Re:sad day for those who don't like 4chan trolls
on
'weev' Conviction Vacated
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· Score: 3, Informative
that the security measures were woefully inadequate is beside the point
On the contrary, we cannot have the law being abused to take the place of security. Too many people would fake the security and rely on the law to make it work. Too many are already doing exactly that. It's a costly and unreasonable burden upon the public. Pay for your own security. That includes designing a reasonable system, implementing it properly so that actually works, and performing tests and audits. Just because perfection is hard is no reason to excuse sloppy security work. DRM, for instance, fails the reasonability requirement. We have had our publicly funded police forces and courts misused to confiscate prescription drugs, improperly demand license fees from users rather than producers (SCO scared and bullied a few users into paying for a license to use Linux), and of course conduct a massive campaign to hold back technology in the name of stopping piracy. ISPs are pretty well free of being burdened with requirements to keep years and years of logs, for fishing expeditions, but there is still danger it could become the law.
It is also better not have doubt about whether some security effort was meant to be real but was bungled, or was indeed faked and, after being breached, is claimed to have been a real effort all along and therefore the breaches are worthy of prosecution. This is especially true on a system that is not experimental, but is instead an implementation of well known, effective methods. AT&T wasn't doing anything new, no, they just plain blew it. Saves us all a lot of time and money arguing over a pointless aside.
We even have cases of security law being gamed. We don't need someone setting up a honey pot to snare particular victims, then running to the law to complain that mean, bad people broke in, ask that the seeming perpetrators be thrown in prison, and kick back and watch as the full paranoia and wrath of the law is released upon their enemies.
Owners should install working locks on their doors and use them, not demand that the government spend enough money, no matter how much, to watch every door all the time because they can't be bothered to spend the trivial amount of money needed to have a working lock.
Heck yeah, we know who Monsanto is. They're the scum who want to patent plant reproduction, and sue farmers for farming. If anything can give a company lots of bad press everywhere, not just in geek circles, it's victimizing innocent farmers with complicated legalese over a grossly obvious right. Aside from the huge problem of that ultimately leading to needing their permission to eat, they don't care if that also leads to the RIAA and MPAA winning the right to force DRM on everyone, and Big Pharma patenting our own genes and us having to pay them license fees just to exist. And some thought paying a levy for breathing the air was draconian.
I've always wanted to take a road trip south out of the US. Drive to South America, see the Amazon, Brazil, and Argentina, visit the telescopes in Chile, swing back through Peru and look at Incan ruins. But it has never seemed even remotely safe to try it. Also, it still isn't possible to drive the entire distance. There is no road connection between Panama and Columbia, so you must employ a ferry, or stop and turn around there. Is that why your plan is to turn back there? I hear that Columbia is especially unsafe, and your ferry ride should bypass that entire nation. A gringo driving through Columbia is just asking to be kidnapped and held for ransom.
It's a different world, this attitude of dealing with corruption by playing along, working within this system and its unwritten rules. Wouldn't be better to change the system, rather than help perpetuate it by participating, no matter how unwillingly? McAfee wanted to travel, without waiting for such corruption to be cleaned up. Admittedly the wait may be a very long one. The West has changed its approach in recent years. Now businesses based in the West have many more legal obstacles against playing the game and bribing authorities, on the idea that corruption will never be cleaned up as long as the powerful can so easily profit from it, and that allowing it to go on is too costly to everyone else.
Yes, and disingenuousness. They say they are ending the free service because there is too much abuse. Google, Yahoo, MS, and others can still offer free email, despite all the spam, but Dyn can't continue the free version of a service that is much simpler and easier to manage than email? And, wasn't there plenty of abuse 5 years ago, 10 years ago? They could handle it then, and now they can't?
That's like saying the US didn't need railroads either. Before the Ttranscontinental, there were 3 basic ways to travel between the east and west coasts. 1) Overland. Time: almost 6 months at first, then down to 4 months as the trails improved. Might not make it if attacked by Indians, or you became ill with cholera, or you took a wrong turn and ended up lost and dying of thirst in a desert, or trapped and starving and frozen in a snowed shut mountain pass. 2) Take ship around the southern tip of South America. Time: 4 months. Safer than overland, but still somewhat risky, uncomfortable, and more expensive. 3) Take ship to Panama, cross, then continue on another ship. Time: 1 month, if lucky and there was a ship wih room on the other side. The Transcontinental took 1 week. Also, the army had to maintain and man forts all over the west, at great expense, to protect citizens from Indians. Took too long to travel, they had to be near at hand. When the railroad came and "annihilated space and time", the forts were no longer useful and were quickly abandoned.
Like the railroads did, the Internet saves huge amounts of time and money. The phone system can't gather and deliver data at any efficiently remotely approaching the Internet. Call brokers to check commodity prices, are you mad? Takes many hours to check everywhere by phone, by which time some prices would change. Instead, what farmers did was simply not check everywhere, they would only check a few local dealers. And as for snail mail, please. Same day delivery is fantastic, for goods. But for information, it is hopelessly outclassed.
I thought it was: 1st world = the West-- the US and its allies, 2nd world = USSR and its allies, 3rd world = non aligned-- all the nations that weren't interested and didn't want to take sides in the Cold War, and even resisted pressure to choose a side. Most of them also happened to be very poor, which reduced the interest of the 2 sides in them.
Among the 5 democratic candidates for a US Senate seat where I live was one who campaigned on the idea that Obama was trying to impart Islamic values to our school children, and should be impeached. She got 2nd place, and will be facing the 1st place candidate in a runoff.
How do we get through to supporters of that sort of thing just how uncool that is?
