There is no "right to bear arms" in the European Declaration of Human Rights. Only a right to life. And bearing arms is not considered to be compatible with that.
What about using arms to defend your life or the life of a family member, friend, or complete stranger?
My elderly mother (63) lives alone, and has a gun. She would never be able to fend off an attacker using a knife or even his bare hands, but she is a great shot, and there is no doubt in my mind she is capable of defending herself.
Removing her right to bear arms could be denying her right to life, especially in the rural area she lives in, with only a 8-5 M-F police force.
Makes me wonder if China is working on its own global positioning system (see previous slashdot story/thread)
They're in on Galileo
That does not suprise me. The French believe in a "multipolar" world. They seek a counterbalance to US power. The EU alone can't do it, so they (among others, but them to a large degree) are embracing the Chinese.
The history of abusing international trade agreements for the benefit of US based corperations.
Or you could substitute US with "France," "China," or any number of other countries. Or do you think the recent Novaris nonsense by the French was completly on the up-and-up?
No amount of code review, open source or proprietary, can guarantee that there isn't some lurking bug in the application.
I've been thinking through the dynamics of OSS. For a moment, let's forget Linux, Apache, FreeBSD and the four or five other "big guys" out there (the reason: they seem to be managed much like commercial software, in a hierarchial, closed-group fashion, just without the keeping the code a secret part).
For the vast majority of little OSS that is in so many systems, large and small, is there really any empirical proof that OSS is more secure than proprietary software? I've been wondering if it isn't possible that its even less secure.
The reason is the dynamics of programmer laziness (and I'm a programmer myself.... I know all about it). Combing through code looking for buffer overflows is tedious and repetative. How many programmers really do it all the time, every time?
I also understand the "millions of eyeballs" argument, but doesn't that really apply again to the "big guys." Does anyone really believe that literally millions of people have done detailed reviews of the myriad small programs and libraries present on a typical open source operating system?
I don't know, perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm wondering if there may not be a group-think problem here. I don't look at those tools, because everyone else is, and I'm lazy. I may poke through kernel source because it interests me, but TinyXML source does not. In a commercial environment, I make developers do it, but, except on the few big OSSes that are run basically like commerical operations, how are we really sure it is more, and not less, secure?
having people get together so they can negotiate from a position of power is a good thing
Last time I did that, it was called "collusion." Oh wait, even though this is supposedly a Democracy, we have picked two groups - consumers and labor - to protect at the expense of another group - shareholders.
I guess that consumers and labor are in the majority...
There is no way in hell that OSX would run decently at that speed, what with all the transparancy and animation of the UI.
Its worse than you think. Mac (on Apple hardware) does that stuff with hardware acceleration (Quartz). This high level of software-hardware integration results in tremendous performance and the nice OS X interface, but makes supporting other hardware even harder.
I doubt PearPC does the pass-through to hardware acceleration on supported hardware (nVidia and ATI). That would make it even slower than the simple "slow down the processor" math, because of lack of hardware acceleration that Apple is so good at using.
It is a fact after you do open your net up there is no way for them to proove that you commited the illegal acts.
You may be forgetting all the civil and criminal facilitation laws. The article describes a deliberate attempt to allow unlawful activity and to obscure its source (disabling of all filtering). You may not be able to prove you did the activity, but proving who facilitated it is a snap.
Consider night clubs that "look the other way" on illegal drugs. They get slapped with a criminal facilitation charge.
Up to the point of turning off the logging, you could argue ignorance (by default, most wireless routers ARE wide open, except they log things). As soon as you intentionally create a launch-pad for illegal activities, you are hardpressed in court to prove to a reasonable jury a legitamite purpose (notice I said reasonable, as in reasonable doubt, not "shadow of a doubt," the standard some believe you must achieve but, in fact, don't need to).
What can be worse for developers in general, is having managers get the idea that development doesn't have a cost. If that idea becomes common among managers, then salaries among working developers will take a BIG hit.
This is already going on, and the result is relentless cost pressure on corporate development. If you are a CIO, and can get full operating systems for free (Linux), how do you justify the budget for some small business application and its team of developers?
