> What about paying for it because they created the game and are trying to make a living selling it?
And what about only paying for it if it's any good instead?
In the UK we have a thing called "fit for purpose": if you buy a physical product and it's not "fit for purpose", you can just take it back for a full refund. It's even enough that the item didn't "fit the purpose" that you expected of it (within reason), regardless of anything that it might say on the outer box.
I see no justification whatsoever for paying for a game that is crap, regardless of the fact that its creators are trying to make a living. If they fail to make an interesting, playable game, then they should fail to earn good money from it.
I'm perfectly happy with "proportional recompense" though. Eg. if the game was crap for you then you could pay only $5, say. That would recompense the developers a little for having delivered an experience at least, even if that experience was crap.
And before you say "But people won't pay after the event", let me refer you to a well-received gem of wisdom that appeared in a recent Slashdot article: "Make your product for your fans, not for the downloaders who are not fans". Fans will pay, because they want to support the product, even to the extent of buying silly merchanidise and multiple copies. That's what makes them fans.
> Without a Linux version, it's obviously the work of Satan.
Not really. It's just the work of somebody who doesn't hold portability as an important requirement.
Sometimes this happens because they don't have the means to test on other platforms. Sometimes it's because they're so narrowly focussed that they're not even aware that there's more to computing than their own platform. Some people are simply too lazy, or lacking in computing skills, to write portable applications. And quite frequently it's the work of someone who is totally obsessed with his own platform's unique UI and so produces an UI app that can't run anywhere else, without actually wanting to be evil.
Only very rarely does a minor wannabe Satan appear, one who willfully writes open-source code that can't be run on other platforms by design. I'm not even sure I can name a clear example of it... mostly they're just lazy or uninformed.
> There's nothing obvious, natural, or fair about the coercive enclosure and commodification of ideas. If you're going to assert such a right, then the onus is on you to justify it.
Bad suggestion (in bold). One thing people are never short of is justifications.
A better approach might be to describe harshly but accurately how those who coercively enclose and commodify ideas are actually seeking to create an artificial scarcity of product and an artificial curtailing of derivative invention. No amount of justification can make that right.
You don't have a right to merchantability beyond your ability to achieve it. Why would "loss of merchantability" be actionable in the case of copying, but not in the case of competition?
Well said.
It's worth considering also that the fallacious "right to merchantability" has another silly counterpart in the "right to [potential] profit", which the content providers proclaim is being attacked by file sharing.
Using your form of words, it needs to be stated loudly and often that "You don't have a right to profit beyond your ability to achieve it." And "potential" merely means "maximum", and not that it's already yours.
> If there are not subterranean aquifers close enough to the surface to be accessible, then things are going to be very hard-going.
I'm not sure where you got the impression that there is no easy to reach water on Mars.
There are billions of cubic kilometers of water ice quite easily accessible at the poles. Furthermore, it's right there on the surface at the north pole (except during winter when it gets covered by a layer of CO2 ice about a meter thick). At the south pole, water ice lies about 8 meters under the CO2 surface ices. (These numbers are very rough estimates, please note.)
If you want water, just apply heat! The problem of gathering and transportation in that environment is non-trivial, but at least there's no shortage of actual water ice.
They're searching for liquid water because that's more likely to harbor life, but for sustaining human life all we have to do is to live near the poles and melt a continuous supply. What we'd need most is a plentiful supply of energy and good isolation from the dangerous environment.
For more info on Martian polar ices, Wikipedia provides a reasonable summary.
Windows will add a bit to the price of the machines, about $3, the licensing fee Microsoft charges to some developing nations under a program called Unlimited Potential.... [cut]... The project's agreement with Microsoft involves no payment by the software giant.
What? That's totally ridiculous. It means that the XO becomes nothing more than a vehicle for transfer of money from 3rd world children to Microsoft.
Whoever thought that idea up at OLPC has shit for brains.
Microsoft should be *PAYING* for the privilege of getting its O/S installed on a machine to which it contributed absolutely nothing during development, and which will become an instrument of propaganda for Microsoft among the children of the world.
OLPC guys, you've really dropped the ball on this one, and forgotten that the XO was not intended as a normal western product for exploitation of consumers.
All recent nVidia and ATI graphics cards accelerate 3D. Why wouldn't the 8600M GT?
The 8600 GT is a fairly good low-to-mid-range desktop card, and on my 2.33GHz Core2Duo-powered desktop it runs glxgears at around 5540 FPS.
The lower-power 8600M GT is a very good laptop card, and on my 2.0GHz Core2Duo-powered laptop it runs glxgears at around 5150 FPS.
