That was actually kind of the point of the GP. By doing the design themselves, they might learn quite a bit about computer design. Of course, since we're talking about a country and a government here, rather than about individuals, I'm not sure that that really makes so much sense. But regardless, the GP said "doing the design itself on their own might be beneficial, regardless of the quality of the end product", and you said "But all they care about is doing the design itself on their own, they don't care about the quality of the end product."
Also, you point out that they haven't made enough mistakes yet, but then you immediately turn around and blast them for... making a mistake?
First: The GP was making the analogy a better analogy by making a closer fit to the topic at hand, to wit: If computers were designed in such a way as to prevent virii and friends, there would be no need for the security industry. The poor version of the analogy: If people didn't commit crimes, we wouldn't need police. This poor version would map back to: If people didn't write virii and friends, we wouldn't need the security industry. See the difference?
Second: Stating that a better design for stores, banks, homes, businesses, etc, would obviate the need for police is not blaming the victims for crime. It is simply stating the facts. If there were not any actual way to break into your home, then nobody would do it. This is blatantly obvious. If there were truly a way to completely eliminate any way for a crime to be committed, then no crimes would be committed because they would all be impossible. To put it a little bit more thoroughly: If stores, banks, homes, businesses, etc, were designed in such a way as to prevent all crime, then being a criminal would be impossible. If being a criminal were impossible, then every person would not be a criminal. If every person were not a criminal, then there would be no need for police. This can be combined down by syllogism to a very slightly modified version of the original statement: If stores, banks, homes, businesses, etc, were designed in such a way as to prevent all crime, then there would be no need for police.
Well, the guy asked for suggestions on what to do. Either he must abandon his principles and break the law, or he must stick to his principles, which means not following the instructions of his immediate superiors. Practically, this usually means quitting. This is simply logic: the law of the excluded middle; either A or not A.
OTOH, simply refusing to do something unethical doesn't always wind up with you losing your job. My mother had the same summer job for four summers during her college years. She worked for a company which sold electric grills (now defunct). Every summer, they would frequently ask her to lie to their customers, eg tell them that various things had shipped when they in fact had not. She simply said "no, I won't do that." They said "ok", and did it themselves. They kept hiring her every summer, though.
By this logic, nobody would ever engage in any kind of extortion. Clearly, people do, so either people are just acting illogically, or there is some flaw. I'm guessing some of both.
UAC is like DOD clearances and while that may be implemented with Unix Groups, or some such, I'm not specifically aware of anyone doing it that way before 1999.
Let's see, IIRC, Red Hat 6.2 used a floppy group. The floppy device node was owned by the floppy group, and if you were a member of that group, then you could access the floppy drive. If you were root, then of course you could access the floppy drive, too, whether or not you were part of the floppy group. Red Hat 6.2 was sometime around 1999/2000, so it is certainly close, but I'd be quite surprised to find that something like this did not predate Red Hat 6.2 by a long ways. There was also a games group, along with a few others that I can't remember right now.
You can quite clearly set up a hierarchical model with ease using nothing more than groups. People have been doing so for a long time. I think this constitutes prior art.
Or, perhaps I'm misunderstanding a particular point of patent law. If I invent something, say a pair of scissors, (supposing nobody has invented it before) then I can patent it. If you find a specific use for scissors, a special case, such as "using scissors to cut paper", can you then patent that? If so, then it seems that you could think of as many uses for scissors as you could as soon as you heard about them, and patent all the uses, thereby rendering my patent useless. So, surely this sort of thing is not allowed? I'm probably being insufficiently cynical.
So, supposing your speculation is correct, then the longer block size doesn't actually enable better reliability, it just lowers the capacity cost for a given "amount" of reliability. They could build in as much reliability as they cared to with the current block size, but then they would have to decrease the capacity by more than they would have to with a larger block size.
The patent is for a heirarchical security model where there are multiple levels of access not the all or nothing of sudo.
Soooo, you mean something kind of like the Unix group:user permissions system, whereby you can give specific users (and hence specific programs) access to various things in a really quite fine-grained manner? Or better yet, Access Control Lists (present in various flavors of Linux, notably SELinux)?
