I think you misread the post. It sounds like you interpreted it as "at their own hands" - indicating that the tradgedy was the tragedy of suicide. But re-read it. What was actually said was "at the hands of their own" - indicating the the tragedy was the tragedy of "their own" doing them in - meaning their own grouping, or their own peers, or their own country, or someting like that - so I don't thing ioslipstream was in disagreement with your point. I think ioslipstream saw it exactly like you do.
It's better to not have such an agency in the first place than to have it and hope that democratically electing it's leader will curb it's power. I am against the FCC as it exists *today*, but an organization that does just what the FCC was originally meant to do, and no more, is still a good idea. While one way to get from here to there is to try to scale back the FCC, another way is to demolish it and replace it with something newer and smaller. Given human nature, it's probably easier to get there by starting anew than by taking an existing group and telling it to change it's methods. We still need an ability to register who is broadcasting where and we need the ability to make it illegal for someone to drown out your signal. The problem is that this requires some governmentally recognized concept of owning pieces of the spectrum as if they were property, and that's what the FCC was originally supposed to be for. The problem is that instead of ending up "owning" your channel you ended up only "renting" it from the government, via your FCC license, and they have the ability to evict you just like a landlord does. And through that abilty, they ended up controlling content. What is needed is a way to actually OWN a slice of the spectrum, with all the inherent rights that property ownership entails.
The difficulty with this is that radio spectrum is a very tight, tight piece of real estate, and you can't easily slice it up into thinner peices than it already has been. It's not sprawling all over like land ownership is, and therefore only a few people will be able to own pieces of the airwaves. If only a few people own the airwaves, this isn't *necessarily* a bad thing if slander and libel laws are being properly enforced so they can't get away with lying in public, which is something our government has been lax on.
This guy's words show that he's not much of a Democrat. He probably hails from one of those places where people lean very far to the right, such that a centrist ends up looking like a Democrat to the locals. (The same effect happens in the other direction in other areas, where centrists end up looking like Republicans as far as the locals are concerned, because the locals are extremely leaning to the left.)
These days there's very little difference between the two parties anyway.
If your goal is "build myself a house" then there are places to go where that is possible, outside Manhattan. If your goal is "build myself a radio transmitter and broadcast with it", then the RF spectrum that radios can pick up is your absolute limit, set mostly by the fact that the RF spectrum is a world of one-dimensional real estate between some endpoints. The only way to fit more people is to take some space away from someone else out.
Your Manhattan analogy fails because Manhattan is ONE dense area in a world that is mostly less dense than that. If the whole world was as dense as Manhattan, then your analogy would hold true (and there would be radically different rules governing real estate than we have right now.)
How many people are employed by the corporations of which you speak - versus how many people are in the marketplace of their potential consumers? Favoring big corporations over their potential customers *is* favoring the few over the many.
The original purpose of the FCC was to do one thing and one thing only - make sure that people weren't allowed to 'war' over the broadcast spectrum by trying to get in the way of each other's signals. That was their only purpose. The demarking of the radio dial into discrete 'channels' was for this purpose only. The necessity of needing to register to be allowed to use a channel was for this purpose only. It was purely to make sure that if big bully company X wants to compete on the airwaves with little company Y, it cannot use the technique of drowning out company Y's signal. It has to compete on content instead. This is where the original ban on a company owning more than a few channels in an area came from - Since there are a limited number of them, one could use the tactic of buying them all up to prevent a competitor from being able to register them. This is also where the original requirement on broadcasting your callsign every so often came from. If you want to buy the licensing to use a limited resource, you have to prove you are actually making use of it and not just buying it for the sake of keeping it out of someone else's hands. So they made the requirement that you must broadcast at least your callsign if nothing else, a certain number of times a day, in order to keep using that channel and keep your license valid. (This is why radio stations are constantly butting in to tell you what station you're listening to, by the way.)
If *that* was all the FCC did, then they wouldn't be a problem. They'd be no more dictatorial than your local county registrar that you have to post your title deed to as proof you own a piece of land in the event of a dispute.
What made the FCC bad is when they used their licensing power to start dictating other things about a broadcast. Instead of just regulating the demarkation of the radio spectrum so that people don't step all over each other's signals, they started withholding licenses purely for content reasons, and that's what needs to be repealed.
Take away the regulation by content, but keep the regulation that separates RF frequencies from each other.
Not entirely correct- there's a reason we have the word after all, there seems to be a natural drive to seek divinity in the human soul. What we assign that divinity to, however- is the real question.
