Unfortunately, you should have read the article closer. You are making his point. I think he's wrong, but you are restating his point (in fact, you have the most consice summary of his article I've seen). He's saying Open Source acts just like Closed Source when it comes time to making a strategic enterprise software decision. His point appears to be that just because it's open source doesn't free you from having to make a good strategic decision, because X years from now the people behind the software might disappear for financial reasons. I think that he's wrong in his assertion that if a company fails while providing commercial support for Open Source, that means the product goes away. However, that's a different issue.
What you see as the flaw in his article is the point of his article. His whole point, is that Open Source isn't a magic bullet that means things are going to go well.
Nope, anyone can request your SSN, and you can refuse to give it to anyone. Anyone can refuse you service based on a lack of you disclosing it.
The Federal Law that covers this is the 1974 Privacy Act (I might have the year wrong, it's the last major update to the privacy act since it was enacted in the 1930's when the SSA was created).
The Federal Gov't can't even require that you give it for an essetial services or rights. They can for priviledges (including a drivers license). I also believe no gov't agency who receives Federal funding can use it as an identifier.
I believe the IRS can require you to give it to them. However, they can't force you to have one. In fact, it's considered descrimination for any employer who refuses to hire you on the grounds that you don't have an SSN (INS has to love that one). You end up paying into all of the taxes, and your employer has to file all of your tax records special, but it can be done. You can not have an SSN for pretty much your whole life. However, it makes everything significantly more difficult.
Go search around for people who've lived without an SSN. There are several websites that document the trials and tribulations of doing it. You can file for some sort of "Objector" status. The SSA site linked to above mentions it if you look thru enough of the FAQ. They had a story on Slashdot several years ago who lived on the PA/NY border who documented all of it.
I believe this is the web page of the story. He links to several sites that will get you the proper keywords for Google.
First, I'm fairly sure Dan Rather didn't lie. He was absolutely wrong, but that's different then willfully telling something you know to be false. Dan Rather believed the story he'd been given, and errantly trusted the people who "verified" and "autheniticated" the documents. Dan Rather I'm fairly sure doesn't have the expertise or skills necessary to have realized the lie that happened. Dan might have been duped because he wanted to believe (for which you can fault him to no end, and I'll not argue). However, I have absolutely no doubt that Dan Rather at no point, knew it wasn't true and continued to report upon it. He stubbornly held on, because he trusted people he shouldn't have. You can even accuse him refusing to accept reality when it was put in front of him. However, that's still semantically a different deal then flat out lying. For all the bad things I've thought about Dan Rather at various points, calling him a liar never was one of them. (Biased, stupid, bumpkin being among the pot shots I'd take at him).
Second, you're looking at the situation all wrong. I've been on the wrong end of a collection agency's phone calls, just becuase I got some deadbeats old phone number. I gave them the same advice:
Just because you deal with liars all day, doesn't mean that I'm not telling you the truth. You are making harassing phone calls to a completely innocent person. You're harrasing me, and that's against Federal Law. Let's turn this around, I'm calling you to speak with John Doe, he owes me money. "But I'm not John Doe, John Doe doesn't live here you have the wrong number". Well that's what anyone who is getting collected from will say. So I got harrassing phone calls all the time (at times that were when I was sleeping because I live a non-standard schedule, despite Federal Laws that should have protected me from that). In the end, it's what finally got me to just give up my land line. I had no use for it, and having collection agencys calling me wans't working out. The best part, is that collection agencys can't call cell phones. They can't do anything that could cost you more money. So no collect calls, and no cell phones.
Stop and think about the completely honest person completely telling you the truth. They'd give you the indiginate response of: "That person doesn't live here, stop calling me". Just like someone who tells a wild tale about catching an identity thief says: "You can believe me or not, but it still happened". Short of him getting a notarized copy of a police report (all of which would be trivial to fake, how precisely would he prove it to you?).
I still remember you as the irritating fellow who accused me of being an Microsoft Shill (your nickname is memorable, if only because I have 3 of the 4 editions of that book), because I pointed out that a couple of books by "Microsoft Press" had some really good advice. "Code Complete", and "Writing Solid Code" are still pretty damn good books even after all this time (Haven't read the second edition of "Code Complete"). Despite the fact that I gave up using Microsoft products 7-8 years ago, you were quite insistant that I had to be a Microsoft Astroturf'er, and Shill. Even when my posting history is fairly clear I'm not. So go ahead, be a Doubting Thomas, however, I know for an absolute fact, you've jumped to wrong conclusions, and then stuck to them long after it was obvious to anyone aware of the details you were completely wrong. How very Dan Rather like of you...
"I for one welcome our new overloads", I first heard on the Simpsons, it was said in season 4 or 5 by the character "Kent Brockman" during a news broadcast. I forget the exact reference.
The underpants thing, is from South Park. I've never seen it, but I'm your reference to "Underpants Gnomes" is familiar.
"In Soviet Russia", is from Yakov Smirnov. I first heard it said on Night Court (a pretty funny show in it's day). However, he was a standup comedian, so it might have been a part of his act before that.
Those might not be the original sources, but they are the cultural references I remember it from.
It's my understanding that they can't re-copyright the actual text. However, they can copyright the presentation, line editting, page breaks and whatnot. So you could take the actual text from them, you couldn't take the text in that presentation from them.
Oddly enough, your subject still applies. That's not how the law works. You are incorrect. You have bought into the "viral" aspect of the GPL that Microsoft and others keep saying.
If your code is a derivative of GPL'ed code, and you do something not allowed by the GPL, you are a copyright infringer. Absolutely nothing about the GPL compels anyone to license there code in any way. That's just the easiest way to resolve the problem. Hence why most people do it.
Instead, it makes you subject to civil law (at least in the US districts), at which point, you'll have a judgement against you. You'll probably have to stop using the GPL'ed code. You'll have to make a best effort to destroy/collect all the copies of the works you've illegally distributes, and possibly pay some sort of resitution/punative damages to the copyright holder who sued you. One thing the GPL'ed work holder could ask the court to order is that you release the code under the GPL. However, I doubt that any court would do that, unless it was an egregious case. The copyright holder has a lot of rights. However, his rights don't extend to compel me to give up the right to pick my own license for my own works.
It's not out of the realm of possibility that the GPL holder could get screwed and be compelled to release their work under a different license. The court could decide that the derivative work is too valuable to the public, and it's in the best interest for you to re-license said project to the infringers under different terms then the GPL. So that the copyright holders are entitled to a licensing fee under terms that aren't the GPL. It's a court. The judge is king of the kingdom there. There is precedent for that sort of thing. I believe in a case involving photography and the digitial rights. It was on slashdot 4-5 years ago. It involved National Geographic putting out CD's that included images. Essentially the judge dictated that they would come to a new licensing agreement that neither of them wanted, because it was in the best interest of the public for the images to be available digitally.
