I hope you block ports 80 and 443, too, because otherwise it's still trivial to create an SSH session to the outside. All the enterprising student must do, is configure their (parents') home firewall, to forward outside port 80 to LAN port 22 on their PC. It's no more difficult really than just opening up port 22 bidirectionally. Then it's just "ssh -p 80 -D 8080 joestudent@mypc.dyndns.org"
If you want to filter, get a packet shaper and stop using ports; all you do by blocking ports is encourage people to abuse port 80 and other well known service ports, and make diagnostics more difficult. Unless the goal is just to give the semblance of censorship while making it as easily avoidable as possible, which is arguably laudable, but in that case why bother to block port 22 in the first place.
And before anyone makes the argument about blocking ports making it more difficult for 'casual' users, even a casual user is capable of reading Google, or asking a smarter user what to do. A few years ago, I witnessed what happened on a campus LAN when the admins inadvertently mis-configured the firewalls and blocked port 5190, which is used by AIM. Within twenty minutes, there were emails circulating which included screenshots and step-by-step instructions on how to change the AIM client to use port 80 instead. Hundreds, if not thousands of students, who didn't even know what port was, were able to follow one person's instructions and get around the problem. (It turns out it wasn't an intentional block, but just a mistake; however, the result was that half of the student machines ended up running AIM over port 80 forevermore.) It only takes one user with enough brains to read a manpage, and a desire to score some points with other students by showing them how to get around the block, to torpedo port-based blocking.
Sametime, at least in previous versions, was similar to AOL's IM protocol. IIRC, some versions of the Sametime client could actually interface with AOL's service, and combine both your corporate ST buddy list, and your personal AIM buddy list. Not sure what most CIOs would think of all their employees doing that, but it definitely was there in the program.
If they're switching to XMPP it's a pretty big change, and I can imagine it would break backwards compatibility.
Why should I register with IBM to read a document created by a guy from Northrop Grumman (We Build the B-2 Bomber!)?
He's probably a subcontractor. IBM/NG/LM all share personnel back and forth on projects. It's not uncommon to run into people who've worked for years on projects for one company, while getting their paychecks from somebody else. I think it's because the big contracting companies seem to avoid pilfering staff from each other, and instead just subcontract them out. I can't decide if this sort of 'cooperation' is better or worse for employees.
Huh? No; all parts of the Constitution are considered to have basically equal weight, in terms of forming a document which itself is the supreme law of the land. It's not just the First Amendment that's law, it's all of the Constitution, which includes parts giving Congress the authorization to implement copyright and patents. While this may be literally contradictory, it just means that when viewed as a whole, the First Amendment right isn't unlimited, but constrained by other parts of the document.
You can't pull out certain Amendments and view them as if they were in a vacuum. You have to view them as portions of a greater whole.
The claim that the scientific process leads to objective truth is nothing more than axiomatic. Under certain conditions that, as far as we know, are impossible to verify, it may be true.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I don't think that what you're saying undermines science greatly. Science has a benefit greater than "objective truth," in that it produces models which themselves yield useful predictions of reality. Whether these models are correct, in the sense of actually describing reality in any fundamental way, is debatable. However, the predictions are testable and thus useful.
For example, if you consider some basic Newtonian motion, say a ball being tossed around in the air on the surface of the Earth, it doesn't take very long of asking "why" to a physicist, before you run up against untestable theories. (E.g.: "Why does the ball fall to the ground?" "Because of gravity." "What's gravity?" "Gravity is a force between objects that attracts them to each other." "How is the force communicated between the objects?" "Gravitons...Maybe." "?!") To a casual observer, it might seem as though the physicist's theories have no clothes; they don't describe anything with absolute confidence, in terms of explaining why actions occur and precisely what the universe is doing to produce the actions we witness. However, the physicist's theories, while they may not provide absolute theoretical explanations, provide higher-level predictions and models which are useful, even though they are founded on unprovable assumptions. Nobody has ever seen, or proved the existence of, a graviton (or the competing theories' equivalents), however, we can still state with relative confidence what a thrown ball will do, because of the vast body of statistical and experimental evidence that confirm the high-level models.
If you look hard enough at any science, eventually you will run up against untested, and potentially untestable, hypotheses and assumptions. However that's not as bad as it sounds, because fundamental understanding is thankfully not required in order to produce useful models at levels closer to our day-to-day existence. That is the true benefit of science; "objective truth," if it exists, is of far less utility.
Speaking of the middle mouse button, is there any (easy) way in Linux, particularly either under KDE or XFE, to make the middle mouse button work like (ohgodIcantbelieveImsayingthis) Windows'? As in, acting like a scroll-with-pointer button? For the unfamiliar, at least on my work machine, if you press the middle button, the cursor changes into this two-arrows-inside-a-circle icon, which causes the window to scroll if you then move it up or down. It scrolls faster if you move it further, as you would expect, and stops scrolling instantly on release of the buttom.
I've gotten a bit addicted to this feature, and frankly I think it's the handiest thing I've used since the addition of the scroll wheel to the mouse a few years back. It's absolutely terrific for zipping through lengthy documents, and it's a lot better than PageDNing (even on 5-button mice where you can do that without moving to the keyboard).
I've never used a system that had middle click paste (or, if I have, I haven't used it), but the middle-click-scroll feature is pretty handy. I doubt it will appear in Mac OS X anytime soon -- it was hard enough to get Apple to make mice with two buttons, I'm not holding my breath on three, and I'm definitely not holding my breath on a feature that might make people think that they were admitting that their Mighty Mouse Balls weren't the hottest idea in the world -- but it'd be nice to get the option on Linux.
But, if you posses a legitimate drivers license (a permit) from another state, you may legaly drive in any other state. This is not the case with a carry permit. What is the major difference?
You can kill more people, in less time, with a car?
The guy isn't talking about plagiarism; he calls the essay "a plagiarism" with (IMO) tongue planted in cheek. It's not correct to say that it's about plagiarism specifically, because to say that sounds like he's defending plagiarism specifically, when the issues covered in the essay itself are far more broad.
The essay is "on" creative influence, not plagiarism.
