I'm not sure if you're deliberately trolling or just confused. I think I agree with the poster who said that you're just an anti-GPL zealot. But in case you're truly misinformed, I'll give enlightening you a stab.
You conveniently ignore one very important point: patches against a big GPL codebase are WORTHLESS without the rest of that codebase.
How exactly is this a very important point? If you are contributing to someone else's code, you of course need to make your code available using a compatible license. For example, if I decide to contribute a patch to Mozilla or OpenSolaris, I will have to provide my work to them under a license compatible with their codebase, if I want them to be able to distribute it.
This has nothing whatever to do with the GPL. I'm not sure what your point is. If I decide to contribute a patch to say, some component of OpenBSD, I'll need to provide said patch under the BSD license. So this point trivially applies to every single license.
Yeah, I can write a patch to the linux kernel (or any other GPL project) and license it however I want. But for anyone to make use of my patch, they'll have to make use of GPLed code as well - what, you expect me to believe that my patch will cleanly apply to the BSD kernel?
Ok, now we're out in "What the fuck?" land. If you write a patch for the linux kernel, you're contributing to a GPL'd project. The only people that can benefit directly from this patch are people that use Linux. Presumably, if you're hacking the Linux kernel, you yourself use Linux. I mean, if I hack software package A, and improve it in some way, only people that use software package A are going to see the fruits of my labor.
Maybe you meant something like, you write something complex, say, a cryptographic algorithm, and submit it as a patch to the linux kernel. Then, the BSD guys (who also would like to have said algorithm in their kernel) are forced to reimplement it, instead of just taking your patch and hacking it.
Now, if that is what you mean (and I can't be sure, because that's not what you said) then you're wrong, quite simply. You can license your patch to the linux kernel under a BSD license. The linux guys can still use it. And so can the BSD guys. So again, it's just a matter of you (the author) choosing the license you want to distribute your code under.
Now, copyright law covers distribution of code only, so you could even write a patch to the Linux kernel and release it under some GPL-incompatible license -- no problem! But the Linux guys wouldn't be able to incorporate your patch, because then they would be distributing it under the terms of the GPL, which is incompatible with your license. But you could still make your patch available for free at some other source; and if a user downloaded your patch, they could apply it to the Linux kernel themselves and use it, and it would be completely legal, as long as they didn't try to redistribute your patch under the terms of the GPL.
It comes down to exactly what the GP said: the GPL prevents you from relicensing other people's code arbitrarily. But for your own code, you can license it however you want, and you can do this regardless of whether your code is a full product or just a patch. You can even distribute it under a bunch of different licenses, if it suits you. It's your code, you're free to license it however the hell you want.
If an author contributes code to a large GPL codebase, he is de facto required to GPL it. Sure he can release it under some other license; however, to make use of it, everyone else will have to apply it to the original GPLed code, which immediately brings it back under the GPL. The author has your so-called freedom in name only, but can never make use of that freedom; in my book, that means the author is just as restricted as the GPL.
I presume you're making a joke, but in case you aren't, soluble also means solvable. It's quite common to see it used that way in mathematical papers and journals.
It's majority rule. We have another term for that: tyranny. At one point not so long ago, the majority of Americans were convinced that black people were fit only to be used as glorified beasts of burden, to be bought and sold as they saw fit. Not much later, the majority saw them as unfit to vote, and not much later, unfit to eat in the same diner or sit in the same part of a bus as a white person. If you think that was long ago, maybe you should call up Rosa Parks and ask her what she thinks about it.
Recently, we have a huge number of Americans that said they voted for Bush for "moral reasons" (meaning, don't let those fags marry). Now, I'm not slamming Bush here -- intelligent Bush supporters didn't vote for him because they hate gays, presumably -- but my point is that many Americans feel so strongly about homosexuality that they got out and voted to make sure some gay people would never be allowed to marry.
The mob is fickle. It's great when you're in the majority, and not so good when you're not. We don't want mob rule.
Understand that in a "majority rules" government, without checks and balances, you have democracy and mob rule. They are, in fact, the same thing.
You know, I work in Semiconductors (or whatever field) and TSMC is my competitor. They're selling something, so screw'em. Ima go write up a DDOS program right now.
Besides, lest you forget "free speech" is not a universally protected right; further more, in all countries where it is a right (including the US) it is a restricted right. There are some things you just aren't allowed to say.
The internet, as everyone on Slashdot loves to forget, is not the US. What is legal and what is not on the internet is currently very gray. Because it is international, no one can agree on who controls the internet -- the only thing everyone can agree on is that it's not the other guy. So as a result, cyberspace is a sort of no-man's land. There is no justice, there are no laws here, at least none that can be universally applied.
In my opinion, it is precisely this lawlessness that makes the internet what it is -- it's the unregulated underbelly of society, exposed for all to see. Let the politicians have it, or the corps, and it will become AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy or MSN.
Do we want that? Fuck no. So resist the urge to take part in vigilante justice, no matter how deserved. Because large mobs instituting their will on others sound a lot like armies to me. And armies lead revolutions. And revolutions impose governments. We don't want one of those on the internet.
We certainly don't want Lycos deciding who gets DDOSed.
Remember, the internet, despite having been created by the US, is not under US jurisdiction. And the age of consent (for example) varies widely from country to country, being as low as 14 or even 12 in some nations (in fact, the age of consent is 16 in many US states -- I believe it's even 14 in South Carolina). So what constitutes kiddie porn, then?