Yawn. Our intelligence is based on an instinct to find patterns out of fuzzy confusing data. We're very good at it. Unfortunately we have such an instinctual emotional attachment to finding these patterns that we are uncomfortable admitting to ourselves when we can't do it. So we pretend to have found answers where we haven't yet. This is all that is required to explain why faith is so common. We don't like admitting to ourselves that a thing is unknown, so we make up an explanation and it makes us feel good to believe it.
No, that's an agnostic.
You are operating under the false premise that agnostic and atheist are mutually exclusive properties. They aren't. One is about what you think, and the other is a measure of your degree of certainty about it. In fact, someone could be both an agnostic and a Christian, even, if that person says "I know I don't have the actual knowlege that there's a god, and I know I don't have a reason to believe, but I believe anyway, because it just feels right." Such a person is common, and is in fact both an agnostic and a Christian, although he probably wouldn't realise it. The same can happen the other way around, and someone can be both agnostic and atheistic.
or as it's more routinely put, that faith is always false
That's a misrepresentation of the postion held by those you are arguing against. It's not that faith is always false - it's that the practice of belief without reason is always a bad idea, and if something you have faith in turns out to be true, it can only be so by pure, utter coincidnece.
By the way, faith is not boolean. Everything has varying degrees of it. The faith that god exists is 100% faith, all the way over on one end of the sliding scale. The "faith" that it's a bad idea to believe based on faith alone, is maybe about 1 or 2% faith. It's a position based mostly on observation of how reliable such things have turned out to be in the past.
They are fine so long as they remain optional. There are times when a transparent window has functionality beyond just looking cool. The ability to see what's printed in the window behind the one you're typing into is useful when reading a manual (in the form of on-line help or a web page), and using that manual to decide what to type into an editor or shell prompt. (This is the same reason I hate systems that force the keyboard focus window to always be the topmost window. Ever since I first felt what it was like to have the two decoupled, using Sun's openView system in 1992, I never wanted to go back.)
What really bothers me, and it is the main reason I have stopped using Gnome, is this: Developers often assume that the moment the computers get fast enough that they can respond to fancy graphic requests using 100% of the CPU time, that this is the point where all reasonable people would stop complaining about the time they take up, and would be happy to have the little graphic toys unconditionally turned on at all times. This I call "bullshit". It's only when the fancy graphic requests end up taking a teeny, tiny fraction of the CPU time that it starts to become acceptable to leave them uncoditionally on.
I don't just want fast response from my UI when the system is under light load. I also want fast response from my UI when there's a runaway process I need to find and kill, or when I'm calculating some big raytrace in the background. So, yes, even in this day and age where you can't find a new computer with less than a Gigahertz clock rate, it is STILL worth it to provide the user with the ability to turn off features that require a good amount of CPU usage.
It's up to the owner of the computer to decide what to spend their CPU time on, not the maker of the UI.
Imagine someone is a hermit and has never heard of the concept of a God. Along comes someone to visit the hermit and describes his god to the hermit, and the hermit says, "I don't believe you". Did the hermit pick up a new belief by doing this? Or, did his worldview he pick up a new assertion beyond those he had before? No. He just didn't change his viewpoint from what it was beforehand. His worldview didn't include a god before, and it still doesn't now. This incurs NO BURDEN OF PROOF.
The notion that an atheist has a burden of proof is based on the assumption that belief in god is an assumed default from birth, which it obviously isn't. Belief in god is a supposition you pick up during your lifetime, and therefore *it* is the neck-sticking-out assertion that needs a reason.
I do agree that it is possible that you have experienced evidence that I have not. I do not agree that this makes it wrong for me to take the atheistic position.
Your post appears to be based on the notion that atheism must be an active belief there is no god. This is not true. A lack of the active belief that there *is* a god is sufficient to fit the definition.
Like all such security measures, this one contains the same exact problem all the others do - it realies on the end-user application being willing to play along with the scheme, and *that* means only proprietary software will be invited to play, and that means, again, open source software will be automatically deemed 'evil' and to be used only be pirates. (when the real problem was making a security model based on the notion that a good citizen is an ignorant citizen. Writing CD playing software is something that only big companies should be allowed to do, right? People who know how to do it themselves are an irrelevantly tiny part of the marketplace, so who cares if we screw them over, right?)
