None of those are security-related. Or do you mean digital restrictions management? Those things are certainly useful to the copyright-holder on the document, but they're certainly not security-related. They're also not very reliable, and no substitute for the legal system.
You're using SMTP AUTH over TLS on port 587/tcp per RFC 2476, right? ISPs have fewer legitimate reasons (if any) to block 587/tcp out than 25/tcp out.
That may be true, but if an ISP is blocking outgoing ports to begin with, they may well be blocking everything and only unblocking allowed ports. How many ISPs would have enough clue to unblock the submission port?
By first reading it is better than irrevocable. It is revocable only in the case that you take action against a free software project. Free software developers would seem to be able to use these 500 patents as a form of patent defence by saying: "Sue us and leave yourself liable to being stomped by IBM."
It looks a lot like a patents version of the GPL, doesn't it? It creates a pool of patents that are available to anyone willing to play nice by extending others the same courtesy.
YOUR code, if you choose, can be released under whatever licence that YOU choose.
Now, in the context of the GPL... I CANNOT choose. I have to go GPL if I have anything at all to do with GPL code being involved in my changes.
Still, not true. Your code, which you wrote, can still be released under whatever licence you like. You just can't release any GPL'ed contributions under another licence, nor any of your code that is derivative of those contributions. But you certainly can keep parallel trees for GPL and non-GPL development. Have a look at the Ghostscript licensing, for an example.
It's a strange commodity that makes you lose rights to your own work if you attempt to incorporate it.
The GPL can never cause you to lose any rights to your own work; only to derivative works of other works that you would not have any right to incorporate without the GPL. Now, if you incorporate GPL'ed code into something you've written, you still only own the part you wrote, not the whole shebang. And if you release your work under the GPL, and someone contributes improvements to it, you only own the part you wrote; you have rights to the contributions only under the GPL.
Complaints about the GPL "taking away my rights" basically amount to the vocalizations of people who want to use other people's work without abiding by the terms (based on giving back to the community) that the author of that work set. Basically, GPL-hatred is a kind of looter-mentality.
One caveat: it will not work well in US Presidential elections as long as the Electoral College in place. Then again, neither will any of the other alternative election methods. Oh well.
Well, states can allocate their electoral votes however they want. The electoral votes eventually get compared with the traditional plurality method, but if the electoral votes from each state were generated from the popular vote using Approval Voting or some kind of ranked voting, it would at least be an improvement over our current system that didn't require a constitutional amendment.
I think the article's theory is correct -- searching for George-W-Bush or George-Bush rather than Bush (as the article did for John-Kerry as opposed to Kerry) turns up mainly anti-Bush stories. This goes a good way towards confirming the suggestion that it's a usage difference between establishment and alternative news sources.
What percentage would a Green party president expect an average American making $75,000 a year pay to support all these social plans?
Bah, I wanted to moderate rather than post in this thread, but you've baited me into it. If you think an average American makes $75,000 a year, you are completely out of touch. The median household income for the US was
$43,318 last year. Per capita income was 35,000, but that counts children, so isn't really applicable.
Also, it's rather naive to talk about "tax percentages" as if there were only one tax out there and it affected everyone equally. Most people pay a variety of state and local taxes along with federal income tax (progressively graduated) and federal payroll taxes (slightly regressive because of how it's capped). Tax reform is a complex subject, and it can't be reduced to "what do you think the rate should be." If you're interested, you should have a look at a very good overview
of the different possibilities and their consequences.
Unless we really want to live in a society where equality is enforced and nobody is allowed to have anymore than anyone else, the presence of thieves and other criminals is something we will always need to deal with.
Well there are (or, increasingly, were) societies where that equality is enforced by reality rather than by society. Hunter-gatherers, in general, didn't have a problem with theft because if you steal it, you have to carry it, and no one wants to have to schlep around more stuff than they have to.
We can also imagine societies where theft is as much or more work than obtaining things legitimately (e.g., the anarcho-socialist societies in Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed or Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division), or simply where everyone is rich enough or has enough opportunity to be that they'd rather work for what they want (e.g., the anarcho-capitalist society in Ken MacLeod's The Stone Canal). Science-fiction now, but even if utopia's not acheivable, it should be possible to at least get to where theft, while it exists, is just not a big concern for most people.
