The article mentions this interesting invocation of chess in philosophy:
Daniel Dennett's evocation of chess computers in his argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism.
I find it far more interesting than the two the article DOES cover, i.e. whether ideal objects exist and whether computers will out-think humans.
If this comment has any particular point, it's that there are many interesting questions that are probably NOT covered by this article, and this might be an interesting forum to bring some of them up.
The last 2 years here has shown me how bad reliance on the state can be and pushed me from moderate republican to anarcho-capitalist.
You're not, I hope, trolling. I know there are people out there who fervently believe the beauty of pure capitalism, such as all those interesting folks at the Cato Institute.
I understand the power of personal incentive, but I do believe there is a proper balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of society. Societies can and do get torn apart when the power of individuals gets too strong. I fail utterly to see how a society can function, long-term, under anarcho-capitalism. It is as crazy a utopian ideal as Marxist communism.
But I still believe I have an open mind, so I'll pay attention to any constructive reply you might have.
In that case, consumers must depend less on information describing each program and more on an overall reputation of the programmers.
Exactly my view, too. I would argue that serious software errors can take months or years to uncover because they may only be triggered when an exceptionally rare set of inputs are provided. Kind of like Easter Eggs. So you do have to fall back on reputation.
But with this the case, the company with the best PR crew wins (this is the case for MS). And that seems hardly a good system.
So here I am struggling to see how the system could be made more fair.
"open information" (or a close approximation) will happen automatically, unless steps are taken to prevent it.
Something about this sentence bothers me still; otherwise I agree with most everything you say.
What about the time component here? Information may spread automatically, but does it appear and spread instantaneously? I would argue that it very often does not, especially in the abstract field of information technology.
In capitalism, the difference between winning and losing can be the head start of a few days or weeks over one's competitors. I would still argue that a vendor who knowingly hides something negative about their product should face penalties for this reason: by the time the negative information is out, the competitors are gone. Consumers lose.
So are you implying that vendors who secretly include spyware should not face penalties? Does a society function well if deceit goes unpunished?
We could apply the same argument to suggest the removal of FDA food labels. Foods labels could include just "good" information. But then, I'd argue, the health of people would suffer more than with our current system: capitalism rewards those who sell the cheapest products for the greatest profit. I don't see many "health food" items falling into this category.
I'm interested in an intelligent discussion of ideas in the marketplace, and whether the government should be in the position of enforcing the openness of information. Trolls need not participate; we know how tempting it is for you.
Basic economic principles, such as supply/demand curves, are based on the principle of a marketplace with "open information": all buyers and sellers know the same things.
Yet, even when it comes to the FDA ingredients label, we hear companies bitching and moaning and finding new ways to confuse people. Case in point: Cholesterol-free Mazola Corn Oil! Good for the heart!
So, who exactly (besides the corporations themselves) is against the idea of government forcing the opening of information to buyers? Is it really such a hard line to draw (between what buyers *should* know and what is proprietary information)?
You're refering to the capitalist ideal of social security, which in the name of short term policies is doomed to require a massive cash influx?
Uh, removing slimy tax loopholes for the insanely rich and the corps' they own should cover that. And, by the way, done properly it will not destroy incentives to invest where there is actual risk of loss.
Or the capitalist ideals of modern europe who are also faced with the baby boom, have promised things that are undeliverable and now face massive strikes when the truth comes out?
Uhhhh, what? Modern Europe has some pretty solid economic foundations. Life's pretty good there for most. It's too bad more Americans don't ever leave their own countries. It's my explanation for why the Republican Party can continue to exist.
Socialism is not perfect, but neither is Capitalism.
CAPITALIST MAXIMS:
1. Plan short-term strategies to maximize profit; never mind the long-term consequences. If you don't, your competitor will and you might not last long enough to plan your next move.
2. Profits are maximized when people are discontent; they're better consumers than those who are happy with what they already have.
So here we are, metaphorically driving at night without our lights on. Sounds like a great idea!
Let's just sit back and let our descendants worry about coastal flooding around the world (read google news and search for greenland). Ha ha, suckers!
