I cannot help but think this is going to be a major security problem if it is implemented. If you thought bored teenagers (and worse, actual malicious crackers) wardriving for open wireless networks was bad, just wait until thieves with RFID scanners are standing at busy street corners and bus stops emptying your virtual wallet.
Of course, one would think that such a scheme would be implemented with a PIN or some other kind of password, but then, what advantage would it have over a debit card? I don't know about you, but the only time I don't have my debit card with me is when my pants are off (and call me prudish, but I kind of insist on my debit card not being a prerequisite for having my pants off), so a subdermal RFID debit chip is really not going to offer me any convenience unless -- as no doubt they ultimately plan -- the only authorization required for dinging my account is to have some pasty-faced clerk smacking a button on his cash register.
And if you thought changing cell phone providers was painful, wait until you change RFID bank networks! Ouch!
Oh wait, of course, the idea is that the banking community will adopt a common scheme with RFID chips acting as -- drum roll, please -- de facto universal identifiers. Mark of the beast if you're into neolithic supersition, or the long arm of warrantless, unaccountable federal law enforcement if you live in the modern age.
More benignly, if an order of magnitude more annoyingly, wait until commissioned salespeople can discreetly perform a pre-authorization on your RFID to see how much they can shake you down for. Does your car salesman seem to have an almost uncanny sense of how much he can screw you for? Does your down-on-his-luck buddy always seem to get a better price on goods and services than you do? Welcome to the brave new world of commercial information awareness.
Thank you, but I'll pass. I like my cards dumb and my chips in PCBs.
Any generic free BIOS would be fine, thank you. I'm really surprised that there aren't lots of open source BIOS ROM images available -- all the BIOS chip is, after all, is an EEPROM, and there are certainly a fair number of people who seriously get into low-level bare-metal coding.
It worked for the American Revolutionaries, it worked for the North Vietnamese, and there are countless other historical examples.
Spoken like a true product of paranoid evangelical home schooling.
Of course, I assume all the rest of your "countless" historical examples are also cases of a major power confronting a guerilla movment on its home turf in an unpopular war far from home. That's a very different case than fighting the central government on its own territory. My ancestors tried that on terms that were almost equal at the outset, fought valiantly, and lost miserably. Civil wars are not even in the same ballpark as penny-ante colonial pacification campaigns.
Up until that moment I had always assumed the cash machines were running some specially written firmware on specially made hardware. This was a massively important and widespread system after all.
I had assumed they were 8-bit machines, probably packing a 6502 or a Z80, with an EEPROM containing all of the necessary code. I made this assumption because that should be enough to handle ATM operations, the actual computing hardware would be cheap and secure, and that block font most of them use is the same as the uppercase-only font on the early Apple II machines.
I walked up to an ATM this past weekend and saw an OS/2 error window floating over the simulated bitmap font. I was grateful it wasn't Windows, but still...
Thank God we have the 2nd Amendment to tell our elected representatives that enough is enough.
Amen to that. I'll crouch inside of my front door, holding off the Abrams main battle tanks and Apache gunships with this here huntin' rifle, Jed, while you make a dash out the back door. If'n I don't meet you at the Rio Grande tonight, you jes' forgit about me and high-tail it into May-hee-co.
North America, the continent with three different countries on it, including the USA).
When you're done correcting the original poster's grotesque ignorance of geography, you might spend a little time correcting your own. There are ten nations on the North American continent. The seven you forgot are: Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.
What we need to do is file 1000's of small claims against SCO in your local courts, alleging copyright violation.
I hate to hit you with this, Perry Mason, but copyright violation cases do not get tried in small claims courts. Furthermore, unless you registered your copyright with a form TX at the Copyright Office, you can't sue for punitive damages, so you will have to demonstrate actual monetary losses in order to sue for compensatory damages, and since you are, presumably, not being paid royalties on non-existent sales of the kernel, you have no grounds for a suit.
And "lose" has only one 'o'. "Loose", as in "loose legal reasoning" has two.
If this is true then one must wonder why Linus doesn't utilize more of these available resources. Why does he instead have a relatively small group of hackers working on only a kernel? Why, with all his resources, is he not developing, embracing and extending a plethora of other operating system components and applications?
