Small projects can be about purity. Making the best possible code base you can. Especially ones where people work on it for free -- they wouldn't be working on it if they didn't deeply believe in it.
That may be true, but if people are working for free, the project can suffer from an inadequate amount of labor and the existing workers might have trouble getting stuff done in addition to their day job.
The bigger problem with when people are working for free is that they generally want to avoid the horrible can of worms bugs that need to be fixed by a shitload of horrible refactoring and concentrate on fixing silly little things instead. The other problem is where they have to do things that seem utterly wrong in principle to the developer like implement a broken and entirely wrong standard but that needs to be done for the sake of the project as a whole. (Disclaimer - I work with SCORM, the defacto broken standard for eLearning)
You also have to wonder about the two month delay in sending the bug to mariaDB. Did that allow them to take advantage of some over the beer mug discussion with Oracle employees about who was going to release it first?
Doh. Because if you submitted to both teams at the same time then as soon as one fixed it then the other can just migrate the fix into their code. Of course this could have backfired on him if Oracle had fixed it super quick he would have no way to accurately test the responsiveness of the MariaDB team without finding a similar bug and next time submitting it to MariaDb first.
As it is though the problem is that as I read the bug report filed with MariaDB it would not surprise me if they fixed this super quick just because they knew Oracle had been a little tardy so this would win them some brownie points and may even get posted to news sites like slashdot.
We were only able to develop Golden Rice because the technology was patented. Thus it was publicly accessible for research. Without patents, the technology would have been secret.
They were granted free use of those patents because of the humanitarian usage. And I expect they'll do the same with the final patent on Golden Rice itself. This guy is looking to help the world, not make money. Read the interview, it's quite interesting.
I think he is probably being a little naive though.
The company who owned the patents in question has probably just done this as a one off with the aim of winning support for genetically modified food. Personally I have no problem with GM food and think this golden rice is a wonderful idea. The problem is that most companies involved in GM research in food are not trying to find a way to solve vitamin A deficiency, they are trying to find a way to make as much money as possible.
I am all for GM being used to solve world hunger problems, I am totally against it being used for purely financial gain. This is especially a worry when you look at how many of these companies have behaved in the past. i don't they have suddenly become nice people, I think they realise they need to win a PR battle so are trying to play nice.
If they really wanted to do the right thing then instead of this "humanitarian usage" clause for farmers making less than $10K they would have just given the patents over into the public domain.
If this sort of research was done solely by academics in universities and the results always made public and free for anyone to use then I would be all for it. I would even be happy to eat the stuff as I am pretty open minded when it comes to grub. I fully expect to be eating vat grown meat at some point in my life.
Anyone who uses a 'best interests of the children' argument should be immediately shipped to an island populated entirely by other people just like them.
I was about to post something along the lines of maybe you will feel differently when you have kids of your own but then maybe you never will judging by your profile saying DYKE in big letters. I get the impression you are still quite young though so that may change, many women do when they start looking at the menopause in their late thirties.
The thing is, I have no real problem with attempts to block porn that can be turned off by adults. I know they are not 100% effective I know that have tons of false positives but they are better than nothing even if they only stop one or two kids access something they should not.
I know about the "if they can block this then they can block that" argument, but that simply does not hold any weight as when something is blocked it is usually fairly obvious that is what is happening and if society as a large generally objects (like in the case of the wikipedia debacle here a few years back) then the block is usually reversed pretty quickly. If they did start trying to use the same technology as they do in China to restrict access to things like Al Jazeera or Russia Today then the public would probably be aware of this pretty quickly.
As to the fact that it means you have to register with someone as being a consumer of porn you have to realise that your credit company already know that anyway from your purchase history, why does it matter if your ISP does too?
I think this is just one of those cases where as you get a bit older you stop giving a shit about people knowing you look at tits and start caring more about how old your kids are going to be when they discover about sex and what they learn about it. I have no problem with 13 - 18 year olds experimenting in this regard but I think that porn is about the worst educator possible so seeing most of the crap produced by that industry is not going to make learning about sex any easier for them.
The problem with porn is that it generally produced to cater for the extremes of people's sexual preferences to appeal to people who are not satisfied in this regard. The difficulty this presents is that someone who knew nothing about sex looking at something like that to figure out what it is all about is going to be led completely down the wrong path in terms of what sex should be about as the norm of that they are viewing bears no resemblance to the actual norms of society and loving (or purely sexual as well for that matter) relationships between people.
I do however believe that it is entirely wrong to completely ban all porn as I think it has a place in society and adults should be free to watch pretty much whatever they like (providing the participants are willing and above age obviously). This presents a problem in that you then need someway of restricting certain content to adults only.
In the past restricting porn to adults was easier as you actually had to go into a shop to buy it. In the age of the internet it is much more difficult though but that does not mean we should not try. In some situations it makes sense for the protection provided to be parental such as in the case of home internet accounts but one mobile phones this needs to come from somewhere else to cope with prepay phones that can be bought by children.
For my home internet this will easy as I will just make sure I have a decent router password set then send all internet traffic to syslog on a secure linux box. Then I can set up various crons that quietly alert me to any browsing I do not like. I can then raise this with my missus and we decide on how to proceed from there. Chances are the first stop would be a conversation though rather than any sort of blocking. I suppose what I would really like is for something similar to be possible for mobile phones so I could set up a monthly account for my kids that gave me the same degree of
We arent talking about making money. Open Source's point is not MONEY. Its about making sure we have free and available building blocks to create an information society.
