The project was canceled in part due to concerns about its existence being overly proactive
Homer: I know I can come off a little proactive, and for that I'm sorry. But if everyone could find a place in their hearts for the little exposed-plutonium-core nuclear death cruise missile that nobody wanted, I know we can make them laugh and cry until we grow old together.
And because you release it to everyone, you release it to opposing factions who use the intelligence contained. Well done. That'll help everyone.
Because it's a moral and logical certainty that all the interests of the USA are precisely the same as those of the entire world, and that any "opposing faction" using intelligence against the USA is, by definition, evil?
Who, please name ONE SINGLE person who got killed! One would do.
Sheesh, use some common sense! We can't tell you who Wikileaks got killed because then it would endanger everyone who knew the people who knew the people who knew who Wikileaks got killed! In fact to save lives, we already had to kill all those people ourselves so they could never talk!
Oh very well. Brace yourself.
Santa Claus.
Yes, Virginia, there WAS a Santa Claus. But now there isn't. He was under deep diplomatic cover for the CIA, NSA, NRO, KLA, Mossad, Opus Dei, Google and Red Crescent in Yemen, transporting "packages" to Saudi rebels in Qatar. When Wikileaks exposed the unredacted "naughty and nice list"... well let's just say there's a reason a whole lot of Arctic pack-ice is now melted.
Unlike WikiLeaks, Openleaks will not receive and publish information directly for the public eye.
Ah. So, it's not really "open" at all then. Following the classic tactic of naming your product/service exactly what it's not (I'm looking at you, Great Quality).
So OpenLeaks is to WikiLeaks as Citizendium is to Wikipedia, then? "We want to be democratic... but not TOO democratic. Successful... but not TOO successful. Information the public eagerly wants to know... but not TOO eagerly, because whether it's Pokemon slashfic, maths theorems or state secrets, there are some bits of knowledge mankind needs to be protected from for your own good."
Hey Larry, how's that project working out for you, anyway?
Is there something wrong with that? We have 12 aircraft carrier sailing around the world constantly. What are they for? Defense and world peace?
Of course. The squadrons of rainbow-pooping pegasus unicorns have to have some kind of reliable basing and deployment mechanism, and all the magic underwater love dragons are already occupied as strategic Care Bear launchers. Until the National Happiness Agency has populated all the orbital slots... but unless you have Lucy Sky Diamond clearance, I can say no more.
Because I have studied those people. I know who made a big deal back in the early 70s about the Pentagon Papers. I don't need to do a study of the Pentagon Papers and what was in them and what effect that had on the country.
Seriously?
You haven't studied the issues "those people" were concerned with and spent their lives addressing, yet despite living in a wilfully self-created bubble of ignorance about them, you somehow believe you have "studied those people"?
How does that chain of illogic even begin to make sense for you?
I guess John Kerry got some ridiculously unfair treatment from the Swift Boaters but there did seem to be some legit questions about his war record and discarding his medals.
Yes, about that. I wish Kerry had stood by his anti-Vietnam War protest days. Because he was right. That was a horrible, pointless, war of atrocities which the USA should never have entered.
Kerry should have stood up proudly and said "Vietnam was wrong, Iraq is wrong, Afghanistan is wrong, Dubya is a war criminal, I'm an antiwar hero and proud of it, and if elected I'm pulling the USA out immediately, closing Gitmo and filing treason charges, you'd better believe it."
Would it have played to the 2004-era masses? Dunno, but it would have been the right thing to do. Politics shouldn't always be about lying to get elected. It should involve sometimes standing up and saying the truth.
I don't think quite that many people are interested in space exploration because of glamour, instead, there is a simpler reason, space is hugely interesting. I would love being able to colonize and explore part of a planet or moon, maybe even a particularly large asteroid.
Are you sure about the "interesting" part?