Answer: you can't. You offshore, thereby reducing cost.
I've said this before on/. and gotten flamed, but I'll say it again and brace for pain: the same instinct that makes many people use OSS is the instinct that makes CIOs offshore programming jobs. I'm not saying which I believe is right, but human nature is to want something for nothing (or cheap). A few humans are willing to pay more for social good, but not many.
What I envision is a system where funds are collected and pooled (like taxes), so that they can be spent on R&D and the like in a manner that all can benefit from.
This is exactly the R&D system used in the former Soviet Union. A good friend of my was a physicist there and worked, of course, for the state, and told me how it worked. A certain portion of proceeds collected from other ventures went to R&D. Of course, the "public" owned the output, because the public did the investment.
The USSR invested amazing amounts of money in R&D, and had some good results (for those that don't know, a USSR scientist came up with the stealth technology the US makes such great use of). However, by any measure I've seen, money invested in research produced less results in the USSR than in the US. Also, in spite of patents, etc, the US public gets the greater good (see health care statistics - mortality, fertility, life expectancy - in the US as compared to the USSR in the same time periods).
The collectivization of R&D sounds good on paper, but the "real world labrotories" of the USSR, N Korea, China, and so on, have had poor luck (even resetting for factors like development level). Countries with privatized R&D (US, Western Europe, Southeast Asia) seem to get more bang for the research buck.
Frankly, it's hard to kill someone with a cell phone.
They managed to do it in Madrid with a cell phone.
Re:Don't ticket me - control my car's max speed
on
Road Marker Marks You
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· Score: 1
Keep in mind that when you say "your car will not be able to exceed a certain limit," you are saying that you will *lose control* over operating your car. A 1 ton vehicle that you do not have control over is a very dangerous weapon.
Uhmmm... that's not the same. My car seems utterly incapable of exceeding 115mph (and I've tried...), yet I would hardly say I have no control over the car. All speeds up to that speed are possible. Steering is possible. There is just some speed it can't go past. This happens to be a limitation of mechanics, but it could just as easily be artifical (due to, say, speed control software).
Or the submitter is in fact just a pathetic twat who thinks that knowing that Orwell is a pen name somehow makes him smart.
I didn't know George Orwell was a pen name. Now I do, and know his real name. I had to look it up (although I figured as much as soon as I saw '1984'). I'm glad I learned that.
Why is it that we think ignorance is some God-given right and get mad when anyone disspells it. This is like the public gets mad when a newspaper users a multi-syllable word. Reminds me of growing up in the Deep South, where your friends made fun of you if you talked about "school stuff" on the weekends.
For those that didn't grow up in the Deep South, "school stuff" is anything at all that is not cartoons, NASCAR, sports, guns, or hunting.
Why not thank the submitter for teasing the mind, instead of insulting him?
Does that mean that if you hack a server in Australia from America, you are prosecuted under Australian law?
Yes, and that is a long-standing law. The US has several laws that apply to what happens in other lands. For instance, "Conspiracy to kill Americans Abroad" does not require any action on US soil. The "Foreign Corrupt Organizations Act" prevents Americans from briding people in other countries, and executives from Exxon Mobile were prosecuted and convicted under that law. Drug traffers in Columbia can be extradited to the US. People shooting Americans from inside Mexico are, in fact, committing a crime in America, even though only their bullets (like "their data") ever entered this country.
The GPL doesn't need tested, it's simple just copyright law -> author chooses what rights we have with their work. And Copyright law doesn't need tested.
Then why all the hubub about the RIAA, fair-use, etc? Why can't they just put anything they feel like in their license, and never have it reviewed by the court, effectively ending "fair use" protections?
Nat Friedman on the increasing interest about the Linux desktop.
In a vacum, this is not impressive. Is the interest in Desktop Linux due to quality of the platform, available technologies, developer friendly environment, ease of integration, or is it simply based on cost.
If its simply cost then, well, where is the pride in that? As a true propeller-head, I find winning on price, well, cheap.
This is not an occupation. The rovers will be there forever regardless of the mission status.
