I don't know about you guys but when ten years ago when I was fourteen, e-mail was dead too.
Initially, I used to use Web based IM clients to talk to my friends quickly followed by ICQ and
and even later MSN.
I only started using e-mail when my group of friends started working full time.
I think the reason for this is that e-mail is mostly open at work because it's required for the business.
Moreover, employers don't really care if you e-mail your friends from your account, provided you're not taking the piss.
In contrast, browsing social networking sites from work can get you sacked.
In short, there's nothing new here. I think the youngsters of today will follow the same path as I did ten years ago; they
will adopt e-mail when their circle of friends grow-up and go to work.
... that its all just a little bit of history repeating
It isn't just Shirley Bassey who thinks history is repeating, I do too. When the first canals were built in the 18th century that connected the centre
of Manchester with the local coal mines, the price of coal fell by half. It wasn't just coal, suddenly the cotton from the New World could be transported
from Liverpool to Manchester in a matter of days - not in the weeks of yester-year.
This lead to a collapse in price of a whole range of minerals and materials. It is not an exaggeration to say that the humble cannal was the back-bone of the
Industrial Revolution. It supplied cheap materials, power in the form of water wheels, and allowed production of a product to move far away from sea,
yet still have global reach at the same time.
Parallels with the Internet can obviously be drawn. Rather than aiding the movement of physical commodities, the Internet aids the movement of intellectual commodities.
It completes what the Industrial Revolution started. Now production of information is not tied to any location. It can be forged anywhere and transported to anywhere
in a fraction of a second.
Forget Web 2.0, AJAX or Silverlight. In a century these words will only be known by Internet Historians,
who will still have no better clue that us what web 2.0 actually means;). What will be taught in the class-room about the early Internet is how it allowed the production of value to be independent of the physical location of a business.
The weakness of this approach, is that you prevent legitimate review of the mechanism - a 'good' algorithm can be mathematically proven as 'strong' (e.g. PGP).
Close but not quite. Typically, you can prove a cipher does not fall to a specific range of attacks. AES for example has a proof that standard differential cryptanalysis is impossible to perform against the cipher.
What is much harder to prove is that the only way to break a cipher is to solve a particular known hard problem. For example, the Blum Blum Shub cipher reduces to the difficulty of factoring the modulus used within the cipher. For interest, it's worth noting that RSA has no known reduction proof; it's existence is still a conjecture.
Of course, what we really want but nobody has managed to do so far is to put a non-trivial lower-bound on the difficulty on breaking any block cipher. This is thought to be a difficult problem.
People often confuse this open problem for the P?=NP debate, however, the P?=NP is a statement at infinitely sized inputs. Obviously, no cipher can take infinitely sized inputs. The upshot of this is that P could equal NP and you could still have a computationally secure block-cipher. To see this, consider the trivial case where F(x) has an O(n) and F^-1(x) has an O(n^500). For all intents and purpose, F(X) would be a usable one-way function even though both algorithm are clearly P-time.
So we may see truly provably secure ciphers before we see P?=NP being resolved. I certainly hope we do!
When the Germans kept Enigma a secret, they did nothing more or less common than anyone else was doing, or still does for the most part. National governments by and large do not leave their communications to AES, but instead use (what they at least perceive to be) more secure methods. NSA still keeps our codes secret, Russia's FSB keeps its codes secret, and the UK's GCHQ keeps its codes secret.
This isn't true. Click here for more information. (Warning: It's a PDF)
The United States Government rates AES with a 128-bit key suitable for use on data with the SECRET classification and 192 to 256-bit versions for TOP SECRET classification.
It's just another piece of evidence that nobody - not even the military - knows how to break the Advanced Encryption Standard.
You know, a few years back I was in San Diego and went to Toorcon (excellent conference by the way - please support it) and I got in to this discussion
late at night on socialised health care.
For those that don't know, the United Kingdom spends eighty billion pounds a year on healthcare, funded directly through taxes.
His central point was: "Don't you feel like you're being ripped off paying for the health care of jobless
people when you're busting a gut earning a living?"
I think it's an important question and one that needs answering if the United States is going to replace their broken healthcare system.
My answer is simply that even ignoring the people who don't work, it is still a better deal for you if you have socialised health care.
Free market economies work best when prices are elastic; that is, where changes in price affect the demand for the product. This allows
price to signal the level of available supply and prevent shortages of goods. The problem with healthcare is that it is not elastic.
If I have cancer, a broken leg or some other ailment I have to get it fixed - regardless of the cost.
In a profit making company, this means raising the price indefinitely sees no reduction in demand. This leads to an ever increasing cost that outstrips inflation.
The American system compounds this because a lot of white-collar workers get insurance plans from their companies. Companies have deeper pockets than an individual ever could
so the prices increase still further!
Socialised health care delivers better value for money because of the enormous purchasing power of the government. The NHS can purchase millions of shots
in one go. That allows you to hammer the drug companies on price and share the proceeds with the population. In the American system, it is you against
the drug company and you are needy; you are willing to pay anything to fix yourself. In short you're screwed.
