Actually this is the exact OPPOSITE of what anonymity does for freedom of speech. Let's think about this for a minute. The claim that anonymity is required for true freedom of speech (I'll leave the debate as to whether this is actually the case to someone else, and assume that it is true) is so that you can make any allegations you want publicly, without fear of reprisal for what you have said (USSR, anyone?).
What these darknets do (in this context) is allow speech to be distributed only among a select few people. Furthermore, you can exclude those you are making allegations against, allowing you to say whatever you like, true or false, and they have no access to this information (PATRIOT Act, anyone?). In other words, you've crushed their ability to respond to allegations like the Gestapo. But I guess that's okay in your mind, because it's individuals doing so, and not the government. Might I suggest you read up on factory life in the US before the government started regulating the factories, especially with regard to unions and blacklists?
As for myself, I shall always be a proponent of true freedom of speech (and I might add that do not require anonymity for that purpose).
How ignorant (or perhaps downright legally retarded) do you have to be to consider questionable business tactics on par with the holocaust, Cultural Revolution, the gulags, etc.? I'm not sure what's more disturbing: that one person was dumb enough to actually say it, or that a number of people agree with it. Not making a good show of intellect for Slashdot here, guys.
Very nice. If you hadn't been so intent on being a smartass you might have used a little logic before posting. Having submitted stories rejected at one point, only to be accepted when someone else submits them later, is a well-known phenomenon at Slashdot. Given how frequently it occurs, I'd be liable to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he DID submit the story earlier, and it was rejected; and he probably wasn't the only one to do so.
A few months ago, Taylor became obsessed with tracking a rather unusual botnet consisting of computers running Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.
As that means that there a large numbers of breachable OS X and Linux machines out there, that pretty much puts to death the myth that OS X and Linux are sufficiently secure out of the box.
That has to be the most shocking thing I've heard in months. Moreso even than finding out the "illegal wiretapping" incidents weren't actually illegal (nor unconstitutional).
Actually, you missed the key 'any other' in that statement. This implies that the terrorist surveillance IS an "eavesdropping program conducted under a 1978 surveillance law"
I suppose that's true for companies. For individual users, however, it doesn't matter, as the risk to THEM is what is important. Also a consequence of the massive difference in install base is the target profile. If you were going to develop a worm or other kind of exploit for some malicious purpose, would you want to target 7% of the market, or 80%? I'm betting the amount of effort put into developing malicious software is proportionate to the third or fourth power (at least) of the market share.
Mod parent up. The NT kernel is both very well made and stable. One of the things that plagues Windows, however, is low-quality drivers (even MS ones) and API layers (things above the kernel but below the application). Many of the Windows security warnings are due to this kind of thing. It seems both extremely arrogant and foolhardy to assume that Linux has 0 such vulnerabilities.
Then there's a bunch of functions that only work on NT-based flavors of Windows, not 9x-based. And the opposite is also true. Then XP came along, then Server 2003, each adding a bunch of new stuff to the API that Microsoft (unfortunately) did not go back and also add to the earlier versions of Windows.
I can only think of one feature that's available on Windows 9x but not NT, which isn't part of the Internet Explorer toolkit, and it's a very rarely used feature (although it's just the kind of thing I use). Almost universally, the API on NT is a superset of that available on 9x; though it is true that occasionally some small implementation details different between the two.
Then XP came along, then Server 2003, each adding a bunch of new stuff to the API that Microsoft (unfortunately) did not go back and also add to the earlier versions of Windows.
Correct. The Windows API evolves over time, adding new and often useful features to new versions, often involving new features of the kernel. In nearly all cases these changes are backwards compatible.
There really are at least 3 distinct flavors of the Win32 API, and you have to be careful what functions you use if you want your program to run on all three of them.
Windows 9x, Windows NT, and..? Well, I suppose you could call the ANSI/Unicode versions different, even though the differences between the implementations are usually very clear-cut (i.e. path strings are always handled in certain different ways).
For an example, check out the documentation for the CreateWindowEx function.
If you scroll to the bottom, they describe several of the differences in the behaviour of this function on different versions of Windows ranging from 95 to XP.
That serves as an excellent demonstration of what I've said: the differences are usually minor enough to not be a concern, and that new features are added in a backward compatible way. Take a look: one of those differences refers to a feature that was added in XP (WS_EX_COMPOSITED), another refers to a kernel limitation of 9x, and the third refers to a feature that was added in 2000. Of those, the only "serious" one is the 9x kernel limitation, and even then it's not particularly important.
1. I'm afraid my knowledge of hardware is too limited to answer that definitively, although my previous assumption was nothing (an assumption which I'll use in later answers). 2. Definitive answer: because MS didn't want to. Assuming it isn't written in assembly, MS should only need to recompile the EFI loader on x86. 3. Nobody said anything about it being easy (at least for anyone outside MS). I merely pointed out that the reason you can't use an IA64 binary on x86 is because they're completely different architectures with completely different instruction sets; that's like asking why you can't run a PPC Linux app on an x86 Linux box.
