Because, maybe, just MAYBE every noteworthy operating system except one is some form of Unix? If you know how to use Unix, you are capable of working efficiently with Linux (more and more common every day!) and can do more with Mac OS X, something a lot (not a plurality, but still a noteworthy quantity) of seventh graders have at home.
You did not really answer my question, how does average student get benefit from knowing the inner workings of unix? Essentials of word processing? sure. Basics of email? Why not. How to use mouse and keyboard? Certainly. Those are skills they will benefit from. But to teach the inner workings of unix is a skill that is neither useful or important for the vast majority of the population.
It'd be better if they'd spend their time learning math or maybe english.
What we need is an open source, secure protocol for chatting, newly implemented for today's uses. I'm getting tired of chatting over AIM, just because it has something to do with AOL. Yahoo I don't like either, nor MSN, or ICQ for above mentioned reasons. And other chat programs with half-standards aren't at all what we need at all. There are more than enough able geeks out there, some solution shouldn't be too difficult to organize a consortium to address the situation. Mayhap I smell an Ask Slashdot in the future. Have you heard about IRC?
Here's a hypothetical for you -- BigCorp is running Windows, has no firewall, and has not patched it's 8,000 desktops in 42 locations in over a year. A worm hits this corporation, and proceeds to DoS the root name servers from 42 different network feeds on different ISPs, taking out what most people call the Internet, for all practical purposes. Your company is doing B2B shit over VPNs ont he Interweb. You are down for 6 hours, causing you to lose a contract worth over a million $$. Are they liable in any way, or is ignorance a valid excuse? I'd say that that is a somewhat different case as while we cannot expect understanding and competence from home users we should be able to expect that from corporations. I'd call internet a high risk zone, if you want to risk your money by doing critical stuff here it's your own mistake.
Should be perhaps move this problem at the ISP level? By definition they must have competence to handle these situations?
If ISP recieves complaints about ip x.x.x.x DDoS:ing in IP y.y.y.y the ISP of x.x.x.x should curtail all the traffic from x.x.x.x to y.y.y.y untill problem is fixed or whatever?
That'd be a solution that would be a fair to all parties?
I'm sorry but I simply cannot support idea that would make 95-99% of the population guilty.
Laws create the minimium standards of morality that must be obeyed and it takes horrible twisting of that idea to create the system you want.
Not to mention that it simply cannot work. Computer security is not something you can learn overnight. Maybe people even cannot learn it.
And we should not require everyone to learn something as extensive as computer security to just benefit a small minority of computer users.
Sure I get packets on my firewall. But that's not so bad compared to the idea of being sued because someone thinks I didn't take reasonable steps to protect my computer.
By law? No. But if their negligence causes significant damage, it is a civil tort. As much as I don't like the USian sue-everybody attitude, it has it's uses. I don't want the government involved either, but people have to take responsibility for their action, or for their inaction.
Freedom does not come without responsibility.
A better way to say that is "Freedom does not come withut a price" and the 'problem' is that people are willing to pay the price of DDoS attacks and being spam bots but are not willing to pay the price of being responsible.
Besides, would you really want laws that'd define that actions of 95% of people illegal? Do you think that kind of law would be respected? It'd get worse treatment then prohibition!
Problem is that people dont think that the costs associated with security (having to update computer, possible criminal prosecution for failure to do so) aren't worth the gains (maybe a bit fewer reinstalls, bit more bandwidth).
And who are you to tell them otherwise? If they want easy software over stable, unpatched systems over unreasonable responsibility let them have it. Internet does not exist for sysadmins. Internet does not exist for programmers. The beauty of internet is how it is all encompassing. You could have a network where every page is checked for standards compiliancy, every program is automatically checked for latest patches. Yes you could have it.
But it would not be internet that we all have learned to love. Some would even say that it's not internet that we've learned to love but freedom to act as we wish. You might not like it but the internet belongs to the general population more then it belongs to the technological elite in the same way as electricity.
I see the costs vs benefits of making updates mandated by law. I do not think it would be worth it. Majority agrees with me. Any ISP or country that does not will see their clients fleeing towards competition.
Now the question that remain is: Do you think people should be forced by law to update their computers against their wishes and perhaps even their best interests?
4) Supply MUCH MORE documentation to end users, discussing the importance of keeping one's machine patched.
Problem: People dont read the documentation. Fix: Write more documentation. Uh-huh?
The thing is that an OS is a product. Product should do what people want it to do. People want their product to be secure without having to waste their time doing anything about it.
If 90% of the consumers cant drive the new CarX is the fault in the consumers or in the car?
If 90% of the users don't know how to make a call in their new cell phone is the fault in the users or in the cellphone?
If 99.99% of the users cant read a book written in latin should we: a) Translate the book b) Teach everyone latin
Only people who would even consider option b are computer engineers.
