What's really needed, once these IDs are handed out, is to get 100 or so volunteers to follow the senators around with a nice big antenna and blog daily about who they are meeting with, where, and for how long. When they stop carrying their Personal Identification Device find creative ways to force them to. For example intimate that they must have something to hide, like meeting with foriegn officials / the mob. Hopefully it wouldn't require anything illegal (such as reporting them to DHS for "suspicion activity") in order to get them to do their patriotic duty by carrying their papers with them.
Doing this might actually cause some positive change. In the meantime, tin foil works fairly well... I find two layers is usually sufficient =P
I like gnome, and despite what the popular opinion might be it's far better in usability in a lot of areas. It just doesn't have as many bells and whistles. Basically, gnome : mac:: kde : windows, which could also explain why it's not so popular.
Take for example dual screen support. The last KDE I tried (3.4) had the option of one continuous bar extending across both screens, so windows in the bar are usually on the wrong screen (where it spills over one screen, the buttons are just cut in half). KDE also had the 'option' of having exactly one window list in the entire display. This from a C++, object-oriented environment? Meanwhile in gnome I can have as many bars as I want and the windows move from lists to list dynamically as they are dragged between screens.
And you know what, this lack of usability for KDE is pervasive. Putting the kmix? into the taskbar and the default is like 20 miniture mixer controls, which look retarded and are very difficult to use. The volume control is similar, where in kde you get like maybe 20 pixels of range (depending on your bar size) whereas in gnome you click and get a popup slider so you can actually set the volume accurately. And the stock performance monitor in gnome shows a history instead of a vertical, rainbow colored bar showing the last sample. And it goes on and on like that.
So sure KDE has more bells and whistles and gnome does have its many flaws, but KDE just doesn't have that nice elegant feel to it; it feels like a bunch of hacks. And I didn't get into linux just for a free, better version of Windows.
There was a story a while back about flaws in Firefox and that it should integrate an instant messenger client. Kinda...
My idea is to have a IM/IRC panel that automatically shows other Firefox users with their windows open to the same page or maybe site. Just think how cool it would be if you read some comment on Slashdot and it says the author is online; you can chat and followup a discussion without having to post lots of +0 Noise posts that nobody else really cares about anyway. Or maybe you're reading some technical article and see a few other Firefox users on the same page -- you can ask them some question specific to that page (one might be the author with the page open in firefox to answer questions, ask readers what they think of the wroiting, etc).
If done right this could be pretty darn cool IMO. It has to be done with the browser because basically it should be a system that applies to all websites. This would also be a great social aspect to help build the Firefox community. The server load could be balanced by hashing the site or URL and thereby dividing the load on the browser end.
F*cking ignorant coward. I swear the whole Bush presidency must be one huge bet to see what the stupidest idea is they can convince people of. So let's take your straw men -- even they make Bush seem like "Milwaukee's Best":
Grant: war hero, a drunk, a failed president. Bush: protected Texas from immigrants, coke addict and a drunk, a failed president.
Lincoln: freed the slaves, saved the union, log cabin to president Bush: rendered "darkies", "the great divider", still playing with lincoln logs
And the anonymous coward actually thinks "kicking ass so people are AFRAID of the US" is a good thing; people should respect our authority not fear getting anally raped and electrically labotomized. Iraq and Afghanistan can be solved with an iron hand that comes down fair not one with a finger up their butt.
Iraq produced 1 million fewer barrels of oil per day than in 2002; 12% of our 2002 imports were from Iraq. That's a lot less oil and one less country to help lower OPEC's prices. And incidentally it's also about how much ANWAR would produce on a good day. So either ANWAR is no big deal or Iraq not exporting that oil is a significant loss of production. Not like it's the only reason, but it's there.
Okay I realize this is probably a lost cause since the AC is very ignorant (which he probably already knows since he posted that FUD anonymously). He probably grew up being 'whooped' by his father (an educated guess since he loves ass being kicked). But seriously, AC: you don't have to be ignorant and poorly adjusted. You can get help for these problems.
Americans will be paying for this particular mistake for decades to come
Well duh. Bush failed at absolutely everything he did until his 40's when his father became president; I don't consider winning the fraternaty bong contest a glowing success, although some might. Then he accepted gifts and help from people wanting to get close to his dad. So why on earth would anybody think a failure until age 40 and drug addict would do well as president? I guess if you want a figurehead who's easy to manipulate he might be a good choice.
