48% of their citizens can't read or write, but they're funding a space program to the equivalent of a few billion U.S. dollars. Amazing. I can only imagine what taxes must be like in India to pay for something so expensive when the per capita income is so low.
While many limits on stem cell research exist in the United States
This is a lie, and a particularly silly (yet widespread) one at that.
Go check your facts. There are no limits on stem cell research in the U.S. There is a ban on federal funding for such research, but that is not anything remotely near a total ban. Private companies can pursue whatever research they like without hindrance of this.
As pointed out above, the fastest tape drives in existence today are in many cases faster than hard drives. The Ultrium 960 has a sustained transfer rate of 160MB/sec. The best Ultra320 SCSI or Fibre Channel drive I've yet found can't match this transfer rate. Now, a RAID array of such drives can, but it's still something of a chore to find any array that can maintain a sustained 160MB/sec for days on end.
So, in short, the tape drive speed isn't necessarily the limiting factor here.
But to address your point, yes, tape can be slow. However, the best tape drive money can buy right now (a title claimed by HP's Ultrium 960) is faster than most hard drives -- 160MB/sec according to the specs. It's not going to be that bad. Expensive, yes, but not slow.
Just a thought experiment: sending a terabyte of data via this tape solution would require (1,000,000 megs / 160 megs per sec) 6,250 seconds, or 104 minutes to write to tape. This assumes 2:1 compression of course, but the actual compressability is unknown.
Sending 500 terabytes in this fashion would require 866 hours (36 days) to write and that same amount to read back onto disk. 72 days sounds like a lot, but this could be shrunk down to as little as 104 minutes if you're willing to employ 500 simultaneously-operating Ultrium 960 tape drives. Expensive, yes, but this is a fun thought experiment where dollars don't matter. Let's assume you use ten drives in an array on both ends (ship the drives with the media to save buying double drives), shrinking your backup/restore times to 86.6 hours (3.6 days) each.
7.2 days plus FedEx Priority Overnight transit time of about 16 hours yields a total transfer time of 7.87 days (7 days, 20 hours, 52 minutes, 48 seconds), or about 680,400 seconds to transfer 500,000,000 megabytes. This gives us a sustained transfer rate of 734MB/sec. This is 22% better performance than the link in the article. The time could be shrunk to as little as one day (the vast majority of it FedEx transit time) if you have 500 tape drives operating all at once.
Total expenditure for such an enterprise would be 10 Ultrium 960 drives (10x$6,190 each = $61,900) and 625 tape cartridges (625x$129 each = $80,625), for a total hardware cost of $142,525. FedEx International Priority shipping costs for a box of tapes like this would be $603, bringing the grand total to $143,128.
Just for giggles, a 500-drive array would cost you $3,095,000 in drive hardware but still take only $80,625 in tapes. With shipping it's a mere $3,176,228.
I'm willing to bet the LHC network costs considerably more than that to operate. What's more, the "tape" network hardware costs need be borne only once. The only operating costs are FedEx shipping costs and replacement tapes if and when needed. It's actually a very efficient way to send huge sums of data from place to place when you think about it.
Note: I've done all this math off the cuff while doing about ten other things, so if my figures are off, don't try to have me drawn and quartered. It was a joke, and it's supposed to be mildly entertaining.
I say, tell that to the astronauts who have to sit on top of the goddamn thing.
The astronauts are well aware of the condition of their craft prior to launch. Indeed, NASA policy is to involve the astronauts as much as possible in the launch preparation process, much the same way that a commercial airline pilot is expected to give his plane a walk-around inspection prior to flying it (although the latter is obviously far more trivial than the former).
Further, nobody puts a gun to the heads of these astronauts. They are volunteers, and at any time any of them can elect to not fly the mission. They are well aware of the risks of flying even a "perfect" craft into an environment where the slightest failure can kill you.
On the one hand you quote the letter of the law ("To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;") but in the same breath discount the "spirit" of the law ("I don't care what Congress or the Supreme Court says right now.") Fascinating how you bend things to fit just what you want, disregarding all the rest. Too bad there's nearly a century of case law that says you're wrong.
Now, there is one small point where we agree: I disagree with current copyright law. I think it's overly restrictive and panders to media moguls and the like. Odd, then, that I'm defending copyrights, eh?
And that's where most people misunderstand me. I'm not defending copyrights. I'm simply against this self-appointed vigilantism that says it's OK to "steal" from someone else because the law is wrong. This "two wrongs make a right" logic is disgusting, but in reality I doubt most MP3 pirates don't care one whit about the law. They want their free music and DVD's and to hell with everyone else, nevermind the fact that hundreds or perhaps thousands of people expended effort to produce the works they are pirating. They cloak their own personal greed in the guise of playing Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the...well, not the poor since it's difficult to imagine anyone with a PC, MP3 player, and broadband Internet connection "poor." It is a lie, and I despise lies of this kind more than any other.
