Look at the "shoe bomber" - he was stopped only by passengers, and his plot was unknown to counter-terrorist officials beforehand. If he'd had the smarts to try and pull it off in the airplane's bathroom, one would assume he'd have been much more successful.
Yeah. What the fuck? Even a total idiot would have known to go somewhere isolated in order to ignite his shoes. The only thing I figure is that maybe the explosive power of his shoes was too small to do much damage unless it was in the right spot to ignite the fuel in the tanks and that spot was not in a bathroom. Even then, would it have been too hard to buy up all the seats in the general area of the tanks so he could have blown up his shoes unmolested.
Until you made that post, I'd kinda bought the party line on Richard Reid. But now I am wondering if he was meant to get get caught.
Re:I have a different perspective...
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Using free software is good and should be encouraged but don't not use somthing just because it doesn't fit into your commie world view.
Oh, you're one of those dumbshits...
carry on then, I assume you never worked for an hourly wage? Never been paid on commission? Otherwise where do you get off equating Free software with communisism? Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, not private ownership of ideas.
increase oil profits for who? the arabs? they own the oil, lease the fields out, control production a nd recieve the $60 per barrol or what ever the going rate is.
You got everything right except for the last part. In plenty of cases they've signed agreements for fixed prices or for fixed percentages based on the cost to extract. So in the later case, they might only get 10% of the market price. Back when oil was $20/barrel that $2 might have been all the profit there was after all costs. But at $60/barrel, costs are still about the same, but now the oil company pockets $36/barrel of profit vs the pennies they were making before.
See Shell's recent profit announcement of over $26B for the last year. That's profit, not revenues and is the largest annual profit ever earned by any european company so far and is due primarily to sales of oil, not gas.
Wrong. Any film-sourced material is 24fps and even most native 1080p content is 24fps, the industry even has a name for it, they call it "24p" because they have a stupid fixation on their digital content being limited to the same frame rate as film. Smart 1080p encodes at 30fps and 60fps just mark frames to be displayed multiple times, stupid encodes actually waste space by including the same frame multiple times. Most, if not all, 720p broadcast material in the USA uses the stupid encode method.
a higher colour depth
Wrong. Its 4:2:0 on all consumer-level formats. Recent versions of the HDMI spec include higher depth color, but that's just the protocol on the wire from the decoder/pc to the display. There is no consumer-level content format that takes advantage.
four times as many pixels as a DVD
Wrong. DVD = 720x480 for NTS and 720x575 for PAL vs 1920x1080 for 1080p. That works out to 5.8 for NTSC and 5.0 for PAL
A high quality DVD rip of a movie is around 5-7GB. Your definition of high quality must be lacking.
Only if you rip to MPEG2 which nobody who cares about space would do. If you re-encode with h.264 then 2GB will get you a result that is effectively indistinguishable from the original DVD. I watch movies on a 9' screen, have a critical eye and plenty of personal experience with the technology.
I've also watched 1080p material encoded with WM9 (Memento Mori,deluxe edition), which is roughly equivalent to h.264, at 8GB for ~100min and it was top notch. The same for 720p material at 8GB for ~120min (Brothers Grimm,german edition). By top notch, I mean better than 99% of all broadcast HDTV in the US.
I will grant that all other things being equal (codec, transfer, etc) more bits are better. But there is a point at which the law of diminishing returns kicks in and it currently seems to be around the 8GB/movie point.
The West is hardly on the verge of collapse because of it.
That's debateable. Most of the cost of Bush's reaction has yet to be paid for, its a bill he's leaving for future presidents.
Nor have their actions reduced the presence of Western forces in the Middle East.
They have signifcantly re-arranged them. One of Osama's main demands in the years leading up to 911 and immediately afterwards was the removal of US troops from Saudi soil. They are all mostly gone now. Gone to Iraq yes, but Mecca isn't in Iraq so Osama doesn't care so much about that.