So it's a crusade to colonize? The martains will never recognize our rovers as legitamite. Maybe the two rovers could drive to the same place and set up a governing council? No, we better bring in the UN, except the French and Russians will veto.
Bet it turns out the French and Russians are in cahoots with the Martains as well...
Legal institutions such as corporations, partnerships and trusts were invented to serve the people, not the other way around. If they're hurting us, bust 'em up.
So we have this ammendment that gives us equal protection under the law. Yet we pick one group (consumers) to benefit at the expense of the another group (business owners).
Of course, there are more consumers than business owners. I guess by definition, business owners are the minority, so why shouldn't they serve the majority?
Or does it not come down to right or wrong, just who has the most votes, or uses their votes most wisely.
If copyright law is revoked, the GPL becomes unnecessary.
This is totally false. GPL requires that software derived from GPLed code is, itself GPL. Without copyright, nothing stops Microsoft from taking all GPL code, and bundling it in with their software.
People 'round here seem to hate copyright, but it seems to me that OpenSource's future depends on copyright law, and the GPL model could not exist without copyright to defend it.
It would certainly piss me off if some guy was speeding ahead of me and caused the light ahead of us to turn red, stopping both of us.
But isn't peer pressure a good motivator? Now, speeding will not only get you more redlights (making it, in fact, take longer to get anywhere the faster you go), but you also run the risk of being the jackass that stopped all traffic.
Seems to me that this solves the speeding problem in a way that doesn't involve fines, which have had almost no effect.
The high end" means a totally different thing today than it did 10 years ago. We used to buy $20K Sun machines to use around the network as everything from firewalls to mail servers to DNS servers.
The high-end is way more than $20k. I've spend well over $1M on a single, fully-configured Sun machine (one of the original E10Ks, with all 64 processores, lots of RAM, and a massive disk array). I've seen rooms full of those machines.
If you want a single, big UNIX monster, its still basically monster Sun, HP or IBM. Clustering is bringing Linux up there, but I don't see any 64 - 256 processor Linux boxes around (that I know about, anyway).
I don't know if that is due to the Intel platform (I know Linux is portable, but its mostly used on Intel in my experience) or due to locking in ther kernel. I do know the "old kernel" (I started with Linux 0.96c+, when the whole system was on 4 floppy disks, and we didn't even joke about a graphical interface, and Linux was no more popular than 386BSD) was not terribly scalable in a multi-processor setting. I don't know much about the scalability of the newer kernels, honestly.
This thing proves brags that the "information wants to be free" concept will doom
I'm not quite sure this article says anything about information's desires, as I'm sure its free of them. It says more about information's users and their desires for it. Information, in fact, doesn't much care whether or not it is free.
Isn't that point a bit like saying that cows obviously want to be eaten? After all, look at how good they taste.
Slashdot Mirror
What about using arms to defend your life or the life of a family member, friend, or complete stranger?
My elderly mother (63) lives alone, and has a gun. She would never be able to fend off an attacker using a knife or even his bare hands, but she is a great shot, and there is no doubt in my mind she is capable of defending herself.
Removing her right to bear arms could be denying her right to life, especially in the rural area she lives in, with only a 8-5 M-F police force.
(Obviously, we are in the US, not Europe.)
They're in on Galileo
That does not suprise me. The French believe in a "multipolar" world. They seek a counterbalance to US power. The EU alone can't do it, so they (among others, but them to a large degree) are embracing the Chinese.
I see the next [hopefully cold] war starting...
Or you could substitute US with "France," "China," or any number of other countries. Or do you think the recent Novaris nonsense by the French was completly on the up-and-up?
I've been thinking through the dynamics of OSS. For a moment, let's forget Linux, Apache, FreeBSD and the four or five other "big guys" out there (the reason: they seem to be managed much like commercial software, in a hierarchial, closed-group fashion, just without the keeping the code a secret part).
For the vast majority of little OSS that is in so many systems, large and small, is there really any empirical proof that OSS is more secure than proprietary software? I've been wondering if it isn't possible that its even less secure.
