Or you could use autoupdate, which works better and doesn't require you to dig through menus on the rhn website to update a box. Also, I've had rhn just drop boxes I had entitlements for. Look for me to change distros before the end of this year.
That's an extremely good argument, but I don't agree that it applies to this topic.
What if X is itself the act of crossing a boundary in terms of public policy? No one has, to date, thought of computers in terms of a vice. Excise taxes, which is what this levy is, are used by governments to economically discourage acitivities deemed "bad", such as drinking, smoking, and using gasoline. What the Germans are doing represents the first recognition by the powers that be that a computers are inherently bad and that fines for their use must be collected before the fact so that a socioeconomic barrier can be established against their popular use. At the risk of making the X-Y leap, I think the Internet pretty much proves that this essentially represents an excise tax on the free exchange of information (a.k.a. "free speech"). This is really no different from the intent behind gun licensing fees. Thing == bad, therefore, license and fee the Thing so that fewer people can get Thing, starting with the poor.
That you may not feel less free in your personal daily life is really irrelevant, and your examples of questioning the situation are more an exercise in positive thinking than reasoned analysis of the problem. True, jack booted thugs are not watching you use your computer at gunpoint. Confiscations have not yet begun. And at one point, it was illegal to use a social security number for identity purposes.
At the risk of sounding like a Linux zealot, I must ask - what is the goal here, education or training?
I guess I always imagined, (and my Lit professors consistently agreed) that education was an experience that was supposed to transcend job skills and give you something you couldn't get from a technical guide, training bootcamp, etc.
If you are any sort of computer professional, you are training all the time. If you can't handle changing gears in terms of the development platform you use, you are already behind the game before you've even gotten started. If, on the other hand, you've gotten some real Computer Science with emphasis on theory, you are going to have a framework of knowledge which I personally understand to be education.
If one were to recognize the need to get into the nuts and bolts of a system, free from constraints of filtering the information to remove marketing intent, and free from anticompetitive obfuscation and outright deceit, which would be the best option to look at if one wanted an education?
Remeber that the successfule police states - Tsarist Russia, Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, Iraq, N Korea and Comminist China today - have not depended on technology.
Ever heard of the Great Firewall of China? Besides that, I think that western Europe is doing a pretty good job of building a police state around surveillance cameras.
As for the big picture, you should know that freedom is not bitten off in big bites. It is nibbled away over time.
...all of a sudden someone's trip through the mall is like an episode of the Crocodile Hunter where they track the habits of some migratory animal.
Just what I need, another thing to worry about. Not only must I tape my windows to keep out nerve gas and wear a tinfoil hat to stop mind probes, but I'll have to devise some method to prevent my being shot in the ass with a tranquilizer dart and relocated to a remote swamp.
See how the store reacts to you wearing 5 pairs of socks, or other "unusual" combinations.
They will conclude you are a shoplifter and will tackle you on your way out the door. In fact, my big concern with this is that there will be shoplifting arrests of people who simply wore a piece of clothing while returning to the store they bought it from.
As opposed to a face-to-face conversation, where you blankly stare through someone or choose to ignore them? Or a phone call is supposed to be better in some way.
Man, no fucking doubt. I despise the idea that meaningful communication must take place over the phone or in person. What I hear when people say that is "I am incapable of trasmitting or receiving information without emotional context, and therefore do not work with, will not act on, and will not communicate facts."
If you can't organize your thoughts well enough to write them down, why should I spend time sorting through them?
This is clearly a problem with SUVs. A vehicle as heavy as an SUV puts down a trememdous amount of torque when it moves, and this action, combined with the great suburban conspiracy of living to the East of their workplace (you go faster going home, so more torque to slow down the Earth), are creating this problem.
Although I don't believe that this will really damage the Linux movement, it certainly warrants each of us, as Linux supporters, carefully analyzing what this is all about, and just what it is we are working for.
