The Pentagon would much rather have a healthy, full-strength, all-volunteer military force than an expensive, byzantine network of "independent contractors" doing more and more grunt work outside the scope of both military and civil law.
No. On the contrary, I do believe that the Pentagon would be much more interested in an all-mercenary force. Sure, they are more expensive but consider the following advantages:
They are already trained. Preferably by some other country (West/East european countries, Russian, etc) so that the training cost has not been paid by US tax payers. Besides, it's often better to have 100+ dogs of war that are at the top of their game (ex-special forces, SAS, Foreign Legion, Spetznatz, etc) than 1000 US citizens fresh out of basic training.
Death of a foreign 'contractor' is just that: the death of a foreign contractor. That death, all of a sudden, becomes invisible to US tax payers.
Also, when a foreign 'contractor' dies, you don't have to pay anything special to the family and the next of kin. Same if said 'contractor' is maimed or severely wounded in combat. Also, contractors are not supposed to receive help and assistance from US forces if they are in difficult situation. No more expensive air support operations to help 15 guys locked in a bunker somewhere.
If said 'contractor' engage in torture, civilian massacres and/or other barbarous acts, the Pentagon can blame the contracting 'company' and shift its contracts to some other 'service provider'. Just like Abu Ghraib, really, where a few morons were prosecuted, while the generals, colonels, etc all escaped the consequence of their orders (or lack thereof).
And the best part: armored vehicles? Who said anything about providing armored vehicles to mercenaries?
So, for all these reasons, I do believe the Pentagon would love to have an all-mercenaries force. Sure, it's messy, but hey, it's war!
I noticed that the $399 machine comes with a VIA C3 CPU, which I found interesting...
Has anybody got any numbers/benchmarks showing the C3 performances/power consumption versus Intel/AMD CPUs?
And, more importantly has anybody actually bought one of these machines, tested it, and installed something other than Xandros on it? OpenBSD and Slackware comes to mind, but any other distribution would also be interesting...
Sure, the Open Source community is non-innovative.
Let's see... BitTorrent?
Hmmm... that sounds pretty innovative to me.
OpenBSD's pf? CARP?
Hmmm... that sounds pretty innovative to me.
Rsync? SpamAssassin? Encrypted file systems, such as cgd? Zope? Stable journaling file systems, such as ReiserFS and ext3fs? Or even Arch, Monotone and other source management programs?
Well, I guess some innovations come from the Open Source community, after all...
Frankly, big corporations (Microsoft comes to mind) do not 'innovate' either. They slavishly copy whatever worked for the competition.
I think this gentleman is just angry that some people decided to copy his precious SubVersion. But guess what? That is the nature of Open Source. If the 'community' likes something, it is going to copy it, and then improve on it.
And, in the case of OpenSSH (for instance) the copy actually is better than the original. I rest my case.
Just as a reminder, the French project of an almost purely digital library (Bibliotheque de France) has been a huge money burner. Their IT system is a complete mess, a mess in which they have already sunk millions of Euros.
Who was the President of that fiasco? Jeanneney, the same guy who is now trying to 'counter Google' or something. I suspect this so-called 'European' project is a scam to obtain more money for his own aggrandizement.
Is that open-source usually works well with cheap commodity machines, like the ubiquitous PC.
True story: I once did an interview with a very interesting start-up, who designed custom chips for high-speed routers.
During that interview, one of the founders of the company mentioned they were moving all their engineers from Sun machines to 4 CPUs Intel machines running Linux.
He said Linux was already good enough to do 90% of the job, for less than 10% of the cost of a Sun machine. The move, of course, saved '000s of dollars for the company.
In other words: the Internet is dead, people. First ICANN, then this. Prepare for an Internet that will be increasingly segmented by the cultural, religious and political preferences of each and every dictatorship in the world.
Islamic country? No sex and no equality for women, please.
Dictatorship? No free expression of anything, please.
Corporate state? No piracy and peer-to-peer, please.
Of course, it won't work, because technology will increasingly make it possible to go around the censorship, but, please, don't tell them that. They have to keep their illusions.
As a matter of fact, even countries like Iran find it hard to control things like satellite television. Wait until they discover satellite Internet providers.
Maybe, in the near future, we will see revolutions because people want to be free... to vote, to express themselves and to surf the Internet. Who knows?
Another rant by the what's-his-name Institute of Lies, Damn lies, and Distortion proved that Linux is a legal time bomb ticking away.
What's next? SCO will publish another inane series of press releases on its latest strategic re-deployment?
It's FUD, people. Nothing new here. Move along. Film at 11, and could the last person out of the building please shut down the lights? Thanks.