Oh yes, should mention the one that made the biggest news recently, the closure of lanes at a busy bridge on the pretext of traffic studies, to punish a community for favoring Chris Christie's political opponents.
This kind of anti-social road operation is common. Many merchants want people sitting at the intersections where their stores are, with nothing to look at but the stores. Rich and politically well connected businesses can get traffic lights added to the entrance of their businesses. I know of at least one country club that serves the superrich, and not only did they get a stoplight, it also severly favors their entrance, truning green for them the instant anyone wants out, and screw the 6 lanes of traffic on the major street. Toll road operators want free side roads to be inadequate, badly maintained, and jammed with traffic lights. Revenue hungry cities are always running speed traps, red light camera programs, and the like, and calculatedly neglecting problems such as foliage that blocks signs.
Charles City, Iowa had a place where 3 streets cross the highway, and all 3 have traffic lights. But, not the same style of traffic light. The 2 on the end have the lights hanging from arms that reach over the highway, while the middle one has only a vertical post and buildings right at the corner, all which makes it harder to see. Of course the lights are mistimed, so that when the 2 on the end turn green, the one in the middle turns red. There's a bypass now. Olney, Texas had 3 lights, 2 in their tiny downtown area, and 1 about a mile down the highway, nearly impossible to see because it was a temporary that hung from a wire, and the trees on either side had grown out over the highway and obscured the traffic light. You could not see the light until you were less than a block away, and even then, you had to know where to look. I heard an allegation that completion of I49 through Alexandria, Louisiana was delayed for several years by a local politician who owned a restaurant on the old road.
Yes. Manufacturers are always cutting. They'll cheapen everything they can. That in itself is not bad, but then they don't do adequate testing, because that costs money too. Nor do they calculate the costs correctly. Often they can't be bothered to consider future costs. All that matters is that the up front cost is as low as possible. They hope they can dodge having to do a massive recall a few years later.
In the late 1980s, Ford got so cheap with heater cores that in as little as 5 years, they all developed leaks. Saw this in an '88 Escort and an '88 Grand Marquis. That Escort was junk. The too small ball joints and too small clutch were worn out after just 50,000 miles, the light switch failed, the fittings for the A/C used O-rings that failed in a few years, the plastic used in the bumpers turned brittle and would crack under the least pressure after a few years in the sun, the ignition system failed regularly, and even the steering failed once. I don't mean only that the power steering went out, no, I mean that the rack and pinion were so underdesigned that they wore out in less than 150,000 miles and could not keep the 2 front wheels pointing in the same direction! Had the car been on a highway when that happened, it could've killed. A few more cents spent on these items would have made for a much, much better car. Was stupid to introduce such huge problems to save so little.
To add to the insanity, Ford did splurge on idiotic cosmetics. That Escort had a worthless tail fin and spoilers, and the visors had lit vanity mirrors. They couldn't even do the vanity mirrors right. They were covered with a flap held on by little pieces of velcro glued to the visor. When the visor was down and receiving a good bit of sunlight, the glue would soften up and release the flap, which would flop down and block the driver's view of the road. If the car was left parked with the visor down, the same thing would happen, and the little lights would come on. If away from the car for a few hours, the users would discover the battery was drained when they got back.
I'm not pretending, I'm saying, right out, that copying is not stealing. Some kinds of copying are illegal. Some kinds of copying may be immoral or unethical or unfair regardless of legality. But copying is not stealing.
But we are at an impasse. If we can't agree on whether copying is or is not theft, and why, then further discussion is pointless. I think years from now, the public will embrace sharing as a natural right, and we will devise other ways to compensate artists and scientists. Trying to control copying, in order to fairly compensate creators, isn't working. Surely we can find and use some other means. That's what the debate is really about.
Vandalism, arson, speeding, blasphemy, slander, theft, fraud, and copying are all different. None of these should be lumped together as somehow different forms of stealing, not even fraud, vandalism or copying. While the goal of most fraud may be theft, it isn't always. Money is not the only thing that can be forged. So can driver's licenses and identification papers. Throwing a brick through your window is not stealing, it is vandalism. You lost a window, and no one gained it, whereas copying is the other way around. Someone gains something and you lose nothing. Nor should all of these be crimes. Blasphemy is no longer a crriminal act in much of the world. And what have you to say about the distinction between the material and the immaterial? These different things should have different legal treatment.
I did not say a DDoS was okay. I said that what could seem to be a DoS (with one 'D') should be okay. The principle is that any use that is easily handled by a good system should not be regarded as bad. If the system is poor and can't handle some usage that could be handled by a known better system within reason, that is the fault of the system, not the usage.
scientific journals... are very expensive to run
No. Journals are no longer expensive to run. Neither the authors nor the reviewers receive any compensation from the publishers. Distribution, except for the obsolete dead tree kind, is now so cheap as to be close to zero cost. The publishers have sunk to being lowly, rent seeking gatekeepers who contribute no value.
often charge outrageous subscription fees
I agree, and am glad you also see their fees as outrageous.
public access which would be _impossible_ with so many journals and no organization of their contents and references, and no infrastructure to keep websites running and backups made
Let's say it again: copying is not stealing. You keep using that word "steal" because... you're trying to strengthen your argument, which is that Swartz was a jerk?
To further this assertion that Swartz was a jerk, you say that he effectively did a Denial of Service attack, though you concede that it was probaly not intentional. Let's look at that charge a little more. If some high school kid crashes the school web server by repeatedly hitting F5, is the kid in the wrong? Or, maybe, you know, the people who set up the system did a bad job and as soon as a problem crops up, go on a witch hunt. JSTOR was not hit with a DDoS. Systems should be robust enough to handle requests in a fair fashion. Maybe the ability to handle a DDoS is asking too much, but this was a single user. Don't join the witch hunt!
