I mean, doesn't this article just *scream* Godwin's law?
No, it's a statement of fact. To many Europeans, an oath of allegiance does conjure up images of Nazi Germany and the Hitler Jugend in particular. Let's face it, this sort of thing (as far as I know) happens nowhere else in the free world.
the act is without authorisation if the person doing it [...] does not have the permission of the owner
If you operate a public webserver you implicitly authorise Internet users to connect to it. A slashdotting is just a group of people doing something that has been authorised by the operator of the server, even if it is a very large group of people.
Re:One thing I've NEVER seen here....
on
Fair IP Laws?
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· Score: 1
Of course, this "analogy" totally falls apart because patents are not in fact granted in perpetuity.
Since it's only been one revision, it can't have destabilized that much.
2.5.1 introduces major changes to the block device layer, a rather crucial bit of code. Bugs in that code might well eat your data. In fact, it's a good idea to put the dangerous changes in early rather than in a late phase of development.
It takes as much work to destabilize a kernel as it did to stabilize it
Absolutely untrue, as any programmer knows. It takes a lot of hard work to make something stable, but it only takes a one-character change at the wrong place to destabilize the system for all users (cf. 2.4.15).
it would not be used against a legitimate programmer such as himself
While it is unlikely that Alan would be arrested for fixing security bugs in the Linux kernel, he is quite right in saying that under the letter of the law, he might be. Even if you merely can be arrested for such an activity, then the DMCA is a bad law and must be repealed, or at least modified very substantially. So Alan should be applauded for taking a stand, even if (or exactly because!) that inconveniences some people temporarily.
Given that only 4% of the world population resides in the US, the fact that half of the top hub cities are in the US means the the Internet is pretty US-centric.
Since it is believed
that Bin Laden (if he is in fact behind the attacks) hasn't been using the Internet at all, how would this kind of wiretapping crap prevent similar attacks? Isn't it just a cheap excuse for creating a police state?
If it would save the lives of other innocent people, I would personally print out all of my communications and had them to the FBI.
If you are not a terrorist, then how does printing out your communication and handing them to the FBI help prevent terrorism?
I wouldn't sit back happily if I were you. Everything bad that happens in the US also happens in Europe with a few years delay.
Anyway, the European Council has accepted a new DMCA-style copyright directive back in April. It states: "Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures, which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective." (Article 6.1) So, forget DeCSS. Member states now have until December 2002 to implement it in local law.
The GNU project has done a bit more than do "background work". Think of GNOME, bash, all the Unix utilities, or even Emacs. Not to mention all the development stuff, in particular the GNU compiler, which is not at all "background" if you develop software.
And of course FedEx didn't create the Super Bowl, while it is questionable whether Linux, or indeed much of the free software movement, would have existed without Stallman and the GNU project.
Re:On celebrating backwards compatibility
on
Linux Turns 10
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· Score: 2, Interesting
... never was very well designed to begin with, and neither was UN*X.
Are we talking about the same OS? There is a reason that UNIX has remained essentially unchanged for the last thirty years, and that intelligent folks like Torvalds or the BSD or GNU people chose to clone UNIX instead of some other system. The reason is that UNIX is a Good Idea.
Take the API, for instance. Compared to most other systems in history it's a miracle of elegance and simplicity. In many OSes (especially those in the 60's), you have different system calls to write to a disk, systems calls to write to the printer, the display, other processes, etc. In UNIX, on the other hand, everything is a file (or more properly a file handle): regular files, directories, disks, tapes, pipes, sockets... The entire UNIX API boils down to open()/read()/write()/close(). Sure, implementations have acquired a lot of cruft of the years, but that's a property of any living system.
Take the file system. Other systems give you crap like drive letters, device names, and UNC paths. Not so in UNIX, where all your files and other stuff exist in a single unified namespace. You can use tar to write to a file, a tape, or a CD writer; it's all the same. One interface for everything.
Take the user interface. Instead of providing a lot of commands with lots of options for accomplishing some specific task, UNIX gives you a few commands that each do a particular thing well, along with the infrastructure (e.g., pipes) to combine them. Then the user can build arbitrarily complex stuff from a few simple commands.
In summary, UNIX is succesful (and becoming more so every day) because it is a work of art. Really. May it last another 30 years.
But you could run several VMs simultaneously, so you could have pre-emptive multitasking of Windows applications, and prevent one crashing process from taking down all the others.
Hence, "a better Windows than Windows," as the IBM advertisement campaign claimed.
Slashdot Mirror
To quote George Leigh Mallory (Everest pioneer), "because it's there."
I mean, doesn't this article just *scream* Godwin's law?