I hardly think that al-Qaeda is particularly heartened by the U.S. governments increased surveillance of its own people, etc, either
This was the sentence that provoked me to respond. Osama loves it. He's probably revelling in it, hoping that it will eat away at as from the inside. Another front on the war that he doesn't even have to fight. Here's what he said about it soon after 911:
"I tell you, freedom and human rights in America are doomed," bin Laden said as the U.S. war on terrorism raged in Afghanistan. "The U.S. government will lead the American people in -- and the West in general -- into an unbearable hell and a choking life." Bin Laden's Sole Post-September 11 TV Interview
If the choice is shooting yourself in the foot while someone else shoots you in the knee, or just getting shot in the knee and leaving your own foot intact, the answer is obvious. Doing something for the sake of merely "doing something" is usually conterproductive. Israel themselves have admitted that their attacks on hezbollah have had much less effect than they had hoped for and the massive destruction to lebanese infrastructure just makes the country ripe for an even more hezbollah-friendly government to take control later on. Not to mention all the good will israel has generated in the process - hezbollah was started as response to a similar bombing campaign back in the early 80s, it seems israel doesn't learn from history.
It does however present evidence of irrational thinking.
Huh? I don't see how that follows. Tribalism is as rational as nationalism or any other "us vs them" conflict, which is almost all of them.
And for a non religious fight, there certainly seem to be a lot of Mosques being attacked.
That's because they are there. There are a lot of mosques in the area period. Of course some of them are going to get attacked, that's where there are a lot of the people are after all. If anything, its proof of non-religious motivation because they don't care about "hallowed ground" or any similar concepts.
Wow that plan sure fucked up.
You think so? The US has moved almost all of its troops out of saudi arabia, that was one of bin laden's primary demands before and after 9/11. Seems to me that over all, its been a net gain for bin laden's stated goals. Similarly the sanctions on Iraq are gone, another one of his big demands. Sure, a 100K+ iraqis were killed in the process, but that many would probably have starved to death in the last 3-4 years anyway. Palestine is about the same, no real progress there, but other than that wall, no real slippage either.
This is a "I don't give a fuck what they know about me approach".
Privacy is like Pandora's box. Once you let your privacy out, you will never, ever be able to put it back in, all that will be left is hope.
Look at how many things have happened in recent years that no "reasonable" person would have predicted, like the government outsourcing survellience to private companies in order to get around constitutional protections of civil liberties, or the hundreds of thousands of identity thefts straight out of the databases of credit reporting bureaus just as starting points. I don't think it is cynical to assume that things will only get worse as society becomes ever more dependent on databases to function.
Are you so confident in the future that you will never regret giving away your privacy?
I admit the concept is similar, but western heroes are generally considered to be those who gave their lives fighting against an enemy who wanted to kill them (us). No matter how you stretch it, women and children on a plane are no threat whatsoever to the Islamic nations or their people. So perhaps insane is not the right label, but certainly their is a demonstration here of utter disregard for any life (including their own) to achieve their means.
You don't think that's how the terrorists see themselves? Look at israel in lebanon - despite clearly killing more innocents than hezbollah, they seem quite content to think of themselves as just and righteous. That's the nature of any conflict, each side always paints themselves in the best possible terms, no matter what the reality of the situation is.
We are certainly not celebrating the disgraced soldiers who murdered and raped Iraq women, while it seems in Islam they would be revered as heroes for the cause.
Oh come on, "In Islam?" Have you really bought into the propaganda so much as to believe that raping women would be considered heroic by any group of muslims?
That argument flies in the face of the sectarian violence occurring in Iraq right now, where they are killing each other randomly not for worshiping the wrong god, but for belonging to the wrong subtle subgroup within Islam.
They aren't killing each other for differences of religious opinion. Its simply tribalism. The "tribes" in this case are usually aligned along sunni/shia lines, but even then that's not the only defining characteristic. It certainly isn't any sort of proof that religious motivation behind terrorism.
I would make the argument that it is hurting the regular people of the middle east more, the ones the terrorists are supposedly fighting for. Since you have obviously thought about this, what do you feel the end goal of the terrorists are? Realistically, not "eradication of America" because that is simply not going to happen with a couple of AK47s and IEDs.
Really? A couple of boxcutters has caused trillions of dollars in damage to the US. That's the whole point of asymmetric warfare -- They hit our weak points exactly the right way and inflict orders of magnitude more damage than we do when we go after their strong points. Their goal isn't necessarily "eradication of America" but it is to get the west to stop meddling in their backyards.
Maybe al-queda underestimates the value to the west of maintaining the status quo, or maybe we are just over-estimating it.
Actions like this most recent one just play right into Bush's hands (and approval rating) by reminding people we are fighting an enemy that wants you dead for no reason other than to make a statement.
