Actually, that model loses a lot of functionality. Applications rarely put the entire data on the clipboard - they write a stub there and wait for the paste operation, when they dump in the data in the format requested by the app that is receiving it. If you have to write your clipboard model so that you need to put every conceivable format on the clipboard then you seriously reduce your system's usability.
Essentially, security and usability are often at odds and you need to chose one over the other. That's just a fact of life that extends way beyond computer systems.
Nothing says the clipboard can't be a pipe that gets connected on one end to the copying program and on the other end to the pasting program, or even a secure RPC handler set up to send and receive data of different formats. The important point is that *access* to the clipboard is controlled directly by the user via the OS, instead of the clipboard being fully accessable to every application.
Security and usability are not at odds. In fact, because of the lack of security, people are having usability issues with viruses, worms, botnets, and keyloggers. What I've described so far does not need any user interaction with the security system to be able to cut and paste, unless of course the user wants to do something smart like protect passwords by setting a higher security level on the clipboard when copying from a certain program, like a password safe, and then prompting for a dialog when pasting just to make sure that they really mean to paste their password where they clicked. Security can increase usability by helping the user stay secure instead of forcing them to be constantly thinking about the security of their actions. Even on Linux I have to protect sensitive passwords by not leaving them laying around in the command history or visible on a console or copying them into web pages via the clipboard. I don't like thinking about having to use the same passwords from Windows boxes.
There is a problem with this study: it measures shareholder return as a percentage, but compensation as a dollar value. If a CEO grows a $10B company by 1%, he generates $100M for shareholders. If a CEO grows a $100M company by 10%, he generates only $10M for shareholders. The study implies that the second CEO deserves to be paid more, because his company had a larger percentage return. But one could certainly make a good argument that the first CEO deserves to be paid more, because he generated a larger absolute return to shareholders.
False. If the 10% CEO ran the $10B company, he would generate $1B for the shareholders of that company, so he's still 10 times better than the 1% CEO no matter where he works. Basically, the market will simply tend for the 10% CEO to work at larger companies because they can afford to pay more. Unfortunately, CEOs are not plug and play. They have to know the industry and have contacts to be effective, so it may be that a 10% CEO is still better off at a $100M company.
This would break copy-n-paste and a million other things. You don't really want this.
You mean the copy and paste where any program can pull and push anything it wants to and from the clipboard at any time? Oh yeah, that's a great idea. A much better method would be for the clipboard to be a resource managed by the OS, essentially just a FIFO with a backing store. To copy or paste something, the user would activate the function at the OS level (it doesn't matter how, it could be a button click or key combination) and the currently active program would receive the signal to copy or paste along with the capability to perform the operation. The capability would be limited in duration and to one use, with an indicator to let the user know when the operation was finished.
No functionality is lost, and in fact every program has to respect the copy and paste commands that you use (ctrl-v versus shift-insert versus ctrl-y versus right-click-paste, etc...), and no program can violate the security policy of the clipboard.
Do YOU want to go through and tell the system what files each and every program you want to run may access?
Because I sure as hell don't...
Thankfully, you don't really need to. Should a program be able to read your letters to your mom? Not unless you want it to. System libraries? Sure, with read only access. Basically, the only rights a program should have when it starts are basic read only rights to the system files it needs to run, and nothing else. If you want to open a document and print it, you can grant permission to that document and that printer. Granting permissions does not need to be difficult if it's structured properly. The biggest problem is designing a secure interface for using the operating system. Ideally, the operating system would provide open/save/delete/print menus directly, which would automatically grant the necessary permissions. If you have a letter you want to print, you select the file containing the letter, and tell the OS to print it. Call it object orientation or type awareness or whatever you want, but the OS should be configured so that every type of object has a list of possible actions that can be taken on it, and for each action a program called to perform that action. Permissions are defined on the actions that can be performed by a given program on a given object. Defaults can be specified for objects, object types, programs, etc. so that you rarely have to manually choose which permissions to grant to programs.
The security model is built on "window stations" -- If you put a privileged window into an unprivileged window station, then you have made a configuration error. Period.
Each application should get its own secure window station to run in, then. I don't want Claria or any other software running on a desktop to be able to see any other application, because that allows unprivileged software to act as a keylogger. That's just unbelievably stupid. X probably has the same problems. Basically, applications should not run as the user who's using them, instead they should run with limited permissions and only access files the user has granted permission to. What modern operating systems need is a capability approach to security instead of a user+acl approach. Programs are not users, so it stands to reason that individual programs should not have the same rights as users.
But as one "super-psychic" points out, even scientists now say that matter-as-we-know-it only makes up between 4 and 7% of the universe. The rest is labeled as "dark matter" and "dark energy". They don't know what exactly it is, but that plain matter is inadequate to explain the measurements taken by cosmologists.
Mua ha ha ha! I bet 300 years ago it was the phlogiston and aether that would explain psychics and the paranormal.
... And pointed out that "dark energy" interpenetrates everything, and is the carrier medium for experiences previously labeled "extra-sensory".
Dark energy, by its nature, is difficult to detect because it does not interact with most of our physical matter, therefore it would not interact with brains, either. Or, if it did, it shouldn't matter if the brain was alive or dead, or from an animal or a person, since no real cellular differences have been observed. Likewise, if brains were somehow connected to dark energy, one would imagine that toenails and arses would likewise be affected, in that perhaps one's toenail would twitch to the tune of another's arse.. Of course, any sort of paranormal activity is highly resistive to any sort of imperical testing. For instance, cars, guns, airplanes, death, taxes, and statistics work for everyone, regardless of what they may personally believe. Generally, the universe is like that, e.g. it depends very little upon the organization of molecules within someone's mind and instead is driven by its own rules and laws. If anything, the paranormal is just a simple proof that most people are stupid when it comes to statistics.
