`Sumdumass' on slashdot claiming that the Professor of Law and Legal History at Colombia University is `incompetent' when it comes to drafting legislation in the field of law he is largely responsible for founding.
"With the default repository list "apt-get update" takes about one hour and forty five minutes to complete over dial-up!"
Debian's (and I presume ubuntu's) default is to use daily pdiff text files. This works fine if you update frequently, but not so if you don't. It's quite easy to switch back to a gzipped monolithic update file, which would be faster in dial-up.
There's no need to resort to broken shite like Automatix for this - just configure your tools.
New Zealanders should use their votes to oppose this. Let it be know that you will not vote for people who pass this sort of nonsense. At least in New Zealand your votes count for something. Here in the UK we don't have Proportional Representation and my vote (like hundreds of thousands of others) goes straight down the loo."
So, since all parties bar one supported the regulations, you advocate that New Zealand should elect the Green Party to government - a party which believes, among other things, that lowering the age of suffrage to 16 is a good idea?
Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Recourse to the electoral system is the second of the four canonical boxes to be used in the defence of liberty; I think this is the sort of trivial rule which will be changed if the first box is used sufficiently.
"1. Your second point, first sentence, is not relevant. Rules that restrict what use people can make of parliamentary material do not suddenly become good just because everyone else is doing it."
I agree in principle, but the argument here is that this constitutes `international best practice'. You can debate whether that is truly the case, but the invocation of international precedent in other legitimate democracies makes it clear that the regulations are not simply a capricious abuse of power and authority, as `far-reaching powers' seems to imply.
"2. Your third and sixth points miss the point. We've seen in other countries what can happen, and more to the point, what does when rule-making bodies make draconian rules, with the apparent intention of not enforcing them harshly. What happens? They transform over time into catch-all rules that cover far more than their original scope. That this is just a parliamentary regulation, not a law, makes that less of a worry, but the point is no one should be cultivating bad habits."
This is a slippery-slope argument, and would have some merit if the ultimate arbiter of the regulations were not an independent judiciary. Two other vitally important factors act as a brake on the slope: firstly, a very strong and free press in New Zealand which takes every opportunity to pan politicians for anything at all - and rightly so. The first government to try a frivolous prosecution on this matter (aside from being laughed out of court) would suffer such severe media backlash that the second point would come into play: the electoral system. This regulation was voted in with broad cross-party support; however within a few days of passing the major opposition party and one of the minor parties withdrew their support for the regulations. Now the two major parties are in a no-win situation: whichever one chooses to prosecute would very likely hand the electoral balance of power to the other in ~14 months. The race is already very tight indeed.
"And regardless of the extent to which it's enforced, the culture the rule is trying to create is a revolting one. Parliament should be the one place in the country that is more open to general inspection and comment than any other place."
I do agree with this, and most wholeheartedly with the closing sentiment. However I think it's very important to not oveerreact, and to focus criticism on issues of real policy importance, rather than symbolic issues.
Campaigning on policy is valuable participation in democracy; campaigning on symbolic issues lends itself to propaganda.
The media are blowing this out of all proportion. That's fair and reasonable - it's their job. But as a political scientist and media analyst in New Zealand, I think it's important to note a few things here.
1. For one thing, this is not a law, it's a sessional order - the sort of thing parliaments enact all the time for all manner of arbitrary reasons. Breach of a sessional order constitutes `contempt of parliament' - the sort of thing for which you would typically get ejected from the galleries and perhaps prevented from returning for a while. The offence *does* carry more severe penalties for extreme cases, however there is no indication those would apply in this case (especially since the judiciary in NZ is genuinely and thoroughly independent of the legislature).
2. The order was passed by a *vast* majority of the parliament (without looking it up I believe six of 121 MPs voted against it) and is very much in line with regulations in other parliamentary democracies, including those in Australia and Great Britain. The order *does not* restrict satire, ridicule or denigration - it simply precludes the use of *parliamentary footage* from being used in such
3. The parliament, upon passing the order, acknowledged that the measures will be seen as unreasonable, and assured the public and media they would interpret the rules `liberally' and would review them if any major friction came up.