The check engine light is basically the "GPF" of the auto world. "Something is wrong, but it would take way to long to explain it to you and there's nothing you can do about it right now anyway..."
I had a jeep once that it turns out was hardwired to have it's "check engine" light turn on at 85,000 miles on the odometer - No Matter What. This was covered in the owner's pamphlet (I refuse to call it a manual, those are those telephone-book sized things). The reason for it? There was an oxygen sensor in the exhaust pipe that they claim they can't tell if it's failing or not since it's *supposed* to be registering zero most of the time. It's used to help calibrate the fuel mixture - the mixture should be just barely rich enough that there is no leftover oxygen in the exhaust, and no richer. Anyway, they claimed that 85,000 miles was the first point at which the oxygen sensor *might* start to fail, so they just automatically put the light on at 85,000 to make you go in to replace the sensor whether it needs it or not. It's a five minute job you should be able to do yourself, except that you need the magic computer codes to tell the car's computer to turn off the damn engine light, and so you *must* take it to a licensed mechanic that has the computer link for that and the super-secret code from the company.
That felt like I was getting ripped off, and it astonished me that it was legal. (Making the light go on at 85,000 because they can't tell when the sensor will go bad - that I can understand and agree with - but forcing you to use an expensive mechanic just to turn the f-ing thing off - that was extortion, plain and simple.
(And you *do* have to get the light to turn off, because of the "boy who cried wolf" problem - you don't want to be in a situation where your check engine light is no longer believable.)
Yes, and a person dumb enough to slam a crowbar into his head repeatedly can be killed from it - so let's ban crowbars too. The fix to the kind of problem you mention is to stop allowing people to sue companies for their own stupidity. Then companies would be able to stop reacting back with stupidly over-restrictive measures that try to baby their customers. A company is only guilty of someone dying from their product in the case where that company misled the consumer, or the product did something other than what it was stated it could do. If D-con sells you some rat poison, and says on the box, "hey dumbass, this is poision, don't drink it", then anyone who drinks it shouldn't be able to sue the company over it (or their next of kin sue the company).
If a person modifies his car, the original car company shouldn't be held accountable for accidents that occur because of that modification. A warning label on modding the car computer is all that *should* be necessary to aleviate this problem. Totally preventing the customer from even *seeing* the error codes from the car computer shouldn't be necessary. Just like you shouldn't have to put up a chainlink fence just because you have a swimming pool and neighbors that don't watch their kids.
These auto codes are not protected by any security, besides obscurity.
Just like a number of other things the DMCA has been used with, like Adobe's e-book reader in the Skylyrov incident.
And, after all, a password is just another form of security through obscurity. If you learn the right things to do (type the right letters) you can make the system work for you. If you don't know about the right string of letters, you can't. *All* forms of computer security are like that, actually.
I don't see what the difference is, in category, between a blinking light that maps to an obscure code and a code that maps things like "65" to "A" and "66" to "B" and "67" to "C" and so on.
The difference between an encryption system and ASCII is not one of type, it's one of degree.
I think it's odd that they think it's your God-given right to reverse-engineer your car, but not your XBox.
It's simple. They understand cars enough to know what the danger is. They don't understand computers enough to see the same dangers there. (Your XBox example doesn't really highlight the problem, since it is just a game after all - a better example is things like voting machine code and proprietary device drivers.)
Really, that's all there is to it. It's simple familiarity. Screw with people's ability to fix their own cars and you impact a lot of people the congrescritters know personally - they grok what's going on because everyone's got cars, everyone's opened hood on them, and everyone either knows how to fix minor things on them or is just one relationship hop away from someone who does. Now, how many congressmen know the first thing about how computer software is made? How many of them realize just how artificial the line is between software design and software fixing? It's not nearly as clearly cut as the line between designing a car and fixing a car.
Secondly, a congresscritter would never accept that it's okay for someone to get free access to the blueprints from a car manufacturer for how to make the car, but they understand that people should have access to the diagnostic tools. What they don't understand is that that distinction doesn't exist in computer software. The "user-servicable" part of a software program is...the whole thing. And only a programmer can really understand how true that is.
I was picturing that the checksum is run from an external media device, like a bootable floppy or zip drive. It acesses the hard drive of the machine and runs the checksum on it. Thus it could in theory be a totally different OS. In fact it doesn't even have to look at the filesystem intelligently - just read the disk in a low-level "dd"-like fashion and make a checksum off of that. But the crucial thing is that the checksum program is not produced by the same people who make the voting system. The election commission contracts out to one vendor for the voting machines, and to a totally different vendor for the simple little checksumming mechanism. The two never talk to each other.
