dear cloud,
please stop crapping up the front page of slashdot with your buzzword laden stories. I have not been this annoyed since everybody started "surfing" the "information superhighway". I hope you soon turn to "rain" and fall from the "cybersky" and die.
thank you,
umbrellaman
Amen. Imagine something like BitTorrent but instead of receiving and transmitting data among many other clients, you instead receive and transmit slices of computing power AND data among many other clients. I would perhaps call that "cloud computing" in the same way that you could call BitTorrent "swarm downloading". I would liken it to the distributed SETI processing or the distributed efforts to crack various encryption schemes, except more general-purpose.
So instead of a single monolithic machine centrally running everyone's programs, something more like a Beowulf cluster centrally runs everyone's programs. As others have pointed out, this really seems to be just another iteration of the mainframe model. I share parent's wariness of anything that is so thoroughly buzzword-laden.
Might I suggest doing business with spammers a crime instead?
I wonder if some sort of Internet business license might be a way to do this. The fee would need to be something fairly nominal and just enough to fund the process. The idea would be to implement something such that payment processors would not be allowed to and/or would be under no obligation to complete transactions for anyone without said business license. If someone wants to conduct business outside of this scheme using cash, checks, etc., they do so at their own risk. A little publicity and honest merchants showing that they have said license should be sufficient to make the scheme known.
A few more details... Licenses get revoked for proved spamming. Licenses are tied to an originating domain with a DNS tie in to allow mismatches between license number and originator to be filtered. Trying to sell something using e-mail but without including the Internet business license becomes illegal and ISPs are free to trash such e-mails.
Obviously, this only would affect spam that is attempting to sell something. 419 scams, various phishing scams, etc. would still be a problem. The idea is that legitimate commercial e-mail becomes non-anonymous which doesn't hurt legitimate vendors or non-commercial e-mail. People attempting to sell stuff using spam become "visible" and subject to countermeasures.
Cheers,
Dave
This might not be a bad idea except for the idea that government would probably have to handle the licensing, and if it turns out anything like licensing has turned out for automobiles, then they won't give a damn how incompetent the licensed people are so long as fees and fines related to licensing and any violations provide a steady revenue source. Other than this one drawback, your idea is sound IMHO.
I had another idea that would help, either separately or perhaps in conjunction with yours. One is that the law should be changed to make it perfectly legal to construct a virus/worm that exploits already-patched vulnerabilities, infects a machine, resides on that machine for a couple of weeks to spread itself, and then promptly formats all writable media on that machine (preferably a secure wipe and not just a regular format). This would put a huge dent on the amount of spam because almost all of the spam is coming from compromised machines that are members of various botnets. Let it be understood that your right to use the network ends the moment you make that network a worse place for anyone else, either deliberately or through incompetence. If the owner of the machine refuses to either secure it (due digilience, the real "big scary" for most people, or so you would think from their actions) or take it offline, then it will be taken offline for them. Spammers understand that a good virus/worm/etc does not kill its host; therefore making sure that there is a virus/worm that does "kill" its host computer would not only impede spammers but would also provide incentive to users to care about security.
Incompetence and stupidity (that is, incompetence that any literate adult could rememdy except that they choose not to) is the root cause of spam. So long as there are millions of incompetent and stupid users who don't think that informing themselves is important, there will be spammers to take advantage of them. The way I see it, any other solution amounts to escalating an arms race.
For some reason, computers are just about the only field where people honestly seem to think that they can use what they do not remotely understand and achieve a good result. That they get a good result as often as they do is something of a miracle and is never appreciated as such. A strong incentive to learn that not only is understanding important, but that you do not (nearly) need to be an expert to become a much harder target can only be a good thing. I really believe that at some point it's going to come to that anyway bec
This is actually redundant but it was rewarded with "Funny" because it implies that Monroe has lots of sex. You guys like Monroe and heaven forbid if you could separate the moderation guidelines from your personal feelings. Therefore, this is complimentary of Monroe and gets modded up. I made a very similar post that, while intended to be humorous, could have been taken as derogatory of Monroe since it suggested that the three-fourths part did not include sex, so I get modded down into oblivion. That's alright; to be honest, in hindsight, I don't think my own post was any good and it probably deserves the moderation it received. However, this post is a carbon copy of mine and was modded up. I contend that either they are both funny or they are both redundant.
The reason why I complain about the mods from time to time is because the moderation guidelines are well-written and easy to understand, yet I never see any consistency. It seems like there's always a matter of fanboy-ism that reduces moderation to a matter of popularity (in this case, Monroe's popularity). For an unrelated example, did you know that if someone does a good deal of research, shares his findings, and explains why he came to the conclusion that he did, that he deserves an Informative mod even if you hate his fucking guts and can't stand any of his opinions? That if you want to tell him how much you hate and disagree with him, the way to do it is by posting a response and not by abusing the moderation system? I'm just not seeing that kind of maturity and that's a shame, as Slashdot is one of the few places where it could be possible.
Do I give a shit about a few points when I have more than enough karma to burn? Not really. Do I give a shit about the rampant, childish, nothing-exists-beyond-my-personal-feelings knee-jerk type of attitude that I am seeing more and more often? Yes, that one does bother me, for it tells me that the culture (be it a Web site or a nation) is heading in the wrong direction.
Munroe describes XKCD as 'a webcomic about stick figures who do math, play with staple guns, mess around on the Internet, and have lots of sex. It's about three-fourths autobiographical.'"
So does that mean Munroe does math, plays with staple guns, and messes around on the Internet?
There is no doubt there are bad people that would like to do bad things to others in the world, but why anyone takes this kind of propaganda seriously is beyond me.
It's more than likely the amount of funding he gets is directly proportional to the amount of fear mongering produced.
Not to mention, that "of course" this means that the only way to be "safe" is to increase the size and police power of government. Why, that's always the solution now that you've had problem and reaction! When we all learn the goose step, just think of how incredibly wonderfully SAFE we'll all be!
Moreover, the detection routine soaked up 64 percent of McAllister's 1.6GHz Atom CPU, with the video from the Webcam soon developing a few seconds' lag that made controlling onscreen cursors challenging.
And your text
A TI dsp would have no problem handling this kind of load.