Day 1: We have landed on Rocky Asteroid 1034565. Go the United Space Foundation! USF! USF! Whooooo! Ate spam. Day 2: Scouted the south face from our inflatable tent. Excitingly made of rocks. USF! Ate spam. Day 3: North face is also made of rocks. A good day. Claimed rocks in name of USF. Ate spam. Day 4. West face. Rocks, again. USF, etc. Ate spam. Day 5. East face. Wow, was that a glimmer of CO2 ice? Nope, rocks. Ate spam. Day 6. Struck out for the northeast cravasse. Brought the synthetic aperture gamma-ray crystallography lidar. Verdict? Rocks all the way down. Ate spam. Day 7. Dreamed I ate a cockroach. It was a good dream. Nope, still just rocks. Ate spam. Day 8. Reached edge of asteroid 1034565. Rocks and vacuum! Now that's a find. USF! USF! Ate spam.
One side of me says: "What if you had a bunker under your house that you could escape to if some army was attacking you. Then you could blow up your house to defend your person as a last ditch effort."
Thereby cleverly revealing your formerly hidden bunker's trapdoor?
Filling your house with live bobcats might be more effective. Then, if the army doesn't arrive, you get bonus bobcats.
The people donating money to Julian Assange are at risk of their lives being ruined. By a government that will stop at nothing to stop Julian Assange.
This means informants. This means entrapment. This means torture. This means psychological operations. This means black ops, false flags, black bag, honey trap operations.
So what you're saying is, donating to Wikileaks is the new Okcupid?
Perhaps Facebook should look into adding a new relationship status indicator, "It's Classified".
I think the intelligent hackers are not hostile towards graphics, but towards unspecified nontransportable interfaces. Graphical interfaces, unfortunately, often lend themselves towards vagueness at a programming level. GUIs are often an inexact representation of the true state of a system and while they may be 'easy' for untrained users, they become progressively hostile as the user gains skill.
It doesn't have to be that way. A system could be built where the GUI was an exact visualisation of the current state of the system, which could also be expressed in a portable serialisation, saved in a file, emailed, etc. Ironically, it seems to be Microsoft at the moment who is leading this investigation with XAML and PowerShell.
Yes, when you switch from Gnome to KDE many of the applets, plug-ins, and supplementary do-dads go with. But the functionality, while perhaps different, is still probably there.
"Probably" is not a good word to hear in the computing trade. If you don't absolutely know for sure if something will work, odds are it won't.
The problem is that this view assumes that "functionality" is all about what is presented to the user, at a general and high level - "can you perform your office-level tasks at a workstation using roughly similar tools?"
And the answer is usually "yes, sort of, for certain values of yes". Sure you can kinda-almost drop in Kwrite for Gedit and get something sorta, generally, somewhere in the same ballpark. But that's not useful if you're trying to write a script to automate workflow.
This is a big worry of mine at the moment. I'm seeing a shift in focus in the open-source world from well-specified "small tools that work well together" to big sprawling apps with UI baked in, aimed at performing vague high-level user-centric tasks that don't have any kind of formal API for communicating, but that sorta-kinda implement HUI guidelines.
The iPad is the poster boy for the task-based single-purpose app model, but so is GNOME, and Unity is drifting even further there.
It works-ish, yes. It produces spike solutions that hit specific tick-boxes. It makes stuff that looks pretty for single-purpose jobs. But at the end of the day, the end user can't plug stuff together - more and more they're getting locked into developer-built boxes. Sweet work if you're a developer - you get to sell stuff. Not so good if you're a user and you want to streamline and automate your own workflow, and sculpt your own personal UI, or delegate your daily tasks to scripts and bots. The apps you use only generally expose human-usable interfaces, or very arcane developer interfaces in brittle languages like C. There's not much in between.
This app-based, task-based approach with a human in the seat least to evaporating one of the main advantages of computers: that we can automate tasks, so that a human doesn't have to sit at a workstation doing it. And that was my big dream for the open source world and Linux: that once all our software got freed from copyright rules, we could work on tying it all together with some kind of open scripting framework that was accessible to the user. But I'm seeing that dream die.
