"If you want privacy, use your own computer, phone and Internet..."
How can this be modded insightful? While I can understand adviceable being careful about the use of corporate resources so easy to spy on I really can't see how many people is ready to be forgetful about their bosses simply ignoring the basic right to privacy.
What about installing cameras in the WC for everybody to see you shitting away? Hey, if you want privacy you come shitted from home!
"So if I am to understand correctly, these things are on full-time autopilot."
You understood wrongly.
Hey, but don't let that making you to read TFA.
"If it doesn't pick me up on radar or other sensors, BOOM?"
What do you think that happens if you are flying in a colliding trajectory to another human-piloted aircraft and no one of you pick the other on radar or other sensors? Yes: pilot eyes are sensors.
"Wait, you mean that asking an author to not print something, getting that author's agreement, and then paying for the printing cost of books that had the material the author agreed to remove is censorship?"
(the music from The Godfather sounds) I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.
"So if the likes of Japan and the United Kingdom can sustain their economies with oil-fuel prices about 80-100% higher, why not the US?"
Because the real oil price is more or less the same. The difference in price comes in the form of heavy taxes (in the 40~50% rank or even more) which go to the government which then (in more or less efficient ways) get returned to the market.
It's one thing having your money circulating in some convulted ways and a very different one having it burned forever in some oil well.
"Offworld assets give poor returns given the cost of launch vehicles."
Oh, but that *is* "just" technology limitation: Jupiter-to-Earth is basically steep downhill so it must be economically feasible at some unknown distant future.
Of course it doesn't help too much being here now instead of some unknown distant future.
"Petroleum is really convenient in terms of an energy source"
Not only that, but we have built and extremely consumist society pretty specifically around it.
"but we have a whole lot of others"
But regarding those others, they are neither so convenient (or else we would be using them right now) nor we have built the industries to take advantage from them, so the transition will be greatly costly.
"There is lots and lots of power to be had from nuclear sources. No it isn't a 1:1 replacement for oil but that's ok, we can deal with that."
On one hand, there are voices that already say we have not as much fissible fuel as commonly thought; on the other, nuclear helps only with regard to electricity while oil is used for much than this. It is not that it's not a 1:1 replacement but that it is far away to be a 1:1 replacement.
"The more expensive oil gets, the more alternatives are attractive."
Sure. But that by itself won't make them any more cheaper. If all 10 dollar-a-bottle wine goes away, it makes 20 dollar-a-bottle wine more attractive but it still means 20 dollars less in your pocket instead of 10.
"It'll be a gradual thing, an increase in prices as supplies dwindle and/or harder to reach deposits are tapped."
Yes, but it still means more money going into energy expenditure, so less money going into anywhere else, and that's compounded with the fact that energy is what is used in the "making everything else", so it will be doubly expensier.
"Gradual change is something economies cope with relatively well. It is sudden change that is the real problem."
Or it will a "cooked frog" case: disregarding temporary crisis (1974 OPEP wars, Gulf wars...) oil price has steadly been about 20~25 dollars a barrel (inflation-adjusted) since post-IIWW; currently is about 75 after its Irak invasion-related peek well over 100 dollars for a barrel. That's a three-fold increment yet we have done basically nothing about it and it seems 100 dollars for a barrel is still not enough incentive for starting to really worrying. So when exactly will we begin? Or is it that aquisition power from middle-class will be steadly eroded and eroded so we can return to kind of middle-ages feudalism or the early years or industrial revolution with a bunch or really rich tycoons and a big mass of "peasants" bounded to the high ranks by their mortages and a bit of stability instead of military protection? You can bet more than one in power would salivate about the idea.
"One thing you may notice is that humans are pretty good at solving problems."
Yes. It's not as if two thirds of world population were literally starving or dying from well known deseases, we weren't able to get rid of wars after more than 5000 years or pursuing happiness of the individual were not the common and accepted target of all the governments around the world.
" And software, software is different because even when you are distributing it on a disk, it's the installed product that counts."
But that's exactly what all this is about. Here there were nothing installed (old copies of Autocad 14 not installed anywhere) and the first sale doctrine was being applied to the physical product (a cardbox with a CD). Look that the rule was not that the buyer had not the right to install and use the software but that the seller can't sell the box.