There are several problems with this scheme. It solves the problem of spam (more or less), but creates new ones.
The first is that it gives power (which will be converted into money) to the certificate signing authority. This is currently a problem with https, as even though anyone can set up a web server using SSL, for it to be usable buy the public, you must pay an often very high tax to one of a very few signing authorities. This problem would be much, much worse with email.
The second is that once you have given this power to the signing authorities, you must trust them completely. It only takes one established authority going bad (e.g., by being bought out by someone unscrupulous) to ruin this scheme in any of a number of ways. You can 'untrust' that authority, then, but most people probably won't know how to, or won't be inclined to.
Finally, this scheme attempts to eliminate spam by eliminating anonymous email. However, there are legitimate uses for anonymous email (whistle-blowers, political dissidents), and it seems to me that trying to eliminate obnoxious commercial speech is not enough of a justification to eliminate these kinds of speech as well. It might be possible to get around this by means of remailers, but then the remailers must be either trusted as well, or be vulnerable to use as spam relays.
It's true that it's not just MS -- IIRC, the gnome keyboard switching applet had to be changed to not show any flags whatsoever after China got mad for the inclusion of the Taiwanese flag, and Taiwanese hackers got mad at Redhat for taking it out of their packages. There's a discussion on it here
They still need a warrant, but the procedure for obtaining a warrant is changed. If the feds say a search or wiretap is related to national security, then they do not have to present evidence of probable cause to the judge. The judge then has only the investigators' say-so on whether to grant the warrant. Also, the person wiretapped does not need to be notified afterwards (as they would be under a standard wiretap).
Well, there's the associated issue that a backdoor usable by law enforcement may well become useable by other, less well-intentioned people, as well. Organized crime and industrial espionage operators are the likeliest examples that come to mind. Fortunately or unfortunately, reliable security has to be secure against everyone.
Will the power of Linux apps put Solaris back into the running?
Which apps would those be, exactly? Just about everything significant that's available for Linux is available as source, and most of those build with autoconf and GNU tools for portability, so installation on Solaris is just a 'configure; make; make install' away.
There are a handful of proprietary applications for Linux that might be relevant, but I'd guess most of these are back-office type things that probably already have Solaris versions. That just leaves things like the Flash plugin, and I simply can't see that sort of thing as being very important.
While it would be really nice to have an e-book reader with a really good display, great battery life, and the rest, I couldn't really see spending money on one unless it had a couple of critical features (one technical, one partly technical and partly social).
The first one is the ability to load any content that I already have in electronic form. Most particularly, I'd use this for reading Gutenberg public domain e-texts, and for storing and reading webpages offline (e.g., the Python Library Reference). And to do this, I'd need either for the reader to handle several common formats (text, html, and perhaps PDF), or a Free utility to convert those formats into the reader's native format.
The second is the ability to pay for all-you-can-read access to the catalogs of various publishers, in an open and non-discriminatory fashion. That is, I don't want to be stuck only being able to buy new (copyrighted) books only through the manufacturers of the e-book, and only from the publishers they happen to have a deal with. And I don't want to pay full hardback price for single books. I want to be able to go directly to the publisher (or to the author for self-published books), and pay a yearly fee for access to everything in their catalog, or possibly a very low price for a single book ($50 a year, say, or $5 for one book; right now one hardback costs on average $25, and that's about all any one publisher will see from me in a given year). This will obviously require an open standard for e-book publishing. There seems to be work towards such a thing already in progress.
As for DRM, I'm not sure what I'd accept; certainly not much. Ideally there would be no reading or copying restrictions, but rather some sort of watermarking that would make it easy to track down redistributors, but I'm not sure how feasible that would be. I think with a subscription-based model, the convenience of having full access to a catalog would be enough to make illegal copying not worth the trouble. Publishers might lose a few sales of popular books to copying, but they'd make up for it with a guaranteed revenue stream.
