Yeah, running a "business" is really hard work when all you have to do to correct a costly "business mistake" is to go pick more money off the money tree...
That's a theoretical argument, because, in practice, those federal entitlement programs are, in fact, comparatively well-run.
It is private businesses that constantly "pick more money off the [public] money tree". Just look at the S&L disaster; the tax payer paid for that. If you privatized social security and similar programs, you'd get more of the same: companies would waste the money, disappear, and the tax payer would end up paying the bill twice, once for funding the program and once for paying for the necessary benefits and services anyway.
let's all keep in mind that it was politicians enamored with redistribution and central planning who paved the way for the Federal government to become the leviathan that it is today.
No, it wasn't. The US federal government is a leviathan because of one thing: the US military. That takes up 50% of discretionary spending.
Yes, the US federal government also happens to run a bunch of huge social insurance businesses (social security, medicare, etc.), but they seem to be doing that quite well, actually.
But Xgrid uses the BEEP protocol for all communication, which is open, and allowed this project to interoperate easily. The closed source part of Xgrid is just a Cocoa GUI that was thrown together with Interface Builder.
I think that remains to be seen. I doubt that knowledge of BEEP is sufficient to write Xgrid-compatible clients and servers.
And regardless whether the protocols can be reversed engineered, Xgrid itself remains proprietary for now.
True, but I can't think of any reason why Apple would based the Xcode engine on distcc and use something else for Xgrid. I can picture them using a heavily hacked up version of distcc, but if they really thought they had a better piece of software that had been developed in-house, I don't see why it wouldn't be used for both applications.
Because grid computing isn't the same as distributed computation. And if you look around the web (as I did before posting), you'll find that Xgrid apparently really is not open, let alone open source.
Starvation is one thing, but there is more. Your bones and joints can't take arbitrarily large forces. Muscles need to regenerate, and that takes resources. If you get more muscles very early, it is possible that more of your cortex gets devoted to controling them (less available for other stuff, silly as that may sound). Having lots of muscle mass may increase the risks for some kinds of diseases. There are just lots of possibilities. Time will tell.
Xgrid is proprietary, closed-source software. I think that hardly counts as "embracing" open-source software. Many other parts of the Macintosh platform are proprietary and closed source as well.
I'm not disputing that Apple released Darwin source code. But before you start cheering, keep in mind that Darwin started out as open source: the CMU Mach kernel and bits and pieces of BSD. And it's not like Apple made a big sacrifice in releasing a kernel that looks and feels like half a dozen other open source kernels.
I seriously doubt you are going to get more power transmitted through the human body using conduction than you are going to get via RF or via body-powered batteries or motion powered generators.
Keep in mind that you need two conductors to make the circuit. Something like an earring is going to have two electrodes very close to each other very far from the power source, which is like having two high resistance wires with lots of low resistance wires between them.
I think they never tried this. Furthermore, the patent does seem to claim data transmission by itself, and that clearly has lots of prior art.
Seed from Monsanto's plants isn't even supposed to be viable. Not only did they cause this guy harm, not only could he reasonably assume that Monsanto's seeds would not reproduce, the whole thing shows how poorly Monsanto's genetic engineering is actually working.
So, Monsanto contaminates his field and he is supposed to go through extra work and resuce the amount of seed available to him? Why?
If I dump some trash in your yard, are you then obligated not to use those parts of your yard that I dumped the trash on because you would be touching my property (the trash)? What should happen is that I become liable for the harm I have caused you, not that you are further inconvenienced.
His only mistake was that he didn't sue Monsanto as soon as he found out about the contamination. But it's an understandable mistake: anybody sane would be reluctant to take on a company like Monsanto in court.
Also, I think the court acted formally according to patent law. The decision may have been right legally, but not just. What really needs to happen is that the laws change and explicitly place the burden of limiting the spread of patented organisms on the patent holder.
A major US worry has been that when the US goes to war, the US controls the availability of GPS.
Has that demand been dropped? Or is this language about Galileo "not disrupting" the US military signal a codeword for saying that the US military gets the same control over Galileo as it has over the US system?
That's nothing unusual even in "serious" reporting. You may get a journalist claiming to do a story about how great X is but actually writing a story about how much better Y is than X. This is usually followed by out-of-context quotes. Even if there is no initial misrepresentation or intent, you may often not like what your name gets attached to.
It should never be against the law to speak your mind, even if your ideas are unpopular or offensive to some (or most, or all).
