...you'd think that developers would finally know how to write software that doesn't have such vulnerabilities.
But unfortunately we don't seem to have made that much progress, despite the reasonably large number of development tools we have that address such issues (including anything from memory debuggers to string libraries). I mean, really... people are still writing these things in C... in the 21st century! I'm a big fan of picking the right tool for the job, but I think it should be clear by now that C isn't the right tool for writing secure software. There are simply too many ways to screw up.
I think it's time we started writing system software (that is, software which provides services but which runs as a process under the OS) in a language which doesn't have these problems. And if a suitable language is unavailable, that argues strongly for creating that language.
You might still have to worry about buffer overflow exploits against the kernel, but that's a much more manageable problem.
To think, along with a group, that groupthink is unintelligent is still groupthink, I think.
Perhaps, if you apply the term literally. But "groupthink" implies more than merely that an organized group of people believe a certain way -- it implies that those who are engaged in it believe the way they do because others do, not because they arrived at that way of thinking in an independent manner.
"Groupthink", literally applied, is fine as long as those who engage in it arrived at their way of thinking independently through a valid reasoning process. Groupthink isn't fine when those who engage in it think the way they do only because others within their group also think that way.
Very soon we are going to need an actual lawsuit to reassert out rights as the public to use devices we purchase in any manner we deem fit.
With the way things are going, I won't be surprised at all if we lose that lawsuit, even at the Supreme Court level.
I, personally, think the events we're witnessing now are it, that the pendulum has so much momentum in the wrong direction that it won't swing back in the right direction enough to matter. Were it the 1700s I'd say a revolution might be in order, but the disparity in firepower between the average government soldier and the average civilian is so hugely in favor of the soldier (after you account for armor, artillery, and air support -- we're not even talking about the really advanced stuff yet) that a revolution simply can't succeed. Between that and the surveillance technology we have today, I think what's coming, a worldwide corporate police state, is capable of lasting thousands of years.
Better savor what freedom you have left. It'll be gone soon.
Almost all manned space missions are a prestige matter and hence a waste of money for as much as science is concerned.
People, the sooner you start looking to the horizon the sooner you'll understand what needs to be done and why.
This isn't about science. It's not about profit. It's not about efficiency. It's not even about short-term survival.
It's about the human experience and long-term survival. The reason we should be trying to get into space on a permanent basis is that eventually it's where we must be, because otherwise the species will die.
And the reason we should be trying to build a permanent, distributed manned presence in space is that there is simply no substitute for human experience. It's human experience, and only human experience, that provides us with the judgement and knowledge needed to accomplish anything worthwhile. We're not going to learn how to get people into space and keep them there by sending unmanned probes there. Nor will we learn all the little things that ultimately make the difference between a comfortable experience and a painful one, or the difference between a survivable experience and one that isn't. Only some of that can be learned through probes. The rest requires that we be there.
Oh, and for those whose only concern is the defense of the country, consider this: whichever country manages to build a permanent manned presence in space first and move at least some of their government there will be able to rule the rest of the planet, because they'll have the ultimate bargaining chip: the ability to cause an asteroidal strike while not being completely vulnerable to one.
Makes me wonder what sort of "protection from liability suits" these seals will get exactly.
Absolutely none, of course. Just like airplane certification doesn't buy the airplane manufacturer any liability protection, even though certification costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and is required by law...
Which brings us one step closer to my idea. If there are any real lawyers here, could you please tell me why no one has bothered to attack the RIAA's charges using the Federal RICO Act?
Umm...it wouldn't be because RICO is a federal statute, would it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that would mean that only a federal prosecutor, i.e. the DOJ, could initiate a RICO action against the RIAA. But the DOJ, along with most of the rest of the federal government, is Own3d by the RIAA and its friends (hence the easy passage of the DMCA), so no RICO action will ever be brought against them by the only people who can bring such action.
And that's why you haven't seen prosecution of the RIAA under the RICO statutes...
Just remember this simple fact : People have long memories and these management twits will pay for their nazi policies once the economy improves.
I hate to break the bad news, but the economy isn't going to improve that way. Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with the news, but the economy itself appears to be growing, but only as a result of significant debt increases but people are still losing jobs.
So: this is a jobless "recovery", and because the U.S. is still the
largest customer base (I hate the word "consumer"), it means that the
"recovery" won't last very long, once people in the U.S. start to run
out of credit:
People who run out of credit can't pay for goods and
services.
Businesses that sell to individuals will see a sharp decline in
demand.
Those businesses will cut jobs, increasing the feedback in step
1, and thus the economic decline.
Those businesses will also cut demand for goods and services, thus
causing upstream businesses to cut jobs and demand for goods and
services, thus accelerating the economic decline.
Those businesses above that need to fill some of the jobs they
previously eliminated will do so primarily by hiring overseas
workers.
Those who lose work will have a much harder time getting credit because
of all the people who came before that defaulted as a result of
running out of credit while still being jobless, so
being unemployed will really mean you probably won't have any money to
spend (hint: credit is the only thing keeping the U.S. economy
afloat right now).
End result? IMO, there's a reasonable chance that the U.S. economy
will collapse in a crash at least as bad as the Great Depression,
because the very people who are needed to support the economy will be
unable to do so because they're unemployed. And because their jobs
are being shipped overseas, they won't ever be employed until the cost
of living in the U.S. drops to roughly the same or less than it is in
the poorest of countries -- businesses won't have any real incentive
to hire locally otherwise.
And that means that you can permanently say goodbye to the
first-world standard of living we currently enjoy, unless you're in
the richest few percent of the population.