Your ability to misread the law is both impressive and disturbing. Now go and read up a bit on copyright law so you can realize all at once just how stupid your prior comment was.
I call "B.S." The legal system allows you to kill someone in self-defense. That is "subjectivism."
No, it's not. Self-defense is not defined as "justified murder", they are two completely different concepts. If you're too naive to understand why, this conversation is pointless.
The concept behind the GPL is "make sure everyone has the freedom to read/use/change this stuff." The base concept behind the music industry is "make sure we suck as much money out of the people as possible." These two concepts could hardly be more different.
You're missing the point, perhaps because you're trying very hard not to think too much about the implications of copyright infringement. The law in this matter is clear, not fuzzy at all: a copyright is a copyright is a copyright whether it applies to the GPL or the RIAA. The law doesn't state "copyrights are only for nice people with nice ideas." You seem to think it should say that, so I encourage you to lobby your elected representatives to change the wording of the law. That way only nice people get the protection of the courts, and all those nastybad, doubleplus-ungood people get none at all.
You are a nice person, aren't you? I sure hope so. I'd hate for someone with a differing view from yours to classify you as a bad person. In your world, that would be very bad.
Perhaps you should think about the implications of what you're proposing before you propose it next time. There's a reason justice is supposed to be blind. In your world, you'd prefer she peeks at Santa's list to make sure you deserve protection.
I explicitly did not state my opinion on the matter. If you are going to base this conversation on assumptions, then the conversation is over.
Pleading the Fifth Amendment isn't going to win you any points here, bub. You explicity did not state your opinion, true. You did, however, say the following:
I'm not going to bother telling you my personal opinion on the matter, but given the differences in the two scenarios, it should not be surprising that freedom-minded people might be more supportive of the first use of copyright, and more critical of the second.
The latter half of the last sentence is an implicit justification of copyright infringement. If you are (a) unwilling to state your position on the matter and (b) arguing a point that supports copyright infringement, it logically follows that you feel your opinions differ from mine (hence the reticence to disclose them). If you wish to end the conversation, be my guest, but you alone are responsible for the image you project to others. If you don't wish to be categorized in this manner, perhaps you should state your fucking opinion and remove the doubt. Or perhaps you should stop ducking the issue, which you are so artfully doing. There's nothing worse in this world than a fence-sitter who acts like they're "above it all."
In one case, copyright is being used as a tool to protect the ability to freely disseminate and modify works. In the other case, it is being used as a tool to restrict freedom of distribution and prevent modification.
I love your twisted logic here, justifying copyright infringement on the one hand because it promotes "freedom" but condemning it on the other because it promotes the "freedom" to disseminate. Orwell would love you.
Here's the situation, and it's not a shade of grey as you imply: copyright infringement is either good for all or bad for all, you can't pick specific instances where it's good for some and bad for some. That's called subjectivism, and it has no business intruding into a legal matter such as copyright infringement. Open that door and all law suddenly becomes entirely relative, and you do not want to go down that path. Is murdering a white supremacist wrong? Sure, the world's better off without him, but does that make murder "right"? You cannot use the "it's for the greater good" argument because there is no "fair" way to define the greater good. What's good for you is most likely bad for someone else. That's why these matters must be objective, not subjective.
So, which is it? Would you stand on a hill and defend my right to violate the GPL however I see fit? I doubt it.
Don't look now, but your double standard is showing. Perhaps you'd be more comfortable with this definition instead.
It's nice to know that someone is looking after the GPL.
After all, as everyone here on/. knows, copyright violators are bad people who need to be punished. Right?
Now, everyone go and enjoy your vast collection of pirated MP3's and DVD's you downloaded last month via Bittorrent. You can all nod your heads in a knowing, philosophical manner as you examine your hypocrisy and double standards.
Attempts to justify your copyright infringement activities in the name of "sticking it to the man" or other variations of socio-economic class warfare will be automatically redirected to/dev/null.
You can mod this as flamebait if you want, but before doing so you should really examine whether or not you have a double standard when it comes to copyrights. If copyrights are good for Linux, they're good for the MPAA and RIAA as well, and both should be equally respected. If you want to bash the RIAA/MPAA by massive copyright infringement, you have no right to complain when some company takes a GPL work and violates the GPL copyright.
