There's no national security/law enforcement exemption? I'd find that pretty curious; the probable US equivalent (Freedom of Information Act) does have clauses allowing the government to hold back information that might compromise either, if memory serves.
I'm saying that it's good to have checks and balances -- for instance, it's good to have a judge be required to approve a wiretap, so that there's at least SOME oversight. It's bad to have, say, a law enforcement data network with practically no authentication (which exists for some American PDs -- facilitating cops doing "research" well beyond what's called for in their law-enforcement role.)
Governments consist of people. You think that people haven't abused government power, for anything ranging from "researching" former spouses to finding nice, expensive land to confiscate?
For one thing, there are probably numerous boxes with nice broadband -- a virus could use a user account as a launchpad for a DDOS, for instance. In addition, boxes may be lacking patches or workarounds for any recent local exploits, so one might theoretically be able to get root privs without tricking root.
Depending on what's limited, one might try to fill up/tmp, generate lots of logs and possibly fill/var/adm/syslog or wherever, maybe fill the process table via fork bomb depending on how processes are limited, grab the user's cookies and browser history files for popular browsers and e-mail them to people, consume large amounts of memory (again, unless limited per user) forcing swap...
If, for instance, one writes a security-critical product for external distribution, such as a server involved in e-commerce, and involves even a little bit of GPL code, the source for the entire server must be made freely distributable. With BSD, there is no such obligation. Having the source combined with an potentially large economic (in this case) incentive would likely accelerate any efforts at compromise.
...or, they ran out of space for books, or they once had a use for it but no longer do (for instance, a textbook for a course that's peripheral to his main interests).
Not that I've resold much of anything for a while -- I'm really a packrat in human guise -- but there are quite valid reasons that one might do so.
Sharing isn't nice when it involves breaking your word, even when it's implicitly given. And unless it's explicitly stated, a content provider is ALWAYS asking you to not "share"...
Actually, writing and drama paid Shakespeare's bills -- and some of those of his relatives, since apparently he turned out to be the wealthy one in his family. Given how much time and effort he spent on writing and drama, it's not like he had another 9-5 job to cover his bills...
Hmmm. We might still be richer if families have more "stuff" than they did in the 50's -- technologically more advanced automobiles that aren't kept for 18 years, very powerful computers, big-screen televisions, private collegiate educations, more luxury goods, and so forth. Our standard of living could be much more expensive partly because it encompasses far more today than generations ago.
Re:Writer believes everyone is rich?
on
The Almighty Buck
·
· Score: 2
Heh. It's fiction, and futurist satire at that, but Neal Stephenson has an amusing take on it near the beginning of "Snow Crash":
In the real world -- planet Earth, Reality -- there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others put together.
Americans (and, for that matter, just about everybody else in the wealthy nations of the First World -- the US isn't the world leader in per-capita income, if memory serves, although yeah, you'd probably have to normalize against cost-of-living or some other standard *shrug*) range from poor and homeless to fabulously wealthy, but even the lower bound is often pretty well-off compared to dying of cholera, dysentary, or random atrocities during a civil war.
Popups? Consider using Konqueror, which lets you a) set global JavaScript policies, b) set site-by-site JavaScript policies, and c) has a popup-specific allow/ask/deny setting. You can, AFAICT, even refuse all JavaScript on nytimes.com without losing any non-popup content.
Exploiting vanity and insecurity is a sector of the economy, and even many not particularly well-to-do participate. Witness the massive cosmetics industry, and, hell, diamonds, which are nothing more than shiny lumps of carbon that somehow got associated with marriage by a huge advertising campaign, and that would be far more common if the De Beers cartel didn't exert so much control over supply.
'sides, what, she claims it was $100/week. That's not THAT outrageous compared to such concepts as "shopping therapy".
You can create your own bogus interpretations of phrases, but don't be surprised when they create massive communications difficulties if you choose completely different definitions.
Providing source under expensive, restricted licensing isn't open source, despite your implication that it is. Providing source for, at most, a nominal distribution charge IS -- and if the source distribution includes such an obligation, it approaches GPL, whereas a "you can have the source and I don't care what you do with it" attitude leads to BSD.
Simpler -- read the bloody article next time. If you had, you'd know that the author isn't claiming that Open Source is never viable; instead, he's attacking the idea that everything should be open source instead of having coexistence between open source and proprietary software.
It still sounds like you'd run into a prisoner's dilemma.
Action A -- spend money to fund open-source in-house development.
Action B -- mooch off those who chose Action A, and invest in your core business instead.
