You're forgetting that Christians outright and publically denounced the IRA's methods and actions.
So did quite some muslims about the 9/11 attacks. Ah,but some supported them also? lemme telll you what, the USA has for decades financially supported IRA.
The IRA also gave several hours warning before attacks which allowed time to remove people from the vicinity of any explosions.
At times they did, at times they didn't. I seem to recall the house of a protestant family being burned down and kids being killed as a result. I seem to recall an attack on a pub with no warning whatsoever. I seem to recall random 'protestants' being attacked and lynched on the street...
It was purely for political reasons that the IRA did what they did. They wanted and want to be in control of Ireland independantly and without british intervention and presence. They resorted to seemingly terroristic tactics simply because they lacked the resources to wage a full scale war.
It is only for political reasons that Hamas does what it does. They want to be in control of Palestina independently and without Israelian intervention and presence. They resorted to seemingly terroristic tactics simply because they lacked the resources to wage a full scale war.
And this statement can be repeated with only some minor changes about many supposed terrorist groups.
If such people are freedom fighters/rebels or terrorists does not depend on their actions, it completely depends on your position.
They have also now denounced their violent past, laid down their arms and are seeking a peaceful solution.
After both sides got tired of violence and got a lot of external preasure on top.
Their war was not of a religious nature. They just happened to be "devout" catholics so that obviously played a role in the politics of it all.
Yep, and their enemy just happened to be devout protestants...
The violent actions of Christians/Catholics have ALWAYS been denounced and condemned by Christianity as a whole.
Oh really?
I actually think christianity as a whole does not have a consistent opinion on such matters. Rather, they tend to fight petty wars about religion among themselves (read up on 30 years, 80 years and 100 years wars in Europe for a bit on that) just as easily as against other religions (does the word crusade ring any bell?), some such wars have been mandated and even called for by the then only official Christian church.
Aha - now this is a very interesting thing to talk about and it's been through my thoughts in the last day. I'm not sure that it's possible to take it all in and I think you need to be open minded but strategic with your focus.
I'm pretty sure you can't in most cases. Making an informed decision however doesn't require knowing everything, merely you need to know 'enough' (vague, I know, but it quite depends on the subject what is enough).
Usually the problem isn't lack of knowledge or understanding so much as believing one doesn't like what one doesn't understand.
If I don't understand either of 2 mutually exclusive options I cannot make a choice between them. If I understand one option but not the other, I still cannot make a good choice between them.
The quote was paraphrased from what I saw on lateline earlier this week. Or do you mean the whole post? Er? I wrote the post and paraphrased the bit featuring what Howard said. I thnk it is relevent that Howard specifically indicated he wasn't in favour of legislating against channel ten or shows like Big Brother before he made the remarks that the media services chose to quote in isolation but still - my critism of what you said was still too thin to be valid.
Well, I meant the entire post. But you made clear here what is your opinion and what is quoted from elsewhere.
There was a time where I could have easily. But I intensely hate political tribalism (that "I'm a Labor man" or "I've voted Liberal or my life" or gymnastics where people support or oppose things based on who's calling for it rather than how the facts add up)
I hear you. Let me also say that I recognize your post in the way I mentioned because I have been involved in such things and no longer are for the exact motivation that you mention.
But then you go on saying this:
and I won't compromise myself on the need for small government and low taxes and none of the Australian platforms are sufficiently pushing for that for me to feel comfortable being part of the inner system.
What your specific beliefs are in this is completely irrelevant for the argument you made above, and for those who happen to disagree with this specific opinion, it only distracts from the argument made above. Sorry but this is not helpfull when you want to discourage the tribalism in politics.
But let me make a few comments about it anyway, seeing this as a seperate discussion in which we are bound to disagree, but maybe can learn a thing or 2..
More importantly, I feel it's important that people (including me) have work that actually creates value;
Agreed, but this does not depend on having civil services. Rather, civil services can very well result in people doing exactly that, work that creates value. The question is about initiative and whom pays for it in what form.
I'm very unhappy with the sprawl of the civil service in this country and don't want to be part of that when I could be working and creating meaningful things.
Roads are very meaningfull things, so are railroads, just to name some examples.
Having elderly and/or sick people being cared for instead of dying in the streets when they are too poor to afford care is maybe not 'productive' in your definition, but it definitely results in a better society with a much lower risk on epidemics, which does really have quite a bit of value..
In other words, think again about civil services and value, not all 'value' comes from factories, in fact most does not.
This of course in no way means just throwing money at civil services without thought or limits.
But - at times I write letters to the paper, seek to derail corrupt tenders, campaign against people and policies that diminish our freedom and the strength of our political systems,
Please go on, and make sure you also participate in public debate.
read liberal think tank publications
Why not read a whole variety of publications from opposing sources? gives a much better picture. Reading what you like to hear is not gonna teach you much usually.
, that sort of thing. I like that Howard is reformist when the political climate means that he could so easily just sit back and enjoy the good times (eg: gst, industrial regulations) but I'm uncomfortable with his political style and the fact that he has done nothing to stem the creep of copyright and patents. Still - he's miles better than any of the alternatives and unless something crazy happens I'll certainly be finding a reformist, non-machine-driven Liberal candidate to support at the next federal election.