So this could already be implemented in regular households! The power can be erratic since it is used to heat huge boilers and fireplaces that store energy for the next day. I guess, we'll need another article with more facts. Good news for wind power, I guess.
Yep. It absolutely could. Really, all that you'd need in order to do this, would be a programmable thermostat on your freezer, just like the furnace/AC ones that let you set a different temperature during the day than for when you're around in the morning and evening.
Assuming you know what times the electricity is cheap and when it's expensive, you could just turn the thermostat down, cooling the freezer extra cold, when power was cheap, and then set it back up higher when electricity is expensive. The "cheap cool" you bought earlier (say during the night) would allow you to use less power when it's expensive.
Now, it probably wouldn't really be worth doing with a residential food freezer, but with a grocery store's cold case, or certainly a refrigerated warehouse, it could mean serious savings with minimal equipment.
You might be able to do the reverse with hot-water-heaters, too, although there you'd need to make sure there were some safeguards to prevent scalding (if your hot water heater heats to 190F at night due to the cheap power, so it can 'coast' down to 110F during the day, you might get a nasty surprise if you ever tried to take a late-night shower).
Also, Chillout isn't the only open-source DRM project, Sun has (had?) their DReaM [wikipedia.org] initiative. But none of these attempts seem to be gaining any traction.
I think it's unfortunate that this whole discussion has gotten hung up on the same old issues, because I was really interested in hearing about "open source DRM" in general. I'm glad you brought it up (even if it's now 2/3rds of the way down the page!).
It seems to me, that such a thing can't possibly work. All currently extant DRM systems depend, fundamentally, on the difficulty of reverse-engineering and modifying binaries that are run on a user's system. If you had an open source, easily modifiable DRM system, it would be trivial to produce a cracked version of it that didn't actually enforce anything.
I can't think of ANY OSS projects that include DRM, and I don't think it's just a political/belief issue. A while ago I remember reading some (heated) mailing list theads about one of the big OSS PDF viewers. I think it might have been xpdf, but don't quote me on that. Anyway, the PDF spec includes some very rudimentary DRM -- basically, "no print" flags can be set on files, which then tells the viewer not to let the user print it. It's impossible to really enforce, since you could just do some screen scraping and get the raster anyway, but it's there. The author of the PDF viewer, for reasons I never quite understood, felt strongly that the program should respect this flag. Many other people disagreed. The program was built with the restriction, but almost instantly was forked to add an option to ignore the no-print flag.
I don't know what ended up out of that debate, and whether mainstream distros today use a PDF viewer that respects the no-print flag or not, but the point is that anyone who wanted to get rid of the no-print "feature" could do so trivially. If there was a big user demand to print "unprintable" PDFs, the software would be written, and it would be distributed, and that would be the end of it.
So I don't see how you could ever make an 'open source' DRM system, as long as there are a lot of talented programmers out there who would defang it as soon as they got their hands on the source code. So you'd either have to radically alter the definition of 'open source,' or you'd have to convince a lot of people that such a scheme was a Good Idea, to make it work.
For the record, what they're trying to prevent isn't copyright "theft," it's copyright violations. There's a difference. If you copy a CD and give it to your friend, you didn't steal the copyright from the record label who produced the CD, you violated it; they still have their copyright.
It's the difference between trespassing (violating someone's right to enjoy/exploit their property) and swindling them into signing over the deed to their house (actually stealing their property).
Yes, the limit is on the playlist, not on the songs themselves. So if you make a mix CD and burn it 5 times (or 10 times, whatever), it will stop you. But you can delete that playlist, and make a new one that's different, but which could contain some of the same songs, and burn it another x times.
I'm not sure how closely it tracks the contents of the playlist; you might be able to recreate the same playlist with trivial differences (song ordering, adding a 1s blank track, etc.) and keep churning them out.
All it does is stop you from mass producing the same mix CD over and over. It's one of those restrictions that I'm sure were insisted on by the record companies, because it has almost no effect whatsoever on reality.
If you really did want to churn out copies of a mix CD, you can just make one copy, quit iTunes, put the disc in, and copy it using Toast or Apple's Disk Utility. (Oh, crap, I probably violated the DMCA there. Ignore everything I just said, even though anyone with a Mac and an IQ above room temperature could figure it out.)
This, I understand, is different from WMA's restrictions, where the software actually keeps track of how many times you've burned a track, and will cut you off. Furthermore, many WMA based systems have restrictions that make certain tracks "unburnable," so you can make up a playlist, only to have it fail because certain songs are playable (and event transferrable to a Fauxpod, but not burnable to a Red Book CD).
The simplicity of FairPlay's restrictions is definitely part of its success.
graphics of Muslims murdering Christians and Jews...Just going out on a limb here, but maybe that's because it's relatively trivial to find videos of (purported) Muslim terrorists doing things like beheading POWs, while it's relatively difficult to find any video of Christian extremists doing the same thing? (At least, not unless you include the History Channel, then there's lots of material.)
I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that, right now, there seems to be a lot more ugliness being done by extremists in the name of Islam than in the name of Christ. Which is not to say that there aren't Christians doing evil, but they don't mostly claim to have religious motives.
If you're beheading people and claiming that it's because of a religion, I think the video of the act is pretty much fair game as far as religious criticism is concerned.
It's the extremists who are tarnishing the name of Islam, not people who collect the video clips of their handiwork and post it on YouTube.
neoconservative pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman's ("D"-CT) struggle against the Democratic antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont
I stopped reading here, because it's obvious you have no concept of what the "American people" think, if you characterize Lieberman as a "neoconservative." Pro-war, perhaps, but that has more to do with his unwavering (and unapologetic) stance on Israel, which drives most of his Mid-East policy, than any real kinship with the Republican party or any real conservatives (which, to be clear, are not necessarily the same thing).
Lamont was a southern-Connecticut (NYC Suburb) carpetbagger without any real vision, who ran a negative campaign that didn't pan out in the general election (as such campaigns are wont to do). And it probably helped that Lieberman's campaign was a train wreck.