I hope there's clear prior art
Please see above.
Sudo is a single quick and convenient mechanism for utilizing the security features that are built in to the Unix permissions system. It is not the entirety of the Unix security model.
Better yet, just eat the lead. Then you don't have to wear a ridiculous hat because the protection is inside of you! You'll be completely protected for the rest of your (mercifully (for us) short) life.
It is worth pointing out that a whole lot of US people pre-US civil rights movement thought that blacks didn't much have the capacity to understand the ramifications of who they voted for. I'm not for minors voting, but this is really a rather dangerous and somewhat silly reason.
So, in other words, the UK does not have it set up so that everyone is within a few hundred meters of a polling station, contrary to what was said a couple of posts back in the thread.
So three minor bugfixes are worth a major application? I think the points probably need reworking. Unless of course you meant that for any number of minor bugfixes, you would get one point total? But then why would anyone bother (mod other motivations) making more than one bugfix per year?
Interesting idea, though. Details can always be worked out once the initial idea has been put forth.
According to wikipedia, the Linux kernel 2.6.0 had just a hair under 6 million lines of code. The linux kernel has always been developed by a decentralized network of programmers, a herd of cats, as you so aptly put it. That is, the initial framework, if there is such a thing, was also created by a decentralized network.
Solaris, OTOH, has always been developed as a centralized project. Not many people would say that Solaris is really superior to Linux at this point. Perhaps it was simply not well run? I don't know, but that is the most direct comparison I could come up with off the top of my head.
Today the RIAA sounds more and more like organized crime,
Indeed. It occurs to me that actions like those describe in the summary are far more like piracy than anything the RIAA has labeled as piracy. Let's see: many pirates found pinch points in shipping lanes, such as straits, and then carefully watched them for any ships trying to get by. Those ships were then stopped and boarded, and some form of payment extracted. Today, the RIAA has found a pinch point in music distribution, internet radio, and they are trying to place themselves firmly in the middle of that path so that they can extract some form of payment from everyone who wants to send something by them.
Agreed. But we mourn their passing, because they were human beings, and then we move on and live in the now better world. It's about respect and dignity, which still exist and are still important even if the human being in question was the lowest scum on the earth.
My point was that in order for a law to change, a political issue must be made of it. This has nothing to do with whether or not society thinks the law should or should not change. OTOH, in order for a law to stay the same, it isn't made a political issue unless someone else is seeking to change it. Thus, the right did not "make a political issue" out of gay marriage. It had already been made a political issue by those who wanted to change the law, whether or not society was with them.
The people pushing for gay marriages are...
pushing for gay marriages. This is exactly my point. You don't push on an issue when the law is already on your side unless you're pushing back against somebody. It's just logic.
I wouldn't start a special interest group for "Let's maintain the legality of alcohol consumption!" That'd be ridiculous, because the law is already on my side, and nobody is pushing to change the law.
The guy was just trying to describe bandwidth starvation to laypeople.
Well, as far as technological matters go, he's a layman himself (he's certainly not part of the Internet Priesthood!). It might be that he understands the internet reasonably well, or it might be that he was roughly repeating something that someone who understands it fairly well (eg an aide) told him. I suspect the latter is more likely. In either case, though, that doesn't qualify him for ridicule.
Without the right constantly making an issue out of gay marriage, no one would give a damn and there'd be some sort of legal recognization of gay unions everywhere.
We wouldn't have legal recognition of gay unions anywhere unless somebody made a political issue out of it... Seems to me that the fact that there are people who want legal recognition of gay unions is what first made a political issue out of it. Then right-wing politicians countered because either they felt that it would help out their party or because they felt that their constituency wanted it.
If no one gave a damn about it, then the law wouldn't change, and gay unions would remain unrecognized.
Offer a couple of different options for internet access, so that you (students) pay up front for a certain amount of bandwidth to be available to you. You'd probably have to do some sort of MAC address registration for those who bought anything above the bottom, so that you could throttle bandwidth based on MAC address. Then, people who want to download a lot of stuff could pay for a faster connection, and the extra money the university gets from that could be used to buy a big enough pipe to serve the total bandwidth needs of the campus. Research labs and (perhaps) professors' offices could still have unlimited bandwidth, you don't have to block anything, you don't have surprises for the parents on the billing, and you don't have too much traffic for your pipe, so research isn't hindered.