And lest you think that all this activity will cause other countries to see increases in their standard of living (and thus their cost of living), remember that we're seeing proof before our eyes that employers are willing and able to shift jobs elsewhere much more quickly than economies can adjust to it. That means that whichever country has the lowest standard of living (while still being able to provide sufficiently skilled workers) will be the one to supply the workforce. Which country that happens to be may change over time but the speed that employers can shift their hiring patterns will ultimately determine the amount of time that the country's economy can grow before it loses its jobs to some other (cheaper) source.
Just remember: the cheapest possible worker is the one who uses the fewest resources. That means someone living in a dirt-floored hut with no running water, using the money he's paid to barely buy enough food to survive.
Military spending in the USA is geared towards protecting lives.
And you think this is only because the USA is Just and Good and Right or something?
That's only part of it. Another reason military spending in the USA is geared towards protecting lives is to make it easier to sell the public on military campaigns of conquest, e.g. Iraq, and other uses of the military that would otherwise be unpalatable. It would be a lot tougher to convince the American public that the campaign in Iraq was a good thing if it meant the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process.
Yet another reason is that by more accurately targeting your fire, you destroy less infrastructure that's likely to be useful to you once your forces occupy the area.
Don't make the mistake of believing that the USA is all about what's Just, Good, and Right. It's not. It just claims to be.
It's interesting to see that the RIAA has such a low opinion of human nature.
They have such a low opinion because the only people they have any peer-level experience (as opposed to master/slave experience, e.g. with artists) with -- themselves -- are people that deserve such a low opinion...
the Constitution is much more precise about what is considered a right, and privacy is not in there
Really?
Amendment IX:
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.
The Constitution enumerates some rights. In that regard it may be more "precise" than the Declaration of Independence. But that is the maximum extent of that precision. The Constitution itself states that other rights exist even if not enumerated, but the Supreme Court and most other courts, as well as most people (including you, it seems), have managed to see fit to completely ignore the Constitution on this issue.
The law is not some holy document handed down to us by a perfect being. We create the laws (indirectly, of course). A free country cannot enforce a law broken habitually by 57M people while still remaining free.
Correct.
What makes you think America will remain free? Looks like it's very quickly headed towards corporate police statehood to me, if it's not already there...
Robinson asks: 'Why are our imaginations retreating from science and space, and into fantasy?'
I can only speak of the United States here, even though what I say may
apply elsewhere. The short answer is: because society has changed.
Good science fiction fired the imagination with what could be based on
what we currently know or think. Back then, people were encouraged to
explore the world by their parents, teachers, and others. Back then,
you could get a real chemistry set, an electronics set, etc., which
you could use to perform experiments limited only by your imagination.
Today the only kinds of things you can get are prepackaged junk, where
the "experiments" have essentially already been done for you and all
that's left for you to do is to combine the (pre-allocated)
ingredients. The exploration angle is gone, replaced with protection
from oneself. And all in the name of "liability concerns".
We've become a society of frightened children, afraid to go out into
the world and learn about it because to do so requires taking risks.
If you try to build and sell something that requires some intelligence
(or at least common sense) to use and will hurt you if you don't
exhibit even a rudimentary amount of care, society will deem that you
must pay, and the only exceptions to this are those things that have
always been sold to the public, like automobiles, that are too useful
to eliminate.
Science fiction doesn't sell because people are no longer interested
in learning about the world, but are rather much more interested in
being sheltered from it -- and in sheltering their children from it,
as well. Part of being sheltered from the world is ignorance of the
world, because to learn about the world requires taking risks.
Science fiction isn't terribly interesting if one doesn't even
understand the basics of the science behind it.
I can't help but think that perhaps some of this is intentional: an
ignorant, frightened population is more easily controlled, after all.
Look at vietanam and Afganaston before you say that too loudly. Sure there was a lot of external assistance, but then the American revolution got a lot of assistance too. (Mostly from France, which was at war with England)
Neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan are terribly relevant to the original point (that the weapons technology makes an uprising essentially impossible to win).
In the case of Vietnam, the actions available to the U.S. were constrained by political considerations. If they hadn't been, they'd have bombed North Vietnam into the stone age, with nukes if necessary, which would have gained them an instant win.
In the case of Afghanistan, the Russians were similarly constrained and, furthermore, the Afghanis had very significant assistance from the outside in the form of support from the U.S.
In the case of an uprising in the U.S., none of those things would be a problem:
The government of the U.S. would not hold back if its survival is what's on the line. When it's do or die, you do. That means that the government will use nukes if it proves to be necessary. But because the average soldier has, with things like air support, artillery, etc., a thousands to tens of thousands to one advantage in firepower over the average civilian even without the nukes, it's unlikely that the government will need to employ nukes.
The government of the U.S. is perfectly capable of preventing the civilian population from getting any advanced weaponry, not to mention the training required to make use of it. It'll form a complete blockade around the entire country if necessary. It'll shoot down anything that tries to enter the U.S. from the air, and will threaten Mexico and Canada with nukes in order to prevent those countries from sending any aid.
The U.S. government only needs to keep up the above actions long enough to contain and eliminate the revolt. The stockpile of supplies available to the military should easily be enough to do that, with plenty of room to spare.
The bottom line is that a popular revolt against the U.S. government simply isn't going to succeed unless the military sides with the civilians. Since the military adheres very strongly to the chain of command, which begins with the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (all of whom are strongly tied together politically, so a major rift within that part of the hierarchy is very unlikely), the military is unlikely to side with the civilians except at the bottom, where a disagreement matters the least. Sound familiar? It should: it's exactly the same deal as in any major corporation: policy is set at the top and it doesn't matter how much the people at the bottom disagree.
Yes, there are a lot of guns among the civilian population. But the peashooters the civilians are allowed to keep are no match for the kind of weaponry (artillery, armor, bombs, aircraft, etc., not to mention more exotic stuff like chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons) available to the military. The amount of time and preparation it took for Timothy McVeigh to put together a bomb capable of destroying a medium sized building should give you an idea of just how much advantage the military has: they routinely drop bombs at least as powerful, and don't need any real prep time to do it.