Seems also that you are not thinking of JSTOR at all. Were they jerks? Absolutely! They should never have locked away all that research that we paid for. It should be freely available, perhaps in torrents. JSTOR's entire model is an offense to freedom and a slap in the face to us all. And they could have done a better job on the technical side, and made their service able to handle a more demanding load. It's not like we haven't done loads of research into operating systems and task scheduling. Why do you give JSTOR a free pass? They're as much or more at fault for your friends' difficulties in accessing research.
I don't think we know enough to make that claim that programming is intrinsically hard.
Writing used to be hard. In the Bronze Age, literacy was rare. In some societies, only priests knew how to read and write. The idea of trying to educate everyone and push literacy close to 100% was ridiculous. Hieroglyphic and Cuneiform languages were just too hard. Even for people who could achieve literacy, many did not. They didn't have time. Survival took a lot more of everyone's time. The Phonecians radically changed that with the idea of a 'phonetic' written language, around the start of the Iron Age. It became possible for many more people to become literate. Another problem early civilizations had was their primitive numbering systems. No concept of zero. Algorithms to do basic arithmetic in a numbering system like the Roman one are more complicated, harder to learn, and an all around drag on every engineering and scientific endeavor.
That's where we're at with programing now. Bronze Age programming languages, because we haven't yet figured out how to do it more simply. We have this feeling it should be easier, but we don't know how to make it easier.
Javascript sure blew that one. It is easier to create a global variable than a local variable thanks to a simple little syntax requirement. Have to declare a variable local with a "var" keyword. Global variables can just be used.
Why did the Javascript designers do it that way? Did they carefully analyze the frequency and usefulness of global vs local, and conclude global is more popular and common? Do they disagree with the idea of limiting scope to the minimum necessary? Probably none of those. They just threw the language together in a hurry. I don't know the history, but I would guess globals were the only kind of variable Javascript had originally.
No, actually Social Security is not a budget buster. It is funded entirely through payroll taxes specifically for Social Security, and interest paid on that money when the government borrows it (which is all the time), and none of its money comes from general revenue or borrowing. Those people who claim SS is an entitlement and a disaster for the budget have ulterior motives. They aren't interested in SS per se, they are only interested in that big pile of money SS has. Currently, SS has about $2.7 trillion in reserve. If they can push SS into crisis, or manufacture a fake crisis and convince the public it is real, to shake loose some of that money, they will. This has already been done to some lesser retirement funds, pension plans and the like. Most of us have heard that SS is in trouble and will go bankrupt sometime around 2030 unless changes are made. There have been calls to privatize SS and invest its money in the stock market. Such an event, especially if it was done over a short period of time, would pump the stock market so high it would make the housing bubble of 2007 look petty. The finance industry would go nuts and pocket immense amounts of our wealth, then, when the inevitable fall and crash comes, hope to quietly walk away and leave us to pick up the pieces.
Only reason I can think to work in security is because it's hot, been hot since 9/11. $. But interesting? It can be, if you can stay away from the idiots. Useful? Maybe, if politics can be kept out of it. But that's the point-- the people with the purse strings are political and stupid. Look how Microsoft has handled security. Norton/Symantec once said that they would go out of business if MS ever fixed Windows. If I were to work in security, the very last place I would choose is anti-malware software for Windows because it is such a total waste of effort to slap bandaids on fundamentally broken models.
People want perfect security, until it becomes inconvenient, then they choose convenience over security and go blame the security people. Who finds SELinux more useful than painful? The moment SELinux prevents an app from functioning is the moment the user dumps the security. MS twists the meaning of security, and tries to sell their customers the idea that secuirty for MS against them being naughty pirates is really security for everyone. Uncle Bill will make sure you don't commit piracy and get sued, don't you feel safer now? Years ago, the Prodigy Internet service promised to keep their customers safe from porn, profanity and other naughtiness and found that they could not. The meaning of security became so broad it was nearly useless. Everything can be cast as a security issue. I love Google's Evil Bit idea. Makes it clearer that just trying to figure out which info is "evil" is hard. Others want unbreakable security with backdoors (hello there NSA!).
The people who want security are suspicious and distrustful of security workers. Paranoid. It doesn't take much for them to turn against their own security people. They'll do something that wrecks security, then blame it on the security workers and get away with it. As for security workers themselves, maybe some of them go off the deep end and hide in jungles and do other weird stuff that makes the stuffed shirts doubt their fitness to work in security.
I haven't stayed current with DVDs, and haven't even tried Bluray. Have a Bluray drive in my computer, but it has never had a Bluray disc in it. Consequently, I have found the copy protection of recent DVDs not so trivial. I don't use DVDs any more myself, and this copy protection crap they pull makes me less willing than ever to get back into DVDs. It's a pain to read up on how they've screwed with DVDs in recent years, and track down the means to handle it when I try one and find it won't play on my Linux box. Only reason I even mess with it occassionally is for friends.
DeCSS and removal of region encoding isn't enough any more, have to deal with crud like this ARccOS protection. There are intentionally corrupt sectors that confuse old school DVD ripping software, fake titles that DVD players overlook as intended because their size is below the DVD standard's lower limit but which are picked up by DVD drives and software in computers, and corrupt video files with sizes set to 0x0 width and height, and lengths set to 0 seconds, and I think some screwing around with colors as well, to cause blank black screens. There's not much on Linux to handle that. MakeMKV does fairly well, but can't always produce files that can be burned to DVD. But I've heard the best software is AnyDVD, which is Windows only. Haven't tried it.