So it sounds like virus protection will improve if they get people to stop running apps with admin privileges, but until then, the registry is potentially open to abuse through carefully crafted exploits.
Thanks for the informative reply; I hope you get the mod points it deserves.
It seems that the 3rd party apps put MS in a tough spot.
Apps can, and should, have more registry protections than they currently do, in line with good modular design. Like maybe one registry per app, plus a common "system" registry that is off-limits to all but the most trusted apps.
So do you see MS being able to satisfy backward compatibility with a more effective registry scheme?
The Registry has access permissions on different parts of it. They are set on a user basis.
OK, so someone was thinking when they designed NT, I'm assuming.
But I'm still wondering if all this permissions stuff isn't defeated by the fact that most users have Admin privileges by default. Or are the permission levels more fine-grained than that? If not, then it would seem that making users/software have Admin privileges defeats goal of Registry permissions.
If you install software with Admin privileges, does the software have modify access to large parts of the Registry?
No, the Registry has an access-control/authorization subsystem very similar to the file system.
OK; that does seem to address all questions at once.
Except for one small matter: by default, don't most apps run with Admin privileges, since most users have Admin privileges when they install software?
So how effective is this access system, anyway? I thought most viruses/trojan horses wreak havoc with system files that they shouldn't be able to access, except that Outlook, IE, etc run as root!
Yet the parent's post clearly shows that if you actually have to change anything fundamental, such as Services or Registry cleanups, it's a total fucking nightmare.
No wonder Windows admins get nervous, and sometimes run away screaming from changing Exchange configs, secure file sharing across networks, and nearly daily virus updates.
Am I forgetting anything?
Can an MS expert answer some questions please?
on
Microsoft Clips Longhorn
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
1. Does Windows XP currently allow every application full write access to the Registry, or at least access to registry components for other applications?
2. If so, does this strike anyone else as a really bad idea from the view of modularity, scalability, and security?
By producing - without permission - altered versions of intellectual property, censors are effectively pirating directors' and studios' work, the lawsuit argues.
I see the point; I'm sure studios would feel differently about this technology if they were asked permission and negotiated in good faith with ClearPlay. I'm surprised Clearplay believes it has the rights to rebroadcast and resegment these movies, which are copyrighted work.
The GPL is founded on a philosophy and is designed to propagate that philosophy (mainly that RMS wants all his software for free and in source form). I would think that pro-GPL would relish the communist label since the so desire that others join in on it.
Methinks someone's slumber under the bridge was interrupted. Sorry, it wasn't my intention to troll for trolls. I guess trolls are attracted to controversy like fish to shiny objects.
Look closely at the parent's post, kids. Parent's statements are subtle yet inflammatory and lack grounding in logic or truth. Parent is not interested in constructive discussion.
From the article: More importantly, Microsoft and Sun have a new common enemy: Linux, an operating system that competes with Windows and with Sun's Solaris but which, unlike the other two, is written by volunteers and shared freely among all who want to download and use it. When Mr Ballmer gives Mr McNealy a hug and says that "we do both believe in intellectual property", this is a not-so-veiled jab at the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic. Microsoft and Sun happen to be the only major backers (in the form of licence payments) of Linux's gadfly, a firm called SCO, which is trying to obtain money from Linux users with threats of litigation.
Why the GPL can't be explained and left alone is beyond me. If IBM, HP, or Sun wants to use GPL code is free to ignore everyone else, make their changes, and publish the changes if they plan on distributing the binaries. They don't have to listen to the "communist" linux promoters (Side Note: is McCarthyism alive and well today, or what? Next stop: fascism) or cooperate with them.
Companies can create their own "corporate" branches of any GPL code they want. Lots and lots of freedom. Just don't use it take other other people's freedom away. Now, was that hard for anyone to understand?
For the love of God, let some journalist read this comment and berate the entire lot of them. No more stupid human-interest angles, please.
Two reasons why people laughing at you wouldn't happen regularly:
* Moderation is anonymous, partly, I believe, because it's the collective effects of moderation that count, not the individual moderators' choices, which are occasionally prone to error.