If you are in any way suggesting that the prevailing opinion on/. is not in favor of massive copyright infringement when it comes to CD's and DVD's, you're either lying or hopelessly naive. Given your stance, I'd feel safe betting on the former.
It's nice to know that someone is looking after the GPL.
After all, as everyone here on/. knows, copyright violators are bad people who need to be punished. Right?
Now, everyone go and enjoy your vast collection of pirated MP3's and DVD's you downloaded last month via Bittorrent. You can all nod your heads in a knowing, philosophical manner as you examine your hypocrisy and double standards.
Attempts to justify your copyright infringement activities in the name of "sticking it to the man" or other variations of socio-economic class warfare will be automatically redirected to/dev/null.
While it has been mildly entertaining watching you do a fantastic rendition of a broken record, I'm tiring of your constant display of an inability to grasp reality. Thus, I'm tuning you out. I'll find others elsewhere who are actually capable of independent, engaging thought with which to spend my debate time.
Thus, I still say your comparison of bugs in Apache to bugs in Windows' TCP stack doesn't quite cut the mustard even if the outcome is the same.
I can see your point, but to an end user, if the results are the same, does it really matter to them that it was an app-level exploit or a kernel-level one? I doubt it.
And if that happened, it's stupid, regardless of who's OS is involved.
Agreed in full. I'm no friend of Microsoft, but I do recognize that applying a double standard to Linux will ultimately allow a laxity in OSS development that will, in the end, weaken OSS. Since I'm all for strong competition against Microsoft, I'm all for strong and objective criticism of Linux (and BSD!) as well.
Can't address the topic? Easy! Change subjects! You must have learned that from right-wing pundits.
Can't understand plain-written English that is on-topic? Easy! Act like the parent post changed the topic! You must have learned that from left-wing Deanie Babies.
All I said was that it wasn't the user's fault that this bug was back again. And it isn't the user's fault.
Something I, oddly enough, agreed with you upon. However, in order for the bug to be exploited, the user would have to manually disable the firewall which Microsoft by default enables. Ergo, the bug isn't the user's fault, but getting exploited by it would be. I know logic is difficult for you to follow, so if I left you behind somewhere, must go back a re-read this paragraph again. Don't worry, I'll wait.
This article is not about re-appearing bugs in Linux.
No, it's not, but the very fact that it isn't even mentioned that similar fates befall Linux regularly and nobody here complains point to an overriding bias.
You're comparing apples and oranges here. On the one hand, you're turning on lots of services.
Not necessarily. If I answer a few questions properly during a Red Hat install, a lot of questionable services (BIND, SMTP, FTP, SAMBA) could be already on without a user having to do much of anything post-install, just like Windows. Not that there's anything to fear from BIND or Sendmail, of course, since none of these apps have every had any security faults, rootkits, or other exploits, right? Yeah, I thought so.
If you so much as open a single port - say, port 80 to a copy of Apache running on that Windows machine (you'd not be so foolish as to use IIS, after all), your machine can be DOSsed silly.
Very true. And if I open up a single port on Linux and I'm running a version of Apache with a known DDoS exploit (such as any of these, two of which remain unpatched) I can get identical results. And in some cases you don't even need to open a port because 2.6 has more than a few kernel exploits available (36 to date, with 15 remaining unpatched) that can cause everything from privilege escalation to DDoS. Where's your moral indignation now? Or has it been dampened somewhat by the fact that you'd have to sling mud objectively?
No, this is not only really bad, but it's also really, really stupid.
OSS programmers can be lumped into this same category, as they have made and continue to make many of the same mistakes. Again, I'm not saying Microsoft is above criticism here -- far from it. Call them on the carpet, nail them to the wall, whatever you want. But if we're going to scream at Microsoft for making stupid programming mistakes, we have to be willing to do the same for OSS. Funny how the latter half of that argument never seems to materialize on a so-called "enlightened" site like Slashdot.
The LAND bug was fixed long ago, before any firewalls were shipped with Windows. This is a very old bug that has managed to creep back into the code for the TCP stack somehow. It isn't the user's fault.
Yes, it's deplorable when an already-fixed bug finds its way back into production code. And I suppose that's never, ever, ever happened with Linux, has it? Yet when it does, nobody here raises a fuss about it like they do when someone at Microsoft screws up. Typical Slashdot double standard.
Granted, you need to have the firewall turned off for this work, but there's a whole lotta machines that don't have it turned on.
OK, so what you're saying is that in order for XP to be vulnerable, it must be directly connected to the Internet, the user must specifically have disabled the firewall, and no intermediate firewall must be present.