The contempt for scripting has its uses. That contempt allowed me to use an open, if weak, language, the bash shell scripting language, rather than be forced to code in this proprietary language the company was overzealous about. I would rather have used Perl, but that would have run afoul of the rules. Company policy was that all code had to be written in that language, but as shell scripting didn't count as coding, hardly anyone noticed, and no one made a fuss. Strangely, the proprietary language was itself something of a scripting language. At least, it was not compiled, it was interpreted. It also helped that the job of one of the scripts was to install that proprietary language, and so obviously could not be written in it since there was no way to compile the code.
The downside was that the boss didn't consider that real programming, and by extension didn't consider me a real programmer. He was smart in some ways, but was very predujiced, arrogant, and suffered from some significant blind spots. He showed proper respect for visual problems like designing a web page, but couldn't understand that behind the scenes work can also be difficult. Thought the hard part of putting together a web page to display statistics was the visual part, and didn't properly consider that gathering all the statistics desired wasn't a simple matter of gathering information that was lying around, no that information in many cases had to be created (more like, not thrown away) by changing the configurations of the web servers and OSes to log the needed raw info, and by making new tables and routines in the databases, and then that had to be balanced against available disk space and sometimes performance.
Ever consider that lower demand is the right move to make in a recession?
For individuals, it's not the "right"" move, it's the only move. When you don't have money, you do without. And if useful sectors of the economy falter for lack of demand, too bad, eh? General Motors should have been left to go bankrupt?
For governments, lowering demand is absolutely the wrong move. When demand, employment, and interest rates drop, the government should borrow more, because borrowing is a bargain, and hire people because employing them is a bargain, and fix our infrastructure not to give people something to do but because it really is crumbling and needs fixing. The stupidest thing about the management of our economy in recent years is that we haven't done this. The I35 bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis should never have collapsed, and it wouldn't have, if we had stayed on top of our infrastructure. We have a lot of other infrastructure that needs fixing or replacing, but it seems we will have to wait for another few bridge collapses before the politicians find the guts to fund it, possibly even by reducing the huge amounts spent on corporate welfare.
Pay down government debt when the economy is good. The most exasperating thing about our phoney budget crises is that even in bad times the budget could be balanced in an instant simply by plugging the loopholes big corporations use to avoid paying any taxes whatsoever, and by cutting the big costs, which are NOT the various social programs we have. Food stamps, Sesame Street, and NASA are pittances, but are relentlessly targeted by people screaming about the budget. If they were really concerned about the budget, they would target the biggest expense of all, the military. The War of Choice was by far the biggest budget buster in the past 25 years, far bigger than the TARP, and these self proclaimed Republican penny pinchers uttered not a single squawk over it at the time.
While I'm glad to hear it's not a complete blackout, come on yourself. There is no 3rd party manual for recent Mazda MPVs. That Haynes site you linked has none listed for MPVs made after 1998. Chilton's site has very expensive online only manuals for the MPV up to 2006. Coverage of other Mazda models is also spotty. No Haynes manuals for the CX-5, CX-7, CX-9 SUV and crossover models. No Haynes manual for the RX-8, though that last one may be because it's too rare for a manual to be worth printing.
Mazda abuses copyright to stop 3rd parties from publishing manuals. Can't get a Haynes or Chilton manual for any Mazda newer than about 1995. When I learned this about them, I decided never to own another Mazda.
They aren't the only automaker doing that. I don't know which other ones are pulling that stunt, but I'll certainly check before buying a particular brand.
One of the biggest problems with systemd is simply documentation. System administrators have a lot of learning invested in SysV and BSD, and systemd changes nearly everything. Changing everything may be okay, may be good, but to do it without explanation is bad no matter how good the changes. I'd like to see some succinct explanation, with data and analysis to back it up. Likely there is such an explanation, and I just don't know about it. But the official systemd site doesn't seem to have much, I'd also like to see a list with common system admin commands on one side, and systemd equivalents on the other, like this one but with more. For example, to look at the system log, "less/var/log/syslog" might be one way, and in systemd, it is "journalctl". To restart networking it might be "/etc/rc.d/net restart", and in systemd it's "systemctl restart network.service". Or maybe the adapter is wrongly configured, DHCP didn't work or received the wrong info, in which case it may be something like "ifconfig eth0 down" followed by an "up" with corrected IP addresses and gateway info.
When information is not available, it looks suspicious. How can we judge if systemd is ready for production? Is well designed? And that the designers aren't trying to hide problems, aren't letting their egos blind them to problems? To be brusquely told that we shouldn't judge it we should just accept it and indeed ought to stop whining and complaining and be grateful someone is generously spending their free time on this problem, because we haven't invested the time to really learn it ourselves and don't know what we're talking about, doesn't sit well with me.
Same goes for Wayland and MIR. Improving X sounds like a fine idea. But these arguments the different camps are having-- get some solid data, and let's see some resolution. Otherwise, they're just guessing and flinging mud. Makes great copy, but I'd rather see the differences carefully examined and decisions made, not more shouting.
And I don't care about "being like Chrome", as if Chrome owns the idea of minimalism. In the early days of Firefox and before that the early Netscape/Mozilla browsers, I was always looking for more room and speed. I like the UI changes. Change the URL bar on the bottom into a popup that appears only when the user hovers over a link, make the menu autohide, get rid of the bookmarks toolbar, shrink the icons, and others were all things I was using buggy popups to do before the Firefox team integrated them into the default UI.