I've played around with computers long enough to have been a part of the garage days of the early 80's, where the introduction of the personal computer turned everything everyone thought about computers upside down. The heart of computers before that time, the stuff you would have seen written up in national newspapers and in Wired magazine, as we did ad nauseum during the heady and ridiculous 90's bubble, was room sized mainframes sold at truly absurd prices from IBM. It was universally agreed that only the most wealthy corporations and governments could afford to use computers, and the technology remained safely ensconsed in the top 1%. Then a couple of idiots built one out of wood in their garage. I'll spare the historical details from here becuase the point is that the PC revolution put complex information tools in the hands of everyday people. This is what it took for computers as we know them now to come into being. This turned IBM from a 20's style all encompassing megacorp to an important but surpassed purveyor of technology as they are today. This was a shocking, powerful, important change that we need to keep in mind in todays age of mistaking computer science for what takes place in posh Silicon Valley campuses among people wearing Armani suits. Computers went for nearly 20 years in an environment of very big money with very professional researchers, programmers, and engineers working on them without becoming a revolution. Certainly, almost all of the important technology that makes up computers today, TCP/IP, the GUI, C, etc., were developed in the top 1% environment that I described, but when the day is over and the history is being written, what you know is irrelevant. History is a record of our actions. And history does not care how long the Chinese used magnetic compasses to build according the the laws of feng shui. Compasses began to matter when people starting using them to navigate ships. Similarly, computers started to matter when you and I started using them.
This history continued through the implementation of the Internet among those personal computers, the open source movement, and now through what I believe will be the next step in this new information revolution, which is the development and use of advanced peer to peer networks which will make information sharing completely uncontrollable. None of thse things, especially the last two, were envisioned, pioneered, or wanted by people like Microsoft, IBM, or Sun. I know we see IBM and Sun as friends, but we need to remember that their support of Linux is part of their business plan, and they are doing it because it damages Microsoft and puts them in a position to compete with that company. As this event demonstrates, corporate friends are fair weather friends.
What does all of this mean to us? It means, in short, that we need to remember that the computer revolution is and has always been about US. They are the ones who are marginalized (by history, not by RMS style activism), so it is wrong for us to believe that anything we do depends on their recognition, esteem, or money for it to become important. Furthermore, as this affair demonstrates, we need to be continually suspicious of their involvement, because their goals are not our goals. They will shove Linux into the underground through patent law just as quickly as they will spend money working on big open source projects if they believe it will make them money.
The last renaissance did not require a business plan. There is no need to believe that this one will.
Oh, and support Gnunet and/or Freenet. You may be downloading your ISOs from them before long.
Suing Red Hat may have been the one way to get Slashdot geeks off their ass and actually physically protesting somewhere. A giant PR disaster is not a good way to cash out on a dying company. Suing a megacorp in hopes of winning a modest settlement is. A company like IBM has money, but suing them for 1 billion is really throwing down the gauntlet. They could've settled for a couple of million, but IBM will make an example of Caldera for this insolence.
Slashdot is selling premium access to random web sites (before they are slashdotted). That almost sounds like charging admission to see you blow up random buildings. I can't wait to see what happens when one of them figures out that/. is using this technique to make money off of their content.
Yes, but it goes somewhat further than that. Everyone knows that a good comment posted in the first 200 posts will get moderated higher than one posted later. This is because moderators read oldest first, and almost never see anything past the first couple of hundred posts. This would effectively raise the karma of those who pay for Slashdot. (assuming they made worthy posts every now and then, which isn't that hard)
It would also allow us to identify (and make fun of) subscribers, so karma whoring would be elevated from suspicion to outright social fact on Slashdot, assuming the disgruntled trolls don't buy subscriptions en masse and fill the first couple of hundred posts with ASCII goatses.
As a business model, this is a pretty good plan. Tapping into the desire for karma, if obtusely, is a very good way for Slashdot to make money. Whether this is a good idea for Slashdot's soul (if it still exists) is a question I leave for the reader.
