The interest of justice is a sufficient incentive to maintain the ability to seal certain court filings by participants in a trial. Reductio ad absurdum: what happens if the provision for sealed documents is done away with? Individuals and companies involved in a suit will be *more likely* to attempt to hide evidence since its disclosure could be damaging to them if made public. The whole idea of discovery in a civil trial is to allow pertinent documents to be made available to the other side. If public disclosure of a document could cost a company or an individual much more than the value of the suit, it is highly likely that said document will conveniently disappear.
In current practice, the parties to a civil suit and the court agree to rules defining what may be kept confidential and then the rules are applied to various filings. Requests to seal are subject to challenge by the other party and the filing party is free to file a redacted version of a document without the portions that are subject to being sealed (e.g., leave out the formula for the "secret sauce" but leave in the rules for disclosing it, licensing it, etc.). This works for me.
Good analysis. I only take issue with your suggested alternative:
I would suggest a system where any imported goods into industrialized nations are assesed a duty proportional to the amount of greenhouse gases issued during their production. Such a tarrif would place products imported into a first world nation on the same footing as those created at home (the tariff should be set at the same price domestic pollution credits are availible) while not restricting the internal trade of third world nations. Additionally it has the benefit that it only requires the consent of the first world nations.
This doesn't address the issue of things like electric power plants and cars both of which emit a significant proportion of the greenhouse gasses we supposedly are attempting to diminish. In the case of the U.S., most of the electric power produced in this country comes from burning coal mined within the U.S. To the extent that the U.S. imports oil for the cars, you could probably come up with some sort of scheme to somehow tax the imported oil but this would have less of an effect on the U.S. than say Japan which imports all of its oil and have no effect at all on oil exporters. I don't even want to think about trying to come up with a fair scheme that somehow calculates an appropriate tariff for an imported car based on how much it *might* pollute during its lifetime and, besides, you would probably just prop up domestic car manufacturers who in the U.S. have historically built cars that are inefficient.
Unfortunately, if you want to cut greenhouse gas emissions through some sort of treaty regulation, you will probably have to look at the emissions side. This just brings us back to the rest of your analysis which bascially says that that approach probably won't be "fair" and won't "work".
I don't claim to have the answer. However, I will point out that sometimes doing something that isn't well understood will create worse problems than doing nothing.
The flight crew will either serve them during the hour you're taxiing from the terminal to the runway and waiting for clearance to take-off or during the two hours you're waiting for your gate to open up after you land.
I doubt if the airlines would cut back on the serving size. A bag with just one peanut in it probably isn't cost effective.
You have no idea how right you are. Just ask the folks in Darfur, the Bosnians, etc. I can think of no other cry that would so remove any hope of survival.
The anonymous doofus who posted the article, the editors at the Guardian and Ms. Hitchens should READ THE FINE TREATY (RTFT) before making up their stories. Quoting from the article:
Plans for a 'thin constellation of three to six spacecraft' in orbit, which would target enemy missiles as they took off or landed, are planned, according to Hitchens. The document, said Hitchens, signals that the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, which outlaws the use of weapons in orbit, will be ignored.
A careful reading of the treaty clearly shows that it specifically only prohibits the placement of nuclear weapons and weapons of mass destruction in space. It is quite silent on the existing military uses of space (e.g., spy satelites, military communications satelites, the GPS system, etc.) and contains no language that would prohibit the placement of conventional weapons in space.
I could be wrong (not usually when it comes to weapons terminology) but point weapons such as "kinetic kill vehicles" and lasers are not generally considered weapons of mass destruction. These are more than sufficient and actually prefered for attacking satelites, launch vehicles, etc. for a variety of reasons and are in no way prohibited by the treaty as long as they are not installed on the "moon or other celestial body."
How would you feel about that if the "other countries stuff" included satellites carrying nuclear weapons or biowarfare payloads?
Without that capability, what would you do if a hostile nation launched placed such weapons in orbit?
I'm sure the UN would take immediate action to destroy such vile weapons that are clearly in violation of international treaties.
Say, what? What do you mean the UN doesn't have such a capability?