4. Most media in NZ (particularly TV3, but even the state broadcaster TVNZ; and all the radio networks except Radio New Zealand) are quite explicitly anti-parliament (not implying that they are anti-government partisans - just unjustifiably critical of parliamentarians in general). This is part of the `bah, humbug' discourse of New Zealand politics which is quite well documented here and elsewhere. Again - this is the media's job, to criticise elected representatives. However the balance has in the past couple of years moved away from criticising substantive policy content to various `personality wars' and other such trivia, which gives quite a poor image of what is actually a fairly well-behaved and civilised chamber by most international standards.
5. The new regulations *do* in fact liberalise reporting rules in parliament, in addition to making available a free high-quality video feed of all proceedings to anyone who wants it. The video feed is also much *less* strict in what it can sho - previously only the member with the `call', currently speaking, could be shown - this made it very hard to track who was speaking to whom and to get a feel of the overall debate. The new regulations allow for contextual coverage of other members or the house in general, as appropriate. This is actually a major improvement over the past.
6. The main thing for all those people who think the sky is falling to remember here is that neither the government nor the opposition stand to gain much from this regulation, but they DO stand to lose a great deal in terms of public confidence if it is too strictly enforced. New Zealand has a very strong tradition of satire which will continue unabated, and woe betide any politician who seeks to restrict that.
All that said, I think passing the sessional order was unwise - as I said, it gains parliament little and could potentially cost it very dearly in terms of public confidence. It plays into the hands of a significant but vocal minority of alarmist nutters in the New Zealand political-media economy (people like Lindsay Perigo and John Banks) who take every perceived imposition of government authority as an indication that Stalinism is just around the corner. This is very far from the case, but such beat-ups sell air time and column inches. But as other posters have noted - the New Zealand media has pledged to treat the order with the satire, ridicule and denigration it so richly deserves.
"I know people from the Pacific islands. They are not thrilled that everyone is so fat - they are more resigned to the fact that they love to eat and eat."
Perfectly understandable now that there is no meaningful food shortage.
"As for sub-Saharan, I'm so sick of textbooks giving examples of sub-Saharan cultures that do this or that."
Just because you're sick of it being so doesn't make it not so.
"A woman transported several centuries would change from being desirable to undesirable because of the dynamics of food supply dynamics of the society?"
Not necessarily from `desirable' to `undesirable' - it's not binary. But from higher up the desirability scale to lower down. Marilyn Monroe is a good example.
"Then would a famine ridden society see a 400lb woman as the most beautiful woman they have ever seen?"
Reductio ad absurdum isn't really going to help your case.
"If aversion to obesity isn't genetic, then why is there 'a genetic predisposition to obesity'?"
If aversion to obesity *was* genetic there would be a genetic predisposition *against* obesity, according to natural selection. So you're now arguing against your own thesis.
"It's good in theory and all but fat people are unattractive - we are genetically programmed to think fat people are ugly."
More eurocentric bollocks from someone who probably thinks Discovery is some sort of substitute for an education.
In much of sub-Saharan Africa and in the Pacific Islands, fat (and even obesity) is traditionally considered a mark of beauty, health, wealth, fertility and status.
It was even so in Europe, not so many generations ago. Go back and look at some renaissance paintings - Botticelli is a good example. See the fat Venus? That means Venus had plenty to eat and was not in danger of starvation, which (among other things makes her a very viable mother of children. IN medieval Japan, samurai traditionally cultivated a good rotund pot. Why? Because the dominant fighting style of the day placed great utility on balance and stability, and a low centre of gravity provides this well. For the vast bulk (heh) of human history, malnutrition has been a much more significant threat to survival than obesity. The trend toward thin women and athletic men being attractive happened broadly as food supply problems lessened and has achieved its natural conclusion in the most affluent societies, where overeating is now a far greater risk than malnutrition in the usual case.
You think the modern obesity aversion is genetic; it's not. It's cultural. If we faced a few hundred years of severe food shortage, you'd probably see it reverse.
"How long will it be before they block access to alternatives or the alternatives themselves can not be trusted? Breaking something as fundamental as DNS breaks the an important agreement that makes the internet work."