There was not customization of the agreement to apply to the first buyer as to make him any different from any second buyer but still the original vendor says he has a special advantage about the selling... and the judge complies to that!
"What, you think replacing Windows with Linux is magically going to grant its user 20 IQ points?"
I think that, at the very least, the grandparent wouldn't need to "run around to PCs and flat-out shutting them off": he could have done the same from the comfortability of his chair and the aid of ssh.
"Really? So in Linux/Unix, I can download a file and it autoruns and runs amok?"
Of course yes. Do you think is there any magic forbidding a browser from downloading an openoffice document and gladly open it or, say, a firefox extension from downloading a shell script mime-typed as text/x-script and executing it?
"I open a folder containing a bad shortcut and my computer gets owned?"
Owned? maybe not. But if you use a KDE desktop environment please put into ~/.kde/Autostart a script (or a symlink to a script) with something like `rm -rf ~` or `nc -l -p 23456` and see what happens (other desktop environments have different directories to same effect). Oh, and if you don't want to put the script, how do you think your filesystem browser is able to produce thumbs for common applications (hint: have a look at those directories with `ls -la`).
"In Linux/Unix the user's files might be affected not the system files"
And what the heck do you think your standard home user thinks is of more value?/bin/ls or his foreignly studing son's e-mails?
"Windows was never designed with security from the beginning."
Quite true. And what the heck has that to do with the fact that Linux is wide open to both PEBCAK and "marketing pushed for the good of joe sixpack usability" application design malpractices?
"It's a market alright but I wouldn't call it a free market. A free market assumes that everyone involved is rational and acting in their own interests."
I'm all in with respect of Microsoft being an almost monopoly and how that affects the market, but I can't sign that one: a free market assumes that everyone *have the means* for everyone to be rational and action in their own interests. But having the means and having the interest is a different thing: if someone wants to go nuts, it is his issue -after all, it couldn't be free market if you are forced to behave properly with regards to your own interests.
"less-powerful side is no longer making a truly free choice."
I've been using Linux with almost complete exclusivity for more than a decade (and the times I used Windows in between was because of working considerations not for my own stuff) so I positively know that making the choice is possible, maybe a bit hard, but possible, so I sadly must correct your previous sentence to "less-powerful side is no longer *wanting* to make a truly free choice". As long as citizens gladly behave like lambs, greedy will behave as wolves.
"I don't like the idea of the FCC essentially requiring hardware vendors to keep source code proprietary when even the vendor wants to release it."
Have you thought that there would be no way for a system emitting overpower if the hardware was such that it couldn't do it? FCC regulations is security by obscurity at best and lame excuses at worst.
"One of the reasons that viruses do not infect them the same as Windows is that it requires privilege escalation to do any real damage."
What do you mean by "real damage"?
I'd say that deleting all user's valuable data is "real damage". I'd say that open a network socket both to connect or start a process on an unprivileged port for a bot net is "real damage".
"it isn't really a technical flaw in Windows since I don't see any reports of the e-mail attachments being automatically executed. This is more like a social engineering attack."
"My guess is that ACTA is not something that is really critical from an institutional point of view as the community patent is, so if it is rejected, I would be very surprised to see a similar treaty showing up the next 10-15 years."
I can't share your opinion.
EU was pretty convinced and satisfied with the fact that software is not subjected to patents full stop. USA thinks otherwise, therefore EU government is pressed by less than fair methods to align patent laws to USA interests.
In the same vein, ACTA is a USA invention mainly for USA profit and then again you have EU government being pressed by less than fair methods to align to USA desires.
In fact, software patents and ACTA are pressed from USA because of basically the same reasons (making intellecutal property into a full blown bussiness "product") so they both are going to follow the same tracks.
"You actually have great examples. They show that short-sighted policies destroy the business."
I know. My point is that acting against the customer is not deterrent for companies; even self-destroying practices are not deterrent for CEOs as long as there's benefit for them. And there *is* benefit for them.
"Only companies that respect their partners (supplies, workforce and customers) can survive in long term."
