Yes, I took Organic chemistry too. The average person cannot get Nitric acid (HNO3) as it is the primary component in explosives like trinitrotoluene (TNT) and the strongest hydrogenperoxide (H2O2) that you can get is 3% from the pharmacy because it too can be used for nefarious things at concentrations over 30% like mixing it with rubber to make a hypergolic rocket fuel. If you read the poster's question and you are really trying to provide a solution then I have to ask how you intend to RMA a jar of liquid that is so nasty that it cannot be mailed through USPS, UPS or FedEx. Although I would like to see the look on the faces of the techs that receive it!:-)
Linus is not opposed to closed source drivers in the kernel. He is against allowing closed source drivers in the kernel from affecting kernel development. He will not keep module interfaces from changing and he will not help people that have incorporated closed source drivers into the kernel when their shit breaks. nVidia has to spend alot of effort keeping up with the kernel changes so that their drivers continue to work and that is their decision. It would be easier if nVidia just submitted source code so that the kernel maintainers could help them make changes when the kernel interface to modules changes. It would also make my life easier so that I didn't have to keep two versions of the kernel and two versions of xorg.conf on my system but nVidia has made their decision. Linus hasn't gone out of his way to make their lives more difficult but he does refuse to go out of his way, even in the slightest, to make their lives easier. In my opinion that does not constitute dead set against closed sources drivers. Obviously, your opinion differs.
For those of you that don't remember the lost patches and snails pace of Linux development from 2000-2002 I invite you to browse through the LKML history. We had a real problem with the fact that Linus was unable to keep up with the vast number of patches that were coming in through email and when he went on vacation there was no reason for anyone else to even try to submit patches. We all said that Linus doesn't scale!
There is no way that 2.6.x would be anywhere near what it is today without some form of Source Control Management (SCM). Developers had been trying to get Linus to use some form of SCM for years but none would do what Linus wanted them to (most were not distributed enough). Larry offered Linus, and other developers, Bitkeeper for free but insisted that they not use it for non Open Source projects and that developers of competing SCM not use it at all (without paying for it). It was nice of him to give us that chance but everyone knew that the strings would, sooner or later, tie us in knots. Bitkeeper served its purpose well (relieving the Linus load) for years; all developers had to do was to send an email to Linus saying "pull the patch from my tree". This solution was a vast improvement on the previous way of doing things and the pace of kernel development increased significantly. It also enabled Linus to hand off large chunks of the kernel to other maintainers so he could focus on the parts he is good at.
The most important thing that Bitkeeper did was to show the developers what was possible with the right tools. Anyone that reads the LKML knew that this day would come sooner or later and many of the SCM developers have used the time to improve their tools. What we really need to do is thank Larry for the use of his program (it was a great help) and move on. I don't think that Linus and the other kernel developers will ever go back to the days before fine grained changelogs, distributed source trees, and the ease with which patches from any one tree can be applied to any other tree. I think, if anything, that the biggest thing that dropping Bitkeeper will do at this point is to accelerate the development of better (and more distributed) SCM's.
Thanks Larry! And more importantly: Thanks Linus, Alan, Andrew, Marcello, Rik, et al. Your work and dedication is much appreciated!;-)
P.S. Kernel.org has a new SCM written by Linus (in his directory) that is available for your perusal.
Thanks for the reply. I don't use Win that often but at least now I can show my friends that do how to run their systems in a safer manner as I always seem to get drafted to clean their systems up for them. A quick question: where did you learn this trick? Is it in the documentation anywhere or did you just pick it up from another guru along the way? The reason that I ask (I assume that you read the thread) is that MS makes no real effort to teach their customers how to properly use their computers. Unfortunately ease of use applies equally to the computer's owner as well as mal-ware authors. I haven't even read the new manuals since XP shipped; is there a quick start guide and if so does it mention the need to create a non-admin account?
Linux has a frame buffer device that DOES run at the kernel level so possible problems can arise there as there are versions of X that utilize the frame buffer device. X itself runs with root priviledges but drops them as soon as it sets up the appropriate sockets, in some cases (old mice) it also has to echo mouse movements to a socket for use in text consoles (while X runs on another console), and there are a few keyboard functions (for password entry) that demand access directly to the keyboard so that something can't stuff the buffer or snoop on keystrokes but they have to be explicitly called for each string entry. X also needs to be able to talk to the video card and that requires elevated privs but once the connections (be they ports that need accessed or a section of video memory for display/fonts/textures/etc.) are established they remain established even after the X server drops its priviledges.
