How about clause 2a of the GPL, "You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change."? That certainly seems to satisfy the first and possibly the second requirements you list (particularly if the original program name is trademarked, as most "big name" open source programs are). Certainly this license is less GPL-incompatible than the licenses of many trumpeted open source projects (Eclipse, Apache...)
You say that like it's a good thing. Much as I dislike the MPAA, the fact is that movies cost money to make. A lot of money. Yet you're proposing that the best way to view those movies is to download an unauthorised copy from the net before it's even hit the cinemas. That brings in precisely zero revenue to recoup the cost of making the film. I hate to break it to you, but there won't be a HitMovie.avi for you to download in a few years if this becomes the norm.
I read it more that he wants to be able to buy the movie to watch at home immediately once it's finished, rather than having to wait for the DVD release. Straight-to-dvd movies exist and are profitable, so it would certainly be possible to release DVDs at the same time as the cinema release and still have the money to make movies. (It might destroy cinemas, but it wouldn't destroy movies)
Last time this came up there was a submariner who gave a pretty insightful description of what has happened since crews went mixed. The time periods are not quite as long (iirc 6 months at a time), but it still gives insight into what happens when a group of people are stuck in a confined space for a long time.
What about the enrichment though? What about all the noxious chemicals involved in separating the fissile isotopes from the 99+% useless U-238?
You can centrifuge so you don't really need any chemicals, and so little fuel is needed to get a given amount of energy that the amounts used are miniscule compared to what would be used digging up the same amount of coal/oil/etc.
What about the huge piles of toxic and somewhat radioactive U-238 that you get at the end?
Ever seen a slag heap? The amount of waste is again going to be miniscule compared to what you'd produce getting the coal or oil needed to get the same amount of energy, the radiation danger is a tiny fraction of what you get from the radon you'll release mining coal. The toxicity is overstated, it's not really any worse than lead - yes it's not something you'd want to be too near, but neither are the much larger piles of stuff used for mining and oil-drilling.
there really IS no major advantage to the higher capacity of Blu-Ray that any consumer would notice,
One could say the same of the higher capacity of HD-DVD over normal DVD. If you're going to upgrade to a new format for higher capacity - that's the whole driving force behind upgrading at all - then you ought to go for one that's actually significantly larger.
Doesn't this again bring up the question which was discussed a while ago. 'Why should Operating systems have a policy of default accept? Run programs only which you trust.' Not that this will solve the problem in one shot but it will make the problem more manageable.
No it won't. A default deny policy is simply not practical unless you can afford a lot of extra trouble. If I was developing on such a machine, would I have to get every revision of my code signed?
What kind of pleasure can be had from doing this kind of hacking? After a while, doesn't it just become old hat?
There's a constant struggle to defeat the detection measures, or detect newer, stealthier rootkits. I've played around with seeing how well I can hide something on my own system, never used it in anger but there's an intellectual challenge there. Like chess or go, it's basically the same every time but I can see people constantly finding new pleasure in it.
Re:Isn't God trying to tell us something?
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Tier One ISPs Dying
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· Score: 3, Insightful
People have been able to say something like that at every point in history. And I'd hardly call this nastier than hurricanes, and the Tsunami was worse than either them or this. The sky is not falling.
A truly determined adversary, which is the ones you should be really concerned about for a national security situation (script kiddies aren't going to fuck with you), doesn't need the source to find the exploit. The situation with normal websites is a tradeoff - don't make it public and you'll probably have a few extra years when you're vulnerable to real crackers, make it public and you'll have a week when you're vulnerable to every 1337 kid on the planet and after that you're secure. But in a government setting there's far less of a tradeoff, the only thing that makes sense is to make the source public.
There is only one reason the U.N. wants control over DNS. And that is to censor content on the internet by controling who does, and doesn't have a domain. As it stands, the internet is already under the control of ICANN, an international organisation.
One could say exactly the same things about why ICANN wants control over it. The more likely reason, for everyone, is that they don't like being dependent on someone else. The profit from selling domains probably helps a bit too.
I trust it with the DNS far more than I trust the United Nations,
Rightly or wrongly, most of the rest of the world trusts the UN more than an organisation that's ultimately answerable to the US government.
The issue is whether or not, all things being equal, a certain software package that is unmodifiable by civilians (since it's military grade, they won't just accept your patches)
They'll accept your exploit code and fix it their own way, which will be just as effective.
Did Windows magically become more secure when the partial source code was leaked on the net? No.
Yes it did. At least one vulnerability (the IE jpeg buffer overflow) was fixed because a hole was found in that source.
Does the same apply to the latest weekly Ubuntu release or Mac speed bump, or do you have sliding standards for different products?
