It may not make the Internet run faster, but it may make it run more reliably.
There is one thing that Intel got very, very right: the P4 will keep itself from burning up by dropping its internal clock speed until its internal temperature remains below whatever its internal cutoff is. And it seems to do so smoothly (so that even when it's running more slowly, it's still running smoothly).
I can't tell you how cool that is. I've disconnected the CPU fan while running a benchmark test in a loop and watched as the system slowly dropped its speed to about half its original speed, and then it stabilized. And kept going as if nothing had happened. I did the same thing while a CPU-intensive screensaver was running to see if there would be any noticeable jerkiness and it was completely smooth at the visual level.
This is perfect for servers. If you lose the CPU fan or if the heatsink falls off, the system keeps going, which is exactly what you want for server duty! You, the admin of the box, may notice that the system is running slowly and investigate, but at least the system doesn't go down.
I'm sold on the P4 for that reason alone. The Athlon may be faster on a per-clock basis, but the P4 has it where it counts in the reliability department. And for some of us, reliability trumps speed.
And when backed into a corner by the legal system, businesses usually prefer to just pay the fee to the troll under the bridge rather than fight it for a chance to pass for free.
Hmm....
Become a Slashdot troll. Position yourself under a bridge.
When I use a 3d API like glide, openGL, or D3D, I don't give a damn how they work. And what's more, I'm not going to go digging into their guts to "check their integrity and submit improvements." The whole reason I'm using an API/service is to save myself time by *not* having to deal with the routines the services provide.
Which is fine for most types of libraries.
But we're talking about cryptography libraries here -- libraries which are used to keep data secure. A bug in one of these libraries doesn't merely cause the occasional strange artifact on the screen, or the occasional application crash. A bug in a crypto library can very easily mean that the data that you thought was secure really isn't. That's a much more serious consequence, and it's why bugs in crypto libraries have to be taken more seriously.
Actually, he's advocating using the best tool for the job, and that zealous fanatics that insist on using Open Source everything will get us nowhere.
Perhaps. And if the federal government were simply another company or individual then simply going for the best tool for the job would be appropriate.
But I think an extreme example will illustrate my point better than anything else.
Suppose that the government, in its infinite wisdom, decides that the best desktop platform to use is HP/UX running on HP desktop machines. If they decide that it's the best tool for the job, then they should be able to use that platform, right? That's what you and O'Reilly are arguing.
Now, let's further suppose that on that platform, the best email client to use is some $10,000 piece of proprietary software that runs only on HP/UX and which encrypts every message sent such that only another copy of that software can decrypt it. Since the government is, in this example, standardizing on HP/UX and on this email client, internal communication is a non-issue. Since it's the best email client to use, the government should use it, right? That's what you and O'Reilly are arguing.
Now suppose the citizenry needs to communicate with this government (what a surprise!). For a citizen to be able to read the email generated by the government, he must not only acquire the email client in question, he must also acquire an HP workstation running HP/UX!
This is an unreasonable burden on the citizenry.
But it's even worse than that. Suppose that the company that manufactures the email client decides to change the encrypted format such that new clients can read email from old clients, but old clients can't read email generated by new ones. Now the government has to upgrade everyone at once if it wants to upgrade at all. And in two generations of the email client, the manufacturer can completely eliminate support for the original format. And not only will the government be forced to upgrade, but any citizen that wishes to communicate with the government will also be forced to upgrade.
Do you really believe the above outcome is a reasonable one? It's entirely possible given the starting conditions (namely, the government can use whatever it deems most suitable regardless of the desires and needs of the citizenry).
In an ideal world, the government would always consider the needs of its citizens above all else when deciding what software to use for the job. But reality isn't like that. In reality, the decision of what piece of software to use is a political decision, and as a result is greatly skewed by things like campaign contributions, money under the table, influence of the rich and powerful, etc. This, above all else, is why the government should be forced to use open source software. Open source software is the only way to guarantee the following things:
The ability to communicate with the citizenry without placing any financial burden upon the citizenry beyond that of acquiring a computer.
The ability to read data generated long ago.
The ability to know, through internal audits of the source code, that the software is secure and that it does what it needs to.
Proprietary software might provide some of the above for a limited time, but that is something that can and will change at the whim of the software vendor. When the government uses proprietary software, it places itself at the mercy of the software vendor. This may be an acceptable position for an individual or company to put itself in, but it is not an acceptable position for a government to be in, precisely because the government's responsibility is to its citizenry and not to some proprietary software vendor.