This misses the point in a couple of ways. Firstly, the core kernel developers are a minority of the developers working in the kernel -- many hundreds or thousands more are working on kernel modules, not all of which are part of the official tree. Secondly, Linus is essentially the project manager for one product: the Linux kernel. This is a task he apparently does very well, and it is not at all clear that if he was instead acting as a CEO and directing the work of dozens or hundreds of project managers, that he would be as effective. What could Linus contribute to the development of MySQL, OpenOffice.org, gcc, GNOME, or KDE? Probably nothing -- he has, so far as I can tell, no experience in any of these areas. His opinion on kernel design is demonstrably valuable; his opinion on word processor design is worth no more than mine.
The comparison between Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds is ultimately meaningless; their jobs aren't remotely similar. A comparison between Linus and whoever oversees OS development within Microsoft would be more useful, and there, I think, Linus probably does command more and better developers. The original article might better be read with Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds as symbols of closed-source commercial software versus open and free software.
Combine this with the fact that they are driven to participate based on their interest or itch and we end up with a fine kernel, a few great apps and an abundance of mp3 players.
This, however, is a valid point. If you care about Linux on the desktop -- and I think most of us do, if only for its side-effects on the software market -- then the situation is not very rosy. OpenOffice.org is a fine package, but it has fewer features than Office 97, and requires a much beefier machine to run usefully than Office 97. This is at least partly because very few developers use word processors and spreadsheets the way the average desktop user does. Too many of them fail to understand that, for example, while the average user only uses 10% of the features in something like a word processor, the average user also uses a different 10% than the guy sitting next to him. The remainder fail to grasp that the average user is using a machine that is five years behind the latest and greatest. (My vintage 1996 ThinkPad 560 runs Office 97 just fine, but can't even load OpenOffice.org, though it's quite zippy on the dual Pentium desktop box I do my development work on.)
Here we can see where the involvement of commercial developers can be useful: Sun backs StarOffice and OpenOffice.org precisely because it cuts into Microsoft's bottom line. Where the "itch" is lacking among hobbyists, everyone but Microsoft sees free and open software as a weapon against Microsoft. (Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the major players in this area, like Sun and IBM, are primarily hardware and consulting vendors rather than software vendors.)
We don't need a 'new master, same as the old master' ascending to power, but some here seem to think it would be okay.
Not that there's any danger of Apple ever crawling out of its niche again, but Apple would make a much worse master than Microsoft. Think about it -- do you want your software and your hardware controlled by a greedy monopoly?
The only thing that separates Microsoft from most other technology companies is their monopoly status. If you have six people in a room, and one of them is an asshole with a gun, handing the gun to one of the other five people will leave you in the same situation as before: six people in a room, and one of them is an asshole with a gun.
I have no doubt that the GPL and therefore software freedom will be upheld in court, even if worse comes to worst with the Linux kernel (however unlikely that is). Yes, SCO is crazy/dangerous, but in the long run they can't really hurt free and open source software.
I think it's fair to say that losing Linux would hut free software for a long time. You may have noticed that every time someone has announced a new free operating system -- or, for that matter, an older one like the BSDs -- there is a chorus of "Who needs it? We have Linux!" and it usually dies for lack of both users and developers. What we have today is a bad case of too many eggs in one basket.
Honestly, the free and open software community often behaves en masse like "non-conformist" teenagers who buck the norm only to rigidly adhere to the one true alternative. Of course, that may not be wholly coincidental.
There are dozens and dozens of free operating systems out there ranging from pre-alpha plans to complete, mature systems. Do yourself a favor and check them out until you are sure you can name ten of them off the top of your head. Linux isn't the silver bullet for all applications any more than Windows or MacOS or Solaris are.
It's not about giving up freedom for security, we're now reduced to giving up freedom for TV shows?
What's really warped is that, at a time when really important freedoms like due process of law, attorney-client privilege, and the right to trial by jury are being threatened by the current regime, people have the time and energy left over to piss and moan about how their VCRs work.
If you're going to pick a single distribution for the desktop end user, Debian would be damn near the worst choice possible. There are four reasons for this.
1. Debian is the least user-friendly of all the major distributions. This should be immediately evident from its popularity among the most technically-skilled users.