"But a Supreme Court ruling last June - it found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists - appears to have become a turning point for the entire country." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/international/am ericas/26canada.html
What the heck is wrong with the mods on this site? How the heck did the grandparent get up to 5 (insightful), and this (parent) post hasn't even gotten one vote for funny?:P
...my apologies for forgetting Slashdot used HTML formatting for posts by default. Let me repost that entire post, since it's nearly unreadable.
It's funny you should mention that. About a week ago I found http://crp.org/industries/list.asp , did some investigation, and posted the following summary of interesting points on another site I visit:
- The Republicans received $20 million from oil/gas companies, compared to $5 million for Democrats. This sounds significant, but it actually is only significant in how small this amount is (considering how many people say the Republicans are in the pocket of the oil industry). This amounts to 2.3% of the Republicans' campaign donations for 2004. - Democrats receive a MASSIVE amount of finance from law firms and lawyers - $149 million, or 16.6% of their total finance, compared to $59.9 million for Republicans. This is by far the single largest industry (and the one with the biggest difference in contributions) that I've found. - There is no significant difference between the two parties in terms of contributions from lobbyists. - Republicans received $195.8 million the finance/insurance/real estate industries, compared to $136.8 million for Democrats - Democrats received $111.8 million from single-issue activists, compared to $68.8 million for Republicans - Democrats received about 2.5% more finance than Republicans ($900 million for Democrats, $880 million for Republicans). - Democrats received $53.6 million from labor unions, compared to $7.7 million for Republicans.
This prompted such replies as "same shit, different pile" and "I think you've just summed the near entirety of political science" (in reference to the previous quote). If you think one party is morally superior to the other, or that the character of members of one party is superior to those of the other, reality will crush your misconceptions.
It's funny you should mention that. About a week ago I found http://crp.org/industries/list.asp , did some investigation, and posted the following summary of interesting points on another site I visit:
- The Republicans received $20 million from oil/gas companies, compared to $5 million for Democrats. This sounds significant, but it actually is only significant in how small this amount is (considering how many people say the Republicans are in the pocket of the oil industry). This amounts to 2.3% of the Republicans' campaign donations for 2004.
- Democrats receive a MASSIVE amount of finance from law firms and lawyers - $149 million, or 16.6% of their total finance, compared to $59.9 million for Republicans. This is by far the single largest industry (and the one with the biggest difference in contributions) that I've found.
- There is no significant difference between the two parties in terms of contributions from lobbyists.
- Republicans received $195.8 million the finance/insurance/real estate industries, compared to $136.8 million for Democrats
- Democrats received $111.8 million from single-issue activists, compared to $68.8 million for Republicans
- Democrats received about 2.5% more finance than Republicans ($900 million for Democrats, $880 million for Republicans).
- Democrats received $53.6 million from labor unions, compared to $7.7 million for Republicans.
This prompted such replies as "same shit, different pile" and "I think you've just summed the near entirety of political science" (in reference to the previous quote). If you think one party is morally superior to the other, or that the character of members of one party is superior to those of the other, reality will crush your misconceptions.
I think the percentage of people in business and politics that think doing what's right is more important than keeping their jobs is around the percentage of people that use Linux on their home PCs. Complain all you like, but nothing will change, in government or in the Fortune 500.
I suspect things like this predated the DHS, and the DHS just saw another opportunity to monitor for things that are out of the ordinary (presumably their logic is that if they look at every such case, at some point one of these will be a terrorist; I won't say anything about how good such logic is...).
If there's even the slightest chance of this being ironic in some way, I'm not seeing it. Afghanistan is a huge mass of sparsely populated terrain, and things vaguely resembling civilization. It also is a couple orders of magnitude less wealthy, and has no manner of country-wide government. I'm not seeing a single way that your comment isn't a "well, duh" case.
I can think of a few good reasons a program could work on XP but not on 2000. But the most likely answer (and not one of those good reasons) is that the coders were lazy - they didn't want to take the time/effort to find out if the code they wrote would work on non-XP.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually this is the exact OPPOSITE of what anonymity does for freedom of speech. Let's think about this for a minute. The claim that anonymity is required for true freedom of speech (I'll leave the debate as to whether this is actually the case to someone else, and assume that it is true) is so that you can make any allegations you want publicly, without fear of reprisal for what you have said (USSR, anyone?).