It's hard to pin the "down on space" tail on Bush. Especially when he's talking about building nuclear powered interplanetary exploration craft that will use ion impulse engines and magnetic shielding for ultra-high energy transfer flights to Mars taking weeks rather than months.
I did some testing, and found that if we are successful in building a ship that can sustain 1 g of acceleration over six days (Prometheus calls for constant thrust to keep astronauts under 1 g of gravity to maintain bone and muscle mass, so it could go a hell of a lot faster), I can send a manned mission to Neptune that will take 40 days to get there. This trip would take 14 years on a Hohmann transfer.
I think they are just focusing their multimedia marketing to the scale of the problem. Think of the animation requirements of doing this for the SQL slammer. You'd go from one to 80 bazillion moving objects in less than 2 seconds.
I'm sure that eventually multimedia presentation software will catch up with the visualization requirements of the security problems in other platforms.
It is based on the construction of an infinite family of operators D^{(k,l)} in one dimension, and their respective eigenfunctions \psi_s (t), parameterized by continuous real indexes k and l.
Just out of curiosity, which laymen know what an eigenfunction is? I'm just wondering, because when I talk like that about something that I know a lot about, It's generally because I'm hurling bullshit to show off the size of my (insert topic here) balls, especially if I precede it with "Well, to put this in layman's terms..."
I mean, clearly you have mad math skillz and I (and I suspect many others) suxor, but you could at least post snippiness simply celebrating that fact without claiming to put it in layman's terms, such as: if this is for real then it means that factoring the product of prime numbers will be easy, which will profoundly affect the security of electronic encryption.
Well, that totally works with comedy. Especially when you have a pair running around like Lister and Rimmer. Their characters were specifically designed to piss each other off. hehe. I think Farscape tries to come off as gritty, but the effect is that you can't get personally involved with any of the characters.
I liked Battlestar Galactica, mainly because the technology/tactics were internally consistent. I got into the whole universe a bit too much, though, because several weeks after I got a warrior jacket, I was explaining to my fourth grade teacher that "frack" was not a curse word. Unfortunately, you can't go very far as a story when you are running away to some distant destination all the time (...cough cough Voyager), and the show just got worse and worse until it basically fell apart quite horribly by the time they reached Earth. I watched "The return of Starbuck" during the last marathon and almost gagged. It's hard to find science fiction that sucks more than that.
I never could get into farscape. It's one thing to have flawed characters, quite another to have a bickering band of characters so self-absorbed and just generally pissy that you can't sympathize with any one of them for more than a scene.
I've been using bogofilter for a while now as a pass-through tagging mechanism. I filter on the client side based on the tag information. This sounds a lot like what you are doing.
The only thing close to a false positive I've gotten was having to dumpster dive into my spam folder to retrieve an amazon order confirmation.
Bayesian filtering really works, but you have to train the filter correctly and with as large a corpus as possible.
If we had Palladium DRM we could restrict the license of use on our outgoing messages, and this wouldn't have happened. You can prevent someone from forwarding content, replying to all on BCC's, etc.
If you can eschew the moral implications for a moment, this part really helps in understanding the wave of anti-Americanism:
The rich -- whether they are French or Chinese or just about anybody -- are livid about the Iraq
crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes.
Add in the bit about how Al Qaeda is down to 200 from 7000 members, and the foreign perspective on this starts to click into focus. Esepcially if there's anything behind this comment:
I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
If they went straight to the FBI with a false complaint like this, they'd probably end up in jail.
Untrue. The FBI investigates, and thats that. You go the FBI with suspicion, they investigate. That is how it works.
Wrong. If I as an individual make a false criminal complaint against someone, I can be criminally liable for doing so. Extensive law and precedent of civil liability is also associated with making false accusations.
Slashdot Mirror
Prophetic and profound words which I will take to heart the next time I watch the Osbournes.
Or you could use autoupdate, which works better and doesn't require you to dig through menus on the rhn website to update a box. Also, I've had rhn just drop boxes I had entitlements for. Look for me to change distros before the end of this year.
That's an extremely good argument, but I don't agree that it applies to this topic.
