Better yet, why isn't there relative modding, where people who mod similarly to you auto-mods posts (ie, just like the suggested mechanism to overcome poisoning a p2p network; trolls are out to poison this blog, right?). And yes, I could use the source. So, clearly I'm just as insightful as the parent to be bitching about why things aren't done already the way I want.
This is the only method to stop cheating, and thats to be invasive.
Uh, no. There's really two steps to crack all such cheat-prevention software. One, read/disassemble any code that's on your HD and crack it. Two, sniff the connection, possibly using code from the program to decrypt it, and read/disassemble any code sent to your system. So long as there's a way to crack the programs themselves and the connection between machines is a simple data channel (ie, there's no way to verify something directly, but you have to rely on a program to not lie), it's possible to overcome any such protections. The real way to stop cheating is to never provide clients with more information than they should have and have the server run the state machine, allowing only verified relative changes--this is rather CPU-intensive and probably the reason why the invasive hack approach is taken. Hypothetically, though, with DRM it won't be necessary to do things the right way, and these hacks will have the backing of hardware to protect them. It still might not be enough, though, to prevent sniff/stuffing of packets, which could still allow cheating.
I totally agree that the drawing functions should be in user space. And while this harkens back to this comment, it also brings up an interesting point brought up by this comment. Or to summarize, MS seems to try to hire really smart people to do really impossible things in the name of marketing, and so they'll succeed in the market a lot of the time (and by their design have more problems, as well as their popularity), they're willing to go to pretty great lengths to entirely butcher a good idea.
I make this point especially because it was decided in Windows 2000 to move the GUI drawing routines into the kernel, as the context switching was such a huge burden on performance. And while certainly if MS had went the more "mellow" route of following good design, there'd still be many disgruntled people (MS business practices--ie, not just marketing--also piss a lot of people off) who would use their, almost certainly, lower benchmark scores to demonstrate why open source was better than Windows. In the end, though, even with Windows obvious dominance in the market place (again, I think business practices assured that at some point--say, Windows 98), in this hypothetical parallel world, Windows would be a hell of a lot safer.
I say this because I think it's important to remember. As vehemently as people hate Microsoft, possibly even Microsoft programmers for writing such "swill" code, I think it's worth nothing that these programmers are only human. And the project they've been given is such monsterous beasts, it's unlikely that--short of a radical shift in the way Microsoft functions--Windows could ever have been written more securely. So, I say put more blame on the marketers and the businessmen, and less blame on the programmers' abilities. Of course, if you want to dislike these people for working for such a company *still* after finally figuring out that they'd be given such ridiculous projects, that's a whole other thing. But, that's another story.
The real question is, how long until Osama bin Laden legally changes his name to George W. Bush. And how many times does Bush need to be strip searched before the system is scrapped because the whole "No Fly List" is fucking retarded*.
*Note: No insulting to retarded individuals is intented. Being born with a mental defect or gaining it through no fault of one's own is not at all realistically comparable to repeated, willful stupidity. Unfortunately, the sheer heights of stupidity some people exhibit cannot succinctly be stated, and clearly trying to use the word retarded to fudge for this fact is doing a disservice to the retarded and to stated idiots. If you can think of any word or words to use to better describe this phenomenon, please reply.
I'm sorry if I sounded a bit harsh, but I was trying to clarify the American way of thinking, not demonize it or the Australian belief you demonstrated. I do think, though, that you have this impression that most Americans own guns and/or petty crimes involve guns in the US. This simply isn't the case. Further, it's not like the mere existance of a gun in a crime makes it highly probable that one will be shot. Simply put, most thiefs use a gun for fear, not for killing. The same holds true for people who have a gun for self-defense. A thief can't really enjoy their worldly possessions if they're dead. Of course there are exceptions which brings up:
Does comitting a crime entitle you to death? Do you feel qualified to sentence someone to death?
The simple fact is that in certain circumstances, yes I feel qualified in "sentencing" someone to die. In truth, self-defense using a gun that kills a person isn't really sentencing. While I'm against the death penalty, that doesn't mean I'm against self-defense. It's the same reason that I, for example, believe it's fine to kill a soldier on a battlefield while it's not okay to abuse or kill a prisoner once they surender/are captured. And please note that I make this point because it's the same principle of self-defense that applies in both cases, not because I'm dellusional about modern society being anything like a war zone.
I'm a little skeptical that should you need to overthrow a tyrannical government, that laws restricting the use of automatic weapons are going to be a significant obstical. You'll need a better plan than "buy big guns".
Yes and no. One key problem is that throughout history, there's been many times where societies have been able to prosper without a need for weapons of any kind. But even if there's never an outside invader, a progressive or radical change in a society can change which can make it necessary to overthrow one's government. This means that it's necessary to train oneself not because one believes that today, tomorrow, or even any time soon will be the day it's necessary to cast out tyranny. It means that eternal vigilance is necessary because one cannot predict the future, so prepaidness is the only safeguard one has.
And you're right, that perhaps automatic weapons won't help very much alone, and simply buying "bigger guns" isn't necessarily the answer. But that's also the reason behind militias and the freedom of association. It's the reason why tyrannies push more for suppressing speech than arms; it's the power and intelligence of the masses that is what gives the movement against tyranny any chance of success, as well as any chance of remaining free (look at the first French Revolution for an example of the masses more interested in killing the aristocrats than being free, and where that led).
Can you not at least acknowledge that in our case, not yours, that there is a possibility that more guns will only degrade our society and our standard of living?
I can believe for the time being that your culture is so repulsed to guns that the introduction of guns as common would have a radical and degrading effect on your society/standard of living. In the long run, though, I don't know if trying to ban guns will keep you safe, as a society or an individual. And really, I don't know that American's being allowed to guns is the answer either. The only thing I am sure of is that guns and speech are crucial tools to fight tyranny. And while it's possible, thought from my reading of history not at all probable, that Australia will never sink into a tyranny, it is the case that few Americans believe that America will always be a free place. The only real questions to me are, when will there be less speaking and more action and will the results collapse into yet another form of tyranny?
Again, I'm really not trying to demonize any culture. But, my beliefs will certainly conflict with others, and the beautiful part about liberty is that there is nothing which will be done to forcibly change my beleifs or yours.
I believe there were armed Kurds, though I'm not sure if you'd consider that genocide. I'm pretty certain there were many people with guns in Iraq under Saddam's rule. The problem with your argument is you're only partially right. What is often missing is the fact that if you lose the ability to talk and congreate like minded people, you lose the ability to form an effective fighting force to overcome those who would do you harm. Even so, a larger army can still conceivably wipe you out, no matter how many guns you have. Guns are, after all, not the end solution. The key is to realize that guns are merely one tool towards redefining the problem. If the problem is an oppressive regime, then yes guns can possibly help. But if it's an oppressive culture, then attacking the other culture will be a blood civil war. But speech can turn the oppressive culture into an ally, by making it clear that the oppression in the end will hurt them as well.
