Frankly, I think the better question here is why the other OSes don't have more 'fixed this vulnerability five months ago through a standard audit'. Is Linux not being reviewed formally and regularly? If not, why not? Do people doubt the benefits that regular code reviews yield?
--John
Except that the difference between radio stations and MP3.com is that radio stations have an arrangement with the owners of the copyright material that allow them to re-broadcast the material. MP3.com did not.
Just commenting on one piece of your comment. Is it so wise to always destroy database handles as soon as you can? Yes, they take up memory that could be used for processing another request. However, the act of opening a database connection is both intensive and fairly uncontrollable(you can't just re-write the database driver on a whim to get better performance, unless you're project is a hell of a lot better funded than most in the software industry are). It seems to me like keeping a pool of persistant database connections wouldn't be such a bad idea. Indeed, it also seems to me that this is the direction that the technology is headed. What do you think?
Ah. Yeah, I can't think of a single Java applet we've sent out onto the web. We have one we use internally for displaying hierarchical, expandable lists, but that's mostly because it was simple, free, and we're lazy when it comes to internal websites for some reason:>
Okay. Your post confuses me. In one breath you seem to imply that no one should use Java for web applications and in the next breath you say its a good idea. I can tell you as a professional web developer(who regularly uses ASP, perl, PHP, and Java in the course of his job), that (a) being a professional web developer does not merely involve being able to hack together some HTML and/or javascript and (b) We're using Java Server Pages more and more for our new projects. Its a wonderful technology, as far as we are concerned.
So it sounds to me as if your opinion is that governments exist to protect these human rights as you define them. Or would it be more? In your opinion, what is the social contract that binds people to governments?
I'm not sure I understand your definition of a 'human right', since you define the right to bear arms as one but the right to a substance required for human existance as not one. Please clarify?
Its my personal belief that gun control really shouldn't be considered one issue. It isn't, really. I've heard two distinct 'subissues' running through it -> 'keeping guns from criminals' and 'reducing accidental shootings'.
The first issue is one that I don't think banning guns is going to fix. Its too simple for a criminal to bypass those. Granted, there would be a percentage of criminal who *wouldn't* be comitting their crimes with armed weapons anymore however I think that they would switch to other weapons(knives come directly to mind). Either way, I haven't thought too much on this so I'm not going to even pretend to be an expert.
It is the second issue that I feel more strongly about. My personal belief is that firearms ought to be handled in the same category as automobiles - to get a gun you must get a license which involves *mandatory* training and a test(granted, I'd like the training and test to be a tad bit more involved than that involved with getting a driving license). Gun locks should be mandatory, and if a child shoots someone with a gun that he got because you were careless and left a loaded weapon around you should be liable(are you as it is?).
There are a few problems with this, of course. Foremost is the Second Amendment. Even beyond that come the question of whether this should be a national government or a state government issue. Even beyond *that* is the question of whether or not government should have the jurisdiction to carry out these regulations at all.
In all, this is an insanely complex issue and I strongly feel that simple slogans like 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people' or 'Guns are evil!' are going to encompass a full solution.
Wait. Allow me to get this straight. It'd be wrong to do this to a poor, starving artist, but its somehow alright to do the same thing to a successful artist? So by becoming successful, an artist forfeits his or her rights to their work?
You're right. We do need to educate people as to why the space program is a good thing. You know what I think would be the easiest, quickest way to shoot ourselves in the foot though? Start calling people 'sheeple'. Frankly, nothing is going to make people stop listening to anyone faster than being condescended to. Its not just you, I see the attitude here way to often that people who have other interests other than the posters are 'sheeple' or 'sheep' or 'morons' or 'induhviduals'. And I really think that we're doing nothing more than shooting ourselves in the foot with that attitude.
Wow. After reading that article I could almost feel the sense of panic this guy is feeling at the new digital world. Yeah, buddy, the future is dark. However I don't think you can do much to illuminate that darkness trying to apply old, worn out legal methods to new technology. We have to come up with something new, or at least be prepared to change the law to reflect circumstances.
Anyways. I was wondering just where this guy expects to find hackers and pirates with hundreds and hundreds of free GBs to play movies. And just where all the people out there with these huge hard drives are. After all, when a single movie weighs in at 17GB, you'd think that that alone would be detrimental to downloading movies over the internet.
Further does anyone else notice that in his model you never own a song. You own a right to listen to the song. The fact that you're holding a digital recording in your hand is meaningless: its essentially not your property. Is this right?
Actually I think its a matter of both, in my opinion. Yeah the employees broke the law. But searching through their computers was still an invasive act that, in my opinion, was still uncalled for.