Nominally, the best payoff would seem to be if one chooses Action B while competitors choose Action A -- you exploit their software if it's sufficiently useful for your purposes, and treat the saved money as a competitive advantage. Of course, if everybody chooses B, then nobody has the software, heh. Alternately, if the software is so specialized so that it's absolutely useless to others (making B not possible), then action A isn't too meaningful either, because you'll probably have far fewer potential devs who know the relevant domain.
Hm. It would seem like Sourceforge and similar sites could yield some useful statistics. For instance, what is the distribution of contributors per project, and the size of their contributions in terms of LOC or time (or, alternately, simply the number of check-ins they've done)? What percentage of projects are orphaned before they ever progress beyond buggy alpha-grade crap, or perhaps even at the design stage?
It would also be interesting, if less relevant, to learn how many of the projects there are simply derivative works (particularly common for games -- Tetris clones, *craft clones, Civ clones, Space Invaders clones, et al) instead of original designs.
A little cryptography plus a net of trusted compilers (as in people, not gcc) who produce signed binaries goes a long way. See Netrek, for instance -- most servers will boot you if you're not using a 'blessed' binary as determined via an RSA-based challenge. You can create modded clients all you want and unleash them on anything-goes servers; but while it's almost certainly possible to play on a blessed-only server, it'd be a hassle and isn't often done (e.g. rig a program to monitor the socket and redirect the authentication challenges to the 'blessed' binary, and otherwise send the data to the modded client).
If they knew about a user pr0n-surfing in public, and repeatedly neglected to do anything about it, I wouldn't like to be in their administration when the "hostile environment" sexual harrassment lawsuits start flying.
Would permiting speeding psychologically harm others by increasing fear of drastic bodily harm via auto accidents? And if so, do the fearful deserve compensation?
Alternately, at what level of probability should a possible transgression be punished? For instance, should an act that has a low probability of causing harm be forbidden if the unlikely harm is extremely high?
If that sort of question interests you, hrm. Nozick's "Anarchy, State and Utopia" might intrigue you. It does NOT promise answers...
First -- I wouldn't discount board games. In particular, _Diplomacy_ and _Empires in Arms_. The former is quite simple, and emphasizes the human element -- naive people get crunched, but so do obvious monomanical conquerors once their neighbors gang up on them. The latter is incredibly complicated and requires thinking ahead (e.g. want to build a fleet? Well... it'll be finished ONE YEAR after you start, whereas militia are available in a month, regulars in three, and cavalry in seven or so), plus logistics (Want to invade Russia? In winter? Hehehehe... BWAHAHAHAHA you'd better guard your supply depot chain well, and pray for a QUICK victory).
Computer... well, there's Master of Orion I/II (pretty flexible, cooperation helps considerably, not too complex), Space Empires IV (more flexible, more complex, logistics do matter somewhat) and their ilk. Balance of Power is ancient, but may be interesting... Netrek is pretty fast-paced, and cooperation is vital against a team with even the slightest amount of clue. Rogue Spear/Urban Ops requires close cooperation between teammates, and severely penalizes gungo-ho macho-wannabes -- you can be downed in an instant, and you're not going to respawn. Bolo is another game that requires some thought and teamwork, and it's been cloned for the PC.
Or use a violent, but well-crafted FPS. For instance, in Rogue Spear...
...if you ever get careless, you pretty much die instantly.
...if you don't work well with your team, e.g. you've got some bozo who shoots without IDing what's in his sights, or somebody's grenade-happy, you die.
...if you simply shoot without caution, sooner or later a hostage will die, and you lose.
Or, you could skip that book as an example of dishonest drivel, because Mr. Moore apparently feels that "satire" gives him a license to severely warp the truth in rather crucial ways. go search Spinsanity for details.
I'm not a Biblical scholar, but there might be two particular reasons --
1) If the Amalekites were damned as a whole nation of sinners. The deity of OT is not particularly forgiving -- death for this, death for that, yadda yadda. (religious reason, basically)
2) If you simply leave the orphans there after such a massacre, they'll die slowly anyway. If you raise them, they will probably learn to secretly hate you for destroying their people and may dedicate themselves to revenge... (practical reason)
Nah. Even if their filtering worked, it doesn't excuse the fact that they swore up and down that it wasn't possible until the Court forced them to implement it, and that until then they were deliberately riding on massive-scale copyright infringement for publicity and the hope of eventual profits.
Slashdot Mirror
There's no national security/law enforcement exemption? I'd find that pretty curious; the probable US equivalent (Freedom of Information Act) does have clauses allowing the government to hold back information that might compromise either, if memory serves.
