That a high profile failure is better than a low profile success, at least in the management world. I can't understand it, but then again I'm just a lowly engineer.
Well, by installation I meant the setup done by the admin when installing the distribution. The point was that to get a secure setup you can't just install a distribution and leave it at that, you still have to configure things like the boot loader, the BIOS, probably the network services, etc.
If you are at the keyboard, you can usually get root instantly on Linux. "lilo: linux single"
At least in Debian, even with "linux single" you have to type the root password to get root. And any installation with the least pretense of security has always disabled user parameters for LILO, of course. Just like it had to disable e.g. booting from a disk.
You know your demands for hard data and PROVING (uppercase and all) are just hot air. I haven't run a study of freenet usage nor I plan to do so.
What I'm concerned with is this "prove you need your freedoms" attitude of which your posts are good examples.
So let me turn the tables. PROVE that most of the people who benefit from due process are not criminals. And if you can't, be coherent and say you'll support the abolition of due process. I'm impatient.
I don't go with the "freedom is a boon for criminals" line.
Well, to me it quite looks like you do.
They are NOT actually arguing from a moral standpoint for not going against Saddam
Policitians misrepresent their motivations, news at 11. Also, Bush's allusions to morality seem quite more strident and pervasive to me (God this, evil that, you know what I mean). At least Chirac's and Schroeder's stance is against war, children being killed by American weapons and all that.
[...] while conveniently ignoring what it is LIKELY to be used the most for (not a minority of the use, the MAJORITY of the use): illegal (not grey area illegal, REAL illegal - kiddie porn and terrorist communication).
You don't get freedom. Most freedoms are quite likely to be used mainly for illegal use. If you think of it, most people could live quite happily under a dictatorship. Freedom of speech? Legal crypto? Due process? Most people aren't really interested in political speech, can pass without saying anything against the government and won't ever get convicted. Still, those freedoms are deemed worthy, albeit by an ever decreasing number of people it seems. I'd hate to sound patronising, but maybe we all should think about it.
You say one true thing (busineses are built around maximizing profit) and use this to sneak in a bald-faced lie (stealing doesn't affect prices).
First, unauthorized copying is not the same as stealing, because intellectual property is not the same as physical property. That's why there are different words for each concept. Refering to unauthorized copying as stealing is just propaganda to manipulate people into a greater dislike of unauthorized copying.
Second, unauthorized copying can affect prices. Everything can affect prices. The point is that the effect of unauthorized copying on prices is indirect, as the prices are primarily determined by the maximum profit achievable by the company (i.e. "what the consumers are willing to pay"), not the manufacturing costs. No company is going to set lower prices than the customers are willing to pay, simply because it happens to be efficient manufacturing its product.
If stealing didn't affect prices, this law wouldn't even be being discussed anywhere.
Yeah. Every law is just, as we know. Lobbies do not exist.
When you steal something that cost 2$ to make, even if you think, "I'm only stealing 2$" you're actually stealing the 40$ some guy would've paid to enjoy that game.
Huh? You're confusing direct and indirect effects again. The direct effect of unauthorized copying is that someone gets a copy of some intellectual property. There can exist the indirect effect that someone does not buy the intellectual property. I'm sure we all can think of plenty of cases when this indirect effect does not take place.
If you're opposed to violations of intellectual property, that's fine, but please don't troll Slashdot with the same old *AA propaganda that has already been debunked to extenuation.
A small but vocal minority appear to be dead-set against using even GObject, which only tackles a small subset of the problem of code sharing - the idea of using GObject seems to scare them witless. I wouldn't normally name names, but it's starting to get very irritating. Neil Stevens and Zack Rusin in particular, (there are others) consistantly object whenver the possibility of using something based on GObject (even when wrapped in the KDE style) is brought up.
Can you give a link to this discussion? I've searched the mail archives at lists.kde.org but I can't find any mails from Zach Rusin discussing the GObject issue.
Also, it doesn't seem fair to bitch in Slashdot about people because they don't support the path you would like for KDE. If you have technical arguments for your position, present them in the appropriate mailing list. If you don't, name-calling is not the solution.
In other messages you've admitted you don't even know C++, so your experience in KDE development must be inevitably small. These people probably know quite a lot more than you about KDE's internal workings, so why not show a little respect for their position.
Core are not the only ones allowed to commit. They are simply the democratically elected body of committers who preside over the welfare of the project.
Who elects core developers?
Who decides if someone is elegible to be a core developer?
If core developers are elected democratically, why was it necessary to throw out Matt Dillon explicitly instead of just explaining the situation to the electors? Aren't electors trusted to do the (apparently) reasonable thing and unelect him?