At what point do we cease blaming Microsoft for stupid user tricks? I mean, Microsoft has freely given SP2 to anyone who wants it. Pretty soon it will be a mandatory download from WindowsUpdate. People bitched and moaned for years that Microsoft didn't do enough for security and didn't default to having updates apply automatically. But when Microsoft finally does improve security (with a better firewall) and tries to turn it all on by default, everyone griped. Damned if you do...
Look, if a Windows zealot took something like Fedora, turned on a bunch of services, turned off the firewall, and then griped because his box got hacked, Slashdotters everywhere would be screaming that this guy was a fool, that Linux security is great when it's not sabotaged by an idiot at the keyboard. And they'd be right. But when an attack requires that a Windows user actively subvert the very security measures Microsoft's put in place to protect him, everybody blames Microsoft. Nope, no bias to see here, citizens, please move along.
And your point is what, exactly? I couldn't care less what his political leanings are, and you shouldn't either, so long as his arguments are well thought out and proven with *evidence*.
Very true. However...
Of course, he has probably stacked the deck in his favour
Ah, now we come to the crux of the issue and my problem with the original poster's reliance on Chomsky's book for information. A slanted "documentarian" isn't a documentarian if he picks and chooses his data to fit a preconceived conclusion, he's merely editorializing at that point. You can claim Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" is an excellent piece of documentation, but Moore picks only the worst moments of his subjects, ignores anything that conflicts with his worldview, and presents data in such a way that the viewer isn't merely nudged into a particular viewpoint, he's (figuratively) violently shoved that way. Calling such works "documentaries" is an insult to objective scientific documentarians.
Chomsky's work may be bolstered by all sorts of fact and figures, but that means very little to me. The tobacco industry is legendary for citing all kinds of facts and studies proving that tobacco isn't habit forming and isn't dangerous to your health and the health of those around you. Should I consider the tobacco industry a "documentarian" source worthy of consideration when I'm trying to decide whether I should take up smoking? Of course not. They have a vested interest in me becoming a nicotine addict, and their entire business model depends on millions of such people being addicts to a destructive habit. Again, to even consider such a biased source as anything above propaganda is irresponsible.
Consider the following case: if Chomsky were researching a book about politics, class struggles, and so forth, and he came across a set of data conflicting with his worldview, what do you think he'd do? Cite it? Or go find a different source of data that didn't conflict. I feel fairly confident he'd do the latter, since that's all he's done during his entire professional career. Citing him as a source of any information or subject relating to politics is naive. It's like asking Rush Limbaugh to write an objective biography on Howard Dean.
Hitler was against Communism, and Communism is an ideology generally regarded as pretty far left. His regime is largely regarded as fascist, and fascism is generally regarded as pretty far right. However, Hitler's Germany did indeed practice a form of government similar to Socialism, where the government controlled production. I agree Mussolini would've been a better choice, but Hitler was not a leftist.
For a scholarly look at this issue read Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky's
You should be aware that Noam Chomsky is far, far, far from an objective source on the material presented in the book. To characterize Mr. Chomsky as slightly left of center would be be similar to saying Hitler was just a tad right of center. This is not to be construed as calling Mr. Chomsky the equivalent of Hitler, it is merely to point out Chomsky's politics, which are decidedly anti-capitalist, pro-socialist to begin with.
To see a book written by Mr. Chomsky come to the conclusion that capitalism is bad, wealth and thatpower must be "evenly distributed" is about as surprising as hearing water is wet. It should not be taken as any sort of real justification for Mr. Chomsky's position any more than Rush Limbaugh's books are justification for his position. Both represent rather extremist views.
I'd really like to see some on-line evidence of this. Has Microsoft competition in office suites really cut prices there?
Yeah, in everybody else's software! MS Office Pro has become the most expensive component of a new PC, more expensive than the CPU, the display, or the hard drive. Granted, if you amortize that cost over an expected three year lifespan, $599 isn't so bad ($200/year, essentially, which is less than what you'll pay for electricity for the PC during that time period) but it's still damned expensive.
However, if you look at current and past competitors, you see Lotus's SmartSuite being so cheap it was almost sinful. WordPerfect's suite was similarly cheap. OpenOffice and StarOffice are essentially free. So, yeah, you'd have to say Microsoft's entry into any market does reduce pricing, because everyone else is forced to drop prices to fire sale levels in order to compete against the Beast.
Slashdot Mirror
Plenty of orbiting satellites up there. What's amazing is this comes from a country with an average literacy rate of 52% (compared to 97% for the U.S.).