Can anyone think of a different system that doesn't reward the patent examiner awarding bad patents?
Yeah: if you approve a patent that is later proven to be a bad patent (prior art, etc.) you're fired.
You can also set it up so that the patent applicant gets, say, two chances to get his patent approved. If his patent is rejected after the second attempt, that's the end. The patent goes to a different examiner the second time around, in order to prevent bias.
In reality, the bias at the patent office should be against granting patents. So I'd arrange things so that patent applicants have to pay each time they submit a patent application, even if it's for the same patent. So rejections would be encouraged, because the patent office would get more work and thus make more money that way.
There should be no consequences for rejecting what turns out to be a valid patent. Not being granted a patent doesn't prevent one from further developing the invention in question, but being granted a patent certainly does prevent others from further developing that invention. A patent is a grant of a monopoly over the invention in question, so in reality being granted a patent should be a rare occurrance, not a commonplace one.
A mess for those running old/current distros...
on
GCC 3.2 Released
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Suppose I have a system that uses an older compiler and I want to put gcc 3.2 on it. No problem as far as naming the compiler and such goes, that's the easy part.
But now I have to recompile every single C++ library on the system in order to make the new compiler truly useful.
Yet, at the same time, I want to be able to run my old C++ binaries and also want to be able to drop back to my older compiler if necessary.
The best way to accomplish this, I suppose, is to put the new libraries in their own directory and modify gcc 3.2's spec file to include a -L directive to the linker to reference those libraries at link time and a -rpath directive at link time so that the resulting binary references that directory at runtime.
The other options I thought of involve either renaming the libraries (thus requiring manual intervention when compiling any package that would refer to the libraries by their "old" names) or changing their major version number (surely a serious abuse of the purpose of the major number! And it would cause problems when linking using the old compiler anyway). Neither of those are very palatable.
We're talking about evolution. Evolution is a statistical process. So of course I'm going to use terms like "probably" to describe evolutionary effects.
Materialistic people are more successful on the chart of... materialism. No shit Sherlock.
You apparently didn't get my point: materialistic people are more successful at providing for their families, which is something that requires physical resources.
There is a HUGE difference between materialism and evolutionary competitiveness.
Think so, huh?
I think we'd better get some facts out of the way first. One of them is that there are various degrees of materialism, ranging from none (wherein you don't give a crap about having any material possessions whatsoever) to extreme (wherein the only thing that matters is what you have and what you can acquire). Most people are, of course, somewhere in between.
Now, it should be quite obvious that in evolutionary terms, the extremes aren't going to do as well as the middle, because people at the extremes have to compromise other things in order to be there. But if you have to pit the two extremes against each other, I'd say that the ultra-materialist is more likely to be evolutionarily successful than the non-materialist, and I think the people who run companies like Microsoft and organizations like the RIAA are excellent examples of that.
Materialism is just a trait like many others. There's as much difference between materialism and evolutionary competitiveness as there is between physical fitness and evolutionary competitiveness. Each brings certain advantages to the table.
But don't fool yourself into thinking that materialism has no effect on evolutionary competitiveness. You'd be an idiot if you thought that, for the reasons I described previously, namely that the greater a person's materialism, the greater the amount of effort they will put into acquiring wealth (in the general case), and while there isn't a linear relationship between effort and results, there is a relationship. You don't acquire the means to provide for your family by sitting around on your ass all day long wishing for those means to find you. It takes effort, and the greater your materialistic drive the more willing you will be to expend the necessary effort, and thus the more successful you are likely to be, and thus the more successful your offspring who inherit your drive are likely to be.
I agree about the benefits of valuing happiness and overall wellbeing over materialist possessions. It's the philosophy I subscribe to myself (I only want those items that will enable me to do the things I enjoy). But I'm not idealistic enough to believe that my philosophy is more successful in an evolutionary sense. The real world has taught me repeatedly that such idealism is usually rewarded with pain.
And I was hoping that it was a problem with the shuttle itself. The shuttle is entirely too expensive (half a billion dollars per launch?!?!) for what we get, and it really needs to die so that we can at least get another opportunity to replace it with something more cost effective. Because as long as they can continue to operate the shuttle, they will, no matter the cost -- because it's politically easier.
Materialistic women often do not have children, because it's just too expensive in terms of time and money of course.
Perhaps. But even if that's true, is it generally true? Or specific only to women in the U.S.? And is their rate of childbirth less than the average of the society they live in?
