I am apalled at Microsoft for their blatent disregard of our children. Apparently, it is possible to enter in a special code into a search engine, and get Internet Explorer to display lude pictures. This is outrageous!
I was also informed that other Microsoft products have similar problems. Outlook has a built-in feature for detecting pornographic emails and filing them into a separate folder called "junk." The product even comes with a built-in list of keywords to help the search!
I think we need the government to step in and regulate this stuff.
...the Doom monsters like the Baron, the Imp and the Pinky Demon will mostly be real monsters...
Oh no! Didn't these people learn anything from the first Doom?!?! If they create real monsters, it will be Hell on Earth! I know Hollywood is going for realism, but it's just not worth it. Oh the humanity! I just hope the portal's aren't real too...
...Other suggested responsibilities for this new organization include Internet surveillance, 'consumer protection,' and perhaps even the power to tax domain names to pay for 'universal access.'"
I was fine up until that part. ICANN does not and should never have the power to do any of the above things. They could at least PRETEND to be legitimate. But when they start off by suggesting that they could have power way beyond the scope of what is reasonable, right away, it becomes pretty clear that this is a bad idea.
I was listening to NPR and they interviewed someone who finally made it clear to me: He said that the modern version of the death penalty is not effective as a deterrent. The theory behind the death penalty is:
1) It is cheaper than infinite incarceration. 2) It is a deterrent because most humans do not want to die. 3) It is a deterrent because it is swift and highly visible.
But in the U.S. today, the death penalty no longer does these things:
1) It takes decades of court appeals and decisions, so it is more expensive than life in prison. 2) It is only applied to people who are absolutely mind-boglingly insane, where deterrents do not matter to them. 3) It is so rare and boring that no one fears it.
These arguments are not meant to sway any one to be for or against the death penalty. The idea is to show that the current way the U.S. imposes the death penalty makes it completely worthless. It should either be eliminated, or fixed. But leaving it as-is just costs money and serves no purpose.
You are frustrated because you misunderstand the definition of a programming langauge. Programming languages don't provide APIs. Let me quote from the Wikipedia:
A programming language...is a standardized communication technique for expressing instructions to a computer. It is a set of syntactic and semantic rules...to precisely specify what data a computer will act upon, how these data will be stored/transmitted, and precisely what actions to take under various circumstances.
This definition does not include GUIs, graphics, or sound, or networking, or even file I/O. A language is used to describe allocating memory, and performing if/then/else logic, and describing data structures. Some examples of programming languages are: C, C++, Fortran, LISP, COBOL, TCL, Prolog, and shell scripts. Java is only a programming language if you remove the libraries.
What you are looking for is often called a platform. The Java platform ships with the Java language + a series of libraries that give you graphics and sound and networking.
If you treat C++ as a platform, you will be forever frustrated. If you are looking for a platform based on C++, I recommend C++ + POSIX + GTK. Most of the time I use C++ + Win32 as my platform. Try this, and you will be far less frustrated.
Oh, and just to make it clearer: If you want, you can use C++ + AWT or C++ + Swing if you want. The Java APIs are fully callable from C/C++. I don't recommend it because it defeats the purpose of using an low-level language like C++ if you then include a big virtual machine, but if you like the Java APIs, you can do it.
I don't get this stuff. I hear this story all the time and I don't believe it. I can't download and execute an EXE file in less than 3 clicks, and that's if I've already done it previously and set it as the default and I use an old version of Internet Explorer.
If you were using Mozilla, you would have had 5 clicks and a double click: Click on the page, then click "Save to Disk" then point to a location, then minimized your browser, then double-clicked the EXE. That's a big accident!
Firefox lets you set a default download location, so that's down to 4 clicks.
Maybe you were using Internet Explorer 6 and had the default operation for EXE files to be to open them. You are down to 3 clicks. You could have clicked the web page, clicked OKAY to the prompt to open the EXE. Then maybe you accidentally clicked OK to the prompt about installing an application from the web that shows in a big warning box telling you about signed and unsigned applications.
