This leads me to wonder if you've ever even been to the UK. Where I live, the only 'pervasive surveillance' is in shopping malls and smaller retail outlets, and is all private. If you don't want to be surveilled (sic) you can just avoid the shops with CCTV (and, of course, pay more since you are also paying for shoplifters).
I live in Cambridge. There is extensive centrally-controlled CCTV coverage throughout the city centre, and in fact the city council have started a poster campaign encouraging people to report potentially criminal behaviour within a CCTV-covered area, by sending a text message to the control centre.
You missed out the excessive force part. You are perfectly free to defend yourself with 'reasonable force.' This means force proportional to the threat. If someone threatens to punch you and you shoot them then this is not reasonable force, and you will be prosecuted. Self defence continues to be a valid defence in the UK, but self defence ends as a defence after you have neutralised the threat.
Actually, this isn't entirely accurate. Suppose someone threatens you with a knife, and you point a shotgun at them. They then lunge at you anyway, and you pull the trigger and kill them. IANAL, but people who are have suggested that this falls under the remit of 'reasonable force.'
One of the reasons that the farmer who I think the GP was referring to was sent down for such a long time was that he shot the fellow in the back, and thus he could not claim that pulling the trigger was immediate self-defence. I suspect he would have got away with it if he had just emptied a barrel into the burglar's chest without threatening him or giving any warning.
I can't say I'm itching to put these theories to the test, though...
Even "current top-of-the-line encryption schemes" are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, especially SSL and SSH (unless you're really paying attention to signature validation, which I would argue that less than 0.001% of people do).
The highest current batteries are NiCD, and they need practically NO control circuitry, and are without a doubt the safest types of common rechargable batteries.
Claiming danger is inherent with high current or batteries in general, is utter nonsense.
Are you sure? Some tests we've been doing here recently indicate that lead acid provides the best current supply capability.
Anyway, that's beside the point - NiCd batteries don't provide anything near the energy density that Li+ batteries do, hence their failure mode is less exciting. But they don't like being shortcircuited either.
Well, you can choose to make up your own definitions for batteries and explosives, but don't expect the technical folks here to accept them. Also you might want to check the definition for detonation before using it again - it's also a very specific term.
The point I was trying to make (clearly unsuccessfully, for which I apologise) is that as battery technology continues to achieve greater and greater energy densities, the distinction between batteries and explosives becomes decreasingly well-defined.
Or, if a Linux system uses some form of signed binary packaging or updates, does RedHat or Debian have to release their GPG private keyrings to anyone which can create forged packages, patches, security announcements, etc?
No: not only can a user install their own public key in the binary packaging system and then get it to install packages signed with their own private key, but if they want to they can just bypass the packaging system altogether. If the packaging system stopped everything not signed with RH's private key being installed or run, that would be a GPLv3 violation. As it is, RH are perfectly in compliance.
I just hope that the next generation of battery technolgy is inherently less likely to explode.
We can but hope. Batteries are devices that concentrate chemical energy in a form that can be easily (and quickly, for high current applications) released as useful work.
On the other hand, explosives are devices that concentrate chemical energy in a form that can be easily and quickly released as useful work.
Why do you think the control electronics are so important to a laptop battery? Because if you shortcircuit any laptop battery the only thing stopping it from detonating in a spectacular manner is the control electronics.
Under GPLv2, I can write a security library that touches the TPM chip on a PC, verifies that the programs you are running are what they are reporting to be and reports back with the results. The obvious first step is that my library has to verify that it is itself uncompromised if my library can't verify it's integrity, no programmer can rely on the results of my library's responces.
If my library uses other GPLv2 libraries in the compile, I can verify & lock to specific versions I trust, that's fine. However, GPLv3 requires that I accept and allow any changes to the supporting libraries to be incorperated into my code - thus negating my ability to fully trust my own code.