The point I was making is that the BASIC language we were using didn't *have* those kinds of tools - no functions. No procedures. Just Gosubs and gotos, and they made the mistake of trying to mimic the structured statemnts by giving you "cookbook" solutions that did the same things with formulaic uses of the primitive tools available, and then they said that these were the only ways you were allowed to use these things. (To write a loop, you must use one of these three patterns precisely (which were essentially, the while/for/repeat structures), to write a function, you must make your gosub routine be laid out just like this...). In an environment like that, trying to teach structured programming has a bad backlash effect because it doesn't make things easier like it's supposed to, and students can detect this. And they don't have experience of a better language in which the structured style actually works.
It's not entirely true that the bombing didn't have much damage. The reason the German industry grew immune to it was that the Germans would rebuild factories further to the east, to escape the range of the bombers. But that had the direct effect of putting the factories closer to the Russian Front - which wasn't exactly a safe haven either. Because of Russian advances on the ground, the germans did lose industry very quickly in the end and thus lose their ability to supply their armies and thus they collapsed rather fast once they were back within their own borders. But it was allied bombing that forced them to put the factories where the Russians could overtake them, instead of keeping them safely in the core of Germany. So, yes, the allied bombing had a very big effect on the war - it forced the Germans to disperse their industry to the periphery, and thus it sped up the ending phase where the Germans were in retreat.
It's still a lie to say the US is solely responsible, of course. I agree with you on that sentiment. (Although it's important not to downplay the Pacific theatre, in which the US was in a position to do most of the effort, and did so despite putting less resources into it than into the European theatre - good cryptography played a major role there - the US knew the Japaneese codes and therefore could predict exactly when and where to concentrate forces to handle Japanese attacks, and thus could beat the japaneese even with the drastically reduced forces left after Pearl Harbor.)
Britain had (and still has) a population that's "too large" for the land area of the british isles - meaning that they must depend on imports to keep industry going and to keep people fed. In peacetime this works just fine, as they do have a good amount of money and can afford this sort of practice. But if they can't ship anything on the oceans, then they can't support their population or industry. That's what made the battle of the atlantic so important. Keeping Britain supplied was more difficult than keeping the Germans from invading. Keeping the Germans from invading was not that hard because they didn't have enough ships to do it. Despite the fact that the German army was better than the British home defenses in both armorments and in numbers, they would only be able to attack with a few of them at a time due to the bottleneck in ship transport, and that's an assured disaster for the attacker. So while the Battle of Britain was nice in that it kept the Germans from trying to invade, and gave the Luftwaffe a good punch in the nose, even if it had been lost the subsequent German invasion still would have either had to occur immediately, in which case it would have failed for lack of ships, or it would have to take a few years to prepare, in which case Britain wouldn't have been alone anymore by then.
But, if you can cut the sea traffic, Britain's citizens starve, and nobody can put up a resistance under those conditions.
At first the German u-boats were nearly invincible. The only thing that kept the British sea traffic going was that there was just so *MUCH* of it that you could sink a superfrieghter every 5 days and still leave enough trade to keep Britain going.
Given other things he's done, he doesn't have a good reputation to preserve. It's a shame he glommed on to the Toqueville name for his group, since it has nothing at all to do with what he's doing, and he defames a laudable historical figure by associating himself with him.
So, let's see - a commodity that costs more money to manufacture than it does to design is going to be a free product, while a commodity that costs zero money to manufacture, and only has costs to design isn't???
That's where I first encountered it. It's this point that shifted me from calling myself agnostic to calling myself atheist (although technically the terms actually can overlap a bit since one is about what you think and the other is about how certain you are of it.) But, it's a rule of thumb that has good application in general, and leads to a healthy amount of skepticism (and despite the claims to the contrary by many people, skepticism is not a depressing or evil thing. I enjoy flights of fancy. I play in a number of roleplaying games, but I make sure the wall between fantasy and reality is strong.)
The problem with asking applications to fix a problem is that this only works on new applications. I want a solution that works regardless of whether or not the programmer thought of using it. That way it works retroactively on the whole pile of already-written unix tools.
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I think you misread the post. It sounds like you interpreted it as "at their own hands" - indicating that the tradgedy was the tragedy of suicide. But re-read it. What was actually said was "at the hands of their own" - indicating the the tragedy was the tragedy of "their own" doing them in - meaning their own grouping, or their own peers, or their own country, or someting like that - so I don't thing ioslipstream was in disagreement with your point. I think ioslipstream saw it exactly like you do.
