Everyone wants different things from their computers, and there is no single solution that will ever satisfy them all.
I really wish people would get this through their heads, and we could stop all of these "[your OS of choice] sucks! [my OS of choice] is awesome!" arguments. I'm typing this in OSX with a dual-boot Linux/Windows desktop next to me, both of which are used to administer both Linux and Windows servers. In each case, the operating system was chosen specifically because it was the best OS to do the tasks that machine was being set up to perform.
So each has some strengths and weaknesses, and beyond that it falls largely to personal choice. At least, that's as far as practical considerations go. I definitely wish Linux well for more political types of reasons. (I include "openness" as both a practical and political advantage)
Yeah, Dr who people are odd, but it is science fiction so they can do pretty much whatever they want
I remember reading an interview recently of someone... I think it was the head writer of the current show... saying something to the effect of, "You can't have continuity errors when you're writing a scifi show about time travel, because no matter how crazy it gets, you can always come up with a crazy explanation."
Yes, I don't think this is an issue of eggheads vs. common sense. When you have closed-source electronic voting without any kind of verification or paper trail, I don't see how you can be in favor of it unless: (a) you don't believe in democracy and want to see it subverted; (b) you don't understand how computers work; -and/or- (c) you're naive enough to believe that no one would ever seek to improperly influence the election.
And that's not even covering the issue of bugs in the software. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Well I could see a more valid complaint about, "Damn those intellectuals and computer scientists. They pushed us into electronic voting against common sense!" I mean were that the case, I could understand the complaint.
But you have *computer scientists* telling people, "Don't use computers for this purpose. It's a very bad idea because there are inherent security problems. Either address all those security problems in a reasonable way, or stick to a low-tech solution." Those are the people who know what they're talking about, and they're also the people who would generally want to push you towards high-tech solutions-- you know the whole, "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail" thing.
So why the hell shouldn't we listen to those people in this case?
"'We're going to discard tens of millions of dollars to go to a system that is less accurate and secure,' said John Willis
The problem is, they already discarded tens of millions of dollars buying a system that isn't secure, and continuing to use that system isn't going to give us that money back. There's nothing wrong with electronic voting per se, but you have to make the operation of the software open, secure, and verifiable. So if electronic voting is completely insecure, that means you have to change to something else quickly.
'The proper question is security and safeguards. It's not to go backwards into the 19th century with paper."
Why is paper a 19th century solution? It was invented before the 19th century, and it continues to be used in the 21st century. There's nothing wrong with it. What, are we going to start complaining that wheels are technology from the 16th century?
No electronic voting machines should be used unless the source code is available for review, and unless they also create a paper trail that can be used to verify the results. And the paper needs trail needs to be visible to the voter at the time of voting to ensure that his/her vote was counted properly. The money spent on machines that don't do those things was wasted when it was spent, not when those machines were decommissioned.
How many of us have servers that don't need to be live? Yeah, I guess there might be a development server, but that assumes that you're not developing. There could be a failover server that does nothing when the primary hasn't failed, but in that case you'd want to be damn sure that the failover will come online without difficulty when it needs to.
It seems to me like it would be a pretty rare case when this is applicable. I'd sooner be interested in asking, can they build servers that can selectively power down subsystems that aren't currently in use, sufficiently enough that there's no serious harm. For example, I'd consider putting some of my fileservers' hard drives to sleep over night, but I'd still want the server to be available and the drives to spin back up if I log in from home and need access.
Mostly, I'd say that if you have servers that you don't need to be live, you might not be using your servers efficiently. It may be worth looking into setting up some kind of VM server with various images that can be brought up on command. But hey, if you do have a server that you can turn off without causing problems, go for it.
If we assume that the best thing for foreign policy is necessarily to "scare the crap out of our enemies", then we're conceding a point that I don't want to concede.
It's also important to keep faith with our allies, and to win the respect of people who haven't particularly picked a side. Yes, we can and should use overwhelming force against enemies when there is no other choice, but we can't bomb everyone all the time.
It's noteworthy that, at this point, from the US point of view, "winning the war" is being able to get all of our forces out of their country so we can start getting our lives back to normal.
It seems like there *should* be some common ground there.
The phrase "mission creep" appeared in articles concerning the UN Peacekeeping mission in Somalia in the Washington Post on April 15, 1993 and in the New York Times on October 10, 1993.
Now that's under the heading "rediscovery", so I'm not sure if the term has been around for much longer than that, but it was the first time I heard it.
I would say instead that there's not any kind of clear, detailed difference, since neither one is being specific. But there is a difference in tone.
