I care becuase ssh has agent forwarding, public-key authentication, port tunnelling, and much more. All of this I care about, and use in conjunction with CVS and other things.
The entire user-agent system for HTTP(S) is incredibly crappy compared to what ssh provides.
There are two things, closely related, that could can cause the 1984-style world. One of them, as the article correctly pointed out, would be if technology was too expensive to be within reach of the common citizen; having this would make it so that only large, wealthy organizations such as the government could get their hands on the stuff. This, it seems, we don't have to worry about too much; the free-market Western philosophies seem have to helped keep prices down.
The second, more ominous road to 1984 is centralization. The more things become centralized, the fewer powerful entities are needed to collude and walk us down that road. For the most part, so far, this hasn't been a worry, because we have many competing manufacturers of technology, few large multi-state-government cooperations, and a significant, dispersed group of well-educated, free-thinking geeks.
However, with the collapsing of information technology into a couple of roles (you're well out of the norm if you use the internet for anything than HTTP, HTTPS, POP, IMAP, and SMTP over their standard ports), it becomes easy to pass broad, encompassing laws which attempt to lay control over these few avenues. Even the fact that there is one Internet which everyone is expected to be connected to helps make it easier for many software companies to centrally control their dispersed, previously independent products, by having them talk back to central command in real-time (for operations such as registration, remote-disabling, etc). Furthermore, we have single-authority systems such as DNS, overruled by ICANN, providing another source of woes.
In order to be stalwart against falling down this trap, controlled technological homogeny needs to be resisted, and diverse, competing, preferably open technologies (because they promote diversity and competition by their very nature) need to be promoted. What does this mean practically? In the software world, for instance, it means de-facto assumptions such as everyone having MS Word and Windows. It also means resisting efforts that approach the idea of allowing someone to control, from production to consumer sensory inputs, every step of a media feed.
So yes, it's been quite nice so far, and looking at it the right way, you might think it's going to stay that way. But growing centralization and the existance of large, power, multi-national corporations and corporation-conglomerates makes me wonder if it's really going to be that rosy if we just lean back put our feet up.
For more information, I recommend reading Lawrence Lessig's excellent "The Future of Ideas".
Seriously, when you first read that book (as I have), you first think "Wow, look at these cool hacks Perl can do to simulate OO". However, after you use a language like Python for a while, you see what real OO can do, especially with its recently unified types and metaclasses.
I was a strong Perl programmer for 4 years, but now I use Python, and it'd ridiculous to even try to compare Perl's OO to something like Python's.
This is about contract law and property rights. This is not about privacy. You have no expectation of privacy in a rented car.
I said nothing about privacy. You read too much into what I wrote. I was merely arguing that the idea of ultimately-binding contract is not how the US system of justice works.
I am a libertarian, and one of the strongest advocates of personal liberty you will *ever* find, *anywhere*.
This really isn't a question about personal liberty, as much as it is about the validity of a contract.
That being said, if you sign a contract, and agree to limit your use to specific terms and conditions, expect it to be enforced.
Life is not so simple; it's not all about contracts (yes, I know many libertarians will be shocked). There are many reasons to invalidate contracts, even with both parties signing; one of these reasons is that you can't contract away constitutional rights.
Just remember, this drivers rarely hit walls straight on; if they did, the driver would very likely die from his brain sloshing about in his skull, among other nasty things that happen at extremely high G's. Saying that they hit the walls at 200 mph is a little misleading, since the their velocity in the direction perpendicular to the wall is much less.
Since there are 18 numbers involved, all the author would have to do is have a short program that figures out all possibilities of adding/subtracting those numbers, which is a fairly small number, 2^18=262144. You could point it towards any number, and you are likely to to find the right combination of adding/subtracting.
I can respect your opinion on that. 90% of the time I'm hitting ctrl and a button on the left-hand side of the keyboard, though, I am hitting ctrl-x or ctrl-z, so where it is now is probably a little better than the caps-lock location.
When every tool under the sun is using XML schemas, the House is announcing their support for DTDs.
Jeezus, why would you even consider using Schemas when there is there is Relax-NG, a much better, simply, and based on theory system. Note the author of that document I gave; it's James Clark; if you are using an XML parser, chances are good it was written by him (expat). Heck, there is not even any normative spec for XML-Scheme!