Sheeesh. They should have figured it out by now. What do they teach MBAs these days anyway?
Seriously, though, this is another attempt by a really worried company to smear the competition. A clue for Microsoft: it did not work for IBM. It won't work for you.
As a reminder, Microsoft makes up to $ 1 billion of profit per month according to Cringely.
$ 5m per day is something like $ 1.8 billion dollars per year. So, it hurts bad, but it's still something Microsoft can afford.
This being said, the EU could also decide to slowly raise the fines over time. That would probably make Microsoft move. I just hope they are not going to introduce Windows XP Starter Edition in Europe... Scratch that, I hope MS is going to do just that, since that would make many europeans switch to Linux.
Thanks! It seems like, from the standpoint of legal prededent, then, this ruling changes nothing at all, and there's no "chilling effect" to future exploit publishers. All good news.
Except, of course, that (AFAIK) there are no laws about the publications of vulnerabilities in France.
In the absence of a law, and given the muddled decision of this court (condemning Guillermito without really condemning him, blah blah blah), it is highly possible that French security researchers will avoid publishing anything until the legal situation has been clarified.
This means this court decision may well have a chilling effect after all... until someone rich or foolish enough decides to publish another vulnerability and see what happens in front of another French court. Or a law gets passed, whatever 'solution' comes first.
Anyone on Slashdot have an understanding of the principles of French Law?
Yes, I do. I'll try to answer your questions as best as I can.
What sort of constitutional free speech protection does a French citizen have?
Free speech is guaranteed, under French law, through (a) the 1789 Declaration of Human Rights, which is a part of the 1958 V Republic Constitution (Google is your friend if you want an English Translation of this text), (b) the UN Charter on Human Rights, of which France is a part and (c) the different European Community treaties, which also protect free speech.
Please note: The biggest difference with American Law is that 'hate speech' (anti-semitism, racism, fascism, nazism, Holocaust denials, etc) is specifically forbidden under French Law, and will be prosecuted. Anything else is allowed, except that the French government also reserves the right to censor publications in the name of 'national interest' (read: secrets of state). This censorship is very rarely used these days, however.
Does this ruling actually set any sort of precedent? That would be bad news for both freedom of speech and academic freedoms.
French Law does not recognize 'precedents'. It recognizes the primacy of law (vs precedents) and French courts do not have to follow precedents (previous decisions) taken by other court, in the absence of a binding law. If a binding law exists, the court has to respect that, and not any precedents.
This means that, if I publish vulnerabilities on product foobar from French company XYZ, and I am dragged into court, I may well be cleared of all charges. Also, if I win a case, company XYZ would have to pay for both its legal fees and mine. This is a strong deterrent against frivolous lawsuits.
Of course, the reverse is also true: a future decision may refer to a previous decision (precedent) and condemn me. That's when the legal games and fun begin, so to speak...
didn't they actually fine him for something else, suspend the fine, and then use the threat of the suspended fine to incent him to stop publishing?
No, Guillermito was fined because he used an illegal (pirated) copy of the software to find the vulnerabilities he published. Despite the harsh tone of the ruling, he was not really 'fined' ('sursis' means he does not have to come up with the money).
But, in any case, the court did not render a decision on the crucial matter of finding and publishing vulnerabilities, only on the use of an illegal copy of the software. Seems to me the judges were pretty pissed-off by the hysterical attitude of Tegam (the company who brought the lawsuit).
I spent almost two weeks trying to clean the VX2 spyware from a computer that belonged to one of my brothers in law... only to learn the only way to kill this p* of s* is to remove the infected hard disk, plug it into another (uninfected) computer and reformat the whole thing. I kid you not.
I stopped providing "free technical support" to my brothers in law a short while after that episode. And yes, my machines run Linux or OpenBSD.
Well, maybe the "Linux Community" can't match that kind of donation, but I'd like to point out the obvious:
Mr Gates is the head of a company that sells software for a profit, while the 'Linux Community' often gives its software for free to all comers over the Internet. That's one big difference.
I don't think Mr Gates will have any money problems if he ever gets sick. While Patrick Volkerding -- the maintainer of Slackware, the oldest surviving Linux distribution out there -- who has been sick for several months, is asking people to buy Slackware version 10.1 to help him pay his medical bills...
The difference? One of them is someone who can afford to make such a generous donation, while the other is still making his software available for free over the Internet. That makes that last remark pretty insensitive and gratuitous, IMHO.
I know which one I admire the most. But, heck, that's a personal view.
Aside from the obvious chicken-and-egg problem of claiming to have been an ISP before the "I" was even invented - 1989 may pre-date the web but it's a long way short of pre-dating the Internet.
