Yeah, but there's been only 2 releases of windows since then, while there have been 7 releases of OS X.
The iteration cycle of OS X is faster. If you don't like it, then nobody forces you to buy it, stay with windows.
Also, a new version of OS X is something like 20 or 30 bucks, while a new version of windows is ten times that amount. There's little excuse to still be running OS X 10.1
It's not a story. Airbus is the one company I worked with that takes IT security actually seriously and is ready to spend considerable amounts of money, time and effort on getting it right.
As I'm not exactly alone with my understanding of "good", I do feel qualified to make that differentiation, yes.
And no, you should never trust people just because they are knowledgable. That is just one part of making the right decisions. There's a (fairly young) scientific discipline about decision-making, check it out, it's quite fascinating.
And seriously, "who are you hurting"? How about, uh... everyone? They're creating a surveillance state and you're actually asking who is being hurt?
The purpose of Free Software is not to fork it and create your own. The possibility is vital, but just like nuclear weapons, it works best if you have it but don't have to use it.
You can also print your own currency (technically - legally it is actually illegal in many western countries). The same problem: Convince others that it's worth anything.
Fiat currency is a strange beast. It is worth exactly what someone else is willing to pay you for it. A stable currency needs a large market. Someone paying you $10 for a banana won't change the price of bananas if there are millions on sale in thousands of food stores. But if there are only 3 on sale, the other two guys will much more likely change their price.
That's why micro currencies are bullshit. They are too volatile and too useless. If you have 1000 currencies, you are essentially back to the barter system problem that led to the creation of money in the first place: Finding someone to exchange with becomes a challenge.
The world can take another currency, no problem. And Bitcoin actually serves a purpose and closes a gap: It's a non-national currency, independent of politics, borders, governments and central banks. But that gap is closed now, and if you want to improve upon it, use something that has more value, not just the same thing with a different name. Because, you know, plugging the same hole three times doesn't work.
Your argument is pointless. You don't really know what the NSA does so you assume that almost everything it does is evil.
Wow, thanks for assuming so much about a guy you met on the Internet. Unfortunately for you, I know a little about the NSA, and I've even had personal contact with guys from the NSA back from the times when I contributed to SELinux (if you want to verify, my name is on the contributors list somewhere, can't be arsed to Google it for you).
The very problem with the NSA is that they are actually very good at what they're doing. But not everything they are doing is necessarily good. Those are two different meanings of the word "good". Note the word "not everything". I am quite aware that they also strengthened RSA back in the days and heck, they gave us SELinux and so indirectly I owe them because I got to travel to quite a few conferences with my SELinux talks.
But all of that is just distracting from the primary argument that is being made here, so I'll leave it at that.
I agree that an interstellar war is unlikely to a) happen and b) last very long. In all likelihood, if we meet any aliens out there, either they or we will be so technologically advanced over the other that you wouldn't call it a battle - much like a modern day army with air support and tanks meeting a group of stone-age hunters with axes.
But from a philosophical point of view, the "us vs. them" requires an intelligent, recognizable "other group". A volcano isn't. An alien species is. There's this thing called an "agent" in psychology that matters a lot.
And I don't mean that in a positive way. This is the first time I've seen where someone has actually expended some effort to write up something that seems convincing.
However, it is still full of holes. There are two very important ones that are hidden in plain sight, bold-faced lies said out straight so that most audiences won't even notice, much less question them.
The first is his "why didn't he reveal anything about the evil other guys? is he maybe working for them?" allegation, hidden in the two sentences
It may be telling that Snowden did not release [...] any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries, especially Russia or China [...]If it turned out that Snowden did give information to the Russians or Chinese
Well, doh, he didn't work for any russian or chinese intelligence agency during his career, so he did not have an inside view or access to classified documents in any of them. Insinuating otherwise is like complaining that Putin didn't fix the US healthcare.gov problem.
The second crazy-ass hole is that the NSA also did good. You find that a lot these days, apparently it's been given out as a party line.
Well, that is a dramatically misleading statement, not because it is wrong but because it misses the entire point. Allow me to illustrate:
I propose we create an agency similar to the NSA, let's call it the NCA - the National Crime-Eradication Agency. It will have a budget of a billion US$ and one simple task: Buy as many guns and ammo as you can get for that amount, and then drive into every big american city and gun down everyone they meet.
Like the NSA, they will successfully execute a death penalty on many, many murderers, rapists and other criminals who escaped detection or conviction. Even many whose crimes we didn't yet know about because the victims kept silent or were never found.
All in favour?
Of course not, it's a crazy scheme. Just like the NSAs "total surveilance so we detect a few bad apples" approach. Destroying the privacy of several billion people is not an adequate price to pay for capturing a dozen or even a hundred bad guys.