Yeah... they'll just block or corrupt EVERY SINGLE PUBLIC NAMESERVER IN THE WORLD.
Because that's what it would take.
But reality manifestly has no place in your nice cozy conspiracy theories.
In essence, MS is taking the position that developers can use their APIs however they like - unless MS objects, at which point they get to withdraw the offending code without compensation, unless you count not being sued as compensartion.
Given that this could in principle happen to anyone extending MS software, this ought to be a chilling effect on use of MS APIs without a $10,000 annual partnership license. That sets a pretty high bar to participation. Let's say MS developers fall into four categories:
a. Smart and a partner. These will continue to contribute. They always did. (If you accept that they're not an oxymoron.)
b. Smart and not a partner. These will stop contributing because of the legal risk.
c. Dumb and a partner. These will continue contributing, but their contributions will be worthless.
d. Dumb and not a partner. These poor saps will continue contributing, because they're too stupid to realise they're in the gun.
All I can say is that if you screw with the bull, you get the horns. This developer would have had no problems if he'd been working in free software. That's the real lesson.
Spoken like someone who'd never been a teacher. Here's a hint: teaching pays like shit, and the hours and conditions are appalling. Most teachers could make better money outside the education system. Even unqualified teachers can make stupid money doing short stints teaching English in Asia.
The Wellington (NZ) council is looking at rolling out a regional fibre network, on top of CityLink (http://citylink.co.nz/) to ensure widespread broadband access because a decade of private enterprise has singularly failed to provide it. However local whiners the Association of Progressive and Residents' Associations says they will fight it... because of visual pollution caused by an additional overhead cable.
For anyone who's been to Wellington, a dense, hilly city built on hard clay and rocky soil, there is no other feasible way to connect properties - and there are *already* shitloads of cables, so one more ain't making a damn bit of difference.
This'll be blocked by a combination of private interests saying stupid shit liek `public ownership == communism' and short-sighted interest groups.
As much as I agree with Linus on this particular issue (and as much as I want to see the gnometards' `you're a six year-old' UI get its due) I think the point to be made here is that free software isn't zero-sum, isn't inherently competitive, and the appropriate thing to do if you dislike a particular thing is not to tear it down, but to build something else up.
It's impossible to justify the argument that Linus is being destructive, since he's actually contributing what is likely quality code in good faith to a project which sorely needs it - but I wonder if he wouldn't have been better off trying to improve something with whose fundamentals he didn't quite so completely disagree.
As with any sufficiently strong security system, the weakest link I foresee will be the people. In this case, not the people who *use* the XO, but the people who control various points along the keychain: developer keys, activation keys, etc.
The people who hold these keys are plenty vulnerable to corruption, intimidation and good old-fashioned trickery. This doesn't invalidate the security model, but I'd be interested to know how they mean to preserve the integrity of the keychain in case of theft, misuse, disaster, going-out-of-business and aliens.
=== How do you know that Intel has not been putting a TPC module in every CPU for the last five years? They've had this ring architecture for a decade, could there not be one more ring they never told us about? in five more years they could turn it on and surprise! every computer less than a decade old is TPC complient. The remaineder still run but can't use the new OS or must run in a reduced privledge mode. ===
by Starji (578920) Alter Relationship on Friday January 05, @09:38AM (#17467654) How about Opera? === Yeah, because proprietary software is what this project is all about.
At least now he'll have an interesting thesis to write.
This issue is just like the recent Israel-Hezbollah war-let: a massive overreaction resulting in undue harm to one party at no gain to the other, and extremely bad PR for the 'winner'.
Does it describe a general US attitude toward 'minorities'?
Slashdot Mirror
`Sumdumass' on slashdot claiming that the Professor of Law and Legal History at Colombia University is `incompetent' when it comes to drafting legislation in the field of law he is largely responsible for founding.
Mod funny.
L
"With the default repository list "apt-get update" takes about one hour and forty five minutes to complete over dial-up!"
Debian's (and I presume ubuntu's) default is to use daily pdiff text files. This works fine if you update frequently, but not so if you don't. It's quite easy to switch back to a gzipped monolithic update file, which would be faster in dial-up.
