You know what my 65-yr old mother's face would look like if I tried explaining this to her?
It should look the same as her face looks, whenever she buys things on Amazon using https. When she clicks the little icon to see how she knows she's really talking to Amazon (that is, when she examines the cert) does she understand all that stuff? Does she know what Verisign is, and can she explain why she trusts Verisign, and what Verisign is saying about the cert?
If yes, then she can handle PGP.
If no ("what's a cert?"), then she can't handle https. Yet the world gets by with https anyway.
All of that is okay to happen. Yes, it's trivial to MitM whenever you use an untrusted key, but it's also trivial to MitM plaintext, so you might as well use untrusted keys, until you get around to making them trustable. You lose nothing, except some CPU cycles.
What he is describing, is a baseline protocol for getting a bunch of untrusted keys deployed out there, and into ubiquitous use. You can still do things right, later, and have keysigning parties, check fingerprints etc, and start signing and trusting these keys, getting back up to the 1990s crypto-ideal.
Just don't have people signing these unverified keys without getting fingerprints out of band, don't have the email client showing bullshit "this is secure" icons, etc.
Really, the main problem with email clients automatically generating keys without any interaction at all, is that people move around, change machines, change clients on the same machine, log in as different users with different home directory, etc. I don't want my new machine generating a new key; I want it to stop and tell me "hey, I don't have your key yet." If I have to send an email in a hurry, from a new install, I don't want that email telling other people a silly keyid. If someone uses that one, and then I restore my home dir from a backup and now I have my "real" keys and the temporary one is gone, then someone is going to send me an undecryptable email, or mistakenly think we had a MitM when they see my temporary (bogus) on-demand-made one, etc. These are the kinds of flies in the ointment, that we really have to worry about, with the proposed approach.
The trust issue is trivial: don't trust an unverified key. That's was the rule for PGP twenty years ago and it hasn't changed.
No OpenPGP implementation assumes that any public keys, no matter where they came from, are accurate. The whole point of signing and the WoT is to not trust any key's accuracy unless you have reason to.
Keyservers can lie to you all day long. You can even manually import totally fraudulent keys, with the intent of deceiving the system. And it still won't matter. None of the keys in question will be trusted one iota, until you look at a fingerprint and sign, essentially saying "Yes, I know for sure that fingerprint came from that person."
PGP does not trust keyservers to be accurate, to be working right, to be working in good faith, to not be owned by your adversary, or anything else. Keyservers are a convenience, and nothing more. All this kind of stuff was figured out and dealt with, decades ago.
When I run that sim, as you suggest, the outcome I see is that you have the wrong key for someone's email address. You get MitMed.
(And in spite of the fact that you're being MitM, passive parties who are not involved in the attack, are still locked out. e.g. If the NSA MitMs your email to your wife, other observers are still seeing ciphertext, not plaintext.)
You're no worse off than if you hadn't ever encrypted; i.e. better than the status quo for 99% of users.
Furthermore, if you ever meet the person you emailed, or ever meet someone they met, and start to actually check and sign fingerprints, thereby creating WoT links, then the original attack eventually gets discovered ("Hey, I had a bogus wrong key on file for you. What happened?").
It looks like a decent situation, and an unambiguous upgrade from what people currently do. Can you find any downsides?
10 minutes to write reusable code or 10 hours of clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking and clicking every single time (and forget about reusability).
Heh. I have one of those, too. Different tools, different area, but same thing. Trivial script, or complicated human-time-eating error-prone hard-to-review clickfest.
Q: "Is that field on this screen?" A: "I'll just grep.. no wait, the 'modern' version: command-F: no wait, I can't search anything. Let's click a hundred times, once for every control on the screen, to see which one(s) of them, if any, have that field as the default on its menu."
Thankfully, for me at least, that kind of sillytech is getting more marginalized and fading out. In my life. Right now. For this job. Until...
