I can't agree with you that the goal of socialism is to crush personal freedom. In fact, I'd take the direct opposite stance.
Full-on socialist policies (which some refer to as a "nanny state" because the essentials of life are provided by the government) actually free the citizenry from having to worry about the very trials and tribulations that consume the time and energy of a capitalist society: survival.
Even fascism isn't so much about "crushing" personal freedom as it is about whipping the population into a fanatical frenzy of support for the state and it's purported mission.
Had you said that they try to manipulate people into giving up the ideals of capitalism, I'd have agreed. But I don't see capitalism as the be-all and end-all of society. Never have, and never will.
Primarily because I grew up in and live in a country that has had socialist leanings pretty much since the 1930's -- Canada. Having grown up in such an environment, I can see definite benefits to society from a government which generally considers the welfare of society as a whole to be more important than some ideology of freedom to rape, pillage, and rob your neighbours without restriction so long as it's profitable.
The more you think about things, the more you are going to find errors and omissions in any text or tract that claims to be "perfect", regardless of whether it's religion being discussed, science, medicine, or anything else. No one document or ideal is perfect and infallible; at best it's an approximation of "how things work". Even math texts have mistakes and "this exercise is left up to the reader" sections, so they're far from perfect.
I suspect that if there were widespread legions of followers of some older polytheistic religions, people's faith wouldn't be shaken so severely by the idea that their deity is wrong. Greek, Roman, and Norse religions are full of arguments, fighting, and other human failings of the gods, which implies that they are not perfect right from the outset.
Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology, on the other hand, is founded on the idea that God is perfect in every way. So when some argument of their religious text doesn't compute, a little bit of their foundation of faith is chipped away. There's just no avoiding the conclusion: the world is not perfect, so God itself is not perfect.
So how do "true believers" hang on to their faith? Simple. They blame all the ills and woes of the world on our own free will, and on Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge. In other words, they literally consider knowledge and thinking to be bad things which mankind should never have been granted access to.
Look, if a store catches a shoplifter, they call the police. They can't be sued for calling the police.
If a bank has a robbery, they call the police. They can't be sued for doing so.
Why in any sane world should ISPs and online providers be subject to lawsuits for doing the same damn thing? And that's the main intent of this legislation as I read it. Now I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm not "reading it right", but then again, nor are most politicians, much less slashdotters.
Do you have any examples of such GMOs? Because this is the first I hear of any GMO being developed for anything other than pesticide and herbicide resistance.
I do know that plants have been bred for survival in drier climates and bad soil, but that just goes back to my point about "land race" genetics that have adapted to their environment. I've never heard of gene engineering being used to achieve such a purpose.
Or the employees could just STFU in public, like those of every other corporation on the planet.
But maybe Apple's employees aren't presumed to be capable of discretion, seeing as they've repeatedly proven stupid enough to leave internal prototypes at random bars...
If you don't want a computer company tying together and coordinating such data center systems, who would you like to have do so?
The media companies? Health care providers, perhaps? How about game companies like Nintendo?
Uncoordinated and unmanaged data is all but useless. The fact that all this data feeds into reporting by a central system does not mean the system is in control. I have no doubt there are still a few hundred actual operations staff involved.
Or did you think the monitors were for the benefit of an AI like Watson?
Despite the paniced bleatings, I firmly believe that companies should not be subject to lawsuits for co-operating with police or reporting people who are abusing their systems to perform illegal activities.
Is the legislation subject to abuse? Sure it is -- just about any legislation with any teeth is subject to abuse. Take, for example, false reportings of child abuse to CPS, or kids claiming teachers "sexually harassed" them.
Reporting abuse isn't a charge; it's only grounds for a warrant to do further investigation. I don't believe the legislation goes much beyond providing whistle-blower protection for companies reporting the abuse. And I can't think of any way the legislation could have been written to provide that protection from lawsuits without causing fear and panic amongst rabid privacy advocates.
