Well, in that case you'd be violating the DMCA or a terrorist, whichever is more expensive in your state.
I think the article counters the headline best.
on
Cable TV Ruins Bhutan
·
· Score: 1, Troll
I have to agree with gad_zuki and Leki Dorji who says in the middle of the article:
Yes, we are seeing some different types of crime, but that just reflects the fact that our society is changing in many ways. A culture as rich and sophisticated as ours can survive trash on TV and people are quite capable of turning off the rubbish.
These people went from a kingdom without television to a democracy with it in a four year span.
Dayam.
In my culture (US (and yes we have one)) our resistance to change is so comical they make movies about it "Trouble. That starts with T which rhymes with P, that stands for Pool." Pool halls didn't ruin us, we pulled our heads out after the first Prohibition, Bingo halls didn't turn into dens of inequity when they finally got licensed for pull-tabs and other wimpy forms of gambling.
I laugh to think of what chaos would have ensued had we not had 200 years to sidle up to modern life, and I think these people will be doing extraordinarily well if they make it through the transition without having to return to some outdated, unworkable fundamentalist stupidity, that so often follows culture shock on this scale.
But there isn't really much bandwidth available in the 100khz band.
Even if you use cool techy modulations that give you ~100% return on bandwidth, and you decide to trash the full 90khz-110khz band, that gives you 20,000 bits per second to divide between the all the water craft on the Pacific ocean.
Even if you were allowed to trash an ungodly chunk of the nearby spectrum say 100khz-400khz, that would give you a max. transmit rate of 300kbits per sec. or 6 dialup modems worth of bandwidth for all the ships in the Pacific.
Returning the signal is the other snaglette in the design. This site has the details. The transmitters are large/heavy/expensive and transmit at powerlevels in 11 Kilowatt to 1.2 MegaWatt range. You can figure on at least double that amount of power being consumed in operation.
The only neat data application I came up with for this would be to trash the smaller amount of bandwidth (20kbits) and put compressed copies of AP news out all over the world. The cost of adding the necessary microcontroller decode mechanism to a radio would be small, and you could get news, with pictures and maps, and weather system data. Your Grundig Databoy could keep the last 7 days worth of news for your to browse on a little LCD at your leisure regardless of sat. coverage and with no antenna to point. I supposed it's kind of like the data version of shortwave radio, only the fact that it's data means you don't have to listen at specific times (maybe like Tivo for shortwave).
...you will always have some roaming bands of jerks. These jerks will exemplify the people on the undesirable end of the bell curve (however it is plotted) and they will become a nuisance.
Most of the people reading this site don't surf at -1. Which brings me to my point.
Every system needs methods for moderation.
In the real world anybody coming on to my girlfriend after she has expressed her disinterest will come up against her acid wit, and if public humiliation weren't enough, any weightlifter types in earshot will take this as their cue to help a damsel in distress (she's cute), thereby gaining a good story to tell other women on dates
Thus far this has proven 100% effective.
If there were ever a time where it weren't, men would soon arrive with their +3 sticks of moderation and solve the problem.
A good analog in the RPG world would be quite helpful.
It would be especially easy in a pay-to-play game as then the âoeinfinite number of 1st level jerksâ strategy would be unavailable. The rule of the game could be that you can only have 2 âoeactiveâ characters at a given time. When a character is feeling harassed, s/he puts in a âoecall to the baron.â Only a small percentage of these calls get answered, so it is by no means a guarantee. The âoebaronâ can read through the logs of interaction with another character, and finding it inappropriate can drop a piece of parchment in the purse of the offending character that explains what was found in appropriate. That character can then find themselves significantly poorer and in the middle of a maze that will take two hours worth of gameplay to escape, if they can stay out of reach of the Minotaur.
T-Mobile's rates were just as stupid. It would appear that they have a new method of disguising this fact. They don't charge per megabyte, they charge per minute. $40 a month and.20cents a minute. At 1k bytes per second (optimistic GPRS avg. transfer rate (really, try it)) it's $3.33 per meg.
On the second megabyte in a MONTH this is more expensive than my cable modem.
Even if you lived near a transmitter and got 3k bytes per second (30k bits avg.), clicking the "Little Coders predicament" Read More button will cost you a minute's wait, and 20 cents. Surfing adds up quickly that way.
When I can comfortably surf (3k/bytes/sec) for 30 minutes a day anywhere I normally drive for $40 a month, I'll buy it. At $220 I'll do without thank you.
I don't know if the married core developer's wives are going to be happy about this. Especially if the Trillian's you're issueing are in the classic Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy form factor.