McCain tends to talk about it with language like, "We'll stay there as long as we have to." Meanwhile, Obama's statements tend to be more like, "We wont stay there any longer than we have to." You can definitely make the argument that these statements are effectively the same, but you could also argue that there's a difference.
On the subject of bidding wars, how will they handle multiple applications for the same TLD. Will it be an auction? (no I will not RTFA)
And beyond that, what if a TLD is determined to have value far exceeding $185k? Maybe that seems like a strange question, but it just seems like giving a private organization permanent control over TLDs is a system that might need to be overthrown or subverted in the future.
But maybe that's just me thinking funny things. I do think there's something disturbing about the rate at which domain names have been taken up by squatters. There are plenty of good domain names that are basically unavailable and at the same time unused (unless you count placeholder pages with ads as being "used"), and I wonder whether there might be some alternative way of dealing with these things.
Yes, but it's not just that infrastructure. Obama has also talked about the need to build out our tech infrastructure, e.g. the Internet.
If European countries start getting 1Gbps symmetric connections and the best we have to offer is still 10Mbps down, 2Mbps up, then where do you think businesses are going to locate themselves?
Every time the Dems have said they were going to raise taxes on the "rich" in the last 36 years (my working life), my taxes have gone up.
On a side note, 36 years sounds like a nice long time until you realize that you're talking about... what, 2 Democratic presidents? Two people are hardly a good sample size to offer as proof of a pattern.
In my opinion, no. The only edge I'd give is to Obama for at least talking about the need to build infrastructure. Building infrastructure is one of the few things that pretty much everyone agrees that the Federal government should be involved in, and it's important for long-term economic strength.
There can be a short-term benefit in putting people to work building the infrastructure, but it has long-term benefits too. Lots of businesses are more likely to operate and invest where there's a robust infrastructure, and the US is falling behind.
And also, don't give me this "denying change" stuff. Am I supposed to install every new application just because it's new? If someone comes out with a new version of Bonzai Buddy, I should rush to get it into my default image in order to "stay current"? Or what, every single product Microsoft releases is the wave of the future, and if I don't immediately install it, I'm "denying change"? Get real.
No, I'm not going to install every little proprietary browser plugin that anyone comes up with. The question is, has Silverlight gotten to the point where it's common enough and useful enough that we accept it as a common system requirement? Like when we hear someone say, "It requires Silverlight" are we Slashdotters saying, "OK, well everyone already has that installed anyway."?
I'm not there yet, and I'm not eager to get there.
I don't agree that it's not as good as that guy's, because (a) we're talking about the same thing, and (b) I'm stressing the main purpose of the 4th amendment.
Because ultimately, I'm not complaining about "overly numerous laws" that mean you can't help but break the law. That's one kind of problem, but it's a different problem. The greater point is that, even if you haven't broken any laws, that won't keep the police from harassing/arresting you. Even if you've broken no laws, it's possible that police, allowed to search through your entire life long enough, could cherry pick enough evidence to make it appear that you had broken very serious laws. They could put together enough circumstantial evidence for an arrest, and they may even be able to find enough for a conviction, even if you assume they won't bother to plant evidence.
That's why police can't just search you without a warrant. That's why you have the right to remain silent. Like I said, police aren't allowed target people for investigation, looking for crimes that you can use as justification for punishing them. These are basic protections formulated in the Bill of Rights to protect citizens against the abuse of power.
To be completely honest, I don't think that the hardware is *that* important for normal documents. You could develop a strategy for continually updating the media that the documents, pictures, and movies are stored on such that you don't need to be able to read old media. Given that the format was open, you wouldn't necessarily need to run the old application for reading that format, and so you wouldn't need to have the hardware necessary to run that application. All you'd need was the data itself, stored on accessible media, and enough knowhow to write an editor or viewer on the current generation of hardware.
Unfortunately, the real reason to have open hardware is for a purpose that most people won't take very seriously-- being able to run the actual applications for historical preservation. We still study today how ancient blacksmiths made swords, so why wouldn't it be interesting 100 years ago to see how early wordprocessors worked?
Also, and unfortunately people won't take this seriously at all: video games. It's an art form where many works might be entirely lost to time if we can't recreate or emulate the hardware. For example, I went back to play Fallout and Fallout 2 a couple months ago only to find that none of the computers I own will run either game. Even though it will technically run in Windows XP, there's some incompatibility with lots of modern video cards. I even tried to find a DOS emulator, but had no luck.