So what if your computer doesn't crash when your graphics subsystem crashes, you still can't do anything about it.
That statement is not true. There is a kernel hacking feature that will enable you to send keystrokes directly to the kernel, safe on single user systems - not multi-user systems, and if it is enabled Alt-SysRq-K will reset the keyboard and enable you to switch to a text console so that you can kill the X session and then restart it. You can also use another computer to log into the one w/ a crashed X session and reset the X session. You can also send signals to the programs running in the crashed X session and most of the programs will exit gracefully saving their open files at that time. This is one of my favorite features in Linux as it can still be gracefully shutdown and rebooted if need be so that the disk buffers/caches are properly flushed but most of the time I simply need to resatrt X.
The biggest culprit here is the OOM (Out of Memory) killer; when the kernel runs out of memory it can either halt or try to find something to kill (failing an alloc request is cool if a program wants the memory -- if the kernel wants the memory then it tends to insist on having it). This tends to happen after the machine hasn't been rebooted for a few months, has 5+ Mozilla windows open with 10+ tabs in each (I once counted 67 tabs open at once), a mail reader, a development environment, various other small programs, and a girlfriend with her own X session running on a different terminal with a boat load of her own stuff. When that happens the OOM picks something to kill in order to free up some memory so it doesn't have to panic and halt. I'm convinced that Murphy wrote this algorithm as the odds of a particular program being killed seems to be related to the number of unsaved files (it can't risk asking the prog to gracefully exit as the prog may try to allocate memory thus creating a race condition).
The kernel will panic if a disasterous situation happens but mine hasn't in years. Nvidia and ATi distribute binary drivers for their video cards that are linked with the kernel and therefore add all of the problems that Windows has with the graphics system crashing the whole computer. To combat this problem the kernel hackers have implemented a tainted flag that gets set anytime a module is loaded into the kernel with an unapproved license. They won't even investigate problems in that situation. I talked to a very talented Windows programmer that told me that Windows originally had the video drivers isolated from the kernel but performance was very poor; the solution was to put the video stuff into the kernel. Any truth to that? I think that he was referring to the first version of NT.
Tux - the HTTP server in the kernel - has been removed. I think the only reason that it was ever placed there was to achieve awesome benchmarks and it succeeded there. It wasn't so much of a security risk as it only served static web pages and passed anything more complicated up to Apache.
About the user: years ago I worked for a local computer sh
Thanks for the response. I'm not trying to spread FUD here but the U causes the F. Since I'm uncertain as to how many undocumented API's there are (it is documented that a number of MS apps use undocumented APIs) I would be in fear that one or more of these may be able to do things that side-step their internal security. In Linux it is necessary for an app to eventually get kernel privs to do things like read/write to the hard drive. Although some of these APIs have been found to be lacking in checking the data that is sent to them they have usually been cleaned up pretty fast. The Windows' APIs are an unknown without source code but the undocumented ones are the really scary ones: they could be written to work faster than their documented counterparts by intentionally failing to perform needed checks. It would be extremely hard to fix a -- not really broken but lazy/fast API -- if a number of other MS apps used it and some cracker did discover how to exploit it to side step the internal security. In the long run I believe that the weakest point in any operating system is person in front of the keyboard and education is the only thing that can effect the way said individual performs certain tasks.
I'll take your word for it as I haven't used anything MS for a few years and don't really want to take the time to research this too deeply. I do have a question though: IE is tightly integrated with ActiveX and Windows update, can a user - not running as admin - update the software on their system? Another question, since Media Player uses tightly integrated DRM in the latest version, are the DRM keys/watermarks/whatever stored in a place local for the user so that each user has a different set or are they stored somewhere globally so that they are unique for each computer instead of each user? If that is the case then there must be some form of priviledge escalation in order to access them.
I'm not trying to spread FUD but I do know that many MS users fall over all kinds of security issues that don't seem to affect non-MS users. And Apache should stand out as a light on the dark claim that MS gets hacked because they are more popular. And a final point: I have yet to come across a Linux distro that does not practically force you to create a user account and warn you against running as root; why doesn't MS do the same -- tell users that they should create a non-admin account and use it for everything except reconfiguring the computer. Further MS should explain in more detail the risks that are associated with running as Admin.