So let's see... I google around for "soundbug UK" as something I recently wished to purchase, find a sponsored link pointing me at a site I've never heard of before, get as far as the obligatory https:// part, take a phone number from the site, phone them up say "what's your fingerprint?"....
Who says you have to get their phone number off their web site? If they have a phone number, then they should have a phone book entry, right? So you call the number in the phonebook. Now the attacker has to hijack the company's SSL sessions and their telephone lines -- a much more difficult problem.
Materialistic women need to get with reality and stop the pretentious b.s.
Uh, I hate to burst your bubble, people, but being materialistic, particularly as regards to selection of men, is evolutionarily very advantageous for women.
Think about it. Take two women, one who is materialistic and one who isn't. The materialistic success of a potential partner doesn't matter to the non-materialistic woman, but does to the materialistic one. So the woman who is materialistic is more likely to end up partnering with a guy who is materially successful than the woman who isn't.
End result? The materialistic woman is more likely to end up with offspring who are more capable of being materially successful than non-materialistic woman and, on top of that, the offspring of the materialistic woman will be better provided for.
Material success is strongly tied to the ability to provide for a family. The more materially successful you are, the greater the resources you have at your disposal to provide well for your offspring. The better you can provide for your offspring, the greater their chances of survival. The better their ability to provide for themselves (i.e., to inherit your success traits), the greater their chances of survival and reproduction. And the odds of survival and reproduction are the only things that matter in evolutionary terms.
So if you were to start with those two women and look at their extended family many generations later, you'll probably find that the materialistic woman has more descendants and that those descendants are materially better off, on average, than the descendants of the non-materialistic woman.
Eventually, the materialistic types will dominate the population. Which, I think, is exactly the situation we see today. And it's no coincidence that those greedy types happen to be the most successful, as well. Why else do you think greedy entities like Microsoft, the RIAA, etc., are all so powerful and successful? It's because they're run by people who are also greedy and materialistic -- the very trait which enables them to succeed.
There is more truth than you can imagine in the phrase "nice guys finish last". You can thank evolution for it.
It doesn't add anything to have to phone up to read out an SSL certificate fingerprint - you might as well just place the order over the phone!
This isn't true at all.
When you phone up to get the SSL fingerprint, all you're doing is asking the company for data that is already public, but doing so in such a way that you can reasonably be sure that you're getting it from the official source. This transaction doesn't involve any private, sensitive data at all.
If you then use the certificate to conduct a business transaction, the sensitive data (credit card data, for instance) will be encrypted end-to-end using the now trusted certificate so that eavesdroppers cannot intercept that sensitive data (and the fact that you're using a verified certificate prevents man-in-the-middle attacks).
So the end result is quite a bit more secure than simply placing the order over the telephone, since it is possible to tap a telephone line without either end knowing about it.
2. The big P2P sharers leave the networks. Usage drops drastically. However, the P2P software makers are still in business, as they are now left alone. Music is still being shared, only now its stuff that explicitly has been allowed by the Artists to be shared.
Huh? How naive can you get?
You think the RIAA will just be nice and leave P2P software makers alone once trading of RIAA 0wn3d music on P2P networks drops through the floor? You think the RIAA will just ignore all those independent artists that they don't have any control over but who would now have more relative exposure on P2P networks?
You've gotta be kidding me. What world did you grow up in?
The RIAA will not stop until all music distribution methods are completely under their control. Total domination is what they're after and they're not going to settle for anything less. And because they 0wn Congress, they have a reasonable chance of succeeding. Oh, yeah, they might destroy the Internet in the process, but everyone knows that the only people who use the internet as anything other than a glorified TV set are 3v1l h4x0rz and terrorists, right?
Maybe I'm too idealistic, but it seems to me that too many have given up on democracy really working (including myself often). The real test is that countries can change. That has happened in the past, if it can no longer happen, I think the fault lies more with the citizens than with the elected officials.
That would be true in an ideal world. But before you really believe that, consider this:
One of the big reasons for using a representative democracy, instead of a direct one, is that people simply don't have time to vote directly on every little issue that comes up. It's much more efficient for them to elect someone to represent them, someone whom they believe best represents their interests. To demand that everyone keep up with all the issues is to negate one of the biggest reasons for electing representatives instead of simply voting directly on issues to begin with.