I hate spam, but what makes the net a great place is its decentralized, anarchist nature. I'd rather get a few unsolicited ads for Viagra in my inbox than let some powertripping politicians regulate it.
I agree with the GP. This is setting a dangerous precedent.
NAT is not the same thing as a firewall. In particular, NAT would not help your set up here at all.
However, for the rest of your post, I agree completely. Mac OS X is very secure initially, but on UNIX based systems, any process can open a port above 1024. A firewall is needed to control what ports are accessible. (I think MacOS X comes with the firewall enabled, but I digress).
I assume you know all this, but let me take some time to explain to a reader who might not know why NAT doesn't do anything useful securitywise and basically only serves to annoy the hell out of anyone that is forced to use it.
See, NAT is a many to one mapping, and as every person who has taken algebra knows, many to one mappings are not invertible; so as a result, in the absence of port forwarding rules (not part of NAT), traffic outside the NAT cannot get past the computer (or little linksys router, or whatever) doing the NAT. This seems to provide security, but in fact, it doesn't really. It's better than nothing, perhaps, but there are a number of problems with it.
First, NAT is only designed to allow machines inside the network to access the outside of the network using only one IP address. So TCP/IP connections can still be made; it's just that they must originate on the inside of the network. So a compromised PC behind a NAT is still able, for example, to spam the universe.
How do they get compromised? Because when an exploit is passed to a computer, it doesn't matter who initiates the connection. If you open up your favorite chat program, file sharing program, or web browser, and said program has a buffer overflow or other security exploit, then the computer it connects to can still exploit it.
Now, obviously, the only way that you can prevent this is by not allowing internet connectivity at all, and this obviously defeats the purpose of having the router in the first place. This is why we say that no computer attached to the network can be guaranteed secure. But there are ways that you can fine-tune your security.
For example, you can block ports that you won't be using. There's no reason, for example, than any machine on the inside should be able to directly connect to machines on the outside on random ports. This helps a lot; it also ensures that (thanks to logging), a compromised machine on the inside of your network is quickly visible.
These features (logging, port forwarding, port blocking, etc) are not features of NAT. They are features of a normal firewall.
So, for example, in your NAT arrangement, you have machine A, machine B, and machine C, with IP addresses 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.2, and 192.168.1.3; and then you have machine R, which has two network interfaces, one (facing the LAN) being 192.168.1.4, and the other (facing the internet) something else, like 238.126.23.95 (I just made that up). It does NAT and also firewalls. Secure system, right? Looks good. Of course, if you wanted to put a webserver on both machine A and machine B, you'd need some wacky port forwarding rules, because to the internet, your whole network looks like just one computer: machine R.
Now let's look at how it's supposed to work. You have machine A, machine B, and machine C, as well as machine R; these have IPs 238.126.23.92, 238.126.23.93, 238.126.23.94, and 238.126.23.95, respectively. Machine R has a firewall (but no NAT). It's firewall ruleset prevents any data coming from the outside from entering the LAN, and further blocks unwanted traffic from exiting the LAN. It also logs stuff. In this way, it behaves exactly as NAT does -- it blocks incoming traffic. Except that it blocks the data because it's been told to, not because the non-invertibility of a NAT mapping forces it to.
It's identical to the NAT+firewall setup, and just as secure. So what did we gain by removing the NAT? Now I can run services on these machines, and mak
Lots of CS majors don't cope well with functional programming paradigms. In the old days (and at many tier 1 CS universities) Lisp or Scheme are still taught as introductory languages, which helps some.
Functional languages are very intuitive to math majors, and people who study abstract computer science (which is essentially discrete math). Concepts like currying, recursion, and the like make a lot of sense if you're used to the way mathematicians think.
I don't know Ocaml, but I do program in Haskell. I remember looking at the language as a freshman and finding it very confusing. By the time I'd taken graduate level math classes though, and was comfortable with functors and morphisms, lambda calculus and Haskell were not only a piece of cake, but incredibly intuitive.
Note that this way of thinking is (at least in my opinion) no more "intuitive" than procedural programming paradigms. It just depends on your background. I had some classmates that never groked programming until they were introduced to ML or Prolog.
Well, in my grandfather's case, he lives in a country that is rather generous with social security; and sound investment decisions when he was younger mean that he would probably live well even without these aids. He's French.
For poor Americans that won't get much help from Social Security, even though they probably paid into it for most of their lives, I agree, financial aid is necessary. But then, you don't need to live with your grandparents to support them financially, do you?
Understand that I'm not against your general view: that children should help parents. I think that's fair; as was mentioned previously, they take care of you when you can't take care of yourself, and you take care of them when they can't take care of themselves -- and throughout your lives, you help each other.
But understand that there are many ways to satisfy these laudable goals.
I think your ad homniem attack on the GP is in poor taste. I grew up in a family that moved around; I was raised on two continents and now live on a third. Being moved around as a child was hard, but I think that frankly I've lived a lot more than most people my age, and with experience comes maturity, common sense and open-mindedness. There were times when I hated my parents for their dynamic lifestyles -- but as I understand it, non-mobile kids hate their parents for forcing them to do things they don't want to do too, like cleaning their room or not wearing that dress to the prom, or whatever.
Now, I'm 25, I speak 4 languages fluently and am conversant in 6, am a citizen of no less than three different countries and have lived and worked all over the world. I'd love to take credit for these accomplishments, but who am I kidding? My parents did that for me, and its opened more doors for me than a xenophobic monoglot could possibly imagine. If that's bad parenting, man, I'd sure like to see good!