No, you don't have an unlimited right to speak your mind, not even in the US. Your right ends where the right of others to their good name begins. If you say "It is a proven fact that [some specific person] is a child molester" when, in fact, he is not, then he can take you to court to get you to stop and to get you to pay damages.
I have the human right to be whoever I want, even if I want to be a racist, sexist, prejudiced asshole.
You don't have a human right to make unfounded statements about other people that harm their reputations. And that is exactly what racism is: unfounded statements about people, statements that harm their reputations.
"Freedom is expensive, but it's something worth fighting and dying for." That sounds extremely noble in writing,
No, it doesn't. For someone living in a democracy, it sounds like someone who wants to replace the democratic process with violence when he isn't getting his way.
The specific freedoms guaranteed by democracy are something worth fighting and dying for. But there are many other "freedoms" that are not only not worth fighting for, they are just not acceptable in a free society. You don't have the freedom to go around killing people or the freedom to go around stealing their money. You don't have the freedom to defame, or incite violence against, people identified by name. Well, laws against hate speech are saying that you also don't have the freedom to defame people identified by race.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
That would be a magnanimous sentiment if you were actually the victim of hate speech. But by your likely economic status alone, chances are that you aren't, even if you are Jewish or homosexual or a member of another minority that is the target of hate speech. So, it's a good bet that your grand statement actually reduces to "I don't care about giving these groups their rights because it doesn't affect me".
And I don't care what anyone says, my liberty trumps your sense of security (not necessarily your *safety*, but rather your misguided *sense* of safety).
It's not a question of "safety", it's a question of rights.
If you call someone a child molester or a person of inferior intelligence by name and in public and can't back up your statements, they can take you to court for defamation of character and win. It's not a question of their safety, it's a question of their rights. Your liberty doesn't trump their rights.
Well, hate speech is just like that, except that it uses racial tags instead of names to make false assertions about people. There is no a-priori reason why the law shouldn't restrict defamation of people identified by race just as much as it restricts defamation of people identified by name.
But perhaps we don't even need new laws--the existing libel laws might be sufficient. Maybe if you go out and make statements of the form "Jews are..." or "homosexuals are..." and you can't back them up with facts, every person falsely defamed by you should be able to take you to court individually, just like if you had defamed them by name.
If you don't let people vent their anger on websites that no one will read, then they might go out and use violence to vent that anger.
Yeah, or maybe they'll sprout second heads, or they'll join the Hare Krishnas. Nobody knows, and so that isn't a basis for making laws. If there were compelling evidence that such restrictions on speech lead to widespread violence that outweighs the harm that such speech causes, then you would have a point.
What we do know is that the people who are "venting their anger" are spreading lies about other people and those other people object. If your neighbor puts up a web site accusing you of child molestation and fraud, are you going to say "oh, let him keep doing that, because otherwise he might use violence to vent that anger" or would you want him to stop? I think most people would want him to stop.
The problem is once you ban racist speech in public, you immediately open the door for more laws that do nothing to actually curtail the problem, but rather limit the rights and freedoms of everyone.
That door has already been opened in the US: you may be able to defame minority groups, but you can't defame beef, milk, or trademarks. Likewise, you face restrictions on other kinds of speech: there are limits on the copyrighted content you can include in your speech, and as the Scientologists show, those can be made to stick. There are limits on how you can use trademarks in US speech. Etc.
No, what rankles people like you about these kinds of laws is that they are foreign restrictions on US speech. But every nation has restrictions on speech, every nation tries to export their restrictions, and every nation is successful to some degree at that.
Freedom is expensive, but it's something worth fighting and dying for.
Terrorists believe they are dying for freedom, and you can see what US attitudes towards terrorists are--people who blow things up and fight the US government. Face it: fighting and dying for freedoms is neither acceptable nor effective anymore, and it is becoming less so.
Since US corporations can take legal measures to limit speech worldwide that affect their trademarks and copyrights, and those measures are successful to some degree, other entities (governments in that case) can take legal measures to limit speech world wide that has racist content.
Note that I didn't call either kind of speech "free" speech or pass any other kind of judgement. Whether you think of either kind of speech as "free" and whether you think restrictions on either kind of speech are justified, you can easily disagree over with the next guy. But restrictions on speech can have some degree of success and enforceability, even on the Internet.
And it has EXACTLY the same open source software availability as Linux.
If not for anything else, it doesn't have the same set of drivers. But also you're naive if you think that all UNIX-like systems run all open source software: there are plenty of subtle differences between *BSD, Linux, Solaris, and other UNIX-like systems that mean that porting specific packages.