2. Debian packages are much, much harder to create than RPMs. Sure, they're technically superior in many ways, but it's already a major pain in the ass to get commercial vendors to produce RPMs; how are they going to react to the increased pain of producing Debian packages?
3. The Debian organization is ideologically rigid and openly hostile to the very commercial software vendors whose support is a prerequisite to serious penetration into the desktop market.
4. Debian follows a "release late, release rarely" model that appeals (with good reason) to sysadmins, but which will not appeal at all to individual users who want to take advantage of the latest hardware.
If the goal is to unite around a purely non-commercial distro, Slackware is the obvious choice. If the goal is just to replace RedHat, then SuSE is the obvious choice -- certainly Novell should be enthusiastically friendly to developers these days.
On the other hand, it is worth asking whether we need or want a formally-defined standard distribution is commoditization of the operating system is a goal. Distributions should adhere to standards, not be standards themselves. We need to get to the point where it doesn't matter whether you're running RedHat, Slackware, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, etc.
The simple fact is that if the FCC and the US Govt gets heavy-handed with regulating VoIP, it will go underground, just like file and music swapping did when they clamped down on it.
The terrifically vital point you are missing here is that the government never clamped down on P2P. A couple of companies got sued by a couple of other companies, and the victors have been threatening to sue still more companies. That's just civil litigation. The government, on the other hand, are the people who whisk folks away from the other side of the planet in giant transport planes and put them in dog kennels in Cuba. That is not a trivial difference.
If the government had clamped down on P2P, it wouldn't exist anymore. It's not as if there's enough profit motive involved in illicit copies of Metallica albums to make it worth going toe-to-toe with federal agencies as it might be, for example, with cocaine smuggling.
Of course, all this is beside the point. The only way VoIP is going to matter will be if it becomes commonly used by the oft-mentioned unwashed masses. Being "rogue" or "underground" would render it about as unimportant as every other "rogue" activity that doesn't involve weapons-grade uranium or livestock diseases. That's what separates useful but not terribly important geek toys like syntax-highlighting libraries from major forces for social changes like the world wide web.
Great. So now I'll have to worry about staying in the good graces of the Seven Patriarchs of Outer Boobistan, as if avoiding the wrath of my own enlightened, free, democratic government wasn't getting hard enough as it is.
Seriously, I say this is bad. The UN should be finding ways to get force countries to accept disagreeable content, not finding ways to make it easier for them to export censorship. Besides, there already is a way for military and religious dictatorships to shield their populations from the horrors of free speech and bare nipples: don't connect to the global internet. Run your own damn closed TCP/IP networks; I'll even send a free CD with all the software they'll need to the first dictator to call.
Of course, just not listening/reading/watching stuff you don't like is a strategy that, while damn near 100% effective, never seems to occur to these paleolithic troglodytes. That goes for Outer Boobistan no less than it does for Inner GOPistan.
So before anyone says that virus only show up for windows because it is the most popular
This has always sounded like a bogus argument to me. Because more Linux boxen are servers in important roles and because the Linux internals are out there for everyone to see, Linux ought to be a more appealing target for virus writers except that it is more fundamentally secure than Windows. Windows is a more popular target because it is so easy to hijack, not because it is more popular.
also realize that Micro$oft can't even write a secure word processor.
The main problem is that most people, apparently including Microsoft's management, don't realize that Word (and by extension, Office) is not just a word processor; it is a fully-blown development platform designed to integrate at many levels to outside applications. Unfortunately, Microsoft continues to act as if Word was just an ordinary desktop app like, say, Winzip, instead of what it really is, a bytecode interpreter with a word processor bolted on top.
As a start, you could build a spinning-liquid telescope that points straight up, perfect for deep-field observation
I don't know if you've ever handled much mercury, but the shit is pretty damn heavy. A vial barely large enough to comfortably fit in one's closed hand weighs five pounds. Moving enough mercury to the moon to make a spinning-liquid telescope would involve lofting vastly more mass than an equivalent volume of optical glass.
Basically, if you don't like these movies you are not intellectual enough.
The proper response to this approach is to laugh. My eight-year-old has a similar complaint about people who don't "get" Pokemon, though to her credit, the premise of Pokemon makes more sense than AI machines who are smart enough to take over the world but not smart enough to use nuclear power (or, for that matter, coal) instead of human batteries.
