A while back I was curious about the origin of the customary way of logging in by first entering a user ID/name, then entering in your password. Where was this first done? Why that order? Why not ask for the password first, or ask for only the password? Maybe it used to be done differently? I knew of Multics, and thought there might be older OSes. A bit of searching turned up CTSS, and the source code. I looked at enough of the CTSS source to see that it did the login 2 step we all know.
What I'm not sure of is how it handled incorrect input. Haven't gone through the source enough to suss that out. I think if a nonexistent user ID was given, those early systems would not ask for a password, they would reject the input on the spot. Today, systems always ask for passwords before rejecting a login attempt, so that a cracker can't use the login to find valid user IDs.
User IDs were not supposed to be secret information suitable for use in authentication. You kind of needed to know them in order to send messages to other users. Now people are frequently advised to keep their usernames secret, and the username has degenerated into being part of the password.
CTSS may be the origin of the login 2 step that we still do today. That's a legacy I feel has been uncritically accepted for far too long.
Thanks! That could explain why I saw btrfs processes using so much CPU time. btrfs-endio sometimes used more than Firefox itself.
Thing I don't like about the ext's is they're not very space efficient, and that can make a difference on tiny hard drives such as the 8G this system has. Reiserfs is pretty good with space, and reiser4 was even better. Been wishing for btrfs to mature quickly, as reiser4 is probably dead. I found at least 1 gotcha with xfs. If you don't tune the parameters (block size and such), deletion of a large tree such as the Linux kernel source can take a very long time. Haven't tried any other file systems.
And you might want to consider progress per population rather than years. I expect technological advance is more even when based on "man hours".
There are all kinds of other factors you have not mentioned in your simplistic correlation. Why did Europeans from 1500 onwards advance past the rest of the world? One idea is plurality. Because Europe was politically fragmented, no one political entity could retard growth and advancement, as seems such entities are wont to do. And IP laws? Probably not.
In fact, IP laws worked against progress. IP laws are exactly the sort of tool that monolithic political entities use to maintain a status quo. The church was an early promoter of IP law, in order to maintain a monopoly on the Bible. They were very anxious to stamp out heresies, and one way heresies could arise was through the distribution of poor translations. They were slow to produce translations themselves, preferring instead that people learn Latin. Does that sound familiar, just like the RIAA's slowness to sell mp3s rather than CDs? The church cut deals with printer's guilds, so that no one could buy their services to print Bibles without church authorization. They even burned a few people at the stake for writing and printing unauthorized translations of the Bible. But that was too much for the public, and the church was forced to back off. The modern equivalent of a burning would seem to be an agonizingly long trial ending in a judgment of millions in damages for allegedly sharing as few as 24 songs online. It is rather ironic that today the Bible is often held up as an example of a work that should not be protected by copyright because 1) it is definitely too old, and 2) it belongs to everyone.
You better believe there's some conniving going on. It shouldn't be so easy for workers to falsify information. If it is easier than it ought to be, as seems likely, that's almost certainly because the employer purposely make a hash of the monitoring system, and neglected to fix obvious flaws. Even just being too cheap to do any maintenance can provide plenty of opportunities to cheat as the system slowly breaks down. They wink at the employees after putting on a fine show of concern and safety. To make sure everyone gets the message, they hoke up totally unrelated reasons to fire a few honest ones. No one says anything explicit; the message is all between the lines. The most cunning part is that if the situation is investigated, they can blame it all on cheating employees, and might get away with that.
As an exercise in insanity, I tried to install a modern Linux distro on an old Pentium II system with only 128M of RAM. Used btrfs for the heck of it. It was all going well until I tried to run Firefox 9.0.1. Thrashed that system mercilessly. Never mind actually showing a web page, just starting up blank was extremely slow. Sometimes I saw the "unresponsive script" popups on Firefox's own Javascript. I hacked out everything that used memory, dumping the LXDE desktop environment for a plain old window manager (jwm), and this helped, but it's not enough. Turned off images and disabled Javascript. It still thrashes swap.
Chrome didn't do any better. Firefox 3.5 worked okay on an even smaller system (96M of RAM). Version 3.6.8 + LXDE works fine on a system with 192M of RAM. Here's hoping their MemShrink effort scores more big wins.
Nice idea. Since copyright is enshrined in the Constitution, it could take an amendment to fix matters. IANAL, but I tried to write just such an amendment. Not easy. Found myself throwing in statements to counter every weasel that I could think of. There was also a problem of scope. Should it forbid much of what is in a typical EULA? What should it change in patent law? Trademark law? An elementary dodge is playing around with language. Gets tough to nail things down when there is so much disagreement over simple definitions. You could outlaw copyright, and find that it still exists and is practiced, with the only change being to the names, to get around the law. So I started with a section of definitions. When the whole thing got rather long, I went back and ripped out redundancies.
Think anyone would be interested in reading it? I haven't posted it anywhere. I don't know. Even if it could be passed, it just doesn't seem that any amendment can stop the campaign against the Age of Information. Time and generational changes will eventually stop that, not government fiat. After that we can see about an amendment. Slavery was amended out of the constitution after the Civil War, not during or before.
More like theft? But the action still is not theft. See, there's this website called "Wikileaks" not "Wikithefts", and no one has any problem comprehending the name. I don't hear anyone saying it ought to change its name either. Why do people continue to accept this incorrect characterization and conflation? You even say "piracy is completely different". Then why are you trying to say this action isn't completely different from theft? It's a leak, not a theft. It's hard to say that this even really counts as a leak. Were others being told what the code was for? Is it worthy of being considered a valuable secret? Doesn't sound like it.
What I see is the typical hysteria of keepers of secrets who have been compromised, or think they've been compromised, or feel someone has demonstrated a way in which they could be compromised. They're very free with that hot button concept, theft. Ironically, the fuss has likely attracted the attention of the very people they wanted to keep in the dark. They've triggered a Streisand Effect. One of the more annoying things about government work was their desire to classify everything as secret. Mostly it was paranoia about keeping their own butts covered, hiding problems or favoritism behind a veil of secrecy, but it was also paranoia that anything could be valuable information. They tried to lock down basic science. You'd have some idiot bureaucrats who, after being introduced to a basic algorithm, something simple enough that they could understand it without a lot of study and training, such as Quicksort, and being impressed with its power, would demand that it be considered a national secret. No enemies were to know that their fantastic project relied upon the awesome power of Quicksort, or know of Quicksort itself! That kind of crap makes collaboration impossible. No one can share anything with anyone else. Remember the fuss over encryption technology. Netscape had to have 2 versions of their browser, and was not allowed to let foreigners download the version with stronger encryption. A t-shirt with a few lines of code counted as a munition. The government harassed the author of PGP.