Ahh, the other side of the integration issue. MS says it has the right to keep throwing everything into their OS (I'm just waiting for the kitchen sink app) without acknowledging a fundamental fact. If Firefox or Mozilla gets hacked, cracked, phished, etc. then the bad guy has gotten into a computer with the priviledges of the user running the app. After MS integrates Internet Exploder and Media Slayer into the OS when one of those gets hacked the attacker is already in the OS and has the priveldges of the OS kernel! One hole in anything that MS calls part of the OS and the entire house of cards comes crashing down. This is the reason that U*IX has many small tools that get linked together to perform a job. MS has one monster of a tool that they currently call XP and if you can find a hole in it then you can get into everything else.
Don't the paparazzi use the fact that they are taking photographs in a public place, or from a public place, to invade the privacy of celebrities all the time. Can't the police survail you in public without the need to obtain a warrant first. These are based upon the fact that whatever can be seen from a public place is open to the public. It seemse that the rules are getting interpretted differently depending upon the situation. If the City of Chicago can copyright their parks and the City of Paris can copyright The Eiffel Tower then can't a celebrity copyright themselves and thus prevent the paparazzi from taking their photographs without first obtaining a license? Can't politicians copyright their images thereby making it illegal for a journalist to photograph them with their pants down (so to speal)? What about copyrighting their names to prevent all but approved stories about them from being published?
It is obvious that we need to pick one way for these laws to go and stick with it. I just hope that we don't need to get a license for things that are today accepted as normal behavior. Like: taking a family photo at a ski slope; taking a group photo at a local restaurant; a photo of Mt. Rushmore or the various other national parks in the US; or, even taking a photo of your family inside your family home when something that is copyright is visible through a window. It is truly terrifying to imagine what could come next: copyrighting proper names? consumer products? or perhaps even a thought. Imagine taking a photo of Bono wearing an Ipod in front of Buckingham Palace wearing a tee shirt that says "Think Peace". That is four distinct copyright violations: The name Bono; The Ipod device; the landmark Buckingham Palace; and, the tee shirt slogan "Think Peace". Where will it stop?
I do participate in lobbying efforts both as a member of groups and as an individual but I can't share your optimism when it comes to our (USA) political process. I did venture over to check out the mailing list that you mentioned and found it to be in a number of languages that I'm not very fluent in. Most Americans, myself included, only speak English (although a few of us speak C/Perl/Asm/etc.) due to our miserable public education system. In contrast, most of the Europeans that I have met spoke at least two or three languages, and could fumble their way through a few more if they really needed to. I try not to, but many Americans do, think that we are the center of the world and therefore consider other languages unnecessary. That and the fact that we are rarely exposed to other languages leads us to be mostly uni-lingual.
Apple was in no position to patent the windowing interface. It was Xerox PARC (Palo Alto Research Center) that developed the mouse, windows, ethernet, and many other things that we take for granted in modern desktop computers. It is said that the greatest business faux pas was the person who chose not to go into business with Alexander Grahm Bell because he thought that few people would want a novelty like a telephone in their home. If that is true then the second biggest faux pas has to be the Xerox Board of Directors deciding that the inventions of their PARC division weren't going to be beneficial to their business; after all they were a document company not a computer company. The board directed the head of PARC to invite Steve Jobs in to show off their new toys without patenting them or getting a nondisclosure agreement. Steve promptly went back to Apple and completely redesigned the Macintosh from a cheap text based apple into what we all no it to have been. Xerox should have patented these inventions but Apple had no grounds to patent what they copied from Xerox PARC.
Although I am very much against software patents, because they are usually frivolous, these inventions were truly novel enough to warrant patents!
Another big business mistake was for Steve Jobs to give Bill Gates a McIntosh development platform so Micro$oft could port some business software to it.
I think that delaying and then defeating patents in Europe is the best opportunity that we have in the USA to get the subject revisited. There is a need to have some uniformity in patent laws throughout the world, or at least with our major trading partners; if we (or more accurately, Europeans) can get Europe to defeat software patents or at least demand that they truly be inventive and not the next logical step in programming (a la one click) then there will be a need to have the two systems brought closer together. If Europe stands opposed to them, and America (Adobe/Micro$oft) stands for them then hopefully they will be forced to compromise. Not that a compromise is a good solution for us but I believe a negotiation like this is the best hope/chance that we have at bringing our patent system in line with what our Founding Fathers had in mind: "To Promote the Useful Arts and Sciences". As long as US politicians are bought and paid for by the big corporations there is no other way that this issue will come up for discussion in either the House or the Senate.
