There is such a thing as safe programming. There are safe languages. There exists formal methods. There are best practices in programming. There exists tools for source code verification.
If you program and don't care about any of these things, hey, guess what - you're 20 years behind in your programming practices and your reading list. Even if you program in C, you can adopt better practices (*). 90% or more of the problems related to software security spring from C/C++ hacking without any method of program verification for correctness. Just read a security site vulnerabilities list. If only people were to program: medical; military; aerospace software like Firefox or IE programmers, the we'd all be dead one way or another by now.
(*) see OpenBSD for instance and compare their security advisories with Linux or Microsoft.
The correlation between IQ and working memory is very much an ongoing debate in the psychometry community. The article is heavily biased toward one end of the spectrum in that debate, as well as in a biased (to be fair, everyone has a bias) towards a certain view of IQ tests that may, or may not, correspond to facts.
The point being that a News Scientist article posted on the internet is not the best source of information. Research is.
all you need to be "anti-American" is to disagree with some of the current US government's policies
They can't say "communist" nowadays, so they use "anti-American."
This is just a perfect system: patriotism bottle-fed from the craddle to the grave, propaganda disguised in the form of entertainment (movies, video-games, overly simplistic news "analysis"), a huge middle class population who just couldn't care less about the state of the world, smug in consumerism, with very low news readerhip, geographical isolation, and cultural isolation, civil rights violation and government-sanctioned torture of war prisioners.
You boil it up all together with a grain of evangelical proselitism and you get Bush's America.
How far can they move away from the spirit of the "Founding Fathers" and from the spirit of a constitution that is widely recognized as possibly the most beautiful one ever written?
From the perspective of a citizen of the United States, yes.
This is nonsense! It's the job of every government to defend itself against any other governments. To say otherwise is to proclaim the Bush fallacy of "you're either with us or against us." And it turns out, because of propositions such as the above, the Bush government is one major PR disaster and every government that associates itself too closely with him get lambasted in election days (Spain, UK, Italy,...)
I think they're useless because they're not thinking outside the box. When those planes crashed in the Twin Towers, that was thinking outside the box.
Now, to imagine jihadists conducting a cyberwar is something that might look good when you're trying to act as if your job mattered...
All this nuisance in Airports and civil rights tightening, was that thinking outside the box? Just last week we saw this guy fly over Washington with a small airplane. Response time was bad. Did it help to have all those measures? What about threats from the inside, like Timothy McVeigh-type of characters?
Anyways, whatever...Americans feel safe with Bush. It's not about facts, it's about feeling safe.
the "anti-globalisation" groups don't indulge in terrorism
Yeah, if you've ever met one of these groups, you know they are all talk and no action. They're sort of like a quasi-hippie species.
Which brings me to a sort of relfection on two gatherings: one was Rio92 (were an Agenda for the environment was set - Clinton era - Kyoto protocol, etc). It was funny to see these CIA guys using suits and these huge, conspicuous cell phones no-one had at the time. The other one was the World Social Forum (supposedly, the world is divided between the Good, that gathered on the WSF, and the Evil, who gathered in Davos, in the World Economic Forum), were I was with a local Debian group setting up the computers (you know, helping folks out in avoiding Microsoft), and there was a bunch of these pot-smoking "revolutionaries", highly inarticulate, doing all sorts of weird stuff, like chanting to the moon (I kid you not), or "revolutionary activism" like this group from South Africa that was all about making clandestine energy and water home installation "for the people."
I mean, fighting greedy corporations and dirty politics is one thing, something every economically-conscious human being ought to do, but tripping all the time about "the revolution that's gonna come" is another whole different story.
My guess is, unless you have a special background or special talents, and are strategically convenient (like Bin Laden once was when he worked for the CIA), this security clearance thing is for the chubbies in Virginia. Mom and pop kinda agents.
Ever been to a third world country? Can you imagine an overweight, undertanned, clean-cut, crew-cut, blond agent sweating like hell trying to infiltrate a terrorist cell?
There was an Article in the Atlantic Monthly, I believe, that interviewed an ex-CIA head honcho and he said one of the problems with Afghanistan ops was that the Agency couldn't find people "to eat shitty food for years, not get laid." Agents were all middle class folks from Suburbia, in Virginia. IIRC, it was in that same article that Peter Bergen mentions that it was easier to infiltrate Palestinian organizations, because they were more prone to enjoy a night with prostitutes then wahabists (but I might be misquoting here - the Atlantic article used to be free access, IIRC). Meaning, it was easier to get along and become friends.:-)
There's been a rise in black ops, and human rights violation as we see from the media. But as everything from the Bush administration, it's all muscle and no brain: mainly torture. I guess the days were agents knew each other face-to-face are over. It's a whole different ball game infiltrating an Arab organization than infiltrating the Soviet KGB...