What these darknets do (in this context) is allow speech to be distributed only among a select few people. Furthermore, you can exclude those you are making allegations against, allowing you to say whatever you like, true or false, and they have no access to this information (PATRIOT Act, anyone?). In other words, you've crushed their ability to respond to allegations like the Gestapo. But I guess that's okay in your mind, because it's individuals doing so, and not the government. Might I suggest you read up on factory life in the US before the government started regulating the factories, especially with regard to unions and blacklists?
As for myself, I shall always be a proponent of true freedom of speech (and I might add that do not require anonymity for that purpose).
Interesting. Source(s)?
How ignorant (or perhaps downright legally retarded) do you have to be to consider questionable business tactics on par with the holocaust, Cultural Revolution, the gulags, etc.? I'm not sure what's more disturbing: that one person was dumb enough to actually say it, or that a number of people agree with it. Not making a good show of intellect for Slashdot here, guys.
that CmdrTaco immediately be castrated and then beheaded.
Very nice. If you hadn't been so intent on being a smartass you might have used a little logic before posting. Having submitted stories rejected at one point, only to be accepted when someone else submits them later, is a well-known phenomenon at Slashdot. Given how frequently it occurs, I'd be liable to give him the benefit of the doubt and say that he DID submit the story earlier, and it was rejected; and he probably wasn't the only one to do so.
A few months ago, Taylor became obsessed with tracking a rather unusual botnet consisting of computers running Mac OS X and Linux operating systems.
As that means that there a large numbers of breachable OS X and Linux machines out there, that pretty much puts to death the myth that OS X and Linux are sufficiently secure out of the box.
That has to be the most shocking thing I've heard in months. Moreso even than finding out the "illegal wiretapping" incidents weren't actually illegal (nor unconstitutional).
where the president has publicly admitted to undertaking impeachable acts
Citation?
government agencies regularly breaking laws
Citation (that indicates this is currently at higher levels than historically)?
try to vote in Florida where they deliberately send people away that statistically will vote for the opposition
Oh, did I mention citation?
Actually, you missed the key 'any other' in that statement. This implies that the terrorist surveillance IS an "eavesdropping program conducted under a 1978 surveillance law"
I suppose that's true for companies. For individual users, however, it doesn't matter, as the risk to THEM is what is important. Also a consequence of the massive difference in install base is the target profile. If you were going to develop a worm or other kind of exploit for some malicious purpose, would you want to target 7% of the market, or 80%? I'm betting the amount of effort put into developing malicious software is proportionate to the third or fourth power (at least) of the market share.
Mod parent up. The NT kernel is both very well made and stable. One of the things that plagues Windows, however, is low-quality drivers (even MS ones) and API layers (things above the kernel but below the application). Many of the Windows security warnings are due to this kind of thing. It seems both extremely arrogant and foolhardy to assume that Linux has 0 such vulnerabilities.
Even linux developers are known to deviate from the SUS occasionally, but they too do strive to implement the standard wherever possible.
Don't, just don't go there.
Then there's a bunch of functions that only work on NT-based flavors of Windows, not 9x-based. And the opposite is also true. Then XP came along, then Server 2003, each adding a bunch of new stuff to the API that Microsoft (unfortunately) did not go back and also add to the earlier versions of Windows.
I can only think of one feature that's available on Windows 9x but not NT, which isn't part of the Internet Explorer toolkit, and it's a very rarely used feature (although it's just the kind of thing I use). Almost universally, the API on NT is a superset of that available on 9x; though it is true that occasionally some small implementation details different between the two.
Then XP came along, then Server 2003, each adding a bunch of new stuff to the API that Microsoft (unfortunately) did not go back and also add to the earlier versions of Windows.
Correct. The Windows API evolves over time, adding new and often useful features to new versions, often involving new features of the kernel. In nearly all cases these changes are backwards compatible.
There really are at least 3 distinct flavors of the Win32 API, and you have to be careful what functions you use if you want your program to run on all three of them.
Windows 9x, Windows NT, and..? Well, I suppose you could call the ANSI/Unicode versions different, even though the differences between the implementations are usually very clear-cut (i.e. path strings are always handled in certain different ways).
For an example, check out the documentation for the CreateWindowEx function.
If you scroll to the bottom, they describe several of the differences in the behaviour of this function on different versions of Windows ranging from 95 to XP.
That serves as an excellent demonstration of what I've said: the differences are usually minor enough to not be a concern, and that new features are added in a backward compatible way. Take a look: one of those differences refers to a feature that was added in XP (WS_EX_COMPOSITED), another refers to a kernel limitation of 9x, and the third refers to a feature that was added in 2000. Of those, the only "serious" one is the 9x kernel limitation, and even then it's not particularly important.
1. I'm afraid my knowledge of hardware is too limited to answer that definitively, although my previous assumption was nothing (an assumption which I'll use in later answers).
2. Definitive answer: because MS didn't want to. Assuming it isn't written in assembly, MS should only need to recompile the EFI loader on x86.