* Moderations are "staggered" in time, meaning that the many moderators who started modding before you did will have seen the earlier post and the later one. Unless you're in the freakish position of being the only moderator, you're not going to come across a redundant post that isn't already marked "Redundant" by someone before you.
Of course, the latter point doesn't work if you're the ONLY person modding later posts. It DOES apply if enough moderators can be convinced to view "Recent First". Hence the importance of getting the word out, and hence the content of my sig.
The following belief enables me to sleep at night:
There are many eyeballs at work at each level of hardware and software because large hardware/software projects are necessarily collaborative efforts.
Keeping malicious secrets in projects involving lots of people would require serious coercive control that most people naturally find repugnant.
It only takes one super-paranoid out of a million end-users to uncover a strange login attempt via some unconventional means. Then it becomes known to everyone. The risk for getting caught is very high, IMHO.
I can't believe that ALL router vendors ALL AROUND THE WORLD, for example, would conspire to hack their hardware in exactly the same way. So if someone wanted to be super-paranoid, they would buy some random kind of external packet auditing system and apply it to an arbitrarily chosen hardware/software configuration.
Most counties in most states disqualify absentee ballots that have errors (more than one choice chosen, etc.). There is simply no other easy way to handle them, and they're unusally such a small percentage of the total vote that they don't change the vote.
Florida in 2000, of course, was a different story. There was such blatant vote tampering that it's a shameful scandal that should go down in history as another Watergate. Just considering the completely improper and illegal counting of thousands of overseas military ballots that arrived past the legal deadline (which were overwhelmingly pro-Bush) was enough to change the results of the election from Gore to Bush.
This completely astounding and sickening fact continues to get almost NO PRESS COVERAGE.
Maybe it's just me, but the parent post's echo of the MAIN ARTICLE may not deserve +5 Interesting; perhaps the moderators didn't read the article themselves, or haven't followed all of the eVoting threads here over the past few weeks.
Yes, the idea of the voter-verifiable paper trail IS the main idea of the article. The voter should be able to request the receipt but not be able to take it home (to prevent vote buying), and blind people should be able to have an audible verification done with earphones.
Friendly Tip to Moderators: the quality of this discussion thread will improve if you go up to the top of the screen and select "Newest First" instead of "Oldest First". Many posts past the first 100 are well worth reading; you don't have to understand all previous posts to moderate later posts.
Journalists: STOP the FUD......Pretty Please!!
on
Linux in Canada
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Really, it's such a simple idea:
If you use GPL code, you publish somewhere the modifications you make under the GPL.
THAT'S IT. END OF STORY. JOURNALISTS, YOU CAN GO HOME NOW.
Instead, we get heart-wrenching human interest CRAP like the following:
Linux evangelists have prophesied for years that the open-source operating system would challenge Microsoft Corp.'s Windows. But it wasn't until the past year or so, when International Business Machines Corp., Novell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. seriously threw their collective and considerable weight behind it, that a challenge became a real possibility.
Victory, however, will not come cheaply.
The problem is that the future of Linux was never dependent on its quality. If quality were all that is required to win, everyone would be watching movies on Beta videotape and working on Apple Macintosh computers.
The problem is cultural.
The open-source community, an ad-hoc worldwide network of programmers dedicated to creating free software, has been too shrill, evangelistic and hot-eyed for corporate interests to deal with; the ferocity of their anger at proprietary software became the Linux community's own worst enemy -- nobody wants to gamble a corporate future on fanatics, no matter how worthy their bible.
Why do journalists slather this "human community" BS on top of this very simple idea?
It's like they're trying to freak people out! How completely idiotic is that???!!!
Slashdot Mirror
The article mentions this interesting invocation of chess in philosophy:
Daniel Dennett's evocation of chess computers in his argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism.
I find it far more interesting than the two the article DOES cover, i.e. whether ideal objects exist and whether computers will out-think humans.
If this comment has any particular point, it's that there are many interesting questions that are probably NOT covered by this article, and this might be an interesting forum to bring some of them up.