So, please do not be so short-sighted to say that guns are a panacea. Nor is speech. Nor are guns and speech combined. But even from a purely ulitarian perspective, one needs at least those tools to overcome oppression. And one can only hope that by recognizing that every person has such rights that such oppression will not reform or when it does that it'll be more easily defeated. Of course, supporting it as a pure ideology is another way to think, since clearly that's a world perspective many people view through.
Unlike Americans, we don't believe guns are useful just because it's a gun.
Americans believe guns are useful for what they can do. This means from hunting to sports to self-defense, be it one's home or one's country. I'm not sure if that qualifies as "useful just because it's a gun".
We acknowledge it's a lethal weapon which must be used with care.
Most any sane person recognizes this. There's even a nice Simpsons episodes, where Homer gets a gun, that rather mocks the idea that the NRA is perfectly happy with nuts owning a gun. That's not to say the NRA is going to start a court battle to stop "the crazy people", but that's because many in the NRA don't believe (and past legislation is good proof of this) the government is good at filtering out gun ownership for that purpose.
It is a priveledge, not a right.
It's a right in America for the same reason owning a rock is. That is, it's a right to own just about anything (people aren't a thing), but it's not necessarily a right to use it for its intended purpose. Valid laws are, after all, intended to punish people for their actions, not their state of being or ownership of things.
A liability, a responsibility.
Yes, guns are a liability. And misusing them is very much a responsibility, for which the law holds people accountable. You do realize we have laws against murder, right?
We acknowledge that not every random bastard on the street is going to be responsible and rational enough to engage in safe gun ownership.
I'd acknowledge that too. At the same time, the majority of those people who aren't responsible enough to engage in safe gun ownership are likely to commit a crime and be thrown in prison before being able to purchase a gun, so for them the discussion is moot. For the rest of the "crazies", there's no single test to weed out whether or not someone is competent to own a gun. Nothing about your discussion of paperwork sounds like it actually filters out those peole, just those who aren't smart enough to lie. So, while the amount of people who are simply unable to be responsible with gun ownership might be in the 2-3% range, the rest shouldn't be barred arbitrarily nor does requiring them to get a piece of paper change anything (especialy given that 2-3% can just as easily get said paper). It's a pointless hassle, except for possible tracking purposes.
You must have a legitimate reason to own one, this includes agricultural and sporting applications.
Does defending one's country count?
Letting people own a gun purely because "it's teh c00l" or "self protection" does not benefit society at all.
The same could be said for owning a TV, the free press, or just about anything. One thing to remember is that the Constitution wasn't written only to benefit society--governments had long been claiming that as their basis for their actions well before the Declaration of Independence was written--but primarily to benefit the individual. It requires a much stronger argument than "it's a fad" and "people might misuse it" to start banning something in the US--at least in theory:(. So, while I might not want to own a gun (I don't trust myself yet, given I've not had the training), I realize it's me who has to make that decision. If, after all, the majority of people are not rational enough to limit themselves, then a democracy is by definition doomed.
You know, I just had a funny thought. What if you're running a business over the internet? Does this mean they'll try to stop you if you, say, talk about your experiences at the school as an example of your qualifications? Certainly it'll be an interesting discussion from the "family values" and the "free market" people on just how exactly schools are protecting student businesses from themselves. it seems a great basis, though, to try punishing people for writing a gossip column in a student newspaper (run off school grounds and distributed solely by URL, to get around the past BS about students newspapers at school). Yes, I'm somewhat of a cynic.:/
Yes, one can throw enough money at the problem to get a custom card so that even a really slow system (I think a Tivo uses a ~75MHz CPU) can support encoding. My point was that even without a custom card it's quite possible to do direct mpeg4 encoding on a cheap box today, which only highlights what'll be possible in the future. In any case, if digital ever becomes standard, all that will be needed is a program to dump the compressed stream to the HD, and then there *really* won't be a need for much of a CPU. I just wish that satellite, cable, and broadcast all would switch already and make a ready connection to computers, since it's virtually always easier to handle disk space in one mass than a bunch of clusters.
I'd just like to state for the record that the ability to compress video on the fly is here and now. On my 1.26GHz machine, I was quite easily able to record at 320x320 in mpeg4 and mp3 at ~50% CPU utilization--it's square to support some deinterlacing to appear less jagged. Now, it's possible to record and play back this video at the same time. The only real limitation is you wouldn't want to record a show and say play a CPU intensive game. But if you've got the CPU time to spare and already have a computer with a good bit of disk space (~400MB/30 minute show), it's not out of the question to use your computer as a PVR.
And of course, as a dedicated box, Tivo and the like are still better. But if dual cores become common, then it really will just be another small task to do video recording of TV shows on the side...assuming that on-demand d/ling is a flop/delayed/whatever.
Think about that for a second. The reason the metafile exists is to not only provide the url(s) of the file, the filename, and the filesize, but it also includes the encryption key. Ie, if you upload the metafile(1), you're going to need a metafile(2) with a key to get the metafile(1). Ie, no, it won't work.
And if the day does occur that GNU fades into obscurity--a point at which I'm not exactly holding my breathe waiting for to happen--it will be a sad day for the free market. You see, the GPL is actually a very free license. GNU, through the GPL, is one of the few movements that's worked towards turning copyrighted works more towards the free market. How, you ask? By removing the government created monopoly of exclusive distribution. The same sort of freedom that lets a company use BSD code in their commercial product should be just as freely available to another person or company to use their commercial product in their commercial product. Of course, this leads to a commercial price approaching $0 (not actually $0, though) for most software (much business software, being funded on a service basis, will still be able based on salaries/contract pay), but that's exactly what you'd expect on a good with such a small production and distribution cost.
So, as marxist as it might be to demand the source with the binary, the currently twisted copyright law leaves the GPL the closest widely used (closest, period?) license to a lack of copyright law and an existance of no government control over creative works. Ironic, eh?
There's nothing wrong with the argument; you simply didn't fully paraphrase it properly. The correct way to paraphrase would be "just because 99% of people don't want murder to happen doesn't mean banning it isn't a violation of one's civil liberties". This is quite true. The basis upon which banning murder isn't a violation of one's civil liberties is that murder itself is a violation of the rights of others. It has nothing to do with the fact that 99% or even 1% are in support of banning it. Of course, the basis upon which it is illegal is that 99% want to ban it, but that which is illegal and that which is not a civil liberty are clearly not the same thing in most places. Whether you consider that a good thing or not is a side point. The fact remains that owning a gun, or a nuke, or really just about anything is a civil liberty. It's simply the fact that socities, for better or worse, have decided to ban such civil liberties "for the community good".
