The main reason for it is that (a) it lets people with default-width xterms and terminals read your code, and (b) it provides a reasonably universal standard to code around.
80 col seems pretty unused in the Windows world, where most people use that godawful Visual Studio Editor, and conventions are to extend lines to infinity.
80 col is common in the *IX world, where most folks doing a lot of coding are using emacs/xemacs or vi. Space-indented, 80 col code can be read by pretty much anyone and edited by anything, so it's a reasonably universal standard to base code on.
Some projects deviate from this -- it's considered good open source etiquette to stick with the format already being used in the file that you're hacking on, instead of mixing things up.
That being said, I rather like the idea of python's approach (where how the user chooses to view code, wrapped or scrolling, is independent of the storage format).
The advantage of using 80 columns is that you can have multiple source lines on screen.
At 1152x864, you can slap four xterms with the default fixed 9 font onscreen, and refer easily to headers and other code.
I view X as particularly useful because I can *have* four terminals onscreen at once, though I can make any bigger if I feel like it or my eyes are tired.
This would be true in a system without hard line breaks. In a hard-line-broken environment, be it 80 col, 120 col, 132 col, or whatever.
However, if you start changing tab width around, consistent line length goes to hell (not bad if you're shortening tabs, but if you lengthen them, you have a bunch of lines that are badly broken).
The CNN execs probably decided it would play better on CNN International, rather than add to the antiAmerican bashing by the liberal media.
I'm curious. What are you thinking of? I've seen relatively little bashing of America by the American media. Criticism of Bush, sure, but he's hardly America.
If I criticize one of my town official's actions, am I bashing my town?
The Canucks have long since figured out that nothing bad happens to them if they ignore DRM and simply "promote" themselves to first-class citizens when it comes to media. Ah, yes, satellite TV...
Also, Tor, the anonymizing onion-skin routing system mentioned on Slashdot yesterday, could be modified to allow requesting an endpoint in the country in question, bypassing attempts to block connections based on nation.
And a question for other./-ers: is it possible to watch movies (mplayer | xine) using LTSP over a 100-BaseT Ethernet? Is that possible, or must the movie player be run locally?"
I have been able to play movies remotely over a 100Mbps LAN with mplayer using xv.
High-resolution movies caused jerkiness, more sane ones worked fine.
Really, though, unless you have nothing to do with your network but have one computer spew raw video over it, you're better off running mplayer locally.
All of those either have strong potential to cause direct physical harm (traffic duty, robbery, assault) and/or badly undermine systems that allow our society to continue functioning effectively (robbery, fraud).
Calling someone a "jap", a "mick" or a "cracker" just doesn't even register on the scale.
And since this is an addiction (getting more porn makes you want to get even more and/or act out your fantasies) that's a bad thing.
I'm not sure that "porn makes you act out your fantasies" is a valid claim. There is a number of people with fetishes that would be illegal to act out -- take cannibalism or other variants of snuff fetishes, for instance. Yet I hear no stories of large numbers of real-life cannibalistic killings. Clearly, at least in some cases, there is no such connection.
1) This is a weak argument -- it's a single high-profile person, who already has tried to exploit his fame (Ted Bundy is a bit of a showman who likes to be known as an expert on criminals, and has volunteered to help track down at least one killer before to keep his name in the press). I would guess that, say, a prison psychologist probably knows more serial killers well than Ted Bundy.
2) Even if we suppose that Ted Bundy can effectively profile serial killers, this is an attempted argument for correlation, not causation. Remember the infamous argument: people that drive Ferraris tend to make more money than those that drive Volkswagon Beetles. Therefore, if you want to become truly wealthy, you should buy a Ferrari! I can think of a number of very plausible reasons why a serial killer might have pornography.
3) We're talking about an anecdotal piece of evidence -- not something that one wants to use to draw statistical conclusions.
4) Even assuming that Bundy is correct, unless he is using a very clinical use of "addicted" he still doesn't establish correlation even in the few people that he is talking about -- most men I know of whom I'm aware of their habits regarding pornography possess some form of pornography or another (I'm assuming Bundy is talking about men -- female serial killers are extremely rare, and in any case would not be in the same prison as Bundy).
5) The argument is not about the subject at hand -- it is regarding general pornography, not child pornography. We allow possession of general pornography to be legal, yet this argument is against general pornography.