Unless your vision is so bad that you're effectively incapacitated without glasses, why bother? Is wearing glasses so terrible? I don't think so -- I prefer glasses to contacts or any kind of surgery. They're relatively low-tech (thus reliable), and they make you look more distinguished and sophisticated.
If you want to spend a pile of money on your vision, go out and buy a really good pair of glasses. Get lenses with all the added extras (UV-resistance, scratch-resistant coating, lightweight material), and get a pair of fashionable frames (Slashdot readers, bring a fashion consultant to help with the frames). Even really laying it on will be cheaper than the surgery, and then in a few years when the surgical technology has improved, you can consider it again.
[...]authors - people who actually take the time to sit down and write, for their readers, something worth reading - have a right to not have their works consistently and persistently changed.
There's a simple technological solution to this problem that doesn't require legal coercion. Just cryptographically sign all of your works, and let it be known that any copy of any of your works that doesn't have a valid signature is not authentic. That way it's easy to tell your original works from any modified copies that may be floating around, and it's also easy to distribute unmodified copies and to verify that they are unmodified.
Right now gnome's main usability problem is it's speed. That's the only reason I don't use it. I have a 900mhz Duron. Sure it's old but it runs wind32 and qt apps quickly-- quickly enough for most tasks. I hope gtk gets speed tweaks soon. (I've even heard people with recent CPUs saying gtk feels lethargic on their systems.)
Three words: memory, memory, and memory.
Seriously, the processor is not the problem; GNOME is just RAM hungry. For a local nonprofit, I set up from spare parts a Celeron 450 machine with 256 Mb of RAM and Fedora Core 2. It runs quite speedily. 128 MB (per concurrent user) is probably about the bare minimum for a fully-loaded GNOME system.
I don't think it's a gtk2 problem, per se. Try running, for example, xfce4 (a lighter gtk2-based DE) as your desktop environment on the same computer and see if it makes a difference.
It doesn't matter if spatial nautilus is good or bad. Overriding people's existing preferences without asking them is always bad.
In this case, there were no existing preferences to override -- spatial navigation was a new feature. There was no choice to use spatial navigation in the old Nautilus; the feature wasn't there. The preference for spatial vs. browser couldn't have been being overridden if it didn't exist.
And no, the "open every folder in a new window" option under the old Nautilus was not spatial navigation, so there would be no sense in following that preference.
Note: I am neither a lawyer, nor a Francophone. However, after reading the English translation, it looks like a French developer should simply release software under the CeCILL license; the freedoms guaranteed are essentially the same as those guaranteed by the GPL (though the section on warranty is much more complex). If any GPL'ed modifications are made to a CeCILL'ed piece of software, the resulting software can be distributed under the GPL thanks to a clause in CeCILL specifically allowing this.
Slashdot Mirror
None of those are security-related. Or do you mean digital restrictions management? Those things are certainly useful to the copyright-holder on the document, but they're certainly not security-related. They're also not very reliable, and no substitute for the legal system.
That may be true, but if an ISP is blocking outgoing ports to begin with, they may well be blocking everything and only unblocking allowed ports. How many ISPs would have enough clue to unblock the submission port?
If it could, it would have most humans beat.
How about "ridiculous"?
Unless you mean "pediculous" (of or pertaining to lice)?
Still, not true. Your code, which you wrote, can still be released under whatever licence you like. You just can't release any GPL'ed contributions under another licence, nor any of your code that is derivative of those contributions. But you certainly can keep parallel trees for GPL and non-GPL development. Have a look at the Ghostscript licensing, for an example.
The GPL can never cause you to lose any rights to your own work; only to derivative works of other works that you would not have any right to incorporate without the GPL. Now, if you incorporate GPL'ed code into something you've written, you still only own the part you wrote, not the whole shebang. And if you release your work under the GPL, and someone contributes improvements to it, you only own the part you wrote; you have rights to the contributions only under the GPL.
Complaints about the GPL "taking away my rights" basically amount to the vocalizations of people who want to use other people's work without abiding by the terms (based on giving back to the community) that the author of that work set. Basically, GPL-hatred is a kind of looter-mentality.