There are also other economic benefits. Heathier and less desperate neighbours translates to less crime and increase productivity. It pays to insure that the
daughter of a crack-addict prostitute get first class health care and education - if only to increase their chances of escaping the poverty trap and contribute
more to the economy.
It also pays because you can remove the inefficent insurance companies. If everybody is covered then there is no need to have a bureaucracy to decide
if a person is covered.
Socialised health care is not evil communism, it is a practical solution to the health care of your nation. I don't see anybody complaining about the socialised road,
garabage collection, fire, police and military. When you trust the security of your nation to the government, why do you not trust your healthcare to them too?
I'd I've seen the benefits first hand. When a friend of mine, at the age of 20 developed Lukemia, put his Computer Science course on hold, checked in to the local hospital and began
his treatment straight away. He was cured and back in education the following year. I fear that had he born in the United States, he would not have been able to continue
with his studies, in fact, he probably would have been bankrupt. Socialised healthcare not only save his life, but his future.
I've always held that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole? It's a grammatically correct question but we can't expect it to mean anything.
While we don't have a working theory of quantum gravitation, we do have some strong hints that time and and space themselves were forged in the Big Bang. If you look at a Universe a Planck Length is size, the error in the time of any event observed would be longer than the time the Universe has existed for, to this point, and any error is position would
be large than the current Universe at that size.
In short, time and space are useless measurements of a Universe this small.
In a very real sense, the Universe has always existed but has a finite age. I think once I came to understand what this really meant, it's very a beautiful
truth about the world. I am sceptical of any theory that talks about a "before" the Big Bang - I think it misses one of the most important truths there is to know!
DRM free content? Absolutely. I have to pay my TV license every year for the BBC. For the most part, I think it is value for money. The BBC news site is worth the license fee all by itself. For comparison, I pay about a third of the cost of a license on a Slashdot subscription each year and Slashdot is less than a third of the quality.
However, I'm of the opinion that if you're going to force people to pay for a service through a tax, then the products of that government service should be free in the BSD style sense of the word. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that this needs to be codified in to law. In fact, we may already have in the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
Having just read the first section of the act, you could make a questionable legal argument that if you make a request for the unDRMED content and they fail to give you that version they are in breach of the act. If you have to buy a Windows machine just to watch one of their publicly broadcast snippets I'd say that obstructs the request for the information sufficiently for it to become unlawful. No other department is free to restrict requests in that manner!
We've already paid for the service so give us the bloody content in a usable format!
OK, so they found a correlation. But it was a correlation they weren't looking for, correct? If I check for the existence of 20 different correlations with a 95% confidence interval, wouldn't I be likely to find one even if none exist? Somebody else would have to confirm this finding for me to give it any credence.
I agree that this result needs clarification but there are many 'weird' correlations like this in animals. Bodies are built differently to computer programs. When I build a program, it's a good idea to have each part of the program do one thing and one thing only and do that thing well.
I'm no expert in this field, but I do not believe that this is so in the body. The presence of a single protein often triggers a whole host of side-effects. This research is interesting because if increased mathematical skill is caused by something like a single protein, then it could help us determine what protein that is.
What is it about Microsoft and reinventing perfectly good tools. First they tried to replace Nant with MsBuild, with limited success. They're trying
to reinvent Subversion and Cruisecontrol with the Microsoft Team System. They are the ultimate NIH company. I've started to form the opinion
that this is unsustatinable for Microsoft. You can't keep reinventing and supporting tools like this forever, because no matter how many
programmers you have there OSS movement has more. They will keep producing high-quality tools faster than you can release competitors.
People used to complain that Sun were control freaks about Java. What did Sun do? They listened and GPLed Java. I think the guys at Sun
have come to a similiar conclusion to me. Your products are part of an ecology and the ecology is always bigger than one company. What
you want to do is foster a larger ecology for your products and hope that this translates to sales.
I admire Sun for this approach, it's risky but it shows maurity in face of change ushered in at the hands of OSS. Microsoft seems to have no
strategy for tackling OSS outside of the United States. Over here, software patents don't exist. They may win the battle but be swamped by
the tidal wave from abroad.
I use TestDriven every single day I'm in work and I can tell you that this makes the licensed copy of Visual Studio 2005 (paid at full price) a much more
functional piece of software. To me, this is validation of the ecology; the open source product made me feel that I'm getting more value out of the purchase.
It's this affect that Sun hopes GPLing Java will bring to their revenues. I for one think they're right.
As the Web takes over, C languages are also becoming less relevant, according to Padveen. "C++ and C Sharp are still alive and kicking, but try to find a basic C-only programmer today, and you'll likely find a guy that's unemployed and/or training for a new skill," he says.
What the web can now allocate memory and talk to my hardware? Even if you're not a kernel programmer, the web has sucked and still sucks for application development. It will continue to suck for years, due to Internet Explorer. It's misleading to claim AJAX will solve all these problems because it won't. In fact, it might even cause a few problems of its own. For example, do you really think all that AJAX is secure? In short, I think the web is taking over what naturally comes to that medium. It is wrong to say its displaced C.