Disclaimer: I am a Panix user, and I have always been very satisfied of their service.
A Panix old-timer once explained that the first connection between Panix and the outside world was a UUCP link. So they did predate the Internet in a way, since that connection was not TCP/IP.
This being said, they probably meant before the Internet was mainstream...
But when technology ended the paper trail and e-tickets came of age, it wasn't the existing airlines that benefited. New players like Southwest and JetBlue could enter the business cheaply. A couple of million bucks in servers and broadband was all the back office they needed.
Well... If you could just direct a cool couple of million of US$ my way...
I mean, I could use these servers and broadband connections for... uh... "stuff". You know *cough* *cough* pr0n leeching... *cough* *cough*
Anyone notice that all the stories on the front page are now listed as posted by 'samzenpus'? The fact that such a glaringly obvious dupe was posted kinda raised the 'this website has been hacked' alarm.
Yep. Also, MetaModeration is severely out of whack. [Yes, I do MetaModerate from time to time...]
Actually, Linux (and other free operating systems) work great with blind people. What you do need, though, is a serial terminal that is able to translate the text-only display into either Braille or speech.
Now... The problem is, of course, that these terminals are getting fewer and fewer by the day... Blame companies such as Microsoft and the makers of JAWS (can't remember the name of the company right now) for sucking dry the market.
Frankly, I have wrestled with JAWS quite a few times, for a friend who has been blind since he was 6 years old, and it is a nightmare to install and maintain. And my friend does not want to change because everyone he know uses Windows+JAWS, and because he uses the same combination at work.
When I think of the money thrown out the window (no pun intended) because of this absolute piece of c**p, it makes me want to scream. Especially when you look at the hundreds of free software that run perfectly well with a text-only terminal... No need for X11, or a powerful machine that can manage both Windows and speech conversion...
Linux Kernel is solid. Sadly, once you put useful applications on it (like the ones that make WXP 40 million lines long) it will fall apart.
Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Here is a clue for you: my main Linux machine is a laptop, running all the applications that I need. Examples:
GUI = XFCE, Fluxbox
Surfing the web = Mozilla, dillo
Writing a document = Abiword, LyX, vim
Creating a spreadsheet = GNUmeric
E-mail = Sylpheed, mutt, pine
Programming = Python, Perl, C, C++
Graphics = EyeOfGnome, Gimp, Inkscape, XFig
Usenet news = Pan
IRC, IM = irssi, Gaim
MP3, Ogg Vorbis = xmms
Please note that most of these applications are just as rock-solid as the Linux Kernel, with the possible exception of Mozilla. I can leave dozens of applications opened, lock the screen or use the 'sleep' function of the laptop and -- in a few seconds -- go back to my desktop.
The linux kernel has never crashed on me doing all this. The only time I have to reboot my machine is when I upgrade the kernel itself, which is something done in a matter of a few minutes.
Then again, you don't care about all this, right? You are just here to troll anyway...
Slashdot Mirror
No. On the contrary, I do believe that the Pentagon would be much more interested in an all-mercenary force. Sure, they are more expensive but consider the following advantages:
So, for all these reasons, I do believe the Pentagon would love to have an all-mercenaries force. Sure, it's messy, but hey, it's war!
"When you have dinner with the devil, make sure you have a long spoon".
If anybody at the EU Commission is still in love with Microsoft, that should wake them up. I hope.
I noticed that the $399 machine comes with a VIA C3 CPU, which I found interesting...
Has anybody got any numbers/benchmarks showing the C3 performances/power consumption versus Intel/AMD CPUs?
And, more importantly has anybody actually bought one of these machines, tested it, and installed something other than Xandros on it? OpenBSD and Slackware comes to mind, but any other distribution would also be interesting...
Ack! I stand corrected!
(Shame on me for mixing up SubVersion and BitKeeper -- I meant BitKeeper of course !)
Sure, the Open Source community is non-innovative.
Let's see... BitTorrent?
Hmmm... that sounds pretty innovative to me.
OpenBSD's pf? CARP?
Hmmm... that sounds pretty innovative to me.
Rsync? SpamAssassin? Encrypted file systems, such as cgd? Zope? Stable journaling file systems, such as ReiserFS and ext3fs? Or even Arch, Monotone and other source management programs?
Well, I guess some innovations come from the Open Source community, after all...
Frankly, big corporations (Microsoft comes to mind) do not 'innovate' either. They slavishly copy whatever worked for the competition.
I think this gentleman is just angry that some people decided to copy his precious SubVersion. But guess what? That is the nature of Open Source. If the 'community' likes something, it is going to copy it, and then improve on it.