That said, people can only vote based on what they know. And what they know is controlled by the very corporations that have managed to pollute our entire political system. It's ingenious (in an evil way) how they've done it, really: in order for a politician to be elected he has to have wide, popular exposure. In order to get that, he has to pay a lot of money to the media. The costs today are high enough that only corporations have enough money to give to make a politician's election possible. But the media is owned by the very corporations that give the politican the money to spend on his own election!! In any case, the end result is that people only vote for those people they know something about (you can't vote for someone whose existence you're not aware of, can you?), and the only source of information that is widespread enough to make election possible is the mass media, which is owned by the very corporations that are the root of the problem to begin with. So the only politicians that can get elected are the ones that the large corporations want to be elected.
So it's not the fault of the citizens that things are the way they are. They really don't have much of a choice: the large corporations have arranged things in order to ensure that.
It looks to me like there is no solution to this problem short of violent revolution. There is simply no way to get "there" (a government that listens and responds to the actual wants and needs of the people and not those of the corporations) from "here", because the system itself has feedback mechanisms (see above) in place that make such a direction impossible.
This is why a corporate-run police state is inevitable, at least in the U.S. It's why the average person in the U.S. today has (as far as I know) longer hours and less real vacation (a "vacation" in which you take your cellphone and laptop "just in case" the office calls is not a real vacation!) than anywhere else in the first world (people who work harder have less time to think about politics, so it's obviously in the best interests of the corporations both from the standpoint of overall profits and from a political standpoint to give the working people as little free time as possible).
Sorry for the rant, but we really are falling into a bottomless pit and it sure looks like there isn't a damned thing any of us can do to stop it.
Really? Well, then, I guess walking must also be a privilege, yes?
Oh, so you think walking is a right but driving is a privilege, huh? Then, pray tell, what is the difference between the two? Safety? Then how about riding your bicycle? Is that a right or a privilege?
Think it's a matter of whether or not you do it on "public" property? Well, "public" property is property owned by us, the people. If there is any property we have the right to use, it's public property. But for you to be consistent in using the "public property" argument, then walking on the sidewalk (public property) must be a privilege, not a right.
Understand this: the entire point behind the founding of the U.S. was to give the people the right to do any damned thing they please so long as in doing so they don't interfere in the rights of others.
In just over 200 years we've gone from that to the belief that most things are "privileges" to be given or taken away at the whim of the government (and the corporations that control it) we're now so obviously subservient to. It's enough to make any freedom loving person ill.
Strangely, Michael, it is a convention of the "old media" that one does not refer to someone as having committed a "criminal fraud committed with full knowledge it was a crime" until that person has been found guilty in a court of having done so.
Yes. But, of course, this is the same media that also reports on individuals such as Mitnick and Sklyarov with phrases along the lines of "charged with intellectual property violations" or "arrested for breaking into computer systems".
The point being that the media do not treat large corporations such as Worldcom the same way they treat individuals who have far less power and money. What a surprise, when the media is 0wn3d by large corporations.
Hey, where did you get that code from? We never intended to release that part of the code!
Just stay right there. A team of, er, negotiators, will be there to speak with you shortly.
Steve Balmer, Microsoft head negotiator
Re:But it makes the firewall illegal, no?
on
More MS EULA Fun
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
It seems to me that the EULA means that you're not allowed to block out their requests.
Sure you are.
The law says you have the right to do certain things with the copyrighted works you own, such as make backups for personal use, etc. But the copyright owners don't have an obligation by law to make that possible, and that's exactly the "loophole" they're using against us right now.
Well, we're just applying exactly the same principle to Microsoft: they may have the right to remotely perform installs and upgrades to your system, but you don't have an obligation to make that possible. By putting the appropriate firewalls in place, you're simply not giving them the technological means to do what they have a "right" to do.
Now, I agree that in practice it'll work out such that the big corps like Microsoft will have the right to do whatever they please and you won't have the right to do jack shit, but that's a different discussion...
I'm sure any judge will realise how broad the DMCA is and as a result how damaging it can be to a persons rights as well as to a community of developers, not to mention privacy advocates.
You mean like Judge Kaplan did in the 2600 DeCSS case?
Re:Perhaps I'm completely missing the point here..
on
HP Backs Off DMCA Threat
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Adobe brought a `DMCA violation' to the attention of the FBI to prompt the Skylarov / Elcomsoft affair. When they backed down, the FBI did not follow suit. Is it not the case that all a person or company can do is bring a `violation' to the attention of the FBI, and let them take it from there?
The FBI didn't follow suit... at least based on what Adobe publicly said. But how much would you wager that Adobe told the FBI in private to stick it to Sklyarov? That's where my money is...