(the basis of his talk was that "we need new words, because there are experiences that don't have a label, and the words we do have limit us to concepts that are 200 years out of date" Or something like that...)
Funny, maybe he should try German... But really folks, after thousands of years of psychics and languages, you'd think *some* word would stick to these vague, untestable experiences. You know, words like "charlatan", "trickster", and "fraud", but without the negative connotations.
"Dioxide is everywhere, in your house, in your car, in your children's lungs! Dioxide has a bluish color in liquid or solid form, but is found in the gaseous state in nature. It is highly flammable (with suitable reducer), lethal in high concentrations, and often combines with other trace elements to form dihydrogen monoxide, trioxide, and other dangerous substances!"
The upshot? If you have the capacity for living most of your life online, and you can take all that real-life survival stuff for granted, you are enjoying a life of luxury. And the best part is that, online, you will almost never encounter those poor starving folks, so you can safely ignore their existence (just like you do on your way to Starbucks). Enjoy!
Not only that, but anyone with a computer now completely outranks any person living in the entire history of the world up until a hundred years ago simply due to the advance of medical technology. In fact, many people in second and third world countries are better off than their ancestors becuase of the advance of science. It's unfortunate, but basically scientific progress only happens in relative luxery, further driving that luxury. So far, luxery has required an inequity of labor so that the poor of the world support luxery upon their backs, but with automation and better material sciences, this will eventually no longer be true. My belief is that it's better to allow the feedback of invention and automation to operate with few boundaries so that it progresses as quickly as possible. Every time an advance is made, a larger percentage of the world benefits from it. At some point, hopefully sooner than later, technological advances will improve everyone's life at once due to increasing interconnections between countries and societies.
I don't feel bad for being among the richest 1% of humanity. It will give me more time to study mathematics, physics, computer science, and hopefully improve the world.
So far as we know the most common result of this is an illness so minor as to be not worth noticing (and thus little studied). But with the domestication of chickens and turkeys, we have created species subtypes (domesticated poultry) that can catch an avian flu virus adapted to waterfowl and have it rapidly mutate into a form that kills in days over 90% of an entire flock and spread to other flocks and kill 90% of them and can only be stopped by killing every domestic bird in the area.
Why not just let 90% of all the birds die and breed the 10% that don't?
Transhumanists don't believe in a messiah of technology or even go to church or pay dues. They just assume that technology will help them rise above their current limitations as a human.
As opposed to a Singularitian, who believes that currents trends make lead to a Singularity type of event through Strong AI. But that movement is secular and believes that such an event would be acheived via science and technology instead of magic and gods.
Then again... Many Transhumanists buy into the singularity and vice versa.
But both groups are pretty much secular and or humanists. No faith or belief or required.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and almost by definition god is indistinguishable from magic. Technology after the singularity will also be, by definition, sufficiently advanced. I'd say that at some point transhumanists believe technology will be sufficiently advanced as well. I'd safely call both ideas religions in that they require trust and faith in science and technology that is not yet present.
Just change the definition of death by adding the word "irreversably" before ceased, and you'll be fine.
Just try to prove no one made a backup at some point.
Not only that, but all the EM leaving the earth probably has suitable resolution to rebuild a working human brain for everyone except deep sea submarine sailors. It's just the size and precision of the collector that matters. Basically, death is dead.
But herin is the issue, isn't it? End-to-end over the internet doesn't exist. And let's say the backbones do want to turn it on.. Isn't this "Net Neutrality" from the technical stand-point?
Net neutrality just means that providers route packets based on the RFCs, which means no degredation or enhancement of service unless the IP protocol specifies that this MUST, SHOULD or MAY happen. In other words, route the packets from source to destination, applying QoS based on the Type of Service in the IP header. Specifically, net neutrality would must prevent ISPs from charging third parties for routing IP traffic. Only directly connected peers should be part of the contract, because the IP protocol does not allow the sender of a packet to specify which hosts the packet will travel through, and thus there is absolutely nothing to base a contract on, unless the source or destination address of the packet belongs to one of the ISPs networks.
Since IP has QoS built in, it's obviously a good thing, and not the terrible Tiered Internet that people are afraid of. QoS just means that some packets will have priority over others. It doesn't say that some protocols or destinations or sources of IP packets will have that priority, just the ones with certain types of service. Anyone should be able to buy higher classes of service for their packets, and put whatever they want inside those packets. That's net neutrality, because it favors decisions at the endpoints of the Internet instead of the middle.
Right now, QoS (RSVP) isn't part of IPv4 and doesn't progress outside of a LAN... So if the possibility to enable QoS over the Internet makes some packets more valuable at a cost premium (to the sender or reciever? With snailmail it is the sender who pays for first-class rather than third-class) regarding traffic control, the results are the others will become less valuable.
Look at RFC 791 and the Type of Service field. QoS has been built into IP since the beginning, and its implementation just left up to individual networks. If people want QoS on the Internet, they should force their ISPs to form contracts with each other to respect the QoS bits that customers set, and adopt pricing schemes for everyone to pay for the QoS packets they send. There shouldn't need to be any distinction between what traffic is marked for QoS, so long as the ISP maintains enough reserved bandwidth to send all the QoS they sell to customers.
This is called a natural monopoly. If you don't like your cable company, you can't have another company dig up your neighborhood to run new lines to your house.