Obviously you shouldn't do those things while driving. The article isn't about a situation where we think a person might have been doing that. It was about having a personal computer screen which may, or may not, be illegal to have in a car.
It'll come down to technicalities in the wording in the law in question, bizarre precedents made up by previous judges, etc.
What the driver was doing on their computer, isn't said and probably can't be proven either way. So if the law turns out to involve how the device was being used at the moment driver was pulled over, then they might actually be acquitted. Even if they were texting or reading wikipedia.
The more management feels they need to say about how to do something, the harder it is and the longer it takes.
Make me a website: easy.
Make me a website using WordPress and it must use this particular plugin: hard (since it's very unlikely that particular plugin is well-suited to the job; if it made sense to use it, they wouldn't have told you that you have to use it) (and for that matter, it's vanishingly unlikely that WordPress itself is going to be suitable for the application in question, for the same reason: if it made sense, then it wouldn't be a requirement).
I've seen things' time blossom by a factor of ten, due to stupid shit like this. Seriously, that's not an exaggeration.
Who bought the law that says we have to use some exotic chemical? Execute that person with whatever supply remains. Then repeal the ridiculous policy, hire any halfway-competent administrator and tell them "You have a $10 budget. Kill." A hundred years ago, people were able to get executions competently done, without exotic expensive tech.
And let's remember: it's basically the practical definition of technological progress, that it makes things cheaper and easier, giving you more for less. When you see yourself moving toward something that is harder and costs more, that's your signal that you need a reality check.
I don't get what's the purpose of these "remedial sanctions," especially coming from the SEC.
If the SEC is doing this to deter Knight's management from being un-diligent with Knight's owners' assets, then it ought be a fine or prison time for the people who were responsible, not the company (the owners, who were also the victims). That's like punishing someone for the crime of being raped, while talking about how irresponsible the rapist was.
If the SEC is doing this to deter Knight's owners (who worked through their agents, the management) from making poor decisions that will cost them money, then (like everyone else is posting) it seems like the loss itself, is punishment enough. That's like punishing someone for the crime of suicide.
Lol. You got in line and voted for Obama like everyone else here.
Like hell I did, you libelous snake.
By 2008 I was old enough to have remembered the last Democrat president, who signed CALEA, DMCA, etc instead of vetoing them like any honest person would do. I fucking hate Democrats and think every one of them ought to burned at the stake. I just think they are decent, civic-minded, sensible, good conservative people, compared to Republicans. But I wouldn't want my daughter to date one, and I sure as hell never vote for a Democrat whenever there's another party on the ballot.
And for presidential elections, there are always plenty of relatively good candidates on the ballot.
Shame about Congress, though. If I lived in Illinois, then yeah, I might have voted for Obama in 2004. But I don't live there, so of course I've never voted for him.
The story here isn't that he was fired. It's that the Whitehouse investigated him. He didn't accidentally leak his identity to some private sector reporter who put it in their article, and then the president saw it in a newspaper. They spent time and money on trying to figure out the identity of a totally irrelevant and unimportant Twitter user over a bunch of totally irrelevant and unimportant tweets. Like, this was important to them.
At least Pepsi would be able to somewhat justify such an expenditure, since their marketing really is so important, and all Pepsi stockholders would agree that marketing is a good use of funds. But what say America's "stockholders," about our new "marketing counter-intelligence" program?
They guy wasn't even saying stuff analogous to "USA sucks for tourists. Foreign tourists should take vacations somewhere else and spend their money there instead of in USA." or "You should buy used F-16s from Israel instead of from USA." He was just talking shit about shit. There's no legitimate reason for the government to have been working on this.
While firing the unprofessional jerk after he was outed is perfectly defensible (I have no problem with it at all), the government did get caught working against America's interests again:
The website Politico said White House officials had worked over months to discover the identity of Mr Joseph - a key member of the team negotiating over Iran's nuclear programme.
It said his travel and shopping habits had been profiled by parsing over 2,000 tweets.