My only reaction was "oh shit, Microsoft software using a high amount of CPU for a given task?! SAY IT ISN'T SO!!!" Sorry...
Yeah: Anyone who can still rationalize working for this company is an asshole.
Sorry, but that is my belief. I've worked for companies before where people quit on principle even when the company's actions didn't affect them personally. And on those occasions the company had done far less than Microsoft has done to harm the community.
It is high time it became a badge of dishonor to be affiliated with Microsoft in any way.
By "affiliated" I hope you include "buying their products". It's easy to forget that Microsoft's business practices are only part of the problem; the real issue is that they continue to be rewarded with profits for this behavior.
Wouldn't it be far easier for a nefarious government organization to target that distribution's repositories, mirror that singular distribution's disk images with files of its own design, and leave every last one of that distribution's users in the great wide open?' What should truly paranoid user do?"
If you don't or can't trust the single distribution's integrity, there's an easy alternative that no one seems to have mentioned. You can always check which tools ParanoidLinux includes and how they are configured, and then go download a more ordinary (less attention-attracting, if you really are paranoid) distribution. Then just install those same open-source tools and configure them in a similar manner and you no longer need to trust that particular distribution. If you believe that someone or a group of people wants to compromise the ParanoidLinux distribution, then by doing this you have just forced them to also compromise every other Linux distribution in order to achieve the same result.
This is, after all, what security is about. You really cannot make anything impossible to compromise; what you can do is make your system more and more difficult for an adversary to both successfully compromise and to successfully compromise without being detected. Personally, I consider a system to be "secure" when the effort needed to compromise it is far, far more expensive than anything that would be gained by doing so.
The difference between you and me is that I can't afford the luxury of getting 'disheartened'. But I do get angry. And an illogical, indefensible decision like this one ticks me off.
The way you discourage illogical, indefensible decisions like this is to (with due process of course) impose sanctions against such judges and/or conduct independent investigations into whether there is anything that remotely looks like the judge is receiving money or other favors from the RIAA. If this is possible at all, it should be easy considering that this will not be the first time that the RIAA's tactics have (I'll be nice and say) been questionable. You then follow up by conducting an investigation into the RIAA's tactics, including whether or not the likes of MediaSentry are in fact breaking the law by acting like unlicensed private investigators (why is this not a completely separate issue from the lawsuit at hand?) because as those in power so enjoy telling us, "they shouldn't care if they have nothing to hide".
I felt that way when I first saw this summary but I am certainly not a lawyer and so I do not feel that I am qualified (without doing lots of research at any rate) to say whether this judge's actions are illogical or indefensible in the context of legal proceedings, in the sense that many perfectly legal practices are complete unenlightened bullshit to me, but now that a lawyer such as yourself has cleared that up for me the rest seems quite simple. Yes I know that as someone who does not understand the nuances of law as you do, I very well may be coming off like a complete armchair amateur so if you point that out, I'll understand, but either way I am grateful for people like you who can be a part of the system without also being blind to things about it that probably need to change. I wish that insiders with your honesty were not the small minority that they seem to be.
In true slashdot tradition I know nothing about what I speak of, but...
I would assume, with the volume of users this site enjoys, that it would take more than a few users tagging something for any individual tag to appear. If you happen to be unique with your tags, you may well not see yours appear.
That did occur to me as well, but I see some truly off-the-wall tags from time to time that tend to remove credibility from the idea that tons of users came up with and agreed with that all at once. I suppose stranger things have happened though most of the tags I try to apply are not really very novel. It's just that I have been reading Slashdot for quite some time before there were tags at all, I have never once seen a tag I've applied show up on the main page for a very long time now, and this did not seem to be the case early on when tags were fairly new.
I'm sorry Ray, but just how does an outside observer not draw the conclusion that the legal system is inherently corrupted? I know you can't answer the question (at least not publicly) and I and many others support your valiant efforts. However, its hard as someone from outside the US to not see your country as just the world's biggest banana republic. Where the law has the appearance of granite and the firmness of quicksand. A legal system whose flexibility is only ever exercised to the favour of power, never the other way. As an amateur student of early American history and the founding of your nation, I just find the underlying hypocrisy galling and the fall of the republic utterly disheartening.
I was just going to make a quick post in which I would say something like "this seriously makes me wonder just how difficult it is to impeach a judge," then I saw your comment. I can say that from inside the US it also looks like the world's biggest banana republic. Nothing is as it should be and this is only becoming more true as time passes.
The reason why I refer to the general public with terms like "sheep" or "sheeple" or "bovine idiots" is because they accept this without question. No threat to their money, their liberty, or their well-being is ever sufficient to prompt them to think critically and stop accepting the party line(s) at face value. All it takes is for the talking heads on CNN or Fox News to frame a phony debate in the form of a false dichotomy and they buy it, so long as the phony debate is nuanced and there's lots of chatter about it. The truth is, if there were any real philosophical differences between the two parties concerning the role of government, it would not take 9 months of campaigning to point them out.
WIth the exception of a very few, no one with any real media presence points out that the only disagreement between the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate is how to carry out the expansion of the size and power of government. One candidate wants to expand the size and authority of government for reasons A, B, C while the other candidate wants to expand the size and power of government for reasons D, E, F and that's the basis of the election. There is no mention of whether it should be expanded, whether what we are doing now is remotely sustainable and whether continuing down the same path is going to help or harm the country.
What you point out about the legal system is unfortunately just a symptom of a much deeper problem. The real problem is that the media and the economy have become increasingly centralized over the last century and the number of people controlling both could probably all be seated comfortably in a relatively small room. For example, when the news outlets first started talking about the idea of bailing out Bear Stearns, I knew without doubt that it was going to happen, that the false debate and "controversy" only served the purpose of providing the appearance of legitimate dissention because without it, the people might actually wake up and realize that all is not as it seems. Americans need to seriously ask themselves whether they have ever once seen a major decision like this that a) was hyped up in the media and given lots of coverage and b) went against the desires of a monied interest. The sad thing is that not only do most Americans not understand these things, most of them seem like they don't want to understand -- apparently the latest celebrity gossip or sports scores or artificially hectic lifestyles (the new status symbol) are much more important to them. While I think that these people deserve what's coming, it saddens me that many who do not share their willful ignorance are going to suffer as well because everything is global now; there is no more "small and local". I hope that those outside the USA realize that no matter how you feel about Americans, the soverignty of the USA is just about the only thing that is currently standing in the way of a one-world government or a system of 2-3 global factions in the "but Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" sense and that the USA is not being run by people who act like they want to maintain that soverignty.