Does this guy forget that all of the GNU/Linux Kernel base system is written in C? You know, the operating system that powers most web-servers? I'll tell you one thing, C will still be here in twenty years time when Ruby on Rails is talked about much in the same was Blitz Basic is today. C is here to stay; it's immortal.
This is quickly making DRM look less like rights management and more like digital restrictions mockery. Of course, we knew this from the start. Any security strategy that depends on giving the attacker both the key and lock is doomed to fail.
The guys who make this DRM know its flawed but they still get paid when it fails. They must be quietly laughing all the way to the bank. Yet like morons the record labels keep handing money over. It's no wonder CD sales are declining when you're *that* clue-proof.
EMI has the right idea. Shock horror, if you give the customer what they want, they'll pay you for it. I never would have guessed!
I think it would stupid for the AbiWord or OpenOffice teams to down tools and start working on a web-based version of the software. At the minute, a lot of productivity is wasted on browser incompatibilities and AJAX is still rather clumsy in comparison to what it could be. To get even the fairly basic functionality of AbiWord in to a web-app would take far longer to develop than it would for an equivalent desktop application.
I think the free software movement is doing very well. It's getting somewhere. I've used Windows on every PC I've owned since the Windows 3.11 days. In January I made the switch to Ubuntu on a new PC that I recently purchased. I decided to ditch Windows because I thought that Vista was a downgrade to Windows XP.
I was frankly amazed at just how good GNU/Linux really is. It isn't just tolerable, it's out and out better than Windows XP. After installation, the machine is usable in that it has all the software I need to actually start using the computer. Windows by comparison has a basic 'toolset' (if you can even call it that). The file system layout is far more intuitive than the baroque drive lettering system. The firewall is simple, powerful and non-intrusive - compare that to Windows based firewalls. Windows Update only supports Microsoft products. Ubuntu provides updates for all software packages it distributes. In short, it feels better engineered, more robust, consumer centric and easier to use.
Why should the free software movement rethink its strategy when it's just starting to gain traction in a big way? I say keep up the good work! It is no accident that Dell have decided to sell Ubuntu on their machines. This is no longer a hobbyists OS but a baby gorilla eating its way through plenty of fruit and gaining in size all the time. Watch out Microsoft!
They are at it again. Snob, uppish, wants whole world do things in their own way, learn french and whatnot. They isolate themselves, dont join in the international community, and they want whole 250+ countries in the world to listen to what they say.
That sounds an awful lot like the US to me. The US/France relationship reminds me of two brothers who "hate" each other for no other reason that they are so similar. The French are a proud, strong and patriotic nation and so are the citizens of the United States.
On top of this, the French are also more internationally minded than the US. They did start the European Union after all and relinquished control of interest rates to Brussels to adopt the single currency.
So... when I play Counterstrike it's virtual murder? What about when I over-power a base in Red Alert 3? Can I be taken to the Haugue and tried for war crimes on the charge of "unprovoked attack on a virtual state?"
To equate virtual rape to rape that takes place in the real-world only serves to cheapen the ordeal of real women are who subjected to this awful crime.
It's a fucking game, ladies and gentlemen. If you had to behave responsibly and legally, it wouldn't be much fun now would it?
I've fell out of love with public-key signature schemes as a means of proving authenticity. There are a few problems with the idea in general:
Nobody actually reads the certificates.
Even if they did, they don't really mean anything anyway. How difficult is it to get a real certificate with fake credentials?
Moreover, if the URL is similar enough to the target of your phish then your SSL certifcate may well be legitmate in every sense of
the word but you trick people because the URL is close enough to a big brand's main domain.
I think Zimmerman, with his ZPhone program, has got it right. Really, all you're interested in for E-mail or VoIP is not whether the person really is Simon Johnson, of Widnes, based in the United Kingdom who is 23 years old with a pet dog called Thornton. You're actually interested in whether this Ckwop guy I'm speaking to now is the same guy as I spoke to last-time.
When you weaken your security requirement to this position, you can remove a staggering amount of complexity. You can cut out all the CAs, all the
X.509 certificates and ASN.1 implementations etc. What you're left with is Diffie-Helman and AES in CCM mode. You can implement this in a couple of
thousand lines of provably correct code and your done.
The real way to solve the "identification problem" with web-sites is to change the way credit-cards work. You have a secure token that outputs a different string every thirty seconds. RSA have made these but they're very expensive for no explicable reason, the banks would develop an open-standard in my model to drive down prices. When you pay for something, you submit your credit-card along with the token's value. The transaction will only be authorised if the token's value matches what the bank thinks that value should be.
That way, phishers only have one shot to take your money. Sure, they could make a mock payment page but the auth-code is only going to work once. I think this would destroy the cost effectiveness of phishing for credit-card numbers. That said, identity theft would still be an issue.
I want a new directive. One that bans all member states from making any new laws for the next ten years.
Think about this for a second, think of one piece of legislation passed in the last ten years that has positively impacted anyone you know in the first world?