OK, maybe they'll pass a strongly worded motion of condemnation. I'm sure that'll fix things right up. Look at how effective those have been in the past.
No, they probably can't get agreement for one of those either. Maybe they'll just talk about doing something and hope that the problem will go away before the end of the debate.
Damn. I just got a 419 scam-spam and was all set to turn it into an offer to Jeff Merkey for the Linux kernel source. I see I'm not the only one with this idea.
I'm sure the/. editorial staff will jump right on this. Not checking the background of a story could even lead to duplicative stories being posted. Heaven knows,/. would never do something like that.
That would be a good way to jump start it if this is an entirely new product.
I'm sort of assuming that whatever they come up with will look a lot like an x86 version of their existing Sun PCI video card. If they took this approach, they could probably port and then open up some of the code from their existing Sun drivers at the hardware and BIOS interface and come up with a version 0.1 driver fairly quickly and cheaply.
Actually, given a look at the company's products, I would guess that the real question is how do they get their existing Sun PCI video card into the x86 Linux world. Meaning that they have a revenue stream from existing sales for Sun systems and want to also sell to the x86 open source world while keeping the driver development costs low. The real question then becomes, can they start getting sales from the x86 Linux market by simply publishing the interface specs for their existing video card or, as you suggest, do they need to follow that up with at least some sort of minimal, initial version of the driver.
Having not only RTFAed, I also clicked through the link to where the guy who posted it works. His employer already markets PCI based graphics cards for Sun and government customers. Turning some of the counter arguments on their head, this would be a cheap way for his employer to open up the x86 Linux market at minimal cost.
Just a reminder, drivers are a cost for video card manufacturers. They sell a card and have to bury the cost of driver development and maintenance into the cost of the card. Open sourcing driver development lets a card manufacturer profit from the hardware while the community develops drivers for them and they get good karma to boot. This would be a fairly inexpensive/low risk way for a low-end (PCI only it appears at the moment) card manufacturer to get their "foot in the door".
Only the "big boys" (Nvidia and ATI) have anything to lose by open sourcing their cards. People would actually see to what extent they fudge their cards and drivers for benchmarks.
There are far too many people in the world who continue to practice the following:
"War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means." -- Clausewitz
With far less at stake I cut the cards, scan for viruses, lock my doors, etc. Likewise, any nation would be foolish to trust the rest of the world to do them no harm. This is especially true in an era when people like bin Laden, the butchers who could perpetrate an atrocity like occurred in Beslan, the Madrid train bombers, etc. are lose in the world.
I whole-heartedly agree. I wonder what these wonderful "Codeless Development Environments" (CDEs) do when the problem you ask them to solve is NP-complete or worse NP-hard. I've run into both in various applications and had to come up with a case specific algorithm that solved the problem in less than the user's lifetime.
People seem to think because a lot of applications can be done in VB that all programs are simple. I think its great that tools are available that let non-programmers solve simple programming problems without a lot of formal computer instruction but, if you've ever had to productionize one of these concoctions, you rapidly find out why understanding programming principles is important.
Lastly, the article brings to mind the story of the U.S. patent commisioner in the late 19th century who recommended closing his office since, obviously, everything that could be invented had been invented. Cheap hardware has meant throwing more computing power at simple problems (VB again) rather than bring in a specialist to fit the solution into a well crafted program. Yeah, these are the jobs that are going away. This is great for solving simple problems but the same cheap hardware that means you can throw VB and a bunch of hardware at a problem also means that a number of *hard* problems can now be undertaken. Think of all of the various distributed computing projects and the number of computer cluster modeling projects that are now feasible. I'm sure the algorithms needed for these are off-the-shelf CDE tools.
To pick just one example, the F-117A has a very angular design because the computing power and algoritms for predicting radar reflectivity at the time it was designed weren't up to working with curved surfaces. I'm sure some aerospace engineer just typed a few commands into a "codeless development environment" that then proceeded to "invent" and implement the algorithms needed for predicting radar reflectivity of the curved surfaces of say the B-2. As long as there are harder problems that remain unsolved the article is pure, unadulterated hogwash.