Look, do you want extensive experience or not? I trust this guy to have run into more security problems than just about anyone else out there.
Somehow I believed that a security chief should have experience solving problems, instead of just running into them. Especially since Schmidt's own work at Microsoft demonstrates that knowing of a security hole and closing it don't always go together.
Every now and then there is some fuss in the Open Source community about license trouble. More often than not they are because of minor technicalities or it's even unclear if the trouble really exists or not.
I say, open source should be about computers and programming and not about law. If there is some small inconsistence in licenses that can be more or less safely ignored, let's ignore it. Being perfectly compliant with licenses is like provably optimum code, it can be a nice idea but in real world nobody is really interested about it.
IMO Debian should package mplayer (in fact it is already packaged, just search for it) and if somebody with a legal standing actually asksabout it being removed, then they can start to analyze the problem. No need to get out the way to find license problems that with all probability nobody will ever make a case of law about.
Red Hat's Jeremy Hogan said any KDE breakage was unintentional
the big problem is that Red Hat's developers are almost all Gnome people
the breakage is only in Red Hat 8.0's default hybrid Gnome/KDE Bluecurve desktop
So RedHat's default setup broke one of the two big Linux desktops and there's nothing to complain about because they only did it out of incompetence and not on purpose? Well, that's like totally vulterant.
No, because that was I "meant" to get when I purchased the video card. Seriously, how is it that what companies "meant" is now of moral and even legal (e.g. DMCA) relevance?
You hardly need to stress that there is no foolproof way of stopping trolls. This is Slashdot, remember? What next, a comment informing us that duplicate stories are sometimes posted to online forums?
Speed means simply distance divided by time. That distance and time don't need to fulfill any special requirement, any distance and time can be used as long as the resulting speed concept is useful. For example, with some types of waves you can talk about "group speed", which is not the speed of any material object. In fact, group speed can be above the speed of light.
About the speed of gravity, let's suppose you have two stationary particles: A and B. A experiments an attraction force directed towards B due to gravity. Now let's suppose B starts moving towards A. The gravity force experimented by A will start increasing -- but a certain time passes since B starts moving until the gravity force experimented by A starts increasing. If you divide the distance between A and B by that time, you've got the speed of gravity.
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That a high profile failure is better than a low profile success, at least in the management world. I can't understand it, but then again I'm just a lowly engineer.
I wonder how Saddam didn't thought of it. "Architectural limitations do not support destroying my illegal al-Samud missiles".
Well, by installation I meant the setup done by the admin when installing the distribution. The point was that to get a secure setup you can't just install a distribution and leave it at that, you still have to configure things like the boot loader, the BIOS, probably the network services, etc.
Or "linux root=/dev/fd0". That's the reason of the "least pretense of security" part of my comment :-).
If you are at the keyboard, you can usually get root instantly on Linux. "lilo: linux single"
At least in Debian, even with "linux single" you have to type the root password to get root. And any installation with the least pretense of security has always disabled user parameters for LILO, of course. Just like it had to disable e.g. booting from a disk.
You know your demands for hard data and PROVING (uppercase and all) are just hot air. I haven't run a study of freenet usage nor I plan to do so.
What I'm concerned with is this "prove you need your freedoms" attitude of which your posts are good examples.
So let me turn the tables. PROVE that most of the people who benefit from due process are not criminals. And if you can't, be coherent and say you'll support the abolition of due process. I'm impatient.
I don't go with the "freedom is a boon for criminals" line.
Well, to me it quite looks like you do.
They are NOT actually arguing from a moral standpoint for not going against Saddam
Policitians misrepresent their motivations, news at 11. Also, Bush's allusions to morality seem quite more strident and pervasive to me (God this, evil that, you know what I mean). At least Chirac's and Schroeder's stance is against war, children being killed by American weapons and all that.
[...] while conveniently ignoring what it is LIKELY to be used the most for (not a minority of the use, the MAJORITY of the use): illegal (not grey area illegal, REAL illegal - kiddie porn and terrorist communication).
You don't get freedom. Most freedoms are quite likely to be used mainly for illegal use. If you think of it, most people could live quite happily under a dictatorship. Freedom of speech? Legal crypto? Due process? Most people aren't really interested in political speech, can pass without saying anything against the government and won't ever get convicted. Still, those freedoms are deemed worthy, albeit by an ever decreasing number of people it seems. I'd hate to sound patronising, but maybe we all should think about it.
Freedom of speech is a boon to hatemongers but you have to break a few eggs eh?
Due process is a boon to terrorists but you have to break a few eggs eh?