We can assume that, for instance, in Iraq, there's no intelligence, no infiltration, because the number of insurgent incidents keep rising.
Incidentally, I had to go to Al Jazeera to find that passage- CNN, those J-school dropouts, post a heavily edited version without even mentioning that it was edited.
Yeah, I remember reading the original statement: "And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. [When they pointed out that] for example, al-Qaida spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost - according to the lowest estimate - more than $500 billion.
Meaning that every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.
As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujahidin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan - with Allah's permission.
It is true that this shows that al-Qaida has gained, but on the other hand, it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced. And it all shows that the real loser is... you."here)
Actually, at the time I was kind of shocked at the self-imposed censorship of the American media. Sometimes I think the USA has achieved a more effective way of brain-wahing than the Soviets could have ever dreamed of...No in-depth analysis in news media, no space for political discussion, people afraid to vent their political views, a presidential campagin that can only be won with loads of money, indirect elections for president, moralism, fear of "communism" (or, as the neo-macarthist term would have it today "anti-americanism"), etc. And, no, I'm, no a lefty.
Worries with "Anti-American hackers" I can understand and sounds justified. But "Anti-globalization" seems to be too much on the side of a political agenda for a government agency, since it's just a political trend like any other (e.g., "right-wing").
So, who's agenda is this? The CIA's or the original poster?
I'm just asking because it's not clear.
I would add, however, were I an American and this were a terminology employed by the CIA, that I would go to Thomas Jefferson's tomb and I would weep and wallow...Since when does an Intelligence agency get to have its political agenda? Oh, wait, I forget, this is the USA...
This is not the same. Red Hat and Debian mostly pull from upstream sources which do not develop together. For most of OpenBSD userland, the upstream is the same as the package maintainer.
I'm a Debian and OpenBSD user too. I just am tired of the argument the Debian community puts forth, that they're always late on releases because "they're all volunteers",and they "have problems with upstream", "it's a huge amount of software to port", etc, etc. Well, OpenBSD guys too are all volunteers. Sure, guys like Theo develop it full-time, but that's because he set out to organize OpenBSD.org in such a way that he can. OTOH, OpenBSD folks hack kernel and protocols, not just userland. OpenBSD is a much more cohesive system and Linux fanboys would know if only they looked at the source code, which is clean and nicely written. Ever tried to read the code for dpkg? If you had, you would know (and you would also want to know what void ohshit does...) The only problem i have with OpenBSD so many people in the free software community accept proprietary software like Java, or are just smug with their binary drivers, and also that so many developers forget they should be writing software for Unix and not for Linux (which makes some software impossible to compile without a huge ammount of work), which is the whole point of POSIX standards.
It all depends on what you define as "desktop":-) The OpenBSD FAQ states clearly that they're not trying to overtake the world. OpenBSD is an excellent Unix-like system, and it looks works and feels just like any Gnome or KDE desktop would. Right now, for me, the biggest difficulty I'm having is with source code full of Linuxism that present difficulty when compiling on OpenBSD for compiling on Unix, because some Linux fuckheads forget they're supposed to be on Unix (I'm sorry, I feel strongly about this...) "Desktop" for me means "programming language", "scientific applications" and "mathematical software." And when I say "programming languages", I don't mean C, Python, Perl, etc. But Qi, Common Lisp, Haskell, Mozart, Mercury, etc...On all that stuff, I am having some difficulty on OpenBSD because of the said "writing for Linux" mentality (so I keep Debian around...). But I think the trend is for things to get better...Look at FreeBSD, they have everything you have on Linux... You can't blame BSD folks for that, you have to educate people about Unix. But if you feel you need CrossOver Office (and you might, for legitimate reasons), you haven't really given up on your Microsoft dependency, have you? So why sweat it?
Personally, I think it's outrageous that a lot of people use free software, but don't donate anything...If everyone who downloaded a free software distro would just chip in $10.00 monthly, for fuck's sake! This is less than what people spend on movies...And why not $50.00 or $100.00, if you are one of those lucky few who live in the USA or Europe?
Here's a quote: "And to the Linux "vendors" that regardlessly ship non-free firmware images with their OSes, I'd say that they are playing against their camp. Why would vendors ever change their policies if such things are accepted by the open source community?"
IBM can allow Linux to use its technology but can still charge money to anyone who wants to use this technology in proprietary applications.