But everyone needs money so it has to be part of the conversation. Without money you starve.
Only trust open source software where the code has been audited carefully.
Even in that case there is still the possibility that there are very subtle bugs that can be exploited under certain circumstances.
Open source software actually has another risk which is that someone at the NSA or GCHQ can be paid to contribute to the project for a few years and do mostly amazing work but deliberately introduce a single bug that can be very carefully exploited. If you are very crafty and hide the bug carefully will it may end up hidden for years.
This is not to say that open source software is worse than closed source software, just that open source projects need to be very careful about vetting who contributes to them.
There is no way around it anymore - if your a company providing security products and your not full open source, and that source has not been stable and well reviewed for some time, then your product cannot be trusted no matter how many famous upstanding people are on your board of directors or licenses the US/UK Gov buys from you.
But if you do release all your source then someone can take all you hard work and then undercut you on price in the case of something like silent circle where you are selling a service not a product. Alternative people can take your source and just use it in house to roll their own solution. In both of these cases nobody pays you a penny and you go broke real fast.
Open Source is really tricky to do well and make money from and sometimes it is just not a viable business model.
You say you're an atheist, so of course you think nobody REALLY believes in God, they just say they do as a ploy to get more wealth.
What? Of course not. I personally do not believe in god but I know many people who do and respect that it is their choice. I think some people are probably just pretending to believe in god but they are probably in a minority.
I also know people who are helped a great deal by their religious beliefs and have had quite a few long discussions with them about why it helps them so I think I would have seen through them if they did not really believe what they were saying.
That's hilarious since that's one the faults of Islam that is most often criticized.
Sorry? What is most criticised? The fact that the Quran is unchanged since it was first written down due its rigid poetic structure? Maybe they have a point, but I think that you could only really make an informed judgement on this if you could actually read it and that means learning arabic in order to ensure you were not criticising a translation. I have no interest in learning arabic as I simply do not have the time.
Hate preachers want us all to live in an Islamic Caliphate just because that puts them in charge.
That's one of those tenets of the faith that you were just praising for being unchanging.
Actually I am not sure you are right about living in a caliphate being a tenet of Islam. I get the impression that the Quran itself is a bit vague about whether religious obedience should be enforced on people by the law of the land. I only consider something to be a tenet of islam if it is made clear in the Quran and not left up to interpretation. There are many Muslims who still believe in a separation of religion and state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_secularism).
The Taliban isn't motivated by money, they're motivated by their Islamic faith and they need money to accomplish their goals.
I personally think that many of taliban leaders are motivated by a lust for power rather than faith or money. A good few are also just on a quest for revenge at any cost against those they blame for wrongs committed against them.
There's a step there that you are avoiding. To exterminate everyone in a country you might need a bomb, but you might also use a genetically targeted bio weapon. Or whatever else we invent.
The problem is that the biggest risk factor is not genetic - it is Islam. I suppose in the far future it might be possible to have intelligent swarms of robot "wasps" with poisonous stings, who can look out for indications that someone is a muslim, but the problem will still be with us for many years.
You must be one of the people who pose the biggest risk to society if you actually believe that, you are one of the stupid morons who is unable to critically evaluate anything not fed to you by fox news.
Islam is a religion, nothing more nothing less. Many people go through life being helped by Islam (just like Christianity) to be better people and act in ways less dictated by self interest and more in being nicer to ones fellow man. The problem is that just like Christianity a few years back it is twisted by some very sick individuals to justify their own sick ends.
This is hardly a fault of Islam since the main tenets of that faith were written down thousands of years ago and have been unchanged since (the Koran is actually less flexible in this regard than the Bible, although it worth remembering that Islam still recognises Christ as being a prophet so they don't exactly ignore his teachings). This is the fault of the person doing the twisting and the person who believe the twisted result. Hate preachers want us all to live in an Islamic Caliphate just because that puts them in charge.
We in the west though have similar people who try and twist christianity or democracy or patriotism towards their own ends: We have people who own arms companies who love it when we invade other nations as they sell more guns. We have people who own oil companies who love it when invading a country and installing a friendly government opens up a new market. We have politicians who carp on about something happening overseas and whipping up a furor amongst the public to distract from them humping their PA or giving their chums a tax break (ok, this might be an exaggeration but I certainly do not believe that many of our politicians act in our own best interest, they act in theirs).
The problem is not the idea of patriotism, democracy, christianity or islam. The problem is when we blindly follow interpretations of these ideas spouted by people with a hidden agenda. The only solution to this is that we question more of the information that it is given to us and think more about motives of the people trying to encourage our views in a particular direction.
(Just for the record, I think there is about as much chance of any western country becoming a caliphate as their is of world peace breaking out tomorrow. I am also a thoroughly decided atheist who has read about a few religions but decided that ultimately they are all the creations of man, not god so I would simply refuse to follow any religious laws that were imposed on me that I did not agree with morally anyway.)
How quickly we forget 9/11. If our government had been more vigilant in who crosses our border, it would have never happened. Border searches are one of the few powers I am happy to grant my overgrown, bloated, ineffective federal government. If you come to the U.S. with bad intentions, I hope they catch you.
