Ah diddums. I'm a programmer too. Please go here and copy
my code as much as you want. The only restrictions (for which I too rely on copyright law)
is that you do not take the code and hide it away from me. I don't really need copyright law
for that - it just happens to be my only option at the moment. I'd be happy with a law that
encoded just the freedoms to share and not make proprietary.
Yes, I'm getting paid for this too, by helping paying customers and
developing more software and features for them.
We should draft random people to become politicians.
This was tried before - in a few ancient Greek city-states, notably in Athens. Actually in
Athens there were a number of restrictions - age, gender and status-related - but it was by and large
a random allotment to administrative roles. The Athenian experiment is educational, and relevant
today, even though it happened 2,500 years ago. That Wikipedia page summarises it better than I can.
I thought I was going to get a pitchfork-wielding reply from a Montana resident, but this will do.
The examples that you cite show exactly that the police are answerable to the voters.
The trouble is, young people who understand the issues don't vote. Old people who outnumber
youngsters and vote in droves, don't understand the issues and read manipulative
headlines in tabloid newspapers (remember those? large white things made of paper which are
a bit like websites but perpetually out of date and don't let you post comments).
Want real change? Vote for it. Get your friends out to vote for it.
(Although unfortunately in western societies, demographics are against young people
because oldies outnumber youngsters and the gap is just going to increase... This fact will
cause some dramatic problems in the future).
Investigating a crime is not "turning the internet into a Police State".
If your house gets burgled do you run around with pitchforks and torches and burn the
first dodgy-looking person you find? No, you call the police. This isn't
the 16th century. We have functional police forces, with checks and balances,
answerable to the people.
It's not like the FBI and Interpol and going to look at the bogus whois information and
throw their hands up and say "oh noes". They can go and raid the registrar's offices and
find out what IPs registered the domain, what credit cards (stolen or not) were used, and if
they were stolen, where from and when. Furthermore the worm has a whole list of websites,
so every single one of those can be checked in the same way, and even if they are all
hijacked, there will be hundreds of potential clues about the perpetrators.
Personally, I am sick of spammers attempting to add comment spam to sites that I run,
signing up for bogus accounts, sending massive amounts of spam, continuously trying
ssh connections, running exploits etc the list goes on. The police need to do something to help us.
Rich.
Re:time to port gnome!
on
Qt Becomes LGPL
·
· Score: 5, Informative
Presumably your "arguments" don't include the vast developer and language support for Gtk?
Also we're using and compiling
Gtk on Windows just fine. It even
has nice native look and feel.
It was about two weeks after I got back from Japan last time, so Nov 2007.
As a guide to how fscked up Japanese politics is, the law came in because
the Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama claimed he had a "friend of a friend"
in Al-Qaida who frequently visited Japan on forged
passports. You couldn't make it up. Although of course he had
made it up it appears because he now refuses to identify the mysterious terrorist friend.
It's particularly stupid because anyone who has spent more than a moment observing birds
knows that they spend about 80% of their active time foraging for food. We have no idea
how to make power systems which even approach several orders of magnitude below the
efficiency/weight/size of a bird's digestive system. So the idea that
you can build a UAV the size of a sparrow (or, by the same argument, the size of a fly)
is necessarily a non-starter unless you want one which will spend all its time looking
for food.
I tend to agree with the sentiment, but this does open me to some
unnecessary legal liability. What happens if my mate uses my computer
and copies some of my music onto his portable music player, then later
decides to share that music with the world? What happens if I discard
a hard drive or catch a worm and my watermarked music ends up getting
leaked that way?
None of those things are likely to happen to me personally (least of
all because I prefer to buy CDs), but they
could happen to Joe Random computer user quite easily.
You can mount the home directory (*) with noexec which means they cannot run anything
even if they can compile it. However this doesn't prevent people from writing elaborate
Perl scripts, unless you take away Perl/Python/etc, at which point the whole thing starts to get
counterproductive.
In any case, what the GP meant is that you can lock down Linux so
that users cannot make unauthorized modifications to the base
OS, and so that it doesn't need to be reinstalled. To be fair you can
do that with Windows too, but it's likely to be easier with Linux because
that's how most Linux distros come by default.
Rich.
(*) You have to do this with all user-writable directories, eg./tmp
(Blatant plug, but it's all open source software so what the heck...)
Don't forget Red Hat's KVM. Been part of the Linux kernel for about 2 years, and now supports pretty well all the "enterprisy" virtualization features you could need.
That $3mil is pocket change for the $66.95 billion market cap McD's Corp.
The trouble is that McDonald's would also be purchasing all the
countersuits.
That opens them to some very large liabilities. For example I'm sure IBM would like to
be paid in full for all the time their lawyers have put in.