The closest thing that I recall is (once H.R. 3162) the USA PATRIOT Act, which expands intercept authority and relaxes assorted safeguards.
Bill text
EFF Analysis
I'm saying that it's good to have checks and balances -- for instance, it's good to have a judge be required to approve a wiretap, so that there's at least SOME oversight. It's bad to have, say, a law enforcement data network with practically no authentication (which exists for some American PDs -- facilitating cops doing "research" well beyond what's called for in their law-enforcement role.)
Governments consist of people. You think that people haven't abused government power, for anything ranging from "researching" former spouses to finding nice, expensive land to confiscate?
For one thing, there are probably numerous boxes with nice broadband -- a virus could use a user account as a launchpad for a DDOS, for instance. In addition, boxes may be lacking patches or workarounds for any recent local exploits, so one might theoretically be able to get root privs without tricking root.
/tmp, generate lots of logs and possibly fill /var/adm/syslog or wherever, maybe fill the process table via fork bomb depending on how processes are limited, grab the user's cookies and browser history files for popular browsers and e-mail them to people, consume large amounts of memory (again, unless limited per user) forcing swap...
Depending on what's limited, one might try to fill up
Hint: there is a pretty huge difference.
If, for instance, one writes a security-critical product for external distribution, such as a server involved in e-commerce, and involves even a little bit of GPL code, the source for the entire server must be made freely distributable. With BSD, there is no such obligation. Having the source combined with an potentially large economic (in this case) incentive would likely accelerate any efforts at compromise.
...or, they ran out of space for books, or they once had a use for it but no longer do (for instance, a textbook for a course that's peripheral to his main interests).
Not that I've resold much of anything for a while -- I'm really a packrat in human guise -- but there are quite valid reasons that one might do so.
Sharing isn't nice when it involves breaking your word, even when it's implicitly given. And unless it's explicitly stated, a content provider is ALWAYS asking you to not "share"...
Actually, writing and drama paid Shakespeare's bills -- and some of those of his relatives, since apparently he turned out to be the wealthy one in his family. Given how much time and effort he spent on writing and drama, it's not like he had another 9-5 job to cover his bills...
Hmmm. We might still be richer if families have more "stuff" than they did in the 50's -- technologically more advanced automobiles that aren't kept for 18 years, very powerful computers, big-screen televisions, private collegiate educations, more luxury goods, and so forth. Our standard of living could be much more expensive partly because it encompasses far more today than generations ago.
Heh. It's fiction, and futurist satire at that, but Neal Stephenson has an amusing take on it near the beginning of "Snow Crash":
In the real world -- planet Earth, Reality -- there are somewhere between six and ten billion people. At any given time, most of them are making mud bricks or field-stripping their AK-47s. Perhaps a billion of them have enough money to own a computer; these people have more money than all of the others put together.
Americans (and, for that matter, just about everybody else in the wealthy nations of the First World -- the US isn't the world leader in per-capita income, if memory serves, although yeah, you'd probably have to normalize against cost-of-living or some other standard *shrug*) range from poor and homeless to fabulously wealthy, but even the lower bound is often pretty well-off compared to dying of cholera, dysentary, or random atrocities during a civil war.
Popups? Consider using Konqueror, which lets you a) set global JavaScript policies, b) set site-by-site JavaScript policies, and c) has a popup-specific allow/ask/deny setting. You can, AFAICT, even refuse all JavaScript on nytimes.com without losing any non-popup content.
Exploiting vanity and insecurity is a sector of the economy, and even many not particularly well-to-do participate. Witness the massive cosmetics industry, and, hell, diamonds, which are nothing more than shiny lumps of carbon that somehow got associated with marriage by a huge advertising campaign, and that would be far more common if the De Beers cartel didn't exert so much control over supply.
'sides, what, she claims it was $100/week. That's not THAT outrageous compared to such concepts as "shopping therapy".
You can create your own bogus interpretations of phrases, but don't be surprised when they create massive communications difficulties if you choose completely different definitions.
Providing source under expensive, restricted licensing isn't open source, despite your implication that it is. Providing source for, at most, a nominal distribution charge IS -- and if the source distribution includes such an obligation, it approaches GPL, whereas a "you can have the source and I don't care what you do with it" attitude leads to BSD.
Simpler -- read the bloody article next time. If you had, you'd know that the author isn't claiming that Open Source is never viable; instead, he's attacking the idea that everything should be open source instead of having coexistence between open source and proprietary software.
It still sounds like you'd run into a prisoner's dilemma.