So what? It seems you imply that companies not respecting their partners shouldn't worry us in the grand scheme of things because they tend to self-destruct. My point is that not only they should worry us because of the damage they incur short term but that without regulatory bodies (the government) they'd be a majority (a changing majority, maybe, but a majority). Shouldn't we worry about suicide terrorists because they won't be able to make a second attack?
"If you tell us what you are thinking, that might be another story."
Exactly what I already told, and the half you already hinted from it: that nature does in fact give to human beings a monopoly over their ideas, but that there's no such monopoly for whatever is made public and that's exactly because once it's made public and I gain knowledge of it, it becomes my idea and my idea is my own monopoly.
That's why there's no need for legal protection for secrets (they protect by themselves as long as they are secrets) but you need a legal protection for patents if you mean to withold its monopoly (because once you make your idea into the public, there's no natural protection for it).
"It's executable permission bit. If a file is downloaded by anything other than package manager, it remains non-executable until the user explicitly sets it on the command line or in a scary-looking permission setting screen."
And that happens exactly why? Because there's an almighty law impeding any program but `chmod` to set the exec bit? Or is it that there is exactly *nothing* impeding Linux to automatically run executables downloaded from the Internet, except the good sense of developers... to date?
"Since all applications are installed in a package manager [...] Oh, I see. You are either a Microsoft astroturfer or an idiot"
I think you'd better reassess the limits of your own knowledge prior to call names to unkown people that might be a bit more knowledgeable than you think.
Look: even on Microsoft environments, by the days of Windows 3.1 plus trumpet winsock plus Eudora (you know, that's about twenty years ago -yes, I was already wandering the intertubes by then, and operating unix too) you needed to go through a lot of steps in order to load an attachment as an executable. But, hey, you don't need to do it anymore. You know why? because there wasn't any law forbidding it and the marketing guys at Microsoft thought it would be a great idea.
Now, there is exactly the same limitation on Linux that there were on Windows: exactly zero. There's nothing intrinsically avoiding a, say, Thunderbird extension for looking at the mime-type of an e-mail attachment and call an external program to execute it on behalf of the user. And that's exactly the kind of things that the "linux is difficult" advocates expect to see.
Now try that from your beloved linux command line:
echo "echo hello, world" > test.txt ls -l test.txt (see? no execution bit -I assume your umask is set to a sane value)/bin/sh test.txt OH, WONDERFUL THING, LOOK AT THE OUTPUT!!! hello, world
On one hand you see how a file without the execution bit can be "executed" On another hand you see how a file not coming from a package can be both installed and executed On the third hand (yes, third hand, so what?) given that my "helping program", the shell, is running on behalf of my UID it can access (and modify, and delete) ALL my data from ALL my hard disk. That would also be the case for ANY other program (firefox, thunderbird... you name it) that would happen to run under my UID.
The ONLY thing avoiding that to happen is not the almighty god from the unix of older days but the common sense from developers. The very day those developers (maybe pushed by some company's greed and money) forget about that common sense you can bet you'll see exactly the same kind of worms and virus attacking linux as there are in windows-world. And, so it seems if your hear the "experts", for linux really having "a year for the desktop" that's exactly what should happen.
"okay there's the lock switch but christ, it's not like a 1964 Buick Skylark."
Surely corporations have learnt how to build better devices since 1964... "better" meaning much less durable, around the time they need to launch next model.
Slashdot Mirror
"If you want privacy, use your own computer, phone and Internet..."
How can this be modded insightful? While I can understand adviceable being careful about the use of corporate resources so easy to spy on I really can't see how many people is ready to be forgetful about their bosses simply ignoring the basic right to privacy.
What about installing cameras in the WC for everybody to see you shitting away? Hey, if you want privacy you come shitted from home!
"So if I am to understand correctly, these things are on full-time autopilot."
You understood wrongly.
Hey, but don't let that making you to read TFA.
"If it doesn't pick me up on radar or other sensors, BOOM?"
What do you think that happens if you are flying in a colliding trajectory to another human-piloted aircraft and no one of you pick the other on radar or other sensors? Yes: pilot eyes are sensors.