You're half right as far as I can tell. You must accept and allow any changes to supporting libraries. However, nothing stops your library from screaming blue murder at link-time and run-time about library versions, and nothing stops you from requiring the person who wants to link your library against the modified versions to manually sign the modified versions with a key you provide. As long as you provide all the encryption keys and instructions (no matter how complicated) required to use customised versions of the supporting libraries, you're in the clear with the GPLv3.
Please feel free to give a more specific example of this situation, I'm still not entirely sure what the problem is that you're getting at.
To get there from 20 miles would still require a considerable rocket, though, and I'd be very surprised to see them pull that off for under US$2k. That additional 40 miles is still a considerable event in amateur rocketry, even with the wind essentially eliminated, and that's from a standing start.
(Disclaimer: although I work in the same lab as the CUSpaceflight folks, I'm not a member of the team and am not an official spokesperson, etc, etc)
They're not planning to get to orbit, although they are planning to launch a rocket from 30k to just over 100k, with a very small payload. I'm afraid I can't discuss the specifics, although I will say that it's not actually a very large motor they're planning to use.
They've got a few other subprojects going on that aren't so big and sexy, too. The Meteor guided recovery system is likely to be much significant technology-wise, if they can get it to work.
Maybe, but there are plenty of more exciting things that can be done with the balloon than take pictures. One can measure the UV intensity at given altitudes, the ozone profile of the atmosphere, etc...
(Disclaimer: although I work in the same lab as the CUSpaceflight folks, I'm not a member of the team and am not an official spokesperson, etc, etc)
The guys now have a lot of interest from various agencies, organizations and university departments to get them to fly payloads to do exactly that sort of thing. However, generally it's nice to have proven that you can do it before someone entrusts you their multi-thousand-pound experiment.
In addition, I don't think anyone was expecting the publicity to get this big this fast! I personally think the hype is reaching Daikatana-like levels...
Which is why it's so slow. There is no problem that can't be solved by adding a layer of redirection, but every layer adds overhead and increases reaction time. And why the heck does a desktop need to work over FTP ?
The desktop doesn't "work over FTP" in the same way that, for instance, you can tunnel your X session over SSH. Basically, there's a layer that allows any resource that can be addressed by a URL to be opened as a file pointer by a KDE app.
This is nice. Suppose you want to update the.htaccess file on your webspace, but the only way you can access your webspace is through FTP. Now, on Windows, or on Linux without using something like ioslaves or GnomeVFS, you have to:
Download the file using your FTP client
Edit the file in a text editor
Go back to your FTP client and upload the file again
When using ioslaves or GnomeVFS, editing the file is exactly the same as if it was sitting in your home directory on the local machine -- use the open and save dialogs in your editor.
The abstraction that ioslaves offer is one of the key features that attracts me to use KDE on Linux rather than Windows, and I use it continuously. There's nothing so nice as to be able to copy files from a server in Japan (over SSH) to a server in the USA (over FTP) from my computer in my study simply by dragging a bunch of files from one Konqueror window to another. Or to be able to rip a CD by browsing to audiocd:/MP3 and copying and pasting the files to my music collection.
The abstraction layer is something that's crucial to modern desktop usage. If you don't want it, don't use a modern desktop.
Sometimes I'd love to use apps that were designed to be fast and small, instead of each requiring its own hideous parody of a virtual machine in the quest for complete flexibility and portability...
Then fire up TWM or blackbox and use your X server as a container for an array of xterms. Unfortunately, modern programmers spend so much time working on making their programs accessible and discoverable that they never get round to fast and small, due to either business concerns or losing interest. There's plenty of fast and small stuff out there, however -- just don't expect it to have a pretty user interface.
However, I suppose the fact that Emacs Makes A Computer Slow is considered a fast and lightweight program by modern standards is mildly worrying...
USE LIGHTS: Lights on your bike are to BE SEEN, even in daylight. Use them front and back, flashing. Many drivers subconsciously associate flashing lights with cars, and hence they will factor you into their driving logic, which in some cases means they'll notice you at all when they otherwise wouldn't have.
