When I was a student at UTS in Sydney they used blackboard for discussion boards for some subjects. Just getting to the discussion boards was a nightmare - the interface was so complicated and badly laid out it would give you a headache just trying to work out where anything was. It looked like a classic example of building one big monolithic super-application that tries to tie together functions better done by several seperate apps running off the same database.
A year or 2 a ago I heard that WebCT had caused a major disaster at the Uni of Wollongong. The UOW was/is completely reliant on that system - all lecture notes, assignments, grades etc. are recorded and made available using webct. One of my friends who goes there told me that their whole WebCT system had crashed and that no-one could access anything. Apparently in the end some people had to be given estimated marks on some subjects/assessments because they couldn't get the data back. I also heard that the 'database' that WebCT ran off at the time was a multi-gigabyte CSV file!! Not sure how true that is.
Re:gaim works for me, but loses ground from here
on
Linux Instant Messengers
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Why do these tired old Linux-is-hard-to-install-software trolls keep getting modded up on slashdot?
All grandma has to do on Mandriva is software->configuration->packaging->Install Software, type GAIM and click install. Ubuntu, Suse, Linspire etc. all have similar Install systems that are just as easy.
No worse than trying to get her to goto gaim.sf.net, find and download the 'Windows Installer', find where she downloaded it, double-click it, click next, agree to this, choose an install location, choose optional components etc.
The good thing about the Linux was is when she runs the update program next (or turns on automatic updates) she will get the latest Gaim, or at least the backported update to fix that latest security hole they found in it, along with all the other programs installed on her machine.
He keeps insisting that software can be made to be almost perfect, yet backs his arguments up with absolutely nothing. Where's the proof? examples? What about realistic estimates of how much this will cost compared to present software development?
This whole 'guaranteed software' thing seems like a troll to restrict or get rid of open source software. Its a bit like software patents in that its pushed by big software companies because they know that it will mean that nobody can develop software without a multi-million dollar law-suit fund to back them up. There's no doubt many lawyers salivate at the idea of being able to successfuly sue someone for the simple act of producing a piece of software.
Also the car analogy is a fallacy. Cars sold to consumers are heavily regulated because if something goes wrong it will likely kill or seriously injure someone. If something goes wrong with consumer computer equipment its simply a matter of inconvenience - 'oh shit I lost my essay, I'll have to write it again' and often the consumer contributed to the problem by not using the computer properly, eg. 'maybe I should have saved my essay sometime in the last 4 hours'. At no time is life, limb or property in danger from a crashing PC.
Computers used in important tasks (eg. hospitals, nuclear plants etc.) are a different matter and are treated differently. They can pay the big bucks required for an integrated, well tested, reliable system
First, let's understand the nature of the space program. The goal was to get to the moon. Full stop. If they could do that without researching computers, composites, insulation, etc., they would have. The spillover to humans is therefore necessarily coincidedantal, because that is not the goal, while the benefits to humans in for-profit research cannot be coincidental because that was the goal.
This makes no sense. If the research is for-profit then that is the goal - to turn a profit. Any 'benefits to humans' are 'necessarily coincidental' if that's what you want to call it.
How does the government know what theoretical research to engage in? If entrepreneurs didn't regard it as a good use of scarce resources, government's entrance doesn't change that; it merely causes this waste to actually happen, on someone else's dollar.
That's exactly the point. Entrepreneurs only invest in research that will turn a profit within the next few years. Governments can conduct research that has a far longer time frame for turning a useful product.
As for the productive efficiency of government research, all I have to say is $500 toilet seats and $80 hammers. Imagine how much they overspend on things for which there is no comparable market!
Exactly - they're hopeless at consumer products. But government-funded research has produced things like the computer, jet engine and radar. None of those was a consumer or business product but they served the aim of the original research well - eg. the first computers helped break German codes in WW2 which gave the allies a massive boost. It then took for-profits to capitalise on this and make it into something usable by consumers and business.
Finally, learn the difference between direct and indirect. If you research a way to get to the moon and stumble up GPS, that's indirect. if you research a positioning system and get GPS, that's direct.
You need to learn that scientific research does not produce single-use, compartmentalised technologies. Researching a way to navigate using radio waves to get to the moon does not stumble-up anything, it produces a radio-nav system that can have many uses.