3. Nobody said anything about it being easy (at least for anyone outside MS). I merely pointed out that the reason you can't use an IA64 binary on x86 is because they're completely different architectures with completely different instruction sets; that's like asking why you can't run a PPC Linux app on an x86 Linux box.
Could it possibly be because Intel Macs don't have IA64 chips?
You mean like in Canada?
m ericas/26canada.html
"But a Supreme Court ruling last June - it found that a Quebec provincial ban on private health insurance was unconstitutional when patients were suffering and even dying on waiting lists - appears to have become a turning point for the entire country." http://www.nytimes.com/2006/02/26/international/a
*thumbs up*
Furthermore, they were forbidden by their CO from watching any news other than Fox News in the mess.
For me you lost all credibility right there.
What the heck is wrong with the mods on this site? How the heck did the grandparent get up to 5 (insightful), and this (parent) post hasn't even gotten one vote for funny? :P
...my apologies for forgetting Slashdot used HTML formatting for posts by default. Let me repost that entire post, since it's nearly unreadable.
It's funny you should mention that. About a week ago I found http://crp.org/industries/list.asp , did some investigation, and posted the following summary of interesting points on another site I visit:
- The Republicans received $20 million from oil/gas companies, compared to $5 million for Democrats. This sounds significant, but it actually is only significant in how small this amount is (considering how many people say the Republicans are in the pocket of the oil industry). This amounts to 2.3% of the Republicans' campaign donations for 2004.
- Democrats receive a MASSIVE amount of finance from law firms and lawyers - $149 million, or 16.6% of their total finance, compared to $59.9 million for Republicans. This is by far the single largest industry (and the one with the biggest difference in contributions) that I've found.
- There is no significant difference between the two parties in terms of contributions from lobbyists.
- Republicans received $195.8 million the finance/insurance/real estate industries, compared to $136.8 million for Democrats
- Democrats received $111.8 million from single-issue activists, compared to $68.8 million for Republicans
- Democrats received about 2.5% more finance than Republicans ($900 million for Democrats, $880 million for Republicans).
- Democrats received $53.6 million from labor unions, compared to $7.7 million for Republicans.
This prompted such replies as "same shit, different pile" and "I think you've just summed the near entirety of political science" (in reference to the previous quote). If you think one party is morally superior to the other, or that the character of members of one party is superior to those of the other, reality will crush your misconceptions.
It's funny you should mention that. About a week ago I found http://crp.org/industries/list.asp , did some investigation, and posted the following summary of interesting points on another site I visit: - The Republicans received $20 million from oil/gas companies, compared to $5 million for Democrats. This sounds significant, but it actually is only significant in how small this amount is (considering how many people say the Republicans are in the pocket of the oil industry). This amounts to 2.3% of the Republicans' campaign donations for 2004. - Democrats receive a MASSIVE amount of finance from law firms and lawyers - $149 million, or 16.6% of their total finance, compared to $59.9 million for Republicans. This is by far the single largest industry (and the one with the biggest difference in contributions) that I've found. - There is no significant difference between the two parties in terms of contributions from lobbyists. - Republicans received $195.8 million the finance/insurance/real estate industries, compared to $136.8 million for Democrats - Democrats received $111.8 million from single-issue activists, compared to $68.8 million for Republicans - Democrats received about 2.5% more finance than Republicans ($900 million for Democrats, $880 million for Republicans). - Democrats received $53.6 million from labor unions, compared to $7.7 million for Republicans. This prompted such replies as "same shit, different pile" and "I think you've just summed the near entirety of political science" (in reference to the previous quote). If you think one party is morally superior to the other, or that the character of members of one party is superior to those of the other, reality will crush your misconceptions.
Hello? 2000 was an even bigger fiasco than 2004, and 2000 used paper ballots. To this day many people say the 2000 election was rigged.
I think the percentage of people in business and politics that think doing what's right is more important than keeping their jobs is around the percentage of people that use Linux on their home PCs. Complain all you like, but nothing will change, in government or in the Fortune 500.
I suspect things like this predated the DHS, and the DHS just saw another opportunity to monitor for things that are out of the ordinary (presumably their logic is that if they look at every such case, at some point one of these will be a terrorist; I won't say anything about how good such logic is...).
If there's even the slightest chance of this being ironic in some way, I'm not seeing it. Afghanistan is a huge mass of sparsely populated terrain, and things vaguely resembling civilization. It also is a couple orders of magnitude less wealthy, and has no manner of country-wide government. I'm not seeing a single way that your comment isn't a "well, duh" case.
I can think of a few good reasons a program could work on XP but not on 2000. But the most likely answer (and not one of those good reasons) is that the coders were lazy - they didn't want to take the time/effort to find out if the code they wrote would work on non-XP.