There's no need to resort to broken shite like Automatix for this - just configure your tools.
L
New Zealanders should use their votes to oppose this. Let it be know that you will not vote for people who pass this sort of nonsense. At least in New Zealand your votes count for something. Here in the UK we don't have Proportional Representation and my vote (like hundreds of thousands of others) goes straight down the loo."
So, since all parties bar one supported the regulations, you advocate that New Zealand should elect the Green Party to government - a party which believes, among other things, that lowering the age of suffrage to 16 is a good idea?
Talk about throwing out the baby with the bathwater. Recourse to the electoral system is the second of the four canonical boxes to be used in the defence of liberty; I think this is the sort of trivial rule which will be changed if the first box is used sufficiently.
L
"1. Your second point, first sentence, is not relevant. Rules that restrict what use people can make of parliamentary material do not suddenly become good just because everyone else is doing it."
I agree in principle, but the argument here is that this constitutes `international best practice'. You can debate whether that is truly the case, but the invocation of international precedent in other legitimate democracies makes it clear that the regulations are not simply a capricious abuse of power and authority, as `far-reaching powers' seems to imply.
"2. Your third and sixth points miss the point. We've seen in other countries what can happen, and more to the point, what does when rule-making bodies make draconian rules, with the apparent intention of not enforcing them harshly. What happens? They transform over time into catch-all rules that cover far more than their original scope. That this is just a parliamentary regulation, not a law, makes that less of a worry, but the point is no one should be cultivating bad habits."
This is a slippery-slope argument, and would have some merit if the ultimate arbiter of the regulations were not an independent judiciary. Two other vitally important factors act as a brake on the slope: firstly, a very strong and free press in New Zealand which takes every opportunity to pan politicians for anything at all - and rightly so. The first government to try a frivolous prosecution on this matter (aside from being laughed out of court) would suffer such severe media backlash that the second point would come into play: the electoral system. This regulation was voted in with broad cross-party support; however within a few days of passing the major opposition party and one of the minor parties withdrew their support for the regulations. Now the two major parties are in a no-win situation: whichever one chooses to prosecute would very likely hand the electoral balance of power to the other in ~14 months. The race is already very tight indeed.
"And regardless of the extent to which it's enforced, the culture the rule is trying to create is a revolting one. Parliament should be the one place in the country that is more open to general inspection and comment than any other place."
I do agree with this, and most wholeheartedly with the closing sentiment. However I think it's very important to not oveerreact, and to focus criticism on issues of real policy importance, rather than symbolic issues.
Campaigning on policy is valuable participation in democracy; campaigning on symbolic issues lends itself to propaganda.
Cheers,
L
http://www.parliament.nz/LiveBroadcast/house-384.a sx
The media are blowing this out of all proportion. That's fair and reasonable - it's their job. But as a political scientist and media analyst in New Zealand, I think it's important to note a few things here.
1. For one thing, this is not a law, it's a sessional order - the sort of thing parliaments enact all the time for all manner of arbitrary reasons. Breach of a sessional order constitutes `contempt of parliament' - the sort of thing for which you would typically get ejected from the galleries and perhaps prevented from returning for a while. The offence *does* carry more severe penalties for extreme cases, however there is no indication those would apply in this case (especially since the judiciary in NZ is genuinely and thoroughly independent of the legislature).
2. The order was passed by a *vast* majority of the parliament (without looking it up I believe six of 121 MPs voted against it) and is very much in line with regulations in other parliamentary democracies, including those in Australia and Great Britain. The order *does not* restrict satire, ridicule or denigration - it simply precludes the use of *parliamentary footage* from being used in such
3. The parliament, upon passing the order, acknowledged that the measures will be seen as unreasonable, and assured the public and media they would interpret the rules `liberally' and would review them if any major friction came up.
4. Most media in NZ (particularly TV3, but even the state broadcaster TVNZ; and all the radio networks except Radio New Zealand) are quite explicitly anti-parliament (not implying that they are anti-government partisans - just unjustifiably critical of parliamentarians in general). This is part of the `bah, humbug' discourse of New Zealand politics which is quite well documented here and elsewhere. Again - this is the media's job, to criticise elected representatives. However the balance has in the past couple of years moved away from criticising substantive policy content to various `personality wars' and other such trivia, which gives quite a poor image of what is actually a fairly well-behaved and civilised chamber by most international standards.
