as dangerous as the procedure that would be performed on people with leukemia.
It's still likely to be major surgery, of course, with all the attendant risks of any transplant, but it might not be quite that bad.
"Prejudiced" doesn't mean "makes me uncomfortable".
I doubt there is anyone in the Republican party who is both sane and wants racist people associated with the Republican party.
I'll see your doubt and raise you the Southern Strategy, xenophobic rhetoric about who exactly counts as a "real" American and association with the racist aspects of the anti-immigration movement--even if you can't see it, Latino voters certainly could.
It was the Republican party, as a matter of fact, that pushed for the abolition of slavery in the United States to begin with. Granted, the GOP at that point and the GOP now are only of vague similarities, partially because there is not a very clear vision and direction in the Republican party at the moment, and partially because radical elements have been in the limelight in the GOP as of late.
I point out that the conservative movement relies on a racist base, and you point out that the party currently identified with conservatism was, more than a century ago, the socially-liberal party.
The spooky part is that you think this actually proves anything.
Despite opinions to the contrary, most people who tend to vote along conservative lines see the radical right as just as bad an influence in government as the radical left. I'm religious but I believe the hardcore evangelists need to get the fuck out of the party, and don't let the door hit your ass on the way out. This is a big reason why they lost soundly in the elections of 2008.
Ah, but the party has been snuggling up to them since Roe v. Wade; strongly religious voters made a major jump from voting on social-justice issues (can you believe that Catholics used to be a reliably Democratic constituency?) to voting on abortion and only on abortion. You may well believe that the fundies need to get the fuck out of your party, or, at the very least, stop being pandered to quite so damned much, but the folks in charge of strategy apparently haven't felt like that.
But to say that the Republican Party is the party of racists because there are some idiots on the internet who call themselves Republican and say shitty things about Obama and other Americans who are Black.
That would indeed have been a good point, except I never said that. The Republican party is the party of racists--which, again, isn't to say that Republicans tend to be racists, rather that racists rend to be Republicans--because it actively tries to court the racist vote as much as it can without alienating mainstream voters.
I also don't believe that the majority of Black people voted for Obama just because he is Black. It probably didn't disuade them, but I seriously doubt that most Black Americans voted for him for any other reason than they saw the choice between a guy espousing change or a guy they saw being compared to George W. Bush.
Racists weren't going to vote Democrat in any case, which is, I think, why the much-feared Bradley Effect didn't materialize. I'm certainly not saying that the only reason not to vote for Obama was racism. I am saying that non-white voters have been driven out of the Republican party because of its consistent courting of the racist vote, and that's why black people lean so heavily Democratic.
The main problem I think McCain had, if anything, was letting morons hold the reigns of his campaign. He's a good guy and didn't deserve some of the shit that has been said about him, but one thing he does deserve is criticism for a haphazard campaign and also for not making a clear statement against Palin getting railroaded by McCain's campaign staff because of Obama winning.
Oh, please. The buck has to stop somewhere. If McCain wasn't in control of his campaign, he certainly didn't deserve to be in control of the country.
I'm basing my notes on this report. While it's true that Latino voters have leaned Democratic in the past (53-44 for Kerry nationally), they leaned much further in this election (67-31 for Obama nationally); Florida, especially, where Latinos were +12 for Bush in 2004, and were +15 for Obama this year.
Good point about Cubans in Florida, though; the change there is at least in part attributed to Cubans making up a smaller portion of the aggregate Latino population.
It's not so much racism among black voters, as the racism of the Republican party. Hell, the Republicans would, if not for the racism thing, be a good pick for at least a portion of that voting bloc, as they frequently lean socially-conservative on plenty of issues. (Take Prop 8 in California, for instance.) But in attempting to appeal to their own racists--the white kind--who make up the party's base, they alienate everyone else.
Consider this: the election was heavily influenced by Latino voters, who were previously a very Republican constituency, especially in Florida. But due to the influence of Tom Tancredo, of Lou Dobbs, of Michelle Malkin, of the Minutemen and all their ilk, Latinos are now considerably more Democratic.
So, no, black people didn't vote for Obama because he was black. They voted for Obama because the other part is the party of white racists. I'm not saying that all or even most Republicans are racists, but there's one party that's made its bones by courting them, and there's one party that hasn't; it's not hard to tell which is which.
