You got modded flamebait, and I think rightly so, but I think you deserved a real reply anyway.
First, dumping Israel will not protect us from terrorists. You must remember that al-Qaeda attacked Saudi Arabia, even though Saudi Arabis is the guardian of the Islamic holy cities. But they weren't idealogically pure enough, they crossed one of al-Qaeda's lines, and they got hit anyway. So if we were to totally stop supporting Israel, would that buy us protection from terrorist attacks? No. There would be some other issue - we were still selling products to Israel, or buying from them, or something. Are you prepared to write a blank check of concessions to every set of idiots that are willing to use violence to accomplish their goals?
Second: Israeli terrorism??? Hello?
Imagine that the Mexicans, instead of just flooding across our borders in insane numbers, were firing homemade rockets into downtown San Diego and El Paso. Imagine that this had been going on for two years. And imagine that the people doing this (the Zapatistas, say) won the next Mexican presidential election. Now they're the Mexican government. Then they fire some more rockets. Since they're the government, that's now an act of war.
So we go after them. After all, enough is enough. And, though we try to avoid it, there are inevitably civilian casualties. Does that make us terrorists? Or are the terrorists the people who were firing rockets into our cities for two years, deliberately targeting civilians?
Third: Enabling Israel to keep going after the people who are targeting their civilians is a good thing. There cannot be peace while Hezbollah and Hamas continue firing missiles into Israel, and neither of them seem willing to stop, ever. So they have to be stopped. That means that Israel is doing the right thing. But sometimes doing the right thing - or helping someone else to do the right thing - upsets people who are doing the wrong thing. We should help them do the right thing anyway.
When the problem you have is a werewolf, all your tools look like silver bullets.
If you don't get it, think of it this way: When your problem is driving a nail, all your tools look like hammers. Yeah, you can drive a nail with a screwdriver (if the nail is small enough) or a wrench, but hammers work better.
But in software development, most problems turn into werewolves eventually, so...
Except perl's, python's and C's are about a thousand times as good. Which says a lot about your understanding of 'above average'.
Look, you can get anything in a C library. What you can't get it in is libc - the standard, comes-with-the-compiler-so-everybody's-got-it library. Compare the standard library of Java to the standard library of C or perl, and I think you'll see his point.
I mean... one developer deleted some files? Oh, the horror! But, um... I'm a developer, and I've been known to do that from time to time, not to destroy evidence, but just to clean up my drive.
We should also note that Forbes doesn't exactly have a great track record with respect to objectivity and accuracy on this case.
All in all, I think I'll refrain from assuming IBM's guilt just yet...
I think this is the equivalent situation. When you chroot, it changes the root of the file system, "/", but IIRC it doesn't change any open directory handles. In particular, it doesn't change the current working directory. So you should always follow a chroot with "cd/" or equivalent. If you have other open directories, you also have to deal with those.
Otherwise, a hacker could just "cd.." and they're out of your jail.
Yes, that's right, our other poster boy of bad legislation, the DMCA, to the rescue! See, bypassing the lock constitutes circumventing an access control...
There's more to it than that. How do the controlled blasts do their thing? By shattering the rock. They break it by a sudden, sharp pressure change that just has to crack the rock from the stick of dynamite to the working face, which is maybe a foot. And there's nothing but air pressure pushing back from the working face.
But in the sabotage case, you've got to break the rock clear to the water. I don't know how far that is in the case of the Holland tunnel, but let's say it's 50 feet. That means you need 2500 times the blast force (1 over r squared, and all that), plus you have the tamping issue. On top of that, you have the weight of the water pushing back against the blast force that's trying to move the rock.
But yes, if you can overcome all of that, then gravity takes over...
First the easy part: McVeigh was Oklahoma City, not Kansas City.
Now for the real issue: Do you have any idea how hard it is to dig tunnels through rock with explosives? You dig holes into the rock. You put explosives into the holes. You carefully tamp each of the charges. You set off the explosives in their neat little holes in the rock. And what do you get?
A few feet. That's all.