6) While not a fallacy in the argument, generally I try to do something if I lack much evidence one way or another -- I look for something that I would expect to be present if an argument would be true. There are a number of people and groups that would love to have established a causual link between pornography and murders. The conservative Christian movement was quite strong in the United States during the post-World-War-II period when studies on sexual habits became more acceptable, like the Kinsey study. My suspicion is that there have probably been such studies before, and that I would have heard about a successful study establishing a causual link between pornography and killings.
Frankly, I don't give a damn one way or the other what someone calls someone else. I'm white. If someone wants to call me "whitey" or "cracker", I might think it's kind of funny, but other than that, it doesn't mean anything to me.
I just don't have any sympathy for people overinduling in their own victimhood. There are people starving around the world, an African continent full of AIDS, people without access to uncontaminated drinkable water, and someone is going to complain about the choice of word that someone uses to describe them, or even more ridiculously, a three-letter-acronym that happens to match up with that word? How can anyone remotely sympathize with someone complaining about this? If they really can't think of a single worthwhile issue to complain about, I'd suggest the upcoming US presidential election, which stands to significantly impact a lot more people than the term that someone uses to refer to a group of people.
The extreme anonymity provided by Freenet is exactly why I'm avoiding it like the plague (and also because it's a Java thing, but that's another problem): unless you live in some dictatorship like China, the only real reason you'd need that much anonymity is for kiddy pr0n...
I'm curious -- what issue do you take with child porn in such an environment as Freenet? Yes, it's anonymous, but in such an environment, it's not possible for pornography producers to profit from child porn.
The main point of making possession of child porn illegal and in making it a social taboo is that it makes unprofitable and thus presumably discourages further production of child porn. In turn, this presumably reduces sexual interaction with children, which presumably reduces physical harm coming to children (which I suspect most people would consider having intrinsic value, due to the insticts we have toward children), which is the most obvious reason for banning child porn.
Since there is no impact on the profitability of child porn if such content is distributed in an environment where the porn cannot be sold, it seems that this eliminates the dissuasion factor, the only reason for such an extreme step as making possessing a particular type of data illegal.
but does anyone really think that the ratio of illegal porn and illicitly-traded copyrighted material to legitimate use isn't astronomical?
That means little.
The same is true of P2P networks.
P2P file distribution is simply both cheap and an effective way of offloading distribution costs onto all consumers -- it is as elegant a concept as the free market.
Currently, much of the use of P2P file distribution happens to be for copyright-infringing content and porn. This is not because of anything inherent to the technology, but because there is a good deal of demand for such content without the overhead of high distribution costs. So the first things to hit P2P were, naturally, porn and copyright-infringing content.
Eventually, as more people understand how to use and take advantage of P2P distribution, it will be incorporated more and more into "legitimate" practices.
The same thing is true of anonymizing stuff. Remember the people who post complaints about someone on, say, Yahoo, and then that person gets a court order to find out who they are? This lets people be truly anonymous if they so desire.
What does any of that (even killing people) have to do with the definition of a terrorist: someone who uses force against civilians to produce political influence?
I'm concerned that negative impacts could be used as ammunition for attempts to ban anonymous systems. I'd rather have a more strongly entrenched group of people using anonymizing software before seeing something released that can be used to attack systems anonymously.
Isn't this onion routing thing exactly what freenet uses?
Not in the same form.
Freenet allows posting of data, which does travel through multiple nodes, much like this one. It also allows retrieval of data. However, the two are separate operations. You don't establish a connection between the publisher of data and the reciever, which means Freenet tends to be unsuitable for things that require even remotely interactive latency. I think Tor might wind up being a bit high for, say, SSH, but it could easily be just fine for instant messaging -- two people that don't know each other by anything but pseudonyms and cannot trace each other can conduct conversations.
Zero Knowledge Systems provided commercial onion skin routing for quite some time.
Since heavily-used onion-skin-routing can make traffic analysis a pain and is one of the best anonymity mechanisms we have, I'm certainly cheering Tor on. If you don't like your network usage being monitored, be it web browsing, newsgroup reading, email, or chatting, onion-skin routing is a Good Thing.
The problem isn't really that someone is a lawyer. Being a lawyer is simply a profession that involves knowing a lot of laws and how they interrelate and have been judged on in the past so that you may advise people.