"Doesn't that violate some law of physics?"
Hummm... gotta study on this...
Where's my DoD grant, now?
"Classified information is censorship?"
Why, of course yes. Legally and socially accepted censorship, but censorship nevertheless.
How else would you call at forcibly forbidding releasing info you are aware of?
"Wait, you mean that asking an author to not print something, getting that author's agreement, and then paying for the printing cost of books that had the material the author agreed to remove is censorship?"
(the music from The Godfather sounds)
I'll make him an offer he can't refuse.
"I want to see a flame hurricane, can you forward the suggestion for me?"
You came too late. You should have been at Dresden by mid forties!
"So if the likes of Japan and the United Kingdom can sustain their economies with oil-fuel prices about 80-100% higher, why not the US?"
Because the real oil price is more or less the same. The difference in price comes in the form of heavy taxes (in the 40~50% rank or even more) which go to the government which then (in more or less efficient ways) get returned to the market.
It's one thing having your money circulating in some convulted ways and a very different one having it burned forever in some oil well.
"Offworld assets give poor returns given the cost of launch vehicles."
Oh, but that *is* "just" technology limitation: Jupiter-to-Earth is basically steep downhill so it must be economically feasible at some unknown distant future.
Of course it doesn't help too much being here now instead of some unknown distant future.
"Petroleum is really convenient in terms of an energy source"
Not only that, but we have built and extremely consumist society pretty specifically around it.
"but we have a whole lot of others"
But regarding those others, they are neither so convenient (or else we would be using them right now) nor we have built the industries to take advantage from them, so the transition will be greatly costly.
"There is lots and lots of power to be had from nuclear sources. No it isn't a 1:1 replacement for oil but that's ok, we can deal with that."
On one hand, there are voices that already say we have not as much fissible fuel as commonly thought; on the other, nuclear helps only with regard to electricity while oil is used for much than this. It is not that it's not a 1:1 replacement but that it is far away to be a 1:1 replacement.
"The more expensive oil gets, the more alternatives are attractive."
Sure. But that by itself won't make them any more cheaper. If all 10 dollar-a-bottle wine goes away, it makes 20 dollar-a-bottle wine more attractive but it still means 20 dollars less in your pocket instead of 10.
"It'll be a gradual thing, an increase in prices as supplies dwindle and/or harder to reach deposits are tapped."
Yes, but it still means more money going into energy expenditure, so less money going into anywhere else, and that's compounded with the fact that energy is what is used in the "making everything else", so it will be doubly expensier.
"Gradual change is something economies cope with relatively well. It is sudden change that is the real problem."
Or it will a "cooked frog" case: disregarding temporary crisis (1974 OPEP wars, Gulf wars...) oil price has steadly been about 20~25 dollars a barrel (inflation-adjusted) since post-IIWW; currently is about 75 after its Irak invasion-related peek well over 100 dollars for a barrel. That's a three-fold increment yet we have done basically nothing about it and it seems 100 dollars for a barrel is still not enough incentive for starting to really worrying. So when exactly will we begin? Or is it that aquisition power from middle-class will be steadly eroded and eroded so we can return to kind of middle-ages feudalism or the early years or industrial revolution with a bunch or really rich tycoons and a big mass of "peasants" bounded to the high ranks by their mortages and a bit of stability instead of military protection? You can bet more than one in power would salivate about the idea.
"One thing you may notice is that humans are pretty good at solving problems."
Yes. It's not as if two thirds of world population were literally starving or dying from well known deseases, we weren't able to get rid of wars after more than 5000 years or pursuing happiness of the individual were not the common and accepted target of all the governments around the world.
" And software, software is different because even when you are distributing it on a disk, it's the installed product that counts."
But that's exactly what all this is about. Here there were nothing installed (old copies of Autocad 14 not installed anywhere) and the first sale doctrine was being applied to the physical product (a cardbox with a CD). Look that the rule was not that the buyer had not the right to install and use the software but that the seller can't sell the box.
There was not customization of the agreement to apply to the first buyer as to make him any different from any second buyer but still the original vendor says he has a special advantage about the selling... and the judge complies to that!