Wait the GOP is suing? What about all that stuff I read on the internet that Diebold is in the pocket of the GOP? How can I believe anything I read on the Internet any more? Does this mean that Diebold is in the Democrats pockets?
Answer:Yes, it's ture, Diebold isn't in anyone's pockets - they are simply incompetent.
Or it just means that the Republicans, like the Democrats, are not a monolithic block.
It's not the Republicans as such that you have to worry about -- I'm sure that the overwhelming majority of Republicans would be every bit as outraged as the Democrats over the possibility of vote-tampering. Every reasonable person knows that's a sword that cuts both ways.
The Republican faction that you have to worry about is the unholy alliance between the Neocons, who have no respect for the opinions of the electorate, and the so-called Religious Right, who believe that they are answerable to a higher law and therefore cannot be trusted to uphold statutory law.
Ten years later, it is no exaggeration to say this issue has been dealt with thoroughly.
What planet do you live on? The general state of documentation for Linux and OSS applications in general is just awful. A number of GNU apps have good-to-excellent documentation, and Perl springs immediately to mind, but on the whole, I'd say that the general state of open source docs is not appreciably better than it was five years ago, and only marginally better than what it was ten years ago.
As for the Linux Documentation Project, the last time I checked, most of its HOWTO's were woefully out of date.
OTOH, perhaps this is a sign of open source finally reaching parity with the closed source world. Crowing about the maturity of open source documentation is exactly like Microsoft talking about the improved security of its products.
This is ridiculous. The guy was using this quote as a signature. Come on!
Slashdotters, please take note. Not only does this guy have a good point, he's the first Slashdotter in nearly a month to spell "ridiculous" correctly. On that basis, I suspect he can spell "ludicrous" as well.
Many corporate companies I have worked for explicitly forbid bring a camera of any sort onto the campus. If a person is unhappy with such a restriction they should work somewhere else.
He's lucky he didn't work for Intel. I did, and the first thing management made you aware of, before even discussing the location of your cubicle, was the URL of the internal Information Security website. InfoSec has a goddamn enormous site full of things you need to know you can't do -- possessing a camera on campus, mingling GPL code with Intel IP, revealing anything to outsiders without prior written approval, yada yada. It was all pretty standard, even if it was anally thorough, and no one had any excuse not to know it.
Intel would have sued the holy living shit out of this guy -- after he discovered he was no longer employed when his security badge wouldn't open the door to let him back in after a smoke break. For Microsoft to rather gently walk him out the door -- after his manager tried to negotiate with the higher-ups on his behalf -- says that, despite their external business practices, MS managers must be pretty reasonable.
yes... because we all know that no one underage ever gets cigarettes or alcohol. That method works like a charm.
Your cyncism -- or perhaps naivete -- is amazing.
This isn't a good comparison for the simple reason that no one is really trying to prevent kids from getting access to tobacco and alcohol, and the penalties for doing so are very, very light. If the laws regarding sale of tobacco and alcohol to minors were enforced with anything like the vigor applied to less dangerous illegal drugs, I am confident that the trade would drop off very sharply. If the average apathetic convenience store clerk or unscrupulous convenience store owner knew that one violation would lead to total forfeiture of all personal assets and 30 years to life -- as it can with possession of marijuana with intent to sell in some jurisdictions -- then you could bet your bottom dollar those clerks would check every ID and not sell a pack of cigarettes with a wink and a nod.
Frankly, I think it's worth doing and worth far more emphasis than minor problems like illegal drug abuse, which kill fewer people in a century than legal alcohol and tobacco kill in a month.
Of course, that would only make sense if the government and the conservative anti-drug factions were really interested in public health and not using their phony drug war (like their phony terrorism war) to expand the role of state terror in minimizing dissent and maximizing profit.
It does not have "Do you want fries with that?" in the vocabulary though."
Well, thank God. The day someone figures out that voice recognition systems are no worse than undermotivated teenagers and cheap-ass microphones at correctly understanding drive-through orders, millions will be out of work.
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I cannot help but think this is going to be a major security problem if it is implemented. If you thought bored teenagers (and worse, actual malicious crackers) wardriving for open wireless networks was bad, just wait until thieves with RFID scanners are standing at busy street corners and bus stops emptying your virtual wallet.
