"Free" rings alarm bells and this is an issue I rarely hear mention of when people talk about the problems linux has spreading.
That's why Eric Raymond et. al. coined the term "Open Source" back in '96 or thereabouts: because most people presume that "free" means "free as in beer," and get suspicious. But the name "open source" has its own problems, namely RMS railed against it because it doesn't address the idea of freedom.
I think we should call it "freedomware" but my idea doesn't seem to have caught on.;-)
It's not supposed to make us feel safe. It's supposed to make the police feel like they're in control of the herd^H^H^H^H citizenry. After all, it's law enforcement agencies, not the general public, that is falling all over themselves to acquire these dodgy systems.
Why on Earth would any university condone the use of university personnel, facilities, etc. to do the work of someone else for free?
That's an interesting point, and it can be taken one step further. How can the RIAA convince a jury that, by the preponderance of the evidence, the university is responsible for copyright infringement done by its students? That's as daft as saying the DEA ought to arrest the university president because some the students are smoking pot.
Seems to me the university has nothing to lose by letting this go to trial.
A rock is too simple. No government agency would buy that. You need to sell them a sophisticated multistatic wide-spectrum digital sensor array, connected by high-speed fiberoptic network to a rock, which in turn is connected to a nationwide database.
One of the axioms of free software is that users are free to fix whatever they want, when they want. So after 17 years of Linux evolution, why are these "problems" not fixed yet?
In most cases, it's because the cure would be worse than the disease.
This is one of the many fragmentation problems that makes it difficult for commercial software vendors to offer their products for Linux. No one package format will do the trick across distributions -- not without hassle, anyway.
So obviously what we need is yet another package management system that's different from all the ones that exist now. Developed from scratch, of course.
To that end, there's little or no centralized configuration: everything in the system is controlled through a welter of files, and there's no guarantee that the syntax of any one configuration file will apply to any other.
Obviously the solution is to rewrite every program in the OS to use a standard configuration file format. Instead of, you know, writing a man page that explains how the configuration file works.
If there is one complaint that comes up more often than any other about developing for Linux, it is the way the kernel application binary interfaces are a moving target.
So we should freeze all kernel development until proposed changes go through a 2-year approval process by a configuration control board. We all know that keeps the Debian distro moving along smoothly.
And so on.
Bottom line: the author doesn't like Linux, doesn't bother to understand it, and wishes it were more like a proprietary OS controlled by a single vendor.
If we were to create an exact replica via a different manufacturing process, we would expect it to have the same emergent property.
If we were to create a functionally exact replica of even a single neuron using semiconductors (or any artificial material), then we'd have a Nobel Prize coming to us.
I don't think it's likely that a computer will resemble a biological nervous system. For one thing, nerve signals ain't digital.
Because this program was supposed to find terrorists, not people with fake IDs or people trying to sneak a couple of ounces through security.
I don't think it was ever supposed to catch terrorists; that was just a pretext to set up a dragnet without that pesky Bill of Rights getting in the way.
McCarthyism resulted in less than 1% of the citizens of Hollywood being blacklisted from the movie industry (on hearsay and specious evidence). So that was OK, then?
Numbers don't matter. Justice matters. What ever happened to "probable cause?"
And if you were to create a system that had similar properties, similar level of complexity it would therefore have the same emerging [sic] property.
Non sequitur. It would very likely have an emergent property, but nothing requires that it be the same, or similar, to properties that emerge in biological systems.
I guess there is a real point lurking beneath my irony though. Advertisers don't actually need your attention. They believe that if they bombard you with their brand name and logo often enough, for long enough, they can bias your purchasing decisions toward their product. I'm skeptical of the value of this whole "brand recognition" idea, myself.
Oh, look at the time! I have to run down to the Lexus dealer and then go to McDonalds!;-)
Ah, but all the subliminal messages still work on you. Hence your inexplicable urge to go drive a Lexus to McDonalds and pay with your Capital One credit card.;-)
Here we have a classic case of what Republicans "legislating from the bench." Justice Douglas' argument boils down to "the past 1000 years of Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, which we the people have willingly incorporated into our jurisprudence, are inconvenient and don't make a lot of sense. I could follow the law as it is, rule in accordance with the established law of the land, and find in favor of the plaintiffs, but nah, my common sense revolts at the idea. So instead I'll redefine what property means right here in this courtroom, all by myself, without any input from the legislature or the general public."
Yes, it's nonsense to have property rights extend to the boundary of the known universe. But think for a moment if the verdict in this case had been, "Sorry, Congress, property rights haven't changed and technically overflying private property is trespass. You've got two laws, the property rights common-law definition and this new thing about airplanes, and the older law wins. Maybe you ought to change one of 'em."