As for taking care of the elderly, I agree that this is sometimes necessary -- but only when the elderly are incapable of taking care of themselves. Assuming that just because someone is in their 80s they can't live on their own is agist and my grandfather, at least, would resent it.
Wait, you mean the internet and the web aren't the same thing?
Whoda thunk it?
They probably aren't including P2P, either... sometimes gift tells me I'm searching over a petabyte of data, but I don't know if that number is correct or not. Still, I'm quite sure it's in the same ballpark as 500TB.
Now, I don't use windows (at all) and in fact never have -- switched to Linux in 94 -- but I was under the impression that Windows doesn't seperate "focused" from "raised." Which would imply that covering the ad with notepad wouldn't work; you'd click on Opera and Windows would raise it, wouldn't it?
Now if you were running Linux, that would be a different story... but Notepad doesn't run on Linux (well, WINE has a version... but why on earth would you use that?)
If I'm wrong about Windows, I appologize -- I've only ever used it at the library.
Good post, but unfortunately, your baseball analogy, while good, doesn't reflect just how fucked up this situation is. Because a baseball is real property; therefore, if I throw it through your window, it has changed hands, and by giving you the baseball I have deprived myself of it. While calling this transfer "stealing" is still ludicrous, at least I can claim lost property.
But Intellectual Property, which is not actually property, is worse, because in transfering the seeds to you I have not been deprived of the genes in question. So a better analogy would be me hacking into your computer system, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to your files in the process, and installing a copy of MS office licensed to me -- and then reporting the infraction to MS, who sues the pants off of you for having an unlicensed copy. But but wait, it gets worse! I install said copy in such a way that the only way you can remove that copy is by deleting most of the rest of your files in the process.
Obviously, analogies that accurately underscore the injustice of this are hard to come by, because there really hasn't been anything so completely fucked up in a long time.
Oh, man, that's hilarious. I think that's the first time I've heard someone try to paint bush as liberal, and not as an authoritarian reactionary.
Don't start painting Bush & Co as "Enlightenment Liberals" because it's flaimbait and stupid. Simply recognize that Bush is calling himself conservative based on moral issues, not based on fiscal or political issues. Unfortunately, a fairly large number of american "conservatives" also identify themselves this way, and so he has a lot of popular support.
It sounds as though you need to vote Libertarian.
Anyway, "people have been doing this for thousands of years" can sometimes be a good argument and sometimes not -- ain't reality a bitch. For example, "People have been selling black people as slaves for thousands of years" is not a good argument, as I'm sure you'd agree -- and yet that wouldn't make you an "Enlightenment Liberal".
In general, there is no "one question" that can serve as a litmus test for conservativism (or any political -ism, for that matter). It's like Bush claiming that to be conservative, you must hate abortion and gays and be for prayer in school. It's patently stupid. It's general outlook that defines a conservative, not stances on specific issues.
Schizophrenia != Multiple Personality Disorder, just FYI. Schizophrenics often hallucinate, hear voices, and are generally psychotic.
I'm not exactly sure how the popular misconception that it was at all similar to Multiple Personality Disorder started, but that's completely wrong. As I'm sure you like being right, try to avoid using schizophrenia in this context. To a psychology geek, it makes you look as stupid as you would saying something like, "I bought a bigger hard drive because I was running out of memory."
The wikipedia entry provides a lot of information on this widely misunderstood condition. In particular, check out the signs and symptoms section, which gives a good overview of how Schizophrenics actually behave.
Conversely, the wikipedia entry on multiple personality disorder (now refered to as Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID), offers some information on what people with little or no exposure to abnormal psych tend to incorrectly presume is the defining characteristic of Schizophrenia.
Don't get the two confused, it makes you look stupid (or at least, ignorant).
It amazes me that you can have this attitude. Have you ever met women involved in CS or Engineering that can say that haven't felt "actively discouraged" in their field of choice?
I haven't. Never, not one. There aren't many women in CS, and every single one I have ever met has confessed that she's felt discriminated against, made to feel stupid, been hit on, and just generally treated differently from everyone else.
I suppose all these women are lying, eh? Just want attention, maybe? Oh, oh, I know, it's a gender-wide conspiracy! They're trying to get affirmative action-like benefits to lower the entry barriers into these fields, right?
You know, maybe you should use that oversized brain god gave you (I'm presuming it's oversized, because on Slashdot, heck, we're all above average when it comes to intellect) and think that maybe, just maybe, all the women that are complaining about being discriminated against or actively discouraged are doing it because, oh, I don't know, they've been actively discouraged?
I hate to rant, but honestly, sometimes people are so unforgiveably dense. Just look at how many base, sexist comments we get on Slashdot that get modded up. All those people -- the one telling the joke or making the crass remark, as well as all the people laughing at it -- are demonstrating behaviour that says to women, without any ambiguity, "you aren't welcome". Even giving you the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and saying that you never partake in such phillistine activities, you must admit that a sizeable number of geeks do.
So there you have it. Sexism. And you know what? Pretending it doesn't exist doesn't make it go away; it merely convinces those that partake in it that what they're doing doesn't constitute sexism or discouragement. Which is good, because most of us are good guys, and would rather not believe that we might be part of the problem when it comes to involving women in our field of choice.
But denial doesn't help anyone. It's time to get off this "everything that's PC is bullshit" kick, time to drop the "I'm a white male and I'm discriminated against" rant, and grow a pair. Honestly.
Hi. Just as a disclaimer, I don't care (about your dispute, that is.) But I feel it's necessary to point out that just because many countries that are demonstratably not "of the people" have used republic in their names doesn't make them republics.
