The most important part of this news, which has been true for a while now, is that no single browser is winning in anything remotely like a permanent way. That means that everybody still has motivation to stick to standards, making the old Embrace-Extend-Extinguish routine more and more difficult.
Remember all those "This site is best viewed in..." sections of far too many sites back in the day?
Yeah, I'm totally fine with an organization that started with that kind of talk, for a lot of reasons: 1. I recognize that capitalist economics can and is used as a tool of oppression. I'm not as radical as Baldwin - I'm ok with a democratically elected government and the use of increase of wealth as a motivator for people to work. But like him, I'm not willing to allow pure capitalism to create a situation where workers are choosing between working at whatever rich people will pay, and dying of starvation, disease, or exposure to the elements.
2. He sees the US government as a tool of the megacorps of his day. He was generally right - this was at a time when people talking about forming trade unions were routinely attacked by police or arrested for saying that things would be much better if workers got together and demanded a 40 hour work week, safer working conditions, and enough pay to be able to feed their families.
3. Baldwin was talking in those terms when communists' primary goals were combating fascism in Europe and developing trade unions here in the US. He later revised his views on communism, notably in a 1953 article entitled "A new slavery; forced labor: the communist betrayal of human rights." which was largely about how Stalin in particular had undermined and betrayed everything communism was supposed to stand for.
4. Organizations change over time. To say the modern-day ACLU is mostly about Baldwin's socialism makes about as much sense as saying that the modern-day IBM is mostly about selling equipment to classify prisoners to the Nazis.
The ACLU isn't remotely crazy. They are focused on the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth amendments rather than the Second or Tenth, to be sure, and they take the absolute position on what "Congress shall make no law" is. That doesn't make them crazy. However, those who would like to get rid of those freedoms frequently portray them as crazy because they're a roadblock to their cause. For anyone who believes they're crazy, please present evidence of it, and I mean that absolutely seriously.
As far as government by, for, and of the corporations, that's been going on for at least 150 years now, and there's no reason to think it would stop anytime soon. If you want some idea of the history, I highly recommend A People's History of the United States.
Everything changes - the megas wouldn't exist if government wasn't there, protecting them from any competition, saving them from their resource mis-management, which ultimately collapses them.
Oh yes they would. How do you think the megacorps started to exist in the first place? No government protected John Hancock from competition or bailed him out, yet he was easily one of the richest people in America at the start of the revolution. No government gave J.P. Morgan (the man, not the firm after his death) a guarantee that his investments would never collapse (in fact Morgan bailed out the United States on one occasion and prevented 2 banking panics from getting worse) and he made Warren Buffett look like small fry.
That suggests an even better solution: 1. Apache takes OpenOffice off of Oracle's hands. 2. Apache says, "Hey, Document Foundation, you want this? We'll even give you the name back." 3. Document Foundation says "Great, we never really liked 'Libre' anyways," merges anything useful that was added pre-fork and switches back to OpenOffice branding. 4. Users and developers are all happy, because they have all the LibreOffice features, but are back to an easily recognizable, pronounceable, and established name.
There's no way for Oracle to win this round, that's for sure.
They don't need to specify a reason, but coming up with BS excuses is a nice boost to civilian morale. It's a prestigious line of work with a long and glorious history: Remember the Maine!
Thank you for making our jobs easier by continuing to pursue bad products with bad management. When we saw your pitiful attempt at a search engine, we laughed until our sides split.
Sincerely, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, and Sergei Brin
The only way I see this being even remotely commercially feasible (especially in an anti-big-brother society like America) is:
3. Collude with competitors with no fear of being stopped by the government (because they want to be able to easily spy on citizens) to ensure that Americans can't get any new TVs without one.
Of course. Just pass around INSTALL instructions like this:
To install the nataliehotgrits package, open up the tarball, and run: #./configure --prefix=/home/dumbuser/ --include-stupid-stuff --disable-sanity-checks --disable-selinux && # make && # make PAY_TO_THE_ORDER_OF=badguys_in_russia AMOUNT=1000.00 check && # make install
He pretty clearly broke the law, and they're not going to let that go.