Then Congress would have formally passed a new definition of property rights, and it could have come up for debate, been subject to Presidential veto, and generally gone through the whole deliberative process by which laws are supposed to get made.
Frankly, I am all in favor of the Supreme Court's power to strike down laws that violate the Constitution... but violating "common sense" ain't the same thing.
Which candidate will be better positioned to answer the problem? It will be the one who is able to make some hard decisions and stand up to powerful lobbyists.
Well said. I would add that it will be the one who's willing to spend the time and energy to seriously address health care, amid the economic crisis and the two wars and energy independence and tax policy and all the other urgent problems the next president will face.
It's not a matter of who has the better plan IMO, it's who has the will to actually work hard enough on this one problem among many other priorities.
Starting in January, Massachusetts will require businesses that collect information about that state's residents to encrypt sensitive data stored on laptop computers and other portable devices.
And how much authority does Massachusetts have over a company in Wilimgton, DE (for example)? None.
Best case, this law will be ignored for a few months, then struck down by Federal court on the grounds that a state lacks authority over businesses that operate across state lines.
Worst case, businesses will just move their data warehouses out of Massachusetts and claim the law doesn't apply to them any more.
I'm not saying encryption is stupid or unnecessary. I'm just saying this law has very minimal chance of making any real difference. You can't change the nature of e-commerce one state at a time.
I have always thought of quantum cryptography more as something for CIA-to-Pentagon or Swiss-bank-to-Swiss-bank kinds of communication, not something for Aunt Tillie. I think the vulnerability of the system depends on who's using it.
You yanks know WW2 as this war that happened somewhere else, you had a one or two hundred thousand soldiers total, and generally it mostly happened to somewhere else.
My country's war dead were more than 400,000; the total number of troops the U.S. committed to the war effort was more like 16 million.
I am not one of those Americans who likes to claim a lot of credit for what my ancestors did 60 years ago, but it's clear that your idea of how World War II affected America is as far off as many Americans' idea of how the war affected Europe.
That said, I would agree with the basic point of what you said; American casualties were less than a tenth of German casualties, and the U.S. didn't get split in half for 50 years. And most Americans do underestimate the cultural impact of that aftermath.
If your not comfortable with this sort of crazy BS, investing in individual stocks is not for you.
Oh, I disagree; you can invest in individual stocks without the crazy BS, as long as you don't attempt to day-trade (that is, to make short-term profits by timing the market).
Even a huge price fluctuation like this barely registers with me, because I only look at my stocks' performance about once a quarter. (If that.)
"If I didn't take cash off the top, I couldn't afford to stay in business. Nobody could. The taxes are too high."
Even if that were true (and I think it's crap), the choice would boil down to being a crook, or going out of business. It's still a choice, and those who choose to evade taxes are still crooks.
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So this one teacher dislikes Linux and banned it from his classroom. I dislike Brussels sprouts and ban them from my kitchen. It's a free country.
That's why Eric Raymond et. al. coined the term "Open Source" back in '96 or thereabouts: because most people presume that "free" means "free as in beer," and get suspicious. But the name "open source" has its own problems, namely RMS railed against it because it doesn't address the idea of freedom.
I think we should call it "freedomware" but my idea doesn't seem to have caught on. ;-)
It's not supposed to make us feel safe. It's supposed to make the police feel like they're in control of the herd^H^H^H^H citizenry. After all, it's law enforcement agencies, not the general public, that is falling all over themselves to acquire these dodgy systems.
is a smile or a pair of eyeglasses. What a stupid waste of taxpayer dollars.
That's an interesting point, and it can be taken one step further. How can the RIAA convince a jury that, by the preponderance of the evidence, the university is responsible for copyright infringement done by its students? That's as daft as saying the DEA ought to arrest the university president because some the students are smoking pot.
Seems to me the university has nothing to lose by letting this go to trial.
A rock is too simple. No government agency would buy that. You need to sell them a sophisticated multistatic wide-spectrum digital sensor array, connected by high-speed fiberoptic network to a rock, which in turn is connected to a nationwide database.
One of the axioms of free software is that users are free to fix whatever they want, when they want. So after 17 years of Linux evolution, why are these "problems" not fixed yet?
In most cases, it's because the cure would be worse than the disease.
So obviously what we need is yet another package management system that's different from all the ones that exist now. Developed from scratch, of course.
Obviously the solution is to rewrite every program in the OS to use a standard configuration file format. Instead of, you know, writing a man page that explains how the configuration file works.
So we should freeze all kernel development until proposed changes go through a 2-year approval process by a configuration control board. We all know that keeps the Debian distro moving along smoothly.
And so on.