I don't see the difference between "we need a way to navigate to the moon, here's funding to develop a radio nav system" or "we need a way to precisely locate and easily navigate our troops, aircraft, vehicles and bombs in a war, here's money to develop a nav system" or "people would like an easy to use nav system that tells them exactly where they are at any time, here's funding to develop one". Its all to meet the same human need - navigation and any technology developed in one field (eg. military) can just as easily be used in another field (consumer products, space, whatever).
Or is there some aspects of the system that aren't GPL and can't be uploaded?
Yep. The powerpack versions (either the full DVD or 7 CD set) contain closed-source software and aren't redistrutable. The 4CD version (1 more than the publicly available download version) that's available to the lowest level of club membership should be alright though.
As always with Mandrake all the software available in the powerpack, except the closed-source stuff, and more is available through the mirrors listed at http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
Don't say "The space program was a good idea because it gave us more and better tech than would have otherwise gotten" because it didn't. Instead say "The space program was a good idea because the benefits to the people who wanted a man on the moon far exceeded the costs to those who didn't want it" or something like that. And please, understand the difference.
The space program is good for both reasons - exploration of new frontiers and development and improvement of tech. Do you know what a futures market is? It's this cool deal where profit-seeking investors intertemporally allocate goods so that they're never consumed too quickly, depriving future generations. They make it so that if goods are really in danger of running out, we'll know 20-30 years in advance, in which case it will be profitable for someone to go mine an asteroid. Remember, governement doesn't *create* resources; it redirects them. If it would be a loss for the private sector to harvest some resource, it will be for the government as well; the only difference is that rather than investors putting their own money on the line, government officials put everyone else's money on the line.
Markets only really look a few years forwards into the future. If something isn't profitable in 5 years then its not going to attract investment. One day when we mine asteroids it will (and probably should be) done by private companies but it takes government to lay the foundation for that with a space program. The capability and technologies for mining asteroids don't just appear overnight, nor can they be fully developed within the short time frame that markets respond to.
Anyway the point still stands that the space program is satisfying a 'human need' here by laying the foundations for a future mining industry.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. NASA was pursuing the end of getting to the moon. Any benefit to real, actual people not trying to get to the moon was coincidental. Again, say what you mean. If you think the space program was a good idea because it produced aweseome blankets, then you should just advocate government funding of awesome blankets! Don't cloak endorsement of satsifaction of human non-desires (beating the Ruskies) in endorsement of awesome blankets.
You can't get to the moon whithout a lot of research in technology, and all of this will naturally have significant uses outside the space program. The technological improvements produced by the space program effort are no more 'coincidental' than the technolofical improvements produced by research aimed at profit.
Wrong again, the research satisfied human needs by *coincidence*. That's far less efficient that researching to directly satisfy human desires.
This is where you're wrong. NASA has the same 'human desires' as any other organisation. For example they need to research faster computers to manage their extremely complex space program in the same way that your business needs faster, better computers to allow more efficient management of resources and automation of tasks. Or the need to develop better insulation to protect their astronauts from extreme conditions, just like people on earth need protection from extreme conditions.
Why is research done in the space program less efficient? The challenge of getting to the moon or whatever is purely a technical one, so indeed the whole space program is in fact one big R&D excercise. As I've already pointed out any technologies improved in this process can't help but have significant practical uses in industry and even in consumer products.
If you want the government to fund research specifically intended to help people, say so. Don't advocate research that helps them by coincidence.
The space program does help people and it does so directly. There's nothing coincidental about the technological improvements that came out of it, they are the focus of the program. They may not be directly focused at consumer products but that is the job of i
In my post, I specifically showed how the spinoff arguments don't hold up to logic. At the beginning of the space program, entrepreneurs were researching better ways to satisfy human desires. Then the government diverted resources from this activity to another activity, which indirectly led to the satisfaction of some human desires. You're claiming that this diversion *from* satisfying human desires... *helped* satisfy human desires?
Your whole argument is based on these 'human desires' yet you haven't defined them anywhere. The fact is that on the whole human beings have always had an appetite for exploration and pursuing new knowledge, pushing new frontiers and things like that. The space program directly satisfies that. More importantly though human beings have an undeniable desire for more natural resources to provide for their material needs and wants. Mining asteroids might be decades away still but it is essential since we simply don't have enough mineral reserves on earth for long term use by +6 billlion people. The space program directly meets this need too.