I think we sell the Civil Rights movement a little short when we forget that racism was as acceptable fifty years ago as sexism was in medieval times. No, the movement didn't end racism, but it did at least make it unfashionable; racists at least had to pretend to be interested in "law and order" or "national security" or "enforcement of immigration laws" whatever the dogwhistle is this season.
Eric Raymond describes two kinds of racism, essentially the kind where you think you're racist and the kind where you don't. Being Eric Raymond, he goes on to claim that the latter isn't racism at all, and so racism is over, but hey, it's Eric Raymond. The distinction, I think, is a useful one--what was once as common and universal as the very air is now essentially vanished from our mainstream discourse.
Racism isn't over, not by a long shot, but damn, is it ever not as bad as it used to be.
If you thought there was whining aplenty about how there are no conservatives here before the election, you haven't seen anything yet. Soon enough, the vast majority of comments will be complaints modded +5 about how no one's left who's brave enough to stand up against the liberal menace, and if so, they're invariably modded down.
I overreached. While the object filesystem was pushed back to WinFS and still hasn't been delivered, the rest of it has, in fact, been rolled out. Egg on me.
Nobody who believes in liberty has made such a distinction. Your argument is a strawman.
My argument is a strawman? Obama's tax plan has been widely publicized; the only taxes he's raising are on the ridiculously wealthy, which will be brought up to Clintonian levels. McCain's would not have. That's the difference--as I said, 4.6% on the top marginal tax rate. For this, Obama is apparently a socialist. If there's some other portion of his actual stated tax policy which reeks to you of socialism, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
'Course, all of this apparently means that America chooses socialism. I'll be hailing our new commissars any moment now, I'm sure.
I can't tell what you mean by your particular iteration of No-True-Scotsman, as I doubt you could find anyone who doesn't "believe in liberty". Try a little harder to not speak in libertarian code words. (No, I don't think "liberty" is a dirty word; I just have a sense that you're using it to mean something very specific.) I know that libertarianism does some horrific things to language, but try not to do them, just for a few moments here.
If everyone only had to pay for the physical infrastructure they used, taxes would be a small fraction of what they are now.
Oh, pardon me. I was referring to things other than roads and bridges and such; I was referring to food that's not full of mushed-up rats, drugs that actually do what they say they do, streets that aren't full of starving old people, and all the other things which separate us from a neofeudal nightmare.
Most libertarians I know enjoy civilization, and pay good money to use its services.
Yes. Because they don't take their batshit ideas seriously.
This changes everything. The politics of fear will end. Black people won't be seen "out of place" in any place from now on.
No... and yes. Racism isn't over; racism wasn't over when slavery ended, when the military was integrated or when Jim Crow was abolished. But each of those was a watershed, and things were a little bit different, a little bit better.
I wonder if folks who were around for the civil rights movement of the 60s thought they'd live to see this day.
I saw a reporter speaking from Times Square, or maybe it was Grant Park, last night, saying that his father had always told him that this country would never elect a black man president. He said that the country had finally proved his old man wrong. From a practical standpoint, it's not that big a deal. From a symbolic one, its importance can't be overstated.
Those rights aren't important to him. The only important right to this kind of fellow is the right not to pay taxes while he pretends not to benefit from the infrastructure, from the civilization he resides in. Torture and disappearances happen to other people.
You're apparently a libertarian. Good on you. If you want to live in a place where the government doesn't take the fruits of your labors, there are plenty of government-free zones around the world. They also tend to be Mad Max-esque nightmares that everyone is desperately trying to escape from, but I'm sure that's a fantastic chance for you to prove that your individual right to bear arms will outgun the local mafia. Bon voyage!
On a slightly less sarcastic note, I find it fucking hilarious that the difference between rugged individualism and the heavy yoke of baleful commie servitude is a four point six percent rise in the marginal tax rate. Oh, hell, I'll just let Ruben Bolling mock you.
Finally, it's funny-sad-but mostly funny that taxes are whined about when they're paid, not when the expenses are incurred. If you have a problem with our finances, your beef is with the guys who just pissed roughly a trillion bucks away halfway 'round the world, not with the killjoy who points out that we all have to pay for that mess now.