Cool. That's great to hear. If the paper was produced for hire, then it should be held to a higher standard of perfection. So perhaps his inaccurate statements regarding the capabilities of Unixware should have been better researched.
However, (you knew it was coming), I would have to suggest that the "Get it perfect before releasing it" paradigm is not as effective as the "release early, release often" one [evidence]. I didn't catch his SCO rebuttal until it had been "in the wild" for some time, but from what little I know of the flaws that were fixed, it sounds like the real fault would be if he didn't mark the first released draft as ".9 RC5" and welcome comments.
If he didn't do such a thing and he's making large sums of money on this, then I can be dissappointed with his thoroughness.
If he did, then it would seem like behavior extremely consistent with the "Bazaar" methodologies he's well known to espouse. In fact, adhereing to the "Cathedral" model in this development and thereby denying the value of peer review would have seemed a bit ironic. Whether he did or didn't mark the paper Beta, he did respond to community input and alter to suit.
"Hacker" politics range widely, from left to right, from intensely political to completely uninterested in political issues.
In what universe is that "more accurate?" From the hackers I've known and even a cursory examination of the/. crowd there is a significant anti-authoritarian trend that would bear mentioning in any definition of "politics" for hackers.
Egheghegheghegheghegh!
Lack of effort, you lose.
As for the toadying, if you're jealous, why don't you do something OF VALUE for your section of the hacker community and you might see people stick up for you if you do something lame (like pretending that "And a hell of a lot more accurate." is a sentence).
I take issue with people who look the gift horse in the mouth, and greater issue with those who snivel incessantly that their perspective on something was somehow "slighted" by the fact that it's different from that of one who took the time to write it down.
If someone were to produce a diff of the jargon file and found that 10 of the last hundred entries ESR added (or modified) were "bent" toward his perspective and point out how they were inaccurate and send it off to ESR, and publish it on/. that would be news, and worth reading.
Simply combing through the changes to find things to bitch about may get you seat on the Jerry Springer show, but it isn't remotely objective or helpful.
If you'd like to argue the issues, then please do so.
Please provide us in 77 words or fewer, a better definition of hacker politics than the one ESR posted.
What you may find incomprehensible is that if you succeed, odds are ESR will gladly add it, merge it, or even replace his with yours. I wonder, if he did so, if you'd still maintain that he's being egotistical, or whether you'd have time to do so after reading all the flamemail from the pink bottomed whiners sitting around in their SpiderMan Underoos misdirecting their pre-teen angst.
This piece at NTK sounds like flamebait. For the following reasons.
1) They claim he's added terms to the jargon file that...
"on closer search-engine examination, appear to have been used almost exclusively by Raymond himself."
The concept that a term that is (by the very context of it's entry) "jargon" would have to have any search engine presence seems like a very bad assumption. Though it's not a common part of net-speech, I'd had the word "Fucktard" taunted at me in Half-Life TFC games long before I'd read it in anything a search engine could reference. The fact that one of the hacker communities most literate advocates would have the majority of hits for a new bit of jargon sounds more like probability mechanics at work than any sinister plot by ESR to reshape the vocabulary of the Internet.
2) They take issue with his update of the "politics" section. It's 77 words long, and seems like as good a summary as one could come up with. http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/politics.html
3) I've put together documents like his rebuttal to the SCO mess, and they are an nightmare of fact checking and redesign. When someone makes claims as preposterous as SCO did regarding Linux it's hard to know where to start. It's even harder to know how much background is needed to explain your points to non-unixphiles. I read the whole document and it was a work of art. It was clear, it had links to piles of substantiating data, I'd be surprised if the IBM legal team didn't throw a party when they first read it.
Did anyone pay ESR for this massive effort?
Does anyone else find it thoughtless and ungrateful to criticize one of the communities greatest single person assets because the tremendous efforts he puts forth FOR FREE are colored by his personal experiences?
Though you expressed it with humor, the point is very valid. Doing a diff on to kernel source trees that kicks out 50k lines of code sounds like reading enough, but in many cases of a 10 line change, you'll have to read a good chunk of the rest of the module to get the proper context.
Additionally, all this is in the realm of seriously expert shit. If the NSA put in a backdoor like
if (connecting_socket->IP == 152.63.39.37) {
connecting_socket->priv_level = GODLIKE; }
You're in luck.
In most other cases a backdoor is just a hard to exploit/spot vulnerability like a stack overflow, or an awkwardly cast variable assignment that allows the tricky person to assign values to the target varible that are outside it's normal range and have a desirable side effect. If you wrote the modules in question these things would be noticable, if you're a full time kernel coder, they would be possible but hard to spot. If you're asking/. this question, you have no chance in hell of catching them.