Or maybe you were using an old version of Internet Explorer (IE 4? 5?) which doesn't prompt for anything if you have that set as the default. That seems highly unlikely for someone smart enough to know COM and the registry.
Okay, sorry if I am sounding like a jerk. I really just want to know how this can happen!
Bittorrent is great. Having it as part of the browser is great. But isn't it about time that the Bittorrent protocol become a W3C standard? Or is Bittorrent too hacky, and ill-suited to be a standard? If Bittorrent wants protection from IP litigators and large-scale adoption, this would help a lot.
You just proved the point. Your example is not quick or easy. Honestly: How many Slashdot readers can explain what that days without looking up 2 or 3 man pages? Easy is not measured in terms of how many bytes your code takes up.
I remember when I first learned BASIC. I I spent hours fitting 100 lines into 50, then 25, then 10. I determined how quick and easy my code was by the number of lines it took. That's what gives us the hacker mentaility. It's cool. It's slick. It's not quick and easy. It is naive.
Easy is not determined by how many lines of text are required to enter it in. Quick is not how much work can be performed per byte of input. If I can code that in 5 bytes shorter, it doesn't make it any easier or quicker. It makes it harder to develop, harder to maintain.
Now, whether or not this is powerful and extensible is simply down to your prejudiced interpretation of those two properties.
No, powerful and extensible are terms that can be defined and measured. "Prejudice" has no relevance to the discussion. Allow me to define them for you.
Powerful is the range of tasks that can be performed. For example, the grandparent showed examples of manipulating windows, opening and launching tasks, and adjusting the UI. This is not something you can do with pipes. Hence, they are less powerful. That is a fact. It has nothing to do with prejudice.
Extensibility is measured in two main ways: Forward compatibility, and backward compatibility. Forward compatibility is when new data is added to the output, and existing code is not broken. Backward compatibility is when data is removed or changed, and the code produces proper diagnostic information. Shell scripts that use pipes fail both of the above compatibility tests. Thus, they are not extensible.
Let me give you an example: Suppose that the df command has the -k flag removed. Would your script return an error to the caller indicating that the -k flag is obsolete? Or would it know to use the old version of df? No. So it fails the extensibility test. You cannot add to any of the steps without breaking your script.
You are welcome to dispute my facts. I would be interested in new information. But do not call them prejudiced just because you do not understand what they mean. One day, you will need to maintain a 5000 line honking Makefile or something. Then you'll learn something like ANT, and you will become enlightened on what powerful and extensible mean.
The bill stops short of the U.S. system that allows patenting of business methods or computer programs such as Amazon.com Inc.'s "one-click" shopping technique, which gives consumers a quick system to buy goods on its Web site.
I always thought this measure was just like the US one that allows the crazy patents. Maybe it isn't evil after all.
The bill -- which would extend patent protection to computer programs when the software is used in the context of realizing inventions...
Wait, that sounds logical. I was against this because the US passed a law allowing obvious, simple, and non-technological things to be patented. But it sounds like the EU measure doesn't include that.
Was this bill always this way, or did it morph into something reasonable as a result of the grassroots lobbying efforts. If so, maybe it is time to say that this measure is okay. Can someone tell me if I'm missing something?
Exactly! I hope the mods notice your reply. It is a common old-school myth that pipes are very powerful and extensible way to connect things. But that is exactly the opposite of the truth, and it is one of the things that holds so many *nix advocates back.
About 20 years ago, computer scientists realized that a raw stream of formatted data is not the way to go. In the future, when that data format changes then all consumers must also be changed. There's no extensibility or backward compatibility. That's why functional and OO interfaces were created.
Many hackers have so much experience parsing piped data streams that they are afraid to deal with functional or object-oriented interfaces. So they claim the old is better.
Biometrics is not the approach. That suffers from the exact same problems, only they are one worse: Once your biometric data is stolen, you cannot get a new fingerprint issued.
Your biometrics are just a number, so once someone has that number then they can impersonate you. Ex: You want to do an online credit card purchase, so you scan your thumbprint. Great! You send it to someone else, and now they have your thumbprint.
