I got a way to cut spending right here. NO SALARY FOR THE PRESIDENT and he pays rent for the whitehouse and buys his own airline tickets.
Because that makes a lot of sense. Let's cast aside all pretenses of democracy, by making the wealthy the only people capable of affording their Presidency.
It may also surprise you that Slashdot is a community composed of individual people. At any given time, a subset of these people have a particular opinion, a further subset feel the need to post, and a separate subset (mutually exclusive with the former subset) feel the need to moderate what other people say. The groups with the most time and mod points get a soapbox for a while, and can be eventually counteracted by those with less time or mod points. Hence, at any given time, a particular view is projected by the community as a whole.
In other words, "these same people" aren't contorting their logic... in fact, different people are being heard.
So, your use of unencrypted, easily-readable passwords is what is insecure, and has nothing to do with the use of an "ASCII format file".
True, but this completely ignores the point of his post: file formats can be insecure, depending upon the metric used to evaluate said security. In MS's case, the format parser is broken. In his example, using a file format sans encryption (or with vulnerable encryption) is also insecure:
Imagine a file format that specifies encrypting with a Caesar cipher, or checksumming with MD5. The file format is insecure, even when the associated program is 100% bug-free.
... I'm using secure in the meaning "the data in the file is vulnerable to attack"--that an attacker can view or modify information they lack the formal privilege to access.
Providing an alternate means of privileged access, such as file permissions or an ACL, makes the file system, not the file, more or less secure.
Hmmm, going after a competitors throat, killing the baby, cutting off their air supply? Remind you of somebody?
It reminds me of any publicly held company. Competition is vicious, particularly among those whose sheer desire and sole motivation is profit, personal or otherwise.
You can only wonder if Intel did this to appease its biggest customer, Microsoft.
Sit down, and wrap your head around the idea of sales. Salespeople are typically paid by commission. The more they sell, the more they earn. They also have quotas. If they don't sell enough in a given time span, they're terminated. Salespeople think short-term; they think tactics; they think until the end of the sale. They think, "If I don't get the sale I move on, and so does the other guy. It's just business." Long term, strategic goals don't enter the picture (that's marketing). And this isn't stupid or callous, it's what the job requires of them.
In Intel's case, a saleswoman saw an opportunity to push more product. She took it, it blew up in her face, and Intel gets to scrub the fallout. The story ends there. So please, do us a favor and cut the Microsoft conspiracy a break.
One problem is that there are so few people out there like Mr. Negroponte in the business world
In my experience, there are tons of people in the business world like Mr. Negroponte. We don't hear about them for two reasons. First, they tend to be small business owners. Second, they tend not to do heinous things. The news goes for interesting stories, which excludes the small fry doing something nice for someone else.
The realities of digital distribution preclude formal copyright registration in many cases. Requiring a formal process to receive the benefits of copyright protection would destroy blogging, open-source software, and several online communities not to mention commercial enterprises.
To some extent, I feel that your third point ignores the operational parameters of the US government. Non-retroactive claims could be codified in current law, established by judicial precedent, established by international treaty, or vigorously defended by the citizenry.
I'm not exactly sure how to respond to the rest of your post. My recommendation strikes a pragmatic compromise between several conflicting ideas: commercialization, personal rights, social well-being, the public domain, and administrative logistics. Your suggestions seem polarized and anachronistic in comparison.
Unless it takes me most of the term of the copyright to get the work out there, I don't see a reason for an extension.
There are two reasons, in my mind:
To protect cash cows, albeit it works for late-bearing works as well.
To encourage people to submit their work for posterity. A 20 to 60 year extension is a great reason to register the work, even if libraries get to stock it freely.
I agree. I tried to incorporate a mixture of today's system and the previous ones. Specifically, I aimed for an optionally long copyright length, automatic copyright, and minimal fuss about keeping the work "alive".
It's all happening internal to the government, so a license isn't mandatory if the law is written carefully. I can see three immediate solutions/workarounds:
The government says STFU to other industries.
The government inserts language into other IP law that accomplishes the same thing as the distribution clause of the license.
The government inserts language into the license that effectively limits the terms necessary for compliance.
Of course, the entire point of this copyright registration idea is the tradeoff. The alternative is the work passing into the public domain immediately.
I'm using secure in the meaning "the data in the file is vulnerable to attack"--that an attacker can view or modify information they lack the formal privilege to access.
My idea is slightly more complex, but (IMHO) more reasonable logistically:
Everything is automatically copyrighted for X years (my choice for X would be between 10 and 20 years).
