Yup, and 5 years ago nobody was proposing requiring a specific sysvinit implementation in order to run Gnome.
I'm sure X11 will be left perfectly intact while Wayland is still gaining acceptance. The question is what happens when X11 only has 2% market share? Keep in mind that the Slashdot crowed is basically that 2%...
True, but you can just ignore most EULAs since much of them isn't legally enforceable, and that which is is usually immoral and not practically enforceable.
And what happens when those toolkit maintainers decide "hey, nobody uses X11 anyway, so let's drop all this crufty code?"
After all, if the use-cases for X11 are so minor that it isn't worth porting them over to Wayland, then they're going to be so minor that it isn't worth having anybody else support them either. You're just pushing the same decision further down the chain.
Or maybe QT keeps support and GTK+ drops it, and then you have this wonderful experience where half of your apps work and half don't.
That's the thing that bugs me. There are plenty of things about X11 that could stand improvement, and the fact that any client can evesdrop on your keyboard app is just one of them. The problem with Wayland is that they are tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yeah, google for untrusted x11 forwarding failed and read about the misery you get when you change that default. That feature is essentially broken with modern versions of the various pieces of software.
We already have N incompatible ways today - X11, VNC, RDP, NX, etc. All Wayland intends to do is to move *1* of them from the display server out to the toolkits. That's not going to have much visible effect to the user, except perhaps the smoother rendering of local apps, because the local path can have a simpler architecture now
Yes, but right now EVERYTHING supports X11, and almost nothing supports any of the others except for bridging software that basically converts from X11 to those protocols. So, the *1* thing that you propose to move is the *1* thing that has universal support. Toolkits aren't going to implement direct support for any of the others (or if they do they'll pick 1-2 and you'll end up with apps that can run on RDP and apps that run on NX and so on). So, if you get rid of X11 then you're stuck with VNC screen-scraping, since that is the least common denominator, and it is pretty lousy.
If an app is untrusted typically something will be done to the window directions to indicate this. That way when some java applet pops up a dialog box that looks like the OS standard dialog box it has an ugly border that says "DANGER" all over it.
However, if the client controls the window decorations, then the OS has no control over how its windows appear, and the client can spoof a "trusted" dialog box.
These kinds of certifications are more a matter of spending a lot of money than having any particular capability (though the capabilities usually are a pre-requisite).
It is kind of like saying that Diginotar is more secure than CACert because they passed all the audits needed to be included as a root on Firefox. The catch is that CACert doesn't just issue wildcard intermediate certs to whoever asks for them.
I work on regulated software. Certifications are more about paperwork than quality. In fact, I've found quality to suffer since so much effort goes into trying to document that the system works that nobody has time to actually make it work, and when it is found not to work nobody wants to fix it because that means more paperwork.
Lovely. And you'll note that there is no option to install the software WITHOUT granting all those permissions. Android has a take it or leave it permissions model, which is fundamentally one-sided.
Seems like the simple solution is to just not use that API. I never understood the point of it anyway - if I'm going to pirate software using my phone, wouldn't I just intercept the API call? The OS is open source.
My point was only that the sorts of people who commit genocide for what you consider the purpose of making the world a more irrational place probably feel that they are in fact making the world a more rational place.
I'm not suggesting that in the case of this article that those committing these atrocities are doing it in the name of rational humanism. I'm just saying that there is nothing that prevents people from committing atrocities in that name.
History is full of examples where at one time people who held to certain beliefs felt that those beliefs compelled them to commit atrocities, and at other times people who held to what they profess to be the same beliefs felt that the same actions were wrong. People can justify whatever they care to.
Unless you can retire at any time and you're just trying to squeeze the last bit out of your present employer, I would NOT mention to them that you're seeking another job except to give your notice, and would never accept a counter-offer.
The extra money they'd offer you isn't nearly as much as what you're risking if you end up with no job for a year or two, or flying around as a consultant - again unless you can just do without an income for an extended period of time.