Bottom line: the author doesn't like Linux, doesn't bother to understand it, and wishes it were more like a proprietary OS controlled by a single vendor.
If we were to create a functionally exact replica of even a single neuron using semiconductors (or any artificial material), then we'd have a Nobel Prize coming to us.
I don't think it's likely that a computer will resemble a biological nervous system. For one thing, nerve signals ain't digital.
I don't think it was ever supposed to catch terrorists; that was just a pretext to set up a dragnet without that pesky Bill of Rights getting in the way.
McCarthyism resulted in less than 1% of the citizens of Hollywood being blacklisted from the movie industry (on hearsay and specious evidence). So that was OK, then?
Numbers don't matter. Justice matters. What ever happened to "probable cause?"
Non sequitur. It would very likely have an emergent property, but nothing requires that it be the same, or similar, to properties that emerge in biological systems.
Sorry, I was kidding. :-)
I guess there is a real point lurking beneath my irony though. Advertisers don't actually need your attention. They believe that if they bombard you with their brand name and logo often enough, for long enough, they can bias your purchasing decisions toward their product. I'm skeptical of the value of this whole "brand recognition" idea, myself.
Oh, look at the time! I have to run down to the Lexus dealer and then go to McDonalds! ;-)
Ah, but all the subliminal messages still work on you. Hence your inexplicable urge to go drive a Lexus to McDonalds and pay with your Capital One credit card. ;-)
Here we have a classic case of what Republicans "legislating from the bench." Justice Douglas' argument boils down to "the past 1000 years of Anglo-Saxon legal tradition, which we the people have willingly incorporated into our jurisprudence, are inconvenient and don't make a lot of sense. I could follow the law as it is, rule in accordance with the established law of the land, and find in favor of the plaintiffs, but nah, my common sense revolts at the idea. So instead I'll redefine what property means right here in this courtroom, all by myself, without any input from the legislature or the general public."
Yes, it's nonsense to have property rights extend to the boundary of the known universe. But think for a moment if the verdict in this case had been, "Sorry, Congress, property rights haven't changed and technically overflying private property is trespass. You've got two laws, the property rights common-law definition and this new thing about airplanes, and the older law wins. Maybe you ought to change one of 'em."
Then Congress would have formally passed a new definition of property rights, and it could have come up for debate, been subject to Presidential veto, and generally gone through the whole deliberative process by which laws are supposed to get made.
Frankly, I am all in favor of the Supreme Court's power to strike down laws that violate the Constitution ... but violating "common sense" ain't the same thing.
Well said. I would add that it will be the one who's willing to spend the time and energy to seriously address health care, amid the economic crisis and the two wars and energy independence and tax policy and all the other urgent problems the next president will face.
It's not a matter of who has the better plan IMO, it's who has the will to actually work hard enough on this one problem among many other priorities.
No one understands how the economy really works. Economists call that the Efficient Market Hypothesis.
And how much authority does Massachusetts have over a company in Wilimgton, DE (for example)? None.
Best case, this law will be ignored for a few months, then struck down by Federal court on the grounds that a state lacks authority over businesses that operate across state lines.
Worst case, businesses will just move their data warehouses out of Massachusetts and claim the law doesn't apply to them any more.
I'm not saying encryption is stupid or unnecessary. I'm just saying this law has very minimal chance of making any real difference. You can't change the nature of e-commerce one state at a time.
I have always thought of quantum cryptography more as something for CIA-to-Pentagon or Swiss-bank-to-Swiss-bank kinds of communication, not something for Aunt Tillie. I think the vulnerability of the system depends on who's using it.
My country's war dead were more than 400,000; the total number of troops the U.S. committed to the war effort was more like 16 million.
I am not one of those Americans who likes to claim a lot of credit for what my ancestors did 60 years ago, but it's clear that your idea of how World War II affected America is as far off as many Americans' idea of how the war affected Europe.
That said, I would agree with the basic point of what you said; American casualties were less than a tenth of German casualties, and the U.S. didn't get split in half for 50 years. And most Americans do underestimate the cultural impact of that aftermath.
Oh, I disagree; you can invest in individual stocks without the crazy BS, as long as you don't attempt to day-trade (that is, to make short-term profits by timing the market).
Even a huge price fluctuation like this barely registers with me, because I only look at my stocks' performance about once a quarter. (If that.)
You seem to be confusing "innovation" with "competition." They're not the same, and one does not imply the other.
I wish we could mod articles down.
IANAL, but if I were, I would think of some argument.
Even if that were true (and I think it's crap), the choice would boil down to being a crook, or going out of business. It's still a choice, and those who choose to evade taxes are still crooks.
Just because Red Hat made one high-profile mistake, doesn't mean their support service is without value. Jump to conclusions much?