More OT, I apologize to the mods and hope they are forgiving today though at least this thread is labelled as such...
I don't believe that a single tag I have ever applied has ever shown up on the main page, be it seconds or minutes later. Yes, I am accepting Javascript/etc and all other Slashdot functions work beautifully. The tags I've tried to apply are fairly normal ones, nothing absurd or insulting or anything like that, yet they are silently discarded. If Slashdot has a "tag shitlist" of users who aren't allowed to set tags, it'd be nice if the criteria for this list were posted and if users who end up on it were notified.
It creates (at compile time) an automaton representing the system call activity of the program
At compile time of the program? So in addition to a modified kernel you need a modified gcc and to compile everything from source or have a specialised distro? It doesn't surprise me that the summary should be lacking such details, but it would be nice if for once it gave a decent overview.
I agree that this was a poor summary but instead of complaining about the summary you could always do something crazy like read the article.
....I thought that was the philosophy behind AppArmor (http://en.opensuse.org/Apparmor).
It's been deployed in SuSE products for years.
Apparmor seems to be a relatively sophisticated least-privilege system, i.e. the idea that if a BIND DNS server should never need to (for example) modify the routing table, then it also should not be able to modify the routing table. That way, if an attacker compromises said DNS server, he won't be able to do very much with it that isn't directly related to serving DNS requests (this is why I would personally refer to such a system as damage control, useful for containing/limiting an attacker who has already compromised something). The system discussed in the article is different in that it seems to be less concerned with what specific tasks a program should or should not be doing and more concerned with whether the code that is executed and the way that it is executed is what you would expect from the program's source. That way, if someone exploits i.e. a buffer overflow and inserts their own shellcode, it would deviate from the pattern that you would have expected from the exploited program and this deviation would be detected.
Both can be compared to systems like PaX (kernel) and SSP (userspace) which are intended to make sure that an attacker will fail to exploit an existing vulnerability, such as an unpatched buffer overflow, in the first place.
Can anyone say DRM? Consumers do not like DRM and thus are not buying Blu-Ray. The poor economy is also a factor.
I believe that other factors have been significant as well.
What you will not hear any Sony executives say: "Gee, maybe if we hadn't insisted on a long and drawn-out format war and did whatever we had to do to come up with a single standard early on, perhaps the market for high-definition DVDs would be doing better right now."
I agree that DRM is an abomination but whether I like it or not, it seems that most "consumers" don't understand it and don't see why it's such a bad thing. "Another Betamax vs. VHS" and "I don't want to invest in the loser" however, is something that most people do understand. Because of the way digital downloads (legal and otherwise) are becoming more and more prevalent and are obviously here to stay, the idiots behind the format wars should have seen that time as their one chance to establish themselves and gain some marketshare before people lost interest in purchasing physical media.
The Blu-ray format will be useful as a replacement for DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW, since more space is always useful for data storage. But I really think the days of buying physical media from a brick-and-mortar store in order to watch movies are numbered.
I agree that government officials should be held to a higher standard but I ask, whose law?
It's not against US law for our operatives to spy on foreign governments. It's against that foreign government's law.
You're comparing to very different things.
The example given was one in which an official conducts an action by proxy in order to hide the fact that he is conducting that action, i.e. because said action is illegal/unethical and would get said official into legal trouble or perhaps bring a large amount of disgrace. Therefore in this example it's implied that there is a law or a standard somewhere that could be used against this hypothetical official (whose law or whose standard is irrelevant so long as it satisfies that criteria). You are talking about something entirely different. Reading comprehension FTW!
I think it is my military (Marines) background that triggers it on conversations like this. There are times and places where the law must be broken. It is against the Geneva Convention to use a shotgun in combat. If I am in combat and the only weapon I have available is a shotgun then, yeah, fuck that convention.
The difference between us and them (the government officials) is that you would do that expecting to pay the price for violating the Geneva Conventions. If any government official feels he has a higher duty that necessitates breaking the law, let him do so openly and prepared to do the time for the crime. Otherwise they're just garden-variety cowards with no principles whatsoever and still pose a threat to the concept of rule of law.
There are times when violating a law is a requirement for a variety of reasons. Civil Rights leaders accomplished a great deal by encouraging people to disobey the laws that they felt were unjust.
As anyone familiar with Thoreau or Ghandi would know, breaking the law openly and expecting that you will be arrested and prosecuted is central to the concept of civil disobedience. The Civil Rights leaders had this kind of courage, which is why their message could not be denied. These men and women were not cowards. They believed in something so deeply that they were willing to pay a severe personal price for it. I see none of this kind of real courage in those who think themselves our masters.
In *my* state you are ENTITLED to drive as fast as you would like if you are an elected representative and are not on time for the assembly. On the other hand, if you are too slow in getting there, they can and will send out the state police to get your ass to the assembly via escort.
Yes, but that's probably what the law actually says, which means they are not breaking the law at all (whether that SHOULD be the case is another question). For that matter, an ambulance with its siren and lights on is allowed to speed and disregard traffic lights (albeit for a much better reason), no law-breaking necessary.
There is a time and place to allow people to violate the law. Some laws are just fucking stupid. I think that in ALL cases of law violation the matter should be judged effectively and without bias while looking to ensure the greater good for the society as a whole.
It seems that very few Americans understand this, but this is what juries are for. A jury's purpose is not merely to determine if the law, as written, was broken. A jury's purpose is also to evaluate the law itself. Jury nullification is all about sending a message which says "yes, he clearly broke the law, but the law is unjust and we refuse to punish the defendant for breaking it". I really apprecite the Fully Informed Jury Association site for this reason.