You choose an embedded OS based on your needs, and NOT because someone on Slashdot is advocating it.
Yes, and I don't choose an embedded OS at all because I don't need it. What I do choose, and what we are talking about here, is general purpose OSes running on lots of different hardware, not just some kernel ticking away in some obscure embedded system.
Sure I have, but NetBSD has been nowhere nearly as widely ported as Linux. Furthermore, NetBSD has nowhere near the functionality, support, or software availability that Linux has.
Again, if the *BSD series had some compelling technical advantage over Linux that would be compelling to many people, more people would use them, but they are just big C-based UNIX-like kernels, just like Linux. So, that doesn't mean BSD is bad, it just means people end up using what has more software available to them and more support in industry.
The whole point of SmartCards is that, unlike a ROM or fixed key, they have a processor in them and can't be duplicated. What good does a SmartCard programmer do you for pirating DirecTV's signal?
It seems to me their engineering must be completely screwed up if people can duplicate their SmartCards.
Ctrl-Alt-Del, itself, is an example of physical security. Tell me you've never hit the wronf key...
In IT, "security" means "protection from malicious attackers", while "safety" means "protection from accidental errors".
So, choosing a difficult-to-type key combination for this function may be an example of safety (safe UI design), but it is not an example of security.
The use of Control-Alt-Delete as a secure attention key, however, is an example of security because it makes it hard for attackers to present a fake login. However, making the key hard to type is not necessary for its security purpose; they could have picked F10 as the secure attention key.
0.9 still seems to have the same problems as previous versions of Firefox/Mozilla on Linux:
Trying to start up multiple instances results in a dialog box. What should happen is that a new window opens in the existing Firefox process. Alternatively, multiple Firefox processes should just work correctly and not trash the configuration files.
Installation of the Java plugin (and probably others) over the web doesn't work: it claims that it "installed successfully", but it can't find it after restart.
0.8 also used to die and leave processes behind that would keep other instances of Firefox from starting up correctly; I don't know yet whether 0.9 fixes at least that problem.
All of that stuff works correctly on Windows. It is regrettable that even champions of free and open source put Windows first and don't fix such elementary problems correctly on Linux.
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Yeah, running a "business" is really hard work when all you have to do to correct a costly "business mistake" is to go pick more money off the money tree...
That's a theoretical argument, because, in practice, those federal entitlement programs are, in fact, comparatively well-run.
It is private businesses that constantly "pick more money off the [public] money tree". Just look at the S&L disaster; the tax payer paid for that. If you privatized social security and similar programs, you'd get more of the same: companies would waste the money, disappear, and the tax payer would end up paying the bill twice, once for funding the program and once for paying for the necessary benefits and services anyway.
let's all keep in mind that it was politicians enamored with redistribution and central planning who paved the way for the Federal government to become the leviathan that it is today.
No, it wasn't. The US federal government is a leviathan because of one thing: the US military. That takes up 50% of discretionary spending.
Yes, the US federal government also happens to run a bunch of huge social insurance businesses (social security, medicare, etc.), but they seem to be doing that quite well, actually.
But Xgrid uses the BEEP protocol for all communication, which is open, and allowed this project to interoperate easily. The closed source part of Xgrid is just a Cocoa GUI that was thrown together with Interface Builder.
I think that remains to be seen. I doubt that knowledge of BEEP is sufficient to write Xgrid-compatible clients and servers.
And regardless whether the protocols can be reversed engineered, Xgrid itself remains proprietary for now.
True, but I can't think of any reason why Apple would based the Xcode engine on distcc and use something else for Xgrid. I can picture them using a heavily hacked up version of distcc, but if they really thought they had a better piece of software that had been developed in-house, I don't see why it wouldn't be used for both applications.
Because grid computing isn't the same as distributed computation. And if you look around the web (as I did before posting), you'll find that Xgrid apparently really is not open, let alone open source.
Starvation is one thing, but there is more. Your bones and joints can't take arbitrarily large forces. Muscles need to regenerate, and that takes resources. If you get more muscles very early, it is possible that more of your cortex gets devoted to controling them (less available for other stuff, silly as that may sound). Having lots of muscle mass may increase the risks for some kinds of diseases. There are just lots of possibilities. Time will tell.
Xgrid is proprietary, closed-source software. I think that hardly counts as "embracing" open-source software. Many other parts of the Macintosh platform are proprietary and closed source as well.