I'm not sure if this is a troll or what, but if you really think that someone like Lamont -- who couldn't get elected in one of the Bluest states in the country -- typifies what Americans want, you've been spending too much time smoking dope in Boston or L.A.; people want out of Iraq, sure, and are pretty pissed about what they perceive to be American jobs lost to outsourcing and imports, but to equate that with some wellspring of progressivism/socialism is a mistake.
besides, in large urban centers and suburban areas Gun Control LOWERS crime rates, not increases them.
Would you like to cite a source on that besides your rectum?
Gun control has never been shown, at least in any respectable study that I've ever seen, and I've been following the issue for a while, to lower the crime rate, except in theoretical situations where you can magically cut urban areas off from the outside world, or where you only look at specific categories of crime and neglect the crime reduction due to civilian gun ownership.
The usual anti-gun arguments that get trotted out in these situations are Europe/USA comparisons, and those are bogus for any number of reasons (simply: there are far too many variables besides gun control that lead to Europe having a far lower violent crime rate in general than the U.S., regardless of their gun control policies).
There are certainly legitimate arguments for staying on Windows. I could think of half a dozen: hardware support, backwards-compatibility with existing applications, user retraining / changeover costs, ease of procuring knowledgeable staff, lack of feature parity, ease-of-use at certain tasks... those are all rational, quantifiable arguments, probably each valid in a different case.
However, there are a not-insignificant number of people, particularly management-types, who have already decided to stay with Windows, and then back up the decision with as many justifications as are necessary, creating new ones as old ones are found to be false. This isn't a particularly controversial statement -- people do this all the time. There's probably even some nice psychological term for it, which I can't remember at the moment. But at any rate, people constantly to make irrational decisions, and then will create seemingly rational justifications for them after the fact. It's not unique to computers, or even business.
My point is basically that it's important to separate these two categories of objections -- real objections that are actually prohibiting a would-be switcher from leaving Microsoft, and sham arguments that are simply covering a decision that's already been made for other reasons (rational or irrational) -- because the second are just a sink for time and effort, and worst of all, lead software development in the wrong direction. You can argue all day with someone in the latter category, and never make headway, because the crux of their objection is that 'Linux isn't Windows.' So it's better not to even try, if it seems that they've already made up their mind and are just looking for external confirmation.
Hardware compatibility and feature parity are real problems, and their lack leads to tangible, rational objections. Those are things that need to be dealt with. (And in fact, ESR cites hardware and features, media codecs in particular, as the two most pressing problems with Linux today, and who am I to disagree?)
The key problem is just in sounding out whether a person's stated objections to Linux are real and rational, or just covers for a decision already made for other reasons. Attempting to please people in the second group is dangerous, because ultimately what they want isn't Linux at all, but Windows (just, usually, for free); trying to turn Linux (or any other OS) into something it's not, ultimately weakens it as a distinct product, and diverts attention both from areas that actually use improvement, and from areas which are already at par, and could be made superior and into selling points themselves.
I would argue that if you take taxpayer dollars for your art project, then (in the same way that the software that I write at work belongs to my company, not to me) it's basically a government work, done on commission. If you don't like that, don't take the cash. Nobody ever said that cash handouts should come without strings attached; actually, as long as the government is giving away my tax dollars, I'd prefer that they attach enough strings to make sure that the public has the greatest possible benefit. And ensuring that everything produced ends up in the public domain would be a good way to ensure that.
I could probably be argued to compromise on something that gave the author a short-term period of exclusivity, say 5 or 10 years, but nothing like the current copyright span. (I could also see giving the same terms to recipients of scientific grants; i.e., you have 5 years to publish your results in any journal you want, but at the end of that span, it needs to be submitted to a central database and all findings become public domain material. The journals would bitch and moan, but they'd have to bend over and deal, or become irrelevant; government funding drives too much science for them to ignore or blackball it.)
A good model for what the NEA could become, would be the photographic projects commissioned by the FSA in the 1930s, which included work by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, or the Department of the Interior's commissioning of Ansel Adams in the 1940s (the Manzanar photos). In both cases, the worksproduced ended up in the public domain and are now freely available (online and in hardcopy). Had the tactics common today been used, most of the works would still be under copyright, and few Americans would ever have seen them. (And, it goes almost without saying, many of them would probably be gone forever.) Projects like these should be the rule where government funding of the arts is concerned, rather than the exception.
I would rather see the NEA fund a smaller number of works more completely, and have the output free for anyone to view, copy, reuse, distribute, and modify, than fund a large number of works halfassedly, without regard to what the public can do with the output, as currently seems to be the case. As it stands right now, the NEA is practically regressive; it uses taxpayer dollars to fund projects that only a small percentage of citizens (generally those in higher income brackets anyway) really care about. If the government is funding Art, then the resulting artworks should belong to all the people, to do whatever they want with it. If artists don't want to give the People their art, they don't have to take the People's cash.
Core Duo, Min 512MB Ram, only need like 20GB of HD, don't need a CD drive optional, Gigabit Ethernet, decent onboard graphics
Is your reservation program a first-person shooter? That seems like some awfully excessive specs for a kiosk machine; particularly the GigE.
The Mini sort of sits in a class by itself, mostly IMO because it goes after a market that most of the SFF PC makers aren't interested in (or, are too inept to target correctly). Most of the mainboards I've seen that are the size of the Mini's are meant for embedded, portable, or automobile use, and don't touch it for features at the price. But then again, they don't have to; most of the Mini's features aren't necessary for embedded applications, and people building bespoke portable or automotive equipment aren't constrained by price.
When I think "reservation terminal," what comes first to my mind is something like a Wyse WinTerm; nothing near the specs of a Mini.
I have a strong suspicion, judging from the increasing number of DOAs I've witnessed in the past few years, that the Big Name manufacturers (hardly 'manufacturers,' really they're just 'assemblers,' or better yet, 'name-stampers') do not do any real burn in testing anymore, besides making sure it POSTs.