Actually one of the more interesting bits i've run into concerning modern espionage is based exactly on what you're describing there. Between the restrictions on covert operatives and the restrictions on us "officials and ambassadors" usually the actual black-mask stuff is outsourced to a foreign power. This allows the US to state they did not authorize whatever it was, deny that their agents had anything to do with it (carefully), and also show that they didn't break the statute that US officials and ambassadors cannot bribe foreign nationals.
Amazing how that works, isn't it? This is a completely hypothetical scenario: If you kill someone, you are charged with murder; if you contract a thug to kill somebody for you... you are charged with murder. If you're a US official and you conduct the "black-mask stuff", you are breaking the law. If you're a US official and you conduct the "black-mask stuff" by proxy, why, that's fine and good and you get to enjoy doing so with impunity. Isn't that wonderful?
I seem to be in a tiny minority because I believe that government officials should be held to a stricter standard and punished much more severely when they break the law, because when they do it and especially when they either get away with it or receive a slap on the wrist, it's a threat to the entire concept of rule of law. The fevered egos who want political power are easily replaced -- if any are legally removed from power by means of due process and convicted of a crime, there are plenty more where they came from. The concept of rule of law is not so easily replaced.
Most journals make you transfer copyright to them. Making your paper available is then illegal.
That's pure evil. Why do people keep submitting material to them? Journals that do that should lose their credibility.
It's changing, faster and faster.
I hope you are right.
How about this: if you received any (one penny or more) public grants or public funds to perform your research, then that research must be available to the public free of charge. If you are wealthy and want to entirely fund your own research (for example), then you may do whatever you like with the results. The part that I consider bullshit is the idea that tax dollars are taken from me by force or threat of force under a confiscatory tax system and then I am denied access to what this money is purchasing.
Well, they could zero the pagerank on sites that show different stuff to googlebot vs ordinary mortals.
If THAT'S all it is, then set your user agent to "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)" and say fuck 'em. But you're right, Google should actively resist this sort of double standard because it's a detriment to the usefulness of the search engine. It doesn't matter how many great results you get with a search engine if you can't actually access the information in those results.
You know, I still don't understand why there is even such a thing as a user agent string. That is, I can see why i.e. Microsoft would want such a thing but I do not see any way that it's in the interests of users. If we really want standards and we really want openness, having no way for a Web server to determine what the browser is can only advance this goal. Then the only concern is whether that browser is standards-compliant.
It's interesting that you mention jury nullification. I think these people (the organization men and government types, i.e. the statists) are very much afraid of that practice. It used to be that the judge would explain the option of jury nullification to the jurors. Now, not only does the judge not explain this option, the judge tells them that they have instructions regarding how to derive a Guilty or Not Guilty verdict and that these instructions must be strictly followed. The defense attorney is not allowed to mention jury nullification either. So, what was once a widespread safeguard for our liberties has now been transformed into this perception of a rogue hijacking of the court system. I know that I would refuse to convict a nonviolent drug offender, but that doesn't matter much in the face of millions of potential jurors who say "well gee that IS illegal, so he's guilty!" without a second thought. For this reason I appreciate the efforts of the Fully Informed Jury Association. The reason why I think we're fucked up as a society is that important issues like this don't get the national attention and airtime that petty shit like the meaning of Obama's "you can't put lipstick on a pig" comment receive on a daily basis.
The rest of your post is more about whether the law is equal to morality and is written like we agree on it and have not just debated whether this is the case. So, I don't really see a point in responding to that to be honest with you; it would be a rehashing of a previous discussion. I don't say that out of disrespect but because I think that at this point, we are unlikely to convince each other. I just thought that your mention of jury nullification was interesting.
impulsiveness who could perhaps model a better example of how to live
Just FYI (and seeing this nonsense got modded +5), things like impulsiveness cannot be changed by role models -- they are genetically determined, inborn. Any average psychologist would tell you that temperament can not be changed by being exposed to role models or by growing up next to or with people whose temperament or behavior are different.
While I disagree about temperament being complete immutable (in that you are now talking about how much effort it would require and whether you know yourself well enough to do it -- the hurdles are high enough that I can see why it's perceived as immutable), that isn't really the point. I am talking about discipline, not temperament and not any aspect of personality.
It's easy to try and complicate this issue by trying to lure me into some big psychological debate -- in fact that's slightly more clever than most of the more obvious straw man tactics I encounter on Slashdot. In a different setting where people are not so quickly declaring what is utterly 100% completely impossible, perhaps then I can tell you what I think of psychology and of someone who uses excess faith in it or any other system as a substitute for finding his own answers. But whether temperament is immutable and what I think of psychology is irrelevant, and here's why: You might want to punch somebody in the face and break his nose because he's really pissing you off. You decide not to do it because the consequences of doing so (i.e. being arrested) are not worth it. In this example, you had an impulse and you did not act it out because of discipline. Just because you want to do something or feel a temptation does not mean that you are forced to act it out. The wise person who is impulsive understands that he is impulsive and disciplines himself accordingly. To an outside observer, such a person (if well-disciplined) is indistinguishable from someone who was not impulsive or had no such temptation to begin with. This is what a good role model or a strong father figure would teach you. Whether you want to attribute that to a change of temperament, an acquiring of discipline, impulsive or not impulsive, or whatever, is fine by me. I really don't give a damn about which set of terms you want to use to play what amount to games of semantics; it's petty and does not lead to any real understanding.
Now, everything I said above is my response to your post. What follows below is a personal explanation that I offer for your edification, should you decide to accept it as such. I am not likely to respond to any comments on what follows below. Consider it all opinion if you want.
If you see what I say, see that it bears a very superficial resemblence to some of the terms and theories of psychology and then assume that I am also coming from a system of psychology, you will probably conclude that I don't quite understand psychology. That's because you assumed that I am coming from a system of psychology, and if you are honestly not trying to use a straw man or other distraction technique or debate ploy, then this is why you are more or less bound to get caught up in terms and semantics in my case. There was a time when I was looking for answers in psychology. At some point, I realized that they don't have the deep satisfying answers I was after -- what they have are medical models and observations of external behavior rooted in a reductionist philosophy that is largely unstated and a materialist philosophy that is mostly stated. I found psychology to have a great deal of knowledge and very little understanding, and so I came to see it as a potentially useful but extremely limited tool (talking now of sincere psychology -- the connection to extremely lucrative pharmaceuticals is another discussion). To pretend that it is the be-all and end-all such that you could find what I just said to be heretical or sacrilidgeous is exactly the sort of "we got it all figured out, now let us hand down answers to you" arrogance I am talking about. Psychology cannot begin to attempt to describe a human being without first reducing that human being to a much simpler subset of what human beings are.