Anyway all the inventions and technological improvements developed during space programs or war or whatever were developed to satisfy human desires too. The improvements in computers made during the space program were directed at satisfying human desires. NASA has the same need for computers as businesses and the wider population do - to allow automation and rapidly crunch through complex calculations. Or for example the improvements in insulation made necessary by the extremes in temperature in space have found use for exactly the same purpose in the wider world - for example using 'space blankets' to keep body heat in extreme conditions.
Almost all research funding is directed by practical considerations, wether that be to make money (the most common), preserve national pride or develop weapons for war. If the research didn't meet human needs then we wouldn't have any of the technologies we do today.
My understanding is that the 1918 flu died out completely by 1920 or 1921 and no modern human flus are known to be related (corrections are welcome, if you have information on this)
From TFA: "Like the 1918 virus, the current avian flu in Southeast Asia occurs naturally in birds. In 1918, the virus mutated, infected people and then spread among them" ""The effort to understand what happened in 1918 has taken on a new urgency," said Taubenberger, who led the gene-sequencing team." "The three new segments appear to be crucial in explaining how the bird-based virus became adapted to humans, Taubenberger said.
Tumpey also confirmed the 1918 virus's avian-like characteristics by injecting it in fertilized bird eggs. It killed the eggs, just like the Asian bird flu does. Other modern-day flu strains that are human-based don't kill fertilized bird eggs, he noted."
The whole point of this was to help understand the current H5NI bird-flu strain.
The situation's a little more complex than that. The UN doesn't consider Taiwan a seperate nation because its not a UN member, because China has used their veto power in the security council to keep them out. The US may not officially refer to Taiwan as a seperate country but at the same time they state in no uncertain terms they will fight to keep it out of the hands of Beijing should they attack.
This includes track and sector editors, secure deletion and shredding programs, easy formatters
All of these already exist on Linux.
registry and log file editors
Linux has no registry and it already has log file viewers (and I don't just mean a text editor but proper GUI log file viewers)
and secure deleters, internet cookie and intrusive spyware secure deleters, obsessive 'history' shredders
Once again it has all this. A secure delete program is installed by default on most distros. Firefox and konqueror can be used to clean their history records - why do you need an external program to do this? Also you can easily point your secure delete program at the.mozilla or.kde directories if you want to secure delete it.
The reason that the secure delete option isn't in the KDE GUI anymore (it used to be) is that on journaling file systems it gives a false sense of security - the data you've just securely deleted may very well still be in the journal. This is the same as on NTFS file systems, which is something all those shareware 'secure' delete programs will neglect to go into detail about. Secure delete should work however on the non-journaled FAT32 and ext2 file systems.
we complained for so long about how far behind the rest of the world we were when it came to broadband, but it now looks like we're really catching up
Apparently New Zealand has had this for years which shows that once again we are just catching up thanks to Telstra's monopoly. And no Telstra your usual 'we have to charge so much for data because Australia is so remote' arguments don't work here - New Zealand is even more remote from the rest of the world and has an even smaller population to support the infrastructure.
Umm Limewire itself is open source (GPL http://www.limewire.org/gnu.shtml) and as well as that it runs on the Gnutella protocol which is also open source. The fact that Limewire has a company behind it than can be the target of lawsuits is irrelevant. If they get sued out of business or put too many restrictions on it the project will just be forked by the community and they'll be in the same boat as eMule and Bittorrent.
Actually geosynchornous orbit is around 36000KM up from the surface (~22000 miles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit) so the 62,000 miles isnt quite even. I wonder why they need it to be longer from the geosynchronous point?
If you have or would like to set up an online gaming operation, and want a regulated and secure environment that has tight, but not rediculous, gaming regulations
Maybe they should rename themselves 'The Federal Republic of Slashdot'. Not only are they tolerant to Internet Gambling and P2P operations but they appear to be the first country to have slashdotese as their national language.
It'd be good if users had a choice - there was a good way to make a package that installed on all Linux distros, perhaps using autopackage, so that people who wanted the latest-and-greatest of a particular Linux app could just install it.
I'm a big fan of Linux's package management systems - it makes it easy for people who don't/cant'/can't be bothered managing their own software installs. Eg. I can just go into MandrakeUpdate and update all the software on my machine, I can even script it to run every night so I never have to even touch the machine and have it always keep up to date.
On the other hand its a problem when you want the latest version of a particular app and you have wait either for it to come through the update system of your distro or even wait for the next version of your distro if its a non-security update or a completely new version (eg. OO.org 2).
I mean with open source product you could just pick up the source code and look for problems and holes in it. After this you are ready to exploit what ever system uses that code.