Pulling a Michael Moore and quoting you out of context,
Okay, MS's security is laughable, but you cannot say that they're not trying to fix it.
I'm tired. Its late and I have to get up and go to work in the morning so I'll agree with the above but there are a lot of us who think that simply offering a reward that bags someone who is little more than a high-end script kiddie is only a drop in the bucket when it comes to actually doing anything to improve computer security. As to Microsoft's actual programming efforts to improve security, I'm hoping that "too little, too late" isn't going to be the final assessment.
I will ask you to think about a few final questions with regard to Microsoft's reward in this case. Do you really think it will deter others from doing the same thing? Or will the people who are crafty enough to be able to offer zombied systems "for sale" simply look at it as a high profile bust that makes their job easier because it gives their targets a false sense of security? And to Microsoft its just money well spent on PR that's cheaper than actually fixing the problem?
So how did their efforts stack up against the zombie systems for sale to anyone willing to drop $2,000 to $3,000? Or this assessment of their latest "effort"? Given their reputation for vaporware that Redmond says "is coming", what makes you think tinhorn er longhorn will be any better?
Given the above, I don't see Mr. Gates as having been concerned about security in the past or being currently concerned about security. I also see little hope that Microsloth will turn over a new leaf and suddenly actually do something about their insecure bloatware in the future.
How about this? Microsoft would rather pay out a paltry $250,000 to nail some stupid script kiddie who is dumb enough to make his exploits known rather that actually improve the security of their bloatware and prevent the people who aren't dumb enough to blab about their exploits from creating zombie PC armies (as this article on/. earlier today described).
IMNSHO, that means "Microsoft is evil!" (you asked)
What about "Kids who have no idea of what they want to do for the rest of their lives"?
That would be a bigger group than any one of yours.
Perhaps instead, we need to get over the idea that we only educate children/young adults and then send them out into the world to a career that is supposed to last them until they retire 45 or so years later.
Not everyone knows what they want to do for the rest of their life when they are 20 +/- 2 years old and many people won't have the world experience to know their own talents until much later in life. I find the German system particularly absurd since it assumes that such a determination can be made even younger and then you are trapped as either a "professional" or a "tradesman/laborer".
Why is it that, when *every* other governement monopoly has been replaced by a competitive private equivalent, the quality of the product has gone up and the price of the product has come down but no one is willing to try this with primary education? Where there is competition, costs fall and quality rises.
Also, you assume that the only way to provide education is at the public expense through taxpayer funded schools staffed by so-called "education professionals" and the only alternative is a costly private school. I know of quite a few people who have home-schooled their kids to keep them out of the public school beast and have managed to do so on not a whole lot of money and with extremely good results (i.e., educated, inquisitive kids with independent ideas and without public education scars). Interestingly, this also didn't present a significant time-drain for the parents since a couple of hours of individual, quality instruction each day were more than sufficient to impart the same material that mass classroom instruction required a full day to attempt to communicate. Finally, the kids who have been home schooled also tend to be better disciplined than the public school product since they knew better than to "mouth off" and "goof off" with their parents.
You have no idea how realistic it is.
on
Virtual Girlfriend
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Wow, it's realistic, too!!
Just wait until much later in the game when you get introduced to her "virtual divorce lawyer."
All those spam zombies on Comcast, etc. are probably running on legitimately licensed copies of Windows. Then you count each person who hires a zombie as a user of each system and, voila, a billion Windows lusers and all of them on licensed, legal copies.
IIRC, the format is a 64-bit integer which counts 100s of nano-seconds since the VAX epoch. So the VAX/VMS rollover time actually isn't much further off than the UNIX rollover. I'm guessing either way it won't matter 34 years from now.
BTW, I'm writing this while contemplating my souvenir cup/candy holder from the 1985 DECUS Fall Symposium. Since it was held at Disneyland, it has a picture of Mickey Mouse on it. I did my my first VAX work writing FORTRAN for a bunch of 11/780s doing radar data processing (detection and tracking stuff).
