"Aren't all these reasonable 'security by obscurity' examples that work ok?"
Only for people that doesn't understad what is 'security by obscurity'. Most security systems depend on something being secret. Security by obscurity is when you tell that secret to the enemy, but in a hard to read way.
And it only works if what they can gain from you is worth less than the cost of deciphering the secret. That is, almost never.
Well, the customer is not directly interacting with a dishonest party (Sony), but he is really at fault when refusing to ask from his money back after being deluded. Ultimately, I do blame the customer on such things.
Retailers are responsible for honest advertizing. If they where deluded by the manufacturer, they can pass the damage to them, if not, they are the only responsibles for what they do. Anyway, they are responsible for honest advertizing their products.
And Sony IS damaged by that. If the retalier can't make money selling their products, he won't. If it is too risky, most won't sell and the others will ask for bigger profits (from Sony, since he doesn't have the power to change the market price). And, finaly (and not so important), the retailer will ask Sony for compensation.
Yes, there'll be some damage to the retailer. But that is the cost of doing business with dishonest parties. That is the sole deterrent we have for dishonest people: doing business with them will hurt you. Remove it at your own peril.
Let's assume it's really not the retailer fault... And so what? So he gives it back to the distributor, eventualy it'll go back to Sony.
But the retailer is partialy at fault. He's doing business with dishonest partnes. On a sane society, losing money is the least one expect from doing business with dishonest people. That is, on a society where people stand to their acts, and don't go out of their way to protect the guilty...
"And the enigmas of dark matter and dark energy will forever disappear, as this substitution can provide the exact forces necessary to explain things like how spiral galaxies can spin as if they are solid plates and how matter might repel other matter."
I'd love to see how do you explain such fenomena using eletricity. Also, if you make an actual explanation the entire physics community will probably aplaud and recognize you (and teach your name on classrooms for decades to come).
But, of course, nobody was able to create such explanation until now (at least that we know about), so if you aready has one, please, share it with the rest of us.
Well, I always wondered why I never heard about such thing happening here, at Brazil. And, consequently, I always tought that it was caused by agrochemicals (that we use much less than US and Europe). We have slightly different bees (they are mixed, but mostly honeybees) too, so that could also be the reason...
But are you saying that those missing bees where feed with syrup?!? That's news for me, and a very plausible explanation too. One just can't replace natural nectar with that, we have bird that is near extinct near several urban areas because people feed them with syrup (they naturaly eat nectar), and althoug they stop searching for other kinds of food, they can't really survive on that.
"And yeah Microsoft does have various conspiracies against linux. See the recent news on Bill Gates asking how to make an open ACPI spec that would be difficult for linux to implement."
What is kind of funny, because ACPI on Windows is so bloody HARD to use nowadays, while on Linux you can use it even from the command line:) (But I get that the point was to make it hard for the kernel developers.)
Well, I'd say that the WYSIWYG tools cut it. But it is quite hard do comment on your unbased oppinion.
About the rest, I don't tend to have problems with verbhosity because I spend more time thinking about what I'm writting than really writting it (maybe you can think faster, or has simpler things to write), even more when writting academical papers, where people will complain about every small mistake.
I've only a few times gotten those hard to debug build errors, but lots of times Word has changed the position of my figures, sent them to the very end of the documment of hidden behind some text. That takes almost as much time to solve. Not to say that lots of times Word has simply created a document too big for dealing with (it's easy to get a hundreds of megabytes big document), and one can't simply debug them. Hint, don't try to write your books on Word, ok?
Macro expansion is overrated, but the troubles on using them are also so. It's very usefull when you have to wite several documents all alike (ok, that is not common for most people). And LaTeX will enforce your template, so if you create a template and share with the rest of your organization, people will follow it (I'm really missing this feature now that I work with Word). With Word's templates you simply take your chances, even because you can't really describe some things on them.
And, yes, there is no precise placement of figures and tables. They are normaly well placed for books and articles but not so much for short memos. Now, if your boss complains about the placement of stuff on short memos, that is not really a problem with LaTeX, although being very common so it would be nice to solve. And why you convert LaTeX to Word when people ask you for a editable copy? (Why people using uncompatible tools are asking for editable copies? And why they have so much power that it's YOU who must convert them?) Not a problem with LaTeX either, but very common too, so it'd be nice if we could do something about it (we can't, because they are using Microsoft).
That also cuts for commecial proprietary software, since distributing the costs on lots of consumer is what they do. In fact, your argument works only against in-house developped software.
FOSS have a clear advantage if you think about multi layered software, where a stack of libraries is used by another stack of libraries, and so on until you get to the user program. Proprietary software's cust grows exponentialy when the number of stacks grows, that happens because capital wants to be rewarded every time it change hands, and proportinaly to the amount changed. But FOSS can mix itself freely, without overhead.
Now, one'd need more than pure economics to see how that is important. For most other business, that effect is negligible.
It's hard to exploit a Linux user (or in a better way, it's too easy to exploit a Windows user).
First, no Linux decompressor run the code inside the package (differently from Windows, and uncompatible too). So you'll need the user to explicitly run the code (or explicitly chmod +x it and run if it's not compressed).