It's better to not have such an agency in the first place than to have it and hope that democratically electing it's leader will curb it's power. I am against the FCC as it exists *today*, but an organization that does just what the FCC was originally meant to do, and no more, is still a good idea. While one way to get from here to there is to try to scale back the FCC, another way is to demolish it and replace it with something newer and smaller. Given human nature, it's probably easier to get there by starting anew than by taking an existing group and telling it to change it's methods. We still need an ability to register who is broadcasting where and we need the ability to make it illegal for someone to drown out your signal. The problem is that this requires some governmentally recognized concept of owning pieces of the spectrum as if they were property, and that's what the FCC was originally supposed to be for. The problem is that instead of ending up "owning" your channel you ended up only "renting" it from the government, via your FCC license, and they have the ability to evict you just like a landlord does. And through that abilty, they ended up controlling content. What is needed is a way to actually OWN a slice of the spectrum, with all the inherent rights that property ownership entails.
The difficulty with this is that radio spectrum is a very tight, tight piece of real estate, and you can't easily slice it up into thinner peices than it already has been. It's not sprawling all over like land ownership is, and therefore only a few people will be able to own pieces of the airwaves. If only a few people own the airwaves, this
isn't *necessarily* a bad thing if slander and libel laws are being properly enforced so they can't get away with lying in public, which is something our government has been lax on.
This guy's words show that he's not much of a Democrat. He probably hails from one of those places where people lean very far to the right, such that a centrist ends up looking like a Democrat to the locals. (The same effect happens in the other direction in other areas, where centrists end up looking like Republicans as far as the locals are concerned, because the locals are extremely leaning to the left.)
These days there's very little difference between the two parties anyway.
If your goal is "build myself a house" then there are places to go where that is possible, outside Manhattan. If your goal is "build myself a radio transmitter and broadcast with it", then the RF spectrum that radios can pick up is your absolute limit, set mostly by the fact that the RF spectrum is a world of one-dimensional real estate between some endpoints. The only way to fit more people is to take some space away from someone else out.
Your Manhattan analogy fails because Manhattan is ONE dense area in a world that is mostly less dense than that. If the whole world was as dense as Manhattan, then your analogy would hold true (and there would be radically different rules governing real estate than we have right now.)
How many people are employed by the corporations of which you speak - versus how many people are in the marketplace of their potential consumers? Favoring big corporations over their potential customers *is* favoring the few over the many.
Asking for decency during one particular type of broadcast is not the same as supressing free speech or censorship.
Yes, it is. Certain social and political ideas are considered "indecent" by some.
The original purpose of the FCC was to do one thing and one thing only - make sure that people weren't allowed to 'war' over the broadcast spectrum by trying to get in the way of each other's signals. That was their only purpose. The demarking of the radio dial into discrete 'channels' was for this purpose only. The necessity of needing to register to be allowed to use a channel was for this purpose only. It was purely to make sure that if big bully company X wants to compete on the airwaves with little company Y, it cannot use the technique of drowning out company Y's signal. It has to compete on content instead. This is where the original ban on a company owning more than a few channels in an area came from - Since there are a limited number of them, one could use the tactic of buying them all up to prevent a competitor from being able to register them. This is also where the original requirement on broadcasting your callsign every so often came from. If you want to buy the licensing to use a limited resource, you have to prove you are actually making use of it and not just buying it for the sake of keeping it out of someone else's hands. So they made the requirement that you must broadcast at least your callsign if nothing else, a certain number of times a day, in order to keep using that channel and keep your license valid. (This is why radio stations are constantly butting in to tell you what station you're listening to, by the way.)
If *that* was all the FCC did, then they wouldn't be a problem. They'd be no more dictatorial than your local county registrar that you have to post your title deed to as proof you own a piece of land in the event of a dispute.
What made the FCC bad is when they used their licensing power to start dictating other things about a broadcast. Instead of just regulating the demarkation of the radio spectrum so that people don't step all over each other's signals, they started withholding licenses purely for content reasons, and that's what needs to be repealed.
Take away the regulation by content, but keep the regulation that separates RF frequencies from each other.
Not entirely correct- there's a reason we have the word after all, there seems to be a natural drive to seek divinity in the human soul. What we assign that divinity to, however- is the real question.