This can be best prevented by using encryption and such, but then those things can be applied to existing methods so the biometric data didn't help.
In related news, the district court ruled that it is legal for the Mafia to use competing brands in their extortion efforts. A store owner complained that the local mafia was using Glock guns to threaten him when his store was selling Magnums. The store owner complained that it was not fair that his assailants were advertising competing products.
The judge stated that "It does not violate trademark law to use competing products during an extortion effort." He added that this ruling does not make extortion legal, it merely states that the brand names of the products is not relevant.
I don't play MMORPGs because they are too expensive. You point out that it is no more expensive than arcades. I don't play arcades either: They are a jip too. I am a casual gamer, so I buy a game, play it for 6 months, then buy another. So to me, that's $40 over 6 months = $6.67 per month. Then I give away the game or donate it. Sometimes I borrow a game from someone else.
That is the casual gamer. This is also the person who doesn't have cable because it is not worth it.
They need to offer a per hour pricing model. That will get people like me hooked, and they will spend >$15 in a month. Then the people switch over to the $15 rate and they are hooked. That's how they got me on a cell phone plan.:-)
It is great to see large organizations moving to open formats. Just remember that these are not necessarily altruistic OSS-loving freedom-loving folks doing it because they want compatibility. They may be doing it to promote the local economy.
Microsoft is a US-centric company feeding money into the US economy, while using *nix environments and open source promotes their local economy. That is a good reason, but these officials could just as quickly change their mind if Microsoft decides to open an office in their country and promise them 10,000 new jobs.
Can someone show me an example of where Grokster was promoting their software as a piracy tool? Looking at Grokster's web site they don't seem to be doing that. Did they change their face in light of the court case?
And the Supreme Court decision still allows for that.
Just remeber that we are here because that's not what Grokster was promoting. They weren't telling artists that this was a way to distribute their music. They weren't telling software developers that they could host their software on it. They weren't telling corporations that they could distribute documentation this way.
This ruling means that Bram Cohen is not liable for all you jerks stealing anime. Yaaay! And it means that Bittorrent and Gnutella and similar P2P technologies are safe.
...developers of software violate federal copyright law when they... take "affirmative steps to foster infringement..."
This means that I can write and develop and research and use P2P software, so long as I don't promote the technology as a way to steal (sorry, "Copyright Infringement"). To me, this makes a lot of sense.
To use an analogy: I can sell guns. I just can't sell them with a slogan like "Number 1 tool for killing your ex-wife!" And I can't sell a P2P app named "Most efficient piracy software for pr0n and anime!" But the technology is safe.
This is good because it means The Supreme Court found a way to see through the jerks who are abusing this stuff without stifling innovation.
I was reading an article on a site that had ads inside the content. The article referred to a chart which I could not find. I looked and looked and scrolled and scrolled to no avail. Then, I put my finger on the screen and scanned left to right, top to bottom.
Behold! The chart was exactly where the article said it was. But I couldn't see it, because it looked like an ad. I was in awe. I really honestly truly had to break out of my normal reading process to even see it.
Advertisers fight this with blinking popping scrolling punch the monkey ads to lure our eyes. But they fight a losing battle because it just makes it easier to spot. The younger untrained brains (kids and teens) can't block them yet, and they are more impressionable. That's why advertising works well there.
Eventually, surrepticious ads are they only thing that will work anymore. That will be when your video game character drinks Coke instead of using health packs.
1) Where's the survey!!! For the curious, it is the CSA Alliance Home Pagee They only mention 2 things about the survey. Nothing truly valuable. Who did Americans trust the most? The least? What did they want the government to do? The first thing they teach in Journalism is to write about "The 5 Ws and an H" Who, what, where, why, when, and how.
2) Someone please write a meaningful headline! Slashdot: Most Americans Want Gov't To Make Internet Safer CNN: Most want Congress to make sure Internet safe
Neither one of these headlines makes sense! The Internet is quite safe. It's not going anywhere. It is Americans who want to be safe. So how about "Americans Want Government to Ensure Safety on the Internet"
3) Not a complaint about the articles, but an observation about congress: The article mentions fraud and identity theft. Nothing about blocking porn, which is what all the congress persons are focusing on. People have dealt with porn for centuries, and the solution isn't technical. It's the fraud that they need help with.