One way of settling the case without going to court (and hence is really cheap) is to release the derivative work's source code in machine readable, and perferred form under a GPL compatible license (any number of these, including the GPL and the MIT-X license).
I interpreted "Bullshit, they are free to make their own icons" as "You don't know what free is, or at the very least you are using the wrong definition of free".
'If your only definition of free is "anyone can do anything"'
Nope. My definition of free generally extends to be "You don't have to ask my permission individually to clear your activity with me". I don't have to ask the government "Am I allowed to say this?". Yep, I have freedom of speech. I don't have to ask the government "Can I print this in a public newspaper", that's pretty much freedom of the press. Lather, rinse, repeat for other freedoms you want to check.
"Can I please use your icons in my project?", sure don't sound like "Free" to me. Not when it comes to a "Copyright license". Free has a special meaning in that context. Just like gravity has a special meaning in science that is nearly unrelated to its usage in common English sentences. The word you are looking for is "Allowed", not "Free" (as the adjective, "Free" is the correct legal expression in "Free for Non-Commercial Use").
Free for non-commercial use means that it's free for non-commercial use. It doesn't stop being free for non-commercial use just because you want to sell it.
First, I don't want to sell anything. However, I completely understand exactly why Debian uses the standards they do for what is "Free". They are crazy about a lot of things, but at least when they distribute something, I know there's a very low probability that I can get in trouble for doing absolutely anything I want with that source code (I could get into GPL trouble with the binaries, but that's about the worst of it). With *BSD, just don't remove any copyrights, and don't remove warnings about having no Warrantee if I remember correctly.
Yes it is free for non-comercial use. However, that is a major deterrant for people who aren't selling a damn thing. It'd a deterrant for RedHat , it's a deterrant for Debian, it's a deterrant for *BSD. The last two aren't really commercially driven. Heck, even RedHat only wants you to pay for the support, not the source or the binaries.
It's a deterrant for people who don't want to pay a laywer to figure out what the hell the legal definition of "Non-Commercial use" is. I'm fairly confident that the semantics of "Non-Commercial use" are something that can't accurately be predicted in advance. It's a judgement made by a judge in a court of law if there is a dispute. I can't afford to risk those types of costs (if I use the icons on my desktop at work, does that constitute "Commercial Use", if I am using them on a website that promotes someone elses product is that "Commercial Use", but I don't sell anything on the site and am in no way affiliated with the products?). What if I embed it in a project that is GPL'ed, but eventually start a consulting business doing support for said project? Is that "Commercial Use"? It's a nasty little legal area, that while there are good rules of thumb, until you have a judgement from a judge in that jursidiction, you won't know.
This is why it's best to avoid every using someone elses work. It's hard and expensive to tell if something is a derived work. It's hard and expensive to tell if this is an infringement of a Trademark. It's hard and expensive to tell if this is Commerical Use. It's hard to tell if this is "Fair Use" under copyright. If you can avoid those things, especially if you are a big legal entitity, you are best to do it. It's why I stay with relatively simple non-judgemental things when I do stuff. Absolutely no GPL software is linked with my stuff at work. No LGPL'ed software. There are no questions about who violated what then. There are no questions about if I am distributed binaries. It's all black and white. We aren't going to ever distribute our software. We use the software internally to provide a service. However, I won't be shocked if someone asks us to escrow the source, or
I can see how difficult it is for *all these people* to contact me - man, how could I ever manage the time to talk to them all? There are clearly tens of people who are selling Linux commercially.
RedHat, I know has a policy that essentially everything they include in their base distro *MUST* be a certain type of free, with only two exceptions. The RedHat Logos, and some Anaconda images files (I'd have to double check anaconda package name, but essentially it's some images they used during the install process).
Which means, that they couldn't include your images, because the people who get it from them, don't have the same rights RedHat did. It's very similar to the policy Debian has. RedHat does include some special stuff on the extra disks that come with commerical distributions.
Debian has similar provisions. I'm fairly sure Not for Commercial use doesn't pass the Debian standards for "Free" (some clever response will probably include which section of the Debian definition of Free it doesn't meet). So, no as a matter of fact, a number of major distributions couldn't use your icons, if they want to follow their own rules about licensing (I'm doubtful they'll decide the icons are so pretty they'll give up their guiding princepals). I'm not sure if Suse/Novell, Mandrake or Connectiva (didn't they just merge w/ Mandrake?) have similar rules.
Bullshit. They're perfectly free to make their own icons.
You are using different standards of freedom from the parent poster, and then saying he doesn't understand the definition of "freedom". It's a silly argument to make. His claim is that if Microsoft renamed their EULA to be the "Freedom 'R' Us License', it'd still hardly meet the common meaning of the "Free" when as an adjective to a copyright license name. He's correct in saying that releasing it under a "Non-Commercial Use" license isn't meeting nearly anyones definition of free (the FSF's, the BSD, the Debian, or the OSI criterion for "free"). Sure your still free to create your own work. Using your logic, Microsoft can legitimately claim "Freedom 'R' Us License" isn't doublespeak, becase we are free to re-write compatible software from scratch. Doesn't hold water with me at least.
Your confusing, x86-64 (what non-chip vendors generally refer to it as) and IA64. EMT64 I believe is the Intel name for it. AMD64 is obviously the AMD name for it. I believe it has also been referred to as IA32E by Intel (IA32 is a name they use to refer to the x86 ISA).. If you read the "others" story, and the pages it links to from you own post you'd see that.
x86-64 is a natural extension of x86 to 64 bits (just like 386 turned the x86 family into 32-bit). IA64 if the name used for Itanimum (or Itanic if you are a "The Register" reader). It is completely different in nearly every way from x86. It was Intel's clean break from their old architecture. It was a joint venture started by Intel and HP in the early 90's. I remember the hype back in '94 that it was the future, and would be so incredibly cool. It was Intel's move into SPARC/MIPS/Alpha/etc quality server chips. Little did they know, that their own engineers and sales force would make economies of scale work out so that the horrific x86 architecture would end up being cost effective, and essentially end all of the other chip lines except SPARC the Itanic was supposed to compete with.
Honest to goodness pre-emptive multi-tasking? Hmmm, I might have to look it up. I thought in the 50's, batch processing, partitioning, and maybe co-operative multitasking was pretty much all there was. Then again, I might be discussing "shipping commercial systems", while you are discussing "state of the art research projects".
if one thread is in a wait state waiting on disc activity, then the CPU should jump threads
Your using the wrong word in there. Where you use the word "thread", you should be using the work "process" in UNIX parlance. What you are describing is "multi-tasking" in roughly a generic sense. It wasn't invented with the i386, try sometime in the 1960's (I'd have to crack out an OS book to be sure of the date).
Threads are different then processes.