Yawn. Our intelligence is based on an instinct to find patterns out of fuzzy confusing data. We're very good at it. Unfortunately we have such an instinctual emotional attachment to finding these patterns that we are uncomfortable admitting to ourselves when we can't do it. So we pretend to have found answers where we haven't yet. This is all that is required to explain why faith is so common. We don't like admitting to ourselves that a thing is unknown, so we make up an explanation and it makes us feel good to believe it.
No, that's an agnostic.
You are operating under the false premise that agnostic and atheist are mutually exclusive properties. They aren't. One is about what you think, and the other is a measure of your degree of certainty about it. In fact, someone could be both an agnostic and a Christian, even, if that person says "I know I don't have the actual knowlege that there's a god, and I know I don't have a reason to believe, but I believe anyway, because it just feels right." Such a person is common, and is in fact both an agnostic and a Christian, although he probably wouldn't realise it. The same can happen the other way around, and someone can be both agnostic and atheistic.
or as it's more routinely put, that faith is always false
That's a misrepresentation of the postion held by those you are arguing against. It's not that faith is always false - it's that the practice of belief without reason is always a bad idea, and if something you have faith in turns out to be true, it can only be so by pure, utter coincidnece.
By the way, faith is not boolean. Everything has varying degrees of it. The faith that god exists is 100% faith, all the way over on one end of the sliding scale. The "faith" that it's a bad idea to believe based on faith alone, is maybe about 1 or 2% faith. It's a position based mostly on observation of how reliable such things have turned out to be in the past.
They are fine so long as they remain optional. There are times when a transparent window has functionality beyond just looking cool. The ability to see what's printed in the window behind the one you're typing into is useful when reading a manual (in the form of on-line help or a web page), and using that manual to decide what to type into an editor or shell prompt. (This is the same reason I hate systems that force the keyboard focus window to always be the topmost window. Ever since I first felt what it was like to have the two decoupled, using Sun's openView system in 1992, I never wanted to go back.)
What really bothers me, and it is the main reason I have stopped using Gnome, is this: Developers often assume that the moment the computers get fast enough that they can respond to fancy graphic requests using 100% of the CPU time, that this is the point where all reasonable people would stop complaining about the time they take up, and would be happy to have the little graphic toys unconditionally turned on at all times. This I call "bullshit". It's only when the fancy graphic requests end up taking a teeny, tiny fraction of the CPU time that it starts to become acceptable to leave them uncoditionally on.
I don't just want fast response from my UI when the system is under light load. I also want fast response from my UI when there's a runaway process I need to find and kill, or when I'm calculating some big raytrace in the background. So, yes, even in this day and age where you can't find a new computer with less than a Gigahertz clock rate, it is STILL worth it to provide the user with the ability to turn off features that require a good amount of CPU usage.
It's up to the owner of the computer to decide what to spend their CPU time on, not the maker of the UI.
Sigh - this old thing again.
Imagine someone is a hermit and has never heard of the concept of a God. Along comes someone to visit the hermit and describes his god to the hermit, and the hermit says, "I don't believe you". Did the hermit pick up a new belief by doing this? Or, did his worldview he pick up a new assertion beyond those he had before? No. He just didn't change his viewpoint from what it was beforehand. His worldview didn't include a god before, and it still doesn't now. This incurs NO BURDEN OF PROOF.
The notion that an atheist has a burden of proof is based on the assumption that belief in god is an assumed default from birth, which it obviously isn't. Belief in god is a supposition you pick up during your lifetime, and therefore *it* is the neck-sticking-out assertion that needs a reason.
I do agree that it is possible that you have experienced evidence that I have not. I do not agree that this makes it wrong for me to take the atheistic position.
Your post appears to be based on the notion that atheism must be an active belief there is no god. This is not true. A lack of the active belief that there *is* a god is sufficient to fit the definition.
...Which is an idea they took from the many varied X-windows iconbox utilities.
Hint: this is true of _all_ security mechanisms
You just repeated my point while pretending to be against it. This makes no sense.
Like all such security measures, this one contains the same exact problem all the others do - it realies on the end-user application being willing to play along with the scheme, and *that* means only proprietary software will be invited to play, and that means, again, open source software will be automatically deemed 'evil' and to be used only be pirates. (when the real problem was making a security model based on the notion that a good citizen is an ignorant citizen. Writing CD playing software is something that only big companies should be allowed to do, right? People who know how to do it themselves are an irrelevantly tiny part of the marketplace, so who cares if we screw them over, right?)
