this strikes me as a pretty unfair subsidy of the technologically savvy at the expense of the less technologically competent.
Seems like the sensible thing to do would be to tax DSL and Cable in roughly the same way that telephone lines are taxed (is that feasible?), instead of regulating VOIP over DSL and Cable like telephone lines.
The current situation does seem a bit bizarre, though. Does this mean that all the phone company needs to do is send me a new phone and insure that, somehow or another, the phone uses IP to talk to the local station, and then suddenly a service that is (from my point of view) functionally identical is suddenly not regulated as phone service?
If the kernels are good enough for linus they should be good enough for these guys. 2.69-1.665??
I'd heard that the Fedora 2.6 kernels are actually much *closer* to mainline than previous vendor kernels have been. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
This gets moderated as 0, Troll? What exactly is wrong this opinion? While I do think Libertarians tend to be closet-anarchist nut jobs, this isn't a troll. It's just an expression of a political opinion, which is what this thread is about, isn't it?
No. I'd like to believe that a post consisting of little more than "vote Kerry!" or "vote Bush!" would similarly be modded down. Where's the content?
Finally, giving the money to the developers would be fraud. The donations were made specifically for the purpose of the ad.
Erm, look again--this was a fundraiser for the mozilla foundation, and they stated from the beginning that only a *portion* of the donations would go to buying the ad. There's no fraud here....
--Bruce Fields
Re:Debian can be thought of as 3 parts...
on
Updates From Debian
·
· Score: 1
Debian/unstable: No security patches for unstable packages.
That's not quite true. That is to say, I'm not sure what the official policy is, but in practice every time I've heard about a new security hole, I've noticed that new packages have shown in the unstable apt archives very quickly. Quickly enough that I don't think it's just because they happened to pull down a new upstream version that day.
Testing is the one distribution that doesn't currently seem to get security updates, which means unless you're up to dealing with patching yourself, I think only stable or unstable make real sense for networked hosts.
--Bruce Fields
Re:Oh Debian, I don't know what to think
on
Updates From Debian
·
· Score: 2
If you want modern packages, you often have to hang out with the "unstable" crowd, rather than the "testing" crowd. But this is like being signed up for regular crotch-kicks, since unstable breaks systems on a practically weekly basis. This, plus dependency creep, makes anything but "stable" debian sort of a drag.
OK, Debian unstable does have occasional problems, but the above is a massive exageration. All of my machines are running unstable, I apt-get upgrade at least weekly (often daily), and I can't think of any serious problems that have been caused by that in the last year or so. Maybe I'm forgetting something, but breaking systems every week? No way.
There are smaller annoyances that are more common; e.g. there was an update that made my mozilla fonts ugly for a while. Hm, actually I'm having trouble thinking of anything else.
I think the main practical problem for many people is that the size of the updates would make it awkward to use without broadband.
Ah socialism, take from the upper middle class and give to the lower middle class
I suppose you were just being facetious, but there are a number of reasons why it may make simple economic sense do basic infrastructure this way.
Stuff like networking tends to end up being a monopoly anyway, and there are advantages to it being a democratically regulated one--the government has to be responsive to voters, is bound by the first amendment, etc.
Once the city has decided to roll out wireless everywhere, there's the choice whether to pay for it out of taxes or by charging connection fees. But if a large portion of the population actually uses the service, then the per-user cost is probably quite low. The billing, bookkeeping, and enforcement required to collect fees may just not look worth it at that point.
Obviously, there may be certain economic advantages to a city with a really good data network, and those advantages might turn into tax revenue that helps offset the cost of the network.
These are the same sorts of reasons why road networks aren't usually privatized....
Also, this isn't just a toy for the rich; the cost of an entry-level computer has plumeted over the last couple decades. Isn't it likely that the price of a basic 802.11b-enabled handheld could drop under $100 in the next few years? Consider all the ways that could be useful to someone looking for work, trying to find basic city services, etc., etc.
(Digression: one small convenience I would personally love: many municipal public transport systems already track all of their buses and trains using GPS. A handheld with GPS and wireless could easily answer questions like "how can I get from here to the library by 2pm?", "where is the nearest stop for the southbound red line?", or "where is the #75 right now?")
The hypothesis I was addressing was a scenario in which Linux was distributed under a licence which required anyone producing software which ran on it to distribute source code with that software.
That's a weird hypothesis, since no distribution I've ever heard of uses such a license. I'm not sure it would even be possible to distribute Linux under stuch a license.