Remember: we have the best government money can buy. And Adobe has a lot of money...
"I can't think of any good reason to do X, but at least one reason not to do X, so X should be illegal."
Right?
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand the nature of freedom at all. In the general case, the only things that should be made illegal are those things that do direct harm to others: your right to swing your fist stops at my nose and all that. If there's something you want made illegal but that doesn't directly harm others then you'd better have a damned good reason for it, as in an overwhelmingly good argument supporting your position.
I don't think such an argument exists for the IMEI number.
There are plenty of examples of companies with firm ethical backgrounds. Big companies, sucessful companies.
Really? In the United States? Who?? And are they still around? Or have they been bought up by some other larger, unethical company (like Phillip Morris).
What's with people equating their window manager with their entire GUI environment???
Windowmaker is just a window manager. A good one, yes. But it's still just a window manager, nothing more. It handles movement and resizing of windows, virtual desktops, the root window menu, and the "dock". And that's all.
Everything else, from the menus in the applications, to drag and drop, to the appearance of all the controls used in applications, is provided by any number of toolkits (Qt, GTK, Motif, Xt, etc.). Change the appearance of Windowmaker and what happens to the appearance of applications? Absolutely nothing.
Windowmaker is a very nice window manager. But a truly user friendly desktop needs more consistency than that. If you're using Windowmaker, you really want all your applications to use the same menuing mechanism that Windowmaker uses.
The real problem with the Linux desktop is consistency, and that's because everyone has been taking the wrong approach to building GUIs. They've been building toolkits such as GTK, QT, etc., directly, when what they should have done first is to abstract the GUI into a protocol in much the same way that drawing operations were abstracted into a protocol when X was designed (Xlib is only one way to talk to the X server. It's entirely possible to write your own library to talk to the X server, but nobody's done that because it hasn't proven to be useful).
Makes me wonder whether it might be useful to define a "widget" extension to X, so that you wouldn't have to reinvent all the work that has been done at the low level protocol layer...
Slashdot Mirror
There is one thing that Intel got very, very right: the P4 will keep itself from burning up by dropping its internal clock speed until its internal temperature remains below whatever its internal cutoff is. And it seems to do so smoothly (so that even when it's running more slowly, it's still running smoothly).
I can't tell you how cool that is. I've disconnected the CPU fan while running a benchmark test in a loop and watched as the system slowly dropped its speed to about half its original speed, and then it stabilized. And kept going as if nothing had happened. I did the same thing while a CPU-intensive screensaver was running to see if there would be any noticeable jerkiness and it was completely smooth at the visual level.
This is perfect for servers. If you lose the CPU fan or if the heatsink falls off, the system keeps going, which is exactly what you want for server duty! You, the admin of the box, may notice that the system is running slowly and investigate, but at least the system doesn't go down.
I'm sold on the P4 for that reason alone. The Athlon may be faster on a per-clock basis, but the P4 has it where it counts in the reliability department. And for some of us, reliability trumps speed.
Hmm....
Which is fine for most types of libraries.
But we're talking about cryptography libraries here -- libraries which are used to keep data secure. A bug in one of these libraries doesn't merely cause the occasional strange artifact on the screen, or the occasional application crash. A bug in a crypto library can very easily mean that the data that you thought was secure really isn't. That's a much more serious consequence, and it's why bugs in crypto libraries have to be taken more seriously.
Perhaps. And if the federal government were simply another company or individual then simply going for the best tool for the job would be appropriate.
But I think an extreme example will illustrate my point better than anything else.
Suppose that the government, in its infinite wisdom, decides that the best desktop platform to use is HP/UX running on HP desktop machines. If they decide that it's the best tool for the job, then they should be able to use that platform, right? That's what you and O'Reilly are arguing.
Now, let's further suppose that on that platform, the best email client to use is some $10,000 piece of proprietary software that runs only on HP/UX and which encrypts every message sent such that only another copy of that software can decrypt it. Since the government is, in this example, standardizing on HP/UX and on this email client, internal communication is a non-issue. Since it's the best email client to use, the government should use it, right? That's what you and O'Reilly are arguing.
Now suppose the citizenry needs to communicate with this government (what a surprise!). For a citizen to be able to read the email generated by the government, he must not only acquire the email client in question, he must also acquire an HP workstation running HP/UX!
This is an unreasonable burden on the citizenry.