Q. Is it really necessary that every Slashdot summary ends with a very polarizing question?
A. No. Writing polarizing/. summaries is the sure-fire technique, developed over many years, to get people to post responses and not just click on the links. Haven't you noticed that the non-polarizing articles only get 50 or so replies, but the one that incite all-out flamewars can get several thousand? This technique works whether or not the polarizing summary actually ends with a very polarizing question, so the polarizing question itself is in fact not necessary.
This seems to be what you are saying, and expresses a little bit more clearly what I meant about you not drawing a distinction between polarizing questions appearing at the end of summaries (which was the subject of the original poster's "Q.") and polarizing summaries (which seem to be the primary subject of all of your posts in this thread).
Well, to be fair, the title of the Register article that the summary linked to is "ICANN is the USSR of the internet - Karl Auerbach speaks out". The summary doesn't mention this, however, and perhaps should, or else change the title...
You have failed to draw a distinction between polarizing stories and stories which, whether or not they are polarizing in their own right, end with a polarizing question. Two different things, and the difference is important.
Slashdot Mirror
That was actually kind of the point of the GP. By doing the design themselves, they might learn quite a bit about computer design. Of course, since we're talking about a country and a government here, rather than about individuals, I'm not sure that that really makes so much sense. But regardless, the GP said "doing the design itself on their own might be beneficial, regardless of the quality of the end product", and you said "But all they care about is doing the design itself on their own, they don't care about the quality of the end product."
Also, you point out that they haven't made enough mistakes yet, but then you immediately turn around and blast them for... making a mistake?
First: The GP was making the analogy a better analogy by making a closer fit to the topic at hand, to wit: If computers were designed in such a way as to prevent virii and friends, there would be no need for the security industry. The poor version of the analogy: If people didn't commit crimes, we wouldn't need police. This poor version would map back to: If people didn't write virii and friends, we wouldn't need the security industry. See the difference?
Second: Stating that a better design for stores, banks, homes, businesses, etc, would obviate the need for police is not blaming the victims for crime. It is simply stating the facts. If there were not any actual way to break into your home, then nobody would do it. This is blatantly obvious. If there were truly a way to completely eliminate any way for a crime to be committed, then no crimes would be committed because they would all be impossible. To put it a little bit more thoroughly: If stores, banks, homes, businesses, etc, were designed in such a way as to prevent all crime, then being a criminal would be impossible. If being a criminal were impossible, then every person would not be a criminal. If every person were not a criminal, then there would be no need for police. This can be combined down by syllogism to a very slightly modified version of the original statement: If stores, banks, homes, businesses, etc, were designed in such a way as to prevent all crime, then there would be no need for police.
Well, the guy asked for suggestions on what to do. Either he must abandon his principles and break the law, or he must stick to his principles, which means not following the instructions of his immediate superiors. Practically, this usually means quitting. This is simply logic: the law of the excluded middle; either A or not A.
OTOH, simply refusing to do something unethical doesn't always wind up with you losing your job. My mother had the same summer job for four summers during her college years. She worked for a company which sold electric grills (now defunct). Every summer, they would frequently ask her to lie to their customers, eg tell them that various things had shipped when they in fact had not. She simply said "no, I won't do that." They said "ok", and did it themselves. They kept hiring her every summer, though.
A fire in a storm drain might very well heat up the surrounding earth sufficiently to damage fiber in nearby conduits.
By this logic, nobody would ever engage in any kind of extortion. Clearly, people do, so either people are just acting illogically, or there is some flaw. I'm guessing some of both.
You can quite clearly set up a hierarchical model with ease using nothing more than groups. People have been doing so for a long time. I think this constitutes prior art.
Or, perhaps I'm misunderstanding a particular point of patent law. If I invent something, say a pair of scissors, (supposing nobody has invented it before) then I can patent it. If you find a specific use for scissors, a special case, such as "using scissors to cut paper", can you then patent that? If so, then it seems that you could think of as many uses for scissors as you could as soon as you heard about them, and patent all the uses, thereby rendering my patent useless. So, surely this sort of thing is not allowed? I'm probably being insufficiently cynical.