Perhaps black folks would vote Republican if the Republican party exorcised its racism. Like it or not, they're the party of white dudes scared as hell that they might not be better than some black dude. While that does well for the scared white dude vote, it doesn't do well for the black vote.
You might consider that black people tend to be surprisingly socially conservative. They'd probably lean Republican, if it weren't for the racism.
You might also consider that Latinos were a solidly Republican constituency in 2004, but were solidly Democratic in 2008, despite being generally socially conservative. (Consider the D/R split in California compared to the split over Prop 8.) You can thank Tom Tancredo, Michelle Malkin and their ilk for that.
Oh, please. King scared the hell out of white people because he questioned the assumption that we lived in a just and fair nation. White folks said the same things about King when he was alive that they're saying about Wright now, and for the same reasons--because they're offensive to the assumptions that white people are privileged enough to hold.
There's something especially grotesque about King's corpse being exhumed by his critics and paraded around as though he'd support them. The man was a socialist, for crying out loud.
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Nearly everyone else working on it is a volunteer doing it in their spare time. We're working on it, I assure you. If a bug report exists, that's important to know. If there's a workaround, it may still be that there's a usability issue and that's valid. If it's a problem with your hardware, what on earth do you expect them to do about it? If you can live without your shiny 3D eye-candy (or buying an Intel graphics card), you don't run into the evil-hardware-company issue.
And lastly, the quickest way to fix an issue is to provide a patch. That's not really fair, but, given that you're not paying anyone for the software, that's the way it is. (That doesn't mean that someone who tells you that the only reason you're not a happy user is that you haven't written enough patches isn't a tremendous jerk.) I've gone from filing bugs, to confirming and testing them, to writing my own patches and testcases. It's rewarding, in its own way, to make the system better, bit by bit.
Honestly, the situation on the Ubuntu tracker isn't that bad. Yes, there are still people who drop into ignored bug reports, ask "Is it still present?" and set the bug to expire if someone doesn't write back that, yes, the bug is still present in the current version, as (in plenty of cases) the owner could see if they just took five minutes to test it. Yes, there's no good way to escalate a bug or get it triaged with a quickness, even if it's something that's really damned important. Given how bad things are at the GNOME bugzilla (bugs wait forever there), I'm pleased in comparison.
Given all this, it's understandable that Linux isn't for everyone. Hell, look at the state of audio support. It's a damned tragedy. You have to really love it at this point. I'm motivated by the fact that it's worlds better than it was only a few years ago: suspend/resume actually works sometimes, a major vendor (Intel) actually maintains bleeding-edge open-source video drivers as part of the X.org distribution, and there's a lot more polish on things--all the little usability details that sound like nitpicking when you enumerate them, but add up to a good or bad user experience, in the final evaluation. You may have left Linux--and, really, if you're not willing to put up with quite a bit at this point, it's not for you--but it's not a failure.
It sounds like the default configuration uses screenshots as input for the various screensavers. This is not a good default, if it's really set up like this. On the other hand, there's a reported bug where nVidia drivers cause the screensaver to be transparent--the desktop is visible behind it. So maybe it's that particular issue. (If it is, someone who's seeing it should confirm that it's still present.)
People arrive and leave. Even if the number of stable users stays static, or grows at a rate slower than that of new people arriving, the proportion of active users will drop. Hell, look at Slashdot--total contribution volume by commenters is larger than it was, but the vast majority of accounts are dead.
You may as well say that the percentage of dead projects on SourceForge and Freshmeat mean that nobody's contributing to those sites.
If you took all editors of an article over all time, there would be a completely different consensus than the momentary ones that occur when a single dissenter arrives.
Well, yes. That's what consensus means. People who join Wikipedia and intend to "fix" an article that they see as unfairly slanted are invariably disappointed, as I think you were.
No bank is going to get a cert from RapidSSL or the like. (At least, I hope not--given the security practices I've seen at banks, I'd be surprised if they didn't
This is, supposedly, what EV certificates provide, apart from a fat new revenue stream for selling those expensive bits (quick, someone explain why wildcard certs cost a single damned penny more than single-domain certs) and making anyone who can't afford them into second-class citizens.