Which is one reason this "action" has been greeted with such skepticism. So far, the only action has been the arrests of some people and tons of publicity. We've seen similar "actions" recently like the the round-up in Miami that keeps looking more bogus with every new detail. this is a congressional election year in the US and the (ruling) Labor party in the UK recently suffered poor result in the May elections.
How does any of that change the ideological basis for most of today's current terrorism? IE, Islam, literally, submission.
Such twisted bullshit. The majority of muslims live in states that suffer either directly or indirectly from oppresive policies of the west. They happen to be muslim because in large part western oil addiction funds the evangelical equivalent of muslim missionaries.
The guy who just went on a shooting spree in a Jewish community center was apparently very well employed, and what came of it? Murder.
Holy shit, you only see what you want to see don't you?
The guy was constantly between jobs, had an engineering degree and had trouble keeping even unskilled jobs like retail clerk at home depot. That's not even close to "very well employed."
Moreover, many US Muslims, despite having everything you wish to give terrorists, sympathize with or outright finance terrorists.
Convenient conjoing of two very disparate claims "sympathize" and "finance" -- most critical thinkers, muslim or not, "sympathize" because they understand what leads people to make desperate acts. But that's a far cry from finance and your blending of two is just an obvious display of bias.
We are fighting people who think it is the will of Allah to convert you to Islam, make you submit as a Dhimmi, or kill you.
The extremist salafists who believe that (the Qutbi) are a tiny minoritiy of muslims, they are even a minority of salafists. Your attempt to ascribe the motives of less than 0.1% of all muslims world-wide to the majority of muslims is disingenious at best. It's like pointing to the KKK and saying they represent the majority of christains.
Come now. Are you so tweeked that a particular news outlet will find the prevention of hundreds of deaths to be a good thing that you're willing to ignore that it's a good thing for everyone that hundreds of people didn't get killed?
Its a damn fine thing that no brazilians were killed this time.
As for the hundreds of others who were not killed, they are going to have do better than a press campaign.
Explosives take a while to check. Especially if you are attempting to check every single liquid in an apartment for instance. Think of the hundreds of items that would need to be checked in your home.
And fortunately plenty of ordinary household chemicals can be combined to form explosives. So, either way, we can pretty much count on them "finding" explosives no matter what.
If desiring to kill oneself and take out innocent people to make a political point about US presence in the middle east is not insane, I don't know what is.
It is easy to call someone insane if you get to make up the proof yourself. But even then, your proof of "insanity" sure is close to western ideals. Consider all the honor reserved for "fallen heroes" who "gave their lives defending their country." It's the same damn thing, just with an ameliorative spin instead of pejorative.
They have sane goals, but their methods are not. Their methods are cowardly and counterproductive.
Sure. Seems to me their methods work exceptionally well. The response to 9/11 has been to cause self-inflicted economic wounds in the trillions of dollars. The US military doesn't call terrorism "asymmetric warfare" for nothing, its a war and so far we are losing big time. Calling the enemy insane just plays into their hands.
Trying to use logic and reason to predict the actions of someone who is willing to blow himself up in a plane full of people is a dangerous game.
Because terrorists are just insane without any quanitifiable goals beyond killing, killing, killing!!! They are all madman, hellbent on destroying the planet - do not attempt to understand their motivations, just deposit your civil liberties in the trashcan to your left sir.
That's a stupid excuse, though. They could always isolate the SGI-laden parts, LGPL the rest,
Hell, they could spend $5 and buy it from SGI who need every dollar they can get to make it out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
In fact, the "trade secret" and "intellectual property" argument is almost certainly the biggest reason for closed-source driver code.
It's the patents. They worry that by disclosing how they talk to the hardware they might provide sufficient proof that their hardware onboard the card violates some obscure patent that they may or may not be aware of. They figure that by not disclosing that information, they completely avoid the entire minefield of surprise patent litigation.
Effing lawyers (and yes, I do wish they would all get the EFF religion)
So what if Doubleclick (may they burn in Hell forever) knows that some guy visits Slashdot, ThinkGeek, and PennyArcade? I figure my privacy is fine as long as they cannot link the activity back to me personally.
The ignorance in this statement is so staggering that I had to respond and lose the moderations I've made on other posts to this story.
