So anyone not approving of the state of Israel shelling civilians is automatically a "Hamas fanboi"? That is the classic example of the fallacy of the excluded middle. People with any sense of compassion tend to be appalled at the suffering of innocent people regardless of their ethnicity, and people with any sense of history know that neither side is exclusively to blame.
They believe, as I do, and as does CAMA, the missions organization I more typically support, that it does little good to heal the body and ignore the soul. CAMA is already in the affected regions, already working with the victims. We personally know some of the people who are there full-time as well as others who've been on short-term missions trips, many of them with a medical component since most people in west and central Africa do not have regular access to medical care.
That is often the case, but it really depends on the pathogen. Because most viral illnesses are self-limiting . . . the immune system clears them up if it is working properly and if the patient doesn't die first . . . vaccination even after exposure may still make sense. For instance, rabies can usually be prevented or at least made non-fatal if the shots are given shortly after exposure. Generally, a vaccine will be effective if (a) it stimulates production of sufficient antibodies in sufficient time to prevent the pathogen from overwhelming the victim; and preferably (b) if the severity of the side effects are not significantly more damaging than the disease itself, which is the problem that many people, including me, have with childhood vaccinations, which prevent old strains of very mild diseases (at least compared to, say, Ebola or smallpox), but also contain potent toxins whose effects are known to be harmful.
Absolutely, in the U.S. where "laws" prevent competition. The results elsewhere will likely be better. Remember basic economics: in a market with enough buyers and sellers that none can exert inordinate influence on prices, those prices will tend toward the marginal cost of production. That doesn't happen here in the U.S. mainly because of regulatory capture - telecom regs are written by the telecom companies and are designed to hinder competition to the greatest extent possible.
While starvation is uncommon in the U.S., malnutrition, especially among the poorest (which would be the working poor - they are generally worse off than people on welfare), is not. It is damned-near universal among the children of the working class, as well as the children of those with substance abuse and/or mental health issues. Almost every family in my church - and most of us are at best lower-middle-class ourselves - helps to feed other kids in our neighborhoods. We mostly have access to cars and such, which children and the poorest adults don't, and to places one can buy food that is reasonably healthful and affordable, which most people in the inner city, regardless of income, can't unless they drive. Now, there are always things to eat . . but . . NOT necessarily healthy things. Not for the inner-city poor, the vast majority of them children.
Your argument appears to be "we haven't solve the technical and practical challenges yet, so we never will." Progress is disappointingly slow; I'll give you that. The challenges are hard. I'll give you that too. However, given what human ingenuity has managed to accomplish just in the past 20 years, I think it is a very, very poor strategy to bet against it in the long term. Part of why we're not solving these challenges is that we're frankly not trying that hard. What we have now is still good enough for now. When that changes, when sufficiently larger players start taking fusion research seriously, I think the game will change pretty dramatically.
A lot of wisdom I do agree with. Regarding the storage problem - which I also agree to be the main bottleneck toward adoption of cleaner energy: why not use that energy at the point of production, to crack other hydrocarbons (biomass, corn husks, dirty coal, other carbon-rich waste), into liquid fuels using that energy, and store/transport these liquid fuels to the point where they will be used? I realize the process is not yet optimally efficient and not quite carbon-neutral, but it seems to me no worse and in many incremental ways better, than our current strategy of "burn whatever, just tax the crap out of it so we can bomb more brown people."
I feel really bad when I trap a mouse or a rat, which I had to do a couple days ago. I prefer nonlethal traps when they work, but sometimes they don't, and on Saturday I managed to trap one in a way that badly hurt but didn't kill it. I felt really bad. I understand that they are intelligent and sentient creatures. They don't belong in our food, and the diseases they carry don't belong in our home, so I do have to deal with them from time to time. But I so much wish that non-lethal traps actually worked, that I could just catch and release them in nearby woods. Alas, most of the time, that doesn't happen.:(
Agreed. It's completely irrelevant to most use cases. But not all. For instance, pro audio, which is a part of what I do, still benefits greatly from increased CPU speed as well as reduced cache latency. The tools I use have not been architected to take advantage of the immense power of modern GPUs. Eventually they likely will be, but, for now, every couple years' worth of CPU improvements does make a significant difference for what I do.
Back in MY day, we didn't have those newfangled computer doohickeys. We had adding machines and slide rules, and we liked them. "Innernet" was where you hoped the fish would go when you went fishing with a net. "Netflix" was what you would do if a bug got on your fishing net . . you "flicks" it off. A "color TV" was a huge thing that took half your living room, and the only thing "color" about it was the color of the cabinet; the picture itself was black and white. We had 3 channels, and we liked them. Now git off my lawn!!!