This is true to an extent. Red Hat did essentially "go their own way" in some respects, setting up their own standards for some things. The most notorious of these breaks is, of course, the use of GCC 2.96 instead of 2.95. This caused a lot of controversy, and deservedly so, but it's what they felt they had to do for their distro. They had customers who required the enhancements of 2.96, and so they met those needs. They took a lot of crap for it, too, but they stuck to their guns (and the customers they were serving).
This is exactly the same reasoning that people give for why IE and other Microsoft products have so many bad-standards-wise 'features'. I don't buy it when it's applied to Microsoft producs, and I don't buy it when it's applied to RedHat products.
Let me be clear that am not trying to knock RedHat here, but merely your means of argument.
You've opened my eyes a bit here. I have always been amazed that the USPS was able to charge such a pittance to deliver a hand-addressed envelope anywhere in the country, together with extra measures like return addresses and forwarding. You've now shown me that they certainly aren't making a profit on that part. First class mail is sweet deal.
Excellent to see it come to light in the form of working code, OSS style.
Only the client of Razor is OSS. The author has explicitily stated that the server will not be released under an Open Source license. This is exactly why I'm implementing Pyzor, which is a razor-like system but where both the client and server are released openly under the GPL.
The ccTLDs were an agreement between representatives of various countries and ICANN, in order to split the root namespace according to country, and allow each country a namespace to administer independant of ICANN.
If this is true, then it does grant some validity to the notion that the country pointed to should be in control of said namespace, but it doesn't convince me fully yet.
If the.za ccTLD was administered by someone whose dispute resolution policy was "if it has money, it wins", you would be singing a very different tune.
No I wouldn't, since I know full well that if I didn't like how ICANN was handling its root nameservers, then I could switch to a different root.
What use are country TLDs if the countries' governments are NOT in control? If countries have no control of what goes under their country's TLD, they become meaningless, at which point we shouldn't even have them.
Umm, wrong. The TLD's are currently NOT under individual governmental control, and they obviously aren't useless. The current state of affairs proves your argument to be without merit.
I'm willing to bet that you're no longer making money like this. The 80s are over. Your story is irrelevant.
Perhaps he couldn't make money doing the exact same, thing, but that doesn't mean that as an enterprising Open Source author, he can't figure out another system where he ends up actually selling the software.
That doesn't exactly answer the question, does it moron?
There are two possible inferences you could have pulled from what I said. One is that I don't feed my family (which is vacuously true, and not the intended semantics), while the other is that I don't have a family to feed (unless you count the 1 person family that is myself).
To liken programming to any kind of assembly work is one of the greatest fallacies one can perform.
A better analogy would be an artist who does commercial graphics during the day, but exquisite panaramas at night. It's a more correct, and appealing analogy.
Slashdot Mirror
I care becuase ssh has agent forwarding, public-key authentication, port tunnelling, and much more. All of this I care about, and use in conjunction with CVS and other things.
The entire user-agent system for HTTP(S) is incredibly crappy compared to what ssh provides.
CVS uses ssh which is much more reliable and secure than yet-another-protocol-over-HTTP.
Ugh, how awful. One of the things I love about CVS is that it can run over ssh.
There are two things, closely related, that could can cause the 1984-style world. One of them, as the article correctly pointed out, would be if technology was too expensive to be within reach of the common citizen; having this would make it so that only large, wealthy organizations such as the government could get their hands on the stuff. This, it seems, we don't have to worry about too much; the free-market Western philosophies seem have to helped keep prices down.
The second, more ominous road to 1984 is centralization. The more things become centralized, the fewer powerful entities are needed to collude and walk us down that road. For the most part, so far, this hasn't been a worry, because we have many competing manufacturers of technology, few large multi-state-government cooperations, and a significant, dispersed group of well-educated, free-thinking geeks.
However, with the collapsing of information technology into a couple of roles (you're well out of the norm if you use the internet for anything than HTTP, HTTPS, POP, IMAP, and SMTP over their standard ports), it becomes easy to pass broad, encompassing laws which attempt to lay control over these few avenues. Even the fact that there is one Internet which everyone is expected to be connected to helps make it easier for many software companies to centrally control their dispersed, previously independent products, by having them talk back to central command in real-time (for operations such as registration, remote-disabling, etc). Furthermore, we have single-authority systems such as DNS, overruled by ICANN, providing another source of woes.
In order to be stalwart against falling down this trap, controlled technological homogeny needs to be resisted, and diverse, competing, preferably open technologies (because they promote diversity and competition by their very nature) need to be promoted. What does this mean practically? In the software world, for instance, it means de-facto assumptions such as everyone having MS Word and Windows. It also means resisting efforts that approach the idea of allowing someone to control, from production to consumer sensory inputs, every step of a media feed.