The problem with your logic is that its based on the assumption that security is improved by making it difficult to find security holes. The opposite is in fact true - the easier it is to find what security holes do in fact exist the more likely those security holes will be closed.
Or to put it another way - security through obscurity provides absolutely no security at all.
1.) First, immediately dismiss the results, just like you did in the last Mozilla security story. Mozilla is flawless.
No one said Mozilla is flawless, nice straw man there.
2.) Randomly reference Open Source, claiming the flaws were easier to find because of it, which has nothing to do with the report in the article and actually sounds like a criticism of Open Source, if anything.
So its better that the security bugs be harder to find? Huh? Maybe you need to think that through.
3.) Accuse the study of bias or "shilling." ALWAYS do this when the study goes against your pre-made worldview (in this case, Mozilla being flawless). When the study gives the opposite conclusion, agree with it and praise it, often with related anecdotal stories.
True, a lot of people on/. automatically do this. However at least in this case they've got a point - the conclusion that Mozilla has more security problems than IE is very shaky at best. Its not even supported by the evidence in the story.
4.) Reference Internet Explorer's age, which has little to do with and doesn't change Mozilla having more flaws than Internet Explorer today.
Who said Mozilla had more flaws than IE? Did you RTFA - ie. the bit about the 19 vulnerabilities in IE that MS has yet to confirm?
5.) Ask how quickly the Mozilla vulnerabilities were patched, ignoring that Mozilla has marked vulnerabilities "Confidential" before for them to sit for two years unfixed.
Mozilla does generally have a quick patching record I have heard of some bug reports being open for years. But could you provide an example? Are you sure these are actual security problems and not other bugs?
6.) Claim Internet Explorer is integral to the OS, when you argued that Internet Explorer was easily removed from Windows during the anti-trust trial.
Microsoft was the one that insisted that IE was integral while probably most of the the slashdot crowd were urging them to de-integrate it. Microsoft refused to do that so it remains integral to the OS. No hypocrisy there.
7.) Claim matter-of-factly that, for some reason, it "goes without saying" that the study uses some sort of flawed logic, without citing the logic, giving proof, or backing the statements in any way. Simply claim it, knowing everyone will mod you up because they, too, want to believe Mozilla is flawless.
More straw-men. No one thinks Mozilla is flawless nor do the (modded up at least) posts on this thread claim the article is flawed without giving a reason. Actually read them and you'll see people have made some good points about why the initial data in the article doesn't present the full picture.
"Are you sure? Because I can't find anything about it on the manpages and infopages for nohup on my OpenBSD, Linux and OS X systems"
Well I don't know about OpenBSD or Mac OS but nohup is installed by default on every Linux system I've ever encountered, which is hardly surprising considering its in the coreutils package along with cp, ls, touch, chmod, chown etc. It'd be a very strange Linux distro that didn't have that package,
1) Why would I give my computer up to 'hackers', by which I assume you mean people who break into machines illegaly or maliciously. There would be nothing to stop them from fully taking over the machine and doing whatever they want - ie. under this arrangement I have no power or control over them to ensure they hold up their end of the bargain. Since what they are doing is probably illegal and they are more than likely in a far off country I have no legal hold over them either.
2) What's the point of this when its perfectly practical and possible to secure your machine anyway. Even if you must use Windows logging in as a non-admin user, not using IE or OE and using common sense (don't click on the 'screensaver' in your email) is enough to keep your machine secure.
This (2)) is fundamentally different from the protection-racket scenario I think you've derived this idea from. In the protection-racket scenario there is nothing much you can do - maybe you can put a 10-cm think steel door on your house, but if you do that the mob will just walk through the open front door of your cafe/bar/shop/whatever during business hours and demand their payment. So in short its out of your control for all practical purposes whereas having a secure internet-access machine (even with Windows) is not.
I use fetchmail to get my email from various IMAP accounts and it works fine - just like POP3, you don't have to go in for the whole 'remote folders' thing if you don't want to.
Slashdot Mirror
When I was a student at UTS in Sydney they used blackboard for discussion boards for some subjects. Just getting to the discussion boards was a nightmare - the interface was so complicated and badly laid out it would give you a headache just trying to work out where anything was. It looked like a classic example of building one big monolithic super-application that tries to tie together functions better done by several seperate apps running off the same database.