5. The new regulations *do* in fact liberalise reporting rules in parliament, in addition to making available a free high-quality video feed of all proceedings to anyone who wants it. The video feed is also much *less* strict in what it can sho - previously only the member with the `call', currently speaking, could be shown - this made it very hard to track who was speaking to whom and to get a feel of the overall debate. The new regulations allow for contextual coverage of other members or the house in general, as appropriate. This is actually a major improvement over the past.
6. The main thing for all those people who think the sky is falling to remember here is that neither the government nor the opposition stand to gain much from this regulation, but they DO stand to lose a great deal in terms of public confidence if it is too strictly enforced. New Zealand has a very strong tradition of satire which will continue unabated, and woe betide any politician who seeks to restrict that.
All that said, I think passing the sessional order was unwise - as I said, it gains parliament little and could potentially cost it very dearly in terms of public confidence. It plays into the hands of a significant but vocal minority of alarmist nutters in the New Zealand political-media economy (people like Lindsay Perigo and John Banks) who take every perceived imposition of government authority as an indication that Stalinism is just around the corner. This is very far from the case, but such beat-ups sell air time and column inches. But as other posters have noted - the New Zealand media has pledged to treat the order with the satire, ridicule and denigration it so richly deserves.
L
"I know people from the Pacific islands. They are not thrilled that everyone is so fat - they are more resigned to the fact that they love to eat and eat."
Perfectly understandable now that there is no meaningful food shortage.
"As for sub-Saharan, I'm so sick of textbooks giving examples of sub-Saharan cultures that do this or that."
Just because you're sick of it being so doesn't make it not so.
"A woman transported several centuries would change from being desirable to undesirable because of the dynamics of food supply dynamics of the society?"
Not necessarily from `desirable' to `undesirable' - it's not binary. But from higher up the desirability scale to lower down. Marilyn Monroe is a good example.
"Then would a famine ridden society see a 400lb woman as the most beautiful woman they have ever seen?"
Reductio ad absurdum isn't really going to help your case.
"If aversion to obesity isn't genetic, then why is there 'a genetic predisposition to obesity'?"
If aversion to obesity *was* genetic there would be a genetic predisposition *against* obesity, according to natural selection. So you're now arguing against your own thesis.
L
"It's good in theory and all but fat people are unattractive - we are genetically programmed to think fat people are ugly."
More eurocentric bollocks from someone who probably thinks Discovery is some sort of substitute for an education.
In much of sub-Saharan Africa and in the Pacific Islands, fat (and even obesity) is traditionally considered a mark of beauty, health, wealth, fertility and status.
It was even so in Europe, not so many generations ago. Go back and look at some renaissance paintings - Botticelli is a good example. See the fat Venus? That means Venus had plenty to eat and was not in danger of starvation, which (among other things makes her a very viable mother of children. IN medieval Japan, samurai traditionally cultivated a good rotund pot. Why? Because the dominant fighting style of the day placed great utility on balance and stability, and a low centre of gravity provides this well. For the vast bulk (heh) of human history, malnutrition has been a much more significant threat to survival than obesity. The trend toward thin women and athletic men being attractive happened broadly as food supply problems lessened and has achieved its natural conclusion in the most affluent societies, where overeating is now a far greater risk than malnutrition in the usual case.
You think the modern obesity aversion is genetic; it's not. It's cultural. If we faced a few hundred years of severe food shortage, you'd probably see it reverse.
L
"How long will it be before they block access to alternatives or the alternatives themselves can not be trusted? Breaking something as fundamental as DNS breaks the an important agreement that makes the internet work."
... they'll just block or corrupt EVERY SINGLE PUBLIC NAMESERVER IN THE WORLD.
Yeah
Because that's what it would take.
But reality manifestly has no place in your nice cozy conspiracy theories.
L
In essence, MS is taking the position that developers can use their APIs however they like - unless MS objects, at which point they get to withdraw the offending code without compensation, unless you count not being sued as compensartion.