For the Mac, god yes. But slashdot being an OSDL site, I expect to get more information about OSS than other software, just like I'd expect MSDN to have more articles on MS software than that from other vendors.
I wish there were so. But fact is, China is NOT a legitimate government.
For a long time after the revolution the UN didn't acknowledge the new chinese government. Then countries decided to accept it, normalised diplomatic relations with them, etc. Maybe we shouldn't have, but if we accept them like we have we should give them equal representation in world affairs.
In fact, any non-democratic government is not legitimate as far as I'm concerned. Unless the people can vote, no government is legitimate.
My country's election system would have put one party in power even if the other got 53% of the vote. Is that a legitimate government? I could vote (well, actually I couldn't in the last election because I was underage. Can I be legitimately governed by people who didn't let me vote?) but my vote wouldn't even come into the final count because of the way my country's electoral system works.
The only legitimate government arises from the will of the people. Tyranny is not a form of legitimate government.
Then why does the US conduct trade negotiations etc. with them? You can't recognise a government when it benefits you and then say they're illegitimate when they want something you don't like.
What are you talking about? It sure isn't the internet...since it's not under the control of the United States government. It's under the control of a privately run international organization based in the United States.
And answerable to (iirc it's the FTC), that's part of the US government. The US government has control over the DNS system, they may have to pass orders on through a couple of layers of organisations, but that's not really relevant from another country's perspective.
Yes, governments are a necessary evil...as they prevent even worse horrors from happening. But they are an evil regardless. The more power one is given, the more dangerous one is. It is best to keep them limited, caged, tamed...under the thumb of the People.
Worse things are likely to happen by leaving a single country in charge of DNS than by putting it in the hands of an international organisation.
The UN is not a representational body, it's members are not elected democratically,
They are representatives of their country. How that country chooses its UN representative is their own business.
many come from nations which themselves are dictatorships. Doesn't sound like a very good government to me.
A government which represents all, sounds a lot better to me than a government which only lets certain types of people vote. I don't like dictatorships, but if we believe in national sovereignty and they are the recognised government of their country, they have as much right to a say in world affairs as any other government.
And your premise makes the assumption that more government is good, and that is not really necessarily true.
No, I make the assumption that what we believe is good in terms of a government of individuals is also good in terms of a government of nation-states. If you believe the US should be able to unilaterally control something the whole world depends on, doesn't that mean you believe that a single person should control the things everyone in a country depends on?
The more government is in place, the more restricted the people tend to be, the more rights taken away and violated. More government is, therefore, a bad thing.
Then why do people have governments? We don't believe that life should be about who has the bigger weapons, we band together in nations for the common good. Why shouldn't countries do the same?
If a supra-national government/organization is made up of similar national governments which are in turn made up of similar sub national entities, it makes sense to see a function such as DNS moved to the supra-national level.
Everyone is using DNS. It makes sense for the DNS to be moved to the top level regardless of how well we get along, because DNS is relied upon by everyone, just like things like satellite orbits are organised internationally.
However, the UN is not really an organization of nation states that are equal in temperament, national organization or capacity. As such it isn't a completely legitimate supra national governing body. Totalitarian nations get a vote just like nations that derive the sovereignty from a mandate by their people.
Sovereign nations get a vote, those that aren't don't. That's the only way to do things. In my country one party has an absolute majority and so can force bills through even though they only got about 35% of the popular vote. Is that getting sovereignty from a mandate by the people? I certainly feel disenfranchised. If you're going to insist on absolute democracy I don't think you'd allow anyone in. Countries can be and are not allowed representation in the UN if their government is not felt to be legitimate. Poor as it may be it's the best representative body we have of the world as a whole, certainly more so than the US Government.
The analogy between a government of the people and a government of governments is weak anyway, unless you assume that more government is better. Otherwise, you run afoul of the argument that government is better when it is closer to the people. Instead of people voting on representatives to send to congress, such as in the US, governments would choose a person to send to the international body, and the way that these are determined would vary from being entirely undemocratic to perhaps an elected official, though I don't know how many democratic countries elect a representative to the UN, if any.
But elections in both the US (where I assume you come from) and my country (UK) are indirect anyway - we vote on MPs who then vote on our PM, while you vote for electors to vote for your president (although you actually put the president's name down, but if the intent was direct choice of president, it would be easier to just have you elect one directly). I do think directly choosing both our prime minister and UN representative would be a good idea, but given the way countries currently work that doesn't seem to be the majority view.
That doesn't look very promising to me. It would be revolutionary if web browsers in general could break the monopoly of JavaScript and introduce other script languages (python, ruby,...) on the client side. This would boost the web applications much further as they are now. That's just a wish, but probably a security nightmare.