OK, sorry, my fault for not carefully RTFA. I did not mention that while my family and I do drive a great deal, almost all of it is within 75km of home. This *plus* a standard battery probably handles my situation, plus the occasional longer road trip, just fine.
When I worked in one inner suburb of a medium-sized city, and lived in another, I commuted about 50km each way, 100km in total, and hence 3000km over the course of a little over a month. Commutes 3-4 times that long are not unheard of in larger cities. But for me, would have meant a battery swap about 10 times a year. I don't know how long the swap should take, but I do know I would not have time to visit a dealer - the closest being about a half hour away - anywhere near that frequently, even if it were a short and painless process.
Like much of what tries to pass for modern science, nutritional research is tainted by the influence of those with a vested interest in the outcome. A healthy dose of skepticism is completely understandable. But there are things I believe we are learning. For instance, while it's been known for centuries that sugars and what we now recognize as high-glycemic starches tend to encourage obesity, it's only fairly recently that we've come to understand why. The role of various micronutrients, again long suspected to be important but not fully understood, is now coming into sharper focus. We're learning that many pesticides and herbicides are far more toxic to humans, especially over long periods of time, than was known previously. Many cancers, autoimmune disorders, and other illnesses are now known to be triggered by entire classes of substances previously regarded as safe. It is now known that we are actually symbionts, that our intestinal flora are such an important part of our normal digestive and immune system functioning that we cannot live healthy lives without them. These are just a few of the newer revelations off the top of my head, and I'm not in any way an expert in the field. So, here as in all areas, I try for a healthy balance of skepticism and openness. Truth does eventually come out.
The TC license you'll probably have to hunt for a bit, as it has been pulled from the Web and was never included in the Wayback Machine. I was not able to find it. But as for the DFSG, I mentioned them because (a) you did first, and (b) it is more or less what the OSI uses as its definition of Open Source. The FSF's definition is extremely similar.
You've already referenced the Debian Free Software Guidelines. That would be a perfectly good place to start. Read the TrueCrypt license (as I have, although it was a couple years ago) and compare with the four freedoms mentioned therein. I think you will find it violates at least the first.
By "more difficult" I mean "not worth their effort." I'm hoping to dissuade them from even trying, not because what I have to protect is particularly valuable, but because in principle I don't want them snooping on my stuff, *or* anyone else's either. I want the bar for them to do so to be high enough that they won't bother unless there is some plausible reason for them to do so.
Here is what my belief explains that yours does not: if their actions were not coerced, then the only other possible explanation is that they were rude, unhelpful, not in keeping with the general standards of open (or in this case semi-open) software in general, and burned every possible bridge back to the security community forever. There was no possible incentive for them to do this and every reason not to. The only reasonable alternative is that they were coerced, and the only entity likely to do so, and capable of getting away with it, would be some agency of the U.S. government.
OK, you got me on this one. Some people are that stupid. What I should have said was, "even most within Corporate America." No one in any of the companies I've ever worked for would trust it, and I'm not certain that any publicly traded company legally even can, because of Sarbanes-Oxley.
The license under which TrueCrypt was distributed is neither Free by the FSF definitition, nor Open by the OSI's, mostly because of usage restrictions which are not allowed by either. None of this is in any way controversial. It is simple fact, acknowledged by anyone who is familiar with all three. You do not appear to be familiar with any, thus your confusion. Source availability is a necessary but NOT sufficient condition for both freedom and openness.
A few facts to help clarify your thinking.
First, RMS advocates Free Software, not Open Source. They're not the same thing, although the first can be viewed as a subset of the second.
Second, neither RMS, nor any other public figure I'm aware of, has ever suggested that not GPL means not open-source, or even not free. RMS does explain eloquently and persuasive why Free (which implies Open) is better than merely Open, and why copyleft licenses are a more useful tool, in most cases, to preserve freedom. But he quite readily acknowledges that licenses such as BSD (new-style) or Apache are Free, which, generally, implies they are Open as well.
Third, ownership of the source implies the right to re-license at will, but this right accrues only to the owner, not to those to whom it is redistributed, unless it is distributed in the public domain.
Correct. But GP is also correct. It had to be "source available and will build binaries identical to those we distribute" in order for it to be trusted. But "source available" does not automatically translate to OSS, which does not automatically translate to Free/Libre. Each of these is, to a first approximation, a subset of the previous.
he most plausible explanation to me so far is that the TC developer with the keys have gone to work for a commercial competitor to TrueCrypt and decided to throw a grenade in order to drive as many people away from TC as possible and pick up the pieces.