There's a huge difference between companies voluntarily reporting abuses of their systems and the government mandating that they monitor and track their customers and users, and the latter is not what this legislation does.
I can't agree that GMO's are "conventional" agriculture.
"Conventional" agriculture seeds the fields with part of the last harvest, the seeds of the plants which survived in the local conditions. After about 20 generations or so, you have "land race" genetics -- plants whose genomes have self-tuned to the pests and weather of the local environment. Provided the environment remains stable and isn't affected by imported pests, such crops are far more productive than genetics imported from outside the region.
GMO's on the other hand, have one purpose and one purpose only: To allow the use of herbicides and pesticides that would kill the "natural" plant. I can guarantee you that if landrace genetics were resistant to those same herbicides and pesticides that they'd out-produce the imported GMOs.
Now what are the odds of that? Replying to a comment and coming up with the same heading as the comment above it?
It's a good thing I'm not a gambler -- I'd be taking this as either proof that it's a "good luck day" or cursing the fact that I "wasted" my luck on something so trivial.,:D
I only said "billions" because the vast majority of people would think you're crazy if you claimed "trillions" or more. But in an infinite universe, the latter is probably far more accurate than the former.
Thinking about infinity is fun. And the universe is infinite in that by the time you'd reach the boundary (even with FTL), the expanding boundary will have moved and you still won't be at the theoretical "edge" of the universe.
if it's a dying mouse button, why does it work fine for the past year or more under 10.04.1 and Fedora/KDE?
I know you're probably trolling, but the matrix of features in use when the problem occurs dictates that the bug is in GTK. One thing you learn early on in a 30 year career is how to "guess" where bugs are (and after enough time, those guesses start becoming pretty damned good.)
The idea of finding life on other planets is actually based on statistics. There are literally billions of Earth-like planets in the universe. The chances are that conditions on at least some of those planets has given rise to life.
There is also a very good statistical chance that there are non-carbon life-forms on other planets.
So unless you've got a "God created the Earth" mentality, there being life on other planets is a foregone conclusion.
Does that mean we'll encounter life from other planets? Perhaps not. That depends on whether any forms of FTL ever prove feasible, beyond which there's the roll of the dice of the rarity of planets with life. The odds are you'd have visit and explore a fair number of dead worlds before you'd encounter one with life.
Only those who think we are "created in God's image" would stick their heads in the sand and claim otherwise. God has no image, and it's form is the universe itself. To think we look anything like the universe is ludicrous!
I'm not particularly hopeful of a functional system given the mouse problems I've had from 10.04.2 onwards, but I'll download it, try to install it, and give it a shot.
I really do like Debian's APT system a lot better than Fedora's RPM, though both get the job done. But unless that mouse problem isn't present, it doesn't matter which I prefer -- I need to use a distro that works.
The kicker will be whether they're using a GTK based installer or not. While you can always resort to text/expert mode, it's a nuisance to have to do so.
Yes, I know it's not an Ubuntu specific issue, but this is the problem I have with the recent set of distros from Debian and Ubuntu (including Kubuntu's installer.)
I recently switched to the Conexus Credit Union here in Regina, Canada.
I've used online banking for years, but Conexus is the first bank to require a cookie that they set into my browser. Setting the cookie is a special registration process that asks you to answer one of the "secret questions" that you set up when you enable the online banking services for your account.
The net result is that you can't even try to log in with a computer or device that hasn't been "registered" by answering such a question. It may not be full two-factor authentication, but it's a heck of a lot better than the account number/password combination that every other bank I've ever dealt with uses.
It's the next-best thing to real two-factor authentication with a hardware dongle or id-code sheet such as used by the German banks described in the article.
As to bank liability: I agree with the German courts. No matter how many times you warn people, no matter how clearly you explain the risks, there will always be a few people who don't read the warnings, ignore the warnings, or otherwise compromise their own security. As long as the bank has not been leaving an insecure protocol or technology in place that they knew (or should have known) could be breached, it's the consumer's own damned fault.