You used to be able to do that with Tcl via plugins. You could even run applets in the browser with Tk, like the java applet's we're used to, and there seemed to be a well thought out security model (similar to java's). But I can't see plugins for anything newer than IE5 and netscape 4. Seems a shame - Tcl is far nicer to code in than either Javascript or Java, and seemed to provide the advantages of both while only having to learn one language. Anyone know any more about what happened to it?
There are many OS licenses, but the only ones that count are the BSD, GPL and possibly LGPL. There's no general one for "patches-only" that I know of, so possibly the QPL deserves its own category. Projects that choose their own license, unless there's a very pressing reason to take notice I'll simply ignore their code. If there's a real improvement in the license I'll look at it, but I don't have the time or inclination to work out why everyone's GPL-like license is supposed to be better and what it allows me to do with the code.
Plato got away with comparing people and governments to say what makes a good city-state government and a good person, it makes sense to extend that to what makes a good international governing body compared with what makes a good government of a country.
Slashdot Mirror
It's easy to tell them apart, the former exists and the latter doesn't.
How about clause 2a of the GPL, "You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change."? That certainly seems to satisfy the first and possibly the second requirements you list (particularly if the original program name is trademarked, as most "big name" open source programs are). Certainly this license is less GPL-incompatible than the licenses of many trumpeted open source projects (Eclipse, Apache...)
I don't blame him. Java sucks. The performance of something like perl, with all the coding ease of C.
I read it more that he wants to be able to buy the movie to watch at home immediately once it's finished, rather than having to wait for the DVD release. Straight-to-dvd movies exist and are profitable, so it would certainly be possible to release DVDs at the same time as the cinema release and still have the money to make movies. (It might destroy cinemas, but it wouldn't destroy movies)
Last time this came up there was a submariner who gave a pretty insightful description of what has happened since crews went mixed. The time periods are not quite as long (iirc 6 months at a time), but it still gives insight into what happens when a group of people are stuck in a confined space for a long time.
You can centrifuge so you don't really need any chemicals, and so little fuel is needed to get a given amount of energy that the amounts used are miniscule compared to what would be used digging up the same amount of coal/oil/etc.
What about the huge piles of toxic and somewhat radioactive U-238 that you get at the end?
Ever seen a slag heap? The amount of waste is again going to be miniscule compared to what you'd produce getting the coal or oil needed to get the same amount of energy, the radiation danger is a tiny fraction of what you get from the radon you'll release mining coal. The toxicity is overstated, it's not really any worse than lead - yes it's not something you'd want to be too near, but neither are the much larger piles of stuff used for mining and oil-drilling.
One could say the same of the higher capacity of HD-DVD over normal DVD. If you're going to upgrade to a new format for higher capacity - that's the whole driving force behind upgrading at all - then you ought to go for one that's actually significantly larger.
MS sells a remote administration program that will hide its presence completely if you want it to.
The point is this one is not only designed to not be found by "normal" methods, but also to avoid detection by specialist anti-rootkit programs.
No it won't. A default deny policy is simply not practical unless you can afford a lot of extra trouble. If I was developing on such a machine, would I have to get every revision of my code signed?
There's a constant struggle to defeat the detection measures, or detect newer, stealthier rootkits. I've played around with seeing how well I can hide something on my own system, never used it in anger but there's an intellectual challenge there. Like chess or go, it's basically the same every time but I can see people constantly finding new pleasure in it.
People have been able to say something like that at every point in history. And I'd hardly call this nastier than hurricanes, and the Tsunami was worse than either them or this. The sky is not falling.
Where did you find it? Seriously, I've been looking all over for a legit copy.
A truly determined adversary, which is the ones you should be really concerned about for a national security situation (script kiddies aren't going to fuck with you), doesn't need the source to find the exploit. The situation with normal websites is a tradeoff - don't make it public and you'll probably have a few extra years when you're vulnerable to real crackers, make it public and you'll have a week when you're vulnerable to every 1337 kid on the planet and after that you're secure. But in a government setting there's far less of a tradeoff, the only thing that makes sense is to make the source public.
One could say exactly the same things about why ICANN wants control over it. The more likely reason, for everyone, is that they don't like being dependent on someone else. The profit from selling domains probably helps a bit too.
I trust it with the DNS far more than I trust the United Nations,
Rightly or wrongly, most of the rest of the world trusts the UN more than an organisation that's ultimately answerable to the US government.
They'll accept your exploit code and fix it their own way, which will be just as effective.
Did Windows magically become more secure when the partial source code was leaked on the net? No.
Yes it did. At least one vulnerability (the IE jpeg buffer overflow) was fixed because a hole was found in that source.