And, in the case of OpenSSH (for instance) the copy actually is better than the original. I rest my case.
D... D... Duke Nukem?
Tada!
Sorry, I just had to say it!
(/me ducks under flame-proof shelter)
Just as a reminder, the French project of an almost purely digital library (Bibliotheque de France) has been a huge money burner. Their IT system is a complete mess, a mess in which they have already sunk millions of Euros.
Who was the President of that fiasco? Jeanneney, the same guy who is now trying to 'counter Google' or something. I suspect this so-called 'European' project is a scam to obtain more money for his own aggrandizement.
Is that open-source usually works well with cheap commodity machines, like the ubiquitous PC.
True story: I once did an interview with a very interesting start-up, who designed custom chips for high-speed routers.
During that interview, one of the founders of the company mentioned they were moving all their engineers from Sun machines to 4 CPUs Intel machines running Linux.
He said Linux was already good enough to do 90% of the job, for less than 10% of the cost of a Sun machine. The move, of course, saved '000s of dollars for the company.
In other words: the Internet is dead, people. First ICANN, then this. Prepare for an Internet that will be increasingly segmented by the cultural, religious and political preferences of each and every dictatorship in the world.
Islamic country? No sex and no equality for women, please.
Dictatorship? No free expression of anything, please.
Corporate state? No piracy and peer-to-peer, please.
Of course, it won't work, because technology will increasingly make it possible to go around the censorship, but, please, don't tell them that. They have to keep their illusions.
As a matter of fact, even countries like Iran find it hard to control things like satellite television. Wait until they discover satellite Internet providers.
Maybe, in the near future, we will see revolutions because people want to be free... to vote, to express themselves and to surf the Internet. Who knows?
One word: Ouch.
Let's see what happened in the last few days:
What's next? SCO will publish another inane series of press releases on its latest strategic re-deployment?
It's FUD, people. Nothing new here. Move along. Film at 11, and could the last person out of the building please shut down the lights? Thanks.
Sheeesh. They should have figured it out by now. What do they teach MBAs these days anyway?
Seriously, though, this is another attempt by a really worried company to smear the competition. A clue for Microsoft: it did not work for IBM. It won't work for you.
As a reminder, Microsoft makes up to $ 1 billion of profit per month according to Cringely.
$ 5m per day is something like $ 1.8 billion dollars per year. So, it hurts bad, but it's still something Microsoft can afford.
This being said, the EU could also decide to slowly raise the fines over time. That would probably make Microsoft move. I just hope they are not going to introduce Windows XP Starter Edition in Europe... Scratch that, I hope MS is going to do just that, since that would make many europeans switch to Linux.
Thanks! It seems like, from the standpoint of legal prededent, then, this ruling changes nothing at all, and there's no "chilling effect" to future exploit publishers. All good news.
Except, of course, that (AFAIK) there are no laws about the publications of vulnerabilities in France.
In the absence of a law, and given the muddled decision of this court (condemning Guillermito without really condemning him, blah blah blah), it is highly possible that French security researchers will avoid publishing anything until the legal situation has been clarified.
This means this court decision may well have a chilling effect after all... until someone rich or foolish enough decides to publish another vulnerability and see what happens in front of another French court. Or a law gets passed, whatever 'solution' comes first.
Anyone on Slashdot have an understanding of the principles of French Law?
Yes, I do. I'll try to answer your questions as best as I can.
What sort of constitutional free speech protection does a French citizen have?
Free speech is guaranteed, under French law, through (a) the 1789 Declaration of Human Rights, which is a part of the 1958 V Republic Constitution (Google is your friend if you want an English Translation of this text), (b) the UN Charter on Human Rights, of which France is a part and (c) the different European Community treaties, which also protect free speech.
Please note: The biggest difference with American Law is that 'hate speech' (anti-semitism, racism, fascism, nazism, Holocaust denials, etc) is specifically forbidden under French Law, and will be prosecuted. Anything else is allowed, except that the French government also reserves the right to censor publications in the name of 'national interest' (read: secrets of state). This censorship is very rarely used these days, however.
Does this ruling actually set any sort of precedent? That would be bad news for both freedom of speech and academic freedoms.
French Law does not recognize 'precedents'. It recognizes the primacy of law (vs precedents) and French courts do not have to follow precedents (previous decisions) taken by other court, in the absence of a binding law . If a binding law exists, the court has to respect that, and not any precedents.
This means that, if I publish vulnerabilities on product foobar from French company XYZ, and I am dragged into court, I may well be cleared of all charges. Also, if I win a case, company XYZ would have to pay for both its legal fees and mine. This is a strong deterrent against frivolous lawsuits.