No, it's a statement of fact. To many Europeans, an oath of allegiance does conjure up images of Nazi Germany and the Hitler Jugend in particular. Let's face it, this sort of thing (as far as I know) happens nowhere else in the free world.
Read on:
the act is without authorisation if the person doing it [...] does not have the permission of the owner
If you operate a public webserver you implicitly authorise Internet users to connect to it. A slashdotting is just a group of people doing something that has been authorised by the operator of the server, even if it is a very large group of people.
Of course, this "analogy" totally falls apart because patents are not in fact granted in perpetuity.
Just saw this headline on Yahoo: Study links MS, mono virus.
Couldn't have said it any better.
Since it's only been one revision, it can't have destabilized that much.
2.5.1 introduces major changes to the block device layer, a rather crucial bit of code. Bugs in that code might well eat your data. In fact, it's a good idea to put the dangerous changes in early rather than in a late phase of development.
It takes as much work to destabilize a kernel as it did to stabilize it
Absolutely untrue, as any programmer knows. It takes a lot of hard work to make something stable, but it only takes a one-character change at the wrong place to destabilize the system for all users (cf. 2.4.15).
it would not be used against a legitimate programmer such as himself
While it is unlikely that Alan would be arrested for fixing security bugs in the Linux kernel, he is quite right in saying that under the letter of the law, he might be. Even if you merely can be arrested for such an activity, then the DMCA is a bad law and must be repealed, or at least modified very substantially. So Alan should be applauded for taking a stand, even if (or exactly because!) that inconveniences some people temporarily.
Given that only 4% of the world population resides in the US, the fact that half of the top hub cities are in the US means the the Internet is pretty US-centric.
Since it is believed that Bin Laden (if he is in fact behind the attacks) hasn't been using the Internet at all, how would this kind of wiretapping crap prevent similar attacks? Isn't it just a cheap excuse for creating a police state?
If it would save the lives of other innocent people, I would personally print out all of my communications and had them to the FBI.
If you are not a terrorist, then how does printing out your communication and handing them to the FBI help prevent terrorism?
I wouldn't sit back happily if I were you. Everything bad that happens in the US also happens in Europe with a few years delay.
Anyway, the European Council has accepted a new DMCA-style copyright directive back in April. It states: "Member States shall provide adequate legal protection against the circumvention of any effective technological measures, which the person concerned carries out in the knowledge, or with reasonable grounds to know, that he or she is pursuing that objective." (Article 6.1) So, forget DeCSS. Member states now have until December 2002 to implement it in local law.
Mr. Clippy: I'm sorry, you're not experienced enough to change text colors yet. Try underlining it for now!
When will I be able to import my Baldur's Gate character into Word?
Aw cmon, you couldn't have added 3 spaces?
Or perhaps timothy should have let JonKatz pad it out to 31337 bytes.
The GNU project has done a bit more than do "background work". Think of GNOME, bash, all the Unix utilities, or even Emacs. Not to mention all the development stuff, in particular the GNU compiler, which is not at all "background" if you develop software.
And of course FedEx didn't create the Super Bowl, while it is questionable whether Linux, or indeed much of the free software movement, would have existed without Stallman and the GNU project.
Are we talking about the same OS? There is a reason that UNIX has remained essentially unchanged for the last thirty years, and that intelligent folks like Torvalds or the BSD or GNU people chose to clone UNIX instead of some other system. The reason is that UNIX is a Good Idea.
Take the API, for instance. Compared to most other systems in history it's a miracle of elegance and simplicity. In many OSes (especially those in the 60's), you have different system calls to write to a disk, systems calls to write to the printer, the display, other processes, etc. In UNIX, on the other hand, everything is a file (or more properly a file handle): regular files, directories, disks, tapes, pipes, sockets... The entire UNIX API boils down to open()/read()/write()/close(). Sure, implementations have acquired a lot of cruft of the years, but that's a property of any living system.
Take the file system. Other systems give you crap like drive letters, device names, and UNC paths. Not so in UNIX, where all your files and other stuff exist in a single unified namespace. You can use tar to write to a file, a tape, or a CD writer; it's all the same. One interface for everything.
Take the user interface. Instead of providing a lot of commands with lots of options for accomplishing some specific task, UNIX gives you a few commands that each do a particular thing well, along with the infrastructure (e.g., pipes) to combine them. Then the user can build arbitrarily complex stuff from a few simple commands.
In summary, UNIX is succesful (and becoming more so every day) because it is a work of art. Really. May it last another 30 years.
I think I will just submit cat(1). Should beat all others in the "correctness" and "speed of optimisation" department!
Hence, "a better Windows than Windows," as the IBM advertisement campaign claimed.
Not at all. Back in the Windows 3.x days, Windows applications ran better under OS/2 than under Windows :-)