Re:Super highway for a super hydrogen infastructur
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The Super Superhighway
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Where are the mod points now?!? Not that it will happen though, Texas being built on oil and all.
I read this story here and my brother (somewhat computer illiterate) begged me to submit it but I thought against it because of all of the political overtones. For those that are interested in more details, including some possible conspiracy theories, you should read it. It discusses where the financing came from and links it directly back to the Bush family. It further alledges
that President Bush's money trail has been exposed by the CIA in retaliation for his recent house cleaning there. It also mentions several elections that were adjusted during the testing phase of the illicit program.
I have to say that the Patriot Act, and President Bush telling me I'm unpatriotic for opposing it, has definitely affected my vote. Not only did I not vote for a single Republican, but I swear that I will never vote for another one again. EVER! Unfortunately it appears that The Al Quida recruitment poster-boy will get to remain in office for another four years. Bush has pissed off more Muslims in four years than the previous four or five presidents combined and in the future, after he and Cheney have made their millions off of the war in Iraq, the repurcusions will befall the rest of us.
I have but a single slashdot account but have had an account for years. My Karma is Excellent and always has been since it first got there (in the beginning I think your karma is untrusted or something) and I get moderator points every few days or something. I swear that they have a Murphy's law engine in there: the less time I have the more likely I am to get mod points that day! In retrospect I wish I had quoted:
And at the last UN World Summit on the Information Society, Brazil led a bloc including India, South Africa, and China that thwarted an attempt by the US and its allies to harden the UN's line on intellectual property rights, insisting that the final conference document recognize just as strongly the cultural and economic importance of shared knowledge.
Now that I've fully woken up, I posted the original at 5:00am local time, I see the error of my ways. That quote would have more closely represented the theme of the article and the sentiments of Brazilians.
Wired magazine has an excellent four page article discussing Brazil's new approach to Intellectual Property rigths. Discussing everything from battling with the international pharmacutical industries, to song sampling, to the national adoption of Linux. Richard Stallman
stated that India's political commitment to free software is, second only to Brazil's after attending a weeklong free software teach-in for members of the Brazilian national congress, where 161 out of 594 members of congress, from a broad range of parties, had signed up with the free software caucus - making it one of the largest caucuses in the Brazilian government. Later that week Stallman donned a robe and a halo made out of a compact disc and declared himself "Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs" but was surprised to be upstaged when Gilberto Gil, Brazil's newly appointed minister of culture, said: "this whole process that led to the computer, to the personal computer, to Silicon Valley, this extraordinary degree of cognition that arose from the intersection of math and design and the crystallographic structures of quartz was made possible by acid trips." It even has its fair share of MS bashing for those whose goal in life it is.
The story was pending for over five hours. I think they were waiting for someone to submit one that didn't equate drug use to computers! I was merely quoting the Brazilian Culture Minister (p. 4). Just a quick FYI.
That reminds me of the undercover operation tht the US government funded to study automobile accidents. They secretly placed black box devices in cars all over the country. The last thing said by most of the drivers about to wreck was something along the lines of "Oh, Shit" with the exception of Texas. The most common thing heard while playing back the cockpit recordings from the vehicles in TX was: "Hold my beer and watch this!"
For the few that haven't figured it out... this was sarcasm.
I posted a comment a few minutes ago addressing some of these issues. You have to fail a few times (at least twice) before it takes action. It does not hang from the ceiling; it is mounted under the dash so you have to bend over and put your head under the dash to blow; I would call that a visibility issue though as you can't see anything from sown there. Imagine picking something up off of the floor of your car; can you see the road from down there? You only have to blow for 5 seconds; the other 25 are for the device to analyze the breath.
My Brother had one of these things installed in his car as the result of a DUI. It was either get the device or not drive. But I recently had the misfortune of borrowing his car while mine was being repaired. Not only did my brother feel the need to give me a thirty minute lecture on the device but I'm glad that he did. I never drink and drive but I failed this device on more than one occasion. If you have a dry mouth - from jogging, taking allergy medication, not drinking anything in the last hour - the device will fail. It assumes that you are using some other source for air besides a person (like a balloon). It asks you to blow in the device while you are driving down the road and his particular model shuts the car off. It does give you warning that the car is going to shut off but it will do it while you are driving down the highway! Do you have any idea how difficult it is to bring a car to a stop from seventy miles an hour after the power steering and power brakes fail? It is a seriously dangerous device. It will not be that long before it either causes an accident by shutting the ignition off while the car is moving or fails to allow a non-intoxicated driver to start their car. It keeps track of every attempt (success or failure) and reports it back to the installer. Which my brother then has to take to the court as part of his probation. He then has to explain why to a skeptical judge. Although it is obvious that the device failed when he passes a few minutes later - after getting a drink of water - but it is generally a pain in the ass.