The problem is that we in the United States did a poor job of setting up our court system, with extremely lucrative punitive damages. As a result, it is very profitable to prosecute bullshit lawsuits, and a number of people, not surprisingly, do so.
Furthermore, it turns out that most people are irrational and swayed by emotion, and those that serve on a jury are no different -- hence efforts by lawyers to try to sway jurors, and the perception of them as manipulative people.
We recognize that our country has issues with its legal system; the problem is that we then blame lawyers for it.
However, libpng is the most commonly used PNG implementation due to it's free licence. These bugs affect to very many applications (graphics applications, Office applications, user interface managers, browsers, etc.) which happen to use PNG.
Note that this is an issue that has not recieved enough attention. These days, data files are transfered around a lot. Sure, people are terribly careful about network code, anything reading data from the network, but how careful are they in checking data that they're reading from "local" files? How secure is MS Office at reading MS Office files, or OpenOffice at reading OpenOffice files? What about libvorbis? How about id3 tag readers? The problem is exacerbated when authors of network applications treat code that reads "trusted", "local" files (i.e. libraries to parse files) as safe, and automatically hands off data to such libraries.
See, even if you encrypt the content of your e-mail, you can't encrypt the headers. Sure, "subject" can be filled with nonsense, but the address is good enough to draw a line that says "X said something to Y at this date/time" which is still useful info in an intel puzzle...
It is possible to communicate with someone on the Internet without providing association via Freenet; there is Frost (the message board protocol) and a Freenet email protocol.
Of course, the very fact that someone is using Freenet in the United States of America could be considered incriminating. After all, if you don't have anything to hide, if you aren't a bad guy aiding terrorists or growing marijuana, then exactly why do you want privacy?
Whoever thinks that they are going to wiretap all VoIP networks at the FBI is living in dreamland. Let's take a brief look at a quick VoIP system that I'm going to design. I'll even publish the source code, right here on Slashdot. It will take me a few seconds to write:
# smallvoip.sh # VoIP software capable of bypassing FBI wiretap regulations. # Warning: use or posession of this software may be a federal crime in the United States of America. Download this software at your own risk. # Copyright 2004, 0x0d0a, released under the GPL # Usage: smallvoip remote-username remote-ip-address # You must have a shell account on the remote machine. # Run on each of the two machines involved in the call. # Duplex audio support required. # TODO: pass through lame or oggenc for better bandwidth usage. This will make the second line slightly longer. # LIMITATIONS: only one user per host at once # I recommend setting up public-key ssh authentication with this software.
Hmm. My high-security, encrypted Internet phone doing VoIP.
Now, I have to ask the people in charge of Homeland Security: do you really, truly, honestly think that you have *any* hope of keeping anyone from writing such a two-line program? Any *IX user with a bit of experience could write this piece of software. In addition, the fact that it contains voice data is completely undetectable to the outside world, so there is no practical way to "catch" someone using such a system.
It is true that this is a very simple program, but it can also be very easily extended into a full-blown encrypted voice communication program, without the minor limitations here that make this annoying for day-to-day use. In addition, there are a vast number of extant Internet systems for communicating that cannot be wiretapped by the FBI -- PGP/GPG contains no back doors to allow wiretapping of email communications. Frost (on the Freenet platform) can disguise the very fact that an association exists between two users. These systems are rarely used, but they are also not hard to deploy, and if the FBI insists on forcing conventional voice communication to be breakable, there is little incentive not to use systems such as the one that I have demonstrated here.
And why shouldn't you be using a vanilla kernel on a production machine?
Because while the kernel has been tested to some extent, is hasn't been tried with your mix of userspace software. It'd be like taking the latest kernel that passes the internal Microsoft QA and immediately slapping it into, say, NT4, without internal or beta testing of the whole at all.
Really, Stallman should sit down and have a big bash (heh, heh, heh... bad pun). He wanted to provide a free *IX alternative to the world, and he and the other GNU contributors ended up taking it over.
Slashdot Mirror
The main reason for it is that (a) it lets people with default-width xterms and terminals read your code, and (b) it provides a reasonably universal standard to code around.
80 col seems pretty unused in the Windows world, where most people use that godawful Visual Studio Editor, and conventions are to extend lines to infinity.