Personally, I'm opposed to banning any civil liberties on such a basis. From the way you and others speak, I get the impression you feel the same (by equating illegal with non-civil liberties). It is, afterall, the direct violation of individual rights that's the deciding pointing on what is a civil liberty, not vague indirectly societal violations. So, one has to accept that if they want to ban guns, they're deciding to favor the community's "rights" over the civil rights of a person. Again, for better or for worse.
The US mentality and laws about guns is dominated by sheer stupidity.
If by law you mean Constitution, then I'd love to hear how exactly it is this stupidity you speak of.
Banning guns and bombs has nothing to do with civil liberties, but with having a society where people don't kill each other as easily, either by mistake or by intent.
Interesting. So, it is your contention that it is government, not people, that shape society. I didn't realize that it was government that was stopping me from owning a gun. If you had read my original post, you'd have noticed that I made it clear that upwards of 99% of people don't want handguns. It's this fact, not the government, that's making society better. However you want to slice it (calling it stupidity, for example), the majority deciding to ban something they disagree with solely based on their paranoia on misuse of something is a violation of civil liberties. It is, afterall, a right of every person to do anything so long as it does not interfere with the rights of another. While clearly this dynamic is hard to quantify as exact rights, it is quite clear that merely owning a gun, a nuke, or a can of cheeze whiz does not interfere with the rights of others.
If you need a handgun for shooting at a club or because you're a hunter, apply for it.
Why? If anyone who wants to own a handgun can simply by getting a license, then clearly the whole purpose of such laws is to track, through a license, people. Actually, there's an even more nefarious point to this. Thanks to the fact that one has to get a license, it's possible then to deny an ex-felon access to a gun. Let me ask you something, though. Do you really feel safer letting an ex-felon walking around simply because they can't legally obtain a gun, knowing full well that they're an *ex-felon* and by assumption of being barred from owning a gun, are looking to commit an illegal act. Simply put, licensing guns becomes a means of punishing people even after they've "served their time". To that end, it makes the whole country a prison for these ex-felons, and you just happen to live in it too.
Personally, I'd feel safer if there were no licenses and less of these "dangerous" felons were ever freed from jail. But I see nothing in these licenses which provide any real safety. They only provide a means to track/convict after a crime has been committed (I guess an argument could be made here that at least the tracking could probably catch a serial killer faster than otherwise to reduce overall crime) and to make the whole country police officers instead of adequate maintaining a closed prison. I just don't see how fundamentally questioning such a system is "stupid".
I hate to break it to you, but just because 60% or 90% or even 99% of people don't want to own a handgun doesn't mean them banning a handgun for the 1% that do isn't a violation of a civil liberty. If it were truly the case that there was complete support for banning handguns, then there'd be no need for a law to ban handguns; people simply would choose not to possess, buy, or sell them. Clearly the case is that one group, however large, has decided that another group, however small, is likely to buy a handgun and use it against the first group.
The problem is, that's paranoia. It might be justifiable paranoia, but it's paranoia never the less. It's very similar to laws against drunk driving. The purpose is to a) catch a person before they break another law or b) to magnify punishment for breaking lower laws. The problem with this is that the former simple makes criminals out of people solely based on a presumption of guilt and a majority's paranoia; ie, it's simply violating the majority violation a person's civil liberties. The problem with the latter is that if one can take an unrelated activity to justify magnifying punishment for a crime, then the crime itself should have a harsher punishment to begin with. Or in simpler terms, if you're weaving all over the road, your license should be removed because you're a bad driver; it's irrelevant that you chose to drink or your bad driving is an inherent defect in your abilities. Similarly, stealing from another with a weapon or causing harm with a weapon should be severely punished, regardless of if the weapon is a handgun or a knife.
So, while I'd certainly understand why individuals would choose to decide not to give a person a drink if they're driving or handing over a gun to someone unless they really trust them, the law should be blind to such things and only concerned about the abstract acts that occurred against one person by another. Making people guilty before violating another person is the road that's lined with banning the personal use of drugs/alcohol and leaves the majority open to dictate what activities it deems acceptable, regardless of the fact that such activities effect no one but the person themself. That's why such is evil.
Is that sort of like "How many licks to the center of a tootsie roll pop?"? Perhaps what is needed is an owl to do a few licks then bite right through to reach the goal. I don't think that simply sending in $100 bills will do the job.
It's ironic that there aren't more articles talking about the looming failure of Vista, which will likely sell at the same price (for the home user) but have more features. And Vista will certainly require a beefer computer for a lot of people, so the truth is that the side costs to actually use it will almost certainly cost more (how much, due to the commoditization when the beefy specs become the norm, is still unknown). So, nice comment.
A capitalist doesn't fear competition; he simply loathes it. Competition gets in his way of using his capital to generate more capital in most cases (exceptions apply when a capitalist is a monopolist who lets smaller companies invent new efficiencies or designs that they copy and then use to make more money and buy/crush said small companies, a la MS). The sad part is not realizing that the free market is pretty much a simplified world view of markets in general. Be it government or hired goons that interfere with this ideal, capitalism and morality are neither models that fully support the free market.
In general, it's those who are being "wronged" economically that call for a free market but those who are on top who call for capitalism. And morality can side with those wanting to enter the market, who will drive down prices and reduce the effectiveness of greed, as well as against capitalists, who would sell their own mother to make a dollar, as well as for capitalists, for those who have a long term vision of success which entails bettering the life of those who are sold to.
So, I'm not wearing any rose colored glasses that capitalists are some sort of saint or that the free market will ever trully exist (long term situates are hard to predict, so free markets buyers and sellers can only play a game of chess with short term and long term strategies to try to win). Instead, I simply don't trust elected officials to do the right thing to resolve problems. Movements of the people through group actions to try to correct the free market by increasing information flow, even when capitalists try to stifle it, are the only long term solution: eternal vigilance.
PS - I'm mainly responding because there's way too many people who want to equate the free market with capitalism, but when the free market demands that customs have perfect information and capitalism is about selling (ie, controlling the flow of) information, there's clearly no way they can be equivalent or one the subset of the other.
And who's to say that you didn't find out about the whole "plot" why smoking pot? The simple fact is, there's a serious problem with the amendments to the constitution. Primarily, a criminal defendant can compel people to speak as witnesses for them, yet at the same time those witnesses are supposed to be granted 5th amendment protection themselves which might very well prevent them from speaking. Granting any type of immunity really doesn't resolve the problem because clearly you're still incriminating yourself; you're just not likely to be convicted.