A year or 2 a ago I heard that WebCT had caused a major disaster at the Uni of Wollongong. The UOW was/is completely reliant on that system - all lecture notes, assignments, grades etc. are recorded and made available using webct. One of my friends who goes there told me that their whole WebCT system had crashed and that no-one could access anything. Apparently in the end some people had to be given estimated marks on some subjects/assessments because they couldn't get the data back. I also heard that the 'database' that WebCT ran off at the time was a multi-gigabyte CSV file!! Not sure how true that is.
Why do these tired old Linux-is-hard-to-install-software trolls keep getting modded up on slashdot?
All grandma has to do on Mandriva is software->configuration->packaging->Install Software, type GAIM and click install. Ubuntu, Suse, Linspire etc. all have similar Install systems that are just as easy.
No worse than trying to get her to goto gaim.sf.net, find and download the 'Windows Installer', find where she downloaded it, double-click it, click next, agree to this, choose an install location, choose optional components etc.
The good thing about the Linux was is when she runs the update program next (or turns on automatic updates) she will get the latest Gaim, or at least the backported update to fix that latest security hole they found in it, along with all the other programs installed on her machine.
He keeps insisting that software can be made to be almost perfect, yet backs his arguments up with absolutely nothing. Where's the proof? examples? What about realistic estimates of how much this will cost compared to present software development?
This whole 'guaranteed software' thing seems like a troll to restrict or get rid of open source software. Its a bit like software patents in that its pushed by big software companies because they know that it will mean that nobody can develop software without a multi-million dollar law-suit fund to back them up. There's no doubt many lawyers salivate at the idea of being able to successfuly sue someone for the simple act of producing a piece of software.
Also the car analogy is a fallacy. Cars sold to consumers are heavily regulated because if something goes wrong it will likely kill or seriously injure someone. If something goes wrong with consumer computer equipment its simply a matter of inconvenience - 'oh shit I lost my essay, I'll have to write it again' and often the consumer contributed to the problem by not using the computer properly, eg. 'maybe I should have saved my essay sometime in the last 4 hours'. At no time is life, limb or property in danger from a crashing PC.
Computers used in important tasks (eg. hospitals, nuclear plants etc.) are a different matter and are treated differently. They can pay the big bucks required for an integrated, well tested, reliable system
First, let's understand the nature of the space program. The goal was to get to the moon. Full stop. If they could do that without researching computers, composites, insulation, etc., they would have. The spillover to humans is therefore necessarily coincidedantal, because that is not the goal, while the benefits to humans in for-profit research cannot be coincidental because that was the goal.
This makes no sense. If the research is for-profit then that is the goal - to turn a profit. Any 'benefits to humans' are 'necessarily coincidental' if that's what you want to call it.
How does the government know what theoretical research to engage in? If entrepreneurs didn't regard it as a good use of scarce resources, government's entrance doesn't change that; it merely causes this waste to actually happen, on someone else's dollar.
That's exactly the point. Entrepreneurs only invest in research that will turn a profit within the next few years. Governments can conduct research that has a far longer time frame for turning a useful product.
As for the productive efficiency of government research, all I have to say is $500 toilet seats and $80 hammers. Imagine how much they overspend on things for which there is no comparable market!
Exactly - they're hopeless at consumer products. But government-funded research has produced things like the computer, jet engine and radar. None of those was a consumer or business product but they served the aim of the original research well - eg. the first computers helped break German codes in WW2 which gave the allies a massive boost. It then took for-profits to capitalise on this and make it into something usable by consumers and business.
Finally, learn the difference between direct and indirect. If you research a way to get to the moon and stumble up GPS, that's indirect. if you research a positioning system and get GPS, that's direct.
You need to learn that scientific research does not produce single-use, compartmentalised technologies. Researching a way to navigate using radio waves to get to the moon does not stumble-up anything, it produces a radio-nav system that can have many uses.
I don't see the difference between "we need a way to navigate to the moon, here's funding to develop a radio nav system" or "we need a way to precisely locate and easily navigate our troops, aircraft, vehicles and bombs in a war, here's money to develop a nav system" or "people would like an easy to use nav system that tells them exactly where they are at any time, here's funding to develop one". Its all to meet the same human need - navigation and any technology developed in one field (eg. military) can just as easily be used in another field (consumer products, space, whatever).
This version of Mandriva still has Mozilla FireFox 1.0.6, with backported patches.
Which is exactly the same as having 1.0.7 AFAICT. They freeze the version number and backport so they can keep a consistent updates policy.