The poor bastard who is accused will be railroaded if the Fed has its way. I hope for his sake that the courts are calmer and cooler. Sandy Berger's punishment, for what was probably far more valuable information, was largely to his reputation. He was fined $50000 (probably peanuts to him), and put on probation and ordered to do some community service. No jail time.
You talk as if the guilt of sites such as The Pirate Bay is beyond doubt, and as if there's no question that copying is a vile crime. Your choice of language is poor. "Loop hole"? "Exploit"? No, that is not the way to characterize what they do. Do search engines also "exploit loop holes" whenever copyrighted material appears in their search results? Of course not!
People are lying? Everyone is a liar, except you, huh? And you're "shocked, I tell you, shocked!" Your world view needs some major revising if you seriously think that most people are lying, cheating scum. We didn't set out to engage in crime. Special interests twisted the law to make most of us into criminals. That's a problem with the law, not our morals. Those interests are the criminals, not the public. It used to be a crime to criticize the king. Today, we have the right to Free Speech. Some day, copying will not be a crime, and then what will you say? Just like that, we're not lying, thieving criminals any more.
You shouldn't have to rush into court to stop your website from poofing. We have a long tradition of "innocent until proven guilty". No, the onus and burden should be on the accuser. Do you really not understand why? A website such as Wikipedia would be buried in accusations. There is no way they could possibly respond to every accusation in a timely fashion, and we'd very quickly reach that "last measure" because they didn't "cooperate". No one has to prove that they didn't commit a crime, or we'd never have time for anything else.
Balanced? Balanced?! Get a clue about just how bad this whole SOPA and PIPA thing is. Or are you the kind of guy who thinks he got a balanced and fair deal if you persuade a rapist to use a condom when he anal rapes you?
These stupid bastards are doing nothing less than threatening the Internet. And not even intentionally, but only as collateral damage towards a goal that cannot be reached. I agree with the GP. Should this become law, there is not a single legitimate website that will be able to stay online when the flood of accusations starts. This is not a matter for calm deliberation, this is a clear and present danger to the livelihood of everyone in the IT business.
Oh, the "hostile environment" idea. Any environment where the boys grossly outnumber the girls is automatically hostile to the girls. I should think however, that nerdy though we are, we are a tiny bit more respectful than other boys clubs such as the military, and the average sport. But maybe we are worse because we're so starved for a bit of affection. And we certainly don't have neat uniforms.
Many single women act as if just looking at them is some kind of horrible crime, and are so ready to see most guys as creeps. She's only seen some guy from across a room for a moment, but she's already formed a first impression and just knows that he's a creep. Saw what a slob he is and how his eyes wandered over some cleavage. That kind of attitude tends towards the self-fulfilling. Puts our backs up, and brings out a bit of snark. She expected a hostile environment, and turned it into one. Personally, I don't like being around anyone, male or female, who acts like the lot of us ought to be banished to a leper colony. Note in another post the typecast dig at RMS for supposedly being smelly. There's the related attitude of viewing us all as inferiors and incompetents in social matters. Insulting, really. The mere slipping out of such an attitude can hardly be considered a display of competence at socializing! Maybe single women have to act that way to stem the deluge of propositions they get. Married women are much more relaxed.
Anyway, no one wonders why women compete separately from men in most sports, or has much of a problem with that. And I hope doesn't use that as a reason to come to a blanket conclusion that women are inferior. Physical strength is such a small part of any person, and isn't a pure positive, it comes with costs in many other areas, otherwise we should have all evolved into muscle bound hulks. But why is a decidedly non-physical activity such as programming so hugely skewed? Is it the social aspect? "Hostile environment" doesn't seem a sufficient explanation, not when programming can be done, and perhaps is better done in solitude.
Since so many in this thread talked about ancient history, I'll mention one. Does anyone remember the option to browse without images, from back in the day? Sometime around Netscape Navigator 2? Used to be a rather prominent option, but somewhere along the line it was quietly dropped off the menus.
MS is as evil as ever. You are having doubts about this? Think they turned over a new leaf after 2005? Then consider these:
2006-2007: The draconian DRM of Windows Vista
2006-2008: OOXML. MS bribes and threatens the ISO to get the purposely bad and encumbered OOXML format declared a standard.
2008: EU fines MS for failing to comply with a 2004 antitrust order. MS has a long history of paying lip service to court orders while evading the spirit of the findings.
2011-2012: Secure Boot: Windows 8 may be designed in a way that prevents other OSes from booting.
2012: LG caves, and will pay MS to license technologies supposedly infringed by Android.
They're still rent seeking, controlling, monopolistic scum.
You're the one engaging in Chicken Little antics-- about Slashdot's alleged Chicken Little antics. You think SOPA isn't any big deal? Maybe you're right. But this isn't about only SOPA, this is about the climate, attitudes, ignorance, and problems that made it possible for such horrible ideas to even come before Congress. SOPA is just the latest battle in this war, the War Against Information. We know quite well that even if SOPA and PIPA crash and burn like a lead Hindenburg, powerful interests will be back for another round, and another. They're fools who think to create their own little corner of control to profit from, and who don't see how that could come back to bite them, and all of us. They evidently think they have real chances of putting this sort of thing over on the public, and, sadly, they're right.
This war isn't won until nobody but a few cranks on the fringes gives such outrageous ideas the time of day. When they have less credibility than the average Nigerian scammer, then the war is won. Nobody would seriously try to pass legislation that, for instance, declares that Christianity is the official religion of the US, and outlaws mosques, synagogues, etc. Sure, there are people who would like to do just that, but they know such a thing doesn't have (pardon the joke) a prayer. Enough people believe that separation of church and state is a good idea to see to that. "In God we trust" is on the currency, but that was a sop that in no way affects how the country operates. We don't yet have similar principles established for information. The public isn't too sure where the lines should be. If the US blows it on this, that won't end in our destruction. But, it could very well put the US in decline. Other countries might seize the opportunity to lure away the best and brightest minds.