Yeah, the terrorists would set off a bigger explosion. But it wouldn't be tamped - the force of the blast would escape both directions along the tunnel. For "gravity" to work for you, you'd first have to crack the rock enough that it's no longer structural. (It's not just the concrete and steel that holds all that rock up. The rock holds itself up.)
And if a tamped explosion only breaks a few feet of rock, a bigger but untamped one isn't going to do much more...
No, if the situation is as you claim, then Groklaw is not just fun - it is an essential, public, FUD-fighter. It is a big part of why SCO's claims get no traction in the mainstream press anymore. It is why everybody is surprised that the case is still going on, because now everybody knows that SCO has no case and never did.
If the war is a FUD war, Groklaw is the best defense I've seen. Facts. Loads of facts. Sources given. The invitation to look for yourself. Commentary too, interpretations given, but always the sources and the invitation to check it out for yourself. That's how you fight a FUD war.
Because the software isn't perfect. There's some fraction of legit users that it detects as being illegitimate. And the more they try to catch every last real pirate, the more innocent people get nailed.
Based on the history of WGA, the people who get falsely detected tend to be ones who change hardware - they replace a motherboard or a hard drive. Well, out of 300 million users, how many do that? Probably, several million. Not all of them get nailed.
But just imagine that 10,000 users get falsely nailed. Now is there harm? Yes, there is.
who said, "The USA stinks! I'm going to move to Canada", well, now's the time to rethink your position.
This is one of the craziest, most twisted, least democratic things I have ever heard of an allegedly democratic government doing.
(Yeah, I know, the NSA. That's crazy. But at least I understand it. I understand why they want to do it, and why they want to keep it secret, and even if the effects are bad, and the precedent is horrible, at least the intent is not at the moment evil. But using government money to lobby the government? I just can't begin to get my brain around that one.)
"We achieve great results from ordinary people with a brilliant process. Our competitors achieve mediocre results from brilliant people with a mediocre process. They try to overcome this by hiring even more brilliant people. We are going to win."
"Collective faith in god" mixed with politice has never gotten humanity any better than dictatorship
*cough*American revolution*cough* What do you think we were talking about here? You think I'm quoting the Declaration of Independence because I'm talking about Catholic Spain?
If Bush was chosen to lead the nation by God, you damn well better not question him.
Wow. Way to totally ignore my point. My point is that, when America had a more-or-less consensus that God was there, and a somewhat-less-but-still-significant consensus on what He was like, and what the implications were for human freedom, people had a consensus that the President did not have the authority to run wild over people's freedoms. You don't like what Bush is doing? I'm not wild about all of it, myself (and a big "Hi" to all my fans in the NSA). So don't go putting words in my mouth about how belief in God means unquestioningly following a political leader who says that he's following God. That's almost exactly the opposite of what I'm saying.
I'll try it again since so many people seem to have gotten hung up on this as a God-vs-atheism thing. It's not. The point is that beliefs have consequences - for individuals, and for societies. When the bulk of society shifts beliefs, it has political consequences. And I don't just mean in terms of what you say to voters to try to get their votes. The America that many of us look back on longingly, wishing we still had it, was a political expression of the bulk of society's theology. (A more cynical view would be that the leaders of the American Revolution knew that it was important to appeal to theology to support their position, but I think it ran a lot deeper than that.)
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these rights are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness..."
This wasn't just a political idea. It was a theological statement. God gave us these rights, and nobody - not a judge, not Congress, not the President, not the King of England - has the authority to take them away from us.
Now take away the creator. What are you left with?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are equal, that they have certain rights..." Along with "creator", another word disappeared - "inalienable". Because once we don't believe in God, and that He gave us these rights, then we just have them because... well, because we decided that we have them. And that means that we (or the majority of "we") can decide that we don't have them. The rights aren't inalienable any more.
When our country lost its collective faith in God, it had political consequences. All our rights are up for grabs now.
The rules apply, but it's more subtle than that
on
Phishers Get Phoney
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· Score: 1
Recently, a caller left us a message about being behind on our house payment, and asked us to call a certain number. (We were slightly behind - we had been paying late because the bill was due earlier than all our other monthly bills, and we had forgotten that and paid it at the same time as the others.)