80 col is common in the *IX world, where most folks doing a lot of coding are using emacs/xemacs or vi. Space-indented, 80 col code can be read by pretty much anyone and edited by anything, so it's a reasonably universal standard to base code on.
Some projects deviate from this -- it's considered good open source etiquette to stick with the format already being used in the file that you're hacking on, instead of mixing things up.
That being said, I rather like the idea of python's approach (where how the user chooses to view code, wrapped or scrolling, is independent of the storage format).
The advantage of using 80 columns is that you can have multiple source lines on screen.
At 1152x864, you can slap four xterms with the default fixed 9 font onscreen, and refer easily to headers and other code.
I view X as particularly useful because I can *have* four terminals onscreen at once, though I can make any bigger if I feel like it or my eyes are tired.
No.
This would be true in a system without hard line breaks. In a hard-line-broken environment, be it 80 col, 120 col, 132 col, or whatever.
However, if you start changing tab width around, consistent line length goes to hell (not bad if you're shortening tabs, but if you lengthen them, you have a bunch of lines that are badly broken).
This is a long, long debate.
The CNN execs probably decided it would play better on CNN International, rather than add to the antiAmerican bashing by the liberal media.
I'm curious. What are you thinking of? I've seen relatively little bashing of America by the American media. Criticism of Bush, sure, but he's hardly America.
If I criticize one of my town official's actions, am I bashing my town?
I suspect that people will be interested in making fun of Bush for at least as long as Bush is interested in keeping our soldiers in Iraq.
The Canucks have long since figured out that nothing bad happens to them if they ignore DRM and simply "promote" themselves to first-class citizens when it comes to media. Ah, yes, satellite TV...
Also, Tor, the anonymizing onion-skin routing system mentioned on Slashdot yesterday, could be modified to allow requesting an endpoint in the country in question, bypassing attempts to block connections based on nation.
And a question for other ./-ers: is it possible to watch movies (mplayer | xine) using LTSP over a 100-BaseT Ethernet? Is that possible, or must the movie player be run locally?"
I have been able to play movies remotely over a 100Mbps LAN with mplayer using xv.
High-resolution movies caused jerkiness, more sane ones worked fine.
Really, though, unless you have nothing to do with your network but have one computer spew raw video over it, you're better off running mplayer locally.
All of those either have strong potential to cause direct physical harm (traffic duty, robbery, assault) and/or badly undermine systems that allow our society to continue functioning effectively (robbery, fraud).
Calling someone a "jap", a "mick" or a "cracker" just doesn't even register on the scale.
And since this is an addiction (getting more porn makes you want to get even more and/or act out your fantasies) that's a bad thing.
I'm not sure that "porn makes you act out your fantasies" is a valid claim. There is a number of people with fetishes that would be illegal to act out -- take cannibalism or other variants of snuff fetishes, for instance. Yet I hear no stories of large numbers of real-life cannibalistic killings. Clearly, at least in some cases, there is no such connection.
Just two points:
1) This is a weak argument -- it's a single high-profile person, who already has tried to exploit his fame (Ted Bundy is a bit of a showman who likes to be known as an expert on criminals, and has volunteered to help track down at least one killer before to keep his name in the press). I would guess that, say, a prison psychologist probably knows more serial killers well than Ted Bundy.
2) Even if we suppose that Ted Bundy can effectively profile serial killers, this is an attempted argument for correlation, not causation. Remember the infamous argument: people that drive Ferraris tend to make more money than those that drive Volkswagon Beetles. Therefore, if you want to become truly wealthy, you should buy a Ferrari! I can think of a number of very plausible reasons why a serial killer might have pornography.
3) We're talking about an anecdotal piece of evidence -- not something that one wants to use to draw statistical conclusions.
4) Even assuming that Bundy is correct, unless he is using a very clinical use of "addicted" he still doesn't establish correlation even in the few people that he is talking about -- most men I know of whom I'm aware of their habits regarding pornography possess some form of pornography or another (I'm assuming Bundy is talking about men -- female serial killers are extremely rare, and in any case would not be in the same prison as Bundy).
5) The argument is not about the subject at hand -- it is regarding general pornography, not child pornography. We allow possession of general pornography to be legal, yet this argument is against general pornography.