What if X is itself the act of crossing a boundary in terms of public policy? No one has, to date, thought of computers in terms of a vice. Excise taxes, which is what this levy is, are used by governments to economically discourage acitivities deemed "bad", such as drinking, smoking, and using gasoline. What the Germans are doing represents the first recognition by the powers that be that a computers are inherently bad and that fines for their use must be collected before the fact so that a socioeconomic barrier can be established against their popular use. At the risk of making the X-Y leap, I think the Internet pretty much proves that this essentially represents an excise tax on the free exchange of information (a.k.a. "free speech"). This is really no different from the intent behind gun licensing fees. Thing == bad, therefore, license and fee the Thing so that fewer people can get Thing, starting with the poor.
That you may not feel less free in your personal daily life is really irrelevant, and your examples of questioning the situation are more an exercise in positive thinking than reasoned analysis of the problem. True, jack booted thugs are not watching you use your computer at gunpoint. Confiscations have not yet begun. And at one point, it was illegal to use a social security number for identity purposes.
Do you have to register your beer to prove you paid your sales tax on it?
Does your car have a revenue sticker on it?
At the risk of sounding like a Linux zealot, I must ask - what is the goal here, education or training?
I guess I always imagined, (and my Lit professors consistently agreed) that education was an experience that was supposed to transcend job skills and give you something you couldn't get from a technical guide, training bootcamp, etc.
If you are any sort of computer professional, you are training all the time. If you can't handle changing gears in terms of the development platform you use, you are already behind the game before you've even gotten started. If, on the other hand, you've gotten some real Computer Science with emphasis on theory, you are going to have a framework of knowledge which I personally understand to be education.
If one were to recognize the need to get into the nuts and bolts of a system, free from constraints of filtering the information to remove marketing intent, and free from anticompetitive obfuscation and outright deceit, which would be the best option to look at if one wanted an education?
Remeber that the successfule police states - Tsarist Russia, Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, Iraq, N Korea and Comminist China today - have not depended on technology.
Ever heard of the Great Firewall of China? Besides that, I think that western Europe is doing a pretty good job of building a police state around surveillance cameras.
As for the big picture, you should know that freedom is not bitten off in big bites. It is nibbled away over time.
Just what I need, another thing to worry about. Not only must I tape my windows to keep out nerve gas and wear a tinfoil hat to stop mind probes, but I'll have to devise some method to prevent my being shot in the ass with a tranquilizer dart and relocated to a remote swamp.
See how the store reacts to you wearing 5 pairs of socks, or other "unusual" combinations.
They will conclude you are a shoplifter and will tackle you on your way out the door. In fact, my big concern with this is that there will be shoplifting arrests of people who simply wore a piece of clothing while returning to the store they bought it from.
As opposed to a face-to-face conversation, where you blankly stare through someone or choose to ignore them? Or a phone call is supposed to be better in some way.
Man, no fucking doubt. I despise the idea that meaningful communication must take place over the phone or in person. What I hear when people say that is "I am incapable of trasmitting or receiving information without emotional context, and therefore do not work with, will not act on, and will not communicate facts."
If you can't organize your thoughts well enough to write them down, why should I spend time sorting through them?
This is clearly a problem with SUVs. A vehicle as heavy as an SUV puts down a trememdous amount of torque when it moves, and this action, combined with the great suburban conspiracy of living to the East of their workplace (you go faster going home, so more torque to slow down the Earth), are creating this problem.
Although I don't believe that this will really damage the Linux movement, it certainly warrants each of us, as Linux supporters, carefully analyzing what this is all about, and just what it is we are working for.