Not plausible in my respectful opinion. First, presuming that a commercial project would be closed-source, who would trust a closed-source encryption product? Even Corporate America is not that stooooopid. Second, supposing they otherwise might have trusted said product . . . would they still do so knowing it was developed by the very people who torpedoed TrueCrypt? That would be difficult information to keep secret for very long.
Occam's Razor suggests that this is exactly what it appears to be. . . another salvo in "No Such Agency's" ongoing war against every human being in the world. It will be treated as such by me and by many others, lessons will be learned, and we will move forward. Hopefully in a way that makes their (NSA's) lives more difficult in the future, rather than easier.
No, I think you misunderstand. Fascism is nationalistic socialism. Bolshevism is internationalist socialism. Stalin and Hitler, in spite of differing ideologies and opposition to one another, prove to be very much similar in terms of their authoritarianism as well as their body counts. As I said, each sucks more than the other.
The translation is not as bad as the experience sounds like it must have been. Note that German and English are very similar as languages go.
"Recently ate I a bad batch of Tacos from Taco Bell. Massive gastrointestinal complaints quickly. I tried quickly to the nearest bathroom . After what seemed like an eternity , I finally found what was probably the worst public bathroom in New York. So I sat down , risking a thousand different kinds of messed -butt disease to launch just in time for a nuclear -equipped missiles shit directly in the shell . Unfortunately, the water in the bowl is a deterrent to the overwhelming force of the chair proved to be - his rocket . After the start of the water itself , every part of my body as well as the ceiling and most of the walls we went to the toilet bowl to break, it breaks into two parts. I could only watch in horror as all the other "water" and its contents flooded the room like a tsunami. The few other people in the vicinity gasped for air while running as fast as they could to , so that I have the worst smell from hell and the mother only in security - to endure humper all embarrassments . I do not think I even have a chance to wipe the freshly baked Dingleberries of my back. Based on this experience , I lean against the choice of a different restaurant next time."
In the Christian faith, it is, for both genders (1 Cor. 7:1-5). However, so is love (1 Cor. 13). I have the right to ask my wife for sex, but, because I know she is no longer interested, I choose not to. On the rare occasions when she wants it - and the even more rare occasions when I don't - I'm here for her.
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So anyone not approving of the state of Israel shelling civilians is automatically a "Hamas fanboi"? That is the classic example of the fallacy of the excluded middle. People with any sense of compassion tend to be appalled at the suffering of innocent people regardless of their ethnicity, and people with any sense of history know that neither side is exclusively to blame.
They believe, as I do, and as does CAMA, the missions organization I more typically support , that it does little good to heal the body and ignore the soul. CAMA is already in the affected regions, already working with the victims. We personally know some of the people who are there full-time as well as others who've been on short-term missions trips, many of them with a medical component since most people in west and central Africa do not have regular access to medical care.
That is often the case, but it really depends on the pathogen. Because most viral illnesses are self-limiting . . . the immune system clears them up if it is working properly and if the patient doesn't die first . . . vaccination even after exposure may still make sense. For instance, rabies can usually be prevented or at least made non-fatal if the shots are given shortly after exposure. Generally, a vaccine will be effective if (a) it stimulates production of sufficient antibodies in sufficient time to prevent the pathogen from overwhelming the victim; and preferably (b) if the severity of the side effects are not significantly more damaging than the disease itself, which is the problem that many people, including me, have with childhood vaccinations, which prevent old strains of very mild diseases (at least compared to, say, Ebola or smallpox), but also contain potent toxins whose effects are known to be harmful.
Absolutely, in the U.S. where "laws" prevent competition. The results elsewhere will likely be better. Remember basic economics: in a market with enough buyers and sellers that none can exert inordinate influence on prices, those prices will tend toward the marginal cost of production. That doesn't happen here in the U.S. mainly because of regulatory capture - telecom regs are written by the telecom companies and are designed to hinder competition to the greatest extent possible.
While starvation is uncommon in the U.S., malnutrition, especially among the poorest (which would be the working poor - they are generally worse off than people on welfare), is not. It is damned-near universal among the children of the working class, as well as the children of those with substance abuse and/or mental health issues. Almost every family in my church - and most of us are at best lower-middle-class ourselves - helps to feed other kids in our neighborhoods. We mostly have access to cars and such, which children and the poorest adults don't, and to places one can buy food that is reasonably healthful and affordable, which most people in the inner city, regardless of income, can't unless they drive. Now, there are always things to eat . . but . . NOT necessarily healthy things. Not for the inner-city poor, the vast majority of them children.