Or is there some aspects of the system that aren't GPL and can't be uploaded?
Yep. The powerpack versions (either the full DVD or 7 CD set) contain closed-source software and aren't redistrutable. The 4CD version (1 more than the publicly available download version) that's available to the lowest level of club membership should be alright though.
As always with Mandrake all the software available in the powerpack, except the closed-source stuff, and more is available through the mirrors listed at http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/
Don't say "The space program was a good idea because it gave us more and better tech than would have otherwise gotten" because it didn't. Instead say "The space program was a good idea because the benefits to the people who wanted a man on the moon far exceeded the costs to those who didn't want it" or something like that. And please, understand the difference.
The space program is good for both reasons - exploration of new frontiers and development and improvement of tech.
Do you know what a futures market is? It's this cool deal where profit-seeking investors intertemporally allocate goods so that they're never consumed too quickly, depriving future generations. They make it so that if goods are really in danger of running out, we'll know 20-30 years in advance, in which case it will be profitable for someone to go mine an asteroid. Remember, governement doesn't *create* resources; it redirects them. If it would be a loss for the private sector to harvest some resource, it will be for the government as well; the only difference is that rather than investors putting their own money on the line, government officials put everyone else's money on the line.
Markets only really look a few years forwards into the future. If something isn't profitable in 5 years then its not going to attract investment. One day when we mine asteroids it will (and probably should be) done by private companies but it takes government to lay the foundation for that with a space program. The capability and technologies for mining asteroids don't just appear overnight, nor can they be fully developed within the short time frame that markets respond to.
Anyway the point still stands that the space program is satisfying a 'human need' here by laying the foundations for a future mining industry.
Wrong, wrong, wrong. NASA was pursuing the end of getting to the moon. Any benefit to real, actual people not trying to get to the moon was coincidental. Again, say what you mean. If you think the space program was a good idea because it produced aweseome blankets, then you should just advocate government funding of awesome blankets! Don't cloak endorsement of satsifaction of human non-desires (beating the Ruskies) in endorsement of awesome blankets.
You can't get to the moon whithout a lot of research in technology, and all of this will naturally have significant uses outside the space program. The technological improvements produced by the space program effort are no more 'coincidental' than the technolofical improvements produced by research aimed at profit.
Wrong again, the research satisfied human needs by *coincidence*. That's far less efficient that researching to directly satisfy human desires.
This is where you're wrong. NASA has the same 'human desires' as any other organisation. For example they need to research faster computers to manage their extremely complex space program in the same way that your business needs faster, better computers to allow more efficient management of resources and automation of tasks. Or the need to develop better insulation to protect their astronauts from extreme conditions, just like people on earth need protection from extreme conditions.
Why is research done in the space program less efficient? The challenge of getting to the moon or whatever is purely a technical one, so indeed the whole space program is in fact one big R&D excercise. As I've already pointed out any technologies improved in this process can't help but have significant practical uses in industry and even in consumer products.
If you want the government to fund research specifically intended to help people, say so. Don't advocate research that helps them by coincidence.
The space program does help people and it does so directly. There's nothing coincidental about the technological improvements that came out of it, they are the focus of the program. They may not be directly focused at consumer products but that is the job of i
In my post, I specifically showed how the spinoff arguments don't hold up to logic. At the beginning of the space program, entrepreneurs were researching better ways to satisfy human desires. Then the government diverted resources from this activity to another activity, which indirectly led to the satisfaction of some human desires. You're claiming that this diversion *from* satisfying human desires ... *helped* satisfy human desires?
Your whole argument is based on these 'human desires' yet you haven't defined them anywhere. The fact is that on the whole human beings have always had an appetite for exploration and pursuing new knowledge, pushing new frontiers and things like that. The space program directly satisfies that. More importantly though human beings have an undeniable desire for more natural resources to provide for their material needs and wants. Mining asteroids might be decades away still but it is essential since we simply don't have enough mineral reserves on earth for long term use by +6 billlion people. The space program directly meets this need too.
Anyway all the inventions and technological improvements developed during space programs or war or whatever were developed to satisfy human desires too. The improvements in computers made during the space program were directed at satisfying human desires. NASA has the same need for computers as businesses and the wider population do - to allow automation and rapidly crunch through complex calculations. Or for example the improvements in insulation made necessary by the extremes in temperature in space have found use for exactly the same purpose in the wider world - for example using 'space blankets' to keep body heat in extreme conditions.