In what court has that been determined?
The most important legal concept needing defending right now is that an accusation by the executive branch does not equal guilt. If Barack Obama accused Elbereth tomorrow of terrorism, does that make Elbereth a terrorist?
For instance, right now Barack Obama claims and has tried to exercise the power to kill American citizens accused of terrorism. Before that, George W Bush claimed the power to indefinitely imprison and torture American citizens accused of terrorism.The accusation is secret. There is no jury trial. There is no confrontation of the evidence or witnesses. There is no due process of law. And many defend this sort of thing because the target must be an evil terrorist if the Obama administration said so.
The list goes on: The NSA won't wiretap everyone, only the evil terrorists! The US Border Patrol won't steal everyone's stuff, only the terrorist's laptops! They all rest on the same lie, that the executive alone can decide guilt and act accordingly.
As long as the list of sites was configurable, I expect that a lot of users would really like that. I mean, how many different sites do you hit on a typical day, really? More to the point, how many sites does your non-technical mom use on a typical day?
It's complicated indeed, but tax receipts for road maintenance are only going to decrease as vehicles use less fuel.
There's a way to solve that problem: ratchet up the tax rate to keep up. Yeah, it would suck to be paying more for gas, but that's still going to lead to a more fair result than a mileage tax because it would at the very least be somewhat related to the actual government costs incurred by the use of roads. A mileage tax, by contrast, would fall on our hypothetical 750-pound motorcycle and 22-ton truck equally.
But that of course is why a mileage tax would be considered preferable by politicians: Orwellian surveillance aside, it moves the burden from the trucking and busing and domestic auto industries to politically powerless motorcyclists, hybrid drivers, and average Joes.
The trouble is, nobody wants to pay the cost of switching until enough of everybody else switches to make it worthwhile. So long as there's no significant IPv6 traffic to a website, there's no reason for the servers to make the effort to support IPv6. So long as there's no significant number of websites that support IPv6, there's no reason for ISPs to make the effort to support connecting to IPv6 websites and converting their users over to IPv6. In both cases, there's no short-term return on investment, so each organization separately decides it's a bad idea and tells their tech team to stop bugging them about it.
There are only 2 solutions I can think of to actually force the transition to occur: 1. Government mandate. Not my first choice on this, but one of the few things that would work. 2. Let the crisis happen. They'll be a long period where the ISPs try to cobble something together using NAT, but eventually that won't work either, and then they will scramble to try to make something with IPv6 work spending about 10 times the cash they really needed and having their tech teams working 80-hour work weeks for months.
Here's a good argument for a gas tax over a mileage tax: Gas taxes land more heavily on larger vehicles, and larger vehicles cause more wear-and-tear on roads than smaller vehicles. I'm also an advocate of ensuring that diesel is taxed as heavily as gasoline (if not more), since trucking is by far the most damaging thing that happens on the Interstate Highway System. It's reasonably intuitive - a 22 ton truck has more impact on the road surface than a 750 pound motorcycle.
This is completely ignoring the carbon emissions problem.
The trouble is, you very quickly get into "do-what-I-mean" territory. If I'm building a binary package in whatever form for whatever distro I'm building it for, I'm expecting the system to be set up in certain ways with certain conventions. For instance, do the executables belong in/opt/foo/bin,/bin,/usr/bin,/usr/local/bin, or somewhere completely different? I as the package maintainer for an attempt at a generic distribution system certainly don't know, and any tool that tries to figure it out would fall flat on its face as soon as it got anything other than a list of well known setups.
For instance, let's say I build a tool that understands where Red Hat / CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, and Slackware all like to put stuff. If I put this on a Arch or Gentoo or SourceMage box and it's going to promptly fail. So while my tool would be possibly handy for those others I just mentioned, it still doesn't solve the problem.
Short version: Different boxes => different setups => different correct configurations => different tools to set up those configs.
And while home theatre costs a lot up front, a basic TV / DVD player set does not, making the cinema an even worse deal. You may not get quite as zoned out as you would in your home theatre, but that's not really a bad thing.