For reference, a non-accelerated glxgears runs at a mere 250 FPS or so. Clearly the 8600M is providing good 3D acceleration, and is keeping up quite well with its desktop sibling.
What about those of us who love our jobs and love to excel in them, but don't want to make work our entire life?
That suggests to me that you've chosen a job that you don't *really* love, since you see a clean break between going to work as a necessary chore and returning home to enjoy life. That's not uncommon: it's called 9-to-5'ism, and it's the bane of company life because it creates shoddy, uncommitted workforces full of people whose main concern is leaving the office.
If you truly love something, then you *DO* want to make it your entire life --- it's part of the human makeup, to seek to maximize what you enjoy and to minimize what you don't enjoy. If you truly loved your job then you would give it unlimited attention, and multiplex it with other things that you love (eg. sleep, eating, family) as best you can, flexibly. That means sitting at the job's bedside for 48h non-stop when there is trouble, just as you would sit at a beloved's bedside non-stop when they are in trouble. No 9-to-5'ism, no treating the job as second best.
From your description, it seems that you don't place your job in the same category as your home life. This contradicts your statement that you really love your job, and it casts a doubt on your claim that you love to excel in it, since your level of committment to it is limited. You may "love to excel in it" as you say, but only on your own terms, as a secondary, less-loved interest. It's still 9-to-5'ism, and it really isn't in the same league as working in a job that you truly love.
Incidentally, the tell-tale sign of really "loving your job" is continuing to do it when you get back home after office hours are over, without getting paid, when there are no other issues of higher priority to attend to. It's part of our natural desire to maximize those things we love. If you don't do that, on principle, then you're actually deluding yourself about loving your job.
The browser is the single flakiest application in modern operating systems, and has long needed an overhaul to make it robust and protected by design.
In Firefox on Linux, to lose 20 open tabs just because of a single bad web page is incompetent browser design, and Mozilla should be taken to task over it. The fact that some lost sessions can be recovered on restart is just a band aid --- the entire browser should not have gone down in the first place.
A robust browser kernel plus strong MMU-guaranteed separation and protection between pages or websites is exactly the way to go.
From TFA: Apologies in advance for this being a simple html website. I'm a scientist/engineer, not a graphic designer.
No apologies needed. I wish all web pages were as clean as yours, instead of covered in irrelevant decor, side panels and advertising that just obscures the message and makes loading times 10 times as long as they should be.
Google's minimalist search page stands almost alone in retaining functional sanity among major websites. Don't feel bad emulating that frugality.
Singularity also introduces a software-isolated process (SIP) mechanism, which makes it possible for lightweight processes to coexist safely with their own sealed code environments in the same memory space. All communication between SIPs is conducted through channels. The use of SIPs effectively eliminates the overhead traditionally incurred by context-switching in conventional microkernels.
In other words, Microsoft finally discovers Erlang.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the guys at Redmond lost the habit of inventing anything new a long time ago, the above concepts have been in industrial use in Erlang-powered PTT exchanges since the dawn of time.
When you can no longer trust your government to look after the interests of the people, then it is time for the people to go underground.
At the rate at which the UK is spiraling down into a combined police state, nanny state, and corporation-controlled state, it won't be long before the online population decides to make itself cryptographically invisible to the corrupted "guardians" as the only strong defense available.
Encryption of normal communications never gained a strong hold in the west simply because there was little need outside of web login and payment transactions, for most people, so almost everything else was left in the clear. But when the government starts branding a large chunk of the population as criminal instead of supporting them as part of an evolving community, then the need becomes obvious.
I bet that the next generation of totally opaque file sharing systems is already in the works now --- anonymized, undetectable, untraceable, decentralized, and with all content cryptographically fragmented and bitwise-distributed across all darknet participants. Obtaining a particular shared file won't be distinguishable from obtaining any other, because the gathering and reassembly from a cryptographically dispersed image will be done by your client with N:M mapping, and no two clients will do it the same way. What's more, as the individual dispersed fragments become tinier they also become generic, ie. belonging to millions of different files, not just one, so individual files will not be detectable anywhere in their dispersed storage across the net.
None of this is too hard, and it's probably already in place in regions with evil governments. It's just a pity that some governments in the west, the UK in particular, have gone so bad that they are forcing it to happen here now as well.
This isn't a problem just with Firefox, but with all full browsers today (the various midget text-mode ones excluded).
Any non-trivial program contains bugs and vulnerabilities proportional to its size, and the relationship between size and inherent problem-count is probably a lot worse than linear. This is true for all programs and all systems, but it is especially true for monolithic ones, and to a very large extent the main body of modern browsers is quite monolithic. Even the plugins load into the same address space in most cases, although there are exceptions to this in the browser world.