The real core issue, though, is that the prosecutor/judge/etc can't know that something you might say will incriminate you unless you say it. So, I'd say they're clearly not the people that should be compelling you to testify under claim that you're really not self-incriminating. Seeing how you can be effectively jailed indefinitely for not testifying before grand jury or a criminal jury, I'd say such "contempt of court" would be an infamous crime and need due process of law (ie, a jury trial) to rectify. And since you're unwilling to testify, there'd be nothing to punish you for, so you'd have to be set free. That's, at least, the closest sort of resolution I can work out from the many different parts of the Bill of Rights.
>>I'd rather we have a bunch of horny kids out there humping than have a bunch of violent ones out there killing each other.
>Where you imply that violent games lead kids to become "violent ones out there killing each other", which I strongly disagree with. And then you go on to:
>>And don't give me the crap about porn leading to rape.
>Where you seem to disagree with yourself as to the ability of media to influence children.
No. He's disagreeing with the belief (or really, the teary eyed BS) that porn is violent or leads to violence. His argument is perhaps kids watching porn will turn them into porn stars, but kids watching porn won't make them rape. It'd be, by analogy, claiming playing a video game where you kill makes one steal. There's no real connection between those two except that killing (in most cases) and theft are crimes.
And no, this isn't me agreeing with his belief that media directly effects children or adults. That doesn't mean I like repeating hearing the wacky unrelated connection between two things which are even farther apart. I'd assume that those who are against sex in general, except for some distinct scope of reproduction, bring up rape because otherwise the majority of people would just shrug, realizing that kids are going to go out and have sex, and video games aren't the start of that nor will filtering somehow stop it. So, the only way to stop such "smut" is to make it out that it causes something people are offended with.
I mean, imagine if there were a game called "Cops", where you were directed to do all the appropriate actions a cop would take, including shooting at a criminal if necessary. Those who are against violent video games in general would end up spinning it to make it look like GTA. It's a sickening fact that too many people with an agenda will play illogic games, and they're so rarely called on it.
So, should Microsoft wait until a bank decides to use MS-DOS 6.0 and loses data because someone decided to use Dblspace (and the customers can sue the banks afterwards for such stupidity)? Will MS try to claim the EULA exempts them? Or do you think MS might be bankrupted if that happens a few times. The simple fact is, people know not to use Microsoft software in critical applications because of examples like this. Microsoft wasn't proactive in protecting data, which might be worth billions of dollars. It would have been amusing, though, for them to have gone bankrupt over their greed to sell out updates for ~$10 to fix a serious bug.
This still seems like bait and switch. The issue is still distribution. There's nothing stopping you from making a derivative work or making a new work. Nothing about the software prevents your ability to use it. The license only restricts distribution. Derviation is an irrelevant and separate tangent.
Btw, if you think distribution rules are "unreasonable", then might I suggest you work to end copyright, whose entire basis of law is restricting distribution and performance, not use. It's questionable if any EULA one agreed to could legally even restrict use--I state this because if EULAs have to either be agreed to or the software returned, which implies that it's an extension of copyright (otherwise you could just work around the EULA as a part of your use right), and such an extension can go beyond the extent of the original power of the document. It'd be like forcing you to agree to not drink, ever, whenever you pay off a traffic fine. You can't bind arbitrary contracts to things that one is "required" to do that are beyond the scope of the original law.
Surely people aren't so stupid as to be confused by 7 different types of GNU/Linux. If someone had done a similar article about the number of Windows versions out there, would it have been posted on the front page of slashdot? Sure, RMS is a power-hungry greedy individual convicted of free software spreading activities, but this is going a bit far.
I hereby propose some legitimate reasons to bash GNU/Linux: 1) Linus refuses to play nice with Proprietary developers. 2) RMS actively seek to destroy any proprietary competition, regardless of whether the competition is actually helping the computer community or not. 3) RMS is promoting licenses that will kill patent law usage
Those are all (I think) legitimate complaints against GNU/Linux. Calling Debian/RedHat/etc "nutty" for releasing 7 versions of an OS is rather stupid and petty. I have no doubt that the average person can simply read a chart that has little checks next to "features" and decide which of the 7 they want. This will actually help people, I think, because it will prevent people from getting extraneous software that might increase their risk of attack.
People often complain about GNU/Linux bundling too many things in their OS and how there's a lack of flexibility, and now they complain because GNU/Linux is "too" flexible and might "confuse" the poor ignorant user who is incapable of choosing between 7 different forms of GNU/Linux.
One of the points basically comes down to "write perfect code".
I'd say his argument is closer to "don't write in C". Primarily exploits like buffer overflows are a resulting of using C. Now, as you point out, if one wrote perfect code, then using C would be fine. But clearly people don't write perfect code. So, the next best thing is to use a language that is designed to handle a lot of the problems that are experienced in incorrectly using C.
Of course, there's nothing about using Java or another language that makes your system immune from attack. But Java/Lisp/another high level language, design-by-contract, and checks for overflows (or using a language where overflows basically can't occur) would go a long way to turning exploits into loggable DOS attacks. The best way to design well is to use tools geared toward that end. Sadly, C isn't one of them.
His argument that an OS should ask you before running something is also stupid. How many users do you know who would actually read & understand such a question? Never mind actually giving a sensible answer.
Few. But the users he's primarily talking about are those on company workstations/desktops, not home users. In such an environment it makes perfect sense to lock down the system and give the IT department the control on whether a user can run programs. To that end, the user never has to give a sensible answer. They just need to have their IT staff "do the right thing". The fact that no OS seems to support such well isn't a good thing (Linux sort of supports it, but you have to go through hoops to set it up).
Now, what about the home user? The fact is, while most home users are incapable of knowing whether something is "good" or "bad", there's nothing to stop the OS from figuring out if a program was installed properly and only allowing such to run. Further, there's nothing stopping the OS from setting to so it's trivial to block a program from running ever; imagine, for example, being able to easily keep MSN Messenger from loading. The fact is, modern OSs are a long way from allowing the sort of fine-grain control over program behavior. Zonealarm seems a great example of a step in the right direction, allowing independent blocking of in/out network traffic.
Users might know very little of how to do "the right thing", but that doesn't mean the OS can't do a lot on its own. Nor does it mean that the user can't try and succeed a lot of the time. Of course, don't be surprised when you'll have to reenable Java for granny after you disabled it one day because of an annoying web ad but the next can't get a web game to work. Of course, the real answer then is more granular control. And of course, as was stated, the opt-in, not opt-out mentality so that granny never had to disable the web ad in the first place, but instead she's the one who enabled support for the web game.