The Linux From Scratch suggestion above seems like the most user accessible way to go. I would trust the good will and intentions of individuals over any government's institutions every day of the week.
You may not be fighting a losing battle due to pointy-haired-boss problems. If you haven't developed much other software in-house and the boss thinks this app. is critical to not have done "half assed" then s/he has a legitimate fear that you have no track record, and s/he doesn't want to get saddled with crappy software.
That said, the fact that this is important enough to you to keep trying is some evidence that you might have the perseverance to create a polished, completed product.
A approaches come to mind:
1) As others had hinted, code a demo quick before s/he signs on the dotted line for the contractors. There is not better evidence that you can do something than doing it. If they boss sees you did 30% of the work in X weeks s/he might reasonably assume in 4X weeks you could have a pretty good version.
2) Create an implementation plan. Tracking systems can be imagined and built more grandios and powerful than can be found of the shelf. If you make a convincing development plan with milestones and features far in excess of the spec. going to the contractors s/he can see the big-picture value of the in-house development more clearly.
3) If a contracted services are a must (and they might be). Get a quote from people who will host onsite and maintain your systems remotely. Also get a quote that includes an Open Source solution. Letting someone who has coded a dozen of these systems start you off with a great code base is NOT a bad thing. This gives you the "proving ground" option with the boss as well. The boss can ask you to add a feature, and if s/he doesn't like the results he can still hire the contractors to add features until such time as your team can convince/replace him/her.
We Open Source contractors are not hard to find, and many are glad to share source, tips, good stories and stories of mistakes that you don't want to repeat.
The part of your question regarding the benefits of deregulation is that easily answered. A typical intra-state phone call during business hours was ~28 cents a minute in 1990. Now I can use the latest marketing gimick (pre-paid LD phone cards) and get flat rate 2.99 cents a minute, no connect charge, LD anywhere in the country. Let me state that another way, ten years ago people were paying 9 TIMES as much per minute for their LD. It's worth noting that the break up of the Bells was noticably prior to this date, and that it took some time to get to where we are, but if you're willing to tough it out, competition rocks.
Service is exactly as abysmal as it always was, but this is actually a function of what the consumer is willing to tolerate. People will pick the company with crappy service and 3 cents a minute over the company with good service and 6 cents a minute. Until you change that fact, service will remain where it is.
I would only be a win for the consumer if the consumer realized what was going on.
If the average user notices that he can browse any site with IE, but only half the sites out there with Mozilla, he/she is unlikely to choose Mozilla. I wish we lived in a world where the average consumer was sufficiently concerned with freedom that this would spur them on to use FOSS products, but if that were the case, they probably would already be using them.
Thank you Brento, I hadn't checked the article dates.
I'm not sure it detracts significantly from my point though. Settlements aren't reached overnight, nor are these strategies formed instantly. For these two events to occur in the same month seems sufficiently coincident to suggest that there is a strong correlation between putting the Netscape fun behind them and going forward with their plans for the fully Monolithic OS.
How many minutes has it been since Microsoft spent 3/4ths of a billion dollars putting that Netscape stuff to rest? It was a strange set of arguments they had, simultaneously attempting to prove that IE was "an inextricable part of the OS" and yet entirely optional with no unfair advantage over any other browser option the user might attempt to use.
Now that that case is put to rest it's about time they made sure that the next generation of DRM technology can't be run under WINE or on the MAC. The best approach I can imagine for this is to have is use an entirely proprietary API for IE and to update it with WindowsUpdate. It's not hard to imagine the newbie surfing along who gets this webpage.
Our web servers have observed that your computer needs several security updates available for free from Microsoft [here]. For the safety of our customers we cannot allow you to continue surfing our site until these updates are in place. We apologize for any inconvenience.
At that point the user is using the latest IE with DRM enabled with no idea how many or few sites need it. All your content can then be DRM protected by default with FrontPage, and the user's take is that everything "just works" when they use IE, and has intermittant and annoying problems with every other browswer. This strategy is getting old.
What I find so annoying, about this is not that its another "we know what's best for you" kind of law, but that its one based on the assumption that the lives of normal citizens are less valuable than that of the policefolk. Apparently, if you were just mowing down innocent bystanders the game would be fine for minors that would otherwise be damaged by simulated combat with the police.
Thankfully I live in Washington state and can sign the petition for the repeal of this stupidity.