Fundamentally, the standard definition of a thread is: "Seperate control of CPU, with the same VM space". Essentially, it's two processes who have precisely the same memory mapped. (I'm sure there are lots of details I just glossed over, but essentially, that's it). On thing this leads to is blowing the L1 cache if you have several threads interacting on the same pieces of memory.
Threads have lots of performance problems, but they also greatly simplify programming as you pay a lot less attention to the "shared memory" aspect of it. You add some locking, and then essentially multiple threads of execution can work on the same bits of memory.
However, you can do roughly what you described at the process level. Apache used to have a significant patch for "State Threads", that used various OS primitives to tell if an OS call would be blocking or not. If it wasn't going to be, it would make the call. If it was, it'd move on and see if there was more interesting work it could do rather then blocking.
Threads a huge performance win, because any time you have multiple independent tasks they can be performed in parallel assuming you have enough CPU units. The problem is most computer problems have areas where there are separate areas where they can work on, and then they have other areas where they have to sync up and work serially thru some portions. At points, it's the overhead of spawning threads, and syncing is a losing proposition. However for a lot of things, it's the obvious way to speed up performance (GUI applications, it's nice to have on thread that works at keeping the screen up dated, while another is fetching data to display on the screen, thus avoiding applications that feel non-responsive because the window won't refresh for long periods of time while data is being fetched).
This sounds roughly like, they are adding hardware support for threading just like the TLB hardware got added to make VM run at a sane speed. It's fundamentally we have this cool stuff we do in software, the sucks speedwise becuase the hardware is bad at X.
Use a decent tar implementation. GNU tar handles block special devices just fine. It archives the block special devices, not the data you get if you open the contents of the device and read from it.
Yes and no. In the context of a phone call, that doesn't make a lot of sense. I'd have to care about my private key, which I'd need some way to put into a phone in order to secure the connection. (Which in my personal case means, I couldn't talk with my bank if I wasn't at my home because I ain't caring my private key for my bank with me all the time, and I'm surely not using my standard e-mail key for it, if my e-mail key gets broken that's really bad, and could potentially be embarrasing, if my bank account gets compromised, I could lose my house).
In a mail setting that makes a lot more sense. Althought now you've just changed the phishers methodology. Now instead they'll write trojans that instead of poisioning your DNS, they'll hack your mail client so that when your secret key gets out in the open it sucks it out of memory and posts it to a secret IRC channel with all of the personal info it can suck off of your mail client. Or they'll send you cipher text that has been encrypted with your public key and ask you to encrypt it with your private key and respond (there's an attack based on that which allows the extraction of the private key, I forget which encryption scheme it was).
The problem is no matter what the scheme is, it's a small matter of social engineering that will overcome any technical sophistication put into the system. The phishers just have to convince you to do something silly once, and you are in trouble.
Obviously, I'd prefer that the bank tell me something out of my personal file before I give them any information. However, if they dial the wrong number (or have been convinced to dial the wrong number), I certainly wouldn't want them to give out any secret information about me to strangers before I authenticate with them (along with the fact, that a lot of the "secret" information is given to so many places that breaking into any one of them would give you access to convince me that you had my secret information from them, unless it's a unique password, unlike my SSN, Mothers maiden name, or the last school I graduated from). Even then, it's subject to a replay attack. If you tell a phisher the secret information, they can now call me and tell me exactly the same secret information.
He's not talking about security monitoring. He's talking about: "This machine is about to run out of disk space, someone should really fix it before it actually does.", "This machine isn't running Apache, and it should be". This machine isn't responding to ping and it should be. I run Nagios (the new name of NetSaint), and it's wonderful for this.
He's talking about day to day alerts to notify if a machine's services aren't working when they should be. That'd be SNMP alerts, MRTG, something akin to Nagios, NetSaint, BigBrother as an answer. Not sure what works with Windows, as I don't do much with them.
Finally, anyone worth their salt can secure a Windows machine. I can't, but that's by virtue of not running a Window's machine since 98 was state of the art, but I know lots of security consious people who can and do run Windows on public internet IP's that can manage to avoid all of the major problems that hit a lot of IT shops.
Curious, most of the geeks I know want to use the oldest most reliable and supported version of the software they can find in production.
Heck, we run several things well past their Vender EOL because it was incredibly stable and upgrading had serious transition costs. We practice the transitions over, and over again testing each change. To ensure that everything will go smoothly. Lack of support for the stable system be damned.
Sure on my desktop, I've got some shiney new stuff. On my servers. Not a chance, old reliable every last time.
Voting. I certainly agree with you, walking away with a publically verifiable receipt is a bad idea. I've always heard because you could sell your vote.
Patents. Patents are good. However, the system as currently construction is just dumb. You shouldn't be able to patent: X has been done for 20 years, I'm now automating X with a computer. No one else can automate said task with a computer. Especially not for the ridiculously long time of 20 years in the current business environment. It's dumb. The fact that you can patent things without having a working one is silly. You want to patent something, you should have to get one working first. The people we have evaluating "novel and non-obvious" are not doing their job terribly well. They have a vested financial interest in approving patents (the fees go up when you say yes, the current rules don't allow long enough for the patent researchers enough time, and finally working for the patent office is very low paying job so it doesn't attract the best qualified people to do the evaluation).
DRM. Hmmm, I kinda sorta agree with you (I write code for a living, all of it is in house, so piracy isn't really a problem for us, however, if I sold shareware, I would feel your pain). I have several problems with current people in favor of DRM. One, media shifting is fair use. Timeshifting, fair use. When I scratch a CD, if I sent in the unreadable one, you owe me new media for a reasonable cost of shipping and materials (if I have a VHS moving that's unplayable, you owe me one of them, or a DVD. If the DVD is a completely stripped versions with none of the extras that currently come on DVD's, I'm fine with that, but I want the content I paid for materials and a small fee). I already paid for the right to have the materials once. I don't owe you for the content for the second time. If that means up front, I'm willing to accomadate that.
However, I would note, that it is in the public interest for almost everything said to be true, and fairly widely accepted to be true, especially by the founding fathers of this country (I'm in the US). While you might disagree with them, feeling that it's against your personal opinion thus it's rude and arrogant seems well a little bit "pot, kettle, black". It would be best of the public if every idea was free for everyone to use. It would be best, if the science and arts were available to the public immediatly without copyright protection. It would be best for the public if they could ensure that there was no hanky panky going on with the voting machines. However, there would be no incentive for people to dream up new ideas, no incentive for artists (like yourself) to create new content. There would be less incentive for voting machine builders if they had to give up their source code and hardware designs. So the gov't did things that in the short term aren't in the public interest, so look after the long term public interest. The problem with the "Information wants to be free people", is that they have a very immediate "public interest" goal. The gov't is supposed to look after the long term "public interest".
In other words, McHenry was doing his job. Namely, the checking of spelling, grammar, and text flow, on the generally rational basis that a single person cannot reasonably be expected to be able to verify the truth, falsity, or indeterminacy of every fact in the encyclopedia.