The problem is that at the time all the government agencies who do border security type stuff were looking at yet more budget cuts and a public that was becoming less and less sympathetic to paying tax for this sort of crap. Some people actually believe that some government agencies knew that 9-11 was going to happen but ignored it in order to justify all the budget increases they have had over the past decade.
I am not entirely sure I 100% believe this but sometimes there are things government does that make me think I am wrong.
If the primary goal is to steal trade secrets why bother with any of that? You can purchase the use of a 50GB VPS for $6 a month and store any encrypted data you want on it which can be accessed anywhere in the world with Internet access.
But where is the company who host your VPS based? The truth is that if the US wants access they will just quietly get a snapshot of it by asking directly if it is hosted by an american company. There are a few companies in certain parts of europe and russia you might be able to trust not to give the US access but not many.
All companies with a US presence though will voluntarily help the US government crack or bypass any encryption you have in place, probably just by snooping from within their network when you enter the password for access. The only safe approach to this is if you only enter passwords locally any time they go over the net it becomes possible for the US to gain access to them somehow.
It's not necessarily complete waste. All scrambled JavaScript code can be returned into an understandable form, that's for sure. But by obfuscating the code, you're always adding some extra puzzle to those who want to steal your code.
Steal your code? Will they be deleting it from your servers?
The right way to handle this situation is to not do a bunch of client-side js yourself. And why would you?
In my case it was because I had to produce something that was scorm 1.2 compatible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharable_Content_Object_Reference_Model). That meant I had to use javascript as to produce a scorm compatible course there has to be no server side code (Only flash or JS). I should have used flash but that would have meant me spending 6 months learning actionscript before having anything to show for it.
Why do so many developers waste time on obfuscation and other ways of hiding the source in scripting languages?
Because the boss tells us to.
This is spoken as someone who has been asked to obfuscate javascript. I spent a few minutes trying to explain why this was an utter waste of time and such but the problem is that the boss knows a bit of JS code so looked at it and could understand it. He then googled "javascript obfuscation" and found a product that made the code so he could no longer understand it. The fact that I said I could still understand it he just blamed on me having created it.
The problem was that this was dynamically generated JS so I had to then go away and incorporate obfuscation into my server side code. I tried to do the best I could and make the result really hard to understand (once I am given a task I hate doing a poor job, even if it is a waste of time) but one of our competitors he gave access to the end result still reverse engineered it and copied it in a few months.
Now it is back on my task list again to go and revisit it and make the end result more cryptic using the stuff I learned by looking at our competitors similar solution. I have long since given up trying to explain why trying to hide what is ostensibly an open technology does is a complete waste of time.
Maybe so but it helps to only consider one thing at a time.
I was amazed that Prague made the list. It's a lovely place to visit but it is the capital of an ex-communist country, and the last I heard the government telephone company still owned all the infrastructure.
You seem to automatically associate government owning the telco with it being crap whereas the truth is exactly the opposite. When these are government owned they throw money at stuff since nobody is looking for a profit.
We learned from that, and have become much better at keeping stock of which bulls are the fathers and grandfathers of which cattle. I don't see how cloning affects the situation significantly.
Ok, first up when you fertilise an egg you have no real control over what bits of genetic material comes from which parent in many cases. Sometimes it is predetermined by dominant / recessive genes but for other stuff there is a huge element of chance in there. Cloning completely removes this from the equation which is actually the whole point.
Secondly, if you start allowing clones you really need to keep a sample of genetic material from the donor as well to ensure it was not altered as part of the cloning process. Like maybe you want a horse to run faster and can find someway to tweak it's genetic makeup to make this possible.
Don't get me wrong, I am not personally against cloning, genetic modification or any other amazing new technology like this. I do think you have to be a little careful though at how it is applied when money is involved and horse racing is certainly in that category. It seems that if a bunch of a majority of trainers do not want to pit their animals that have been bred in a similar way for hundred of years against a horse that is grown in a lab that should be their prerogative just like most athletes don't want to compete against someone drugged up to eyeballs.
I don't see it. Horse breeding is not Horse cloning. Bad idea. Very bad. I can't even fathom the idea that they can force them to take cloned animals.
It's very simple:
The US has a great many companies involved in genetically modifying or cloning stuff. These companies donate substantial sums to the political parties that judges are appointed by. Any judge who allowed these companies to be put at any sort of commercial inconvenience would find themselves very unpopular with the people who ultimately have a large say in them getting a promotion.
Some judges might hold firm on matters of principle safe in the knowledge that they cannot be easily removed from office but that may well remove any chance of them making it to the supreme court.
But most carriers default their phones to auto-connect to open WIFI to save themselves bandwidth.
I'm thinking that must be a British thing. My GS3 (on Virgin/Bell) in Canada doesn't autoconnect to anything WiFi unless you've previously explicitly connected to a given network and AFAICT, there's no option to even make it do so.
It's not a british thing, its apparently how android and maybe iphones work. Even though you were not actually connecting to the wifi access point as it came into range your phone does a little hello to get a signal back and determine range and stuff that included its MAC address. They then logged the MAC and monitored whether the signal was getting stronger or weaker in order to figure out your rough direction of movement. Apparently all this was done even when you just walked past the bloody things even though you never actually associated the device with the access point.
