Smart people are mostly made, not born. Otherwise there would be a lot more geniuses in the slums,...and don't toss out social-darwinian bullshit, modern economics, even interpreted liberally, hasn't been around long enough and the populations in question are far too large, and intelligence (short of incapacitation) isn't only a small chunk of what contributed to human survival until very recently (for the first 99.9999999% of human history, being resistant to diseases and dumb was a lot more reliable than clever and of below average health made you a lot more likely to survive long enough to procreate. Even people who know evolution pretty well often mistake "breeding" for "good" and assume the "best" (in terms of some human standard of judgement) people are contributing the most genes to the pool.
when you are entering html style markup tags, you are using xml. but xml is a much much larger subject than that. hand editing a website is fine. (if the documents are getting huge, it should be split into smaller files and automated somehow, anyway) hand editing, say, Open Office's xml format or any of the fairly arcane XMl formats used for interprocess communication.
XML is sort of designed to be the second best data format for any application. There are a lot of times when something like/etc/passwd is more legible and appropriate. And there are times when the volume of data requires binary. XML is good because it is widely known and when the originating application is lost, the data can still be (with moderate difficulty) understood.
It's very similar to Java really. It got hyped for a specific web use that didn't really materialize, but it's ability to be generic, widely-spoken, and safety-checked means it has found widespread use across the entire computer industry in places that aren't quite as visible to end-users as simple web application or document formats.
Well clearly we now need to spread Freedom and Democracy to the poor oppressed Titians, who will welcome us with roses and be able to finance their own reconstruction.
I realize that with a local root exploit a piece of software could use the exploit to do something nasty as root. However, as all applications on a typical users system have been vetted by a distribution team, and code is only going into those applications with the approval of project managers, the chance of a linux user winding up with a dangerous application on their system is diminishingly small.
This is in contrast to many Windows user's environments, which typically have a dozen or so, at least, closed source utilities downloaded from various points around the internet.
While it's by no means impossible, it takes a lot of effort to execute arbitrary code on a linux machine to which you don't have login access, at any level of access.
Now on a server that allows for anonymous telnet or ssh login, yes, this might be a serious problem. But it's very unlikely to be the kind of issue for desktop machines as similar exploits have been for Windows.
One, I think you underestimate how dedicated some people can be to a hobby. I could definitely see someone contacting a university and traveling to test their improvement to some open circuit diagram. Yes, every computer owner out there doesn't have access to the source, but even with software only a diminishing minority of folks have use for the source. What is gained is the security that comes with having a hoard of financially disinterested eyeballs looking over the design of your system.
As you point out, the latest processes and fabrication techniques are for the big players only. This is fine, because these are exactly the people who will be holding onto their trade secrets. Unlike with software, however, hardware actually gets fully outdated. The board designs of 15 years ago are either useless, or have become so commoditized that they are being produced and sold at minimum cost by countless Taiwanese concerns. It's these designs that academia and an interested community of electrical engineers could really profit from. And in the cases of things like network cards, where cutting edge tech hasn't been a driving force in sales in years.
If someone has copyright on a hardware design and they're considering making it free, they probably have figured that they no longer have any useful trade advantage from the secrets in that design; their competitors are able to produce identically functioning counterparts to the hardware in question. It's like Id software giving out the source to Quake. It's not a competitive game or engine any more, they have nothing to gain by keeping the internals to themselves.
Any programs run by a normal user will be run in "normal user mode." The exception being suid programs, which are few and far between (and aren't things like webbrowsers). As to code on my system using a malicious exploit, especially one that has made headlines? Yes, I do trust packages from Debian enough to be fairly certain that those in the stable repositories are that safe.
See, we don't download binaries from websites and click "yes" until the installer shuts up. (Though I hate to say it but there are some utilities and install scripts coming out of the Ubuntu community that are dangerously close to that kind of installation paradigm.)
Ok so you assume the existence of something unobservable based on a desire for its existence. Then, to prove your belief valid, you posit a metaphysical entity that will make it in keeping with observed reality. This, friends, is religious thought.
Sure, but it's also predicted things that have happened.
Thinking of our power relationship with technology as a random walk, we can win as much as we want and we're still destined to lose by basic mathematics. It's called the gambler's ruin.