Nonsense. The screening of apps starting in the very beginning with a process designed to enable that very thing. Apple stated from the start that they would be screening apps. Only fools believe it's for anything other than Apple's best interests.
I think it's more a question of whether Apple perceives that giving its customers what they want, the way that they want it and thus creating happier customers is in its best interests more than strict control is in its best interests. Obviously any for-profit corporation is going take actions that it believes to be in the best interests of its profitability; it's what those actions are that tell you what sort of company you are dealing with.
Slashdot Mirror
dear cloud, please stop crapping up the front page of slashdot with your buzzword laden stories. I have not been this annoyed since everybody started "surfing" the "information superhighway". I hope you soon turn to "rain" and fall from the "cybersky" and die. thank you, umbrellaman
Amen. Imagine something like BitTorrent but instead of receiving and transmitting data among many other clients, you instead receive and transmit slices of computing power AND data among many other clients. I would perhaps call that "cloud computing" in the same way that you could call BitTorrent "swarm downloading". I would liken it to the distributed SETI processing or the distributed efforts to crack various encryption schemes, except more general-purpose.
So instead of a single monolithic machine centrally running everyone's programs, something more like a Beowulf cluster centrally runs everyone's programs. As others have pointed out, this really seems to be just another iteration of the mainframe model. I share parent's wariness of anything that is so thoroughly buzzword-laden.
Of course in the same sentence in which I mention literate adults, I make a typo on the word "remedy". Yay!
I wonder if some sort of Internet business license might be a way to do this. The fee would need to be something fairly nominal and just enough to fund the process. The idea would be to implement something such that payment processors would not be allowed to and/or would be under no obligation to complete transactions for anyone without said business license. If someone wants to conduct business outside of this scheme using cash, checks, etc., they do so at their own risk. A little publicity and honest merchants showing that they have said license should be sufficient to make the scheme known.
A few more details... Licenses get revoked for proved spamming. Licenses are tied to an originating domain with a DNS tie in to allow mismatches between license number and originator to be filtered. Trying to sell something using e-mail but without including the Internet business license becomes illegal and ISPs are free to trash such e-mails.
Obviously, this only would affect spam that is attempting to sell something. 419 scams, various phishing scams, etc. would still be a problem. The idea is that legitimate commercial e-mail becomes non-anonymous which doesn't hurt legitimate vendors or non-commercial e-mail. People attempting to sell stuff using spam become "visible" and subject to countermeasures.
Cheers, Dave
This might not be a bad idea except for the idea that government would probably have to handle the licensing, and if it turns out anything like licensing has turned out for automobiles, then they won't give a damn how incompetent the licensed people are so long as fees and fines related to licensing and any violations provide a steady revenue source. Other than this one drawback, your idea is sound IMHO.
I had another idea that would help, either separately or perhaps in conjunction with yours. One is that the law should be changed to make it perfectly legal to construct a virus/worm that exploits already-patched vulnerabilities, infects a machine, resides on that machine for a couple of weeks to spread itself, and then promptly formats all writable media on that machine (preferably a secure wipe and not just a regular format). This would put a huge dent on the amount of spam because almost all of the spam is coming from compromised machines that are members of various botnets. Let it be understood that your right to use the network ends the moment you make that network a worse place for anyone else, either deliberately or through incompetence. If the owner of the machine refuses to either secure it (due digilience, the real "big scary" for most people, or so you would think from their actions) or take it offline, then it will be taken offline for them. Spammers understand that a good virus/worm/etc does not kill its host; therefore making sure that there is a virus/worm that does "kill" its host computer would not only impede spammers but would also provide incentive to users to care about security.
Incompetence and stupidity (that is, incompetence that any literate adult could rememdy except that they choose not to) is the root cause of spam. So long as there are millions of incompetent and stupid users who don't think that informing themselves is important, there will be spammers to take advantage of them. The way I see it, any other solution amounts to escalating an arms race.
For some reason, computers are just about the only field where people honestly seem to think that they can use what they do not remotely understand and achieve a good result. That they get a good result as often as they do is something of a miracle and is never appreciated as such. A strong incentive to learn that not only is understanding important, but that you do not (nearly) need to be an expert to become a much harder target can only be a good thing. I really believe that at some point it's going to come to that anyway bec
This is actually redundant but it was rewarded with "Funny" because it implies that Monroe has lots of sex. You guys like Monroe and heaven forbid if you could separate the moderation guidelines from your personal feelings. Therefore, this is complimentary of Monroe and gets modded up. I made a very similar post that, while intended to be humorous, could have been taken as derogatory of Monroe since it suggested that the three-fourths part did not include sex, so I get modded down into oblivion. That's alright; to be honest, in hindsight, I don't think my own post was any good and it probably deserves the moderation it received. However, this post is a carbon copy of mine and was modded up. I contend that either they are both funny or they are both redundant.
The reason why I complain about the mods from time to time is because the moderation guidelines are well-written and easy to understand, yet I never see any consistency. It seems like there's always a matter of fanboy-ism that reduces moderation to a matter of popularity (in this case, Monroe's popularity). For an unrelated example, did you know that if someone does a good deal of research, shares his findings, and explains why he came to the conclusion that he did, that he deserves an Informative mod even if you hate his fucking guts and can't stand any of his opinions? That if you want to tell him how much you hate and disagree with him, the way to do it is by posting a response and not by abusing the moderation system? I'm just not seeing that kind of maturity and that's a shame, as Slashdot is one of the few places where it could be possible.
Do I give a shit about a few points when I have more than enough karma to burn? Not really. Do I give a shit about the rampant, childish, nothing-exists-beyond-my-personal-feelings knee-jerk type of attitude that I am seeing more and more often? Yes, that one does bother me, for it tells me that the culture (be it a Web site or a nation) is heading in the wrong direction.