Exactly. Ever wondered why more and more companies are dual-licensing their code? Because only the GPL allows room for that. The BSD license doesn't. This, in a funny way, in a paradoxical collateral effect of the GPL. However, in a scenario where you want to extend and incorporate code from a community code base, the BSD license may be more interesting. This is a Real World scenario, for instance, you work for a company. This gets the GPL camp worked up. However, the code base is there for the community, and the proprietary extension might apply only in a limited scenario. So, it's all good.:-)
You can relicense new code, AFAIK, but the code already released is not under the new license, because you've granted a third party that. You can't retroactively remove a right that you voluntarely granted to a third party, and upon which said third party rightfully developed or derived work from or livelihood. I believe it's a principle in Law, at least Roman Law (which I'm more acquainted with), called "acquired rights", or some such term.
BSD is great (IMHO) for things like reference implementations (e.g. for TCP/IP). For things that you want implemented everywhere. But if you don't want your code ending up proprietary then it's not as good.
What's missing from your picture is the scenario where you want your code to become proprietary. For instance, if you work on a company whose proprietary extensions on top of your code gives the company an edge, where these extensions would only be relevant in that competitive scenario, and largely irrelevant in the general scenario.
Using the BSD license, you're able to share your code, keep your dayjob, and provide value to the company you work at.
(d) you do not distribute additional software intended to replace any component(s) of the Software, From:http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/j2sdk-1_5_0- ne tbean-4_0-cobundle-license.txt
Seems to me this imparts Sun the right to stop any Linux or BSD distro from distributing any other non-Sun Java project. How does that sound to you? Restrictive?
Slashdot Mirror
There is such a thing as safe programming.
There are safe languages.
There exists formal methods.
There are best practices in programming.
There exists tools for source code verification.
If you program and don't care about any of these things, hey, guess what - you're 20 years behind in your programming practices and your reading list. Even if you program in C, you can adopt better practices (*).
90% or more of the problems related to software security spring from C/C++ hacking without any method of program verification for correctness. Just read a security site vulnerabilities list.
If only people were to program: medical; military; aerospace software like Firefox or IE programmers, the we'd all be dead one way or another by now.
(*) see OpenBSD for instance and compare their security advisories with Linux or Microsoft.
PS: Just one such example of a little used tool: CIL - Infrastructure for C Program Analysis and Transformation
The correlation between IQ and working memory is very much an ongoing debate in the psychometry community. The article is heavily biased toward one end of the spectrum in that debate, as well as in a biased (to be fair, everyone has a bias) towards a certain view of IQ tests that may, or may not, correspond to facts.
The point being that a News Scientist article posted on the internet is not the best source of information. Research is.
all you need to be "anti-American" is to disagree with some of the current US government's policies
They can't say "communist" nowadays, so they use "anti-American."
This is just a perfect system: patriotism bottle-fed from the craddle to the grave, propaganda disguised in the form of entertainment (movies, video-games, overly simplistic news "analysis"), a huge middle class population who just couldn't care less about the state of the world, smug in consumerism, with very low news readerhip, geographical isolation, and cultural isolation, civil rights violation and government-sanctioned torture of war prisioners.
You boil it up all together with a grain of evangelical proselitism and you get Bush's America.
How far can they move away from the spirit of the "Founding Fathers" and from the spirit of a constitution that is widely recognized as possibly the most beautiful one ever written?
Well, it just happens to be my opinion that when you screw political correctness in government institutions, you screw these institutions.
Australia and Georgia don't count.
Blair's party lost 100 seats in the parlament because of the war.
From the perspective of a citizen of the United States, yes.
...)
This is nonsense! It's the job of every government to defend itself against any other governments. To say otherwise is to proclaim the Bush fallacy of "you're either with us or against us."
And it turns out, because of propositions such as the above, the Bush government is one major PR disaster and every government that associates itself too closely with him get lambasted in election days (Spain, UK, Italy,
I think they're useless because they're not thinking outside the box. When those planes crashed in the Twin Towers, that was thinking outside the box.
Now, to imagine jihadists conducting a cyberwar is something that might look good when you're trying to act as if your job mattered...
All this nuisance in Airports and civil rights tightening, was that thinking outside the box? Just last week we saw this guy fly over Washington with a small airplane. Response time was bad. Did it help to have all those measures? What about threats from the inside, like Timothy McVeigh-type of characters?
Anyways, whatever...Americans feel safe with Bush. It's not about facts, it's about feeling safe.
the "anti-globalisation" groups don't indulge in terrorism
Yeah, if you've ever met one of these groups, you know they are all talk and no action. They're sort of like a quasi-hippie species.