And now look where the country is: the military can't even recruit poor blacks anymore, the deficit and debt are at ridiculously high levels, the world hates us, gas is expensive (partially due to less oil as a result of the iraq war), the constitution is ripped all the hell, the schools are failing mostly because of "no child left behind." And maybe our very democracy is at the brink of failure.
It's totally predictable based on the man's track record -- I mean jesus christ if you have a visa or family overseas then get out while you have a chance.
The only real problem I've had with gentoo is fragmentation caused by all the compiling and updating files. I think it isn't so much that the files are fragmented as spread out thin across the disk... that's because you're always compiling something and creating system files with different amounts of space in use.
I've tried different filesystems such as jfs, reiser4 (using -mm kernel), and ext3 of course and none of them really solved the problem. Reiser4 is the best overall, but suffers from several-second long pauses when doing file-io as in rebalances the tree, which can be really irritating when:wq from vi hangs for a while. The best solution I have found is to create a fairly large partition and mount tmpfs onto/tmp then bind to/usr/tmp and optionally to/usr/portage/distfiles or portage cache dir. Creating a loopback device file and putting portage on it helps but the real problem IMO is all the files from compiling. Over time this has a large impact.
Other that that gentoo is awesome. I always have more up-to-date software than any other distro, it's simple to set options for various software, and there's never any version conflicts. The only thing that ever takes any time from an administration POV is etc-update. Once you figure out the interactive merge and what files to actually care about (/etc/conf.d and/etc/fstab|rc.conf|make.conf) it goes pretty smooth, although it defitely needs some work on that part.
The solution is pretty obvious IMO: when looking up the domain name get some other records such as the company name, contact address, etc and display them in the URL bar, window title, status, or some other place. Perhaps a firefox-style extra panel that appears and gives that info.
Who cares if the site says it is www.bank.com if you can easily see it is registered to Boris at his mom's basement in Russia?
Personally I dislike the US government because of it, not the US people.
Americans get to vote on the federal government at least once every two years. Combine that with state referendums and offices and that's a lot of voting. So no, you should not have a problem with individual Americans, but you should a big problem with "the US people." We voted for all these unconstitutional laws and so-called leaders.
As a citizen I can say that you should dislike the American people as a whole. Ultimately the buck stops here and we are the ones responsible for our government (at least for now).
"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?
How can you now be sure? What part of the Constitution says the goverment can even take away one's right to vote? The 15th amendment states that "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof".
So either felons are not people or states are already in violation of the constitution by denying them the right to vote at least for the senate (even while in prison). And what is the problem with felons voting anyway? Maybe they'll vote for people that will repeal the laws that convicted them? For example, maybe the mass of people convicted on drug offenses will vote to end the drug war? Awesome... the drug war is stupid.
The prison population shouldn't ever be so large that they should really affect the vote anyway. And if felons are ever are that large of a group then God help us all if they can't vote.
The basic problem many on the Left have with Fox is that it's not the party line that is CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS.
No the problem the Left has with FOX News is that they just plain lie. For example, search google for "global climate change site:foxnews.com" and of the top-10 results you get 7 opinion pieces making up random crap about climate change... everything from "more research is needed" to "the alarmist U.N.". The other 3 articles portray global climate change reasonably because they are written by the Associated Press.
Try the same for the sources you say are just reporting the "party line" and you get completely different results -- not even one single opinion piece and no bias (the articles are just reporting the science). If the facts happen to agree with what the liberals are saying that isn't bias, that's the liberals just being correct.
I mean the first search I try and the results for FOX News are 70% opinion whereas for the supposedly biased networks are 100% news. I mean wake the fuck up, FOX News is a propoganda machine and that's it's purpose. The reason it is successful is that there are a lot of uneducated Americans that like to think they are right.
Having a free, open-source virtual machine means you can easily copy songs from napster or any other source regardless of DRM. It should be trivial to patch the sound blaster emulation to start dumping to disk when the sound starts and stop once the device is closed or the sound pauses for 1 sec or so. This would make it trivial to copy napster songs regardless of what they do to lock down Windows itself, and it requires almost no work on the part of the user (they just play the song in a qemu-xp and it's saved as qemu###.wav... it would be a bit more difficult to automatically get the song name). But no manual starting/stoping of the recording is needed.
Ultimately this will be used to justify locking the system down at the hardware level with a verification key of some sort (aka paladium or whatever). If the BIOS has a private key and the OS includes the public key then it can encrypt something only the real bios can decrypt, so a virtual pc will need to either have the private key or be able to fake the OS. But ultimately the OS depends on the processor and system to be "honest" so the only way to prevent a QEMU from tricking the OS is to prevent it from running at all (the actual OS must prevent arbitrary programs from running).