So, supposing your speculation is correct, then the longer block size doesn't actually enable better reliability, it just lowers the capacity cost for a given "amount" of reliability. They could build in as much reliability as they cared to with the current block size, but then they would have to decrease the capacity by more than they would have to with a larger block size.
Sudo is a single quick and convenient mechanism for utilizing the security features that are built in to the Unix permissions system. It is not the entirety of the Unix security model.
Better yet, just eat the lead. Then you don't have to wear a ridiculous hat because the protection is inside of you! You'll be completely protected for the rest of your (mercifully (for us) short) life.
It is worth pointing out that a whole lot of US people pre-US civil rights movement thought that blacks didn't much have the capacity to understand the ramifications of who they voted for. I'm not for minors voting, but this is really a rather dangerous and somewhat silly reason.
So, in other words, the UK does not have it set up so that everyone is within a few hundred meters of a polling station, contrary to what was said a couple of posts back in the thread.
So three minor bugfixes are worth a major application? I think the points probably need reworking. Unless of course you meant that for any number of minor bugfixes, you would get one point total? But then why would anyone bother (mod other motivations) making more than one bugfix per year?
Interesting idea, though. Details can always be worked out once the initial idea has been put forth.
According to wikipedia, the Linux kernel 2.6.0 had just a hair under 6 million lines of code. The linux kernel has always been developed by a decentralized network of programmers, a herd of cats, as you so aptly put it. That is, the initial framework, if there is such a thing, was also created by a decentralized network.
Solaris, OTOH, has always been developed as a centralized project. Not many people would say that Solaris is really superior to Linux at this point. Perhaps it was simply not well run? I don't know, but that is the most direct comparison I could come up with off the top of my head.
Agreed. But we mourn their passing, because they were human beings, and then we move on and live in the now better world. It's about respect and dignity, which still exist and are still important even if the human being in question was the lowest scum on the earth.
pushing for gay marriages. This is exactly my point. You don't push on an issue when the law is already on your side unless you're pushing back against somebody. It's just logic.
I wouldn't start a special interest group for "Let's maintain the legality of alcohol consumption!" That'd be ridiculous, because the law is already on my side, and nobody is pushing to change the law.
If no one gave a damn about it, then the law wouldn't change, and gay unions would remain unrecognized.
Offer a couple of different options for internet access, so that you (students) pay up front for a certain amount of bandwidth to be available to you. You'd probably have to do some sort of MAC address registration for those who bought anything above the bottom, so that you could throttle bandwidth based on MAC address. Then, people who want to download a lot of stuff could pay for a faster connection, and the extra money the university gets from that could be used to buy a big enough pipe to serve the total bandwidth needs of the campus. Research labs and (perhaps) professors' offices could still have unlimited bandwidth, you don't have to block anything, you don't have surprises for the parents on the billing, and you don't have too much traffic for your pipe, so research isn't hindered.
So, in short, we have:
/. summaries is the sure-fire technique, developed over many years, to get people to post responses and not just click on the links. Haven't you noticed that the non-polarizing articles only get 50 or so replies, but the one that incite all-out flamewars can get several thousand? This technique works whether or not the polarizing summary actually ends with a very polarizing question, so the polarizing question itself is in fact not necessary.
Q. Is it really necessary that every Slashdot summary ends with a very polarizing question?
A. No. Writing polarizing
This seems to be what you are saying, and expresses a little bit more clearly what I meant about you not drawing a distinction between polarizing questions appearing at the end of summaries (which was the subject of the original poster's "Q.") and polarizing summaries (which seem to be the primary subject of all of your posts in this thread).
Well, to be fair, the title of the Register article that the summary linked to is "ICANN is the USSR of the internet - Karl Auerbach speaks out". The summary doesn't mention this, however, and perhaps should, or else change the title...
You have failed to draw a distinction between polarizing stories and stories which, whether or not they are polarizing in their own right, end with a polarizing question. Two different things, and the difference is important.