Why THE FUCK was the government spending time investigating this? And why the fuck is this not a big secret?
The BushBama whitehouse is seriously confused about what the country needs from its government, and over the last 12 years they have just gotten repeatedly more brazen and open about it. Is it simply that really, nobody cares?
I pay taxes in order for you to funnel them to obscurely-overbilling contractors for substandard work, so that they can then divert a portion of their obscene profits to the re-election campaigns of the people in congress and administration, who make the funneling happen. That is why we have government: to give crooks a non-violent outlet for their greed and need to victimize society. A few billion dollars here, a few billion dollars there.. we have a strong economy and can sustain that.
But I don't pay taxes for you people to spend it tracking tweets. That's not what government is for! All these crooks need to get out of the surveillance game and back into mainstream profitable corruption. And we voters should insist upon it. Please, everyone: stop voting Republicrat.
It seems like the more you get this pork project out of peoples' faces, the more they'll accept it, and keep on paying for it all instead of constantly bitching about it. As long as the system delays travellers and also makes everyone less safe (because of the lines of concentrated targets), it's always going to face some risk, however small, of getting cut. Pre-screening could help to cement the parasite's permanence: out of site, out of mind. (And the safety improvement, shockingly, would actually be real!)
Whether that's good or bad, depends on which side you're on.
The only catch I can think of, is that the entertainment media (e.g. Fox News, MSNBC) might lose out, by the loss of an easy rage story. So we should expect to see them oppose this. It'll be amusing to see how Fox spins pre-screening as Obama making everyone less safe and less free. MSNBC doesn't really get to use that angle until we have a Republican president, so I don't know how they'll do it. But they'll have to do something until then. Maybe troll through Fox's 2001-2008 archive for ideas on how to lie about how your guy is being made to do something bad, by That Other Party.
When HBO refuses to sell the GoT matroska files, implying that people who want DRM-free media should pirate instead, the pirates don't call that "subsidy." The word is "stupidity." HTH.
What are you talking about? There's tons of photographs and other physical evidence, confirming the existence of bears. Some bears have been captured, too. At this point, I'd say people claiming bears to be mythical, are he ones who are making extraordinary statements which need backing up.
Even if this FUD turns out to be true, I don't see why Shuttleworth, of all people, would want it spoken aloud. If Mac OS X continues to decline in quality the way it has the last few years, causing a new exodus of people jumping ship, do you really think they'll go to Ubuntu, of all places? Ever hear the phrase "out of the frying pan and into the fire?"
Sure, people can jump ship and really end up avoiding this nonsense and still use an Ubuntu-based system: Xubuntu or something like that. But they're just as likely to go with Fedora or Mint or something. (And honestly, some of them might even end up on Windows. People can do anything when they're overcome with despair!) And even if they do go with Xubuntu, I don't see how that's somehow a face-saving situation for Shuttleworth. If users reject the basic idea of Unity, they're rejecting Shuttleworth at an ego level, even if they're still using his infrastructure.
What could possibly go wrong with having "everyone pay their fair share"?
I know, man! What the hell was so wrong with "Someone else has to pay my bills!" As long as I was one of the people who was getting free ER, the system was perfect! Sure, the Democrats would keep labelling me a "taker" and the ones with jobs always scowled at me because of the higher taxes they had to pay to keep the hospitals open, but other than that, it was a sweet system, totally based on True Fairness (subsidies). Now these suit'n'tie penny-pinchers are coming in, and saying i should have to pay my own bills, instead of relying on handouts. Fucking nazis! Don't they know that if I have to pay my bils, I might be forced to get a job, and that means one less job is available for someone who really wants one? Nazi job killers!
Once we go to this nazi job-killing system where people have to pay their fair share, they'll be more in touch with the realities of the economics, "feel" it more, and start complaining about costs and wanting to do something about it, like, say "whoa.. what's with all the expensive patented medicine here?" That's just making waves man. Can't we all just get along, by you keeping on paying my bills?
