Calling a law unconstitutional is simply ruling a law invalid because the supreme law of the USA is the Constitution as ammended and it says something contradictory to that law.
Judicial activism is something beyond that, when a judge makes a twisted ruling that's likely to be appealed because it's not grounded in any law at all... simply "legislating from the bench". That's really exposing a weakness in our government, that a judge has to really-really-really screw up to lose their job. Bad judges are hard to get rid of, but the solution isn't to want bad judges who you agree with.
That's more of a problem for the system than him. Lawyers can't always be judged by their win-loss record. Afterall, most public defenders don't really get to be selective about their clients.
So really, I think he's realizing that he's better off lobbying lawmakers than trying cases right now... the reason why he's losing so many cases is because the laws keep getting worse.
Lessig is definitely not in the "all software should be Free" camp. He tends more to suggest that we should continue to feed the public domain, which means shorter copyrights, not the elimination of them.
So really, he's much more moderate than RMS, so having him on the board should likely make the FSF a little more Congress-friendly.
He could actually enact through judicial activism...
Stop right there. That's not right. Judicial activism should not exist in any direction, even on viewpoints we agree on. Judicial activism is where a judge ignores the law and just rules based on how they wish the law was. That's wrong.
If you want him writing laws... send him to Congress.
Cray wants all forms of clusters disqualifed from that list for not being true supercomputers since they can only consider tasks that support multithreading at their full speed. If given a logical task that must be processed serially, the cluster will end up dropping to the speed of its fastest processor. Sure, the rest of the cluster is available to consider other questions... but the point is, it's going to waste some cycles while a true supercomputer would be able to dedicate its entire resources to the task.
Every task has a maximum number of threads it can be broken into where adding another parallel process threads just won't make it any faster. For some, that number is in the stratosphere and doesn't have to be worried about. However, for others, that number is in the single digits. Those tasks aren't going to be helped much by a cluster that exceeds that number of processors.
In a sense, what Cray is asking for in the record books is an asterisk to say that "100 clustered computers times 3 MFLOPs each" is as faster as a single 300 MFLOP supercommuter because you can only get the 300 MFLOPs out of the cluster if the task is capable of being broken out into 100 threads that can each be independantly considered.
There are some tasks that still require a true supercomupter rather than a cluster. Imagine an environment simulator... each atomic time-unit in the simulation cannot be started until the previous unit has been completely computed. Such a serialized task doesn't chop up into 100 threads very easily... so most of the speed of the custer will be wasted, while the supercomputer can still go at full speed on-task.
So, a Linux cluster is a powerful tool that can do most of the things supercomputers have been asked to do in the past... but there's still some specific cases where it's just not going to work. Therefore, a Linux cluster is a Linux cluster... and can't be directly compared to supercomputers in a speed race.
Yes, but Google has some quirks. Sometimes, on fast-moving issues, Google will not always return the same results on the same query if the query gets routed to two different datacenters. Google isn't a single "supercomputer", it's a distributed network and sometimes it shows. It's rather easy to parcel out the search query load in atomic units.
I'm not saying it'd be practical for Google to run off of one central really big server, but there are some applications, such as financal registers, where having transactions processed distributedly is an absoulute no-no. In such environments, there has to be one serial thread, and only a supercomputer can do that fast... a distributed cluster given an application it can't multithread will crawl at the speed of its fastest single machine, all of the others will just be waiting.
Clusters can rival a supercomupter when they are assigned is a task that's suitable for distributed computing. That is, work units can be divided up and worked on in any sequence... the result of segment 45 doesn't depend on knowing the result of 44 and such. Effectively, you can have the sum of all of the processors minus just a little overhead for the clustering.
What Cray's rightfully pointing out is that for most business applications, however, distributed computing is not a viable option. When processing on a transaction basis, the transactions often need to posted in the exact order they were recieved, which means they must be taken serially. In those situations, the programs can't multithread work out to the other processors so well, and the cluster will end up running at roughly the speed of just one processor while the others waste clock cycles waiting for something to do.
The cluster isn't the solution to everything. Nor is the supercomputer. You've gotta think about the job, then figure out which tool is right for the task.
Clear Channel can get a pretty good idea who's driving at any hour a day based on adding up the radio listening data... they can do supplemental surveys to subtract out at-work listeners so that they only count in-car listeners to figure out what the demographic that's going to pass their billboards at each hour of the day will be.