The reason is the dynamics of programmer laziness (and I'm a programmer myself.... I know all about it). Combing through code looking for buffer overflows is tedious and repetative. How many programmers really do it all the time, every time?
I also understand the "millions of eyeballs" argument, but doesn't that really apply again to the "big guys." Does anyone really believe that literally millions of people have done detailed reviews of the myriad small programs and libraries present on a typical open source operating system?
I don't know, perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm wondering if there may not be a group-think problem here. I don't look at those tools, because everyone else is, and I'm lazy. I may poke through kernel source because it interests me, but TinyXML source does not. In a commercial environment, I make developers do it, but, except on the few big OSSes that are run basically like commerical operations, how are we really sure it is more, and not less, secure?
CVS: Putting the "Open" back in "Open Source Software"
There is a reason no one has ever built a statue to a committee.
Last time I did that, it was called "collusion." Oh wait, even though this is supposedly a Democracy, we have picked two groups - consumers and labor - to protect at the expense of another group - shareholders.
I guess that consumers and labor are in the majority...
Who didn't know that cigaretts kill you?
Who didn't know that McD's makes you fat?
Who didn't know that coffee was hot, and not to pour it in your lap?
Its America, we can sue anybody, for any reason, any time we feel like (just ask the RIAA or SCO).
Gotta run... off to sue Starbucks for keeping me awake at night.
Its worse than you think. Mac (on Apple hardware) does that stuff with hardware acceleration (Quartz). This high level of software-hardware integration results in tremendous performance and the nice OS X interface, but makes supporting other hardware even harder.
I doubt PearPC does the pass-through to hardware acceleration on supported hardware (nVidia and ATI). That would make it even slower than the simple "slow down the processor" math, because of lack of hardware acceleration that Apple is so good at using.
You may be forgetting all the civil and criminal facilitation laws. The article describes a deliberate attempt to allow unlawful activity and to obscure its source (disabling of all filtering). You may not be able to prove you did the activity, but proving who facilitated it is a snap.
Consider night clubs that "look the other way" on illegal drugs. They get slapped with a criminal facilitation charge.
Up to the point of turning off the logging, you could argue ignorance (by default, most wireless routers ARE wide open, except they log things). As soon as you intentionally create a launch-pad for illegal activities, you are hardpressed in court to prove to a reasonable jury a legitamite purpose (notice I said reasonable, as in reasonable doubt, not "shadow of a doubt," the standard some believe you must achieve but, in fact, don't need to).
Did you get the URL for that? For research I mean, so I can block mail... or something... whatever... WHAT'S THE URL?!
(note to self... don't forget to click AC box).. DAMN
This is already going on, and the result is relentless cost pressure on corporate development. If you are a CIO, and can get full operating systems for free (Linux), how do you justify the budget for some small business application and its team of developers?
Answer: you can't. You offshore, thereby reducing cost.
I've said this before on /. and gotten flamed, but I'll say it again and brace for pain: the same instinct that makes many people use OSS is the instinct that makes CIOs offshore programming jobs. I'm not saying which I believe is right, but human nature is to want something for nothing (or cheap). A few humans are willing to pay more for social good, but not many.
This is exactly the R&D system used in the former Soviet Union. A good friend of my was a physicist there and worked, of course, for the state, and told me how it worked. A certain portion of proceeds collected from other ventures went to R&D. Of course, the "public" owned the output, because the public did the investment.
The USSR invested amazing amounts of money in R&D, and had some good results (for those that don't know, a USSR scientist came up with the stealth technology the US makes such great use of). However, by any measure I've seen, money invested in research produced less results in the USSR than in the US. Also, in spite of patents, etc, the US public gets the greater good (see health care statistics - mortality, fertility, life expectancy - in the US as compared to the USSR in the same time periods).
The collectivization of R&D sounds good on paper, but the "real world labrotories" of the USSR, N Korea, China, and so on, have had poor luck (even resetting for factors like development level). Countries with privatized R&D (US, Western Europe, Southeast Asia) seem to get more bang for the research buck.
They managed to do it in Madrid with a cell phone.