This I can't comment on as a non Australian not following politics in Australia too closely. I just get sad whenever I hear the 'Ok, maybe he is terrible, but he was miles better then the competition' argument about politicians, regardless of where it comes from.
Neither is a television broadcast, one still has to purchase the correct equipment, tune the television to that channel (in order to receive it)
Both true.
and then still choose to watch that particular channel.
People get disturbed by 'stumbling' upon it, even if they decide to switch away.
IMHO from the perspective of broadcasting that is basically no different to an internet stream, there are technical differences (the many different tubes) but that doesn't really matter.
There is a rather significant difference.
A TV broadcast is out there in the air. While you are right that you have to have equipment to receive it, and have to tune the equipment to the appropriate channel, the signal is always there. With an internet stream however you (or your computer on your behalf) has to actively do a request before any data comes your way. In other words, in a TV broadcast the data is in the air by decision of the broadcaster, in case of an internet stream the broadcaster has to make it available, but the data only gets communicated on request from the receipient.
Dont forget that Big Brother is a television show that is *also* broadcast on the net. The network felt that they could not show this on TV in the middle of the night, so why should should they feel the net is somehow different.
As I understand it, they only broadcast 'hilights' (hmm, do those exist in the case of this program anyway) on broadcast TV since they do not have a dedicated 24/7 Big Brother channel. On the Internet however you can stream such a thing 24/7 without a problem. This combined with the fact that others did broadcast the specific bit of video in Australia rather suggests that your argument doesn't hold and they had other motivations to not broadcast it on TV (maybe because of the bit of extra 'controversy' it suggests?)
I just dont see that the net should be treated any differently. Lets not forget that online journalists should get the same protection as other journalists.
Because the net is different. There where it is, it should be treated differently.
Notice that of all the players with something to say in this article the government is the most restrained - calling for a review but not going overboard with censorship demands.
Lets just start with saying that Big Brother as a program does not at all cater to viewers hoping to get a glimpse of something naughty happening...
At any rate, how nice that the Ausie government doesn't go overboard with censorship demands just yet.. Previous attempts and current comments give some reason however to believe that they would if they anywhere could. To witness: calling for self regulation as soon as undesired contect appears is threatening indirect censorship.
In fact, it has been the federal opposition in recent times which has called for ridiculous measures while the government has been realistic in its approach
Believing that internet streaming can and should be regulated similar to public TV really tells all about how reasonable and knowledgable they are.
Slashdot editors - panning Australians for our bad internet regulation system may once have been fitting.
You can remove the words Australians and 'bad' there, and it wouldn't have made a difference, internet regulation will be complained about, and that does in no way depend on whom tries to implement it where (unless it is to fight spam of course)
In other words, don't be so silly to think that this was written to make Australia look bad or such.
However, it would be nice if you could review things a bit more carefully based on the evidence rather than knee-jerks to posts making grand claims about Australian policy.
What is absurd and why this is in fact something to take note of is the fact that politicians concern themselves with what was visible on some internet live video stream at 4am, as part of a program where this kind of thing was actually somewhat hoped for (ever noticed how bb actually mentions the cameras are on 24/7 and in all rooms and such, giving people the idea how they can indeed get a glimpse of 'naughty things' also).
It's annoying to see my country being portrayed as stoneage based on bad evidence. This snide post is not a story and it shouldn't have been put through.
As pointed out above, this has absolutely nothing to do with 'your country' as such. Stop trying to see it as an attack on your country if you want to have any kind of discussion about content instead of a nationalistic pissing contest.
Well - yes - but he said was that he dislikes the government telling the business community what to do. He suggested that there's a place for self-regulation and that channel ten had an opportunity here to exercise self-regualtion. Your comment could reasonably be interpreted to mean that the government was about to cause it to happen.
We are not gonna tell you what to do at all! but now we are talking anyway, you did this and this, and we regard that as prime example of you failing to self regulate.. FIX IT!
You seriously fail to see how this does not in effect make for telling broadcasters what to do?
Makes me wonder, did you copy/paste that post? it sounds a lot like the typical political misdirection, consider a carreer in that if you thought it up yourself.
To this day, Microsoft has produced over 12,000 pages of documentation that DID NOT EXIST a year ago. The EU refused to state WHAT specifically is inadequate about this documentation, rather they just say it is unusable. What measure did they choose to decide the usability of the documentation? They gave someone with no background in the relevent technology a week to implement everything required to add a user to a domain from scratch.
Depending a bit on complexity, a week is probably too short, but expecting that documentation for a protocol tells you all you need to know to implement it without prior knowledge of the protocol (but with prior knowledge of programming languages and general understanding of the kind of thing the protocol is used for) is quite a good norm for this. Please try to understand the purpose of the ruling. As some others noticed, complying with the letter while breaking the spirit of a rule is not generally accepted in EU courts, so you can look for the letter that allows MS to do what they do now, but since it is clearly against the spirit of the rulling, they'll still be seen as non compliant.
Filling page upon page with information and yet leaving out some essential parts is a very good way to make it look like you comply while in fact you don't comply on purpose. It looks like they quite managed to fool you (and some others)
The functionaly being documented was never intended for use by non-Microsoft software or programmers.