I've played around with computers long enough to have been a part of the garage days of the early 80's, where the introduction of the personal computer turned everything everyone thought about computers upside down. The heart of computers before that time, the stuff you would have seen written up in national newspapers and in Wired magazine, as we did ad nauseum during the heady and ridiculous 90's bubble, was room sized mainframes sold at truly absurd prices from IBM. It was universally agreed that only the most wealthy corporations and governments could afford to use computers, and the technology remained safely ensconsed in the top 1%. Then a couple of idiots built one out of wood in their garage. I'll spare the historical details from here becuase the point is that the PC revolution put complex information tools in the hands of everyday people. This is what it took for computers as we know them now to come into being. This turned IBM from a 20's style all encompassing megacorp to an important but surpassed purveyor of technology as they are today. This was a shocking, powerful, important change that we need to keep in mind in todays age of mistaking computer science for what takes place in posh Silicon Valley campuses among people wearing Armani suits. Computers went for nearly 20 years in an environment of very big money with very professional researchers, programmers, and engineers working on them without becoming a revolution. Certainly, almost all of the important technology that makes up computers today, TCP/IP, the GUI, C, etc., were developed in the top 1% environment that I described, but when the day is over and the history is being written, what you know is irrelevant. History is a record of our actions. And history does not care how long the Chinese used magnetic compasses to build according the the laws of feng shui. Compasses began to matter when people starting using them to navigate ships. Similarly, computers started to matter when you and I started using them.
This history continued through the implementation of the Internet among those personal computers, the open source movement, and now through what I believe will be the next step in this new information revolution, which is the development and use of advanced peer to peer networks which will make information sharing completely uncontrollable. None of thse things, especially the last two, were envisioned, pioneered, or wanted by people like Microsoft, IBM, or Sun. I know we see IBM and Sun as friends, but we need to remember that their support of Linux is part of their business plan, and they are doing it because it damages Microsoft and puts them in a position to compete with that company. As this event demonstrates, corporate friends are fair weather friends.
What does all of this mean to us? It means, in short, that we need to remember that the computer revolution is and has always been about US. They are the ones who are marginalized (by history, not by RMS style activism), so it is wrong for us to believe that anything we do depends on their recognition, esteem, or money for it to become important. Furthermore, as this affair demonstrates, we need to be continually suspicious of their involvement, because their goals are not our goals. They will shove Linux into the underground through patent law just as quickly as they will spend money working on big open source projects if they believe it will make them money.
The last renaissance did not require a business plan. There is no need to believe that this one will.
Oh, and support Gnunet and/or Freenet. You may be downloading your ISOs from them before long.
Suing Red Hat may have been the one way to get Slashdot geeks off their ass and actually physically protesting somewhere. A giant PR disaster is not a good way to cash out on a dying company. Suing a megacorp in hopes of winning a modest settlement is. A company like IBM has money, but suing them for 1 billion is really throwing down the gauntlet. They could've settled for a couple of million, but IBM will make an example of Caldera for this insolence.
Slashdot is selling premium access to random web sites (before they are slashdotted). That almost sounds like charging admission to see you blow up random buildings. I can't wait to see what happens when one of them figures out that /. is using this technique to make money off of their content.
Yes, but it goes somewhat further than that. Everyone knows that a good comment posted in the first 200 posts will get moderated higher than one posted later. This is because moderators read oldest first, and almost never see anything past the first couple of hundred posts. This would effectively raise the karma of those who pay for Slashdot. (assuming they made worthy posts every now and then, which isn't that hard)
It would also allow us to identify (and make fun of) subscribers, so karma whoring would be elevated from suspicion to outright social fact on Slashdot, assuming the disgruntled trolls don't buy subscriptions en masse and fill the first couple of hundred posts with ASCII goatses.
As a business model, this is a pretty good plan. Tapping into the desire for karma, if obtusely, is a very good way for Slashdot to make money. Whether this is a good idea for Slashdot's soul (if it still exists) is a question I leave for the reader.
It's hard to pin the "down on space" tail on Bush. Especially when he's talking about building nuclear powered interplanetary exploration craft that will use ion impulse engines and magnetic shielding for ultra-high energy transfer flights to Mars taking weeks rather than months.