(Well, OK, maybe it could, if you, for example, produced a distribution that used a Linux kernel but replaced gcc by your own proprietary compiler and placed a license on that compiler that made such a requirement. I don't know whether anyone would call the resulting distribution "Linux"....)
That couldn't possibly happen, because you can produce software which runs on Linux without agreeing to any licence. An easy example is Java programs, but C programs could be compiled for Linux on another platform.
The language and the platform its compiled on have nothing to do with it. Even if you do accept the screwed-up interpretation of copyright law that says mere use of a program requires a license (since it copies the code into memory in order to use it!), the GPL explicitly gives unconditional permission for use of GPL'd software. (It's only when you start distributing the GPL'd software that it places conditions on you.) You can distribute proprietary software compiled with gcc on Linux, and lots of people do so.
Ok, so you'd have to team up with your next door neighbor and put them in a class of four. And settle for a whiz with an MS degree.
I don't think you're doing the math. Assuming you're willing to pay the NCES's $7000 per year per pupil figure, you're only going to have $28,000 a year to work with. That's nowhere close to paying for a "whiz with an MS degree" in the US (elsewhere? I don't know but I'm skeptical), especially one that also has good people skills, the ability to explain ideas clearly, a broad enough background to handle every subject, etc., etc. Keep in mind that you're also paying for the time they spend preparing and grading, not just the time they spend with the kids. And that they have to factor costs like health insurance and retirement into their feees.
In practice you're probably going to have to hire multiple people, which will make the overhead even worse--it's more work for you to deal with more tutors, and more work for them since they're each now having to piece together a living from multiple customers....
For the $10,000/child/year we spend now on public education, you could probably send your child overseas and have him personally tutored by people with PhDs.
Erm, I know you're just being facetious, but $10,000 minus overhead isn't going to buy you much of the average PhD's time, overseas or not.
The first per-pupil cost numbers I came across claim per-pupil costs of $7000 a year in 2001-2002 for public elementary and seconday schools.
If the host is compromised (and it's best to assume that any untrusted host is), it has full access to your keystrokes, I/O, and the entire memory image of your system.
Yes, of course. I think they're not very clear about what this meant to protect against. I can think of a set of assumptions under which it could be helpful, though. Assume you trust the host machine not to be compromised (so whoever administers it is not out to get you and, in addition, does timely security updates, keeps people from installing hardware keyloggers, etc.). But assume the host doesn't have any of the privacy-protecting software you normally like to use installed. Then this gives you an easy way to ensure you always have, for example, an ssh client with you.
How useful that would be in practice, I don't know--I'd think that it'd be difficult to maintain a typical internet-cafe kiosk host that was both sufficiently secure and that would run programs off of USB sticks....
I think Dell is going to do some small case studies of selling the average user a machine loaded with linux and see if it becomes cheaper to support them.
First you'll have to explain what it is about Linux that makes it inherently more spyware-averse than Windows.
If there are differences I suspect they're in applications rather than the OS--for example, Explorer may make it too easy to download and run software from random websites (but not having used Explorer or ever tried to download spyware for any browser, I don't know if that's actually true...).
When I read biased reporting I feel like I've eaten something with flavor. I either like or dislike the flavor but I know I've gotten nutrition.
Agreed. In fact, I'm a bit tired of the word "biased". The way people use the word, it tends to equate someone who has take a position based on careful thinking about the evidence with someone who has taken a self-serving position.
If the only way to be "unbiased" is to refuse to take a position on anything that is contested, even when there's a mountain of evidence for the position, well, I'd rather be biased!
There's a difference between having an opinion and being on the take....
You sent the message when we bought your shit music for $16+ and found that 14 of the songs were filler.
I'm just curious, since I heard people say this on slashdot so often. Could you give an example of such an album? I have lots of CD's, some that I like better than others, but none that I think of as 1 good track with the rest filler.
Historically, Linus has never liked merging in great glops of code that touch the kernel in many places. It is disruptive to his maintenance of the kernel and it is disruptive to his lieutenants and their sub projects. The article even hinted at how Linus expects those with a major patch like this to handle things. Montavista needs to break this up into bite size chunks that can be slowly merged into the kernel and gives everybody time to get up to speed.
Note also that the patch hasn't really even been submitted for inclusion. The Montavista people posted it to LKML with a lot of warnings, making it clear this was intended as a way to get early feedback on the direction of their project, rather than as an example of a finished implementation.
So the slashdot headline is more than a little misleading; everybody agrees this is early in the process, and it's no suprise no-one's rushing to apply the patch.