Action A -- spend money to fund open-source in-house development.
Action B -- mooch off those who chose Action A, and invest in your core business instead.
Nominally, the best payoff would seem to be if one chooses Action B while competitors choose Action A -- you exploit their software if it's sufficiently useful for your purposes, and treat the saved money as a competitive advantage. Of course, if everybody chooses B, then nobody has the software, heh. Alternately, if the software is so specialized so that it's absolutely useless to others (making B not possible), then action A isn't too meaningful either, because you'll probably have far fewer potential devs who know the relevant domain.
Hm. It would seem like Sourceforge and similar sites could yield some useful statistics. For instance, what is the distribution of contributors per project, and the size of their contributions in terms of LOC or time (or, alternately, simply the number of check-ins they've done)? What percentage of projects are orphaned before they ever progress beyond buggy alpha-grade crap, or perhaps even at the design stage?
It would also be interesting, if less relevant, to learn how many of the projects there are simply derivative works (particularly common for games -- Tetris clones, *craft clones, Civ clones, Space Invaders clones, et al) instead of original designs.
A little cryptography plus a net of trusted compilers (as in people, not gcc) who produce signed binaries goes a long way. See Netrek, for instance -- most servers will boot you if you're not using a 'blessed' binary as determined via an RSA-based challenge. You can create modded clients all you want and unleash them on anything-goes servers; but while it's almost certainly possible to play on a blessed-only server, it'd be a hassle and isn't often done (e.g. rig a program to monitor the socket and redirect the authentication challenges to the 'blessed' binary, and otherwise send the data to the modded client).
If they knew about a user pr0n-surfing in public, and repeatedly neglected to do anything about it, I wouldn't like to be in their administration when the "hostile environment" sexual harrassment lawsuits start flying.
Would permiting speeding psychologically harm others by increasing fear of drastic bodily harm via auto accidents? And if so, do the fearful deserve compensation?
Alternately, at what level of probability should a possible transgression be punished? For instance, should an act that has a low probability of causing harm be forbidden if the unlikely harm is extremely high?
If that sort of question interests you, hrm. Nozick's "Anarchy, State and Utopia" might intrigue you. It does NOT promise answers...
First -- I wouldn't discount board games. In particular, _Diplomacy_ and _Empires in Arms_. The former is quite simple, and emphasizes the human element -- naive people get crunched, but so do obvious monomanical conquerors once their neighbors gang up on them. The latter is incredibly complicated and requires thinking ahead (e.g. want to build a fleet? Well... it'll be finished ONE YEAR after you start, whereas militia are available in a month, regulars in three, and cavalry in seven or so), plus logistics (Want to invade Russia? In winter? Hehehehe... BWAHAHAHAHA you'd better guard your supply depot chain well, and pray for a QUICK victory).
Computer... well, there's Master of Orion I/II (pretty flexible, cooperation helps considerably, not too complex), Space Empires IV (more flexible, more complex, logistics do matter somewhat) and their ilk. Balance of Power is ancient, but may be interesting... Netrek is pretty fast-paced, and cooperation is vital against a team with even the slightest amount of clue. Rogue Spear/Urban Ops requires close cooperation between teammates, and severely penalizes gungo-ho macho-wannabes -- you can be downed in an instant, and you're not going to respawn. Bolo is another game that requires some thought and teamwork, and it's been cloned for the PC.
Or use a violent, but well-crafted FPS. For instance, in Rogue Spear...
...if you ever get careless, you pretty much die instantly.
...if you don't work well with your team, e.g. you've got some bozo who shoots without IDing what's in his sights, or somebody's grenade-happy, you die.
...if you simply shoot without caution, sooner or later a hostage will die, and you lose.
Or, you could skip that book as an example of dishonest drivel, because Mr. Moore apparently feels that "satire" gives him a license to severely warp the truth in rather crucial ways. go search Spinsanity for details.
I'm not a Biblical scholar, but there might be two particular reasons --
1) If the Amalekites were damned as a whole nation of sinners. The deity of OT is not particularly forgiving -- death for this, death for that, yadda yadda. (religious reason, basically)
2) If you simply leave the orphans there after such a massacre, they'll die slowly anyway. If you raise them, they will probably learn to secretly hate you for destroying their people and may dedicate themselves to revenge... (practical reason)
Nah. Even if their filtering worked, it doesn't excuse the fact that they swore up and down that it wasn't possible until the Court forced them to implement it, and that until then they were deliberately riding on massive-scale copyright infringement for publicity and the hope of eventual profits.