I'm looking forward to the day when we all subsidize relatively expensive ER visits, and when we create something called "bankruptcy law" where after someone has sold their house and still doesn't have enough to pay their medical bills, the heavy socialist hand of government steps in and interferes with the free market, saying the liability no longer exists. That'll be the real socialist revolution, finally ushering in the era that Marx promi--
Oh wait, sorry. That's the status quo that I was describing, the thing we hippies (Republicans) are trying to keep, that The Man (reactionary Democrats, with their "people should have to pay their own bills" hardass attitude) reformed, because the status quo was not only consuming too much of the GDP (thanks to the inefficiencies), but "too pinko", as those unyielding Adam Smith worshippers put it.
What the right wing Man needs to understand, is that when an uninsured hippie goes to the ER for subsidized health care, that's not really communism, man. It's just Jesusism. Jesus said people shouldn't have to pay their bills, man, especially once they're bankrupt and living in the street and no longer part of the ownership society that The Man keeps telling you, is so keen. Jesus said it's in society's interest to simultaneously bankrupt and subsidize everything, because a nation of homeless sick people, like, that'd be a far out party! A Party In The Streets, man!
Sure, the ER visits cost more and the overall quality/duration of the care isn't as good, but Democrats who point out performance value issues like that, are just being penny-pinching economists. Hey penny pinchers, do I have to remind you what Jesus said about rich men entering the kingdom of heaven?
Democrats, don't you see? Don't you get that your Republican Brothers just want you to join them in tuning in, turning on, and dropping out? It'll be grooovy, man! Republicans want to protect your freedom to run up bills at someone else's expense. Republicans are the modern followers of our heros, LBJ, FDR, the last bastion in protecting our FREEDOM to have those squares with their jobs, bail us out. Freedom, man. Why do all you Democrats hate our freedom to be dependent on the taxpayer-funded social welfare handout called "bankruptcy?"
Not having to pay our medical bills is a right, dammit. I can prove it: there's nothing in the constitution that says we don't have the right to make other people pay our health care bills! And that means our handouts are a 10th amendment protected right. Take that, man.
(Who's who in liberalism vs conservatism: it's all so confusing!)
Best of all, you can wear the home-made one, without having to remember a bunch of arbitrary bullshit, or having to worry about events beyond your control.
The dress from the store has "malfunctions" if you wear it on Tuesdays or with a different manufacturer's shoes, and disintegrates if the dressmaker goes out of business, or may even disintegrate if they later (a year after you bought the dress) have a contractual dispute with their thread vendor.
Money issues aside, the dress from the store simply sucks, in ways that home dressmakers would never begin to imagine.
TFA makes it sounds like the sender can make decisions about what the receiver's machine does. That is insane (and also impossible, or it's irresponsible to lead users to believe they'll get that). I hope I am misreading the claim.
If the receiver has that control, or if the sender gets to specify advisory info in the hopes that the receiver uses it, ok. If not, then I think one of the most respected programmers ever (PZ) has left the path of wisdom.
Elop was just doing his Microsoft job by working against the interests of Nokia's stockholders for Microsoft's financial gain. It might be a criminal job, but a job is a job, and I'm not sure that in Nokia's case, the crime was even illegal. Don't hate the enemy soldier for being an enemy soldier.
Nokia's board was presumably legitimately stupid for hiring him. Don't hate your generals for being stupid; hate yourself for fighting under their banner.
No, I'm talking to the next company: Board, explain why your hiring of the Microsoft guy shouldn't result in an immediate investigation. Because you'd have to be either just shocking stupid, or willfully negligent, to embrace a Microsoft agent. The ignorance excuse just can't possibly fly at this point, can it?
It's laughable how small the performance gains are between recent generations of Core processors. I realize there are other improvements like power consumption and integrated GPU performance but the desktop gamer isn't going to drop another grand to save watts or get better performance on an IGPU he never will use anyway.