Except if the tightly knit community is located in a geographical area that gets snow for four months of the year, at which point cycling to work/school every day gets to be at best inconvenient if not downright dangerous for a good time of the year.
Nah, it's not that bad. People in northern climes ride year round too. Good sites for ideas include icebike and bikewinter.
Also I wrote up some suggestions on riding in winter.
Where I live in Michigan it's pretty easy as the streets usually get cleared early on all but a few of the worst days, so it's not really the ice and snow as just a matter of dressing right for the weather. (Main points: protect extremities, but don't dress *too* warm, since you'll warm up as you exercise.)
I do wonder about their counting.... Does the one panel only count as background just because it doesn't have a border? Or do the one diagonal pair of borders not count as real panel separators?
Music is/not/ "*your* personal property". You do/not/ in the traditional/buy/ music any more. You license it.
Not true. Music isn't generally sold the way software is. Of the hundred-or-so CD's in my collection, I've never agreed to any license on any of them.
Buying the copy doesn't give me the *copyright*, so certain rights (like redistribution) still remain with the copryright owner. But the copy that I buy *is* my personal property, to dispose of how I wish, as long as it doesn't interfere with those rights--google for "first sale rights" for more information on this.
His customers, who may have to decide whether to continue to be his customers or to change platforms.
His shareholders, who need to know whether he's leading the company in a profitable direction
Etc., etc. The "free market" works best when everybody involved has good information. The fact that the CEO of a major corporation can "talk shit about his competition,... [ or say ] that the Microsoft way is the only way", even when it's just "empty crap talk", and people just accept this and say "it's his job", is a reminder of how broken the system is.
One way we can keep the system from becoming even more broken is by calling people on it when they make empty unsupported claims. We owe it to ourselves.
The format being as open as it is ( you can read, in the code, the format if all else fails ), you can do a great many things that just aren't possible with ms office.
I think the question to ask would be, is the normal home or business user going to need or want to do those "great many things"?
There's a lot of stuff that may be pretty damn cool if you're a geek or hacker type, but I think you're going to have to find more relevant selling points if you want wider exposure than those limited circles.
The windows and mac users I know are often quite fond of downloading little extras for their favorite OS, many of which appear to be written by just random geeks who got excited when they noticed that the OS provided some API that would let them do some nifty thing.
So the "pretty damn cool" stuff for geeks can trickle down.
I really do not need statistics to tell me that if I stay off the road, I will likely NOT be hit by a road travelling vehicle.
In your case, where you take "off the road" to actually mean in the wilderness, yes, of course.
But many people use the identical argument to persuade themselves that they would be better off on, say, a sidewalk next to a busy road than actually in the road, and then they get in a nasty accident in the next crosswalk. (This Palo Alto study and this survey of LAB members are two examples of evidence for higher accident risk for sidepaths than for roads.)
This is why I am a cross-country mountain biker.
OK. Though in the case of someone cycling for transportation, this isn't really an option....
Also, though this is something I don't have real evidence for, I think there are likely to be differences between the risks encountered on typical recreational road cyclists' routes (rural highways, traffic rare but fast) and typical commuters' routes (more complex traffic patterns but somewhat slower, possibly more awake drivers). For what it's worth, I'm personally much more comfortable with the latter....
You really want to take the high and mighty road when your chance of winning if someone else doesn't agree is essentially zero?
The problem with that argument is that it presumes you would be safer if you didn't take the lane. There is evidence, however, that taking the lane is actually the safer option in many cases.
Here's one summary of research, mainly on the related issue of choosing between roads and sidepaths--but it does at least call in to question the idea that you reduce the chance of accidents by staying out of traffic lanes.
Slashdot Mirror
Seems like the sensible thing to do would be to tax DSL and Cable in roughly the same way that telephone lines are taxed (is that feasible?), instead of regulating VOIP over DSL and Cable like telephone lines.
The current situation does seem a bit bizarre, though. Does this mean that all the phone company needs to do is send me a new phone and insure that, somehow or another, the phone uses IP to talk to the local station, and then suddenly a service that is (from my point of view) functionally identical is suddenly not regulated as phone service?
--Bruce Fields
I'd heard that the Fedora 2.6 kernels are actually much *closer* to mainline than previous vendor kernels have been. Do you have any evidence to the contrary?
No. I'd like to believe that a post consisting of little more than "vote Kerry!" or "vote Bush!" would similarly be modded down. Where's the content?
--Bruce Fields
Erm, look again--this was a fundraiser for the mozilla foundation, and they stated from the beginning that only a *portion* of the donations would go to buying the ad. There's no fraud here....