But it's even worse than that. Suppose that the company that manufactures the email client decides to change the encrypted format such that new clients can read email from old clients, but old clients can't read email generated by new ones. Now the government has to upgrade everyone at once if it wants to upgrade at all. And in two generations of the email client, the manufacturer can completely eliminate support for the original format. And not only will the government be forced to upgrade, but any citizen that wishes to communicate with the government will also be forced to upgrade.
Do you really believe the above outcome is a reasonable one? It's entirely possible given the starting conditions (namely, the government can use whatever it deems most suitable regardless of the desires and needs of the citizenry).
In an ideal world, the government would always consider the needs of its citizens above all else when deciding what software to use for the job. But reality isn't like that. In reality, the decision of what piece of software to use is a political decision, and as a result is greatly skewed by things like campaign contributions, money under the table, influence of the rich and powerful, etc. This, above all else, is why the government should be forced to use open source software. Open source software is the only way to guarantee the following things:
Proprietary software might provide some of the above for a limited time, but that is something that can and will change at the whim of the software vendor. When the government uses proprietary software, it places itself at the mercy of the software vendor. This may be an acceptable position for an individual or company to put itself in, but it is not an acceptable position for a government to be in, precisely because the government's responsibility is to its citizenry and not to some proprietary software vendor.
Now do you understand?
Yeah: if you approve a patent that is later proven to be a bad patent (prior art, etc.) you're fired.
You can also set it up so that the patent applicant gets, say, two chances to get his patent approved. If his patent is rejected after the second attempt, that's the end. The patent goes to a different examiner the second time around, in order to prevent bias.
In reality, the bias at the patent office should be against granting patents. So I'd arrange things so that patent applicants have to pay each time they submit a patent application, even if it's for the same patent. So rejections would be encouraged, because the patent office would get more work and thus make more money that way.
There should be no consequences for rejecting what turns out to be a valid patent. Not being granted a patent doesn't prevent one from further developing the invention in question, but being granted a patent certainly does prevent others from further developing that invention. A patent is a grant of a monopoly over the invention in question, so in reality being granted a patent should be a rare occurrance, not a commonplace one.
But now I have to recompile every single C++ library on the system in order to make the new compiler truly useful.
Yet, at the same time, I want to be able to run my old C++ binaries and also want to be able to drop back to my older compiler if necessary.
The best way to accomplish this, I suppose, is to put the new libraries in their own directory and modify gcc 3.2's spec file to include a -L directive to the linker to reference those libraries at link time and a -rpath directive at link time so that the resulting binary references that directory at runtime.
The other options I thought of involve either renaming the libraries (thus requiring manual intervention when compiling any package that would refer to the libraries by their "old" names) or changing their major version number (surely a serious abuse of the purpose of the major number! And it would cause problems when linking using the old compiler anyway). Neither of those are very palatable.
Anyone have better ideas on how to do this?
We're talking about evolution. Evolution is a statistical process. So of course I'm going to use terms like "probably" to describe evolutionary effects.
You apparently didn't get my point: materialistic people are more successful at providing for their families, which is something that requires physical resources.
Think so, huh?
I think we'd better get some facts out of the way first. One of them is that there are various degrees of materialism, ranging from none (wherein you don't give a crap about having any material possessions whatsoever) to extreme (wherein the only thing that matters is what you have and what you can acquire). Most people are, of course, somewhere in between.
Now, it should be quite obvious that in evolutionary terms, the extremes aren't going to do as well as the middle, because people at the extremes have to compromise other things in order to be there. But if you have to pit the two extremes against each other, I'd say that the ultra-materialist is more likely to be evolutionarily successful than the non-materialist, and I think the people who run companies like Microsoft and organizations like the RIAA are excellent examples of that.
Materialism is just a trait like many others. There's as much difference between materialism and evolutionary competitiveness as there is between physical fitness and evolutionary competitiveness. Each brings certain advantages to the table.
But don't fool yourself into thinking that materialism has no effect on evolutionary competitiveness. You'd be an idiot if you thought that, for the reasons I described previously, namely that the greater a person's materialism, the greater the amount of effort they will put into acquiring wealth (in the general case), and while there isn't a linear relationship between effort and results, there is a relationship. You don't acquire the means to provide for your family by sitting around on your ass all day long wishing for those means to find you. It takes effort, and the greater your materialistic drive the more willing you will be to expend the necessary effort, and thus the more successful you are likely to be, and thus the more successful your offspring who inherit your drive are likely to be.
I agree about the benefits of valuing happiness and overall wellbeing over materialist possessions. It's the philosophy I subscribe to myself (I only want those items that will enable me to do the things I enjoy). But I'm not idealistic enough to believe that my philosophy is more successful in an evolutionary sense. The real world has taught me repeatedly that such idealism is usually rewarded with pain.