The only thing that's laughable, is that the desktop gamer thinks everything is about him and that his concerns add up to even 1% of the market.
Slashdot Mirror
It should look the same as her face looks, whenever she buys things on Amazon using https. When she clicks the little icon to see how she knows she's really talking to Amazon (that is, when she examines the cert) does she understand all that stuff? Does she know what Verisign is, and can she explain why she trusts Verisign, and what Verisign is saying about the cert?
If yes, then she can handle PGP.
If no ("what's a cert?"), then she can't handle https. Yet the world gets by with https anyway.
All of that is okay to happen. Yes, it's trivial to MitM whenever you use an untrusted key, but it's also trivial to MitM plaintext, so you might as well use untrusted keys, until you get around to making them trustable. You lose nothing, except some CPU cycles.
What he is describing, is a baseline protocol for getting a bunch of untrusted keys deployed out there, and into ubiquitous use. You can still do things right, later, and have keysigning parties, check fingerprints etc, and start signing and trusting these keys, getting back up to the 1990s crypto-ideal.
Just don't have people signing these unverified keys without getting fingerprints out of band, don't have the email client showing bullshit "this is secure" icons, etc.
Really, the main problem with email clients automatically generating keys without any interaction at all, is that people move around, change machines, change clients on the same machine, log in as different users with different home directory, etc. I don't want my new machine generating a new key; I want it to stop and tell me "hey, I don't have your key yet." If I have to send an email in a hurry, from a new install, I don't want that email telling other people a silly keyid. If someone uses that one, and then I restore my home dir from a backup and now I have my "real" keys and the temporary one is gone, then someone is going to send me an undecryptable email, or mistakenly think we had a MitM when they see my temporary (bogus) on-demand-made one, etc. These are the kinds of flies in the ointment, that we really have to worry about, with the proposed approach.
The trust issue is trivial: don't trust an unverified key. That's was the rule for PGP twenty years ago and it hasn't changed.
No. Please learn more about PGP.
No OpenPGP implementation assumes that any public keys, no matter where they came from, are accurate. The whole point of signing and the WoT is to not trust any key's accuracy unless you have reason to.
Keyservers can lie to you all day long. You can even manually import totally fraudulent keys, with the intent of deceiving the system. And it still won't matter. None of the keys in question will be trusted one iota, until you look at a fingerprint and sign, essentially saying "Yes, I know for sure that fingerprint came from that person."
PGP does not trust keyservers to be accurate, to be working right, to be working in good faith, to not be owned by your adversary, or anything else. Keyservers are a convenience, and nothing more. All this kind of stuff was figured out and dealt with, decades ago.
When I run that sim, as you suggest, the outcome I see is that you have the wrong key for someone's email address. You get MitMed.
(And in spite of the fact that you're being MitM, passive parties who are not involved in the attack, are still locked out. e.g. If the NSA MitMs your email to your wife, other observers are still seeing ciphertext, not plaintext.)
You're no worse off than if you hadn't ever encrypted; i.e. better than the status quo for 99% of users.
Furthermore, if you ever meet the person you emailed, or ever meet someone they met, and start to actually check and sign fingerprints, thereby creating WoT links, then the original attack eventually gets discovered ("Hey, I had a bogus wrong key on file for you. What happened?").
It looks like a decent situation, and an unambiguous upgrade from what people currently do. Can you find any downsides?
PGP doesn't trust keyservers; it uses keyservers.
Saying PGP trusts keyservers is like saying HTTPS trusts webservers.
Heh. I have one of those, too. Different tools, different area, but same thing. Trivial script, or complicated human-time-eating error-prone hard-to-review clickfest.
Q: "Is that field on this screen?" A: "I'll just grep.. no wait, the 'modern' version: command-F: no wait, I can't search anything. Let's click a hundred times, once for every control on the screen, to see which one(s) of them, if any, have that field as the default on its menu."