GoDaddy got the message. I'm sure they still want to support SOPA, but now they know they'd better not if they don't want to lose even more customers. Maybe we can't move MS and Apple because they're too big and get too much support from the uninformed general public, but sometimes we can make the likes of GoDaddy blink.
No other solutions? Guaranteed working conditions are NOT necessary. We can have decent working conditions with much softer approaches than naked and clumsy dictation to employers. Make the environment worker friendly, so that businesses have to compete for workers. How? Well, for one, health care that is not tied to employment. The US has tried for universal health care many times over the last 100 years, and each time it was scuttled because businesses saw that lack as leverage they could use against their employees, and wanted to preserve their power.
Then all this crap about denying vacations, paying peanuts, and looking upon financial responsibility and independence as a threat and employees who practice that as "flight risks", would be, quite simply, bad business. Give employees some realistic options, make businesses actually have to compete for employees, and they will not be able to get away with the stunning amount of crap they can pull now. We fought the Civil War over the issue of slavery. One thing that conflict showed is that free people make better workers than slaves. So long as the Union had the will, the Confederacy despite having more land and an easier climate never had a real chance of winning that war. In large part that's because a significant part of their manpower came from slaves who could hardly be expected to be enthusiastic workers let alone fighters. Sure, they had a much lower population even when slaves are fully included, but why was their population so much lower? They had no chance of winning on the battlefields, and only poor chances of winning by other means such as obtaining foreign aid, or demoralizing or fatiguing the Union into giving up. Brilliant generalship could never be enough to make up for the fundamental imbalance. Their slave economy system simply was not as good at harnessing the potential of the land. That's a big reason why they were so badly outnumbered. Their whole war effort was doomed before they started, and they knew it.
Yet here we are today, busting unions like crazy, doing all we can to beat workers down into indentured servitude, and vilifying the unemployed as lazy losers, because many of us have been sold on the idea that this will lead to greater productivity.
I've tried running Windows with an ext2 file system. Windows can read other file systems with help from drivers, but it's never 100% compatible. When I tried it, it was also a pain to use, because you had to remember to manually start the driver after booting up. And still need NTFS or FAT to boot.
MS of course prefers that it not be easy to use a different file system. I keep hoping their loser business strategies will eventually send them into bankruptcy. It would serve them right. But there is still an amazing amount of blind love for MS out there. Apple also gets way more love than they deserve.
You ought to feel heartless, for that. That was a smug diagnosis that you have no way of knowing is correct. Has it occurred to you that "bad genes" is awfully convenient? Great way to blame the victim. Great way for polluters to dodge culpability. What if she was sensitized by exposure to toxic chemicals? Why isn't her brother, whose genes are almost the same, afflicted?
Like obesity, allergies have really increased in recent decades, and we aren't sure why. There's this idea that we've taken our desire for hygiene too far, and aren't letting our children get enough exposure to dirt. Possibly parents are more protective of girls than boys, which might explain why the sister is afflicted but the brother isn't. Or, it could be chemicals we've introduced to the environment. Another possibility is makeup, of all things, but actually, all kinds of dubious chemicals have been put in makeup. Look how long it took to decide that BPA is definitely a problem, thanks to interference from business interests that irresponsibly put profit ahead of public health. Past history isn't encouraging either, just read up on the Radium Girls. The tobacco industry is notorious for denying and interfering with science. We've had DDT, and lead, and asbestos problems. Took decades of fighting to get everyone to stop using those substances, and we're still not done. We've removed lead from gasoline and paint. We still have some lead in our plumbing, in particular, faucets. Predictably, manufacturers claim it's perfectly safe, that there's no evidence it's harmful, while quietly working to suppress evidence. Quite often, banned substances pop up again in poor countries with loose regulation. Just this week we had reports of carbendazim in orange juice from Brazil.
I prefer a simpler definition: universal machines, in the sense of the Church-Turing thesis. Of course, we say that computers are not alive. But we define life in a way that excludes computers, at least, current computers.
It is surprisingly easy to support universal computation. One might think it takes all kinds of complicated logic and machinery, but this is not so. Some two input logic gates, such as NAND, are enough. Conway's Game of Life is a simple cellular automaton that can do universal computation. It could be argued that the environment alone is not enough, however "life" forms capable of "reproducing" in that environment are still simple, needing only a few thousand cells. The Glider Gun, possibly the simplest producer of moving life forms, needs only a few hundred cells.
Anything that can support simple logic could host life. We mostly look outside our solar system, but we've by no means exhausted the possibilities for life right here in our backyard.
Reproduction's potential works against peace. Populations can grow exponentially. Given anything less than infinite traveling speeds, the area any population can expand into grows at only polynomial rates. Expanding into space cannot solve this problem. Space is, astonishingly, not big enough. Or, rather, the space we could reach, even with typical storybook FTL propulsion, is not big enough. If we don't restrain ourselves somehow, the options are grim: War, massive famine, or lemming like suicide marches.
Life has been dealing with this problem ever since life started. Running amok until the environment is completely exhausted doesn't happen all that often. That tends to be too damaging, which made it easy for better strategies to evolve.
PBS might also support it. Last month, the News Hour ran a story on piracy. They interviewed two "opposing" parties, the Open Internet Coalition and the MPAA, whose only difference was how much copying should be regulated: a lot, or a lot more. That was the most biased, unbalanced, and stupidly wrong coverage I'd ever seen from PBS. I thought they were a cut above the rest of the mainstream media. They weren't, not that time.
I think the only reason this historical approach has potential is because historic computers were much simpler, had much lower barriers of entry.
I started on the computers of the 80's, the TRS-80, Commodore 64, and most of all, the Apple ][+. In the Apple's ROM was BASIC and a disassembler. Its default environment was a BASIC command line. BASIC didn't use line numbers just for GOTOs. The line numbers were necessary to support the development environment. If you wanted to change line 500, at the prompt you just typed in a new line for 500, starting with "500" of course. Simple and direct. Software companies tried to protect their code from exposure, but really could not. Was fairly easy to hack in and look at any source code you wanted. If that wasn't enough, there was a ton of good documentation for the Apple, including the famous book, Beneath Apple DOS. Interestingly, when ProDOS, the successor to Apple DOS 3.3, came out, they wrote a book for that too, but said ProDOS was too big to cover in the detail given in the previous work. That's right, too big. Too big to document. ProDOS is tiny compared to the Linux kernel. As if the mere size of the Linux kernel isn't daunting enough, it changes on a daily basis.