I can't think of a single thing, not one, nothing. Maybe this is a failure of imagination on my part but on the whole laws in the last ten years have
been mostly negative.
Maybe voting is declining in Britain not because of athapy, per se, but because people like myself our realizing the truth. Our politicians
are powerless - they can't do a thing to change the plight of the average person on the street. They can raise taxes, lower taxes, pass all
sorts of laws but they can't stop the dickheads burning people's bins or the fourteen year olds buying cider to vomit up on the street.
In short, what's the point in voting when both parties are equally as corrupt and when the decisions taken there never effect you? It's a
powerful argument but not one I personally agree with. I vote not for myself but because a great many lives were lost trying to defend that vote.
The tragedy is that this generation has come to find that their vote would be more productively used as toilet paper than a means of expressing
your opinion.
We need a new sort of politics. A politics where local issues and common people are listened to. A politics where the career of the politician
matters less than serving their constituents. A politics where issues are not decided based on the party your belong to but what improves the lives of the people of the country. We need a politics where an honest politician is not considered an oxymoron. We need a rupture from the past and we need it more urgently than ever before.
That's nice rhetoric and a few years ago I would have believed this too.
However, having lived in the United Kingdom and having been involved in a prosecution of an offender, I can say that this could not be further from the truth.
The truth is that it is very, very hard to prosecute somebody for child porn possession if they're will to fight it. The "It was a virus defence" almost always gets the case chucked before it even reaches a jury. There's this thing called "continuity of evidence" and it's a hard hurdle to jump over (and rightly so).
He who alleges must prove and if you can't show any evidence that the virus didn't put it there then the guy walks free. Remember, to convict you must disprove the defence's point.
The defence is always better funded. To see why this is so, consider this: wouldn't you be if your liberty and life was at stake? People well gladly sell their house for the best lawyer in these circumstances. By comparison, the state fights these cases with people just out of their pupillage.
In the case I was involved in, I was certain the man was guilty. I was willing to get up on the stand and testify to that fact. He should have gone to jail for a long time and the fact he still walks the streets and cares for his children leaves me sick in the stomach.
That said, it is better than ten guilty men go free than a single innocent go to jail. This principle is the basis of our entire criminal system. Even after this experience, I still believe in this principle one-hundred percent. If ten paedophiles have to go free to prevent an innocent man's life being destroyed, I begrudgingly have to accept that. That, as they say, is the price of freedom.
It doesn't matter which operating system you use - they all contains buffer overflows. In a way, the consumer is to blame for this. BSD has been whiling with little to no market-share despite the fact it's free. Nobody it seems wants software that's secure out of the box and stays secure.
People want features and features are the enemy of security. So the status-quo continues even though we've known how to fix these issues for forty years.
Why would ISPs agree to this? I can imagine it now, a group of ISPs implement this and then customers flock to the small ISPs who aren't big enough to warrent attention from the ARIA. Faced with a slump in revenue the ISPs reverse course and try to win customers back.
Let's not get started on SSL encrypted DCC transfers on IRC channels or private FTP servers! That's going to be almost impossible to track. These kind of darknets (as I've seen them called) or going to be very hard to shut-down!
Does this even matter anyway? My friend from Canada brought over his personal collection on a 320Gig drive when he visited this week. This is getting more and more common, people now have so much portable storage that it's often easier to swap collections and cherry pick the songs you like (or take the whole collection if you prefer). Compared to downloading, this is a far safer way to pirate on a huge quantity of music.
At some point, their revenues will become so small that they start to lose credibility. A case in point, where are the blacksmiths' guilds today? This whole issue with trundle on for some time to come but the inevitable will eventually happen. Time is on our sides, my friends.
owever, he has not yet found a way to exploit that overflow because Word keeps crashing. Microsoft says that the crash is preventing any security hazard, and therefore there is none.
The Open BSD guys have a philosophy: "The only difference between a bug and a vulnerability is the intelligence of the attacker."
I wish more programmers held this view! A bug is an undefined state of the program. It's quite clear that this is a dangerous position for your program to be in. Bug really are baby vulnerabilities. It's best to remove them as soon as you find them.
This really begs the question: are the climate scientists who dissent really tools for corporations or are the climate scientists who advocate (consent to global warming caused by man) really tools for government/special interest groups?
I saw a documentary a week or so ago on the United Kingdom's Channel 4. I believe this interview is taken from that show. The show made the case against man made global warming, calling it part of a natural cycle.
The claims it makes are fairly reasonable. It is true that carbon dioxide is a green house gas. It is also true to that we have released a lot of CO2 in to the atmosphere. However, clouds seem to have a far greater impact on climate than CO2 levels and the mechanism for cloud formation from cosmic rays seems like a better smoking gun than CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
That said, even if they are completely wrong, climate change is just one factor in man's destructive rampage on the planet. I'm worried about shrinking bio-diversity and the shear amount of waste we produce as a people. We should care about these things anyway so cutting CO2 as part of this line of thinking is a good idea. Conservation is in everyone's best interest!
Without teens on myspace where will I get my anti-emo rage from?
We should encourage them to whine and mop about how life is sooooo tough in middle-class suburbia.