The present situation is not good, and everyone is familiar with the consequences of it: the web browser is by far the most crash-prone of all applications present in our operating systems today.
Is there a solution to this on the horizon? Not at present, because developers in all the most popular programming languages almost always implement monolithic systems (because the languages encourage it and the courses teach it), and are highly adverse to extreme modularization. Again, there are exceptions, but they are rare.
We are living in a bit of a Dark Age in this area currently, and I don't forsee any change within the next five years at least.
Although some people can't see beyond the ends of their politically correct noses in the west and so talk down RMS for his shaggy look, that's not an issue in the guru culture of India. In fact, the picture of RMS in TFA fits in perfectly. You wouldn't trust a "wise old man" dressed in a slimy western business suit and tie.
Kudos to RMS for all his work over the years, and putting up with small-minded criticism.
The lecturer tells students that the natural (ie normal) response is to feel pressure "in the pencil", and because they trust him, they believe...
It works for me, and I sure as hell don't trust anyone on Slashdot.:-)
Try it with something longer, like a long kitchen knife, or a sword if you have one. You definitely don't think of the touch as occurring in your fingers, but in the tip of the blade. It probably helps when your entire hand is in contact with the handle, so that you can't localize the pressure on a single finger. It works!
>> Perhaps it's more a combination of multitasking and immediate gratification.
Or perhaps some peoples' gratification comes in small doses? I always found the "time management" kind of managers very annoying, regularly distracting me from concentrating on my work just because they had a deep belief in making everything subservient to the clock, their organizers, and their arbitrary day schedules.
>> When you get everything you want quickly, there's no need to ever learn patience or persistence.
Well they were past masters at persistence, but only a couple learned that patience was a virtue, and that it got them better results. You really can't be distracted in the middle of a core dump analysis say, not without starting from scratch anyway. And there are many similar kinds of task in the general field of computing, where human multitasking doesn't pay.
OTOH, machines don't have that frailty, and as long as they complete their concurrent tasks without intrusively interrupting us, we're peachy.
Regardless of whether this particular initiative succeeds or fails, it would be wonderful if community pressure could lead corporations to adopt a "Community Standard" for their proprietary file formats:
Either support your format, or publish a full specification if you abandon it. (Do neither, and you suck, publicly.)
The world is currently headed towards a rather worrying future in which a staggering number of valued documents and other file resources of many types are destined for demise by corporate abandonment. Maybe it's time for communities to stand up and proclaim:
"We're not merely point-in-time consumers of your product. When we invest in your proprietary format by using your tools, we need its longevity safeguarded. Either support the old format, or publish full specs for it so that we can seek that support elsewhere."
I guess it's wishful thinking, but hey, we're paying them, not the other way around. Ultimately, if enough people and their wallets want something done, it will be done.
Encryption is designed to secure communication between Alice and Bob while denying it to the evil Eve.
In DRM, Bob and Eve are one and the same person.
In other words, DRM seeks to give a person access to an item while denying him/her access to that item. This is not a recipe for success.
The proponents of DRM seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths and weaknesses of encryption, and so are attempting to use it in a manner that is inherently weak. The fact that DRM schemes are so frequently and so rapidly broken by people with minimal cracking resources is a clear pointer to this.
Solar irradiation at the Earth's surface is approximately 150,000 TW.
Mankind's projected peak power needs by 2020 or so amount to about 22 TW. Yeah. 22, not 22,000.
So throw stupid statements like "three forms of base-load energy, fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear" in the rubbish bin of irrelevancy, and tap what is effectively an infinite supply (and if that's not enough, place solar arrays into LEO).
There are hundreds of times more permanently irradiated deserts in the world than would be needed to supply Mankind's power needs for the forseeable future. What's more, they're spread around the world, so base load is as easy to supply as peak, without storage. All that's lacking is the will to do so --- especially the will to act against the greed of those who are currently making megabucks off fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear.
So dear Gwyneth, think again. You've just been sold the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a costly mistake.
There doesn't need to be a flame war, because in this particular instance Theo's argument has a gaping hole in it. Consider the following two system architectures:
1) An ordinary multi-function Unix-type system which also runs a non-trivial component that is exposed to the world (all non-trivial components have bugs, as Theo is right to point out, and hence are attack vectors).
2) A machine running 2-guest virtualization, in which the non-trivial component runs in one guest, and the rest of the functions run in another.