Which brings me to a sort of relfection on two gatherings: one was Rio92 (were an Agenda for the environment was set - Clinton era - Kyoto protocol, etc). It was funny to see these CIA guys using suits and these huge, conspicuous cell phones no-one had at the time. The other one was the World Social Forum (supposedly, the world is divided between the Good, that gathered on the WSF, and the Evil, who gathered in Davos, in the World Economic Forum), were I was with a local Debian group setting up the computers (you know, helping folks out in avoiding Microsoft), and there was a bunch of these pot-smoking "revolutionaries", highly inarticulate, doing all sorts of weird stuff, like chanting to the moon (I kid you not), or "revolutionary activism" like this group from South Africa that was all about making clandestine energy and water home installation "for the people."
I mean, fighting greedy corporations and dirty politics is one thing, something every economically-conscious human being ought to do, but tripping all the time about "the revolution that's gonna come" is another whole different story.
My guess is, unless you have a special background or special talents, and are strategically convenient (like Bin Laden once was when he worked for the CIA), this security clearance thing is for the chubbies in Virginia. Mom and pop kinda agents.
Ever been to a third world country? Can you imagine an overweight, undertanned, clean-cut, crew-cut, blond agent sweating like hell trying to infiltrate a terrorist cell?
There was an Article in the Atlantic Monthly, I believe, that interviewed an ex-CIA head honcho and he said one of the problems with Afghanistan ops was that the Agency couldn't find people "to eat shitty food for years, not get laid." Agents were all middle class folks from Suburbia, in Virginia. IIRC, it was in that same article that Peter Bergen mentions that it was easier to infiltrate Palestinian organizations, because they were more prone to enjoy a night with prostitutes then wahabists (but I might be misquoting here - the Atlantic article used to be free access, IIRC). Meaning, it was easier to get along and become friends. :-)
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/prem/200410/bergen
There's been a rise in black ops, and human rights violation as we see from the media. But as everything from the Bush administration, it's all muscle and no brain: mainly torture. I guess the days were agents knew each other face-to-face are over. It's a whole different ball game infiltrating an Arab organization than infiltrating the Soviet KGB...
We can assume that, for instance, in Iraq, there's no intelligence, no infiltration, because the number of insurgent incidents keep rising.
A fascinating post yours was.
Incidentally, I had to go to Al Jazeera to find that passage- CNN, those J-school dropouts, post a heavily edited version without even mentioning that it was edited.
... you."here)
Yeah, I remember reading the original statement:
"And it was to these sorts of notions and their like that the British diplomat and others were referring in their lectures at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. [When they pointed out that] for example, al-Qaida spent $500,000 on the event, while America, in the incident and its aftermath, lost - according to the lowest estimate - more than $500 billion.
Meaning that every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.
As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujahidin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan - with Allah's permission.
It is true that this shows that al-Qaida has gained, but on the other hand, it shows that the Bush administration has also gained, something of which anyone who looks at the size of the contracts acquired by the shady Bush administration-linked mega-corporations, like Halliburton and its kind, will be convinced. And it all shows that the real loser is
Actually, at the time I was kind of shocked at the self-imposed censorship of the American media. Sometimes I think the USA has achieved a more effective way of brain-wahing than the Soviets could have ever dreamed of...No in-depth analysis in news media, no space for political discussion, people afraid to vent their political views, a presidential campagin that can only be won with loads of money, indirect elections for president, moralism, fear of "communism" (or, as the neo-macarthist term would have it today "anti-americanism"), etc. And, no, I'm, no a lefty.
Worries with "Anti-American hackers" I can understand and sounds justified. But "Anti-globalization" seems to be too much on the side of a political agenda for a government agency, since it's just a political trend like any other (e.g., "right-wing").
So, who's agenda is this? The CIA's or the original poster?
I'm just asking because it's not clear.
I would add, however, were I an American and this were a terminology employed by the CIA, that I would go to Thomas Jefferson's tomb and I would weep and wallow...Since when does an Intelligence agency get to have its political agenda? Oh, wait, I forget, this is the USA...
This is not the same. Red Hat and Debian mostly pull from upstream sources which do not develop together. For most of OpenBSD userland, the upstream is the same as the package maintainer.
I'm a Debian and OpenBSD user too. I just am tired of the argument the Debian community puts forth, that they're always late on releases because "they're all volunteers",and they "have problems with upstream", "it's a huge amount of software to port", etc, etc. Well, OpenBSD guys too are all volunteers. Sure, guys like Theo develop it full-time, but that's because he set out to organize OpenBSD.org in such a way that he can. OTOH, OpenBSD folks hack kernel and protocols, not just userland.