Piss poor planning on the part of the communities and local governments that gave the cable companies the right to dig up their neighborhood in the first place without guaranteeing some future level of service.
That and people, listen, stop running windows as root. Make yourself a less privileged user and learn to work in a non-root environment!!!
Too bad that Windows and most of the nixes have had at least one privilege escalation exploit present at any given time. Not to mention that to install software (for all users), one has to be root. A rootkit only needs to be embedded in an installer.
which is of-course irrelevant, you are a looking for a technological loophole to declare that the two works are different, that one is not a real copy of another, right?
Wrong, I'm looking for the ability to chop a work in half, or in pieces, and still be able to own those pieces. If you own a physical piece of property, you can chop it up however you like and give it away to anyone you want. You can even chop up someone else's physical copy of a work if they pay you to censor it for them. However, there is no feasible way to do this with optical media because of the reasons I outlined. The problem is that copyright law does not recognize that *all* digital works require numerous copies to be made just for normal use. If it did, there would be no problem in cutting up a work and recombining it. Look at it this way: copyright is currently spacetime compatible, because you can move your physical copy of a work around spacetime, but copyright is not information theory compatible, because it does not allow you to move a digital copy of a work through mathematical transformations that are the digital equivalent of common physical actions.
we should allow what with content altered DVDs? Should we allow distribution of content altered DVDs without permission from copyright holders? I don't think so. Whether you changing your DVD content and using it yourself falls under fair use or not, I am not sure, but I am certain that noone can legally take a DVD, modify its content and redistribute it without permission.
See, here's the basic problem with copyright in the digital age: there is absolutely no way to modify a particular copy of a work and redistribute it, because it automatically becomes a derivative work. In the old days censors could tear pages out of a book or snip sections out of cassette tape and then sell the remainder (as long as it was not represented as the entire work, which would be fraud and not a copyright violation). It is very difficult, if not impossible, to erase sections of video on a DVD. In fact, due to MPEG encoding, the portion of the movie you want to keep may be composed of P or B frames that require data from an unwanted scene. Even if the edited movie is written to a new DVD and the original destroyed, copyright law still considers the edited movie to be a derivative work, instead of simply the truncation of the original work. Basically, there is no legal concept of the work as anything other than its physical manifestation, however the DVD is not truly the physical manifestation that actually matters. The work itself is encoded with enough redundancy on the DVD to separate it into two works that could retain a full copy of the entire work, simply for error correction. The work is also stored in the discrete frequency domain truncated by a quantization table and compressed by an efficient binary or arithmetic coding and represented as a multiple of some irriducible polynomial that is itself represented as an overdefined set of points lying on a second polynomial whose binary representation is frequency modulated onto the surface of the DVD as a series of pits and lands, or in the case of recordable discs, as patches of differently reflecting dye. The physical copy of the work bears no similarity to the resulting video and audio that can be generated by repeatedly copying data from the DVD into registers in a microprocessor, applying functional transformations and table lookups and finally copying the digital signals into analog approximations that drive a mechanical speaker element and display as individual pixels.
In fact, since the MPEG patent prevents the user from personally performing the decoding algorithm, the user cannot legally be the one who actually decodes the DVD, which implies that the user must *give a copy* of the DVD to a third party, namely the licensed DVD player, simply to play the DVD. Technically, this means that either fair use allows the owner of a DVD to copy it and give it to a third party, that somewhere there is a license agreement giving DVD owners the right to copy DVDs to their DVD player, or that it is illegal to play DVDs. Personally, I haven't seen any license agreement on a DVD comprehensive enough to cover these situations without stupid edge cases cropping up. Copyrights and patents are simply undue burdons in the digital age. Not only that, but the thing that really annoys me is that if Shannon had patented information theory and all the coding methods he developed, DVDs wouldn't even exist today. People just can't comprehend the vast mathematical breakthroughs that are freely used to drive society today, and they still allow corporations to patent what amounts to tiny shadows upon the monuments of mathematics that make them possible.
As you note (b) was really not needed becaue it's up to Verizon to try and charge or not. Since public backlash has ssemingly accomplished anything a law was aimed to do why not accept the fix and not add yet another law to the book that is bound to be badly written and laden with earmarks to build a $4 million house for the Petunia Lovers Of Ohio?
I agree: Right now, laws are not necessary simply because of all the public awareness that's been stirred up. How long will that last? I don't know. If ISPs succeed in threatening other third party companies, I will support legislation to stop them. I also think that Internet service will at some point need to fall under common carrier status, which will definitely require legislation. I think network and data neutrality will have to be an integral part of it, along with respect for privacy, the right to a choice of ISP, etc. An important thing to keep in mind is that while network neutrality may not have succeeded, that says nothing about telco lobbyists being able to pass opposite legislation in the vaccuum left by its defeat. They would probably even spin it as a clear indicator that everyone wants the telcos to have more control over their own pipes and be allowed to charge whoever they want...
So where's the flash song ala AYB that will sweep the Internet and make them a laughing stock? The best way to fight stupidity is by drawing lots of attention to it.
My question is this, if it's simply about building and upgrading networks and the costs will be ultimately be passed on to the customer, why not just raise rates to those that purchase bandwidth accross the board? Why add the overhead of lobbying Congress to COMPLICATE the process of selling bandwidth?
Why does this innaccurate assumption keep coming up? What SBC wanted to do was start charging third parties for routing their traffic. Right now, only direct peers contract with each other. SBC would have changed that to the "long distance" model of Internet service, where you have to buy passage for your packets through some third party after they leave your local ISP. A horrible, horrible fate for the Internet. All contracts and charges should be at the connecting edges of networks, not from one random network to another. Look at it this way: If neither the source nor destination address of a packet belongs to a network (think RFC network number + mask), then the owner of that network shouldn't be able to charge anyone but its peers for routing that packet.