Almost all research funding is directed by practical considerations, wether that be to make money (the most common), preserve national pride or develop weapons for war. If the research didn't meet human needs then we wouldn't have any of the technologies we do today.
My understanding is that the 1918 flu died out completely by 1920 or 1921 and no modern human flus are known to be related (corrections are welcome, if you have information on this)
From TFA:
"Like the 1918 virus, the current avian flu in Southeast Asia occurs naturally in birds. In 1918, the virus mutated, infected people and then spread among them"
""The effort to understand what happened in 1918 has taken on a new urgency," said Taubenberger, who led the gene-sequencing team."
"The three new segments appear to be crucial in explaining how the bird-based virus became adapted to humans, Taubenberger said.
Tumpey also confirmed the 1918 virus's avian-like characteristics by injecting it in fertilized bird eggs. It killed the eggs, just like the Asian bird flu does. Other modern-day flu strains that are human-based don't kill fertilized bird eggs, he noted."
The whole point of this was to help understand the current H5NI bird-flu strain.
The situation's a little more complex than that. The UN doesn't consider Taiwan a seperate nation because its not a UN member, because China has used their veto power in the security council to keep them out. The US may not officially refer to Taiwan as a seperate country but at the same time they state in no uncertain terms they will fight to keep it out of the hands of Beijing should they attack.
This includes track and sector editors, secure deletion and shredding programs, easy formatters
.mozilla or .kde directories if you want to secure delete it.
All of these already exist on Linux.
registry and log file editors
Linux has no registry and it already has log file viewers (and I don't just mean a text editor but proper GUI log file viewers)
and secure deleters, internet cookie and intrusive spyware secure deleters, obsessive 'history' shredders
Once again it has all this. A secure delete program is installed by default on most distros. Firefox and konqueror can be used to clean their history records - why do you need an external program to do this? Also you can easily point your secure delete program at the
The reason that the secure delete option isn't in the KDE GUI anymore (it used to be) is that on journaling file systems it gives a false sense of security - the data you've just securely deleted may very well still be in the journal. This is the same as on NTFS file systems, which is something all those shareware 'secure' delete programs will neglect to go into detail about. Secure delete should work however on the non-journaled FAT32 and ext2 file systems.
we complained for so long about how far behind the rest of the world we were when it came to broadband, but it now looks like we're really catching up
Apparently New Zealand has had this for years which shows that once again we are just catching up thanks to Telstra's monopoly. And no Telstra your usual 'we have to charge so much for data because Australia is so remote' arguments don't work here - New Zealand is even more remote from the rest of the world and has an even smaller population to support the infrastructure.
And besides, it's not going to stop other people from moving to Bearshare, or WinMX, or Shareaza, or Gnucleus, or even Bittorrent or USENET.
Nor will it stop anybody create a fork of Limewire with the copy protection stuff removed.
Copyright is automatic but not compulsory - you can explicitly declare your work is in the public domain.
Nowhere. The Limewire fork will be out faster than all use pirates can say 'arrrgh me hearties'
Umm Limewire itself is open source (GPL http://www.limewire.org/gnu.shtml) and as well as that it runs on the Gnutella protocol which is also open source. The fact that Limewire has a company behind it than can be the target of lawsuits is irrelevant. If they get sued out of business or put too many restrictions on it the project will just be forked by the community and they'll be in the same boat as eMule and Bittorrent.
Actually geosynchornous orbit is around 36000KM up from the surface (~22000 miles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geosynchronous_orbit) so the 62,000 miles isnt quite even. I wonder why they need it to be longer from the geosynchronous point?
If you have or would like to set up an online gaming operation, and want a regulated and secure environment that has tight, but not rediculous, gaming regulations
Maybe they should rename themselves 'The Federal Republic of Slashdot'. Not only are they tolerant to Internet Gambling and P2P operations but they appear to be the first country to have slashdotese as their national language.
It'd be good if users had a choice - there was a good way to make a package that installed on all Linux distros, perhaps using autopackage, so that people who wanted the latest-and-greatest of a particular Linux app could just install it.
I'm a big fan of Linux's package management systems - it makes it easy for people who don't/cant'/can't be bothered managing their own software installs. Eg. I can just go into MandrakeUpdate and update all the software on my machine, I can even script it to run every night so I never have to even touch the machine and have it always keep up to date.