I have been walking past these things for months so they must have a nice track showing my walk to work every day as I am fairly sure I walk past a few of them between Bank and Shoreditch.
More precisely, is there anything Obama has said since he gained the public eye in 2007 which hasn't been 180 degrees from the actual truth?
I think the only thing he's been honest about at this point is his intention of making gas/diesel/etc. more expensive and a couple slip-ups about healthcare not being available for everyone.
I am sure that at some point he must have said "I am better than the other guy".
I actually think that at least he kinds of wants to do the right thing and juts makes a screw up of it, whereas generally republicans just seem to be about fucking over everyone who is not incredibly rich. I suppose that does make them more honest though.
Yeah, that's leadership, which is different than project management.
Project management is about getting the project done. It's nice to be a leader, but what happens when key people quit? Who arranges to make sure different parts are done? Leadership is an extremely good skill, but management is a different but also extremely good skill to have.
Exactly.
Most of the discussion of this on slashdot just shows how little people bother to actually read what they are commenting on or how clueless they are about what leading a project actually entails. Managers in my experience very rarely lead projects. They assign teams to projects under a team leader who is responsible for getting the stuff done.
Some people need very little direction given to them and some people refuse to take direction completely, but most technical teams of 5 or so people will have a mix. The job of the technical lead is to help the people who need it when they need it. Either through advice or actually doing the job for them in the rare occasion when someone is totally out of their depth. If you are technical lead of an amazing team the job is easy, if you are a technical team of a bunch of people like me it is hard. (I'm joking, I work as a lead developer)
Generally though being a technical lead is a far more technical role than being a manager. It does involve knowing how to manage people effectively though as it involves far more people skills then just being a member of a technical team.
The reason companies always like people with leadership skills though is simply because as you work for a company you accrue more and more technical skills. Companies want you to have the potential to impart those technical skills into other people through leadership. This is what the interviewer is probably referring to, the linked article the guy posted is just a red herring where he misunderstood what was being asked of him in my opinion.
I don't see how criminal copyright infringement is more enforceable than civil copyright infringement. Unless you're referring to the copyright holder having effectively the entire law enforcement community as extra unpaid (well, taxpayer paid) manpower...
Because in civil enforcement you can only go after people who have money with the idea of being awarded some it as a settlement if you are going after them after the fact. If the person you are going after is a student or teenager with no assets you can't really get awarded much. In criminal law you can hand them jail time and criminal record which actually a meaningful punishment.
If petty shoplifting was a civil offence rather than a criminal one far more people would do it. This is not saying that shoplifting and streaming are the same thing because obviously they are different but this is another example of something that has to be covered by criminal law in order to be effective as the loss from a single incident is very small but someone who simply went to every shop stealing everything then only having to give items back when they were caught could make huge gains from many different victims.
They did ask. In fact, they asked him not to leave the country... his response was to promptly flee the country and then talk about how THEY weren't accommodating HIM.
I was saying the swiss prosecutor could ask the ecuadorian embassy to enter to have a private chat with Assange after he had entered. The thing is it would be at Assange's discretion, he may say yes but he would hold all the power in that interview so the prosecutors office would not be interested.
As to the rest of your rant it seems you are just have some sort of anger issues judging by the profanity (this seems a regular occurrence in your posts judging by your history). Never mind, one day you might start getting laid and that should help calm you down a bit, otherwise try a valium or dope or something.
Try as you may you will always be in violation of some law or provision.
Maybe, but the real question should always come down to whether a jury will convict you.
You mention the UK, that make me think you are actually a UK citizen like me (sorry if I am wrong). In our case we are pretty lucky in terms of still having some semblance of a legal aid system that allows us to actually go to court if we think we broke the law but they jury would agree with our reasons for doing so and getting the state to pay for our defence. The problem with copyright law though is that most of the population eligible for jury duty (that includes me) actually supports it. Without copyright law you would be able to take other peoples digital works and then sell them as your own, that is simply not right.
There are a million problems with copyright law as it stands but throwing it all in the bin and having nothing in its place would be no better apart from for people who just want free access to everything and have no money to pay for it. The only time I think we can get rid of copyright law completely is when we also do away with the concept of money.
What should be a civil case where some corp should sue a private citizen becomes a thing with a DA and a possible prison sentence.
The problem with keeping things like this as civil torts is that they become unenforceable so the infringer effectively wins. Maybe that is your aim by saying this but then why not simply roll out the usual "there should be no such thing as copyright" argument instead.
If we made this covered as a civil tort then what do you give back if you stream the superbowl or something to 50,000 people over the internet when it eventually reaches court? You had a licence that enabled you to watch it over cable TV or whatever that you breached by sharing it with loads of other people, do you have to pay a subscription for each person who watched your stream equivalent to what you paid (hello bankruptcy). Do you pay some arbitrary value that the content owner chooses?
If your real aim is the complete abolition of copyright law you need to start making coherent decent arguments toward this aim if you want to be taken seriously not suggesting systems that are just unworkable in the real world. I know the studios / content owners are just as adept at this but stooping to their level does not help anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Since religious nutjobs started crashing planes into buildings flying cars have been put on the back burner for a while. Sorry.