If you really think a popular revolt can succeed, then name one that has succeeded against a militarily powerful government (one that fields an air force and armored force roughly as large relative to its population as the U.S.'s, or even within an order of magnitude) without the support (or at least abstention) of that military in the last 50 years. I'll bet you can't name a single one.
Also, if you look at the history of South Korea, Japan, and other nations that industrialized rapidly on US lines, we're still more productive per capital than they are. They get close, but the US always seems to pull ahead in the end, for a variety of reasons (lots of bright, motivated immigrants, low barriers to start new companies are big ones).
But this all depends on just how you measure productivity of the U.S., doesn't it?
If it's being measured by taking the dollar value of all goods sold by U.S. companies and dividing that by the number of employed people in the U.S., then the measurement is fundamentally misleading. The reason is that much of the labor that goes into producing those goods is done by people not within the U.S. but by people who are, as a result of the economic conditions within their countries, much cheaper to hire. By that measure, the productivity of people in the U.S. isn't being measured at all -- it's the productivity of the people U.S. companies hire around the world that is being measured, and only loosely at that since the measurement doesn't account for things like exchange rates, living conditions, etc.
No, the right way to measure productivity is to measure the amount of human labor it takes to produce something. By that measure, I'll bet Americans aren't significantly more productive than anyone else, except where Americans are making significantly better use of automation.
Download a new version of a web browser, break all your old plugins because of a compiler incompatibility.
I'd hope this will be fixed before Mozilla 1.5 goes out of beta. It's clearly a major hurdle to widespread adoption.
If they're going to break plugin compatibility, I'd rather they broke it properly.
The plugin "architecture" (or perhaps it's just the implementation. See below) as it exists right now is horribly broken. This is proven whenever a plugin causes the browser to crash. That should never happen, and it shouldn't matter whether or not the plugin itself is broken: the plugin architecture should insulate the browser from the misdeeds of any plugin.
If that means turning Gecko into a "window manager" so that it can provide plugins a Gecko-managed area in which to draw, so be it. But under no circumstances should the plugin ever have access to the browser's memory space. Instead, the plugin architecture should define an API through which plugins must perform all interactions with the outside world, and all plugins should run in their own address space.
And the same goes for Java. Java should never cause the browser to hang, no matter what the applet is doing.
Perhaps Linux could simply get rid of all the BSD code. That would avoid this kind of crap in the future. Not that SCO has a point, but it just seems like Linux ought to be it's own purebred thing.
Whatever for?
If it's to help develop a competing approach to solving a problem, I'm all for it: whichever one winds up proving to be best at solving the problem should be the one adopted, even if it's the other camp's solution.
But dumping the BSD code just to be "unique" is silly.
With respect to this SCO nonsense, the only thing I care about is whether or not the origins of the contributed code can be traced. If a piece of code winds up in, say, FreeBSD, I expect they have checked its source as thoroughly as the Linux maintainers would for any code contributed directly to Linux. In short, I see little reason to discriminate between the two.
Finally, if a piece of code winds up in either distribution that shouldn't, then it's a moderately simple matter of pulling the code and rewriting it if necessary if it's found that the contributer who donated the code did so without proper authorization. One would hope that a court would find the action of such removal and rewriting in the face of accidental infringement to be sufficient remedial action once the infringing code is revealed. But this is the U.S. legal system we're talking about here, and it seems to be so screwed up that I can't dismiss the possibility that it would rule heavily against an accidental infringer. In fact, things seem bad enough that I have to consider such a situation to be likely.
Eolas is not a patent profolio company by a long shot, they are a pure R&D company.
The truly important question is whether or not the company actually produces anything. If they do, then they're vulnerable to a countersuit involving patent infringement.
"IP" holding companies are some of the most dangerous creatures in the technological world today. The reason is simple: the traditional way the patent game is played is that most companies would collect patents for use as a defense against patent infringement suits. When the inevitable suit happened, they'd break out their own patent portfolio and, hopefully, find at least one that the company suing them was infringing. Both companies would agree to cross-license their patents and life is good again.
Companies that don't have a patent portfolio are at a disadvantage in that game, of course, but the upside is that patent infringement suits were relatively rare, so one could do development work in relative peace. Only if you were wildly successful as a result would you face an infringement suit, and at that point you'd generally have the ability to pay for a licensing arrangement -- unless the initiator of the suit was a competitor (as was the case in, e.g., Amazon vs. B&N). The overall system wasn't perfect, of course, but it worked well enough. Certainly free software was reasonably safe from such suits because there would be no money to be had from such a suit.
Enter the "IP" holding company. The problem with such a company is that there is no defense against them. The traditional method of cross-licensing doesn't work because such a company doesn't infringe on any patents. It can't, because the company itself doesn't actually make anything. As often (probably more, actually) as not, these "IP" holding companies don't even invent anything. Their sole purpose in life is to suck money out of companies that do invent and build things. That can include any company that does a lot of free software work, like IBM and RedHat.
I think these "IP" companies are among the greatest dangers our technology-driven world faces today, because there is no effective remedy against them, short of legislation. And we all know how likely it is that that will be of overall benefit.
As far as I know, Microsoft hasn't ever actually started a patent infringement suit against anyone (examples to the contrary welcome, of course).
That being the case, and given the fact that they lost this lawsuit, there are a number of things that could happen:
Microsoft could just pay up and otherwise leave things alone, chalking this up to the cost of "doing business".
Microsoft could appeal this all the way to the Supreme Court.
Microsoft could push for some type of legislation to reduce the risk of a repeat performance.
Microsoft could buy the company that hit them with this suit, along with other similar companies, and then start suing others through their newly-acquired companies.