Of course, one would think that such a scheme would be implemented with a PIN or some other kind of password, but then, what advantage would it have over a debit card? I don't know about you, but the only time I don't have my debit card with me is when my pants are off (and call me prudish, but I kind of insist on my debit card not being a prerequisite for having my pants off), so a subdermal RFID debit chip is really not going to offer me any convenience unless -- as no doubt they ultimately plan -- the only authorization required for dinging my account is to have some pasty-faced clerk smacking a button on his cash register.
And if you thought changing cell phone providers was painful, wait until you change RFID bank networks! Ouch!
Oh wait, of course, the idea is that the banking community will adopt a common scheme with RFID chips acting as -- drum roll, please -- de facto universal identifiers. Mark of the beast if you're into neolithic supersition, or the long arm of warrantless, unaccountable federal law enforcement if you live in the modern age.
More benignly, if an order of magnitude more annoyingly, wait until commissioned salespeople can discreetly perform a pre-authorization on your RFID to see how much they can shake you down for. Does your car salesman seem to have an almost uncanny sense of how much he can screw you for? Does your down-on-his-luck buddy always seem to get a better price on goods and services than you do? Welcome to the brave new world of commercial information awareness.
Thank you, but I'll pass. I like my cards dumb and my chips in PCBs.
Any generic free BIOS would be fine, thank you. I'm really surprised that there aren't lots of open source BIOS ROM images available -- all the BIOS chip is, after all, is an EEPROM, and there are certainly a fair number of people who seriously get into low-level bare-metal coding.
It worked for the American Revolutionaries, it worked for the North Vietnamese, and there are countless other historical examples.
Spoken like a true product of paranoid evangelical home schooling.
Of course, I assume all the rest of your "countless" historical examples are also cases of a major power confronting a guerilla movment on its home turf in an unpopular war far from home. That's a very different case than fighting the central government on its own territory. My ancestors tried that on terms that were almost equal at the outset, fought valiantly, and lost miserably. Civil wars are not even in the same ballpark as penny-ante colonial pacification campaigns.
Up until that moment I had always assumed the cash machines were running some specially written firmware on specially made hardware. This was a massively important and widespread system after all.
I had assumed they were 8-bit machines, probably packing a 6502 or a Z80, with an EEPROM containing all of the necessary code. I made this assumption because that should be enough to handle ATM operations, the actual computing hardware would be cheap and secure, and that block font most of them use is the same as the uppercase-only font on the early Apple II machines.
I walked up to an ATM this past weekend and saw an OS/2 error window floating over the simulated bitmap font. I was grateful it wasn't Windows, but still...
Thank God we have the 2nd Amendment to tell our elected representatives that enough is enough.
Amen to that. I'll crouch inside of my front door, holding off the Abrams main battle tanks and Apache gunships with this here huntin' rifle, Jed, while you make a dash out the back door. If'n I don't meet you at the Rio Grande tonight, you jes' forgit about me and high-tail it into May-hee-co.
Ah. If you speak well, you must be insincere?
It's a variation on the "never trust anyone over thirty" thing. Only with Slashdot, it's "never trust anyone who can spell ridiculous correctly."
North America, the continent with three different countries on it, including the USA).
When you're done correcting the original poster's grotesque ignorance of geography, you might spend a little time correcting your own. There are ten nations on the North American continent. The seven you forgot are: Belize, Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama.
What we need to do is file 1000's of small claims against SCO in your local courts, alleging copyright violation.
I hate to hit you with this, Perry Mason, but copyright violation cases do not get tried in small claims courts. Furthermore, unless you registered your copyright with a form TX at the Copyright Office, you can't sue for punitive damages, so you will have to demonstrate actual monetary losses in order to sue for compensatory damages, and since you are, presumably, not being paid royalties on non-existent sales of the kernel, you have no grounds for a suit.
And "lose" has only one 'o'. "Loose", as in "loose legal reasoning" has two.
If this is true then one must wonder why Linus doesn't utilize more of these available resources. Why does he instead have a relatively small group of hackers working on only a kernel? Why, with all his resources, is he not developing, embracing and extending a plethora of other operating system components and applications?