6) While not a fallacy in the argument, generally I try to do something if I lack much evidence one way or another -- I look for something that I would expect to be present if an argument would be true. There are a number of people and groups that would love to have established a causual link between pornography and murders. The conservative Christian movement was quite strong in the United States during the post-World-War-II period when studies on sexual habits became more acceptable, like the Kinsey study. My suspicion is that there have probably been such studies before, and that I would have heard about a successful study establishing a causual link between pornography and killings.
Frankly, I don't give a damn one way or the other what someone calls someone else. I'm white. If someone wants to call me "whitey" or "cracker", I might think it's kind of funny, but other than that, it doesn't mean anything to me.
I just don't have any sympathy for people overinduling in their own victimhood. There are people starving around the world, an African continent full of AIDS, people without access to uncontaminated drinkable water, and someone is going to complain about the choice of word that someone uses to describe them, or even more ridiculously, a three-letter-acronym that happens to match up with that word? How can anyone remotely sympathize with someone complaining about this? If they really can't think of a single worthwhile issue to complain about, I'd suggest the upcoming US presidential election, which stands to significantly impact a lot more people than the term that someone uses to refer to a group of people.
Paedophiles trade movies too you know.
The extreme anonymity provided by Freenet is exactly why I'm avoiding it like the plague (and also because it's a Java thing, but that's another problem): unless you live in some dictatorship like China, the only real reason you'd need that much anonymity is for kiddy pr0n...
I'm curious -- what issue do you take with child porn in such an environment as Freenet? Yes, it's anonymous, but in such an environment, it's not possible for pornography producers to profit from child porn.
The main point of making possession of child porn illegal and in making it a social taboo is that it makes unprofitable and thus presumably discourages further production of child porn. In turn, this presumably reduces sexual interaction with children, which presumably reduces physical harm coming to children (which I suspect most people would consider having intrinsic value, due to the insticts we have toward children), which is the most obvious reason for banning child porn.
Since there is no impact on the profitability of child porn if such content is distributed in an environment where the porn cannot be sold, it seems that this eliminates the dissuasion factor, the only reason for such an extreme step as making possessing a particular type of data illegal.
What's your take on it?
but does anyone really think that the ratio of illegal porn and illicitly-traded copyrighted material to legitimate use isn't astronomical?
That means little.
The same is true of P2P networks.
P2P file distribution is simply both cheap and an effective way of offloading distribution costs onto all consumers -- it is as elegant a concept as the free market.
Currently, much of the use of P2P file distribution happens to be for copyright-infringing content and porn. This is not because of anything inherent to the technology, but because there is a good deal of demand for such content without the overhead of high distribution costs. So the first things to hit P2P were, naturally, porn and copyright-infringing content.
Eventually, as more people understand how to use and take advantage of P2P distribution, it will be incorporated more and more into "legitimate" practices.
The same thing is true of anonymizing stuff. Remember the people who post complaints about someone on, say, Yahoo, and then that person gets a court order to find out who they are? This lets people be truly anonymous if they so desire.
What does any of that (even killing people) have to do with the definition of a terrorist: someone who uses force against civilians to produce political influence?
I'm concerned that negative impacts could be used as ammunition for attempts to ban anonymous systems. I'd rather have a more strongly entrenched group of people using anonymizing software before seeing something released that can be used to attack systems anonymously.
Ah, well.
Isn't this onion routing thing exactly what freenet uses?
Not in the same form.
Freenet allows posting of data, which does travel through multiple nodes, much like this one. It also allows retrieval of data. However, the two are separate operations. You don't establish a connection between the publisher of data and the reciever, which means Freenet tends to be unsuitable for things that require even remotely interactive latency. I think Tor might wind up being a bit high for, say, SSH, but it could easily be just fine for instant messaging -- two people that don't know each other by anything but pseudonyms and cannot trace each other can conduct conversations.
Zero Knowledge Systems provided commercial onion skin routing for quite some time.
Since heavily-used onion-skin-routing can make traffic analysis a pain and is one of the best anonymity mechanisms we have, I'm certainly cheering Tor on. If you don't like your network usage being monitored, be it web browsing, newsgroup reading, email, or chatting, onion-skin routing is a Good Thing.
The problem isn't really that someone is a lawyer. Being a lawyer is simply a profession that involves knowing a lot of laws and how they interrelate and have been judged on in the past so that you may advise people.
