Wow, this makes how many politics articles this week? And all of them attacking either the GOP or the Bush Administration. The editors don't even know how to be subtle about their political prejudices anymore. And doing a story from a political blog?
I think moderating parent post as flamebait just proves that he's right. It isn't flamebait, it's accurate.
Maybe Jobs wants Microsoft to think its a trap because it's actually a good idea!
It reminds me of the movie The Princess Bride...
Vizzini: But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
From above post: The part that concerns me most, which I'm not seeing enough commentary on, is the extremely serious allegation that Apple have deliberately installed backdoors into their systems.
And from the article: Sometimes Apple make things worse. For example, widgets, small programs that can do things like search online dictionaries or let you listen to streamed BBC programs, can be installed without your permission when you visit a website using the Safari browser, just like Windows does with ActiveX controls.
Bill Thompson does NOT claim Apple purposefully installed backdoors. He claims that Apple has installed features which historically have had security problems.
I personally find Thompson's comment a bit worthless (browsers have historically had security flaws and caused vulnerabilities, why not ship without a browser?). But to be fair, he is NOT claiming Apple is doing anything malicious.
I see nothing to be gained from this proposal and much to be lost. For all its problems, ICANN has worked reasonably well, and I see handing the reins of the Internet over to the UN to be fraught with danger.
The US (compared with other countries) has a history of a hands off approach to regulation. Even though ICANN operates at some level under US law, the US government has kept its hands off and let industry and academia do its thing. Other governments simply don't have this approach. Other govenrments will try to assert more direct control, and because governments are slow and dumb, they'll do something to screw it up.
I don't know what would immediatly would happen, but there is a great potential for mischief if China, Iran, and other governments that practice censorship had partial control of Internet governance. They could try to write censorship controls more directly into technical standards, deny dns service to groups they dislike etc... The people who run these dictatorships are not dumb and could come up with mischievious stuff that no one has ever imagined.
To be honest, I'm slightly worried even about the other Western democracies. France banned the sale of Nazi material on Yahoo. People have brought llibel lawsuits in Australia against United States newspapers because of material published on web servers in America. I'm MUCH less worried about them to be sure... but they still don't have the US 1st amendment.
So if I'm paying for their education (via that tax money that will fund vouchers), I can't have any accountability as to how my future fellow citizens are being educated? How did education not become an interest of society as a whole?
Who do you trust to make a better decision about a child's education? The parents? or a taxpayer in the school district who doesn't have kids?
As a taxpayer, I would say you should have a say over minimum funding levels for education (vouchers are essentially the minimum state guaranteed funding level per child), but the general taxpayer should not have any role in how the school is run. I doubt 1% of people in a school district know ANY teacher in that district unless the person went to a school in that district or had a child that went to a school in that district. Compared with the parents, the general taxpayer has no significant stake in the system and can't be trusted to give it the sustained attention it deserves.
That's just reality. Its hard to pass a school bond measure in a district with lots of elderly. Despite some levels of altruism, on the whole, people can be most trusted to look after themselves and their close family. Under the construct of vouchers, this selfish behavior would help the educational system rather than make it weaker. Think of the market for cars. The government may set certain minimum safety requirements and standards for automobiles, but the government doesn't mandate what car you actually buy. Imagine how bad things would be if the government collected taxes from you and gave you no choice in what car it bought you.
Or on the other hand, why can't the public system be modified to allow for accountability to parents? What makes a voucher system the only way to achieve the result you describe? I think allowing for diversity of approaches in the public school system (some schools geared towards high achievers, others geared towards the less gifted or less willing) is possible and more desirable. It would allow for students (they're the ones who matter, not the parents, forgive me parents) to be responded to appropriately by the system and given the teaching methods most appropriate to their needs, while ensuring for society that good content is still being taught (e.g. real science as opposed to creation ideology).
Who runs your system? Who do they report to? Who audits their performance? People take orders from the organization that writes the paycheck.
B) no way to verify results. Private and parochial schools will not be held to any scrutiny or standard measure. I think standardized testing is an unfortunate fetish of our society, but if we really think it works, I will demand that all schools receiving vouchers be held to the same standards and measurements as public schools, even if that continues to be standardized testing.
If there is school choice, schools will be ACCOUNTABLE TO THE CHILD'S PARENTS! If the school sucks, the parents will yell at the school administration to fix things or they'll take their kids (and their voucher money) elsewhere.