So, after the usual questions (Is this, essentially, phishing using voice? Should I answer at all?), I decided to call them back and find out who these people were. (I should mention that the voice message didn't name the mortgage company.) Of course, I get the computer first. It asks me to enter my account number. Yeah, right - there is absolutely no way I'm going to give my account number to these people.
Eventually I get a person. She also asks for my account number. I say, "No, you people called me. You asked me to call this phone number. Now prove to me that you are the people that I do business with." She asked for my phone number. I gave it to her - hey, they'd already called me once, so it wasn't like I was giving away some great secret - and then she knew my name. She then asked for the last four digits of my social security number - not the whole thing, just the last 4 digits. Since she was able to figure out who I was from my phone number that quickly, I felt safe going that far. I mean, she could have gotten it from a reverse phone directory, but it seemed much more likely that she just looked it up in their database. She then told me what the amount of my last payment should have been, including in it the late fee for the month before. At this point, I felt confident that I was talking to the right people. I was impressed. This whole thing was conducted about as close to a zero-knowledge proof as you can get when it's humans rather than computers talking.
So, the point is, you can call the number. But you have to get a human on the line, and you have to make them prove to you that they already know your account information.
"even though it seems they have complied to a great length with the demands of the plaintiffs"
It may seem like that, but they haven't. The requirement is that they publicly document their APIs. What MS has done in response is make available source code for a large fee (50-100 thousand dollars). You do understand that that isn't the same thing they were required to do, don't you? If not, I'll explain a bit.
API documentation is something that tells what parameters a function takes, and what the values mean. Source code tells exactly how the function does what it does. It's true that I can derive the first from the second, but it's a lot of work. So what Microsoft has done is made available for a high price something that was much less helpful than what they were ordered to provide for free. That's not compliance. That's the kind of stuff that earns a two-year-old a spanking.
A PC without Windows installed, that is? I mean, yeah, I can get one with Linux installed and still pay the Windows tax, but I'd really prefer to save my money rather than sending it to Bill...
Reading a book is a completely different experience from reading email or the web. Yes, I know, they're both reading. But for stuff that you're going to seriously think about, a book is much better. Email and the web make it too easy to get distracted. (I think this is a user interface issue. You have to physically set down a book, but you can just click on a link when browsing, or move to the next email. When you're reading a book, you're just reading a book, but when you're reading the web, you're reading one out of 6 billion linked pages, and when you're reading email, you're reading your messages - note the plural.)
In the same way, for writing something that takes serious thought, I prefer a pad of paper over any computer ever made. (Writing code is obviously an exception.) Writing on paper is single-task by nature. I mean, I can write other things on that pad of paper, but all I can do is write. I can't play solitare on it. A computer gives too many options, and so makes it harder to focus on one.
And before you dismiss me as another luddite, I've been a professional software engineer for twenty years. (Feel free to dismiss me as undisciplined, too easily distracted, but a luddite I am not.)
I've wondered about this as well. What if Microsoft really doesn't have internal documentation that's worth anything? What if, for the most part, their code really is their documentation?
This would still be an uneven playing field for the rest of the world, because the rest of the world doesn't have access to Microsoft's source, and even if they did, they don't have access to the relevant developers to have them explain it. So, even if that's all Microsoft has, the EU still needs to force them to fix it - to deliver real, usable documentation. That's going to take a while, which means that it's going to get expensive. It might even trip the impatience switch at the EU, and result in even higher fines. This is payback with a vengeance for not doing the job right in the first place.
But (presuming that this whole scenario is accurate), in an important way, this could save Microsoft. Forcing MS to document their stuff means that MS would have actual documentation that they can use to make their future stuff more compatible and less buggy. In the long run, it helps Microsoft to not drown in the swamp created by their own flawed development process.
For the EU citizens, the point is not that the fines will lower their taxes. The point is that the fines will force MS to publish the specifications of their functions and/or protocols, so that other outfits (commercial and free) can write stuff that works as well with Windows as Microsoft's own stuff does.
This way MS can't do the "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" business to anybody ever again. This means that they have to actually compete, rather than driving app vendors out of business with OS tricks. This means more choice and lower prices for EU computer customers. That's the point.