Which brings us nicely to my favourite google search
We see a lot of people use the phrase "defective by design" when talking about Vista and in that instance I'm pretty sure the use of the term is correct.
Having never used PHP but heard of its many security problems I'm wondering: Is PHP defective by design? If so, why so and how would Slashdot seek to fix it?
The legitimate download industry has a problem. Their products can't compete with the freely available infringing versions of the same content.
Their products cost more and they are less useful. The only selling point they have is that the copy they give you is legitimate.
However, rightly or wrongly the vast majority of people are willing to ignore this if the unlawful version is materially better than the legal version.
The music industry has to react logically to the situation rather than emotionally. Until they do that, decline is all they can look forward to.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't know about you guys but when ten years ago when I was fourteen, e-mail was dead too. Initially, I used to use Web based IM clients to talk to my friends quickly followed by ICQ and and even later MSN.
I only started using e-mail when my group of friends started working full time. I think the reason for this is that e-mail is mostly open at work because it's required for the business. Moreover, employers don't really care if you e-mail your friends from your account, provided you're not taking the piss. In contrast, browsing social networking sites from work can get you sacked.
In short, there's nothing new here. I think the youngsters of today will follow the same path as I did ten years ago; they will adopt e-mail when their circle of friends grow-up and go to work.
Simon
It isn't just Shirley Bassey who thinks history is repeating, I do too. When the first canals were built in the 18th century that connected the centre of Manchester with the local coal mines, the price of coal fell by half. It wasn't just coal, suddenly the cotton from the New World could be transported from Liverpool to Manchester in a matter of days - not in the weeks of yester-year.
This lead to a collapse in price of a whole range of minerals and materials. It is not an exaggeration to say that the humble cannal was the back-bone of the Industrial Revolution. It supplied cheap materials, power in the form of water wheels, and allowed production of a product to move far away from sea, yet still have global reach at the same time.
Parallels with the Internet can obviously be drawn. Rather than aiding the movement of physical commodities, the Internet aids the movement of intellectual commodities. It completes what the Industrial Revolution started. Now production of information is not tied to any location. It can be forged anywhere and transported to anywhere in a fraction of a second.
Forget Web 2.0, AJAX or Silverlight. In a century these words will only be known by Internet Historians, who will still have no better clue that us what web 2.0 actually means ;). What will be taught in the class-room about the early Internet is how it allowed the production of value to be independent of the physical location of a business.
Simon
Close but not quite. Typically, you can prove a cipher does not fall to a specific range of attacks. AES for example has a proof that standard differential cryptanalysis is impossible to perform against the cipher.
What is much harder to prove is that the only way to break a cipher is to solve a particular known hard problem. For example, the Blum Blum Shub cipher reduces to the difficulty of factoring the modulus used within the cipher. For interest, it's worth noting that RSA has no known reduction proof; it's existence is still a conjecture.
Of course, what we really want but nobody has managed to do so far is to put a non-trivial lower-bound on the difficulty on breaking any block cipher. This is thought to be a difficult problem.
People often confuse this open problem for the P?=NP debate, however, the P?=NP is a statement at infinitely sized inputs. Obviously, no cipher can take infinitely sized inputs. The upshot of this is that P could equal NP and you could still have a computationally secure block-cipher. To see this, consider the trivial case where F(x) has an O(n) and F^-1(x) has an O(n^500). For all intents and purpose, F(X) would be a usable one-way function even though both algorithm are clearly P-time.
So we may see truly provably secure ciphers before we see P?=NP being resolved. I certainly hope we do!
Simon
This isn't true. Click here for more information. (Warning: It's a PDF)
The United States Government rates AES with a 128-bit key suitable for use on data with the SECRET classification and 192 to 256-bit versions for TOP SECRET classification.
It's just another piece of evidence that nobody - not even the military - knows how to break the Advanced Encryption Standard.
Simon
You know, a few years back I was in San Diego and went to Toorcon (excellent conference by the way - please support it) and I got in to this discussion late at night on socialised health care.
For those that don't know, the United Kingdom spends eighty billion pounds a year on healthcare, funded directly through taxes. His central point was: "Don't you feel like you're being ripped off paying for the health care of jobless people when you're busting a gut earning a living?"
I think it's an important question and one that needs answering if the United States is going to replace their broken healthcare system. My answer is simply that even ignoring the people who don't work, it is still a better deal for you if you have socialised health care.
Free market economies work best when prices are elastic; that is, where changes in price affect the demand for the product. This allows price to signal the level of available supply and prevent shortages of goods. The problem with healthcare is that it is not elastic. If I have cancer, a broken leg or some other ailment I have to get it fixed - regardless of the cost.
In a profit making company, this means raising the price indefinitely sees no reduction in demand. This leads to an ever increasing cost that outstrips inflation. The American system compounds this because a lot of white-collar workers get insurance plans from their companies. Companies have deeper pockets than an individual ever could so the prices increase still further!