I'm not disputing that Apple released Darwin source code. But before you start cheering, keep in mind that Darwin started out as open source: the CMU Mach kernel and bits and pieces of BSD. And it's not like Apple made a big sacrifice in releasing a kernel that looks and feels like half a dozen other open source kernels.
I seriously doubt you are going to get more power transmitted through the human body using conduction than you are going to get via RF or via body-powered batteries or motion powered generators.
Keep in mind that you need two conductors to make the circuit. Something like an earring is going to have two electrodes very close to each other very far from the power source, which is like having two high resistance wires with lots of low resistance wires between them.
I think they never tried this. Furthermore, the patent does seem to claim data transmission by itself, and that clearly has lots of prior art.
Seed from Monsanto's plants isn't even supposed to be viable. Not only did they cause this guy harm, not only could he reasonably assume that Monsanto's seeds would not reproduce, the whole thing shows how poorly Monsanto's genetic engineering is actually working.
So, Monsanto contaminates his field and he is supposed to go through extra work and resuce the amount of seed available to him? Why?
If I dump some trash in your yard, are you then obligated not to use those parts of your yard that I dumped the trash on because you would be touching my property (the trash)? What should happen is that I become liable for the harm I have caused you, not that you are further inconvenienced.
His only mistake was that he didn't sue Monsanto as soon as he found out about the contamination. But it's an understandable mistake: anybody sane would be reluctant to take on a company like Monsanto in court.
Also, I think the court acted formally according to patent law. The decision may have been right legally, but not just. What really needs to happen is that the laws change and explicitly place the burden of limiting the spread of patented organisms on the patent holder.
A major US worry has been that when the US goes to war, the US controls the availability of GPS.
Has that demand been dropped? Or is this language about Galileo "not disrupting" the US military signal a codeword for saying that the US military gets the same control over Galileo as it has over the US system?
That's nothing unusual even in "serious" reporting. You may get a journalist claiming to do a story about how great X is but actually writing a story about how much better Y is than X. This is usually followed by out-of-context quotes. Even if there is no initial misrepresentation or intent, you may often not like what your name gets attached to.
It should never be against the law to speak your mind, even if your ideas are unpopular or offensive to some (or most, or all).
No, you don't have an unlimited right to speak your mind, not even in the US. Your right ends where the right of others to their good name begins. If you say "It is a proven fact that [some specific person] is a child molester" when, in fact, he is not, then he can take you to court to get you to stop and to get you to pay damages.
I have the human right to be whoever I want, even if I want to be a racist, sexist, prejudiced asshole.
You don't have a human right to make unfounded statements about other people that harm their reputations. And that is exactly what racism is: unfounded statements about people, statements that harm their reputations.
"Freedom is expensive, but it's something worth fighting and dying for." That sounds extremely noble in writing,
No, it doesn't. For someone living in a democracy, it sounds like someone who wants to replace the democratic process with violence when he isn't getting his way.
The specific freedoms guaranteed by democracy are something worth fighting and dying for. But there are many other "freedoms" that are not only not worth fighting for, they are just not acceptable in a free society. You don't have the freedom to go around killing people or the freedom to go around stealing their money. You don't have the freedom to defame, or incite violence against, people identified by name. Well, laws against hate speech are saying that you also don't have the freedom to defame people identified by race.
I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it.
..." or "homosexuals are ..." and you can't back them up with facts, every person falsely defamed by you should be able to take you to court individually, just like if you had defamed them by name.
That would be a magnanimous sentiment if you were actually the victim of hate speech. But by your likely economic status alone, chances are that you aren't, even if you are Jewish or homosexual or a member of another minority that is the target of hate speech. So, it's a good bet that your grand statement actually reduces to "I don't care about giving these groups their rights because it doesn't affect me".
And I don't care what anyone says, my liberty trumps your sense of security (not necessarily your *safety*, but rather your misguided *sense* of safety).
It's not a question of "safety", it's a question of rights.
If you call someone a child molester or a person of inferior intelligence by name and in public and can't back up your statements, they can take you to court for defamation of character and win. It's not a question of their safety, it's a question of their rights. Your liberty doesn't trump their rights.
Well, hate speech is just like that, except that it uses racial tags instead of names to make false assertions about people. There is no a-priori reason why the law shouldn't restrict defamation of people identified by race just as much as it restricts defamation of people identified by name.
But perhaps we don't even need new laws--the existing libel laws might be sufficient. Maybe if you go out and make statements of the form "Jews are
If you don't let people vent their anger on websites that no one will read, then they might go out and use violence to vent that anger.