Copyright can be extended to Y years (say, 2X or 3X years) by registering the copyright with the copyright office. Registration requires the full text of any copyrighted work to be submitted with the application. Registration may incur a reasonable filing fee.
Registering a copyright grants government institutions the following mandatory licenses to the work:
All government institutions (e.g. libraries, schools, public parks) may stock the complete text, royalty free.
The government may make an indefinite number of copies for archival and preservation.
If the entity that holds a registered copyright ceases distribution of the work, the government may (at its option) distribute the work for the price of reproduction, plus a reasonable and compulsory license fee (paid to the copyright owner).
Any trademarks, patents, or other intellectual property rights required to distribute the work are licensed to the government. The terms of this license should be narrow--only those required to enable distribution under the terms previously enumerated.
Additional extension of copyright is not possible. Retroactive extension is explicitly denied.
After the copyright expires, the work passes into the public domain.
Refinements of an existing work may enable additional property rights. However, refinements are treated as derivative of but separate from the original work. Creating a derivative or refined work does not extend the rights or terms granted to previous work.
Ultimately, there is nothing wrong with the "file formats". A file format is not insecure.
Imagine a file format that specifies encrypting with a Caesar cipher, or checksumming with MD5. The file format is insecure, even when the associated program is 100% bug-free.
The idea is to place the following tag on your webpages, which will randomly fetch a page from 'myminicity.com' from our list of jerks into a 1 pixel image that you can place in an inconspicuous spot on your site(s).
How do you expect this to help defeat the trolls? You're giving them more links/clicks.
If the woman's job required a security clearance and she neglected to note that her father worked for foreign competition (or a similar circumstance), the employer could be quite justified in firing her. Also consider patent knowledge crossing hands. You may not want to fire the woman, but she could end up being a great liability to the company.
As an employer, it's hard to make this decision, much less execute it. At times, you must way the benefits of the collective versus the individual. What's worse, it's possible for someone to become completely jaded towards termination. The person dehumanizes the experience to cope with the stress that comes with letting someone go.
The situation can be exaggerated as degrees of separation grow. The less you know someone, the less empathy you'll equate with them. This is part of the reason why corporate execs don't express much sorrow during massive layoffs--they don't empathize with their worker's plight (albeit many sympathize). It sucks, but it's life.
It's not like someone who's high on drugs can hide that fact, unless they're really wimpy drugs
Two exceptions: 1) A person who has done drugs long enough could learn to "sober up" long enough to hide the fact their high. 2) Some people have been sheltered long enough that they don't know what a high person looks like. (I've been the latter and seen the former).
The Freeman Dyson article referred to in the article above is located at NYBooks.com. FTA:
Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.
Going from "is my work really outdated?" to "How can I keep my work from becoming outdated?" and implicitly assumes that the work _is_ outdated.
Alternatively, one could opt not to answer the latter if the former yielded a negative conclusion.
1. was your comment really just bollocks?
1. If a comment is the dog's bollocks, does it still count as being bollocks?
2. How can we keep our comments the dog's bollocks?
3. How can we write posts that continue to be the dog's bollocks?
Why can't they put an undo button on the desktop and file manager?
Because the customer doesn't desire a button in either place. In my experience, non-destructive operations can be undone in most modern OS's. (This example includes deletes when the "recycle bin" exists.) Furthermore, Apple created Time Machine to solve a different problem than the undo queue. Undoing an action functions like a stack--first action in, last action out.
Popping each change in the filesystem isn't an optimal solution in this case, because you'll undo many intended operations to recover the unintended one. Popping on one file doesn't work much better--most users don't track the revision number of each change to a file. They'd need to restore each copy before viewing it. Even if that's acceptable, how do you communicate revisions without using the timeline metaphor? Users are not technical gurus.
The OS doesn't auto-save because persistent information is "hard" to identify, and automatically saving the state of memory creates far too much overhead. That said, many applications do feature auto-saving and persistence where warranted. Several frameworks persist automatically, once they've been instructed what data requires the service.
"WinFS" sounds like a neat technological solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Consumers are generally happy with file systems. Desktop search isn't a universal solution, but can easily be incorporated into the offering to provide essentially the same service. Those that prefer search use it, and others use the folder metaphor. Furthermore, filesystems are becoming more capable, and many store extended metadata.
Even searching for all of cousin Larry's communications is possible on some OS's. For instance, on my Mac I can search for my father's name in spotlight. It pops up all images, emails, movies, chat logs, and documents that I received from him. If I search in the finder, I can save it as a virtual folder. The data's not stored all in one place, but does it matter?