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses ( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected (X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money ( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks ( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it ( ) Users of email will not put up with it ( ) Microsoft will not put up with it ( ) The police will not put up with it ( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers ( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once ( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers ( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists (X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it ( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email ( ) Open relays in foreign countries ( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses (X) Asshats (X) Jurisdictional problems ( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes ( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money ( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP ( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack ( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email ( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes ( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches (X) Extreme profitability of spam ( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft ( ) Technically illiterate politicians (X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers (X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves ( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering ( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical ( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable ( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation ( ) Blacklists suck ( ) Whitelists suck ( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored ( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud ( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks ( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually ( ) Sending email should be free ( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers? ( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses (X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem ( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome ( ) I don't want the government reading my email (X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. ( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. ( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
This because they also believe that somewhere out there there's a greater fool, someone else who will, like themselves, ignore the fact that they value thing X below the actual cost of acquiring it.
The thing is, as bad as bubbles are for the system, for each individual caught up in them in modern times they are very much a winning proposition, for a bunch of reasons: 1. For almost all of them, there is a greater fool out there. For instance, on the bad subprime mortgage market, Goldman Sachs made darn sure that when it hit the fan that all of it was propelled in the direction of AIG. 2. If a bubble breaks, you're likely to get bailed out by Uncle Sam if you're big enough and stupid enough, so you really have nothing to worry about. 3. Even if your company has gone under, thanks to limited liability the person making the decision to buy bubble assets knows they won't be penalized too much by the loss. 4. Thanks to most corporate cultures in big Wall St firms, if you ever play it on the safe side and react to a bubble by staying out of it, you'll be penalized a great deal for performing below the market during the bubble.
So game theory gives our fund manager 2 options with some theoretical payoffs: 1. Play it safe: +10, or 2. Buy into the bubble: 90% chance of +100 / 10% chance of +0. Any rational fund manager picks option 2.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, what they had managed to acquire was just the last year's worth of lunch menus of all Iranian embassies.
The most important part of this news, which has been true for a while now, is that no single browser is winning in anything remotely like a permanent way. That means that everybody still has motivation to stick to standards, making the old Embrace-Extend-Extinguish routine more and more difficult.
Remember all those "This site is best viewed in ..." sections of far too many sites back in the day?
Yeah, I'm totally fine with an organization that started with that kind of talk, for a lot of reasons:
1. I recognize that capitalist economics can and is used as a tool of oppression. I'm not as radical as Baldwin - I'm ok with a democratically elected government and the use of increase of wealth as a motivator for people to work. But like him, I'm not willing to allow pure capitalism to create a situation where workers are choosing between working at whatever rich people will pay, and dying of starvation, disease, or exposure to the elements.
2. He sees the US government as a tool of the megacorps of his day. He was generally right - this was at a time when people talking about forming trade unions were routinely attacked by police or arrested for saying that things would be much better if workers got together and demanded a 40 hour work week, safer working conditions, and enough pay to be able to feed their families.
3. Baldwin was talking in those terms when communists' primary goals were combating fascism in Europe and developing trade unions here in the US. He later revised his views on communism, notably in a 1953 article entitled "A new slavery; forced labor: the communist betrayal of human rights." which was largely about how Stalin in particular had undermined and betrayed everything communism was supposed to stand for.
4. Organizations change over time. To say the modern-day ACLU is mostly about Baldwin's socialism makes about as much sense as saying that the modern-day IBM is mostly about selling equipment to classify prisoners to the Nazis.
The ACLU isn't remotely crazy. They are focused on the First, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth amendments rather than the Second or Tenth, to be sure, and they take the absolute position on what "Congress shall make no law" is. That doesn't make them crazy. However, those who would like to get rid of those freedoms frequently portray them as crazy because they're a roadblock to their cause. For anyone who believes they're crazy, please present evidence of it, and I mean that absolutely seriously.
As far as government by, for, and of the corporations, that's been going on for at least 150 years now, and there's no reason to think it would stop anytime soon. If you want some idea of the history, I highly recommend A People's History of the United States.
Everything changes - the megas wouldn't exist if government wasn't there, protecting them from any competition, saving them from their resource mis-management, which ultimately collapses them.
