So long as they keep this on its own chip and don't integrate it with other, critical, components, it would probably be possible to cut it out of a regular commercial motherboard by jumpering and/or cutting leads. If they integrate it into critical components like the CPU,
on the other hand, it is going to be hard to get around it by building your own motherboard.
It seems to me that the only uses for which this might actually work are the nefarious ones, namely DRM and eliminating anonymous speech.
The benign uses mentioned are things like proving to your bank that you are who you say you are. However, for those purposes this is a lousy solution since your TPM is tied to a particular computer. Want to access your bank account from a hotel, a friend's house, or work? You're out of luck. And how about if multiple people use the same computer?
There are workarounds for these problems, but as far as I can see, they all depend on having the option of using other ways of verifying identity that don't depend on a tie to a particular piece of hardware, but the more those are used, the less the benefit of TPM.
My.xmodmaprc is slightly different. Instead of swapping Control and Caps lock it just makes Caps Lock into another Control key.
How often do you need Caps Lock? In my case, hardly ever, and when you do, that's what ESC-U is for.
remove Lock = Caps_Lock remove Control = Control_L keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L add Lock = Caps_Lock add Control = Control_L
I'd like to second this. The limited Unicode support in Emacs is a real drawback. Although I've been a dedicated emacs user since 1982, I sometimes find that I just can't do what I need to do without better Unicode support. For me this is the highest priority for emacs development. A lot of the other improvements are of little importance.
Along the same lines, a version of TeX with good Unicode support would be a godsend.
The original context (in parent's own post) was "why use a slow language like C for kernel development". Granted that Fortran is better suited to parallelization and therefore faster for things like numerical computation with multiple processors, since when is this relevant to kernel development? Indeed, the very limitations on pointers in Fortran that make it more easily parallelizable should make it unsuitable for kernel code.
Ah, that's very interesting. I wasn't aware of the British textile and salt policy or the exportation of the wealth from the mines.
The inconsistency of Churchill in wanting freedom for some (e.g. the English) and not for others (e.g. Indians) is unfortunately far from uncommon. Look at the behavior of the French: the national myth is founded on just about everybody having been a hero of the resistance in the Second World War, yet the principal occupation of France in the immediate postwar period was to reclaim its colonies in Indochina and North Africa.
What should we have done when you colonised us and took away our wealth built up over centuries, if not millenia? When India alone accounted for a few dozen percent of world trade?
"We" didn't colonize India. With minor exceptions such as the Portuguese
in Goa it was the British who colonized India. Although I certainly don't justify colonialism and agree with most of your post, I don't see any justification for the view that India is poor because of British colonialism. The reason that India is a relatively poor country today is primarily because India has not developed the way Europe, North America, Australia, and some East Asian countries have. I don't see how that can be blamed on the British. Another major cause of India's poverty is internal: high rates of population growth coupled with inheritance customs and the rigidity of the caste system.
There have been cases in which a colonial power literally robbed the colony of its accumulated wealth and took control of the current sources
(e.g.gold mines), but I'm not aware that this happened on any real scale
in India. The main economic benefit that the British got from India was first opium to sell to China to make up for the huge British trade deficit with China and secondly tea. While the opium trade was immoral, I don't see how it was particularly exploitative of India. Nor did the British destroy the traditional economy out of spite or in order to make room for activities of their own.
So, granting that colonization was unfair and humiliating, what basis is there for the claim that is a significant cause of India's current economic situation?
The differences between ID and evolution are not just differences in philosophy. Most forms of ID take as a major premise the claim that biological structures are so perfect that they must have been designed by an intelligent designer. And of course those IDers who are fundamentalist Christians, certainly a large fraction though not all, think that the designer was not merely intelligent but omniscient and omnipotent, the natural consequence of which is that biological structures should all be really well designed. The premise of biological perfection is an empirical premise, so empirical that it is false. IDers have a terrible time explaining why so many biological structures are horrible kludges. Take the retina for instance. What kind of nutcase would design an eye like that?
Yeah, unfortunately the prices are about the same as from the site
in the article, twice or more what you'd pay for a regular USB stick.
I like the sushi ones, but I don't want to pay that much of a premium.
How very Japanese, though, to offer them in a "family set" and "dinner set"
along with a mug showing the Chinese characters for various things eaten as sushi.