It makes me sad because I do believe that it's a real and serious art form, as much as music or movies. The development over the past 30 years or so has been astounding, and it would be a real shame if we weren't able to preserve that development for people to study.
I don't know what the solution is, though. If applications and games are open source and running on open-source operating systems, then it seem like that would be enough to maintain them in some form, even if the hardware weren't available... possibly. It's hard to say, given that we don't know how computers will develop over the next 100 years.
The fact is that there are so many laws on the books that, no matter how clean you are, someone could probably find some evidence that maybe you committed some kind of crime, even if only by technicality.
The protection against unreasonable searches is to prevent harassment. Without that protection, the police could just search your home and your computer on a regular basis, just because they didn't like you or didn't agree with your politics. If someone does that long enough, they can find some obscure law that you've technically broken even if it's something so innocuous that they wouldn't normally prosecute it, and go ahead and arrest you.
The purpose of the 4th amendment isn't particularly to protect criminals who are rightfully under investigation, and though it might protect law abiding citizens from embarrassment, that's not particularly the purpose either. The purpose is specifically to prevent agents of the government from harassing citizens, targeting particular people and digging through their lives looking for acts that might possibly be stretched to be criminal.
Law enforcement can't investigate people they think are bad until they find crimes, but instead they have to go the other direction-- investigating particular crimes until they find the guilty parties.
Are we accepting Silverlight as a valid system requirement now?
I don't mean that as an anti-Microsoft question, but I don't want to have to install every company's obscure little proprietary plugins to run my apps and access my data. Flash is bad enough, but I draw the line directly behind Flash and won't go any further. In fact, I'm still hoping to boot Flash to the other side of that line, especially since it crashes my browser on a regular basis, but I still seem to be stuck with it.
But regardless of who's developing it, I'm loath to install another proprietary incompatible Flash clone.
Slashdot Mirror
Everyone wants different things from their computers, and there is no single solution that will ever satisfy them all.
I really wish people would get this through their heads, and we could stop all of these "[your OS of choice] sucks! [my OS of choice] is awesome!" arguments. I'm typing this in OSX with a dual-boot Linux/Windows desktop next to me, both of which are used to administer both Linux and Windows servers. In each case, the operating system was chosen specifically because it was the best OS to do the tasks that machine was being set up to perform.
So each has some strengths and weaknesses, and beyond that it falls largely to personal choice. At least, that's as far as practical considerations go. I definitely wish Linux well for more political types of reasons. (I include "openness" as both a practical and political advantage)
I'd say that the bigger problem is that David Tennant has been a good Doctor. I hope they can find an equally good replacement, but fear they won't.
Yeah, Dr who people are odd, but it is science fiction so they can do pretty much whatever they want
I remember reading an interview recently of someone... I think it was the head writer of the current show... saying something to the effect of, "You can't have continuity errors when you're writing a scifi show about time travel, because no matter how crazy it gets, you can always come up with a crazy explanation."
I'm paraphrasing.
Yes, I don't think this is an issue of eggheads vs. common sense. When you have closed-source electronic voting without any kind of verification or paper trail, I don't see how you can be in favor of it unless: (a) you don't believe in democracy and want to see it subverted; (b) you don't understand how computers work; -and/or- (c) you're naive enough to believe that no one would ever seek to improperly influence the election.
And that's not even covering the issue of bugs in the software. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.
Well I could see a more valid complaint about, "Damn those intellectuals and computer scientists. They pushed us into electronic voting against common sense!" I mean were that the case, I could understand the complaint.
But you have *computer scientists* telling people, "Don't use computers for this purpose. It's a very bad idea because there are inherent security problems. Either address all those security problems in a reasonable way, or stick to a low-tech solution." Those are the people who know what they're talking about, and they're also the people who would generally want to push you towards high-tech solutions-- you know the whole, "to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail" thing.
So why the hell shouldn't we listen to those people in this case?
"'We're going to discard tens of millions of dollars to go to a system that is less accurate and secure,' said John Willis
The problem is, they already discarded tens of millions of dollars buying a system that isn't secure, and continuing to use that system isn't going to give us that money back. There's nothing wrong with electronic voting per se, but you have to make the operation of the software open, secure, and verifiable. So if electronic voting is completely insecure, that means you have to change to something else quickly.
'The proper question is security and safeguards. It's not to go backwards into the 19th century with paper."
Why is paper a 19th century solution? It was invented before the 19th century, and it continues to be used in the 21st century. There's nothing wrong with it. What, are we going to start complaining that wheels are technology from the 16th century?