This argument sounds fundamentally flawed to me. Here, lets apply it to the person in charge of Mac OS X at Apple (I'll refer to him as "Bob"). We could use MS Office, or the guy in charge of the kernel at RedHat, it makes no difference.
In order words, Bob was doing his job. Namely, the checking of internal consistancy of the UI, graphics, artwork, and color scheme, on the general rational basis that a single person cannot reasonable be expected to be able to verify that every single line of code in OS X is bug free in a source code base as large Mac OS X.
No, Bob's job at some point is to institute and manage a process by which OS X shipps with as few bugs as possible. His job is not soley to ensure that the software ships conforms the the Apple's HIG. Bob can't possibly do all the work of shipping a bug free OSX.
Furthermore, I'll poing out that for a work as large as Britannica, no single person could possibly be expected to check the spelling, grammer or text flow of such a document. He must oversee other people who do that. Otherwise one editor could probably only ship one or two editions of Britannica in a lifetime. I'm fairly sure Britannica has released more then that in the last 20 years.
Just like I expect him to institute and manage a policy to ensure that the spelling and grammer are well done in Britannica, I also expect him to manage fact checking too! It should be seen as at least as important in what is considered an authoratative sources of information. The Editor in Chief is the person with the final say so on if the books are ready to ship. I'm fairly confident he should use plenty of other criteria besides just the presentation of the text.
(You might know this, but others reading this thread might not).
Use LVM snapshots. You dedicate some freespace out of an LVM pool to an LVM snapshot. If a block of the filesystem gets written to, the original block gets copied to the LVM snapshot. The more of the blocks that get written to while the snapshot is held open, the more space you have to dedicate to it.
In the end, if you have twice the disk space, then you can hold the snapshot open indefinitely (otherwise the snapshot fails once change more unique blocks then the snapshot had dedicated for it). You can write the the same block 100 times and it only takes one block on the snapshot device. You then run your backups from the snapshot, it tries to read the original blocks from the raw device. If they have changed, it gets them from the snapshot device. I've played around with this with LVM in 2.4, but not with the LVM2 stuff in the 2.6 kernel.
LVM is pretty flexible. If ext3 would just get the online re-sizing done, I'd be able to do online partition resizing out of the box (I don't trust ReiserFS from RedHat, SuSe ship it out of the box, but RedHat doesn't appear to be dedicating the kinds of resources to it to make me happy). It'd be a thing of beauty once that goes into the mainstream kernel.
Actually, the appointment of electors is a grant of authority from the federal governmennt (contrary to what you were probably taught in high school civics, that it all flows from state to fed) to the state *legislatures*, not to the states.
The sad part is my civics class never got that detailed. However, your point is interesting. I'm shocked that the state legislatures can do something unconstitutional according the state. I'm fairly surprised the state constitution isn't considered a matter of state law. I would have accepted the argument better if they said, that the state legislature wasn't acting on behalf of the state, but is merely the group of people the Federal Gov't appointed to make a decision on the matter. However, I'm not up on the finer points of my constitutional law. I've read it enough times to know when people are expousing nonsense on slashdot about what your constitutional rights are, but not enough to argue with you successfully (unless I miss my guess).
That was really more of a large/small state issue than a free/slave state issue.
The possession of a gun might be of questionable constitutinality. However, a strict reading of the words of the constitution, it's fairly obvious that the who gets to vote is completely up to the state, with the added additions of the handful of amendments that mention voting (XV, XVII, XIX, XXIV, XXVI).
The fact that it constitution doesn't guarantee a right to vote is blantantly obvious from the need for amendments XV, XIX (this one mentions it in passing), XXIV, XXVI. There are a couple of other sections. Heck, there is nothing that says the Electoral college voters have to be picked by the public. As far as I can tell, it is constitutionally legal for the Electoral college voter to be picked by the governor of a state. (It's probably against most of their state constitutions, but not against the Federal constitution).
The constitution specifically doesn't grant the authority to choose who is allowed to vote to the Federal Gov't, which means it is left to the state government.
There is nothing in the Constitution that would limit Nebraska from allowing 16 year olds to vote. There is nothing limiting the rights of the states to let aliens (non-citizens) to vote.
Go get an actual copy of the Constitution and read it some time. It is intentionally very, very silent on who gets to vote. If nothing else, if they didn't, they'd have to be very careful to specify jursdictions, and local gov't voting rights, and all sorts of other nonsense that has no business being in the Constitution. If they weren't careful, I'd end up with the constitutional right to vote in all 50 states during the presidential election (if the states didn't have authority to limit my right to vote, that's precisely what would happen, it's state law that says I have to be a resident of the state to vote in that state). It's why they have 4 amendments about specific things the states can't use to limit your right to vote based upon. Until one that says, "criminal history" can't be used as criteria on your right to vote, it sure is well within the rights of the states to limit them by such criteria. At least if one reads the words on the paper, and not using case history, or intent of the framers.
By the way, there is an interesting theory, that the Electoral college is one of the last vestiges of slavery left in this country. That slave holding states wouldn't agree to anything else. Because the electoral college gave they power in proportion of the number of slaves in the state. In fact, Thomas Jefferson wouldn't have been elected President if the slave population wasn't factored into the electoral college (slaves counted as 3/5th's a person when giving out electoral votes).
Oh, sorry, I meant that as a compliment. If that wasn't obvious the wording was poor. I meant that he does accomplish what most people would deem impossible when he started. I recognize that as a wonderful thing.
Kirby
Re:Info on what exactly SHA-1 is ...
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SHA-1 Broken
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They didn't want to make DES stronger, they wanted to keep "Differential Power" attacks secret. The problem with the old S-box and 112-bit key, was that it made a specific type of attack the NSA was regularly, more obvious and easier to find.
From what I've read, it was less to make DES stronger, and more that Differential Power attacks secret. They had National Security implications.
it's good to see that RMS has lawyal and intelligent people arround, many times people just discards rms's words, just because it's him saying it, and the enormous campaign against him over the last years has convinced many people into looking at him like a crazy zealot, and just not hearing to what he has to say. Maybe having other people saying some things to the media would be a smart move.
But RMS is a crazy zealot. He is! He is! He is! However, he happens to be right about a lot of things. He happens to have an incredible drive to accomplish what any idiot could have seen was impossible when he started.
Look sometime at some of the things that RMS has actually said. The scary part is he's coming a bit closer to reality in a lot of aspects. One of my personal favorites being that he didn't think anyone had a right to privacy in terms of their e-mail, if they wanted help resolving a technical problem. He had some long speech/manifest that is still out on gnu.org where he mentions that as a blurb (in a speech given in the early 80's, I want to say 1984).
He's since changed his personal opinion. He used to think that it was great that anyone could log into any machine as him. His account was always, rms, and he had a blank password, or some other small set of fixed strings he used for a very long time. That way anyone could just log in as him on any machine he was given access to.