No, I can't, but I don't think that this makes the point you probably
think it does. First, they wouldn't try it unless they're unusually stupid because they know that the courts have already ruled that they can't do it. Getting Creationism into the science classroom isn't so
patently unconstitutional so they go that route instead. Second, much of the motivation for the growth of private Christian schools is to keep the kids from learning about evolution and other topics that fundamentalists don't like. In such private schools, they do indeed ban the teaching of evolution.
Christians are not persecuted in the US, but I think that they often think that they are for two reasons. First, evangelical Protestantism is an exclusive and evangelical religion. Since they think that they have the only truth, tolerance for other views is not a virtue and they think that they are not really able to be Christians unless the State enforces their views. Christians think that it is their right and duty to make everyone into a Christian. What for the rest of us is protection against harassment and imposition of Christianity is therefore for them an infringment of their right to spread Christianity.
The second reason that fundamentalists, feel persecuted is because they know that their views are considered to be ridiculous by many other people, especially intellectuals and scientists.
I agree that its too bad he cancelled the class. Exposure to a wider range of beliefs is an important antidote to narrow-mindedness. The reason that fundamentalists want their children exposed only to their ideas is that they know deep down that their ideas are likely to lose if they have to compete fairly with others. If they don't indoctrinate the kids while they are young, they're in trouble.
My point is not that Coptic Christians and fumdamentalists differ on Creationism but rather that the diversity of ways in which Christianity developed, together with the diversity of religious belief and practice in that part of the world at the time at which Christianity originated and the ways in which texts and beliefs were created, suppressed, and influenced each other, tends to undermine the idea that one tradition could be literally true.
If you look at Mirecki's areas of expertise
his irritation with fundamentalists becomes all the more understandable. His areas areas are Ancient Mediterranean Religion, Early Christianity, and Coptic Papyrology. That means that he knows a lot about about religion in the area in which Christianity developed about the origins of Christianity, and about branches of Christianity that either died out (e.g. gnosticism) or have followed a rather different course from the one that led to fundamentalism (e.g. Coptic Christianity). For someone with this background, the belief of fundamentalists that their interpretation of the particular compilation of texts that they consider holy is God's Truth must seem particularly crazy. I can't speak for him, but I bet that to him fundamentalists seem ignorant, naive, and arrogant even if one looks just at the religious texts and their interpretation, without concerning oneself with the conflict between fundamentalist beliefs and science.
This is an important point that I think people aren't paying enough attention to. He has resigned only an extra administrative position that he may not particularly have enjoyed anyhow. In American universities
(outside of the medical schools) being Chair of the department is usually not that big a deal. It isn't like some European universities where the Chair is really the person who runs the show. Mirecki still has his job and his academic rank - all he's done is stepped out of the limelight a little, whether to make life easier for himself or to keep himself from being a lightning rod for anti-University sentiment.
It sounds like this would be a good time to upgrade to Linux or FreeBSD.
That will take care of your security worries. And since you're deployed for operation Iraqi Freedom, it seems especially appropriate to liberate your OS.:)
You shouldn't get the idea that these Indian texts are in "rare"
languages. Hindi
has 180 million first language speakers, plus 120 million second language speakers. Sanskrit
has only a few first language speakers but about 200,000 speakers total, and many more people can read it. (Sanskrit is, roughly speaking, the Indian equivalent of Latin.)
Tamil has some 66 million speakers. These languages are not all that well known in North America and Europe, but there is no shortage of people who understand them.
This case is disturbing, but it looks like he wasn't jailed simply for posting but as part of a larger case of harassment. Depending on the facts, that might be legitimate.
I think that the wording of the European publishers' complaint is telling. They don't complain about Google or others publishing their copyrighted material without their permission, which, if true, would be a valid complaint (and perhaps is true of Google cache, however convenient we may find it). What they actually complain about is the fact that other people are making money from their publications. That is not necessarily a violation of copyright and, in the general case, is not a complaint that should be acted upon.
Suppose that publisher X publishes a book on a controversial topic of wide interest. I write a response to this book which sells well and makes a lot of money. Since my book is a response to publisher X's book, the money (and fame, women, etc.:)) that I received is indeed dependent on the work of Publisher X, but Publisher X has no legal or moral claim on me. The same is true if I compile and publish a bibliography, or make money as a consultant to people who want to know what they ought to read in a certain area. My profit ultimately depends on the work of the publishers, but I don't need their permission and don't owe them a dime.