What's next? A cell phone wielding driver suing the cell phone maker for damages because they got in a car accident despite it being illegal to use a cell phone while driving in their jurisdiction?
No matter whether you're dealing with antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, or natural predators, life will always evolve to survive.
We all know this. The scientists. The chemists. The engineers. The pharmacorps. The pesticide and herbicide companies.
Hell, Monsanto even gene-engineers such resistance into their tainted products.
But the public doesn't want to accept the truth: we're all on borrowed time. All we're doing is leveraging short-term odds for short-term gain, at the price of long term dissolution. So the marketing experts and technology pundits tell them what they want to hear: that we can win the fight in the long term.
We can't, and we won't. Eventually every single antibiotic, pesticide, and herbicide we have will be useless, and the new generations of such products will be so lethal that we won't be able to use them because they're also poisonous to humans.
And then the shit is really gonna hit the fan, big time.
But that's exactly why I wasn't clear on the issue: GPLv2.
Not LGPLv2.
That means any application using those libraries is required to be released under GPLv2, and I seriously, seriously doubt that many people would be following that restriction because they think of Java as a "free" compiler and don't think about the licensing terms on the libraries.
If the only way the core Java library source is available to the public is under GPLv2, it's effectively useless to most projects. You can't link libraries of GPL code to non-GPL applications!
Why do you think I kept trying to test it on different machines? Had it only been my box, I'd have assumed hardware (and did for many months.) But two other boxes from completely different manufacturers are affected as well. There is nothing in common between the three systems in terms of chipsets, CPU, or I/O devices.
I do plan on filing a bug report. It wasn't until last week that I finally narrowed down the problem to a GTK issue so I'd know where to report the bug.
I had reported the problem last year to Ubuntu, but got no response or progress, and based on it's continued appearance in GTK-based installers and desktops, it clearly hasn't been addressed (i.e. the bug was submitted to the wrong project.)
That's the one frustrating thing about open source. You have to at least do enough debugging to identify which software component is causing the problem before you can even report that there is a problem.
There is a lot more to Java than the runtime engine and it's bytecode format -- like a few million lines of library code. Did they develop a clean room version of that as well?
While the source for those libraries was eventually released by Sun, it's not clear to me what license applies to the library source, and it's definitely not clear that the source was released before Google's work on Android. The issue may be water under the bridge as Sun did open source the vast majority of Java, but it kind of flies in the face of "clean room" claims.
Ubuntu 10.04.2 inherited a GTK problem which has persisted through every release since; it's in the Debian code base as well.
Some random time after logging in to a Gnome session, mouse clicks get lost (usually within 30 seconds to 5 minutes of login.) Not just clicks on menus or windows, but all mouse clicks. KDE, however, works fine. So do the lesser known non-GTK desktops that I've played with.
Unfortunately, the bug surfaces almost immediately in GTK-based installers such as provided by Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Debian. Which means that even getting an install done requires that you use the text mode installer (which is muy painful.)
At this point the only installation I've found that I can use is Fedora's KDE edition.
On the bright side, it's another year before 10.04.1 drops from the support list and I have to upgrade.
The problem occurs on an ASUS P5QL Pro mobo, my friend's Acer laptop with trackpad, and a buddy's HP laptop with trackpad.
Doesn't anyone test any more?
(And no, despite years of C/C++ programming, I have absolutely no interest in finding and fixing the problem myself. I have other work to do. I'm content with the simple "workaround" of dropping Ubuntu and GTK based systems, particularly as I hate Gnome 3 with a passion.)
Slashdot Mirror
I can't agree with you that the goal of socialism is to crush personal freedom. In fact, I'd take the direct opposite stance.
Full-on socialist policies (which some refer to as a "nanny state" because the essentials of life are provided by the government) actually free the citizenry from having to worry about the very trials and tribulations that consume the time and energy of a capitalist society: survival.