At one point, he defended spam, and ironically only objected when he realized that the mail had so many to: and cc: addresses that it overflowed the internal buffers in the mail software and the addresses flowed to be the start of the message.
The sad part, is that a lot of his original ideals are pretty darned "communistic". In the naive communism sense (communism might work if everyone was as good natured as RMS used to believe they were, human nature is what makes communism fail, capitalism works out better because it takes advantage precisely of the things that cause communism to fail).
Now, RMS as of right now, is kinda well out there. He's crazy nuts on a number of topics. That doesn't mean a lot of what he does accomplish isn't good for me, or that I don't appreciate it.
It's my understanding that Sir Issaic Newton, was well, downright obsessed with some things, we'd find incredibly strange for a man who independently invented Calculas, devised a system of physical princepals was the fundamental model for 300 years before we started to find flaws in it (and still accurately describes anything normal people deal with on a daily basis). He did all of the fundamental work in optics and probably a bunch of other areas I'm forgetting.
Now, crazy things he did most people don't know about:
Can you differentiate between Indigo from Blue or Purple? Newton was obsessed with numerology. So the sepectrum had to have 7 colors (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).
I believe he spent an immense amount of time calculating until the End of the World. He accurately figured out the number of seconds until the world ended (I forget when it is, sometime in the 2060's if I remember correctly). That was when all the really nasty stuff from Revelations out of the Bible was going to happen. He was big into prophecy, and predicting the future.
Newton was seriously pious and religious. I believe he was proud on his death bed that he died a virgin.
I can't site all the infomation, but it's told to me by a guy who was a serious history buff, and loves physics. I know I've seen several times (specifically on the story on/. about one of the original copies of Newtons Physics books being sold, that Newton wrote roughly 7 Million words in his life, only about a million of them on science or mathematics, most of the rest were on other topics most people don't realize he spent most of his life).
However a quick search came up with this interesting link:
Server: Something that actively listens all the time on a port.
A VoIP phone would definitly qualify as that (at least if you accept incoming phone calls). An e-mail client, does not listen on any ports (at least not any I've ever heard of). They might have a connection they established that exists for a long time. But at no point in time does any sane e-mail client issue:
listen(...); ... accept(... );
However, any number of SMTP, IMAP and POP3 servers do that as part of normal operations.
You might see an FTP client listen on a port in one of the two modes (Passive or non-Passive, I can't remember which). However, that is the data connection, not the control connection.
Slashdot Mirror
What you see as the flaw in his article is the point of his article. His whole point, is that Open Source isn't a magic bullet that means things are going to go well.
Kirby
The Federal Law that covers this is the 1974 Privacy Act (I might have the year wrong, it's the last major update to the privacy act since it was enacted in the 1930's when the SSA was created).
The Federal Gov't can't even require that you give it for an essetial services or rights. They can for priviledges (including a drivers license). I also believe no gov't agency who receives Federal funding can use it as an identifier.
I believe the IRS can require you to give it to them. However, they can't force you to have one. In fact, it's considered descrimination for any employer who refuses to hire you on the grounds that you don't have an SSN (INS has to love that one). You end up paying into all of the taxes, and your employer has to file all of your tax records special, but it can be done. You can not have an SSN for pretty much your whole life. However, it makes everything significantly more difficult.
Go search around for people who've lived without an SSN. There are several websites that document the trials and tribulations of doing it. You can file for some sort of "Objector" status. The SSA site linked to above mentions it if you look thru enough of the FAQ. They had a story on Slashdot several years ago who lived on the PA/NY border who documented all of it.
I believe this is the web page of the story. He links to several sites that will get you the proper keywords for Google.
Kirby
Second, you're looking at the situation all wrong. I've been on the wrong end of a collection agency's phone calls, just becuase I got some deadbeats old phone number. I gave them the same advice:
Just because you deal with liars all day, doesn't mean that I'm not telling you the truth. You are making harassing phone calls to a completely innocent person. You're harrasing me, and that's against Federal Law. Let's turn this around, I'm calling you to speak with John Doe, he owes me money. "But I'm not John Doe, John Doe doesn't live here you have the wrong number". Well that's what anyone who is getting collected from will say. So I got harrassing phone calls all the time (at times that were when I was sleeping because I live a non-standard schedule, despite Federal Laws that should have protected me from that). In the end, it's what finally got me to just give up my land line. I had no use for it, and having collection agencys calling me wans't working out. The best part, is that collection agencys can't call cell phones. They can't do anything that could cost you more money. So no collect calls, and no cell phones.
Stop and think about the completely honest person completely telling you the truth. They'd give you the indiginate response of: "That person doesn't live here, stop calling me". Just like someone who tells a wild tale about catching an identity thief says: "You can believe me or not, but it still happened". Short of him getting a notarized copy of a police report (all of which would be trivial to fake, how precisely would he prove it to you?).
I still remember you as the irritating fellow who accused me of being an Microsoft Shill (your nickname is memorable, if only because I have 3 of the 4 editions of that book), because I pointed out that a couple of books by "Microsoft Press" had some really good advice. "Code Complete", and "Writing Solid Code" are still pretty damn good books even after all this time (Haven't read the second edition of "Code Complete"). Despite the fact that I gave up using Microsoft products 7-8 years ago, you were quite insistant that I had to be a Microsoft Astroturf'er, and Shill. Even when my posting history is fairly clear I'm not. So go ahead, be a Doubting Thomas, however, I know for an absolute fact, you've jumped to wrong conclusions, and then stuck to them long after it was obvious to anyone aware of the details you were completely wrong. How very Dan Rather like of you...
Kirby
The underpants thing, is from South Park. I've never seen it, but I'm your reference to "Underpants Gnomes" is familiar.
"In Soviet Russia", is from Yakov Smirnov. I first heard it said on Night Court (a pretty funny show in it's day). However, he was a standup comedian, so it might have been a part of his act before that.
Those might not be the original sources, but they are the cultural references I remember it from.
Kirby
FAQ entry on books with updated copyright dates
So there you go.
It's my understanding that they can't re-copyright the actual text. However, they can copyright the presentation, line editting, page breaks and whatnot. So you could take the actual text from them, you couldn't take the text in that presentation from them.
Fun huh?.
Kirby
If your code is a derivative of GPL'ed code, and you do something not allowed by the GPL, you are a copyright infringer. Absolutely nothing about the GPL compels anyone to license there code in any way. That's just the easiest way to resolve the problem. Hence why most people do it.
Instead, it makes you subject to civil law (at least in the US districts), at which point, you'll have a judgement against you. You'll probably have to stop using the GPL'ed code. You'll have to make a best effort to destroy/collect all the copies of the works you've illegally distributes, and possibly pay some sort of resitution/punative damages to the copyright holder who sued you. One thing the GPL'ed work holder could ask the court to order is that you release the code under the GPL. However, I doubt that any court would do that, unless it was an egregious case. The copyright holder has a lot of rights. However, his rights don't extend to compel me to give up the right to pick my own license for my own works.