Small projects can be about purity. Making the best possible code base you can. Especially ones where people work on it for free -- they wouldn't be working on it if they didn't deeply believe in it.
That may be true, but if people are working for free, the project can suffer from an inadequate amount of labor and the existing workers might have trouble getting stuff done in addition to their day job.
The bigger problem with when people are working for free is that they generally want to avoid the horrible can of worms bugs that need to be fixed by a shitload of horrible refactoring and concentrate on fixing silly little things instead. The other problem is where they have to do things that seem utterly wrong in principle to the developer like implement a broken and entirely wrong standard but that needs to be done for the sake of the project as a whole. (Disclaimer - I work with SCORM, the defacto broken standard for eLearning)
You also have to wonder about the two month delay in sending the bug to mariaDB. Did that allow them to take advantage of some over the beer mug discussion with Oracle employees about who was going to release it first?
Doh. Because if you submitted to both teams at the same time then as soon as one fixed it then the other can just migrate the fix into their code. Of course this could have backfired on him if Oracle had fixed it super quick he would have no way to accurately test the responsiveness of the MariaDB team without finding a similar bug and next time submitting it to MariaDb first.
As it is though the problem is that as I read the bug report filed with MariaDB it would not surprise me if they fixed this super quick just because they knew Oracle had been a little tardy so this would win them some brownie points and may even get posted to news sites like slashdot.
We were only able to develop Golden Rice because the technology was patented. Thus it was publicly accessible for research. Without patents, the technology would have been secret.
They were granted free use of those patents because of the humanitarian usage. And I expect they'll do the same with the final patent on Golden Rice itself. This guy is looking to help the world, not make money. Read the interview, it's quite interesting.
I think he is probably being a little naive though.
The company who owned the patents in question has probably just done this as a one off with the aim of winning support for genetically modified food. Personally I have no problem with GM food and think this golden rice is a wonderful idea. The problem is that most companies involved in GM research in food are not trying to find a way to solve vitamin A deficiency, they are trying to find a way to make as much money as possible.
I am all for GM being used to solve world hunger problems, I am totally against it being used for purely financial gain. This is especially a worry when you look at how many of these companies have behaved in the past. i don't they have suddenly become nice people, I think they realise they need to win a PR battle so are trying to play nice.
If they really wanted to do the right thing then instead of this "humanitarian usage" clause for farmers making less than $10K they would have just given the patents over into the public domain.
If this sort of research was done solely by academics in universities and the results always made public and free for anyone to use then I would be all for it. I would even be happy to eat the stuff as I am pretty open minded when it comes to grub. I fully expect to be eating vat grown meat at some point in my life.
Anyone who uses a 'best interests of the children' argument should be immediately shipped to an island populated entirely by other people just like them.
I was about to post something along the lines of maybe you will feel differently when you have kids of your own but then maybe you never will judging by your profile saying DYKE in big letters. I get the impression you are still quite young though so that may change, many women do when they start looking at the menopause in their late thirties.
The thing is, I have no real problem with attempts to block porn that can be turned off by adults. I know they are not 100% effective I know that have tons of false positives but they are better than nothing even if they only stop one or two kids access something they should not.
I know about the "if they can block this then they can block that" argument, but that simply does not hold any weight as when something is blocked it is usually fairly obvious that is what is happening and if society as a large generally objects (like in the case of the wikipedia debacle here a few years back) then the block is usually reversed pretty quickly. If they did start trying to use the same technology as they do in China to restrict access to things like Al Jazeera or Russia Today then the public would probably be aware of this pretty quickly.
As to the fact that it means you have to register with someone as being a consumer of porn you have to realise that your credit company already know that anyway from your purchase history, why does it matter if your ISP does too?
I think this is just one of those cases where as you get a bit older you stop giving a shit about people knowing you look at tits and start caring more about how old your kids are going to be when they discover about sex and what they learn about it. I have no problem with 13 - 18 year olds experimenting in this regard but I think that porn is about the worst educator possible so seeing most of the crap produced by that industry is not going to make learning about sex any easier for them.
The problem with porn is that it generally produced to cater for the extremes of people's sexual preferences to appeal to people who are not satisfied in this regard. The difficulty this presents is that someone who knew nothing about sex looking at something like that to figure out what it is all about is going to be led completely down the wrong path in terms of what sex should be about as the norm of that they are viewing bears no resemblance to the actual norms of society and loving (or purely sexual as well for that matter) relationships between people.
I do however believe that it is entirely wrong to completely ban all porn as I think it has a place in society and adults should be free to watch pretty much whatever they like (providing the participants are willing and above age obviously). This presents a problem in that you then need someway of restricting certain content to adults only.
In the past restricting porn to adults was easier as you actually had to go into a shop to buy it. In the age of the internet it is much more difficult though but that does not mean we should not try. In some situations it makes sense for the protection provided to be parental such as in the case of home internet accounts but one mobile phones this needs to come from somewhere else to cope with prepay phones that can be bought by children.
For my home internet this will easy as I will just make sure I have a decent router password set then send all internet traffic to syslog on a secure linux box. Then I can set up various crons that quietly alert me to any browsing I do not like. I can then raise this with my missus and we decide on how to proceed from there. Chances are the first stop would be a conversation though rather than any sort of blocking. I suppose what I would really like is for something similar to be possible for mobile phones so I could set up a monthly account for my kids that gave me the same degree of
We arent talking about making money. Open Source's point is not MONEY. Its about making sure we have free and available building blocks to create an information society.