But was supposed to be used by MS' own products. You seem to have forgotten about not being allowed to use your monopoly position in one market to obtain one in another market. Basicly, due to them being an effective monopoly, they are not allowed to do this.
As a matter of fact, when is the US government finally going to enforce their laws with regards to that?
As far as you know they did comply, and the EU commission is doing its best to "make sure" that they didn't.
As far as I can tell, the only way to get some software to write to ntfs is either by using Windows, or by lots of reverse engineering. This is because the appropriate documentation for it is not available.
Come again with 'they complied'. As was to be expected, they tried to follow the letter and ignored what the ruling was about.
But this is slashdot, you're a linux "fan", and all that matters to you is that Microsoft is punnished for shipping a media player that isn't as shit-tastic as Real.
Ah, so you do not really know what the issue is here to begin with, well, that explains your badly informed post at least in part.
For your information, this is not about media player.
It's completely reasonable not to document the full capabilities of a framework or software component.
They have explicitly been ordered by court to document the full capabilities of certain frameworks and protocols. There have been long arguments about it and the judges found that in this case it is completely unreasonable for Microsoft to keep those secret for a huge variety of reasons mostly relating to Microsofts market position and behavior. Had they been reasonable themselves in past times, this would not have happened.
It is completely reasonable to expect a company to comply with the law and court rulings in a territory where they want to do business
Publishing an interface is a big deal, since a published interface is set in stone for eternity.
And if they don't document them properly how are their own products going to work? Oh, and changes can be dealt with by updates to the documentation (silly concept eh?)... Oh, those don't exist? back to square one, how is your own software supposed to implement them..
It's simply good design practice to expose as little information as possible about how to exploit/abuse the internals of a component.
1. Hiding your implementation details is not a design decision, it at best a way to hide the idiocy of your design decisions 2. Keeping interfaces obscure is not helping the non exploitability of Windows at all. Not only is this argument well known to be false (security through obscurity), Microsoft's products also show how consistently it fails in the real world.
So.. the only argument you have there is that it is in itself reasonable for them to want to hide certain information. Too bad that due to their own misbehavior in the past, they are not allowed to hide some information that they'd like to keep hidden. Since they didn't comply, they got fined.
So you use a hash table to keep track of blocked ips. That table scales as well or better then a state table, but will remain smaller usually hence faster.
I believe pf can do that as well, but not sure, don't use pf much myself.
Heh, earlier today I posted a comment to a discussion on my own weblog (see url at top of the post) about this. While there are definitely cases where patents work, but in fields of development where a lot of progress is taking place, they are usually not needed and more of a hinderence then a help.
I think you misunderstand the mechanism by which invention is "encouraged" or "promoted" by the existence of patents. There are two basic mechanisms: 1. the incentive of exclusive profit and 2. developing a new way of doing something that doesn't infringe the patent.
You forget a 3rd aspect of this. By providing documentation of existing inventions, inventors can concentrate on new things instead of reinventing the wheel over and over.
The second one is always ignored by those who say that "patents do not promote invention." If you can't go down one road because it's blocked by a rockslide, you can either sit down and cry about it, or you can find another way around.
Whereas those who argue the merrits of the 2nd one, usually ignore the 3rd one. You could even argue that many companies that apply for patents try to get around the 3rd one as much as they can.
Check out the Constitution. It is aware of the freedom of ideas, but when that idea has been reduced to a useful product, then Congress is given the power to enact legislation to protect that invention. The purpose is to encourage inventors to invent by giving them exclusivity--but also to give other inventors an incentive to find another solution--or invent around.
First of all, some EXTREMELY IMPORTANT words are missing in your explanation: the words 'for a limited time'.
Not that I am arguing that current patent laws do not impose a limited term, but those words are extremely important for reasons way beyodn that.
What the statement in the constitution signifies is that: 1. Any invention is owned by society. There is no way in which society could grant temporary exclusive rights to the creator if society doesn't own the work.
2. Those exclusive rights serve a very specific purpose: promoting usefull inventions (or art in case of copyright, but we are talking patents here).
When combining those, it should be blatantly obvious that a situation where patents do not clearly promote invention makes that no exclusive rights to the invention can exist and it is by definition owned by society as a whole.
the bios hashes grub, grub hashes the kernel and initrd, get a "known" good result. This should be fairly stable. If executing within a hypervisor, the resulting hash value will not be equivalent and you will know something is up.
You do not need tcpa for this. You do however need to have grub loaded from the MBR, and the MBR code needs to validate its checksum. In this case the bios will warn you if either the code or the checksum changed, and the MBR code can warn you about changes to whatever it loads.
As you can see, this could easily be done today, and has been a possibility for the last decade or such at the very least.
The problems with this, as well as with the setup you suggest (which seems functionally identical to me) is that you count on the code that gets loaded in the 1st stage to verify the code that gets loaded after that. It is this aspect that isn't implemented by most systems and why mbr change notification barely helps if any (with the systems we have today). It could be a usefull tool if used properly.