If they made it against the law to sell a game that depicted shooting white people, but it was OK to sell the game where people are shooting African-Americans, I think it would be slightly more obvious who they thought the second class citizens were, but it is no less offensive.
Re:Have to side with the GNU folks here.
on
Ghostscript Leaves GNU
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I apologize for not getting the name of the lic. right. The quote is from the AFPL.
Again I say, I really like the GS software, and hope they make good money with it.
The issue here is muddied by the fact that GS is a wonderful app. and have contributed something very significant to the Linux desktop.
BUT [you gnu it was coming]...
At what point does a GNU project turn into just an advertisement for commercial software. Can Microsoft release the source (ugly crap that it is) to GWindows 3.1 and spam it with ads. for Windows XP?
I don't know where they should draw the line for this, but there should be a line. The fact that some GNU folk would draw it well to one side of reasonble seems consistent with their views and past behaviors. Therefore I can't fault them for not wanting this to be a GNU project.
You are handing them a black box that doesn't work, and getting back one that does. This leaves a great deal of room for them to use cheaply available surplus cells to refurb. the pack. The fact is, if your battery is more than a year old it's very likely cells of the same dimensions and voltage are available with even better amp-hour ratings than the original. But it's hard for companies to compete who sell a product with the improved batteries as the metrics buy which their competition, and the original manufacturer are rated are nebulous, fakeable and often unavailable.
I've had good luck with the people at PrimeCell.
Having played with Li-Ion charge circuits (yes, just the reference design from Atmel) I can see that calibration might be an issue. I don't however think it will be a critical one. Very smart chargers can in fact compensate for the changing characteristics of aging batteries. That the people replacing them would insert cells with characteristics within the "acceptable margins." of the compensating code doesn't sound impossible either.
Have to side with the GNU folks here.
on
Ghostscript Leaves GNU
·
· Score: 0, Insightful
From the Artifex Public License
You do need an Artifex license if you intend to redistribute Ghostscript technology with your commercial product, or if you intend to use any source code from Ghostscript technologies within your commercial product.
That's just not "Free Software." It's open source, and it may be a profitable business model. I wish them the best of luck as I have used the GS tools for years with great satisfaction. But there can be little question that this is not the kind of freedom that the GNU folks wish guaranteed to those that use their software.
Cool but very dangerous.
on
DVRs for Cop Cars
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Bad assumptions abound here. Yes, this could make citizens safer from police. And since "Police Abuse of Power" is a popular meme it may seem like it's all daisies. First off the article doesn't go into nearly the depth needed to establish authentication. For instance:
The recorder authenticates all the video to prevent changes, and it will have a checkout system to keep track of which officers have checked out which hard drives.
This could mean the officer get's handed a clipboard and "signs out" a drive, like he does a gun or any other piece of equipment. For evidence that can be so damaging (to both victim and jerk (whichever they may be)) the standard must come up to a whole new level. Anything less than outstandingly modern security will allow the tired mystery novel scenario to occur:
Officer A switches tivos with officer B; Officer A checks out drive 1 while signing for drive 2. Officer B checks out drive 2 while signing for drive 1. Officer A goes out to do something bad. Officer B drives a rush our traffic route so there are no tickets to hand out. That night they check in their drives, but Officer A has wiped his. Later Officer A is accused of a crime and has video to prove that he was somewhere else at the time. The fact that Officer B's drive crashed that day is not compelling evidence of anything.
The device that checks out the hard drive should be a black box digital time clock that puts it's own signature in the data of the drive. The vending company should make the public keys available to verify the signature, but keep the private keys out of the reach of law enforcement altogether. The officer that checks out a drive should type his pass-phrase into the checkout terminal so that it can generate a second signature that cannot be replicated without the pass-phrase. The Tivo-like computer should, in addition to other features, keep a running log of which hard drives (by signature) have been inserted into it and when, and these logs (up to the last say 100 insertions) should be included and signed on each new hard drive that goes into the Tivo. So any hard disk mucking about would be distributed over all the hard disks in the pool, and they would therefore have to destroy them all to successfully cover this stuff up. With the addition of signed GPS location/timestamps swapping/editing could be pretty tough especially if the tivo device derived it's signature from an unremovable factory issued SIM.
It's worth noting that I've never seen an episode of "Cops: A night of police screw ups."
Censoring the things they don't want seen is already the norm, and it will continue to be unless we legislate it otherwise.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in that case you'd be violating the DMCA or a terrorist, whichever is more expensive in your state.
I have to agree with gad_zuki and Leki Dorji who says in the middle of the article:
Yes, we are seeing some different types of crime, but that just reflects the fact that our society is changing in many ways. A culture as rich and sophisticated as ours can survive trash on TV and people are quite capable of turning off the rubbish.