Yeah, but I figure if I get him into using find, he can figure out the details like that for himself. It may take a couple of passes (e.g., something like my initial post but with "-type d" to just check permissions on directories) with different passes applying different rules to determine which file or directory don't have the permissions he wants. I'd bet on three passes: regular files, directories, and executables will each have different "rules".
I like to give people enough information to get them started and let them figure out the details on their own. If you spoon feed too much, you end up with a script kiddie who doesn't know why what he's doing gives the right answer and then can't apply it anywhere else.
find already does most of what you're looking for:
find . -perm u=xrw,g=xrw,o=xrw -print
finds all mode 777 files under the current directory (the initial ".", substitute a path like/var/www if that's where you want to look). If you run it as root (probably required for what you want to do), you can use -user or -uid to find all of the files owned by a particular user name or UID.
Play with the -perm or +perm flags if need be to refine the result.
No problem here either using Mozilla to access my employer's Outlook web-mail. Everything seems to work including being able to accept meeting invites, replying, looking at my calendar, etc. Perhaps the problem is not using a browser other than IE but your system administrator doesn't have your Outlook web-mail set up correctly.
Its a good thing this works with Mozilla since I run Linux on my primary desktop at work and also use the Outlook web-mail from "inside" since that way I can avoid firing up my Windows box. About the only feature of regular Outlook that this doesn't provide is those annoying pop-up meeting reminders.
Seems everyone here has jumped all over using alternate browsers but they haven't said much about how this thing got started and spread: sites that use Microsoft's Internet Infection Spreader (IIS) as their web server. Interesting that the perps only made a subtle change to the sites to re-direct traffic silently to their own server that then installs the exploit so that most people won't even know where they got the infection and the people who run the site won't even know that they've been cracked.
Slashdot Mirror
That Microsoft keeps the source code for some of their products secret:
1) Visual Basic
2) Access
3) Bob
4) Outlook Express
5) IIS
6) Internet Explorer
Preferably, they would keep the source code a secret by destroying *ALL* copies and starting over again.
The interest of justice is a sufficient incentive to maintain the ability to seal certain court filings by participants in a trial. Reductio ad absurdum: what happens if the provision for sealed documents is done away with? Individuals and companies involved in a suit will be *more likely* to attempt to hide evidence since its disclosure could be damaging to them if made public. The whole idea of discovery in a civil trial is to allow pertinent documents to be made available to the other side. If public disclosure of a document could cost a company or an individual much more than the value of the suit, it is highly likely that said document will conveniently disappear.
In current practice, the parties to a civil suit and the court agree to rules defining what may be kept confidential and then the rules are applied to various filings. Requests to seal are subject to challenge by the other party and the filing party is free to file a redacted version of a document without the portions that are subject to being sealed (e.g., leave out the formula for the "secret sauce" but leave in the rules for disclosing it, licensing it, etc.). This works for me.
Unfortunately, if you want to cut greenhouse gas emissions through some sort of treaty regulation, you will probably have to look at the emissions side. This just brings us back to the rest of your analysis which bascially says that that approach probably won't be "fair" and won't "work".
I don't claim to have the answer. However, I will point out that sometimes doing something that isn't well understood will create worse problems than doing nothing.
The flight crew will either serve them during the hour you're taxiing from the terminal to the runway and waiting for clearance to take-off or during the two hours you're waiting for your gate to open up after you land.
I doubt if the airlines would cut back on the serving size. A bag with just one peanut in it probably isn't cost effective.
You have no idea how right you are. Just ask the folks in Darfur, the Bosnians, etc. I can think of no other cry that would so remove any hope of survival.
I could be wrong (not usually when it comes to weapons terminology) but point weapons such as "kinetic kill vehicles" and lasers are not generally considered weapons of mass destruction. These are more than sufficient and actually prefered for attacking satelites, launch vehicles, etc. for a variety of reasons and are in no way prohibited by the treaty as long as they are not installed on the "moon or other celestial body."
Say, what? What do you mean the UN doesn't have such a capability?
OK, maybe they'll pass a strongly worded motion of condemnation. I'm sure that'll fix things right up. Look at how effective those have been in the past.
No, they probably can't get agreement for one of those either. Maybe they'll just talk about doing something and hope that the problem will go away before the end of the debate.