So yes, it's been quite nice so far, and looking at it the right way, you might think it's going to stay that way. But growing centralization and the existance of large, power, multi-national corporations and corporation-conglomerates makes me wonder if it's really going to be that rosy if we just lean back put our feet up.
For more information, I recommend reading Lawrence Lessig's excellent "The Future of Ideas".
Seriously, when you first read that book (as I have), you first think "Wow, look at these cool hacks Perl can do to simulate OO". However, after you use a language like Python for a while, you see what real OO can do, especially with its recently unified types and metaclasses.
I was a strong Perl programmer for 4 years, but now I use Python, and it'd ridiculous to even try to compare Perl's OO to something like Python's.
I said nothing about privacy. You read too much into what I wrote. I was merely arguing that the idea of ultimately-binding contract is not how the US system of justice works.
This really isn't a question about personal liberty, as much as it is about the validity of a contract.
Life is not so simple; it's not all about contracts (yes, I know many libertarians will be shocked). There are many reasons to invalidate contracts, even with both parties signing; one of these reasons is that you can't contract away constitutional rights.
Just remember, this drivers rarely hit walls straight on; if they did, the driver would very likely die from his brain sloshing about in his skull, among other nasty things that happen at extremely high G's. Saying that they hit the walls at 200 mph is a little misleading, since the their velocity in the direction perpendicular to the wall is much less.
Lars, my friend, people are not panicking as much as they are mentally masturbating :) BTW, are you staying in the cornfields this summer?
Since there are 18 numbers involved, all the author would have to do is have a short program that figures out all possibilities of adding/subtracting those numbers, which is a fairly small number, 2^18=262144. You could point it towards any number, and you are likely to to find the right combination of adding/subtracting.
I can respect your opinion on that. 90% of the time I'm hitting ctrl and a button on the left-hand side of the keyboard, though, I am hitting ctrl-x or ctrl-z, so where it is now is probably a little better than the caps-lock location.
Jeezus, why would you even consider using Schemas when there is there is Relax-NG, a much better, simply, and based on theory system. Note the author of that document I gave; it's James Clark; if you are using an XML parser, chances are good it was written by him (expat). Heck, there is not even any normative spec for XML-Scheme!
You obviously don't write C or C++ much (constants are in caps), or Eiffel (class names are in caps).
This is exactly the same reasoning that people give for why IE and other Microsoft products have so many bad-standards-wise 'features'. I don't buy it when it's applied to Microsoft producs, and I don't buy it when it's applied to RedHat products.
Let me be clear that am not trying to knock RedHat here, but merely your means of argument.
You've opened my eyes a bit here. I have always been amazed that the USPS was able to charge such a pittance to deliver a hand-addressed envelope anywhere in the country, together with extra measures like return addresses and forwarding. You've now shown me that they certainly aren't making a profit on that part. First class mail is sweet deal.
You ask a question
and then you answer it. Clearly, why stop when they're doing so well?
Only the client of Razor is OSS. The author has explicitily stated that the server will not be released under an Open Source license. This is exactly why I'm implementing Pyzor, which is a razor-like system but where both the client and server are released openly under the GPL.
Exactly, which is why /bin/true is rock solid, and also approaching 99.9999% perfection.
Why bother, when f u cn rd ths, u cn gt a gd jb n cmptr prgrmmng.
If this is true, then it does grant some validity to the notion that the country pointed to should be in control of said namespace, but it doesn't convince me fully yet.
No I wouldn't, since I know full well that if I didn't like how ICANN was handling its root nameservers, then I could switch to a different root.
My amazon analogy wasn't as clear as the analogy I give in my other comment.
Umm, wrong. The TLD's are currently NOT under individual governmental control, and they obviously aren't useless. The current state of affairs proves your argument to be without merit.
Perhaps he couldn't make money doing the exact same, thing, but that doesn't mean that as an enterprising Open Source author, he can't figure out another system where he ends up actually selling the software.
There are two possible inferences you could have pulled from what I said. One is that I don't feed my family (which is vacuously true, and not the intended semantics), while the other is that I don't have a family to feed (unless you count the 1 person family that is myself).
To liken programming to any kind of assembly work is one of the greatest fallacies one can perform.
A better analogy would be an artist who does commercial graphics during the day, but exquisite panaramas at night. It's a more correct, and appealing analogy.