The bad: It can make your webserver appear to be hosting arbitrary content if you are hosting any PDF files and the user is using Acrobat reader.
Worse, much worse. It allows anyone to execute javascript code as if it was on your server. Another name for that is Cross Site Scripting. This can result in cookie stealing and many other nasty things.
I've never used Solaris before so I can't compare it to Linux; however, IMHO, there are a lot of options available in the GNU/Linux world an my personal experience is that Fedora tends to be one of the worse. There are many other free distros that are much more into delivering a real product that their users can be productive with instead of the treating their users like lab rats.
If OpenSolaris works, than more power to you. Otherwise I'd suggest you try one of these out (In no particular order): Gentoo, Ubuntu, Slackware. Each of them different paradigms, so I can't make a meaningful comparison between them. If you really need Red Hat compatibility, there's always CentOS, but I really don't like a number of ways Red Hat does things.
P.S. I'm not trying to flame Red Hat. They're an awesome company and have done some awesome things with Linux. I just don't like their products.
I know you're half joking, but from my experience, the most common argument against eating meat is health related and not ethics. I've you've seen the way we "manufacture" our farm animals, you might agree with them too.
XSS, or Cross-site scripting, attacks are something that happen in web pages, not web browsers. It has just as much to do with Mozilla Firefox as it does with IE7.
I hardly know anything about Plasmas or LCD's but I've heard that Plasmas are cheeper for the respective level of quality. The price difference might be a factor for some people, particlarly in places like Canada, where our hydroelectric dams make power very cheap. 5 years is a fairly long time in the tech world too.
And another thing: instead of calling it an experiment, call it experimental.
It does make a difference how things are put. For instance, if it were even whispered that the N.I.C.E. wanted powers to experiment on criminals, you'd have all the old women of both sexes up in arms and yapping about humanity. Call it re-education of the mal-adjusted, and you have them all slobbering with delight that the brutal era of retributive punishment has at last come to an end. . . . You mustn't experiment on children; but offer the dear little kiddies free education in an experimental school attached to the N.I.C.E. and it's all correct!
Maybe, but in my experience, bloggers don't behave as you would expect normal people would. For one thing, they have a very short memory of offences and are ridiculously easy to fool. As a result I don't think groups 1, 2, or 3 will be any problem as people will quickly forget any bribery issues. Group 4 probably will probably behave as you described, but groups 1 and 2 will happily avoid critisising Microsoft in hope of future goodies.
Going back to Ethics 101, this is (however subtly) acting against the best interest of society, and therefore unethical.
I don't know who your ethics prof was, but this is only true if you're a secular humanist. Many people have different definitions of ethical: "What God wants" or "What I want" are two very popular ones.
I'm all for being pragmatic about computing and such, but exactly how is he supposed to know which is better if he doesn't use Linux. To expect a switch from Windows to Linux to go flawless is unrealistic, but that doesn't mean Linux is worse. He will have to get use to different ways of doing things, but some of them are better in the long run. The people who say Linux "doesn't work for them" but have never actually used it for anything significant are like the people who say they hate sushi because the idea of seaweed doesn't sound very yummy.
Some things about Linux really do stink (for the end users at least). Most of them are caused by polititians and not programmers, but to the end user, it doesn't matter. Whether he cares to live with those problems are not is his decision. Personally, I love Linux, and I love software freedom; but I would not recommend it to my parents who rely heavily on Windows specific tools (although that's changing:). Every users' story is different.
Maybe in the utopian land of happiness and glee. But for those of who live in the real world, it doesn't work so well. The fact is that software is buggy, and the more features it has, but buggier it tends to get. Security isn't a black and white thing. Most of the real decisions us real people have to make is based on a number of factors that we aren't quite certain about. Something like HTML email provides a much larger surface of attack and potential places for programmers to screw up. The most mail client exploits are related to HTML email (including less trivial things like phishing).
I use Firefox for web browsing. All things considered, Firefox is fairly secure, but I would be rather foolish to think that the whole thing is bug free. On the other hand, it allows me to use some extentions that really improve my security in other ways (encryption of stuff). So for me, it works out fairly well, but there's always a chance that someone might exploit it (In reallity, social enginneering is probably much easier though).
I don't know how old you are, but I'm still a college student and I share your feelings as well. What annoys me the worst is that retarted mail client called Outlook that has a love afair with <FONT SIZE=8 COLOR=BLUE> [1]. Text is wonderful because it allows me to specify the color, font family, and size of the email so I can read the blasted thing.
