The United States was originally formed by two groups; 1) settlers primarily in the Virginia that came for economic reasons who thought they would return to Europe and 2) religious "pilgrims" primarily in New England who came because either they were being persecuted.
The belief in moral superiority has pervaded US culture from its formation.
While I agree that there is valid criticism in this regard - I find that many Europeans love to criticize it without recognizing that they have there own problems in this area.
From the right-wing Skinheads, Neo-Nazis, National Fronts, anti-immigrants, etc etc etc The whole concept of the English Empire and the class system was based on this.
I work as a musician and see the same type of behavior by European tourists that they criticize Americans for.
And we don't even need to discus Japanese and Chinese practices of Cultural Superiority!
The believe in one's Cultural Superority is a Human trait that has existed a lot longer than 225 years and is pervasive ALL ACROSS THE GLOBE!
First of all - Pinochet wasn't abducted - he legally travelled to the UK and Spain filed for extradition. However in the case of Adolph Eichmann - who was abuducted by the state of Israel from a country without an extradition treaty (Argentina?). I believe this was upheld in International Law - so in the case of "Crimes Against Humanity" it would be legal to abduct the defendant.
But for your point - yes. If Hussein could argue that someone committed a "crime" against his citizens - he should be able to file extradition for the defendant. But Iraq would have to have a valid extradition treaty with that country (which I doubt).
Then Iraq would have to argue that the crime was one recognized under International Law. In the case of the bombings or other actions during the Gulf War (and the embargo hence); He wouldn't have a case. The US (and allied countries) filed resolutions through the United Nations - so it would be difficult to argue that a crime was committed.
Lastly it would have to be argued that the defendant could receive a fair trail in the country to be extradited to. There is no doubt that Spain is such a country and Iraq is not - so under this issue - the defendant could probably block extradition...
You are obviously ignorant (I don't mean that pejoratively) of the crimes that Pinochet was accused of. Among other thing; basically ordering the murder of journalists who reported unfovorably on his policies...
Pretty ironic considering that Elvis basically "borrowed" his style from many black musicians...
Elvis fans - please don't flame me for this - I like Elvis too - even played in a the back-up band for an Elvis impersonator in college (there are worse ways of earning beer money!)
That's the stupidest comment I've ever heard. I guess by that Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is out of date- I mean after all it was written in 1776 and Italian history continued after that...
Any historical text is valid (and "up-to-date" as long as the points and conclusions it draws are still valid.
Dan Sniderman Consultant BA - History 1984 (I guess I'm out-of-date now too!)
You're wrong here. It's still against the law. If you have a product and you include crypto - even crypto written by your third-country programmers - and include THEIR code in your app; it's against the law to export it.
The only way it's illegal would be for you to design your app where the customer can install the crypto routines AFTER they install your app.
You have to design your app to allow this; it may be less efficient; and the three-letter-agencies (who are behind this gov't policy) are counting on the fact that many if not most of your customers either will be too lazy or ignorant to actually do this.
I believe the company I used to work for (and now consult for) is a pretty "typical" corp (and outside the tech industry)
They would NEVER take that approach. They require extensive in-house testing before they apply any fix. They would never consider putting patches in weekly - and no way in hell would they have patches going on automatically from an ftp server. They will install a "hot-fix" type thing for a "known" problem - os if this test was a "real-life" type problem - it would be in response to the "actual" hack.
[This is pretty hypothetical of course - because they use a third-party to host their public (outside-of-the-firewall) web servers (GTE I think). Security of course becomes the vendor's responsiblity.]
They just recently put SP5 on the development servers migrating them soon.
I'm not sure how they are patching their Linux Servers (they have a few - formerly used a LOT of AIX boxes - but after a recent merger are going Sun) - I would expect they would probably wait until the next release came out for their Distribution (I would assume Red Hat will include that fix in their next distro..
I found the article and test very intesting. I don't buy the conspiracy theory at all. IMHO the test is a valid one - what would the experience by of a "typical" Corporate type user who sets up a web server.
If you read the article about the test on the box - they go to great lengths to stress that this test doesn't say that NT is better or more secure than Linux.
The article closes with an interesting point - about security through obscurity...
(From their web page) "Our problems do bring up some of the issues with deploying open source software. We have no doubt that had the hacker that compromised our system not had access to the source of our scripts it would have been impossible for him to get in. However our scripts weren't fully open source and thus not fully open to peer review. However peer review only matters if smart people are looking at the code, and the question of security via obscurity still persists."
Did anyone actually look at the article? He is basing the "immenent death of Cobol" on a study purely based on job postings at www.dice.com
I personally don't think that is the single, definitive source for determining the future of Programming Languages. Not to mention - it shows a very slight decline on the number of job posting in Cobol. It's not valid to say - because the deman is declining it is going to zero...
I used COBOL for a long time - I know it very well. While I have little desire to do any more Cobol programming or maintenance in my life (althought I probably will)there is definitely a place for it and it's not going away.
Good programmers know about "the right tool for the job". Most bad programmers I know are ones who only know one language and think that is the best solution for every problem...
Slashdot Mirror
(Sorry couldn't resist)..
Fuzzbone
The United States was originally formed by two groups; 1) settlers primarily in the Virginia that came for economic reasons who thought they would return to Europe and 2) religious "pilgrims" primarily in New England who came because either they were being persecuted.