And I was hoping that it was a problem with the shuttle itself. The shuttle is entirely too expensive (half a billion dollars per launch?!?!) for what we get, and it really needs to die so that we can at least get another opportunity to replace it with something more cost effective. Because as long as they can continue to operate the shuttle, they will, no matter the cost -- because it's politically easier.
Who says you have to get their phone number off their web site? If they have a phone number, then they should have a phone book entry, right? So you call the number in the phonebook. Now the attacker has to hijack the company's SSL sessions and their telephone lines -- a much more difficult problem.
Uh, I hate to burst your bubble, people, but being materialistic, particularly as regards to selection of men, is evolutionarily very advantageous for women.
Think about it. Take two women, one who is materialistic and one who isn't. The materialistic success of a potential partner doesn't matter to the non-materialistic woman, but does to the materialistic one. So the woman who is materialistic is more likely to end up partnering with a guy who is materially successful than the woman who isn't.
End result? The materialistic woman is more likely to end up with offspring who are more capable of being materially successful than non-materialistic woman and, on top of that, the offspring of the materialistic woman will be better provided for.
Material success is strongly tied to the ability to provide for a family. The more materially successful you are, the greater the resources you have at your disposal to provide well for your offspring. The better you can provide for your offspring, the greater their chances of survival. The better their ability to provide for themselves (i.e., to inherit your success traits), the greater their chances of survival and reproduction. And the odds of survival and reproduction are the only things that matter in evolutionary terms.
So if you were to start with those two women and look at their extended family many generations later, you'll probably find that the materialistic woman has more descendants and that those descendants are materially better off, on average, than the descendants of the non-materialistic woman.
Eventually, the materialistic types will dominate the population. Which, I think, is exactly the situation we see today. And it's no coincidence that those greedy types happen to be the most successful, as well. Why else do you think greedy entities like Microsoft, the RIAA, etc., are all so powerful and successful? It's because they're run by people who are also greedy and materialistic -- the very trait which enables them to succeed.
There is more truth than you can imagine in the phrase "nice guys finish last". You can thank evolution for it.
This isn't true at all.
When you phone up to get the SSL fingerprint, all you're doing is asking the company for data that is already public, but doing so in such a way that you can reasonably be sure that you're getting it from the official source. This transaction doesn't involve any private, sensitive data at all.
If you then use the certificate to conduct a business transaction, the sensitive data (credit card data, for instance) will be encrypted end-to-end using the now trusted certificate so that eavesdroppers cannot intercept that sensitive data (and the fact that you're using a verified certificate prevents man-in-the-middle attacks).
So the end result is quite a bit more secure than simply placing the order over the telephone, since it is possible to tap a telephone line without either end knowing about it.
He wouldn't have to worry. He'd just whip out a really large wad of cash:
Judge: Mr. Ballmer, you're in contempt of court! I sentence you to ...
[Ballmer pulls out huge wad of cash and waves it in front of the judge.]
Judge [mesmerized]: ... sentence you to ... er ... a vacation in Hawaii! Yes, that should do quite nicely ...
Ballmer: Thank you, your honor. I promise it won't happen again. [Walks out, snickering]
Huh? How naive can you get?
You think the RIAA will just be nice and leave P2P software makers alone once trading of RIAA 0wn3d music on P2P networks drops through the floor? You think the RIAA will just ignore all those independent artists that they don't have any control over but who would now have more relative exposure on P2P networks?
You've gotta be kidding me. What world did you grow up in?
The RIAA will not stop until all music distribution methods are completely under their control. Total domination is what they're after and they're not going to settle for anything less. And because they 0wn Congress, they have a reasonable chance of succeeding. Oh, yeah, they might destroy the Internet in the process, but everyone knows that the only people who use the internet as anything other than a glorified TV set are 3v1l h4x0rz and terrorists, right?
Sigh...
That would be true in an ideal world. But before you really believe that, consider this:
So it's not the fault of the citizens that things are the way they are. They really don't have much of a choice: the large corporations have arranged things in order to ensure that.
It looks to me like there is no solution to this problem short of violent revolution. There is simply no way to get "there" (a government that listens and responds to the actual wants and needs of the people and not those of the corporations) from "here", because the system itself has feedback mechanisms (see above) in place that make such a direction impossible.