The reason ISPs are not raising rates to their direct customers is that they would be undersold by their competitors. The market is at saturation, and they can't make more money without improving service. They oversubscribed most of their customers, so they can't grow without spending money or degrading service. The long shot option was to try to increase revenue while doing *absolutely nothing* and charging Google (a third party) for routing the same packets it has for years.
In addition, alternative lanuages and tools tend to be stifled in so-called "open" (read group) environments, because the rest of the group immediately pushes to have the alternative tool or environment removed, unless the group agrees that it is a good idea. Is that the way inventions are made? No. Inventions are made by a single person with a radical idea avoiding all the intervention/interference, naysayers, etc. and presenting that idea DESPITE the opinions of others. I can see opening source after the fact for auditing and sugestions, but not for development.
I think perl, php, python, ruby, and many other languages disprove that assumption. That much open source software is written in C or C++ does not imply that other languages are excluded, in fact the majority of Windows and other Unix software is also C or C++. If you want to be worried about marginalizing new languages, rant about Microsoft's push for everyone to adopt.net. Please don't forget about KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, XFCE, and all the other window manages, nor vi, emacs, jed, pico, and all the other editors, nor any number of other cases where your argument is severely flawed.
Inventions are generally not made by a single person with radical ideas; that's the misconception upon which modern copyrights and patents are based. Most inventions are gradual improvements of existing ideas, made by many people at many different times, and drawing from many other sources of inspiration. Most inventions are independantly reinvented by numerous people around the same time.
"None of us is as dumb as all of us"
dispair.com is not exactly a source of rigorously justified assertions. When truly intelligent people work in a group, they recognize their individual strengths and also share a common framework for logical discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to a problem. An open environment is the best place for this to happen because everyone can observe whether individuals are acting rationally and intelligently, or just being dumb. Groupthink only happens to those who don't recognize it.
This isn't because everybody's stupid or because Microsoft is putting guns to people's heads and demanding everybody use their format. It's because video over the web is a huge problem with no clear-cut solution. It's a pity, really. If millions of people were more inclined to go download codecs and shit, this wouldn't have been such a headache inducing problem.
Actually, Microsoft doesn't ship anything but basic mpeg2 and WMV for a reason: They want everyone to use their format. They could easily include video codecs for mpeg4, divx, etc., just like they include hardware drivers for most brands of hardware. Microsoft is more than willing to integrate thousands of drivers for third party hardware, but not willing to include a couple extra audio/video codecs.
Do you use the credit card or banking features? Credit card features work for me in Firefox, including payments. I do hate their worthless HTTP only front page, but I just sign in with a random username to get to a proper HTTPS page before using my real username. The idiots in customer support couldn't understand a simple MITM attack, and I doubt they would change the site over it anyway...
You'll note we don't have he broadcast flag yet (thanks to the lack of a net neutrality bill passing which will increase the FCC power enough to do so).
The broadcast flag affects television and radio broadcasts, and is essentially meaningless for the Internet because the DMCA already covers the media that the *AA cares about. The FCC already has enormous power over broadcasts, and the fact that they didn't have the power to enact the broadcast flag implies that even with more power over the Internet, the same limitation would apply to the broadcast flag. It will take specific legislation to reverse that, as several recent attempts to shoehorn it into unrelated bills have shown.
Yes bad things can happen - and they have. That's exactly what I am saying. Given that bad things are likely to happen why has this particular bad thing, Verizon trying to charge google a fee per user access, come to pass? That is what we all fear. Why has it not happened when there is seemingly nothing to stop them from doing that right now?
It has not come to pass because a) people noticed (and only because Google publicizing it instead of rolling over), and b) people cared enough to lobby Congress to preempt the problem. Perhaps b) was unnecessary, Google is a big company after all. But without the support of essentially the entire population of the world minus cable and telephone companies and their flunkies, I don't know if they would have been successful.
Nothing so why has it not happened already. That is the "simple question" I am asking. Must not be so simple since no-one can answer it.
When SBC even mentioned it, they got shouted down and legislation was attempted. That just means they need to wait a few years until everyone has forgotten.
People like you always fear the worst but fail to understand that sometimes, perhaps a lot of times, the worst doesn't happen because there are a lot of factors at work you do not understand. When you throw an additional control on top of a system that you do not understand you will get results you do not expect, which may or may not be bad. Before you change what we have now udnerstand what you dislike about how things are CURRENTLY done, not what may be - and work to address those. Trying to legislate against a problem we are not having is insane.
Yes, that's why we don't have DRM, the impending broadcast flag, 95 year copyright, software patents out the wazoo, and why Murphy's law is baseless. The worst has happened lots of times when people don't get involved and try to stop it. World Wars are usually of this variety: Most of the time they could have been prevented if people had simply seen the consequences of their actions. Right now, a whole lot of people can see a pretty clear consequence of letting the telcos run rampant with their near monopoly on Internet pipes. They ran rampant with the phone network, and they are merging to the point that the breakup is a distant memory. People in general do not understand telecom, they are already used to paying stupid fees and taxes on phone service, and actually paying to call long distance. You do realize that the Internet breaks the telco's model of the phone system and they will fight to maintain their control, don't you? In this case. Perhaps you're right that legislation isn't needed now, but my guess is that if everyone didn't worry and didn't care and didn't write their Senators and didn't lobby for a new law, everyone would be wishing they did a few years down the road
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Actually, that model loses a lot of functionality. Applications rarely put the entire data on the clipboard - they write a stub there and wait for the paste operation, when they dump in the data in the format requested by the app that is receiving it. If you have to write your clipboard model so that you need to put every conceivable format on the clipboard then you seriously reduce your system's usability. Essentially, security and usability are often at odds and you need to chose one over the other. That's just a fact of life that extends way beyond computer systems.