But everyone needs money so it has to be part of the conversation. Without money you starve.
Only trust open source software where the code has been audited carefully.
Even in that case there is still the possibility that there are very subtle bugs that can be exploited under certain circumstances.
Open source software actually has another risk which is that someone at the NSA or GCHQ can be paid to contribute to the project for a few years and do mostly amazing work but deliberately introduce a single bug that can be very carefully exploited. If you are very crafty and hide the bug carefully will it may end up hidden for years.
This is not to say that open source software is worse than closed source software, just that open source projects need to be very careful about vetting who contributes to them.
There is no way around it anymore - if your a company providing security products and your not full open source, and that source has not been stable and well reviewed for some time, then your product cannot be trusted no matter how many famous upstanding people are on your board of directors or licenses the US/UK Gov buys from you.
But if you do release all your source then someone can take all you hard work and then undercut you on price in the case of something like silent circle where you are selling a service not a product. Alternative people can take your source and just use it in house to roll their own solution. In both of these cases nobody pays you a penny and you go broke real fast.
Open Source is really tricky to do well and make money from and sometimes it is just not a viable business model.
You say you're an atheist, so of course you think nobody REALLY believes in God, they just say they do as a ploy to get more wealth.
What? Of course not. I personally do not believe in god but I know many people who do and respect that it is their choice. I think some people are probably just pretending to believe in god but they are probably in a minority.
I also know people who are helped a great deal by their religious beliefs and have had quite a few long discussions with them about why it helps them so I think I would have seen through them if they did not really believe what they were saying.
That's hilarious since that's one the faults of Islam that is most often criticized.
Sorry? What is most criticised? The fact that the Quran is unchanged since it was first written down due its rigid poetic structure? Maybe they have a point, but I think that you could only really make an informed judgement on this if you could actually read it and that means learning arabic in order to ensure you were not criticising a translation. I have no interest in learning arabic as I simply do not have the time.
Hate preachers want us all to live in an Islamic Caliphate just because that puts them in charge.
That's one of those tenets of the faith that you were just praising for being unchanging.
Actually I am not sure you are right about living in a caliphate being a tenet of Islam. I get the impression that the Quran itself is a bit vague about whether religious obedience should be enforced on people by the law of the land. I only consider something to be a tenet of islam if it is made clear in the Quran and not left up to interpretation. There are many Muslims who still believe in a separation of religion and state (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islam_and_secularism).
The Taliban isn't motivated by money, they're motivated by their Islamic faith and they need money to accomplish their goals.
I personally think that many of taliban leaders are motivated by a lust for power rather than faith or money. A good few are also just on a quest for revenge at any cost against those they blame for wrongs committed against them.
There's a step there that you are avoiding. To exterminate everyone in a country you might need a bomb, but you might also use a genetically targeted bio weapon. Or whatever else we invent.
The problem is that the biggest risk factor is not genetic - it is Islam. I suppose in the far future it might be possible to have intelligent swarms of robot "wasps" with poisonous stings, who can look out for indications that someone is a muslim, but the problem will still be with us for many years.
You must be one of the people who pose the biggest risk to society if you actually believe that, you are one of the stupid morons who is unable to critically evaluate anything not fed to you by fox news.
Islam is a religion, nothing more nothing less. Many people go through life being helped by Islam (just like Christianity) to be better people and act in ways less dictated by self interest and more in being nicer to ones fellow man. The problem is that just like Christianity a few years back it is twisted by some very sick individuals to justify their own sick ends.
This is hardly a fault of Islam since the main tenets of that faith were written down thousands of years ago and have been unchanged since (the Koran is actually less flexible in this regard than the Bible, although it worth remembering that Islam still recognises Christ as being a prophet so they don't exactly ignore his teachings). This is the fault of the person doing the twisting and the person who believe the twisted result. Hate preachers want us all to live in an Islamic Caliphate just because that puts them in charge.
We in the west though have similar people who try and twist christianity or democracy or patriotism towards their own ends: We have people who own arms companies who love it when we invade other nations as they sell more guns. We have people who own oil companies who love it when invading a country and installing a friendly government opens up a new market. We have politicians who carp on about something happening overseas and whipping up a furor amongst the public to distract from them humping their PA or giving their chums a tax break (ok, this might be an exaggeration but I certainly do not believe that many of our politicians act in our own best interest, they act in theirs).
The problem is not the idea of patriotism, democracy, christianity or islam. The problem is when we blindly follow interpretations of these ideas spouted by people with a hidden agenda. The only solution to this is that we question more of the information that it is given to us and think more about motives of the people trying to encourage our views in a particular direction.
(Just for the record, I think there is about as much chance of any western country becoming a caliphate as their is of world peace breaking out tomorrow. I am also a thoroughly decided atheist who has read about a few religions but decided that ultimately they are all the creations of man, not god so I would simply refuse to follow any religious laws that were imposed on me that I did not agree with morally anyway.)
How quickly we forget 9/11. If our government had been more vigilant in who crosses our border, it would have never happened. Border searches are one of the few powers I am happy to grant my overgrown, bloated, ineffective federal government. If you come to the U.S. with bad intentions, I hope they catch you.