I did some testing, and found that if we are successful in building a ship that can sustain 1 g of acceleration over six days (Prometheus calls for constant thrust to keep astronauts under 1 g of gravity to maintain bone and muscle mass, so it could go a hell of a lot faster), I can send a manned mission to Neptune that will take 40 days to get there. This trip would take 14 years on a Hohmann transfer.
Talk about rubbing it in.
I think they are just focusing their multimedia marketing to the scale of the problem. Think of the animation requirements of doing this for the SQL slammer. You'd go from one to 80 bazillion moving objects in less than 2 seconds.
I'm sure that eventually multimedia presentation software will catch up with the visualization requirements of the security problems in other platforms.
It is based on the construction of an infinite family of operators D^{(k,l)} in one dimension, and their respective eigenfunctions \psi_s (t), parameterized by continuous real indexes k and l.
Just out of curiosity, which laymen know what an eigenfunction is? I'm just wondering, because when I talk like that about something that I know a lot about, It's generally because I'm hurling bullshit to show off the size of my (insert topic here) balls, especially if I precede it with "Well, to put this in layman's terms..."
I mean, clearly you have mad math skillz and I (and I suspect many others) suxor, but you could at least post snippiness simply celebrating that fact without claiming to put it in layman's terms, such as: if this is for real then it means that factoring the product of prime numbers will be easy, which will profoundly affect the security of electronic encryption.
Well, that totally works with comedy. Especially when you have a pair running around like Lister and Rimmer. Their characters were specifically designed to piss each other off. hehe. I think Farscape tries to come off as gritty, but the effect is that you can't get personally involved with any of the characters.
I liked Battlestar Galactica, mainly because the technology/tactics were internally consistent. I got into the whole universe a bit too much, though, because several weeks after I got a warrior jacket, I was explaining to my fourth grade teacher that "frack" was not a curse word. Unfortunately, you can't go very far as a story when you are running away to some distant destination all the time (...cough cough Voyager), and the show just got worse and worse until it basically fell apart quite horribly by the time they reached Earth. I watched "The return of Starbuck" during the last marathon and almost gagged. It's hard to find science fiction that sucks more than that.
I never could get into farscape. It's one thing to have flawed characters, quite another to have a bickering band of characters so self-absorbed and just generally pissy that you can't sympathize with any one of them for more than a scene.
We (the OSS community) need to make sure that we can easily and indisputably prove "prior-art"...
Done.
I've been using bogofilter for a while now as a pass-through tagging mechanism. I filter on the client side based on the tag information. This sounds a lot like what you are doing.
The only thing close to a false positive I've gotten was having to dumpster dive into my spam folder to retrieve an amazon order confirmation.
Bayesian filtering really works, but you have to train the filter correctly and with as large a corpus as possible.
<troll>
If we had Palladium DRM we could restrict the license of use on our outgoing messages, and this wouldn't have happened. You can prevent someone from forwarding content, replying to all on BCC's, etc.
</troll>If you can eschew the moral implications for a moment, this part really helps in understanding the wave of anti-Americanism:
The rich -- whether they are French or Chinese or just about anybody -- are livid about the Iraq crisis primarily because they believe it will sink their financial fortunes.
Add in the bit about how Al Qaeda is down to 200 from 7000 members, and the foreign perspective on this starts to click into focus. Esepcially if there's anything behind this comment:
I learned from American security and military speakers that, "We need to attack Iraq not to punish it for what it might have, but preemptively, as part of a global war. Iraq is just one piece of a campaign that will last years, taking out states, cleansing the planet."
Jesus. One hopes she is exaggerating.
If they went straight to the FBI with a false complaint like this, they'd probably end up in jail.
Untrue. The FBI investigates, and thats that. You go the FBI with suspicion, they investigate. That is how it works.
Wrong. If I as an individual make a false criminal complaint against someone, I can be criminally liable for doing so. Extensive law and precedent of civil liability is also associated with making false accusations.
Many of the tactics that BSA employs would actually be illegal if the law was applied in an even-handed approach.
Name three, please.
Extortion, racketeering, and violation of due process.