Sure it did get them some. So would carpet-bombing New York City. Success alone is a worthless measure without taking cost into account.
Apparently I wasn't clear. An outside, alien danger is essential in order to trigger the "us vs. them" instinct we humans all have. We are social animals that instinctively group up in the face of danger. That is why an outside danger would forge us together while inside dangers just split us further apart.
Yes, laying eggs somewhere else could improve the chances, self-sustaining space colonies is the way to try it more than generation ships, if any of them is ever possible. But that don't have a chance to happen with current culture where profit in the present is more important than having a future.
It really is very simple. If you sum up everything we know about human history and psychology, there is one basic conclusion and two basic paths we can take.
The basic assumption is that evolution has resulted in a species that prioritises short-term survival over long-term progress and reacts more strongly to outside dangers than to internal abstract goals.
The two basic paths we can take are a) find a way to re-program our minds, a proposal of uncertain results as we are talking about a self-modifying program that is known to be flawed at the start or b) we find an actual, serious, short-term outside danger like an alien species that wants to wipe us out.
I know nothing about this particular guy, but from what I learned about J.R.R. Tolkien, serious linguistics freaks often use invented languages to study patterns in language in a clearer form than available on living languages. Basically, it's a sandbox environment to play around with.
This, a thousand times. You especially don't battle them on their own turf, giving credibility not only to the idiot, but also to his idiot theme park.
...maybe they just have an engineer who convinced them to be early this time. If you had got a class A network back when they were basically given to anyone who so much as asked, you know?
That is actually factually true. I live in Germany, and former Stasi-Officiers are on record for saying exactly that in interviews after the Snowden leaks.
When you think of "naked women", you think photoshopped models. Go to the airport and look around, and this time try hard to not overlook all the women of no interest to you (age, with children, etc.) and also all the fat, bald men.
Now you have a much better mental image of what "everybody get naked" really means. If you're not puking yet, that is.
GUIs are walled gardens in that features available in one piece of software is not available to other pieces of software.
That is actually blatantly false. It appears true because most people who write GUI software don't give a flying fuck about interoperability, while UNIX commandline tools are mostly expected to work as filters, a concept that by itself guarantees interoperability.
But if you look at the OS X world, for example, where universal drag & drop is pretty much a reality, the same is true of the GUI. I can drag almost everything from almost everywhere to almost everywhere else and it'll just work.
Interoperability is not a feature of GUI or no GUI but of developers investing the effort to make it, or not.
Ok, everyone has to start somewhere, but really? You've just uncovered the cool commandline tools available on an operating system that has it's GUI added-on as an afterthought ?
It's a bit like discovering that Windows can be used with - you won't believe it - a mouse! And some tasks are just so much easier! Wow!
Seriously. Don't Ask Slashdot. Commandline tools are the bread and butter. Almost everything that's not Gnome or KDE (aka cheap-windows-rip-off) has commandline functionality. So asking such a broad question is guaranteed to give mostly useless answers. Ask (or better, yet: Google) for specific use cases and you'll find plenty of answers, usually several different tools that can do the job.
While the "competition über alles" meme is crowding out other concepts, there are still societies left where your career is a part of you, and not everything.
Yes, I understand what metaphors are for, in fact I've read a bit of scientific material on the subject as linguistics is a hobby interest of mine.
Which is why I believe it utterly fails as a metaphor. How many people have heard of the Nicene Creed? The chances that this makes it easier for a mainstream audience is next to nil.
I always knew trolls are stupid idiots, but even your trolling makes no sense - if my butt hurt, it makes no sense to rub something on my cheeks. Can we get some better trolls, please? These ones failed Biology 101.
It's "news for nerds", which means lots of stuff is not relevant to a mainstream audience, but I've not been coming here for 15 years because it's all drivel.
Then it failed, because as humor goes, most random YouTube videos are better.
If something intended as fun does not seem funny to you the best thing is to ignore it.
Why? I could, sure. Or I could not. Maybe I'm an idealist, but some days I think that if you tell the people who post bullshit nonsense on a sometimes interesting blog that they'll get the clue and it will improve.
So everything someone somewhat famous says after he's had a beer too many and is basically just goofing around with friends is newsworthy? Somehow, I doubt your basic assumption.
sk some college kids why they are studying there, and most will answer:
I need to get a college degree to get a job.
. . . not many will say:
I'm here to learn.
That's what you get when you base your entire society around competition and success - people focus on the end result and on victory. That's so blatantly obvious that I can't imagine it being news to anyone.
Slashdot Mirror
You need to ask /. for that?
Either, you delete it, or you put a standard "wrong address, return to sender" sentence on a macro and reply with that.