Perhaps I'm just cynical. It seems like it would be possible, though, to write a utility that would conduct a burn-in of the machine, and then erase itself, if you wanted to. It would just need to load itself into RAM, go through its test cycle, and then at the conclusion of the cycle, wipe the HD and then power the system down. Or you could have a burn-in program that was run off of the USB port, or a CD. The cost of writing something like that would probably pay for itself in a few hundred units; you wouldn't even have to be Dell for something like that to make sense.
Just installing an OS and then letting the machine run idle for a few hours doesn't strike me as a particularly good test; for good QC you'd want heavy processor usage and disk I/O, in order to make sure that everything gets correctly stressed. That implies some sort of special software (which needs to be deleted afterwards); having an OS on the machine when it goes out to the customer doesn't really make this process that much easier.
There is a certain overhead involved in dealing with more than one OS, that's understandable: if you previously only had one type of HD that got stuck into all your boxes, adding another option obviously creates some complexity. However, I don't think this is a legitimate anti-Linux argument: Microsoft has rolled out more and more versions of its OS, and the manufacturers have seemingly accepted without complaint. Obviously there are systems in place that allow for Windows {Home|Professional|Media Center} to get installed, and while the cost of going from 1 option to 2 is great, adding one more option seems fairly trivial. (How many options does Vista have? Adding another for "blank drive" or "FreeDOS," if not Linux proper, can't be that hard. It's only when you factor in Microsoft's retaliatory measures that it gets expensive.)
In fact, it's closer to $29 than $139. With Windows Vista for $50, with Novell Linux for $29. I know what most people would choose.
Maybe you do, but I don't. I don't think it's an obvious choice at all. Most people don't even consider Linux as an option right now because it's not listed when they buy their Dell or HP; it's some sort of weirdo aftermarket geek hack, hardly a "legitimate" OS. If Dell priced out Windows, at whatever it actually costs, right next to Linux, I'd be happy. Even if it was "Windows Vista $50, Novell Linux $29," at least Linux would be there, next to Windows, as a valid option. That would go a very long way towards driving adoption -- even if people didn't buy it at first, they would probably at least see it there, and know that there is an alternative. It might take a few upgrade cycles, and a lot of good PR work, to get people to actually give it a shot, but having Linux as an option would plant the seed in people's minds that there is something besides Windows, and it is not just some integral part of the computer.
To be honest, I think Microsoft fears the erosion of that 'package deal' more than they fear any particular OS. From their perspective, alternate operating systems have come and gone; first there was OS/2, and BeOS, and even the Mac OS has been pushed into a corner. They have been able to do this, because people have come to assume that Windows is the computer. When you make the OS a choice -- when you let people know that yes, they are choosing to use Windows, instead of something else, you strike at the very heart of this assumption. From there, you have a "foot in the door" for any number of alternate OSes (although admittedly, the field is a little thin aside from Linux at the moment).
I think the point comes down to how you define "created by."
Unfortunately, current copyright law only covers "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties." This probably made sense, when most of the government's functions were actually accomplished by government employees, but today -- when a large part, if not the majority, of government functions are done by private-sector contractors -- it means that an awful lot of what would traditionally be 'government works' are not going into the public domain.
IMO, it would make more sense to put everything that is funded wholly or in the majority by tax dollars into the public domain, unless specifically exempted for national security or other bona fide public interest reasons.
Well, we can't say for sure now, because it's not like TFA included a copy of the relevant policy (although, if someone wanted to, they could probably figure out where the guy in the article works, and find the policy from there), but he admits that it's vaguely written, and was written back before Tor existed. So there are two immediate issues:
1) The policy may be so vague, as written, so as to make it unclear whether Tor is legitimate or not. For instance, it could simply have a blanket prohibition of doing things that are detrimental to the network, but not specify exactly what's prohibited and allowed. This is fairly common in most AUPs that I've read, particularly academic ones; rather than attempting to specifically outline what you can't do, they basically say "anything that's bad, don't do it." (Usually in a more verbose fashion, but that's the general idea.) Sometimes they're clear about who decides what is 'bad,' other times less so. It all depends on how bright a person wrote the policy.
2) The policy, as written, may actually prohibit Tor, but the faculty member, who said he was part of the committee that wrote the policy, believes that owing to the age of the policy and his knowledge of the writers intentions, that it was never intended to prohibit something like Tor. Thus, his usage, while technically in violation, he believes is OK because -- to put it bluntly -- he knows what behaviors the policy was supposed to prohibit better than the sysadmin does. (This seems like it could be a dangerous position for him to take, but I guess if you've got tenure, you might as well use it.)
These people are not convertible. Linux isn't Windows, and shouldn't try to be; to attempt to make Windows more attractive to them is probably to damage it.
Should read:
These people are not convertible. Linux isn't Windows, and shouldn't try to be; to attempt to make Linux more attractive to them is probably to damage it.
It doesn't really make sense as it was written above. Durh.
A long term criticism of Linux has been the number of different distros leading to numerous ways of performing the same tasks.
Absolutely. Another perennial criticism of Linux as a desktop OS is the lack of proprietary codecs and software, which hamper its usefulness with regards to digital media in its default configuration. An operating system that can't play DVDs without some shady "wink, wink, nudge, nudge, here are the addresses of some mirrors in France," is a non-starter for most people.
Hopefully, the collaboration between Linspire (who are one of the only distros that I know of, who actually license the codecs and thus can have a fully-functional, U.S.-legal distro out of the box) and Ubuntu (which seems to have the largest desktop userbase, and the most mindshare among users), will move Linux a little closer to parity with Windows.
Windows zealots are always going to have something to use as an excuse for the inferiority of Linux; ultimately, their objections (and many PHB's) tend to boil down to "Linux is not Windows," and are really sham arguments used to justify a decision that's already been made. These people are not convertible. Linux isn't Windows, and shouldn't try to be; to attempt to make Windows more attractive to them is probably to damage it. However, there are a significant number of people 'on the fence,' without strong feelings for or against Linux, and who are kept from being more interested because it's perceived as too complicated or limited. Providing U.S.-legal media codecs in mainstream distributions -- even if this means knuckling under and paying royalties in the short term -- is an important step towards bringing those users onto a Free platform.