The company that makes this device would be foolish to allow this legislation to pass without carving out some sort of loophole for themselves that will protect them against lawsuits. Having lived in Colorado for years, I know that the possibility that you get a car stuck and have to spend the night on the side of the road with the car running to provide heat is real. It happens every year to someone and happened to me about eight years ago. If this device shuts the car off while the stranded occupant is sleeping and allows that person to freeze to death there will be some serious liability to the company. It is one thing for the company to say that the occupant was obviously drunk; just look at their record of DUI's. It is quite another matter for them to make that claim against an elderly person who has never had a drink in their life; you have to blow HARD or the device fails. Can you say millions in liability?
What about the person that gets stranded in a bad part of town by a failed device only to be mugged. You can bet that at least one of these people will have the resources to persue the company in court. My point is that when a judge orders the device installed in a person's car as the result of a DUI the company can make some argument about the lessor of two evils. When it is installed in everybody's car and it harms that person that doesn't drink the company is going to get sued unless there is a legal protection clause (indemnification). If there is some indemnification clause then is it right to allow some company to escape legal recourse for the malfunction of their device when it causes a death or injury?
My final point is the cost. My brother had to pay $2000 to have the device installed in his $500 car. It isn't that unfair since he did drive drunk but should we charge everyone that much money for the mistakes of a few? I predict that these people from NM will start to buy and sell their cars in neighboring states and that car dealerships in NM will have their business seriously curtailed. They won't sell as many new cars; new cars will have their warrantis voided because these devices will have to be installed after market; and it is a serious invasion of privacy to have your own car keep track of when you use it and for how long. Will it also become law that to have your license renewed that you have to provide the data from the device to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
This law may pass but it will soon be repealed and some politicians will probably loose their jobs for undertaking such Stalinist tactics. The citizens of New Mexico will become politically active and want some lynchings at the capital.
There was a good story in Wired about synthetic diamonds not to long ago. It was discussed on Slashdot too. Where diamonds are going to be interesting in the future is when they displace silicon in chip manufacturing. A diamond chip can operate at temperatures that would turn silicon into a puddle in the bottom of your machine. If Moore's law is to continue, and faster chips = hotter chips, then silicon is going to have to be replaced. The eetimes has an interesting article about a diamond semiconductor, verified by NTT, that operates at 81GHz or 81,000MHz! Another one of diamonds benefits is its high thermal conductivity.
There is even a third type of diamond that has been developed at City University in Hong Kong. It differs from the one found in nature (a cubic form) and the one found in meteorites (a hexagonal form) by the way the carbon atoms bond to each other: rhombohedral form.
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Not if you are 16!
Yes, I took Organic chemistry too. The average person cannot get Nitric acid (HNO3) as it is the primary component in explosives like trinitrotoluene (TNT) and the strongest hydrogenperoxide (H2O2) that you can get is 3% from the pharmacy because it too can be used for nefarious things at concentrations over 30% like mixing it with rubber to make a hypergolic rocket fuel. If you read the poster's question and you are really trying to provide a solution then I have to ask how you intend to RMA a jar of liquid that is so nasty that it cannot be mailed through USPS, UPS or FedEx. Although I would like to see the look on the faces of the techs that receive it! :-)
Linus is not opposed to closed source drivers in the kernel. He is against allowing closed source drivers in the kernel from affecting kernel development. He will not keep module interfaces from changing and he will not help people that have incorporated closed source drivers into the kernel when their shit breaks. nVidia has to spend alot of effort keeping up with the kernel changes so that their drivers continue to work and that is their decision. It would be easier if nVidia just submitted source code so that the kernel maintainers could help them make changes when the kernel interface to modules changes. It would also make my life easier so that I didn't have to keep two versions of the kernel and two versions of xorg.conf on my system but nVidia has made their decision. Linus hasn't gone out of his way to make their lives more difficult but he does refuse to go out of his way, even in the slightest, to make their lives easier. In my opinion that does not constitute dead set against closed sources drivers. Obviously, your opinion differs.