I've known plenty of managers that would take something like that personally. Those who wouldn't would question your loyalty (oh sure, they'd have little loyalty to you if a directive came down to lay you off). They'll look to make you expendable. They might keep you around, but you'll never be made a critical person on a project, or promoted, etc. When the day comes that somebody has to go, you'll be that somebody, since you are expendable by design.
I've talked to managers who basically agree with me. They've told me that if they were to leave they'd never ask for a counter-offer, and if they were asked for one by a subordinate they would always give one, but consider them a short-term prospect. You're basically turning yourself into a temp employee when you ask for a counteroffer - and companies do hire temp employees all the time, but they fire them just as quickly.
No one has ever tried to prosecute a genocide against irrationality and magical thinking, in the name of making the world a more rational place.
While I don't have any citations handy, I'm pretty sure it has been done. When talking about the span of human history, the word "never" is a VERY strong word.
For starters, not all those who do things in the name of rationality are actually rational. In fact, it is hard to come up with a definition of "rational" that does not include behaviors that most people would consider "irrational." Rational simply means in accordance with reason or logic. However, when your opening premise is that all men should worship the great spaghetti monster, then that which rationally follows can be rather absurd.
Logic is a vacuum - it can only restate the truths it starts with. Your set of axioms goes a great way towards explaining your behavior, especially if you are rational.
So, since when should people be punished for having an ego, having bad lawyers, and so on?
The RIAA's original offer was disproportionate to the crime, and so are all the jury awards. I don't care if I'd hate her guts if only I had the chance to meet her - the purpose of courts is to serve justice and not whatever one of the parties can get away with.
Sure, some flights are 10000 lbs lighter, and some are 10000 lbs heavier. However, the average weight certainly does affect the annual cost of fuel. Water retention by passengers has no real effect on average weight, unless somebody starts handing out free water outside your gate year-round. On the other hand, removing an item that is always present on the plane has a direct impact on average weight. Remove one screw that weighs one gram from the design, and every flight will be a gram lighter than it would otherwise be, especially if the change is made across the entire fleet.
So, why should I as a member of society care whether you can manipulate the tax system to lower your effective rate? It is in my interests to maximize the amount of taxes you have to pay, since I benefit from those taxes.
And why should I have a say in what you can and can't do? Simple - because those taxes you pay go into a fund that allows you to cry for help when somebody robs the bank all your money is sitting in.
There was nothing HF about what Knight was doing, as far as I have read. HFT is dealing in micros, while most others generally deal in milliseconds. Everyone is slowly moving towards a micro game due to customer demand.
Stock trades don't NEED to be executed at either pace. If they were run once a day the market would serve its purpose just fine - a means by which companies can raise capital by sharing ownership with the public.
The reason everybody wants to move faster is that it is a big arms race - if you run at a millisecond pace then some HFT trader is going to skim a pile of profits off of your trade, which you'd rather keep. So, everybody goes faster and faster. Eventually everybody is going to want the whole market to be implemented in a quantum computer running at a billion degrees so that trades can run in the time it takes quarks in some plasma to collide. It makes no sense at all economically when all the rest of us have neurons that take milliseconds just to become aware of the fact that we just lost all our money.
Your post almost proves my point - you spend all that time to grow what - a few baskets of food? In a pinch that could probably feed you for a week or two, and then what do you do for the other 50 weeks of the year? Oh, and if you're feeding a family you won't get two weeks out of those few plants.
Commercial farms operate on dozens of square miles of land, with dense planting, and multiple plantings per year. They generate food by the truckfull, several times per year. You just can't get that kind of biomass density from small gardens tended by hand.
Sure, you can farm without machines - that's what we all did 100 years ago when most of us just worked on farms all day.
I doubt most people subsisted almost entirely off their gardens. Sure, they can help with production, but only if the time used to tend them is otherwise unrpoductive time. If people are quitting their day jobs to tend crops, it doesn't work out, as chances are that far more food will be produced if engineers build tractors and farmers use them to plow fields, than if the engineers just took up hoes and everybody did it by hand.