Oh yes they would. How do you think the megacorps started to exist in the first place? No government protected John Hancock from competition or bailed him out, yet he was easily one of the richest people in America at the start of the revolution. No government gave J.P. Morgan (the man, not the firm after his death) a guarantee that his investments would never collapse (in fact Morgan bailed out the United States on one occasion and prevented 2 banking panics from getting worse) and he made Warren Buffett look like small fry.
That suggests an even better solution:
1. Apache takes OpenOffice off of Oracle's hands.
2. Apache says, "Hey, Document Foundation, you want this? We'll even give you the name back."
3. Document Foundation says "Great, we never really liked 'Libre' anyways," merges anything useful that was added pre-fork and switches back to OpenOffice branding.
4. Users and developers are all happy, because they have all the LibreOffice features, but are back to an easily recognizable, pronounceable, and established name.
There's no way for Oracle to win this round, that's for sure.
They don't need to specify a reason, but coming up with BS excuses is a nice boost to civilian morale. It's a prestigious line of work with a long and glorious history: Remember the Maine!
Thank you for making our jobs easier by continuing to pursue bad products with bad management. When we saw your pitiful attempt at a search engine, we laughed until our sides split.
Sincerely,
Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Larry Page, and Sergei Brin
The only way I see this being even remotely commercially feasible (especially in an anti-big-brother society like America) is:
3. Collude with competitors with no fear of being stopped by the government (because they want to be able to easily spy on citizens) to ensure that Americans can't get any new TVs without one.
No ... this ... is ... Captain ... .... Kirk.
This! Is! Leonidas!
Of course. Just pass around INSTALL instructions like this:
To install the nataliehotgrits package, open up the tarball, and run: ./configure --prefix=/home/dumbuser/ --include-stupid-stuff --disable-sanity-checks --disable-selinux &&
#
# make &&
# make PAY_TO_THE_ORDER_OF=badguys_in_russia AMOUNT=1000.00 check &&
# make install
He pretty clearly broke the law, and they're not going to let that go.
In what court has that been determined?
The most important legal concept needing defending right now is that an accusation by the executive branch does not equal guilt. If Barack Obama accused Elbereth tomorrow of terrorism, does that make Elbereth a terrorist?
For instance, right now Barack Obama claims and has tried to exercise the power to kill American citizens accused of terrorism. Before that, George W Bush claimed the power to indefinitely imprison and torture American citizens accused of terrorism.The accusation is secret. There is no jury trial. There is no confrontation of the evidence or witnesses. There is no due process of law. And many defend this sort of thing because the target must be an evil terrorist if the Obama administration said so.
The list goes on: The NSA won't wiretap everyone, only the evil terrorists! The US Border Patrol won't steal everyone's stuff, only the terrorist's laptops! They all rest on the same lie, that the executive alone can decide guilt and act accordingly.
As long as the list of sites was configurable, I expect that a lot of users would really like that. I mean, how many different sites do you hit on a typical day, really? More to the point, how many sites does your non-technical mom use on a typical day?
Wait, Bing can do that?
It's complicated indeed, but tax receipts for road maintenance are only going to decrease as vehicles use less fuel.
There's a way to solve that problem: ratchet up the tax rate to keep up. Yeah, it would suck to be paying more for gas, but that's still going to lead to a more fair result than a mileage tax because it would at the very least be somewhat related to the actual government costs incurred by the use of roads. A mileage tax, by contrast, would fall on our hypothetical 750-pound motorcycle and 22-ton truck equally.
But that of course is why a mileage tax would be considered preferable by politicians: Orwellian surveillance aside, it moves the burden from the trucking and busing and domestic auto industries to politically powerless motorcyclists, hybrid drivers, and average Joes.
IPv6 is necessary. Most everyone agrees on that.
The trouble is, nobody wants to pay the cost of switching until enough of everybody else switches to make it worthwhile. So long as there's no significant IPv6 traffic to a website, there's no reason for the servers to make the effort to support IPv6. So long as there's no significant number of websites that support IPv6, there's no reason for ISPs to make the effort to support connecting to IPv6 websites and converting their users over to IPv6. In both cases, there's no short-term return on investment, so each organization separately decides it's a bad idea and tells their tech team to stop bugging them about it.