48% of their citizens can't read or write, but they're funding a space program to the equivalent of a few billion U.S. dollars. Amazing. I can only imagine what taxes must be like in India to pay for something so expensive when the per capita income is so low.
While many limits on stem cell research exist in the United States
This is a lie, and a particularly silly (yet widespread) one at that.
Go check your facts. There are no limits on stem cell research in the U.S. There is a ban on federal funding for such research, but that is not anything remotely near a total ban. Private companies can pursue whatever research they like without hindrance of this.
As pointed out above, the fastest tape drives in existence today are in many cases faster than hard drives. The Ultrium 960 has a sustained transfer rate of 160MB/sec. The best Ultra320 SCSI or Fibre Channel drive I've yet found can't match this transfer rate. Now, a RAID array of such drives can, but it's still something of a chore to find any array that can maintain a sustained 160MB/sec for days on end.
So, in short, the tape drive speed isn't necessarily the limiting factor here.
Umm...it's a joke, remember?
You do realize it was a joke, don't you?
But to address your point, yes, tape can be slow. However, the best tape drive money can buy right now (a title claimed by HP's Ultrium 960) is faster than most hard drives -- 160MB/sec according to the specs. It's not going to be that bad. Expensive, yes, but not slow.
Just a thought experiment: sending a terabyte of data via this tape solution would require (1,000,000 megs / 160 megs per sec) 6,250 seconds, or 104 minutes to write to tape. This assumes 2:1 compression of course, but the actual compressability is unknown.
Sending 500 terabytes in this fashion would require 866 hours (36 days) to write and that same amount to read back onto disk. 72 days sounds like a lot, but this could be shrunk down to as little as 104 minutes if you're willing to employ 500 simultaneously-operating Ultrium 960 tape drives. Expensive, yes, but this is a fun thought experiment where dollars don't matter. Let's assume you use ten drives in an array on both ends (ship the drives with the media to save buying double drives), shrinking your backup/restore times to 86.6 hours (3.6 days) each.
7.2 days plus FedEx Priority Overnight transit time of about 16 hours yields a total transfer time of 7.87 days (7 days, 20 hours, 52 minutes, 48 seconds), or about 680,400 seconds to transfer 500,000,000 megabytes. This gives us a sustained transfer rate of 734MB/sec. This is 22% better performance than the link in the article. The time could be shrunk to as little as one day (the vast majority of it FedEx transit time) if you have 500 tape drives operating all at once.
Total expenditure for such an enterprise would be 10 Ultrium 960 drives (10x$6,190 each = $61,900) and 625 tape cartridges (625x$129 each = $80,625), for a total hardware cost of $142,525. FedEx International Priority shipping costs for a box of tapes like this would be $603, bringing the grand total to $143,128.
Just for giggles, a 500-drive array would cost you $3,095,000 in drive hardware but still take only $80,625 in tapes. With shipping it's a mere $3,176,228.
I'm willing to bet the LHC network costs considerably more than that to operate. What's more, the "tape" network hardware costs need be borne only once. The only operating costs are FedEx shipping costs and replacement tapes if and when needed. It's actually a very efficient way to send huge sums of data from place to place when you think about it.
Note: I've done all this math off the cuff while doing about ten other things, so if my figures are off, don't try to have me drawn and quartered. It was a joke, and it's supposed to be mildly entertaining.
...a box full of DLT, LTO, or AIT tapes. With FedEx at my side, I can have several hundred terabytes sent almost anywhere on the planet in 24 hours.
Of course, the latency for this gargantuan data pipeline is a bit on the high side...
I say, tell that to the astronauts who have to sit on top of the goddamn thing.
The astronauts are well aware of the condition of their craft prior to launch. Indeed, NASA policy is to involve the astronauts as much as possible in the launch preparation process, much the same way that a commercial airline pilot is expected to give his plane a walk-around inspection prior to flying it (although the latter is obviously far more trivial than the former).
Further, nobody puts a gun to the heads of these astronauts. They are volunteers, and at any time any of them can elect to not fly the mission. They are well aware of the risks of flying even a "perfect" craft into an environment where the slightest failure can kill you.
Methinks thou dost protest too much.
On the one hand you quote the letter of the law ("To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;") but in the same breath discount the "spirit" of the law ("I don't care what Congress or the Supreme Court says right now.") Fascinating how you bend things to fit just what you want, disregarding all the rest. Too bad there's nearly a century of case law that says you're wrong.
Now, there is one small point where we agree: I disagree with current copyright law. I think it's overly restrictive and panders to media moguls and the like. Odd, then, that I'm defending copyrights, eh?