Yeah, or maybe they'll sprout second heads, or they'll join the Hare Krishnas. Nobody knows, and so that isn't a basis for making laws. If there were compelling evidence that such restrictions on speech lead to widespread violence that outweighs the harm that such speech causes, then you would have a point.
What we do know is that the people who are "venting their anger" are spreading lies about other people and those other people object. If your neighbor puts up a web site accusing you of child molestation and fraud, are you going to say "oh, let him keep doing that, because otherwise he might use violence to vent that anger" or would you want him to stop? I think most people would want him to stop.
The problem is once you ban racist speech in public, you immediately open the door for more laws that do nothing to actually curtail the problem, but rather limit the rights and freedoms of everyone.
That door has already been opened in the US: you may be able to defame minority groups, but you can't defame beef, milk, or trademarks. Likewise, you face restrictions on other kinds of speech: there are limits on the copyrighted content you can include in your speech, and as the Scientologists show, those can be made to stick. There are limits on how you can use trademarks in US speech. Etc.
No, what rankles people like you about these kinds of laws is that they are foreign restrictions on US speech. But every nation has restrictions on speech, every nation tries to export their restrictions, and every nation is successful to some degree at that.
Freedom is expensive, but it's something worth fighting and dying for.
Terrorists believe they are dying for freedom, and you can see what US attitudes towards terrorists are--people who blow things up and fight the US government. Face it: fighting and dying for freedoms is neither acceptable nor effective anymore, and it is becoming less so.
Since US corporations can take legal measures to limit speech worldwide that affect their trademarks and copyrights, and those measures are successful to some degree, other entities (governments in that case) can take legal measures to limit speech world wide that has racist content.
Note that I didn't call either kind of speech "free" speech or pass any other kind of judgement. Whether you think of either kind of speech as "free" and whether you think restrictions on either kind of speech are justified, you can easily disagree over with the next guy. But restrictions on speech can have some degree of success and enforceability, even on the Internet.
And it has EXACTLY the same open source software availability as Linux.
If not for anything else, it doesn't have the same set of drivers. But also you're naive if you think that all UNIX-like systems run all open source software: there are plenty of subtle differences between *BSD, Linux, Solaris, and other UNIX-like systems that mean that porting specific packages.
You choose an embedded OS based on your needs, and NOT because someone on Slashdot is advocating it.
Yes, and I don't choose an embedded OS at all because I don't need it. What I do choose, and what we are talking about here, is general purpose OSes running on lots of different hardware, not just some kernel ticking away in some obscure embedded system.
I guess you haven't heard of NetBSD then.
Sure I have, but NetBSD has been nowhere nearly as widely ported as Linux. Furthermore, NetBSD has nowhere near the functionality, support, or software availability that Linux has.
Again, if the *BSD series had some compelling technical advantage over Linux that would be compelling to many people, more people would use them, but they are just big C-based UNIX-like kernels, just like Linux. So, that doesn't mean BSD is bad, it just means people end up using what has more software available to them and more support in industry.
The end result is that by manipulating the program flow, the hacker can get to a point where he can read and write to the EEPROM at will.
So, in short, they screwed up, since the primary purpose of using SmartCards is to avoid this.
The whole point of SmartCards is that, unlike a ROM or fixed key, they have a processor in them and can't be duplicated. What good does a SmartCard programmer do you for pirating DirecTV's signal?
It seems to me their engineering must be completely screwed up if people can duplicate their SmartCards.
Ctrl-Alt-Del, itself, is an example of physical security. Tell me you've never hit the wronf key...
In IT, "security" means "protection from malicious attackers", while "safety" means "protection from accidental errors".
So, choosing a difficult-to-type key combination for this function may be an example of safety (safe UI design), but it is not an example of security.
The use of Control-Alt-Delete as a secure attention key, however, is an example of security because it makes it hard for attackers to present a fake login. However, making the key hard to type is not necessary for its security purpose; they could have picked F10 as the secure attention key.
Among other things, because it doesn't meet Microsoft's Tablet PC specs.
Also, Windows applications tend to be pretty resolution and display-size dependent; Tablet PC apps wouldn't work well on this thing.
At this point, Linux probably has the most applications available for devices of this form factor, due to projects like handhelds.org.
Never mind about the "multiple instances", that seems to have gotten fixed.
0.8 also used to die and leave processes behind that would keep other instances of Firefox from starting up correctly; I don't know yet whether 0.9 fixes at least that problem.
All of that stuff works correctly on Windows. It is regrettable that even champions of free and open source put Windows first and don't fix such elementary problems correctly on Linux.