Really, I don't think it's a 'bug' so much as it is shoddy coding and bloat in general. They've seen no desire or need to fix that to this point, so I don't see why filing endless bug reports telling them to clean up and slim down will help.
I keep seeing people make statements like this, but when I ask for steps to reproduce any problem, no one can seem to come up with any.
1. Use the browser daily 2. See terrible memory usage in your favorite memory-usage utility (Taskmanager, whatever).
Currently, firefox is using 20% on average of the primary core of my Core Duo T2400, and approximately 600 MB of RAM. I have 25 tabs open: mostly messageboards, Slashdot, news sites, google, etc.
This instance of Firefox has been open for about three days.
Whether or not it's any worse than any other browser... so what? It's still annoying. Being the best of a bad lot isn't much of a commendation.
The problem with all of the above is that they all specify inalienable rights, which are laughable constructs at the best of times.
There's no such thing, and there never can be. Society is nothing more than a mirror of the individuals within it. A government cannot survive without the population supporting it.
I'm not going to go into the founding documents of the United States, because they're not really relevant to this issue. But my opinion is (and always has been) that they're essentially rubbish in all of their forms due to the fact that they do tend to rely on somehow 'inalienable' rights, which society has always realized to be a ridiculous concept.
Perhaps. However, most of the western world supports of the view of the monopoly of force; the state is the singular entity that has the legal authority to kill or to authorize killings, and therefore has a monopoly on the use of force.
Some have argued otherwise for the United States, in that the second amendment provides for a militia counter to the govenrment, but I would argue that any rebellion is by definition an illegitimate use of force.
Except that self-defense is not a right, and neither is fair use. Both concepts have little basis in law.
Now, as to the legal concept of being allowed to plead in the alternative, you'll never see me doing that. It's a disgusting practice that I have never yet seen an honorable purpose for.
Then again, I have a problem with plea bargaining in general, too, and only 2% of cases reach trial. So obviously my views are not well supprted in the judicial community.
Ironically, I was reading the origins of the adversary criminal trial a few days ago, and back in the day the English legal system would not allow lawyers for the defense- they were seen to do nothing more than muddy up the truth by introducing all sorts of extraneous concepts. Old-fashioned indeed, but I feel similarly about most methods of pleadings these days.
In any case, to return to the issue at hand, It is my opinion that intellectual property is a necessary creation of the state for the simple reason that capitalism as a pure system is doomed to fail. It requires a system of economic knowledge which is simply impossible. Similarly, intellectual property is basically 'regulation' of the intellectual marketplace.
Within that framework, then, you have no more right to fair use than you have to unregulated trade. It may be possible under certain circumstances when the legislative context is correct, but it's certainly not guaranteed. It is not a right at all.
Self-defense is arguably similar. The state has a monopoly on the use of force; it may be possible under certain circumstances when the legislative context is correct for an individual to wield force against another, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
Self-defense is not a right. It's an affirmative defense. Sibling poster is slightly confused in use, but not in content.
If you plead self-defense, you are pleading that you DID murder the person, but you shouldn't be punished for it because there were exonerating circumstances (namely that person was a threat to your own safety).
Fair use is similar. You argue that you DID copy the material without the owner's permission, but that there are exonerating circumstances that make it acceptable.
I dunno, I'd say some recent switchers from Windows to Mac ("average" users, not the Slashdot know it all types) might feel a little naked without their antiviruses and all that. It's almost understandable, seeing as they've had years of conditioning that everything they do invites trojans and viruses. Kind of like how a New Yorker who moves to the suburbs is amazed he doesn't have to lock his car doors.
Which is ironic, because just as you should still lock your car doors in the suburbs, the principle of defense in depth is just as applicable to any *nix-based OS as it is to Windows.
Both switchers are getting exactly the wrong impression.
No, but you can sell me your car under the contractual proviso that I only drive it on streets named main, and if I fail to follow through, you can sue me for breach of contract.
Which is essentially what copyright does. It automatically adds a proviso to any purchase that you do not have the right to reproduce the work.
By defeating copyright 'law' all that changes is that purchasing digital work will become more complicated, contractually.
The people who could fake it are probably not going to be the same people who will stand for being blackmailed by their employer into voting for one candidate or the other.
That said, why will poll officials not stop you from using your cell phone camera to take a picture but will stop you from using it to take a video? Do they have magic x-ray vision now?
Possibly, although the definition is probably academic; as I said before, interaction and observation are really the same thing.
The only way security is not obscurity is if the 'secret' does not actually exist.
But even so, it's far less clear here.
For example, say you have a lock (an analog for encryption) and do not give me the key. Obscurity here provides you with protection: with enough time examining the lock I can deduce the key.