This misses the point in a couple of ways. Firstly, the core kernel developers are a minority of the developers working in the kernel -- many hundreds or thousands more are working on kernel modules, not all of which are part of the official tree. Secondly, Linus is essentially the project manager for one product: the Linux kernel. This is a task he apparently does very well, and it is not at all clear that if he was instead acting as a CEO and directing the work of dozens or hundreds of project managers, that he would be as effective. What could Linus contribute to the development of MySQL, OpenOffice.org, gcc, GNOME, or KDE? Probably nothing -- he has, so far as I can tell, no experience in any of these areas. His opinion on kernel design is demonstrably valuable; his opinion on word processor design is worth no more than mine.
The comparison between Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds is ultimately meaningless; their jobs aren't remotely similar. A comparison between Linus and whoever oversees OS development within Microsoft would be more useful, and there, I think, Linus probably does command more and better developers. The original article might better be read with Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds as symbols of closed-source commercial software versus open and free software.
Combine this with the fact that they are driven to participate based on their interest or itch and we end up with a fine kernel, a few great apps and an abundance of mp3 players.
This, however, is a valid point. If you care about Linux on the desktop -- and I think most of us do, if only for its side-effects on the software market -- then the situation is not very rosy. OpenOffice.org is a fine package, but it has fewer features than Office 97, and requires a much beefier machine to run usefully than Office 97. This is at least partly because very few developers use word processors and spreadsheets the way the average desktop user does. Too many of them fail to understand that, for example, while the average user only uses 10% of the features in something like a word processor, the average user also uses a different 10% than the guy sitting next to him. The remainder fail to grasp that the average user is using a machine that is five years behind the latest and greatest. (My vintage 1996 ThinkPad 560 runs Office 97 just fine, but can't even load OpenOffice.org, though it's quite zippy on the dual Pentium desktop box I do my development work on.)
Here we can see where the involvement of commercial developers can be useful: Sun backs StarOffice and OpenOffice.org precisely because it cuts into Microsoft's bottom line. Where the "itch" is lacking among hobbyists, everyone but Microsoft sees free and open software as a weapon against Microsoft. (Perhaps not coincidentally, many of the major players in this area, like Sun and IBM, are primarily hardware and consulting vendors rather than software vendors.)
We don't need a 'new master, same as the old master' ascending to power, but some here seem to think it would be okay.
Not that there's any danger of Apple ever crawling out of its niche again, but Apple would make a much worse master than Microsoft. Think about it -- do you want your software and your hardware controlled by a greedy monopoly?
The only thing that separates Microsoft from most other technology companies is their monopoly status. If you have six people in a room, and one of them is an asshole with a gun, handing the gun to one of the other five people will leave you in the same situation as before: six people in a room, and one of them is an asshole with a gun.
I have no doubt that the GPL and therefore software freedom will be upheld in court, even if worse comes to worst with the Linux kernel (however unlikely that is). Yes, SCO is crazy/dangerous, but in the long run they can't really hurt free and open source software.
I think it's fair to say that losing Linux would hut free software for a long time. You may have noticed that every time someone has announced a new free operating system -- or, for that matter, an older one like the BSDs -- there is a chorus of "Who needs it? We have Linux!" and it usually dies for lack of both users and developers. What we have today is a bad case of too many eggs in one basket.
Honestly, the free and open software community often behaves en masse like "non-conformist" teenagers who buck the norm only to rigidly adhere to the one true alternative. Of course, that may not be wholly coincidental.
There are dozens and dozens of free operating systems out there ranging from pre-alpha plans to complete, mature systems. Do yourself a favor and check them out until you are sure you can name ten of them off the top of your head. Linux isn't the silver bullet for all applications any more than Windows or MacOS or Solaris are.
It's not about giving up freedom for security, we're now reduced to giving up freedom for TV shows?
What's really warped is that, at a time when really important freedoms like due process of law, attorney-client privilege, and the right to trial by jury are being threatened by the current regime, people have the time and energy left over to piss and moan about how their VCRs work.
If you're going to pick a single distribution for the desktop end user, Debian would be damn near the worst choice possible. There are four reasons for this.
1. Debian is the least user-friendly of all the major distributions. This should be immediately evident from its popularity among the most technically-skilled users.