I suppose locking up the computer so only offical, blessed software can run so that megacorps can deny us fair-use rights is called progress. But until then I'll continue to donate to wikipedia (so we know) and add more GPL code to the world (so we can do something about it).
Good question, and the short answer is that google needs to host wikipedia in order to co-opt it. They did it with usenet. Essentially the only way to access the vast majority of Usenet posts is through google... sure there are other obscure ways to read the news (maybe your ISP hosts an NNTP server), but if you sit down at some generic computer or want to see any non-current posts then you use google. Period. They took a free, public-domain source and ownzed it.
Now they are after wikipedia. It's also free in that google can download the database and start their own fork of it. What stops them is that as soon as they get a fork it is out-of-data since people know the wikipedia site, link to it, and that there is a community set up that creates and edits articles on wikipedia site. The solution is to put their own interface on wikipedia, whether wikipedia is hosted on google's servers or not. Then once more people are editing articles through google than wikipedia then can just discontinue updating wikipedia. At that point wikipedia is totally out of the picture. They will have a database but it will be out of date. They won't have the visitors anymore. And google will no longer provide access to the entire archive as a download. So from that point on wikipedia content will be controlled exclusively by google.
Don't mistake google founders for fools; they are some of the smartest people. Smarter than you or I, and the have thought about this. Maybe you think they are altruistic and will be benevolent dictators over the information -- okay, just know that it will happen unless people do something about it now, for instance donating money to wikimedia.org (I donated $250) so they can buy real servers and bandwidth.
For wikipedia, what they should do in any deal with google is to require that google provide, for a nominal fee, access to the complete archive for as long as they use the data. It's all public domain and with their costs covered if they don't agree to this then that's pretty much a guarentee of an alterior motive on their part.
I have been waiting for months for this book to come out, based on the strength of the author's discussion on C-SPAN about it. And no, I don't normally watch Book TV, but I got sucked in because it was so fascinating (it was on the radio and even Book TV is better than ClearChannel crap).
The idea that autistic people can be used to model normal people in situations where there is not enough time to make a complex, socially-based decision. That police stopping a vehicle are safer if only one cop is at the scene than if there are two, because the presence of the other makes them proceed too quickly. The author even admits out that race and other prejudices are a factor in split-second decisions whether we like it or not, even when we don't consciously support it (ie raised in a blue state) -- regardless of how much as we might like that to be different.
Gladwell has clearly has done his research and has some really good ideas.
Terrorism: A space elevator is vulnerable to terrorism at every part of its length. A terrorist can target any section of the elevator, but we have to defend all of it. That's not a winning stragegy -- we have to take the fight to them.
So screw colonizing Mars, we need to occupy it now or the terrorists will win.
It is very strange that it is being attacked so vehemently, when Gentoo users do not attack others. Usually - everyone has their share of pimply teenagers that thinks it makes them alpha males to do such. But in Gentoo community, they seem very, very rare.
It isn't strange at all, it's just basic human envy. Gentoo has a more reasonable community, it's faster, it has easier and better package management, it has better documentation, and it requires less effort to maintain. Those are just the facts for anybody that's actually used it. But it takes more initial effort to set up so people in general don't do it, but wish they had.
Seems to me a gbrowser would be a way to browse google. In theory, Google works by taking your search term and returning the most linked sites that contain that term. But what if they flip it and instead when you are on a page gbrowser would show you links to that page, ranked by link-ed-ness or maybe filtered by search terms?
Think about it... everything on the web is forward. Google might be using their vast database of links to go backward. It would be a kind of pre-linking, a giant meta-back button for the web. You can sort of do this with the advanced search link:, but if they put it in a non-obtrusive sidebar it would be the shiznit!
Other legal regimes make it impossible to sell authors' rights
You mean like the USA? Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution grants the federal government the power to:
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors
the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
Unfortunately we just choose to ignore the consitution is this matter.
The main point that the author is missing is that there are two types of hackers: those that are really good at quickly making complicated code that does the job, and those that are really good at making beautiful code that does the job better and simpler. The speed-hackers like perl and C++ whereas the quality-hackers like Java and C. It's the difference between pixels and bitmaps vs vectors and display-pdf, or Windows vs Mac.
The author clearly has no experience with the kind of great hackers that favor elegance over quickness. That's why he doesn't stop to think that google probably requires python experience for their Java jobs because they're using python to script Java.. Also, he says retarded things like "the less smart people writing the actual applications wouldn't be doing low-level stuff like allocating memory". It takes just as much genius and skill to do a great job arranging high-level components as low-level components and the key is to get your great hackers to do the core parts at every level and have the rest fill in the details around it.