Whenever the self-directed technological apocalypse comes, be it army of soldier bots, self-aware ICBM control systems, nanocancer, servant droid rebellion, a world banking AI (that one is mine), or whatever, there's one thing we will not be able to say
and that is "we didn't see this coming."
Sci-fi has been predicting this for seventy years, and I'm starting to really believe that it might be on the list with satellites and lasers of stuff that's actually going to happen in our lifetimes.
If I can make IE, Firefox, and Safari render the same by including a meta tag, that's such a vast improvement to the current order, I'm not going to complain.
Get real. OS X 10.2 is all but useless now. Their OS upgrades are more frequent and more mandatory than MS's. MS would love to force consumers to get the new version like Apple does, but their corporate clients won't allow that to happen. Apple doesn't have the kind of base in conservative businesses that MS does.
As long as regulation is a bad word, Corporations will only be as ethical as the purchasing public demands. The public is in general too busy with children, work, and life to organize boycotts and follow the business press. Perhaps if the mainstream media reported more on the bad behavior of business, but advertisers have found that doesn't generally catch as many eyeballs, and anyway, who owns the media? A free market with the current corporate structure (which could not exist without forceful government backing) does little for society but maximize production. There is value in that to be sure, but the communities that make up the world need far more out of the powers that affect their lives than just maximized production. I'd be a libertarian (or anarcho-capitalist or whatever) if it was prefaced first by redistributing any wealth held by legal "persons" who do not, in fact, exist. Wealthy individuals can keep their toys.
Nah, if they were going to copy Apple, they'd also needlessly break backwards compatibility.
I like Macs, best UI stuck on a Unix out there, but there's a lot to hate about the cult and what it gets away with.
Re:Go back and read _Free to Choose_...
on
Geekonomics
·
· Score: 1
Commercial open source vendors could pay the overhead in order to sell verified software.
This would be different from other regulations because it's totally impossible to make unregulated software unwritable or unrunnable. If legislators don't grasp that, then all bets are off, of course. The regulation would more likely come in the form of watching businesses over a certain size and making sure they used approved software where needed.
Under that kind of regulation, open-source could flourish as in many areas Open Source (GNU & BSD) are far more secure than any commercial alternative.
Right now purchasing decisions are made on Microsoft's sales team vs. Open source's sales team.
Sooner or later the global market is going to teach MS that the marginal cost of software is $0.00. At that point the platform that is better at doing things for free is pretty much sure to win out.
I guess I suppose that was a joke. Even the bible has hundreds more laws than this, you know. Not even a three thousand year old bronze age civilization was that simple.
But it is a reasonable goal for, in any single area of life, the laws proscribing behavior to be straightforward and few in number. With hundreds of thousands of laws, you can't actually know what is or is not illegal. Rather than avoiding the things you know are against the rules, you more or less have to do what everyone else is doing, or hire professional legal advice. This doesn't seem like a desirable trait in a "free" society.
How much can a human memorize. Lots, I guess. In the ancient world it was common to have the Illiad and Oddessey memorized. There are hundreds of millions of people around the world with most or all of the Al-Quran committed to memory. My mother knows the words to seemingly every single pop song from 1964-1974. Verse helps though. Maybe laws should be written in a regular meter with common repeating phrases.
This argument is only valid if criminalization creates a large scale decline in usage. If the effect is only slight, then the many associated problems with criminalization are too great.
Every law, currently enforced or not, is a right taken from the individual and given to the police. This shouldn't be done except in cases of overwhelming necessity. It would be a great day when the laws of the land were few enough to list by memory.
Here's a bit of a hint to in-shape nerds everywhere:
Shut up about martial arts. Martial arts is for pro bodyguards and nerds with inferiority complexes. Are you a pro bodyguard?
I'm sure it's a nice skill to know, but you're still going to lose a fight against anyone who's been in more than a halfahandful of real ones before, so don't get too cocky.
Rent a boxing ring? Jeeesus... what a bourgie way to threaten an ass-beating.
Slashdot Mirror
Teach it to them in school.
...and don't toss out social-darwinian bullshit, modern economics, even interpreted liberally, hasn't been around long enough and the populations in question are far too large, and intelligence (short of incapacitation) isn't only a small chunk of what contributed to human survival until very recently (for the first 99.9999999% of human history, being resistant to diseases and dumb was a lot more reliable than clever and of below average health made you a lot more likely to survive long enough to procreate. Even people who know evolution pretty well often mistake "breeding" for "good" and assume the "best" (in terms of some human standard of judgement) people are contributing the most genes to the pool.