The interesting question is: which of the above would represent the best thing for the free software community, and how likely is it to happen?
Things obviously don't get any better initially if they cave, though the long-term consequences might be of benefit (if they cave and just pay, then other patent-holding companies will be very much encouraged by that and we'll probably end up seeing many more such suits by such companies, and eventually the big corps will Do Something about the problem, though I suspect the end result will benefit only them and not us).
If Microsoft appeals to the Supreme Court, they can only do so if they have some sort of Constitutional argument. That's not as far-fetched as it sounds, because they can very legitimately question whether or not the patent in question and others like it meets the intent of the clause in the Constitution upon which patent law itself is based. If it weren't for the fact that Microsoft hates to lose and generally tries to win at all costs, I would totally dismiss this as a possibility.
If Microsoft pushes for some sort of legislation, the natural question is what that legislation would look like. My cynical outlook forces me to think that the resulting legislation would somehow raise the barrier of entry for either acquiring a patent or prosecuting a patent so high that only megacorps like Microsoft would be able to participate. Problem solved, along with the problems of these pesky little IP companies and free software types.
Finally, Microsoft could buy the company in question out, but that might be the same thing as IBM buying SCO out as far as end results go, with the end result being that every little upstart IP company will be suing the likes of Microsoft in order to get bought out. If Microsoft has a big enough patent portfolio, then they really don't need to do this and thus probably won't.
I'll bet Eolas is going to get lots of visits from the BSA from now on...
Revolutions are no longer reasonably possible. Back when revolutions against major powers (e.g., the American Revolution) happened, the firepower of the average soldier was only a little higher than the firepower of the average armed citizen, after accounting for all the military support infrastructure, weapons, etc.
Today, the average soldier commands a thousands-to-one advantage over the average armed civilian because of all the advanced weapons he has access to (either directly, as is the case with his assault rifle, or indirectly, as is the case with artillery and air support).
When it takes weeks of planning and preparation for a civilian (Timothy McVeigh) to build a bomb big enough to take down a medium-sized building, no civilian population can win a revolution against a military that can routinely take down the same building, and we haven't even talked about the advanced weapons the military has access to such as nukes.
This is why it's so incredibly important to kill issues like the one we're discussing here before they have a chance to gain any sort of foothold -- because there is no other alternative, and the governments of the world know this. That's why they're so willing to whore themselves to corporations: they know they are in no real danger from the civilian population because of the huge difference in firepower between them and us.
It means that we, the people, had better get used to being slaves, because that's where the world is headed.
The GPL lets you use the software for free (yay!), and then you can make your own software based on GPL'd software (again, yay!). BUT--if you do make any software based on GPL'd software, you have to release it in a near-identical license to the GPL--and here is where the right is taken away, and where the whole "BSD v GPL" shism comes from.
What "right"?
The right to distribute modifications? You never had that right.
The right to distribute binaries compiled from a modified version of the source? You never had that right, either.
The right to run the software? That's granted by fair use, if it's granted by anything at all other than the GPL.
The entire point of this discussion is simple: without the GPL, you have no rights to the software at all, except those granted to you by the fair use clause of the Copyright Act.
I agree that it's possible for a court to rule that certain parts of the GPL are invalid while, simultaneously, other parts are valid. But then, it's possible for a court to rule any way it likes on any issue, so that's not saying much.
And so, it then comes down to what is reasonable and likely. And in this case, copyright itself has more precedent behind it than anything else that might be relevant. So if parts of the GPL are ruled invalid, it's likely to be done so in such a way that basic copyright remains intact.
More importantly, if any part of the GPL is ruled invalid, then EULAs will be very much weakened by that, because the same legal mechanism which makes EULAs enforceable also makes the GPL as it is enforceable. Rule against the GPL and you almost certainly rule against EULAs in general, because both depend on the same legal framework for their power.
As I said, anything can happen. But I don't think it's reasonable at this point to argue that the GPL is in any real danger.
The problem with postgresql is that number one it does not scale worth a shit. Number two it cannot be kept online 24/7 that in itself is some major faults.
One more thing: if you're having stability problems with the database and you're running 7.3 or later, the PostgreSQL developers will be very interested in helping you track down the problem and fix it. They take stability issues very seriously (but don't really have the manpower to fix versions earlier than the 7.3 series).
Similarly, for performance issues, you should try subscribing to the PostgreSQL Performance mailing list and describe your difficulties there. If they can't help you then (and only then) try asking the guys on the Hackers list.
I've found the PostgreSQL developers to be extremely responsive, helpful, friendly, and extremely capable in dealing with PostgreSQL issues of various kinds, and they all seem very interested in doing the right thing for the community. I haven't seen a better example of the open source ethos in action.
We have been running postgresql for about 3 years in a production environment. The problem with postgresql is that number one it does not scale worth a shit. Number two it cannot be kept online 24/7 that in itself is some major faults. I run a system with databases consisting of simple data only about 15 million records or so. If we load on more than about 20 simultaneous users is slows to a grinding halt.
It seems that people's experiences vary on this. Certainly your complaints were valid in the pre-7.0 days, but PostgreSQL has improved an amazing amount since then, especially after the introduction of 7.2. The current stable version is 7.3.4, and 7.4 is right around the corner.
Much of the scalability issue you mention has to do with the default settings regarding shared memory, buffers, etc. The PostgreSQL developers have been very conservative about the defaults, because they want the database to run on the widest range of hardware possible. Unfortunately that leads to a "least common denominator" approach and the end result is a database that out of the box performs suboptimally on most systems in order to run on almost all of them.
But if you change the tunable parameters to values that are much closer to the actual hardware you're running the database on, the performance increases a great deal.