Still, there are a lot of good observations in the article.
I haven't seen it mentioned yet but it should be pointed out that virtually everything in Unix or Mac OS X "could be exploited across the internet". A temporary file bug in gzipcould be exploited across the internet. A bug in automake could be exploited across the internet.
How many of these "over the network" holes can be done by somebody without an account? If the number of those in both OS X and Linux combined, covering the range of software that comes with Windows, is more than two or three then that would be a newsworth story. What this story is really saying is that even though you can't do squat remotely in Windows there's still a huge number of remote exploits.
The screenshots for Metisse suck and you can only use FVWM - what gives? It is a great demonstration of how productive Java is though.
Looking Glass: Looks awesome Metisse: Looks like crap
Looking Glass: one guy in his spare time Metisse: "a lot, see the source" (really one dude hacking other sources though)
Looking Glass: from scratch because of Java APIs Metisse: hacked X server, hacked FVWM, hacked vnc.
Looking Glass: very secure Metisse: insecure (it's in C and it's hacked up code)
Looking Glass: easy to write plug-ins, dynamically load Metisse: hack fvwm in C, recompile ...
There was an article a while back saying that the language doesn't matter for security because it is bad programming that is responsible. Even without looking at the source I can guarentee there's no buffer overflows, double-free's, format string exploits, etc in Looking Glass. And I would bet my life savings there's at least several in Metisse.
There was an article recently about Java performance where most posters insisted it's still slow and jerky, but the movie of Looking Glass sure looks good to me. It's sad that people still use C/C++ to create lame hacks like this Metisse when there are such better alternatives. Can you imagine if the whole OS was written in a modern language?
These results clearly show that Java is in the same league as C++, despite being slowed down by running in a C-based operating system. Just imagine how fast is would be if the OS was not so archaic.
A safe, object-oriented operating system would make Java way faster than C++:
eliminates the penalty for context switches, so timeslices could be extremely short.
system calls would just be normal method calls instead of incurring the overhead of an interrupt. and they would be inlined like normal methods.
data would not need to be copied in/out of kernel memory.
if memory is sufficient then the code can run in real mode, without the overhead of using page tables / address translation.
even if virtual memory is needed, there's no tlb and cache flush overhead
since there's no need for separate memory spaces, creating a new 'task' (ie fork) would be nearly as fast as creating a thread.
the object in memory can be rearranged to reduce cache misses
the OS api could be much simpler and use more efficient approaches, such as using real callbacks (event listeners) instead of the crippled signal mechanism.
and there are probably many more advantages. Take a system like that and run a C++ app on it (in a CVM) and you'll see it run orders of magnitude slower at best. C/C++ is just a much slower language than Java.
There are other Smalltalk-based languages that are far better than this, for example SmallScript. The guy behind it, David Simmons, is trying to learn from Smalltalk's mistakes:
Isolated, all-in-one environment creates a with-us or against-us situation. Smallscript can plug into.NET, and you can embed C++ or other language code directly into the program and link to external code.
Slow performance. Smallscript is targeted more at scripting, where performance is less critical. Even the best Smalltalks average about 1/10th the speed of C on common codes. All Smalltalks are significantly slower than Java.
Complete lack of security. Smalltalks allow dynamically loading and running code (there are even smalltalk-lets like applets), but have no provisions for Java-like sandbox security. Smallscript has some provisions for security and can leverage.NET's security.
Unnatural language syntax for programming. Smalltalkers claim their language is more like English, but most programmers just don't like it. Smallscript has added a few C-like keywords and syntax.
Lack of solid, stable core. One of Java's strengths is a huge core library that is unmodifiable by applications. This means that everybody knows what the core does and what is available in it. Smalltalk core is flexibly, where developers add methods to objects on a whim and re-writing the actual code for the core objects. This means that apps are not portable to future language runtime versions and can't co-exist with other applications.
This new Slate language looks just like Smalltalk only with new features that nobody actually wants, such as prototypes instead of classes. AFAICT, it hasn't improved on any of the above problems and has actually made some of them worse. IOW, it's doomed.
Scallscript is a start. It's definitely the best of the breed. Personally, I think the greatest barrier to acceptance of Slate / Smalltalk / Smallscript / Squeak / Whatever is the language syntax. Programmers just don't yoda talking like, and a slightly-off Germanic style of grammar just doesn't fit well with an activity like programming that is more mathematical and logical than like communication.