These tools don't help if you can't plug the drive into a computer. I had a bunch of hard drives to get rid of, mostly P-ATA, some SCSI-LVD. I only have one computer left with P-ATA, and since it's my main computer and I really have better things to do than dismantle my main computer and plug in ten drives, waiting hours each time, I used a drill to destroy them in about 10 minutes. I haven't seen a SCSI-LVD connector on a computer for at least eight years.
if a engine, or even a few, fail on the falcon 9, it can still complete its mission, the other engines just have to burn a bit longer.
The failure(s) on the N1 was in the complex
pipework leading to the 30 engines. This caused the whole rocket to fail (3 or 4 times IIRC - the Wikipedia article has
more details).
Also even if a engine itself fails, you have to remember that the failure is not necessarily a clean shutdown, but likely a large
explosion, taking out adjacent engines.
This is something we were working on from 1998. We documented the design in some detail, and
I released the documentation to prevent people from trying to patent it:
http://www.annexia.org/freeware/fleet
The innovation in this (never-built) MMO is that the design requires no server at all. It what
might now be called "P2P" (although that term wasn't around at the time).
My understanding of botnets is that all their activity is centrally coordinated: the bots sit in an IRC channel waiting for orders and do what they're ordered to do.
For comment spam it's more sophisticated than that: I monitor all attempts at adding comment spam to
several sites I run. One site is interesting because it requires several distinct requests in order to post a
message (and you have to visit each of those pages in turn in order to be successful at posting). The bots
can perform these steps -- I watched as the controller in the Ukraine first worked it out manually -- but they do it from random IP addresses in turn. However, the cookie that I send
in the first request is faithfully sent back by the other IP addresses.
These are not human attacks using something like Tor - far too quick for that.
So the bots communicate that cookie back to their "master" between each request, and that happens
in sub-second times.
Slashdot Mirror
which never exceeded 2% CPU Utilization, was woefully inadequate to handle the four virtual machines into which it was virtualized.
Sorry, but your "experts" were idiots. Virtualization adds at most a few percentage points overhead. What were your experts doing? Runnings Bochs?
Rich.
Although, given the price of VMWare you could have afforded to replace your hardware instead.
Ah diddums. I'm a programmer too. Please go here and copy my code as much as you want. The only restrictions (for which I too rely on copyright law) is that you do not take the code and hide it away from me. I don't really need copyright law for that - it just happens to be my only option at the moment. I'd be happy with a law that encoded just the freedoms to share and not make proprietary.
Yes, I'm getting paid for this too, by helping paying customers and developing more software and features for them.
Rich.
We should draft random people to become politicians.
This was tried before - in a few ancient Greek city-states, notably in Athens. Actually in Athens there were a number of restrictions - age, gender and status-related - but it was by and large a random allotment to administrative roles. The Athenian experiment is educational, and relevant today, even though it happened 2,500 years ago. That Wikipedia page summarises it better than I can.
Rich.
No wonder private schools have stopped teaching GCSEs ...
Red Hat ship some web based tools called Luci and Ricci which basically do all of this, with a pointy-clicky interface.
Rich.
I thought I was going to get a pitchfork-wielding reply from a Montana resident, but this will do.
The examples that you cite show exactly that the police are answerable to the voters. The trouble is, young people who understand the issues don't vote. Old people who outnumber youngsters and vote in droves, don't understand the issues and read manipulative headlines in tabloid newspapers (remember those? large white things made of paper which are a bit like websites but perpetually out of date and don't let you post comments).
Want real change? Vote for it. Get your friends out to vote for it. (Although unfortunately in western societies, demographics are against young people because oldies outnumber youngsters and the gap is just going to increase ... This fact will
cause some dramatic problems in the future).
Rich.
Investigating a crime is not "turning the internet into a Police State". If your house gets burgled do you run around with pitchforks and torches and burn the first dodgy-looking person you find? No, you call the police. This isn't the 16th century. We have functional police forces, with checks and balances, answerable to the people.
Rich.
It's not like the FBI and Interpol and going to look at the bogus whois information and throw their hands up and say "oh noes". They can go and raid the registrar's offices and find out what IPs registered the domain, what credit cards (stolen or not) were used, and if they were stolen, where from and when. Furthermore the worm has a whole list of websites, so every single one of those can be checked in the same way, and even if they are all hijacked, there will be hundreds of potential clues about the perpetrators.
Personally, I am sick of spammers attempting to add comment spam to sites that I run, signing up for bogus accounts, sending massive amounts of spam, continuously trying ssh connections, running exploits etc the list goes on. The police need to do something to help us.
Rich.
Presumably your "arguments" don't include the vast developer and language support for Gtk?
Also we're using and compiling Gtk on Windows just fine. It even has nice native look and feel.