And that's where most people misunderstand me. I'm not defending copyrights. I'm simply against this self-appointed vigilantism that says it's OK to "steal" from someone else because the law is wrong. This "two wrongs make a right" logic is disgusting, but in reality I doubt most MP3 pirates don't care one whit about the law. They want their free music and DVD's and to hell with everyone else, nevermind the fact that hundreds or perhaps thousands of people expended effort to produce the works they are pirating. They cloak their own personal greed in the guise of playing Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the...well, not the poor since it's difficult to imagine anyone with a PC, MP3 player, and broadband Internet connection "poor." It is a lie, and I despise lies of this kind more than any other.
Your ability to misread the law is both impressive and disturbing. Now go and read up a bit on copyright law so you can realize all at once just how stupid your prior comment was.
I call "B.S." The legal system allows you to kill someone in self-defense. That is "subjectivism."
No, it's not. Self-defense is not defined as "justified murder", they are two completely different concepts. If you're too naive to understand why, this conversation is pointless.
The concept behind the GPL is "make sure everyone has the freedom to read/use/change this stuff." The base concept behind the music industry is "make sure we suck as much money out of the people as possible." These two concepts could hardly be more different.
You're missing the point, perhaps because you're trying very hard not to think too much about the implications of copyright infringement. The law in this matter is clear, not fuzzy at all: a copyright is a copyright is a copyright whether it applies to the GPL or the RIAA. The law doesn't state "copyrights are only for nice people with nice ideas." You seem to think it should say that, so I encourage you to lobby your elected representatives to change the wording of the law. That way only nice people get the protection of the courts, and all those nastybad, doubleplus-ungood people get none at all.
You are a nice person, aren't you? I sure hope so. I'd hate for someone with a differing view from yours to classify you as a bad person. In your world, that would be very bad.
Perhaps you should think about the implications of what you're proposing before you propose it next time. There's a reason justice is supposed to be blind. In your world, you'd prefer she peeks at Santa's list to make sure you deserve protection.
Pleading the Fifth Amendment isn't going to win you any points here, bub. You explicity did not state your opinion, true. You did, however, say the following:
The latter half of the last sentence is an implicit justification of copyright infringement. If you are (a) unwilling to state your position on the matter and (b) arguing a point that supports copyright infringement, it logically follows that you feel your opinions differ from mine (hence the reticence to disclose them). If you wish to end the conversation, be my guest, but you alone are responsible for the image you project to others. If you don't wish to be categorized in this manner, perhaps you should state your fucking opinion and remove the doubt. Or perhaps you should stop ducking the issue, which you are so artfully doing. There's nothing worse in this world than a fence-sitter who acts like they're "above it all."
In one case, copyright is being used as a tool to protect the ability to freely disseminate and modify works. In the other case, it is being used as a tool to restrict freedom of distribution and prevent modification.
I love your twisted logic here, justifying copyright infringement on the one hand because it promotes "freedom" but condemning it on the other because it promotes the "freedom" to disseminate. Orwell would love you.
Here's the situation, and it's not a shade of grey as you imply: copyright infringement is either good for all or bad for all, you can't pick specific instances where it's good for some and bad for some. That's called subjectivism, and it has no business intruding into a legal matter such as copyright infringement. Open that door and all law suddenly becomes entirely relative, and you do not want to go down that path. Is murdering a white supremacist wrong? Sure, the world's better off without him, but does that make murder "right"? You cannot use the "it's for the greater good" argument because there is no "fair" way to define the greater good. What's good for you is most likely bad for someone else. That's why these matters must be objective, not subjective.
So, which is it? Would you stand on a hill and defend my right to violate the GPL however I see fit? I doubt it.
Don't look now, but your double standard is showing. Perhaps you'd be more comfortable with this definition instead.
It's nice to know that someone is looking after the GPL.
/. knows, copyright violators are bad people who need to be punished. Right?
/dev/null.
After all, as everyone here on
Now, everyone go and enjoy your vast collection of pirated MP3's and DVD's you downloaded last month via Bittorrent. You can all nod your heads in a knowing, philosophical manner as you examine your hypocrisy and double standards.
Attempts to justify your copyright infringement activities in the name of "sticking it to the man" or other variations of socio-economic class warfare will be automatically redirected to
You can mod this as flamebait if you want, but before doing so you should really examine whether or not you have a double standard when it comes to copyrights. If copyrights are good for Linux, they're good for the MPAA and RIAA as well, and both should be equally respected. If you want to bash the RIAA/MPAA by massive copyright infringement, you have no right to complain when some company takes a GPL work and violates the GPL copyright.
Food for thought.