I am so sick of this crap.
The check engine light is basically the "GPF" of the auto world. "Something is wrong, but it would take way to long to explain it to you and there's nothing you can do about it right now anyway..."
I had a jeep once that it turns out was hardwired to have it's "check engine" light turn on at 85,000 miles on the odometer - No Matter What. This was covered in the owner's pamphlet (I refuse to call it a manual, those are those telephone-book sized things). The reason for it? There was an oxygen sensor in the exhaust pipe that they claim they can't tell if it's failing or not since it's *supposed* to be registering zero most of the time. It's used to help calibrate the fuel mixture - the mixture should be just barely rich enough that there is no leftover oxygen in the exhaust, and no richer. Anyway, they claimed that 85,000 miles was the first point at which the oxygen sensor *might* start to fail, so they just automatically put the light on at 85,000 to make you go in to replace the sensor whether it needs it or not. It's a five minute job you should be able to do yourself, except that you need the magic computer codes to tell the car's computer to turn off the damn engine light, and so you *must* take it to a licensed mechanic that has the computer link for that and the super-secret code from the company.
That felt like I was getting ripped off, and it astonished me that it was legal. (Making the light go on at 85,000 because they can't tell when the sensor will go bad - that I can understand and agree with - but forcing you to use an expensive mechanic just to turn the f-ing thing off - that was extortion, plain and simple.
(And you *do* have to get the light to turn off, because of the "boy who cried wolf" problem - you don't want to be in a situation where your check engine light is no longer believable.)
Yes, and a person dumb enough to slam a crowbar into his head repeatedly can be killed from it - so let's ban crowbars too. The fix to the kind of problem you mention is to stop allowing people to sue companies for their own stupidity. Then companies would be able to stop reacting back with stupidly over-restrictive measures that try to baby their customers. A company is only guilty of someone dying from their product in the case where that company misled the consumer, or the product did something other than what it was stated it could do. If D-con sells you some rat poison, and says on the box, "hey dumbass, this is poision, don't drink it", then anyone who drinks it shouldn't be able to sue the company over it (or their next of kin sue the company).
If a person modifies his car, the original car company shouldn't be held accountable for accidents that occur because of that modification. A warning label on modding the car computer is all that *should* be necessary to aleviate this problem. Totally preventing the customer from even *seeing* the error codes from the car computer shouldn't be necessary. Just like you shouldn't have to put up a chainlink fence just because you have a swimming pool and neighbors that don't watch their kids.
These auto codes are not protected by any security, besides obscurity.
Just like a number of other things the DMCA has been used with, like Adobe's e-book reader in the Skylyrov incident.
And, after all, a password is just another form of security through obscurity. If you learn the right things to do (type the right letters) you can make the system work for you. If you don't know about the right
string of letters, you can't. *All* forms of computer security are like that, actually.
I don't see what the difference is, in category, between a blinking light that maps to an obscure code and a code that maps things like "65" to "A" and "66" to "B" and "67" to "C" and so on.
The difference between an encryption system and ASCII is not one of type, it's one of degree.
I think it's odd that they think it's your God-given right to reverse-engineer your car, but not your XBox.
It's simple. They understand cars enough to know what the danger is. They don't understand computers enough to see the same dangers there. (Your XBox example doesn't really highlight the problem, since it is just a game after all - a better example is things like voting machine code and proprietary device drivers.)
Really, that's all there is to it. It's simple familiarity. Screw with people's ability to fix their own cars and you impact a lot of people the congrescritters know personally - they grok what's going on because everyone's got cars, everyone's opened hood on them, and everyone either knows how to fix minor things on them or is just one relationship hop away from someone who does. Now, how many congressmen know the first thing about how computer software is made? How many of them realize just how artificial the line is between software design and software fixing? It's not nearly as clearly cut as the line between designing a car and fixing a car.
Secondly, a congresscritter would never accept that it's okay for someone to get free access to the blueprints from a car manufacturer for how to make the car, but they understand that people should have access to the diagnostic tools. What they don't understand is that that distinction doesn't exist in computer software. The "user-servicable" part of a software program is...the whole thing. And only a programmer can really understand how true that is.