Slashdot Mirror
I hope you block ports 80 and 443, too, because otherwise it's still trivial to create an SSH session to the outside. All the enterprising student must do, is configure their (parents') home firewall, to forward outside port 80 to LAN port 22 on their PC. It's no more difficult really than just opening up port 22 bidirectionally. Then it's just "ssh -p 80 -D 8080 joestudent@mypc.dyndns.org"
If you want to filter, get a packet shaper and stop using ports; all you do by blocking ports is encourage people to abuse port 80 and other well known service ports, and make diagnostics more difficult. Unless the goal is just to give the semblance of censorship while making it as easily avoidable as possible, which is arguably laudable, but in that case why bother to block port 22 in the first place.
And before anyone makes the argument about blocking ports making it more difficult for 'casual' users, even a casual user is capable of reading Google, or asking a smarter user what to do. A few years ago, I witnessed what happened on a campus LAN when the admins inadvertently mis-configured the firewalls and blocked port 5190, which is used by AIM. Within twenty minutes, there were emails circulating which included screenshots and step-by-step instructions on how to change the AIM client to use port 80 instead. Hundreds, if not thousands of students, who didn't even know what port was, were able to follow one person's instructions and get around the problem. (It turns out it wasn't an intentional block, but just a mistake; however, the result was that half of the student machines ended up running AIM over port 80 forevermore.) It only takes one user with enough brains to read a manpage, and a desire to score some points with other students by showing them how to get around the block, to torpedo port-based blocking.
Sametime, at least in previous versions, was similar to AOL's IM protocol. IIRC, some versions of the Sametime client could actually interface with AOL's service, and combine both your corporate ST buddy list, and your personal AIM buddy list. Not sure what most CIOs would think of all their employees doing that, but it definitely was there in the program.
If they're switching to XMPP it's a pretty big change, and I can imagine it would break backwards compatibility.
Wow; I'd never noticed that before. Guess that's another point for Firefox over Safari...
It'd be nice to get that system-wide.
Why should I register with IBM to read a document created by a guy from Northrop Grumman (We Build the B-2 Bomber!)?
He's probably a subcontractor. IBM/NG/LM all share personnel back and forth on projects. It's not uncommon to run into people who've worked for years on projects for one company, while getting their paychecks from somebody else. I think it's because the big contracting companies seem to avoid pilfering staff from each other, and instead just subcontract them out. I can't decide if this sort of 'cooperation' is better or worse for employees.
Welcome to the public sector.
Huh? No; all parts of the Constitution are considered to have basically equal weight, in terms of forming a document which itself is the supreme law of the land. It's not just the First Amendment that's law, it's all of the Constitution, which includes parts giving Congress the authorization to implement copyright and patents. While this may be literally contradictory, it just means that when viewed as a whole, the First Amendment right isn't unlimited, but constrained by other parts of the document.
You can't pull out certain Amendments and view them as if they were in a vacuum. You have to view them as portions of a greater whole.
The claim that the scientific process leads to objective truth is nothing more than axiomatic. Under certain conditions that, as far as we know, are impossible to verify, it may be true.
I'm not disagreeing with you at all, but I don't think that what you're saying undermines science greatly. Science has a benefit greater than "objective truth," in that it produces models which themselves yield useful predictions of reality. Whether these models are correct, in the sense of actually describing reality in any fundamental way, is debatable. However, the predictions are testable and thus useful.
For example, if you consider some basic Newtonian motion, say a ball being tossed around in the air on the surface of the Earth, it doesn't take very long of asking "why" to a physicist, before you run up against untestable theories. (E.g.: "Why does the ball fall to the ground?" "Because of gravity." "What's gravity?" "Gravity is a force between objects that attracts them to each other." "How is the force communicated between the objects?" "Gravitons...Maybe." "?!") To a casual observer, it might seem as though the physicist's theories have no clothes; they don't describe anything with absolute confidence, in terms of explaining why actions occur and precisely what the universe is doing to produce the actions we witness. However, the physicist's theories, while they may not provide absolute theoretical explanations, provide higher-level predictions and models which are useful, even though they are founded on unprovable assumptions. Nobody has ever seen, or proved the existence of, a graviton (or the competing theories' equivalents), however, we can still state with relative confidence what a thrown ball will do, because of the vast body of statistical and experimental evidence that confirm the high-level models.
If you look hard enough at any science, eventually you will run up against untested, and potentially untestable, hypotheses and assumptions. However that's not as bad as it sounds, because fundamental understanding is thankfully not required in order to produce useful models at levels closer to our day-to-day existence. That is the true benefit of science; "objective truth," if it exists, is of far less utility.
Speaking of the middle mouse button, is there any (easy) way in Linux, particularly either under KDE or XFE, to make the middle mouse button work like (ohgodIcantbelieveImsayingthis) Windows'? As in, acting like a scroll-with-pointer button? For the unfamiliar, at least on my work machine, if you press the middle button, the cursor changes into this two-arrows-inside-a-circle icon, which causes the window to scroll if you then move it up or down. It scrolls faster if you move it further, as you would expect, and stops scrolling instantly on release of the buttom.
I've gotten a bit addicted to this feature, and frankly I think it's the handiest thing I've used since the addition of the scroll wheel to the mouse a few years back. It's absolutely terrific for zipping through lengthy documents, and it's a lot better than PageDNing (even on 5-button mice where you can do that without moving to the keyboard).
I've never used a system that had middle click paste (or, if I have, I haven't used it), but the middle-click-scroll feature is pretty handy. I doubt it will appear in Mac OS X anytime soon -- it was hard enough to get Apple to make mice with two buttons, I'm not holding my breath on three, and I'm definitely not holding my breath on a feature that might make people think that they were admitting that their Mighty Mouse Balls weren't the hottest idea in the world -- but it'd be nice to get the option on Linux.
But, if you posses a legitimate drivers license (a permit) from another state, you may legaly drive in any other state. This is not the case with a carry permit. What is the major difference?
You can kill more people, in less time, with a car?
The guy isn't talking about plagiarism; he calls the essay "a plagiarism" with (IMO) tongue planted in cheek. It's not correct to say that it's about plagiarism specifically, because to say that sounds like he's defending plagiarism specifically, when the issues covered in the essay itself are far more broad.