The problem is that at the time all the government agencies who do border security type stuff were looking at yet more budget cuts and a public that was becoming less and less sympathetic to paying tax for this sort of crap. Some people actually believe that some government agencies knew that 9-11 was going to happen but ignored it in order to justify all the budget increases they have had over the past decade.
I am not entirely sure I 100% believe this but sometimes there are things government does that make me think I am wrong.
If the primary goal is to steal trade secrets why bother with any of that? You can purchase the use of a 50GB VPS for $6 a month and store any encrypted data you want on it which can be accessed anywhere in the world with Internet access.
But where is the company who host your VPS based? The truth is that if the US wants access they will just quietly get a snapshot of it by asking directly if it is hosted by an american company. There are a few companies in certain parts of europe and russia you might be able to trust not to give the US access but not many.
All companies with a US presence though will voluntarily help the US government crack or bypass any encryption you have in place, probably just by snooping from within their network when you enter the password for access. The only safe approach to this is if you only enter passwords locally any time they go over the net it becomes possible for the US to gain access to them somehow.
It's not necessarily complete waste. All scrambled JavaScript code can be returned into an understandable form, that's for sure. But by obfuscating the code, you're always adding some extra puzzle to those who want to steal your code.
Steal your code? Will they be deleting it from your servers?
The right way to handle this situation is to not do a bunch of client-side js yourself. And why would you?
In my case it was because I had to produce something that was scorm 1.2 compatible (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharable_Content_Object_Reference_Model). That meant I had to use javascript as to produce a scorm compatible course there has to be no server side code (Only flash or JS). I should have used flash but that would have meant me spending 6 months learning actionscript before having anything to show for it.
Why do so many developers waste time on obfuscation and other ways of hiding the source in scripting languages?
Because the boss tells us to.
This is spoken as someone who has been asked to obfuscate javascript. I spent a few minutes trying to explain why this was an utter waste of time and such but the problem is that the boss knows a bit of JS code so looked at it and could understand it. He then googled "javascript obfuscation" and found a product that made the code so he could no longer understand it. The fact that I said I could still understand it he just blamed on me having created it.
The problem was that this was dynamically generated JS so I had to then go away and incorporate obfuscation into my server side code. I tried to do the best I could and make the result really hard to understand (once I am given a task I hate doing a poor job, even if it is a waste of time) but one of our competitors he gave access to the end result still reverse engineered it and copied it in a few months.
Now it is back on my task list again to go and revisit it and make the end result more cryptic using the stuff I learned by looking at our competitors similar solution. I have long since given up trying to explain why trying to hide what is ostensibly an open technology does is a complete waste of time.
Maybe so but it helps to only consider one thing at a time.
I was amazed that Prague made the list. It's a lovely place to visit but it is the capital of an ex-communist country, and the last I heard the government telephone company still owned all the infrastructure.
You seem to automatically associate government owning the telco with it being crap whereas the truth is exactly the opposite. When these are government owned they throw money at stuff since nobody is looking for a profit.
My Formula 1 Race car appreciates this new rule change
Screw that, I am entering a tank. Lets see how many laps you manage before you get crushed.
We learned from that, and have become much better at keeping stock of which bulls are the fathers and grandfathers of which cattle. I don't see how cloning affects the situation significantly.
Ok, first up when you fertilise an egg you have no real control over what bits of genetic material comes from which parent in many cases. Sometimes it is predetermined by dominant / recessive genes but for other stuff there is a huge element of chance in there. Cloning completely removes this from the equation which is actually the whole point.
Secondly, if you start allowing clones you really need to keep a sample of genetic material from the donor as well to ensure it was not altered as part of the cloning process. Like maybe you want a horse to run faster and can find someway to tweak it's genetic makeup to make this possible.
Don't get me wrong, I am not personally against cloning, genetic modification or any other amazing new technology like this. I do think you have to be a little careful though at how it is applied when money is involved and horse racing is certainly in that category. It seems that if a bunch of a majority of trainers do not want to pit their animals that have been bred in a similar way for hundred of years against a horse that is grown in a lab that should be their prerogative just like most athletes don't want to compete against someone drugged up to eyeballs.
I don't see it. Horse breeding is not Horse cloning. Bad idea. Very bad. I can't even fathom the idea that they can force them to take cloned animals.
It's very simple:
The US has a great many companies involved in genetically modifying or cloning stuff. These companies donate substantial sums to the political parties that judges are appointed by. Any judge who allowed these companies to be put at any sort of commercial inconvenience would find themselves very unpopular with the people who ultimately have a large say in them getting a promotion.
Some judges might hold firm on matters of principle safe in the knowledge that they cannot be easily removed from office but that may well remove any chance of them making it to the supreme court.
But most carriers default their phones to auto-connect to open WIFI to save themselves bandwidth.
I'm thinking that must be a British thing. My GS3 (on Virgin/Bell) in Canada doesn't autoconnect to anything WiFi unless you've previously explicitly connected to a given network and AFAICT, there's no option to even make it do so.