This kind of accountability is REAL as opposed to the bogus teach to the test accountability of mass standardized testing. It is an utter fallacy to think that public schools will be transformed by mass standardized tests and complicated funding formulas from Washington.
School choice creates the kind of decentralized accountability that really works. Furthermore, as K-12 education becomes a truly competetive market, you will have the kinds of reviews and comparative literature you have with cars and universities. If people actually HAVE a choice, a market will develop to help them make an INFORMED choice. For cars you can read consumer reports, for universities you can read stuff by the Princeton Review, but for schools, there is currently a dearth of information because quite frankly, there's no market for it.
Currently large bureaucratic public school districts have a monopoly on K-12 education. And as is the case with any monopoly, you get a poor product at a high price.
Competition works. US universities compete for students and they are the best in the world. AMD competes with Intel and we get faster, cheaper processors.
Furthermore, our country HAD competition at grades K-12 in the past. Back when school districts were smaller, people could move a small distance and get into a new school district. With large unified school districts, the monopoly is inescapable unless you are rich enough to afford private school. What we in essence have now is school choice (and quality schools) for the rich, and normal public monopoly school for everyone else.
There are tons of arguments for the government to pay to educate every child, but there are no good arguments why the government should itself be the teacher. The government should give vouchers to parents who can use the money to pay for their childs education. At the very least, the government should pay for various charter schools, districts should be made smaller, and other action should be taken to inject choice and competition into the system.
There are a few private schools out there, but overall, large bureaucratic school districts have a virtual monopoly on K-12 education across the country.
And with any monopoly, you get a poor product at a high price.
We at Slashdot love the competition AMD is giving Intel and what this is doing for the processor market. Competition should be embraced at the grade school level as well.
Look at our country's university system, which is universally acknowledged as the best in the world. We have a combination of state and private schools, but they all compete.
They don't claim their operating system is Unix, just "Unix based." I'm just thinking that if Open won the lawsuit, what could you replace "Unix based" with?? Unix has become an English word referring to a family of operating systems. How else would you refer to the family of operating systems populated by Linux, the BSDs, Solaris, Irix etc.. except mentioning the word Unix????
Cygwin calls itself a "Linux like environment for Windows."
Could Apple say "FreeBSD based environment."...
Nothing conveys the information as quickly though as simply mentioning the word Unix.
People using Sun machines are NOT using them because they went a pretty way to check their e-mail. They're using them because they need powerful, scalable, reliable machines.
And it seems to me that Sun's biggest problem is that their hardware is really expensive and not that much faster or more robust than linux running on Intel machines. From my own very unscientific and emprical tests, it seems that a gigahertz Sun Blade 2000 handles high loads better than my PIV machine running linux, but that the runtimes of most single-threaded programs I write finish as fast if not faster on the PIV. And you can get a well equipped PIV with linux for $2000 and a Sun Blade 2000 will cost you 10 times as much.
With 64 bit architecture from AMD and Intel etc... the reasons you need Sun are just getting fewer and fewer.
The same (or more) number of "bad guys" are likely to have found the problem only if the probability of bad guys finding it is the same (or greater). My general impression is that on an individual bug by bug basis (which is what we're talking about here....) the original developpers, linux system vendors etc.... are more likely to find the bug than your evil crackers out there....
Furthermore, if an exploit really exists... its likely after a while to make some waves and become a "known" exploit....
Probabiliy(bug exploited by crackers | no known wild exploit) is less than P(bug exploited by crackers)
All together, if there isn't any known exploit in the wild, and an exploitable bug was found by "good guys." I think the probabilities are pretty good that the bug HASN'T been cracked yet. Giving vendors a short reasonable time to respond in private is therefore the responsible thing to do.
Mathematically speaking, its basically impossible to prove that some encryption algorithm is intractably difficult to solve.
(If for example you show the decryption process is NP complete, that just shows that the worst case is likely to be difficult if P != NP etc...)
However, strong peer review and research though can give very strong motivation as to why a certain algorithm is computationally intractable (making the encryption scheme practically unbreakable).
Before I could ever trust some new-fangled encryption scheme, I think I would like to see the company submitting REAL detailed articles of mathematics and techniques to appropriate research conferences and have the whole algorithm and math undergo the process of peer review. Its just too easy to fuck up encryption and to think something REALLY REALLY hard to compute isn't in reality a lot easier than it seems.
Devices like linksys suffered from a much larger security problem. IGNORANCE!... Education!!! Plain and simple will reduce any threat that this flaw or any other would exacerbate.