Some people have gotten very good scalability out of PostgreSQL as a result. I'm sure you're aware of the PHPBuilder article that talks largely about the scalability issues. That was written some time ago, and PostgreSQL has gotten quite a lot better since then.
It doesn't work for everyone. MySQL has the advantage of having a rudimentary replication mechanism out of the box, and its full-text indexing is much easier to set up and use. It's also much easier to upgrade between major versions (PostgreSQL requires that you dump and restore if you're upgrading to a new major version, e.g. 7.3 -> 7.4). But in the general case, PostgreSQL seems to me to be a much more capable database than MySQL is.
I don't know of any other database, commercial or otherwise, that allows you to write stored procedures in Perl, Python, or TCL. That alone might be worth the few tradeoffs.
If you're running a relatively old (7.1 or earlier) version of PostgreSQL, you might want to give 7.3.4 a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.
The only way to edit a column definition is to delete it and readd it with the correct properties, which means taking the DB offline, copying the whole table to a temporary table, deleting the offending column, readding the column, and then moving all of the data back into the old table from the temporary one, and now since your columns are in a different order, you have to play fun games to get that to work right.. then you can delete the temporary table, and put the DB back online, PURE TORTURE.
You, sir, are full of shit. Witness (the output isn't exactly what you'd see because of the crappy lameness filter and the limited Slashdot HTML options):
kevin> \d No relations found. kevin> create table foo (x integer, y varchar(20), z float); CREATE TABLE kevin> insert into foo (x, y, z) values (2, 'hello', 20.5); INSERT 16997 1 kevin> select * from foo; x y z 2 hello 20.5 (1 row)
kevin> begin; BEGIN kevin> alter table foo add column z2 integer; ALTER TABLE kevin> update foo set z2 = z; UPDATE 1 kevin> alter table foo drop column z; ALTER TABLE kevin> alter table foo rename column z2 to z; ALTER TABLE kevin> select * from foo; x y z 2 hello 20 (1 row)
kevin> \d foo Table "public.foo" Column Type Modifiers x integer y character varying(20) z integer
kevin> rollback; ROLLBACK kevin> \d foo Table "public.foo" Column Type Modifiers x integer y character varying(20) z double precision
So: not only can you do the operation without taking the database down, you can do it while within a transaction, and even rollback the entire change if you screw up!
Somebody please mod the parent "redundant," since the same fucking joke has been made in every patent story for the last year?
Just patent the process of posting redundant patent jokes on Slashdot, then.
It's not like the PTO cares about prior art, and I doubt the courts really do, either, so you won't have to worry about the fact that people have been posting these stupid jokes prior to your filing.
You'll even have a reasonably easy time making the case that you've suffered irreparable harm as a result of people violating your patent!
Slashdot Mirror
But unfortunately we don't seem to have made that much progress, despite the reasonably large number of development tools we have that address such issues (including anything from memory debuggers to string libraries). I mean, really ... people are still writing these things in C ... in the 21st century! I'm a big fan of picking the right tool for the job, but I think it should be clear by now that C isn't the right tool for writing secure software. There are simply too many ways to screw up.
I think it's time we started writing system software (that is, software which provides services but which runs as a process under the OS) in a language which doesn't have these problems. And if a suitable language is unavailable, that argues strongly for creating that language.
You might still have to worry about buffer overflow exploits against the kernel, but that's a much more manageable problem.
Perhaps, if you apply the term literally. But "groupthink" implies more than merely that an organized group of people believe a certain way -- it implies that those who are engaged in it believe the way they do because others do, not because they arrived at that way of thinking in an independent manner.
"Groupthink", literally applied, is fine as long as those who engage in it arrived at their way of thinking independently through a valid reasoning process. Groupthink isn't fine when those who engage in it think the way they do only because others within their group also think that way.
In short, the reasons matter. Big surprise.
Of course, that $3000 buys 1500 gallons of gasoline at $2/gallon, and if you're averaging 20 mpg you can go 30,000 miles.
So the gas car still wins, and we haven't even factored in the cost of the electricity to recharge the Tzero.
The Tzero might do significantly better in Europe, but that depends a great deal on how much electricity costs there.
With the way things are going, I won't be surprised at all if we lose that lawsuit, even at the Supreme Court level.
I, personally, think the events we're witnessing now are it, that the pendulum has so much momentum in the wrong direction that it won't swing back in the right direction enough to matter. Were it the 1700s I'd say a revolution might be in order, but the disparity in firepower between the average government soldier and the average civilian is so hugely in favor of the soldier (after you account for armor, artillery, and air support -- we're not even talking about the really advanced stuff yet) that a revolution simply can't succeed. Between that and the surveillance technology we have today, I think what's coming, a worldwide corporate police state, is capable of lasting thousands of years.
Better savor what freedom you have left. It'll be gone soon.
People, the sooner you start looking to the horizon the sooner you'll understand what needs to be done and why.
This isn't about science. It's not about profit. It's not about efficiency. It's not even about short-term survival.
It's about the human experience and long-term survival. The reason we should be trying to get into space on a permanent basis is that eventually it's where we must be, because otherwise the species will die.
And the reason we should be trying to build a permanent, distributed manned presence in space is that there is simply no substitute for human experience. It's human experience, and only human experience, that provides us with the judgement and knowledge needed to accomplish anything worthwhile. We're not going to learn how to get people into space and keep them there by sending unmanned probes there. Nor will we learn all the little things that ultimately make the difference between a comfortable experience and a painful one, or the difference between a survivable experience and one that isn't. Only some of that can be learned through probes. The rest requires that we be there.
Oh, and for those whose only concern is the defense of the country, consider this: whichever country manages to build a permanent manned presence in space first and move at least some of their government there will be able to rule the rest of the planet, because they'll have the ultimate bargaining chip: the ability to cause an asteroidal strike while not being completely vulnerable to one.