Uhmmm... that's not the same. My car seems utterly incapable of exceeding 115mph (and I've tried...), yet I would hardly say I have no control over the car. All speeds up to that speed are possible. Steering is possible. There is just some speed it can't go past. This happens to be a limitation of mechanics, but it could just as easily be artifical (due to, say, speed control software).
I didn't know George Orwell was a pen name. Now I do, and know his real name. I had to look it up (although I figured as much as soon as I saw '1984'). I'm glad I learned that.
Why is it that we think ignorance is some God-given right and get mad when anyone disspells it. This is like the public gets mad when a newspaper users a multi-syllable word. Reminds me of growing up in the Deep South, where your friends made fun of you if you talked about "school stuff" on the weekends.
For those that didn't grow up in the Deep South, "school stuff" is anything at all that is not cartoons, NASCAR, sports, guns, or hunting.
Why not thank the submitter for teasing the mind, instead of insulting him?
Yes, and that is a long-standing law. The US has several laws that apply to what happens in other lands. For instance, "Conspiracy to kill Americans Abroad" does not require any action on US soil. The "Foreign Corrupt Organizations Act" prevents Americans from briding people in other countries, and executives from Exxon Mobile were prosecuted and convicted under that law. Drug traffers in Columbia can be extradited to the US. People shooting Americans from inside Mexico are, in fact, committing a crime in America, even though only their bullets (like "their data") ever entered this country.
Then why all the hubub about the RIAA, fair-use, etc? Why can't they just put anything they feel like in their license, and never have it reviewed by the court, effectively ending "fair use" protections?
In a vacum, this is not impressive. Is the interest in Desktop Linux due to quality of the platform, available technologies, developer friendly environment, ease of integration, or is it simply based on cost.
If its simply cost then, well, where is the pride in that? As a true propeller-head, I find winning on price, well, cheap.
So it's a crusade to colonize? The martains will never recognize our rovers as legitamite. Maybe the two rovers could drive to the same place and set up a governing council? No, we better bring in the UN, except the French and Russians will veto.
Bet it turns out the French and Russians are in cahoots with the Martains as well...
Eric Cartman: French people piss me off!
So we have this ammendment that gives us equal protection under the law. Yet we pick one group (consumers) to benefit at the expense of the another group (business owners).
Of course, there are more consumers than business owners. I guess by definition, business owners are the minority, so why shouldn't they serve the majority?
Or does it not come down to right or wrong, just who has the most votes, or uses their votes most wisely.
This is totally false. GPL requires that software derived from GPLed code is, itself GPL. Without copyright, nothing stops Microsoft from taking all GPL code, and bundling it in with their software.
People 'round here seem to hate copyright, but it seems to me that OpenSource's future depends on copyright law, and the GPL model could not exist without copyright to defend it.
But isn't peer pressure a good motivator? Now, speeding will not only get you more redlights (making it, in fact, take longer to get anywhere the faster you go), but you also run the risk of being the jackass that stopped all traffic.
Seems to me that this solves the speeding problem in a way that doesn't involve fines, which have had almost no effect.
The high-end is way more than $20k. I've spend well over $1M on a single, fully-configured Sun machine (one of the original E10Ks, with all 64 processores, lots of RAM, and a massive disk array). I've seen rooms full of those machines.
If you want a single, big UNIX monster, its still basically monster Sun, HP or IBM. Clustering is bringing Linux up there, but I don't see any 64 - 256 processor Linux boxes around (that I know about, anyway).
I don't know if that is due to the Intel platform (I know Linux is portable, but its mostly used on Intel in my experience) or due to locking in ther kernel. I do know the "old kernel" (I started with Linux 0.96c+, when the whole system was on 4 floppy disks, and we didn't even joke about a graphical interface, and Linux was no more popular than 386BSD) was not terribly scalable in a multi-processor setting. I don't know much about the scalability of the newer kernels, honestly.
I'm not quite sure this article says anything about information's desires, as I'm sure its free of them. It says more about information's users and their desires for it. Information, in fact, doesn't much care whether or not it is free.
Isn't that point a bit like saying that cows obviously want to be eaten? After all, look at how good they taste.