Hmm.. I have quite a pile of system boards here, dating from old 486 systems upto p4 and athlon xp, with ami, award, phoenix and biosses, and all of them have the boot sector virus protection option (tho sometimes just called virus protection).
This offers at best a partial protection. While the MBR is important, the actual boot is done from the partition boot record, mot the master boot record, and this badly named feature is not going to help against that. Why badly named? because it does monitor (attempted) changes to the bootrecord and doesn't know anything about viruses.
Next. even if you could protect against that, things just get a bit more OS and possibly OS version dependent because you have to move to the file that gets loaded by the partition bootrecord.
Oh, quite a few 'boot managers' change the mbr on every boot.
So while it offers some protection, that protection is extremely limited, and can be quite inconvenient.
Is this the obligitory "wont someone please think of the children" post?
Read again... or maybe I should word it a bit differently to make it easier..
Asking to respect the victims of child pornography and what they went through, and meanwhile ignoring the fact that hijacking those in order to install broad filtering and monitoring technology is thoughtless at the very least, and imho extremely stupid
At least have some respect for those poor souls subjected to such horrific stuff.
I agree with your sentiment, but I'd first of all direct such a request at the people trying to use child pornography as a "can't refuse" argument to implement some pretty broad and abusable monitoring and filtering.
That's why I said it was good that this crack was exposed publicly: now people know better than to trust it. Or at least know better than they did before.
Why should NickServ have access to the clear passwords? What happens if FreeNode switches to another auth service, especially if a result of a dispute? That system is really too insecure to trust at all.
Of course your technical comments are right on the spot, but there is something you don't mention, and that many people tend to forget with regards to nick/channelserv and similar services on IRC networks.
None of those services is intended to provide security, and more generally, IRC does not have any form of security.
Such services are there to make live easier (specifically, to make running a channel and knowing who is who easier), it does not replace good channel operators or such. Networks that want something more should really look for some more robust solution first.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. He mistakes bureaucratic incompetence for intention. Going from incompetence to intention is a huge stretch and implies a serious misunderstanding of how the career employees of the federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies do their jobs. I leave to you the exercise of determining how such a thing could be covered up, given the number of people that would have been involved.
Actually, the flaws in his argument are many, attributing to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence is just one.
That said, the basic issue he is raising is real and quite serious. Regardless of if the US government was in any way involved or allowed the 9/11 attacks, they have used them for a very serious power grab.
To suspect malice is not entirely strange when you look at the congress report on 9/11, suggesting as you also say that burocratic incompetence, and more specifically, having the information, but having failed to actually spot it and communicate it in time were why the attacks were not prevented. To respond to that with increased survailance makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, rather, it just increases the problem. Yet this is exactly what is being done. This gives sufficient reason to believe that the motivation for this survailance is in fact not the one that is being given, from there to concluding that fear is being used to let people agree to things they normally wouldn't agree to is not far fetched, and is confirmed by the actions and words of the current administration.
This leaves it open to debate what the real motivation is but the alternative to attributing this to malice seems to be believing in collective stupidity of the administration.
Whose history? US history? You're saying that the US government has allowed something like the 9/11 attacks to occur in the past just to inflame the populace? Now I'll admit that our government isn't run by a bunch of boy scouts, but I think that you're pulling something out of thin air here.
The history of about any nation on this planet. While there is no serious past incident in US history that I am aware of, that is no reason to ignore the signs that are there now, and assume the USA is inmune to this.
Wether those in power actually caused or helped the incident or not is of course important, but in no way changes how this incident is being abused. Whenever such abuse happens, there are of course going to be people arguing that the incident was on purpose, in this particular case I don't believe that to be very likely (first of all because there simply was no need to do so, it would have happened anyway, tho maybe in a slightly different form at a slightly different moment) but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
Last but not least, I believe that while his argument was flawed, it did need being addressed because the underlying issue is real and pretty important.
Incidentally, at some point, you claimed that I was dismissing the OP's comments by saying that he was paranoid. On the contrary, as I've already mentioned, he did the job himself. I was just challenging his own assertion that I might consider him a troll. I don't think that he's a troll at all. I never addressed his comments, though, because I really didn't think that they were worthy of discussion - at least on my part. Perhaps I was wrong.
Thanks for the explanation. I may not agree with you, but when you explain where you are comming from, I can at least try to understand your point of view.
Fair's fair. My opinion is my own and I don't owe it to anyone to offer justification for it, particularly when my comments were not addressed to anyone else....
By the way, another opinion that I have is that you've tried to make a mountain out of a molehill.
And my opinion is that if you don't have anything to contribute to a discussion, it is a good idea to just stay out of it. If you don't then you better be prepared to motivate what you are saying.
Slashdot Mirror
It's hard to think of any good reason for it.
One meager comfort, you are obviously not alone in finding thinking hard.
You're forgetting that Christians outright and publically denounced the IRA's methods and actions.
So did quite some muslims about the 9/11 attacks. Ah,but some supported them also? lemme telll you what, the USA has for decades financially supported IRA.
The IRA also gave several hours warning before attacks which allowed time to remove people from the vicinity of any explosions.