Their killer app will be to link together packages that promise to reach a certain number of impressions to a given demographic.. based on who's expected to drive by at the hours that the given ad is up. That's what ad buyers really want, is to only count the people who are likely to consider buying the product being pitched... everyone else doesn't count. Doing it this way, they'll be able to get more milage out of their existing boards.
They also could have an admin-side interface to search any given user's account for any given keyword (since that search is already presented to each user) which they'd run when presented with a valid legal warrant.
Interesting that Google would have the ability to trump any such schemes by running the auction themselves...
Announce a 30-day pre-launch period where people can "pre-register" their desired user names. Anybody who picks a unique name gets it free. Anybody who picks a name that's in conflict gets invited into an auction to take part in if they still want the name.
This would deflate most of the name-speculation business because in order for a speculator to profit, they'd have to win the name at auction and then somehow sell that name for more than they paid. Google could keep the money for itself, but knowing their "Don't be evil" rules they'd likely donate the money to a charity cause.
"First come, first served" would be a very unwise policy for Google to take... but notice they haven't told us what their name-handout policy will be yet.
Don't forget the MP3, SVCD, and Warez sites that will also likely exploit the service.
The potential abuse schemes are so many in number that there's no way Google is going to release Gmail into the wild without having defenses in place. To do so would be the ultimate blunder in Web service history, it's just not like Google to do something like that.
Remember, the system right now is in a much talked about yet still closed beta state right now. How they're going to even hand out accounts remains yet to be seen.
Just because they allow 1 GB of historic e-mail storage doesn't mean they can't throtle users to 1 MB per day and make them take over 3 years to get up to that GB... there's so many simple fixes on the table that Google's gonna grab a few of them.
E-mail is an inherently insecure medium. For the most part messages are sent in the clear, meaning almost no attempt is made to obfuscate the contents of a message from someone with prying eyes. All Internet service providers store e-mail on a server in order to deliver it to you. Technicians with time on their hands and lousy ethics can--if they want--read your mail.... Google insists quite clearly in its privacy policy that "No human reads your mail to target ads or other information without your consent." The process by which it pushes ads at its users is fully automated. Fears about privacy problems inherent with the Gmail service are, in our opinion, overblown.
All of the privacy fears surounding Gmail are based on Google breaching their own privacy policy, which would be an unethical violation of trust. But, since e-mail is unencrypted, every e-mail provider on the face of the Earth has the same ability to breach that trust, including MSN Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink, and whoever/whatever you trust your e-mail to.
So, when it comes down to it, the bottom line question is, do you trust Google to do what they say they're going to do? If you don't... just who are you going to trust to handle your e-mail?
If your tin foil hat is firmly on, you can't use e-mail at all. Most people will just not e-mail you rather than jump through security certificate hoops. That means their ISP's SMTP server could be logging everything that's sent from them to you, and you'd be powerless to stop that.
First... notice that I proudly display the subscriber star. That means I get access to a story 15-20 minutes before the rest of the world. In that time, I often can RTFA and queue-up my first three or four posts. Yeah, it does mean that I capture some of most blindingly obvious discussion points first.
I admit that I know linking to my own site in my sig exposes it as almost an inline-ad that generates traffic and Google PageRank. Although, you should also consider that my Slashdot membership and posting history predates the existance of that site. From my point of view, that sig space is a free ad that I get in exchange for contributing to Slashdot. It's not a very high-value ad however... if I really wanted to drive more traffic to it I'd work more on making it better rather than posting here.
I honestly think that my karma level is at the positive limit. Therefore, I don't particularlly care when I make a post that's going to get modded to -1 for calling another poster a troll. I've got the karma to burn, and I'm in no danger of losing the bonus point. It also means that posting more than I already do can't raise it, so that's no motivator.
I never get mod points, and don't really care that I don't. Since the system looks for "averageness" in the users it selects, and I have above average stats, I'm not going to be selected very often. I don't mind, I'd rather post than mod in a thread anyway.
How many times have you Windows admins had to support a desktop app or driver for a peripheral that REQUIRES admin or power user rights? It's insane that there are Windows programmers that are still writing crap like this today.
They're not. Most drivers that require admin rights to run were written in the days of Windows 9x, and because the device-maker doesn't make that product anymore there is no proper Windows NT/2000/XP driver. It's just that the company or user is too cheap to buy a modern version of the device, and instead resorts to the security-weakening workaround that's free.