Your argument appears to be "we haven't solve the technical and practical challenges yet, so we never will." Progress is disappointingly slow; I'll give you that. The challenges are hard. I'll give you that too. However, given what human ingenuity has managed to accomplish just in the past 20 years, I think it is a very, very poor strategy to bet against it in the long term. Part of why we're not solving these challenges is that we're frankly not trying that hard. What we have now is still good enough for now. When that changes, when sufficiently larger players start taking fusion research seriously, I think the game will change pretty dramatically.
A lot of wisdom I do agree with. Regarding the storage problem - which I also agree to be the main bottleneck toward adoption of cleaner energy: why not use that energy at the point of production, to crack other hydrocarbons (biomass, corn husks, dirty coal, other carbon-rich waste), into liquid fuels using that energy, and store/transport these liquid fuels to the point where they will be used? I realize the process is not yet optimally efficient and not quite carbon-neutral, but it seems to me no worse and in many incremental ways better, than our current strategy of "burn whatever, just tax the crap out of it so we can bomb more brown people."
I feel really bad when I trap a mouse or a rat, which I had to do a couple days ago. I prefer nonlethal traps when they work, but sometimes they don't, and on Saturday I managed to trap one in a way that badly hurt but didn't kill it. I felt really bad. I understand that they are intelligent and sentient creatures. They don't belong in our food, and the diseases they carry don't belong in our home, so I do have to deal with them from time to time. But I so much wish that non-lethal traps actually worked, that I could just catch and release them in nearby woods. Alas, most of the time, that doesn't happen. :(
Agreed. It's completely irrelevant to most use cases. But not all. For instance, pro audio, which is a part of what I do, still benefits greatly from increased CPU speed as well as reduced cache latency. The tools I use have not been architected to take advantage of the immense power of modern GPUs. Eventually they likely will be, but, for now, every couple years' worth of CPU improvements does make a significant difference for what I do.
Back in MY day, we didn't have those newfangled computer doohickeys. We had adding machines and slide rules, and we liked them. "Innernet" was where you hoped the fish would go when you went fishing with a net. "Netflix" was what you would do if a bug got on your fishing net . . you "flicks" it off. A "color TV" was a huge thing that took half your living room, and the only thing "color" about it was the color of the cabinet; the picture itself was black and white. We had 3 channels, and we liked them. Now git off my lawn!!!
OK, sorry, my fault for not carefully RTFA. I did not mention that while my family and I do drive a great deal, almost all of it is within 75km of home. This *plus* a standard battery probably handles my situation, plus the occasional longer road trip, just fine.
When I worked in one inner suburb of a medium-sized city, and lived in another, I commuted about 50km each way, 100km in total, and hence 3000km over the course of a little over a month. Commutes 3-4 times that long are not unheard of in larger cities. But for me, would have meant a battery swap about 10 times a year. I don't know how long the swap should take, but I do know I would not have time to visit a dealer - the closest being about a half hour away - anywhere near that frequently, even if it were a short and painless process.
Like much of what tries to pass for modern science, nutritional research is tainted by the influence of those with a vested interest in the outcome. A healthy dose of skepticism is completely understandable. But there are things I believe we are learning. For instance, while it's been known for centuries that sugars and what we now recognize as high-glycemic starches tend to encourage obesity, it's only fairly recently that we've come to understand why. The role of various micronutrients, again long suspected to be important but not fully understood, is now coming into sharper focus. We're learning that many pesticides and herbicides are far more toxic to humans, especially over long periods of time, than was known previously. Many cancers, autoimmune disorders, and other illnesses are now known to be triggered by entire classes of substances previously regarded as safe. It is now known that we are actually symbionts, that our intestinal flora are such an important part of our normal digestive and immune system functioning that we cannot live healthy lives without them. These are just a few of the newer revelations off the top of my head, and I'm not in any way an expert in the field. So, here as in all areas, I try for a healthy balance of skepticism and openness. Truth does eventually come out.
The TC license you'll probably have to hunt for a bit, as it has been pulled from the Web and was never included in the Wayback Machine. I was not able to find it. But as for the DFSG, I mentioned them because (a) you did first, and (b) it is more or less what the OSI uses as its definition of Open Source. The FSF's definition is extremely similar.
You've already referenced the Debian Free Software Guidelines. That would be a perfectly good place to start. Read the TrueCrypt license (as I have, although it was a couple years ago) and compare with the four freedoms mentioned therein. I think you will find it violates at least the first.