Chefs and authors of cookbooks do not require the permission of the farmers, ranchers, hunters, and fishermen without whom there would be nothing to cook or to write about, nor do they owe them compensation. These are some of the many ways in which not only culture and science but business develops on the foundation of work done by other people, yet where we do not consider that the permission of those others is required or that any compensation is owed to them.
When the publishers complain that other people are making money from their content, our response should be "so what?". In and of itself that isn't a valid basis for complaint. It just means that they haven't been the ones to seize new opportunities. Copyright holders are granted certain limited privileges pertaining to publication and that is it. Beyond that, other people are perfectly free to do whatever they want.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not directly involved in John Gillmore's air travel case - it isn't a party and it isn't providing the lawyers or funding. He is suing as a private individual.
The EFF's only role is to have filed an amicus brief, as have the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Privacy Activism, and the Electronic Privacy Activism Center.
In any case, the suit is solely about the right to fly anonymously
and for all laws to be publicly available. He is not objecting to searches of air travelers. What may have misled people who don't read very carefully is that on his second attempt to fly without identifying himself, out of San Francisco International on United, they told him that they would let him fly without identifying himself but that he would have to submit to an extra-intrusive search. He declined on the grounds that this was in effect punishing him for exercising his right not to identify himself. He does not claim that it is unconstitutional to search airline passengers, only that what sort of search is conducted should not depend on whether the passenger identifies himself. For the facts see his description of his lawsuit. The various briefs and other legal documents are available here.
Sure, let him edit however it pleases him, but why can't they export it in something anybody can use, such as mpeg?
I mostly write in TeX, but I don't expect to distribute documents by sending out a TeX or dvi file. I generate a PDF so that anybody can read it.
This sounds really frustrating, but I don't understand why all your content was lost. Doesn't the wiki keep diffs for each edit? If not, it seems to me that that's the solution.
If someone comes in and makes a mess, you just revert to the previous state.
The Soul of a New Machine is indeed a terrific book. The only downside is that it is disappointing to realize that the machine they built was the DG Nova, which wasn't the great success they hoped it would be but was eclipsed by the VAX.
Indeed, prescriptive prescriptions often describe no attested
stage of the language. Language pundits like to think that they
are preserving the language of some ideal age, but they are often
wrong about this.
You want to be careful what you wish for. In the 1960s, for example, the murderers of civil rights workers and black people seen as causing trouble were in several notorious cases acquitted in the face of good evidence by local, all-white juries.
Slashdot Mirror
So long as they keep this on its own chip and don't integrate it with other, critical, components, it would probably be possible to cut it out of a regular commercial motherboard by jumpering and/or cutting leads. If they integrate it into critical components like the CPU, on the other hand, it is going to be hard to get around it by building your own motherboard.
It seems to me that the only uses for which this might actually work are the nefarious ones, namely DRM and eliminating anonymous speech. The benign uses mentioned are things like proving to your bank that you are who you say you are. However, for those purposes this is a lousy solution since your TPM is tied to a particular computer. Want to access your bank account from a hotel, a friend's house, or work? You're out of luck. And how about if multiple people use the same computer?
There are workarounds for these problems, but as far as I can see, they all depend on having the option of using other ways of verifying identity that don't depend on a tie to a particular piece of hardware, but the more those are used, the less the benefit of TPM.
My .xmodmaprc is slightly different. Instead of swapping Control and Caps lock it just makes Caps Lock into another Control key.
How often do you need Caps Lock? In my case, hardly ever, and when you do, that's what ESC-U is for.
I'd like to second this. The limited Unicode support in Emacs is a real drawback. Although I've been a dedicated emacs user since 1982, I sometimes find that I just can't do what I need to do without better Unicode support. For me this is the highest priority for emacs development. A lot of the other improvements are of little importance.
Along the same lines, a version of TeX with good Unicode support would be a godsend.
The original context (in parent's own post) was "why use a slow language like C for kernel development". Granted that Fortran is better suited to parallelization and therefore faster for things like numerical computation with multiple processors, since when is this relevant to kernel development? Indeed, the very limitations on pointers in Fortran that make it more easily parallelizable should make it unsuitable for kernel code.
Ah, that's very interesting. I wasn't aware of the British textile and salt policy or the exportation of the wealth from the mines.
The inconsistency of Churchill in wanting freedom for some (e.g. the English) and not for others (e.g. Indians) is unfortunately far from uncommon. Look at the behavior of the French: the national myth is founded on just about everybody having been a hero of the resistance in the Second World War, yet the principal occupation of France in the immediate postwar period was to reclaim its colonies in Indochina and North Africa.