Victory gardens were as much about morale as production.
100 years ago nobody was shipping food halfway across the country. Everybody DID grow food for their local town, and to do it half the population was employed full-time in agriculture. Oh, and chances are your home is built on land that used to be farmland - it took most of the land area of the US to do it.
The reason we don't all work on farms or live next to one today is because huge commercial farms are FAR more efficient.
Yes, but to grow enough food to feed yourself for a year, you'd need a huge area of land JUST FOR YOUR OWN FAMILY. That median couldn't be shared by a bunch of people - everybody would need their own. And the amount of time involved is about 50% of everybody's time. That is a LOT of time.
It used to be that almost everybody just grew their own food. And back then, half of the population were farmers. Most of the US suburbs are built on what used to be farmland - without large-scale production you'd have to return the land to this use again.
So, the issue isn't so much lack of farmland as subsidies/etc and other political issues.
However, if farmland were the issue planting grain on median strips isn't going to do much. Look down next time you're over flyover country and note the size of the cars compared to the fields. Those fields are HUGE. And they blanket huge chunks of our land. The grass next to your sidewalk or on the median is not really going to add up in comparison. Plus you have to factor in the cost to handle that land. You can crop-dust the farm, and run big plow-trains of combines on the farm. You're just not going to get those economies of scale on a median.
Forget back-yard gardens also. Unless you're using modern technology in your farming then you'll need 50% of the population just to raise food for the other 50% to do something useful. Oh, and you'll need to get your 12 closest suburban neighbors to move out so you can bulldoze their homes to make room for your "garden."
I think it depends. If the Silk Road buyers knew that no exchange/etc would ever accept that money no matter how many transactions it went through, then they wouldn't accept it either. Money only has value if the buyer and seller can agree on that value. The person accepting money has to trust that the next person will accept it from them. If people who receive money tend to get their doors knocked down in the middle of the night, then they will be reluctant to accept the cash themselves, even if they think they're safe, since others will be reluctant to accept it from them.
The whole goal of people doing criminal activity is to get that money into something untraceable that they can hold onto which isn't incriminating in and of itself. Bitcoins are completely traceable, so it makes it very hard to ever get the taint off. Cash with its serial numbers is also traceable to some extent, but people don't broadcast to the world every time they spend a $20, who they are, who they gave it to, and the serial number on the bill. They do that with bitcoins, granted in a pseudonymous fashion.
Couldn't the FBI just make it known that if anybody accepts one of the ransom bitcoins in a laundering scheme, then they'll be prosecuted for money laundering? So, then allowing one of your accounts to be part of this passing money around game just taints it and gives the FBI a reason to come after you. The block chains still show every wallet that handled the money, and every wallet those wallets came in contact with, and so on. If the FBI just makes it known that they're REALLY interested in people who have anything to do with that money, then it doesn't matter if your relay the money through a billion wallets - nobody will want to have anything to do with any of your billion wallets any longer.
Well, even if they can't get your IP, your order on Amazon still is traceable. Anybody can see that you sent money from your anonymous account to Amazon's account. So, the FBI can just ask Amazon what that money was used for (they know what account it came from and probably log it), and where the shipment was sent.
That's the problem with staying anonymous - there are lots of ways to handle money anonymously, but at some point if you want to actually get anything of benefit from the money you need to actually collect it, or buy something with it and have it sent to you, or show up in a store and use that account number (or one traceable to it). It is at that point that you're likely to get caught.
If you could factor an account's private key, then you have access to that account, and that's about it. It won't help you identify them, but you could spend all their money for them.
The tracing comes in once the blackmailer wants to do something with the bitcoins. If they want cash then they have to go to some exchange, or to some private party. If the government can figure out who THAT account belongs to (probably not hard for an exchange), then they can just "nicely ask" where they sent the check.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, and 5 years ago nobody was proposing requiring a specific sysvinit implementation in order to run Gnome.