True. However, at night it's a really good idea (and in fact law in the UK) to have at least one constant light at the front and back. Flashing lights screw with a human's distance perception at night.
"Sued for millions?" You have to prove damages. What are the damages here in monetary terms? Zero.
They're called statutory damages. You know, like the RIAA sues for. You don't think they are claiming that the damage to them caused by someone uploading a single song is really $150,000 do you?
2. much more likely, MS would just add a disclaimer telling the user, "The sharing feature is NOT to be used to share CC files" (like the various DVD/CD copying programs have a disclaimer, "This software is not to be used to violate the copyright of protected works").
Ah, just like that disclaimer (almost verbatim) protected p2p vendors from getting their pants sued off. Oh wait: it didn't. Oh well, maybe MS need to just obey the law that they're so keen on getting others to obey.
DRM advocates could say the exact same thing--DRM doesn't govern use, it governs distribution.
Well, they could, but they'd be lying. If you're trying to tell me that Apple's DRM doesn't stop me from using the track I downloaded in any way I'd like (for instance, playing on a non-Apple music player), you need to do some more research.
By its nature, DRM impacts use. If it didn't impact use, it wouldn't impact distribution either. This is because it's a technological rather than legal remedy, and only a legal remedy is able to distinguish between use and distribution. Example: how would you tell the difference between stripping DRM to put on a music player that doesn't support the DRM (use), and taking that same music player and letting your friend copy the non-DRM'd tracks off it (distribution)?
Works perfectly for me (Konqueror 3.5.4-0.4.fc5). The sidebar isn't perfect yet (it doesn't seem to appear when or where it should), but once it appears it works, as do all the other funky Javascripty features.
Actually, you're dead wrong. You can set your profile to private, like I have. You can hide details, like I have. Now every moron can get in and see my profile.
I'm a Facebook user, and I quite like the new changes. Now I don't have to spend hours trawling through peoples pages in order to find out what's going on.
Maybe it's because I have some common sense and don't put anything I want to keep private up on Facebook...
It's a zipped XML file. I'm a middling programmer at best and I can parse an XML doc. There will be a converter for OO.o two days after release. If Java didn't make me feel slimy inside, I'd write one myself!
If you'd been following the extensive coverage, you would have noticed all the IBM, Sun, RedHat, OpenOffice, KOffice and OASIS people pointing out that the so-called 'OpenXML' is indeed XML... except it's binary-encoded data stuffed between XML tags.
Also, even if OpenXML converters for OO.o/KOffice & friends do become available, I doubt that Debian/Fedora/OpenSUSE will distribute them due to the fact that OpenXML is patent-encumbered, and Microsoft's supposedly 'Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory' patent licensing terms are very unreasonably worded in order to discriminate against open source by being incompatible with nearly every open source license out there. (LGPL and GPL in particular).
Do people REALLY get bent out of shape like this when they get a format that they can open perfectly well--in fact, just about seamlessly with their suite of choice? Does your blood pressure spike when someone sends you a link to a Flash file?
Yes. Sites which embed video players into Flash applets particularly annoy me (*cough* YouTube *cough*).
Amusingly, people who use MS Office have more to gain from getting Microsoft to standardise on ODF that I do. My copy of OpenOffice handles.doc files from older versions of MS Office (e.g. '97) far better than my college's expensive copies of Office 2003 do. I've done file format conversion for friends and colleagues on several occasions before now.
What happens when some collision sends a pluton from space crashing onto earth, and a geologist finds it?
Given the size of (astronomical) plutons, if one crashed into the Earth, said geologists would have much important things to worry about. Such as the ongoing mass extinction and nuclear winter, for instance.