On the other hand, you can refer to the example of Enigma; Allied cryptographers were able to break the encryption and so had access to the obscured messages. However, they could not act upon the contents of the message without revealing that they had, in fact, decrypted them (barring some incidents which provided plausible deniability, admittedly).
The result is that while it is possible to keep a 'secret' without obscuring its contents, doing so is essentially meaningless, as there is no way to act upon its contents without revealing it in some form- at which point the focus drops back to obscurability.
Which is why the dichotomy between 'secure by design' and 'security through obscurity' is so fallacious. Any security system designed to keep intruders out requires some mechanism of doing so, and by design, requires that mechanism to be presented to the intruder. The mechanism is hiding the message, and so is itself a mechanism of obscurity.
A security system (doesn't have to rely on obscurity, as seen above, but reasonably will be), and it can also be secure by design. The two concepts are hardly contradictory, and the latter is not a negative attribute even if it exists.
Badly implemented security through obscurity is bad. But then, so are badly-implemented firearms.
And that's exactly my point. The term is completely meaningless. It's an attempt to obscure the issue- that is, that security IS obscurity, and without obscurity you cannot have security.
Whining about 'security through obscurity' is fallacious in the extreme.
Now, some methods of obscurity are indeed better than others. But an Arquebus is arguably inferior to a crossbow; that does not mean that gunpowder weapons are useless.
If you believe security through obscurity is ineffective, I'd like you to hand over all your encryption keys and passwords: after all, there's no need to keep them obsecure! Eventually, at some point, all of security comes down to obscurity. Security IS the concept that you are hiding (preventing access to) some sort of 'secret'.
Something cannot be secure without obscurity.
It's like the physics concept: Observation is Interaction.
It may be (as it is in some other cases, notably spectrum interference) that it doesn't matter about whether or not you were there first- the plane had a right to be there, and your obligation is to avoid it, period.
That would make it your fault regardless of whether the plane accidentally wandered into your beam or you intentionally wandered the beam into the aircraft.
And then you will suffer the consequences. You always have the right to disobey the law- but you do so at the understanding that you will presumably be punished as the law decides.
Each situation, then, must be judged along the scale of "Is doing X worth more to me than having to suffer punishment Y?"
Re:The worlds of Belief and Reason are Orthagonal
on
Ye Olde World Charm
·
· Score: 1
Only moderately related to your topic...
As anyone who has attempted to understand the feminine mind can attest, reason isn't everything.
Humans are eminently predictable, and the female of the species is no exception.
It's merely a matter of having enough information to be able to make at least a reasonably accurate stab at predicting what the response will be in any given situation. The more information, the more accurate your prediction, much like predicting the weather.
That doesn't mean that the weather doesn't operate along guidelines that can be analyzed, does it?
Really, that's an issue I've always found- people give up when they see a complicated issue. "It's not logical, because I can't see the logic behind it."
And yet that description belies the flaw: The fact that you, or I, personally, cannot determine the logic behind a system does not mean that a system does not operate along logical lines.
It means we have yet to determine what those lines are.
Although I think it's nice of them to say that they're not blaming Windows for their own mistake, I do honestly think that Windows should protect such vital files at all cost - including against Administrator level process (e.g. a prompt "you dumbass - are you sure?" will do).
Isn't the first thing most people do on Vista is turn off the Administrator "Are you sure?" prompts?
(I know that personally I do not- I don't get them more than a half-dozen times a day, if that, so it's really not that big a deal.)
It's possible to eliminate the sonic boom, with a correct airframe shape; apparently people have made working models of the Busemann's Biplane in tests, but the shape itself generates no lift, slightly problematically.
She wanted to sleep with it under the pillow (she also has a katana in an umbrella stand near the bedroom fireplace and a pair of nunchucks hanging off the headboard), and I was afraid she was going to deprive me of some vital portion of my anatomy during the night accidentally. I told her to put it back in the knife block, she refused...
and it sort of went from there.
In the end, she did put it back in the knife block, but I had to sleep on the couch.:(
You know, whenever I tell the story of the two of us wrestling on the kitchen floor over a cleaver at 11 PM, people look at me like I'm insane. I'm afraid it hasn't happened in a while, though. Shame.
As it is, I'm the OCD one with the placement of books. I just can't bring myself to complain about guests rearranging them, it seems rude.
I've seen your space before, it's quite impressive. We have a very large basement- 12 full-height bookcases along each long north-south wall and a bunch of couches and a TV at the south end.
I've found it exceptionally annoying to try to keep databases with large numbers of objects. Especially the ones embedded into consumer products. I have a program for cataloging my DVDs, but it tends to choke up even when dealing with the only ~250 or so DVDs we have.