Socialised health care delivers better value for money because of the enormous purchasing power of the government. The NHS can purchase millions of shots in one go. That allows you to hammer the drug companies on price and share the proceeds with the population. In the American system, it is you against the drug company and you are needy; you are willing to pay anything to fix yourself. In short you're screwed.
There are also other economic benefits. Heathier and less desperate neighbours translates to less crime and increase productivity. It pays to insure that the daughter of a crack-addict prostitute get first class health care and education - if only to increase their chances of escaping the poverty trap and contribute more to the economy.
It also pays because you can remove the inefficent insurance companies. If everybody is covered then there is no need to have a bureaucracy to decide if a person is covered.
Socialised health care is not evil communism, it is a practical solution to the health care of your nation. I don't see anybody complaining about the socialised road, garabage collection, fire, police and military. When you trust the security of your nation to the government, why do you not trust your healthcare to them too?
I'd I've seen the benefits first hand. When a friend of mine, at the age of 20 developed Lukemia, put his Computer Science course on hold, checked in to the local hospital and began his treatment straight away. He was cured and back in education the following year. I fear that had he born in the United States, he would not have been able to continue with his studies, in fact, he probably would have been bankrupt. Socialised healthcare not only save his life, but his future.
Simon
I've always held that asking what came before the Big Bang is like asking what is North of the North Pole? It's a grammatically correct question but we can't expect it to mean anything.
While we don't have a working theory of quantum gravitation, we do have some strong hints that time and and space themselves were forged in the Big Bang. If you look at a Universe a Planck Length is size, the error in the time of any event observed would be longer than the time the Universe has existed for, to this point, and any error is position would be large than the current Universe at that size.
In short, time and space are useless measurements of a Universe this small.
In a very real sense, the Universe has always existed but has a finite age. I think once I came to understand what this really meant, it's very a beautiful truth about the world. I am sceptical of any theory that talks about a "before" the Big Bang - I think it misses one of the most important truths there is to know!
Simon
DRM free content? Absolutely. I have to pay my TV license every year for the BBC. For the most part, I think it is value for money. The BBC news site is worth the license fee all by itself. For comparison, I pay about a third of the cost of a license on a Slashdot subscription each year and Slashdot is less than a third of the quality.
However, I'm of the opinion that if you're going to force people to pay for a service through a tax, then the products of that government service should be free in the BSD style sense of the word. In fact, I'd go as far as saying that this needs to be codified in to law. In fact, we may already have in the Freedom of Information Act 2000.
Having just read the first section of the act, you could make a questionable legal argument that if you make a request for the unDRMED content and they fail to give you that version they are in breach of the act. If you have to buy a Windows machine just to watch one of their publicly broadcast snippets I'd say that obstructs the request for the information sufficiently for it to become unlawful. No other department is free to restrict requests in that manner!
We've already paid for the service so give us the bloody content in a usable format!
Simon
I agree that this result needs clarification but there are many 'weird' correlations like this in animals. Bodies are built differently to computer programs. When I build a program, it's a good idea to have each part of the program do one thing and one thing only and do that thing well.
I'm no expert in this field, but I do not believe that this is so in the body. The presence of a single protein often triggers a whole host of side-effects. This research is interesting because if increased mathematical skill is caused by something like a single protein, then it could help us determine what protein that is.
Simon
What is it about Microsoft and reinventing perfectly good tools. First they tried to replace Nant with MsBuild, with limited success. They're trying to reinvent Subversion and Cruisecontrol with the Microsoft Team System. They are the ultimate NIH company. I've started to form the opinion that this is unsustatinable for Microsoft. You can't keep reinventing and supporting tools like this forever, because no matter how many programmers you have there OSS movement has more. They will keep producing high-quality tools faster than you can release competitors.
People used to complain that Sun were control freaks about Java. What did Sun do? They listened and GPLed Java. I think the guys at Sun have come to a similiar conclusion to me. Your products are part of an ecology and the ecology is always bigger than one company. What you want to do is foster a larger ecology for your products and hope that this translates to sales.
I admire Sun for this approach, it's risky but it shows maurity in face of change ushered in at the hands of OSS. Microsoft seems to have no strategy for tackling OSS outside of the United States. Over here, software patents don't exist. They may win the battle but be swamped by the tidal wave from abroad.
I use TestDriven every single day I'm in work and I can tell you that this makes the licensed copy of Visual Studio 2005 (paid at full price) a much more functional piece of software. To me, this is validation of the ecology; the open source product made me feel that I'm getting more value out of the purchase.
It's this affect that Sun hopes GPLing Java will bring to their revenues. I for one think they're right.
Simon.
I'm with Zen Internet, based in the UK. I get x amount of bandwidth a month and when that runs out I pay for a top-up.
What's wrong with paying for what you use? Why deliberately degrade your service when you can simply get the customer to pay the difference?
Simon
What the web can now allocate memory and talk to my hardware? Even if you're not a kernel programmer, the web has sucked and still sucks for application development. It will continue to suck for years, due to Internet Explorer. It's misleading to claim AJAX will solve all these problems because it won't. In fact, it might even cause a few problems of its own. For example, do you really think all that AJAX is secure? In short, I think the web is taking over what naturally comes to that medium. It is wrong to say its displaced C.