Browsing of Windows shares fails on Fedora Core 4 systems that have the standard firewall configured. This is most easily noticed in the failure of the desktop to display shares.
The firewall disrupts the broadcast mode of SMB browsing, which is the default.
So the default configuration out of the box does not work with Windows shares. That's not reasonable! This is how Linux gets a reputation for hard to use and hard to configure.
I know everyone is happy about this, but taken too far it could be a mess. Suppose he looks at the source code and says that the code works, and now wants to look at the microprocessor opcodes, or the compiler, or the alcohol sensing circuit's schematics. The judge will eventually turn that down and try the person on the available evidence. This isn't some catch-all to get out of jail free.
Something Similar is security utilities that run as root/administrator, and provide a GUI. For example, suppose your Virus Scanner or Firewall runs with higher priveledges so that it can scan all files, change it's priority, monitor network activity, etc. Now suppose it also provides a GUI with a "Disable Scanning" button. It's trivial to open the GUI and simulate UI commands.
This is most prevalent on Windows where it is common to leave an icon on the toolbar for interacting. On Linux, you usually must execute the tool separately and enter an admin password to run it.
A while back I wrote a program that would re-enable disabled GUI elements. It allowed me to get access to all sorts of stuff I wasn't supposed to. Relying on the GUI to provide security is a bad idea.
Do you know of a track ball where the ball is in the top (not side) that has a scroll wheel? I've been looking for one for years. I'm using The Microsoft Tracball Explorer which meets the need, but the left/right mouse buttons are in an odd place.
Subversion doesn't support "tagging" like you call it. There are constant of posts the subversion mailing lists about this. 90% of them are ignored, and a few get responses. They prefer to use their branching concept.
This is a case where the authors of Subversion are trying to force their philosphy of how to use version control on the users. I understand that: It is nice when your users are using the software the way that yoy think is best. But that isn't always possible, and they've removed a feature that is common to 90% of all source control systems.
That makes it very hard to migrate to Subversion. There are many build tools, developer's brains, and business procedures that depend on the concept of tagging. Their arguments against it only take into account one side of things. And unfortunately, it has become more of a holy war with the developers ignoring legitimate reasons to support it rather than address them. I really hope this changes, or I fear Subversion will never gain the "critical mass" that CVS has.
With that complaint out of the way, you can somewhat do what you want with two ways. One is to use a branch instead of a tag, and have some way to identify which branch is the "live" branch. A text file. A custom field on one of the files. A rule like "live-###" where you take the largest number. These are your best bet.
If you use a system where you have a large hierarchy, and you cannot deal with all those branches showing up on the tree (it can get really messy) than you can delete old branches, or move them elsewhere. If that's not possible, you are SOL, and Subversion won't work for you.
This has come up on many Slashdot comments and people seem to gloss over it. Both are simple ways to eliminate the problem. Why must all these pundits come out and announce how useless passwords are, or how dumb users are, while ignoring real solutions?
1) Passphrases
I hate Joe Smith because he stole my ex-girlfriend, Soandso, then ran over my dog...
It is amazing the number of systems with dumb limitations like 6 or 8 characters, or no symbols. Fix those, then people can use pass phrases and security is good again.
2) Hashes
SIl1alsuhvd3oEtlmo
That is the name of site you are logging into ("Slashdot") + a single passphrase used for all passwords (I used "I luv Elmo") hashed together. I just interleave the letters and replaced spaces with the number of characters in the preceeding word.
That is very secure and easy to remember. Years later I still can log in to places I've totally forgotten about. Show people these techniques and the problems go away.
Slashdot Mirror
I am apalled at Microsoft for their blatent disregard of our children. Apparently, it is possible to enter in a special code into a search engine, and get Internet Explorer to display lude pictures. This is outrageous!