Thank you Capt. Obvious! It's not as funny if you have to call attention to the joke.
I appreciate that. Being merely Sergeant Obvious was really getting old. Nothing but work, work, work.
So does that mean Munroe does math, plays with staple guns, and messes around on the Internet?
There is no doubt there are bad people that would like to do bad things to others in the world, but why anyone takes this kind of propaganda seriously is beyond me.
It's more than likely the amount of funding he gets is directly proportional to the amount of fear mongering produced.
Not to mention, that "of course" this means that the only way to be "safe" is to increase the size and police power of government. Why, that's always the solution now that you've had problem and reaction! When we all learn the goose step, just think of how incredibly wonderfully SAFE we'll all be!
And your text
My only reaction was "oh shit, Microsoft software using a high amount of CPU for a given task?! SAY IT ISN'T SO!!!" Sorry ...
Yeah: Anyone who can still rationalize working for this company is an asshole.
Sorry, but that is my belief. I've worked for companies before where people quit on principle even when the company's actions didn't affect them personally. And on those occasions the company had done far less than Microsoft has done to harm the community.
It is high time it became a badge of dishonor to be affiliated with Microsoft in any way.
By "affiliated" I hope you include "buying their products". It's easy to forget that Microsoft's business practices are only part of the problem; the real issue is that they continue to be rewarded with profits for this behavior.
If you don't or can't trust the single distribution's integrity, there's an easy alternative that no one seems to have mentioned. You can always check which tools ParanoidLinux includes and how they are configured, and then go download a more ordinary (less attention-attracting, if you really are paranoid) distribution. Then just install those same open-source tools and configure them in a similar manner and you no longer need to trust that particular distribution. If you believe that someone or a group of people wants to compromise the ParanoidLinux distribution, then by doing this you have just forced them to also compromise every other Linux distribution in order to achieve the same result.
This is, after all, what security is about. You really cannot make anything impossible to compromise; what you can do is make your system more and more difficult for an adversary to both successfully compromise and to successfully compromise without being detected. Personally, I consider a system to be "secure" when the effort needed to compromise it is far, far more expensive than anything that would be gained by doing so.
The way you discourage illogical, indefensible decisions like this is to (with due process of course) impose sanctions against such judges and/or conduct independent investigations into whether there is anything that remotely looks like the judge is receiving money or other favors from the RIAA. If this is possible at all, it should be easy considering that this will not be the first time that the RIAA's tactics have (I'll be nice and say) been questionable. You then follow up by conducting an investigation into the RIAA's tactics, including whether or not the likes of MediaSentry are in fact breaking the law by acting like unlicensed private investigators (why is this not a completely separate issue from the lawsuit at hand?) because as those in power so enjoy telling us, "they shouldn't care if they have nothing to hide".
I felt that way when I first saw this summary but I am certainly not a lawyer and so I do not feel that I am qualified (without doing lots of research at any rate) to say whether this judge's actions are illogical or indefensible in the context of legal proceedings, in the sense that many perfectly legal practices are complete unenlightened bullshit to me, but now that a lawyer such as yourself has cleared that up for me the rest seems quite simple. Yes I know that as someone who does not understand the nuances of law as you do, I very well may be coming off like a complete armchair amateur so if you point that out, I'll understand, but either way I am grateful for people like you who can be a part of the system without also being blind to things about it that probably need to change. I wish that insiders with your honesty were not the small minority that they seem to be.
In true slashdot tradition I know nothing about what I speak of, but... I would assume, with the volume of users this site enjoys, that it would take more than a few users tagging something for any individual tag to appear. If you happen to be unique with your tags, you may well not see yours appear.
That did occur to me as well, but I see some truly off-the-wall tags from time to time that tend to remove credibility from the idea that tons of users came up with and agreed with that all at once. I suppose stranger things have happened though most of the tags I try to apply are not really very novel. It's just that I have been reading Slashdot for quite some time before there were tags at all, I have never once seen a tag I've applied show up on the main page for a very long time now, and this did not seem to be the case early on when tags were fairly new.
I'm sorry Ray, but just how does an outside observer not draw the conclusion that the legal system is inherently corrupted? I know you can't answer the question (at least not publicly) and I and many others support your valiant efforts. However, its hard as someone from outside the US to not see your country as just the world's biggest banana republic. Where the law has the appearance of granite and the firmness of quicksand. A legal system whose flexibility is only ever exercised to the favour of power, never the other way. As an amateur student of early American history and the founding of your nation, I just find the underlying hypocrisy galling and the fall of the republic utterly disheartening.
I was just going to make a quick post in which I would say something like "this seriously makes me wonder just how difficult it is to impeach a judge," then I saw your comment. I can say that from inside the US it also looks like the world's biggest banana republic. Nothing is as it should be and this is only becoming more true as time passes.
The reason why I refer to the general public with terms like "sheep" or "sheeple" or "bovine idiots" is because they accept this without question. No threat to their money, their liberty, or their well-being is ever sufficient to prompt them to think critically and stop accepting the party line(s) at face value. All it takes is for the talking heads on CNN or Fox News to frame a phony debate in the form of a false dichotomy and they buy it, so long as the phony debate is nuanced and there's lots of chatter about it. The truth is, if there were any real philosophical differences between the two parties concerning the role of government, it would not take 9 months of campaigning to point them out.
WIth the exception of a very few, no one with any real media presence points out that the only disagreement between the Democratic candidate and the Republican candidate is how to carry out the expansion of the size and power of government. One candidate wants to expand the size and authority of government for reasons A, B, C while the other candidate wants to expand the size and power of government for reasons D, E, F and that's the basis of the election. There is no mention of whether it should be expanded, whether what we are doing now is remotely sustainable and whether continuing down the same path is going to help or harm the country.