The most important thing that Bitkeeper did was to show the developers what was possible with the right tools. Anyone that reads the LKML knew that this day would come sooner or later and many of the SCM developers have used the time to improve their tools. What we really need to do is thank Larry for the use of his program (it was a great help) and move on. I don't think that Linus and the other kernel developers will ever go back to the days before fine grained changelogs, distributed source trees, and the ease with which patches from any one tree can be applied to any other tree. I think, if anything, that the biggest thing that dropping Bitkeeper will do at this point is to accelerate the development of better (and more distributed) SCM's.
Thanks Larry! And more importantly: Thanks Linus, Alan, Andrew, Marcello, Rik, et al. Your work and dedication is much appreciated! ;-)
P.S. Kernel.org has a new SCM written by Linus (in his directory) that is available for your perusal.
Thanks for the reply. I don't use Win that often but at least now I can show my friends that do how to run their systems in a safer manner as I always seem to get drafted to clean their systems up for them. A quick question: where did you learn this trick? Is it in the documentation anywhere or did you just pick it up from another guru along the way? The reason that I ask (I assume that you read the thread) is that MS makes no real effort to teach their customers how to properly use their computers. Unfortunately ease of use applies equally to the computer's owner as well as mal-ware authors. I haven't even read the new manuals since XP shipped; is there a quick start guide and if so does it mention the need to create a non-admin account?
So what if your computer doesn't crash when your graphics subsystem crashes, you still can't do anything about it.
That statement is not true. There is a kernel hacking feature that will enable you to send keystrokes directly to the kernel, safe on single user systems - not multi-user systems, and if it is enabled Alt-SysRq-K will reset the keyboard and enable you to switch to a text console so that you can kill the X session and then restart it. You can also use another computer to log into the one w/ a crashed X session and reset the X session. You can also send signals to the programs running in the crashed X session and most of the programs will exit gracefully saving their open files at that time. This is one of my favorite features in Linux as it can still be gracefully shutdown and rebooted if need be so that the disk buffers/caches are properly flushed but most of the time I simply need to resatrt X.
The biggest culprit here is the OOM (Out of Memory) killer; when the kernel runs out of memory it can either halt or try to find something to kill (failing an alloc request is cool if a program wants the memory -- if the kernel wants the memory then it tends to insist on having it). This tends to happen after the machine hasn't been rebooted for a few months, has 5+ Mozilla windows open with 10+ tabs in each (I once counted 67 tabs open at once), a mail reader, a development environment, various other small programs, and a girlfriend with her own X session running on a different terminal with a boat load of her own stuff. When that happens the OOM picks something to kill in order to free up some memory so it doesn't have to panic and halt. I'm convinced that Murphy wrote this algorithm as the odds of a particular program being killed seems to be related to the number of unsaved files (it can't risk asking the prog to gracefully exit as the prog may try to allocate memory thus creating a race condition).
The kernel will panic if a disasterous situation happens but mine hasn't in years. Nvidia and ATi distribute binary drivers for their video cards that are linked with the kernel and therefore add all of the problems that Windows has with the graphics system crashing the whole computer. To combat this problem the kernel hackers have implemented a tainted flag that gets set anytime a module is loaded into the kernel with an unapproved license. They won't even investigate problems in that situation. I talked to a very talented Windows programmer that told me that Windows originally had the video drivers isolated from the kernel but performance was very poor; the solution was to put the video stuff into the kernel. Any truth to that? I think that he was referring to the first version of NT.
Tux - the HTTP server in the kernel - has been removed. I think the only reason that it was ever placed there was to achieve awesome benchmarks and it succeeded there. It wasn't so much of a security risk as it only served static web pages and passed anything more complicated up to Apache.
About the user: years ago I worked for a local computer sh
Thanks for the response. I'm not trying to spread FUD here but the U causes the F. Since I'm uncertain as to how many undocumented API's there are (it is documented that a number of MS apps use undocumented APIs) I would be in fear that one or more of these may be able to do things that side-step their internal security. In Linux it is necessary for an app to eventually get kernel privs to do things like read/write to the hard drive. Although some of these APIs have been found to be lacking in checking the data that is sent to them they have usually been cleaned up pretty fast. The Windows' APIs are an unknown without source code but the undocumented ones are the really scary ones: they could be written to work faster than their documented counterparts by intentionally failing to perform needed checks. It would be extremely hard to fix a -- not really broken but lazy/fast API -- if a number of other MS apps used it and some cracker did discover how to exploit it to side step the internal security. In the long run I believe that the weakest point in any operating system is person in front of the keyboard and education is the only thing that can effect the way said individual performs certain tasks.