And if MS refuses to pay, then the EU can start grabbing MS assets in Europe - like maybe the Irish operation that MS uses to hide money from US taxes? Or is Ireland not part of the EU? (Should check, but I'm lazy.) The EU could also block MS from selling in the EU, which, since it's about a third of their business, and MS's annual income is about $40 billion, would amount to about a $13 billion fine. No, I think Microsoft will pay, grumbling loudly to the press all the while...
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but for those of us who haven't been following this case that closely, could you give a bit more detail on what "unethical courtroom tactics" RIM tried, and how they backfired?
So let me see if I have this right: Microsoft has been required to publish specifications for it's protocols so that other people can make the same OS calls as Microsoft apps can make. The point of the documentation is that it be useful to other companies. So in the process of determining whether Microsoft has actually produced documentation that meets the requirements, the EU checks with other companies! Oh, the horror of collusion!
Slashdot Mirror
You got modded flamebait, and I think rightly so, but I think you deserved a real reply anyway.
First, dumping Israel will not protect us from terrorists. You must remember that al-Qaeda attacked Saudi Arabia, even though Saudi Arabis is the guardian of the Islamic holy cities. But they weren't idealogically pure enough, they crossed one of al-Qaeda's lines, and they got hit anyway. So if we were to totally stop supporting Israel, would that buy us protection from terrorist attacks? No. There would be some other issue - we were still selling products to Israel, or buying from them, or something. Are you prepared to write a blank check of concessions to every set of idiots that are willing to use violence to accomplish their goals?
Second: Israeli terrorism??? Hello?
Imagine that the Mexicans, instead of just flooding across our borders in insane numbers, were firing homemade rockets into downtown San Diego and El Paso. Imagine that this had been going on for two years. And imagine that the people doing this (the Zapatistas, say) won the next Mexican presidential election. Now they're the Mexican government. Then they fire some more rockets. Since they're the government, that's now an act of war.
So we go after them. After all, enough is enough. And, though we try to avoid it, there are inevitably civilian casualties. Does that make us terrorists? Or are the terrorists the people who were firing rockets into our cities for two years, deliberately targeting civilians?
Third: Enabling Israel to keep going after the people who are targeting their civilians is a good thing. There cannot be peace while Hezbollah and Hamas continue firing missiles into Israel, and neither of them seem willing to stop, ever. So they have to be stopped. That means that Israel is doing the right thing. But sometimes doing the right thing - or helping someone else to do the right thing - upsets people who are doing the wrong thing. We should help them do the right thing anyway.
When the problem you have is a werewolf, all your tools look like silver bullets.
If you don't get it, think of it this way: When your problem is driving a nail, all your tools look like hammers. Yeah, you can drive a nail with a screwdriver (if the nail is small enough) or a wrench, but hammers work better.
But in software development, most problems turn into werewolves eventually, so...
Except perl's, python's and C's are about a thousand times as good. Which says a lot about your understanding of 'above average'.
Look, you can get anything in a C library. What you can't get it in is libc - the standard, comes-with-the-compiler-so-everybody's-got-it library. Compare the standard library of Java to the standard library of C or perl, and I think you'll see his point.
I mean... one developer deleted some files? Oh, the horror! But, um... I'm a developer, and I've been known to do that from time to time, not to destroy evidence, but just to clean up my drive.
We should also note that Forbes doesn't exactly have a great track record with respect to objectivity and accuracy on this case.
All in all, I think I'll refrain from assuming IBM's guilt just yet...
I think this is the equivalent situation. When you chroot, it changes the root of the file system, "/", but IIRC it doesn't change any open directory handles. In particular, it doesn't change the current working directory. So you should always follow a chroot with "cd /" or equivalent. If you have other open directories, you also have to deal with those.
.." and they're out of your jail.
Otherwise, a hacker could just "cd
The DMCA!
Yes, that's right, our other poster boy of bad legislation, the DMCA, to the rescue! See, bypassing the lock constitutes circumventing an access control...
But in the sabotage case, you've got to break the rock clear to the water. I don't know how far that is in the case of the Holland tunnel, but let's say it's 50 feet. That means you need 2500 times the blast force (1 over r squared, and all that), plus you have the tamping issue. On top of that, you have the weight of the water pushing back against the blast force that's trying to move the rock.