There is no operating system that actually has speech and large print capabilities built into the core. Accessibility has always been a "bolt on" solution. In many cases, large print software and screen reading software has altered and even mangled video drivers in order to try to figure out what was being put on the screen to work with it. However, in the last few years there has been a move to incorporate the ability for third party software such as screen readers and large print software to be able to access the data in otehr apps more easily so that the text can be read by the screen readers. Unfortunately, it is still possible (and common) to run into applications that use odd ways of writing to the video cards that the large print software is unable to intercept. Therefore you will get issues such as in Microsoft Word where if you insert Word Art it is invisible when you are using large print software but visible when you disable the software.
And of course, we all hate Microsoft for being a monopoly so the adaptive technology industry is rather happy (I'm sure) that MS doesn't incorporate a useful large print and screen reader software built into the OS. Now, there is large print and speech applications built into Windows. However, they are no better than many two-bit freeware packages and are not practical for long term use if you're going to be as efficient as a sighted person at work.
I found what you had to say very interesting. However, I wonder how you define a 'operating system', since what I call an operating system (the kernel) doesn't know anything at all about the fonts and text being used by a GUI application like an office suite! I came to the conclusion that you were referring to the "desktop environment", and did some playing around with my preferred one, KDE.
My results may be of interest to you: I found that I could set all the graphical user interface font sizes in one step, and then those font sizes were used in all KDE & Qt applications. This of course means that KOffice, which is an ODF-compliant office suite, has large print support out of the box. I also found a setting for the minimum font size allowed on web pages elsewhere in the KDE Control Centre. (I actually use this anyway: I have a very high resolution monitor, and if I don't use it the text on some websites is unreadably tiny).
The latest version of KDE also appears to have a text-to-speech engine built in (another of this evening's discoveries), but I haven't tried it out.
I appreciate that not every application one might want to run is likely to use the Qt GUI toolkit, but KDE does include a *lot* of applications. With KDE + KOffice + Lyx-QT, one has a system that can do everything expected of a modern office system: instant messaging, browsing the internet, low-end and high-end document preparation, website editing, software development, system administration...
If you'd like to play around with KDE I recommend getting a copy of the Kubuntu live-CD. While I agree it might not yet be ready for blind users, it might well perform better than the equivalent Windows setup for users who require large fonts.
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I live in Cambridge. There is extensive centrally-controlled CCTV coverage throughout the city centre, and in fact the city council have started a poster campaign encouraging people to report potentially criminal behaviour within a CCTV-covered area, by sending a text message to the control centre.
Actually, this isn't entirely accurate. Suppose someone threatens you with a knife, and you point a shotgun at them. They then lunge at you anyway, and you pull the trigger and kill them. IANAL, but people who are have suggested that this falls under the remit of 'reasonable force.'
One of the reasons that the farmer who I think the GP was referring to was sent down for such a long time was that he shot the fellow in the back, and thus he could not claim that pulling the trigger was immediate self-defence. I suspect he would have got away with it if he had just emptied a barrel into the burglar's chest without threatening him or giving any warning.
I can't say I'm itching to put these theories to the test, though...
Even "current top-of-the-line encryption schemes" are vulnerable to man-in-the-middle attacks, especially SSL and SSH (unless you're really paying attention to signature validation, which I would argue that less than 0.001% of people do).
Are you sure? Some tests we've been doing here recently indicate that lead acid provides the best current supply capability.
Anyway, that's beside the point - NiCd batteries don't provide anything near the energy density that Li+ batteries do, hence their failure mode is less exciting. But they don't like being shortcircuited either.
The point I was trying to make (clearly unsuccessfully, for which I apologise) is that as battery technology continues to achieve greater and greater energy densities, the distinction between batteries and explosives becomes decreasingly well-defined.
No: not only can a user install their own public key in the binary packaging system and then get it to install packages signed with their own private key, but if they want to they can just bypass the packaging system altogether. If the packaging system stopped everything not signed with RH's private key being installed or run, that would be a GPLv3 violation. As it is, RH are perfectly in compliance.
We can but hope. Batteries are devices that concentrate chemical energy in a form that can be easily (and quickly, for high current applications) released as useful work.
On the other hand, explosives are devices that concentrate chemical energy in a form that can be easily and quickly released as useful work.