If you are in any way suggesting that the prevailing opinion on /. is not in favor of massive copyright infringement when it comes to CD's and DVD's, you're either lying or hopelessly naive. Given your stance, I'd feel safe betting on the former.
It's nice to know that someone is looking after the GPL.
/. knows, copyright violators are bad people who need to be punished. Right?
/dev/null.
After all, as everyone here on
Now, everyone go and enjoy your vast collection of pirated MP3's and DVD's you downloaded last month via Bittorrent. You can all nod your heads in a knowing, philosophical manner as you examine your hypocrisy and double standards.
Attempts to justify your copyright infringement activities in the name of "sticking it to the man" or other variations of socio-economic class warfare will be automatically redirected to
While it has been mildly entertaining watching you do a fantastic rendition of a broken record, I'm tiring of your constant display of an inability to grasp reality. Thus, I'm tuning you out. I'll find others elsewhere who are actually capable of independent, engaging thought with which to spend my debate time.
Still intact. I run FreeBSD. :-)
Touche, good sir.
Thus, I still say your comparison of bugs in Apache to bugs in Windows' TCP stack doesn't quite cut the mustard even if the outcome is the same.
I can see your point, but to an end user, if the results are the same, does it really matter to them that it was an app-level exploit or a kernel-level one? I doubt it.
And if that happened, it's stupid, regardless of who's OS is involved.
Agreed in full. I'm no friend of Microsoft, but I do recognize that applying a double standard to Linux will ultimately allow a laxity in OSS development that will, in the end, weaken OSS. Since I'm all for strong competition against Microsoft, I'm all for strong and objective criticism of Linux (and BSD!) as well.
Can't address the topic? Easy! Change subjects! You must have learned that from right-wing pundits.
Can't understand plain-written English that is on-topic? Easy! Act like the parent post changed the topic! You must have learned that from left-wing Deanie Babies.
All I said was that it wasn't the user's fault that this bug was back again. And it isn't the user's fault.
Something I, oddly enough, agreed with you upon. However, in order for the bug to be exploited, the user would have to manually disable the firewall which Microsoft by default enables. Ergo, the bug isn't the user's fault, but getting exploited by it would be. I know logic is difficult for you to follow, so if I left you behind somewhere, must go back a re-read this paragraph again. Don't worry, I'll wait.
This article is not about re-appearing bugs in Linux.
No, it's not, but the very fact that it isn't even mentioned that similar fates befall Linux regularly and nobody here complains point to an overriding bias.
Happy now?
I'm not mad, I'm just differently happy.
You're comparing apples and oranges here. On the one hand, you're turning on lots of services.
Not necessarily. If I answer a few questions properly during a Red Hat install, a lot of questionable services (BIND, SMTP, FTP, SAMBA) could be already on without a user having to do much of anything post-install, just like Windows. Not that there's anything to fear from BIND or Sendmail, of course, since none of these apps have every had any security faults, rootkits, or other exploits, right? Yeah, I thought so.
If you so much as open a single port - say, port 80 to a copy of Apache running on that Windows machine (you'd not be so foolish as to use IIS, after all), your machine can be DOSsed silly.
Very true. And if I open up a single port on Linux and I'm running a version of Apache with a known DDoS exploit (such as any of these, two of which remain unpatched) I can get identical results. And in some cases you don't even need to open a port because 2.6 has more than a few kernel exploits available (36 to date, with 15 remaining unpatched) that can cause everything from privilege escalation to DDoS. Where's your moral indignation now? Or has it been dampened somewhat by the fact that you'd have to sling mud objectively?
No, this is not only really bad, but it's also really, really stupid.
OSS programmers can be lumped into this same category, as they have made and continue to make many of the same mistakes. Again, I'm not saying Microsoft is above criticism here -- far from it. Call them on the carpet, nail them to the wall, whatever you want. But if we're going to scream at Microsoft for making stupid programming mistakes, we have to be willing to do the same for OSS. Funny how the latter half of that argument never seems to materialize on a so-called "enlightened" site like Slashdot.
The LAND bug was fixed long ago, before any firewalls were shipped with Windows. This is a very old bug that has managed to creep back into the code for the TCP stack somehow. It isn't the user's fault.
Yes, it's deplorable when an already-fixed bug finds its way back into production code. And I suppose that's never, ever, ever happened with Linux, has it? Yet when it does, nobody here raises a fuss about it like they do when someone at Microsoft screws up. Typical Slashdot double standard.
Granted, you need to have the firewall turned off for this work, but there's a whole lotta machines that don't have it turned on.