That you have "a way" to do things on a different software package doesn't help at all if you've written scripts - you'll have to rewrite them entirely. There needs to be not just about "a way" to do things, but "implements standard X"
The word processor/text editor that comes with the desktop environment may be drastically different, but OpenOffice still works on both, for example.
OpenOffice (and Firefox) are both cases which prove my point: the only reason why they work on both KDE and GNOME desktops is that they each built their own, proprietary, object system which is native to neither (UNO and XPCOM). They *run*, yes, they present a human interface to the user, they do task-based functions - but they don't interact at a deep level.
On Linux today, just with object/component systems, we have a melange of: GObject, Kparts, Dbus, CORBA, OpenOffice, XPcom, and the internal object systems of C++, Java, Mono, Python, PHP, and Perl. Do these serialise? Do they interoperate? Can you link an object made in one language to one in another? Nope, they stay mostly in app-based ghettos.
Thanks to open source, we no longer have a copyright reason for all these components to stay apart - but our languages and frameworks still don't make it easy to link them.
Some of us remember OpenDoc and Lotus Notes promising an era of applications being replaced by rich documents a user could build out of cross-platform components. Those days seem to have long gone.
Imagine if they priced your internet usage like this? No one would use the internet either.
What do you Americans mean, 'if'? That's how we buy Internet in Australia and New Zealand. I have a 15 MB connection and a 20 GB monthly transfer limit.
Last month I installed Lord of the Rings Online and it exceeded my monthly bandwith just getting the game.
There is a big difference between "whistleblowing" to uncover domestic corruption and leaking state secrets of multiple nations.
Because the global public has morally less right to know state secrets than to know domestic secrets.... why, precisely?
Does that reasoning scale? Do citizens of one US state have no right to know secrets of another US state's government? Do citizens of one US city have no right to know secrets of another city's government?
It's one planet, the concept of "state" is artificial, and the concept of "state secrecy" doubly so. High officialdom isn't by virtue of its high office any more ethical than the man in the street - unless they are somehow held to account. Leaking state secrets may be illegal, and may be uncomfortable, and may in the end be counterproductive to transparency - but at least it's one mechanism for creating accountability which we don't currently seem to have.
Surely, one can roll the UI into the "OS," but particularly in this case, the underlying mechanics aren't changing (there's still a GNU kernel in there), but the discussed changes are in layers between, which can be replaced if you don't like the changes.
No, see, that's precisely the problem: because everything at the "GUI" or desktop frramework level is unspecified by Unix, features get provided there in an incompatible, framework-specific, way. So you *can't* replace layers if you don't like the changes - you can maybe pull, eg, parts of X, which at least has some kind of specification, or you can rip out the entire framework, and replace GNOME and all its app ecosystem with KDE and its ecosystem - but nothing in between. Modern desktop frameworks are now based around not just X but a whole horde of daemon services like PulseAudio and Dbus - many of which have no specified API other than their implementation. Good luck deciding to remove one of those and have all your apps still work.
The GUI stuff is treated as separate and second-class and can change from month to month. It prevents distros from being recognizable by end-users, and prevents robust vertical integration where its needed to make things convenient and understandable for the user.
Worse, there is stuff implemented in the Linux GUI toolkits and desktop frameworks which is not provided at lower levels (or if provided, the API is very tightly bound to specific languages and object systems, such as Qt/C++, or GNOME/GObject/C).
What exactly was broken about the Unix "everything is a file" metaphor? Plan 9 seemed to get a long with with using that to describe windows.
Slashdot Mirror
Miss Moneypenny: Have you got a mission, James?
James Bond: Yes. I am to eliminate all free radicals.
Miss Moneypenny: Ooh. Do be careful.
The project was canceled in part due to concerns about its existence being overly proactive
Homer: I know I can come off a little proactive, and for that I'm sorry. But if everyone could find a place in their hearts for the little exposed-plutonium-core nuclear death cruise missile that nobody wanted, I know we can make them laugh and cry until we grow old together.
And because you release it to everyone, you release it to opposing factions who use the intelligence contained. Well done. That'll help everyone.