Anecdotes are persuasive only to the timid, and I can certainly point out that you've covered less than 1/1000 of Europe with yours.
In fact, you may enjoy reading commonly employed devices in disinformation campaigns.
I remain unconvinced of your position.
The last 2 years here has shown me how bad reliance on the state can be and pushed me from moderate republican to anarcho-capitalist.
You're not, I hope, trolling. I know there are people out there who fervently believe the beauty of pure capitalism, such as all those interesting folks at the Cato Institute.
I understand the power of personal incentive, but I do believe there is a proper balance between the needs of the individual and the needs of society. Societies can and do get torn apart when the power of individuals gets too strong. I fail utterly to see how a society can function, long-term, under anarcho-capitalism. It is as crazy a utopian ideal as Marxist communism.
But I still believe I have an open mind, so I'll pay attention to any constructive reply you might have.
In that case, consumers must depend less on information describing each program and more on an overall reputation of the programmers.
Exactly my view, too. I would argue that serious software errors can take months or years to uncover because they may only be triggered when an exceptionally rare set of inputs are provided. Kind of like Easter Eggs. So you do have to fall back on reputation.
But with this the case, the company with the best PR crew wins (this is the case for MS). And that seems hardly a good system.
So here I am struggling to see how the system could be made more fair.
Nicely laid out points. Thanks you.
"open information" (or a close approximation) will happen automatically, unless steps are taken to prevent it.
Something about this sentence bothers me still; otherwise I agree with most everything you say.
What about the time component here? Information may spread automatically, but does it appear and spread instantaneously? I would argue that it very often does not, especially in the abstract field of information technology.
In capitalism, the difference between winning and losing can be the head start of a few days or weeks over one's competitors. I would still argue that a vendor who knowingly hides something negative about their product should face penalties for this reason: by the time the negative information is out, the competitors are gone. Consumers lose.
So are you implying that vendors who secretly include spyware should not face penalties? Does a society function well if deceit goes unpunished?
We could apply the same argument to suggest the removal of FDA food labels. Foods labels could include just "good" information. But then, I'd argue, the health of people would suffer more than with our current system: capitalism rewards those who sell the cheapest products for the greatest profit. I don't see many "health food" items falling into this category.
I'm interested in an intelligent discussion of ideas in the marketplace, and whether the government should be in the position of enforcing the openness of information. Trolls need not participate; we know how tempting it is for you.
Basic economic principles, such as supply/demand curves, are based on the principle of a marketplace with "open information": all buyers and sellers know the same things.
Yet, even when it comes to the FDA ingredients label, we hear companies bitching and moaning and finding new ways to confuse people. Case in point: Cholesterol-free Mazola Corn Oil! Good for the heart!
So, who exactly (besides the corporations themselves) is against the idea of government forcing the opening of information to buyers? Is it really such a hard line to draw (between what buyers *should* know and what is proprietary information)?
You're refering to the capitalist ideal of social security, which in the name of short term policies is doomed to require a massive cash influx?
Uh, removing slimy tax loopholes for the insanely rich and the corps' they own should cover that. And, by the way, done properly it will not destroy incentives to invest where there is actual risk of loss.
Or the capitalist ideals of modern europe who are also faced with the baby boom, have promised things that are undeliverable and now face massive strikes when the truth comes out?
Uhhhh, what? Modern Europe has some pretty solid economic foundations. Life's pretty good there for most. It's too bad more Americans don't ever leave their own countries. It's my explanation for why the Republican Party can continue to exist.
Socialism is not perfect, but neither is Capitalism.
CAPITALIST MAXIMS:
1. Plan short-term strategies to maximize profit; never mind the long-term consequences. If you don't, your competitor will and you might not last long enough to plan your next move.
2. Profits are maximized when people are discontent; they're better consumers than those who are happy with what they already have.
So here we are, metaphorically driving at night without our lights on. Sounds like a great idea!
Let's just sit back and let our descendants worry about coastal flooding around the world (read google news and search for greenland). Ha ha, suckers!
So it sounds like virus protection will improve if they get people to stop running apps with admin privileges, but until then, the registry is potentially open to abuse through carefully crafted exploits.