Now consider what happens when the world-facing component gets compromised, and by one of many methods (because sysadmins are fallible) the attack gets promoted to root privilege. Security has failed in one guest, but has it failed in the other? Not necessarily, depending on whether the sysadmin has made repeated blunders and not just one. (Eg. a fool might be keeping ssh keys on the public-facing guest...)
In this scenario, the isolation created by virtualization has given the syadmin an additional bulkhead against his own fallibility, and that is worthwhile for security, not only for better hardware utilization. The partitioning of the application and O/S space has reduced the cross-section of software open to attack.
Theo's argument also doesn't bear scrutiny at the hypervisor level, because while an O/S in dom0 is just as fragile as the one in domU that runs an exposed application, the instance in the hypervisor isn't exposed to attack. Theo seems to miss the distinction between endpoint fallibility and fallibility in the conveyance and resourcing that is done by hypervisors. They're different.
I like Theo's hard stance on security, but on this issue he's handwaving.
You believe that Apple's actions are OK, and maybe they are in the US. But that won't fly in Europe.
The GSM standard expressly provides for cross-vendor compatibility through simple SIM change, and unlocking of locked phones is entirely legal in most if not all European countries. In fact, it's a substantial business to provide unlocking services, and to sell ready-unlocked phones.
That doesn't mean that it's free (a cellphone service provider will charge you for unlocking, since it carries the risk for them that you might defect to a competitor if their service is bad). But it does mean that unlocking is supported.
If the accepted and legal position in the US is that providers are allowed to deny GSM service mobility by not offering unlocking and by bricking unlocked phones on purpose (allegedly), then those providers are about to face problems when they try to do the same thing in European jurisdictions.
Let me explain this to you by way of a simple 3-party model, since you are too clueless to understand the actual technical details:
Encryption was designed to protect communications between Alice to Bob from the evil Eve. It was not designed to cope with the case where Bob and Eve are the same person. As a clueless DRM proponent, you are trying to give Bob access to an item without giving Bob access to the item... which isn't logical.
If you don't understand that then I have nothing else to say to you, and any brain cells you may have are entirely superfluous. I recommend eBay as a good place to sell them off.
> This idea that the FSF does things in the best interests of the whole free software community isn't correct unless one defines the FSF as the entire free software community.
And that definition would be correct, because they defined the term "free software" (in the sense of libre) after all.
If you want to quibble about "free" also meaning "free as in free beer" then fine, one would have to accept that FSF have done a tiny word-grab rather like MS did with "Windows" (but without the nasty trademarking). But otherwise, you're simply wrong.
The rest of the FOSS world inhabits the (equally useful, but different) world of "open source", and they have their own defining body in the OSI. Meanwhile, "free software" has its own definitions set by the FSF. Each body does things in the best interests of its own segment of FOSS. It's exactly equivalent on both sides.
> Wikipedia, the concept that persistent opinions are accurate opinions
Persistent opinions ARE accurate opinions in many fields (to the best of human knowledge), and in other fields they're not.
The only strong "limitation" of Wikipedia's model is that it requires readers to understand which field falls into which category. If you wish to accuse Wikipedia of not being 100% useful to totally non-perceptive readers, then yes you're right, one would have to agree with you. It's only useful to totally non-perceptive readers when they happen to be reading pages of the first kind, not the second. But those who are perceptive know how much to trust both kinds of article.
The types of fields in which persistent opinions are accurate opinions are those ruled by verifiable fact, the rule of mathematics and logic, and cooperative progress through explicit reasoning, not through debate. That includes mathematics and logic themselves, plus all the hard sciences and branches of engineering. It excludes almost everything else, even many fields that try to employ logical discourse (eg. about 95% of philosophy is excluded). And even harsher than this, it also excludes personal opinion within the included fields: for example, it excludes personal interpretations in climatology and claimed predictions for the future, while including the very scientific fact finding and analysis in that field of science.
To those who understand the above, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource, because (apart from occasional human error and abuse, which are both rapidly corrected) the entries are all made cooperatively and all new progress builds upon past progress. Thus, the entries that persist represent the current peak of human understanding.
This contrasts markedly with the other kind of fields, in which personal opinion, claimed experience, authoritative position, and vocal statements matter. Yes, you can't trust anything that you read in those fields on Wikipedia, but that's not Wikipedia's problem. You can't trust what you read about those field on any other forum or means of communication either.
So, if you have a problem with trusting Wikipedia, it's either because you work in fields of the second kind (and hence you're part of the problem), or else because you fail to understand how human endeavour is split into those two very different categories and so you don't apply suitably varying degrees of trust.