Smart people are mostly made, not born. Otherwise there would be a lot more geniuses in the slums,
Aye that was a tangent.
xhtml is one very small dialect of xml.
/etc/passwd is more legible and appropriate. And there are times when the volume of data requires binary. XML is good because it is widely known and when the originating application is lost, the data can still be (with moderate difficulty) understood.
when you are entering html style markup tags, you are using xml. but xml is a much much larger subject than that. hand editing a website is fine. (if the documents are getting huge, it should be split into smaller files and automated somehow, anyway) hand editing, say, Open Office's xml format or any of the fairly arcane XMl formats used for interprocess communication.
XML is sort of designed to be the second best data format for any application. There are a lot of times when something like
It's very similar to Java really. It got hyped for a specific web use that didn't really materialize, but it's ability to be generic, widely-spoken, and safety-checked means it has found widespread use across the entire computer industry in places that aren't quite as visible to end-users as simple web application or document formats.
Well clearly we now need to spread Freedom and Democracy to the poor oppressed Titians, who will welcome us with roses and be able to finance their own reconstruction.
No this was my point:
I realize that with a local root exploit a piece of software could use the exploit to do something nasty as root. However, as all applications on a typical users system have been vetted by a distribution team, and code is only going into those applications with the approval of project managers, the chance of a linux user winding up with a dangerous application on their system is diminishingly small.
This is in contrast to many Windows user's environments, which typically have a dozen or so, at least, closed source utilities downloaded from various points around the internet.
While it's by no means impossible, it takes a lot of effort to execute arbitrary code on a linux machine to which you don't have login access, at any level of access.
Now on a server that allows for anonymous telnet or ssh login, yes, this might be a serious problem. But it's very unlikely to be the kind of issue for desktop machines as similar exploits have been for Windows.
One, I think you underestimate how dedicated some people can be to a hobby. I could definitely see someone contacting a university and traveling to test their improvement to some open circuit diagram. Yes, every computer owner out there doesn't have access to the source, but even with software only a diminishing minority of folks have use for the source. What is gained is the security that comes with having a hoard of financially disinterested eyeballs looking over the design of your system.
As you point out, the latest processes and fabrication techniques are for the big players only. This is fine, because these are exactly the people who will be holding onto their trade secrets. Unlike with software, however, hardware actually gets fully outdated. The board designs of 15 years ago are either useless, or have become so commoditized that they are being produced and sold at minimum cost by countless Taiwanese concerns. It's these designs that academia and an interested community of electrical engineers could really profit from. And in the cases of things like network cards, where cutting edge tech hasn't been a driving force in sales in years.
If someone has copyright on a hardware design and they're considering making it free, they probably have figured that they no longer have any useful trade advantage from the secrets in that design; their competitors are able to produce identically functioning counterparts to the hardware in question. It's like Id software giving out the source to Quake. It's not a competitive game or engine any more, they have nothing to gain by keeping the internals to themselves.
Any programs run by a normal user will be run in "normal user mode." The exception being suid programs, which are few and far between (and aren't things like webbrowsers). As to code on my system using a malicious exploit, especially one that has made headlines? Yes, I do trust packages from Debian enough to be fairly certain that those in the stable repositories are that safe.
See, we don't download binaries from websites and click "yes" until the installer shuts up. (Though I hate to say it but there are some utilities and install scripts coming out of the Ubuntu community that are dangerously close to that kind of installation paradigm.)
Yeah you guys go spend a bunch of money on that.
We are so fast approaching the time when bands just have concert promoters rather than record labels. I think this is a very good thing.
Ok so you assume the existence of something unobservable based on a desire for its existence. Then, to prove your belief valid, you posit a metaphysical entity that will make it in keeping with observed reality. This, friends, is religious thought.
Sure, but it's also predicted things that have happened.
Thinking of our power relationship with technology as a random walk, we can win as much as we want and we're still destined to lose by basic mathematics. It's called the gambler's ruin.
And acting, they've both gone on to do great stuff (I personally don't understand why American Gangster wasn't higher on critics' lists), but sheesh.
Seeing that movie with my dad when I was what... 12 or 13 is somehow a very distinct memory.