There is, however, an attack which goes around that; as Dan Bernstein proposed in 1999, if you set up your fake server for hugebank.com, and have it serve up redirects to your newly registered (and certified!) hugebank.secure-banking.dom site, then the user will see a validated site that they got to by typing in their bank's address or following an email link.
Given that my current bank requires me to accept javascript served from akamai.net in order for me to pay bills, and other banks use plenty of weird domains for user interaction (see pages 11--13), I don't believe that this would set off any alarms.
I complained to my bank back in August about the site requiring javascript from untrusted domains--I didn't even get to complaining about their use of various domain names. Unfortunately, there's no better alternative where I live, and they seem completely uninterested in responding to me.
It's a bit depressing how nobody takes the security implications of the internet seriously, and acts surprised when they're reminded of them.
Email is not secure. Using SSL for your POP/SMTP/IMAP connections secures your login to the server, but the mail itself is still transmitted in the clear. And people act surprised when you tell them that people can and likely do scan their email?
Then again, given that our financial institutions actively train their users to ignore security indicators (a very exploitable situation), we shouldn't be surprised at that sort of nonsense.
I noticed the following in the article:
It got worse. Most Internet commerce transactions are encrypted. The encryption is provided by companies like VeriSign. Online vendors visit the VeriSign site and buy the encryption; customers can then be confident that their transactions are secure.
But not anymore. Kaminsky's exploit would allow an attacker to redirect VeriSign's Web traffic to an exact functioning replica of the VeriSign site.
I was going to write about how clearly the built-in CA certs in the user's browser would throw up a flag and note that the cert wasn't actually signed by the folks at Verisign or whatever... but then I realized that, hey, given the abysmal state of security compliance, it's probable that nobody would even notice.
And an article on cache poisoning that doesn't even mention that Dan Bernstein had foreseen and fixed the lack of source-port randomization while pointing out that it's still only a stopgap seven years earlier is an article that should have been edited a bit more thoroughly. Kaminsky made the attack much more dangerous, but the possibility should never have existed in the first place.
In a more ideal world, we'd all exchange encrypted and signed email and access any site that involved a login using valid SSL certificates and secure-only cookies. But we're not there.
Civilization existed for thousands of years before the modern regulatory and welfare state.
Yes, and it was, where larger than a simple tribal band, pyramid-shaped, with a wealthy few atop masses of exploited laborers.
The market did not "fail miserably". What problems there were with meatpacking, for example, were well on their way to being remedied when the Pure Food and Drug Act came about. The only thing the Pure Food and Drug Act did was limit competition at the behest of big meatpacking firms, representatives of such firms being the ones who wrote and oversaw the regulations.
That's quite an assertion. Care to back it up?
So where are all the rats?
Well, there's been a sharp uptick in meat recalls due to contamination--that's "shit in the meat", in the vernacular--recently. Please do explain how there's not actually shit in the meat, though; I'd like to hear this.
But there are still people selling snake oil. Yet most people see through their scams.
There are laws regulating how these things can be labeled and what they can contain, which is why people aren't overdosing their kids on unlabeled laudanum.
Rice and beans and other basic foods are cheap and widely available, and would continue to be if WIC were eliminated. WIC exerts no downward pressure on their prices. What the US government does do however, is exert upward pressure on food prices through tariffs and agricultural policy.
Wait, you're pointing to US agricultural subsidies as something which makes basic staple foods expensive? How?
If capitalism causes shanty towns, we should expect to see more shanty towns in more capitalist places, instead of less capitalist places. We do not in fact see that.
Please, please tell that to the inhabitants of those things-which-are-not-shanty-towns outside any major city where globalization has taken hold.
And, again, I'm pointing out that Section 8 and the like are keeping people out of shantytowns, and you're responding that we don't have shantytowns here in the United States. Do you think you're arguing against my point?
The whole point of coded appeals to racists is that they're deniable. Their effect, however, is not. For instance, the "Obama's not a real American, if you know what I mean" line of attack coincided with a surge in threats reported by the Secret Service.
Oh, please. "From both sides"? This is the false balance that makes David Broder such a baleful influence on American politics. I'm pointing out a very real pattern which has been part of Republican politics for decades, and you're comparing that to trivially-disproved rapture-compliant fantasies.