Even fascism isn't so much about "crushing" personal freedom as it is about whipping the population into a fanatical frenzy of support for the state and it's purported mission.
Had you said that they try to manipulate people into giving up the ideals of capitalism, I'd have agreed. But I don't see capitalism as the be-all and end-all of society. Never have, and never will.
Primarily because I grew up in and live in a country that has had socialist leanings pretty much since the 1930's -- Canada. Having grown up in such an environment, I can see definite benefits to society from a government which generally considers the welfare of society as a whole to be more important than some ideology of freedom to rape, pillage, and rob your neighbours without restriction so long as it's profitable.
Thank you. I literally had not heard of such engineering going on. All you ever see in the newsfeeds is ranting about Monstanto and herbicides.
The more you think about things, the more you are going to find errors and omissions in any text or tract that claims to be "perfect", regardless of whether it's religion being discussed, science, medicine, or anything else. No one document or ideal is perfect and infallible; at best it's an approximation of "how things work". Even math texts have mistakes and "this exercise is left up to the reader" sections, so they're far from perfect.
I suspect that if there were widespread legions of followers of some older polytheistic religions, people's faith wouldn't be shaken so severely by the idea that their deity is wrong. Greek, Roman, and Norse religions are full of arguments, fighting, and other human failings of the gods, which implies that they are not perfect right from the outset.
Judeo-Christian-Muslim theology, on the other hand, is founded on the idea that God is perfect in every way. So when some argument of their religious text doesn't compute, a little bit of their foundation of faith is chipped away. There's just no avoiding the conclusion: the world is not perfect, so God itself is not perfect.
So how do "true believers" hang on to their faith? Simple. They blame all the ills and woes of the world on our own free will, and on Adam and Eve eating of the tree of knowledge. In other words, they literally consider knowledge and thinking to be bad things which mankind should never have been granted access to.
Look, if a store catches a shoplifter, they call the police. They can't be sued for calling the police.
If a bank has a robbery, they call the police. They can't be sued for doing so.
Why in any sane world should ISPs and online providers be subject to lawsuits for doing the same damn thing? And that's the main intent of this legislation as I read it. Now I'm not a lawyer, so maybe I'm not "reading it right", but then again, nor are most politicians, much less slashdotters.
Do you have any examples of such GMOs? Because this is the first I hear of any GMO being developed for anything other than pesticide and herbicide resistance.
I do know that plants have been bred for survival in drier climates and bad soil, but that just goes back to my point about "land race" genetics that have adapted to their environment. I've never heard of gene engineering being used to achieve such a purpose.
Or the employees could just STFU in public, like those of every other corporation on the planet.
But maybe Apple's employees aren't presumed to be capable of discretion, seeing as they've repeatedly proven stupid enough to leave internal prototypes at random bars...
If you don't want a computer company tying together and coordinating such data center systems, who would you like to have do so?
The media companies? Health care providers, perhaps? How about game companies like Nintendo?
Uncoordinated and unmanaged data is all but useless. The fact that all this data feeds into reporting by a central system does not mean the system is in control. I have no doubt there are still a few hundred actual operations staff involved.
Or did you think the monitors were for the benefit of an AI like Watson?
Despite the paniced bleatings, I firmly believe that companies should not be subject to lawsuits for co-operating with police or reporting people who are abusing their systems to perform illegal activities.
Is the legislation subject to abuse? Sure it is -- just about any legislation with any teeth is subject to abuse. Take, for example, false reportings of child abuse to CPS, or kids claiming teachers "sexually harassed" them.
Reporting abuse isn't a charge; it's only grounds for a warrant to do further investigation. I don't believe the legislation goes much beyond providing whistle-blower protection for companies reporting the abuse. And I can't think of any way the legislation could have been written to provide that protection from lawsuits without causing fear and panic amongst rabid privacy advocates.
There's a huge difference between companies voluntarily reporting abuses of their systems and the government mandating that they monitor and track their customers and users, and the latter is not what this legislation does.