Democracy is a boon to corrupt populist politicians but you have to break a few eggs eh?
Why are there so many people who say "freedom is a boon for criminals" lately?
the NSA allegedly has secret patents
I thought patents were published as part of the grant process.
A small but vocal minority appear to be dead-set against using even GObject, which only tackles a small subset of the problem of code sharing - the idea of using GObject seems to scare them witless. I wouldn't normally name names, but it's starting to get very irritating. Neil Stevens and Zack Rusin in particular, (there are others) consistantly object whenver the possibility of using something based on GObject (even when wrapped in the KDE style) is brought up.
Can you give a link to this discussion? I've searched the mail archives at lists.kde.org but I can't find any mails from Zach Rusin discussing the GObject issue.
Also, it doesn't seem fair to bitch in Slashdot about people because they don't support the path you would like for KDE. If you have technical arguments for your position, present them in the appropriate mailing list. If you don't, name-calling is not the solution.
In other messages you've admitted you don't even know C++, so your experience in KDE development must be inevitably small. These people probably know quite a lot more than you about KDE's internal workings, so why not show a little respect for their position.
[...] to also make science seem as much a natural and exciting part of life as getting laid [...]
Now, now, I think we're getting carried away here.
Seriously, a nice post, very beautifully written.
There was a Dilbert strip that went something like this:
Asok: Sweet mother of potatoes! I've just come up with a million-dollar idea!
PHB: We own all your ideas. Cough it up or we will fire you and then we will sue you.
[Asok cries]
Alice: The first million-dollar idea is the toughest.
And I thought this was fiction. It's frightening how much of Dilbert is more real than you'd think.
The Internet, of course, is a powerful tool to communicate messages to potential clients.
Look out! Kevin Mitnick has just reinvented SPAM.
Core are not the only ones allowed to commit. They are simply the democratically elected body of committers who preside over the welfare of the project.
Who elects core developers?
Who decides if someone is elegible to be a core developer?
If core developers are elected democratically, why was it necessary to throw out Matt Dillon explicitly instead of just explaining the situation to the electors? Aren't electors trusted to do the (apparently) reasonable thing and unelect him?
Why do you use italics so much?
Look, do you want extensive experience or not? I trust this guy to have run into more security problems than just about anyone else out there.
Somehow I believed that a security chief should have experience solving problems, instead of just running into them. Especially since Schmidt's own work at Microsoft demonstrates that knowing of a security hole and closing it don't always go together.
Every now and then there is some fuss in the Open Source community about license trouble. More often than not they are because of minor technicalities or it's even unclear if the trouble really exists or not.
I say, open source should be about computers and programming and not about law. If there is some small inconsistence in licenses that can be more or less safely ignored, let's ignore it. Being perfectly compliant with licenses is like provably optimum code, it can be a nice idea but in real world nobody is really interested about it.
IMO Debian should package mplayer (in fact it is already packaged, just search for it) and if somebody with a legal standing actually asksabout it being removed, then they can start to analyze the problem. No need to get out the way to find license problems that with all probability nobody will ever make a case of law about.
it was a perfectly cromulent idea.
I know, but I didn't want to be too harsh on RedHat.
Red Hat's Jeremy Hogan said any KDE breakage was unintentional
the big problem is that Red Hat's developers are almost all Gnome people
the breakage is only in Red Hat 8.0's default hybrid Gnome/KDE Bluecurve desktop
So RedHat's default setup broke one of the two big Linux desktops and there's nothing to complain about because they only did it out of incompetence and not on purpose? Well, that's like totally vulterant.
Maybe those game servers can be sued for damages because their defective security is what allowed the DDoS attacks.
No, because that was I "meant" to get when I purchased the video card. Seriously, how is it that what companies "meant" is now of moral and even legal (e.g. DMCA) relevance?
You hardly need to stress that there is no foolproof way of stopping trolls. This is Slashdot, remember? What next, a comment informing us that duplicate stories are sometimes posted to online forums?
Speed means simply distance divided by time. That distance and time don't need to fulfill any special requirement, any distance and time can be used as long as the resulting speed concept is useful. For example, with some types of waves you can talk about "group speed", which is not the speed of any material object. In fact, group speed can be above the speed of light.
About the speed of gravity, let's suppose you have two stationary particles: A and B. A experiments an attraction force directed towards B due to gravity. Now let's suppose B starts moving towards A. The gravity force experimented by A will start increasing -- but a certain time passes since B starts moving until the gravity force experimented by A starts increasing. If you divide the distance between A and B by that time, you've got the speed of gravity.