This is why a corporate-run police state is inevitable, at least in the U.S. It's why the average person in the U.S. today has (as far as I know) longer hours and less real vacation (a "vacation" in which you take your cellphone and laptop "just in case" the office calls is not a real vacation!) than anywhere else in the first world (people who work harder have less time to think about politics, so it's obviously in the best interests of the corporations both from the standpoint of overall profits and from a political standpoint to give the working people as little free time as possible).
Sorry for the rant, but we really are falling into a bottomless pit and it sure looks like there isn't a damned thing any of us can do to stop it.
Really? Well, then, I guess walking must also be a privilege, yes?
Oh, so you think walking is a right but driving is a privilege, huh? Then, pray tell, what is the difference between the two? Safety? Then how about riding your bicycle? Is that a right or a privilege?
Think it's a matter of whether or not you do it on "public" property? Well, "public" property is property owned by us, the people. If there is any property we have the right to use, it's public property. But for you to be consistent in using the "public property" argument, then walking on the sidewalk (public property) must be a privilege, not a right.
Understand this: the entire point behind the founding of the U.S. was to give the people the right to do any damned thing they please so long as in doing so they don't interfere in the rights of others.
In just over 200 years we've gone from that to the belief that most things are "privileges" to be given or taken away at the whim of the government (and the corporations that control it) we're now so obviously subservient to. It's enough to make any freedom loving person ill.
Yes. But, of course, this is the same media that also reports on individuals such as Mitnick and Sklyarov with phrases along the lines of "charged with intellectual property violations" or "arrested for breaking into computer systems".
The point being that the media do not treat large corporations such as Worldcom the same way they treat individuals who have far less power and money. What a surprise, when the media is 0wn3d by large corporations.
Yeah, I guess this explains why the DMCA didn't get voted by Congress into law, and certainly didn't get passed unanimously with a voice vote.
Oh, wait...
Steve Balmer, Microsoft head negotiator
Sure you are.
The law says you have the right to do certain things with the copyrighted works you own, such as make backups for personal use, etc. But the copyright owners don't have an obligation by law to make that possible, and that's exactly the "loophole" they're using against us right now.
Well, we're just applying exactly the same principle to Microsoft: they may have the right to remotely perform installs and upgrades to your system, but you don't have an obligation to make that possible. By putting the appropriate firewalls in place, you're simply not giving them the technological means to do what they have a "right" to do.
Now, I agree that in practice it'll work out such that the big corps like Microsoft will have the right to do whatever they please and you won't have the right to do jack shit, but that's a different discussion...
You mean like Judge Kaplan did in the 2600 DeCSS case?
The FBI didn't follow suit ... at least based on what Adobe publicly said. But how much would you wager that Adobe told the FBI in private to stick it to Sklyarov? That's where my money is...
Remember: we have the best government money can buy. And Adobe has a lot of money...
Right?
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand the nature of freedom at all. In the general case, the only things that should be made illegal are those things that do direct harm to others: your right to swing your fist stops at my nose and all that. If there's something you want made illegal but that doesn't directly harm others then you'd better have a damned good reason for it, as in an overwhelmingly good argument supporting your position.
I don't think such an argument exists for the IMEI number.
Really? In the United States? Who?? And are they still around? Or have they been bought up by some other larger, unethical company (like Phillip Morris).
Please back up your assertion.
Windowmaker is just a window manager. A good one, yes. But it's still just a window manager, nothing more. It handles movement and resizing of windows, virtual desktops, the root window menu, and the "dock". And that's all.
Everything else, from the menus in the applications, to drag and drop, to the appearance of all the controls used in applications, is provided by any number of toolkits (Qt, GTK, Motif, Xt, etc.). Change the appearance of Windowmaker and what happens to the appearance of applications? Absolutely nothing.
Windowmaker is a very nice window manager. But a truly user friendly desktop needs more consistency than that. If you're using Windowmaker, you really want all your applications to use the same menuing mechanism that Windowmaker uses.
The real problem with the Linux desktop is consistency, and that's because everyone has been taking the wrong approach to building GUIs. They've been building toolkits such as GTK, QT, etc., directly, when what they should have done first is to abstract the GUI into a protocol in much the same way that drawing operations were abstracted into a protocol when X was designed (Xlib is only one way to talk to the X server. It's entirely possible to write your own library to talk to the X server, but nobody's done that because it hasn't proven to be useful).
Makes me wonder whether it might be useful to define a "widget" extension to X, so that you wouldn't have to reinvent all the work that has been done at the low level protocol layer...