"What, you think replacing Windows with Linux is magically going to grant its user 20 IQ points?"
I think that, at the very least, the grandparent wouldn't need to "run around to PCs and flat-out shutting them off": he could have done the same from the comfortability of his chair and the aid of ssh.
"Really? So in Linux/Unix, I can download a file and it autoruns and runs amok?"
Of course yes. Do you think is there any magic forbidding a browser from downloading an openoffice document and gladly open it or, say, a firefox extension from downloading a shell script mime-typed as text/x-script and executing it?
"I open a folder containing a bad shortcut and my computer gets owned?"
Owned? maybe not. But if you use a KDE desktop environment please put into ~/.kde/Autostart a script (or a symlink to a script) with something like `rm -rf ~` or `nc -l -p 23456` and see what happens (other desktop environments have different directories to same effect). Oh, and if you don't want to put the script, how do you think your filesystem browser is able to produce thumbs for common applications (hint: have a look at those directories with `ls -la`).
"In Linux/Unix the user's files might be affected not the system files"
And what the heck do you think your standard home user thinks is of more value? /bin/ls or his foreignly studing son's e-mails?
"Windows was never designed with security from the beginning."
Quite true. And what the heck has that to do with the fact that Linux is wide open to both PEBCAK and "marketing pushed for the good of joe sixpack usability" application design malpractices?
"It's a market alright but I wouldn't call it a free market. A free market assumes that everyone involved is rational and acting in their own interests."
I'm all in with respect of Microsoft being an almost monopoly and how that affects the market, but I can't sign that one: a free market assumes that everyone *have the means* for everyone to be rational and action in their own interests. But having the means and having the interest is a different thing: if someone wants to go nuts, it is his issue -after all, it couldn't be free market if you are forced to behave properly with regards to your own interests.
"less-powerful side is no longer making a truly free choice."
I've been using Linux with almost complete exclusivity for more than a decade (and the times I used Windows in between was because of working considerations not for my own stuff) so I positively know that making the choice is possible, maybe a bit hard, but possible, so I sadly must correct your previous sentence to "less-powerful side is no longer *wanting* to make a truly free choice". As long as citizens gladly behave like lambs, greedy will behave as wolves.
"I don't like the idea of the FCC essentially requiring hardware vendors to keep source code proprietary when even the vendor wants to release it."
Have you thought that there would be no way for a system emitting overpower if the hardware was such that it couldn't do it? FCC regulations is security by obscurity at best and lame excuses at worst.
"We had to deal with this mess today, running around to PCs and flat-out shutting them off."
Somehow this doesn't happen to appear on the Windows vs Linux TCO studies from Microsoft.
"Who uses software based e-mail anymore? you can't access it from every where"
Uhhh... me. Are you still using only snail mail or is it that your e-mail clean is working out of fairy dust instead of ones and zeroes?
And no I can't access my e-mail from every where, I still need a computer-like device to do it. Do you access your e-mail by direct brain connection?
"One of the reasons that viruses do not infect them the same as Windows is that it requires privilege escalation to do any real damage."
What do you mean by "real damage"?
I'd say that deleting all user's valuable data is "real damage".
I'd say that open a network socket both to connect or start a process on an unprivileged port for a bot net is "real damage".
Neither of them needs privilege scalation.
"I think a better route would be make that the default method/policy and make it hard for the average user to it."
Microsoft marketing droids think otherwise.
And free market has shown them right by making Bill Gates one of the richest men in planet.
"it isn't really a technical flaw in Windows since I don't see any reports of the e-mail attachments being automatically executed. This is more like a social engineering attack."
In a single word: PEBKAC
"My guess is that ACTA is not something that is really critical from an institutional point of view as the community patent is, so if it is rejected, I would be very surprised to see a similar treaty showing up the next 10-15 years."
I can't share your opinion.
EU was pretty convinced and satisfied with the fact that software is not subjected to patents full stop. USA thinks otherwise, therefore EU government is pressed by less than fair methods to align patent laws to USA interests.
In the same vein, ACTA is a USA invention mainly for USA profit and then again you have EU government being pressed by less than fair methods to align to USA desires.