The belief in moral superiority has pervaded US culture from its formation.
While I agree that there is valid criticism in this regard - I find that many Europeans love to criticize it without recognizing that they have there own problems in this area.
From the right-wing Skinheads, Neo-Nazis, National Fronts, anti-immigrants, etc etc etc The whole concept of the English Empire and the class system was based on this.
I work as a musician and see the same type of behavior by European tourists that they criticize Americans for.
And we don't even need to discus Japanese and Chinese practices of Cultural Superiority!
The believe in one's Cultural Superority is a Human trait that has existed a lot longer than 225 years and is pervasive ALL ACROSS THE GLOBE!
First of all - Pinochet wasn't abducted - he legally travelled to the UK and Spain filed for extradition. However in the case of Adolph Eichmann - who was abuducted by the state of Israel from a country without an extradition treaty (Argentina?). I believe this was upheld in International Law - so in the case of "Crimes Against Humanity" it would be legal to abduct the defendant.
But for your point - yes. If Hussein could argue that someone committed a "crime" against his citizens - he should be able to file extradition for the defendant. But Iraq would have to have a valid extradition treaty with that country (which I doubt).
Then Iraq would have to argue that the crime was one recognized under International Law. In the case of the bombings or other actions during the Gulf War (and the embargo hence); He wouldn't have a case. The US (and allied countries) filed resolutions through the United Nations - so it would be difficult to argue that a crime was committed.
Lastly it would have to be argued that the defendant could receive a fair trail in the country to be extradited to. There is no doubt that Spain is such a country and Iraq is not - so under this issue - the defendant could probably block extradition...
You are obviously ignorant (I don't mean that pejoratively) of the crimes that Pinochet was accused of. Among other thing; basically ordering the murder of journalists who reported unfovorably on his policies...
Pretty ironic considering that Elvis basically "borrowed" his style from many black musicians...
Elvis fans - please don't flame me for this - I like Elvis too - even played in a the back-up band for an Elvis impersonator in college (there are worse ways of earning beer money!)
That's the stupidest comment I've ever heard. I guess by that Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" is out of date- I mean after all it was written in 1776 and Italian history continued after that...
Any historical text is valid (and "up-to-date" as long as the points and conclusions it draws are still valid.
Dan Sniderman
Consultant
BA - History 1984 (I guess I'm out-of-date now too!)
You're wrong here. It's still against the law. If you have a product and you include crypto - even crypto written by your third-country programmers - and include THEIR code in your app; it's against the law to export it.
The only way it's illegal would be for you to design your app where the customer can install the crypto routines AFTER they install your app.
You have to design your app to allow this; it may be less efficient; and the three-letter-agencies (who are behind this gov't policy) are counting on the fact that many if not most of your customers either will be too lazy or ignorant to actually do this.
Actually - it was the state of Indiana. When legendary Chicago columnist Mike Royko lampooned them in his column they quietly repealed the law..
I believe the company I used to work for (and now consult for) is a pretty "typical" corp (and outside the tech industry)
They would NEVER take that approach. They require extensive in-house testing before they apply any fix. They would never consider putting patches in weekly - and no way in hell would they have patches going on automatically from an ftp server. They will install a "hot-fix" type thing for a "known" problem - os if this test was a "real-life" type problem - it would be in response to the "actual" hack.
[This is pretty hypothetical of course - because they use a third-party to host their public (outside-of-the-firewall) web servers (GTE I think). Security of course becomes the vendor's responsiblity.]
They just recently put SP5 on the development servers migrating them soon.
I'm not sure how they are patching their Linux Servers (they have a few - formerly used a LOT of AIX boxes - but after a recent merger are going Sun) - I would expect they would probably wait until the next release came out for their Distribution (I would assume Red Hat will include that fix in their next distro..
I found the article and test very intesting. I don't buy the conspiracy theory at all. IMHO the test is a valid one - what would the experience by of a "typical" Corporate type user who sets up a web server.
If you read the article about the test on the box - they go to great lengths to stress that this test doesn't say that NT is better or more secure than Linux.
The article closes with an interesting point - about security through obscurity...
(From their web page)
"Our problems do bring up some of the issues with deploying open source software. We have no doubt that had the hacker that compromised our system not had access to the source of our scripts it would have been impossible for him to get in. However our scripts weren't fully open source and thus not fully open to peer review. However peer review only matters if smart people are looking at the code, and the question of security via obscurity still persists."
From what I've read - hotmail back end database stuff does in fact run on solaris - but the front end user web servers etc run on FreeBSD
FB
Did anyone actually look at the article? He is basing the "immenent death of Cobol" on a study purely based on job postings at www.dice.com
I personally don't think that is the single, definitive source for determining the future of Programming Languages. Not to mention - it shows a very slight decline on the number of job posting in Cobol. It's not valid to say - because the deman is declining it is going to zero...
I used COBOL for a long time - I know it very well. While I have little desire to do any more Cobol programming or maintenance in my life (althought I probably will)there is definitely a place for it and it's not going away.
Good programmers know about "the right tool for the job". Most bad programmers I know are ones who only know one language and think that is the best solution for every problem...
Dan