Given that this could in principle happen to anyone extending MS software, this ought to be a chilling effect on use of MS APIs without a $10,000 annual partnership license. That sets a pretty high bar to participation. Let's say MS developers fall into four categories:
a. Smart and a partner. These will continue to contribute. They always did. (If you accept that they're not an oxymoron.)
b. Smart and not a partner. These will stop contributing because of the legal risk.
c. Dumb and a partner. These will continue contributing, but their contributions will be worthless.
d. Dumb and not a partner. These poor saps will continue contributing, because they're too stupid to realise they're in the gun.
All I can say is that if you screw with the bull, you get the horns. This developer would have had no problems if he'd been working in free software. That's the real lesson.
L
It's a movie quote.
Spoken like someone who'd never been a teacher. Here's a hint: teaching pays like shit, and the hours and conditions are appalling. Most teachers could make better money outside the education system. Even unqualified teachers can make stupid money doing short stints teaching English in Asia.
L
The Wellington (NZ) council is looking at rolling out a regional fibre network, on top of CityLink (http://citylink.co.nz/) to ensure widespread broadband access because a decade of private enterprise has singularly failed to provide it. However local whiners the Association of Progressive and Residents' Associations says they will fight it ... because of visual pollution caused by an additional overhead cable.
For anyone who's been to Wellington, a dense, hilly city built on hard clay and rocky soil, there is no other feasible way to connect properties - and there are *already* shitloads of cables, so one more ain't making a damn bit of difference.
This'll be blocked by a combination of private interests saying stupid shit liek `public ownership == communism' and short-sighted interest groups.
L
>>>
Vista has built-in DRM.
My current OS does not.
Therefore, my current OS is superior to Vista, because I can safely rely on it.
Nothing trumps that.
I wouldn't install it if it was free.
This is ultimately the only relevant point.
L
Sounds like someone got refused entry to grad skool.
L
As much as I agree with Linus on this particular issue (and as much as I want to see the gnometards' `you're a six year-old' UI get its due) I think the point to be made here is that free software isn't zero-sum, isn't inherently competitive, and the appropriate thing to do if you dislike a particular thing is not to tear it down, but to build something else up.
It's impossible to justify the argument that Linus is being destructive, since he's actually contributing what is likely quality code in good faith to a project which sorely needs it - but I wonder if he wouldn't have been better off trying to improve something with whose fundamentals he didn't quite so completely disagree.
L
As with any sufficiently strong security system, the weakest link I foresee will be the people. In this case, not the people who *use* the XO, but the people who control various points along the keychain: developer keys, activation keys, etc.
The people who hold these keys are plenty vulnerable to corruption, intimidation and good old-fashioned trickery. This doesn't invalidate the security model, but I'd be interested to know how they mean to preserve the integrity of the keychain in case of theft, misuse, disaster, going-out-of-business and aliens.
L
===
How do you know that Intel has not been putting a TPC module in every CPU for the last five years? They've had this ring architecture for a decade, could there not be one more ring they never told us about? in five more years they could turn it on and surprise! every computer less than a decade old is TPC complient. The remaineder still run but can't use the new OS or must run in a reduced privledge mode.
===
Two words: CLASS ACTION.
L
===
Thank god I'm in NZ, where the copyright laws are less crappy
===
Not for long... http://publicaddress.net/default,3778.sm#post3778
L
by Starji (578920) Alter Relationship on Friday January 05, @09:38AM (#17467654)
How about Opera?
===
Yeah, because proprietary software is what this project is all about.
L
They call it `Ubuntu', and Debian persists because a bunch of people still want 15,000+ supported packages.
Yes, Ubuntu has {un,mult}iverse, but only *because* Debian continues to support those packages.
L
Don't fucking use Word.
L
At least now he'll have an interesting thesis to write.
This issue is just like the recent Israel-Hezbollah war-let: a massive overreaction resulting in undue harm to one party at no gain to the other, and extremely bad PR for the 'winner'.
Does it describe a general US attitude toward 'minorities'?
L
Baaaa. Baaaaa. Baaaaa...
Ten years of XML ... and here I am relearning TeX.
L