If you have any account online for which you have ever disclosed your true identity (like in order to make a purchase) then that account information can and will be cross-referenced with all of the tracking data that the tracking companies have been able to put together on you. They are expectionally good at finding those information leaks and putting 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 together to make 4.
Don't be lulled into a false sense of security even if you are the type to disable cookies. Cookies are not the only way Doubleclick and the like track people. Embedded images, tags, 3rd party style sheets with god knows what javascript, ip address correlation, etc. The bag of tricks is practically bottomless.
I religiously use the following extensions to Firefox, with almost every site fully locked out, and even then I still leak personal information like a seive:
If you are able to run malicious software in administrator mode, you can do anything at all, not just compromise signed code authorization. Heck you could replace the whole OS.
You have to wrap your head around "untrusted computing" -- its all about not trusting the owner and operator of the system. Sure you can run in admin mode, but you can't (normally) replace the whole OS because the new replacement parts won't be cryptographically signed by MS and so won't be allowed to execute.
Blue Pill's claim to fame is that it can turn off Vista's requirement for signed drivers - thus letting you execute arbitrary code in the kernel - which means that the MAFIAA can no longer trust MS to lock you out of your own computer.
Probably because she already published enough details of how it works over a month ago.
And, although he says its patched, the patch has not been released and so one must question how well patched - it would not be the first time MS released a patch to close front door that left the back door wide open.
My slightly-humble opinion is that Rutkowska's general approach can only be completely thwarted if the OS itself installs its own "hypervisor" kernel. I've got my fingers crossed that MS hasn't gone that far because if it has - it will make rehosting Vista under linux impossible and without such a hypervisor, it should be possible to thoroughly crack any DRM scheme that MS comes up with.
I am really looking forward to subscribing to "Urge" with its all you can download service for about a month and then freeing all the music to play wherever and however I want. I say, a company that lives by DRM dies by DRM.
My metric is how many people find it useful. Making someone money is useful. Increasing someone's productivity is useful.
Ok, so your metric changes to suit your point. I won't play that game.
There might be some market for customizing software for a business, but it isn't huge.
Bingo. But poor understanding of the market. Depending on the year and who does the measurement, more dollars are spent on in-house corporate customization than are spent on shrink-wrap. Think about that for a second - shrink-wrap employs a programmer once and his employer sells the results of his work over and over again. Customization employs a programmer for each dollar spent. Even if customization was just a tenth of the market dollars, it would still employ more people than the shrink-wrap biz.
BSD is more popular than Linux. Mac OS X is based off of it,
Depends on what you mean by "based" - OSX is Mach with a BSD personality.
You might not consider it a victory because those are proprietary operating systems, but they wrote good software which a lot of people found useful.
But how many programmers madke money from it? That seems to be your own metric, and Apple has already reduced the size of that group to some subset of its own OS developers.
In the FSF's ideal world, there is no proprietary software. In such a world, programmers wouldn't be able to make money.
FALSE. That you believe the only way to make money from software development is by selling support just means you haven't been paying attention.
As soon as a great free Unix existed, a lot of people jumped in to add what was still missing,
BSD4.4 (the first release fully free of USL code) was released at roughly the same time as linux went 1.0.
However, despite having a "more free" license than Linux, and often technically better implementations, the entire *BSD family has yet to garner a tenth of the vitality that Linux has. Can I prove that Linux's popularity over the BSD camp's is due to the GPL -- nope, but it is one very strong differentiator and Linus himself said, "Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did."
they seems more focussed on getting stuff out the door, and the FSF (and RMS in particular) seem more focussed on making sure it's the right stuff, built with the right moral philosophy,
Yet, the history of computing is absolutely stuffed with products that "got out the door" to serve a short-term need and then died. In fact, with a few notable, monopolistic exceptions, that's practically the story of the entire industry.
The FSF's contribution is not about code for things like gcc or emacs or hurd, it's about defining a social framework that complements human nature in order to encourage sharing by preventing any company from using another company's own work against them to gain an advantage.
Linus does engineering that organizes electrons -- the FSF does engineering that organizes nuerons. Excellence on one side can compensate for some deficiencies on the other, but a major blunder is probably fatal no matter what - e.g. all of the examples like vhs vs betamax that you've already mentioned plus thousands more.
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Look at the "shoe bomber" - he was stopped only by passengers, and his plot was unknown to counter-terrorist officials beforehand. If he'd had the smarts to try and pull it off in the airplane's bathroom, one would assume he'd have been much more successful.