--Bruce Fields
That's not quite true. That is to say, I'm not sure what the official policy is, but in practice every time I've heard about a new security hole, I've noticed that new packages have shown in the unstable apt archives very quickly. Quickly enough that I don't think it's just because they happened to pull down a new upstream version that day.
Testing is the one distribution that doesn't currently seem to get security updates, which means unless you're up to dealing with patching yourself, I think only stable or unstable make real sense for networked hosts.
--Bruce Fields
OK, Debian unstable does have occasional problems, but the above is a massive exageration. All of my machines are running unstable, I apt-get upgrade at least weekly (often daily), and I can't think of any serious problems that have been caused by that in the last year or so. Maybe I'm forgetting something, but breaking systems every week? No way.
There are smaller annoyances that are more common; e.g. there was an update that made my mozilla fonts ugly for a while. Hm, actually I'm having trouble thinking of anything else.
I think the main practical problem for many people is that the size of the updates would make it awkward to use without broadband.
--Bruce Fields
I suppose you were just being facetious, but there are a number of reasons why it may make simple economic sense do basic infrastructure this way.
Stuff like networking tends to end up being a monopoly anyway, and there are advantages to it being a democratically regulated one--the government has to be responsive to voters, is bound by the first amendment, etc.
Once the city has decided to roll out wireless everywhere, there's the choice whether to pay for it out of taxes or by charging connection fees. But if a large portion of the population actually uses the service, then the per-user cost is probably quite low. The billing, bookkeeping, and enforcement required to collect fees may just not look worth it at that point.
Obviously, there may be certain economic advantages to a city with a really good data network, and those advantages might turn into tax revenue that helps offset the cost of the network.
These are the same sorts of reasons why road networks aren't usually privatized....
Also, this isn't just a toy for the rich; the cost of an entry-level computer has plumeted over the last couple decades. Isn't it likely that the price of a basic 802.11b-enabled handheld could drop under $100 in the next few years? Consider all the ways that could be useful to someone looking for work, trying to find basic city services, etc., etc.
(Digression: one small convenience I would personally love: many municipal public transport systems already track all of their buses and trains using GPS. A handheld with GPS and wireless could easily answer questions like "how can I get from here to the library by 2pm?", "where is the nearest stop for the southbound red line?", or "where is the #75 right now?")
--Bruce Fields
That's a weird hypothesis, since no distribution I've ever heard of uses such a license. I'm not sure it would even be possible to distribute Linux under stuch a license.
(Well, OK, maybe it could, if you, for example, produced a distribution that used a Linux kernel but replaced gcc by your own proprietary compiler and placed a license on that compiler that made such a requirement. I don't know whether anyone would call the resulting distribution "Linux"....)
The language and the platform its compiled on have nothing to do with it. Even if you do accept the screwed-up interpretation of copyright law that says mere use of a program requires a license (since it copies the code into memory in order to use it!), the GPL explicitly gives unconditional permission for use of GPL'd software. (It's only when you start distributing the GPL'd software that it places conditions on you.) You can distribute proprietary software compiled with gcc on Linux, and lots of people do so.
--Bruce Fields
I don't think you're doing the math. Assuming you're willing to pay the NCES's $7000 per year per pupil figure, you're only going to have $28,000 a year to work with. That's nowhere close to paying for a "whiz with an MS degree" in the US (elsewhere? I don't know but I'm skeptical), especially one that also has good people skills, the ability to explain ideas clearly, a broad enough background to handle every subject, etc., etc. Keep in mind that you're also paying for the time they spend preparing and grading, not just the time they spend with the kids. And that they have to factor costs like health insurance and retirement into their feees.
In practice you're probably going to have to hire multiple people, which will make the overhead even worse--it's more work for you to deal with more tutors, and more work for them since they're each now having to piece together a living from multiple customers....
Good education is expensive.
--Bruce Fields
Erm, I know you're just being facetious, but $10,000 minus overhead isn't going to buy you much of the average PhD's time, overseas or not.
The first per-pupil cost numbers I came across claim per-pupil costs of $7000 a year in 2001-2002 for public elementary and seconday schools.
That doesn't buy you a lot of anyone's time.
--Bruce Fields
Yes, of course. I think they're not very clear about what this meant to protect against. I can think of a set of assumptions under which it could be helpful, though. Assume you trust the host machine not to be compromised (so whoever administers it is not out to get you and, in addition, does timely security updates, keeps people from installing hardware keyloggers, etc.). But assume the host doesn't have any of the privacy-protecting software you normally like to use installed. Then this gives you an easy way to ensure you always have, for example, an ssh client with you.