Damn. I just got a 419 scam-spam and was all set to turn it into an offer to Jeff Merkey for the Linux kernel source. I see I'm not the only one with this idea.
I'm sure the /. editorial staff will jump right on this. Not checking the background of a story could even lead to duplicative stories being posted. Heaven knows, /. would never do something like that.
That would be a good way to jump start it if this is an entirely new product.
I'm sort of assuming that whatever they come up with will look a lot like an x86 version of their existing Sun PCI video card. If they took this approach, they could probably port and then open up some of the code from their existing Sun drivers at the hardware and BIOS interface and come up with a version 0.1 driver fairly quickly and cheaply.
Actually, given a look at the company's products, I would guess that the real question is how do they get their existing Sun PCI video card into the x86 Linux world. Meaning that they have a revenue stream from existing sales for Sun systems and want to also sell to the x86 open source world while keeping the driver development costs low. The real question then becomes, can they start getting sales from the x86 Linux market by simply publishing the interface specs for their existing video card or, as you suggest, do they need to follow that up with at least some sort of minimal, initial version of the driver.
Just a reminder, drivers are a cost for video card manufacturers. They sell a card and have to bury the cost of driver development and maintenance into the cost of the card. Open sourcing driver development lets a card manufacturer profit from the hardware while the community develops drivers for them and they get good karma to boot. This would be a fairly inexpensive/low risk way for a low-end (PCI only it appears at the moment) card manufacturer to get their "foot in the door".
Only the "big boys" (Nvidia and ATI) have anything to lose by open sourcing their cards. People would actually see to what extent they fudge their cards and drivers for benchmarks.
There are far too many people in the world who continue to practice the following:
"War is regarded as nothing but the continuation of state policy with other means."
-- Clausewitz
With far less at stake I cut the cards, scan for viruses, lock my doors, etc. Likewise, any nation would be foolish to trust the rest of the world to do them no harm. This is especially true in an era when people like bin Laden, the butchers who could perpetrate an atrocity like occurred in Beslan, the Madrid train bombers, etc. are lose in the world.
I whole-heartedly agree. I wonder what these wonderful "Codeless Development Environments" (CDEs) do when the problem you ask them to solve is NP-complete or worse NP-hard. I've run into both in various applications and had to come up with a case specific algorithm that solved the problem in less than the user's lifetime.
People seem to think because a lot of applications can be done in VB that all programs are simple. I think its great that tools are available that let non-programmers solve simple programming problems without a lot of formal computer instruction but, if you've ever had to productionize one of these concoctions, you rapidly find out why understanding programming principles is important.
Lastly, the article brings to mind the story of the U.S. patent commisioner in the late 19th century who recommended closing his office since, obviously, everything that could be invented had been invented. Cheap hardware has meant throwing more computing power at simple problems (VB again) rather than bring in a specialist to fit the solution into a well crafted program. Yeah, these are the jobs that are going away. This is great for solving simple problems but the same cheap hardware that means you can throw VB and a bunch of hardware at a problem also means that a number of *hard* problems can now be undertaken. Think of all of the various distributed computing projects and the number of computer cluster modeling projects that are now feasible. I'm sure the algorithms needed for these are off-the-shelf CDE tools.
To pick just one example, the F-117A has a very angular design because the computing power and algoritms for predicting radar reflectivity at the time it was designed weren't up to working with curved surfaces. I'm sure some aerospace engineer just typed a few commands into a "codeless development environment" that then proceeded to "invent" and implement the algorithms needed for predicting radar reflectivity of the curved surfaces of say the B-2. As long as there are harder problems that remain unsolved the article is pure, unadulterated hogwash.
I will ask you to think about a few final questions with regard to Microsoft's reward in this case. Do you really think it will deter others from doing the same thing? Or will the people who are crafty enough to be able to offer zombied systems "for sale" simply look at it as a high profile bust that makes their job easier because it gives their targets a false sense of security? And to Microsoft its just money well spent on PR that's cheaper than actually fixing the problem?