Slashdot Mirror
Better yet, why isn't there relative modding, where people who mod similarly to you auto-mods posts (ie, just like the suggested mechanism to overcome poisoning a p2p network; trolls are out to poison this blog, right?). And yes, I could use the source. So, clearly I'm just as insightful as the parent to be bitching about why things aren't done already the way I want.
This is the only method to stop cheating, and thats to be invasive.
Uh, no. There's really two steps to crack all such cheat-prevention software. One, read/disassemble any code that's on your HD and crack it. Two, sniff the connection, possibly using code from the program to decrypt it, and read/disassemble any code sent to your system. So long as there's a way to crack the programs themselves and the connection between machines is a simple data channel (ie, there's no way to verify something directly, but you have to rely on a program to not lie), it's possible to overcome any such protections. The real way to stop cheating is to never provide clients with more information than they should have and have the server run the state machine, allowing only verified relative changes--this is rather CPU-intensive and probably the reason why the invasive hack approach is taken. Hypothetically, though, with DRM it won't be necessary to do things the right way, and these hacks will have the backing of hardware to protect them. It still might not be enough, though, to prevent sniff/stuffing of packets, which could still allow cheating.
Isn't the flu a virus--ie, it's not alive--and hence not covered under evolution?
I totally agree that the drawing functions should be in user space. And while this harkens back to this comment, it also brings up an interesting point brought up by this comment. Or to summarize, MS seems to try to hire really smart people to do really impossible things in the name of marketing, and so they'll succeed in the market a lot of the time (and by their design have more problems, as well as their popularity), they're willing to go to pretty great lengths to entirely butcher a good idea.
I make this point especially because it was decided in Windows 2000 to move the GUI drawing routines into the kernel, as the context switching was such a huge burden on performance. And while certainly if MS had went the more "mellow" route of following good design, there'd still be many disgruntled people (MS business practices--ie, not just marketing--also piss a lot of people off) who would use their, almost certainly, lower benchmark scores to demonstrate why open source was better than Windows. In the end, though, even with Windows obvious dominance in the market place (again, I think business practices assured that at some point--say, Windows 98), in this hypothetical parallel world, Windows would be a hell of a lot safer.
I say this because I think it's important to remember. As vehemently as people hate Microsoft, possibly even Microsoft programmers for writing such "swill" code, I think it's worth nothing that these programmers are only human. And the project they've been given is such monsterous beasts, it's unlikely that--short of a radical shift in the way Microsoft functions--Windows could ever have been written more securely. So, I say put more blame on the marketers and the businessmen, and less blame on the programmers' abilities. Of course, if you want to dislike these people for working for such a company *still* after finally figuring out that they'd be given such ridiculous projects, that's a whole other thing. But, that's another story.
The real question is, how long until Osama bin Laden legally changes his name to George W. Bush. And how many times does Bush need to be strip searched before the system is scrapped because the whole "No Fly List" is fucking retarded*.
*Note: No insulting to retarded individuals is intented. Being born with a mental defect or gaining it through no fault of one's own is not at all realistically comparable to repeated, willful stupidity. Unfortunately, the sheer heights of stupidity some people exhibit cannot succinctly be stated, and clearly trying to use the word retarded to fudge for this fact is doing a disservice to the retarded and to stated idiots. If you can think of any word or words to use to better describe this phenomenon, please reply.
I'm sorry if I sounded a bit harsh, but I was trying to clarify the American way of thinking, not demonize it or the Australian belief you demonstrated. I do think, though, that you have this impression that most Americans own guns and/or petty crimes involve guns in the US. This simply isn't the case. Further, it's not like the mere existance of a gun in a crime makes it highly probable that one will be shot. Simply put, most thiefs use a gun for fear, not for killing. The same holds true for people who have a gun for self-defense. A thief can't really enjoy their worldly possessions if they're dead. Of course there are exceptions which brings up:
Does comitting a crime entitle you to death? Do you feel qualified to sentence someone to death?
The simple fact is that in certain circumstances, yes I feel qualified in "sentencing" someone to die. In truth, self-defense using a gun that kills a person isn't really sentencing. While I'm against the death penalty, that doesn't mean I'm against self-defense. It's the same reason that I, for example, believe it's fine to kill a soldier on a battlefield while it's not okay to abuse or kill a prisoner once they surender/are captured. And please note that I make this point because it's the same principle of self-defense that applies in both cases, not because I'm dellusional about modern society being anything like a war zone.
I'm a little skeptical that should you need to overthrow a tyrannical government, that laws restricting the use of automatic weapons are going to be a significant obstical. You'll need a better plan than "buy big guns".
Yes and no. One key problem is that throughout history, there's been many times where societies have been able to prosper without a need for weapons of any kind. But even if there's never an outside invader, a progressive or radical change in a society can change which can make it necessary to overthrow one's government. This means that it's necessary to train oneself not because one believes that today, tomorrow, or even any time soon will be the day it's necessary to cast out tyranny. It means that eternal vigilance is necessary because one cannot predict the future, so prepaidness is the only safeguard one has.
And you're right, that perhaps automatic weapons won't help very much alone, and simply buying "bigger guns" isn't necessarily the answer. But that's also the reason behind militias and the freedom of association. It's the reason why tyrannies push more for suppressing speech than arms; it's the power and intelligence of the masses that is what gives the movement against tyranny any chance of success, as well as any chance of remaining free (look at the first French Revolution for an example of the masses more interested in killing the aristocrats than being free, and where that led).
Can you not at least acknowledge that in our case, not yours, that there is a possibility that more guns will only degrade our society and our standard of living?
I can believe for the time being that your culture is so repulsed to guns that the introduction of guns as common would have a radical and degrading effect on your society/standard of living. In the long run, though, I don't know if trying to ban guns will keep you safe, as a society or an individual. And really, I don't know that American's being allowed to guns is the answer either. The only thing I am sure of is that guns and speech are crucial tools to fight tyranny. And while it's possible, thought from my reading of history not at all probable, that Australia will never sink into a tyranny, it is the case that few Americans believe that America will always be a free place. The only real questions to me are, when will there be less speaking and more action and will the results collapse into yet another form of tyranny?
Again, I'm really not trying to demonize any culture. But, my beliefs will certainly conflict with others, and the beautiful part about liberty is that there is nothing which will be done to forcibly change my beleifs or yours.
I believe there were armed Kurds, though I'm not sure if you'd consider that genocide. I'm pretty certain there were many people with guns in Iraq under Saddam's rule. The problem with your argument is you're only partially right. What is often missing is the fact that if you lose the ability to talk and congreate like minded people, you lose the ability to form an effective fighting force to overcome those who would do you harm. Even so, a larger army can still conceivably wipe you out, no matter how many guns you have. Guns are, after all, not the end solution. The key is to realize that guns are merely one tool towards redefining the problem. If the problem is an oppressive regime, then yes guns can possibly help. But if it's an oppressive culture, then attacking the other culture will be a blood civil war. But speech can turn the oppressive culture into an ally, by making it clear that the oppression in the end will hurt them as well.