I was also informed that other Microsoft products have similar problems. Outlook has a built-in feature for detecting pornographic emails and filing them into a separate folder called "junk." The product even comes with a built-in list of keywords to help the search!
I think we need the government to step in and regulate this stuff.
I was listening to NPR and they interviewed someone who finally made it clear to me: He said that the modern version of the death penalty is not effective as a deterrent. The theory behind the death penalty is:
1) It is cheaper than infinite incarceration.
2) It is a deterrent because most humans do not want to die.
3) It is a deterrent because it is swift and highly visible.
But in the U.S. today, the death penalty no longer does these things:
1) It takes decades of court appeals and decisions, so it is more expensive than life in prison.
2) It is only applied to people who are absolutely mind-boglingly insane, where deterrents do not matter to them.
3) It is so rare and boring that no one fears it.
These arguments are not meant to sway any one to be for or against the death penalty. The idea is to show that the current way the U.S. imposes the death penalty makes it completely worthless. It should either be eliminated, or fixed. But leaving it as-is just costs money and serves no purpose.
What you are looking for is often called a platform. The Java platform ships with the Java language + a series of libraries that give you graphics and sound and networking.
If you treat C++ as a platform, you will be forever frustrated. If you are looking for a platform based on C++, I recommend C++ + POSIX + GTK. Most of the time I use C++ + Win32 as my platform. Try this, and you will be far less frustrated.
Oh, and just to make it clearer: If you want, you can use C++ + AWT or C++ + Swing if you want. The Java APIs are fully callable from C/C++. I don't recommend it because it defeats the purpose of using an low-level language like C++ if you then include a big virtual machine, but if you like the Java APIs, you can do it.
I don't get this stuff. I hear this story all the time and I don't believe it. I can't download and execute an EXE file in less than 3 clicks, and that's if I've already done it previously and set it as the default and I use an old version of Internet Explorer.
If you were using Mozilla, you would have had 5 clicks and a double click: Click on the page, then click "Save to Disk" then point to a location, then minimized your browser, then double-clicked the EXE. That's a big accident!
Firefox lets you set a default download location, so that's down to 4 clicks.
Maybe you were using Internet Explorer 6 and had the default operation for EXE files to be to open them. You are down to 3 clicks. You could have clicked the web page, clicked OKAY to the prompt to open the EXE. Then maybe you accidentally clicked OK to the prompt about installing an application from the web that shows in a big warning box telling you about signed and unsigned applications.
Or maybe you were using an old version of Internet Explorer (IE 4? 5?) which doesn't prompt for anything if you have that set as the default. That seems highly unlikely for someone smart enough to know COM and the registry.
Okay, sorry if I am sounding like a jerk. I really just want to know how this can happen!
Bittorrent is great. Having it as part of the browser is great. But isn't it about time that the Bittorrent protocol become a W3C standard? Or is Bittorrent too hacky, and ill-suited to be a standard? If Bittorrent wants protection from IP litigators and large-scale adoption, this would help a lot.
I remember when I first learned BASIC. I I spent hours fitting 100 lines into 50, then 25, then 10. I determined how quick and easy my code was by the number of lines it took. That's what gives us the hacker mentaility. It's cool. It's slick. It's not quick and easy. It is naive.
Easy is not determined by how many lines of text are required to enter it in. Quick is not how much work can be performed per byte of input. If I can code that in 5 bytes shorter, it doesn't make it any easier or quicker. It makes it harder to develop, harder to maintain.
No, powerful and extensible are terms that can be defined and measured. "Prejudice" has no relevance to the discussion. Allow me to define them for you.Powerful is the range of tasks that can be performed. For example, the grandparent showed examples of manipulating windows, opening and launching tasks, and adjusting the UI. This is not something you can do with pipes. Hence, they are less powerful. That is a fact. It has nothing to do with prejudice.
Extensibility is measured in two main ways: Forward compatibility, and backward compatibility. Forward compatibility is when new data is added to the output, and existing code is not broken. Backward compatibility is when data is removed or changed, and the code produces proper diagnostic information. Shell scripts that use pipes fail both of the above compatibility tests. Thus, they are not extensible.