Yeah. What the fuck? Even a total idiot would have known to go somewhere isolated in order to ignite his shoes. The only thing I figure is that maybe the explosive power of his shoes was too small to do much damage unless it was in the right spot to ignite the fuel in the tanks and that spot was not in a bathroom. Even then, would it have been too hard to buy up all the seats in the general area of the tanks so he could have blown up his shoes unmolested.
Until you made that post, I'd kinda bought the party line on Richard Reid. But now I am wondering if he was meant to get get caught.
Using free software is good and should be encouraged but don't not use somthing just because it doesn't fit into your commie world view.
Oh, you're one of those dumbshits...
carry on then, I assume you never worked for an hourly wage? Never been paid on commission? Otherwise where do you get off equating Free software with communisism? Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production, not private ownership of ideas.
increase oil profits for who? the arabs? they own the oil, lease the fields out, control production a nd recieve the $60 per barrol or what ever the going rate is.
You got everything right except for the last part. In plenty of cases they've signed agreements for fixed prices or for fixed percentages based on the cost to extract. So in the later case, they might only get 10% of the market price. Back when oil was $20/barrel that $2 might have been all the profit there was after all costs. But at $60/barrel, costs are still about the same, but now the oil company pockets $36/barrel of profit vs the pennies they were making before.
See Shell's recent profit announcement of over $26B for the last year. That's profit, not revenues and is the largest annual profit ever earned by any european company so far and is due primarily to sales of oil, not gas.
Any film-sourced material is 24fps and even most native 1080p content is 24fps, the industry even has a name for it, they call it "24p" because they have a stupid fixation on their digital content being limited to the same frame rate as film. Smart 1080p encodes at 30fps and 60fps just mark frames to be displayed multiple times, stupid encodes actually waste space by including the same frame multiple times. Most, if not all, 720p broadcast material in the USA uses the stupid encode method.
Wrong.
Its 4:2:0 on all consumer-level formats. Recent versions of the HDMI spec include higher depth color, but that's just the protocol on the wire from the decoder/pc to the display. There is no consumer-level content format that takes advantage.
Wrong.
DVD = 720x480 for NTS and 720x575 for PAL vs 1920x1080 for 1080p.
That works out to 5.8 for NTSC and 5.0 for PAL
Only if you rip to MPEG2 which nobody who cares about space would do. If you re-encode with h.264 then 2GB will get you a result that is effectively indistinguishable from the original DVD. I watch movies on a 9' screen, have a critical eye and plenty of personal experience with the technology.
I've also watched 1080p material encoded with WM9 (Memento Mori,deluxe edition), which is roughly equivalent to h.264, at 8GB for ~100min and it was top notch. The same for 720p material at 8GB for ~120min (Brothers Grimm,german edition). By top notch, I mean better than 99% of all broadcast HDTV in the US.
I will grant that all other things being equal (codec, transfer, etc) more bits are better. But there is a point at which the law of diminishing returns kicks in and it currently seems to be around the 8GB/movie point.
That's debateable. Most of the cost of Bush's reaction has yet to be paid for, its a bill he's leaving for future presidents.
Nor have their actions reduced the presence of Western forces in the Middle East.
They have signifcantly re-arranged them. One of Osama's main demands in the years leading up to 911 and immediately afterwards was the removal of US troops from Saudi soil. They are all mostly gone now. Gone to Iraq yes, but Mecca isn't in Iraq so Osama doesn't care so much about that.
I hardly think that al-Qaeda is particularly heartened by the U.S. governments increased surveillance of its own people, etc, either
This was the sentence that provoked me to respond. Osama loves it. He's probably revelling in it, hoping that it will eat away at as from the inside. Another front on the war that he doesn't even have to fight. Here's what he said about it soon after 911:
Should Israel just take it then?
If the choice is shooting yourself in the foot while someone else shoots you in the knee, or just getting shot in the knee and leaving your own foot intact, the answer is obvious. Doing something for the sake of merely "doing something" is usually conterproductive. Israel themselves have admitted that their attacks on hezbollah have had much less effect than they had hoped for and the massive destruction to lebanese infrastructure just makes the country ripe for an even more hezbollah-friendly government to take control later on. Not to mention all the good will israel has generated in the process - hezbollah was started as response to a similar bombing campaign back in the early 80s, it seems israel doesn't learn from history.