I suppose every time you use windows, icons, your mouse, or pointers, it just pisses you off that a bunch of Smalltalkers at Parc years ago foisted that on us! And damn that MVC concept too. And the whole messaging thing, and first class objects, and, well all that other OO stuff, bunch of stuff Smalltalkers foisted on us. I guess they foisted garbage collection onto Java too, huh?
Okay, now off-topic but all Smalltalk did was put these things together into one package:
All these things came well before Smalltalk. Smalltalk isn't even the same OO as the successful object-oriented languages: Java, C#, C++, SIMULA. SWT is good because it came from good people at IBM and uses native widgets, not because it came from Smalltalk. For example, it has manual allocation/free of resources -- not very smalltalk-like, is it?
Slashdot Mirror
What's really needed, once these IDs are handed out, is to get 100 or so volunteers to follow the senators around with a nice big antenna and blog daily about who they are meeting with, where, and for how long. When they stop carrying their Personal Identification Device find creative ways to force them to. For example intimate that they must have something to hide, like meeting with foriegn officials / the mob. Hopefully it wouldn't require anything illegal (such as reporting them to DHS for "suspicion activity") in order to get them to do their patriotic duty by carrying their papers with them.
Doing this might actually cause some positive change. In the meantime, tin foil works fairly well... I find two layers is usually sufficient =P
I like gnome, and despite what the popular opinion might be it's far better in usability in a lot of areas. It just doesn't have as many bells and whistles. Basically, gnome : mac :: kde : windows, which could also explain why it's not so popular.
Take for example dual screen support. The last KDE I tried (3.4) had the option of one continuous bar extending across both screens, so windows in the bar are usually on the wrong screen (where it spills over one screen, the buttons are just cut in half). KDE also had the 'option' of having exactly one window list in the entire display. This from a C++, object-oriented environment? Meanwhile in gnome I can have as many bars as I want and the windows move from lists to list dynamically as they are dragged between screens.
And you know what, this lack of usability for KDE is pervasive. Putting the kmix? into the taskbar and the default is like 20 miniture mixer controls, which look retarded and are very difficult to use. The volume control is similar, where in kde you get like maybe 20 pixels of range (depending on your bar size) whereas in gnome you click and get a popup slider so you can actually set the volume accurately. And the stock performance monitor in gnome shows a history instead of a vertical, rainbow colored bar showing the last sample. And it goes on and on like that.
So sure KDE has more bells and whistles and gnome does have its many flaws, but KDE just doesn't have that nice elegant feel to it; it feels like a bunch of hacks. And I didn't get into linux just for a free, better version of Windows.
There was a story a while back about flaws in Firefox and that it should integrate an instant messenger client. Kinda...
My idea is to have a IM/IRC panel that automatically shows other Firefox users with their windows open to the same page or maybe site. Just think how cool it would be if you read some comment on Slashdot and it says the author is online; you can chat and followup a discussion without having to post lots of +0 Noise posts that nobody else really cares about anyway. Or maybe you're reading some technical article and see a few other Firefox users on the same page -- you can ask them some question specific to that page (one might be the author with the page open in firefox to answer questions, ask readers what they think of the wroiting, etc).
If done right this could be pretty darn cool IMO. It has to be done with the browser because basically it should be a system that applies to all websites. This would also be a great social aspect to help build the Firefox community. The server load could be balanced by hashing the site or URL and thereby dividing the load on the browser end.
F*cking ignorant coward. I swear the whole Bush presidency must be one huge bet to see what the stupidest idea is they can convince people of. So let's take your straw men -- even they make Bush seem like "Milwaukee's Best":
Grant: war hero, a drunk, a failed president.
Bush: protected Texas from immigrants, coke addict and a drunk, a failed president.
Lincoln: freed the slaves, saved the union, log cabin to president
Bush: rendered "darkies", "the great divider", still playing with lincoln logs
And the anonymous coward actually thinks "kicking ass so people are AFRAID of the US" is a good thing; people should respect our authority not fear getting anally raped and electrically labotomized. Iraq and Afghanistan can be solved with an iron hand that comes down fair not one with a finger up their butt.
Iraq produced 1 million fewer barrels of oil per day than in 2002; 12% of our 2002 imports were from Iraq. That's a lot less oil and one less country to help lower OPEC's prices. And incidentally it's also about how much ANWAR would produce on a good day. So either ANWAR is no big deal or Iraq not exporting that oil is a significant loss of production. Not like it's the only reason, but it's there.