What you point out about the legal system is unfortunately just a symptom of a much deeper problem. The real problem is that the media and the economy have become increasingly centralized over the last century and the number of people controlling both could probably all be seated comfortably in a relatively small room. For example, when the news outlets first started talking about the idea of bailing out Bear Stearns, I knew without doubt that it was going to happen, that the false debate and "controversy" only served the purpose of providing the appearance of legitimate dissention because without it, the people might actually wake up and realize that all is not as it seems. Americans need to seriously ask themselves whether they have ever once seen a major decision like this that a) was hyped up in the media and given lots of coverage and b) went against the desires of a monied interest. The sad thing is that not only do most Americans not understand these things, most of them seem like they don't want to understand -- apparently the latest celebrity gossip or sports scores or artificially hectic lifestyles (the new status symbol) are much more important to them. While I think that these people deserve what's coming, it saddens me that many who do not share their willful ignorance are going to suffer as well because everything is global now; there is no more "small and local". I hope that those outside the USA realize that no matter how you feel about Americans, the soverignty of the USA is just about the only thing that is currently standing in the way of a one-world government or a system of 2-3 global factions in the "but Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia" sense and that the USA is not being run by people who act like they want to maintain that soverignty.
More OT, I apologize to the mods and hope they are forgiving today though at least this thread is labelled as such...
I don't believe that a single tag I have ever applied has ever shown up on the main page, be it seconds or minutes later. Yes, I am accepting Javascript/etc and all other Slashdot functions work beautifully. The tags I've tried to apply are fairly normal ones, nothing absurd or insulting or anything like that, yet they are silently discarded. If Slashdot has a "tag shitlist" of users who aren't allowed to set tags, it'd be nice if the criteria for this list were posted and if users who end up on it were notified.
Am I the only one who has this problem?
It creates (at compile time) an automaton representing the system call activity of the program
At compile time of the program? So in addition to a modified kernel you need a modified gcc and to compile everything from source or have a specialised distro? It doesn't surprise me that the summary should be lacking such details, but it would be nice if for once it gave a decent overview.
I agree that this was a poor summary but instead of complaining about the summary you could always do something crazy like read the article.
....I thought that was the philosophy behind AppArmor (http://en.opensuse.org/Apparmor).
It's been deployed in SuSE products for years.
Apparmor seems to be a relatively sophisticated least-privilege system, i.e. the idea that if a BIND DNS server should never need to (for example) modify the routing table, then it also should not be able to modify the routing table. That way, if an attacker compromises said DNS server, he won't be able to do very much with it that isn't directly related to serving DNS requests (this is why I would personally refer to such a system as damage control, useful for containing/limiting an attacker who has already compromised something). The system discussed in the article is different in that it seems to be less concerned with what specific tasks a program should or should not be doing and more concerned with whether the code that is executed and the way that it is executed is what you would expect from the program's source. That way, if someone exploits i.e. a buffer overflow and inserts their own shellcode, it would deviate from the pattern that you would have expected from the exploited program and this deviation would be detected.
Both can be compared to systems like PaX (kernel) and SSP (userspace) which are intended to make sure that an attacker will fail to exploit an existing vulnerability, such as an unpatched buffer overflow, in the first place.
I believe that other factors have been significant as well.
What you will not hear any Sony executives say: "Gee, maybe if we hadn't insisted on a long and drawn-out format war and did whatever we had to do to come up with a single standard early on, perhaps the market for high-definition DVDs would be doing better right now."
I agree that DRM is an abomination but whether I like it or not, it seems that most "consumers" don't understand it and don't see why it's such a bad thing. "Another Betamax vs. VHS" and "I don't want to invest in the loser" however, is something that most people do understand. Because of the way digital downloads (legal and otherwise) are becoming more and more prevalent and are obviously here to stay, the idiots behind the format wars should have seen that time as their one chance to establish themselves and gain some marketshare before people lost interest in purchasing physical media.
The Blu-ray format will be useful as a replacement for DVD-R/RW and DVD+R/RW, since more space is always useful for data storage. But I really think the days of buying physical media from a brick-and-mortar store in order to watch movies are numbered.
I agree that government officials should be held to a higher standard but I ask, whose law?
It's not against US law for our operatives to spy on foreign governments. It's against that foreign government's law.
You're comparing to very different things.
The example given was one in which an official conducts an action by proxy in order to hide the fact that he is conducting that action, i.e. because said action is illegal/unethical and would get said official into legal trouble or perhaps bring a large amount of disgrace. Therefore in this example it's implied that there is a law or a standard somewhere that could be used against this hypothetical official (whose law or whose standard is irrelevant so long as it satisfies that criteria). You are talking about something entirely different. Reading comprehension FTW!
The difference between us and them (the government officials) is that you would do that expecting to pay the price for violating the Geneva Conventions. If any government official feels he has a higher duty that necessitates breaking the law, let him do so openly and prepared to do the time for the crime. Otherwise they're just garden-variety cowards with no principles whatsoever and still pose a threat to the concept of rule of law.
As anyone familiar with Thoreau or Ghandi would know, breaking the law openly and expecting that you will be arrested and prosecuted is central to the concept of civil disobedience. The Civil Rights leaders had this kind of courage, which is why their message could not be denied. These men and women were not cowards. They believed in something so deeply that they were willing to pay a severe personal price for it. I see none of this kind of real courage in those who think themselves our masters.
Yes, but that's probably what the law actually says, which means they are not breaking the law at all (whether that SHOULD be the case is another question). For that matter, an ambulance with its siren and lights on is allowed to speed and disregard traffic lights (albeit for a much better reason), no law-breaking necessary.
It seems that very few Americans understand this, but this is what juries are for. A jury's purpose is not merely to determine if the law, as written, was broken. A jury's purpose is also to evaluate the law itself. Jury nullification is all about sending a message which says "yes, he clearly broke the law, but the law is unjust and we refuse to punish the defendant for breaking it". I really apprecite the Fully Informed Jury Association site for this reason.
Amazing how that works, isn't it? This is a completely hypothetical scenario: If you kill someone, you are charged with murder; if you contract a thug to kill somebody for you ... you are charged with murder. If you're a US official and you conduct the "black-mask stuff", you are breaking the law. If you're a US official and you conduct the "black-mask stuff" by proxy, why, that's fine and good and you get to enjoy doing so with impunity. Isn't that wonderful?
I seem to be in a tiny minority because I believe that government officials should be held to a stricter standard and punished much more severely when they break the law, because when they do it and especially when they either get away with it or receive a slap on the wrist, it's a threat to the entire concept of rule of law. The fevered egos who want political power are easily replaced -- if any are legally removed from power by means of due process and convicted of a crime, there are plenty more where they came from. The concept of rule of law is not so easily replaced.