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that the security measures were woefully inadequate is beside the point
On the contrary, we cannot have the law being abused to take the place of security. Too many people would fake the security and rely on the law to make it work. Too many are already doing exactly that. It's a costly and unreasonable burden upon the public. Pay for your own security. That includes designing a reasonable system, implementing it properly so that actually works, and performing tests and audits. Just because perfection is hard is no reason to excuse sloppy security work. DRM, for instance, fails the reasonability requirement. We have had our publicly funded police forces and courts misused to confiscate prescription drugs, improperly demand license fees from users rather than producers (SCO scared and bullied a few users into paying for a license to use Linux), and of course conduct a massive campaign to hold back technology in the name of stopping piracy. ISPs are pretty well free of being burdened with requirements to keep years and years of logs, for fishing expeditions, but there is still danger it could become the law.
It is also better not have doubt about whether some security effort was meant to be real but was bungled, or was indeed faked and, after being breached, is claimed to have been a real effort all along and therefore the breaches are worthy of prosecution. This is especially true on a system that is not experimental, but is instead an implementation of well known, effective methods. AT&T wasn't doing anything new, no, they just plain blew it. Saves us all a lot of time and money arguing over a pointless aside.
We even have cases of security law being gamed. We don't need someone setting up a honey pot to snare particular victims, then running to the law to complain that mean, bad people broke in, ask that the seeming perpetrators be thrown in prison, and kick back and watch as the full paranoia and wrath of the law is released upon their enemies.
Owners should install working locks on their doors and use them, not demand that the government spend enough money, no matter how much, to watch every door all the time because they can't be bothered to spend the trivial amount of money needed to have a working lock.
Heck yeah, we know who Monsanto is. They're the scum who want to patent plant reproduction, and sue farmers for farming. If anything can give a company lots of bad press everywhere, not just in geek circles, it's victimizing innocent farmers with complicated legalese over a grossly obvious right. Aside from the huge problem of that ultimately leading to needing their permission to eat, they don't care if that also leads to the RIAA and MPAA winning the right to force DRM on everyone, and Big Pharma patenting our own genes and us having to pay them license fees just to exist. And some thought paying a levy for breathing the air was draconian.
I've always wanted to take a road trip south out of the US. Drive to South America, see the Amazon, Brazil, and Argentina, visit the telescopes in Chile, swing back through Peru and look at Incan ruins. But it has never seemed even remotely safe to try it. Also, it still isn't possible to drive the entire distance. There is no road connection between Panama and Columbia, so you must employ a ferry, or stop and turn around there. Is that why your plan is to turn back there? I hear that Columbia is especially unsafe, and your ferry ride should bypass that entire nation. A gringo driving through Columbia is just asking to be kidnapped and held for ransom.
It's a different world, this attitude of dealing with corruption by playing along, working within this system and its unwritten rules. Wouldn't be better to change the system, rather than help perpetuate it by participating, no matter how unwillingly? McAfee wanted to travel, without waiting for such corruption to be cleaned up. Admittedly the wait may be a very long one. The West has changed its approach in recent years. Now businesses based in the West have many more legal obstacles against playing the game and bribing authorities, on the idea that corruption will never be cleaned up as long as the powerful can so easily profit from it, and that allowing it to go on is too costly to everyone else.
Yes, and disingenuousness. They say they are ending the free service because there is too much abuse. Google, Yahoo, MS, and others can still offer free email, despite all the spam, but Dyn can't continue the free version of a service that is much simpler and easier to manage than email? And, wasn't there plenty of abuse 5 years ago, 10 years ago? They could handle it then, and now they can't?
That's like saying the US didn't need railroads either. Before the Ttranscontinental, there were 3 basic ways to travel between the east and west coasts. 1) Overland. Time: almost 6 months at first, then down to 4 months as the trails improved. Might not make it if attacked by Indians, or you became ill with cholera, or you took a wrong turn and ended up lost and dying of thirst in a desert, or trapped and starving and frozen in a snowed shut mountain pass. 2) Take ship around the southern tip of South America. Time: 4 months. Safer than overland, but still somewhat risky, uncomfortable, and more expensive. 3) Take ship to Panama, cross, then continue on another ship. Time: 1 month, if lucky and there was a ship wih room on the other side. The Transcontinental took 1 week. Also, the army had to maintain and man forts all over the west, at great expense, to protect citizens from Indians. Took too long to travel, they had to be near at hand. When the railroad came and "annihilated space and time", the forts were no longer useful and were quickly abandoned.
Like the railroads did, the Internet saves huge amounts of time and money. The phone system can't gather and deliver data at any efficiently remotely approaching the Internet. Call brokers to check commodity prices, are you mad? Takes many hours to check everywhere by phone, by which time some prices would change. Instead, what farmers did was simply not check everywhere, they would only check a few local dealers. And as for snail mail, please. Same day delivery is fantastic, for goods. But for information, it is hopelessly outclassed.
I thought it was: 1st world = the West-- the US and its allies, 2nd world = USSR and its allies, 3rd world = non aligned-- all the nations that weren't interested and didn't want to take sides in the Cold War, and even resisted pressure to choose a side. Most of them also happened to be very poor, which reduced the interest of the 2 sides in them.
Among the 5 democratic candidates for a US Senate seat where I live was one who campaigned on the idea that Obama was trying to impart Islamic values to our school children, and should be impeached. She got 2nd place, and will be facing the 1st place candidate in a runoff.
How do we get through to supporters of that sort of thing just how uncool that is?
Oh yes, should mention the one that made the biggest news recently, the closure of lanes at a busy bridge on the pretext of traffic studies, to punish a community for favoring Chris Christie's political opponents.