But yes, if you can overcome all of that, then gravity takes over...
First the easy part: McVeigh was Oklahoma City, not Kansas City.
Now for the real issue: Do you have any idea how hard it is to dig tunnels through rock with explosives? You dig holes into the rock. You put explosives into the holes. You carefully tamp each of the charges. You set off the explosives in their neat little holes in the rock. And what do you get?
A few feet. That's all.
Yeah, the terrorists would set off a bigger explosion. But it wouldn't be tamped - the force of the blast would escape both directions along the tunnel. For "gravity" to work for you, you'd first have to crack the rock enough that it's no longer structural. (It's not just the concrete and steel that holds all that rock up. The rock holds itself up.)
And if a tamped explosion only breaks a few feet of rock, a bigger but untamped one isn't going to do much more...
If the war is a FUD war, Groklaw is the best defense I've seen. Facts. Loads of facts. Sources given. The invitation to look for yourself. Commentary too, interpretations given, but always the sources and the invitation to check it out for yourself. That's how you fight a FUD war.
Because the software isn't perfect. There's some fraction of legit users that it detects as being illegitimate. And the more they try to catch every last real pirate, the more innocent people get nailed.
Based on the history of WGA, the people who get falsely detected tend to be ones who change hardware - they replace a motherboard or a hard drive. Well, out of 300 million users, how many do that? Probably, several million. Not all of them get nailed.
But just imagine that 10,000 users get falsely nailed. Now is there harm? Yes, there is.
who said, "The USA stinks! I'm going to move to Canada", well, now's the time to rethink your position.
This is one of the craziest, most twisted, least democratic things I have ever heard of an allegedly democratic government doing.
(Yeah, I know, the NSA. That's crazy. But at least I understand it. I understand why they want to do it, and why they want to keep it secret, and even if the effects are bad, and the precedent is horrible, at least the intent is not at the moment evil. But using government money to lobby the government? I just can't begin to get my brain around that one.)
"We achieve great results from ordinary people with a brilliant process. Our competitors achieve mediocre results from brilliant people with a mediocre process. They try to overcome this by hiring even more brilliant people. We are going to win."
"Game over, thanks for playing."
Dispositive, as in, "part of the case can now be disposed of."
*cough*American revolution*cough* What do you think we were talking about here? You think I'm quoting the Declaration of Independence because I'm talking about Catholic Spain?
If Bush was chosen to lead the nation by God, you damn well better not question him.
Wow. Way to totally ignore my point. My point is that, when America had a more-or-less consensus that God was there, and a somewhat-less-but-still-significant consensus on what He was like, and what the implications were for human freedom, people had a consensus that the President did not have the authority to run wild over people's freedoms. You don't like what Bush is doing? I'm not wild about all of it, myself (and a big "Hi" to all my fans in the NSA). So don't go putting words in my mouth about how belief in God means unquestioningly following a political leader who says that he's following God. That's almost exactly the opposite of what I'm saying.
I'll try it again since so many people seem to have gotten hung up on this as a God-vs-atheism thing. It's not. The point is that beliefs have consequences - for individuals, and for societies. When the bulk of society shifts beliefs, it has political consequences. And I don't just mean in terms of what you say to voters to try to get their votes. The America that many of us look back on longingly, wishing we still had it, was a political expression of the bulk of society's theology. (A more cynical view would be that the leaders of the American Revolution knew that it was important to appeal to theology to support their position, but I think it ran a lot deeper than that.)
This wasn't just a political idea. It was a theological statement. God gave us these rights, and nobody - not a judge, not Congress, not the President, not the King of England - has the authority to take them away from us.
Now take away the creator. What are you left with?
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are equal, that they have certain rights..." Along with "creator", another word disappeared - "inalienable". Because once we don't believe in God, and that He gave us these rights, then we just have them because... well, because we decided that we have them. And that means that we (or the majority of "we") can decide that we don't have them. The rights aren't inalienable any more.
When our country lost its collective faith in God, it had political consequences. All our rights are up for grabs now.
Don't remember his name...