Let's say building a lighthouse off a rocky point stops ten ships from running aground on the shore each year, saving $1 million per incident for a total of $10 million. Let's say building the lighthouse costs $5 million. It's easy to see that building the lighthouse is a good idea. Unfortunately the lighthouse won't be built by a single private company because whoever builds it will NEVER get paid (and with these prices its cheaper for each individual shipper to let his/her ships run aground than build the lighthouse himself). Why? because there's no way to charge people for a good which they can just get for free. Once the lighthouse is built, no one can stop other boats from seeing the light. This is called a "non-excludable" good. You can't "exclude" other people from consuming it. Once it's built, you can't STOP other people (non-subscribers) from using it.
The only way to build the lighthouse is if all the shippers band together and agree to jointly build the lighthouse. This is completely analogous to voters getting together and voting for canidates who are for road construction.
Backing up my previous point, roads are also fairly non-excludable, in the early eighteenth century of America, federal law mandated that tollboothes for roads be a certain MINIMUM distance apart (around 30 miles). Whole companies/groups developped which made small bypasses around tollboothes. Tollboothes couldn't collect tolls on local residents moving short distances from one side of the toll to the other.
Furthermore, there's NO WAY to put toll boothes on local roads. (You have a booth at the end of each driveway??)
Your point is somewhat correct in that tolls sort of work on some large French highways (and they most definately work on bridges, where it's really easy to control the entrances and exits). I'm not really sure a French model where you have to stop every few miles and pay a toll is a really great thing though. It might be better to have everyone pay a little bit more in gas tax and not have tolls on freeways.
I'm not saying that personal transportation doesn't pollute. I'm merely saying that personal transportation is NOT economically inefficient.
Roads are generally referred to as a public good. They are expensive to build, and once built, it is very difficult to keep them clear of freeloaders. Therefore private interests are not likely to build roads (toll roads have not been financially viable), and road construction has become a responsibility of the state.
It may be economically beneficial to build a road from point A to point B, but no private interest will do it because once the road is built, everyone can just skip around the tollboothes and the building company will never get paid.
Historically speaking, when turnpikes first became more common in the early 18th century, they were mostly financed by private and local interests, despite the fact that road making companies nearly always had horrible returns on investment. The reason was that the economic benefits of the roads were so great that associations of merchants and individuals would band together and form road companies. Some joined for civic minded reasons, others out of self interest because roads would bring the town and themselves greater business. The infastructure of roads was gradually taken over by states, and with the advent of the personal automobile, began to become competitive with rail.
Automobiles and trucks have vast advantages over rail for most uses. You can leave whenever you want and you can go wherever you want. The creation of the interstate highway system has broughten vast economic benefits. States can subsidize economically inefficient interests (eg. farm subsidies), but saying that road construction and the personal automobile is inefficient is just pure baloney.
Governments as of late have thrown massive subsidies towards alternative energy sources, public transportation, electric cars, and the like. Saying that road construction is inefficient and subsidies are the only reason for the current dominance of the automobile is rather absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
The more Skype adds stupid restrictions like this, the more it will lose market share.
People should chill out, stop the lawsuits, and let free markets work. Free markets make dumb BS like this eventually go away.
I think moderating parent post as flamebait just proves that he's right. It isn't flamebait, it's accurate.
I'd like to know more about the science. I don't really if an individual poster likes or dislikes Bush.
It reminds me of the movie The Princess Bride...
Vizzini: But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me.
The part that concerns me most, which I'm not seeing enough commentary on, is the extremely serious allegation that Apple have deliberately installed backdoors into their systems.
And from the article:
Sometimes Apple make things worse. For example, widgets, small programs that can do things like search online dictionaries or let you listen to streamed BBC programs, can be installed without your permission when you visit a website using the Safari browser, just like Windows does with ActiveX controls.
Bill Thompson does NOT claim Apple purposefully installed backdoors. He claims that Apple has installed features which historically have had security problems.
I personally find Thompson's comment a bit worthless (browsers have historically had security flaws and caused vulnerabilities, why not ship without a browser?). But to be fair, he is NOT claiming Apple is doing anything malicious.
Last time I checked, Apple was planning to release x86 Macs sometime around June 2006. I don't know the latest schedule.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Krang
Care to give an example where free speech has been blocked?
So basically the European argument is:
1) We hate George Bush
2) We hate the Iraq war
=> France and China should control the Internet.
That above argument seems fairly crazy to me.
I think you can dislike George Bush without wanting the Chinese government to read your e-mail.