Does this guy forget that all of the GNU/Linux Kernel base system is written in C? You know, the operating system that powers most web-servers? I'll tell you one thing, C will still be here in twenty years time when Ruby on Rails is talked about much in the same was Blitz Basic is today. C is here to stay; it's immortal.
Simon
This is quickly making DRM look less like rights management and more like digital restrictions mockery. Of course, we knew this from the start. Any security strategy that depends on giving the attacker both the key and lock is doomed to fail.
The guys who make this DRM know its flawed but they still get paid when it fails. They must be quietly laughing all the way to the bank. Yet like morons the record labels keep handing money over. It's no wonder CD sales are declining when you're *that* clue-proof.
EMI has the right idea. Shock horror, if you give the customer what they want, they'll pay you for it. I never would have guessed!
Simon
I think it would stupid for the AbiWord or OpenOffice teams to down tools and start working on a web-based version of the software. At the minute, a lot of productivity is wasted on browser incompatibilities and AJAX is still rather clumsy in comparison to what it could be. To get even the fairly basic functionality of AbiWord in to a web-app would take far longer to develop than it would for an equivalent desktop application.
I think the free software movement is doing very well. It's getting somewhere. I've used Windows on every PC I've owned since the Windows 3.11 days. In January I made the switch to Ubuntu on a new PC that I recently purchased. I decided to ditch Windows because I thought that Vista was a downgrade to Windows XP.
I was frankly amazed at just how good GNU/Linux really is. It isn't just tolerable, it's out and out better than Windows XP. After installation, the machine is usable in that it has all the software I need to actually start using the computer. Windows by comparison has a basic 'toolset' (if you can even call it that). The file system layout is far more intuitive than the baroque drive lettering system. The firewall is simple, powerful and non-intrusive - compare that to Windows based firewalls. Windows Update only supports Microsoft products. Ubuntu provides updates for all software packages it distributes. In short, it feels better engineered, more robust, consumer centric and easier to use.
Why should the free software movement rethink its strategy when it's just starting to gain traction in a big way? I say keep up the good work! It is no accident that Dell have decided to sell Ubuntu on their machines. This is no longer a hobbyists OS but a baby gorilla eating its way through plenty of fruit and gaining in size all the time. Watch out Microsoft!
Simon.
That sounds an awful lot like the US to me. The US/France relationship reminds me of two brothers who "hate" each other for no other reason that they are so similar. The French are a proud, strong and patriotic nation and so are the citizens of the United States.
On top of this, the French are also more internationally minded than the US. They did start the European Union after all and relinquished control of interest rates to Brussels to adopt the single currency.
Simon.
So... when I play Counterstrike it's virtual murder? What about when I over-power a base in Red Alert 3? Can I be taken to the Haugue and tried for war crimes on the charge of "unprovoked attack on a virtual state?"
To equate virtual rape to rape that takes place in the real-world only serves to cheapen the ordeal of real women are who subjected to this awful crime.
It's a fucking game, ladies and gentlemen. If you had to behave responsibly and legally, it wouldn't be much fun now would it?
Simon
I've fell out of love with public-key signature schemes as a means of proving authenticity. There are a few problems with the idea in general:
I think Zimmerman, with his ZPhone program, has got it right. Really, all you're interested in for E-mail or VoIP is not whether the person really is Simon Johnson, of Widnes, based in the United Kingdom who is 23 years old with a pet dog called Thornton. You're actually interested in whether this Ckwop guy I'm speaking to now is the same guy as I spoke to last-time.
When you weaken your security requirement to this position, you can remove a staggering amount of complexity. You can cut out all the CAs, all the X.509 certificates and ASN.1 implementations etc. What you're left with is Diffie-Helman and AES in CCM mode. You can implement this in a couple of thousand lines of provably correct code and your done.
The real way to solve the "identification problem" with web-sites is to change the way credit-cards work. You have a secure token that outputs a different string every thirty seconds. RSA have made these but they're very expensive for no explicable reason, the banks would develop an open-standard in my model to drive down prices. When you pay for something, you submit your credit-card along with the token's value. The transaction will only be authorised if the token's value matches what the bank thinks that value should be.
That way, phishers only have one shot to take your money. Sure, they could make a mock payment page but the auth-code is only going to work once. I think this would destroy the cost effectiveness of phishing for credit-card numbers. That said, identity theft would still be an issue.
Simon
I want a new directive. One that bans all member states from making any new laws for the next ten years.
Think about this for a second, think of one piece of legislation passed in the last ten years that has positively impacted anyone you know in the first world? I can't think of a single thing, not one, nothing. Maybe this is a failure of imagination on my part but on the whole laws in the last ten years have been mostly negative.
Maybe voting is declining in Britain not because of athapy, per se, but because people like myself our realizing the truth. Our politicians are powerless - they can't do a thing to change the plight of the average person on the street. They can raise taxes, lower taxes, pass all sorts of laws but they can't stop the dickheads burning people's bins or the fourteen year olds buying cider to vomit up on the street.