Nothing says the clipboard can't be a pipe that gets connected on one end to the copying program and on the other end to the pasting program, or even a secure RPC handler set up to send and receive data of different formats. The important point is that *access* to the clipboard is controlled directly by the user via the OS, instead of the clipboard being fully accessable to every application.
Security and usability are not at odds. In fact, because of the lack of security, people are having usability issues with viruses, worms, botnets, and keyloggers. What I've described so far does not need any user interaction with the security system to be able to cut and paste, unless of course the user wants to do something smart like protect passwords by setting a higher security level on the clipboard when copying from a certain program, like a password safe, and then prompting for a dialog when pasting just to make sure that they really mean to paste their password where they clicked. Security can increase usability by helping the user stay secure instead of forcing them to be constantly thinking about the security of their actions. Even on Linux I have to protect sensitive passwords by not leaving them laying around in the command history or visible on a console or copying them into web pages via the clipboard. I don't like thinking about having to use the same passwords from Windows boxes.
There is a problem with this study: it measures shareholder return as a percentage, but compensation as a dollar value. If a CEO grows a $10B company by 1%, he generates $100M for shareholders. If a CEO grows a $100M company by 10%, he generates only $10M for shareholders. The study implies that the second CEO deserves to be paid more, because his company had a larger percentage return. But one could certainly make a good argument that the first CEO deserves to be paid more, because he generated a larger absolute return to shareholders.
False. If the 10% CEO ran the $10B company, he would generate $1B for the shareholders of that company, so he's still 10 times better than the 1% CEO no matter where he works. Basically, the market will simply tend for the 10% CEO to work at larger companies because they can afford to pay more. Unfortunately, CEOs are not plug and play. They have to know the industry and have contacts to be effective, so it may be that a 10% CEO is still better off at a $100M company.
This would break copy-n-paste and a million other things. You don't really want this.
You mean the copy and paste where any program can pull and push anything it wants to and from the clipboard at any time? Oh yeah, that's a great idea. A much better method would be for the clipboard to be a resource managed by the OS, essentially just a FIFO with a backing store. To copy or paste something, the user would activate the function at the OS level (it doesn't matter how, it could be a button click or key combination) and the currently active program would receive the signal to copy or paste along with the capability to perform the operation. The capability would be limited in duration and to one use, with an indicator to let the user know when the operation was finished.
No functionality is lost, and in fact every program has to respect the copy and paste commands that you use (ctrl-v versus shift-insert versus ctrl-y versus right-click-paste, etc...), and no program can violate the security policy of the clipboard.
Do YOU want to go through and tell the system what files each and every program you want to run may access? Because I sure as hell don't...
Thankfully, you don't really need to. Should a program be able to read your letters to your mom? Not unless you want it to. System libraries? Sure, with read only access. Basically, the only rights a program should have when it starts are basic read only rights to the system files it needs to run, and nothing else. If you want to open a document and print it, you can grant permission to that document and that printer. Granting permissions does not need to be difficult if it's structured properly. The biggest problem is designing a secure interface for using the operating system. Ideally, the operating system would provide open/save/delete/print menus directly, which would automatically grant the necessary permissions. If you have a letter you want to print, you select the file containing the letter, and tell the OS to print it. Call it object orientation or type awareness or whatever you want, but the OS should be configured so that every type of object has a list of possible actions that can be taken on it, and for each action a program called to perform that action. Permissions are defined on the actions that can be performed by a given program on a given object. Defaults can be specified for objects, object types, programs, etc. so that you rarely have to manually choose which permissions to grant to programs.
The security model is built on "window stations" -- If you put a privileged window into an unprivileged window station, then you have made a configuration error. Period.
Each application should get its own secure window station to run in, then. I don't want Claria or any other software running on a desktop to be able to see any other application, because that allows unprivileged software to act as a keylogger. That's just unbelievably stupid. X probably has the same problems. Basically, applications should not run as the user who's using them, instead they should run with limited permissions and only access files the user has granted permission to. What modern operating systems need is a capability approach to security instead of a user+acl approach. Programs are not users, so it stands to reason that individual programs should not have the same rights as users.
But as one "super-psychic" points out, even scientists now say that matter-as-we-know-it only makes up between 4 and 7% of the universe. The rest is labeled as "dark matter" and "dark energy". They don't know what exactly it is, but that plain matter is inadequate to explain the measurements taken by cosmologists.
... And pointed out that "dark energy" interpenetrates everything, and is the carrier medium for experiences previously labeled "extra-sensory".
Mua ha ha ha! I bet 300 years ago it was the phlogiston and aether that would explain psychics and the paranormal.
Dark energy, by its nature, is difficult to detect because it does not interact with most of our physical matter, therefore it would not interact with brains, either. Or, if it did, it shouldn't matter if the brain was alive or dead, or from an animal or a person, since no real cellular differences have been observed. Likewise, if brains were somehow connected to dark energy, one would imagine that toenails and arses would likewise be affected, in that perhaps one's toenail would twitch to the tune of another's arse.. Of course, any sort of paranormal activity is highly resistive to any sort of imperical testing. For instance, cars, guns, airplanes, death, taxes, and statistics work for everyone, regardless of what they may personally believe. Generally, the universe is like that, e.g. it depends very little upon the organization of molecules within someone's mind and instead is driven by its own rules and laws. If anything, the paranormal is just a simple proof that most people are stupid when it comes to statistics.