The US (compared with other countries) has a history of a hands off approach to regulation. Even though ICANN operates at some level under US law, the US government has kept its hands off and let industry and academia do its thing. Other governments simply don't have this approach. Other govenrments will try to assert more direct control, and because governments are slow and dumb, they'll do something to screw it up.
I don't know what would immediatly would happen, but there is a great potential for mischief if China, Iran, and other governments that practice censorship had partial control of Internet governance. They could try to write censorship controls more directly into technical standards, deny dns service to groups they dislike etc... The people who run these dictatorships are not dumb and could come up with mischievious stuff that no one has ever imagined.
To be honest, I'm slightly worried even about the other Western democracies. France banned the sale of Nazi material on Yahoo. People have brought llibel lawsuits in Australia against United States newspapers because of material published on web servers in America. I'm MUCH less worried about them to be sure... but they still don't have the US 1st amendment.
Who do you trust to make a better decision about a child's education? The parents? or a taxpayer in the school district who doesn't have kids?
As a taxpayer, I would say you should have a say over minimum funding levels for education (vouchers are essentially the minimum state guaranteed funding level per child), but the general taxpayer should not have any role in how the school is run. I doubt 1% of people in a school district know ANY teacher in that district unless the person went to a school in that district or had a child that went to a school in that district. Compared with the parents, the general taxpayer has no significant stake in the system and can't be trusted to give it the sustained attention it deserves.
That's just reality. Its hard to pass a school bond measure in a district with lots of elderly. Despite some levels of altruism, on the whole, people can be most trusted to look after themselves and their close family. Under the construct of vouchers, this selfish behavior would help the educational system rather than make it weaker. Think of the market for cars. The government may set certain minimum safety requirements and standards for automobiles, but the government doesn't mandate what car you actually buy. Imagine how bad things would be if the government collected taxes from you and gave you no choice in what car it bought you.
Or on the other hand, why can't the public system be modified to allow for accountability to parents? What makes a voucher system the only way to achieve the result you describe? I think allowing for diversity of approaches in the public school system (some schools geared towards high achievers, others geared towards the less gifted or less willing) is possible and more desirable. It would allow for students (they're the ones who matter, not the parents, forgive me parents) to be responded to appropriately by the system and given the teaching methods most appropriate to their needs, while ensuring for society that good content is still being taught (e.g. real science as opposed to creation ideology).
Who runs your system? Who do they report to? Who audits their performance? People take orders from the organization that writes the paycheck.
If there is school choice, schools will be ACCOUNTABLE TO THE CHILD'S PARENTS! If the school sucks, the parents will yell at the school administration to fix things or they'll take their kids (and their voucher money) elsewhere.
This kind of accountability is REAL as opposed to the bogus teach to the test accountability of mass standardized testing. It is an utter fallacy to think that public schools will be transformed by mass standardized tests and complicated funding formulas from Washington.
School choice creates the kind of decentralized accountability that really works. Furthermore, as K-12 education becomes a truly competetive market, you will have the kinds of reviews and comparative literature you have with cars and universities. If people actually HAVE a choice, a market will develop to help them make an INFORMED choice. For cars you can read consumer reports, for universities you can read stuff by the Princeton Review, but for schools, there is currently a dearth of information because quite frankly, there's no market for it.
Competition works. US universities compete for students and they are the best in the world. AMD competes with Intel and we get faster, cheaper processors.
Furthermore, our country HAD competition at grades K-12 in the past. Back when school districts were smaller, people could move a small distance and get into a new school district. With large unified school districts, the monopoly is inescapable unless you are rich enough to afford private school. What we in essence have now is school choice (and quality schools) for the rich, and normal public monopoly school for everyone else.
There are tons of arguments for the government to pay to educate every child, but there are no good arguments why the government should itself be the teacher. The government should give vouchers to parents who can use the money to pay for their childs education. At the very least, the government should pay for various charter schools, districts should be made smaller, and other action should be taken to inject choice and competition into the system.
While we're at it, let's abolish Harvard, UC Berkeley, Stanford, Yale, Princeton etc... so we can improve our local community colleges.
And with any monopoly, you get a poor product at a high price.
We at Slashdot love the competition AMD is giving Intel and what this is doing for the processor market. Competition should be embraced at the grade school level as well.
Look at our country's university system, which is universally acknowledged as the best in the world. We have a combination of state and private schools, but they all compete.
Cygwin calls itself a "Linux like environment for Windows." Could Apple say "FreeBSD based environment."... Nothing conveys the information as quickly though as simply mentioning the word Unix.