Plain text isn't perfect either. Things like text formating is often done in awkward ways that can get screwed up fairly easily. (The 80 column line wrapping thing is the biggest offender.
Personally, I think that another system, maybe a strictly designed subset of XHTML or Restructured Text (for XML haters), needs to be designed. It should only contain semantic elements. No style or scripting capabilities at all.
[1] I'm not sure if that's the actual markup it uses. It's an educated guess based on Microsoft's other tools. It's been trimmed a bit for readablity. The real version whould have all sorts of MS Office specifice attributes with magical namespaces floating around (and HTML doesn't even have namespaces, go figure).
Which makes me wonder why we haven't banned these patents altogether. It's not like it's difficult or anything. They don't seem to really serve any purpose besides promoting fear.
Then you just block access from the people looking through the telescope. Web browsers have these things called referers. Say I'm viewing a webpage at http://foo.org/some/page and it includes an image from another webserver (baz.org). When my browser goes to get that image it tells baz.org "Hey I'm coming from http://foo.org/some/page and I've come to get this image". It's perfectly fine for baz.org to reply with a 403 (in laymans terms: "No, go away") if the referer is from another website.
I agree that this can be anoying, but there's already a technological way to fix the problem. Going to the courts over this is somewhat retarted.
Microsoft (and other software companies, but MS gets the most attention for it) spent years working under the paradigm where making things more convenient and/or more powerful for the user was the most important thing you could do to get people to use and buy your product.
I think it's more acurate to say "appear convenient and powerful". There's nothing convient or powerful about data lost or computers infected with worms and trojans.
For firefox, I had to use a flash hack to make it work though, so technically with a default Firefox install you can still mess with the clipboard anyway.
Well no, because (thank God) Flash is not installed by default. Also, this security bug in Flash. Plugins have just as much control over your computer as Firefox does (this is how it works with any browser) and it is up to the plugin's authors to keep their plugin secure. Macromedia/Adobe have failed but they probably couldn't care less. That's why plugins have to be installed and they have warning messsages.
This case is far different, because no one is breaking into a locked box, What they are doing is creating a new box, which happens to use the same key.
That's why their trying to use Trademark law to attack these people. They're saying that in creating a new box that is openable by the key, you've voilated their trademark because the new box looks too much like their old one.
I have this jewish friend, Nogga. She's pretty fluent in hebrew, and a damned good writer in english. Also, she's a F to M in progress. I'll bet if I got her to paraphrase the catholic bible in modern english, as a novel, it would be controversial enough to make her millions of dollars. Or at least get billions of hate-emails. Should be fun either way.
You're probably right, but only because millions of people are idiots and don't check their facts. Like you for example. Here are some facts that might help you.
She may be fluent with modern Hebrew, but I'm pretty sure she'd be almost useless with translating the Hebrew Scriptures which are written with an acient version of Hebrew that is rarely used outside of academia these days. It would be like getting a guy who speaks modern Greek to translate the works of Homer. It wouldn't work.
Language doesn't exist in a vacuum. The Hebrew scriptures include all sorts of literary themes and motifs that have been dead for thousands of years. If you don't understand these, you'll miss out on much of what is going on (which is one reason why you should be very careful when you hear people saying they preach from the True Bible(tm), thy are often very sincere, but also very sincerly wrong).
The Hebrew scriptures that we use and the ones that the Jewish people use are actually very similar (the exception is the Apocryphal book, but they were never really taken seriously anyways). I don't know how devout she is, but she might take issue with translating her scriptures into something sacreligious. Another Jew I know who took a radical view on the Hebrew Scriptures wasn't terribly popular and didn't last too long.
I'm not saying that the current translations are all that good, but you should learn a thing or to be fore you start being critical next time.
Plain english is a start but, as I understand it, these are all translations right? They're not rewrites by people with actual literary skill, are they?
No, they have absolutly no skill whatsovever, just about 8 to 12 years of post secondary education, a Ph. D., and a life-time of work on the translations. You might not agree with the content written in these translations (or in the original for that matter), but these probably are some of the most difficult and finnest pieces of translation to date.
And the line between a translation and a rewrite is incredibly fine. There is no perfect translation for anything. John 6:35 is an awesome example: "Then Jesus declared, 'I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. ..'" (NIV translation). In Jesus' Palistine, bread was a staple food, yet in many Asian countries, bread is something that only the richer people eat (and it's often sweet, and used for deserts). If you just do a straight translation you'll lose a lot of the meaning, so many people have opted to use rice instead of bread, but that isn't perfect either.
Disclaimmer: Both of my parents are Bible Translators and I'm going for a minor in linuguistics.