So, please do not be so short-sighted to say that guns are a panacea. Nor is speech. Nor are guns and speech combined. But even from a purely ulitarian perspective, one needs at least those tools to overcome oppression. And one can only hope that by recognizing that every person has such rights that such oppression will not reform or when it does that it'll be more easily defeated. Of course, supporting it as a pure ideology is another way to think, since clearly that's a world perspective many people view through.
Unlike Americans, we don't believe guns are useful just because it's a gun.
:(. So, while I might not want to own a gun (I don't trust myself yet, given I've not had the training), I realize it's me who has to make that decision. If, after all, the majority of people are not rational enough to limit themselves, then a democracy is by definition doomed.
Americans believe guns are useful for what they can do. This means from hunting to sports to self-defense, be it one's home or one's country. I'm not sure if that qualifies as "useful just because it's a gun".
We acknowledge it's a lethal weapon which must be used with care.
Most any sane person recognizes this. There's even a nice Simpsons episodes, where Homer gets a gun, that rather mocks the idea that the NRA is perfectly happy with nuts owning a gun. That's not to say the NRA is going to start a court battle to stop "the crazy people", but that's because many in the NRA don't believe (and past legislation is good proof of this) the government is good at filtering out gun ownership for that purpose.
It is a priveledge, not a right.
It's a right in America for the same reason owning a rock is. That is, it's a right to own just about anything (people aren't a thing), but it's not necessarily a right to use it for its intended purpose. Valid laws are, after all, intended to punish people for their actions, not their state of being or ownership of things.
A liability, a responsibility.
Yes, guns are a liability. And misusing them is very much a responsibility, for which the law holds people accountable. You do realize we have laws against murder, right?
We acknowledge that not every random bastard on the street is going to be responsible and rational enough to engage in safe gun ownership.
I'd acknowledge that too. At the same time, the majority of those people who aren't responsible enough to engage in safe gun ownership are likely to commit a crime and be thrown in prison before being able to purchase a gun, so for them the discussion is moot. For the rest of the "crazies", there's no single test to weed out whether or not someone is competent to own a gun. Nothing about your discussion of paperwork sounds like it actually filters out those peole, just those who aren't smart enough to lie. So, while the amount of people who are simply unable to be responsible with gun ownership might be in the 2-3% range, the rest shouldn't be barred arbitrarily nor does requiring them to get a piece of paper change anything (especialy given that 2-3% can just as easily get said paper). It's a pointless hassle, except for possible tracking purposes.
You must have a legitimate reason to own one, this includes agricultural and sporting applications.
Does defending one's country count?
Letting people own a gun purely because "it's teh c00l" or "self protection" does not benefit society at all.
The same could be said for owning a TV, the free press, or just about anything. One thing to remember is that the Constitution wasn't written only to benefit society--governments had long been claiming that as their basis for their actions well before the Declaration of Independence was written--but primarily to benefit the individual. It requires a much stronger argument than "it's a fad" and "people might misuse it" to start banning something in the US--at least in theory
You know, I just had a funny thought. What if you're running a business over the internet? Does this mean they'll try to stop you if you, say, talk about your experiences at the school as an example of your qualifications? Certainly it'll be an interesting discussion from the "family values" and the "free market" people on just how exactly schools are protecting student businesses from themselves. it seems a great basis, though, to try punishing people for writing a gossip column in a student newspaper (run off school grounds and distributed solely by URL, to get around the past BS about students newspapers at school). Yes, I'm somewhat of a cynic. :/
Yes, one can throw enough money at the problem to get a custom card so that even a really slow system (I think a Tivo uses a ~75MHz CPU) can support encoding. My point was that even without a custom card it's quite possible to do direct mpeg4 encoding on a cheap box today, which only highlights what'll be possible in the future. In any case, if digital ever becomes standard, all that will be needed is a program to dump the compressed stream to the HD, and then there *really* won't be a need for much of a CPU. I just wish that satellite, cable, and broadcast all would switch already and make a ready connection to computers, since it's virtually always easier to handle disk space in one mass than a bunch of clusters.
I'd just like to state for the record that the ability to compress video on the fly is here and now. On my 1.26GHz machine, I was quite easily able to record at 320x320 in mpeg4 and mp3 at ~50% CPU utilization--it's square to support some deinterlacing to appear less jagged. Now, it's possible to record and play back this video at the same time. The only real limitation is you wouldn't want to record a show and say play a CPU intensive game. But if you've got the CPU time to spare and already have a computer with a good bit of disk space (~400MB/30 minute show), it's not out of the question to use your computer as a PVR.
And of course, as a dedicated box, Tivo and the like are still better. But if dual cores become common, then it really will just be another small task to do video recording of TV shows on the side...assuming that on-demand d/ling is a flop/delayed/whatever.
Think about that for a second. The reason the metafile exists is to not only provide the url(s) of the file, the filename, and the filesize, but it also includes the encryption key. Ie, if you upload the metafile(1), you're going to need a metafile(2) with a key to get the metafile(1). Ie, no, it won't work.
And if the day does occur that GNU fades into obscurity--a point at which I'm not exactly holding my breathe waiting for to happen--it will be a sad day for the free market. You see, the GPL is actually a very free license. GNU, through the GPL, is one of the few movements that's worked towards turning copyrighted works more towards the free market. How, you ask? By removing the government created monopoly of exclusive distribution. The same sort of freedom that lets a company use BSD code in their commercial product should be just as freely available to another person or company to use their commercial product in their commercial product. Of course, this leads to a commercial price approaching $0 (not actually $0, though) for most software (much business software, being funded on a service basis, will still be able based on salaries/contract pay), but that's exactly what you'd expect on a good with such a small production and distribution cost.
So, as marxist as it might be to demand the source with the binary, the currently twisted copyright law leaves the GPL the closest widely used (closest, period?) license to a lack of copyright law and an existance of no government control over creative works. Ironic, eh?
There's nothing wrong with the argument; you simply didn't fully paraphrase it properly. The correct way to paraphrase would be "just because 99% of people don't want murder to happen doesn't mean banning it isn't a violation of one's civil liberties". This is quite true. The basis upon which banning murder isn't a violation of one's civil liberties is that murder itself is a violation of the rights of others. It has nothing to do with the fact that 99% or even 1% are in support of banning it. Of course, the basis upon which it is illegal is that 99% want to ban it, but that which is illegal and that which is not a civil liberty are clearly not the same thing in most places. Whether you consider that a good thing or not is a side point. The fact remains that owning a gun, or a nuke, or really just about anything is a civil liberty. It's simply the fact that socities, for better or worse, have decided to ban such civil liberties "for the community good".