Let me give you an example: Suppose that the df command has the -k flag removed. Would your script return an error to the caller indicating that the -k flag is obsolete? Or would it know to use the old version of df? No. So it fails the extensibility test. You cannot add to any of the steps without breaking your script.
You are welcome to dispute my facts. I would be interested in new information. But do not call them prejudiced just because you do not understand what they mean. One day, you will need to maintain a 5000 line honking Makefile or something. Then you'll learn something like ANT, and you will become enlightened on what powerful and extensible mean.
Exactly! I hope the mods notice your reply. It is a common old-school myth that pipes are very powerful and extensible way to connect things. But that is exactly the opposite of the truth, and it is one of the things that holds so many *nix advocates back.
About 20 years ago, computer scientists realized that a raw stream of formatted data is not the way to go. In the future, when that data format changes then all consumers must also be changed. There's no extensibility or backward compatibility. That's why functional and OO interfaces were created.
Many hackers have so much experience parsing piped data streams that they are afraid to deal with functional or object-oriented interfaces. So they claim the old is better.
Biometrics is not the approach. That suffers from the exact same problems, only they are one worse: Once your biometric data is stolen, you cannot get a new fingerprint issued.
Your biometrics are just a number, so once someone has that number then they can impersonate you. Ex: You want to do an online credit card purchase, so you scan your thumbprint. Great! You send it to someone else, and now they have your thumbprint.
This can be best prevented by using encryption and such, but then those things can be applied to existing methods so the biometric data didn't help.
In related news, the district court ruled that it is legal for the Mafia to use competing brands in their extortion efforts. A store owner complained that the local mafia was using Glock guns to threaten him when his store was selling Magnums. The store owner complained that it was not fair that his assailants were advertising competing products.
The judge stated that "It does not violate trademark law to use competing products during an extortion effort." He added that this ruling does not make extortion legal, it merely states that the brand names of the products is not relevant.
I don't play MMORPGs because they are too expensive. You point out that it is no more expensive than arcades. I don't play arcades either: They are a jip too. I am a casual gamer, so I buy a game, play it for 6 months, then buy another. So to me, that's $40 over 6 months = $6.67 per month. Then I give away the game or donate it. Sometimes I borrow a game from someone else.
:-)
That is the casual gamer. This is also the person who doesn't have cable because it is not worth it.
They need to offer a per hour pricing model. That will get people like me hooked, and they will spend >$15 in a month. Then the people switch over to the $15 rate and they are hooked. That's how they got me on a cell phone plan.
It is great to see large organizations moving to open formats. Just remember that these are not necessarily altruistic OSS-loving freedom-loving folks doing it because they want compatibility. They may be doing it to promote the local economy.
Microsoft is a US-centric company feeding money into the US economy, while using *nix environments and open source promotes their local economy. That is a good reason, but these officials could just as quickly change their mind if Microsoft decides to open an office in their country and promise them 10,000 new jobs.
Can someone show me an example of where Grokster was promoting their software as a piracy tool? Looking at Grokster's web site they don't seem to be doing that. Did they change their face in light of the court case?
And the Supreme Court decision still allows for that.
Just remeber that we are here because that's not what Grokster was promoting. They weren't telling artists that this was a way to distribute their music. They weren't telling software developers that they could host their software on it. They weren't telling corporations that they could distribute documentation this way.
To use an analogy: I can sell guns. I just can't sell them with a slogan like "Number 1 tool for killing your ex-wife!" And I can't sell a P2P app named "Most efficient piracy software for pr0n and anime!" But the technology is safe.
This is good because it means The Supreme Court found a way to see through the jerks who are abusing this stuff without stifling innovation.
I was reading an article on a site that had ads inside the content. The article referred to a chart which I could not find. I looked and looked and scrolled and scrolled to no avail. Then, I put my finger on the screen and scanned left to right, top to bottom.