If it did, then, for example, North Korea -- or the DPRK, as they call themselves -- would be Democratic, wouldn't it? After all, it is "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea". And East Germany, or, as it was actually called, the DDR -- die Deutsche Demokratische Republik -- would also qualify.
Of course, these countries aren't/weren't Democratic, and as any fool will tell you, just because a despotic regime calls itself free or democratic doesn't make it so. This is common sense.
So unfortunately, the widespread use of the term "Republic" by said regimes, like their widespread use of the term "Democratic", most probably qualifies as misuse, as as such proves nothing.
Now, I have no idea which of you is correct, but I wanted to point out that your argument is bunk.
Mozilla holding back developers? What? Mozilla represents, at best estimates, less than 5% of the browser market share. It doesn't hold anyone back. If some random feature like animated backgrounds doesn't work in Mozilla, it's a shame, but you can't honestly say it's holding anyone back.
Furthermore, proper alpha-transparency handling of PNGs allows people to make background-neutral images of say, anti-aliased text (my personal view is that images of text are evil, but I'm a geek, and my views are hardly representative.) So let's imagine for a moment that you actually wanted to have an animated background "on mouse over." You wouldn't be able to have, say, a stylized banner saying "My Site Name" or whatever superimposed on said animated background, because the lack of alpha transparency support in IE means that all images of text must be tailored specifically to one, non-static background.
Seriously, why on earth do you want animated backgrounds, anyway?
That having been said, if animated backgrounds aren't supported in Mozilla, and W3C standards suggest that they should be, it's a bug. File it. Unlike with some other browsers, it will most likely get fixed. Especially if, as you say, it's such a major impediment to modern web development.
So I don't use IE, right, but I have occasionally been called upon to develop webpages/cgi applications and such for my company, because I used to work in IT and they can't be bothered to hire someone with comparable knowledge to do it fulltime.
Anyway, I was chatting with my (non-technical) friend and we were bitching about work, and I was bitching about what a pain IE is when developing webpages. She was vaguely aware that there had been a Netscape at some point in time, but other than that I think she essentially qualified as one of those "there are browsers other than IE?!" people.
So when she asked me what was better, I said that I used Firefox. Never suggested that she convert, or anything. We had a few such conversations and I (without intending to) talked about random features it had that I couldn't live without. I'm not really hostile to IE, it doesn't live on my radar, and I never suggested that she convert.
But convert she did. On her own. Went and downloaded it, bless her. "Oh, I've been using Firefox lately," she said as if nothing had happened, when I mentioned some new IE vulnerability or other that was being abused.
That was maybe 6 months ago. Whenever she's presented with a new computer, by her own admission, Firefox is the first thing she downloads.
It made it easier for her when she got her new laptop -- a Powerbook G4, very nice -- because IE for Macs isn't supported anymore, and she wasn't fond of Safari (for whatever reason). Firefox on Mac OS X does look pretty sexy, I'll admit.
Personally, I'm a diehard GNU/Linux user. I don't care what other people use. I use Firefox because I like it. I've gotten a few people to switch, but never by telling them to switch, or even consciously trying to indirectly influence them. Honestly, if they want to use IE, that's fine with me.
But people switch, of their own accord. Maybe I just have intelligent friends, but I think there are two things at work here: one, Firefox really is a mature product, and frankly, it sells itself. Linux may be for geeks, but Firefox is already at a stage where anyone can use it, easily, with little trouble.
When I first switched to Linux -- must have been 94 or 95 -- I was elated by how cool it was, and I told everyone I could, and not surprisingly, nobody really listened to me. I know, I know, it's come a long way since then, but I think I learned early on that trying to play the "I'm a smart geek, you should listen to me, I know what's best" card doesn't influence people very well. Even if it is true.
People will switch, but they will do so much more readily if they feel like they've made an informed decision on their own. In the case of my friend, I made her curious (without intending to) and she tried it out. She liked it, she stuck with it. When she tries to get other people to use it, I hear her saying a lot of the stuff we all say: "It's more secure, it has tabs, etc, etc" but people often aren't very responsive, because no one likes being told what to do.
Slow and steady wins the race, and all that. Maybe I'm too old-fashioned.
Well, my Firefox crashed just the other day, on Debian GNU/Linux. I can't say one thing or another about the stability of IE, since I've never used it (switched to Linux when win95 came out).
But my point here is that your post is fanboyism. It seems to me that unlike a lot of MS-users, the OP actually gave Firefox a try, compared it to IE, and had a number of very specific things he didn't like about it. The guy who responded to him was able to correct some misconceptions he had, but a few remained. It seems he makes good points.
If IE crashes all the time (which is entirely possible, I don't use it, I wouldn't know, although when using it in computer labs and on other people's computers, it's seemed stable enough) then that sucks, but apparently this isn't something that bothers the OP enough to make him want to switch. His focus is obviously on privacy matters, and he feels that IE is a better fit for him than FF. Now, as I'm not as privacy concerned as he is (Linux keeps all my files in my home directory and doesn't scatter them throughout the system, as I'm told MS Windows does) I don't know how to address his points. I hope that someone out there does, because the fewer IE users out there, the more standard compliant the web will become.
But your post didn't address any of his concerns. You just suggested they weren't valid because IE crashes all the time. I think addressing his concerns directly would be more productive.
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I'm not sure if you're deliberately trolling or just confused. I think I agree with the poster who said that you're just an anti-GPL zealot. But in case you're truly misinformed, I'll give enlightening you a stab.