In fact, software patents and ACTA are pressed from USA because of basically the same reasons (making intellecutal property into a full blown bussiness "product") so they both are going to follow the same tracks.
"You actually have great examples. They show that short-sighted policies destroy the business."
I know. My point is that acting against the customer is not deterrent for companies; even self-destroying practices are not deterrent for CEOs as long as there's benefit for them. And there *is* benefit for them.
"Only companies that respect their partners (supplies, workforce and customers) can survive in long term."
So what? It seems you imply that companies not respecting their partners shouldn't worry us in the grand scheme of things because they tend to self-destruct. My point is that not only they should worry us because of the damage they incur short term but that without regulatory bodies (the government) they'd be a majority (a changing majority, maybe, but a majority). Shouldn't we worry about suicide terrorists because they won't be able to make a second attack?
"If you tell us what you are thinking, that might be another story."
Exactly what I already told, and the half you already hinted from it: that nature does in fact give to human beings a monopoly over their ideas, but that there's no such monopoly for whatever is made public and that's exactly because once it's made public and I gain knowledge of it, it becomes my idea and my idea is my own monopoly.
That's why there's no need for legal protection for secrets (they protect by themselves as long as they are secrets) but you need a legal protection for patents if you mean to withold its monopoly (because once you make your idea into the public, there's no natural protection for it).
"It's executable permission bit. If a file is downloaded by anything other than package manager, it remains non-executable until the user explicitly sets it on the command line or in a scary-looking permission setting screen."
And that happens exactly why? Because there's an almighty law impeding any program but `chmod` to set the exec bit? Or is it that there is exactly *nothing* impeding Linux to automatically run executables downloaded from the Internet, except the good sense of developers... to date?
"Since all applications are installed in a package manager [...] Oh, I see. You are either a Microsoft astroturfer or an idiot"
I think you'd better reassess the limits of your own knowledge prior to call names to unkown people that might be a bit more knowledgeable than you think.
Look: even on Microsoft environments, by the days of Windows 3.1 plus trumpet winsock plus Eudora (you know, that's about twenty years ago -yes, I was already wandering the intertubes by then, and operating unix too) you needed to go through a lot of steps in order to load an attachment as an executable. But, hey, you don't need to do it anymore. You know why? because there wasn't any law forbidding it and the marketing guys at Microsoft thought it would be a great idea.
Now, there is exactly the same limitation on Linux that there were on Windows: exactly zero. There's nothing intrinsically avoiding a, say, Thunderbird extension for looking at the mime-type of an e-mail attachment and call an external program to execute it on behalf of the user. And that's exactly the kind of things that the "linux is difficult" advocates expect to see.
Now try that from your beloved linux command line:
echo "echo hello, world" > test.txt /bin/sh test.txt
ls -l test.txt (see? no execution bit -I assume your umask is set to a sane value)
OH, WONDERFUL THING, LOOK AT THE OUTPUT!!!
hello, world
On one hand you see how a file without the execution bit can be "executed"
On another hand you see how a file not coming from a package can be both installed and executed
On the third hand (yes, third hand, so what?) given that my "helping program", the shell, is running on behalf of my UID it can access (and modify, and delete) ALL my data from ALL my hard disk. That would also be the case for ANY other program (firefox, thunderbird... you name it) that would happen to run under my UID.
The ONLY thing avoiding that to happen is not the almighty god from the unix of older days but the common sense from developers. The very day those developers (maybe pushed by some company's greed and money) forget about that common sense you can bet you'll see exactly the same kind of worms and virus attacking linux as there are in windows-world. And, so it seems if your hear the "experts", for linux really having "a year for the desktop" that's exactly what should happen.
"okay there's the lock switch but christ, it's not like a 1964 Buick Skylark."
Surely corporations have learnt how to build better devices since 1964... "better" meaning much less durable, around the time they need to launch next model.
"Building an iPad right means that when the new shiny one comes out, you can sell the old one on eBay or Craigslist."
I think Steve Jobs will beg to differ: one device sold at eBay is one less prospective shiny new device sold by him.
Building an iPad right means for him that it will fall appart into pieces exactly the same day Steve announces the new shiny model.