Thankfully, for me at least, that kind of sillytech is getting more marginalized and fading out. In my life. Right now. For this job. Until...
Obviously you shouldn't do those things while driving. The article isn't about a situation where we think a person might have been doing that. It was about having a personal computer screen which may, or may not, be illegal to have in a car.
It'll come down to technicalities in the wording in the law in question, bizarre precedents made up by previous judges, etc.
What the driver was doing on their computer, isn't said and probably can't be proven either way. So if the law turns out to involve how the device was being used at the moment driver was pulled over, then they might actually be acquitted. Even if they were texting or reading wikipedia.
The more management feels they need to say about how to do something, the harder it is and the longer it takes.
Make me a website: easy.
Make me a website using WordPress and it must use this particular plugin: hard (since it's very unlikely that particular plugin is well-suited to the job; if it made sense to use it, they wouldn't have told you that you have to use it) (and for that matter, it's vanishingly unlikely that WordPress itself is going to be suitable for the application in question, for the same reason: if it made sense, then it wouldn't be a requirement).
I've seen things' time blossom by a factor of ten, due to stupid shit like this. Seriously, that's not an exaggeration.
Who bought the law that says we have to use some exotic chemical? Execute that person with whatever supply remains. Then repeal the ridiculous policy, hire any halfway-competent administrator and tell them "You have a $10 budget. Kill." A hundred years ago, people were able to get executions competently done, without exotic expensive tech.
And let's remember: it's basically the practical definition of technological progress, that it makes things cheaper and easier, giving you more for less. When you see yourself moving toward something that is harder and costs more, that's your signal that you need a reality check.
I don't get what's the purpose of these "remedial sanctions," especially coming from the SEC.
If the SEC is doing this to deter Knight's management from being un-diligent with Knight's owners' assets, then it ought be a fine or prison time for the people who were responsible, not the company (the owners, who were also the victims). That's like punishing someone for the crime of being raped, while talking about how irresponsible the rapist was.
If the SEC is doing this to deter Knight's owners (who worked through their agents, the management) from making poor decisions that will cost them money, then (like everyone else is posting) it seems like the loss itself, is punishment enough. That's like punishing someone for the crime of suicide.
Like hell I did, you libelous snake.
By 2008 I was old enough to have remembered the last Democrat president, who signed CALEA, DMCA, etc instead of vetoing them like any honest person would do. I fucking hate Democrats and think every one of them ought to burned at the stake. I just think they are decent, civic-minded, sensible, good conservative people, compared to Republicans. But I wouldn't want my daughter to date one, and I sure as hell never vote for a Democrat whenever there's another party on the ballot.
And for presidential elections, there are always plenty of relatively good candidates on the ballot.
Shame about Congress, though. If I lived in Illinois, then yeah, I might have voted for Obama in 2004. But I don't live there, so of course I've never voted for him.
The story here isn't that he was fired. It's that the Whitehouse investigated him. He didn't accidentally leak his identity to some private sector reporter who put it in their article, and then the president saw it in a newspaper. They spent time and money on trying to figure out the identity of a totally irrelevant and unimportant Twitter user over a bunch of totally irrelevant and unimportant tweets. Like, this was important to them.
At least Pepsi would be able to somewhat justify such an expenditure, since their marketing really is so important, and all Pepsi stockholders would agree that marketing is a good use of funds. But what say America's "stockholders," about our new "marketing counter-intelligence" program?
They guy wasn't even saying stuff analogous to "USA sucks for tourists. Foreign tourists should take vacations somewhere else and spend their money there instead of in USA." or "You should buy used F-16s from Israel instead of from USA." He was just talking shit about shit. There's no legitimate reason for the government to have been working on this.
While firing the unprofessional jerk after he was outed is perfectly defensible (I have no problem with it at all), the government did get caught working against America's interests again:
Why THE FUCK was the government spending time investigating this? And why the fuck is this not a big secret?