It does however present evidence of irrational thinking.
Huh? I don't see how that follows. Tribalism is as rational as nationalism or any other "us vs them" conflict, which is almost all of them.
And for a non religious fight, there certainly seem to be a lot of Mosques being attacked.
That's because they are there. There are a lot of mosques in the area period. Of course some of them are going to get attacked, that's where there are a lot of the people are after all. If anything, its proof of non-religious motivation because they don't care about "hallowed ground" or any similar concepts.
Wow that plan sure fucked up.
You think so? The US has moved almost all of its troops out of saudi arabia, that was one of bin laden's primary demands before and after 9/11. Seems to me that over all, its been a net gain for bin laden's stated goals. Similarly the sanctions on Iraq are gone, another one of his big demands. Sure, a 100K+ iraqis were killed in the process, but that many would probably have starved to death in the last 3-4 years anyway. Palestine is about the same, no real progress there, but other than that wall, no real slippage either.
This is a "I don't give a fuck what they know about me approach".
Privacy is like Pandora's box. Once you let your privacy out, you will never, ever be able to put it back in, all that will be left is hope.
Look at how many things have happened in recent years that no "reasonable" person would have predicted, like the government outsourcing survellience to private companies in order to get around constitutional protections of civil liberties, or the hundreds of thousands of identity thefts straight out of the databases of credit reporting bureaus just as starting points. I don't think it is cynical to assume that things will only get worse as society becomes ever more dependent on databases to function.
Are you so confident in the future that you will never regret giving away your privacy?
I admit the concept is similar, but western heroes are generally considered to be those who gave their lives fighting against an enemy who wanted to kill them (us). No matter how you stretch it, women and children on a plane are no threat whatsoever to the Islamic nations or their people. So perhaps insane is not the right label, but certainly their is a demonstration here of utter disregard for any life (including their own) to achieve their means.
You don't think that's how the terrorists see themselves? Look at israel in lebanon - despite clearly killing more innocents than hezbollah, they seem quite content to think of themselves as just and righteous. That's the nature of any conflict, each side always paints themselves in the best possible terms, no matter what the reality of the situation is.
We are certainly not celebrating the disgraced soldiers who murdered and raped Iraq women, while it seems in Islam they would be revered as heroes for the cause.
Oh come on, "In Islam?" Have you really bought into the propaganda so much as to believe that raping women would be considered heroic by any group of muslims?
That argument flies in the face of the sectarian violence occurring in Iraq right now, where they are killing each other randomly not for worshiping the wrong god, but for belonging to the wrong subtle subgroup within Islam.
They aren't killing each other for differences of religious opinion. Its simply tribalism. The "tribes" in this case are usually aligned along sunni/shia lines, but even then that's not the only defining characteristic. It certainly isn't any sort of proof that religious motivation behind terrorism.
I would make the argument that it is hurting the regular people of the middle east more, the ones the terrorists are supposedly fighting for. Since you have obviously thought about this, what do you feel the end goal of the terrorists are? Realistically, not "eradication of America" because that is simply not going to happen with a couple of AK47s and IEDs.
Really? A couple of boxcutters has caused trillions of dollars in damage to the US. That's the whole point of asymmetric warfare -- They hit our weak points exactly the right way and inflict orders of magnitude more damage than we do when we go after their strong points. Their goal isn't necessarily "eradication of America" but it is to get the west to stop meddling in their backyards.
Maybe al-queda underestimates the value to the west of maintaining the status quo, or maybe we are just over-estimating it.
Actions like this most recent one just play right into Bush's hands (and approval rating) by reminding people we are fighting an enemy that wants you dead for no reason other than to make a statement.
Which is one reason this "action" has been greeted with such skepticism. So far, the only action has been the arrests of some people and tons of publicity. We've seen similar "actions" recently like the the round-up in Miami that keeps looking more bogus with every new detail. this is a congressional election year in the US and the (ruling) Labor party in the UK recently suffered poor result in the May elections.
How does any of that change the ideological basis for most of today's current terrorism? IE, Islam, literally, submission.
Such twisted bullshit. The majority of muslims live in states that suffer either directly or indirectly from oppresive policies of the west. They happen to be muslim because in large part western oil addiction funds the evangelical equivalent of muslim missionaries.