At times they did, at times they didn't. I seem to recall the house of a protestant family being burned down and kids being killed as a result. I seem to recall an attack on a pub with no warning whatsoever. I seem to recall random 'protestants' being attacked and lynched on the street...
It was purely for political reasons that the IRA did what they did. They wanted and want to be in control of Ireland independantly and without british intervention and presence. They resorted to seemingly terroristic tactics simply because they lacked the resources to wage a full scale war.
It is only for political reasons that Hamas does what it does. They want to be in control of Palestina independently and without Israelian intervention and presence. They resorted to seemingly terroristic tactics simply because they lacked the resources to wage a full scale war.
And this statement can be repeated with only some minor changes about many supposed terrorist groups.
If such people are freedom fighters/rebels or terrorists does not depend on their actions, it completely depends on your position.
They have also now denounced their violent past, laid down their arms and are seeking a peaceful solution.
After both sides got tired of violence and got a lot of external preasure on top.
Their war was not of a religious nature. They just happened to be "devout" catholics so that obviously played a role in the politics of it all.
Yep, and their enemy just happened to be devout protestants...
The violent actions of Christians/Catholics have ALWAYS been denounced and condemned by Christianity as a whole.
Oh really?
I actually think christianity as a whole does not have a consistent opinion on such matters. Rather, they tend to fight petty wars about religion among themselves (read up on 30 years, 80 years and 100 years wars in Europe for a bit on that) just as easily as against other religions (does the word crusade ring any bell?), some such wars have been mandated and even called for by the then only official Christian church.
Get a fucking clue here please.
Aha - now this is a very interesting thing to talk about and it's been through my thoughts in the last day. I'm not sure that it's possible to take it all in and I think you need to be open minded but strategic with your focus.
I'm pretty sure you can't in most cases. Making an informed decision however doesn't require knowing everything, merely you need to know 'enough' (vague, I know, but it quite depends on the subject what is enough).
Usually the problem isn't lack of knowledge or understanding so much as believing one doesn't like what one doesn't understand.
If I don't understand either of 2 mutually exclusive options I cannot make a choice between them. If I understand one option but not the other, I still cannot make a good choice between them.
The quote was paraphrased from what I saw on lateline earlier this week. Or do you mean the whole post? Er? I wrote the post and paraphrased the bit featuring what Howard said. I thnk it is relevent that Howard specifically indicated he wasn't in favour of legislating against channel ten or shows like Big Brother before he made the remarks that the media services chose to quote in isolation but still - my critism of what you said was still too thin to be valid.
Well, I meant the entire post. But you made clear here what is your opinion and what is quoted from elsewhere.
There was a time where I could have easily. But I intensely hate political tribalism (that "I'm a Labor man" or "I've voted Liberal or my life" or gymnastics where people support or oppose things based on who's calling for it rather than how the facts add up)
I hear you. Let me also say that I recognize your post in the way I mentioned because I have been involved in such things and no longer are for the exact motivation that you mention.
But then you go on saying this:
and I won't compromise myself on the need for small government and low taxes and none of the Australian platforms are sufficiently pushing for that for me to feel comfortable being part of the inner system.
What your specific beliefs are in this is completely irrelevant for the argument you made above, and for those who happen to disagree with this specific opinion, it only distracts from the argument made above. Sorry but this is not helpfull when you want to discourage the tribalism in politics.
But let me make a few comments about it anyway, seeing this as a seperate discussion in which we are bound to disagree, but maybe can learn a thing or 2..
More importantly, I feel it's important that people (including me) have work that actually creates value;
Agreed, but this does not depend on having civil services. Rather, civil services can very well result in people doing exactly that, work that creates value. The question is about initiative and whom pays for it in what form.
I'm very unhappy with the sprawl of the civil service in this country and don't want to be part of that when I could be working and creating meaningful things.
Roads are very meaningfull things, so are railroads, just to name some examples.
Having elderly and/or sick people being cared for instead of dying in the streets when they are too poor to afford care is maybe not 'productive' in your definition, but it definitely results in a better society with a much lower risk on epidemics, which does really have quite a bit of value..
In other words, think again about civil services and value, not all 'value' comes from factories, in fact most does not.
This of course in no way means just throwing money at civil services without thought or limits.
But - at times I write letters to the paper, seek to derail corrupt tenders, campaign against people and policies that diminish our freedom and the strength of our political systems,
Please go on, and make sure you also participate in public debate.
read liberal think tank publications
Why not read a whole variety of publications from opposing sources? gives a much better picture. Reading what you like to hear is not gonna teach you much usually.
, that sort of thing. I like that Howard is reformist when the political climate means that he could so easily just sit back and enjoy the good times (eg: gst, industrial regulations) but I'm uncomfortable with his political style and the fact that he has done nothing to stem the creep of copyright and patents. Still - he's miles better than any of the alternatives and unless something crazy happens I'll certainly be finding a reformist, non-machine-driven Liberal candidate to support at the next federal election.
This I can't comment on as a non Australian not following politics in Australia too closely. I just get sad whenever I hear the 'Ok, maybe he is terrible, but he was miles better then the competition' argument about politicians, regardless of where it comes from.
Neither is a television broadcast, one still has to purchase the correct equipment, tune the television to that channel (in order to receive it)
Both true.
and then still choose to watch that particular channel.