These people went from a kingdom without television to a democracy with it in a four year span.
Dayam.
In my culture (US (and yes we have one)) our resistance to change is so comical they make movies about it "Trouble. That starts with T which rhymes with P, that stands for Pool." Pool halls didn't ruin us, we pulled our heads out after the first Prohibition, Bingo halls didn't turn into dens of inequity when they finally got licensed for pull-tabs and other wimpy forms of gambling.
I laugh to think of what chaos would have ensued had we not had 200 years to sidle up to modern life, and I think these people will be doing extraordinarily well if they make it through the transition without having to return to some outdated, unworkable fundamentalist stupidity, that so often follows culture shock on this scale.
But there isn't really much bandwidth available in the 100khz band.
Even if you use cool techy modulations that give you ~100% return on bandwidth, and you decide to trash the full 90khz-110khz band, that gives you 20,000 bits per second to divide between the all the water craft on the Pacific ocean.
Even if you were allowed to trash an ungodly chunk of the nearby spectrum say 100khz-400khz, that would give you a max. transmit rate of 300kbits per sec. or 6 dialup modems worth of bandwidth for all the ships in the Pacific.
Returning the signal is the other snaglette in the design. This site has the details. The transmitters are large/heavy/expensive and transmit at powerlevels in 11 Kilowatt to 1.2 MegaWatt range. You can figure on at least double that amount of power being consumed in operation.
The only neat data application I came up with for this would be to trash the smaller amount of bandwidth (20kbits) and put compressed copies of AP news out all over the world. The cost of adding the necessary microcontroller decode mechanism to a radio would be small, and you could get news, with pictures and maps, and weather system data. Your Grundig Databoy could keep the last 7 days worth of news for your to browse on a little LCD at your leisure regardless of sat. coverage and with no antenna to point. I supposed it's kind of like the data version of shortwave radio, only the fact that it's data means you don't have to listen at specific times (maybe like Tivo for shortwave).
opposed to _no_ money.
Obviously this test wasn't conducted in Santa Cruz.
Agent Gates will do.
...you will always have some roaming bands of jerks. These jerks will exemplify the people on the undesirable end of the bell curve (however it is plotted) and they will become a nuisance.
Most of the people reading this site don't surf at -1. Which brings me to my point.
Every system needs methods for moderation.
In the real world anybody coming on to my girlfriend after she has expressed her disinterest will come up against her acid wit, and if public humiliation weren't enough, any weightlifter types in earshot will take this as their cue to help a damsel in distress (she's cute), thereby gaining a good story to tell other women on dates
Thus far this has proven 100% effective.
If there were ever a time where it weren't, men would soon arrive with their +3 sticks of moderation and solve the problem.
A good analog in the RPG world would be quite helpful.
It would be especially easy in a pay-to-play game as then the âoeinfinite number of 1st level jerksâ strategy would be unavailable. The rule of the game could be that you can only have 2 âoeactiveâ characters at a given time. When a character is feeling harassed, s/he puts in a âoecall to the baron.â Only a small percentage of these calls get answered, so it is by no means a guarantee. The âoebaronâ can read through the logs of interaction with another character, and finding it inappropriate can drop a piece of parchment in the purse of the offending character that explains what was found in appropriate. That character can then find themselves significantly poorer and in the middle of a maze that will take two hours worth of gameplay to escape, if they can stay out of reach of the Minotaur.
T-Mobile's rates were just as stupid. It would appear that they have a new method of disguising this fact. They don't charge per megabyte, they charge per minute. $40 a month and .20cents a minute. At 1k bytes per second (optimistic GPRS avg. transfer rate (really, try it)) it's $3.33 per meg.
On the second megabyte in a MONTH this is more expensive than my cable modem.
Even if you lived near a transmitter and got 3k bytes per second (30k bits avg.), clicking the "Little Coders predicament" Read More button will cost you a minute's wait, and 20 cents. Surfing adds up quickly that way.
When I can comfortably surf (3k/bytes/sec) for 30 minutes a day anywhere I normally drive for $40 a month, I'll buy it. At $220 I'll do without thank you.
I don't know if the married core developer's wives are going to be happy about this. Especially if the Trillian's you're issueing are in the classic Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy form factor.
... for a /. poll. It would by no means be the scientific evidence you're looking for, but it would certainly be interesting thought fodder.
i an?i c?
Where do you see yourself in the Political Spectrum?
NeoConservative?
Paleoconservative?