Could you provide a link to archives of this discussion? I would find it interesting reading.
Well, states can allocate their electoral votes however they want. The electoral votes eventually get compared with the traditional plurality method, but if the electoral votes from each state were generated from the popular vote using Approval Voting or some kind of ranked voting, it would at least be an improvement over our current system that didn't require a constitutional amendment.
I think the article's theory is correct -- searching for George-W-Bush or George-Bush rather than Bush (as the article did for John-Kerry as opposed to Kerry) turns up mainly anti-Bush stories. This goes a good way towards confirming the suggestion that it's a usage difference between establishment and alternative news sources.
Bah, I wanted to moderate rather than post in this thread, but you've baited me into it. If you think an average American makes $75,000 a year, you are completely out of touch. The median household income for the US was $43,318 last year. Per capita income was 35,000, but that counts children, so isn't really applicable.
Also, it's rather naive to talk about "tax percentages" as if there were only one tax out there and it affected everyone equally. Most people pay a variety of state and local taxes along with federal income tax (progressively graduated) and federal payroll taxes (slightly regressive because of how it's capped). Tax reform is a complex subject, and it can't be reduced to "what do you think the rate should be." If you're interested, you should have a look at a very good overview of the different possibilities and their consequences.
Well there are (or, increasingly, were) societies where that equality is enforced by reality rather than by society. Hunter-gatherers, in general, didn't have a problem with theft because if you steal it, you have to carry it, and no one wants to have to schlep around more stuff than they have to.
We can also imagine societies where theft is as much or more work than obtaining things legitimately (e.g., the anarcho-socialist societies in Ursula LeGuin's The Dispossessed or Ken MacLeod's The Cassini Division), or simply where everyone is rich enough or has enough opportunity to be that they'd rather work for what they want (e.g., the anarcho-capitalist society in Ken MacLeod's The Stone Canal). Science-fiction now, but even if utopia's not acheivable, it should be possible to at least get to where theft, while it exists, is just not a big concern for most people.
Nader is not on the Green Party ticket this year; he is running as an independent. The Green candidate this year is David Cobb.
There are several problems with this scheme. It solves the problem of spam (more or less), but creates new ones.
The first is that it gives power (which will be converted into money) to the certificate signing authority. This is currently a problem with https, as even though anyone can set up a web server using SSL, for it to be usable buy the public, you must pay an often very high tax to one of a very few signing authorities. This problem would be much, much worse with email.
The second is that once you have given this power to the signing authorities, you must trust them completely. It only takes one established authority going bad (e.g., by being bought out by someone unscrupulous) to ruin this scheme in any of a number of ways. You can 'untrust' that authority, then, but most people probably won't know how to, or won't be inclined to.
Finally, this scheme attempts to eliminate spam by eliminating anonymous email. However, there are legitimate uses for anonymous email (whistle-blowers, political dissidents), and it seems to me that trying to eliminate obnoxious commercial speech is not enough of a justification to eliminate these kinds of speech as well. It might be possible to get around this by means of remailers, but then the remailers must be either trusted as well, or be vulnerable to use as spam relays.
It's true that it's not just MS -- IIRC, the gnome keyboard switching applet had to be changed to not show any flags whatsoever after China got mad for the inclusion of the Taiwanese flag, and Taiwanese hackers got mad at Redhat for taking it out of their packages. There's a discussion on it here
They still need a warrant, but the procedure for obtaining a warrant is changed. If the feds say a search or wiretap is related to national security, then they do not have to present evidence of probable cause to the judge. The judge then has only the investigators' say-so on whether to grant the warrant. Also, the person wiretapped does not need to be notified afterwards (as they would be under a standard wiretap).
Well, there's the associated issue that a backdoor usable by law enforcement may well become useable by other, less well-intentioned people, as well. Organized crime and industrial espionage operators are the likeliest examples that come to mind. Fortunately or unfortunately, reliable security has to be secure against everyone.
Which apps would those be, exactly? Just about everything significant that's available for Linux is available as source, and most of those build with autoconf and GNU tools for portability, so installation on Solaris is just a 'configure; make; make install' away.