Personally, I'm opposed to banning any civil liberties on such a basis. From the way you and others speak, I get the impression you feel the same (by equating illegal with non-civil liberties). It is, afterall, the direct violation of individual rights that's the deciding pointing on what is a civil liberty, not vague indirectly societal violations. So, one has to accept that if they want to ban guns, they're deciding to favor the community's "rights" over the civil rights of a person. Again, for better or for worse.
The US mentality and laws about guns is dominated by sheer stupidity.
If by law you mean Constitution, then I'd love to hear how exactly it is this stupidity you speak of.
Banning guns and bombs has nothing to do with civil liberties, but with having a society where people don't kill each other as easily, either by mistake or by intent.
Interesting. So, it is your contention that it is government, not people, that shape society. I didn't realize that it was government that was stopping me from owning a gun. If you had read my original post, you'd have noticed that I made it clear that upwards of 99% of people don't want handguns. It's this fact, not the government, that's making society better. However you want to slice it (calling it stupidity, for example), the majority deciding to ban something they disagree with solely based on their paranoia on misuse of something is a violation of civil liberties. It is, afterall, a right of every person to do anything so long as it does not interfere with the rights of another. While clearly this dynamic is hard to quantify as exact rights, it is quite clear that merely owning a gun, a nuke, or a can of cheeze whiz does not interfere with the rights of others.
If you need a handgun for shooting at a club or because you're a hunter, apply for it.
Why? If anyone who wants to own a handgun can simply by getting a license, then clearly the whole purpose of such laws is to track, through a license, people. Actually, there's an even more nefarious point to this. Thanks to the fact that one has to get a license, it's possible then to deny an ex-felon access to a gun. Let me ask you something, though. Do you really feel safer letting an ex-felon walking around simply because they can't legally obtain a gun, knowing full well that they're an *ex-felon* and by assumption of being barred from owning a gun, are looking to commit an illegal act. Simply put, licensing guns becomes a means of punishing people even after they've "served their time". To that end, it makes the whole country a prison for these ex-felons, and you just happen to live in it too.
Personally, I'd feel safer if there were no licenses and less of these "dangerous" felons were ever freed from jail. But I see nothing in these licenses which provide any real safety. They only provide a means to track/convict after a crime has been committed (I guess an argument could be made here that at least the tracking could probably catch a serial killer faster than otherwise to reduce overall crime) and to make the whole country police officers instead of adequate maintaining a closed prison. I just don't see how fundamentally questioning such a system is "stupid".
I hate to break it to you, but just because 60% or 90% or even 99% of people don't want to own a handgun doesn't mean them banning a handgun for the 1% that do isn't a violation of a civil liberty. If it were truly the case that there was complete support for banning handguns, then there'd be no need for a law to ban handguns; people simply would choose not to possess, buy, or sell them. Clearly the case is that one group, however large, has decided that another group, however small, is likely to buy a handgun and use it against the first group.
The problem is, that's paranoia. It might be justifiable paranoia, but it's paranoia never the less. It's very similar to laws against drunk driving. The purpose is to a) catch a person before they break another law or b) to magnify punishment for breaking lower laws. The problem with this is that the former simple makes criminals out of people solely based on a presumption of guilt and a majority's paranoia; ie, it's simply violating the majority violation a person's civil liberties. The problem with the latter is that if one can take an unrelated activity to justify magnifying punishment for a crime, then the crime itself should have a harsher punishment to begin with. Or in simpler terms, if you're weaving all over the road, your license should be removed because you're a bad driver; it's irrelevant that you chose to drink or your bad driving is an inherent defect in your abilities. Similarly, stealing from another with a weapon or causing harm with a weapon should be severely punished, regardless of if the weapon is a handgun or a knife.
So, while I'd certainly understand why individuals would choose to decide not to give a person a drink if they're driving or handing over a gun to someone unless they really trust them, the law should be blind to such things and only concerned about the abstract acts that occurred against one person by another. Making people guilty before violating another person is the road that's lined with banning the personal use of drugs/alcohol and leaves the majority open to dictate what activities it deems acceptable, regardless of the fact that such activities effect no one but the person themself. That's why such is evil.
Is that sort of like "How many licks to the center of a tootsie roll pop?"? Perhaps what is needed is an owl to do a few licks then bite right through to reach the goal. I don't think that simply sending in $100 bills will do the job.
It's ironic that there aren't more articles talking about the looming failure of Vista, which will likely sell at the same price (for the home user) but have more features. And Vista will certainly require a beefer computer for a lot of people, so the truth is that the side costs to actually use it will almost certainly cost more (how much, due to the commoditization when the beefy specs become the norm, is still unknown). So, nice comment.
> A capitalist doesn't fear competition
A capitalist doesn't fear competition; he simply loathes it. Competition gets in his way of using his capital to generate more capital in most cases (exceptions apply when a capitalist is a monopolist who lets smaller companies invent new efficiencies or designs that they copy and then use to make more money and buy/crush said small companies, a la MS). The sad part is not realizing that the free market is pretty much a simplified world view of markets in general. Be it government or hired goons that interfere with this ideal, capitalism and morality are neither models that fully support the free market.
In general, it's those who are being "wronged" economically that call for a free market but those who are on top who call for capitalism. And morality can side with those wanting to enter the market, who will drive down prices and reduce the effectiveness of greed, as well as against capitalists, who would sell their own mother to make a dollar, as well as for capitalists, for those who have a long term vision of success which entails bettering the life of those who are sold to.
So, I'm not wearing any rose colored glasses that capitalists are some sort of saint or that the free market will ever trully exist (long term situates are hard to predict, so free markets buyers and sellers can only play a game of chess with short term and long term strategies to try to win). Instead, I simply don't trust elected officials to do the right thing to resolve problems. Movements of the people through group actions to try to correct the free market by increasing information flow, even when capitalists try to stifle it, are the only long term solution: eternal vigilance.
PS - I'm mainly responding because there's way too many people who want to equate the free market with capitalism, but when the free market demands that customs have perfect information and capitalism is about selling (ie, controlling the flow of) information, there's clearly no way they can be equivalent or one the subset of the other.
And who's to say that you didn't find out about the whole "plot" why smoking pot? The simple fact is, there's a serious problem with the amendments to the constitution. Primarily, a criminal defendant can compel people to speak as witnesses for them, yet at the same time those witnesses are supposed to be granted 5th amendment protection themselves which might very well prevent them from speaking. Granting any type of immunity really doesn't resolve the problem because clearly you're still incriminating yourself; you're just not likely to be convicted.