Why do you think the control electronics are so important to a laptop battery? Because if you shortcircuit any laptop battery the only thing stopping it from detonating in a spectacular manner is the control electronics.
You're half right as far as I can tell. You must accept and allow any changes to supporting libraries. However, nothing stops your library from screaming blue murder at link-time and run-time about library versions, and nothing stops you from requiring the person who wants to link your library against the modified versions to manually sign the modified versions with a key you provide. As long as you provide all the encryption keys and instructions (no matter how complicated) required to use customised versions of the supporting libraries, you're in the clear with the GPLv3.
Please feel free to give a more specific example of this situation, I'm still not entirely sure what the problem is that you're getting at.
Meh. From that altitude, even a little weeny rocket can hit anywhere in the UK.
(Disclaimer: although I work in the same lab as the CUSpaceflight folks, I'm not a member of the team and am not an official spokesperson, etc, etc)
They're not planning to get to orbit, although they are planning to launch a rocket from 30k to just over 100k, with a very small payload. I'm afraid I can't discuss the specifics, although I will say that it's not actually a very large motor they're planning to use.
They've got a few other subprojects going on that aren't so big and sexy, too. The Meteor guided recovery system is likely to be much significant technology-wise, if they can get it to work.
One of them already built a working hydrogen fusor in his garage.
(Disclaimer: although I work in the same lab as the CUSpaceflight folks, I'm not a member of the team and am not an official spokesperson, etc, etc)
The guys now have a lot of interest from various agencies, organizations and university departments to get them to fly payloads to do exactly that sort of thing. However, generally it's nice to have proven that you can do it before someone entrusts you their multi-thousand-pound experiment.
In addition, I don't think anyone was expecting the publicity to get this big this fast! I personally think the hype is reaching Daikatana-like levels...
The desktop doesn't "work over FTP" in the same way that, for instance, you can tunnel your X session over SSH. Basically, there's a layer that allows any resource that can be addressed by a URL to be opened as a file pointer by a KDE app.
This is nice. Suppose you want to update the .htaccess file on your webspace, but the only way you can access your webspace is through FTP. Now, on Windows, or on Linux without using something like ioslaves or GnomeVFS, you have to:
When using ioslaves or GnomeVFS, editing the file is exactly the same as if it was sitting in your home directory on the local machine -- use the open and save dialogs in your editor.
The abstraction that ioslaves offer is one of the key features that attracts me to use KDE on Linux rather than Windows, and I use it continuously. There's nothing so nice as to be able to copy files from a server in Japan (over SSH) to a server in the USA (over FTP) from my computer in my study simply by dragging a bunch of files from one Konqueror window to another. Or to be able to rip a CD by browsing to audiocd:/MP3 and copying and pasting the files to my music collection.
The abstraction layer is something that's crucial to modern desktop usage. If you don't want it, don't use a modern desktop.
Then fire up TWM or blackbox and use your X server as a container for an array of xterms. Unfortunately, modern programmers spend so much time working on making their programs accessible and discoverable that they never get round to fast and small, due to either business concerns or losing interest. There's plenty of fast and small stuff out there, however -- just don't expect it to have a pretty user interface.
However, I suppose the fact that Emacs Makes A Computer Slow is considered a fast and lightweight program by modern standards is mildly worrying...
True. However, at night it's a really good idea (and in fact law in the UK) to have at least one constant light at the front and back. Flashing lights screw with a human's distance perception at night.
Yes, and it's that the IRA had a peculiar attachment to putting electric masonry drills through people knees.
They're called statutory damages. You know, like the RIAA sues for. You don't think they are claiming that the damage to them caused by someone uploading a single song is really $150,000 do you?
Ah, just like that disclaimer (almost verbatim) protected p2p vendors from getting their pants sued off. Oh wait: it didn't. Oh well, maybe MS need to just obey the law that they're so keen on getting others to obey.