The essay is "on" creative influence, not plagiarism.
So this could already be implemented in regular households! The power can be erratic since it is used to heat huge boilers and fireplaces that store energy for the next day. I guess, we'll need another article with more facts. Good news for wind power, I guess.
Yep. It absolutely could. Really, all that you'd need in order to do this, would be a programmable thermostat on your freezer, just like the furnace/AC ones that let you set a different temperature during the day than for when you're around in the morning and evening.
Assuming you know what times the electricity is cheap and when it's expensive, you could just turn the thermostat down, cooling the freezer extra cold, when power was cheap, and then set it back up higher when electricity is expensive. The "cheap cool" you bought earlier (say during the night) would allow you to use less power when it's expensive.
Now, it probably wouldn't really be worth doing with a residential food freezer, but with a grocery store's cold case, or certainly a refrigerated warehouse, it could mean serious savings with minimal equipment.
You might be able to do the reverse with hot-water-heaters, too, although there you'd need to make sure there were some safeguards to prevent scalding (if your hot water heater heats to 190F at night due to the cheap power, so it can 'coast' down to 110F during the day, you might get a nasty surprise if you ever tried to take a late-night shower).
Also, Chillout isn't the only open-source DRM project, Sun has (had?) their DReaM [wikipedia.org] initiative. But none of these attempts seem to be gaining any traction.
I think it's unfortunate that this whole discussion has gotten hung up on the same old issues, because I was really interested in hearing about "open source DRM" in general. I'm glad you brought it up (even if it's now 2/3rds of the way down the page!).
It seems to me, that such a thing can't possibly work. All currently extant DRM systems depend, fundamentally, on the difficulty of reverse-engineering and modifying binaries that are run on a user's system. If you had an open source, easily modifiable DRM system, it would be trivial to produce a cracked version of it that didn't actually enforce anything.
I can't think of ANY OSS projects that include DRM, and I don't think it's just a political/belief issue. A while ago I remember reading some (heated) mailing list theads about one of the big OSS PDF viewers. I think it might have been xpdf, but don't quote me on that. Anyway, the PDF spec includes some very rudimentary DRM -- basically, "no print" flags can be set on files, which then tells the viewer not to let the user print it. It's impossible to really enforce, since you could just do some screen scraping and get the raster anyway, but it's there. The author of the PDF viewer, for reasons I never quite understood, felt strongly that the program should respect this flag. Many other people disagreed. The program was built with the restriction, but almost instantly was forked to add an option to ignore the no-print flag.
I don't know what ended up out of that debate, and whether mainstream distros today use a PDF viewer that respects the no-print flag or not, but the point is that anyone who wanted to get rid of the no-print "feature" could do so trivially. If there was a big user demand to print "unprintable" PDFs, the software would be written, and it would be distributed, and that would be the end of it.
So I don't see how you could ever make an 'open source' DRM system, as long as there are a lot of talented programmers out there who would defang it as soon as they got their hands on the source code. So you'd either have to radically alter the definition of 'open source,' or you'd have to convince a lot of people that such a scheme was a Good Idea, to make it work.
preventing copyright theft
For the record, what they're trying to prevent isn't copyright "theft," it's copyright violations. There's a difference. If you copy a CD and give it to your friend, you didn't steal the copyright from the record label who produced the CD, you violated it; they still have their copyright.
It's the difference between trespassing (violating someone's right to enjoy/exploit their property) and swindling them into signing over the deed to their house (actually stealing their property).
Yes, the limit is on the playlist, not on the songs themselves. So if you make a mix CD and burn it 5 times (or 10 times, whatever), it will stop you. But you can delete that playlist, and make a new one that's different, but which could contain some of the same songs, and burn it another x times.
I'm not sure how closely it tracks the contents of the playlist; you might be able to recreate the same playlist with trivial differences (song ordering, adding a 1s blank track, etc.) and keep churning them out.
All it does is stop you from mass producing the same mix CD over and over. It's one of those restrictions that I'm sure were insisted on by the record companies, because it has almost no effect whatsoever on reality.
If you really did want to churn out copies of a mix CD, you can just make one copy, quit iTunes, put the disc in, and copy it using Toast or Apple's Disk Utility. (Oh, crap, I probably violated the DMCA there. Ignore everything I just said, even though anyone with a Mac and an IQ above room temperature could figure it out.)
This, I understand, is different from WMA's restrictions, where the software actually keeps track of how many times you've burned a track, and will cut you off. Furthermore, many WMA based systems have restrictions that make certain tracks "unburnable," so you can make up a playlist, only to have it fail because certain songs are playable (and event transferrable to a Fauxpod, but not burnable to a Red Book CD).
The simplicity of FairPlay's restrictions is definitely part of its success.
graphics of Muslims murdering Christians and Jews ...Just going out on a limb here, but maybe that's because it's relatively trivial to find videos of (purported) Muslim terrorists doing things like beheading POWs, while it's relatively difficult to find any video of Christian extremists doing the same thing? (At least, not unless you include the History Channel, then there's lots of material.)
I think there's a pretty good argument to be made that, right now, there seems to be a lot more ugliness being done by extremists in the name of Islam than in the name of Christ. Which is not to say that there aren't Christians doing evil, but they don't mostly claim to have religious motives.
If you're beheading people and claiming that it's because of a religion, I think the video of the act is pretty much fair game as far as religious criticism is concerned.
It's the extremists who are tarnishing the name of Islam, not people who collect the video clips of their handiwork and post it on YouTube.
neoconservative pro-war Senator Joe Lieberman's ("D"-CT) struggle against the Democratic antiwar insurgent Ned Lamont
I stopped reading here, because it's obvious you have no concept of what the "American people" think, if you characterize Lieberman as a "neoconservative." Pro-war, perhaps, but that has more to do with his unwavering (and unapologetic) stance on Israel, which drives most of his Mid-East policy, than any real kinship with the Republican party or any real conservatives (which, to be clear, are not necessarily the same thing).