"We" didn't colonize India. With minor exceptions such as the Portuguese in Goa it was the British who colonized India. Although I certainly don't justify colonialism and agree with most of your post, I don't see any justification for the view that India is poor because of British colonialism. The reason that India is a relatively poor country today is primarily because India has not developed the way Europe, North America, Australia, and some East Asian countries have. I don't see how that can be blamed on the British. Another major cause of India's poverty is internal: high rates of population growth coupled with inheritance customs and the rigidity of the caste system.
There have been cases in which a colonial power literally robbed the colony of its accumulated wealth and took control of the current sources (e.g.gold mines), but I'm not aware that this happened on any real scale in India. The main economic benefit that the British got from India was first opium to sell to China to make up for the huge British trade deficit with China and secondly tea. While the opium trade was immoral, I don't see how it was particularly exploitative of India. Nor did the British destroy the traditional economy out of spite or in order to make room for activities of their own.
So, granting that colonization was unfair and humiliating, what basis is there for the claim that is a significant cause of India's current economic situation?
The differences between ID and evolution are not just differences in philosophy. Most forms of ID take as a major premise the claim that biological structures are so perfect that they must have been designed by an intelligent designer. And of course those IDers who are fundamentalist Christians, certainly a large fraction though not all, think that the designer was not merely intelligent but omniscient and omnipotent, the natural consequence of which is that biological structures should all be really well designed. The premise of biological perfection is an empirical premise, so empirical that it is false. IDers have a terrible time explaining why so many biological structures are horrible kludges. Take the retina for instance. What kind of nutcase would design an eye like that?
Yeah, unfortunately the prices are about the same as from the site in the article, twice or more what you'd pay for a regular USB stick. I like the sushi ones, but I don't want to pay that much of a premium.
How very Japanese, though, to offer them in a "family set" and "dinner set" along with a mug showing the Chinese characters for various things eaten as sushi.
No, I can't, but I don't think that this makes the point you probably think it does. First, they wouldn't try it unless they're unusually stupid because they know that the courts have already ruled that they can't do it. Getting Creationism into the science classroom isn't so patently unconstitutional so they go that route instead. Second, much of the motivation for the growth of private Christian schools is to keep the kids from learning about evolution and other topics that fundamentalists don't like. In such private schools, they do indeed ban the teaching of evolution.
Christians are not persecuted in the US, but I think that they often think that they are for two reasons. First, evangelical Protestantism is an exclusive and evangelical religion. Since they think that they have the only truth, tolerance for other views is not a virtue and they think that they are not really able to be Christians unless the State enforces their views. Christians think that it is their right and duty to make everyone into a Christian. What for the rest of us is protection against harassment and imposition of Christianity is therefore for them an infringment of their right to spread Christianity.
The second reason that fundamentalists, feel persecuted is because they know that their views are considered to be ridiculous by many other people, especially intellectuals and scientists.
I agree that its too bad he cancelled the class. Exposure to a wider range of beliefs is an important antidote to narrow-mindedness. The reason that fundamentalists want their children exposed only to their ideas is that they know deep down that their ideas are likely to lose if they have to compete fairly with others. If they don't indoctrinate the kids while they are young, they're in trouble.
My point is not that Coptic Christians and fumdamentalists differ on Creationism but rather that the diversity of ways in which Christianity developed, together with the diversity of religious belief and practice in that part of the world at the time at which Christianity originated and the ways in which texts and beliefs were created, suppressed, and influenced each other, tends to undermine the idea that one tradition could be literally true.
If you look at Mirecki's areas of expertise his irritation with fundamentalists becomes all the more understandable. His areas areas are Ancient Mediterranean Religion, Early Christianity, and Coptic Papyrology. That means that he knows a lot about about religion in the area in which Christianity developed about the origins of Christianity, and about branches of Christianity that either died out (e.g. gnosticism) or have followed a rather different course from the one that led to fundamentalism (e.g. Coptic Christianity). For someone with this background, the belief of fundamentalists that their interpretation of the particular compilation of texts that they consider holy is God's Truth must seem particularly crazy. I can't speak for him, but I bet that to him fundamentalists seem ignorant, naive, and arrogant even if one looks just at the religious texts and their interpretation, without concerning oneself with the conflict between fundamentalist beliefs and science.