On the other hand its a problem when you want the latest version of a particular app and you have wait either for it to come through the update system of your distro or even wait for the next version of your distro if its a non-security update or a completely new version (eg. OO.org 2).
I mean with open source product you could just pick up the source code and look for problems and holes in it. After this you are ready to exploit what ever system uses that code.
The problem with your logic is that its based on the assumption that security is improved by making it difficult to find security holes. The opposite is in fact true - the easier it is to find what security holes do in fact exist the more likely those security holes will be closed.
Or to put it another way - security through obscurity provides absolutely no security at all.
1.) First, immediately dismiss the results, just like you did in the last Mozilla security story. Mozilla is flawless.
/. automatically do this. However at least in this case they've got a point - the conclusion that Mozilla has more security problems than IE is very shaky at best. Its not even supported by the evidence in the story.
No one said Mozilla is flawless, nice straw man there.
2.) Randomly reference Open Source, claiming the flaws were easier to find because of it, which has nothing to do with the report in the article and actually sounds like a criticism of Open Source, if anything.
So its better that the security bugs be harder to find? Huh? Maybe you need to think that through.
3.) Accuse the study of bias or "shilling." ALWAYS do this when the study goes against your pre-made worldview (in this case, Mozilla being flawless). When the study gives the opposite conclusion, agree with it and praise it, often with related anecdotal stories.
True, a lot of people on
4.) Reference Internet Explorer's age, which has little to do with and doesn't change Mozilla having more flaws than Internet Explorer today.
Who said Mozilla had more flaws than IE? Did you RTFA - ie. the bit about the 19 vulnerabilities in IE that MS has yet to confirm?
5.) Ask how quickly the Mozilla vulnerabilities were patched, ignoring that Mozilla has marked vulnerabilities "Confidential" before for them to sit for two years unfixed.
Mozilla does generally have a quick patching record I have heard of some bug reports being open for years. But could you provide an example? Are you sure these are actual security problems and not other bugs?
6.) Claim Internet Explorer is integral to the OS, when you argued that Internet Explorer was easily removed from Windows during the anti-trust trial.
Microsoft was the one that insisted that IE was integral while probably most of the the slashdot crowd were urging them to de-integrate it. Microsoft refused to do that so it remains integral to the OS. No hypocrisy there.
7.) Claim matter-of-factly that, for some reason, it "goes without saying" that the study uses some sort of flawed logic, without citing the logic, giving proof, or backing the statements in any way. Simply claim it, knowing everyone will mod you up because they, too, want to believe Mozilla is flawless.
More straw-men. No one thinks Mozilla is flawless nor do the (modded up at least) posts on this thread claim the article is flawed without giving a reason. Actually read them and you'll see people have made some good points about why the initial data in the article doesn't present the full picture.
"Are you sure? Because I can't find anything about it on the manpages and infopages for nohup on my OpenBSD, Linux and OS X systems"
Well I don't know about OpenBSD or Mac OS but nohup is installed by default on every Linux system I've ever encountered, which is hardly surprising considering its in the coreutils package along with cp, ls, touch, chmod, chown etc. It'd be a very strange Linux distro that didn't have that package,
2 questions:
1) Why would I give my computer up to 'hackers', by which I assume you mean people who break into machines illegaly or maliciously. There would be nothing to stop them from fully taking over the machine and doing whatever they want - ie. under this arrangement I have no power or control over them to ensure they hold up their end of the bargain. Since what they are doing is probably illegal and they are more than likely in a far off country I have no legal hold over them either.
2) What's the point of this when its perfectly practical and possible to secure your machine anyway. Even if you must use Windows logging in as a non-admin user, not using IE or OE and using common sense (don't click on the 'screensaver' in your email) is enough to keep your machine secure.
This (2)) is fundamentally different from the protection-racket scenario I think you've derived this idea from. In the protection-racket scenario there is nothing much you can do - maybe you can put a 10-cm think steel door on your house, but if you do that the mob will just walk through the open front door of your cafe/bar/shop/whatever during business hours and demand their payment. So in short its out of your control for all practical purposes whereas having a secure internet-access machine (even with Windows) is not.
you likewise protect it with fighters, refuellers etc
How exactly do you plan to protect it with refuelers? Maybe you meant 'protect it with fighters, like with refuellers' or something like that?
I use fetchmail to get my email from various IMAP accounts and it works fine - just like POP3, you don't have to go in for the whole 'remote folders' thing if you don't want to.