By "more difficult" I mean "not worth their effort." I'm hoping to dissuade them from even trying, not because what I have to protect is particularly valuable, but because in principle I don't want them snooping on my stuff, *or* anyone else's either. I want the bar for them to do so to be high enough that they won't bother unless there is some plausible reason for them to do so.
Here is what my belief explains that yours does not: if their actions were not coerced, then the only other possible explanation is that they were rude, unhelpful, not in keeping with the general standards of open (or in this case semi-open) software in general, and burned every possible bridge back to the security community forever. There was no possible incentive for them to do this and every reason not to. The only reasonable alternative is that they were coerced, and the only entity likely to do so, and capable of getting away with it, would be some agency of the U.S. government.
OK, you got me on this one. Some people are that stupid. What I should have said was, "even most within Corporate America." No one in any of the companies I've ever worked for would trust it, and I'm not certain that any publicly traded company legally even can, because of Sarbanes-Oxley.
The license under which TrueCrypt was distributed is neither Free by the FSF definitition, nor Open by the OSI's, mostly because of usage restrictions which are not allowed by either. None of this is in any way controversial. It is simple fact, acknowledged by anyone who is familiar with all three. You do not appear to be familiar with any, thus your confusion. Source availability is a necessary but NOT sufficient condition for both freedom and openness.
A few facts to help clarify your thinking. First, RMS advocates Free Software, not Open Source. They're not the same thing, although the first can be viewed as a subset of the second. Second, neither RMS, nor any other public figure I'm aware of, has ever suggested that not GPL means not open-source, or even not free. RMS does explain eloquently and persuasive why Free (which implies Open) is better than merely Open, and why copyleft licenses are a more useful tool, in most cases, to preserve freedom. But he quite readily acknowledges that licenses such as BSD (new-style) or Apache are Free, which, generally, implies they are Open as well. Third, ownership of the source implies the right to re-license at will, but this right accrues only to the owner, not to those to whom it is redistributed, unless it is distributed in the public domain.
Correct. But GP is also correct. It had to be "source available and will build binaries identical to those we distribute" in order for it to be trusted. But "source available" does not automatically translate to OSS, which does not automatically translate to Free/Libre. Each of these is, to a first approximation, a subset of the previous.
he most plausible explanation to me so far is that the TC developer with the keys have gone to work for a commercial competitor to TrueCrypt and decided to throw a grenade in order to drive as many people away from TC as possible and pick up the pieces.
Not plausible in my respectful opinion. First, presuming that a commercial project would be closed-source, who would trust a closed-source encryption product? Even Corporate America is not that stooooopid. Second, supposing they otherwise might have trusted said product . . . would they still do so knowing it was developed by the very people who torpedoed TrueCrypt? That would be difficult information to keep secret for very long.
Occam's Razor suggests that this is exactly what it appears to be. . . another salvo in "No Such Agency's" ongoing war against every human being in the world. It will be treated as such by me and by many others, lessons will be learned, and we will move forward. Hopefully in a way that makes their (NSA's) lives more difficult in the future, rather than easier.
No, I think you misunderstand. Fascism is nationalistic socialism. Bolshevism is internationalist socialism. Stalin and Hitler, in spite of differing ideologies and opposition to one another, prove to be very much similar in terms of their authoritarianism as well as their body counts. As I said, each sucks more than the other.
... I'm pretty demented now!
The translation is not as bad as the experience sounds like it must have been. Note that German and English are very similar as languages go.
"Recently ate I a bad batch of Tacos from Taco Bell. Massive gastrointestinal complaints quickly. I tried quickly to the nearest bathroom . After what seemed like an eternity , I finally found what was probably the worst public bathroom in New York. So I sat down , risking a thousand different kinds of messed -butt disease to launch just in time for a nuclear -equipped missiles shit directly in the shell . Unfortunately, the water in the bowl is a deterrent to the overwhelming force of the chair proved to be - his rocket . After the start of the water itself , every part of my body as well as the ceiling and most of the walls we went to the toilet bowl to break, it breaks into two parts. I could only watch in horror as all the other "water" and its contents flooded the room like a tsunami. The few other people in the vicinity gasped for air while running as fast as they could to , so that I have the worst smell from hell and the mother only in security - to endure humper all embarrassments . I do not think I even have a chance to wipe the freshly baked Dingleberries of my back. Based on this experience , I lean against the choice of a different restaurant next time."
In the Christian faith, it is, for both genders (1 Cor. 7:1-5). However, so is love (1 Cor. 13). I have the right to ask my wife for sex, but, because I know she is no longer interested, I choose not to. On the rare occasions when she wants it - and the even more rare occasions when I don't - I'm here for her.