Nope. Any system that doesn't allow the user to do whatever they want to do is going to is not user friendly. We've got two somewhat paradoxical concepts here.
Users will always want to be runing at root at all times. Some won't grasp the security implications until it's too late.
What will make it less secure is people using it without and idea of what they should be doing for security. Unless the average user can install it out of the box (they like boxes) and have all their security issues taken care of, they will most likley live with no security at all.
When a hole is discovered, the number of people who get hacked is equal to the number of people who are running the affected software who don't patch in time.
If a luser wants to run telnet to get to their Linux server as root... they're just asking for trouble. Good thing most people who understand what to do at a bash prompt already know that. The problem comes when people who don't understand that SSH is better for a huge reason want to see a Linux command prompt on a remote server...
If popularity breeds vulnerability, Apache should have far more vulnerabilities than IIS. It doesn't.
This theory needs only a slight modification to become valid...
It's popularity among stupid people that breeds vulnerabilities.
Apache may not have very many holes, but it's far too easy to write a PHP script that gives away the keys to the kingdom if you're not careful. A password of "password" is insecure on any system.
On Windows they call it Administrator, on Linux they call it Root. It's the same thing, the user account that has no restrictions on it. Every user wants to run that way, because seeing a "permission denied" message on their own box just isn't going to make them consider the system user-friendly.
It's really more of a user eductation issue than a technical one. The best security practices are usually in counter to an element of ease of use.
One of the biggest design flaws in Windows from a security perspective is that nearly every service that comes with the system is turned on by default.
One of the biggest design flaws in Linux from a usablity perspective is that nearly every service that comes with the system is turned on by default.
If a scanning tool is out for a certain hole... then it's safe to say that the whole world knows that hole exists. If you're at risk for it, you better have closed it up somehow. Patch or replace the application!
Just pretending the hole doesn't exist and wishing the scanning tool would go away isn't security... making holes go away is security.
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Calling a law unconstitutional is simply ruling a law invalid because the supreme law of the USA is the Constitution as ammended and it says something contradictory to that law.
Judicial activism is something beyond that, when a judge makes a twisted ruling that's likely to be appealed because it's not grounded in any law at all... simply "legislating from the bench". That's really exposing a weakness in our government, that a judge has to really-really-really screw up to lose their job. Bad judges are hard to get rid of, but the solution isn't to want bad judges who you agree with.
That's more of a problem for the system than him. Lawyers can't always be judged by their win-loss record. Afterall, most public defenders don't really get to be selective about their clients.
So really, I think he's realizing that he's better off lobbying lawmakers than trying cases right now... the reason why he's losing so many cases is because the laws keep getting worse.
Lessig is definitely not in the "all software should be Free" camp. He tends more to suggest that we should continue to feed the public domain, which means shorter copyrights, not the elimination of them.
So really, he's much more moderate than RMS, so having him on the board should likely make the FSF a little more Congress-friendly.
He could actually enact through judicial activism...
Stop right there. That's not right. Judicial activism should not exist in any direction, even on viewpoints we agree on. Judicial activism is where a judge ignores the law and just rules based on how they wish the law was. That's wrong.
If you want him writing laws... send him to Congress.
Yeah, if Dell started shipping open source software, all the UI/documentation/quality problems would solve themselves. Sure.
Yes they would. Dell would feel compeled to write the documentation and fix the bugs that it saw...
Cray wants all forms of clusters disqualifed from that list for not being true supercomputers since they can only consider tasks that support multithreading at their full speed. If given a logical task that must be processed serially, the cluster will end up dropping to the speed of its fastest processor. Sure, the rest of the cluster is available to consider other questions... but the point is, it's going to waste some cycles while a true supercomputer would be able to dedicate its entire resources to the task.
Every task has a maximum number of threads it can be broken into where adding another parallel process threads just won't make it any faster. For some, that number is in the stratosphere and doesn't have to be worried about. However, for others, that number is in the single digits. Those tasks aren't going to be helped much by a cluster that exceeds that number of processors.
In a sense, what Cray is asking for in the record books is an asterisk to say that "100 clustered computers times 3 MFLOPs each" is as faster as a single 300 MFLOP supercommuter because you can only get the 300 MFLOPs out of the cluster if the task is capable of being broken out into 100 threads that can each be independantly considered.