Because it's a moral and logical certainty that all the interests of the USA are precisely the same as those of the entire world, and that any "opposing faction" using intelligence against the USA is, by definition, evil?
Who, please name ONE SINGLE person who got killed! One would do.
Sheesh, use some common sense! We can't tell you who Wikileaks got killed because then it would endanger everyone who knew the people who knew the people who knew who Wikileaks got killed! In fact to save lives, we already had to kill all those people ourselves so they could never talk!
Oh very well. Brace yourself.
Santa Claus.
Yes, Virginia, there WAS a Santa Claus. But now there isn't. He was under deep diplomatic cover for the CIA, NSA, NRO, KLA, Mossad, Opus Dei, Google and Red Crescent in Yemen, transporting "packages" to Saudi rebels in Qatar. When Wikileaks exposed the unredacted "naughty and nice list"... well let's just say there's a reason a whole lot of Arctic pack-ice is now melted.
I hope you're SATISFIED.
Unlike WikiLeaks, Openleaks will not receive and publish information directly for the public eye.
Ah. So, it's not really "open" at all then. Following the classic tactic of naming your product/service exactly what it's not (I'm looking at you, Great Quality).
So OpenLeaks is to WikiLeaks as Citizendium is to Wikipedia, then? "We want to be democratic... but not TOO democratic. Successful... but not TOO successful. Information the public eagerly wants to know... but not TOO eagerly, because whether it's Pokemon slashfic, maths theorems or state secrets, there are some bits of knowledge mankind needs to be protected from for your own good."
Hey Larry, how's that project working out for you, anyway?
Soon every suburban house will have its own massive angry hornet array and all our problems will be over.
Is there something wrong with that? We have 12 aircraft carrier sailing around the world constantly. What are they for? Defense and world peace?
Of course. The squadrons of rainbow-pooping pegasus unicorns have to have some kind of reliable basing and deployment mechanism, and all the magic underwater love dragons are already occupied as strategic Care Bear launchers. Until the National Happiness Agency has populated all the orbital slots... but unless you have Lucy Sky Diamond clearance, I can say no more.
Because I have studied those people. I know who made a big deal back in the early 70s about the Pentagon Papers. I don't need to do a study of the Pentagon Papers and what was in them and what effect that had on the country.
Seriously?
You haven't studied the issues "those people" were concerned with and spent their lives addressing, yet despite living in a wilfully self-created bubble of ignorance about them, you somehow believe you have "studied those people"?
How does that chain of illogic even begin to make sense for you?
Only the dark scientists deal in absolutes.
Search your anecdotes. You know this to be true.
The department head has foreseen this. We can destroy him.
Together we can rule this faculty as thesis advisor and undergrad!
I guess John Kerry got some ridiculously unfair treatment from the Swift Boaters but there did seem to be some legit questions about his war record and discarding his medals.
Yes, about that. I wish Kerry had stood by his anti-Vietnam War protest days. Because he was right. That was a horrible, pointless, war of atrocities which the USA should never have entered.
Kerry should have stood up proudly and said "Vietnam was wrong, Iraq is wrong, Afghanistan is wrong, Dubya is a war criminal, I'm an antiwar hero and proud of it, and if elected I'm pulling the USA out immediately, closing Gitmo and filing treason charges, you'd better believe it."
Would it have played to the 2004-era masses? Dunno, but it would have been the right thing to do. Politics shouldn't always be about lying to get elected. It should involve sometimes standing up and saying the truth.
I don't think quite that many people are interested in space exploration because of glamour, instead, there is a simpler reason, space is hugely interesting.
I would love being able to colonize and explore part of a planet or moon, maybe even a particularly large asteroid.
Are you sure about the "interesting" part?
Day 1: We have landed on Rocky Asteroid 1034565. Go the United Space Foundation! USF! USF! Whooooo! Ate spam.
Day 2: Scouted the south face from our inflatable tent. Excitingly made of rocks. USF! Ate spam.
Day 3: North face is also made of rocks. A good day. Claimed rocks in name of USF. Ate spam.
Day 4. West face. Rocks, again. USF, etc. Ate spam.