(the basis of his talk was that "we need new words, because there are experiences that don't have a label, and the words we do have limit us to concepts that are 200 years out of date" Or something like that...)
Funny, maybe he should try German... But really folks, after thousands of years of psychics and languages, you'd think *some* word would stick to these vague, untestable experiences. You know, words like "charlatan", "trickster", and "fraud", but without the negative connotations.
"Dioxide is everywhere, in your house, in your car, in your children's lungs! Dioxide has a bluish color in liquid or solid form, but is found in the gaseous state in nature. It is highly flammable (with suitable reducer), lethal in high concentrations, and often combines with other trace elements to form dihydrogen monoxide, trioxide, and other dangerous substances!"
The upshot? If you have the capacity for living most of your life online, and you can take all that real-life survival stuff for granted, you are enjoying a life of luxury. And the best part is that, online, you will almost never encounter those poor starving folks, so you can safely ignore their existence (just like you do on your way to Starbucks). Enjoy!
Not only that, but anyone with a computer now completely outranks any person living in the entire history of the world up until a hundred years ago simply due to the advance of medical technology. In fact, many people in second and third world countries are better off than their ancestors becuase of the advance of science. It's unfortunate, but basically scientific progress only happens in relative luxery, further driving that luxury. So far, luxery has required an inequity of labor so that the poor of the world support luxery upon their backs, but with automation and better material sciences, this will eventually no longer be true. My belief is that it's better to allow the feedback of invention and automation to operate with few boundaries so that it progresses as quickly as possible. Every time an advance is made, a larger percentage of the world benefits from it. At some point, hopefully sooner than later, technological advances will improve everyone's life at once due to increasing interconnections between countries and societies.
I don't feel bad for being among the richest 1% of humanity. It will give me more time to study mathematics, physics, computer science, and hopefully improve the world.
So far as we know the most common result of this is an illness so minor as to be not worth noticing (and thus little studied). But with the domestication of chickens and turkeys, we have created species subtypes (domesticated poultry) that can catch an avian flu virus adapted to waterfowl and have it rapidly mutate into a form that kills in days over 90% of an entire flock and spread to other flocks and kill 90% of them and can only be stopped by killing every domestic bird in the area.
Why not just let 90% of all the birds die and breed the 10% that don't?
Transhumanists don't believe in a messiah of technology or even go to church or pay dues. They just assume that technology will help them rise above their current limitations as a human.
As opposed to a Singularitian, who believes that currents trends make lead to a Singularity type of event through Strong AI. But that movement is secular and believes that such an event would be acheived via science and technology instead of magic and gods.
Then again... Many Transhumanists buy into the singularity and vice versa.
But both groups are pretty much secular and or humanists. No faith or belief or required.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and almost by definition god is indistinguishable from magic. Technology after the singularity will also be, by definition, sufficiently advanced. I'd say that at some point transhumanists believe technology will be sufficiently advanced as well. I'd safely call both ideas religions in that they require trust and faith in science and technology that is not yet present.
Just change the definition of death by adding the word "irreversably" before ceased, and you'll be fine.
Just try to prove no one made a backup at some point.
Not only that, but all the EM leaving the earth probably has suitable resolution to rebuild a working human brain for everyone except deep sea submarine sailors. It's just the size and precision of the collector that matters. Basically, death is dead.
But herin is the issue, isn't it? End-to-end over the internet doesn't exist. And let's say the backbones do want to turn it on.. Isn't this "Net Neutrality" from the technical stand-point?
Net neutrality just means that providers route packets based on the RFCs, which means no degredation or enhancement of service unless the IP protocol specifies that this MUST, SHOULD or MAY happen. In other words, route the packets from source to destination, applying QoS based on the Type of Service in the IP header. Specifically, net neutrality would must prevent ISPs from charging third parties for routing IP traffic. Only directly connected peers should be part of the contract, because the IP protocol does not allow the sender of a packet to specify which hosts the packet will travel through, and thus there is absolutely nothing to base a contract on, unless the source or destination address of the packet belongs to one of the ISPs networks.
Since IP has QoS built in, it's obviously a good thing, and not the terrible Tiered Internet that people are afraid of. QoS just means that some packets will have priority over others. It doesn't say that some protocols or destinations or sources of IP packets will have that priority, just the ones with certain types of service. Anyone should be able to buy higher classes of service for their packets, and put whatever they want inside those packets. That's net neutrality, because it favors decisions at the endpoints of the Internet instead of the middle.
Right now, QoS (RSVP) isn't part of IPv4 and doesn't progress outside of a LAN... So if the possibility to enable QoS over the Internet makes some packets more valuable at a cost premium (to the sender or reciever? With snailmail it is the sender who pays for first-class rather than third-class) regarding traffic control, the results are the others will become less valuable.
Look at RFC 791 and the Type of Service field. QoS has been built into IP since the beginning, and its implementation just left up to individual networks. If people want QoS on the Internet, they should force their ISPs to form contracts with each other to respect the QoS bits that customers set, and adopt pricing schemes for everyone to pay for the QoS packets they send. There shouldn't need to be any distinction between what traffic is marked for QoS, so long as the ISP maintains enough reserved bandwidth to send all the QoS they sell to customers.
This is called a natural monopoly. If you don't like your cable company, you can't have another company dig up your neighborhood to run new lines to your house.
Piss poor planning on the part of the communities and local governments that gave the cable companies the right to dig up their neighborhood in the first place without guaranteeing some future level of service.