It's your problem, not ours on the science and engineering side. Wikipedia serves us well.
Slashdot Mirror
> What about paying for it because they created the game and are trying to make a living selling it?
And what about only paying for it if it's any good instead?
In the UK we have a thing called "fit for purpose": if you buy a physical product and it's not "fit for purpose", you can just take it back for a full refund. It's even enough that the item didn't "fit the purpose" that you expected of it (within reason), regardless of anything that it might say on the outer box.
I see no justification whatsoever for paying for a game that is crap, regardless of the fact that its creators are trying to make a living. If they fail to make an interesting, playable game, then they should fail to earn good money from it.
I'm perfectly happy with "proportional recompense" though. Eg. if the game was crap for you then you could pay only $5, say. That would recompense the developers a little for having delivered an experience at least, even if that experience was crap.
And before you say "But people won't pay after the event", let me refer you to a well-received gem of wisdom that appeared in a recent Slashdot article: "Make your product for your fans, not for the downloaders who are not fans". Fans will pay, because they want to support the product, even to the extent of buying silly merchanidise and multiple copies. That's what makes them fans.
> Without a Linux version, it's obviously the work of Satan.
... mostly they're just lazy or uninformed.
Not really. It's just the work of somebody who doesn't hold portability as an important requirement.
Sometimes this happens because they don't have the means to test on other platforms. Sometimes it's because they're so narrowly focussed that they're not even aware that there's more to computing than their own platform. Some people are simply too lazy, or lacking in computing skills, to write portable applications. And quite frequently it's the work of someone who is totally obsessed with his own platform's unique UI and so produces an UI app that can't run anywhere else, without actually wanting to be evil.
Only very rarely does a minor wannabe Satan appear, one who willfully writes open-source code that can't be run on other platforms by design. I'm not even sure I can name a clear example of it
> There's nothing obvious, natural, or fair about the coercive enclosure and commodification of ideas. If you're going to assert such a right, then the onus is on you to justify it.
Bad suggestion (in bold). One thing people are never short of is justifications.
A better approach might be to describe harshly but accurately how those who coercively enclose and commodify ideas are actually seeking to create an artificial scarcity of product and an artificial curtailing of derivative invention. No amount of justification can make that right.
You don't have a right to merchantability beyond your ability to achieve it. Why would "loss of merchantability" be actionable in the case of copying, but not in the case of competition?
Well said.
It's worth considering also that the fallacious "right to merchantability" has another silly counterpart in the "right to [potential] profit", which the content providers proclaim is being attacked by file sharing.
Using your form of words, it needs to be stated loudly and often that "You don't have a right to profit beyond your ability to achieve it." And "potential" merely means "maximum", and not that it's already yours.
> If there are not subterranean aquifers close enough to the surface to be accessible, then things are going to be very hard-going.
I'm not sure where you got the impression that there is no easy to reach water on Mars.
There are billions of cubic kilometers of water ice quite easily accessible at the poles. Furthermore, it's right there on the surface at the north pole (except during winter when it gets covered by a layer of CO2 ice about a meter thick). At the south pole, water ice lies about 8 meters under the CO2 surface ices. (These numbers are very rough estimates, please note.)
If you want water, just apply heat! The problem of gathering and transportation in that environment is non-trivial, but at least there's no shortage of actual water ice.
They're searching for liquid water because that's more likely to harbor life, but for sustaining human life all we have to do is to live near the poles and melt a continuous supply. What we'd need most is a plentiful supply of energy and good isolation from the dangerous environment.
For more info on Martian polar ices, Wikipedia provides a reasonable summary.
What? That's totally ridiculous. It means that the XO becomes nothing more than a vehicle for transfer of money from 3rd world children to Microsoft.
Whoever thought that idea up at OLPC has shit for brains.
Microsoft should be *PAYING* for the privilege of getting its O/S installed on a machine to which it contributed absolutely nothing during development, and which will become an instrument of propaganda for Microsoft among the children of the world.
OLPC guys, you've really dropped the ball on this one, and forgotten that the XO was not intended as a normal western product for exploitation of consumers.
All recent nVidia and ATI graphics cards accelerate 3D. Why wouldn't the 8600M GT?
The 8600 GT is a fairly good low-to-mid-range desktop card, and on my 2.33GHz Core2Duo-powered desktop it runs glxgears at around 5540 FPS.
The lower-power 8600M GT is a very good laptop card, and on my 2.0GHz Core2Duo-powered laptop it runs glxgears at around 5150 FPS.