If you don't like the fact that most people are ignorant about inner life of computers? Go back to BBSes. Oh wait, they dont have the content, the people, the cheap connectivity? Has it occured to you that those exist because internet is full of people! You cant have it both ways.
If companies think being on the internet is dangerous who forces them to put critical services there? Maybe they are there because the gains outweight the benefits?
And before you throw in the facts about traffic laws... Majority of drivers are in favor of some sort of laws existing, I'd even bet that they support the majority of the current laws. What you'd want is a law supported by the few, benefitting the few, paid by the majority (in work hours wasted studying computer security).
Why move electrons across a grid and have to worry about cascade failures, power station accidents, etc?
The day will come, maybe in just a few decades, when every building has its own fuel cell, connected to a low-pressure hydrogen line. Yes, you'll still need to generate the hydrogen - but show me how you can get a cascade failure with that! Also, it's dramatically easier to generate your own small amount of hydrogen to bolster your commercially supplied hydrogen than to generate and store energy in batteries.
And tell me where are you going to get the energy to create the hydrogen at your home? And if you can get it, why bother converting it to hydrogen and converting that to energy instead of using the energy directly? Good plan except that it requires the violation of laws of physics.
I ask you, what law does not rest upon some concept of morality?
Anything can be justified by some moral system but copyright laws obviously don't fit to the current moral system as they're been broken. Point of laws is to make minority act like the majority wants them to act. That's cruel way of saying it, but it is so. Laws that are disapproved by majority and benefit a minority sound a lot like oppression to me.
Allowing others to make digital copies of music, pictures, movies, books, or any other form of data for which you do not hold the copyright to is illegal.
If you had respected this from the beginning, the DMCA, et al. would have never even been conceived.
Food for thought.
It could be easily argued that you have no duty to follow a law that you consider immoral. It could even be argued that you have the duty to resist it! Remember that in a democratic system it goes: people make ethical judgement -> law.
I'm leaning way more libertarian then I'm comfortable by saying this but I say it anyway:
a world where laws define morality is a dictatorship.
This is particularly true at a state funded college or university. Why should tax-payers bear the burden to defend or indemnify students who are accused of copyright infringement?
Why should state pay for lawyers to defend someone who doesn't have the money the defend himself? It's not like the western principles of providing legal assistance to those who are poor means anything...
All voting software and results should be subject to scrutany by the OSS community. All fraud is shallow when subjected to so many eyeballs. By that logic, wouldn't it be better to abandon electronic voting and leave system as understandable and inspectable by all instead of small technological (programmers) or byrocratical elite?
I thought I was the only one with good experience with Tech Support.
My experience with Soon (Finnish internet provider) from whom I subscribe my DSL.
Their sales clerks know what is IPX.
When I called them at 3am to complain network was down they really had someone to answer and report it forward.
When I asked about open ports and the support guy didn't know about which ports were open and which we're not he asked and called me back when he knew.
When I asked them about running multiple networks over my hub (remember that they just provided my DSL!) because I was running out of IP addresses what did they do? They gave me the personal cellphone number of their network security boss (I dont remember the exact title).
Needless to say, I love 'em.
Re:alright already
on
Assembly '03
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Those who wish that goverment would step in a legislate SCO out of existance or whatever... be careful what you wish for, it might just come true.
That's one nasty door you don't want to open. Maybe next law will say that everyone who ever spoke against the goverment will be shipped to re-education camps.
The point is *not* to hijack the bus and crash it into anything. Who wants to commandeer a bus, of all things? It's hardly an effective weapon.
On the other hand, ask any Israeli why you search the bus. Take off your 9/11 blinders: terrorism isn't about killing people with vehicles. It's about instilling TERROR. Imagine what happens when they blow up a "bus in the middle of Missouri". It never was about hijacking; that was just a means to an end. You can pack way more explosive in a minivan then in your luckage. What would be the point?
Am I the only one who thinks that translation is quickly becoming obsolete?
Almost everyone can speak, read and write at least tolerable english and most young people can have full fledged discussions in it. Just look at Slashdot, I'm quite sure I'm not the only one who doesn't have english as primary language. It's not that farfetched idea that in the (near) future everyone uses or at least knows english well enough to make translations meaningless in all but the most complicated subjects.
Slashdot Mirror
Because, maybe, just MAYBE every noteworthy operating system except one is some form of Unix? If you know how to use Unix, you are capable of working efficiently with Linux (more and more common every day!) and can do more with Mac OS X, something a lot (not a plurality, but still a noteworthy quantity) of seventh graders have at home.
You did not really answer my question, how does average student get benefit from knowing the inner workings of unix? Essentials of word processing? sure. Basics of email? Why not. How to use mouse and keyboard? Certainly. Those are skills they will benefit from. But to teach the inner workings of unix is a skill that is neither useful or important for the vast majority of the population.