How exactly is this a very important point? If you are contributing to someone else's code, you of course need to make your code available using a compatible license. For example, if I decide to contribute a patch to Mozilla or OpenSolaris, I will have to provide my work to them under a license compatible with their codebase, if I want them to be able to distribute it.
This has nothing whatever to do with the GPL. I'm not sure what your point is. If I decide to contribute a patch to say, some component of OpenBSD, I'll need to provide said patch under the BSD license. So this point trivially applies to every single license.
Ok, now we're out in "What the fuck?" land. If you write a patch for the linux kernel, you're contributing to a GPL'd project. The only people that can benefit directly from this patch are people that use Linux. Presumably, if you're hacking the Linux kernel, you yourself use Linux. I mean, if I hack software package A, and improve it in some way, only people that use software package A are going to see the fruits of my labor.
Maybe you meant something like, you write something complex, say, a cryptographic algorithm, and submit it as a patch to the linux kernel. Then, the BSD guys (who also would like to have said algorithm in their kernel) are forced to reimplement it, instead of just taking your patch and hacking it.
Now, if that is what you mean (and I can't be sure, because that's not what you said) then you're wrong, quite simply. You can license your patch to the linux kernel under a BSD license. The linux guys can still use it. And so can the BSD guys. So again, it's just a matter of you (the author) choosing the license you want to distribute your code under.
Now, copyright law covers distribution of code only, so you could even write a patch to the Linux kernel and release it under some GPL-incompatible license -- no problem! But the Linux guys wouldn't be able to incorporate your patch, because then they would be distributing it under the terms of the GPL, which is incompatible with your license. But you could still make your patch available for free at some other source; and if a user downloaded your patch, they could apply it to the Linux kernel themselves and use it, and it would be completely legal, as long as they didn't try to redistribute your patch under the terms of the GPL.
It comes down to exactly what the GP said: the GPL prevents you from relicensing other people's code arbitrarily. But for your own code, you can license it however you want, and you can do this regardless of whether your code is a full product or just a patch. You can even distribute it under a bunch of different licenses, if it suits you. It's your code, you're free to license it however the hell you want.
I presume you're making a joke, but in case you aren't, soluble also means solvable. It's quite common to see it used that way in mathematical papers and journals.
It's majority rule. We have another term for that: tyranny. At one point not so long ago, the majority of Americans were convinced that black people were fit only to be used as glorified beasts of burden, to be bought and sold as they saw fit. Not much later, the majority saw them as unfit to vote, and not much later, unfit to eat in the same diner or sit in the same part of a bus as a white person. If you think that was long ago, maybe you should call up Rosa Parks and ask her what she thinks about it.
Recently, we have a huge number of Americans that said they voted for Bush for "moral reasons" (meaning, don't let those fags marry). Now, I'm not slamming Bush here -- intelligent Bush supporters didn't vote for him because they hate gays, presumably -- but my point is that many Americans feel so strongly about homosexuality that they got out and voted to make sure some gay people would never be allowed to marry.
The mob is fickle. It's great when you're in the majority, and not so good when you're not. We don't want mob rule.
Understand that in a "majority rules" government, without checks and balances, you have democracy and mob rule. They are, in fact, the same thing.
You know, I work in Semiconductors (or whatever field) and TSMC is my competitor. They're selling something, so screw'em. Ima go write up a DDOS program right now.
Besides, lest you forget "free speech" is not a universally protected right; further more, in all countries where it is a right (including the US) it is a restricted right. There are some things you just aren't allowed to say.
The internet, as everyone on Slashdot loves to forget, is not the US. What is legal and what is not on the internet is currently very gray. Because it is international, no one can agree on who controls the internet -- the only thing everyone can agree on is that it's not the other guy. So as a result, cyberspace is a sort of no-man's land. There is no justice, there are no laws here, at least none that can be universally applied.
In my opinion, it is precisely this lawlessness that makes the internet what it is -- it's the unregulated underbelly of society, exposed for all to see. Let the politicians have it, or the corps, and it will become AOL, Compuserve, Prodigy or MSN.
Do we want that? Fuck no. So resist the urge to take part in vigilante justice, no matter how deserved. Because large mobs instituting their will on others sound a lot like armies to me. And armies lead revolutions. And revolutions impose governments. We don't want one of those on the internet.
We certainly don't want Lycos deciding who gets DDOSed.
Illegal in what country?
Yours? Mine?
Remember, the internet, despite having been created by the US, is not under US jurisdiction. And the age of consent (for example) varies widely from country to country, being as low as 14 or even 12 in some nations (in fact, the age of consent is 16 in many US states -- I believe it's even 14 in South Carolina). So what constitutes kiddie porn, then?
I hate spam, but what makes the net a great place is its decentralized, anarchist nature. I'd rather get a few unsolicited ads for Viagra in my inbox than let some powertripping politicians regulate it.
I agree with the GP. This is setting a dangerous precedent.
NAT?
What on earth does NAT have to do with it?
NAT is not the same thing as a firewall. In particular, NAT would not help your set up here at all.
However, for the rest of your post, I agree completely. Mac OS X is very secure initially, but on UNIX based systems, any process can open a port above 1024. A firewall is needed to control what ports are accessible. (I think MacOS X comes with the firewall enabled, but I digress).
I assume you know all this, but let me take some time to explain to a reader who might not know why NAT doesn't do anything useful securitywise and basically only serves to annoy the hell out of anyone that is forced to use it.