I was picturing that the checksum is run from an external media device, like a bootable floppy or zip drive. It acesses the hard drive of the machine and runs the checksum on it. Thus it could in theory be a totally different OS. In fact it doesn't even have to look at the filesystem intelligently - just read the disk in a low-level "dd"-like fashion and make a checksum off of that. But the crucial thing is that the checksum program is not produced by the same people who make the voting system. The election commission contracts out to one vendor for the voting machines, and to a totally different vendor for the simple little checksumming mechanism. The two never talk to each other.
The point I was making is that the BASIC language we were using didn't *have* those kinds of tools - no functions. No procedures. Just Gosubs and gotos, and they made the mistake of trying to mimic the structured statemnts by giving you "cookbook" solutions that did the same things with formulaic uses of the primitive tools available, and then they said that these were the only ways you were allowed to use these things. (To write a loop, you must use one of these three patterns precisely (which were essentially, the while/for/repeat structures), to write a function, you must make your gosub routine be laid out just like this...). In an environment like that, trying to teach structured programming has a bad backlash effect because it doesn't make things easier like it's supposed to, and students can detect this. And they don't have experience of a better language in which the structured style actually works.
It's not entirely true that the bombing didn't have much damage. The reason the German industry grew immune to it was that the Germans would rebuild factories further to the east, to escape the range of the bombers. But that had the direct effect of putting the factories closer to the Russian Front - which wasn't exactly a safe haven either. Because of Russian advances on the ground, the germans did lose industry very quickly in the end and thus lose their ability to supply their armies and thus they collapsed rather fast once they were back within their own borders. But it was allied bombing that forced them to put the factories where the Russians could overtake them, instead of keeping them safely in the core of Germany. So, yes, the allied bombing had a very big effect on the war - it forced the Germans to disperse their industry to the periphery, and thus it sped up the ending phase where the Germans were in retreat.
It's still a lie to say the US is solely responsible, of course. I agree with you on that sentiment. (Although it's important not to downplay the Pacific theatre, in which the US was in a position to do most of the effort, and did so despite putting less resources into it than into the European theatre - good cryptography played a major role there - the US knew the Japaneese codes and therefore could predict exactly when and where to concentrate forces to handle Japanese attacks, and thus could beat the japaneese even with the drastically reduced forces left after Pearl Harbor.)
Britain had (and still has) a population that's "too large" for the land area of the british isles - meaning that they must depend on imports to keep industry going and to keep people fed. In peacetime this works just fine, as they do have a good amount of money and can afford this sort of practice. But if they can't ship anything on the oceans, then they can't support their population or industry. That's what made the battle of the atlantic so important. Keeping Britain supplied was more difficult than keeping the Germans from invading. Keeping the Germans from invading was not that hard because they didn't have enough ships to do it. Despite the fact that the German army was better than the British home defenses in both armorments and in numbers, they would only be able to attack with a few of them at a time due to the bottleneck in ship transport, and that's an assured disaster for the attacker. So while the Battle of Britain was nice in that it kept the Germans from trying to invade, and gave the Luftwaffe a good punch in the nose, even if it had been lost the subsequent German invasion still would have either had to occur immediately, in which case it would have failed for lack of ships, or it would have to take a few years to prepare, in which case Britain wouldn't have been alone anymore by then.
But, if you can cut the sea traffic, Britain's citizens starve, and nobody can put up a resistance under those conditions.
At first the German u-boats were nearly invincible. The only thing that kept the British sea traffic going was that there was just so *MUCH* of it that you could sink a superfrieghter every 5 days and still leave enough trade to keep Britain going.
Given other things he's done, he doesn't have a good reputation to preserve. It's a shame he glommed on to the Toqueville name for his group, since it has nothing at all to do with what he's doing, and he defames a laudable historical figure by associating himself with him.
So, let's see - a commodity that costs more money to manufacture than it does to design is going to be a free product, while a commodity that costs zero money to manufacture, and only has costs to design isn't???
Not in a million years.
It's just like the existence of God
That's where I first encountered it. It's this point that shifted me from calling myself agnostic to calling myself atheist (although technically the terms actually can overlap a bit since one is about what you think and the other is about how certain you are of it.) But, it's a rule of thumb that has good application in general, and leads to a healthy amount of skepticism (and despite the claims to the contrary by many people, skepticism is not a depressing or evil thing. I enjoy flights of fancy. I play in a number of roleplaying games, but I make sure the wall between fantasy and reality is strong.)
The problem with asking applications to fix a problem is that this only works on new applications.
I want a solution that works regardless of whether or not the programmer thought of using it. That way it works retroactively on the whole pile of already-written unix tools.