That and people, listen, stop running windows as root. Make yourself a less privileged user and learn to work in a non-root environment!!!
Too bad that Windows and most of the nixes have had at least one privilege escalation exploit present at any given time. Not to mention that to install software (for all users), one has to be root. A rootkit only needs to be embedded in an installer.
which is of-course irrelevant, you are a looking for a technological loophole to declare that the two works are different, that one is not a real copy of another, right?
Wrong, I'm looking for the ability to chop a work in half, or in pieces, and still be able to own those pieces. If you own a physical piece of property, you can chop it up however you like and give it away to anyone you want. You can even chop up someone else's physical copy of a work if they pay you to censor it for them. However, there is no feasible way to do this with optical media because of the reasons I outlined. The problem is that copyright law does not recognize that *all* digital works require numerous copies to be made just for normal use. If it did, there would be no problem in cutting up a work and recombining it. Look at it this way: copyright is currently spacetime compatible, because you can move your physical copy of a work around spacetime, but copyright is not information theory compatible, because it does not allow you to move a digital copy of a work through mathematical transformations that are the digital equivalent of common physical actions.
we should allow what with content altered DVDs? Should we allow distribution of content altered DVDs without permission from copyright holders? I don't think so. Whether you changing your DVD content and using it yourself falls under fair use or not, I am not sure, but I am certain that noone can legally take a DVD, modify its content and redistribute it without permission.
See, here's the basic problem with copyright in the digital age: there is absolutely no way to modify a particular copy of a work and redistribute it, because it automatically becomes a derivative work. In the old days censors could tear pages out of a book or snip sections out of cassette tape and then sell the remainder (as long as it was not represented as the entire work, which would be fraud and not a copyright violation). It is very difficult, if not impossible, to erase sections of video on a DVD. In fact, due to MPEG encoding, the portion of the movie you want to keep may be composed of P or B frames that require data from an unwanted scene. Even if the edited movie is written to a new DVD and the original destroyed, copyright law still considers the edited movie to be a derivative work, instead of simply the truncation of the original work. Basically, there is no legal concept of the work as anything other than its physical manifestation, however the DVD is not truly the physical manifestation that actually matters. The work itself is encoded with enough redundancy on the DVD to separate it into two works that could retain a full copy of the entire work, simply for error correction. The work is also stored in the discrete frequency domain truncated by a quantization table and compressed by an efficient binary or arithmetic coding and represented as a multiple of some irriducible polynomial that is itself represented as an overdefined set of points lying on a second polynomial whose binary representation is frequency modulated onto the surface of the DVD as a series of pits and lands, or in the case of recordable discs, as patches of differently reflecting dye. The physical copy of the work bears no similarity to the resulting video and audio that can be generated by repeatedly copying data from the DVD into registers in a microprocessor, applying functional transformations and table lookups and finally copying the digital signals into analog approximations that drive a mechanical speaker element and display as individual pixels.
In fact, since the MPEG patent prevents the user from personally performing the decoding algorithm, the user cannot legally be the one who actually decodes the DVD, which implies that the user must *give a copy* of the DVD to a third party, namely the licensed DVD player, simply to play the DVD. Technically, this means that either fair use allows the owner of a DVD to copy it and give it to a third party, that somewhere there is a license agreement giving DVD owners the right to copy DVDs to their DVD player, or that it is illegal to play DVDs. Personally, I haven't seen any license agreement on a DVD comprehensive enough to cover these situations without stupid edge cases cropping up. Copyrights and patents are simply undue burdons in the digital age. Not only that, but the thing that really annoys me is that if Shannon had patented information theory and all the coding methods he developed, DVDs wouldn't even exist today. People just can't comprehend the vast mathematical breakthroughs that are freely used to drive society today, and they still allow corporations to patent what amounts to tiny shadows upon the monuments of mathematics that make them possible.
As you note (b) was really not needed becaue it's up to Verizon to try and charge or not. Since public backlash has ssemingly accomplished anything a law was aimed to do why not accept the fix and not add yet another law to the book that is bound to be badly written and laden with earmarks to build a $4 million house for the Petunia Lovers Of Ohio?
I agree: Right now, laws are not necessary simply because of all the public awareness that's been stirred up. How long will that last? I don't know. If ISPs succeed in threatening other third party companies, I will support legislation to stop them. I also think that Internet service will at some point need to fall under common carrier status, which will definitely require legislation. I think network and data neutrality will have to be an integral part of it, along with respect for privacy, the right to a choice of ISP, etc. An important thing to keep in mind is that while network neutrality may not have succeeded, that says nothing about telco lobbyists being able to pass opposite legislation in the vaccuum left by its defeat. They would probably even spin it as a clear indicator that everyone wants the telcos to have more control over their own pipes and be allowed to charge whoever they want...
And these guys are writing the laws.
So where's the flash song ala AYB that will sweep the Internet and make them a laughing stock? The best way to fight stupidity is by drawing lots of attention to it.
My question is this, if it's simply about building and upgrading networks and the costs will be ultimately be passed on to the customer, why not just raise rates to those that purchase bandwidth accross the board? Why add the overhead of lobbying Congress to COMPLICATE the process of selling bandwidth?
Why does this innaccurate assumption keep coming up? What SBC wanted to do was start charging third parties for routing their traffic. Right now, only direct peers contract with each other. SBC would have changed that to the "long distance" model of Internet service, where you have to buy passage for your packets through some third party after they leave your local ISP. A horrible, horrible fate for the Internet. All contracts and charges should be at the connecting edges of networks, not from one random network to another. Look at it this way: If neither the source nor destination address of a packet belongs to a network (think RFC network number + mask), then the owner of that network shouldn't be able to charge anyone but its peers for routing that packet.