I'm sure X11 will be left perfectly intact while Wayland is still gaining acceptance. The question is what happens when X11 only has 2% market share? Keep in mind that the Slashdot crowed is basically that 2%...
True, but you can just ignore most EULAs since much of them isn't legally enforceable, and that which is is usually immoral and not practically enforceable.
And what happens when those toolkit maintainers decide "hey, nobody uses X11 anyway, so let's drop all this crufty code?"
After all, if the use-cases for X11 are so minor that it isn't worth porting them over to Wayland, then they're going to be so minor that it isn't worth having anybody else support them either. You're just pushing the same decision further down the chain.
Or maybe QT keeps support and GTK+ drops it, and then you have this wonderful experience where half of your apps work and half don't.
That's the thing that bugs me. There are plenty of things about X11 that could stand improvement, and the fact that any client can evesdrop on your keyboard app is just one of them. The problem with Wayland is that they are tossing the baby out with the bathwater.
Yeah, google for untrusted x11 forwarding failed and read about the misery you get when you change that default. That feature is essentially broken with modern versions of the various pieces of software.
We already have N incompatible ways today - X11, VNC, RDP, NX, etc. All Wayland intends to do is to move *1* of them from the display server out to the toolkits. That's not going to have much visible effect to the user, except perhaps the smoother rendering of local apps, because the local path can have a simpler architecture now
Yes, but right now EVERYTHING supports X11, and almost nothing supports any of the others except for bridging software that basically converts from X11 to those protocols. So, the *1* thing that you propose to move is the *1* thing that has universal support. Toolkits aren't going to implement direct support for any of the others (or if they do they'll pick 1-2 and you'll end up with apps that can run on RDP and apps that run on NX and so on). So, if you get rid of X11 then you're stuck with VNC screen-scraping, since that is the least common denominator, and it is pretty lousy.
If an app is untrusted typically something will be done to the window directions to indicate this. That way when some java applet pops up a dialog box that looks like the OS standard dialog box it has an ugly border that says "DANGER" all over it.
However, if the client controls the window decorations, then the OS has no control over how its windows appear, and the client can spoof a "trusted" dialog box.
These kinds of certifications are more a matter of spending a lot of money than having any particular capability (though the capabilities usually are a pre-requisite).
It is kind of like saying that Diginotar is more secure than CACert because they passed all the audits needed to be included as a root on Firefox. The catch is that CACert doesn't just issue wildcard intermediate certs to whoever asks for them.
I work on regulated software. Certifications are more about paperwork than quality. In fact, I've found quality to suffer since so much effort goes into trying to document that the system works that nobody has time to actually make it work, and when it is found not to work nobody wants to fix it because that means more paperwork.
Lovely. And you'll note that there is no option to install the software WITHOUT granting all those permissions. Android has a take it or leave it permissions model, which is fundamentally one-sided.
Of course, it is also easily bypassed.
Seems like the simple solution is to just not use that API. I never understood the point of it anyway - if I'm going to pirate software using my phone, wouldn't I just intercept the API call? The OS is open source.
My point was only that the sorts of people who commit genocide for what you consider the purpose of making the world a more irrational place probably feel that they are in fact making the world a more rational place.
I'm not suggesting that in the case of this article that those committing these atrocities are doing it in the name of rational humanism. I'm just saying that there is nothing that prevents people from committing atrocities in that name.
History is full of examples where at one time people who held to certain beliefs felt that those beliefs compelled them to commit atrocities, and at other times people who held to what they profess to be the same beliefs felt that the same actions were wrong. People can justify whatever they care to.
Unless you can retire at any time and you're just trying to squeeze the last bit out of your present employer, I would NOT mention to them that you're seeking another job except to give your notice, and would never accept a counter-offer.
The extra money they'd offer you isn't nearly as much as what you're risking if you end up with no job for a year or two, or flying around as a consultant - again unless you can just do without an income for an extended period of time.