Liberitar
Traditionally well-established Liberal (hippie)?
Post-Scarcity Gift Cultural?
Redmondcentric?
PaleoNeoCowboyNealist
Cool. That's great to hear. If the paper was produced for hire, then it should be held to a higher standard of perfection. So perhaps his inaccurate statements regarding the capabilities of Unixware should have been better researched.
However, (you knew it was coming), I would have to suggest that the "Get it perfect before releasing it" paradigm is not as effective as the "release early, release often" one [evidence]. I didn't catch his SCO rebuttal until it had been "in the wild" for some time, but from what little I know of the flaws that were fixed, it sounds like the real fault would be if he didn't mark the first released draft as ".9 RC5" and welcome comments. If he didn't do such a thing and he's making large sums of money on this, then I can be dissappointed with his thoroughness.
If he did, then it would seem like behavior extremely consistent with the "Bazaar" methodologies he's well known to espouse. In fact, adhereing to the "Cathedral" model in this development and thereby denying the value of peer review would have seemed a bit ironic. Whether he did or didn't mark the paper Beta, he did respond to community input and alter to suit.
I hate to feed the trolls, but....
/. crowd there is a significant anti-authoritarian trend that would bear mentioning in any definition of "politics" for hackers.
"Hacker" politics range widely, from left to right, from intensely political to completely uninterested in political issues.
In what universe is that "more accurate?" From the hackers I've known and even a cursory examination of the
Egheghegheghegheghegh!
Lack of effort, you lose.
As for the toadying, if you're jealous, why don't you do something OF VALUE for your section of the hacker community and you might see people stick up for you if you do something lame (like pretending that "And a hell of a lot more accurate." is a sentence).
I would not grant them immunity either.
/. that would be news, and worth reading.
I take issue with people who look the gift horse in the mouth, and greater issue with those who snivel incessantly that their perspective on something was somehow "slighted" by the fact that it's different from that of one who took the time to write it down.
If someone were to produce a diff of the jargon file and found that 10 of the last hundred entries ESR added (or modified) were "bent" toward his perspective and point out how they were inaccurate and send it off to ESR, and publish it on
Simply combing through the changes to find things to bitch about may get you seat on the Jerry Springer show, but it isn't remotely objective or helpful.
If you'd like to argue the issues, then please do so.
Please provide us in 77 words or fewer, a better definition of hacker politics than the one ESR posted.
What you may find incomprehensible is that if you succeed, odds are ESR will gladly add it, merge it, or even replace his with yours. I wonder, if he did so, if you'd still maintain that he's being egotistical, or whether you'd have time to do so after reading all the flamemail from the pink bottomed whiners sitting around in their SpiderMan Underoos misdirecting their pre-teen angst.
Drat, their on to me. Must think quickly.
"Guns are, um, icky. Very icky. Bad guns."
Phwew. That should throw them off the scent, at least long enough to load up another batch of 190 gr. 10mm HPs.
..it's ESR.
This piece at NTK sounds like flamebait. For the following reasons.
1) They claim he's added terms to the jargon file that... "on closer search-engine examination, appear to have been used almost exclusively by Raymond himself."
The concept that a term that is (by the very context of it's entry) "jargon" would have to have any search engine presence seems like a very bad assumption. Though it's not a common part of net-speech, I'd had the word "Fucktard" taunted at me in Half-Life TFC games long before I'd read it in anything a search engine could reference. The fact that one of the hacker communities most literate advocates would have the majority of hits for a new bit of jargon sounds more like probability mechanics at work than any sinister plot by ESR to reshape the vocabulary of the Internet.
2) They take issue with his update of the "politics" section. It's 77 words long, and seems like as good a summary as one could come up with. http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/politics.html
3) I've put together documents like his rebuttal to the SCO mess, and they are an nightmare of fact checking and redesign. When someone makes claims as preposterous as SCO did regarding Linux it's hard to know where to start. It's even harder to know how much background is needed to explain your points to non-unixphiles. I read the whole document and it was a work of art. It was clear, it had links to piles of substantiating data, I'd be surprised if the IBM legal team didn't throw a party when they first read it.
Did anyone pay ESR for this massive effort?
Does anyone else find it thoughtless and ungrateful to criticize one of the communities greatest single person assets because the tremendous efforts he puts forth FOR FREE are colored by his personal experiences?
Though you expressed it with humor, the point is very valid. Doing a diff on to kernel source trees that kicks out 50k lines of code sounds like reading enough, but in many cases of a 10 line change, you'll have to read a good chunk of the rest of the module to get the proper context.
/. this question, you have no chance in hell of catching them.