There are only 2 solutions I can think of to actually force the transition to occur:
1. Government mandate. Not my first choice on this, but one of the few things that would work.
2. Let the crisis happen. They'll be a long period where the ISPs try to cobble something together using NAT, but eventually that won't work either, and then they will scramble to try to make something with IPv6 work spending about 10 times the cash they really needed and having their tech teams working 80-hour work weeks for months.
Based on what I've seen, my money's on option 2.
Here's a good argument for a gas tax over a mileage tax: Gas taxes land more heavily on larger vehicles, and larger vehicles cause more wear-and-tear on roads than smaller vehicles. I'm also an advocate of ensuring that diesel is taxed as heavily as gasoline (if not more), since trucking is by far the most damaging thing that happens on the Interstate Highway System. It's reasonably intuitive - a 22 ton truck has more impact on the road surface than a 750 pound motorcycle.
This is completely ignoring the carbon emissions problem.
I was going to say, if Linus started dating again, Tove would be (rightfully) pissed.
The trouble is, you very quickly get into "do-what-I-mean" territory. If I'm building a binary package in whatever form for whatever distro I'm building it for, I'm expecting the system to be set up in certain ways with certain conventions. For instance, do the executables belong in /opt/foo/bin, /bin, /usr/bin, /usr/local/bin, or somewhere completely different? I as the package maintainer for an attempt at a generic distribution system certainly don't know, and any tool that tries to figure it out would fall flat on its face as soon as it got anything other than a list of well known setups.
For instance, let's say I build a tool that understands where Red Hat / CentOS, Fedora, Debian, Ubuntu, SuSE, and Slackware all like to put stuff. If I put this on a Arch or Gentoo or SourceMage box and it's going to promptly fail. So while my tool would be possibly handy for those others I just mentioned, it still doesn't solve the problem.
Short version: Different boxes => different setups => different correct configurations => different tools to set up those configs.
And while home theatre costs a lot up front, a basic TV / DVD player set does not, making the cinema an even worse deal. You may not get quite as zoned out as you would in your home theatre, but that's not really a bad thing.
I mean, in addition to Random Task and Muntadhar al-Zaiydi, now we have this guy launching shoes and eggs.
Your post advocates a
( ) technical ( ) legislative (X) market-based ( ) vigilante
approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)
( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
( ) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(X) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
( ) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
( ) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
( ) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
(X) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business
Specifically, your plan fails to account for
( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
( ) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
( ) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
(X) Asshats
(X) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
( ) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
( ) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
( ) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(X) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
(X) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
(X) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook
and the following philosophical objections may also apply:
( ) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
( ) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
(X) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
(X) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough
Furthermore, this is what I think about you:
(X) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!
This because they also believe that somewhere out there there's a greater fool, someone else who will, like themselves, ignore the fact that they value thing X below the actual cost of acquiring it.
The thing is, as bad as bubbles are for the system, for each individual caught up in them in modern times they are very much a winning proposition, for a bunch of reasons:
1. For almost all of them, there is a greater fool out there. For instance, on the bad subprime mortgage market, Goldman Sachs made darn sure that when it hit the fan that all of it was propelled in the direction of AIG.
2. If a bubble breaks, you're likely to get bailed out by Uncle Sam if you're big enough and stupid enough, so you really have nothing to worry about.
3. Even if your company has gone under, thanks to limited liability the person making the decision to buy bubble assets knows they won't be penalized too much by the loss.
4. Thanks to most corporate cultures in big Wall St firms, if you ever play it on the safe side and react to a bubble by staying out of it, you'll be penalized a great deal for performing below the market during the bubble.
So game theory gives our fund manager 2 options with some theoretical payoffs:
1. Play it safe: +10, or
2. Buy into the bubble: 90% chance of +100 / 10% chance of +0.
Any rational fund manager picks option 2.
Yeah, WTF is with those overlapping TLAs?
Ninja Stallman!
But seriously, if this passes and is enforced, then we might as well accept that we're now a fascist state according to Mussolini's definition of it.