Day 5. East face. Wow, was that a glimmer of CO2 ice? Nope, rocks. Ate spam.
Day 6. Struck out for the northeast cravasse. Brought the synthetic aperture gamma-ray crystallography lidar. Verdict? Rocks all the way down. Ate spam.
Day 7. Dreamed I ate a cockroach. It was a good dream. Nope, still just rocks. Ate spam.
Day 8. Reached edge of asteroid 1034565. Rocks and vacuum! Now that's a find. USF! USF! Ate spam.
One side of me says: "What if you had a bunker under your house that you could escape to if some army was attacking you. Then you could blow up your house to defend your person as a last ditch effort."
Thereby cleverly revealing your formerly hidden bunker's trapdoor?
Filling your house with live bobcats might be more effective. Then, if the army doesn't arrive, you get bonus bobcats.
Whenever I lose a game of chess to an Aussie they say: mate mate.
Have a Meal Mate, mate.
The people donating money to Julian Assange are at risk of their lives being ruined. By a government that will stop at nothing to stop Julian Assange.
This means informants. This means entrapment. This means torture. This means psychological operations. This means black ops, false flags, black bag, honey trap operations.
So what you're saying is, donating to Wikileaks is the new Okcupid?
Perhaps Facebook should look into adding a new relationship status indicator, "It's Classified".
Obi-Wan's last words apply here.
"Hey, watch what you're doing with that light-" ?
the hacker hostility towards graphics.
I think the intelligent hackers are not hostile towards graphics, but towards unspecified nontransportable interfaces. Graphical interfaces, unfortunately, often lend themselves towards vagueness at a programming level. GUIs are often an inexact representation of the true state of a system and while they may be 'easy' for untrained users, they become progressively hostile as the user gains skill.
It doesn't have to be that way. A system could be built where the GUI was an exact visualisation of the current state of the system, which could also be expressed in a portable serialisation, saved in a file, emailed, etc. Ironically, it seems to be Microsoft at the moment who is leading this investigation with XAML and PowerShell.
Yes, when you switch from Gnome to KDE many of the applets, plug-ins, and supplementary do-dads go with. But the functionality, while perhaps different, is still probably there.
"Probably" is not a good word to hear in the computing trade. If you don't absolutely know for sure if something will work, odds are it won't.
The problem is that this view assumes that "functionality" is all about what is presented to the user, at a general and high level - "can you perform your office-level tasks at a workstation using roughly similar tools?"
And the answer is usually "yes, sort of, for certain values of yes". Sure you can kinda-almost drop in Kwrite for Gedit and get something sorta, generally, somewhere in the same ballpark. But that's not useful if you're trying to write a script to automate workflow.
This is a big worry of mine at the moment. I'm seeing a shift in focus in the open-source world from well-specified "small tools that work well together" to big sprawling apps with UI baked in, aimed at performing vague high-level user-centric tasks that don't have any kind of formal API for communicating, but that sorta-kinda implement HUI guidelines.
The iPad is the poster boy for the task-based single-purpose app model, but so is GNOME, and Unity is drifting even further there.
It works-ish, yes. It produces spike solutions that hit specific tick-boxes. It makes stuff that looks pretty for single-purpose jobs. But at the end of the day, the end user can't plug stuff together - more and more they're getting locked into developer-built boxes. Sweet work if you're a developer - you get to sell stuff. Not so good if you're a user and you want to streamline and automate your own workflow, and sculpt your own personal UI, or delegate your daily tasks to scripts and bots. The apps you use only generally expose human-usable interfaces, or very arcane developer interfaces in brittle languages like C. There's not much in between.
This app-based, task-based approach with a human in the seat least to evaporating one of the main advantages of computers: that we can automate tasks, so that a human doesn't have to sit at a workstation doing it. And that was my big dream for the open source world and Linux: that once all our software got freed from copyright rules, we could work on tying it all together with some kind of open scripting framework that was accessible to the user. But I'm seeing that dream die.