Today, the typical OS boots straight to a GUI, and from there we have to set up a development environment. Compiled languages keep source code away from the users even when the authors don't want to deny us the source. The difference is that on an Apple ][, one could turn on the computer, type in 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" and then RUN. On a modern PC, one has to start an editor, type in the program, and save to a file. Depending on the language, compile it, or add a special line to the start, in some shell script language, so the correct interpreter will be called. Then run some sort of file manager, find that executable, and run it. The high status and place development used to have is gone. Now development is just another app, and terminals are antiquated relics that just won't quite go away because they're still too useful. GUI is king now, not development environments.
The gas price spike of 2008 most certainly did change what vehicles we buy! SUVs prices were plummeting while they piled up in inventory and used car lots. Fuel sippers were commanding hefty markups when they could be found at all. Auto manufacturers were caught flatfooted because they didn't have enough of the right sort of vehicles to meet the shift in demand. Every one saw huge drops in sales, except Honda, the king of fuel economy. You might even remember that GM went bankrupt, and it was in part because they relied on sales of big vehicles with big markups.
As for that tired old argument that "it will hurt the economy" or the poor, no, it won't. The opposition trots that old dog out every single time anyone suggests anything they don't like. We'll adjust just fine. We're overweight, not starving. We could do with a bit less. And it's not like saving a bit more fuel is hard, that we're pushing the limits of efficiency, far from it.
Can't equate loss of a sale with theft. There are many crimes. Theft is only one kind of crime, only one class of ways to illicitly obtain things of value. Many things can happen to a car that have little or nothing to do with theft. Here's a list:
If someone threatens to smash your car unless you pay them, they've committed extortion, not theft. If someone actually takes a sledgehammer to your car, they have committed vandalism, not theft. If your legit purchase of repairs or another car somehow benefits them, perhaps because they have interests in repair shops or car dealerships, they are running a racket, not a theft ring.
If you don't make your car payment on time, you are a delinquent, not a thief. You have not stolen the car; they know where you live. They have various remedies such as charging late fees and interest, all the way up to repossession and taking you to court to collect damages.
If someone sells you a miracle gas saving technology for your car, and you install it correctly and it does not work as promised, they've committed fraud, not theft. They tricked you into voluntarily parting with some of your money, they did not take it from you without your consent.
Similarly, if someone makes a copy of a car, and sells it to you on the understanding that it is genuine, they have committed counterfeiting, not theft. If they make it clear to you and everyone that it is a copy, then it may be no crime at all has been committed. They might have infringed on some intellectual property, but if so, that's not theft. Or it may be that it is not protected because its protection has expired, or it was released to the public domain. Replicas of antiquated and obsolete items, complete with the word "replica" stamped somewhere on it, are quite common.
If someone tells you of a fantastic opportunity at some location, and you drive there and are ambushed and end up losing your car to others, your correspondent may be entirely innocent and have no connection, or may be merely an accomplice who leaves the heavy work to others.
If someone takes a photo of your car, no crime has been committed. If the photo shows you doing something illegal while driving it, and they demand that you pay them money or they'll report you to the authorities or your employer or spouse, they've committed blackmail, not theft.
Witnessing a theft and keeping silent is not theft.
If your car is wrecked because of something some other car did, there are all kinds of causes. The other driver could have been drunk, talking on a cellphone, or running a red light. Or the other car could have had mechanical problems, or maybe the road had a slick spot or pothole that caused it all, or maybe there was a dense fog. None of these things have anything to do with theft.
When someone does not buy a Ferrari, even if it's because they could get a free copy, it's not theft.
Some keep trying to ram this incorrect oversimplification that copying is theft down everyone's throat. Why? Inflexible thinking of the "everything looks like a nail to a man with a hammer" variety, or a hidden agenda based on a notion, true or false, that your own livelihood may depend on copyright, or something else?
Centrist? They think they'll be somewhere in the middle? This 1 dimensional view of politics is a problem itself. What positions will they take on our hard problems, problems such as the Great Recession, corruption, the national debt, and climate change? The usual denial and spin, same as both major parties? At least things seem fairly good on the foreign affairs front right now, no need for any drastic policy changes there.
I don't know for sure what we should do about it all, but for starters, fix our tax system, starting with the gas tax. Make it 19% of the price of a gallon, instead of 18.4 cents per gallon. Phase it in over a year or two, rather than shock everyone with an abrupt change. The gas tax should have been a percentage from the start, not a fixed amount. At one stroke, that helps with the deficit and climate change problems, and contrary to the knee jerk reaction, would primarily fall on Big Oil, not the consumer. Big Oil knows they would have to eat most of that tax. And they certainly have the profits to do so. If they try to pass it all on, we suddenly become more interested in fuel economy. Next, close the loopholes, make the rich and the big pay their fair share. Especially, scrap that special 15% rate on stocks. And that's just the start, will need a lot more than that to clean up Big Finance. Jail terms for those Wall Street crooks, clawbacks, and an end to golden parachutes. But I know much of that is politically impossible, can't be done without faux screams of agony about how that will wreck the economy, starve our children, spoil our morals, etc. Well, perhaps not doing this will ultimately wreck the country.
People want to vote for unicorns and rainbows, not hard choices.
Try this analogy. How would it work if we "deregulated" football and hockey? Trust the players to regulate themselves. No more penalties. No more central authority to impose rules.
Of course it would be complete chaos. While the dumber players were overdosing on steroids, the more cunning ones would be figuring ways to spike the opposing team's drinks with something debilitating, rigging the playing field for instance by widening the distance between the goal posts the visitors must defend, loading up with ringers to brawl with and injure the other players the next time a bench clearing fight breaks out, and of course, provoking such a fight. It wouldn't be sporting, wouldn't be a game anymore.