Not sure if that's a good legal argument though :)
QWERTY
is an international organization to oversee the administration of ICANN.
And it seems to me that Sun's biggest problem is that their hardware is really expensive and not that much faster or more robust than linux running on Intel machines. From my own very unscientific and emprical tests, it seems that a gigahertz Sun Blade 2000 handles high loads better than my PIV machine running linux, but that the runtimes of most single-threaded programs I write finish as fast if not faster on the PIV. And you can get a well equipped PIV with linux for $2000 and a Sun Blade 2000 will cost you 10 times as much.
With 64 bit architecture from AMD and Intel etc... the reasons you need Sun are just getting fewer and fewer.
Furthermore, if an exploit really exists... its likely after a while to make some waves and become a "known" exploit....
Probabiliy(bug exploited by crackers | no known wild exploit) is less than P(bug exploited by crackers)
All together, if there isn't any known exploit in the wild, and an exploitable bug was found by "good guys." I think the probabilities are pretty good that the bug HASN'T been cracked yet. Giving vendors a short reasonable time to respond in private is therefore the responsible thing to do.
However, strong peer review and research though can give very strong motivation as to why a certain algorithm is computationally intractable (making the encryption scheme practically unbreakable).
Before I could ever trust some new-fangled encryption scheme, I think I would like to see the company submitting REAL detailed articles of mathematics and techniques to appropriate research conferences and have the whole algorithm and math undergo the process of peer review. Its just too easy to fuck up encryption and to think something REALLY REALLY hard to compute isn't in reality a lot easier than it seems.
Once again the porn industry is a technological pioneer.
Bah, just give them a modem and a few AOL cds.
Let's say building a lighthouse off a rocky point stops ten ships from running aground on the shore each year, saving $1 million per incident for a total of $10 million. Let's say building the lighthouse costs $5 million. It's easy to see that building the lighthouse is a good idea. Unfortunately the lighthouse won't be built by a single private company because whoever builds it will NEVER get paid (and with these prices its cheaper for each individual shipper to let his/her ships run aground than build the lighthouse himself). Why? because there's no way to charge people for a good which they can just get for free. Once the lighthouse is built, no one can stop other boats from seeing the light. This is called a "non-excludable" good. You can't "exclude" other people from consuming it. Once it's built, you can't STOP other people (non-subscribers) from using it.
The only way to build the lighthouse is if all the shippers band together and agree to jointly build the lighthouse. This is completely analogous to voters getting together and voting for canidates who are for road construction.
Backing up my previous point, roads are also fairly non-excludable, in the early eighteenth century of America, federal law mandated that tollboothes for roads be a certain MINIMUM distance apart (around 30 miles). Whole companies /groups developped which made small bypasses around tollboothes. Tollboothes couldn't collect tolls on local residents moving short distances from one side of the toll to the other.
Furthermore, there's NO WAY to put toll boothes on local roads. (You have a booth at the end of each driveway??)
Your point is somewhat correct in that tolls sort of work on some large French highways (and they most definately work on bridges, where it's really easy to control the entrances and exits). I'm not really sure a French model where you have to stop every few miles and pay a toll is a really great thing though. It might be better to have everyone pay a little bit more in gas tax and not have tolls on freeways.
I'm not saying that personal transportation doesn't pollute. I'm merely saying that personal transportation is NOT economically inefficient.
It may be economically beneficial to build a road from point A to point B, but no private interest will do it because once the road is built, everyone can just skip around the tollboothes and the building company will never get paid.
Historically speaking, when turnpikes first became more common in the early 18th century, they were mostly financed by private and local interests, despite the fact that road making companies nearly always had horrible returns on investment. The reason was that the economic benefits of the roads were so great that associations of merchants and individuals would band together and form road companies. Some joined for civic minded reasons, others out of self interest because roads would bring the town and themselves greater business. The infastructure of roads was gradually taken over by states, and with the advent of the personal automobile, began to become competitive with rail.
Automobiles and trucks have vast advantages over rail for most uses. You can leave whenever you want and you can go wherever you want. The creation of the interstate highway system has broughten vast economic benefits. States can subsidize economically inefficient interests (eg. farm subsidies), but saying that road construction and the personal automobile is inefficient is just pure baloney.
Governments as of late have thrown massive subsidies towards alternative energy sources, public transportation, electric cars, and the like. Saying that road construction is inefficient and subsidies are the only reason for the current dominance of the automobile is rather absurd.