Lamont was a southern-Connecticut (NYC Suburb) carpetbagger without any real vision, who ran a negative campaign that didn't pan out in the general election (as such campaigns are wont to do). And it probably helped that Lieberman's campaign was a train wreck.
I'm not sure if this is a troll or what, but if you really think that someone like Lamont -- who couldn't get elected in one of the Bluest states in the country -- typifies what Americans want, you've been spending too much time smoking dope in Boston or L.A.; people want out of Iraq, sure, and are pretty pissed about what they perceive to be American jobs lost to outsourcing and imports, but to equate that with some wellspring of progressivism/socialism is a mistake.
besides, in large urban centers and suburban areas Gun Control LOWERS crime rates, not increases them.
Would you like to cite a source on that besides your rectum?
Gun control has never been shown, at least in any respectable study that I've ever seen, and I've been following the issue for a while, to lower the crime rate, except in theoretical situations where you can magically cut urban areas off from the outside world, or where you only look at specific categories of crime and neglect the crime reduction due to civilian gun ownership.
The usual anti-gun arguments that get trotted out in these situations are Europe/USA comparisons, and those are bogus for any number of reasons (simply: there are far too many variables besides gun control that lead to Europe having a far lower violent crime rate in general than the U.S., regardless of their gun control policies).
Uh, no, that's not what I was saying.
... those are all rational, quantifiable arguments, probably each valid in a different case.
There are certainly legitimate arguments for staying on Windows. I could think of half a dozen: hardware support, backwards-compatibility with existing applications, user retraining / changeover costs, ease of procuring knowledgeable staff, lack of feature parity, ease-of-use at certain tasks
However, there are a not-insignificant number of people, particularly management-types, who have already decided to stay with Windows, and then back up the decision with as many justifications as are necessary, creating new ones as old ones are found to be false. This isn't a particularly controversial statement -- people do this all the time. There's probably even some nice psychological term for it, which I can't remember at the moment. But at any rate, people constantly to make irrational decisions, and then will create seemingly rational justifications for them after the fact. It's not unique to computers, or even business.
My point is basically that it's important to separate these two categories of objections -- real objections that are actually prohibiting a would-be switcher from leaving Microsoft, and sham arguments that are simply covering a decision that's already been made for other reasons (rational or irrational) -- because the second are just a sink for time and effort, and worst of all, lead software development in the wrong direction. You can argue all day with someone in the latter category, and never make headway, because the crux of their objection is that 'Linux isn't Windows.' So it's better not to even try, if it seems that they've already made up their mind and are just looking for external confirmation.
Hardware compatibility and feature parity are real problems, and their lack leads to tangible, rational objections. Those are things that need to be dealt with. (And in fact, ESR cites hardware and features, media codecs in particular, as the two most pressing problems with Linux today, and who am I to disagree?)
The key problem is just in sounding out whether a person's stated objections to Linux are real and rational, or just covers for a decision already made for other reasons. Attempting to please people in the second group is dangerous, because ultimately what they want isn't Linux at all, but Windows (just, usually, for free); trying to turn Linux (or any other OS) into something it's not, ultimately weakens it as a distinct product, and diverts attention both from areas that actually use improvement, and from areas which are already at par, and could be made superior and into selling points themselves.
What about works funded by the NEA?
I would argue that if you take taxpayer dollars for your art project, then (in the same way that the software that I write at work belongs to my company, not to me) it's basically a government work, done on commission. If you don't like that, don't take the cash. Nobody ever said that cash handouts should come without strings attached; actually, as long as the government is giving away my tax dollars, I'd prefer that they attach enough strings to make sure that the public has the greatest possible benefit. And ensuring that everything produced ends up in the public domain would be a good way to ensure that.
I could probably be argued to compromise on something that gave the author a short-term period of exclusivity, say 5 or 10 years, but nothing like the current copyright span. (I could also see giving the same terms to recipients of scientific grants; i.e., you have 5 years to publish your results in any journal you want, but at the end of that span, it needs to be submitted to a central database and all findings become public domain material. The journals would bitch and moan, but they'd have to bend over and deal, or become irrelevant; government funding drives too much science for them to ignore or blackball it.)
A good model for what the NEA could become, would be the photographic projects commissioned by the FSA in the 1930s, which included work by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, or the Department of the Interior's commissioning of Ansel Adams in the 1940s (the Manzanar photos). In both cases, the works produced ended up in the public domain and are now freely available (online and in hardcopy). Had the tactics common today been used, most of the works would still be under copyright, and few Americans would ever have seen them. (And, it goes almost without saying, many of them would probably be gone forever.) Projects like these should be the rule where government funding of the arts is concerned, rather than the exception.
I would rather see the NEA fund a smaller number of works more completely, and have the output free for anyone to view, copy, reuse, distribute, and modify, than fund a large number of works halfassedly, without regard to what the public can do with the output, as currently seems to be the case. As it stands right now, the NEA is practically regressive; it uses taxpayer dollars to fund projects that only a small percentage of citizens (generally those in higher income brackets anyway) really care about. If the government is funding Art, then the resulting artworks should belong to all the people, to do whatever they want with it. If artists don't want to give the People their art, they don't have to take the People's cash.
Core Duo, Min 512MB Ram, only need like 20GB of HD, don't need a CD drive optional, Gigabit Ethernet, decent onboard graphics
Is your reservation program a first-person shooter? That seems like some awfully excessive specs for a kiosk machine; particularly the GigE.
The Mini sort of sits in a class by itself, mostly IMO because it goes after a market that most of the SFF PC makers aren't interested in (or, are too inept to target correctly). Most of the mainboards I've seen that are the size of the Mini's are meant for embedded, portable, or automobile use, and don't touch it for features at the price. But then again, they don't have to; most of the Mini's features aren't necessary for embedded applications, and people building bespoke portable or automotive equipment aren't constrained by price.
When I think "reservation terminal," what comes first to my mind is something like a Wyse WinTerm; nothing near the specs of a Mini.
I have a strong suspicion, judging from the increasing number of DOAs I've witnessed in the past few years, that the Big Name manufacturers (hardly 'manufacturers,' really they're just 'assemblers,' or better yet, 'name-stampers') do not do any real burn in testing anymore, besides making sure it POSTs.