Though on the side, I find it absolutely absurd that federal law prevented these employees from striking. What particular right does the government have to do regulate a group of employees pooling a resource that they have in order to charge a higher premium for it?
If I recall this story, the judge in charge of this case also pounded the union and employees with incredibly excessive fines until they broke. At least, that's what I recall. Its been a month.
This is, I think, utter and total bullshit. I would love to know what the judge was thinking when he signed that order. I would have loved to see if that order was thrown out in apellate court. Do any of these employees have grounds for a lawsuit here?
By this logic, however, one could make any accusations one wanted and there would be absolutely no way to prove them. *Surely* there has to be a better way to approach truth than this.
Actually, I found the update to be nothing more than conspiracy nonsense that was somehow described as a theory. The author of the email takes several events and tries to draw a correlation between them. What he fails to do is provide *any* factual evidence at all that links the NSA or any government agency to this.
As for a FUD attack against the NSA. Maybe they are going to do the same to us. Maybe they aren't. I don't think that matters. I, personally, won't be part of spreading lies and unfounded accusations against people.
I swear, the ammount of paranoia on this site gets worse every day.
I agree with you that a lot of the OO built into perl is just layered on top of what was already there. I think, though, that it goes a little further than you imply. Perl, for instance, supports inheritance(the multiple model) fairly well. I tend to think of it as more analagous to C++.
This said, there are a bunch of OO features that I wish perl would add when they reach 6(or earlier!). These are:
Some sort of abstract/interface setup. I work at a web development firm, and have found on several projects it would have added a great deal to code re-use if I had been able to simply define a template and let people implement it.
Data hiding. I really would like the ability to declare some of my object properties private and not have the programmer be able to access them.
Unfortunately while I think you are correct that email will eventually gain more and more importance, I think you are forgetting one fairly large group of Americans. That is, those who don't have $1000 for a computer plus $20-$30 a month for internet access. How, precisely, do you think we will ensure that they can send and receive mail in the 'new world' that you speak of? Will the government pay to get them all computers? Or will they just drop completely under the radar, forgotten since they can't compete in the new world?
--John
Re:The frightening concentration of media power
on
AOL Nation
·
· Score: 1
Uh, no. I don't believe that AOL & Time-Warner are planning on releasing an operating system as part of their new merger. Or office productivity software. And while they *could* re-release Netscape(btw, anyone have any idea what the end result of this will mean to Netscape and the Mozilla project?), IE still contains a prodigious amount of the market share and is still being bundled with MS's OS. The only way this affects Microsoft is that their attempts to produce content are pretty much screwed.
I disagree. This would have been a test of people's support of Open Standards if MS had come up with their own protocal and then given them to an open standards committee to work with. Or even if they had taken that protocal and published the *entire* specs of it(with no hidden little tricks that would make MS software work faster).
This wasn't that. This was MS basically writing software that cracked into AOL's proprietary database system and then used their network to provide a MS service. This was no more a test of open standards than if I went to a local ISP with a PPP client and *demanded* that they give me access through their network.
I'm not saying that contribution limits *are* the answer, though I do content that we've never seen whether they could be effective. The current system is so full of holes as to be nearly useless. I do contend that even if the candidates don't have to spend time raising money, there will be absolutely no incentive inherent in that to push them away from the methods of campaigning that have worked in the past and will likely continue working until the American voters say enough is enough.
Which is why I don't think a STB doesn't need a RTOS. It really doesn't matter if you know the worst case of system response as long as it *does* respond in a rough period of time.
Uhm. Why, precisely, would the ability to gather huge amounts of money from a small amount of people induce Candidate A to go out to the public and garner votes like that? Why, precisely, wouldn't he go the seemingly standard route: thirty-second sound bites, attack ads all over the media, the *occasional* promotive ad, and a complete and total refusal to debate his oponents?
I think I'm going to have to disagree with your point that limiting political contributions isn't working. Why? Because there really *aren't* any limits. At the very least the limits that are there are so filled with holes as to be nearly useless. I also disagree with your point that things 'balance out'. There have been laws in the past and there will be laws in the future that are for the sole benefit of a single industry. See the Telecommunications Act of 1996 or UCITA.
This is not to say that I believe that making political contributions impossible is going to work either. My personal belief is that the records of who contributed what should be fully and completely open. Not 'fill out a form and we'll *maybe* get you this information'. More like 'go to this website and interact with this database and you'll get the information'. And this should, IMHO, go the same for political parties.
You *do* realize that by your definition nearly every OS is real-time, and particularly linux? After all, if you press a key you don't want to wait forever for it to appear on the screen.