So how did their efforts stack up against the zombie systems for sale to anyone willing to drop $2,000 to $3,000? Or this assessment of their latest "effort"? Given their reputation for vaporware that Redmond says "is coming", what makes you think tinhorn er longhorn will be any better?
Given the above, I don't see Mr. Gates as having been concerned about security in the past or being currently concerned about security. I also see little hope that Microsloth will turn over a new leaf and suddenly actually do something about their insecure bloatware in the future.
IMNSHO, that means "Microsoft is evil!" (you asked)
Not everyone knows what they want to do for the rest of their life when they are 20 +/- 2 years old and many people won't have the world experience to know their own talents until much later in life. I find the German system particularly absurd since it assumes that such a determination can be made even younger and then you are trapped as either a "professional" or a "tradesman/laborer".
Why is it that, when *every* other governement monopoly has been replaced by a competitive private equivalent, the quality of the product has gone up and the price of the product has come down but no one is willing to try this with primary education? Where there is competition, costs fall and quality rises.
Also, you assume that the only way to provide education is at the public expense through taxpayer funded schools staffed by so-called "education professionals" and the only alternative is a costly private school. I know of quite a few people who have home-schooled their kids to keep them out of the public school beast and have managed to do so on not a whole lot of money and with extremely good results (i.e., educated, inquisitive kids with independent ideas and without public education scars). Interestingly, this also didn't present a significant time-drain for the parents since a couple of hours of individual, quality instruction each day were more than sufficient to impart the same material that mass classroom instruction required a full day to attempt to communicate. Finally, the kids who have been home schooled also tend to be better disciplined than the public school product since they knew better than to "mouth off" and "goof off" with their parents.
All those spam zombies on Comcast, etc. are probably running on legitimately licensed copies of Windows. Then you count each person who hires a zombie as a user of each system and, voila, a billion Windows lusers and all of them on licensed, legal copies.
IIRC, the format is a 64-bit integer which counts 100s of nano-seconds since the VAX epoch. So the VAX/VMS rollover time actually isn't much further off than the UNIX rollover. I'm guessing either way it won't matter 34 years from now.
BTW, I'm writing this while contemplating my souvenir cup/candy holder from the 1985 DECUS Fall Symposium. Since it was held at Disneyland, it has a picture of Mickey Mouse on it. I did my my first VAX work writing FORTRAN for a bunch of 11/780s doing radar data processing (detection and tracking stuff).
Yeah, but I figure if I get him into using find, he can figure out the details like that for himself. It may take a couple of passes (e.g., something like my initial post but with "-type d" to just check permissions on directories) with different passes applying different rules to determine which file or directory don't have the permissions he wants. I'd bet on three passes: regular files, directories, and executables will each have different "rules".
I like to give people enough information to get them started and let them figure out the details on their own. If you spoon feed too much, you end up with a script kiddie who doesn't know why what he's doing gives the right answer and then can't apply it anywhere else.
find already does most of what you're looking for:
/var/www if that's where you want to look). If you run it as root (probably required for what you want to do), you can use -user or -uid to find all of the files owned by a particular user name or UID.
find . -perm u=xrw,g=xrw,o=xrw -print
finds all mode 777 files under the current directory (the initial ".", substitute a path like
Play with the -perm or +perm flags if need be to refine the result.
No problem here either using Mozilla to access my employer's Outlook web-mail. Everything seems to work including being able to accept meeting invites, replying, looking at my calendar, etc. Perhaps the problem is not using a browser other than IE but your system administrator doesn't have your Outlook web-mail set up correctly.
Its a good thing this works with Mozilla since I run Linux on my primary desktop at work and also use the Outlook web-mail from "inside" since that way I can avoid firing up my Windows box. About the only feature of regular Outlook that this doesn't provide is those annoying pop-up meeting reminders.
Seems everyone here has jumped all over using alternate browsers but they haven't said much about how this thing got started and spread: sites that use Microsoft's Internet Infection Spreader (IIS) as their web server. Interesting that the perps only made a subtle change to the sites to re-direct traffic silently to their own server that then installs the exploit so that most people won't even know where they got the infection and the people who run the site won't even know that they've been cracked.