I'd have to actually create a database and front end, which I'm somewhat loathe to do (as it involves work. Of the work, and not so cool, variety.)
Slashdot Mirror
Because I'm using firefox.
Really, I don't think it's a 'bug' so much as it is shoddy coding and bloat in general. They've seen no desire or need to fix that to this point, so I don't see why filing endless bug reports telling them to clean up and slim down will help.
1. Use the browser daily
2. See terrible memory usage in your favorite memory-usage utility (Taskmanager, whatever).
Currently, firefox is using 20% on average of the primary core of my Core Duo T2400, and approximately 600 MB of RAM. I have 25 tabs open: mostly messageboards, Slashdot, news sites, google, etc.
This instance of Firefox has been open for about three days.
Whether or not it's any worse than any other browser... so what? It's still annoying. Being the best of a bad lot isn't much of a commendation.
Obviously, he works for the NSA.
The problem with all of the above is that they all specify inalienable rights, which are laughable constructs at the best of times.
There's no such thing, and there never can be. Society is nothing more than a mirror of the individuals within it. A government cannot survive without the population supporting it.
I'm not going to go into the founding documents of the United States, because they're not really relevant to this issue. But my opinion is (and always has been) that they're essentially rubbish in all of their forms due to the fact that they do tend to rely on somehow 'inalienable' rights, which society has always realized to be a ridiculous concept.
Perhaps. However, most of the western world supports of the view of the monopoly of force; the state is the singular entity that has the legal authority to kill or to authorize killings, and therefore has a monopoly on the use of force.
Some have argued otherwise for the United States, in that the second amendment provides for a militia counter to the govenrment, but I would argue that any rebellion is by definition an illegitimate use of force.
Except that self-defense is not a right, and neither is fair use. Both concepts have little basis in law.
Now, as to the legal concept of being allowed to plead in the alternative, you'll never see me doing that. It's a disgusting practice that I have never yet seen an honorable purpose for.
Then again, I have a problem with plea bargaining in general, too, and only 2% of cases reach trial. So obviously my views are not well supprted in the judicial community.
Ironically, I was reading the origins of the adversary criminal trial a few days ago, and back in the day the English legal system would not allow lawyers for the defense- they were seen to do nothing more than muddy up the truth by introducing all sorts of extraneous concepts. Old-fashioned indeed, but I feel similarly about most methods of pleadings these days.
In any case, to return to the issue at hand, It is my opinion that intellectual property is a necessary creation of the state for the simple reason that capitalism as a pure system is doomed to fail. It requires a system of economic knowledge which is simply impossible. Similarly, intellectual property is basically 'regulation' of the intellectual marketplace.
Within that framework, then, you have no more right to fair use than you have to unregulated trade. It may be possible under certain circumstances when the legislative context is correct, but it's certainly not guaranteed. It is not a right at all.
Self-defense is arguably similar. The state has a monopoly on the use of force; it may be possible under certain circumstances when the legislative context is correct for an individual to wield force against another, but it's certainly not guaranteed.
Self-defense is not a right. It's an affirmative defense. Sibling poster is slightly confused in use, but not in content.
If you plead self-defense, you are pleading that you DID murder the person, but you shouldn't be punished for it because there were exonerating circumstances (namely that person was a threat to your own safety).
Fair use is similar. You argue that you DID copy the material without the owner's permission, but that there are exonerating circumstances that make it acceptable.
Which is ironic, because just as you should still lock your car doors in the suburbs, the principle of defense in depth is just as applicable to any *nix-based OS as it is to Windows.
Both switchers are getting exactly the wrong impression.
Only in some cases. Not all copyright violation is criminal liability; mostly it's civil liability.
No, but you can sell me your car under the contractual proviso that I only drive it on streets named main, and if I fail to follow through, you can sue me for breach of contract.
Which is essentially what copyright does. It automatically adds a proviso to any purchase that you do not have the right to reproduce the work.
By defeating copyright 'law' all that changes is that purchasing digital work will become more complicated, contractually.
The people who could fake it are probably not going to be the same people who will stand for being blackmailed by their employer into voting for one candidate or the other.
That said, why will poll officials not stop you from using your cell phone camera to take a picture but will stop you from using it to take a video? Do they have magic x-ray vision now?
Three words: Cell Phone Video.
Possibly, although the definition is probably academic; as I said before, interaction and observation are really the same thing.
The only way security is not obscurity is if the 'secret' does not actually exist.
But even so, it's far less clear here.
For example, say you have a lock (an analog for encryption) and do not give me the key. Obscurity here provides you with protection: with enough time examining the lock I can deduce the key.