It's not out of the realm of possibility that the GPL holder could get screwed and be compelled to release their work under a different license. The court could decide that the derivative work is too valuable to the public, and it's in the best interest for you to re-license said project to the infringers under different terms then the GPL. So that the copyright holders are entitled to a licensing fee under terms that aren't the GPL. It's a court. The judge is king of the kingdom there. There is precedent for that sort of thing. I believe in a case involving photography and the digitial rights. It was on slashdot 4-5 years ago. It involved National Geographic putting out CD's that included images. Essentially the judge dictated that they would come to a new licensing agreement that neither of them wanted, because it was in the best interest of the public for the images to be available digitally.
One way of settling the case without going to court (and hence is really cheap) is to release the derivative work's source code in machine readable, and perferred form under a GPL compatible license (any number of these, including the GPL and the MIT-X license).
Kirby
'If your only definition of free is "anyone can do anything"'
Nope. My definition of free generally extends to be "You don't have to ask my permission individually to clear your activity with me". I don't have to ask the government "Am I allowed to say this?". Yep, I have freedom of speech. I don't have to ask the government "Can I print this in a public newspaper", that's pretty much freedom of the press. Lather, rinse, repeat for other freedoms you want to check.
"Can I please use your icons in my project?", sure don't sound like "Free" to me. Not when it comes to a "Copyright license". Free has a special meaning in that context. Just like gravity has a special meaning in science that is nearly unrelated to its usage in common English sentences. The word you are looking for is "Allowed", not "Free" (as the adjective, "Free" is the correct legal expression in "Free for Non-Commercial Use").
First, I don't want to sell anything. However, I completely understand exactly why Debian uses the standards they do for what is "Free". They are crazy about a lot of things, but at least when they distribute something, I know there's a very low probability that I can get in trouble for doing absolutely anything I want with that source code (I could get into GPL trouble with the binaries, but that's about the worst of it). With *BSD, just don't remove any copyrights, and don't remove warnings about having no Warrantee if I remember correctly.
Yes it is free for non-comercial use. However, that is a major deterrant for people who aren't selling a damn thing. It'd a deterrant for RedHat , it's a deterrant for Debian, it's a deterrant for *BSD. The last two aren't really commercially driven. Heck, even RedHat only wants you to pay for the support, not the source or the binaries.
It's a deterrant for people who don't want to pay a laywer to figure out what the hell the legal definition of "Non-Commercial use" is. I'm fairly confident that the semantics of "Non-Commercial use" are something that can't accurately be predicted in advance. It's a judgement made by a judge in a court of law if there is a dispute. I can't afford to risk those types of costs (if I use the icons on my desktop at work, does that constitute "Commercial Use", if I am using them on a website that promotes someone elses product is that "Commercial Use", but I don't sell anything on the site and am in no way affiliated with the products?). What if I embed it in a project that is GPL'ed, but eventually start a consulting business doing support for said project? Is that "Commercial Use"? It's a nasty little legal area, that while there are good rules of thumb, until you have a judgement from a judge in that jursidiction, you won't know.
This is why it's best to avoid every using someone elses work. It's hard and expensive to tell if something is a derived work. It's hard and expensive to tell if this is an infringement of a Trademark. It's hard and expensive to tell if this is Commerical Use. It's hard to tell if this is "Fair Use" under copyright. If you can avoid those things, especially if you are a big legal entitity, you are best to do it. It's why I stay with relatively simple non-judgemental things when I do stuff. Absolutely no GPL software is linked with my stuff at work. No LGPL'ed software. There are no questions about who violated what then. There are no questions about if I am distributed binaries. It's all black and white. We aren't going to ever distribute our software. We use the software internally to provide a service. However, I won't be shocked if someone asks us to escrow the source, or
RedHat, I know has a policy that essentially everything they include in their base distro *MUST* be a certain type of free, with only two exceptions. The RedHat Logos, and some Anaconda images files (I'd have to double check anaconda package name, but essentially it's some images they used during the install process).
Which means, that they couldn't include your images, because the people who get it from them, don't have the same rights RedHat did. It's very similar to the policy Debian has. RedHat does include some special stuff on the extra disks that come with commerical distributions.
Debian has similar provisions. I'm fairly sure Not for Commercial use doesn't pass the Debian standards for "Free" (some clever response will probably include which section of the Debian definition of Free it doesn't meet). So, no as a matter of fact, a number of major distributions couldn't use your icons, if they want to follow their own rules about licensing (I'm doubtful they'll decide the icons are so pretty they'll give up their guiding princepals). I'm not sure if Suse/Novell, Mandrake or Connectiva (didn't they just merge w/ Mandrake?) have similar rules.
You are using different standards of freedom from the parent poster, and then saying he doesn't understand the definition of "freedom". It's a silly argument to make. His claim is that if Microsoft renamed their EULA to be the "Freedom 'R' Us License', it'd still hardly meet the common meaning of the "Free" when as an adjective to a copyright license name. He's correct in saying that releasing it under a "Non-Commercial Use" license isn't meeting nearly anyones definition of free (the FSF's, the BSD, the Debian, or the OSI criterion for "free"). Sure your still free to create your own work. Using your logic, Microsoft can legitimately claim "Freedom 'R' Us License" isn't doublespeak, becase we are free to re-write compatible software from scratch. Doesn't hold water with me at least.Kirby
x86-64 is a natural extension of x86 to 64 bits (just like 386 turned the x86 family into 32-bit). IA64 if the name used for Itanimum (or Itanic if you are a "The Register" reader). It is completely different in nearly every way from x86. It was Intel's clean break from their old architecture. It was a joint venture started by Intel and HP in the early 90's. I remember the hype back in '94 that it was the future, and would be so incredibly cool. It was Intel's move into SPARC/MIPS/Alpha/etc quality server chips. Little did they know, that their own engineers and sales force would make economies of scale work out so that the horrific x86 architecture would end up being cost effective, and essentially end all of the other chip lines except SPARC the Itanic was supposed to compete with.
Kirby
Kirby
Your using the wrong word in there. Where you use the word "thread", you should be using the work "process" in UNIX parlance. What you are describing is "multi-tasking" in roughly a generic sense. It wasn't invented with the i386, try sometime in the 1960's (I'd have to crack out an OS book to be sure of the date).
Threads are different then processes.
Fundamentally, the standard definition of a thread is: "Seperate control of CPU, with the same VM space". Essentially, it's two processes who have precisely the same memory mapped. (I'm sure there are lots of details I just glossed over, but essentially, that's it). On thing this leads to is blowing the L1 cache if you have several threads interacting on the same pieces of memory.
Threads have lots of performance problems, but they also greatly simplify programming as you pay a lot less attention to the "shared memory" aspect of it. You add some locking, and then essentially multiple threads of execution can work on the same bits of memory.