They did release Star Office again. Then again, I'm not insanely crazy about Star Office it violates the paradigm that I came to linux for: a set of different applications that do *one* or *two* things very well. Its slow, bloated, and very, very ugly IMHO.
Slashdot Mirror
Frankly, I think the better question here is why the other OSes don't have more 'fixed this vulnerability five months ago through a standard audit'. Is Linux not being reviewed formally and regularly? If not, why not? Do people doubt the benefits that regular code reviews yield? --John
Except that the difference between radio stations and MP3.com is that radio stations have an arrangement with the owners of the copyright material that allow them to re-broadcast the material. MP3.com did not.
Just commenting on one piece of your comment. Is it so wise to always destroy database handles as soon as you can? Yes, they take up memory that could be used for processing another request. However, the act of opening a database connection is both intensive and fairly uncontrollable(you can't just re-write the database driver on a whim to get better performance, unless you're project is a hell of a lot better funded than most in the software industry are). It seems to me like keeping a pool of persistant database connections wouldn't be such a bad idea. Indeed, it also seems to me that this is the direction that the technology is headed. What do you think?
Ah. Yeah, I can't think of a single Java applet we've sent out onto the web. We have one we use internally for displaying hierarchical, expandable lists, but that's mostly because it was simple, free, and we're lazy when it comes to internal websites for some reason:>
Okay. Your post confuses me. In one breath you seem to imply that no one should use Java for web applications and in the next breath you say its a good idea. I can tell you as a professional web developer(who regularly uses ASP, perl, PHP, and Java in the course of his job), that (a) being a professional web developer does not merely involve being able to hack together some HTML and/or javascript and (b) We're using Java Server Pages more and more for our new projects. Its a wonderful technology, as far as we are concerned.
So it sounds to me as if your opinion is that governments exist to protect these human rights as you define them. Or would it be more? In your opinion, what is the social contract that binds people to governments?
I'm not sure I understand your definition of a 'human right', since you define the right to bear arms as one but the right to a substance required for human existance as not one. Please clarify?
Its my personal belief that gun control really shouldn't be considered one issue. It isn't, really. I've heard two distinct 'subissues' running through it -> 'keeping guns from criminals' and 'reducing accidental shootings'.
The first issue is one that I don't think banning guns is going to fix. Its too simple for a criminal to bypass those. Granted, there would be a percentage of criminal who *wouldn't* be comitting their crimes with armed weapons anymore however I think that they would switch to other weapons(knives come directly to mind). Either way, I haven't thought too much on this so I'm not going to even pretend to be an expert.
It is the second issue that I feel more strongly about. My personal belief is that firearms ought to be handled in the same category as automobiles - to get a gun you must get a license which involves *mandatory* training and a test(granted, I'd like the training and test to be a tad bit more involved than that involved with getting a driving license). Gun locks should be mandatory, and if a child shoots someone with a gun that he got because you were careless and left a loaded weapon around you should be liable(are you as it is?).
There are a few problems with this, of course. Foremost is the Second Amendment. Even beyond that come the question of whether this should be a national government or a state government issue. Even beyond *that* is the question of whether or not government should have the jurisdiction to carry out these regulations at all.
In all, this is an insanely complex issue and I strongly feel that simple slogans like 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people' or 'Guns are evil!' are going to encompass a full solution.
Wait. Allow me to get this straight. It'd be wrong to do this to a poor, starving artist, but its somehow alright to do the same thing to a successful artist? So by becoming successful, an artist forfeits his or her rights to their work?
You're right. We do need to educate people as to why the space program is a good thing. You know what I think would be the easiest, quickest way to shoot ourselves in the foot though? Start calling people 'sheeple'. Frankly, nothing is going to make people stop listening to anyone faster than being condescended to. Its not just you, I see the attitude here way to often that people who have other interests other than the posters are 'sheeple' or 'sheep' or 'morons' or 'induhviduals'. And I really think that we're doing nothing more than shooting ourselves in the foot with that attitude.
Wow. After reading that article I could almost feel the sense of panic this guy is feeling at the new digital world. Yeah, buddy, the future is dark. However I don't think you can do much to illuminate that darkness trying to apply old, worn out legal methods to new technology. We have to come up with something new, or at least be prepared to change the law to reflect circumstances.
Anyways. I was wondering just where this guy expects to find hackers and pirates with hundreds and hundreds of free GBs to play movies. And just where all the people out there with these huge hard drives are. After all, when a single movie weighs in at 17GB, you'd think that that alone would be detrimental to downloading movies over the internet.