Okay I realize this is probably a lost cause since the AC is very ignorant (which he probably already knows since he posted that FUD anonymously). He probably grew up being 'whooped' by his father (an educated guess since he loves ass being kicked). But seriously, AC: you don't have to be ignorant and poorly adjusted. You can get help for these problems.
Americans will be paying for this particular mistake for decades to come
Well duh. Bush failed at absolutely everything he did until his 40's when his father became president; I don't consider winning the fraternaty bong contest a glowing success, although some might. Then he accepted gifts and help from people wanting to get close to his dad. So why on earth would anybody think a failure until age 40 and drug addict would do well as president? I guess if you want a figurehead who's easy to manipulate he might be a good choice.
And now look where the country is: the military can't even recruit poor blacks anymore, the deficit and debt are at ridiculously high levels, the world hates us, gas is expensive (partially due to less oil as a result of the iraq war), the constitution is ripped all the hell, the schools are failing mostly because of "no child left behind." And maybe our very democracy is at the brink of failure.
It's totally predictable based on the man's track record -- I mean jesus christ if you have a visa or family overseas then get out while you have a chance.
The only real problem I've had with gentoo is fragmentation caused by all the compiling and updating files. I think it isn't so much that the files are fragmented as spread out thin across the disk... that's because you're always compiling something and creating system files with different amounts of space in use.
:wq from vi hangs for a while. The best solution I have found is to create a fairly large partition and mount tmpfs onto /tmp then bind to /usr/tmp and optionally to /usr/portage/distfiles or portage cache dir. Creating a loopback device file and putting portage on it helps but the real problem IMO is all the files from compiling. Over time this has a large impact.
/etc/fstab|rc.conf|make.conf) it goes pretty smooth, although it defitely needs some work on that part.
I've tried different filesystems such as jfs, reiser4 (using -mm kernel), and ext3 of course and none of them really solved the problem. Reiser4 is the best overall, but suffers from several-second long pauses when doing file-io as in rebalances the tree, which can be really irritating when
Other that that gentoo is awesome. I always have more up-to-date software than any other distro, it's simple to set options for various software, and there's never any version conflicts. The only thing that ever takes any time from an administration POV is etc-update. Once you figure out the interactive merge and what files to actually care about (/etc/conf.d and
The solution is pretty obvious IMO: when looking up the domain name get some other records such as the company name, contact address, etc and display them in the URL bar, window title, status, or some other place. Perhaps a firefox-style extra panel that appears and gives that info.
Who cares if the site says it is www.bank.com if you can easily see it is registered to Boris at his mom's basement in Russia?
Personally I dislike the US government because of it, not the US people.
Americans get to vote on the federal government at least once every two years. Combine that with state referendums and offices and that's a lot of voting. So no, you should not have a problem with individual Americans, but you should a big problem with "the US people." We voted for all these unconstitutional laws and so-called leaders.
As a citizen I can say that you should dislike the American people as a whole. Ultimately the buck stops here and we are the ones responsible for our government (at least for now).
Those metal bill o' rights aren't allowed through the security checkpoints...
"Restoration of voting rights for former felons": Not sure. Is a felon that has served its sentence entitled to the same rights as others?
How can you now be sure? What part of the Constitution says the goverment can even take away one's right to vote? The 15th amendment states that "The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State, elected by the people thereof".
So either felons are not people or states are already in violation of the constitution by denying them the right to vote at least for the senate (even while in prison). And what is the problem with felons voting anyway? Maybe they'll vote for people that will repeal the laws that convicted them? For example, maybe the mass of people convicted on drug offenses will vote to end the drug war? Awesome... the drug war is stupid.
The prison population shouldn't ever be so large that they should really affect the vote anyway. And if felons are ever are that large of a group then God help us all if they can't vote.
The basic problem many on the Left have with Fox is that it's not the party line that is CNN/NBC/ABC/CBS.
No the problem the Left has with FOX News is that they just plain lie. For example, search google for "global climate change site:foxnews.com" and of the top-10 results you get 7 opinion pieces making up random crap about climate change... everything from "more research is needed" to "the alarmist U.N.". The other 3 articles portray global climate change reasonably because they are written by the Associated Press.
Try the same for the sources you say are just reporting the "party line" and you get completely different results -- not even one single opinion piece and no bias (the articles are just reporting the science). If the facts happen to agree with what the liberals are saying that isn't bias, that's the liberals just being correct.
I mean the first search I try and the results for FOX News are 70% opinion whereas for the supposedly biased networks are 100% news. I mean wake the fuck up, FOX News is a propoganda machine and that's it's purpose. The reason it is successful is that there are a lot of uneducated Americans that like to think they are right.