Behold! The chart was exactly where the article said it was. But I couldn't see it, because it looked like an ad. I was in awe. I really honestly truly had to break out of my normal reading process to even see it.
Advertisers fight this with blinking popping scrolling punch the monkey ads to lure our eyes. But they fight a losing battle because it just makes it easier to spot. The younger untrained brains (kids and teens) can't block them yet, and they are more impressionable. That's why advertising works well there.
Eventually, surrepticious ads are they only thing that will work anymore. That will be when your video game character drinks Coke instead of using health packs.
1) Where's the survey!!!
For the curious, it is the CSA Alliance Home Pagee
They only mention 2 things about the survey. Nothing truly valuable. Who did Americans trust the most? The least? What did they want the government to do? The first thing they teach in Journalism is to write about "The 5 Ws and an H" Who, what, where, why, when, and how.
2) Someone please write a meaningful headline!
Slashdot: Most Americans Want Gov't To Make Internet Safer
CNN: Most want Congress to make sure Internet safe
Neither one of these headlines makes sense! The Internet is quite safe. It's not going anywhere. It is Americans who want to be safe. So how about "Americans Want Government to Ensure Safety on the Internet"
3) Not a complaint about the articles, but an observation about congress: The article mentions fraud and identity theft. Nothing about blocking porn, which is what all the congress persons are focusing on. People have dealt with porn for centuries, and the solution isn't technical. It's the fraud that they need help with.
So the default configuration out of the box does not work with Windows shares. That's not reasonable! This is how Linux gets a reputation for hard to use and hard to configure.
The bugzilla report makes it even clearer: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi? id=133478
I know everyone is happy about this, but taken too far it could be a mess. Suppose he looks at the source code and says that the code works, and now wants to look at the microprocessor opcodes, or the compiler, or the alcohol sensing circuit's schematics. The judge will eventually turn that down and try the person on the available evidence. This isn't some catch-all to get out of jail free.
Something Similar is security utilities that run as root/administrator, and provide a GUI. For example, suppose your Virus Scanner or Firewall runs with higher priveledges so that it can scan all files, change it's priority, monitor network activity, etc. Now suppose it also provides a GUI with a "Disable Scanning" button. It's trivial to open the GUI and simulate UI commands.
This is most prevalent on Windows where it is common to leave an icon on the toolbar for interacting. On Linux, you usually must execute the tool separately and enter an admin password to run it.
A while back I wrote a program that would re-enable disabled GUI elements. It allowed me to get access to all sorts of stuff I wasn't supposed to. Relying on the GUI to provide security is a bad idea.
Do you know of a track ball where the ball is in the top (not side) that has a scroll wheel? I've been looking for one for years. I'm using The Microsoft Tracball Explorer which meets the need, but the left/right mouse buttons are in an odd place.
Subversion doesn't support "tagging" like you call it. There are constant of posts the subversion mailing lists about this. 90% of them are ignored, and a few get responses. They prefer to use their branching concept.
This is a case where the authors of Subversion are trying to force their philosphy of how to use version control on the users. I understand that: It is nice when your users are using the software the way that yoy think is best. But that isn't always possible, and they've removed a feature that is common to 90% of all source control systems.
That makes it very hard to migrate to Subversion. There are many build tools, developer's brains, and business procedures that depend on the concept of tagging. Their arguments against it only take into account one side of things. And unfortunately, it has become more of a holy war with the developers ignoring legitimate reasons to support it rather than address them. I really hope this changes, or I fear Subversion will never gain the "critical mass" that CVS has.
With that complaint out of the way, you can somewhat do what you want with two ways. One is to use a branch instead of a tag, and have some way to identify which branch is the "live" branch. A text file. A custom field on one of the files. A rule like "live-###" where you take the largest number. These are your best bet.
If you use a system where you have a large hierarchy, and you cannot deal with all those branches showing up on the tree (it can get really messy) than you can delete old branches, or move them elsewhere. If that's not possible, you are SOL, and Subversion won't work for you.
That is very secure and easy to remember. Years later I still can log in to places I've totally forgotten about. Show people these techniques and the problems go away.