This is an important point that I think people aren't paying enough attention to. He has resigned only an extra administrative position that he may not particularly have enjoyed anyhow. In American universities (outside of the medical schools) being Chair of the department is usually not that big a deal. It isn't like some European universities where the Chair is really the person who runs the show. Mirecki still has his job and his academic rank - all he's done is stepped out of the limelight a little, whether to make life easier for himself or to keep himself from being a lightning rod for anti-University sentiment.
It sounds like this would be a good time to upgrade to Linux or FreeBSD. That will take care of your security worries. And since you're deployed for operation Iraqi Freedom, it seems especially appropriate to liberate your OS. :)
You shouldn't get the idea that these Indian texts are in "rare" languages. Hindi has 180 million first language speakers, plus 120 million second language speakers. Sanskrit has only a few first language speakers but about 200,000 speakers total, and many more people can read it. (Sanskrit is, roughly speaking, the Indian equivalent of Latin.) Tamil has some 66 million speakers. These languages are not all that well known in North America and Europe, but there is no shortage of people who understand them.
This case is disturbing, but it looks like he wasn't jailed simply for posting but as part of a larger case of harassment. Depending on the facts, that might be legitimate.
I think that the wording of the European publishers' complaint is telling. They don't complain about Google or others publishing their copyrighted material without their permission, which, if true, would be a valid complaint (and perhaps is true of Google cache, however convenient we may find it). What they actually complain about is the fact that other people are making money from their publications. That is not necessarily a violation of copyright and, in the general case, is not a complaint that should be acted upon.
Suppose that publisher X publishes a book on a controversial topic of wide interest. I write a response to this book which sells well and makes a lot of money. Since my book is a response to publisher X's book, the money (and fame, women, etc. :)) that I received is indeed dependent on the work of Publisher X, but Publisher X has no legal or moral claim on me. The same is true if I compile and publish a bibliography, or make money as a consultant to people who want to know what they ought to read in a certain area. My profit ultimately depends on the work of the publishers, but I don't need their permission and don't owe them a dime.
Chefs and authors of cookbooks do not require the permission of the farmers, ranchers, hunters, and fishermen without whom there would be nothing to cook or to write about, nor do they owe them compensation. These are some of the many ways in which not only culture and science but business develops on the foundation of work done by other people, yet where we do not consider that the permission of those others is required or that any compensation is owed to them.
When the publishers complain that other people are making money from their content, our response should be "so what?". In and of itself that isn't a valid basis for complaint. It just means that they haven't been the ones to seize new opportunities. Copyright holders are granted certain limited privileges pertaining to publication and that is it. Beyond that, other people are perfectly free to do whatever they want.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is not directly involved in John Gillmore's air travel case - it isn't a party and it isn't providing the lawyers or funding. He is suing as a private individual. The EFF's only role is to have filed an amicus brief, as have the ACLU, the Center for Constitutional Rights and Privacy Activism, and the Electronic Privacy Activism Center.
In any case, the suit is solely about the right to fly anonymously and for all laws to be publicly available. He is not objecting to searches of air travelers. What may have misled people who don't read very carefully is that on his second attempt to fly without identifying himself, out of San Francisco International on United, they told him that they would let him fly without identifying himself but that he would have to submit to an extra-intrusive search. He declined on the grounds that this was in effect punishing him for exercising his right not to identify himself. He does not claim that it is unconstitutional to search airline passengers, only that what sort of search is conducted should not depend on whether the passenger identifies himself. For the facts see his description of his lawsuit. The various briefs and other legal documents are available here.
Sure, let him edit however it pleases him, but why can't they export it in something anybody can use, such as mpeg? I mostly write in TeX, but I don't expect to distribute documents by sending out a TeX or dvi file. I generate a PDF so that anybody can read it.
This sounds really frustrating, but I don't understand why all your content was lost. Doesn't the wiki keep diffs for each edit? If not, it seems to me that that's the solution. If someone comes in and makes a mess, you just revert to the previous state.
The Soul of a New Machine is indeed a terrific book. The only downside is that it is disappointing to realize that the machine they built was the DG Nova, which wasn't the great success they hoped it would be but was eclipsed by the VAX.
Indeed, prescriptive prescriptions often describe no attested stage of the language. Language pundits like to think that they are preserving the language of some ideal age, but they are often wrong about this.
You want to be careful what you wish for. In the 1960s, for example, the murderers of civil rights workers and black people seen as causing trouble were in several notorious cases acquitted in the face of good evidence by local, all-white juries.