It was about two weeks after I got back from Japan last time, so Nov 2007.
As a guide to how fscked up Japanese politics is, the law came in because the Justice Minister Kunio Hatoyama claimed he had a "friend of a friend" in Al-Qaida who frequently visited Japan on forged passports. You couldn't make it up. Although of course he had made it up it appears because he now refuses to identify the mysterious terrorist friend.
Rich.
It's particularly stupid because anyone who has spent more than a moment observing birds knows that they spend about 80% of their active time foraging for food. We have no idea how to make power systems which even approach several orders of magnitude below the efficiency/weight/size of a bird's digestive system. So the idea that you can build a UAV the size of a sparrow (or, by the same argument, the size of a fly) is necessarily a non-starter unless you want one which will spend all its time looking for food.
Rich.
I tend to agree with the sentiment, but this does open me to some unnecessary legal liability. What happens if my mate uses my computer and copies some of my music onto his portable music player, then later decides to share that music with the world? What happens if I discard a hard drive or catch a worm and my watermarked music ends up getting leaked that way?
None of those things are likely to happen to me personally (least of all because I prefer to buy CDs), but they could happen to Joe Random computer user quite easily.
Rich.
You can mount the home directory (*) with noexec which means they cannot run anything even if they can compile it. However this doesn't prevent people from writing elaborate Perl scripts, unless you take away Perl/Python/etc, at which point the whole thing starts to get counterproductive.
In any case, what the GP meant is that you can lock down Linux so that users cannot make unauthorized modifications to the base OS, and so that it doesn't need to be reinstalled. To be fair you can do that with Windows too, but it's likely to be easier with Linux because that's how most Linux distros come by default.
Rich.
(*) You have to do this with all user-writable directories, eg. /tmp
(Blatant plug, but it's all open source software so what the heck ...)
Don't forget Red Hat's KVM. Been part of the Linux kernel for about 2 years, and now supports pretty well all the "enterprisy" virtualization features you could need.
And Red Hat are developing a nice GUI management interface which scales to managing 1000s of nodes.
Rich.
That $3mil is pocket change for the $66.95 billion market cap McD's Corp.
The trouble is that McDonald's would also be purchasing all the countersuits. That opens them to some very large liabilities. For example I'm sure IBM would like to be paid in full for all the time their lawyers have put in.
Rich.
These tools don't help if you can't plug the drive into a computer. I had a bunch of hard drives to get rid of, mostly P-ATA, some SCSI-LVD. I only have one computer left with P-ATA, and since it's my main computer and I really have better things to do than dismantle my main computer and plug in ten drives, waiting hours each time, I used a drill to destroy them in about 10 minutes. I haven't seen a SCSI-LVD connector on a computer for at least eight years.
Rich.
If you truly want to live in a country without government, please go and live in Somalia. Let us know how it goes. If you don't get shot.
Rich.
There is a saying from the old sailing days. "Never set sail with two compasses"
Is there?
Rich.
RIPE gives away IP addresses for free, so not sure what difference that would make.
My previous comment on the subject shows they're not exactly used efficiently ...
Rich.
if a engine, or even a few, fail on the falcon 9, it can still complete its mission, the other engines just have to burn a bit longer.
The failure(s) on the N1 was in the complex pipework leading to the 30 engines. This caused the whole rocket to fail (3 or 4 times IIRC - the Wikipedia article has more details).
Also even if a engine itself fails, you have to remember that the failure is not necessarily a clean shutdown, but likely a large explosion, taking out adjacent engines.
Rich.
This is something we were working on from 1998. We documented the design in some detail, and I released the documentation to prevent people from trying to patent it: http://www.annexia.org/freeware/fleet
The innovation in this (never-built) MMO is that the design requires no server at all. It what might now be called "P2P" (although that term wasn't around at the time).
Rich.
That would mean that Windows 7 would be even less likely to run on all those Netbooks, since most of them are 32 bit.
Rich.
My understanding of botnets is that all their activity is centrally coordinated: the bots sit in an IRC channel waiting for orders and do what they're ordered to do.
For comment spam it's more sophisticated than that: I monitor all attempts at adding comment spam to several sites I run. One site is interesting because it requires several distinct requests in order to post a message (and you have to visit each of those pages in turn in order to be successful at posting). The bots can perform these steps -- I watched as the controller in the Ukraine first worked it out manually -- but they do it from random IP addresses in turn. However, the cookie that I send in the first request is faithfully sent back by the other IP addresses.
These are not human attacks using something like Tor - far too quick for that.
So the bots communicate that cookie back to their "master" between each request, and that happens in sub-second times.
Rich.
This page is kind of fun, showing HP's technology where they light the mechanism from lots of angles and photograph them. (Needs Java).