Well, they could, but they'd be lying. If you're trying to tell me that Apple's DRM doesn't stop me from using the track I downloaded in any way I'd like (for instance, playing on a non-Apple music player), you need to do some more research.
By its nature, DRM impacts use. If it didn't impact use, it wouldn't impact distribution either. This is because it's a technological rather than legal remedy, and only a legal remedy is able to distinguish between use and distribution. Example: how would you tell the difference between stripping DRM to put on a music player that doesn't support the DRM (use), and taking that same music player and letting your friend copy the non-DRM'd tracks off it (distribution)?
Works perfectly for me (Konqueror 3.5.4-0.4.fc5). The sidebar isn't perfect yet (it doesn't seem to appear when or where it should), but once it appears it works, as do all the other funky Javascripty features.
It also works perfectly in the KDE Javascript implementation (I've been happily using it since late July).
Or rather, worked. Since this morning the discussion floating sidebar thing no longer appears. Boo, hiss.
Um, you're wrong. Feeds obey privacy settings.
A duress password's hardly going to work when the police are very careful only to work on bit-for-bit copies of the drives.
A real hardcore criminal will just use the TPM. In the way that it's supposed to be used.
I'm a Facebook user, and I quite like the new changes. Now I don't have to spend hours trawling through peoples pages in order to find out what's going on.
Maybe it's because I have some common sense and don't put anything I want to keep private up on Facebook...
If you'd been following the extensive coverage, you would have noticed all the IBM, Sun, RedHat, OpenOffice, KOffice and OASIS people pointing out that the so-called 'OpenXML' is indeed XML... except it's binary-encoded data stuffed between XML tags.
Also, even if OpenXML converters for OO.o/KOffice & friends do become available, I doubt that Debian/Fedora/OpenSUSE will distribute them due to the fact that OpenXML is patent-encumbered, and Microsoft's supposedly 'Reasonable And Non-Discriminatory' patent licensing terms are very unreasonably worded in order to discriminate against open source by being incompatible with nearly every open source license out there. (LGPL and GPL in particular).
The topic's been rehashed several times on Groklaw, and also the Open Standards Blog.
Yes. Sites which embed video players into Flash applets particularly annoy me (*cough* YouTube *cough*).
Amusingly, people who use MS Office have more to gain from getting Microsoft to standardise on ODF that I do. My copy of OpenOffice handles .doc files from older versions of MS Office (e.g. '97) far better than my college's expensive copies of Office 2003 do. I've done file format conversion for friends and colleagues on several occasions before now.
Given the size of (astronomical) plutons, if one crashed into the Earth, said geologists would have much important things to worry about. Such as the ongoing mass extinction and nuclear winter, for instance.
I found what you had to say very interesting. However, I wonder how you define a 'operating system', since what I call an operating system (the kernel) doesn't know anything at all about the fonts and text being used by a GUI application like an office suite! I came to the conclusion that you were referring to the "desktop environment", and did some playing around with my preferred one, KDE.
My results may be of interest to you: I found that I could set all the graphical user interface font sizes in one step, and then those font sizes were used in all KDE & Qt applications. This of course means that KOffice, which is an ODF-compliant office suite, has large print support out of the box. I also found a setting for the minimum font size allowed on web pages elsewhere in the KDE Control Centre. (I actually use this anyway: I have a very high resolution monitor, and if I don't use it the text on some websites is unreadably tiny).
The latest version of KDE also appears to have a text-to-speech engine built in (another of this evening's discoveries), but I haven't tried it out.
I appreciate that not every application one might want to run is likely to use the Qt GUI toolkit, but KDE does include a *lot* of applications. With KDE + KOffice + Lyx-QT, one has a system that can do everything expected of a modern office system: instant messaging, browsing the internet, low-end and high-end document preparation, website editing, software development, system administration...
If you'd like to play around with KDE I recommend getting a copy of the Kubuntu live-CD. While I agree it might not yet be ready for blind users, it might well perform better than the equivalent Windows setup for users who require large fonts.
Citation needed.