See, NAT is a many to one mapping, and as every person who has taken algebra knows, many to one mappings are not invertible; so as a result, in the absence of port forwarding rules (not part of NAT), traffic outside the NAT cannot get past the computer (or little linksys router, or whatever) doing the NAT. This seems to provide security, but in fact, it doesn't really. It's better than nothing, perhaps, but there are a number of problems with it.
First, NAT is only designed to allow machines inside the network to access the outside of the network using only one IP address. So TCP/IP connections can still be made; it's just that they must originate on the inside of the network. So a compromised PC behind a NAT is still able, for example, to spam the universe.
How do they get compromised? Because when an exploit is passed to a computer, it doesn't matter who initiates the connection. If you open up your favorite chat program, file sharing program, or web browser, and said program has a buffer overflow or other security exploit, then the computer it connects to can still exploit it.
Now, obviously, the only way that you can prevent this is by not allowing internet connectivity at all, and this obviously defeats the purpose of having the router in the first place. This is why we say that no computer attached to the network can be guaranteed secure. But there are ways that you can fine-tune your security.
For example, you can block ports that you won't be using. There's no reason, for example, than any machine on the inside should be able to directly connect to machines on the outside on random ports. This helps a lot; it also ensures that (thanks to logging), a compromised machine on the inside of your network is quickly visible.
These features (logging, port forwarding, port blocking, etc) are not features of NAT. They are features of a normal firewall.
So, for example, in your NAT arrangement, you have machine A, machine B, and machine C, with IP addresses 192.168.1.1, 192.168.1.2, and 192.168.1.3; and then you have machine R, which has two network interfaces, one (facing the LAN) being 192.168.1.4, and the other (facing the internet) something else, like 238.126.23.95 (I just made that up). It does NAT and also firewalls. Secure system, right? Looks good. Of course, if you wanted to put a webserver on both machine A and machine B, you'd need some wacky port forwarding rules, because to the internet, your whole network looks like just one computer: machine R.
Now let's look at how it's supposed to work. You have machine A, machine B, and machine C, as well as machine R; these have IPs 238.126.23.92, 238.126.23.93, 238.126.23.94, and 238.126.23.95,
respectively. Machine R has a firewall (but no NAT). It's firewall ruleset prevents any data coming from the outside from entering the LAN, and further blocks unwanted traffic from exiting the LAN. It also logs stuff. In this way, it behaves exactly as NAT does -- it blocks incoming traffic. Except that it blocks the data because it's been told to, not because the non-invertibility of a NAT mapping forces it to.
It's identical to the NAT+firewall setup, and just as secure. So what did we gain by removing the NAT? Now I can run services on these machines, and mak
Lots of CS majors don't cope well with functional programming paradigms. In the old days (and at many tier 1 CS universities) Lisp or Scheme are still taught as introductory languages, which helps some.
Functional languages are very intuitive to math majors, and people who study abstract computer science (which is essentially discrete math). Concepts like currying, recursion, and the like make a lot of sense if you're used to the way mathematicians think.
I don't know Ocaml, but I do program in Haskell. I remember looking at the language as a freshman and finding it very confusing. By the time I'd taken graduate level math classes though, and was comfortable with functors and morphisms, lambda calculus and Haskell were not only a piece of cake, but incredibly intuitive.
Note that this way of thinking is (at least in my opinion) no more "intuitive" than procedural programming paradigms. It just depends on your background. I had some classmates that never groked programming until they were introduced to ML or Prolog.
Don't write much assembly, do you?
Well, in my grandfather's case, he lives in a country that is rather generous with social security; and sound investment decisions when he was younger mean that he would probably live well even without these aids. He's French.
For poor Americans that won't get much help from Social Security, even though they probably paid into it for most of their lives, I agree, financial aid is necessary. But then, you don't need to live with your grandparents to support them financially, do you?
Understand that I'm not against your general view: that children should help parents. I think that's fair; as was mentioned previously, they take care of you when you can't take care of yourself, and you take care of them when they can't take care of themselves -- and throughout your lives, you help each other.
But understand that there are many ways to satisfy these laudable goals.
I think your ad homniem attack on the GP is in poor taste. I grew up in a family that moved around; I was raised on two continents and now live on a third. Being moved around as a child was hard, but I think that frankly I've lived a lot more than most people my age, and with experience comes maturity, common sense and open-mindedness. There were times when I hated my parents for their dynamic lifestyles -- but as I understand it, non-mobile kids hate their parents for forcing them to do things they don't want to do too, like cleaning their room or not wearing that dress to the prom, or whatever.
Now, I'm 25, I speak 4 languages fluently and am conversant in 6, am a citizen of no less than three different countries and have lived and worked all over the world. I'd love to take credit for these accomplishments, but who am I kidding? My parents did that for me, and its opened more doors for me than a xenophobic monoglot could possibly imagine. If that's bad parenting, man, I'd sure like to see good!
As for taking care of the elderly, I agree that this is sometimes necessary -- but only when the elderly are incapable of taking care of themselves. Assuming that just because someone is in their 80s they can't live on their own is agist and my grandfather, at least, would resent it.
I would just like to say... High Strung. Best. Movie. Ever.
Didn't know you'd directed it, haven't seen your docs, but I'm definitely going to go see them now. Holy cow.
8 o'clock!
46.5671642 smoots. Tall building.
Google calculator link...
Not to be overly paranoid, but posts like yours are what that little "Post Anonymously" box is for. :)
Funny, I thought Reagan was president in the 1980s. Maybe you misspelled "big government"?