I'm not trying to spread FUD but I do know that many MS users fall over all kinds of security issues that don't seem to affect non-MS users. And Apache should stand out as a light on the dark claim that MS gets hacked because they are more popular. And a final point: I have yet to come across a Linux distro that does not practically force you to create a user account and warn you against running as root; why doesn't MS do the same -- tell users that they should create a non-admin account and use it for everything except reconfiguring the computer. Further MS should explain in more detail the risks that are associated with running as Admin.
Ahh, the other side of the integration issue. MS says it has the right to keep throwing everything into their OS (I'm just waiting for the kitchen sink app) without acknowledging a fundamental fact. If Firefox or Mozilla gets hacked, cracked, phished, etc. then the bad guy has gotten into a computer with the priviledges of the user running the app. After MS integrates Internet Exploder and Media Slayer into the OS when one of those gets hacked the attacker is already in the OS and has the priveldges of the OS kernel! One hole in anything that MS calls part of the OS and the entire house of cards comes crashing down. This is the reason that U*IX has many small tools that get linked together to perform a job. MS has one monster of a tool that they currently call XP and if you can find a hole in it then you can get into everything else.
It is obvious that we need to pick one way for these laws to go and stick with it. I just hope that we don't need to get a license for things that are today accepted as normal behavior. Like: taking a family photo at a ski slope; taking a group photo at a local restaurant; a photo of Mt. Rushmore or the various other national parks in the US; or, even taking a photo of your family inside your family home when something that is copyright is visible through a window. It is truly terrifying to imagine what could come next: copyrighting proper names? consumer products? or perhaps even a thought. Imagine taking a photo of Bono wearing an Ipod in front of Buckingham Palace wearing a tee shirt that says "Think Peace". That is four distinct copyright violations: The name Bono; The Ipod device; the landmark Buckingham Palace; and, the tee shirt slogan "Think Peace". Where will it stop?
I do participate in lobbying efforts both as a member of groups and as an individual but I can't share your optimism when it comes to our (USA) political process. I did venture over to check out the mailing list that you mentioned and found it to be in a number of languages that I'm not very fluent in. Most Americans, myself included, only speak English (although a few of us speak C/Perl/Asm/etc.) due to our miserable public education system. In contrast, most of the Europeans that I have met spoke at least two or three languages, and could fumble their way through a few more if they really needed to. I try not to, but many Americans do, think that we are the center of the world and therefore consider other languages unnecessary. That and the fact that we are rarely exposed to other languages leads us to be mostly uni-lingual.
Although I am very much against software patents, because they are usually frivolous, these inventions were truly novel enough to warrant patents!
Another big business mistake was for Steve Jobs to give Bill Gates a McIntosh development platform so Micro$oft could port some business software to it.
I think that delaying and then defeating patents in Europe is the best opportunity that we have in the USA to get the subject revisited. There is a need to have some uniformity in patent laws throughout the world, or at least with our major trading partners; if we (or more accurately, Europeans) can get Europe to defeat software patents or at least demand that they truly be inventive and not the next logical step in programming (a la one click) then there will be a need to have the two systems brought closer together. If Europe stands opposed to them, and America (Adobe/Micro$oft) stands for them then hopefully they will be forced to compromise. Not that a compromise is a good solution for us but I believe a negotiation like this is the best hope/chance that we have at bringing our patent system in line with what our Founding Fathers had in mind: "To Promote the Useful Arts and Sciences". As long as US politicians are bought and paid for by the big corporations there is no other way that this issue will come up for discussion in either the House or the Senate.
Where are the mod points now?!? Not that it will happen though, Texas being built on oil and all.
I read this story here and my brother (somewhat computer illiterate) begged me to submit it but I thought against it because of all of the political overtones. For those that are interested in more details, including some possible conspiracy theories, you should read it. It discusses where the financing came from and links it directly back to the Bush family. It further alledges that President Bush's money trail has been exposed by the CIA in retaliation for his recent house cleaning there. It also mentions several elections that were adjusted during the testing phase of the illicit program.
I have to say that the Patriot Act, and President Bush telling me I'm unpatriotic for opposing it, has definitely affected my vote. Not only did I not vote for a single Republican, but I swear that I will never vote for another one again. EVER! Unfortunately it appears that The Al Quida recruitment poster-boy will get to remain in office for another four years. Bush has pissed off more Muslims in four years than the previous four or five presidents combined and in the future, after he and Cheney have made their millions off of the war in Iraq, the repurcusions will befall the rest of us.