This kind of anti-social road operation is common. Many merchants want people sitting at the intersections where their stores are, with nothing to look at but the stores. Rich and politically well connected businesses can get traffic lights added to the entrance of their businesses. I know of at least one country club that serves the superrich, and not only did they get a stoplight, it also severly favors their entrance, truning green for them the instant anyone wants out, and screw the 6 lanes of traffic on the major street. Toll road operators want free side roads to be inadequate, badly maintained, and jammed with traffic lights. Revenue hungry cities are always running speed traps, red light camera programs, and the like, and calculatedly neglecting problems such as foliage that blocks signs.
Charles City, Iowa had a place where 3 streets cross the highway, and all 3 have traffic lights. But, not the same style of traffic light. The 2 on the end have the lights hanging from arms that reach over the highway, while the middle one has only a vertical post and buildings right at the corner, all which makes it harder to see. Of course the lights are mistimed, so that when the 2 on the end turn green, the one in the middle turns red. There's a bypass now. Olney, Texas had 3 lights, 2 in their tiny downtown area, and 1 about a mile down the highway, nearly impossible to see because it was a temporary that hung from a wire, and the trees on either side had grown out over the highway and obscured the traffic light. You could not see the light until you were less than a block away, and even then, you had to know where to look. I heard an allegation that completion of I49 through Alexandria, Louisiana was delayed for several years by a local politician who owned a restaurant on the old road.
Yes. Manufacturers are always cutting. They'll cheapen everything they can. That in itself is not bad, but then they don't do adequate testing, because that costs money too. Nor do they calculate the costs correctly. Often they can't be bothered to consider future costs. All that matters is that the up front cost is as low as possible. They hope they can dodge having to do a massive recall a few years later.
In the late 1980s, Ford got so cheap with heater cores that in as little as 5 years, they all developed leaks. Saw this in an '88 Escort and an '88 Grand Marquis. That Escort was junk. The too small ball joints and too small clutch were worn out after just 50,000 miles, the light switch failed, the fittings for the A/C used O-rings that failed in a few years, the plastic used in the bumpers turned brittle and would crack under the least pressure after a few years in the sun, the ignition system failed regularly, and even the steering failed once. I don't mean only that the power steering went out, no, I mean that the rack and pinion were so underdesigned that they wore out in less than 150,000 miles and could not keep the 2 front wheels pointing in the same direction! Had the car been on a highway when that happened, it could've killed. A few more cents spent on these items would have made for a much, much better car. Was stupid to introduce such huge problems to save so little.
To add to the insanity, Ford did splurge on idiotic cosmetics. That Escort had a worthless tail fin and spoilers, and the visors had lit vanity mirrors. They couldn't even do the vanity mirrors right. They were covered with a flap held on by little pieces of velcro glued to the visor. When the visor was down and receiving a good bit of sunlight, the glue would soften up and release the flap, which would flop down and block the driver's view of the road. If the car was left parked with the visor down, the same thing would happen, and the little lights would come on. If away from the car for a few hours, the users would discover the battery was drained when they got back.
I'm not pretending, I'm saying, right out, that copying is not stealing. Some kinds of copying are illegal. Some kinds of copying may be immoral or unethical or unfair regardless of legality. But copying is not stealing.
But we are at an impasse. If we can't agree on whether copying is or is not theft, and why, then further discussion is pointless. I think years from now, the public will embrace sharing as a natural right, and we will devise other ways to compensate artists and scientists. Trying to control copying, in order to fairly compensate creators, isn't working. Surely we can find and use some other means. That's what the debate is really about.
Vandalism, arson, speeding, blasphemy, slander, theft, fraud, and copying are all different. None of these should be lumped together as somehow different forms of stealing, not even fraud, vandalism or copying. While the goal of most fraud may be theft, it isn't always. Money is not the only thing that can be forged. So can driver's licenses and identification papers. Throwing a brick through your window is not stealing, it is vandalism. You lost a window, and no one gained it, whereas copying is the other way around. Someone gains something and you lose nothing. Nor should all of these be crimes. Blasphemy is no longer a crriminal act in much of the world. And what have you to say about the distinction between the material and the immaterial? These different things should have different legal treatment.
I did not say a DDoS was okay. I said that what could seem to be a DoS (with one 'D') should be okay. The principle is that any use that is easily handled by a good system should not be regarded as bad. If the system is poor and can't handle some usage that could be handled by a known better system within reason, that is the fault of the system, not the usage.
scientific journals ... are very expensive to run
No. Journals are no longer expensive to run. Neither the authors nor the reviewers receive any compensation from the publishers. Distribution, except for the obsolete dead tree kind, is now so cheap as to be close to zero cost. The publishers have sunk to being lowly, rent seeking gatekeepers who contribute no value.
often charge outrageous subscription fees
I agree, and am glad you also see their fees as outrageous.
public access which would be _impossible_ with so many journals and no organization of their contents and references, and no infrastructure to keep websites running and backups made
Those are jobs for our public libraries.
Let's say it again: copying is not stealing. You keep using that word "steal" because... you're trying to strengthen your argument, which is that Swartz was a jerk?
To further this assertion that Swartz was a jerk, you say that he effectively did a Denial of Service attack, though you concede that it was probaly not intentional. Let's look at that charge a little more. If some high school kid crashes the school web server by repeatedly hitting F5, is the kid in the wrong? Or, maybe, you know, the people who set up the system did a bad job and as soon as a problem crops up, go on a witch hunt. JSTOR was not hit with a DDoS. Systems should be robust enough to handle requests in a fair fashion. Maybe the ability to handle a DDoS is asking too much, but this was a single user. Don't join the witch hunt!