For reference, a non-accelerated glxgears runs at a mere 250 FPS or so. Clearly the 8600M is providing good 3D acceleration, and is keeping up quite well with its desktop sibling.
Life is good.
What about those of us who love our jobs and love to excel in them, but don't want to make work our entire life?
That suggests to me that you've chosen a job that you don't *really* love, since you see a clean break between going to work as a necessary chore and returning home to enjoy life. That's not uncommon: it's called 9-to-5'ism, and it's the bane of company life because it creates shoddy, uncommitted workforces full of people whose main concern is leaving the office.
If you truly love something, then you *DO* want to make it your entire life --- it's part of the human makeup, to seek to maximize what you enjoy and to minimize what you don't enjoy. If you truly loved your job then you would give it unlimited attention, and multiplex it with other things that you love (eg. sleep, eating, family) as best you can, flexibly. That means sitting at the job's bedside for 48h non-stop when there is trouble, just as you would sit at a beloved's bedside non-stop when they are in trouble. No 9-to-5'ism, no treating the job as second best.
From your description, it seems that you don't place your job in the same category as your home life. This contradicts your statement that you really love your job, and it casts a doubt on your claim that you love to excel in it, since your level of committment to it is limited. You may "love to excel in it" as you say, but only on your own terms, as a secondary, less-loved interest. It's still 9-to-5'ism, and it really isn't in the same league as working in a job that you truly love.
Incidentally, the tell-tale sign of really "loving your job" is continuing to do it when you get back home after office hours are over, without getting paid, when there are no other issues of higher priority to attend to. It's part of our natural desire to maximize those things we love. If you don't do that, on principle, then you're actually deluding yourself about loving your job.
The browser is the single flakiest application in modern operating systems, and has long needed an overhaul to make it robust and protected by design.
In Firefox on Linux, to lose 20 open tabs just because of a single bad web page is incompetent browser design, and Mozilla should be taken to task over it. The fact that some lost sessions can be recovered on restart is just a band aid --- the entire browser should not have gone down in the first place.
A robust browser kernel plus strong MMU-guaranteed separation and protection between pages or websites is exactly the way to go.
From TFA: Apologies in advance for this being a simple html website. I'm a scientist/engineer, not a graphic designer.
No apologies needed. I wish all web pages were as clean as yours, instead of covered in irrelevant decor, side panels and advertising that just obscures the message and makes loading times 10 times as long as they should be.
Google's minimalist search page stands almost alone in retaining functional sanity among major websites. Don't feel bad emulating that frugality.
In other words, Microsoft finally discovers Erlang.
While I wouldn't go so far as to say that the guys at Redmond lost the habit of inventing anything new a long time ago, the above concepts have been in industrial use in Erlang-powered PTT exchanges since the dawn of time.
When you can no longer trust your government to look after the interests of the people, then it is time for the people to go underground.
At the rate at which the UK is spiraling down into a combined police state, nanny state, and corporation-controlled state, it won't be long before the online population decides to make itself cryptographically invisible to the corrupted "guardians" as the only strong defense available.
Encryption of normal communications never gained a strong hold in the west simply because there was little need outside of web login and payment transactions, for most people, so almost everything else was left in the clear. But when the government starts branding a large chunk of the population as criminal instead of supporting them as part of an evolving community, then the need becomes obvious.
I bet that the next generation of totally opaque file sharing systems is already in the works now --- anonymized, undetectable, untraceable, decentralized, and with all content cryptographically fragmented and bitwise-distributed across all darknet participants. Obtaining a particular shared file won't be distinguishable from obtaining any other, because the gathering and reassembly from a cryptographically dispersed image will be done by your client with N:M mapping, and no two clients will do it the same way. What's more, as the individual dispersed fragments become tinier they also become generic, ie. belonging to millions of different files, not just one, so individual files will not be detectable anywhere in their dispersed storage across the net.
None of this is too hard, and it's probably already in place in regions with evil governments. It's just a pity that some governments in the west, the UK in particular, have gone so bad that they are forcing it to happen here now as well.
This isn't a problem just with Firefox, but with all full browsers today (the various midget text-mode ones excluded).
Any non-trivial program contains bugs and vulnerabilities proportional to its size, and the relationship between size and inherent problem-count is probably a lot worse than linear. This is true for all programs and all systems, but it is especially true for monolithic ones, and to a very large extent the main body of modern browsers is quite monolithic. Even the plugins load into the same address space in most cases, although there are exceptions to this in the browser world.
The present situation is not good, and everyone is familiar with the consequences of it: the web browser is by far the most crash-prone of all applications present in our operating systems today.