For the Mac, god yes. But slashdot being an OSDL site, I expect to get more information about OSS than other software, just like I'd expect MSDN to have more articles on MS software than that from other vendors.
For a long time after the revolution the UN didn't acknowledge the new chinese government. Then countries decided to accept it, normalised diplomatic relations with them, etc. Maybe we shouldn't have, but if we accept them like we have we should give them equal representation in world affairs.
In fact, any non-democratic government is not legitimate as far as I'm concerned. Unless the people can vote, no government is legitimate.
My country's election system would have put one party in power even if the other got 53% of the vote. Is that a legitimate government? I could vote (well, actually I couldn't in the last election because I was underage. Can I be legitimately governed by people who didn't let me vote?) but my vote wouldn't even come into the final count because of the way my country's electoral system works.
Then why does the US conduct trade negotiations etc. with them? You can't recognise a government when it benefits you and then say they're illegitimate when they want something you don't like.
What are you talking about? It sure isn't the internet...since it's not under the control of the United States government. It's under the control of a privately run international organization based in the United States.
And answerable to (iirc it's the FTC), that's part of the US government. The US government has control over the DNS system, they may have to pass orders on through a couple of layers of organisations, but that's not really relevant from another country's perspective.
Yes, governments are a necessary evil...as they prevent even worse horrors from happening. But they are an evil regardless. The more power one is given, the more dangerous one is. It is best to keep them limited, caged, tamed...under the thumb of the People.
Worse things are likely to happen by leaving a single country in charge of DNS than by putting it in the hands of an international organisation.
They are representatives of their country. How that country chooses its UN representative is their own business.
many come from nations which themselves are dictatorships. Doesn't sound like a very good government to me.
A government which represents all, sounds a lot better to me than a government which only lets certain types of people vote. I don't like dictatorships, but if we believe in national sovereignty and they are the recognised government of their country, they have as much right to a say in world affairs as any other government.
And your premise makes the assumption that more government is good, and that is not really necessarily true.
No, I make the assumption that what we believe is good in terms of a government of individuals is also good in terms of a government of nation-states. If you believe the US should be able to unilaterally control something the whole world depends on, doesn't that mean you believe that a single person should control the things everyone in a country depends on?
The more government is in place, the more restricted the people tend to be, the more rights taken away and violated. More government is, therefore, a bad thing.
Then why do people have governments? We don't believe that life should be about who has the bigger weapons, we band together in nations for the common good. Why shouldn't countries do the same?
Everyone is using DNS. It makes sense for the DNS to be moved to the top level regardless of how well we get along, because DNS is relied upon by everyone, just like things like satellite orbits are organised internationally.
However, the UN is not really an organization of nation states that are equal in temperament, national organization or capacity. As such it isn't a completely legitimate supra national governing body. Totalitarian nations get a vote just like nations that derive the sovereignty from a mandate by their people.
Sovereign nations get a vote, those that aren't don't. That's the only way to do things. In my country one party has an absolute majority and so can force bills through even though they only got about 35% of the popular vote. Is that getting sovereignty from a mandate by the people? I certainly feel disenfranchised. If you're going to insist on absolute democracy I don't think you'd allow anyone in. Countries can be and are not allowed representation in the UN if their government is not felt to be legitimate. Poor as it may be it's the best representative body we have of the world as a whole, certainly more so than the US Government.
But elections in both the US (where I assume you come from) and my country (UK) are indirect anyway - we vote on MPs who then vote on our PM, while you vote for electors to vote for your president (although you actually put the president's name down, but if the intent was direct choice of president, it would be easier to just have you elect one directly). I do think directly choosing both our prime minister and UN representative would be a good idea, but given the way countries currently work that doesn't seem to be the majority view.
You used to be able to do that with Tcl via plugins. You could even run applets in the browser with Tk, like the java applet's we're used to, and there seemed to be a well thought out security model (similar to java's). But I can't see plugins for anything newer than IE5 and netscape 4. Seems a shame - Tcl is far nicer to code in than either Javascript or Java, and seemed to provide the advantages of both while only having to learn one language. Anyone know any more about what happened to it?
There are many OS licenses, but the only ones that count are the BSD, GPL and possibly LGPL. There's no general one for "patches-only" that I know of, so possibly the QPL deserves its own category. Projects that choose their own license, unless there's a very pressing reason to take notice I'll simply ignore their code. If there's a real improvement in the license I'll look at it, but I don't have the time or inclination to work out why everyone's GPL-like license is supposed to be better and what it allows me to do with the code.
Plato got away with comparing people and governments to say what makes a good city-state government and a good person, it makes sense to extend that to what makes a good international governing body compared with what makes a good government of a country.