However, you can do roughly what you described at the process level. Apache used to have a significant patch for "State Threads", that used various OS primitives to tell if an OS call would be blocking or not. If it wasn't going to be, it would make the call. If it was, it'd move on and see if there was more interesting work it could do rather then blocking.
Threads a huge performance win, because any time you have multiple independent tasks they can be performed in parallel assuming you have enough CPU units. The problem is most computer problems have areas where there are separate areas where they can work on, and then they have other areas where they have to sync up and work serially thru some portions. At points, it's the overhead of spawning threads, and syncing is a losing proposition. However for a lot of things, it's the obvious way to speed up performance (GUI applications, it's nice to have on thread that works at keeping the screen up dated, while another is fetching data to display on the screen, thus avoiding applications that feel non-responsive because the window won't refresh for long periods of time while data is being fetched).
This sounds roughly like, they are adding hardware support for threading just like the TLB hardware got added to make VM run at a sane speed. It's fundamentally we have this cool stuff we do in software, the sucks speedwise becuase the hardware is bad at X.
Kirby
Kirby
In a mail setting that makes a lot more sense. Althought now you've just changed the phishers methodology. Now instead they'll write trojans that instead of poisioning your DNS, they'll hack your mail client so that when your secret key gets out in the open it sucks it out of memory and posts it to a secret IRC channel with all of the personal info it can suck off of your mail client. Or they'll send you cipher text that has been encrypted with your public key and ask you to encrypt it with your private key and respond (there's an attack based on that which allows the extraction of the private key, I forget which encryption scheme it was).
The problem is no matter what the scheme is, it's a small matter of social engineering that will overcome any technical sophistication put into the system. The phishers just have to convince you to do something silly once, and you are in trouble.
Kirby
Obviously, I'd prefer that the bank tell me something out of my personal file before I give them any information. However, if they dial the wrong number (or have been convinced to dial the wrong number), I certainly wouldn't want them to give out any secret information about me to strangers before I authenticate with them (along with the fact, that a lot of the "secret" information is given to so many places that breaking into any one of them would give you access to convince me that you had my secret information from them, unless it's a unique password, unlike my SSN, Mothers maiden name, or the last school I graduated from). Even then, it's subject to a replay attack. If you tell a phisher the secret information, they can now call me and tell me exactly the same secret information.
Kirby
He's talking about day to day alerts to notify if a machine's services aren't working when they should be. That'd be SNMP alerts, MRTG, something akin to Nagios, NetSaint, BigBrother as an answer. Not sure what works with Windows, as I don't do much with them.
Finally, anyone worth their salt can secure a Windows machine. I can't, but that's by virtue of not running a Window's machine since 98 was state of the art, but I know lots of security consious people who can and do run Windows on public internet IP's that can manage to avoid all of the major problems that hit a lot of IT shops.
Kirby
Heck, we run several things well past their Vender EOL because it was incredibly stable and upgrading had serious transition costs. We practice the transitions over, and over again testing each change. To ensure that everything will go smoothly. Lack of support for the stable system be damned.
Sure on my desktop, I've got some shiney new stuff. On my servers. Not a chance, old reliable every last time.
Kirby
Patents. Patents are good. However, the system as currently construction is just dumb. You shouldn't be able to patent: X has been done for 20 years, I'm now automating X with a computer. No one else can automate said task with a computer. Especially not for the ridiculously long time of 20 years in the current business environment. It's dumb. The fact that you can patent things without having a working one is silly. You want to patent something, you should have to get one working first. The people we have evaluating "novel and non-obvious" are not doing their job terribly well. They have a vested financial interest in approving patents (the fees go up when you say yes, the current rules don't allow long enough for the patent researchers enough time, and finally working for the patent office is very low paying job so it doesn't attract the best qualified people to do the evaluation).
DRM. Hmmm, I kinda sorta agree with you (I write code for a living, all of it is in house, so piracy isn't really a problem for us, however, if I sold shareware, I would feel your pain). I have several problems with current people in favor of DRM. One, media shifting is fair use. Timeshifting, fair use. When I scratch a CD, if I sent in the unreadable one, you owe me new media for a reasonable cost of shipping and materials (if I have a VHS moving that's unplayable, you owe me one of them, or a DVD. If the DVD is a completely stripped versions with none of the extras that currently come on DVD's, I'm fine with that, but I want the content I paid for materials and a small fee). I already paid for the right to have the materials once. I don't owe you for the content for the second time. If that means up front, I'm willing to accomadate that.
However, I would note, that it is in the public interest for almost everything said to be true, and fairly widely accepted to be true, especially by the founding fathers of this country (I'm in the US). While you might disagree with them, feeling that it's against your personal opinion thus it's rude and arrogant seems well a little bit "pot, kettle, black". It would be best of the public if every idea was free for everyone to use. It would be best, if the science and arts were available to the public immediatly without copyright protection. It would be best for the public if they could ensure that there was no hanky panky going on with the voting machines. However, there would be no incentive for people to dream up new ideas, no incentive for artists (like yourself) to create new content. There would be less incentive for voting machine builders if they had to give up their source code and hardware designs. So the gov't did things that in the short term aren't in the public interest, so look after the long term public interest. The problem with the "Information wants to be free people", is that they have a very immediate "public interest" goal. The gov't is supposed to look after the long term "public interest".
Kirby
This argument sounds fundamentally flawed to me. Here, lets apply it to the person in charge of Mac OS X at Apple (I'll refer to him as "Bob"). We could use MS Office, or the guy in charge of the kernel at RedHat, it makes no difference.
In order words, Bob was doing his job. Namely, the checking of internal consistancy of the UI, graphics, artwork, and color scheme, on the general rational basis that a single person cannot reasonable be expected to be able to verify that every single line of code in OS X is bug free in a source code base as large Mac OS X.
No, Bob's job at some point is to institute and manage a process by which OS X shipps with as few bugs as possible. His job is not soley to ensure that the software ships conforms the the Apple's HIG. Bob can't possibly do all the work of shipping a bug free OSX.
Furthermore, I'll poing out that for a work as large as Britannica, no single person could possibly be expected to check the spelling, grammer or text flow of such a document. He must oversee other people who do that. Otherwise one editor could probably only ship one or two editions of Britannica in a lifetime. I'm fairly sure Britannica has released more then that in the last 20 years.
Just like I expect him to institute and manage a policy to ensure that the spelling and grammer are well done in Britannica, I also expect him to manage fact checking too! It should be seen as at least as important in what is considered an authoratative sources of information. The Editor in Chief is the person with the final say so on if the books are ready to ship. I'm fairly confident he should use plenty of other criteria besides just the presentation of the text.
Kirby
Use LVM snapshots. You dedicate some freespace out of an LVM pool to an LVM snapshot. If a block of the filesystem gets written to, the original block gets copied to the LVM snapshot. The more of the blocks that get written to while the snapshot is held open, the more space you have to dedicate to it.