The guy who just went on a shooting spree in a Jewish community center was apparently very well employed, and what came of it? Murder.
Holy shit, you only see what you want to see don't you?
The guy was constantly between jobs, had an engineering degree and had trouble keeping even unskilled jobs like retail clerk at home depot. That's not even close to "very well employed."
The guy was also baptized about a year ago. So much for your islam is a terrorist religion bullshit.
He was due to stand trial on charges of lewd conduct the thursday following the shooting. Considering how strict his family was, and his history of mental illness for which he had been prescribed lithium it is a lot more reasonable to conclude that he felt overwhelmed by life and decided to do something crazy instead.
Moreover, many US Muslims, despite having everything you wish to give terrorists, sympathize with or outright finance terrorists.
Convenient conjoing of two very disparate claims "sympathize" and "finance" -- most critical thinkers, muslim or not, "sympathize" because they understand what leads people to make desperate acts. But that's a far cry from finance and your blending of two is just an obvious display of bias.
We are fighting people who think it is the will of Allah to convert you to Islam, make you submit as a Dhimmi, or kill you.
The extremist salafists who believe that (the Qutbi) are a tiny minoritiy of muslims, they are even a minority of salafists. Your attempt to ascribe the motives of less than 0.1% of all muslims world-wide to the majority of muslims is disingenious at best. It's like pointing to the KKK and saying they represent the majority of christains.
Go crawl back in your hole you troll.
Come now. Are you so tweeked that a particular news outlet will find the prevention of hundreds of deaths to be a good thing that you're willing to ignore that it's a good thing for everyone that hundreds of people didn't get killed?
Its a damn fine thing that no brazilians were killed this time.
As for the hundreds of others who were not killed, they are going to have do better than a press campaign.
Explosives take a while to check. Especially if you are attempting to check every single liquid in an apartment for instance. Think of the hundreds of items that would need to be checked in your home.
And fortunately plenty of ordinary household chemicals can be combined to form explosives.
So, either way, we can pretty much count on them "finding" explosives no matter what.
They've pulled stuff that specific out of their ass in the past.
Indeed, manure is an excellent source of explosive materials.
If desiring to kill oneself and take out innocent people to make a political point about US presence in the middle east is not insane, I don't know what is.
It is easy to call someone insane if you get to make up the proof yourself. But even then, your proof of "insanity" sure is close to western ideals. Consider all the honor reserved for "fallen heroes" who "gave their lives defending their country." It's the same damn thing, just with an ameliorative spin instead of pejorative.
They have sane goals, but their methods are not. Their methods are cowardly and counterproductive.
Sure. Seems to me their methods work exceptionally well. The response to 9/11 has been to cause self-inflicted economic wounds in the trillions of dollars. The US military doesn't call terrorism "asymmetric warfare" for nothing, its a war and so far we are losing big time. Calling the enemy insane just plays into their hands.
Is it really too much to ask to read the article before making smug, smart-ass comments?
From the article:
Trying to use logic and reason to predict the actions of someone who is willing to blow himself up in a plane full of people is a dangerous game.
Because terrorists are just insane without any quanitifiable goals beyond killing, killing, killing!!!
They are all madman, hellbent on destroying the planet - do not attempt to understand their motivations, just deposit your civil liberties in the trashcan to your left sir.
That's a stupid excuse, though. They could always isolate the SGI-laden parts, LGPL the rest,
Hell, they could spend $5 and buy it from SGI who need every dollar they can get to make it out of Chapter 11 bankruptcy.
In fact, the "trade secret" and "intellectual property" argument is almost certainly the biggest reason for closed-source driver code.
It's the patents. They worry that by disclosing how they talk to the hardware they might provide sufficient proof that their hardware onboard the card violates some obscure patent that they may or may not be aware of. They figure that by not disclosing that information, they completely avoid the entire minefield of surprise patent litigation.
Effing lawyers (and yes, I do wish they would all get the EFF religion)
So what if Doubleclick (may they burn in Hell forever) knows that some guy visits Slashdot, ThinkGeek, and PennyArcade? I figure my privacy is fine as long as they cannot link the activity back to me personally.
The ignorance in this statement is so staggering that I had to respond and lose the moderations I've made on other posts to this story.