In short, what's the point in voting when both parties are equally as corrupt and when the decisions taken there never effect you? It's a powerful argument but not one I personally agree with. I vote not for myself but because a great many lives were lost trying to defend that vote. The tragedy is that this generation has come to find that their vote would be more productively used as toilet paper than a means of expressing your opinion.
We need a new sort of politics. A politics where local issues and common people are listened to. A politics where the career of the politician matters less than serving their constituents. A politics where issues are not decided based on the party your belong to but what improves the lives of the people of the country. We need a politics where an honest politician is not considered an oxymoron. We need a rupture from the past and we need it more urgently than ever before.
Simon.
That's nice rhetoric and a few years ago I would have believed this too.
However, having lived in the United Kingdom and having been involved in a prosecution of an offender, I can say that this could not be further from the truth.
The truth is that it is very, very hard to prosecute somebody for child porn possession if they're will to fight it. The "It was a virus defence" almost always gets the case chucked before it even reaches a jury. There's this thing called "continuity of evidence" and it's a hard hurdle to jump over (and rightly so).
He who alleges must prove and if you can't show any evidence that the virus didn't put it there then the guy walks free. Remember, to convict you must disprove the defence's point.
The defence is always better funded. To see why this is so, consider this: wouldn't you be if your liberty and life was at stake? People well gladly sell their house for the best lawyer in these circumstances. By comparison, the state fights these cases with people just out of their pupillage.
In the case I was involved in, I was certain the man was guilty. I was willing to get up on the stand and testify to that fact. He should have gone to jail for a long time and the fact he still walks the streets and cares for his children leaves me sick in the stomach.
That said, it is better than ten guilty men go free than a single innocent go to jail. This principle is the basis of our entire criminal system. Even after this experience, I still believe in this principle one-hundred percent. If ten paedophiles have to go free to prevent an innocent man's life being destroyed, I begrudgingly have to accept that. That, as they say, is the price of freedom.
Simon
It doesn't matter which operating system you use - they all contains buffer overflows. In a way, the consumer is to blame for this. BSD has been whiling with little to no market-share despite the fact it's free. Nobody it seems wants software that's secure out of the box and stays secure.
People want features and features are the enemy of security. So the status-quo continues even though we've known how to fix these issues for forty years.
Simon
Why would ISPs agree to this? I can imagine it now, a group of ISPs implement this and then customers flock to the small ISPs who aren't big enough to warrent attention from the ARIA. Faced with a slump in revenue the ISPs reverse course and try to win customers back.
Let's not get started on SSL encrypted DCC transfers on IRC channels or private FTP servers! That's going to be almost impossible to track. These kind of darknets (as I've seen them called) or going to be very hard to shut-down!
Does this even matter anyway? My friend from Canada brought over his personal collection on a 320Gig drive when he visited this week. This is getting more and more common, people now have so much portable storage that it's often easier to swap collections and cherry pick the songs you like (or take the whole collection if you prefer). Compared to downloading, this is a far safer way to pirate on a huge quantity of music.
At some point, their revenues will become so small that they start to lose credibility. A case in point, where are the blacksmiths' guilds today? This whole issue with trundle on for some time to come but the inevitable will eventually happen. Time is on our sides, my friends.
Simon
The Open BSD guys have a philosophy: "The only difference between a bug and a vulnerability is the intelligence of the attacker."
I wish more programmers held this view! A bug is an undefined state of the program. It's quite clear that this is a dangerous position for your program to be in. Bug really are baby vulnerabilities. It's best to remove them as soon as you find them.
Simon
I saw a documentary a week or so ago on the United Kingdom's Channel 4. I believe this interview is taken from that show. The show made the case against man made global warming, calling it part of a natural cycle.
The claims it makes are fairly reasonable. It is true that carbon dioxide is a green house gas. It is also true to that we have released a lot of CO2 in to the atmosphere. However, clouds seem to have a far greater impact on climate than CO2 levels and the mechanism for cloud formation from cosmic rays seems like a better smoking gun than CO2 levels in the atmosphere.
That said, even if they are completely wrong, climate change is just one factor in man's destructive rampage on the planet. I'm worried about shrinking bio-diversity and the shear amount of waste we produce as a people. We should care about these things anyway so cutting CO2 as part of this line of thinking is a good idea. Conservation is in everyone's best interest!
Simon
Which brings us nicely to my favourite google search
Simon
We see a lot of people use the phrase "defective by design" when talking about Vista and in that instance I'm pretty sure the use of the term is correct.
Having never used PHP but heard of its many security problems I'm wondering: Is PHP defective by design? If so, why so and how would Slashdot seek to fix it?
Simon
The legitimate download industry has a problem. Their products can't compete with the freely available infringing versions of the same content.
Their products cost more and they are less useful. The only selling point they have is that the copy they give you is legitimate.
However, rightly or wrongly the vast majority of people are willing to ignore this if the unlawful version is materially better than the legal version.
The music industry has to react logically to the situation rather than emotionally. Until they do that, decline is all they can look forward to.
Simon