Hope I'm finally getting it.
Thanks for the informative reply; I hope you get the mod points it deserves.
It seems that the 3rd party apps put MS in a tough spot.
Apps can, and should, have more registry protections than they currently do, in line with good modular design. Like maybe one registry per app, plus a common "system" registry that is off-limits to all but the most trusted apps.
So do you see MS being able to satisfy backward compatibility with a more effective registry scheme?
The Registry has access permissions on different parts of it. They are set on a user basis.
OK, so someone was thinking when they designed NT, I'm assuming.
But I'm still wondering if all this permissions stuff isn't defeated by the fact that most users have Admin privileges by default. Or are the permission levels more fine-grained than that? If not, then it would seem that making users/software have Admin privileges defeats goal of Registry permissions.
If you install software with Admin privileges, does the software have modify access to large parts of the Registry?
No, the Registry has an access-control/authorization subsystem very similar to the file system.
OK; that does seem to address all questions at once.
Except for one small matter: by default, don't most apps run with Admin privileges, since most users have Admin privileges when they install software?
So how effective is this access system, anyway? I thought most viruses/trojan horses wreak havoc with system files that they shouldn't be able to access, except that Outlook, IE, etc run as root!
Windows has this reputation for "it just works!".
Yet the parent's post clearly shows that if you actually have to change anything fundamental, such as Services or Registry cleanups, it's a total fucking nightmare.
No wonder Windows admins get nervous, and sometimes run away screaming from changing Exchange configs, secure file sharing across networks, and nearly daily virus updates.
Am I forgetting anything?
1. Does Windows XP currently allow every application full write access to the Registry, or at least access to registry components for other applications?
2. If so, does this strike anyone else as a really bad idea from the view of modularity, scalability, and security?
2. Will Longhorn keep the Windows Registry?
By producing - without permission - altered versions of intellectual property, censors are effectively pirating directors' and studios' work, the lawsuit argues.
I see the point; I'm sure studios would feel differently about this technology if they were asked permission and negotiated in good faith with ClearPlay. I'm surprised Clearplay believes it has the rights to rebroadcast and resegment these movies, which are copyrighted work.
No trolls about copyright hypocrisy, please.
Either way, the parent post is not talking about the article. Moderators should be wary of such posters. Of course, that means the Moderators are:
* Responsible enough to RTFM before moderating
* Aren't trolls abusing mod points.
The GPL is founded on a philosophy and is designed to propagate that philosophy (mainly that RMS wants all his software for free and in source form). I would think that pro-GPL would relish the communist label since the so desire that others join in on it.
Methinks someone's slumber under the bridge was interrupted. Sorry, it wasn't my intention to troll for trolls. I guess trolls are attracted to controversy like fish to shiny objects.
Look closely at the parent's post, kids. Parent's statements are subtle yet inflammatory and lack grounding in logic or truth. Parent is not interested in constructive discussion.
From the article:
More importantly, Microsoft and Sun have a new common enemy: Linux, an operating system that competes with Windows and with Sun's Solaris but which, unlike the other two, is written by volunteers and shared freely among all who want to download and use it. When Mr Ballmer gives Mr McNealy a hug and says that "we do both believe in intellectual property", this is a not-so-veiled jab at the open-source Linux, which both men consider, in essence, communistic. Microsoft and Sun happen to be the only major backers (in the form of licence payments) of Linux's gadfly, a firm called SCO, which is trying to obtain money from Linux users with threats of litigation.
Yay, more FUD. I've already posted about today how dumb journalists are regarding the GPL.
Why the GPL can't be explained and left alone is beyond me. If IBM, HP, or Sun wants to use GPL code is free to ignore everyone else, make their changes, and publish the changes if they plan on distributing the binaries. They don't have to listen to the "communist" linux promoters (Side Note: is McCarthyism alive and well today, or what? Next stop: fascism) or cooperate with them.
Companies can create their own "corporate" branches of any GPL code they want. Lots and lots of freedom. Just don't use it take other other people's freedom away. Now, was that hard for anyone to understand?