It might give one pause that Obama was apparently a radical Christian and a Muslim and a (presumably secular) communist. But if the point is to make him out to be some kind of scary Other (and black people are this country's standard scary Other), it makes more sense.
Feel free to read the entire "God Damn America" sermon; if you think patriotism requires that people bow and scrape before a nation that has grievously wronged them, even as they try to reform their little piece of it, then that's your business.
If it only happened occasionally, the it's-a-coincidence argument might hold water. But it's been a consistent pattern lasting decades, long enough to enable profound shifts in the nation's political map.
Whoa, there. Perhaps I should explain in more detail. Sending coded appeals to racists doesn't make the people doing so racists. It just makes them craven political opportunists bereft of principle.
Zero facts? The explicit Southern Strategy, the demographic shift in Republican voters, the specific loss of the Latino vote in recent years--these aren't facts?
Look, again, before you get your shorts in a knot. I'm not saying that being Republican makes you a racist. I am saying that the Republican Party has become the party of white racists.
Yes. I said that. Open racism is no longer acceptable. Which is why strategies to appeal to racism without explicitly doing so have become the norm.
No. Absolutely wrong. Nixon's Southern Strategy was a calculated move. Reagan followed in this path, as have Republican candidates since then. It is not an accident. (How do you accidentally appeal to racists, anyway?)
Which is why they've built their base around racists--because they were trying so hard to distance themselves?
Overt racism is dead. This does not mean that racism in general is gone. This is what I keep trying to explain, and you keep sailing on by.
Do you think that you, who didn't notice that the GOP was the party of white racism, should really be judging people based on what you'd like to think their intentions are? How wishful can your thinking get?
Yeah, that's pretty much the exact party line put forth by VDARE and their ilk--they'll take our jobs, they're violent gang members, they're going to have anchor babies, and they're probably lepers as well.
In any case, anyone who had a real practical interest in reducing migration would have much better luck reducing the demand for under-the-table labor than reducing the supply. But that wouldn't let people demonize Latinos.
An income of $250,000 per year does not make one "ridiculously wealthy".
According to the Current Population Survey, less than two percent of households make over a quarter million per year. That's less than one in fifty. (Note that this is households, not individuals, as well.) It's a tiny, tiny slice. These people are the few, the elite, and it's insane to hold our nation hostage to their whims.
Obama was called a socialist based on his comment about "spread(ing) the wealth around".
Here, I'll quote McCain in 2000, arguing that people who make more should pay a higher proportion of their income in taxes, which is by definition a leveling of income.
McCain: So, look, here's what I really believe, that when you are -- reach a certain level of comfort, there's nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.
Ooh, looks like we dodged a socialist bullet there.
Who believes that a 35% tax rate on income over 300 some odd thousand dollars is "rugged individualism"?
Wasn't Bush an avatar of rugged individualism, an incarnation of the free market itself?
They're vital components of the civilization you live in. They're things that everyone benefits from, whether or not they paid for them individually.
Except that it's been tried, and failed miserably. The unexpected tragedy-farce of an era in which these problems no longer exist is that we apparently forget why the solutions we put in place were created.
If it's cheaper to fire the ratcatcher, they will. They did, in the early 20th century. This is why we have the FDA and the USDA. (Both of which have been cut back so far that they can't reasonably inspect this country's food supply at this point.)
Try and sell laudanum as a cure for cancer, and see how far you get. (I suppose the DEA would get you before the FDA did, but they'd both want a piece.) Basic foods are cheap and widely available largely because of programs like WIC and we don't have massive shantytowns because of Section 8.
If you're attempting to make an argument for libertarianism by pointing out the problems that we don't currently have, you're doing a terrible job of it.
Did you not notice my mention of the Southern Strategy? The whole point is that Nixon in 1968 and Reagan in 1980 could appeal to racist whites without appearing racist to anyone else. When Goldwater tried appealing to racists in 1964, the results were catastrophic outside the deep South; thus, later conservative attempts to court racists were coded and deniable, but nevertheless effective.
Issues which have "nothing to do with race" usually don't attract racists like free bags of Cheetos attract bloggers. David Neiwert has done plenty of legwork on this question. I'm sure you're a perfectly nice not-at-all-racist king of person, but the anti-immigration movement is rife with prejudice. When you have talking heads on Fox explaining how these folks aren't really looking for work, but are an army trying to complete "the Reconquista" and turn part of the U.S. into "AztlÃn", it becomes a little harder to deny.