OpenBSD is a much more cohesive system and Linux fanboys would know if only they looked at the source code, which is clean and nicely written. Ever tried to read the code for dpkg? If you had, you would know (and you would also want to know what void ohshit does...)
The only problem i have with OpenBSD so many people in the free software community accept proprietary software like Java, or are just smug with their binary drivers, and also that so many developers forget they should be writing software for Unix and not for Linux (which makes some software impossible to compile without a huge ammount of work), which is the whole point of POSIX standards.
Does CrossOver Office work on OpenBSD?
:-)
It all depends on what you define as "desktop"
The OpenBSD FAQ states clearly that they're not trying to overtake the world. OpenBSD is an excellent Unix-like system, and it looks works and feels just like any Gnome or KDE desktop would.
Right now, for me, the biggest difficulty I'm having is with source code full of Linuxism that present difficulty when compiling on OpenBSD for compiling on Unix, because some Linux fuckheads forget they're supposed to be on Unix (I'm sorry, I feel strongly about this...)
"Desktop" for me means "programming language", "scientific applications" and "mathematical software." And when I say "programming languages", I don't mean C, Python, Perl, etc. But Qi, Common Lisp, Haskell, Mozart, Mercury, etc...On all that stuff, I am having some difficulty on OpenBSD because of the said "writing for Linux" mentality (so I keep Debian around...). But I think the trend is for things to get better...Look at FreeBSD, they have everything you have on Linux...
You can't blame BSD folks for that, you have to educate people about Unix.
But if you feel you need CrossOver Office (and you might, for legitimate reasons), you haven't really given up on your Microsoft dependency, have you? So why sweat it?
Personally, I think it's outrageous that a lot of people use free software, but don't donate anything...If everyone who downloaded a free software distro would just chip in $10.00 monthly, for fuck's sake! This is less than what people spend on movies...And why not $50.00 or $100.00, if you are one of those lucky few who live in the USA or Europe?
A lot of people are on dial-up, particularly in developing countries. And the USA lags behind in broadband usage, too...
Here's a quote:
"And to the Linux "vendors" that regardlessly ship non-free firmware images with their OSes, I'd say that they are playing against their camp. Why would vendors ever change their policies if such things are accepted by the open source community?"
You got, like, 3-4 years of reading to do...
IBM can allow Linux to use its technology but can still charge money to anyone who wants to use this technology in proprietary applications.
:-)
Exactly. Ever wondered why more and more companies are dual-licensing their code? Because only the GPL allows room for that. The BSD license doesn't. This, in a funny way, in a paradoxical collateral effect of the GPL.
However, in a scenario where you want to extend and incorporate code from a community code base, the BSD license may be more interesting. This is a Real World scenario, for instance, you work for a company.
This gets the GPL camp worked up. However, the code base is there for the community, and the proprietary extension might apply only in a limited scenario.
So, it's all good.
You can relicense new code, AFAIK, but the code already released is not under the new license, because you've granted a third party that.
You can't retroactively remove a right that you voluntarely granted to a third party, and upon which said third party rightfully developed or derived work from or livelihood.
I believe it's a principle in Law, at least Roman Law (which I'm more acquainted with), called "acquired rights", or some such term.
Yeah, ok, I give in. Way off, but right in spirit.
BSD is great (IMHO) for things like reference implementations (e.g. for TCP/IP). For things that you want implemented everywhere. But if you don't want your code ending up proprietary then it's not as good.
What's missing from your picture is the scenario where you want your code to become proprietary. For instance, if you work on a company whose proprietary extensions on top of your code gives the company an edge, where these extensions would only be relevant in that competitive scenario, and largely irrelevant in the general scenario.
Using the BSD license, you're able to share your code, keep your dayjob, and provide value to the company you work at.
(d) you do not distribute additional software intended- ne tbean-4_0-cobundle-license.txt
to replace any
component(s) of the Software,
From:http://java.sun.com/j2se/1.5.0/j2sdk-1_5_0
Seems to me this imparts Sun the right to stop any Linux or BSD distro from distributing any other non-Sun Java project.
How does that sound to you? Restrictive?
Would CmdrTaco and the /. crew please create a "Java fanboy" option in the moderator drop-down menu?
If OSS it is about freedom, why do they make it difficult for us to choose a non free development method?
This is like asking: "Since individual freedoms are assured in the U.S. Constitution, why can't I just blow your brains out, if I feel like it?"
Seriously deranged...