Wait, you mean the internet and the web aren't the same thing?
Whoda thunk it?
They probably aren't including P2P, either... sometimes gift tells me I'm searching over a petabyte of data, but I don't know if that number is correct or not. Still, I'm quite sure it's in the same ballpark as 500TB.
Now, I don't use windows (at all) and in fact never have -- switched to Linux in 94 -- but I was under the impression that Windows doesn't seperate "focused" from "raised." Which would imply that covering the ad with notepad wouldn't work; you'd click on Opera and Windows would raise it, wouldn't it?
... but why on earth would you use that?)
Now if you were running Linux, that would be a different story... but Notepad doesn't run on Linux (well, WINE has a version
If I'm wrong about Windows, I appologize -- I've only ever used it at the library.
Yes, and you have to have a lot of expertise and/or great brains to write English "good", too. Apparently.
Good post, but unfortunately, your baseball analogy, while good, doesn't reflect just how fucked up this situation is. Because a baseball is real property; therefore, if I throw it through your window, it has changed hands, and by giving you the baseball I have deprived myself of it. While calling this transfer "stealing" is still ludicrous, at least I can claim lost property.
But Intellectual Property, which is not actually property, is worse, because in transfering the seeds to you I have not been deprived of the genes in question. So a better analogy would be me hacking into your computer system, causing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage to your files in the process, and installing a copy of MS office licensed to me -- and then reporting the infraction to MS, who sues the pants off of you for having an unlicensed copy. But but wait, it gets worse! I install said copy in such a way that the only way you can remove that copy is by deleting most of the rest of your files in the process.
Obviously, analogies that accurately underscore the injustice of this are hard to come by, because there really hasn't been anything so completely fucked up in a long time.
Otherwise, great post.
Oh, man, that's hilarious. I think that's the first time I've heard someone try to paint bush as liberal, and not as an authoritarian reactionary.
Don't start painting Bush & Co as "Enlightenment Liberals" because it's flaimbait and stupid. Simply recognize that Bush is calling himself conservative based on moral issues, not based on fiscal or political issues. Unfortunately, a fairly large number of american "conservatives" also identify themselves this way, and so he has a lot of popular support.
It sounds as though you need to vote Libertarian.
Anyway, "people have been doing this for thousands of years" can sometimes be a good argument and sometimes not -- ain't reality a bitch. For example, "People have been selling black people as slaves for thousands of years" is not a good argument, as I'm sure you'd agree -- and yet that wouldn't make you an "Enlightenment Liberal".
In general, there is no "one question" that can serve as a litmus test for conservativism (or any political -ism, for that matter). It's like Bush claiming that to be conservative, you must hate abortion and gays and be for prayer in school. It's patently stupid. It's general outlook that defines a conservative, not stances on specific issues.
Schizophrenia != Multiple Personality Disorder, just FYI. Schizophrenics often hallucinate, hear voices, and are generally psychotic.
I'm not exactly sure how the popular misconception that it was at all similar to Multiple Personality Disorder started, but that's completely wrong. As I'm sure you like being right, try to avoid using schizophrenia in this context. To a psychology geek, it makes you look as stupid as you would saying something like, "I bought a bigger hard drive because I was running out of memory."
The wikipedia entry provides a lot of information on this widely misunderstood condition. In particular, check out the signs and symptoms section, which gives a good overview of how Schizophrenics actually behave.
Conversely, the wikipedia entry on multiple personality disorder (now refered to as Dissociative Identity Disorder, or DID), offers some information on what people with little or no exposure to abnormal psych tend to incorrectly presume is the defining characteristic of Schizophrenia.
Don't get the two confused, it makes you look stupid (or at least, ignorant).
It amazes me that you can have this attitude. Have you ever met women involved in CS or Engineering that can say that haven't felt "actively discouraged" in their field of choice?
I haven't. Never, not one. There aren't many women in CS, and every single one I have ever met has confessed that she's felt discriminated against, made to feel stupid, been hit on, and just generally treated differently from everyone else.
I suppose all these women are lying, eh? Just want attention, maybe? Oh, oh, I know, it's a gender-wide conspiracy! They're trying to get affirmative action-like benefits to lower the entry barriers into these fields, right?
You know, maybe you should use that oversized brain god gave you (I'm presuming it's oversized, because on Slashdot, heck, we're all above average when it comes to intellect) and think that maybe, just maybe, all the women that are complaining about being discriminated against or actively discouraged are doing it because, oh, I don't know, they've been actively discouraged?
I hate to rant, but honestly, sometimes people are so unforgiveably dense. Just look at how many base, sexist comments we get on Slashdot that get modded up. All those people -- the one telling the joke or making the crass remark, as well as all the people laughing at it -- are demonstrating behaviour that says to women, without any ambiguity, "you aren't welcome". Even giving you the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and saying that you never partake in such phillistine activities, you must admit that a sizeable number of geeks do.
So there you have it. Sexism. And you know what? Pretending it doesn't exist doesn't make it go away; it merely convinces those that partake in it that what they're doing doesn't constitute sexism or discouragement. Which is good, because most of us are good guys, and would rather not believe that we might be part of the problem when it comes to involving women in our field of choice.
But denial doesn't help anyone. It's time to get off this "everything that's PC is bullshit" kick, time to drop the "I'm a white male and I'm discriminated against" rant, and grow a pair. Honestly.
Hi. Just as a disclaimer, I don't care (about your dispute, that is.) But I feel it's necessary to point out that just because many countries that are demonstratably not "of the people" have used republic in their names doesn't make them republics.