There are some tasks that still require a true supercomupter rather than a cluster. Imagine an environment simulator... each atomic time-unit in the simulation cannot be started until the previous unit has been completely computed. Such a serialized task doesn't chop up into 100 threads very easily... so most of the speed of the custer will be wasted, while the supercomputer can still go at full speed on-task.
So, a Linux cluster is a powerful tool that can do most of the things supercomputers have been asked to do in the past... but there's still some specific cases where it's just not going to work. Therefore, a Linux cluster is a Linux cluster... and can't be directly compared to supercomputers in a speed race.
Yes, but Google has some quirks. Sometimes, on fast-moving issues, Google will not always return the same results on the same query if the query gets routed to two different datacenters. Google isn't a single "supercomputer", it's a distributed network and sometimes it shows. It's rather easy to parcel out the search query load in atomic units.
I'm not saying it'd be practical for Google to run off of one central really big server, but there are some applications, such as financal registers, where having transactions processed distributedly is an absoulute no-no. In such environments, there has to be one serial thread, and only a supercomputer can do that fast... a distributed cluster given an application it can't multithread will crawl at the speed of its fastest single machine, all of the others will just be waiting.
Clusters can rival a supercomupter when they are assigned is a task that's suitable for distributed computing. That is, work units can be divided up and worked on in any sequence... the result of segment 45 doesn't depend on knowing the result of 44 and such. Effectively, you can have the sum of all of the processors minus just a little overhead for the clustering.
What Cray's rightfully pointing out is that for most business applications, however, distributed computing is not a viable option. When processing on a transaction basis, the transactions often need to posted in the exact order they were recieved, which means they must be taken serially. In those situations, the programs can't multithread work out to the other processors so well, and the cluster will end up running at roughly the speed of just one processor while the others waste clock cycles waiting for something to do.
The cluster isn't the solution to everything. Nor is the supercomputer. You've gotta think about the job, then figure out which tool is right for the task.
Clear Channel can get a pretty good idea who's driving at any hour a day based on adding up the radio listening data... they can do supplemental surveys to subtract out at-work listeners so that they only count in-car listeners to figure out what the demographic that's going to pass their billboards at each hour of the day will be.
Their killer app will be to link together packages that promise to reach a certain number of impressions to a given demographic.. based on who's expected to drive by at the hours that the given ad is up. That's what ad buyers really want, is to only count the people who are likely to consider buying the product being pitched... everyone else doesn't count. Doing it this way, they'll be able to get more milage out of their existing boards.
They also could have an admin-side interface to search any given user's account for any given keyword (since that search is already presented to each user) which they'd run when presented with a valid legal warrant.
Interesting that Google would have the ability to trump any such schemes by running the auction themselves...
Announce a 30-day pre-launch period where people can "pre-register" their desired user names. Anybody who picks a unique name gets it free. Anybody who picks a name that's in conflict gets invited into an auction to take part in if they still want the name.
This would deflate most of the name-speculation business because in order for a speculator to profit, they'd have to win the name at auction and then somehow sell that name for more than they paid. Google could keep the money for itself, but knowing their "Don't be evil" rules they'd likely donate the money to a charity cause.
"First come, first served" would be a very unwise policy for Google to take... but notice they haven't told us what their name-handout policy will be yet.
Just wondering, who do you presently use for e-mail service? What makes you think they're more trustworthy than Google?
Don't forget the MP3, SVCD, and Warez sites that will also likely exploit the service.
The potential abuse schemes are so many in number that there's no way Google is going to release Gmail into the wild without having defenses in place. To do so would be the ultimate blunder in Web service history, it's just not like Google to do something like that.
Remember, the system right now is in a much talked about yet still closed beta state right now. How they're going to even hand out accounts remains yet to be seen.
Just because they allow 1 GB of historic e-mail storage doesn't mean they can't throtle users to 1 MB per day and make them take over 3 years to get up to that GB... there's so many simple fixes on the table that Google's gonna grab a few of them.
E-mail is an inherently insecure medium. For the most part messages are sent in the clear, meaning almost no attempt is made to obfuscate the contents of a message from someone with prying eyes. All Internet service providers store e-mail on a server in order to deliver it to you. Technicians with time on their hands and lousy ethics can--if they want--read your mail. ...
Google insists quite clearly in its privacy policy that "No human reads your mail to target ads or other information without your consent." The process by which it pushes ads at its users is fully automated. Fears about privacy problems inherent with the Gmail service are, in our opinion, overblown.