Seems also that you are not thinking of JSTOR at all. Were they jerks? Absolutely! They should never have locked away all that research that we paid for. It should be freely available, perhaps in torrents. JSTOR's entire model is an offense to freedom and a slap in the face to us all. And they could have done a better job on the technical side, and made their service able to handle a more demanding load. It's not like we haven't done loads of research into operating systems and task scheduling. Why do you give JSTOR a free pass? They're as much or more at fault for your friends' difficulties in accessing research.
I don't think we know enough to make that claim that programming is intrinsically hard.
Writing used to be hard. In the Bronze Age, literacy was rare. In some societies, only priests knew how to read and write. The idea of trying to educate everyone and push literacy close to 100% was ridiculous. Hieroglyphic and Cuneiform languages were just too hard. Even for people who could achieve literacy, many did not. They didn't have time. Survival took a lot more of everyone's time. The Phonecians radically changed that with the idea of a 'phonetic' written language, around the start of the Iron Age. It became possible for many more people to become literate. Another problem early civilizations had was their primitive numbering systems. No concept of zero. Algorithms to do basic arithmetic in a numbering system like the Roman one are more complicated, harder to learn, and an all around drag on every engineering and scientific endeavor.
That's where we're at with programing now. Bronze Age programming languages, because we haven't yet figured out how to do it more simply. We have this feeling it should be easier, but we don't know how to make it easier.
Javascript sure blew that one. It is easier to create a global variable than a local variable thanks to a simple little syntax requirement. Have to declare a variable local with a "var" keyword. Global variables can just be used.
Why did the Javascript designers do it that way? Did they carefully analyze the frequency and usefulness of global vs local, and conclude global is more popular and common? Do they disagree with the idea of limiting scope to the minimum necessary? Probably none of those. They just threw the language together in a hurry. I don't know the history, but I would guess globals were the only kind of variable Javascript had originally.
I'd put Social Security way ahead of that.
No, actually Social Security is not a budget buster. It is funded entirely through payroll taxes specifically for Social Security, and interest paid on that money when the government borrows it (which is all the time), and none of its money comes from general revenue or borrowing. Those people who claim SS is an entitlement and a disaster for the budget have ulterior motives. They aren't interested in SS per se, they are only interested in that big pile of money SS has. Currently, SS has about $2.7 trillion in reserve. If they can push SS into crisis, or manufacture a fake crisis and convince the public it is real, to shake loose some of that money, they will. This has already been done to some lesser retirement funds, pension plans and the like. Most of us have heard that SS is in trouble and will go bankrupt sometime around 2030 unless changes are made. There have been calls to privatize SS and invest its money in the stock market. Such an event, especially if it was done over a short period of time, would pump the stock market so high it would make the housing bubble of 2007 look petty. The finance industry would go nuts and pocket immense amounts of our wealth, then, when the inevitable fall and crash comes, hope to quietly walk away and leave us to pick up the pieces.
Only reason I can think to work in security is because it's hot, been hot since 9/11. $. But interesting? It can be, if you can stay away from the idiots. Useful? Maybe, if politics can be kept out of it. But that's the point-- the people with the purse strings are political and stupid. Look how Microsoft has handled security. Norton/Symantec once said that they would go out of business if MS ever fixed Windows. If I were to work in security, the very last place I would choose is anti-malware software for Windows because it is such a total waste of effort to slap bandaids on fundamentally broken models.
People want perfect security, until it becomes inconvenient, then they choose convenience over security and go blame the security people. Who finds SELinux more useful than painful? The moment SELinux prevents an app from functioning is the moment the user dumps the security. MS twists the meaning of security, and tries to sell their customers the idea that secuirty for MS against them being naughty pirates is really security for everyone. Uncle Bill will make sure you don't commit piracy and get sued, don't you feel safer now? Years ago, the Prodigy Internet service promised to keep their customers safe from porn, profanity and other naughtiness and found that they could not. The meaning of security became so broad it was nearly useless. Everything can be cast as a security issue. I love Google's Evil Bit idea. Makes it clearer that just trying to figure out which info is "evil" is hard. Others want unbreakable security with backdoors (hello there NSA!).
The people who want security are suspicious and distrustful of security workers. Paranoid. It doesn't take much for them to turn against their own security people. They'll do something that wrecks security, then blame it on the security workers and get away with it. As for security workers themselves, maybe some of them go off the deep end and hide in jungles and do other weird stuff that makes the stuffed shirts doubt their fitness to work in security.
I haven't stayed current with DVDs, and haven't even tried Bluray. Have a Bluray drive in my computer, but it has never had a Bluray disc in it. Consequently, I have found the copy protection of recent DVDs not so trivial. I don't use DVDs any more myself, and this copy protection crap they pull makes me less willing than ever to get back into DVDs. It's a pain to read up on how they've screwed with DVDs in recent years, and track down the means to handle it when I try one and find it won't play on my Linux box. Only reason I even mess with it occassionally is for friends.
DeCSS and removal of region encoding isn't enough any more, have to deal with crud like this ARccOS protection. There are intentionally corrupt sectors that confuse old school DVD ripping software, fake titles that DVD players overlook as intended because their size is below the DVD standard's lower limit but which are picked up by DVD drives and software in computers, and corrupt video files with sizes set to 0x0 width and height, and lengths set to 0 seconds, and I think some screwing around with colors as well, to cause blank black screens. There's not much on Linux to handle that. MakeMKV does fairly well, but can't always produce files that can be burned to DVD. But I've heard the best software is AnyDVD, which is Windows only. Haven't tried it.