If it did, then, for example, North Korea -- or the DPRK, as they call themselves -- would be Democratic, wouldn't it? After all, it is "The Democratic People's Republic of Korea". And East Germany, or, as it was actually called, the DDR -- die Deutsche Demokratische Republik -- would also qualify.
Of course, these countries aren't/weren't Democratic, and as any fool will tell you, just because a despotic regime calls itself free or democratic doesn't make it so. This is common sense.
So unfortunately, the widespread use of the term "Republic" by said regimes, like their widespread use of the term "Democratic", most probably qualifies as misuse, as as such proves nothing.
Now, I have no idea which of you is correct, but I wanted to point out that your argument is bunk.
With respect, animated backgrounds? What?
Mozilla holding back developers? What? Mozilla represents, at best estimates, less than 5% of the browser market share. It doesn't hold anyone back. If some random feature like animated backgrounds doesn't work in Mozilla, it's a shame, but you can't honestly say it's holding anyone back.
Furthermore, proper alpha-transparency handling of PNGs allows people to make background-neutral images of say, anti-aliased text (my personal view is that images of text are evil, but I'm a geek, and my views are hardly representative.) So let's imagine for a moment that you actually wanted to have an animated background "on mouse over." You wouldn't be able to have, say, a stylized banner saying "My Site Name" or whatever superimposed on said animated background, because the lack of alpha transparency support in IE means that all images of text must be tailored specifically to one, non-static background.
Seriously, why on earth do you want animated backgrounds, anyway?
That having been said, if animated backgrounds aren't supported in Mozilla, and W3C standards suggest that they should be, it's a bug. File it. Unlike with some other browsers, it will most likely get fixed. Especially if, as you say, it's such a major impediment to modern web development.
So I don't use IE, right, but I have occasionally been called upon to develop webpages/cgi applications and such for my company, because I used to work in IT and they can't be bothered to hire someone with comparable knowledge to do it fulltime.
Anyway, I was chatting with my (non-technical) friend and we were bitching about work, and I was bitching about what a pain IE is when developing webpages. She was vaguely aware that there had been a Netscape at some point in time, but other than that I think she essentially qualified as one of those "there are browsers other than IE?!" people.
So when she asked me what was better, I said that I used Firefox. Never suggested that she convert, or anything. We had a few such conversations and I (without intending to) talked about random features it had that I couldn't live without. I'm not really hostile to IE, it doesn't live on my radar, and I never suggested that she convert.
But convert she did. On her own. Went and downloaded it, bless her. "Oh, I've been using Firefox lately," she said as if nothing had happened, when I mentioned some new IE vulnerability or other that was being abused.
That was maybe 6 months ago. Whenever she's presented with a new computer, by her own admission, Firefox is the first thing she downloads.
It made it easier for her when she got her new laptop -- a Powerbook G4, very nice -- because IE for Macs isn't supported anymore, and she wasn't fond of Safari (for whatever reason). Firefox on Mac OS X does look pretty sexy, I'll admit.
Personally, I'm a diehard GNU/Linux user. I don't care what other people use. I use Firefox because I like it. I've gotten a few people to switch, but never by telling them to switch, or even consciously trying to indirectly influence them. Honestly, if they want to use IE, that's fine with me.
But people switch, of their own accord. Maybe I just have intelligent friends, but I think there are two things at work here: one, Firefox really is a mature product, and frankly, it sells itself. Linux may be for geeks, but Firefox is already at a stage where anyone can use it, easily, with little trouble.
When I first switched to Linux -- must have been 94 or 95 -- I was elated by how cool it was, and I told everyone I could, and not surprisingly, nobody really listened to me. I know, I know, it's come a long way since then, but I think I learned early on that trying to play the "I'm a smart geek, you should listen to me, I know what's best" card doesn't influence people very well. Even if it is true.
People will switch, but they will do so much more readily if they feel like they've made an informed decision on their own. In the case of my friend, I made her curious (without intending to) and she tried it out. She liked it, she stuck with it. When she tries to get other people to use it, I hear her saying a lot of the stuff we all say: "It's more secure, it has tabs, etc, etc" but people often aren't very responsive, because no one likes being told what to do.
Slow and steady wins the race, and all that. Maybe I'm too old-fashioned.
Well, my Firefox crashed just the other day, on Debian GNU/Linux. I can't say one thing or another about the stability of IE, since I've never used it (switched to Linux when win95 came out).
But my point here is that your post is fanboyism. It seems to me that unlike a lot of MS-users, the OP actually gave Firefox a try, compared it to IE, and had a number of very specific things he didn't like about it. The guy who responded to him was able to correct some misconceptions he had, but a few remained. It seems he makes good points.
If IE crashes all the time (which is entirely possible, I don't use it, I wouldn't know, although when using it in computer labs and on other people's computers, it's seemed stable enough) then that sucks, but apparently this isn't something that bothers the OP enough to make him want to switch. His focus is obviously on privacy matters, and he feels that IE is a better fit for him than FF. Now, as I'm not as privacy concerned as he is (Linux keeps all my files in my home directory and doesn't scatter them throughout the system, as I'm told MS Windows does) I don't know how to address his points. I hope that someone out there does, because the fewer IE users out there, the more standard compliant the web will become.
But your post didn't address any of his concerns. You just suggested they weren't valid because IE crashes all the time. I think addressing his concerns directly would be more productive.
But that's just my view. Feel free to ignore it.