Even if you can't see that, the Latino electorate here certainly could, and that was borne out in the vote.
This sounds like you'd need to add bone marrow, rather than replace it. As I understand it, bone marrow transplants are performed in leukemia because the marrow itself is cancerous, and so destroying it is important. But that's not the case here, so it's at least possible that it's not as dangerous as the procedure that would be performed on people with leukemia.
It's still likely to be major surgery, of course, with all the attendant risks of any transplant, but it might not be quite that bad.
"Prejudiced" doesn't mean "makes me uncomfortable".
I'll see your doubt and raise you the Southern Strategy, xenophobic rhetoric about who exactly counts as a "real" American and association with the racist aspects of the anti-immigration movement--even if you can't see it, Latino voters certainly could.
I point out that the conservative movement relies on a racist base, and you point out that the party currently identified with conservatism was, more than a century ago, the socially-liberal party.
The spooky part is that you think this actually proves anything.
Ah, but the party has been snuggling up to them since Roe v. Wade; strongly religious voters made a major jump from voting on social-justice issues (can you believe that Catholics used to be a reliably Democratic constituency?) to voting on abortion and only on abortion. You may well believe that the fundies need to get the fuck out of your party, or, at the very least, stop being pandered to quite so damned much, but the folks in charge of strategy apparently haven't felt like that.
That would indeed have been a good point, except I never said that. The Republican party is the party of racists--which, again, isn't to say that Republicans tend to be racists, rather that racists rend to be Republicans--because it actively tries to court the racist vote as much as it can without alienating mainstream voters.
Racists weren't going to vote Democrat in any case, which is, I think, why the much-feared Bradley Effect didn't materialize. I'm certainly not saying that the only reason not to vote for Obama was racism. I am saying that non-white voters have been driven out of the Republican party because of its consistent courting of the racist vote, and that's why black people lean so heavily Democratic.
Oh, please. The buck has to stop somewhere. If McCain wasn't in control of his campaign, he certainly didn't deserve to be in control of the country.
I'm basing my notes on this report. While it's true that Latino voters have leaned Democratic in the past (53-44 for Kerry nationally), they leaned much further in this election (67-31 for Obama nationally); Florida, especially, where Latinos were +12 for Bush in 2004, and were +15 for Obama this year.
Good point about Cubans in Florida, though; the change there is at least in part attributed to Cubans making up a smaller portion of the aggregate Latino population.
It's not so much racism among black voters, as the racism of the Republican party. Hell, the Republicans would, if not for the racism thing, be a good pick for at least a portion of that voting bloc, as they frequently lean socially-conservative on plenty of issues. (Take Prop 8 in California, for instance.) But in attempting to appeal to their own racists--the white kind--who make up the party's base, they alienate everyone else.
Consider this: the election was heavily influenced by Latino voters, who were previously a very Republican constituency, especially in Florida. But due to the influence of Tom Tancredo, of Lou Dobbs, of Michelle Malkin, of the Minutemen and all their ilk, Latinos are now considerably more Democratic.
So, no, black people didn't vote for Obama because he was black. They voted for Obama because the other part is the party of white racists. I'm not saying that all or even most Republicans are racists, but there's one party that's made its bones by courting them, and there's one party that hasn't; it's not hard to tell which is which.
I think we sell the Civil Rights movement a little short when we forget that racism was as acceptable fifty years ago as sexism was in medieval times. No, the movement didn't end racism, but it did at least make it unfashionable; racists at least had to pretend to be interested in "law and order" or "national security" or "enforcement of immigration laws" whatever the dogwhistle is this season.
Eric Raymond describes two kinds of racism, essentially the kind where you think you're racist and the kind where you don't. Being Eric Raymond, he goes on to claim that the latter isn't racism at all, and so racism is over, but hey, it's Eric Raymond. The distinction, I think, is a useful one--what was once as common and universal as the very air is now essentially vanished from our mainstream discourse.
Racism isn't over, not by a long shot, but damn, is it ever not as bad as it used to be.
Where have you been? Our dear and glorious leader Eric Raymond has redefined hacker politics, and we're now all moderate-to-neoconservative. Some of us reject left-right politics altogether, like Eric. And Dr. Breen.