In the end, if you have twice the disk space, then you can hold the snapshot open indefinitely (otherwise the snapshot fails once change more unique blocks then the snapshot had dedicated for it). You can write the the same block 100 times and it only takes one block on the snapshot device. You then run your backups from the snapshot, it tries to read the original blocks from the raw device. If they have changed, it gets them from the snapshot device. I've played around with this with LVM in 2.4, but not with the LVM2 stuff in the 2.6 kernel.
LVM is pretty flexible. If ext3 would just get the online re-sizing done, I'd be able to do online partition resizing out of the box (I don't trust ReiserFS from RedHat, SuSe ship it out of the box, but RedHat doesn't appear to be dedicating the kinds of resources to it to make me happy). It'd be a thing of beauty once that goes into the mainstream kernel.
Kirby
The sad part is my civics class never got that detailed. However, your point is interesting. I'm shocked that the state legislatures can do something unconstitutional according the state. I'm fairly surprised the state constitution isn't considered a matter of state law. I would have accepted the argument better if they said, that the state legislature wasn't acting on behalf of the state, but is merely the group of people the Federal Gov't appointed to make a decision on the matter. However, I'm not up on the finer points of my constitutional law. I've read it enough times to know when people are expousing nonsense on slashdot about what your constitutional rights are, but not enough to argue with you successfully (unless I miss my guess).
That's a widely held misconception according to what I've read. It wasn't the small states that wanted protection from the large states. Here they discuss it in the context of racism.
As a matter of fact, it was the large states that pushed for the electoral college, not the small states as I was taught in High School.
Here is more discussion
That link points out that the electoral college was desired by the large states, not the small states.
The fact that it constitution doesn't guarantee a right to vote is blantantly obvious from the need for amendments XV, XIX (this one mentions it in passing), XXIV, XXVI. There are a couple of other sections. Heck, there is nothing that says the Electoral college voters have to be picked by the public. As far as I can tell, it is constitutionally legal for the Electoral college voter to be picked by the governor of a state. (It's probably against most of their state constitutions, but not against the Federal constitution).
The constitution specifically doesn't grant the authority to choose who is allowed to vote to the Federal Gov't, which means it is left to the state government.
There is nothing in the Constitution that would limit Nebraska from allowing 16 year olds to vote. There is nothing limiting the rights of the states to let aliens (non-citizens) to vote.
Go get an actual copy of the Constitution and read it some time. It is intentionally very, very silent on who gets to vote. If nothing else, if they didn't, they'd have to be very careful to specify jursdictions, and local gov't voting rights, and all sorts of other nonsense that has no business being in the Constitution. If they weren't careful, I'd end up with the constitutional right to vote in all 50 states during the presidential election (if the states didn't have authority to limit my right to vote, that's precisely what would happen, it's state law that says I have to be a resident of the state to vote in that state). It's why they have 4 amendments about specific things the states can't use to limit your right to vote based upon. Until one that says, "criminal history" can't be used as criteria on your right to vote, it sure is well within the rights of the states to limit them by such criteria. At least if one reads the words on the paper, and not using case history, or intent of the framers.
By the way, there is an interesting theory, that the Electoral college is one of the last vestiges of slavery left in this country. That slave holding states wouldn't agree to anything else. Because the electoral college gave they power in proportion of the number of slaves in the state. In fact, Thomas Jefferson wouldn't have been elected President if the slave population wasn't factored into the electoral college (slaves counted as 3/5th's a person when giving out electoral votes).
Kirby
Kirby
From what I've read, it was less to make DES stronger, and more that Differential Power attacks secret. They had National Security implications.
Kirby
But RMS is a crazy zealot. He is! He is! He is! However, he happens to be right about a lot of things. He happens to have an incredible drive to accomplish what any idiot could have seen was impossible when he started.
Look sometime at some of the things that RMS has actually said. The scary part is he's coming a bit closer to reality in a lot of aspects. One of my personal favorites being that he didn't think anyone had a right to privacy in terms of their e-mail, if they wanted help resolving a technical problem. He had some long speech/manifest that is still out on gnu.org where he mentions that as a blurb (in a speech given in the early 80's, I want to say 1984).
He's since changed his personal opinion. He used to think that it was great that anyone could log into any machine as him. His account was always, rms, and he had a blank password, or some other small set of fixed strings he used for a very long time. That way anyone could just log in as him on any machine he was given access to.
At one point, he defended spam, and ironically only objected when he realized that the mail had so many to: and cc: addresses that it overflowed the internal buffers in the mail software and the addresses flowed to be the start of the message.
The sad part, is that a lot of his original ideals are pretty darned "communistic". In the naive communism sense (communism might work if everyone was as good natured as RMS used to believe they were, human nature is what makes communism fail, capitalism works out better because it takes advantage precisely of the things that cause communism to fail).
Now, RMS as of right now, is kinda well out there. He's crazy nuts on a number of topics. That doesn't mean a lot of what he does accomplish isn't good for me, or that I don't appreciate it.
It's my understanding that Sir Issaic Newton, was well, downright obsessed with some things, we'd find incredibly strange for a man who independently invented Calculas, devised a system of physical princepals was the fundamental model for 300 years before we started to find flaws in it (and still accurately describes anything normal people deal with on a daily basis). He did all of the fundamental work in optics and probably a bunch of other areas I'm forgetting.
Now, crazy things he did most people don't know about:
Can you differentiate between Indigo from Blue or Purple? Newton was obsessed with numerology. So the sepectrum had to have 7 colors (Red, Orange, Yellow, Green, Blue, Indigo, Violet).
I believe he spent an immense amount of time calculating until the End of the World. He accurately figured out the number of seconds until the world ended (I forget when it is, sometime in the 2060's if I remember correctly). That was when all the really nasty stuff from Revelations out of the Bible was going to happen. He was big into prophecy, and predicting the future.
Newton was seriously pious and religious. I believe he was proud on his death bed that he died a virgin.
I can't site all the infomation, but it's told to me by a guy who was a serious history buff, and loves physics. I know I've seen several times (specifically on the story on /. about one of the original copies of Newtons Physics books being sold, that Newton wrote roughly 7 Million words in his life, only about a million of them on science or mathematics, most of the rest were on other topics most people don't realize he spent most of his life).
However a quick search came up with this interesting link:
A VoIP phone would definitly qualify as that (at least if you accept incoming phone calls). An e-mail client, does not listen on any ports (at least not any I've ever heard of). They might have a connection they established that exists for a long time. But at no point in time does any sane e-mail client issue:
However, any number of SMTP, IMAP and POP3 servers do that as part of normal operations.
You might see an FTP client listen on a port in one of the two modes (Passive or non-Passive, I can't remember which). However, that is the data connection, not the control connection.
Kirby