Having a free, open-source virtual machine means you can easily copy songs from napster or any other source regardless of DRM. It should be trivial to patch the sound blaster emulation to start dumping to disk when the sound starts and stop once the device is closed or the sound pauses for 1 sec or so. This would make it trivial to copy napster songs regardless of what they do to lock down Windows itself, and it requires almost no work on the part of the user (they just play the song in a qemu-xp and it's saved as qemu###.wav... it would be a bit more difficult to automatically get the song name). But no manual starting/stoping of the recording is needed.
Ultimately this will be used to justify locking the system down at the hardware level with a verification key of some sort (aka paladium or whatever). If the BIOS has a private key and the OS includes the public key then it can encrypt something only the real bios can decrypt, so a virtual pc will need to either have the private key or be able to fake the OS. But ultimately the OS depends on the processor and system to be "honest" so the only way to prevent a QEMU from tricking the OS is to prevent it from running at all (the actual OS must prevent arbitrary programs from running).
I suppose locking up the computer so only offical, blessed software can run so that megacorps can deny us fair-use rights is called progress. But until then I'll continue to donate to wikipedia (so we know) and add more GPL code to the world (so we can do something about it).
Good question, and the short answer is that google needs to host wikipedia in order to co-opt it. They did it with usenet. Essentially the only way to access the vast majority of Usenet posts is through google... sure there are other obscure ways to read the news (maybe your ISP hosts an NNTP server), but if you sit down at some generic computer or want to see any non-current posts then you use google. Period. They took a free, public-domain source and ownzed it.
Now they are after wikipedia. It's also free in that google can download the database and start their own fork of it. What stops them is that as soon as they get a fork it is out-of-data since people know the wikipedia site, link to it, and that there is a community set up that creates and edits articles on wikipedia site. The solution is to put their own interface on wikipedia, whether wikipedia is hosted on google's servers or not. Then once more people are editing articles through google than wikipedia then can just discontinue updating wikipedia. At that point wikipedia is totally out of the picture. They will have a database but it will be out of date. They won't have the visitors anymore. And google will no longer provide access to the entire archive as a download. So from that point on wikipedia content will be controlled exclusively by google.
Don't mistake google founders for fools; they are some of the smartest people. Smarter than you or I, and the have thought about this. Maybe you think they are altruistic and will be benevolent dictators over the information -- okay, just know that it will happen unless people do something about it now, for instance donating money to wikimedia.org (I donated $250) so they can buy real servers and bandwidth.
For wikipedia, what they should do in any deal with google is to require that google provide, for a nominal fee, access to the complete archive for as long as they use the data. It's all public domain and with their costs covered if they don't agree to this then that's pretty much a guarentee of an alterior motive on their part.
Food for though.
I have been waiting for months for this book to come out, based on the strength of the author's discussion on C-SPAN about it. And no, I don't normally watch Book TV, but I got sucked in because it was so fascinating (it was on the radio and even Book TV is better than ClearChannel crap).
The idea that autistic people can be used to model normal people in situations where there is not enough time to make a complex, socially-based decision. That police stopping a vehicle are safer if only one cop is at the scene than if there are two, because the presence of the other makes them proceed too quickly. The author even admits out that race and other prejudices are a factor in split-second decisions whether we like it or not, even when we don't consciously support it (ie raised in a blue state) -- regardless of how much as we might like that to be different.
Gladwell has clearly has done his research and has some really good ideas.
- Terrorism: A space elevator is vulnerable to terrorism at every part of its length. A terrorist can target any section of the elevator, but we have to defend all of it. That's not a winning stragegy -- we have to take the fight to them.
So screw colonizing Mars, we need to occupy it now or the terrorists will win.It isn't strange at all, it's just basic human envy. Gentoo has a more reasonable community, it's faster, it has easier and better package management, it has better documentation, and it requires less effort to maintain. Those are just the facts for anybody that's actually used it. But it takes more initial effort to set up so people in general don't do it, but wish they had.
Seems to me a gbrowser would be a way to browse google. In theory, Google works by taking your search term and returning the most linked sites that contain that term. But what if they flip it and instead when you are on a page gbrowser would show you links to that page, ranked by link-ed-ness or maybe filtered by search terms?
Think about it... everything on the web is forward. Google might be using their vast database of links to go backward. It would be a kind of pre-linking, a giant meta-back button for the web. You can sort of do this with the advanced search link:, but if they put it in a non-obtrusive sidebar it would be the shiznit!