I can't agree that GMO's are "conventional" agriculture.
"Conventional" agriculture seeds the fields with part of the last harvest, the seeds of the plants which survived in the local conditions. After about 20 generations or so, you have "land race" genetics -- plants whose genomes have self-tuned to the pests and weather of the local environment. Provided the environment remains stable and isn't affected by imported pests, such crops are far more productive than genetics imported from outside the region.
GMO's on the other hand, have one purpose and one purpose only: To allow the use of herbicides and pesticides that would kill the "natural" plant. I can guarantee you that if landrace genetics were resistant to those same herbicides and pesticides that they'd out-produce the imported GMOs.
Actually shit would be organic fertilizer... :P
Now what are the odds of that? Replying to a comment and coming up with the same heading as the comment above it?
It's a good thing I'm not a gambler -- I'd be taking this as either proof that it's a "good luck day" or cursing the fact that I "wasted" my luck on something so trivial., :D
Because no matter how "nice" the current administration and management will be, there will be someone in the future looking for a loophole to abuse.
I only said "billions" because the vast majority of people would think you're crazy if you claimed "trillions" or more. But in an infinite universe, the latter is probably far more accurate than the former.
Thinking about infinity is fun. And the universe is infinite in that by the time you'd reach the boundary (even with FTL), the expanding boundary will have moved and you still won't be at the theoretical "edge" of the universe.
if it's a dying mouse button, why does it work fine for the past year or more under 10.04.1 and Fedora/KDE?
I know you're probably trolling, but the matrix of features in use when the problem occurs dictates that the bug is in GTK. One thing you learn early on in a 30 year career is how to "guess" where bugs are (and after enough time, those guesses start becoming pretty damned good.)
The idea of finding life on other planets is actually based on statistics. There are literally billions of Earth-like planets in the universe. The chances are that conditions on at least some of those planets has given rise to life.
There is also a very good statistical chance that there are non-carbon life-forms on other planets.
So unless you've got a "God created the Earth" mentality, there being life on other planets is a foregone conclusion.
Does that mean we'll encounter life from other planets? Perhaps not. That depends on whether any forms of FTL ever prove feasible, beyond which there's the roll of the dice of the rarity of planets with life. The odds are you'd have visit and explore a fair number of dead worlds before you'd encounter one with life.
Only those who think we are "created in God's image" would stick their heads in the sand and claim otherwise. God has no image, and it's form is the universe itself. To think we look anything like the universe is ludicrous!
I'm not particularly hopeful of a functional system given the mouse problems I've had from 10.04.2 onwards, but I'll download it, try to install it, and give it a shot.
I really do like Debian's APT system a lot better than Fedora's RPM, though both get the job done. But unless that mouse problem isn't present, it doesn't matter which I prefer -- I need to use a distro that works.
The kicker will be whether they're using a GTK based installer or not. While you can always resort to text/expert mode, it's a nuisance to have to do so.
Yes, I know it's not an Ubuntu specific issue, but this is the problem I have with the recent set of distros from Debian and Ubuntu (including Kubuntu's installer.)
Mouse clicks getting lost
I recently switched to the Conexus Credit Union here in Regina, Canada.
I've used online banking for years, but Conexus is the first bank to require a cookie that they set into my browser. Setting the cookie is a special registration process that asks you to answer one of the "secret questions" that you set up when you enable the online banking services for your account.
The net result is that you can't even try to log in with a computer or device that hasn't been "registered" by answering such a question. It may not be full two-factor authentication, but it's a heck of a lot better than the account number/password combination that every other bank I've ever dealt with uses.
It's the next-best thing to real two-factor authentication with a hardware dongle or id-code sheet such as used by the German banks described in the article.
As to bank liability: I agree with the German courts. No matter how many times you warn people, no matter how clearly you explain the risks, there will always be a few people who don't read the warnings, ignore the warnings, or otherwise compromise their own security. As long as the bank has not been leaving an insecure protocol or technology in place that they knew (or should have known) could be breached, it's the consumer's own damned fault.