That you have "a way" to do things on a different software package doesn't help at all if you've written scripts - you'll have to rewrite them entirely. There needs to be not just about "a way" to do things, but "implements standard X"
The word processor/text editor that comes with the desktop environment may be drastically different, but OpenOffice still works on both, for example.
OpenOffice (and Firefox) are both cases which prove my point: the only reason why they work on both KDE and GNOME desktops is that they each built their own, proprietary, object system which is native to neither (UNO and XPCOM). They *run*, yes, they present a human interface to the user, they do task-based functions - but they don't interact at a deep level.
On Linux today, just with object/component systems, we have a melange of: GObject, Kparts, Dbus, CORBA, OpenOffice, XPcom, and the internal object systems of C++, Java, Mono, Python, PHP, and Perl. Do these serialise? Do they interoperate? Can you link an object made in one language to one in another? Nope, they stay mostly in app-based ghettos.
Thanks to open source, we no longer have a copyright reason for all these components to stay apart - but our languages and frameworks still don't make it easy to link them.
Some of us remember OpenDoc and Lotus Notes promising an era of applications being replaced by rich documents a user could build out of cross-platform components. Those days seem to have long gone.
Imagine if they priced your internet usage like this? No one would use the internet either.
What do you Americans mean, 'if'? That's how we buy Internet in Australia and New Zealand. I have a 15 MB connection and a 20 GB monthly transfer limit.
Last month I installed Lord of the Rings Online and it exceeded my monthly bandwith just getting the game.
How is it that they can walk into libraries and copymillions of books without paying for them
Cameras.
Very small cameras embedded in the frames of their spectacles. Or in some cases, surgically implanted in the bridge of their nose.
If you see someone on the street with a little glowing blue LED between their eyes? Google Books agent.
There is a big difference between "whistleblowing" to uncover domestic corruption and leaking state secrets of multiple nations.
Because the global public has morally less right to know state secrets than to know domestic secrets.... why, precisely?
Does that reasoning scale? Do citizens of one US state have no right to know secrets of another US state's government? Do citizens of one US city have no right to know secrets of another city's government?
It's one planet, the concept of "state" is artificial, and the concept of "state secrecy" doubly so. High officialdom isn't by virtue of its high office any more ethical than the man in the street - unless they are somehow held to account. Leaking state secrets may be illegal, and may be uncomfortable, and may in the end be counterproductive to transparency - but at least it's one mechanism for creating accountability which we don't currently seem to have.
Surely, one can roll the UI into the "OS," but particularly in this case, the underlying mechanics aren't changing (there's still a GNU kernel in there), but the discussed changes are in layers between, which can be replaced if you don't like the changes.
No, see, that's precisely the problem: because everything at the "GUI" or desktop frramework level is unspecified by Unix, features get provided there in an incompatible, framework-specific, way. So you *can't* replace layers if you don't like the changes - you can maybe pull, eg, parts of X, which at least has some kind of specification, or you can rip out the entire framework, and replace GNOME and all its app ecosystem with KDE and its ecosystem - but nothing in between. Modern desktop frameworks are now based around not just X but a whole horde of daemon services like PulseAudio and Dbus - many of which have no specified API other than their implementation. Good luck deciding to remove one of those and have all your apps still work.
The GUI stuff is treated as separate and second-class and can change from month to month. It prevents distros from being recognizable by end-users, and prevents robust vertical integration where its needed to make things convenient and understandable for the user.
Worse, there is stuff implemented in the Linux GUI toolkits and desktop frameworks which is not provided at lower levels (or if provided, the API is very tightly bound to specific languages and object systems, such as Qt/C++, or GNOME/GObject/C).
What exactly was broken about the Unix "everything is a file" metaphor? Plan 9 seemed to get a long with with using that to describe windows.
In the second article.
First page, second paragraph.
What part of that was difficult to click on?
What part of "Image gallery: Ubuntu's Unity interface" was difficult to read?
How is this "letting users" skip ads, compared to the existing Youtube popups we can close instantly?
In other news, the chocolate ration has been increased. Go Oceania!