Additionally, all this is in the realm of seriously expert shit. If the NSA put in a backdoor like
if (connecting_socket->IP == 152.63.39.37) {
connecting_socket->priv_level = GODLIKE;
}
You're in luck.
In most other cases a backdoor is just a hard to exploit/spot vulnerability like a stack overflow, or an awkwardly cast variable assignment that allows the tricky person to assign values to the target varible that are outside it's normal range and have a desirable side effect. If you wrote the modules in question these things would be noticable, if you're a full time kernel coder, they would be possible but hard to spot. If you're asking
The Linux From Scratch suggestion above seems like the most user accessible way to go. I would trust the good will and intentions of individuals over any government's institutions every day of the week.
You may not be fighting a losing battle due to pointy-haired-boss problems. If you haven't developed much other software in-house and the boss thinks this app. is critical to not have done "half assed" then s/he has a legitimate fear that you have no track record, and s/he doesn't want to get saddled with crappy software.
That said, the fact that this is important enough to you to keep trying is some evidence that you might have the perseverance to create a polished, completed product.
A approaches come to mind:
1) As others had hinted, code a demo quick before s/he signs on the dotted line for the contractors. There is not better evidence that you can do something than doing it. If they boss sees you did 30% of the work in X weeks s/he might reasonably assume in 4X weeks you could have a pretty good version.
2) Create an implementation plan. Tracking systems can be imagined and built more grandios and powerful than can be found of the shelf. If you make a convincing development plan with milestones and features far in excess of the spec. going to the contractors s/he can see the big-picture value of the in-house development more clearly.
3) If a contracted services are a must (and they might be). Get a quote from people who will host onsite and maintain your systems remotely. Also get a quote that includes an Open Source solution. Letting someone who has coded a dozen of these systems start you off with a great code base is NOT a bad thing. This gives you the "proving ground" option with the boss as well. The boss can ask you to add a feature, and if s/he doesn't like the results he can still hire the contractors to add features until such time as your team can convince/replace him/her.
We Open Source contractors are not hard to find, and many are glad to share source, tips, good stories and stories of mistakes that you don't want to repeat.
Best of luck.
3 cent long distance minutes.
The part of your question regarding the benefits of deregulation is that easily answered. A typical intra-state phone call during business hours was ~28 cents a minute in 1990. Now I can use the latest marketing gimick (pre-paid LD phone cards) and get flat rate 2.99 cents a minute, no connect charge, LD anywhere in the country. Let me state that another way, ten years ago people were paying 9 TIMES as much per minute for their LD. It's worth noting that the break up of the Bells was noticably prior to this date, and that it took some time to get to where we are, but if you're willing to tough it out, competition rocks.
Service is exactly as abysmal as it always was, but this is actually a function of what the consumer is willing to tolerate. People will pick the company with crappy service and 3 cents a minute over the company with good service and 6 cents a minute. Until you change that fact, service will remain where it is.
I would only be a win for the consumer if the consumer realized what was going on.
If the average user notices that he can browse any site with IE, but only half the sites out there with Mozilla, he/she is unlikely to choose Mozilla. I wish we lived in a world where the average consumer was sufficiently concerned with freedom that this would spur them on to use FOSS products, but if that were the case, they probably would already be using them.
Thank you Brento, I hadn't checked the article dates.
I'm not sure it detracts significantly from my point though. Settlements aren't reached overnight, nor are these strategies formed instantly. For these two events to occur in the same month seems sufficiently coincident to suggest that there is a strong correlation between putting the Netscape fun behind them and going forward with their plans for the fully Monolithic OS.
How many minutes has it been since Microsoft spent 3/4ths of a billion dollars putting that Netscape stuff to rest? It was a strange set of arguments they had, simultaneously attempting to prove that IE was "an inextricable part of the OS" and yet entirely optional with no unfair advantage over any other browser option the user might attempt to use.
Now that that case is put to rest it's about time they made sure that the next generation of DRM technology can't be run under WINE or on the MAC. The best approach I can imagine for this is to have is use an entirely proprietary API for IE and to update it with WindowsUpdate. It's not hard to imagine the newbie surfing along who gets this webpage.
Our web servers have observed that your computer needs several security updates available for free from Microsoft [here]. For the safety of our customers we cannot allow you to continue surfing our site until these updates are in place. We apologize for any inconvenience.
At that point the user is using the latest IE with DRM enabled with no idea how many or few sites need it. All your content can then be DRM protected by default with FrontPage, and the user's take is that everything "just works" when they use IE, and has intermittant and annoying problems with every other browswer. This strategy is getting old.