What's next? A cell phone wielding driver suing the cell phone maker for damages because they got in a car accident despite it being illegal to use a cell phone while driving in their jurisdiction?
No matter whether you're dealing with antibiotics, pesticides, herbicides, or natural predators, life will always evolve to survive.
We all know this. The scientists. The chemists. The engineers. The pharmacorps. The pesticide and herbicide companies.
Hell, Monsanto even gene-engineers such resistance into their tainted products.
But the public doesn't want to accept the truth: we're all on borrowed time. All we're doing is leveraging short-term odds for short-term gain, at the price of long term dissolution. So the marketing experts and technology pundits tell them what they want to hear: that we can win the fight in the long term.
We can't, and we won't. Eventually every single antibiotic, pesticide, and herbicide we have will be useless, and the new generations of such products will be so lethal that we won't be able to use them because they're also poisonous to humans.
And then the shit is really gonna hit the fan, big time.
I see your point, though. If they're using the Harmony implementation of the libraries, the question becomes whether the Harmony source is legit.
But that's exactly why I wasn't clear on the issue: GPLv2.
Not LGPLv2.
That means any application using those libraries is required to be released under GPLv2, and I seriously, seriously doubt that many people would be following that restriction because they think of Java as a "free" compiler and don't think about the licensing terms on the libraries.
If the only way the core Java library source is available to the public is under GPLv2, it's effectively useless to most projects. You can't link libraries of GPL code to non-GPL applications!
Bug report filed with bugzilla.gnome.org.
Everyone says "hardware problem."
Why do you think I kept trying to test it on different machines? Had it only been my box, I'd have assumed hardware (and did for many months.) But two other boxes from completely different manufacturers are affected as well. There is nothing in common between the three systems in terms of chipsets, CPU, or I/O devices.
I do plan on filing a bug report. It wasn't until last week that I finally narrowed down the problem to a GTK issue so I'd know where to report the bug.
I had reported the problem last year to Ubuntu, but got no response or progress, and based on it's continued appearance in GTK-based installers and desktops, it clearly hasn't been addressed (i.e. the bug was submitted to the wrong project.)
That's the one frustrating thing about open source. You have to at least do enough debugging to identify which software component is causing the problem before you can even report that there is a problem.
There is a lot more to Java than the runtime engine and it's bytecode format -- like a few million lines of library code. Did they develop a clean room version of that as well?
While the source for those libraries was eventually released by Sun, it's not clear to me what license applies to the library source, and it's definitely not clear that the source was released before Google's work on Android. The issue may be water under the bridge as Sun did open source the vast majority of Java, but it kind of flies in the face of "clean room" claims.
Ubuntu 10.04.2 inherited a GTK problem which has persisted through every release since; it's in the Debian code base as well.
Some random time after logging in to a Gnome session, mouse clicks get lost (usually within 30 seconds to 5 minutes of login.) Not just clicks on menus or windows, but all mouse clicks. KDE, however, works fine. So do the lesser known non-GTK desktops that I've played with.
Unfortunately, the bug surfaces almost immediately in GTK-based installers such as provided by Ubuntu, Kubuntu, and Debian. Which means that even getting an install done requires that you use the text mode installer (which is muy painful.)
At this point the only installation I've found that I can use is Fedora's KDE edition.
On the bright side, it's another year before 10.04.1 drops from the support list and I have to upgrade.
The problem occurs on an ASUS P5QL Pro mobo, my friend's Acer laptop with trackpad, and a buddy's HP laptop with trackpad.
Doesn't anyone test any more?
(And no, despite years of C/C++ programming, I have absolutely no interest in finding and fixing the problem myself. I have other work to do. I'm content with the simple "workaround" of dropping Ubuntu and GTK based systems, particularly as I hate Gnome 3 with a passion.)