It'd be better if they'd spend their time learning math or maybe english.
Now if a REAL computer curriculum were to be developed around the Unix aspects of Mac OS X that would be something
Why would a 7th grader need to know anything about Unix? Seriously.
Please let it be divx instead of realmedia or other crap!
Some places shouldn't have an OS because it adds another level of potential failure points. Simplicity equals stability.
What we need is an open source, secure protocol for chatting, newly implemented for today's uses. I'm getting tired of chatting over AIM, just because it has something to do with AOL. Yahoo I don't like either, nor MSN, or ICQ for above mentioned reasons. And other chat programs with half-standards aren't at all what we need at all. There are more than enough able geeks out there, some solution shouldn't be too difficult to organize a consortium to address the situation. Mayhap I smell an Ask Slashdot in the future. Have you heard about IRC?
Here's a hypothetical for you -- BigCorp is running Windows, has no firewall, and has not patched it's 8,000 desktops in 42 locations in over a year. A worm hits this corporation, and proceeds to DoS the root name servers from 42 different network feeds on different ISPs, taking out what most people call the Internet, for all practical purposes. Your company is doing B2B shit over VPNs ont he Interweb. You are down for 6 hours, causing you to lose a contract worth over a million $$. Are they liable in any way, or is ignorance a valid excuse? I'd say that that is a somewhat different case as while we cannot expect understanding and competence from home users we should be able to expect that from corporations. I'd call internet a high risk zone, if you want to risk your money by doing critical stuff here it's your own mistake.
Should be perhaps move this problem at the ISP level? By definition they must have competence to handle these situations?
If ISP recieves complaints about ip x.x.x.x DDoS:ing in IP y.y.y.y the ISP of x.x.x.x should curtail all the traffic from x.x.x.x to y.y.y.y untill problem is fixed or whatever?
That'd be a solution that would be a fair to all parties?
I'm sorry but I simply cannot support idea that would make 95-99% of the population guilty.
Laws create the minimium standards of morality that must be obeyed and it takes horrible twisting of that idea to create the system you want.
Not to mention that it simply cannot work. Computer security is not something you can learn overnight. Maybe people even cannot learn it.
And we should not require everyone to learn something as extensive as computer security to just benefit a small minority of computer users.
Sure I get packets on my firewall. But that's not so bad compared to the idea of being sued because someone thinks I didn't take reasonable steps to protect my computer.
Worms are an annoyance. Lawsuits are a threat.
By law? No. But if their negligence causes significant damage, it is a civil tort. As much as I don't like the USian sue-everybody attitude, it has it's uses. I don't want the government involved either, but people have to take responsibility for their action, or for their inaction.
Freedom does not come without responsibility.
A better way to say that is "Freedom does not come withut a price" and the 'problem' is that people are willing to pay the price of DDoS attacks and being spam bots but are not willing to pay the price of being responsible.
Besides, would you really want laws that'd define that actions of 95% of people illegal? Do you think that kind of law would be respected? It'd get worse treatment then prohibition!
Problem is that people dont think that the costs associated with security (having to update computer, possible criminal prosecution for failure to do so) aren't worth the gains (maybe a bit fewer reinstalls, bit more bandwidth).
And who are you to tell them otherwise? If they want easy software over stable, unpatched systems over unreasonable responsibility let them have it.
Internet does not exist for sysadmins. Internet does not exist for programmers. The beauty of internet is how it is all encompassing. You could have a network where every page is checked for standards compiliancy, every program is automatically checked for latest patches. Yes you could have it.
But it would not be internet that we all have learned to love. Some would even say that it's not internet that we've learned to love but freedom to act as we wish. You might not like it but the internet belongs to the general population more then it belongs to the technological elite in the same way as electricity.
I see the costs vs benefits of making updates mandated by law. I do not think it would be worth it. Majority agrees with me. Any ISP or country that does not will see their clients fleeing towards competition.
Now the question that remain is:
Do you think people should be forced by law to update their computers against their wishes and perhaps even their best interests?
4) Supply MUCH MORE documentation to end users, discussing the importance of keeping one's machine patched.
Problem: People dont read the documentation.
Fix: Write more documentation.
Uh-huh?
The thing is that an OS is a product.
Product should do what people want it to do.
People want their product to be secure without having to waste their time doing anything about it.
If 90% of the consumers cant drive the new CarX is the fault in the consumers or in the car?
If 90% of the users don't know how to make a call in their new cell phone is the fault in the users or in the cellphone?
If 99.99% of the users cant read a book written in latin should we:
a) Translate the book
b) Teach everyone latin
Only people who would even consider option b are computer engineers.
If you don't like the fact that most people are ignorant about inner life of computers? Go back to BBSes. Oh wait, they dont have the content, the people, the cheap connectivity? Has it occured to you that those exist because internet is full of people! You cant have it both ways.