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A while back I was curious about the origin of the customary way of logging in by first entering a user ID/name, then entering in your password. Where was this first done? Why that order? Why not ask for the password first, or ask for only the password? Maybe it used to be done differently? I knew of Multics, and thought there might be older OSes. A bit of searching turned up CTSS, and the source code. I looked at enough of the CTSS source to see that it did the login 2 step we all know.
What I'm not sure of is how it handled incorrect input. Haven't gone through the source enough to suss that out. I think if a nonexistent user ID was given, those early systems would not ask for a password, they would reject the input on the spot. Today, systems always ask for passwords before rejecting a login attempt, so that a cracker can't use the login to find valid user IDs.
User IDs were not supposed to be secret information suitable for use in authentication. You kind of needed to know them in order to send messages to other users. Now people are frequently advised to keep their usernames secret, and the username has degenerated into being part of the password.
CTSS may be the origin of the login 2 step that we still do today. That's a legacy I feel has been uncritically accepted for far too long.
Thanks! That could explain why I saw btrfs processes using so much CPU time. btrfs-endio sometimes used more than Firefox itself.
Thing I don't like about the ext's is they're not very space efficient, and that can make a difference on tiny hard drives such as the 8G this system has. Reiserfs is pretty good with space, and reiser4 was even better. Been wishing for btrfs to mature quickly, as reiser4 is probably dead. I found at least 1 gotcha with xfs. If you don't tune the parameters (block size and such), deletion of a large tree such as the Linux kernel source can take a very long time. Haven't tried any other file systems.
And you might want to consider progress per population rather than years. I expect technological advance is more even when based on "man hours".
There are all kinds of other factors you have not mentioned in your simplistic correlation. Why did Europeans from 1500 onwards advance past the rest of the world? One idea is plurality. Because Europe was politically fragmented, no one political entity could retard growth and advancement, as seems such entities are wont to do. And IP laws? Probably not.
In fact, IP laws worked against progress. IP laws are exactly the sort of tool that monolithic political entities use to maintain a status quo. The church was an early promoter of IP law, in order to maintain a monopoly on the Bible. They were very anxious to stamp out heresies, and one way heresies could arise was through the distribution of poor translations. They were slow to produce translations themselves, preferring instead that people learn Latin. Does that sound familiar, just like the RIAA's slowness to sell mp3s rather than CDs? The church cut deals with printer's guilds, so that no one could buy their services to print Bibles without church authorization. They even burned a few people at the stake for writing and printing unauthorized translations of the Bible. But that was too much for the public, and the church was forced to back off. The modern equivalent of a burning would seem to be an agonizingly long trial ending in a judgment of millions in damages for allegedly sharing as few as 24 songs online. It is rather ironic that today the Bible is often held up as an example of a work that should not be protected by copyright because 1) it is definitely too old, and 2) it belongs to everyone.
You better believe there's some conniving going on. It shouldn't be so easy for workers to falsify information. If it is easier than it ought to be, as seems likely, that's almost certainly because the employer purposely make a hash of the monitoring system, and neglected to fix obvious flaws. Even just being too cheap to do any maintenance can provide plenty of opportunities to cheat as the system slowly breaks down. They wink at the employees after putting on a fine show of concern and safety. To make sure everyone gets the message, they hoke up totally unrelated reasons to fire a few honest ones. No one says anything explicit; the message is all between the lines. The most cunning part is that if the situation is investigated, they can blame it all on cheating employees, and might get away with that.
As an exercise in insanity, I tried to install a modern Linux distro on an old Pentium II system with only 128M of RAM. Used btrfs for the heck of it. It was all going well until I tried to run Firefox 9.0.1. Thrashed that system mercilessly. Never mind actually showing a web page, just starting up blank was extremely slow. Sometimes I saw the "unresponsive script" popups on Firefox's own Javascript. I hacked out everything that used memory, dumping the LXDE desktop environment for a plain old window manager (jwm), and this helped, but it's not enough. Turned off images and disabled Javascript. It still thrashes swap.
Chrome didn't do any better. Firefox 3.5 worked okay on an even smaller system (96M of RAM). Version 3.6.8 + LXDE works fine on a system with 192M of RAM. Here's hoping their MemShrink effort scores more big wins.
Nice idea. Since copyright is enshrined in the Constitution, it could take an amendment to fix matters. IANAL, but I tried to write just such an amendment. Not easy. Found myself throwing in statements to counter every weasel that I could think of. There was also a problem of scope. Should it forbid much of what is in a typical EULA? What should it change in patent law? Trademark law? An elementary dodge is playing around with language. Gets tough to nail things down when there is so much disagreement over simple definitions. You could outlaw copyright, and find that it still exists and is practiced, with the only change being to the names, to get around the law. So I started with a section of definitions. When the whole thing got rather long, I went back and ripped out redundancies.
Think anyone would be interested in reading it? I haven't posted it anywhere. I don't know. Even if it could be passed, it just doesn't seem that any amendment can stop the campaign against the Age of Information. Time and generational changes will eventually stop that, not government fiat. After that we can see about an amendment. Slavery was amended out of the constitution after the Civil War, not during or before.
More like theft? But the action still is not theft. See, there's this website called "Wikileaks" not "Wikithefts", and no one has any problem comprehending the name. I don't hear anyone saying it ought to change its name either. Why do people continue to accept this incorrect characterization and conflation? You even say "piracy is completely different". Then why are you trying to say this action isn't completely different from theft? It's a leak, not a theft. It's hard to say that this even really counts as a leak. Were others being told what the code was for? Is it worthy of being considered a valuable secret? Doesn't sound like it.
What I see is the typical hysteria of keepers of secrets who have been compromised, or think they've been compromised, or feel someone has demonstrated a way in which they could be compromised. They're very free with that hot button concept, theft. Ironically, the fuss has likely attracted the attention of the very people they wanted to keep in the dark. They've triggered a Streisand Effect. One of the more annoying things about government work was their desire to classify everything as secret. Mostly it was paranoia about keeping their own butts covered, hiding problems or favoritism behind a veil of secrecy, but it was also paranoia that anything could be valuable information. They tried to lock down basic science. You'd have some idiot bureaucrats who, after being introduced to a basic algorithm, something simple enough that they could understand it without a lot of study and training, such as Quicksort, and being impressed with its power, would demand that it be considered a national secret. No enemies were to know that their fantastic project relied upon the awesome power of Quicksort, or know of Quicksort itself! That kind of crap makes collaboration impossible. No one can share anything with anyone else. Remember the fuss over encryption technology. Netscape had to have 2 versions of their browser, and was not allowed to let foreigners download the version with stronger encryption. A t-shirt with a few lines of code counted as a munition. The government harassed the author of PGP.