The reason ISPs are not raising rates to their direct customers is that they would be undersold by their competitors. The market is at saturation, and they can't make more money without improving service. They oversubscribed most of their customers, so they can't grow without spending money or degrading service. The long shot option was to try to increase revenue while doing *absolutely nothing* and charging Google (a third party) for routing the same packets it has for years.
In addition, alternative lanuages and tools tend to be stifled in so-called "open" (read group) environments, because the rest of the group immediately pushes to have the alternative tool or environment removed, unless the group agrees that it is a good idea. Is that the way inventions are made? No. Inventions are made by a single person with a radical idea avoiding all the intervention/interference, naysayers, etc. and presenting that idea DESPITE the opinions of others. I can see opening source after the fact for auditing and sugestions, but not for development.
.net. Please don't forget about KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, XFCE, and all the other window manages, nor vi, emacs, jed, pico, and all the other editors, nor any number of other cases where your argument is severely flawed.
I think perl, php, python, ruby, and many other languages disprove that assumption. That much open source software is written in C or C++ does not imply that other languages are excluded, in fact the majority of Windows and other Unix software is also C or C++. If you want to be worried about marginalizing new languages, rant about Microsoft's push for everyone to adopt
Inventions are generally not made by a single person with radical ideas; that's the misconception upon which modern copyrights and patents are based. Most inventions are gradual improvements of existing ideas, made by many people at many different times, and drawing from many other sources of inspiration. Most inventions are independantly reinvented by numerous people around the same time.
"None of us is as dumb as all of us"
dispair.com is not exactly a source of rigorously justified assertions. When truly intelligent people work in a group, they recognize their individual strengths and also share a common framework for logical discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of different approaches to a problem. An open environment is the best place for this to happen because everyone can observe whether individuals are acting rationally and intelligently, or just being dumb. Groupthink only happens to those who don't recognize it.
This isn't because everybody's stupid or because Microsoft is putting guns to people's heads and demanding everybody use their format. It's because video over the web is a huge problem with no clear-cut solution. It's a pity, really. If millions of people were more inclined to go download codecs and shit, this wouldn't have been such a headache inducing problem.
Actually, Microsoft doesn't ship anything but basic mpeg2 and WMV for a reason: They want everyone to use their format. They could easily include video codecs for mpeg4, divx, etc., just like they include hardware drivers for most brands of hardware. Microsoft is more than willing to integrate thousands of drivers for third party hardware, but not willing to include a couple extra audio/video codecs.
Do you use the credit card or banking features? Credit card features work for me in Firefox, including payments. I do hate their worthless HTTP only front page, but I just sign in with a random username to get to a proper HTTPS page before using my real username. The idiots in customer support couldn't understand a simple MITM attack, and I doubt they would change the site over it anyway...
You'll note we don't have he broadcast flag yet (thanks to the lack of a net neutrality bill passing which will increase the FCC power enough to do so).
The broadcast flag affects television and radio broadcasts, and is essentially meaningless for the Internet because the DMCA already covers the media that the *AA cares about. The FCC already has enormous power over broadcasts, and the fact that they didn't have the power to enact the broadcast flag implies that even with more power over the Internet, the same limitation would apply to the broadcast flag. It will take specific legislation to reverse that, as several recent attempts to shoehorn it into unrelated bills have shown.
Yes bad things can happen - and they have. That's exactly what I am saying. Given that bad things are likely to happen why has this particular bad thing, Verizon trying to charge google a fee per user access, come to pass? That is what we all fear. Why has it not happened when there is seemingly nothing to stop them from doing that right now?
It has not come to pass because a) people noticed (and only because Google publicizing it instead of rolling over), and b) people cared enough to lobby Congress to preempt the problem. Perhaps b) was unnecessary, Google is a big company after all. But without the support of essentially the entire population of the world minus cable and telephone companies and their flunkies, I don't know if they would have been successful.
Nothing so why has it not happened already. That is the "simple question" I am asking. Must not be so simple since no-one can answer it.
When SBC even mentioned it, they got shouted down and legislation was attempted. That just means they need to wait a few years until everyone has forgotten.
People like you always fear the worst but fail to understand that sometimes, perhaps a lot of times, the worst doesn't happen because there are a lot of factors at work you do not understand. When you throw an additional control on top of a system that you do not understand you will get results you do not expect, which may or may not be bad. Before you change what we have now udnerstand what you dislike about how things are CURRENTLY done, not what may be - and work to address those. Trying to legislate against a problem we are not having is insane.
Yes, that's why we don't have DRM, the impending broadcast flag, 95 year copyright, software patents out the wazoo, and why Murphy's law is baseless. The worst has happened lots of times when people don't get involved and try to stop it. World Wars are usually of this variety: Most of the time they could have been prevented if people had simply seen the consequences of their actions. Right now, a whole lot of people can see a pretty clear consequence of letting the telcos run rampant with their near monopoly on Internet pipes. They ran rampant with the phone network, and they are merging to the point that the breakup is a distant memory. People in general do not understand telecom, they are already used to paying stupid fees and taxes on phone service, and actually paying to call long distance. You do realize that the Internet breaks the telco's model of the phone system and they will fight to maintain their control, don't you? In this case. Perhaps you're right that legislation isn't needed now, but my guess is that if everyone didn't worry and didn't care and didn't write their Senators and didn't lobby for a new law, everyone would be wishing they did a few years down the road