People get disturbed by 'stumbling' upon it, even if they decide to switch away.
IMHO from the perspective of broadcasting that is basically no different to an internet stream, there are technical differences (the many different tubes) but that doesn't really matter.
There is a rather significant difference.
A TV broadcast is out there in the air. While you are right that you have to have equipment to receive it, and have to tune the equipment to the appropriate channel, the signal is always there. With an internet stream however you (or your computer on your behalf) has to actively do a request before any data comes your way. In other words, in a TV broadcast the data is in the air by decision of the broadcaster, in case of an internet stream the broadcaster has to make it available, but the data only gets communicated on request from the receipient.
Dont forget that Big Brother is a television show that is *also* broadcast on the net. The network felt that they could not show this on TV in the middle of the night, so why should should they feel the net is somehow different.
As I understand it, they only broadcast 'hilights' (hmm, do those exist in the case of this program anyway) on broadcast TV since they do not have a dedicated 24/7 Big Brother channel. On the Internet however you can stream such a thing 24/7 without a problem. This combined with the fact that others did broadcast the specific bit of video in Australia rather suggests that your argument doesn't hold and they had other motivations to not broadcast it on TV (maybe because of the bit of extra 'controversy' it suggests?)
I just dont see that the net should be treated any differently. Lets not forget that online journalists should get the same protection as other journalists.
Because the net is different. There where it is, it should be treated differently.
We elected the right leader, its just there wasn't a huge range to pick from.
Hmm.. being the least of 2 evils doesn't make one good.
Notice that of all the players with something to say in this article the government is the most restrained - calling for a review but not going overboard with censorship demands.
k ing.html [efa.org.au]
Lets just start with saying that Big Brother as a program does not at all cater to viewers hoping to get a glimpse of something naughty happening...
At any rate, how nice that the Ausie government doesn't go overboard with censorship demands just yet.. Previous attempts and current comments give some reason however to believe that they would if they anywhere could. To witness: calling for self regulation as soon as undesired contect appears is threatening indirect censorship.
In fact, it has been the federal opposition in recent times which has called for ridiculous measures while the government has been realistic in its approach
Look there, them are even worse!
, even by the reasonable (but in earlier times typically conflicting) standards of Electronic Frontiers Australia. See http://www.efa.org.au/Issues/Censor/mandatorybloc
Believing that internet streaming can and should be regulated similar to public TV really tells all about how reasonable and knowledgable they are.
Slashdot editors - panning Australians for our bad internet regulation system may once have been fitting.
You can remove the words Australians and 'bad' there, and it wouldn't have made a difference, internet regulation will be complained about, and that does in no way depend on whom tries to implement it where (unless it is to fight spam of course)
In other words, don't be so silly to think that this was written to make Australia look bad or such.
However, it would be nice if you could review things a bit more carefully based on the evidence rather than knee-jerks to posts making grand claims about Australian policy.
What is absurd and why this is in fact something to take note of is the fact that politicians concern themselves with what was visible on some internet live video stream at 4am, as part of a program where this kind of thing was actually somewhat hoped for (ever noticed how bb actually mentions the cameras are on 24/7 and in all rooms and such, giving people the idea how they can indeed get a glimpse of 'naughty things' also).
It's annoying to see my country being portrayed as stoneage based on bad evidence. This snide post is not a story and it shouldn't have been put through.
As pointed out above, this has absolutely nothing to do with 'your country' as such. Stop trying to see it as an attack on your country if you want to have any kind of discussion about content instead of a nationalistic pissing contest.
Well - yes - but he said was that he dislikes the government telling the business community what to do. He suggested that there's a place for self-regulation and that channel ten had an opportunity here to exercise self-regualtion. Your comment could reasonably be interpreted to mean that the government was about to cause it to happen.
We are not gonna tell you what to do at all! but now we are talking anyway, you did this and this, and we regard that as prime example of you failing to self regulate.. FIX IT!
You seriously fail to see how this does not in effect make for telling broadcasters what to do?
Makes me wonder, did you copy/paste that post? it sounds a lot like the typical political misdirection, consider a carreer in that if you thought it up yourself.
To this day, Microsoft has produced over 12,000 pages of documentation that DID NOT EXIST a year ago. The EU refused to state WHAT specifically is inadequate about this documentation, rather they just say it is unusable. What measure did they choose to decide the usability of the documentation? They gave someone with no background in the relevent technology a week to implement everything required to add a user to a domain from scratch.
Depending a bit on complexity, a week is probably too short, but expecting that documentation for a protocol tells you all you need to know to implement it without prior knowledge of the protocol (but with prior knowledge of programming languages and general understanding of the kind of thing the protocol is used for) is quite a good norm for this. Please try to understand the purpose of the ruling. As some others noticed, complying with the letter while breaking the spirit of a rule is not generally accepted in EU courts, so you can look for the letter that allows MS to do what they do now, but since it is clearly against the spirit of the rulling, they'll still be seen as non compliant.
Filling page upon page with information and yet leaving out some essential parts is a very good way to make it look like you comply while in fact you don't comply on purpose. It looks like they quite managed to fool you (and some others)
The functionaly being documented was never intended for use by non-Microsoft software or programmers.