For the love of God, let some journalist read this comment and berate the entire lot of them. No more stupid human-interest angles, please.
Two reasons why people laughing at you wouldn't happen regularly:
* Moderation is anonymous, partly, I believe, because it's the collective effects of moderation that count, not the individual moderators' choices, which are occasionally prone to error.
* Moderations are "staggered" in time, meaning that the many moderators who started modding before you did will have seen the earlier post and the later one. Unless you're in the freakish position of being the only moderator, you're not going to come across a redundant post that isn't already marked "Redundant" by someone before you.
Of course, the latter point doesn't work if you're the ONLY person modding later posts. It DOES apply if enough moderators can be convinced to view "Recent First". Hence the importance of getting the word out, and hence the content of my sig.
The following belief enables me to sleep at night:
There are many eyeballs at work at each level of hardware and software because large hardware/software projects are necessarily collaborative efforts.
Keeping malicious secrets in projects involving lots of people would require serious coercive control that most people naturally find repugnant.
It only takes one super-paranoid out of a million end-users to uncover a strange login attempt via some unconventional means. Then it becomes known to everyone. The risk for getting caught is very high, IMHO.
I can't believe that ALL router vendors ALL AROUND THE WORLD, for example, would conspire to hack their hardware in exactly the same way. So if someone wanted to be super-paranoid, they would buy some random kind of external packet auditing system and apply it to an arbitrarily chosen hardware/software configuration.
I wonder how absentee ballots do that.
Most counties in most states disqualify absentee ballots that have errors (more than one choice chosen, etc.). There is simply no other easy way to handle them, and they're unusally such a small percentage of the total vote that they don't change the vote.
Florida in 2000, of course, was a different story. There was such blatant vote tampering that it's a shameful scandal that should go down in history as another Watergate. Just considering the completely improper and illegal counting of thousands of overseas military ballots that arrived past the legal deadline (which were overwhelmingly pro-Bush) was enough to change the results of the election from Gore to Bush.
This completely astounding and sickening fact continues to get almost NO PRESS COVERAGE.
Maybe it's just me, but the parent post's echo of the MAIN ARTICLE may not deserve +5 Interesting; perhaps the moderators didn't read the article themselves, or haven't followed all of the eVoting threads here over the past few weeks.
Yes, the idea of the voter-verifiable paper trail IS the main idea of the article. The voter should be able to request the receipt but not be able to take it home (to prevent vote buying), and blind people should be able to have an audible verification done with earphones.
Friendly Tip to Moderators: the quality of this discussion thread will improve if you go up to the top of the screen and select "Newest First" instead of "Oldest First". Many posts past the first 100 are well worth reading; you don't have to understand all previous posts to moderate later posts.
Really, it's such a simple idea:
If you use GPL code, you publish somewhere the modifications you make under the GPL.
THAT'S IT. END OF STORY. JOURNALISTS, YOU CAN GO HOME NOW.
Instead, we get heart-wrenching human interest CRAP like the following:
(From speeding acceptance of linux)
Linux evangelists have prophesied for years that the open-source operating system would challenge Microsoft Corp.'s Windows. But it wasn't until the past year or so, when International Business Machines Corp., Novell Inc. and Hewlett-Packard Co. seriously threw their collective and considerable weight behind it, that a challenge became a real possibility.
Victory, however, will not come cheaply.
The problem is that the future of Linux was never dependent on its quality. If quality were all that is required to win, everyone would be watching movies on Beta videotape and working on Apple Macintosh computers.
The problem is cultural.
The open-source community, an ad-hoc worldwide network of programmers dedicated to creating free software, has been too shrill, evangelistic and hot-eyed for corporate interests to deal with; the ferocity of their anger at proprietary software became the Linux community's own worst enemy -- nobody wants to gamble a corporate future on fanatics, no matter how worthy their bible.
Why do journalists slather this "human community" BS on top of this very simple idea?
It's like they're trying to freak people out! How completely idiotic is that???!!!
Uh, metamoderators who want to feel their oats and encourage thoughtful moderation can go ahead and punish the moderators for excessive gullibility.