If you thought there was whining aplenty about how there are no conservatives here before the election, you haven't seen anything yet. Soon enough, the vast majority of comments will be complaints modded +5 about how no one's left who's brave enough to stand up against the liberal menace, and if so, they're invariably modded down.
I overreached. While the object filesystem was pushed back to WinFS and still hasn't been delivered, the rest of it has, in fact, been rolled out. Egg on me.
My argument is a strawman? Obama's tax plan has been widely publicized; the only taxes he's raising are on the ridiculously wealthy, which will be brought up to Clintonian levels. McCain's would not have. That's the difference--as I said, 4.6% on the top marginal tax rate. For this, Obama is apparently a socialist. If there's some other portion of his actual stated tax policy which reeks to you of socialism, I'd be interested in hearing about it.
'Course, all of this apparently means that America chooses socialism. I'll be hailing our new commissars any moment now, I'm sure.
I can't tell what you mean by your particular iteration of No-True-Scotsman, as I doubt you could find anyone who doesn't "believe in liberty". Try a little harder to not speak in libertarian code words. (No, I don't think "liberty" is a dirty word; I just have a sense that you're using it to mean something very specific.) I know that libertarianism does some horrific things to language, but try not to do them, just for a few moments here.
Oh, pardon me. I was referring to things other than roads and bridges and such; I was referring to food that's not full of mushed-up rats, drugs that actually do what they say they do, streets that aren't full of starving old people, and all the other things which separate us from a neofeudal nightmare.
Yes. Because they don't take their batshit ideas seriously.
No... and yes. Racism isn't over; racism wasn't over when slavery ended, when the military was integrated or when Jim Crow was abolished. But each of those was a watershed, and things were a little bit different, a little bit better.
I wonder if folks who were around for the civil rights movement of the 60s thought they'd live to see this day.
I saw a reporter speaking from Times Square, or maybe it was Grant Park, last night, saying that his father had always told him that this country would never elect a black man president. He said that the country had finally proved his old man wrong. From a practical standpoint, it's not that big a deal. From a symbolic one, its importance can't be overstated.
Those rights aren't important to him. The only important right to this kind of fellow is the right not to pay taxes while he pretends not to benefit from the infrastructure, from the civilization he resides in. Torture and disappearances happen to other people.
You're apparently a libertarian. Good on you. If you want to live in a place where the government doesn't take the fruits of your labors, there are plenty of government-free zones around the world. They also tend to be Mad Max-esque nightmares that everyone is desperately trying to escape from, but I'm sure that's a fantastic chance for you to prove that your individual right to bear arms will outgun the local mafia. Bon voyage!
On a slightly less sarcastic note, I find it fucking hilarious that the difference between rugged individualism and the heavy yoke of baleful commie servitude is a four point six percent rise in the marginal tax rate. Oh, hell, I'll just let Ruben Bolling mock you.
Finally, it's funny-sad-but mostly funny that taxes are whined about when they're paid, not when the expenses are incurred. If you have a problem with our finances, your beef is with the guys who just pissed roughly a trillion bucks away halfway 'round the world, not with the killjoy who points out that we all have to pay for that mess now.
Perhaps black folks would vote Republican if the Republican party exorcised its racism. Like it or not, they're the party of white dudes scared as hell that they might not be better than some black dude. While that does well for the scared white dude vote, it doesn't do well for the black vote.
You might consider that black people tend to be surprisingly socially conservative. They'd probably lean Republican, if it weren't for the racism.
You might also consider that Latinos were a solidly Republican constituency in 2004, but were solidly Democratic in 2008, despite being generally socially conservative. (Consider the D/R split in California compared to the split over Prop 8.) You can thank Tom Tancredo, Michelle Malkin and their ilk for that.
Oh, please. King scared the hell out of white people because he questioned the assumption that we lived in a just and fair nation. White folks said the same things about King when he was alive that they're saying about Wright now, and for the same reasons--because they're offensive to the assumptions that white people are privileged enough to hold.
There's something especially grotesque about King's corpse being exhumed by his critics and paraded around as though he'd support them. The man was a socialist, for crying out loud.
"Ebil", though, that's... wow. Stay classy, there.