There are a handful of proprietary applications for Linux that might be relevant, but I'd guess most of these are back-office type things that probably already have Solaris versions. That just leaves things like the Flash plugin, and I simply can't see that sort of thing as being very important.
While it would be really nice to have an e-book reader with a really good display, great battery life, and the rest, I couldn't really see spending money on one unless it had a couple of critical features (one technical, one partly technical and partly social).
The first one is the ability to load any content that I already have in electronic form. Most particularly, I'd use this for reading Gutenberg public domain e-texts, and for storing and reading webpages offline (e.g., the Python Library Reference). And to do this, I'd need either for the reader to handle several common formats (text, html, and perhaps PDF), or a Free utility to convert those formats into the reader's native format.
The second is the ability to pay for all-you-can-read access to the catalogs of various publishers, in an open and non-discriminatory fashion. That is, I don't want to be stuck only being able to buy new (copyrighted) books only through the manufacturers of the e-book, and only from the publishers they happen to have a deal with. And I don't want to pay full hardback price for single books. I want to be able to go directly to the publisher (or to the author for self-published books), and pay a yearly fee for access to everything in their catalog, or possibly a very low price for a single book ($50 a year, say, or $5 for one book; right now one hardback costs on average $25, and that's about all any one publisher will see from me in a given year). This will obviously require an open standard for e-book publishing. There seems to be work towards such a thing already in progress.
As for DRM, I'm not sure what I'd accept; certainly not much. Ideally there would be no reading or copying restrictions, but rather some sort of watermarking that would make it easy to track down redistributors, but I'm not sure how feasible that would be. I think with a subscription-based model, the convenience of having full access to a catalog would be enough to make illegal copying not worth the trouble. Publishers might lose a few sales of popular books to copying, but they'd make up for it with a guaranteed revenue stream.
Unless your vision is so bad that you're effectively incapacitated without glasses, why bother? Is wearing glasses so terrible? I don't think so -- I prefer glasses to contacts or any kind of surgery. They're relatively low-tech (thus reliable), and they make you look more distinguished and sophisticated.
If you want to spend a pile of money on your vision, go out and buy a really good pair of glasses. Get lenses with all the added extras (UV-resistance, scratch-resistant coating, lightweight material), and get a pair of fashionable frames (Slashdot readers, bring a fashion consultant to help with the frames). Even really laying it on will be cheaper than the surgery, and then in a few years when the surgical technology has improved, you can consider it again.
There's a simple technological solution to this problem that doesn't require legal coercion. Just cryptographically sign all of your works, and let it be known that any copy of any of your works that doesn't have a valid signature is not authentic. That way it's easy to tell your original works from any modified copies that may be floating around, and it's also easy to distribute unmodified copies and to verify that they are unmodified.
Revolution is not an AOL Keyword.
(I'm not the author of this piece, but I thought it was quite appropriate in this context)
Three words: memory, memory, and memory.
Seriously, the processor is not the problem; GNOME is just RAM hungry. For a local nonprofit, I set up from spare parts a Celeron 450 machine with 256 Mb of RAM and Fedora Core 2. It runs quite speedily. 128 MB (per concurrent user) is probably about the bare minimum for a fully-loaded GNOME system.
I don't think it's a gtk2 problem, per se. Try running, for example, xfce4 (a lighter gtk2-based DE) as your desktop environment on the same computer and see if it makes a difference.
In this case, there were no existing preferences to override -- spatial navigation was a new feature. There was no choice to use spatial navigation in the old Nautilus; the feature wasn't there. The preference for spatial vs. browser couldn't have been being overridden if it didn't exist.
And no, the "open every folder in a new window" option under the old Nautilus was not spatial navigation, so there would be no sense in following that preference.
Note: I am neither a lawyer, nor a Francophone. However, after reading the English translation, it looks like a French developer should simply release software under the CeCILL license; the freedoms guaranteed are essentially the same as those guaranteed by the GPL (though the section on warranty is much more complex). If any GPL'ed modifications are made to a CeCILL'ed piece of software, the resulting software can be distributed under the GPL thanks to a clause in CeCILL specifically allowing this.