Off topic? Handedness is particularly pertinent when it comes to usability. If you don't believe me, try using a left-handed door, fridge, ergonomic mouse, or faucet. (Luckily, I'm ambidextrous, or my left-handed apartment would be a royal PITA).
Your post was written in a tone reminiscent of old troll posts. A condescending tone, logically invalid argument, and vague, anachronistic evidence.
And yes pretty much any consumer OS is going to have a hissy fit about flaky memory, but my point was that current Apple hardware is neither better (nor worse) than everybody elses'.
This is where my argument concerning sample size applies. You compared evidence where N=1 (you) to N=75 (your employer). Not only does this ignore a difference in the statistical distribution (T-curve versus the standard normal curve), but it also ignores the probability of error in both results (N=75 has a far smaller p-value than N=1, given identical known distributions and probabilities). The comparison, as presented, is statistically invalid (as presented) and logically anecdotal.
being new to this Apple thing, I thought that all Apple operating systems where just perfect (cough). It's not like we don't beat on Microsoft for Win 95/98/ME (not to mention 3.11, Bob and assorted other oddities).
I rarely see 95/98/ME bashing brought up as more than a joke. Your post used OS 9 as an argument against buying OS X, not to mention the ad hominem attack on Apple. All this despite OS X's exceptional performance for the past 3-4 years (since 10.3.x, and particularly since the x86 switch).
Similar problems ran throughout the remainder of the OP. Hopefully you can appreciate this analysis.
That said, please accept my apologies for the misnomer.
Slashdot Mirror
Because that makes a lot of sense. Let's cast aside all pretenses of democracy, by making the wealthy the only people capable of affording their Presidency.
Some of us are still arguing that file formats can be insecure.
It may also surprise you that Slashdot is a community composed of individual people. At any given time, a subset of these people have a particular opinion, a further subset feel the need to post, and a separate subset (mutually exclusive with the former subset) feel the need to moderate what other people say. The groups with the most time and mod points get a soapbox for a while, and can be eventually counteracted by those with less time or mod points. Hence, at any given time, a particular view is projected by the community as a whole.
In other words, "these same people" aren't contorting their logic... in fact, different people are being heard.
You're changing the argument. The OP never included useful as a metric for evaluation. ;)
True, but this completely ignores the point of his post: file formats can be insecure, depending upon the metric used to evaluate said security. In MS's case, the format parser is broken. In his example, using a file format sans encryption (or with vulnerable encryption) is also insecure:
Providing an alternate means of privileged access, such as file permissions or an ACL, makes the file system, not the file, more or less secure.
It reminds me of any publicly held company. Competition is vicious, particularly among those whose sheer desire and sole motivation is profit, personal or otherwise.
Consider yourself lucky. It was unfairly comprehensible to me. O.o
Sit down, and wrap your head around the idea of sales. Salespeople are typically paid by commission. The more they sell, the more they earn. They also have quotas. If they don't sell enough in a given time span, they're terminated. Salespeople think short-term; they think tactics; they think until the end of the sale. They think, "If I don't get the sale I move on, and so does the other guy. It's just business." Long term, strategic goals don't enter the picture (that's marketing). And this isn't stupid or callous, it's what the job requires of them.
In Intel's case, a saleswoman saw an opportunity to push more product. She took it, it blew up in her face, and Intel gets to scrub the fallout. The story ends there. So please, do us a favor and cut the Microsoft conspiracy a break.
In my experience, there are tons of people in the business world like Mr. Negroponte. We don't hear about them for two reasons. First, they tend to be small business owners. Second, they tend not to do heinous things. The news goes for interesting stories, which excludes the small fry doing something nice for someone else.
The realities of digital distribution preclude formal copyright registration in many cases. Requiring a formal process to receive the benefits of copyright protection would destroy blogging, open-source software, and several online communities not to mention commercial enterprises.
To some extent, I feel that your third point ignores the operational parameters of the US government. Non-retroactive claims could be codified in current law, established by judicial precedent, established by international treaty, or vigorously defended by the citizenry.
I'm not exactly sure how to respond to the rest of your post. My recommendation strikes a pragmatic compromise between several conflicting ideas: commercialization, personal rights, social well-being, the public domain, and administrative logistics. Your suggestions seem polarized and anachronistic in comparison.
There are two reasons, in my mind:
I agree. I tried to incorporate a mixture of today's system and the previous ones. Specifically, I aimed for an optionally long copyright length, automatic copyright, and minimal fuss about keeping the work "alive".