It's not a british thing, its apparently how android and maybe iphones work. Even though you were not actually connecting to the wifi access point as it came into range your phone does a little hello to get a signal back and determine range and stuff that included its MAC address. They then logged the MAC and monitored whether the signal was getting stronger or weaker in order to figure out your rough direction of movement. Apparently all this was done even when you just walked past the bloody things even though you never actually associated the device with the access point.
I have been walking past these things for months so they must have a nice track showing my walk to work every day as I am fairly sure I walk past a few of them between Bank and Shoreditch.
More precisely, is there anything Obama has said since he gained the public eye in 2007 which hasn't been 180 degrees from the actual truth?
I think the only thing he's been honest about at this point is his intention of making gas/diesel/etc. more expensive and a couple slip-ups about healthcare not being available for everyone.
I am sure that at some point he must have said "I am better than the other guy".
I actually think that at least he kinds of wants to do the right thing and juts makes a screw up of it, whereas generally republicans just seem to be about fucking over everyone who is not incredibly rich. I suppose that does make them more honest though.
Yeah, that's leadership, which is different than project management.
Project management is about getting the project done. It's nice to be a leader, but what happens when key people quit? Who arranges to make sure different parts are done? Leadership is an extremely good skill, but management is a different but also extremely good skill to have.
Exactly.
Most of the discussion of this on slashdot just shows how little people bother to actually read what they are commenting on or how clueless they are about what leading a project actually entails. Managers in my experience very rarely lead projects. They assign teams to projects under a team leader who is responsible for getting the stuff done.
Some people need very little direction given to them and some people refuse to take direction completely, but most technical teams of 5 or so people will have a mix. The job of the technical lead is to help the people who need it when they need it. Either through advice or actually doing the job for them in the rare occasion when someone is totally out of their depth. If you are technical lead of an amazing team the job is easy, if you are a technical team of a bunch of people like me it is hard. (I'm joking, I work as a lead developer)
Generally though being a technical lead is a far more technical role than being a manager. It does involve knowing how to manage people effectively though as it involves far more people skills then just being a member of a technical team.
The reason companies always like people with leadership skills though is simply because as you work for a company you accrue more and more technical skills. Companies want you to have the potential to impart those technical skills into other people through leadership. This is what the interviewer is probably referring to, the linked article the guy posted is just a red herring where he misunderstood what was being asked of him in my opinion.
I don't see how criminal copyright infringement is more enforceable than civil copyright infringement. Unless you're referring to the copyright holder having effectively the entire law enforcement community as extra unpaid (well, taxpayer paid) manpower...
Because in civil enforcement you can only go after people who have money with the idea of being awarded some it as a settlement if you are going after them after the fact. If the person you are going after is a student or teenager with no assets you can't really get awarded much. In criminal law you can hand them jail time and criminal record which actually a meaningful punishment.
If petty shoplifting was a civil offence rather than a criminal one far more people would do it. This is not saying that shoplifting and streaming are the same thing because obviously they are different but this is another example of something that has to be covered by criminal law in order to be effective as the loss from a single incident is very small but someone who simply went to every shop stealing everything then only having to give items back when they were caught could make huge gains from many different victims.
They did ask. In fact, they asked him not to leave the country ... his response was to promptly flee the country and then talk about how THEY weren't accommodating HIM.
I was saying the swiss prosecutor could ask the ecuadorian embassy to enter to have a private chat with Assange after he had entered. The thing is it would be at Assange's discretion, he may say yes but he would hold all the power in that interview so the prosecutors office would not be interested.
As to the rest of your rant it seems you are just have some sort of anger issues judging by the profanity (this seems a regular occurrence in your posts judging by your history). Never mind, one day you might start getting laid and that should help calm you down a bit, otherwise try a valium or dope or something.
Try as you may you will always be in violation of some law or provision.
Maybe, but the real question should always come down to whether a jury will convict you.
You mention the UK, that make me think you are actually a UK citizen like me (sorry if I am wrong). In our case we are pretty lucky in terms of still having some semblance of a legal aid system that allows us to actually go to court if we think we broke the law but they jury would agree with our reasons for doing so and getting the state to pay for our defence. The problem with copyright law though is that most of the population eligible for jury duty (that includes me) actually supports it. Without copyright law you would be able to take other peoples digital works and then sell them as your own, that is simply not right.
There are a million problems with copyright law as it stands but throwing it all in the bin and having nothing in its place would be no better apart from for people who just want free access to everything and have no money to pay for it. The only time I think we can get rid of copyright law completely is when we also do away with the concept of money.
What should be a civil case where some corp should sue a private citizen becomes a thing with a DA and a possible prison sentence.
The problem with keeping things like this as civil torts is that they become unenforceable so the infringer effectively wins. Maybe that is your aim by saying this but then why not simply roll out the usual "there should be no such thing as copyright" argument instead.
If we made this covered as a civil tort then what do you give back if you stream the superbowl or something to 50,000 people over the internet when it eventually reaches court? You had a licence that enabled you to watch it over cable TV or whatever that you breached by sharing it with loads of other people, do you have to pay a subscription for each person who watched your stream equivalent to what you paid (hello bankruptcy). Do you pay some arbitrary value that the content owner chooses?
If your real aim is the complete abolition of copyright law you need to start making coherent decent arguments toward this aim if you want to be taken seriously not suggesting systems that are just unworkable in the real world. I know the studios / content owners are just as adept at this but stooping to their level does not help anyone.