Whenever the self-directed technological apocalypse comes, be it army of soldier bots, self-aware ICBM control systems, nanocancer, servant droid rebellion, a world banking AI (that one is mine), or whatever, there's one thing we will not be able to say
and that is "we didn't see this coming."
Sci-fi has been predicting this for seventy years, and I'm starting to really believe that it might be on the list with satellites and lasers of stuff that's actually going to happen in our lifetimes.
There's an apropos Joel on Software article from a few years back
Honestly folks, whatever.
If I can make IE, Firefox, and Safari render the same by including a meta tag, that's such a vast improvement to the current order, I'm not going to complain.
Try to use software released in the last year on OS X 10.2. Every upgrade to OS X is mandatory. Look at BootCamp.
Get real. OS X 10.2 is all but useless now. Their OS upgrades are more frequent and more mandatory than MS's. MS would love to force consumers to get the new version like Apple does, but their corporate clients won't allow that to happen. Apple doesn't have the kind of base in conservative businesses that MS does.
Ethics? Is there money in that?
As long as regulation is a bad word, Corporations will only be as ethical as the purchasing public demands. The public is in general too busy with children, work, and life to organize boycotts and follow the business press. Perhaps if the mainstream media reported more on the bad behavior of business, but advertisers have found that doesn't generally catch as many eyeballs, and anyway, who owns the media? A free market with the current corporate structure (which could not exist without forceful government backing) does little for society but maximize production. There is value in that to be sure, but the communities that make up the world need far more out of the powers that affect their lives than just maximized production. I'd be a libertarian (or anarcho-capitalist or whatever) if it was prefaced first by redistributing any wealth held by legal "persons" who do not, in fact, exist. Wealthy individuals can keep their toys.
Nah, if they were going to copy Apple, they'd also needlessly break backwards compatibility.
I like Macs, best UI stuck on a Unix out there, but there's a lot to hate about the cult and what it gets away with.
Commercial open source vendors could pay the overhead in order to sell verified software.
This would be different from other regulations because it's totally impossible to make unregulated software unwritable or unrunnable. If legislators don't grasp that, then all bets are off, of course. The regulation would more likely come in the form of watching businesses over a certain size and making sure they used approved software where needed.
Under that kind of regulation, open-source could flourish as in many areas Open Source (GNU & BSD) are far more secure than any commercial alternative.
Right now purchasing decisions are made on Microsoft's sales team vs. Open source's sales team.
Hey now, this here descendant of Angles and Saxons wants nothing to do with that post.
Pretty clever to grandfather out the voting block that can remember pre-police state america.
I've always read Jesus as a bit of an anarchist.
Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's; give unto God what is God's. Well... after you take everything that is God's, what exactly is left over for Caesar.
Sooner or later the global market is going to teach MS that the marginal cost of software is $0.00. At that point the platform that is better at doing things for free is pretty much sure to win out.
So yeah; bring it on.
I guess I suppose that was a joke. Even the bible has hundreds more laws than this, you know. Not even a three thousand year old bronze age civilization was that simple.
But it is a reasonable goal for, in any single area of life, the laws proscribing behavior to be straightforward and few in number. With hundreds of thousands of laws, you can't actually know what is or is not illegal. Rather than avoiding the things you know are against the rules, you more or less have to do what everyone else is doing, or hire professional legal advice. This doesn't seem like a desirable trait in a "free" society.
How much can a human memorize. Lots, I guess. In the ancient world it was common to have the Illiad and Oddessey memorized. There are hundreds of millions of people around the world with most or all of the Al-Quran committed to memory. My mother knows the words to seemingly every single pop song from 1964-1974. Verse helps though. Maybe laws should be written in a regular meter with common repeating phrases.
This argument is only valid if criminalization creates a large scale decline in usage. If the effect is only slight, then the many associated problems with criminalization are too great.
Every law, currently enforced or not, is a right taken from the individual and given to the police. This shouldn't be done except in cases of overwhelming necessity. It would be a great day when the laws of the land were few enough to list by memory.
Here's a bit of a hint to in-shape nerds everywhere:
Shut up about martial arts. Martial arts is for pro bodyguards and nerds with inferiority complexes. Are you a pro bodyguard?
I'm sure it's a nice skill to know, but you're still going to lose a fight against anyone who's been in more than a halfahandful of real ones before, so don't get too cocky.
Rent a boxing ring? Jeeesus... what a bourgie way to threaten an ass-beating.