Is there a solution to this on the horizon? Not at present, because developers in all the most popular programming languages almost always implement monolithic systems (because the languages encourage it and the courses teach it), and are highly adverse to extreme modularization. Again, there are exceptions, but they are rare.
We are living in a bit of a Dark Age in this area currently, and I don't forsee any change within the next five years at least.
Although some people can't see beyond the ends of their politically correct noses in the west and so talk down RMS for his shaggy look, that's not an issue in the guru culture of India. In fact, the picture of RMS in TFA fits in perfectly. You wouldn't trust a "wise old man" dressed in a slimy western business suit and tie.
Kudos to RMS for all his work over the years, and putting up with small-minded criticism.
The lecturer tells students that the natural (ie normal) response is to feel pressure "in the pencil", and because they trust him, they believe ...
:-)
It works for me, and I sure as hell don't trust anyone on Slashdot.
Try it with something longer, like a long kitchen knife, or a sword if you have one. You definitely don't think of the touch as occurring in your fingers, but in the tip of the blade. It probably helps when your entire hand is in contact with the handle, so that you can't localize the pressure on a single finger. It works!
>> Perhaps it's more a combination of multitasking and immediate gratification.
Or perhaps some peoples' gratification comes in small doses? I always found the "time management" kind of managers very annoying, regularly distracting me from concentrating on my work just because they had a deep belief in making everything subservient to the clock, their organizers, and their arbitrary day schedules.
>> When you get everything you want quickly, there's no need to ever learn patience or persistence.
Well they were past masters at persistence, but only a couple learned that patience was a virtue, and that it got them better results. You really can't be distracted in the middle of a core dump analysis say, not without starting from scratch anyway. And there are many similar kinds of task in the general field of computing, where human multitasking doesn't pay.
OTOH, machines don't have that frailty, and as long as they complete their concurrent tasks without intrusively interrupting us, we're peachy.
Regardless of whether this particular initiative succeeds or fails, it would be wonderful if community pressure could lead corporations to adopt a "Community Standard" for their proprietary file formats:
Either support your format, or publish a full specification if you abandon it. (Do neither, and you suck, publicly.)
The world is currently headed towards a rather worrying future in which a staggering number of valued documents and other file resources of many types are destined for demise by corporate abandonment. Maybe it's time for communities to stand up and proclaim:
"We're not merely point-in-time consumers of your product. When we invest in your proprietary format by using your tools, we need its longevity safeguarded. Either support the old format, or publish full specs for it so that we can seek that support elsewhere."
I guess it's wishful thinking, but hey, we're paying them, not the other way around. Ultimately, if enough people and their wallets want something done, it will be done.
DRM relies on encryption.
Encryption is designed to secure communication between Alice and Bob while denying it to the evil Eve.
In DRM, Bob and Eve are one and the same person.
In other words, DRM seeks to give a person access to an item while denying him/her access to that item. This is not a recipe for success.
The proponents of DRM seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of the strengths and weaknesses of encryption, and so are attempting to use it in a manner that is inherently weak. The fact that DRM schemes are so frequently and so rapidly broken by people with minimal cracking resources is a clear pointer to this.
For further information, Google on Schneier.
Solar irradiation at the Earth's surface is approximately 150,000 TW.
Mankind's projected peak power needs by 2020 or so amount to about 22 TW. Yeah. 22, not 22,000.
So throw stupid statements like "three forms of base-load energy, fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear" in the rubbish bin of irrelevancy, and tap what is effectively an infinite supply (and if that's not enough, place solar arrays into LEO).
There are hundreds of times more permanently irradiated deserts in the world than would be needed to supply Mankind's power needs for the forseeable future. What's more, they're spread around the world, so base load is as easy to supply as peak, without storage. All that's lacking is the will to do so --- especially the will to act against the greed of those who are currently making megabucks off fossil fuels, hydro and nuclear.
So dear Gwyneth, think again. You've just been sold the Brooklyn Bridge. It's a costly mistake.
> CAUTION: flame war ahead.
...)
There doesn't need to be a flame war, because in this particular instance Theo's argument has a gaping hole in it. Consider the following two system architectures:
1) An ordinary multi-function Unix-type system which also runs a non-trivial component that is exposed to the world (all non-trivial components have bugs, as Theo is right to point out, and hence are attack vectors).
2) A machine running 2-guest virtualization, in which the non-trivial component runs in one guest, and the rest of the functions run in another.