The poor bastard who is accused will be railroaded if the Fed has its way. I hope for his sake that the courts are calmer and cooler. Sandy Berger's punishment, for what was probably far more valuable information, was largely to his reputation. He was fined $50000 (probably peanuts to him), and put on probation and ordered to do some community service. No jail time.
You talk as if the guilt of sites such as The Pirate Bay is beyond doubt, and as if there's no question that copying is a vile crime. Your choice of language is poor. "Loop hole"? "Exploit"? No, that is not the way to characterize what they do. Do search engines also "exploit loop holes" whenever copyrighted material appears in their search results? Of course not!
People are lying? Everyone is a liar, except you, huh? And you're "shocked, I tell you, shocked!" Your world view needs some major revising if you seriously think that most people are lying, cheating scum. We didn't set out to engage in crime. Special interests twisted the law to make most of us into criminals. That's a problem with the law, not our morals. Those interests are the criminals, not the public. It used to be a crime to criticize the king. Today, we have the right to Free Speech. Some day, copying will not be a crime, and then what will you say? Just like that, we're not lying, thieving criminals any more.
You shouldn't have to rush into court to stop your website from poofing. We have a long tradition of "innocent until proven guilty". No, the onus and burden should be on the accuser. Do you really not understand why? A website such as Wikipedia would be buried in accusations. There is no way they could possibly respond to every accusation in a timely fashion, and we'd very quickly reach that "last measure" because they didn't "cooperate". No one has to prove that they didn't commit a crime, or we'd never have time for anything else.
I'm in Texas. Cornyn's site is also struggling. I managed to send him a note telling him to stop supporting PIPA.
Balanced? Balanced?! Get a clue about just how bad this whole SOPA and PIPA thing is. Or are you the kind of guy who thinks he got a balanced and fair deal if you persuade a rapist to use a condom when he anal rapes you?
These stupid bastards are doing nothing less than threatening the Internet. And not even intentionally, but only as collateral damage towards a goal that cannot be reached. I agree with the GP. Should this become law, there is not a single legitimate website that will be able to stay online when the flood of accusations starts. This is not a matter for calm deliberation, this is a clear and present danger to the livelihood of everyone in the IT business.
Oh, the "hostile environment" idea. Any environment where the boys grossly outnumber the girls is automatically hostile to the girls. I should think however, that nerdy though we are, we are a tiny bit more respectful than other boys clubs such as the military, and the average sport. But maybe we are worse because we're so starved for a bit of affection. And we certainly don't have neat uniforms.
Many single women act as if just looking at them is some kind of horrible crime, and are so ready to see most guys as creeps. She's only seen some guy from across a room for a moment, but she's already formed a first impression and just knows that he's a creep. Saw what a slob he is and how his eyes wandered over some cleavage. That kind of attitude tends towards the self-fulfilling. Puts our backs up, and brings out a bit of snark. She expected a hostile environment, and turned it into one. Personally, I don't like being around anyone, male or female, who acts like the lot of us ought to be banished to a leper colony. Note in another post the typecast dig at RMS for supposedly being smelly. There's the related attitude of viewing us all as inferiors and incompetents in social matters. Insulting, really. The mere slipping out of such an attitude can hardly be considered a display of competence at socializing! Maybe single women have to act that way to stem the deluge of propositions they get. Married women are much more relaxed.
Anyway, no one wonders why women compete separately from men in most sports, or has much of a problem with that. And I hope doesn't use that as a reason to come to a blanket conclusion that women are inferior. Physical strength is such a small part of any person, and isn't a pure positive, it comes with costs in many other areas, otherwise we should have all evolved into muscle bound hulks. But why is a decidedly non-physical activity such as programming so hugely skewed? Is it the social aspect? "Hostile environment" doesn't seem a sufficient explanation, not when programming can be done, and perhaps is better done in solitude.
Since so many in this thread talked about ancient history, I'll mention one. Does anyone remember the option to browse without images, from back in the day? Sometime around Netscape Navigator 2? Used to be a rather prominent option, but somewhere along the line it was quietly dropped off the menus.
MS is as evil as ever. You are having doubts about this? Think they turned over a new leaf after 2005? Then consider these:
2006-2007: The draconian DRM of Windows Vista
2006-2008: OOXML. MS bribes and threatens the ISO to get the purposely bad and encumbered OOXML format declared a standard.
2008: EU fines MS for failing to comply with a 2004 antitrust order. MS has a long history of paying lip service to court orders while evading the spirit of the findings.
2011-2012: Secure Boot: Windows 8 may be designed in a way that prevents other OSes from booting.
2012: LG caves, and will pay MS to license technologies supposedly infringed by Android.
They're still rent seeking, controlling, monopolistic scum.
You're the one engaging in Chicken Little antics-- about Slashdot's alleged Chicken Little antics. You think SOPA isn't any big deal? Maybe you're right. But this isn't about only SOPA, this is about the climate, attitudes, ignorance, and problems that made it possible for such horrible ideas to even come before Congress. SOPA is just the latest battle in this war, the War Against Information. We know quite well that even if SOPA and PIPA crash and burn like a lead Hindenburg, powerful interests will be back for another round, and another. They're fools who think to create their own little corner of control to profit from, and who don't see how that could come back to bite them, and all of us. They evidently think they have real chances of putting this sort of thing over on the public, and, sadly, they're right.
This war isn't won until nobody but a few cranks on the fringes gives such outrageous ideas the time of day. When they have less credibility than the average Nigerian scammer, then the war is won. Nobody would seriously try to pass legislation that, for instance, declares that Christianity is the official religion of the US, and outlaws mosques, synagogues, etc. Sure, there are people who would like to do just that, but they know such a thing doesn't have (pardon the joke) a prayer. Enough people believe that separation of church and state is a good idea to see to that. "In God we trust" is on the currency, but that was a sop that in no way affects how the country operates. We don't yet have similar principles established for information. The public isn't too sure where the lines should be. If the US blows it on this, that won't end in our destruction. But, it could very well put the US in decline. Other countries might seize the opportunity to lure away the best and brightest minds.