OK, so what you're saying is that in order for XP to be vulnerable, it must be directly connected to the Internet, the user must specifically have disabled the firewall, and no intermediate firewall must be present.
At what point do we cease blaming Microsoft for stupid user tricks? I mean, Microsoft has freely given SP2 to anyone who wants it. Pretty soon it will be a mandatory download from WindowsUpdate. People bitched and moaned for years that Microsoft didn't do enough for security and didn't default to having updates apply automatically. But when Microsoft finally does improve security (with a better firewall) and tries to turn it all on by default, everyone griped. Damned if you do...
Look, if a Windows zealot took something like Fedora, turned on a bunch of services, turned off the firewall, and then griped because his box got hacked, Slashdotters everywhere would be screaming that this guy was a fool, that Linux security is great when it's not sabotaged by an idiot at the keyboard. And they'd be right. But when an attack requires that a Windows user actively subvert the very security measures Microsoft's put in place to protect him, everybody blames Microsoft. Nope, no bias to see here, citizens, please move along.
And your point is what, exactly? I couldn't care less what his political leanings are, and you shouldn't either, so long as his arguments are well thought out and proven with *evidence*.
Very true. However...
Of course, he has probably stacked the deck in his favour
Ah, now we come to the crux of the issue and my problem with the original poster's reliance on Chomsky's book for information. A slanted "documentarian" isn't a documentarian if he picks and chooses his data to fit a preconceived conclusion, he's merely editorializing at that point. You can claim Michael Moore's "Fahrenheit 9/11" is an excellent piece of documentation, but Moore picks only the worst moments of his subjects, ignores anything that conflicts with his worldview, and presents data in such a way that the viewer isn't merely nudged into a particular viewpoint, he's (figuratively) violently shoved that way. Calling such works "documentaries" is an insult to objective scientific documentarians.
Chomsky's work may be bolstered by all sorts of fact and figures, but that means very little to me. The tobacco industry is legendary for citing all kinds of facts and studies proving that tobacco isn't habit forming and isn't dangerous to your health and the health of those around you. Should I consider the tobacco industry a "documentarian" source worthy of consideration when I'm trying to decide whether I should take up smoking? Of course not. They have a vested interest in me becoming a nicotine addict, and their entire business model depends on millions of such people being addicts to a destructive habit. Again, to even consider such a biased source as anything above propaganda is irresponsible.
Consider the following case: if Chomsky were researching a book about politics, class struggles, and so forth, and he came across a set of data conflicting with his worldview, what do you think he'd do? Cite it? Or go find a different source of data that didn't conflict. I feel fairly confident he'd do the latter, since that's all he's done during his entire professional career. Citing him as a source of any information or subject relating to politics is naive. It's like asking Rush Limbaugh to write an objective biography on Howard Dean.
Bad example.
Hitler was an extreme Leftist.
Hitler was against Communism, and Communism is an ideology generally regarded as pretty far left. His regime is largely regarded as fascist, and fascism is generally regarded as pretty far right. However, Hitler's Germany did indeed practice a form of government similar to Socialism, where the government controlled production. I agree Mussolini would've been a better choice, but Hitler was not a leftist.
For a scholarly look at this issue read Edward Herman & Noam Chomsky's
You should be aware that Noam Chomsky is far, far, far from an objective source on the material presented in the book. To characterize Mr. Chomsky as slightly left of center would be be similar to saying Hitler was just a tad right of center. This is not to be construed as calling Mr. Chomsky the equivalent of Hitler, it is merely to point out Chomsky's politics, which are decidedly anti-capitalist, pro-socialist to begin with.
To see a book written by Mr. Chomsky come to the conclusion that capitalism is bad, wealth and thatpower must be "evenly distributed" is about as surprising as hearing water is wet. It should not be taken as any sort of real justification for Mr. Chomsky's position any more than Rush Limbaugh's books are justification for his position. Both represent rather extremist views.
I'd really like to see some on-line evidence of this. Has Microsoft competition in office suites really cut prices there?
Yeah, in everybody else's software! MS Office Pro has become the most expensive component of a new PC, more expensive than the CPU, the display, or the hard drive. Granted, if you amortize that cost over an expected three year lifespan, $599 isn't so bad ($200/year, essentially, which is less than what you'll pay for electricity for the PC during that time period) but it's still damned expensive.
However, if you look at current and past competitors, you see Lotus's SmartSuite being so cheap it was almost sinful. WordPerfect's suite was similarly cheap. OpenOffice and StarOffice are essentially free. So, yeah, you'd have to say Microsoft's entry into any market does reduce pricing, because everyone else is forced to drop prices to fire sale levels in order to compete against the Beast.