No electronic voting machines should be used unless the source code is available for review, and unless they also create a paper trail that can be used to verify the results. And the paper needs trail needs to be visible to the voter at the time of voting to ensure that his/her vote was counted properly. The money spent on machines that don't do those things was wasted when it was spent, not when those machines were decommissioned.
The academics and computer scientists who said they were unreliable "have won that battle."'
Damn those stupid, fearful academics and computer scientists! Always standing in the way of progress!
Seriously, though, what's the tone they're going for there?
How many of us have servers that don't need to be live? Yeah, I guess there might be a development server, but that assumes that you're not developing. There could be a failover server that does nothing when the primary hasn't failed, but in that case you'd want to be damn sure that the failover will come online without difficulty when it needs to.
It seems to me like it would be a pretty rare case when this is applicable. I'd sooner be interested in asking, can they build servers that can selectively power down subsystems that aren't currently in use, sufficiently enough that there's no serious harm. For example, I'd consider putting some of my fileservers' hard drives to sleep over night, but I'd still want the server to be available and the drives to spin back up if I log in from home and need access.
Mostly, I'd say that if you have servers that you don't need to be live, you might not be using your servers efficiently. It may be worth looking into setting up some kind of VM server with various images that can be brought up on command. But hey, if you do have a server that you can turn off without causing problems, go for it.
If we assume that the best thing for foreign policy is necessarily to "scare the crap out of our enemies", then we're conceding a point that I don't want to concede.
It's also important to keep faith with our allies, and to win the respect of people who haven't particularly picked a side. Yes, we can and should use overwhelming force against enemies when there is no other choice, but we can't bomb everyone all the time.
If there's one thing you should be able to get out of McCain's choice in Vice Presidential candidates, it's that failures can be unqualified too.
It's noteworthy that, at this point, from the US point of view, "winning the war" is being able to get all of our forces out of their country so we can start getting our lives back to normal.
It seems like there *should* be some common ground there.
Yup, wiki article here.
The phrase "mission creep" appeared in articles concerning the UN Peacekeeping mission in Somalia in the Washington Post on April 15, 1993 and in the New York Times on October 10, 1993.
Now that's under the heading "rediscovery", so I'm not sure if the term has been around for much longer than that, but it was the first time I heard it.
I would say instead that there's not any kind of clear, detailed difference, since neither one is being specific. But there is a difference in tone.
McCain tends to talk about it with language like, "We'll stay there as long as we have to." Meanwhile, Obama's statements tend to be more like, "We wont stay there any longer than we have to." You can definitely make the argument that these statements are effectively the same, but you could also argue that there's a difference.
Before software developers talked about "scope creep", there was the term "mission creep", which was used to describe military operations.
On the subject of bidding wars, how will they handle multiple applications for the same TLD. Will it be an auction? (no I will not RTFA)
And beyond that, what if a TLD is determined to have value far exceeding $185k? Maybe that seems like a strange question, but it just seems like giving a private organization permanent control over TLDs is a system that might need to be overthrown or subverted in the future.
But maybe that's just me thinking funny things. I do think there's something disturbing about the rate at which domain names have been taken up by squatters. There are plenty of good domain names that are basically unavailable and at the same time unused (unless you count placeholder pages with ads as being "used"), and I wonder whether there might be some alternative way of dealing with these things.
Actually yes, I did try DOSBox and couldn't get it to run. Oh well. I should have Fallout3 by week's end, so that should handle my fix.
Either way, my point wasn't about Fallout in particular, but Fallout was just an example.
I don't remember which DOS emulators I tried, but I tried a couple and none of them worked for me.
Yes, but it's not just that infrastructure. Obama has also talked about the need to build out our tech infrastructure, e.g. the Internet.
If European countries start getting 1Gbps symmetric connections and the best we have to offer is still 10Mbps down, 2Mbps up, then where do you think businesses are going to locate themselves?
Every time the Dems have said they were going to raise taxes on the "rich" in the last 36 years (my working life), my taxes have gone up.
On a side note, 36 years sounds like a nice long time until you realize that you're talking about... what, 2 Democratic presidents? Two people are hardly a good sample size to offer as proof of a pattern.
In my opinion, no. The only edge I'd give is to Obama for at least talking about the need to build infrastructure. Building infrastructure is one of the few things that pretty much everyone agrees that the Federal government should be involved in, and it's important for long-term economic strength.
There can be a short-term benefit in putting people to work building the infrastructure, but it has long-term benefits too. Lots of businesses are more likely to operate and invest where there's a robust infrastructure, and the US is falling behind.