Absolutely none, of course. Just like airplane certification doesn't buy the airplane manufacturer any liability protection, even though certification costs tens to hundreds of millions of dollars and is required by law...
Umm...it wouldn't be because RICO is a federal statute, would it?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but that would mean that only a federal prosecutor, i.e. the DOJ, could initiate a RICO action against the RIAA. But the DOJ, along with most of the rest of the federal government, is Own3d by the RIAA and its friends (hence the easy passage of the DMCA), so no RICO action will ever be brought against them by the only people who can bring such action.
And that's why you haven't seen prosecution of the RIAA under the RICO statutes...
I hate to break the bad news, but the economy isn't going to improve that way. Perhaps you haven't been keeping up with the news, but the economy itself appears to be growing, but only as a result of significant debt increases but people are still losing jobs.
So: this is a jobless "recovery", and because the U.S. is still the largest customer base (I hate the word "consumer"), it means that the "recovery" won't last very long, once people in the U.S. start to run out of credit:
And I'm not the only one concerned about this.
End result? IMO, there's a reasonable chance that the U.S. economy will collapse in a crash at least as bad as the Great Depression, because the very people who are needed to support the economy will be unable to do so because they're unemployed. And because their jobs are being shipped overseas, they won't ever be employed until the cost of living in the U.S. drops to roughly the same or less than it is in the poorest of countries -- businesses won't have any real incentive to hire locally otherwise.
And that means that you can permanently say goodbye to the first-world standard of living we currently enjoy, unless you're in the richest few percent of the population.
And lest you think that all this activity will cause other countries to see increases in their standard of living (and thus their cost of living), remember that we're seeing proof before our eyes that employers are willing and able to shift jobs elsewhere much more quickly than economies can adjust to it. That means that whichever country has the lowest standard of living (while still being able to provide sufficiently skilled workers) will be the one to supply the workforce. Which country that happens to be may change over time but the speed that employers can shift their hiring patterns will ultimately determine the amount of time that the country's economy can grow before it loses its jobs to some other (cheaper) source.
Just remember: the cheapest possible worker is the one who uses the fewest resources. That means someone living in a dirt-floored hut with no running water, using the money he's paid to barely buy enough food to survive.
And you think this is only because the USA is Just and Good and Right or something?
That's only part of it. Another reason military spending in the USA is geared towards protecting lives is to make it easier to sell the public on military campaigns of conquest, e.g. Iraq, and other uses of the military that would otherwise be unpalatable. It would be a lot tougher to convince the American public that the campaign in Iraq was a good thing if it meant the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in the process.
Yet another reason is that by more accurately targeting your fire, you destroy less infrastructure that's likely to be useful to you once your forces occupy the area.
Don't make the mistake of believing that the USA is all about what's Just, Good, and Right. It's not. It just claims to be.
They have such a low opinion because the only people they have any peer-level experience (as opposed to master/slave experience, e.g. with artists) with -- themselves -- are people that deserve such a low opinion...
Really?
The Constitution enumerates some rights. In that regard it may be more "precise" than the Declaration of Independence. But that is the maximum extent of that precision. The Constitution itself states that other rights exist even if not enumerated, but the Supreme Court and most other courts, as well as most people (including you, it seems), have managed to see fit to completely ignore the Constitution on this issue.
Correct.
What makes you think America will remain free? Looks like it's very quickly headed towards corporate police statehood to me, if it's not already there...
I can only speak of the United States here, even though what I say may apply elsewhere. The short answer is: because society has changed.
Good science fiction fired the imagination with what could be based on what we currently know or think. Back then, people were encouraged to explore the world by their parents, teachers, and others. Back then, you could get a real chemistry set, an electronics set, etc., which you could use to perform experiments limited only by your imagination.
Today the only kinds of things you can get are prepackaged junk, where the "experiments" have essentially already been done for you and all that's left for you to do is to combine the (pre-allocated) ingredients. The exploration angle is gone, replaced with protection from oneself. And all in the name of "liability concerns".
We've become a society of frightened children, afraid to go out into the world and learn about it because to do so requires taking risks. If you try to build and sell something that requires some intelligence (or at least common sense) to use and will hurt you if you don't exhibit even a rudimentary amount of care, society will deem that you must pay, and the only exceptions to this are those things that have always been sold to the public, like automobiles, that are too useful to eliminate.
Science fiction doesn't sell because people are no longer interested in learning about the world, but are rather much more interested in being sheltered from it -- and in sheltering their children from it, as well. Part of being sheltered from the world is ignorance of the world, because to learn about the world requires taking risks. Science fiction isn't terribly interesting if one doesn't even understand the basics of the science behind it.
I can't help but think that perhaps some of this is intentional: an ignorant, frightened population is more easily controlled, after all.
Neither Vietnam nor Afghanistan are terribly relevant to the original point (that the weapons technology makes an uprising essentially impossible to win).
In the case of Vietnam, the actions available to the U.S. were constrained by political considerations. If they hadn't been, they'd have bombed North Vietnam into the stone age, with nukes if necessary, which would have gained them an instant win.
In the case of Afghanistan, the Russians were similarly constrained and, furthermore, the Afghanis had very significant assistance from the outside in the form of support from the U.S.
In the case of an uprising in the U.S., none of those things would be a problem:
The bottom line is that a popular revolt against the U.S. government simply isn't going to succeed unless the military sides with the civilians. Since the military adheres very strongly to the chain of command, which begins with the President and the Joint Chiefs of Staff (all of whom are strongly tied together politically, so a major rift within that part of the hierarchy is very unlikely), the military is unlikely to side with the civilians except at the bottom, where a disagreement matters the least. Sound familiar? It should: it's exactly the same deal as in any major corporation: policy is set at the top and it doesn't matter how much the people at the bottom disagree.