Perhaps I'm just cynical. It seems like it would be possible, though, to write a utility that would conduct a burn-in of the machine, and then erase itself, if you wanted to. It would just need to load itself into RAM, go through its test cycle, and then at the conclusion of the cycle, wipe the HD and then power the system down. Or you could have a burn-in program that was run off of the USB port, or a CD. The cost of writing something like that would probably pay for itself in a few hundred units; you wouldn't even have to be Dell for something like that to make sense.
Just installing an OS and then letting the machine run idle for a few hours doesn't strike me as a particularly good test; for good QC you'd want heavy processor usage and disk I/O, in order to make sure that everything gets correctly stressed. That implies some sort of special software (which needs to be deleted afterwards); having an OS on the machine when it goes out to the customer doesn't really make this process that much easier.
There is a certain overhead involved in dealing with more than one OS, that's understandable: if you previously only had one type of HD that got stuck into all your boxes, adding another option obviously creates some complexity. However, I don't think this is a legitimate anti-Linux argument: Microsoft has rolled out more and more versions of its OS, and the manufacturers have seemingly accepted without complaint. Obviously there are systems in place that allow for Windows {Home|Professional|Media Center} to get installed, and while the cost of going from 1 option to 2 is great, adding one more option seems fairly trivial. (How many options does Vista have? Adding another for "blank drive" or "FreeDOS," if not Linux proper, can't be that hard. It's only when you factor in Microsoft's retaliatory measures that it gets expensive.)
In fact, it's closer to $29 than $139. With Windows Vista for $50, with Novell Linux for $29. I know what most people would choose.
Maybe you do, but I don't. I don't think it's an obvious choice at all. Most people don't even consider Linux as an option right now because it's not listed when they buy their Dell or HP; it's some sort of weirdo aftermarket geek hack, hardly a "legitimate" OS. If Dell priced out Windows, at whatever it actually costs, right next to Linux, I'd be happy. Even if it was "Windows Vista $50, Novell Linux $29," at least Linux would be there, next to Windows, as a valid option. That would go a very long way towards driving adoption -- even if people didn't buy it at first, they would probably at least see it there, and know that there is an alternative. It might take a few upgrade cycles, and a lot of good PR work, to get people to actually give it a shot, but having Linux as an option would plant the seed in people's minds that there is something besides Windows, and it is not just some integral part of the computer.
To be honest, I think Microsoft fears the erosion of that 'package deal' more than they fear any particular OS. From their perspective, alternate operating systems have come and gone; first there was OS/2, and BeOS, and even the Mac OS has been pushed into a corner. They have been able to do this, because people have come to assume that Windows is the computer. When you make the OS a choice -- when you let people know that yes, they are choosing to use Windows, instead of something else, you strike at the very heart of this assumption. From there, you have a "foot in the door" for any number of alternate OSes (although admittedly, the field is a little thin aside from Linux at the moment).
I think the point comes down to how you define "created by."
Unfortunately, current copyright law only covers "a work prepared by an officer or employee of the United States Government as part of that person's official duties." This probably made sense, when most of the government's functions were actually accomplished by government employees, but today -- when a large part, if not the majority, of government functions are done by private-sector contractors -- it means that an awful lot of what would traditionally be 'government works' are not going into the public domain.
IMO, it would make more sense to put everything that is funded wholly or in the majority by tax dollars into the public domain, unless specifically exempted for national security or other bona fide public interest reasons.
Well, we can't say for sure now, because it's not like TFA included a copy of the relevant policy (although, if someone wanted to, they could probably figure out where the guy in the article works, and find the policy from there), but he admits that it's vaguely written, and was written back before Tor existed. So there are two immediate issues:
1) The policy may be so vague, as written, so as to make it unclear whether Tor is legitimate or not. For instance, it could simply have a blanket prohibition of doing things that are detrimental to the network, but not specify exactly what's prohibited and allowed. This is fairly common in most AUPs that I've read, particularly academic ones; rather than attempting to specifically outline what you can't do, they basically say "anything that's bad, don't do it." (Usually in a more verbose fashion, but that's the general idea.) Sometimes they're clear about who decides what is 'bad,' other times less so. It all depends on how bright a person wrote the policy.
2) The policy, as written, may actually prohibit Tor, but the faculty member, who said he was part of the committee that wrote the policy, believes that owing to the age of the policy and his knowledge of the writers intentions, that it was never intended to prohibit something like Tor. Thus, his usage, while technically in violation, he believes is OK because -- to put it bluntly -- he knows what behaviors the policy was supposed to prohibit better than the sysadmin does. (This seems like it could be a dangerous position for him to take, but I guess if you've got tenure, you might as well use it.)
The line:Should read:It doesn't really make sense as it was written above. Durh.
A long term criticism of Linux has been the number of different distros leading to numerous ways of performing the same tasks.
Absolutely. Another perennial criticism of Linux as a desktop OS is the lack of proprietary codecs and software, which hamper its usefulness with regards to digital media in its default configuration. An operating system that can't play DVDs without some shady "wink, wink, nudge, nudge, here are the addresses of some mirrors in France," is a non-starter for most people.
Hopefully, the collaboration between Linspire (who are one of the only distros that I know of, who actually license the codecs and thus can have a fully-functional, U.S.-legal distro out of the box) and Ubuntu (which seems to have the largest desktop userbase, and the most mindshare among users), will move Linux a little closer to parity with Windows.
Windows zealots are always going to have something to use as an excuse for the inferiority of Linux; ultimately, their objections (and many PHB's) tend to boil down to "Linux is not Windows," and are really sham arguments used to justify a decision that's already been made. These people are not convertible. Linux isn't Windows, and shouldn't try to be; to attempt to make Windows more attractive to them is probably to damage it. However, there are a significant number of people 'on the fence,' without strong feelings for or against Linux, and who are kept from being more interested because it's perceived as too complicated or limited. Providing U.S.-legal media codecs in mainstream distributions -- even if this means knuckling under and paying royalties in the short term -- is an important step towards bringing those users onto a Free platform.