And at the last UN World Summit on the Information Society, Brazil led a bloc including India, South Africa, and China that thwarted an attempt by the US and its allies to harden the UN's line on intellectual property rights, insisting that the final conference document recognize just as strongly the cultural and economic importance of shared knowledge.
Now that I've fully woken up, I posted the original at 5:00am local time, I see the error of my ways. That quote would have more closely represented the theme of the article and the sentiments of Brazilians.
Wired magazine has an excellent four page article discussing Brazil's new approach to Intellectual Property rigths. Discussing everything from battling with the international pharmacutical industries, to song sampling, to the national adoption of Linux. Richard Stallman stated that India's political commitment to free software is, second only to Brazil's after attending a weeklong free software teach-in for members of the Brazilian national congress, where 161 out of 594 members of congress, from a broad range of parties, had signed up with the free software caucus - making it one of the largest caucuses in the Brazilian government. Later that week Stallman donned a robe and a halo made out of a compact disc and declared himself "Saint IGNUcius of the Church of Emacs" but was surprised to be upstaged when Gilberto Gil, Brazil's newly appointed minister of culture, said: "this whole process that led to the computer, to the personal computer, to Silicon Valley, this extraordinary degree of cognition that arose from the intersection of math and design and the crystallographic structures of quartz was made possible by acid trips." It even has its fair share of MS bashing for those whose goal in life it is.
The story was pending for over five hours. I think they were waiting for someone to submit one that didn't equate drug use to computers! I was merely quoting the Brazilian Culture Minister (p. 4). Just a quick FYI.
Just how many countries do you claim citizenship in?
I know I had one shut the car off on me. Read my comment
In Colorado its DWAI or Driving While Ability Impaired.
For the few that haven't figured it out ... this was sarcasm.
I posted a comment a few minutes ago addressing some of these issues. You have to fail a few times (at least twice) before it takes action. It does not hang from the ceiling; it is mounted under the dash so you have to bend over and put your head under the dash to blow; I would call that a visibility issue though as you can't see anything from sown there. Imagine picking something up off of the floor of your car; can you see the road from down there? You only have to blow for 5 seconds; the other 25 are for the device to analyze the breath.
The company that makes this device would be foolish to allow this legislation to pass without carving out some sort of loophole for themselves that will protect them against lawsuits. Having lived in Colorado for years, I know that the possibility that you get a car stuck and have to spend the night on the side of the road with the car running to provide heat is real. It happens every year to someone and happened to me about eight years ago. If this device shuts the car off while the stranded occupant is sleeping and allows that person to freeze to death there will be some serious liability to the company. It is one thing for the company to say that the occupant was obviously drunk; just look at their record of DUI's. It is quite another matter for them to make that claim against an elderly person who has never had a drink in their life; you have to blow HARD or the device fails. Can you say millions in liability?
What about the person that gets stranded in a bad part of town by a failed device only to be mugged. You can bet that at least one of these people will have the resources to persue the company in court. My point is that when a judge orders the device installed in a person's car as the result of a DUI the company can make some argument about the lessor of two evils. When it is installed in everybody's car and it harms that person that doesn't drink the company is going to get sued unless there is a legal protection clause (indemnification). If there is some indemnification clause then is it right to allow some company to escape legal recourse for the malfunction of their device when it causes a death or injury?
My final point is the cost. My brother had to pay $2000 to have the device installed in his $500 car. It isn't that unfair since he did drive drunk but should we charge everyone that much money for the mistakes of a few? I predict that these people from NM will start to buy and sell their cars in neighboring states and that car dealerships in NM will have their business seriously curtailed. They won't sell as many new cars; new cars will have their warrantis voided because these devices will have to be installed after market; and it is a serious invasion of privacy to have your own car keep track of when you use it and for how long. Will it also become law that to have your license renewed that you have to provide the data from the device to the Department of Motor Vehicles.
This law may pass but it will soon be repealed and some politicians will probably loose their jobs for undertaking such Stalinist tactics. The citizens of New Mexico will become politically active and want some lynchings at the capital.
There is even a third type of diamond that has been developed at City University in Hong Kong. It differs from the one found in nature (a cubic form) and the one found in meteorites (a hexagonal form) by the way the carbon atoms bond to each other: rhombohedral form.