The real core issue, though, is that the prosecutor/judge/etc can't know that something you might say will incriminate you unless you say it. So, I'd say they're clearly not the people that should be compelling you to testify under claim that you're really not self-incriminating. Seeing how you can be effectively jailed indefinitely for not testifying before grand jury or a criminal jury, I'd say such "contempt of court" would be an infamous crime and need due process of law (ie, a jury trial) to rectify. And since you're unwilling to testify, there'd be nothing to punish you for, so you'd have to be set free. That's, at least, the closest sort of resolution I can work out from the many different parts of the Bill of Rights.
>>I'd rather we have a bunch of horny kids out there humping than have a bunch of violent ones out there killing each other.
>Where you imply that violent games lead kids to become "violent ones out there killing each other", which I strongly disagree with. And then you go on to:
>>And don't give me the crap about porn leading to rape.
>Where you seem to disagree with yourself as to the ability of media to influence children.
No. He's disagreeing with the belief (or really, the teary eyed BS) that porn is violent or leads to violence. His argument is perhaps kids watching porn will turn them into porn stars, but kids watching porn won't make them rape. It'd be, by analogy, claiming playing a video game where you kill makes one steal. There's no real connection between those two except that killing (in most cases) and theft are crimes.
And no, this isn't me agreeing with his belief that media directly effects children or adults. That doesn't mean I like repeating hearing the wacky unrelated connection between two things which are even farther apart. I'd assume that those who are against sex in general, except for some distinct scope of reproduction, bring up rape because otherwise the majority of people would just shrug, realizing that kids are going to go out and have sex, and video games aren't the start of that nor will filtering somehow stop it. So, the only way to stop such "smut" is to make it out that it causes something people are offended with.
I mean, imagine if there were a game called "Cops", where you were directed to do all the appropriate actions a cop would take, including shooting at a criminal if necessary. Those who are against violent video games in general would end up spinning it to make it look like GTA. It's a sickening fact that too many people with an agenda will play illogic games, and they're so rarely called on it.
So, should Microsoft wait until a bank decides to use MS-DOS 6.0 and loses data because someone decided to use Dblspace (and the customers can sue the banks afterwards for such stupidity)? Will MS try to claim the EULA exempts them? Or do you think MS might be bankrupted if that happens a few times. The simple fact is, people know not to use Microsoft software in critical applications because of examples like this. Microsoft wasn't proactive in protecting data, which might be worth billions of dollars. It would have been amusing, though, for them to have gone bankrupt over their greed to sell out updates for ~$10 to fix a serious bug.
This still seems like bait and switch. The issue is still distribution. There's nothing stopping you from making a derivative work or making a new work. Nothing about the software prevents your ability to use it. The license only restricts distribution. Derviation is an irrelevant and separate tangent.
Btw, if you think distribution rules are "unreasonable", then might I suggest you work to end copyright, whose entire basis of law is restricting distribution and performance, not use. It's questionable if any EULA one agreed to could legally even restrict use--I state this because if EULAs have to either be agreed to or the software returned, which implies that it's an extension of copyright (otherwise you could just work around the EULA as a part of your use right), and such an extension can go beyond the extent of the original power of the document. It'd be like forcing you to agree to not drink, ever, whenever you pay off a traffic fine. You can't bind arbitrary contracts to things that one is "required" to do that are beyond the scope of the original law.
Surely people aren't so stupid as to be confused by 7 different types of GNU/Linux. If someone had done a similar article about the number of Windows versions out there, would it have been posted on the front page of slashdot? Sure, RMS is a power-hungry greedy individual convicted of free software spreading activities, but this is going a bit far.
I hereby propose some legitimate reasons to bash GNU/Linux:
1) Linus refuses to play nice with Proprietary developers.
2) RMS actively seek to destroy any proprietary competition, regardless of whether the competition is actually helping the computer community or not.
3) RMS is promoting licenses that will kill patent law usage
Those are all (I think) legitimate complaints against GNU/Linux. Calling Debian/RedHat/etc "nutty" for releasing 7 versions of an OS is rather stupid and petty. I have no doubt that the average person can simply read a chart that has little checks next to "features" and decide which of the 7 they want. This will actually help people, I think, because it will prevent people from getting extraneous software that might increase their risk of attack.
People often complain about GNU/Linux bundling too many things in their OS and how there's a lack of flexibility, and now they complain because GNU/Linux is "too" flexible and might "confuse" the poor ignorant user who is incapable of choosing between 7 different forms of GNU/Linux.
I'd like to counter your arguments.
One of the points basically comes down to "write perfect code".
I'd say his argument is closer to "don't write in C". Primarily exploits like buffer overflows are a resulting of using C. Now, as you point out, if one wrote perfect code, then using C would be fine. But clearly people don't write perfect code. So, the next best thing is to use a language that is designed to handle a lot of the problems that are experienced in incorrectly using C.
Of course, there's nothing about using Java or another language that makes your system immune from attack. But Java/Lisp/another high level language, design-by-contract, and checks for overflows (or using a language where overflows basically can't occur) would go a long way to turning exploits into loggable DOS attacks. The best way to design well is to use tools geared toward that end. Sadly, C isn't one of them.
His argument that an OS should ask you before running something is also stupid. How many users do you know who would actually read & understand such a question? Never mind actually giving a sensible answer.
Few. But the users he's primarily talking about are those on company workstations/desktops, not home users. In such an environment it makes perfect sense to lock down the system and give the IT department the control on whether a user can run programs. To that end, the user never has to give a sensible answer. They just need to have their IT staff "do the right thing". The fact that no OS seems to support such well isn't a good thing (Linux sort of supports it, but you have to go through hoops to set it up).
Now, what about the home user? The fact is, while most home users are incapable of knowing whether something is "good" or "bad", there's nothing to stop the OS from figuring out if a program was installed properly and only allowing such to run. Further, there's nothing stopping the OS from setting to so it's trivial to block a program from running ever; imagine, for example, being able to easily keep MSN Messenger from loading. The fact is, modern OSs are a long way from allowing the sort of fine-grain control over program behavior. Zonealarm seems a great example of a step in the right direction, allowing independent blocking of in/out network traffic.
Users might know very little of how to do "the right thing", but that doesn't mean the OS can't do a lot on its own. Nor does it mean that the user can't try and succeed a lot of the time. Of course, don't be surprised when you'll have to reenable Java for granny after you disabled it one day because of an annoying web ad but the next can't get a web game to work. Of course, the real answer then is more granular control. And of course, as was stated, the opt-in, not opt-out mentality so that granny never had to disable the web ad in the first place, but instead she's the one who enabled support for the web game.