2. Debian packages are much, much harder to create than RPMs. Sure, they're technically superior in many ways, but it's already a major pain in the ass to get commercial vendors to produce RPMs; how are they going to react to the increased pain of producing Debian packages?
3. The Debian organization is ideologically rigid and openly hostile to the very commercial software vendors whose support is a prerequisite to serious penetration into the desktop market.
4. Debian follows a "release late, release rarely" model that appeals (with good reason) to sysadmins, but which will not appeal at all to individual users who want to take advantage of the latest hardware.
If the goal is to unite around a purely non-commercial distro, Slackware is the obvious choice. If the goal is just to replace RedHat, then SuSE is the obvious choice -- certainly Novell should be enthusiastically friendly to developers these days.
On the other hand, it is worth asking whether we need or want a formally-defined standard distribution is commoditization of the operating system is a goal. Distributions should adhere to standards, not be standards themselves. We need to get to the point where it doesn't matter whether you're running RedHat, Slackware, Mandrake, SuSE, Debian, etc.
The simple fact is that if the FCC and the US Govt gets heavy-handed with regulating VoIP, it will go underground, just like file and music swapping did when they clamped down on it.
The terrifically vital point you are missing here is that the government never clamped down on P2P. A couple of companies got sued by a couple of other companies, and the victors have been threatening to sue still more companies. That's just civil litigation. The government, on the other hand, are the people who whisk folks away from the other side of the planet in giant transport planes and put them in dog kennels in Cuba. That is not a trivial difference.
If the government had clamped down on P2P, it wouldn't exist anymore. It's not as if there's enough profit motive involved in illicit copies of Metallica albums to make it worth going toe-to-toe with federal agencies as it might be, for example, with cocaine smuggling.
Of course, all this is beside the point. The only way VoIP is going to matter will be if it becomes commonly used by the oft-mentioned unwashed masses. Being "rogue" or "underground" would render it about as unimportant as every other "rogue" activity that doesn't involve weapons-grade uranium or livestock diseases. That's what separates useful but not terribly important geek toys like syntax-highlighting libraries from major forces for social changes like the world wide web.
Great. So now I'll have to worry about staying in the good graces of the Seven Patriarchs of Outer Boobistan, as if avoiding the wrath of my own enlightened, free, democratic government wasn't getting hard enough as it is.
Seriously, I say this is bad. The UN should be finding ways to get force countries to accept disagreeable content, not finding ways to make it easier for them to export censorship. Besides, there already is a way for military and religious dictatorships to shield their populations from the horrors of free speech and bare nipples: don't connect to the global internet. Run your own damn closed TCP/IP networks; I'll even send a free CD with all the software they'll need to the first dictator to call.
Of course, just not listening/reading/watching stuff you don't like is a strategy that, while damn near 100% effective, never seems to occur to these paleolithic troglodytes. That goes for Outer Boobistan no less than it does for Inner GOPistan.
So before anyone says that virus only show up for windows because it is the most popular
This has always sounded like a bogus argument to me. Because more Linux boxen are servers in important roles and because the Linux internals are out there for everyone to see, Linux ought to be a more appealing target for virus writers except that it is more fundamentally secure than Windows. Windows is a more popular target because it is so easy to hijack, not because it is more popular.
also realize that Micro$oft can't even write a secure word processor.
The main problem is that most people, apparently including Microsoft's management, don't realize that Word (and by extension, Office) is not just a word processor; it is a fully-blown development platform designed to integrate at many levels to outside applications. Unfortunately, Microsoft continues to act as if Word was just an ordinary desktop app like, say, Winzip, instead of what it really is, a bytecode interpreter with a word processor bolted on top.
As a start, you could build a spinning-liquid telescope that points straight up, perfect for deep-field observation
I don't know if you've ever handled much mercury, but the shit is pretty damn heavy. A vial barely large enough to comfortably fit in one's closed hand weighs five pounds. Moving enough mercury to the moon to make a spinning-liquid telescope would involve lofting vastly more mass than an equivalent volume of optical glass.
Basically, if you don't like these movies you are not intellectual enough.
The proper response to this approach is to laugh. My eight-year-old has a similar complaint about people who don't "get" Pokemon, though to her credit, the premise of Pokemon makes more sense than AI machines who are smart enough to take over the world but not smart enough to use nuclear power (or, for that matter, coal) instead of human batteries.