Further does anyone else notice that in his model you never own a song. You own a right to listen to the song. The fact that you're holding a digital recording in your hand is meaningless: its essentially not your property. Is this right?
Actually I think its a matter of both, in my opinion. Yeah the employees broke the law. But searching through their computers was still an invasive act that, in my opinion, was still uncalled for.
Though on the side, I find it absolutely absurd that federal law prevented these employees from striking. What particular right does the government have to do regulate a group of employees pooling a resource that they have in order to charge a higher premium for it?
If I recall this story, the judge in charge of this case also pounded the union and employees with incredibly excessive fines until they broke. At least, that's what I recall. Its been a month.
This is, I think, utter and total bullshit. I would love to know what the judge was thinking when he signed that order. I would have loved to see if that order was thrown out in apellate court. Do any of these employees have grounds for a lawsuit here?
By this logic, however, one could make any accusations one wanted and there would be absolutely no way to prove them. *Surely* there has to be a better way to approach truth than this.
Actually, I found the update to be nothing more than conspiracy nonsense that was somehow described as a theory. The author of the email takes several events and tries to draw a correlation between them. What he fails to do is provide *any* factual evidence at all that links the NSA or any government agency to this.
As for a FUD attack against the NSA. Maybe they are going to do the same to us. Maybe they aren't. I don't think that matters. I, personally, won't be part of spreading lies and unfounded accusations against people.
I swear, the ammount of paranoia on this site gets worse every day.
This said, there are a bunch of OO features that I wish perl would add when they reach 6(or earlier!). These are:
Its a wish list, anyways.
Unfortunately while I think you are correct that email will eventually gain more and more importance, I think you are forgetting one fairly large group of Americans. That is, those who don't have $1000 for a computer plus $20-$30 a month for internet access. How, precisely, do you think we will ensure that they can send and receive mail in the 'new world' that you speak of? Will the government pay to get them all computers? Or will they just drop completely under the radar, forgotten since they can't compete in the new world?
--John
Uh, no. I don't believe that AOL & Time-Warner are planning on releasing an operating system as part of their new merger. Or office productivity software. And while they *could* re-release Netscape(btw, anyone have any idea what the end result of this will mean to Netscape and the Mozilla project?), IE still contains a prodigious amount of the market share and is still being bundled with MS's OS. The only way this affects Microsoft is that their attempts to produce content are pretty much screwed.
--John
I disagree. This would have been a test of people's support of Open Standards if MS had come up with their own protocal and then given them to an open standards committee to work with. Or even if they had taken that protocal and published the *entire* specs of it(with no hidden little tricks that would make MS software work faster).
This wasn't that. This was MS basically writing software that cracked into AOL's proprietary database system and then used their network to provide a MS service. This was no more a test of open standards than if I went to a local ISP with a PPP client and *demanded* that they give me access through their network.
--John
I'm not saying that contribution limits *are* the answer, though I do content that we've never seen whether they could be effective. The current system is so full of holes as to be nearly useless. I do contend that even if the candidates don't have to spend time raising money, there will be absolutely no incentive inherent in that to push them away from the methods of campaigning that have worked in the past and will likely continue working until the American voters say enough is enough.
Which is why I don't think a STB doesn't need a RTOS. It really doesn't matter if you know the worst case of system response as long as it *does* respond in a rough period of time.
Uhm. Why, precisely, would the ability to gather huge amounts of money from a small amount of people induce Candidate A to go out to the public and garner votes like that? Why, precisely, wouldn't he go the seemingly standard route: thirty-second sound bites, attack ads all over the media, the *occasional* promotive ad, and a complete and total refusal to debate his oponents?
I think I'm going to have to disagree with your point that limiting political contributions isn't working. Why? Because there really *aren't* any limits. At the very least the limits that are there are so filled with holes as to be nearly useless. I also disagree with your point that things 'balance out'. There have been laws in the past and there will be laws in the future that are for the sole benefit of a single industry. See the Telecommunications Act of 1996 or UCITA.
This is not to say that I believe that making political contributions impossible is going to work either. My personal belief is that the records of who contributed what should be fully and completely open. Not 'fill out a form and we'll *maybe* get you this information'. More like 'go to this website and interact with this database and you'll get the information'. And this should, IMHO, go the same for political parties.
You *do* realize that by your definition nearly every OS is real-time, and particularly linux? After all, if you press a key you don't want to wait forever for it to appear on the screen.
They did release Star Office again. Then again, I'm not insanely crazy about Star Office it violates the paradigm that I came to linux for: a set of different applications that do *one* or *two* things very well. Its slow, bloated, and very, very ugly IMHO.