Yeah, but there's been only 2 releases of windows since then, while there have been 7 releases of OS X.
The iteration cycle of OS X is faster. If you don't like it, then nobody forces you to buy it, stay with windows.
Also, a new version of OS X is something like 20 or 30 bucks, while a new version of windows is ten times that amount. There's little excuse to still be running OS X 10.1
It's not a story. Airbus is the one company I worked with that takes IT security actually seriously and is ready to spend considerable amounts of money, time and effort on getting it right.
As I'm not exactly alone with my understanding of "good", I do feel qualified to make that differentiation, yes.
And no, you should never trust people just because they are knowledgable. That is just one part of making the right decisions. There's a (fairly young) scientific discipline about decision-making, check it out, it's quite fascinating.
And seriously, "who are you hurting"? How about, uh... everyone? They're creating a surveillance state and you're actually asking who is being hurt?
The purpose of Free Software is not to fork it and create your own. The possibility is vital, but just like nuclear weapons, it works best if you have it but don't have to use it.
You can also print your own currency (technically - legally it is actually illegal in many western countries). The same problem: Convince others that it's worth anything.
Fiat currency is a strange beast. It is worth exactly what someone else is willing to pay you for it. A stable currency needs a large market. Someone paying you $10 for a banana won't change the price of bananas if there are millions on sale in thousands of food stores. But if there are only 3 on sale, the other two guys will much more likely change their price.
That's why micro currencies are bullshit. They are too volatile and too useless. If you have 1000 currencies, you are essentially back to the barter system problem that led to the creation of money in the first place: Finding someone to exchange with becomes a challenge.
The world can take another currency, no problem. And Bitcoin actually serves a purpose and closes a gap: It's a non-national currency, independent of politics, borders, governments and central banks. But that gap is closed now, and if you want to improve upon it, use something that has more value, not just the same thing with a different name. Because, you know, plugging the same hole three times doesn't work.
Your argument is pointless. You don't really know what the NSA does so you assume that almost everything it does is evil.
Wow, thanks for assuming so much about a guy you met on the Internet. Unfortunately for you, I know a little about the NSA, and I've even had personal contact with guys from the NSA back from the times when I contributed to SELinux (if you want to verify, my name is on the contributors list somewhere, can't be arsed to Google it for you).
The very problem with the NSA is that they are actually very good at what they're doing. But not everything they are doing is necessarily good. Those are two different meanings of the word "good". Note the word "not everything". I am quite aware that they also strengthened RSA back in the days and heck, they gave us SELinux and so indirectly I owe them because I got to travel to quite a few conferences with my SELinux talks.
But all of that is just distracting from the primary argument that is being made here, so I'll leave it at that.
I understand that and argued it myself in several comments.
However, TFA explicitly focusses on their snooping activities having done good, so the argument is valid.
I agree that an interstellar war is unlikely to a) happen and b) last very long. In all likelihood, if we meet any aliens out there, either they or we will be so technologically advanced over the other that you wouldn't call it a battle - much like a modern day army with air support and tanks meeting a group of stone-age hunters with axes.
But from a philosophical point of view, the "us vs. them" requires an intelligent, recognizable "other group". A volcano isn't. An alien species is. There's this thing called an "agent" in psychology that matters a lot.
And I don't mean that in a positive way. This is the first time I've seen where someone has actually expended some effort to write up something that seems convincing.
However, it is still full of holes. There are two very important ones that are hidden in plain sight, bold-faced lies said out straight so that most audiences won't even notice, much less question them.
The first is his "why didn't he reveal anything about the evil other guys? is he maybe working for them?" allegation, hidden in the two sentences
It may be telling that Snowden did not release [...] any documents detailing the cyber-operations of any other countries, especially Russia or China [...]If it turned out that Snowden did give information to the Russians or Chinese
Well, doh, he didn't work for any russian or chinese intelligence agency during his career, so he did not have an inside view or access to classified documents in any of them. Insinuating otherwise is like complaining that Putin didn't fix the US healthcare.gov problem.
The second crazy-ass hole is that the NSA also did good. You find that a lot these days, apparently it's been given out as a party line.
Well, that is a dramatically misleading statement, not because it is wrong but because it misses the entire point. Allow me to illustrate:
I propose we create an agency similar to the NSA, let's call it the NCA - the National Crime-Eradication Agency. It will have a budget of a billion US$ and one simple task: Buy as many guns and ammo as you can get for that amount, and then drive into every big american city and gun down everyone they meet.
Like the NSA, they will successfully execute a death penalty on many, many murderers, rapists and other criminals who escaped detection or conviction. Even many whose crimes we didn't yet know about because the victims kept silent or were never found.
All in favour?