The problem is that we in the United States did a poor job of setting up our court system, with extremely lucrative punitive damages. As a result, it is very profitable to prosecute bullshit lawsuits, and a number of people, not surprisingly, do so.
Furthermore, it turns out that most people are irrational and swayed by emotion, and those that serve on a jury are no different -- hence efforts by lawyers to try to sway jurors, and the perception of them as manipulative people.
We recognize that our country has issues with its legal system; the problem is that we then blame lawyers for it.
Really and seriously, would you be afraid of reprisal if you did precisely this?
However, libpng is the most commonly used PNG implementation due to it's free licence. These bugs affect to very many applications (graphics applications, Office applications, user interface managers, browsers, etc.) which happen to use PNG.
Note that this is an issue that has not recieved enough attention. These days, data files are transfered around a lot. Sure, people are terribly careful about network code, anything reading data from the network, but how careful are they in checking data that they're reading from "local" files? How secure is MS Office at reading MS Office files, or OpenOffice at reading OpenOffice files? What about libvorbis? How about id3 tag readers? The problem is exacerbated when authors of network applications treat code that reads "trusted", "local" files (i.e. libraries to parse files) as safe, and automatically hands off data to such libraries.
See, even if you encrypt the content of your e-mail, you can't encrypt the headers. Sure, "subject" can be filled with nonsense, but the address is good enough to draw a line that says "X said something to Y at this date/time" which is still useful info in an intel puzzle...
It is possible to communicate with someone on the Internet without providing association via Freenet; there is Frost (the message board protocol) and a Freenet email protocol.
Of course, the very fact that someone is using Freenet in the United States of America could be considered incriminating. After all, if you don't have anything to hide, if you aren't a bad guy aiding terrorists or growing marijuana, then exactly why do you want privacy?
Whoever thinks that they are going to wiretap all VoIP networks at the FBI is living in dreamland. Let's take a brief look at a quick VoIP system that I'm going to design. I'll even publish the source code, right here on Slashdot. It will take me a few seconds to write:
/dev/dsp|nc localhost 7000"
# smallvoip.sh
# VoIP software capable of bypassing FBI wiretap regulations.
# Warning: use or posession of this software may be a federal crime in the United States of America. Download this software at your own risk.
# Copyright 2004, 0x0d0a, released under the GPL
# Usage: smallvoip remote-username remote-ip-address
# You must have a shell account on the remote machine.
# Run on each of the two machines involved in the call.
# Duplex audio support required.
# TODO: pass through lame or oggenc for better bandwidth usage. This will make the second line slightly longer.
# LIMITATIONS: only one user per host at once
# I recommend setting up public-key ssh authentication with this software.
nc -l -p 7001 >/dev/dsp &
ssh -R 7000:`hostname`:7001 $1@$2 "cat
Hmm. My high-security, encrypted Internet phone doing VoIP.
Now, I have to ask the people in charge of Homeland Security: do you really, truly, honestly think that you have *any* hope of keeping anyone from writing such a two-line program? Any *IX user with a bit of experience could write this piece of software. In addition, the fact that it contains voice data is completely undetectable to the outside world, so there is no practical way to "catch" someone using such a system.
It is true that this is a very simple program, but it can also be very easily extended into a full-blown encrypted voice communication program, without the minor limitations here that make this annoying for day-to-day use. In addition, there are a vast number of extant Internet systems for communicating that cannot be wiretapped by the FBI -- PGP/GPG contains no back doors to allow wiretapping of email communications. Frost (on the Freenet platform) can disguise the very fact that an association exists between two users. These systems are rarely used, but they are also not hard to deploy, and if the FBI insists on forcing conventional voice communication to be breakable, there is little incentive not to use systems such as the one that I have demonstrated here.
And why shouldn't you be using a vanilla kernel on a production machine?
Because while the kernel has been tested to some extent, is hasn't been tried with your mix of userspace software. It'd be like taking the latest kernel that passes the internal Microsoft QA and immediately slapping it into, say, NT4, without internal or beta testing of the whole at all.
Actually, Unix is now GNU.
But, yes, your approach is elegant.
Really, Stallman should sit down and have a big bash (heh, heh, heh... bad pun). He wanted to provide a free *IX alternative to the world, and he and the other GNU contributors ended up taking it over.