How useful that would be in practice, I don't know--I'd think that it'd be difficult to maintain a typical internet-cafe kiosk host that was both sufficiently secure and that would run programs off of USB sticks....
--Bruce Fields
First you'll have to explain what it is about Linux that makes it inherently more spyware-averse than Windows.
If there are differences I suspect they're in applications rather than the OS--for example, Explorer may make it too easy to download and run software from random websites (but not having used Explorer or ever tried to download spyware for any browser, I don't know if that's actually true...).
--Bruce Fields
Agreed. In fact, I'm a bit tired of the word "biased". The way people use the word, it tends to equate someone who has take a position based on careful thinking about the evidence with someone who has taken a self-serving position.
If the only way to be "unbiased" is to refuse to take a position on anything that is contested, even when there's a mountain of evidence for the position, well, I'd rather be biased!
There's a difference between having an opinion and being on the take....
--Bruce Fields
I'm just curious, since I heard people say this on slashdot so often. Could you give an example of such an album? I have lots of CD's, some that I like better than others, but none that I think of as 1 good track with the rest filler.
--Bruce Fields
Note also that the patch hasn't really even been submitted for inclusion. The Montavista people posted it to LKML with a lot of warnings, making it clear this was intended as a way to get early feedback on the direction of their project, rather than as an example of a finished implementation.
So the slashdot headline is more than a little misleading; everybody agrees this is early in the process, and it's no suprise no-one's rushing to apply the patch.
--Bruce Fields
Also except those with salaries from governments, universities, nonprofits,....
Is there actually a prominent kernel hacker that has "always been paid nothing for their work"?
--Bruce Fields
Nah, it's not that bad. People in northern climes ride year round too. Good sites for ideas include icebike and bikewinter. Also I wrote up some suggestions on riding in winter.
Where I live in Michigan it's pretty easy as the streets usually get cleared early on all but a few of the worst days, so it's not really the ice and snow as just a matter of dressing right for the weather. (Main points: protect extremities, but don't dress *too* warm, since you'll warm up as you exercise.)
--Bruce Fields
Not true. Music isn't generally sold the way software is. Of the hundred-or-so CD's in my collection, I've never agreed to any license on any of them.
Buying the copy doesn't give me the *copyright*, so certain rights (like redistribution) still remain with the copryright owner. But the copy that I buy *is* my personal property, to dispose of how I wish, as long as it doesn't interfere with those rights--google for "first sale rights" for more information on this.
--Bruce Fields
Etc., etc. The "free market" works best when everybody involved has good information. The fact that the CEO of a major corporation can "talk shit about his competition, ... [ or say ] that the Microsoft way is the only way", even when it's just "empty crap talk", and people just accept this and say "it's his job", is a reminder of how broken the system is.
One way we can keep the system from becoming even more broken is by calling people on it when they make empty unsupported claims. We owe it to ourselves.
--Bruce Fields
I do. That is to say, it may well be true, but I haven't seen sufficient evidence for it. Have you?
--Bruce Fields
The windows and mac users I know are often quite fond of downloading little extras for their favorite OS, many of which appear to be written by just random geeks who got excited when they noticed that the OS provided some API that would let them do some nifty thing.
So the "pretty damn cool" stuff for geeks can trickle down.
--Bruce Fields
In your case, where you take "off the road" to actually mean in the wilderness, yes, of course.
But many people use the identical argument to persuade themselves that they would be better off on, say, a sidewalk next to a busy road than actually in the road, and then they get in a nasty accident in the next crosswalk. (This Palo Alto study and this survey of LAB members are two examples of evidence for higher accident risk for sidepaths than for roads.)
OK. Though in the case of someone cycling for transportation, this isn't really an option....
Also, though this is something I don't have real evidence for, I think there are likely to be differences between the risks encountered on typical recreational road cyclists' routes (rural highways, traffic rare but fast) and typical commuters' routes (more complex traffic patterns but somewhat slower, possibly more awake drivers). For what it's worth, I'm personally much more comfortable with the latter....
--Bruce Fields
The problem with that argument is that it presumes you would be safer if you didn't take the lane. There is evidence, however, that taking the lane is actually the safer option in many cases.
Here's one summary of research, mainly on the related issue of choosing between roads and sidepaths--but it does at least call in to question the idea that you reduce the chance of accidents by staying out of traffic lanes.
--Bruce Fields