The BushBama whitehouse is seriously confused about what the country needs from its government, and over the last 12 years they have just gotten repeatedly more brazen and open about it. Is it simply that really, nobody cares?
I pay taxes in order for you to funnel them to obscurely-overbilling contractors for substandard work, so that they can then divert a portion of their obscene profits to the re-election campaigns of the people in congress and administration, who make the funneling happen. That is why we have government: to give crooks a non-violent outlet for their greed and need to victimize society. A few billion dollars here, a few billion dollars there .. we have a strong economy and can sustain that.
But I don't pay taxes for you people to spend it tracking tweets. That's not what government is for! All these crooks need to get out of the surveillance game and back into mainstream profitable corruption. And we voters should insist upon it. Please, everyone: stop voting Republicrat.
It seems like the more you get this pork project out of peoples' faces, the more they'll accept it, and keep on paying for it all instead of constantly bitching about it. As long as the system delays travellers and also makes everyone less safe (because of the lines of concentrated targets), it's always going to face some risk, however small, of getting cut. Pre-screening could help to cement the parasite's permanence: out of site, out of mind. (And the safety improvement, shockingly, would actually be real!)
Whether that's good or bad, depends on which side you're on.
The only catch I can think of, is that the entertainment media (e.g. Fox News, MSNBC) might lose out, by the loss of an easy rage story. So we should expect to see them oppose this. It'll be amusing to see how Fox spins pre-screening as Obama making everyone less safe and less free. MSNBC doesn't really get to use that angle until we have a Republican president, so I don't know how they'll do it. But they'll have to do something until then. Maybe troll through Fox's 2001-2008 archive for ideas on how to lie about how your guy is being made to do something bad, by That Other Party.
Next thing you know, Facebook will be showing ads to people without any warning. Perhaps even children!
When HBO refuses to sell the GoT matroska files, implying that people who want DRM-free media should pirate instead, the pirates don't call that "subsidy." The word is "stupidity." HTH.
What are you talking about? There's tons of photographs and other physical evidence, confirming the existence of bears. Some bears have been captured, too. At this point, I'd say people claiming bears to be mythical, are he ones who are making extraordinary statements which need backing up.
Even if this FUD turns out to be true, I don't see why Shuttleworth, of all people, would want it spoken aloud. If Mac OS X continues to decline in quality the way it has the last few years, causing a new exodus of people jumping ship, do you really think they'll go to Ubuntu, of all places? Ever hear the phrase "out of the frying pan and into the fire?"
Sure, people can jump ship and really end up avoiding this nonsense and still use an Ubuntu-based system: Xubuntu or something like that. But they're just as likely to go with Fedora or Mint or something. (And honestly, some of them might even end up on Windows. People can do anything when they're overcome with despair!) And even if they do go with Xubuntu, I don't see how that's somehow a face-saving situation for Shuttleworth. If users reject the basic idea of Unity, they're rejecting Shuttleworth at an ego level, even if they're still using his infrastructure.
I know, man! What the hell was so wrong with "Someone else has to pay my bills!" As long as I was one of the people who was getting free ER, the system was perfect! Sure, the Democrats would keep labelling me a "taker" and the ones with jobs always scowled at me because of the higher taxes they had to pay to keep the hospitals open, but other than that, it was a sweet system, totally based on True Fairness (subsidies). Now these suit'n'tie penny-pinchers are coming in, and saying i should have to pay my own bills, instead of relying on handouts. Fucking nazis! Don't they know that if I have to pay my bils, I might be forced to get a job, and that means one less job is available for someone who really wants one? Nazi job killers!
Once we go to this nazi job-killing system where people have to pay their fair share, they'll be more in touch with the realities of the economics, "feel" it more, and start complaining about costs and wanting to do something about it, like, say "whoa.. what's with all the expensive patented medicine here?" That's just making waves man. Can't we all just get along, by you keeping on paying my bills?