Yes, there are a lot of guns among the civilian population. But the peashooters the civilians are allowed to keep are no match for the kind of weaponry (artillery, armor, bombs, aircraft, etc., not to mention more exotic stuff like chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons) available to the military. The amount of time and preparation it took for Timothy McVeigh to put together a bomb capable of destroying a medium sized building should give you an idea of just how much advantage the military has: they routinely drop bombs at least as powerful, and don't need any real prep time to do it.
If you really think a popular revolt can succeed, then name one that has succeeded against a militarily powerful government (one that fields an air force and armored force roughly as large relative to its population as the U.S.'s, or even within an order of magnitude) without the support (or at least abstention) of that military in the last 50 years. I'll bet you can't name a single one.
But this all depends on just how you measure productivity of the U.S., doesn't it?
If it's being measured by taking the dollar value of all goods sold by U.S. companies and dividing that by the number of employed people in the U.S., then the measurement is fundamentally misleading. The reason is that much of the labor that goes into producing those goods is done by people not within the U.S. but by people who are, as a result of the economic conditions within their countries, much cheaper to hire. By that measure, the productivity of people in the U.S. isn't being measured at all -- it's the productivity of the people U.S. companies hire around the world that is being measured, and only loosely at that since the measurement doesn't account for things like exchange rates, living conditions, etc.
No, the right way to measure productivity is to measure the amount of human labor it takes to produce something. By that measure, I'll bet Americans aren't significantly more productive than anyone else, except where Americans are making significantly better use of automation.
If they're going to break plugin compatibility, I'd rather they broke it properly.
The plugin "architecture" (or perhaps it's just the implementation. See below) as it exists right now is horribly broken. This is proven whenever a plugin causes the browser to crash. That should never happen, and it shouldn't matter whether or not the plugin itself is broken: the plugin architecture should insulate the browser from the misdeeds of any plugin.
If that means turning Gecko into a "window manager" so that it can provide plugins a Gecko-managed area in which to draw, so be it. But under no circumstances should the plugin ever have access to the browser's memory space. Instead, the plugin architecture should define an API through which plugins must perform all interactions with the outside world, and all plugins should run in their own address space.
And the same goes for Java. Java should never cause the browser to hang, no matter what the applet is doing.
Whatever for?
If it's to help develop a competing approach to solving a problem, I'm all for it: whichever one winds up proving to be best at solving the problem should be the one adopted, even if it's the other camp's solution.
But dumping the BSD code just to be "unique" is silly.
With respect to this SCO nonsense, the only thing I care about is whether or not the origins of the contributed code can be traced. If a piece of code winds up in, say, FreeBSD, I expect they have checked its source as thoroughly as the Linux maintainers would for any code contributed directly to Linux. In short, I see little reason to discriminate between the two.
Finally, if a piece of code winds up in either distribution that shouldn't, then it's a moderately simple matter of pulling the code and rewriting it if necessary if it's found that the contributer who donated the code did so without proper authorization. One would hope that a court would find the action of such removal and rewriting in the face of accidental infringement to be sufficient remedial action once the infringing code is revealed. But this is the U.S. legal system we're talking about here, and it seems to be so screwed up that I can't dismiss the possibility that it would rule heavily against an accidental infringer. In fact, things seem bad enough that I have to consider such a situation to be likely.
Sigh...
The truly important question is whether or not the company actually produces anything. If they do, then they're vulnerable to a countersuit involving patent infringement.
"IP" holding companies are some of the most dangerous creatures in the technological world today. The reason is simple: the traditional way the patent game is played is that most companies would collect patents for use as a defense against patent infringement suits. When the inevitable suit happened, they'd break out their own patent portfolio and, hopefully, find at least one that the company suing them was infringing. Both companies would agree to cross-license their patents and life is good again.
Companies that don't have a patent portfolio are at a disadvantage in that game, of course, but the upside is that patent infringement suits were relatively rare, so one could do development work in relative peace. Only if you were wildly successful as a result would you face an infringement suit, and at that point you'd generally have the ability to pay for a licensing arrangement -- unless the initiator of the suit was a competitor (as was the case in, e.g., Amazon vs. B&N). The overall system wasn't perfect, of course, but it worked well enough. Certainly free software was reasonably safe from such suits because there would be no money to be had from such a suit.
Enter the "IP" holding company. The problem with such a company is that there is no defense against them. The traditional method of cross-licensing doesn't work because such a company doesn't infringe on any patents. It can't, because the company itself doesn't actually make anything. As often (probably more, actually) as not, these "IP" holding companies don't even invent anything. Their sole purpose in life is to suck money out of companies that do invent and build things. That can include any company that does a lot of free software work, like IBM and RedHat.
I think these "IP" companies are among the greatest dangers our technology-driven world faces today, because there is no effective remedy against them, short of legislation. And we all know how likely it is that that will be of overall benefit.
That being the case, and given the fact that they lost this lawsuit, there are a number of things that could happen:
The interesting question is: which of the above would represent the best thing for the free software community, and how likely is it to happen?
Things obviously don't get any better initially if they cave, though the long-term consequences might be of benefit (if they cave and just pay, then other patent-holding companies will be very much encouraged by that and we'll probably end up seeing many more such suits by such companies, and eventually the big corps will Do Something about the problem, though I suspect the end result will benefit only them and not us).
If Microsoft appeals to the Supreme Court, they can only do so if they have some sort of Constitutional argument. That's not as far-fetched as it sounds, because they can very legitimately question whether or not the patent in question and others like it meets the intent of the clause in the Constitution upon which patent law itself is based. If it weren't for the fact that Microsoft hates to lose and generally tries to win at all costs, I would totally dismiss this as a possibility.