Now consider what happens when the world-facing component gets compromised, and by one of many methods (because sysadmins are fallible) the attack gets promoted to root privilege. Security has failed in one guest, but has it failed in the other? Not necessarily, depending on whether the sysadmin has made repeated blunders and not just one. (Eg. a fool might be keeping ssh keys on the public-facing guest
In this scenario, the isolation created by virtualization has given the syadmin an additional bulkhead against his own fallibility, and that is worthwhile for security, not only for better hardware utilization. The partitioning of the application and O/S space has reduced the cross-section of software open to attack.
Theo's argument also doesn't bear scrutiny at the hypervisor level, because while an O/S in dom0 is just as fragile as the one in domU that runs an exposed application, the instance in the hypervisor isn't exposed to attack. Theo seems to miss the distinction between endpoint fallibility and fallibility in the conveyance and resourcing that is done by hypervisors. They're different.
I like Theo's hard stance on security, but on this issue he's handwaving.
You believe that Apple's actions are OK, and maybe they are in the US. But that won't fly in Europe.
The GSM standard expressly provides for cross-vendor compatibility through simple SIM change, and unlocking of locked phones is entirely legal in most if not all European countries. In fact, it's a substantial business to provide unlocking services, and to sell ready-unlocked phones.
That doesn't mean that it's free (a cellphone service provider will charge you for unlocking, since it carries the risk for them that you might defect to a competitor if their service is bad). But it does mean that unlocking is supported.
If the accepted and legal position in the US is that providers are allowed to deny GSM service mobility by not offering unlocking and by bricking unlocked phones on purpose (allegedly), then those providers are about to face problems when they try to do the same thing in European jurisdictions.
Dear Sony:
... which isn't logical.
Let me explain this to you by way of a simple 3-party model, since you are too clueless to understand the actual technical details:
Encryption was designed to protect communications between Alice to Bob from the evil Eve. It was not designed to cope with the case where Bob and Eve are the same person. As a clueless DRM proponent, you are trying to give Bob access to an item without giving Bob access to the item
If you don't understand that then I have nothing else to say to you, and any brain cells you may have are entirely superfluous. I recommend eBay as a good place to sell them off.
Kind regards,
Joe Public.
> This idea that the FSF does things in the best interests of the whole free software community isn't correct unless one defines the FSF as the entire free software community.
And that definition would be correct, because they defined the term "free software" (in the sense of libre) after all.
If you want to quibble about "free" also meaning "free as in free beer" then fine, one would have to accept that FSF have done a tiny word-grab rather like MS did with "Windows" (but without the nasty trademarking). But otherwise, you're simply wrong.
The rest of the FOSS world inhabits the (equally useful, but different) world of "open source", and they have their own defining body in the OSI. Meanwhile, "free software" has its own definitions set by the FSF. Each body does things in the best interests of its own segment of FOSS. It's exactly equivalent on both sides.
> Wikipedia, the concept that persistent opinions are accurate opinions
Persistent opinions ARE accurate opinions in many fields (to the best of human knowledge), and in other fields they're not.
The only strong "limitation" of Wikipedia's model is that it requires readers to understand which field falls into which category. If you wish to accuse Wikipedia of not being 100% useful to totally non-perceptive readers, then yes you're right, one would have to agree with you. It's only useful to totally non-perceptive readers when they happen to be reading pages of the first kind, not the second. But those who are perceptive know how much to trust both kinds of article.
The types of fields in which persistent opinions are accurate opinions are those ruled by verifiable fact, the rule of mathematics and logic, and cooperative progress through explicit reasoning, not through debate. That includes mathematics and logic themselves, plus all the hard sciences and branches of engineering. It excludes almost everything else, even many fields that try to employ logical discourse (eg. about 95% of philosophy is excluded). And even harsher than this, it also excludes personal opinion within the included fields: for example, it excludes personal interpretations in climatology and claimed predictions for the future, while including the very scientific fact finding and analysis in that field of science.
To those who understand the above, Wikipedia is an invaluable resource, because (apart from occasional human error and abuse, which are both rapidly corrected) the entries are all made cooperatively and all new progress builds upon past progress. Thus, the entries that persist represent the current peak of human understanding.
This contrasts markedly with the other kind of fields, in which personal opinion, claimed experience, authoritative position, and vocal statements matter. Yes, you can't trust anything that you read in those fields on Wikipedia, but that's not Wikipedia's problem. You can't trust what you read about those field on any other forum or means of communication either.
So, if you have a problem with trusting Wikipedia, it's either because you work in fields of the second kind (and hence you're part of the problem), or else because you fail to understand how human endeavour is split into those two very different categories and so you don't apply suitably varying degrees of trust.
It's your problem, not ours on the science and engineering side. Wikipedia serves us well.