I've known plenty of managers that would take something like that personally. Those who wouldn't would question your loyalty (oh sure, they'd have little loyalty to you if a directive came down to lay you off). They'll look to make you expendable. They might keep you around, but you'll never be made a critical person on a project, or promoted, etc. When the day comes that somebody has to go, you'll be that somebody, since you are expendable by design.
I've talked to managers who basically agree with me. They've told me that if they were to leave they'd never ask for a counter-offer, and if they were asked for one by a subordinate they would always give one, but consider them a short-term prospect. You're basically turning yourself into a temp employee when you ask for a counteroffer - and companies do hire temp employees all the time, but they fire them just as quickly.
No one has ever tried to prosecute a genocide against irrationality and magical thinking, in the name of making the world a more rational place.
While I don't have any citations handy, I'm pretty sure it has been done. When talking about the span of human history, the word "never" is a VERY strong word.
For starters, not all those who do things in the name of rationality are actually rational. In fact, it is hard to come up with a definition of "rational" that does not include behaviors that most people would consider "irrational." Rational simply means in accordance with reason or logic. However, when your opening premise is that all men should worship the great spaghetti monster, then that which rationally follows can be rather absurd.
Logic is a vacuum - it can only restate the truths it starts with. Your set of axioms goes a great way towards explaining your behavior, especially if you are rational.
So, since when should people be punished for having an ego, having bad lawyers, and so on?
The RIAA's original offer was disproportionate to the crime, and so are all the jury awards. I don't care if I'd hate her guts if only I had the chance to meet her - the purpose of courts is to serve justice and not whatever one of the parties can get away with.
You are missing something.
Sure, some flights are 10000 lbs lighter, and some are 10000 lbs heavier. However, the average weight certainly does affect the annual cost of fuel. Water retention by passengers has no real effect on average weight, unless somebody starts handing out free water outside your gate year-round. On the other hand, removing an item that is always present on the plane has a direct impact on average weight. Remove one screw that weighs one gram from the design, and every flight will be a gram lighter than it would otherwise be, especially if the change is made across the entire fleet.
So, why should I as a member of society care whether you can manipulate the tax system to lower your effective rate? It is in my interests to maximize the amount of taxes you have to pay, since I benefit from those taxes.
And why should I have a say in what you can and can't do? Simple - because those taxes you pay go into a fund that allows you to cry for help when somebody robs the bank all your money is sitting in.
There was nothing HF about what Knight was doing, as far as I have read. HFT is dealing in micros, while most others generally deal in milliseconds. Everyone is slowly moving towards a micro game due to customer demand.
Stock trades don't NEED to be executed at either pace. If they were run once a day the market would serve its purpose just fine - a means by which companies can raise capital by sharing ownership with the public.
The reason everybody wants to move faster is that it is a big arms race - if you run at a millisecond pace then some HFT trader is going to skim a pile of profits off of your trade, which you'd rather keep. So, everybody goes faster and faster. Eventually everybody is going to want the whole market to be implemented in a quantum computer running at a billion degrees so that trades can run in the time it takes quarks in some plasma to collide. It makes no sense at all economically when all the rest of us have neurons that take milliseconds just to become aware of the fact that we just lost all our money.
Your post almost proves my point - you spend all that time to grow what - a few baskets of food? In a pinch that could probably feed you for a week or two, and then what do you do for the other 50 weeks of the year? Oh, and if you're feeding a family you won't get two weeks out of those few plants.
Commercial farms operate on dozens of square miles of land, with dense planting, and multiple plantings per year. They generate food by the truckfull, several times per year. You just can't get that kind of biomass density from small gardens tended by hand.
Sure, you can farm without machines - that's what we all did 100 years ago when most of us just worked on farms all day.
I doubt most people subsisted almost entirely off their gardens. Sure, they can help with production, but only if the time used to tend them is otherwise unrpoductive time. If people are quitting their day jobs to tend crops, it doesn't work out, as chances are that far more food will be produced if engineers build tractors and farmers use them to plow fields, than if the engineers just took up hoes and everybody did it by hand.