Of course not, it's a crazy scheme. Just like the NSAs "total surveilance so we detect a few bad apples" approach. Destroying the privacy of several billion people is not an adequate price to pay for capturing a dozen or even a hundred bad guys.
Sure it did get them some. So would carpet-bombing New York City. Success alone is a worthless measure without taking cost into account.
Apparently I wasn't clear. An outside, alien danger is essential in order to trigger the "us vs. them" instinct we humans all have. We are social animals that instinctively group up in the face of danger. That is why an outside danger would forge us together while inside dangers just split us further apart.
Yes, laying eggs somewhere else could improve the chances, self-sustaining space colonies is the way to try it more than generation ships, if any of them is ever possible. But that don't have a chance to happen with current culture where profit in the present is more important than having a future.
It really is very simple. If you sum up everything we know about human history and psychology, there is one basic conclusion and two basic paths we can take.
The basic assumption is that evolution has resulted in a species that prioritises short-term survival over long-term progress and reacts more strongly to outside dangers than to internal abstract goals.
The two basic paths we can take are a) find a way to re-program our minds, a proposal of uncertain results as we are talking about a self-modifying program that is known to be flawed at the start or b) we find an actual, serious, short-term outside danger like an alien species that wants to wipe us out.
I know nothing about this particular guy, but from what I learned about J.R.R. Tolkien, serious linguistics freaks often use invented languages to study patterns in language in a clearer form than available on living languages. Basically, it's a sandbox environment to play around with.
This, a thousand times. You especially don't battle them on their own turf, giving credibility not only to the idiot, but also to his idiot theme park.
...maybe they just have an engineer who convinced them to be early this time. If you had got a class A network back when they were basically given to anyone who so much as asked, you know?
That is actually factually true. I live in Germany, and former Stasi-Officiers are on record for saying exactly that in interviews after the Snowden leaks.
Uh... no.
When you think of "naked women", you think photoshopped models. Go to the airport and look around, and this time try hard to not overlook all the women of no interest to you (age, with children, etc.) and also all the fat, bald men.
Now you have a much better mental image of what "everybody get naked" really means. If you're not puking yet, that is.
GUIs are walled gardens in that features available in one piece of software is not available to other pieces of software.
That is actually blatantly false. It appears true because most people who write GUI software don't give a flying fuck about interoperability, while UNIX commandline tools are mostly expected to work as filters, a concept that by itself guarantees interoperability.
But if you look at the OS X world, for example, where universal drag & drop is pretty much a reality, the same is true of the GUI. I can drag almost everything from almost everywhere to almost everywhere else and it'll just work.
Interoperability is not a feature of GUI or no GUI but of developers investing the effort to make it, or not.
Ok, everyone has to start somewhere, but really? You've just uncovered the cool commandline tools available on an operating system that has it's GUI added-on as an afterthought ?
It's a bit like discovering that Windows can be used with - you won't believe it - a mouse! And some tasks are just so much easier! Wow!
Seriously. Don't Ask Slashdot. Commandline tools are the bread and butter. Almost everything that's not Gnome or KDE (aka cheap-windows-rip-off) has commandline functionality. So asking such a broad question is guaranteed to give mostly useless answers. Ask (or better, yet: Google) for specific use cases and you'll find plenty of answers, usually several different tools that can do the job.
Denmark, amongst others.
While the "competition über alles" meme is crowding out other concepts, there are still societies left where your career is a part of you, and not everything.
Yes, I understand what metaphors are for, in fact I've read a bit of scientific material on the subject as linguistics is a hobby interest of mine.
Which is why I believe it utterly fails as a metaphor. How many people have heard of the Nicene Creed? The chances that this makes it easier for a mainstream audience is next to nil.
I always knew trolls are stupid idiots, but even your trolling makes no sense - if my butt hurt, it makes no sense to rub something on my cheeks. Can we get some better trolls, please? These ones failed Biology 101.
Many, many times.
It's "news for nerds", which means lots of stuff is not relevant to a mainstream audience, but I've not been coming here for 15 years because it's all drivel.
Fun? :-)
Then it failed, because as humor goes, most random YouTube videos are better.
If something intended as fun does not seem funny to you the best thing is to ignore it.
Why? I could, sure. Or I could not. Maybe I'm an idealist, but some days I think that if you tell the people who post bullshit nonsense on a sometimes interesting blog that they'll get the clue and it will improve.
So everything someone somewhat famous says after he's had a beer too many and is basically just goofing around with friends is newsworthy? Somehow, I doubt your basic assumption.
sk some college kids why they are studying there, and most will answer:
I need to get a college degree to get a job.
. . . not many will say:
I'm here to learn.
That's what you get when you base your entire society around competition and success - people focus on the end result and on victory. That's so blatantly obvious that I can't imagine it being news to anyone.