If companies think being on the internet is dangerous who forces them to put critical services there? Maybe they are there because the gains outweight the benefits?
And before you throw in the facts about traffic laws... Majority of drivers are in favor of some sort of laws existing, I'd even bet that they support the majority of the current laws. What you'd want is a law supported by the few, benefitting the few, paid by the majority (in work hours wasted studying computer security).
Are future submissions always going to have some sort of character assasination buzzwords attached to them as well?
For example. "Bill Gates noted closed source zealot and pro-monopolist met with shareholders today."
Have you noticed the Microsoft icon?
Why move electrons across a grid and have to worry about cascade failures, power station accidents, etc?
The day will come, maybe in just a few decades, when every building has its own fuel cell, connected to a low-pressure hydrogen line.
Yes, you'll still need to generate the hydrogen - but show me how you can get a cascade failure with that! Also, it's dramatically easier to generate your own small amount of hydrogen to bolster your commercially supplied hydrogen than to generate and store energy in batteries.
And tell me where are you going to get the energy to create the hydrogen at your home? And if you can get it, why bother converting it to hydrogen and converting that to energy instead of using the energy directly? Good plan except that it requires the violation of laws of physics.
This system of free, voluntary transactions that benefit both buyer and seller has become known as capitalism.
Actually it has been known as trade and has existed way before capitalism.
I ask you, what law does not rest upon some concept of morality?
Anything can be justified by some moral system but copyright laws obviously don't fit to the current moral system as they're been broken. Point of laws is to make minority act like the majority wants them to act. That's cruel way of saying it, but it is so. Laws that are disapproved by majority and benefit a minority sound a lot like oppression to me.
Allowing others to make digital copies of music, pictures, movies, books, or any other form of data for which you do not hold the copyright to is illegal.
If you had respected this from the beginning, the DMCA, et al. would have never even been conceived.
Food for thought.
It could be easily argued that you have no duty to follow a law that you consider immoral. It could even be argued that you have the duty to resist it! Remember that in a democratic system it goes:
people make ethical judgement -> law.
I'm leaning way more libertarian then I'm comfortable by saying this but I say it anyway:
a world where laws define morality is a dictatorship.
This is particularly true at a state funded college or university. Why should tax-payers bear the burden to defend or indemnify students who are accused of copyright infringement?
Why should state pay for lawyers to defend someone who doesn't have the money the defend himself? It's not like the western principles of providing legal assistance to those who are poor means anything...
All voting software and results should be subject to scrutany by the OSS community. All fraud is shallow when subjected to so many eyeballs.
By that logic, wouldn't it be better to abandon electronic voting and leave system as understandable and inspectable by all instead of small technological (programmers) or byrocratical elite?
I thought I was the only one with good experience with Tech Support.
My experience with Soon (Finnish internet provider) from whom I subscribe my DSL.
Their sales clerks know what is IPX.
When I called them at 3am to complain network was down they really had someone to answer and report it forward.
When I asked about open ports and the support guy didn't know about which ports were open and which we're not he asked and called me back when he knew.
When I asked them about running multiple networks over my hub (remember that they just provided my DSL!) because I was running out of IP addresses what did they do? They gave me the personal cellphone number of their network security boss (I dont remember the exact title).
Needless to say, I love 'em.
Just wait until rtf manuals become commonplace.
Those who wish that goverment would step in a legislate SCO out of existance or whatever... be careful what you wish for, it might just come true.
That's one nasty door you don't want to open. Maybe next law will say that everyone who ever spoke against the goverment will be shipped to re-education camps.
The point is *not* to hijack the bus and crash it into anything. Who wants to commandeer a bus, of all things? It's hardly an effective weapon.
On the other hand, ask any Israeli why you search the bus. Take off your 9/11 blinders: terrorism isn't about killing people with vehicles. It's about instilling TERROR. Imagine what happens when they blow up a "bus in the middle of Missouri". It never was about hijacking; that was just a means to an end.
You can pack way more explosive in a minivan then in your luckage. What would be the point?
Am I the only one who thinks that translation is quickly becoming obsolete?
Almost everyone can speak, read and write at least tolerable english and most young people can have full fledged discussions in it. Just look at Slashdot, I'm quite sure I'm not the only one who doesn't have english as primary language. It's not that farfetched idea that in the (near) future everyone uses or at least knows english well enough to make translations meaningless in all but the most complicated subjects.
Lets hope they are using interactive forms (like this comment form) and not just wathing flash movies or playing mmorpgs.
How is Slashdot any less interactive then any multiplaying system?
As a publicly traded company, they'd always be subject to a hostile takeover by the pro-RIAA interests...
Let's have a gentlemans treate, buy at 20, sell at 30. After takeover star new company. repeat. Instant profit.