But was supposed to be used by MS' own products. You seem to have forgotten about not being allowed to use your monopoly position in one market to obtain one in another market. Basicly, due to them being an effective monopoly, they are not allowed to do this.
As a matter of fact, when is the US government finally going to enforce their laws with regards to that?
As far as you know they did comply, and the EU commission is doing its best to "make sure" that they didn't.
As far as I can tell, the only way to get some software to write to ntfs is either by using Windows, or by lots of reverse engineering. This is because the appropriate documentation for it is not available.
Come again with 'they complied'. As was to be expected, they tried to follow the letter and ignored what the ruling was about.
But this is slashdot, you're a linux "fan", and all that matters to you is that Microsoft is punnished for shipping a media player that isn't as shit-tastic as Real.
Ah, so you do not really know what the issue is here to begin with, well, that explains your badly informed post at least in part.
For your information, this is not about media player.
It's completely reasonable not to document the full capabilities of a framework or software component.
They have explicitly been ordered by court to document the full capabilities of certain frameworks and protocols. There have been long arguments about it and the judges found that in this case it is completely unreasonable for Microsoft to keep those secret for a huge variety of reasons mostly relating to Microsofts market position and behavior. Had they been reasonable themselves in past times, this would not have happened.
It is completely reasonable to expect a company to comply with the law and court rulings in a territory where they want to do business
Publishing an interface is a big deal, since a published interface is set in stone for eternity.
And if they don't document them properly how are their own products going to work? Oh, and changes can be dealt with by updates to the documentation (silly concept eh?)... Oh, those don't exist? back to square one, how is your own software supposed to implement them..
It's simply good design practice to expose as little information as possible about how to exploit/abuse the internals of a component.
1. Hiding your implementation details is not a design decision, it at best a way to hide the idiocy of your design decisions
2. Keeping interfaces obscure is not helping the non exploitability of Windows at all. Not only is this argument well known to be false (security through obscurity), Microsoft's products also show how consistently it fails in the real world.
So.. the only argument you have there is that it is in itself reasonable for them to want to hide certain information. Too bad that due to their own misbehavior in the past, they are not allowed to hide some information that they'd like to keep hidden. Since they didn't comply, they got fined.
So ... do you think Microsoft has gathered all it's employees and instructed them to collectively deceive the public ?
Maybe not all, but most of them? yes, definitely. This is in fact a pretty normal thing to do for a company.
So you use a hash table to keep track of blocked ips. That table scales as well or better then a state table, but will remain smaller usually hence faster.
I believe pf can do that as well, but not sure, don't use pf much myself.
Heh, earlier today I posted a comment to a discussion on my own weblog (see url at top of the post) about this. While there are definitely cases where patents work, but in fields of development where a lot of progress is taking place, they are usually not needed and more of a hinderence then a help.
I think you misunderstand the mechanism by which invention is "encouraged" or "promoted" by the existence of patents. There are two basic mechanisms: 1. the incentive of exclusive profit and 2. developing a new way of doing something that doesn't infringe the patent.
You forget a 3rd aspect of this. By providing documentation of existing inventions, inventors can concentrate on new things instead of reinventing the wheel over and over.
The second one is always ignored by those who say that "patents do not promote invention." If you can't go down one road because it's blocked by a rockslide, you can either sit down and cry about it, or you can find another way around.
Whereas those who argue the merrits of the 2nd one, usually ignore the 3rd one. You could even argue that many companies that apply for patents try to get around the 3rd one as much as they can.
Check out the Constitution. It is aware of the freedom of ideas, but when that idea has been reduced to a useful product, then Congress is given the power to enact legislation to protect that invention. The purpose is to encourage inventors to invent by giving them exclusivity--but also to give other inventors an incentive to find another solution--or invent around.
First of all, some EXTREMELY IMPORTANT words are missing in your explanation: the words 'for a limited time'.
Not that I am arguing that current patent laws do not impose a limited term, but those words are extremely important for reasons way beyodn that.
What the statement in the constitution signifies is that:
1. Any invention is owned by society. There is no way in which society could grant temporary exclusive rights to the creator if society doesn't own the work.
2. Those exclusive rights serve a very specific purpose: promoting usefull inventions (or art in case of copyright, but we are talking patents here).
When combining those, it should be blatantly obvious that a situation where patents do not clearly promote invention makes that no exclusive rights to the invention can exist and it is by definition owned by society as a whole.
the bios hashes grub, grub hashes the kernel and initrd, get a "known" good result. This should be fairly stable. If executing within a hypervisor, the resulting hash value will not be equivalent and you will know something is up.
You do not need tcpa for this. You do however need to have grub loaded from the MBR, and the MBR code needs to validate its checksum. In this case the bios will warn you if either the code or the checksum changed, and the MBR code can warn you about changes to whatever it loads.
As you can see, this could easily be done today, and has been a possibility for the last decade or such at the very least.
The problems with this, as well as with the setup you suggest (which seems functionally identical to me) is that you count on the code that gets loaded in the 1st stage to verify the code that gets loaded after that. It is this aspect that isn't implemented by most systems and why mbr change notification barely helps if any (with the systems we have today). It could be a usefull tool if used properly.