I'm looking forward to the day when we all subsidize relatively expensive ER visits, and when we create something called "bankruptcy law" where after someone has sold their house and still doesn't have enough to pay their medical bills, the heavy socialist hand of government steps in and interferes with the free market, saying the liability no longer exists. That'll be the real socialist revolution, finally ushering in the era that Marx promi--
Oh wait, sorry. That's the status quo that I was describing, the thing we hippies (Republicans) are trying to keep, that The Man (reactionary Democrats, with their "people should have to pay their own bills" hardass attitude) reformed, because the status quo was not only consuming too much of the GDP (thanks to the inefficiencies), but "too pinko", as those unyielding Adam Smith worshippers put it.
What the right wing Man needs to understand, is that when an uninsured hippie goes to the ER for subsidized health care, that's not really communism, man. It's just Jesusism. Jesus said people shouldn't have to pay their bills, man, especially once they're bankrupt and living in the street and no longer part of the ownership society that The Man keeps telling you, is so keen. Jesus said it's in society's interest to simultaneously bankrupt and subsidize everything, because a nation of homeless sick people, like, that'd be a far out party! A Party In The Streets, man!
Sure, the ER visits cost more and the overall quality/duration of the care isn't as good, but Democrats who point out performance value issues like that, are just being penny-pinching economists. Hey penny pinchers, do I have to remind you what Jesus said about rich men entering the kingdom of heaven?
Democrats, don't you see? Don't you get that your Republican Brothers just want you to join them in tuning in, turning on, and dropping out? It'll be grooovy, man! Republicans want to protect your freedom to run up bills at someone else's expense. Republicans are the modern followers of our heros, LBJ, FDR, the last bastion in protecting our FREEDOM to have those squares with their jobs, bail us out. Freedom, man. Why do all you Democrats hate our freedom to be dependent on the taxpayer-funded social welfare handout called "bankruptcy?"
Not having to pay our medical bills is a right, dammit. I can prove it: there's nothing in the constitution that says we don't have the right to make other people pay our health care bills! And that means our handouts are a 10th amendment protected right. Take that, man.
(Who's who in liberalism vs conservatism: it's all so confusing!)
Best of all, you can wear the home-made one, without having to remember a bunch of arbitrary bullshit, or having to worry about events beyond your control.
The dress from the store has "malfunctions" if you wear it on Tuesdays or with a different manufacturer's shoes, and disintegrates if the dressmaker goes out of business, or may even disintegrate if they later (a year after you bought the dress) have a contractual dispute with their thread vendor.
Money issues aside, the dress from the store simply sucks, in ways that home dressmakers would never begin to imagine.
I didn't really want to use such profanity in the context of Phil Zimmerman, but I have to sadly admit: if the shoe fits...
TFA makes it sounds like the sender can make decisions about what the receiver's machine does. That is insane (and also impossible, or it's irresponsible to lead users to believe they'll get that). I hope I am misreading the claim.
If the receiver has that control, or if the sender gets to specify advisory info in the hopes that the receiver uses it, ok. If not, then I think one of the most respected programmers ever (PZ) has left the path of wisdom.
Elop was just doing his Microsoft job by working against the interests of Nokia's stockholders for Microsoft's financial gain. It might be a criminal job, but a job is a job, and I'm not sure that in Nokia's case, the crime was even illegal. Don't hate the enemy soldier for being an enemy soldier.
Nokia's board was presumably legitimately stupid for hiring him. Don't hate your generals for being stupid; hate yourself for fighting under their banner.
No, I'm talking to the next company: Board, explain why your hiring of the Microsoft guy shouldn't result in an immediate investigation. Because you'd have to be either just shocking stupid, or willfully negligent, to embrace a Microsoft agent. The ignorance excuse just can't possibly fly at this point, can it?
The only thing that's laughable, is that the desktop gamer thinks everything is about him and that his concerns add up to even 1% of the market.