On the other hand, you can refer to the example of Enigma; Allied cryptographers were able to break the encryption and so had access to the obscured messages. However, they could not act upon the contents of the message without revealing that they had, in fact, decrypted them (barring some incidents which provided plausible deniability, admittedly).
The result is that while it is possible to keep a 'secret' without obscuring its contents, doing so is essentially meaningless, as there is no way to act upon its contents without revealing it in some form- at which point the focus drops back to obscurability.
Which is why the dichotomy between 'secure by design' and 'security through obscurity' is so fallacious. Any security system designed to keep intruders out requires some mechanism of doing so, and by design, requires that mechanism to be presented to the intruder. The mechanism is hiding the message, and so is itself a mechanism of obscurity.
A security system (doesn't have to rely on obscurity, as seen above, but reasonably will be), and it can also be secure by design. The two concepts are hardly contradictory, and the latter is not a negative attribute even if it exists.
Badly implemented security through obscurity is bad. But then, so are badly-implemented firearms.
And that's exactly my point. The term is completely meaningless. It's an attempt to obscure the issue- that is, that security IS obscurity, and without obscurity you cannot have security.
Whining about 'security through obscurity' is fallacious in the extreme.
Now, some methods of obscurity are indeed better than others. But an Arquebus is arguably inferior to a crossbow; that does not mean that gunpowder weapons are useless.
If you believe security through obscurity is ineffective, I'd like you to hand over all your encryption keys and passwords: after all, there's no need to keep them obsecure! Eventually, at some point, all of security comes down to obscurity. Security IS the concept that you are hiding (preventing access to) some sort of 'secret'.
Something cannot be secure without obscurity.
It's like the physics concept: Observation is Interaction.
It may be (as it is in some other cases, notably spectrum interference) that it doesn't matter about whether or not you were there first- the plane had a right to be there, and your obligation is to avoid it, period.
That would make it your fault regardless of whether the plane accidentally wandered into your beam or you intentionally wandered the beam into the aircraft.
Of course, that's all speculating.
And then you will suffer the consequences. You always have the right to disobey the law- but you do so at the understanding that you will presumably be punished as the law decides.
Each situation, then, must be judged along the scale of "Is doing X worth more to me than having to suffer punishment Y?"
Humans are eminently predictable, and the female of the species is no exception.
It's merely a matter of having enough information to be able to make at least a reasonably accurate stab at predicting what the response will be in any given situation. The more information, the more accurate your prediction, much like predicting the weather.
That doesn't mean that the weather doesn't operate along guidelines that can be analyzed, does it?
Really, that's an issue I've always found- people give up when they see a complicated issue. "It's not logical, because I can't see the logic behind it."
And yet that description belies the flaw: The fact that you, or I, personally, cannot determine the logic behind a system does not mean that a system does not operate along logical lines.
It means we have yet to determine what those lines are.
The police are not stupid enough to let you nuke the disk. They'll have a bitstream copy, and be mounting it as read-only.
Isn't the first thing most people do on Vista is turn off the Administrator "Are you sure?" prompts?
(I know that personally I do not- I don't get them more than a half-dozen times a day, if that, so it's really not that big a deal.)
There are theoretical designs such as Busemann's Biplane that don't appear to create any sonic booms at all, and DARPA was able to reduce the sonic signature of an F-5 by almost a third at one point.
It's possible to eliminate the sonic boom, with a correct airframe shape; apparently people have made working models of the Busemann's Biplane in tests, but the shape itself generates no lift, slightly problematically.
She wanted to sleep with it under the pillow (she also has a katana in an umbrella stand near the bedroom fireplace and a pair of nunchucks hanging off the headboard), and I was afraid she was going to deprive me of some vital portion of my anatomy during the night accidentally. I told her to put it back in the knife block, she refused...
:(
and it sort of went from there.
In the end, she did put it back in the knife block, but I had to sleep on the couch.
Sort of defeated the purpose, I suppose.
You know, whenever I tell the story of the two of us wrestling on the kitchen floor over a cleaver at 11 PM, people look at me like I'm insane. I'm afraid it hasn't happened in a while, though. Shame.
As it is, I'm the OCD one with the placement of books. I just can't bring myself to complain about guests rearranging them, it seems rude.
I think my omnipresent female would hurt me if I tried that. :P
I've seen your space before, it's quite impressive. We have a very large basement- 12 full-height bookcases along each long north-south wall and a bunch of couches and a TV at the south end.
I've found it exceptionally annoying to try to keep databases with large numbers of objects. Especially the ones embedded into consumer products. I have a program for cataloging my DVDs, but it tends to choke up even when dealing with the only ~250 or so DVDs we have.
I'd have to actually create a database and front end, which I'm somewhat loathe to do (as it involves work. Of the work, and not so cool, variety.)