Wait the GOP is suing? What about all that stuff I read on the internet that Diebold is in the pocket of the GOP? How can I believe anything I read on the Internet any more? Does this mean that Diebold is in the Democrats pockets?
Answer:Yes, it's ture, Diebold isn't in anyone's pockets - they are simply incompetent.
Or it just means that the Republicans, like the Democrats, are not a monolithic block.
It's not the Republicans as such that you have to worry about -- I'm sure that the overwhelming majority of Republicans would be every bit as outraged as the Democrats over the possibility of vote-tampering. Every reasonable person knows that's a sword that cuts both ways.
The Republican faction that you have to worry about is the unholy alliance between the Neocons, who have no respect for the opinions of the electorate, and the so-called Religious Right, who believe that they are answerable to a higher law and therefore cannot be trusted to uphold statutory law.
Ten years later, it is no exaggeration to say this issue has been dealt with thoroughly.
What planet do you live on? The general state of documentation for Linux and OSS applications in general is just awful. A number of GNU apps have good-to-excellent documentation, and Perl springs immediately to mind, but on the whole, I'd say that the general state of open source docs is not appreciably better than it was five years ago, and only marginally better than what it was ten years ago.
As for the Linux Documentation Project, the last time I checked, most of its HOWTO's were woefully out of date.
OTOH, perhaps this is a sign of open source finally reaching parity with the closed source world. Crowing about the maturity of open source documentation is exactly like Microsoft talking about the improved security of its products.
This is ridiculous. The guy was using this quote as a signature. Come on!
Slashdotters, please take note. Not only does this guy have a good point, he's the first Slashdotter in nearly a month to spell "ridiculous" correctly. On that basis, I suspect he can spell "ludicrous" as well.
Many corporate companies I have worked for explicitly forbid bring a camera of any sort onto the campus. If a person is unhappy with such a restriction they should work somewhere else.
He's lucky he didn't work for Intel. I did, and the first thing management made you aware of, before even discussing the location of your cubicle, was the URL of the internal Information Security website. InfoSec has a goddamn enormous site full of things you need to know you can't do -- possessing a camera on campus, mingling GPL code with Intel IP, revealing anything to outsiders without prior written approval, yada yada. It was all pretty standard, even if it was anally thorough, and no one had any excuse not to know it.
Intel would have sued the holy living shit out of this guy -- after he discovered he was no longer employed when his security badge wouldn't open the door to let him back in after a smoke break. For Microsoft to rather gently walk him out the door -- after his manager tried to negotiate with the higher-ups on his behalf -- says that, despite their external business practices, MS managers must be pretty reasonable.
You know, if I was an attorney for Enlight -- a PC case manufacturer -- I'd be giggling all the way to the bank this morning.
yes... because we all know that no one underage ever gets cigarettes or alcohol. That method works like a charm.
Your cyncism -- or perhaps naivete -- is amazing.
This isn't a good comparison for the simple reason that no one is really trying to prevent kids from getting access to tobacco and alcohol, and the penalties for doing so are very, very light. If the laws regarding sale of tobacco and alcohol to minors were enforced with anything like the vigor applied to less dangerous illegal drugs, I am confident that the trade would drop off very sharply. If the average apathetic convenience store clerk or unscrupulous convenience store owner knew that one violation would lead to total forfeiture of all personal assets and 30 years to life -- as it can with possession of marijuana with intent to sell in some jurisdictions -- then you could bet your bottom dollar those clerks would check every ID and not sell a pack of cigarettes with a wink and a nod.
Frankly, I think it's worth doing and worth far more emphasis than minor problems like illegal drug abuse, which kill fewer people in a century than legal alcohol and tobacco kill in a month.
Of course, that would only make sense if the government and the conservative anti-drug factions were really interested in public health and not using their phony drug war (like their phony terrorism war) to expand the role of state terror in minimizing dissent and maximizing profit.
It does not have "Do you want fries with that?" in the vocabulary though."
Well, thank God. The day someone figures out that voice recognition systems are no worse than undermotivated teenagers and cheap-ass microphones at correctly understanding drive-through orders, millions will be out of work.