Then, email programs (and image viewers, browsers, text editors...) don't try to execute embebed code (again, it's the sane behaviour, Windows is the one off), and Linux users aren't used to answer idiot dialog boxes, so they'll probably read one if they get it.
Only a few programs require SUDO, for a normal user all of them are already installed inside a menu that makes it clear that they require SUDO. It's quite harder to trick a user into giving you his password.
And, finaly, Linux users get almost all its software from the distro (and not some random site at the web), and don't expect to have viruses, so that email wouldn't probably work.
"It's an interesting idea, but I don't see any commercial support for it. In fact I see commercial opposition under the current regime of copyright laws and royalty based business models."
The GPL is very clear on one point: if you know your software infringes on some patent, you can't distribute it, even if you have a deal with the patent holder enabling you to do that*. Can Novell now be prosecuted? Is that code GPLed (it seems to be KDE, so it probably is)?
* Unless that deal is extended to everybody that touches the code.
It's important to academics. Almost no one of them would disclosure their findings without a reward system (recognition is a substitute for patents here, works even where the latter can't be applied and does a much lower colateral damage). Otherwise most would clearly work on more mundane things and keep their findings to themselves (or patent them) or either simply stop studing earlier and never go to academia.
And there was almost no serious science done before the system was stablished. Some people even arguee that our first scientific communits were created because of laws enforcing athorship.
I simply tweak/etc/fstab,/etc/passwd and/etc/groups to use my NFS and NIS exports of users and home dirs. That means, I add 2 lines to the first (to handle email too) and one to each of the other files...
When the server dies (already happened) I simple exchange the hardware, and keep the disks (sometimes I have to insert a new module into the kernel, but it is rare). When a disk die I'll have to restore backpus. That takes time.
I really tought we were here talking about how power point presentation distracts people from what the presenter is telling. I didn't really realize that we want to astonish the audience with our (well paid) graphics during the entire presentation.
Normaly, most of my slides are graphics, pictures, equations, and tedious notes that I don't want to write at presentation time.
A few of the slides are there just to assure I'll talk about a topic and won't get lost reordering my presentation, I never really know what to write on those tough. Normaly I write topics on them, but some times they only have the title.
People really don't like what they get when they ask for my slides after a presentation:)
Slashdot Mirror
Only for people that doesn't understad what is 'security by obscurity'. Most security systems depend on something being secret. Security by obscurity is when you tell that secret to the enemy, but in a hard to read way.
And it only works if what they can gain from you is worth less than the cost of deciphering the secret. That is, almost never.
One of the funniest gadgets I even saw... At least one time I'm sad I'm not at the US to leave one of them at an airport :)
Windows didn't try to restict* what you can do with your computer until WGA and Vista. And the jury is still out on those.
* It just makes it extremely hard and convoluted... And ambiguous, incoherent, and incomplete. But it doesn't restrict what you can do with it.
Exactly. Since I've met Python I can't help not thinking it is the VB killer.
What creates a lot of problems for the language on my point of view, but I was never the target audience of any of those languages.
Well, ok, now are you saying that something written on a public wiki should be accepted as legal evidence?
Or are you just making fun of him? Because if it is the latter, go on.
Well, the customer is not directly interacting with a dishonest party (Sony), but he is really at fault when refusing to ask from his money back after being deluded. Ultimately, I do blame the customer on such things.
Retailers are responsible for honest advertizing. If they where deluded by the manufacturer, they can pass the damage to them, if not, they are the only responsibles for what they do. Anyway, they are responsible for honest advertizing their products.
And Sony IS damaged by that. If the retalier can't make money selling their products, he won't. If it is too risky, most won't sell and the others will ask for bigger profits (from Sony, since he doesn't have the power to change the market price). And, finaly (and not so important), the retailer will ask Sony for compensation.
Yes, there'll be some damage to the retailer. But that is the cost of doing business with dishonest parties. That is the sole deterrent we have for dishonest people: doing business with them will hurt you. Remove it at your own peril.
Let's assume it's really not the retailer fault... And so what? So he gives it back to the distributor, eventualy it'll go back to Sony.
But the retailer is partialy at fault. He's doing business with dishonest partnes. On a sane society, losing money is the least one expect from doing business with dishonest people. That is, on a society where people stand to their acts, and don't go out of their way to protect the guilty...
I'd love to see how do you explain such fenomena using eletricity. Also, if you make an actual explanation the entire physics community will probably aplaud and recognize you (and teach your name on classrooms for decades to come).
But, of course, nobody was able to create such explanation until now (at least that we know about), so if you aready has one, please, share it with the rest of us.
Well, I always wondered why I never heard about such thing happening here, at Brazil. And, consequently, I always tought that it was caused by agrochemicals (that we use much less than US and Europe). We have slightly different bees (they are mixed, but mostly honeybees) too, so that could also be the reason...
But are you saying that those missing bees where feed with syrup?!? That's news for me, and a very plausible explanation too. One just can't replace natural nectar with that, we have bird that is near extinct near several urban areas because people feed them with syrup (they naturaly eat nectar), and althoug they stop searching for other kinds of food, they can't really survive on that.