If you have any account online for which you have ever disclosed your true identity (like in order to make a purchase) then that account information can and will be cross-referenced with all of the tracking data that the tracking companies have been able to put together on you. They are expectionally good at finding those information leaks and putting 1 and 1 and 1 and 1 together to make 4.
Don't be lulled into a false sense of security even if you are the type to disable cookies. Cookies are not the only way Doubleclick and the like track people. Embedded images, tags, 3rd party style sheets with god knows what javascript, ip address correlation, etc. The bag of tricks is practically bottomless.
I religiously use the following extensions to Firefox, with almost every site fully locked out, and even then I still leak personal information like a seive:
NoScript
CookieSafe
AdBlock Plus
Reporters and editors should check with their local geek before becoming such avoidable pawns in a serious contest about the future of the USA.
Unless their local greek writes press releases, it's just too much work for them to bother.
If you are able to run malicious software in administrator mode, you can do anything at all, not just compromise signed code authorization. Heck you could replace the whole OS.
You have to wrap your head around "untrusted computing" -- its all about not trusting the owner and operator of the system. Sure you can run in admin mode, but you can't (normally) replace the whole OS because the new replacement parts won't be cryptographically signed by MS and so won't be allowed to execute.
Blue Pill's claim to fame is that it can turn off Vista's requirement for signed drivers - thus letting you execute arbitrary code in the kernel - which means that the MAFIAA can no longer trust MS to lock you out of your own computer.
Except it's already been patched.
Probably because she already published enough details of how it works over a month ago.
And, although he says its patched, the patch has not been released and so one must question how well patched - it would not be the first time MS released a patch to close front door that left the back door wide open.
My slightly-humble opinion is that Rutkowska's general approach can only be completely thwarted if the OS itself installs its own "hypervisor" kernel. I've got my fingers crossed that MS hasn't gone that far because if it has - it will make rehosting Vista under linux impossible and without such a hypervisor, it should be possible to thoroughly crack any DRM scheme that MS comes up with.
I am really looking forward to subscribing to "Urge" with its all you can download service for about a month and then freeing all the music to play wherever and however I want. I say, a company that lives by DRM dies by DRM.
Defining obvious will not be easy.
Uh, yes it is. He's already done it -- "if two parties came up with the same thing without knowledge of relevant details of each others' work,"
My metric is how many people find it useful. Making someone money is useful. Increasing someone's productivity is useful.
Ok, so your metric changes to suit your point. I won't play that game.
There might be some market for customizing software for a business, but it isn't huge.
Bingo. But poor understanding of the market. Depending on the year and who does the measurement, more dollars are spent on in-house corporate customization than are spent on shrink-wrap. Think about that for a second - shrink-wrap employs a programmer once and his employer sells the results of his work over and over again. Customization employs a programmer for each dollar spent. Even if customization was just a tenth of the market dollars, it would still employ more people than the shrink-wrap biz.
BSD is more popular than Linux. Mac OS X is based off of it,
Depends on what you mean by "based" - OSX is Mach with a BSD personality.
You might not consider it a victory because those are proprietary operating systems, but they wrote good software which a lot of people found useful.
But how many programmers madke money from it? That seems to be your own metric, and Apple has already reduced the size of that group to some subset of its own OS developers.
In the FSF's ideal world, there is no proprietary software. In such a world, programmers wouldn't be able to make money.
FALSE. That you believe the only way to make money from software development is by selling support just means you haven't been paying attention.
With such a high slashdot-id, I just assumed that you were a nube.
However, despite having a "more free" license than Linux, and often technically better implementations, the entire *BSD family has yet to garner a tenth of the vitality that Linux has. Can I prove that Linux's popularity over the BSD camp's is due to the GPL -- nope, but it is one very strong differentiator and Linus himself said, "Making Linux GPL'd was definitely the best thing I ever did."
Yet, the history of computing is absolutely stuffed with products that "got out the door" to serve a short-term need and then died. In fact, with a few notable, monopolistic exceptions, that's practically the story of the entire industry.
The FSF's contribution is not about code for things like gcc or emacs or hurd, it's about defining a social framework that complements human nature in order to encourage sharing by preventing any company from using another company's own work against them to gain an advantage.
Linus does engineering that organizes electrons -- the FSF does engineering that organizes nuerons. Excellence on one side can compensate for some deficiencies on the other, but a major blunder is probably fatal no matter what - e.g. all of the examples like vhs vs betamax that you've already mentioned plus thousands more.