You have to draw the line somewhere.
And also, don't give me this "denying change" stuff. Am I supposed to install every new application just because it's new? If someone comes out with a new version of Bonzai Buddy, I should rush to get it into my default image in order to "stay current"? Or what, every single product Microsoft releases is the wave of the future, and if I don't immediately install it, I'm "denying change"? Get real.
No, I'm not going to install every little proprietary browser plugin that anyone comes up with. The question is, has Silverlight gotten to the point where it's common enough and useful enough that we accept it as a common system requirement? Like when we hear someone say, "It requires Silverlight" are we Slashdotters saying, "OK, well everyone already has that installed anyway."?
I'm not there yet, and I'm not eager to get there.
I don't agree that it's not as good as that guy's, because (a) we're talking about the same thing, and (b) I'm stressing the main purpose of the 4th amendment.
Because ultimately, I'm not complaining about "overly numerous laws" that mean you can't help but break the law. That's one kind of problem, but it's a different problem. The greater point is that, even if you haven't broken any laws, that won't keep the police from harassing/arresting you. Even if you've broken no laws, it's possible that police, allowed to search through your entire life long enough, could cherry pick enough evidence to make it appear that you had broken very serious laws. They could put together enough circumstantial evidence for an arrest, and they may even be able to find enough for a conviction, even if you assume they won't bother to plant evidence.
That's why police can't just search you without a warrant. That's why you have the right to remain silent. Like I said, police aren't allowed target people for investigation, looking for crimes that you can use as justification for punishing them. These are basic protections formulated in the Bill of Rights to protect citizens against the abuse of power.
To be completely honest, I don't think that the hardware is *that* important for normal documents. You could develop a strategy for continually updating the media that the documents, pictures, and movies are stored on such that you don't need to be able to read old media. Given that the format was open, you wouldn't necessarily need to run the old application for reading that format, and so you wouldn't need to have the hardware necessary to run that application. All you'd need was the data itself, stored on accessible media, and enough knowhow to write an editor or viewer on the current generation of hardware.
Unfortunately, the real reason to have open hardware is for a purpose that most people won't take very seriously-- being able to run the actual applications for historical preservation. We still study today how ancient blacksmiths made swords, so why wouldn't it be interesting 100 years ago to see how early wordprocessors worked?
Also, and unfortunately people won't take this seriously at all: video games. It's an art form where many works might be entirely lost to time if we can't recreate or emulate the hardware. For example, I went back to play Fallout and Fallout 2 a couple months ago only to find that none of the computers I own will run either game. Even though it will technically run in Windows XP, there's some incompatibility with lots of modern video cards. I even tried to find a DOS emulator, but had no luck.
It makes me sad because I do believe that it's a real and serious art form, as much as music or movies. The development over the past 30 years or so has been astounding, and it would be a real shame if we weren't able to preserve that development for people to study.
I don't know what the solution is, though. If applications and games are open source and running on open-source operating systems, then it seem like that would be enough to maintain them in some form, even if the hardware weren't available... possibly. It's hard to say, given that we don't know how computers will develop over the next 100 years.
Bull.
The fact is that there are so many laws on the books that, no matter how clean you are, someone could probably find some evidence that maybe you committed some kind of crime, even if only by technicality.
The protection against unreasonable searches is to prevent harassment. Without that protection, the police could just search your home and your computer on a regular basis, just because they didn't like you or didn't agree with your politics. If someone does that long enough, they can find some obscure law that you've technically broken even if it's something so innocuous that they wouldn't normally prosecute it, and go ahead and arrest you.
The purpose of the 4th amendment isn't particularly to protect criminals who are rightfully under investigation, and though it might protect law abiding citizens from embarrassment, that's not particularly the purpose either. The purpose is specifically to prevent agents of the government from harassing citizens, targeting particular people and digging through their lives looking for acts that might possibly be stretched to be criminal.
Law enforcement can't investigate people they think are bad until they find crimes, but instead they have to go the other direction-- investigating particular crimes until they find the guilty parties.
Are we accepting Silverlight as a valid system requirement now?
I don't mean that as an anti-Microsoft question, but I don't want to have to install every company's obscure little proprietary plugins to run my apps and access my data. Flash is bad enough, but I draw the line directly behind Flash and won't go any further. In fact, I'm still hoping to boot Flash to the other side of that line, especially since it crashes my browser on a regular basis, but I still seem to be stuck with it.
But regardless of who's developing it, I'm loath to install another proprietary incompatible Flash clone.