Of course, the reverse is also true: a future decision may refer to a previous decision (precedent) and condemn me. That's when the legal games and fun begin, so to speak...
didn't they actually fine him for something else, suspend the fine, and then use the threat of the suspended fine to incent him to stop publishing?
No, Guillermito was fined because he used an illegal (pirated) copy of the software to find the vulnerabilities he published. Despite the harsh tone of the ruling, he was not really 'fined' ('sursis' means he does not have to come up with the money).
But, in any case, the court did not render a decision on the crucial matter of finding and publishing vulnerabilities, only on the use of an illegal copy of the software. Seems to me the judges were pretty pissed-off by the hysterical attitude of Tegam (the company who brought the lawsuit).
Hope this clears up a few things!
I spent almost two weeks trying to clean the VX2 spyware from a computer that belonged to one of my brothers in law... only to learn the only way to kill this p* of s* is to remove the infected hard disk, plug it into another (uninfected) computer and reformat the whole thing. I kid you not.
I stopped providing "free technical support" to my brothers in law a short while after that episode. And yes, my machines run Linux or OpenBSD.
or
Make of that what you want, but:
Of course, I changed the password to something more politically correct before leaving the companies....
Isn't that supposed to be XSLT? Or is there a technology called XSLT and one called XSTL??
The difference? One of them is someone who can afford to make such a generous donation, while the other is still making his software available for free over the Internet. That makes that last remark pretty insensitive and gratuitous, IMHO.
I know which one I admire the most. But, heck, that's a personal view.
Aside from the obvious chicken-and-egg problem of claiming to have been an ISP before the "I" was even invented - 1989 may pre-date the web but it's a long way short of pre-dating the Internet.
Disclaimer: I am a Panix user, and I have always been very satisfied of their service.
A Panix old-timer once explained that the first connection between Panix and the outside world was a UUCP link. So they did predate the Internet in a way, since that connection was not TCP/IP.
This being said, they probably meant before the Internet was mainstream...
My eyes! My eyes! It burns! It buuuuuuuuuurns! :-)
But when technology ended the paper trail and e-tickets came of age, it wasn't the existing airlines that benefited. New players like Southwest and JetBlue could enter the business cheaply. A couple of million bucks in servers and broadband was all the back office they needed.
Well... If you could just direct a cool couple of million of US$ my way...
I mean, I could use these servers and broadband connections for... uh... "stuff". You know *cough* *cough* pr0n leeching... *cough* *cough*
Anyone notice that all the stories on the front page are now listed as posted by 'samzenpus'? The fact that such a glaringly obvious dupe was posted kinda raised the 'this website has been hacked' alarm.
Yep. Also, MetaModeration is severely out of whack.
[Yes, I do MetaModerate from time to time...]
Actually, Linux (and other free operating systems) work great with blind people. What you do need, though, is a serial terminal that is able to translate the text-only display into either Braille or speech.
Now... The problem is, of course, that these terminals are getting fewer and fewer by the day... Blame companies such as Microsoft and the makers of JAWS (can't remember the name of the company right now) for sucking dry the market.
Frankly, I have wrestled with JAWS quite a few times, for a friend who has been blind since he was 6 years old, and it is a nightmare to install and maintain. And my friend does not want to change because everyone he know uses Windows+JAWS, and because he uses the same combination at work.
When I think of the money thrown out the window (no pun intended) because of this absolute piece of c**p, it makes me want to scream. Especially when you look at the hundreds of free software that run perfectly well with a text-only terminal... No need for X11, or a powerful machine that can manage both Windows and speech conversion...
Riiiiiiiiiiiiight.
Here is a clue for you: my main Linux machine is a laptop, running all the applications that I need. Examples:
Please note that most of these applications are just as rock-solid as the Linux Kernel, with the possible exception of Mozilla. I can leave dozens of applications opened, lock the screen or use the 'sleep' function of the laptop and -- in a few seconds -- go back to my desktop.
The linux kernel has never crashed on me doing all this. The only time I have to reboot my machine is when I upgrade the kernel itself, which is something done in a matter of a few minutes.
Then again, you don't care about all this, right? You are just here to troll anyway...
What does the PR count count?
;-)
The number of opened bugs remaining in the pkgsrc tree.
Is the pkgsrc tree the source tree for the entire distribution?
Nope. The pkgsrc is the source tree for the software that can be installed on a NetBSD system.
Two-space tabs or three?
It's up to you. Edit your ~/.vimrc file to change this. You are using vim, right?