Other legal regimes make it impossible to sell authors' rights
You mean like the USA? Section 8, Clause 8 of the United States Constitution grants the federal government the power to:
Unfortunately we just choose to ignore the consitution is this matter.
The main point that the author is missing is that there are two types of hackers: those that are really good at quickly making complicated code that does the job, and those that are really good at making beautiful code that does the job better and simpler. The speed-hackers like perl and C++ whereas the quality-hackers like Java and C. It's the difference between pixels and bitmaps vs vectors and display-pdf, or Windows vs Mac.
The author clearly has no experience with the kind of great hackers that favor elegance over quickness. That's why he doesn't stop to think that google probably requires python experience for their Java jobs because they're using python to script Java. . Also, he says retarded things like "the less smart people writing the actual applications wouldn't be doing low-level stuff like allocating memory". It takes just as much genius and skill to do a great job arranging high-level components as low-level components and the key is to get your great hackers to do the core parts at every level and have the rest fill in the details around it.
Still, there are a lot of good observations in the article.
I haven't seen it mentioned yet but it should be pointed out that virtually everything in Unix or Mac OS X "could be exploited across the internet". A temporary file bug in gzip could be exploited across the internet. A bug in automake could be exploited across the internet.
How many of these "over the network" holes can be done by somebody without an account? If the number of those in both OS X and Linux combined, covering the range of software that comes with Windows, is more than two or three then that would be a newsworth story. What this story is really saying is that even though you can't do squat remotely in Windows there's still a huge number of remote exploits.
The screenshots for Metisse suck and you can only use FVWM - what gives? It is a great demonstration of how productive Java is though.
Looking Glass: Looks awesomeMetisse: Looks like crap
Looking Glass: one guy in his spare time
Metisse: "a lot, see the source" (really one dude hacking other sources though)
Looking Glass: from scratch because of Java APIs
Metisse: hacked X server, hacked FVWM, hacked vnc.
Looking Glass: very secure
Metisse: insecure (it's in C and it's hacked up code)
Looking Glass: easy to write plug-ins, dynamically load
Metisse: hack fvwm in C, recompile
There was an article a while back saying that the language doesn't matter for security because it is bad programming that is responsible. Even without looking at the source I can guarentee there's no buffer overflows, double-free's, format string exploits, etc in Looking Glass. And I would bet my life savings there's at least several in Metisse.
There was an article recently about Java performance where most posters insisted it's still slow and jerky, but the movie of Looking Glass sure looks good to me. It's sad that people still use C/C++ to create lame hacks like this Metisse when there are such better alternatives. Can you imagine if the whole OS was written in a modern language?
These results clearly show that Java is in the same league as C++, despite being slowed down by running in a C-based operating system. Just imagine how fast is would be if the OS was not so archaic.
A safe, object-oriented operating system would make Java way faster than C++:
and there are probably many more advantages. Take a system like that and run a C++ app on it (in a CVM) and you'll see it run orders of magnitude slower at best. C/C++ is just a much slower language than Java.
This new Slate language looks just like Smalltalk only with new features that nobody actually wants, such as prototypes instead of classes. AFAICT, it hasn't improved on any of the above problems and has actually made some of them worse. IOW, it's doomed.
Scallscript is a start. It's definitely the best of the breed. Personally, I think the greatest barrier to acceptance of Slate / Smalltalk / Smallscript / Squeak / Whatever is the language syntax. Programmers just don't yoda talking like, and a slightly-off Germanic style of grammar just doesn't fit well with an activity like programming that is more mathematical and logical than like communication.
For all those GNOME using computer professionals out there...
I suppose every time you use windows, icons, your mouse, or pointers, it just pisses you off that a bunch of Smalltalkers at Parc years ago foisted that on us! And damn that MVC concept too. And the whole messaging thing, and first class objects, and, well all that other OO stuff, bunch of stuff Smalltalkers foisted on us. I guess they foisted garbage collection onto Java too, huh?
Okay, now off-topic but all Smalltalk did was put these things together into one package:
Mouse/Pointer: Doug Englebart
Menus, drag and drop, word processor, etc: Ivan Sitherland.
OO: Simula
Garbage Collection: LISP (and others)
All these things came well before Smalltalk. Smalltalk isn't even the same OO as the successful object-oriented languages: Java, C#, C++, SIMULA. SWT is good because it came from good people at IBM and uses native widgets, not because it came from Smalltalk. For example, it has manual allocation/free of resources -- not very smalltalk-like, is it?