If Microsoft pushes for some sort of legislation, the natural question is what that legislation would look like. My cynical outlook forces me to think that the resulting legislation would somehow raise the barrier of entry for either acquiring a patent or prosecuting a patent so high that only megacorps like Microsoft would be able to participate. Problem solved, along with the problems of these pesky little IP companies and free software types.
Finally, Microsoft could buy the company in question out, but that might be the same thing as IBM buying SCO out as far as end results go, with the end result being that every little upstart IP company will be suing the likes of Microsoft in order to get bought out. If Microsoft has a big enough patent portfolio, then they really don't need to do this and thus probably won't.
I'll bet Eolas is going to get lots of visits from the BSA from now on...
Revolutions are no longer reasonably possible. Back when revolutions against major powers (e.g., the American Revolution) happened, the firepower of the average soldier was only a little higher than the firepower of the average armed citizen, after accounting for all the military support infrastructure, weapons, etc.
Today, the average soldier commands a thousands-to-one advantage over the average armed civilian because of all the advanced weapons he has access to (either directly, as is the case with his assault rifle, or indirectly, as is the case with artillery and air support).
When it takes weeks of planning and preparation for a civilian (Timothy McVeigh) to build a bomb big enough to take down a medium-sized building, no civilian population can win a revolution against a military that can routinely take down the same building, and we haven't even talked about the advanced weapons the military has access to such as nukes.
This is why it's so incredibly important to kill issues like the one we're discussing here before they have a chance to gain any sort of foothold -- because there is no other alternative, and the governments of the world know this. That's why they're so willing to whore themselves to corporations: they know they are in no real danger from the civilian population because of the huge difference in firepower between them and us.
It means that we, the people, had better get used to being slaves, because that's where the world is headed.
What "right"?
The right to distribute modifications? You never had that right.
The right to distribute binaries compiled from a modified version of the source? You never had that right, either.
The right to run the software? That's granted by fair use, if it's granted by anything at all other than the GPL.
The entire point of this discussion is simple: without the GPL, you have no rights to the software at all, except those granted to you by the fair use clause of the Copyright Act.
I agree that it's possible for a court to rule that certain parts of the GPL are invalid while, simultaneously, other parts are valid. But then, it's possible for a court to rule any way it likes on any issue, so that's not saying much.
And so, it then comes down to what is reasonable and likely. And in this case, copyright itself has more precedent behind it than anything else that might be relevant. So if parts of the GPL are ruled invalid, it's likely to be done so in such a way that basic copyright remains intact.
More importantly, if any part of the GPL is ruled invalid, then EULAs will be very much weakened by that, because the same legal mechanism which makes EULAs enforceable also makes the GPL as it is enforceable. Rule against the GPL and you almost certainly rule against EULAs in general, because both depend on the same legal framework for their power.
As I said, anything can happen. But I don't think it's reasonable at this point to argue that the GPL is in any real danger.
One more thing: if you're having stability problems with the database and you're running 7.3 or later, the PostgreSQL developers will be very interested in helping you track down the problem and fix it. They take stability issues very seriously (but don't really have the manpower to fix versions earlier than the 7.3 series).
Try subscribing to the PostgreSQL Hackers mailing list and post the symptoms of the problems you're experiencing there.
Similarly, for performance issues, you should try subscribing to the PostgreSQL Performance mailing list and describe your difficulties there. If they can't help you then (and only then) try asking the guys on the Hackers list.
I've found the PostgreSQL developers to be extremely responsive, helpful, friendly, and extremely capable in dealing with PostgreSQL issues of various kinds, and they all seem very interested in doing the right thing for the community. I haven't seen a better example of the open source ethos in action.
It seems that people's experiences vary on this. Certainly your complaints were valid in the pre-7.0 days, but PostgreSQL has improved an amazing amount since then, especially after the introduction of 7.2. The current stable version is 7.3.4, and 7.4 is right around the corner.
Much of the scalability issue you mention has to do with the default settings regarding shared memory, buffers, etc. The PostgreSQL developers have been very conservative about the defaults, because they want the database to run on the widest range of hardware possible. Unfortunately that leads to a "least common denominator" approach and the end result is a database that out of the box performs suboptimally on most systems in order to run on almost all of them.
But if you change the tunable parameters to values that are much closer to the actual hardware you're running the database on, the performance increases a great deal.
Some people have gotten very good scalability out of PostgreSQL as a result. I'm sure you're aware of the PHPBuilder article that talks largely about the scalability issues. That was written some time ago, and PostgreSQL has gotten quite a lot better since then.
It doesn't work for everyone. MySQL has the advantage of having a rudimentary replication mechanism out of the box, and its full-text indexing is much easier to set up and use. It's also much easier to upgrade between major versions (PostgreSQL requires that you dump and restore if you're upgrading to a new major version, e.g. 7.3 -> 7.4). But in the general case, PostgreSQL seems to me to be a much more capable database than MySQL is.
I don't know of any other database, commercial or otherwise, that allows you to write stored procedures in Perl, Python, or TCL. That alone might be worth the few tradeoffs.
If you're running a relatively old (7.1 or earlier) version of PostgreSQL, you might want to give 7.3.4 a try. You might be pleasantly surprised.
You, sir, are full of shit. Witness (the output isn't exactly what you'd see because of the crappy lameness filter and the limited Slashdot HTML options):
So: not only can you do the operation without taking the database down, you can do it while within a transaction, and even rollback the entire change if you screw up!
This is under PostgreSQL 7.3.3.
Try that with your vaunted MySQL.
Just patent the process of posting redundant patent jokes on Slashdot, then.
It's not like the PTO cares about prior art, and I doubt the courts really do, either, so you won't have to worry about the fact that people have been posting these stupid jokes prior to your filing.
You'll even have a reasonably easy time making the case that you've suffered irreparable harm as a result of people violating your patent!