Most journals make you transfer copyright to them. Making your paper available is then illegal.
That's pure evil. Why do people keep submitting material to them? Journals that do that should lose their credibility.
It's changing, faster and faster.
I hope you are right.
How about this: if you received any (one penny or more) public grants or public funds to perform your research, then that research must be available to the public free of charge. If you are wealthy and want to entirely fund your own research (for example), then you may do whatever you like with the results. The part that I consider bullshit is the idea that tax dollars are taken from me by force or threat of force under a confiscatory tax system and then I am denied access to what this money is purchasing.
Well, they could zero the pagerank on sites that show different stuff to googlebot vs ordinary mortals.
If THAT'S all it is, then set your user agent to "Googlebot/2.1 (+http://www.google.com/bot.html)" and say fuck 'em. But you're right, Google should actively resist this sort of double standard because it's a detriment to the usefulness of the search engine. It doesn't matter how many great results you get with a search engine if you can't actually access the information in those results.
You know, I still don't understand why there is even such a thing as a user agent string. That is, I can see why i.e. Microsoft would want such a thing but I do not see any way that it's in the interests of users. If we really want standards and we really want openness, having no way for a Web server to determine what the browser is can only advance this goal. Then the only concern is whether that browser is standards-compliant.
It's interesting that you mention jury nullification. I think these people (the organization men and government types, i.e. the statists) are very much afraid of that practice. It used to be that the judge would explain the option of jury nullification to the jurors. Now, not only does the judge not explain this option, the judge tells them that they have instructions regarding how to derive a Guilty or Not Guilty verdict and that these instructions must be strictly followed. The defense attorney is not allowed to mention jury nullification either. So, what was once a widespread safeguard for our liberties has now been transformed into this perception of a rogue hijacking of the court system. I know that I would refuse to convict a nonviolent drug offender, but that doesn't matter much in the face of millions of potential jurors who say "well gee that IS illegal, so he's guilty!" without a second thought. For this reason I appreciate the efforts of the Fully Informed Jury Association. The reason why I think we're fucked up as a society is that important issues like this don't get the national attention and airtime that petty shit like the meaning of Obama's "you can't put lipstick on a pig" comment receive on a daily basis.
The rest of your post is more about whether the law is equal to morality and is written like we agree on it and have not just debated whether this is the case. So, I don't really see a point in responding to that to be honest with you; it would be a rehashing of a previous discussion. I don't say that out of disrespect but because I think that at this point, we are unlikely to convince each other. I just thought that your mention of jury nullification was interesting.
impulsiveness who could perhaps model a better example of how to live
Just FYI (and seeing this nonsense got modded +5), things like impulsiveness cannot be changed by role models -- they are genetically determined, inborn. Any average psychologist would tell you that temperament can not be changed by being exposed to role models or by growing up next to or with people whose temperament or behavior are different.
While I disagree about temperament being complete immutable (in that you are now talking about how much effort it would require and whether you know yourself well enough to do it -- the hurdles are high enough that I can see why it's perceived as immutable), that isn't really the point. I am talking about discipline, not temperament and not any aspect of personality.
It's easy to try and complicate this issue by trying to lure me into some big psychological debate -- in fact that's slightly more clever than most of the more obvious straw man tactics I encounter on Slashdot. In a different setting where people are not so quickly declaring what is utterly 100% completely impossible, perhaps then I can tell you what I think of psychology and of someone who uses excess faith in it or any other system as a substitute for finding his own answers. But whether temperament is immutable and what I think of psychology is irrelevant, and here's why: You might want to punch somebody in the face and break his nose because he's really pissing you off. You decide not to do it because the consequences of doing so (i.e. being arrested) are not worth it. In this example, you had an impulse and you did not act it out because of discipline. Just because you want to do something or feel a temptation does not mean that you are forced to act it out. The wise person who is impulsive understands that he is impulsive and disciplines himself accordingly. To an outside observer, such a person (if well-disciplined) is indistinguishable from someone who was not impulsive or had no such temptation to begin with. This is what a good role model or a strong father figure would teach you. Whether you want to attribute that to a change of temperament, an acquiring of discipline, impulsive or not impulsive, or whatever, is fine by me. I really don't give a damn about which set of terms you want to use to play what amount to games of semantics; it's petty and does not lead to any real understanding.
Now, everything I said above is my response to your post. What follows below is a personal explanation that I offer for your edification, should you decide to accept it as such. I am not likely to respond to any comments on what follows below. Consider it all opinion if you want.
If you see what I say, see that it bears a very superficial resemblence to some of the terms and theories of psychology and then assume that I am also coming from a system of psychology, you will probably conclude that I don't quite understand psychology. That's because you assumed that I am coming from a system of psychology, and if you are honestly not trying to use a straw man or other distraction technique or debate ploy, then this is why you are more or less bound to get caught up in terms and semantics in my case. There was a time when I was looking for answers in psychology. At some point, I realized that they don't have the deep satisfying answers I was after -- what they have are medical models and observations of external behavior rooted in a reductionist philosophy that is largely unstated and a materialist philosophy that is mostly stated. I found psychology to have a great deal of knowledge and very little understanding, and so I came to see it as a potentially useful but extremely limited tool (talking now of sincere psychology -- the connection to extremely lucrative pharmaceuticals is another discussion). To pretend that it is the be-all and end-all such that you could find what I just said to be heretical or sacrilidgeous is exactly the sort of "we got it all figured out, now let us hand down answers to you" arrogance I am talking about. Psychology cannot begin to attempt to describe a human being without first reducing that human being to a much simpler subset of what human beings are.
Nonsense. The screening of apps starting in the very beginning with a process designed to enable that very thing. Apple stated from the start that they would be screening apps. Only fools believe it's for anything other than Apple's best interests.
I think it's more a question of whether Apple perceives that giving its customers what they want, the way that they want it and thus creating happier customers is in its best interests more than strict control is in its best interests. Obviously any for-profit corporation is going take actions that it believes to be in the best interests of its profitability; it's what those actions are that tell you what sort of company you are dealing with.