What I find so annoying, about this is not that its another "we know what's best for you" kind of law, but that its one based on the assumption that the lives of normal citizens are less valuable than that of the policefolk. Apparently, if you were just mowing down innocent bystanders the game would be fine for minors that would otherwise be damaged by simulated combat with the police.
Thankfully I live in Washington state and can sign the petition for the repeal of this stupidity.
If they made it against the law to sell a game that depicted shooting white people, but it was OK to sell the game where people are shooting African-Americans, I think it would be slightly more obvious who they thought the second class citizens were, but it is no less offensive.
I apologize for not getting the name of the lic. right. The quote is from the AFPL.
Again I say, I really like the GS software, and hope they make good money with it.
The issue here is muddied by the fact that GS is a wonderful app. and have contributed something very significant to the Linux desktop.
BUT [you gnu it was coming]...
At what point does a GNU project turn into just an advertisement for commercial software. Can Microsoft release the source (ugly crap that it is) to GWindows 3.1 and spam it with ads. for Windows XP?
I don't know where they should draw the line for this, but there should be a line. The fact that some GNU folk would draw it well to one side of reasonble seems consistent with their views and past behaviors. Therefore I can't fault them for not wanting this to be a GNU project.
the lack of available specs. and guarantees.
You are handing them a black box that doesn't work, and getting back one that does. This leaves a great deal of room for them to use cheaply available surplus cells to refurb. the pack. The fact is, if your battery is more than a year old it's very likely cells of the same dimensions and voltage are available with even better amp-hour ratings than the original. But it's hard for companies to compete who sell a product with the improved batteries as the metrics buy which their competition, and the original manufacturer are rated are nebulous, fakeable and often unavailable. I've had good luck with the people at PrimeCell.
Having played with Li-Ion charge circuits (yes, just the reference design from Atmel) I can see that calibration might be an issue. I don't however think it will be a critical one. Very smart chargers can in fact compensate for the changing characteristics of aging batteries. That the people replacing them would insert cells with characteristics within the "acceptable margins." of the compensating code doesn't sound impossible either.
From the Artifex Public License
You do need an Artifex license if you intend to redistribute Ghostscript technology with your commercial product, or if you intend to use any source code from Ghostscript technologies within your commercial product.
That's just not "Free Software." It's open source, and it may be a profitable business model. I wish them the best of luck as I have used the GS tools for years with great satisfaction. But there can be little question that this is not the kind of freedom that the GNU folks wish guaranteed to those that use their software.
Bad assumptions abound here. Yes, this could make citizens safer from police. And since "Police Abuse of Power" is a popular meme it may seem like it's all daisies. First off the article doesn't go into nearly the depth needed to establish authentication. For instance: The recorder authenticates all the video to prevent changes, and it will have a checkout system to keep track of which officers have checked out which hard drives.
This could mean the officer get's handed a clipboard and "signs out" a drive, like he does a gun or any other piece of equipment. For evidence that can be so damaging (to both victim and jerk (whichever they may be)) the standard must come up to a whole new level. Anything less than outstandingly modern security will allow the tired mystery novel scenario to occur:
Officer A switches tivos with officer B; Officer A checks out drive 1 while signing for drive 2. Officer B checks out drive 2 while signing for drive 1. Officer A goes out to do something bad. Officer B drives a rush our traffic route so there are no tickets to hand out. That night they check in their drives, but Officer A has wiped his. Later Officer A is accused of a crime and has video to prove that he was somewhere else at the time. The fact that Officer B's drive crashed that day is not compelling evidence of anything.
The device that checks out the hard drive should be a black box digital time clock that puts it's own signature in the data of the drive. The vending company should make the public keys available to verify the signature, but keep the private keys out of the reach of law enforcement altogether. The officer that checks out a drive should type his pass-phrase into the checkout terminal so that it can generate a second signature that cannot be replicated without the pass-phrase. The Tivo-like computer should, in addition to other features, keep a running log of which hard drives (by signature) have been inserted into it and when, and these logs (up to the last say 100 insertions) should be included and signed on each new hard drive that goes into the Tivo. So any hard disk mucking about would be distributed over all the hard disks in the pool, and they would therefore have to destroy them all to successfully cover this stuff up. With the addition of signed GPS location/timestamps swapping/editing could be pretty tough especially if the tivo device derived it's signature from an unremovable factory issued SIM.
It's worth noting that I've never seen an episode of "Cops: A night of police screw ups."
Censoring the things they don't want seen is already the norm, and it will continue to be unless we legislate it otherwise.