That's great! Now Debian has a order of magnitude more applications than Windows?
n/t
What is kind of funny, because ACPI on Windows is so bloody HARD to use nowadays, while on Linux you can use it even from the command line :) (But I get that the point was to make it hard for the kernel developers.)
Well, I'd say that the WYSIWYG tools cut it. But it is quite hard do comment on your unbased oppinion.
About the rest, I don't tend to have problems with verbhosity because I spend more time thinking about what I'm writting than really writting it (maybe you can think faster, or has simpler things to write), even more when writting academical papers, where people will complain about every small mistake.
I've only a few times gotten those hard to debug build errors, but lots of times Word has changed the position of my figures, sent them to the very end of the documment of hidden behind some text. That takes almost as much time to solve. Not to say that lots of times Word has simply created a document too big for dealing with (it's easy to get a hundreds of megabytes big document), and one can't simply debug them. Hint, don't try to write your books on Word, ok?
Macro expansion is overrated, but the troubles on using them are also so. It's very usefull when you have to wite several documents all alike (ok, that is not common for most people). And LaTeX will enforce your template, so if you create a template and share with the rest of your organization, people will follow it (I'm really missing this feature now that I work with Word). With Word's templates you simply take your chances, even because you can't really describe some things on them.
And, yes, there is no precise placement of figures and tables. They are normaly well placed for books and articles but not so much for short memos. Now, if your boss complains about the placement of stuff on short memos, that is not really a problem with LaTeX, although being very common so it would be nice to solve. And why you convert LaTeX to Word when people ask you for a editable copy? (Why people using uncompatible tools are asking for editable copies? And why they have so much power that it's YOU who must convert them?) Not a problem with LaTeX either, but very common too, so it'd be nice if we could do something about it (we can't, because they are using Microsoft).
That also cuts for commecial proprietary software, since distributing the costs on lots of consumer is what they do. In fact, your argument works only against in-house developped software.
FOSS have a clear advantage if you think about multi layered software, where a stack of libraries is used by another stack of libraries, and so on until you get to the user program. Proprietary software's cust grows exponentialy when the number of stacks grows, that happens because capital wants to be rewarded every time it change hands, and proportinaly to the amount changed. But FOSS can mix itself freely, without overhead.
Now, one'd need more than pure economics to see how that is important. For most other business, that effect is negligible.
It's hard to exploit a Linux user (or in a better way, it's too easy to exploit a Windows user).
First, no Linux decompressor run the code inside the package (differently from Windows, and uncompatible too). So you'll need the user to explicitly run the code (or explicitly chmod +x it and run if it's not compressed).
Then, email programs (and image viewers, browsers, text editors...) don't try to execute embebed code (again, it's the sane behaviour, Windows is the one off), and Linux users aren't used to answer idiot dialog boxes, so they'll probably read one if they get it.
Only a few programs require SUDO, for a normal user all of them are already installed inside a menu that makes it clear that they require SUDO. It's quite harder to trick a user into giving you his password.
And, finaly, Linux users get almost all its software from the distro (and not some random site at the web), and don't expect to have viruses, so that email wouldn't probably work.
Who needs commecial suport for P2P?
The GPL is very clear on one point: if you know your software infringes on some patent, you can't distribute it, even if you have a deal with the patent holder enabling you to do that*. Can Novell now be prosecuted? Is that code GPLed (it seems to be KDE, so it probably is)?
* Unless that deal is extended to everybody that touches the code.
It's important to academics. Almost no one of them would disclosure their findings without a reward system (recognition is a substitute for patents here, works even where the latter can't be applied and does a much lower colateral damage). Otherwise most would clearly work on more mundane things and keep their findings to themselves (or patent them) or either simply stop studing earlier and never go to academia.
And there was almost no serious science done before the system was stablished. Some people even arguee that our first scientific communits were created because of laws enforcing athorship.
And we'll also get FAI in stable, what is very good.
Now Debian also delays april fools jokes?
And that means that we are old 'get out of my lawn' people, or that Windows is really getting worse on each release?
Sidenote: I won't change to vista. I'm not on Windows for a long time now.
I simply tweak /etc/fstab, /etc/passwd and /etc/groups to use my NFS and NIS exports of users and home dirs. That means, I add 2 lines to the first (to handle email too) and one to each of the other files...
When the server dies (already happened) I simple exchange the hardware, and keep the disks (sometimes I have to insert a new module into the kernel, but it is rare). When a disk die I'll have to restore backpus. That takes time.
I used to think that it was because *nix doesn't execute arbitrary code embebed on images. But thanks for oppening my eyes.
Talking about losing the point...
I really tought we were here talking about how power point presentation distracts people from what the presenter is telling. I didn't really realize that we want to astonish the audience with our (well paid) graphics during the entire presentation.
Normaly, most of my slides are graphics, pictures, equations, and tedious notes that I don't want to write at presentation time.
A few of the slides are there just to assure I'll talk about a topic and won't get lost reordering my presentation, I never really know what to write on those tough. Normaly I write topics on them, but some times they only have the title.
People really don't like what they get when they ask for my slides after a presentation :)