All of the privacy fears surounding Gmail are based on Google breaching their own privacy policy, which would be an unethical violation of trust. But, since e-mail is unencrypted, every e-mail provider on the face of the Earth has the same ability to breach that trust, including MSN Hotmail, Yahoo, Earthlink, and whoever/whatever you trust your e-mail to.
So, when it comes down to it, the bottom line question is, do you trust Google to do what they say they're going to do? If you don't... just who are you going to trust to handle your e-mail?
If your tin foil hat is firmly on, you can't use e-mail at all. Most people will just not e-mail you rather than jump through security certificate hoops. That means their ISP's SMTP server could be logging everything that's sent from them to you, and you'd be powerless to stop that.
First... notice that I proudly display the subscriber star. That means I get access to a story 15-20 minutes before the rest of the world. In that time, I often can RTFA and queue-up my first three or four posts. Yeah, it does mean that I capture some of most blindingly obvious discussion points first.
I admit that I know linking to my own site in my sig exposes it as almost an inline-ad that generates traffic and Google PageRank. Although, you should also consider that my Slashdot membership and posting history predates the existance of that site. From my point of view, that sig space is a free ad that I get in exchange for contributing to Slashdot. It's not a very high-value ad however... if I really wanted to drive more traffic to it I'd work more on making it better rather than posting here.
I honestly think that my karma level is at the positive limit. Therefore, I don't particularlly care when I make a post that's going to get modded to -1 for calling another poster a troll. I've got the karma to burn, and I'm in no danger of losing the bonus point. It also means that posting more than I already do can't raise it, so that's no motivator.
I never get mod points, and don't really care that I don't. Since the system looks for "averageness" in the users it selects, and I have above average stats, I'm not going to be selected very often. I don't mind, I'd rather post than mod in a thread anyway.
But it appears the EU will surpass the USA in the bad law field very quickly...
How many times have you Windows admins had to support a desktop app or driver for a peripheral that REQUIRES admin or power user rights? It's insane that there are Windows programmers that are still writing crap like this today.
They're not. Most drivers that require admin rights to run were written in the days of Windows 9x, and because the device-maker doesn't make that product anymore there is no proper Windows NT/2000/XP driver. It's just that the company or user is too cheap to buy a modern version of the device, and instead resorts to the security-weakening workaround that's free.
Does any of that make sense? ;-)
Nope. Any system that doesn't allow the user to do whatever they want to do is going to is not user friendly. We've got two somewhat paradoxical concepts here.
Users will always want to be runing at root at all times. Some won't grasp the security implications until it's too late.
What will make it less secure is people using it without and idea of what they should be doing for security. Unless the average user can install it out of the box (they like boxes) and have all their security issues taken care of, they will most likley live with no security at all.
When a hole is discovered, the number of people who get hacked is equal to the number of people who are running the affected software who don't patch in time.
If a luser wants to run telnet to get to their Linux server as root... they're just asking for trouble. Good thing most people who understand what to do at a bash prompt already know that. The problem comes when people who don't understand that SSH is better for a huge reason want to see a Linux command prompt on a remote server...
If popularity breeds vulnerability, Apache should have far more vulnerabilities than IIS. It doesn't.
This theory needs only a slight modification to become valid...
It's popularity among stupid people that breeds vulnerabilities.
Apache may not have very many holes, but it's far too easy to write a PHP script that gives away the keys to the kingdom if you're not careful. A password of "password" is insecure on any system.
On Windows they call it Administrator, on Linux they call it Root. It's the same thing, the user account that has no restrictions on it. Every user wants to run that way, because seeing a "permission denied" message on their own box just isn't going to make them consider the system user-friendly.
It's really more of a user eductation issue than a technical one. The best security practices are usually in counter to an element of ease of use.
ugh... foobared that post up... you know what I meant. Linux has everything off by default.
One of the biggest design flaws in Windows from a security perspective is that nearly every service that comes with the system is turned on by default.
One of the biggest design flaws in Linux from a usablity perspective is that nearly every service that comes with the system is turned on by default.
If a scanning tool is out for a certain hole... then it's safe to say that the whole world knows that hole exists. If you're at risk for it, you better have closed it up somehow. Patch or replace the application!
Just pretending the hole doesn't exist and wishing the scanning tool would go away isn't security... making holes go away is security.