So, after the usual questions (Is this, essentially, phishing using voice? Should I answer at all?), I decided to call them back and find out who these people were. (I should mention that the voice message didn't name the mortgage company.) Of course, I get the computer first. It asks me to enter my account number. Yeah, right - there is absolutely no way I'm going to give my account number to these people.
Eventually I get a person. She also asks for my account number. I say, "No, you people called me. You asked me to call this phone number. Now prove to me that you are the people that I do business with." She asked for my phone number. I gave it to her - hey, they'd already called me once, so it wasn't like I was giving away some great secret - and then she knew my name. She then asked for the last four digits of my social security number - not the whole thing, just the last 4 digits. Since she was able to figure out who I was from my phone number that quickly, I felt safe going that far. I mean, she could have gotten it from a reverse phone directory, but it seemed much more likely that she just looked it up in their database. She then told me what the amount of my last payment should have been, including in it the late fee for the month before. At this point, I felt confident that I was talking to the right people. I was impressed. This whole thing was conducted about as close to a zero-knowledge proof as you can get when it's humans rather than computers talking.
So, the point is, you can call the number. But you have to get a human on the line, and you have to make them prove to you that they already know your account information.
It may seem like that, but they haven't. The requirement is that they publicly document their APIs. What MS has done in response is make available source code for a large fee (50-100 thousand dollars). You do understand that that isn't the same thing they were required to do, don't you? If not, I'll explain a bit.
API documentation is something that tells what parameters a function takes, and what the values mean. Source code tells exactly how the function does what it does. It's true that I can derive the first from the second, but it's a lot of work. So what Microsoft has done is made available for a high price something that was much less helpful than what they were ordered to provide for free. That's not compliance. That's the kind of stuff that earns a two-year-old a spanking.
A PC without Windows installed, that is? I mean, yeah, I can get one with Linux installed and still pay the Windows tax, but I'd really prefer to save my money rather than sending it to Bill...
In the same way, for writing something that takes serious thought, I prefer a pad of paper over any computer ever made. (Writing code is obviously an exception.) Writing on paper is single-task by nature. I mean, I can write other things on that pad of paper, but all I can do is write. I can't play solitare on it. A computer gives too many options, and so makes it harder to focus on one.
And before you dismiss me as another luddite, I've been a professional software engineer for twenty years. (Feel free to dismiss me as undisciplined, too easily distracted, but a luddite I am not.)
This would still be an uneven playing field for the rest of the world, because the rest of the world doesn't have access to Microsoft's source, and even if they did, they don't have access to the relevant developers to have them explain it. So, even if that's all Microsoft has, the EU still needs to force them to fix it - to deliver real, usable documentation. That's going to take a while, which means that it's going to get expensive. It might even trip the impatience switch at the EU, and result in even higher fines. This is payback with a vengeance for not doing the job right in the first place.
But (presuming that this whole scenario is accurate), in an important way, this could save Microsoft. Forcing MS to document their stuff means that MS would have actual documentation that they can use to make their future stuff more compatible and less buggy. In the long run, it helps Microsoft to not drown in the swamp created by their own flawed development process.
This way MS can't do the "DOS isn't done until Lotus won't run" business to anybody ever again. This means that they have to actually compete, rather than driving app vendors out of business with OS tricks. This means more choice and lower prices for EU computer customers. That's the point.
And if MS refuses to pay, then the EU can start grabbing MS assets in Europe - like maybe the Irish operation that MS uses to hide money from US taxes? Or is Ireland not part of the EU? (Should check, but I'm lazy.) The EU could also block MS from selling in the EU, which, since it's about a third of their business, and MS's annual income is about $40 billion, would amount to about a $13 billion fine. No, I think Microsoft will pay, grumbling loudly to the press all the while...
I'm not saying that you're wrong, but for those of us who haven't been following this case that closely, could you give a bit more detail on what "unethical courtroom tactics" RIM tried, and how they backfired?
Give me a break, Microsoft.
Yeah, and they also say that I can't copy the one I have at home onto other media, either.
Fortunately, they're just a bunch of greedy slimeballs shooting off their mouths. They aren't the judge or the jury.