GoDaddy got the message. I'm sure they still want to support SOPA, but now they know they'd better not if they don't want to lose even more customers. Maybe we can't move MS and Apple because they're too big and get too much support from the uninformed general public, but sometimes we can make the likes of GoDaddy blink.
No other solutions? Guaranteed working conditions are NOT necessary. We can have decent working conditions with much softer approaches than naked and clumsy dictation to employers. Make the environment worker friendly, so that businesses have to compete for workers. How? Well, for one, health care that is not tied to employment. The US has tried for universal health care many times over the last 100 years, and each time it was scuttled because businesses saw that lack as leverage they could use against their employees, and wanted to preserve their power.
Then all this crap about denying vacations, paying peanuts, and looking upon financial responsibility and independence as a threat and employees who practice that as "flight risks", would be, quite simply, bad business. Give employees some realistic options, make businesses actually have to compete for employees, and they will not be able to get away with the stunning amount of crap they can pull now. We fought the Civil War over the issue of slavery. One thing that conflict showed is that free people make better workers than slaves. So long as the Union had the will, the Confederacy despite having more land and an easier climate never had a real chance of winning that war. In large part that's because a significant part of their manpower came from slaves who could hardly be expected to be enthusiastic workers let alone fighters. Sure, they had a much lower population even when slaves are fully included, but why was their population so much lower? They had no chance of winning on the battlefields, and only poor chances of winning by other means such as obtaining foreign aid, or demoralizing or fatiguing the Union into giving up. Brilliant generalship could never be enough to make up for the fundamental imbalance. Their slave economy system simply was not as good at harnessing the potential of the land. That's a big reason why they were so badly outnumbered. Their whole war effort was doomed before they started, and they knew it.
Yet here we are today, busting unions like crazy, doing all we can to beat workers down into indentured servitude, and vilifying the unemployed as lazy losers, because many of us have been sold on the idea that this will lead to greater productivity.
I've tried running Windows with an ext2 file system. Windows can read other file systems with help from drivers, but it's never 100% compatible. When I tried it, it was also a pain to use, because you had to remember to manually start the driver after booting up. And still need NTFS or FAT to boot.
MS of course prefers that it not be easy to use a different file system. I keep hoping their loser business strategies will eventually send them into bankruptcy. It would serve them right. But there is still an amazing amount of blind love for MS out there. Apple also gets way more love than they deserve.
You ought to feel heartless, for that. That was a smug diagnosis that you have no way of knowing is correct. Has it occurred to you that "bad genes" is awfully convenient? Great way to blame the victim. Great way for polluters to dodge culpability. What if she was sensitized by exposure to toxic chemicals? Why isn't her brother, whose genes are almost the same, afflicted?
Like obesity, allergies have really increased in recent decades, and we aren't sure why. There's this idea that we've taken our desire for hygiene too far, and aren't letting our children get enough exposure to dirt. Possibly parents are more protective of girls than boys, which might explain why the sister is afflicted but the brother isn't. Or, it could be chemicals we've introduced to the environment. Another possibility is makeup, of all things, but actually, all kinds of dubious chemicals have been put in makeup. Look how long it took to decide that BPA is definitely a problem, thanks to interference from business interests that irresponsibly put profit ahead of public health. Past history isn't encouraging either, just read up on the Radium Girls. The tobacco industry is notorious for denying and interfering with science. We've had DDT, and lead, and asbestos problems. Took decades of fighting to get everyone to stop using those substances, and we're still not done. We've removed lead from gasoline and paint. We still have some lead in our plumbing, in particular, faucets. Predictably, manufacturers claim it's perfectly safe, that there's no evidence it's harmful, while quietly working to suppress evidence. Quite often, banned substances pop up again in poor countries with loose regulation. Just this week we had reports of carbendazim in orange juice from Brazil.
I prefer a simpler definition: universal machines, in the sense of the Church-Turing thesis. Of course, we say that computers are not alive. But we define life in a way that excludes computers, at least, current computers.
It is surprisingly easy to support universal computation. One might think it takes all kinds of complicated logic and machinery, but this is not so. Some two input logic gates, such as NAND, are enough. Conway's Game of Life is a simple cellular automaton that can do universal computation. It could be argued that the environment alone is not enough, however "life" forms capable of "reproducing" in that environment are still simple, needing only a few thousand cells. The Glider Gun, possibly the simplest producer of moving life forms, needs only a few hundred cells.
Anything that can support simple logic could host life. We mostly look outside our solar system, but we've by no means exhausted the possibilities for life right here in our backyard.
Reproduction's potential works against peace. Populations can grow exponentially. Given anything less than infinite traveling speeds, the area any population can expand into grows at only polynomial rates. Expanding into space cannot solve this problem. Space is, astonishingly, not big enough. Or, rather, the space we could reach, even with typical storybook FTL propulsion, is not big enough. If we don't restrain ourselves somehow, the options are grim: War, massive famine, or lemming like suicide marches.
Life has been dealing with this problem ever since life started. Running amok until the environment is completely exhausted doesn't happen all that often. That tends to be too damaging, which made it easy for better strategies to evolve.
PBS might also support it. Last month, the News Hour ran a story on piracy. They interviewed two "opposing" parties, the Open Internet Coalition and the MPAA, whose only difference was how much copying should be regulated: a lot, or a lot more. That was the most biased, unbalanced, and stupidly wrong coverage I'd ever seen from PBS. I thought they were a cut above the rest of the mainstream media. They weren't, not that time.
I think the only reason this historical approach has potential is because historic computers were much simpler, had much lower barriers of entry.
I started on the computers of the 80's, the TRS-80, Commodore 64, and most of all, the Apple ][+. In the Apple's ROM was BASIC and a disassembler. Its default environment was a BASIC command line. BASIC didn't use line numbers just for GOTOs. The line numbers were necessary to support the development environment. If you wanted to change line 500, at the prompt you just typed in a new line for 500, starting with "500" of course. Simple and direct. Software companies tried to protect their code from exposure, but really could not. Was fairly easy to hack in and look at any source code you wanted. If that wasn't enough, there was a ton of good documentation for the Apple, including the famous book, Beneath Apple DOS. Interestingly, when ProDOS, the successor to Apple DOS 3.3, came out, they wrote a book for that too, but said ProDOS was too big to cover in the detail given in the previous work. That's right, too big. Too big to document. ProDOS is tiny compared to the Linux kernel. As if the mere size of the Linux kernel isn't daunting enough, it changes on a daily basis.