The contempt for scripting has its uses. That contempt allowed me to use an open, if weak, language, the bash shell scripting language, rather than be forced to code in this proprietary language the company was overzealous about. I would rather have used Perl, but that would have run afoul of the rules. Company policy was that all code had to be written in that language, but as shell scripting didn't count as coding, hardly anyone noticed, and no one made a fuss. Strangely, the proprietary language was itself something of a scripting language. At least, it was not compiled, it was interpreted. It also helped that the job of one of the scripts was to install that proprietary language, and so obviously could not be written in it since there was no way to compile the code.
The downside was that the boss didn't consider that real programming, and by extension didn't consider me a real programmer. He was smart in some ways, but was very predujiced, arrogant, and suffered from some significant blind spots. He showed proper respect for visual problems like designing a web page, but couldn't understand that behind the scenes work can also be difficult. Thought the hard part of putting together a web page to display statistics was the visual part, and didn't properly consider that gathering all the statistics desired wasn't a simple matter of gathering information that was lying around, no that information in many cases had to be created (more like, not thrown away) by changing the configurations of the web servers and OSes to log the needed raw info, and by making new tables and routines in the databases, and then that had to be balanced against available disk space and sometimes performance.
Ever consider that lower demand is the right move to make in a recession?
For individuals, it's not the "right"" move, it's the only move. When you don't have money, you do without. And if useful sectors of the economy falter for lack of demand, too bad, eh? General Motors should have been left to go bankrupt?
For governments, lowering demand is absolutely the wrong move. When demand, employment, and interest rates drop, the government should borrow more, because borrowing is a bargain, and hire people because employing them is a bargain, and fix our infrastructure not to give people something to do but because it really is crumbling and needs fixing. The stupidest thing about the management of our economy in recent years is that we haven't done this. The I35 bridge over the Mississippi River in Minneapolis should never have collapsed, and it wouldn't have, if we had stayed on top of our infrastructure. We have a lot of other infrastructure that needs fixing or replacing, but it seems we will have to wait for another few bridge collapses before the politicians find the guts to fund it, possibly even by reducing the huge amounts spent on corporate welfare.
Pay down government debt when the economy is good. The most exasperating thing about our phoney budget crises is that even in bad times the budget could be balanced in an instant simply by plugging the loopholes big corporations use to avoid paying any taxes whatsoever, and by cutting the big costs, which are NOT the various social programs we have. Food stamps, Sesame Street, and NASA are pittances, but are relentlessly targeted by people screaming about the budget. If they were really concerned about the budget, they would target the biggest expense of all, the military. The War of Choice was by far the biggest budget buster in the past 25 years, far bigger than the TARP, and these self proclaimed Republican penny pinchers uttered not a single squawk over it at the time.
What do you consider a reasonable time to reach 65 mph? A big truck needs over 1 minute.
While I'm glad to hear it's not a complete blackout, come on yourself. There is no 3rd party manual for recent Mazda MPVs. That Haynes site you linked has none listed for MPVs made after 1998. Chilton's site has very expensive online only manuals for the MPV up to 2006. Coverage of other Mazda models is also spotty. No Haynes manuals for the CX-5, CX-7, CX-9 SUV and crossover models. No Haynes manual for the RX-8, though that last one may be because it's too rare for a manual to be worth printing.
Mazda abuses copyright to stop 3rd parties from publishing manuals. Can't get a Haynes or Chilton manual for any Mazda newer than about 1995. When I learned this about them, I decided never to own another Mazda.
They aren't the only automaker doing that. I don't know which other ones are pulling that stunt, but I'll certainly check before buying a particular brand.
Figured systemd would get dragged into this.
One of the biggest problems with systemd is simply documentation. System administrators have a lot of learning invested in SysV and BSD, and systemd changes nearly everything. Changing everything may be okay, may be good, but to do it without explanation is bad no matter how good the changes. I'd like to see some succinct explanation, with data and analysis to back it up. Likely there is such an explanation, and I just don't know about it. But the official systemd site doesn't seem to have much, I'd also like to see a list with common system admin commands on one side, and systemd equivalents on the other, like this one but with more. For example, to look at the system log, "less /var/log/syslog" might be one way, and in systemd, it is "journalctl". To restart networking it might be "/etc/rc.d/net restart", and in systemd it's "systemctl restart network.service". Or maybe the adapter is wrongly configured, DHCP didn't work or received the wrong info, in which case it may be something like "ifconfig eth0 down" followed by an "up" with corrected IP addresses and gateway info.
When information is not available, it looks suspicious. How can we judge if systemd is ready for production? Is well designed? And that the designers aren't trying to hide problems, aren't letting their egos blind them to problems? To be brusquely told that we shouldn't judge it we should just accept it and indeed ought to stop whining and complaining and be grateful someone is generously spending their free time on this problem, because we haven't invested the time to really learn it ourselves and don't know what we're talking about, doesn't sit well with me.
Same goes for Wayland and MIR. Improving X sounds like a fine idea. But these arguments the different camps are having-- get some solid data, and let's see some resolution. Otherwise, they're just guessing and flinging mud. Makes great copy, but I'd rather see the differences carefully examined and decisions made, not more shouting.
And I don't care about "being like Chrome", as if Chrome owns the idea of minimalism. In the early days of Firefox and before that the early Netscape/Mozilla browsers, I was always looking for more room and speed. I like the UI changes. Change the URL bar on the bottom into a popup that appears only when the user hovers over a link, make the menu autohide, get rid of the bookmarks toolbar, shrink the icons, and others were all things I was using buggy popups to do before the Firefox team integrated them into the default UI.