Hmm.. I have quite a pile of system boards here, dating from old 486 systems upto p4 and athlon xp, with ami, award, phoenix and biosses, and all of them have the boot sector virus protection option (tho sometimes just called virus protection).
This offers at best a partial protection. While the MBR is important, the actual boot is done from the partition boot record, mot the master boot record, and this badly named feature is not going to help against that. Why badly named? because it does monitor (attempted) changes to the bootrecord and doesn't know anything about viruses.
Next. even if you could protect against that, things just get a bit more OS and possibly OS version dependent because you have to move to the file that gets loaded by the partition bootrecord.
Oh, quite a few 'boot managers' change the mbr on every boot.
So while it offers some protection, that protection is extremely limited, and can be quite inconvenient.
I'd think the easiest solution is to get yourself a livecd and boot one of the machines from it. Here is a nice list
Is this the obligitory "wont someone please think of the children" post?
Read again... or maybe I should word it a bit differently to make it easier..
Asking to respect the victims of child pornography and what they went through, and meanwhile ignoring the fact that hijacking those in order to install broad filtering and monitoring technology is thoughtless at the very least, and imho extremely stupid
At least have some respect for those poor souls subjected to such horrific stuff.
I agree with your sentiment, but I'd first of all direct such a request at the people trying to use child pornography as a "can't refuse" argument to implement some pretty broad and abusable monitoring and filtering.
http://soapbox.bartsplace.net/article.php/20050203 220950714
That's why I said it was good that this crack was exposed publicly: now people know better than to trust it. Or at least know better than they did before.
Agreed.
Why should NickServ have access to the clear passwords? What happens if FreeNode switches to another auth service, especially if a result of a dispute? That system is really too insecure to trust at all.
Of course your technical comments are right on the spot, but there is something you don't mention, and that many people tend to forget with regards to nick/channelserv and similar services on IRC networks.
None of those services is intended to provide security, and more generally, IRC does not have any form of security.
Such services are there to make live easier (specifically, to make running a channel and knowing who is who easier), it does not replace good channel operators or such. Networks that want something more should really look for some more robust solution first.
Nothing happens in a vacuum. He mistakes bureaucratic incompetence for intention. Going from incompetence to intention is a huge stretch and implies a serious misunderstanding of how the career employees of the federal law enforcement and intelligence agencies do their jobs. I leave to you the exercise of determining how such a thing could be covered up, given the number of people that would have been involved.
Actually, the flaws in his argument are many, attributing to malice what can easily be explained by incompetence is just one.
That said, the basic issue he is raising is real and quite serious. Regardless of if the US government was in any way involved or allowed the 9/11 attacks, they have used them for a very serious power grab.
To suspect malice is not entirely strange when you look at the congress report on 9/11, suggesting as you also say that burocratic incompetence, and more specifically, having the information, but having failed to actually spot it and communicate it in time were why the attacks were not prevented. To respond to that with increased survailance makes absolutely no sense whatsoever, rather, it just increases the problem. Yet this is exactly what is being done. This gives sufficient reason to believe that the motivation for this survailance is in fact not the one that is being given, from there to concluding that fear is being used to let people agree to things they normally wouldn't agree to is not far fetched, and is confirmed by the actions and words of the current administration.
This leaves it open to debate what the real motivation is but the alternative to attributing this to malice seems to be believing in collective stupidity of the administration.
Whose history? US history? You're saying that the US government has allowed something like the 9/11 attacks to occur in the past just to inflame the populace? Now I'll admit that our government isn't run by a bunch of boy scouts, but I think that you're pulling something out of thin air here.
The history of about any nation on this planet. While there is no serious past incident in US history that I am aware of, that is no reason to ignore the signs that are there now, and assume the USA is inmune to this.
Wether those in power actually caused or helped the incident or not is of course important, but in no way changes how this incident is being abused. Whenever such abuse happens, there are of course going to be people arguing that the incident was on purpose, in this particular case I don't believe that to be very likely (first of all because there simply was no need to do so, it would have happened anyway, tho maybe in a slightly different form at a slightly different moment) but I wouldn't dismiss it out of hand.
Last but not least, I believe that while his argument was flawed, it did need being addressed because the underlying issue is real and pretty important.
Incidentally, at some point, you claimed that I was dismissing the OP's comments by saying that he was paranoid. On the contrary, as I've already mentioned, he did the job himself. I was just challenging his own assertion that I might consider him a troll. I don't think that he's a troll at all. I never addressed his comments, though, because I really didn't think that they were worthy of discussion - at least on my part. Perhaps I was wrong.
Thanks for the explanation. I may not agree with you, but when you explain where you are comming from, I can at least try to understand your point of view.
Fair's fair. My opinion is my own and I don't owe it to anyone to offer justification for it, particularly when my comments were not addressed to anyone else. ...
By the way, another opinion that I have is that you've tried to make a mountain out of a molehill.
And my opinion is that if you don't have anything to contribute to a discussion, it is a good idea to just stay out of it. If you don't then you better be prepared to motivate what you are saying.