Victory gardens were as much about morale as production.
100 years ago nobody was shipping food halfway across the country. Everybody DID grow food for their local town, and to do it half the population was employed full-time in agriculture. Oh, and chances are your home is built on land that used to be farmland - it took most of the land area of the US to do it.
The reason we don't all work on farms or live next to one today is because huge commercial farms are FAR more efficient.
Yes, but to grow enough food to feed yourself for a year, you'd need a huge area of land JUST FOR YOUR OWN FAMILY. That median couldn't be shared by a bunch of people - everybody would need their own. And the amount of time involved is about 50% of everybody's time. That is a LOT of time.
It used to be that almost everybody just grew their own food. And back then, half of the population were farmers. Most of the US suburbs are built on what used to be farmland - without large-scale production you'd have to return the land to this use again.
So, the issue isn't so much lack of farmland as subsidies/etc and other political issues.
However, if farmland were the issue planting grain on median strips isn't going to do much. Look down next time you're over flyover country and note the size of the cars compared to the fields. Those fields are HUGE. And they blanket huge chunks of our land. The grass next to your sidewalk or on the median is not really going to add up in comparison. Plus you have to factor in the cost to handle that land. You can crop-dust the farm, and run big plow-trains of combines on the farm. You're just not going to get those economies of scale on a median.
Forget back-yard gardens also. Unless you're using modern technology in your farming then you'll need 50% of the population just to raise food for the other 50% to do something useful. Oh, and you'll need to get your 12 closest suburban neighbors to move out so you can bulldoze their homes to make room for your "garden."
I think it depends. If the Silk Road buyers knew that no exchange/etc would ever accept that money no matter how many transactions it went through, then they wouldn't accept it either. Money only has value if the buyer and seller can agree on that value. The person accepting money has to trust that the next person will accept it from them. If people who receive money tend to get their doors knocked down in the middle of the night, then they will be reluctant to accept the cash themselves, even if they think they're safe, since others will be reluctant to accept it from them.
The whole goal of people doing criminal activity is to get that money into something untraceable that they can hold onto which isn't incriminating in and of itself. Bitcoins are completely traceable, so it makes it very hard to ever get the taint off. Cash with its serial numbers is also traceable to some extent, but people don't broadcast to the world every time they spend a $20, who they are, who they gave it to, and the serial number on the bill. They do that with bitcoins, granted in a pseudonymous fashion.
Couldn't the FBI just make it known that if anybody accepts one of the ransom bitcoins in a laundering scheme, then they'll be prosecuted for money laundering? So, then allowing one of your accounts to be part of this passing money around game just taints it and gives the FBI a reason to come after you. The block chains still show every wallet that handled the money, and every wallet those wallets came in contact with, and so on. If the FBI just makes it known that they're REALLY interested in people who have anything to do with that money, then it doesn't matter if your relay the money through a billion wallets - nobody will want to have anything to do with any of your billion wallets any longer.
Well, even if they can't get your IP, your order on Amazon still is traceable. Anybody can see that you sent money from your anonymous account to Amazon's account. So, the FBI can just ask Amazon what that money was used for (they know what account it came from and probably log it), and where the shipment was sent.
That's the problem with staying anonymous - there are lots of ways to handle money anonymously, but at some point if you want to actually get anything of benefit from the money you need to actually collect it, or buy something with it and have it sent to you, or show up in a store and use that account number (or one traceable to it). It is at that point that you're likely to get caught.
If you could factor an account's private key, then you have access to that account, and that's about it. It won't help you identify them, but you could spend all their money for them.
The tracing comes in once the blackmailer wants to do something with the bitcoins. If they want cash then they have to go to some exchange, or to some private party. If the government can figure out who THAT account belongs to (probably not hard for an exchange), then they can just "nicely ask" where they sent the check.