Of course, the entire point of this copyright registration idea is the tradeoff. The alternative is the work passing into the public domain immediately.
I'm using secure in the meaning "the data in the file is vulnerable to attack"--that an attacker can view or modify information they lack the formal privilege to access.
Preach on, brother! If I voice an opinion, I'd better be ready to stick to my guns for eternity!
Imagine a file format that specifies encrypting with a Caesar cipher, or checksumming with MD5. The file format is insecure, even when the associated program is 100% bug-free.
Your website states the following:
How do you expect this to help defeat the trolls? You're giving them more links/clicks.
If the woman's job required a security clearance and she neglected to note that her father worked for foreign competition (or a similar circumstance), the employer could be quite justified in firing her. Also consider patent knowledge crossing hands. You may not want to fire the woman, but she could end up being a great liability to the company.
As an employer, it's hard to make this decision, much less execute it. At times, you must way the benefits of the collective versus the individual. What's worse, it's possible for someone to become completely jaded towards termination. The person dehumanizes the experience to cope with the stress that comes with letting someone go.
The situation can be exaggerated as degrees of separation grow. The less you know someone, the less empathy you'll equate with them. This is part of the reason why corporate execs don't express much sorrow during massive layoffs--they don't empathize with their worker's plight (albeit many sympathize). It sucks, but it's life.
Two exceptions: 1) A person who has done drugs long enough could learn to "sober up" long enough to hide the fact their high. 2) Some people have been sheltered long enough that they don't know what a high person looks like. (I've been the latter and seen the former).
The Freeman Dyson article referred to in the article above is located at NYBooks.com. FTA:
Alternatively, one could opt not to answer the latter if the former yielded a negative conclusion.
1. If a comment is the dog's bollocks, does it still count as being bollocks?
2. How can we keep our comments the dog's bollocks?
3. How can we write posts that continue to be the dog's bollocks?
Because the customer doesn't desire a button in either place. In my experience, non-destructive operations can be undone in most modern OS's. (This example includes deletes when the "recycle bin" exists.) Furthermore, Apple created Time Machine to solve a different problem than the undo queue. Undoing an action functions like a stack--first action in, last action out.
Popping each change in the filesystem isn't an optimal solution in this case, because you'll undo many intended operations to recover the unintended one. Popping on one file doesn't work much better--most users don't track the revision number of each change to a file. They'd need to restore each copy before viewing it. Even if that's acceptable, how do you communicate revisions without using the timeline metaphor? Users are not technical gurus.
The OS doesn't auto-save because persistent information is "hard" to identify, and automatically saving the state of memory creates far too much overhead. That said, many applications do feature auto-saving and persistence where warranted. Several frameworks persist automatically, once they've been instructed what data requires the service.
"WinFS" sounds like a neat technological solution to a problem that doesn't exist. Consumers are generally happy with file systems. Desktop search isn't a universal solution, but can easily be incorporated into the offering to provide essentially the same service. Those that prefer search use it, and others use the folder metaphor. Furthermore, filesystems are becoming more capable, and many store extended metadata.
Even searching for all of cousin Larry's communications is possible on some OS's. For instance, on my Mac I can search for my father's name in spotlight. It pops up all images, emails, movies, chat logs, and documents that I received from him. If I search in the finder, I can save it as a virtual folder. The data's not stored all in one place, but does it matter?
Off topic? Handedness is particularly pertinent when it comes to usability. If you don't believe me, try using a left-handed door, fridge, ergonomic mouse, or faucet. (Luckily, I'm ambidextrous, or my left-handed apartment would be a royal PITA).
Your post was written in a tone reminiscent of old troll posts. A condescending tone, logically invalid argument, and vague, anachronistic evidence.
This is where my argument concerning sample size applies. You compared evidence where N=1 (you) to N=75 (your employer). Not only does this ignore a difference in the statistical distribution (T-curve versus the standard normal curve), but it also ignores the probability of error in both results (N=75 has a far smaller p-value than N=1, given identical known distributions and probabilities). The comparison, as presented, is statistically invalid (as presented) and logically anecdotal.
I rarely see 95/98/ME bashing brought up as more than a joke. Your post used OS 9 as an argument against buying OS X, not to mention the ad hominem attack on Apple. All this despite OS X's exceptional performance for the past 3-4 years (since 10.3.x, and particularly since the x86 switch).
Similar problems ran throughout the remainder of the OP. Hopefully you can appreciate this analysis.
That said, please accept my apologies for the misnomer.
Government is an establishment of civilized society. By definition, it cannot "stay out" of society's affairs.