Today, the typical OS boots straight to a GUI, and from there we have to set up a development environment. Compiled languages keep source code away from the users even when the authors don't want to deny us the source. The difference is that on an Apple ][, one could turn on the computer, type in 10 PRINT "HELLO WORLD" and then RUN. On a modern PC, one has to start an editor, type in the program, and save to a file. Depending on the language, compile it, or add a special line to the start, in some shell script language, so the correct interpreter will be called. Then run some sort of file manager, find that executable, and run it. The high status and place development used to have is gone. Now development is just another app, and terminals are antiquated relics that just won't quite go away because they're still too useful. GUI is king now, not development environments.
Is your memory so short?
The gas price spike of 2008 most certainly did change what vehicles we buy! SUVs prices were plummeting while they piled up in inventory and used car lots. Fuel sippers were commanding hefty markups when they could be found at all. Auto manufacturers were caught flatfooted because they didn't have enough of the right sort of vehicles to meet the shift in demand. Every one saw huge drops in sales, except Honda, the king of fuel economy. You might even remember that GM went bankrupt, and it was in part because they relied on sales of big vehicles with big markups.
As for that tired old argument that "it will hurt the economy" or the poor, no, it won't. The opposition trots that old dog out every single time anyone suggests anything they don't like. We'll adjust just fine. We're overweight, not starving. We could do with a bit less. And it's not like saving a bit more fuel is hard, that we're pushing the limits of efficiency, far from it.
Can't equate loss of a sale with theft. There are many crimes. Theft is only one kind of crime, only one class of ways to illicitly obtain things of value. Many things can happen to a car that have little or nothing to do with theft. Here's a list:
If someone threatens to smash your car unless you pay them, they've committed extortion, not theft. If someone actually takes a sledgehammer to your car, they have committed vandalism, not theft. If your legit purchase of repairs or another car somehow benefits them, perhaps because they have interests in repair shops or car dealerships, they are running a racket, not a theft ring.
If you don't make your car payment on time, you are a delinquent, not a thief. You have not stolen the car; they know where you live. They have various remedies such as charging late fees and interest, all the way up to repossession and taking you to court to collect damages.
If someone sells you a miracle gas saving technology for your car, and you install it correctly and it does not work as promised, they've committed fraud, not theft. They tricked you into voluntarily parting with some of your money, they did not take it from you without your consent.
Similarly, if someone makes a copy of a car, and sells it to you on the understanding that it is genuine, they have committed counterfeiting, not theft. If they make it clear to you and everyone that it is a copy, then it may be no crime at all has been committed. They might have infringed on some intellectual property, but if so, that's not theft. Or it may be that it is not protected because its protection has expired, or it was released to the public domain. Replicas of antiquated and obsolete items, complete with the word "replica" stamped somewhere on it, are quite common.
If someone tells you of a fantastic opportunity at some location, and you drive there and are ambushed and end up losing your car to others, your correspondent may be entirely innocent and have no connection, or may be merely an accomplice who leaves the heavy work to others.
If someone takes a photo of your car, no crime has been committed. If the photo shows you doing something illegal while driving it, and they demand that you pay them money or they'll report you to the authorities or your employer or spouse, they've committed blackmail, not theft.
Witnessing a theft and keeping silent is not theft.
If your car is wrecked because of something some other car did, there are all kinds of causes. The other driver could have been drunk, talking on a cellphone, or running a red light. Or the other car could have had mechanical problems, or maybe the road had a slick spot or pothole that caused it all, or maybe there was a dense fog. None of these things have anything to do with theft.
When someone does not buy a Ferrari, even if it's because they could get a free copy, it's not theft.
Some keep trying to ram this incorrect oversimplification that copying is theft down everyone's throat. Why? Inflexible thinking of the "everything looks like a nail to a man with a hammer" variety, or a hidden agenda based on a notion, true or false, that your own livelihood may depend on copyright, or something else?
Centrist? They think they'll be somewhere in the middle? This 1 dimensional view of politics is a problem itself. What positions will they take on our hard problems, problems such as the Great Recession, corruption, the national debt, and climate change? The usual denial and spin, same as both major parties? At least things seem fairly good on the foreign affairs front right now, no need for any drastic policy changes there.
I don't know for sure what we should do about it all, but for starters, fix our tax system, starting with the gas tax. Make it 19% of the price of a gallon, instead of 18.4 cents per gallon. Phase it in over a year or two, rather than shock everyone with an abrupt change. The gas tax should have been a percentage from the start, not a fixed amount. At one stroke, that helps with the deficit and climate change problems, and contrary to the knee jerk reaction, would primarily fall on Big Oil, not the consumer. Big Oil knows they would have to eat most of that tax. And they certainly have the profits to do so. If they try to pass it all on, we suddenly become more interested in fuel economy. Next, close the loopholes, make the rich and the big pay their fair share. Especially, scrap that special 15% rate on stocks. And that's just the start, will need a lot more than that to clean up Big Finance. Jail terms for those Wall Street crooks, clawbacks, and an end to golden parachutes. But I know much of that is politically impossible, can't be done without faux screams of agony about how that will wreck the economy, starve our children, spoil our morals, etc. Well, perhaps not doing this will ultimately wreck the country.
People want to vote for unicorns and rainbows, not hard choices.
Try this analogy. How would it work if we "deregulated" football and hockey? Trust the players to regulate themselves. No more penalties. No more central authority to impose rules.
Of course it would be complete chaos. While the dumber players were overdosing on steroids, the more cunning ones would be figuring ways to spike the opposing team's drinks with something debilitating, rigging the playing field for instance by widening the distance between the goal posts the visitors must defend, loading up with ringers to brawl with and injure the other players the next time a bench clearing fight breaks out, and of course, provoking such a fight. It wouldn't be sporting, wouldn't be a game anymore.