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Worse, much worse. It allows anyone to execute javascript code as if it was on your server. Another name for that is Cross Site Scripting. This can result in cookie stealing and many other nasty things.
I've never used Solaris before so I can't compare it to Linux; however, IMHO, there are a lot of options available in the GNU/Linux world an my personal experience is that Fedora tends to be one of the worse. There are many other free distros that are much more into delivering a real product that their users can be productive with instead of the treating their users like lab rats.
If OpenSolaris works, than more power to you. Otherwise I'd suggest you try one of these out (In no particular order): Gentoo, Ubuntu, Slackware. Each of them different paradigms, so I can't make a meaningful comparison between them. If you really need Red Hat compatibility, there's always CentOS, but I really don't like a number of ways Red Hat does things.
P.S. I'm not trying to flame Red Hat. They're an awesome company and have done some awesome things with Linux. I just don't like their products.
I know you're half joking, but from my experience, the most common argument against eating meat is health related and not ethics. I've you've seen the way we "manufacture" our farm animals, you might agree with them too.
XSS, or Cross-site scripting, attacks are something that happen in web pages, not web browsers. It has just as much to do with Mozilla Firefox as it does with IE7.
"Citizen Journalist" as opposed to a journalist who isn't a citizen?
You're right there, but changing jobs from one side of the US to the other in a days notice is pretty spectacular.
Wait, so are you a Google acountant or a security professional. Don't tell me you changed jobs yesterday.
I hardly know anything about Plasmas or LCD's but I've heard that Plasmas are cheeper for the respective level of quality. The price difference might be a factor for some people, particlarly in places like Canada, where our hydroelectric dams make power very cheap. 5 years is a fairly long time in the tech world too.
And another thing: instead of calling it an experiment, call it experimental.
From That hideous strength by C.S. Lewis
Well, Microsoft's software isn't about being better either; it's about making Microsoft richer. At least we admit it.
Maybe, but in my experience, bloggers don't behave as you would expect normal people would. For one thing, they have a very short memory of offences and are ridiculously easy to fool. As a result I don't think groups 1, 2, or 3 will be any problem as people will quickly forget any bribery issues. Group 4 probably will probably behave as you described, but groups 1 and 2 will happily avoid critisising Microsoft in hope of future goodies.
I don't know who your ethics prof was, but this is only true if you're a secular humanist. Many people have different definitions of ethical: "What God wants" or "What I want" are two very popular ones.
TFA mentions that the little box requires some non-free kernel modules. Doesn't shipping this violate the GPL?
I'm all for being pragmatic about computing and such, but exactly how is he supposed to know which is better if he doesn't use Linux. To expect a switch from Windows to Linux to go flawless is unrealistic, but that doesn't mean Linux is worse. He will have to get use to different ways of doing things, but some of them are better in the long run. The people who say Linux "doesn't work for them" but have never actually used it for anything significant are like the people who say they hate sushi because the idea of seaweed doesn't sound very yummy.
Some things about Linux really do stink (for the end users at least). Most of them are caused by polititians and not programmers, but to the end user, it doesn't matter. Whether he cares to live with those problems are not is his decision. Personally, I love Linux, and I love software freedom; but I would not recommend it to my parents who rely heavily on Windows specific tools (although that's changing :). Every users' story is different.
Maybe in the utopian land of happiness and glee. But for those of who live in the real world, it doesn't work so well. The fact is that software is buggy, and the more features it has, but buggier it tends to get. Security isn't a black and white thing. Most of the real decisions us real people have to make is based on a number of factors that we aren't quite certain about. Something like HTML email provides a much larger surface of attack and potential places for programmers to screw up. The most mail client exploits are related to HTML email (including less trivial things like phishing).
I use Firefox for web browsing. All things considered, Firefox is fairly secure, but I would be rather foolish to think that the whole thing is bug free. On the other hand, it allows me to use some extentions that really improve my security in other ways (encryption of stuff). So for me, it works out fairly well, but there's always a chance that someone might exploit it (In reallity, social enginneering is probably much easier though).
I don't know how old you are, but I'm still a college student and I share your feelings as well. What annoys me the worst is that retarted mail client called Outlook that has a love afair with <FONT SIZE=8 COLOR=BLUE> [1]. Text is wonderful because it allows me to specify the color, font family, and size of the email so I can read the blasted thing.
Plain text isn't perfect either. Things like text formating is often done in awkward ways that can get screwed up fairly easily. (The 80 column line wrapping thing is the biggest offender.
Personally, I think that another system, maybe a strictly designed subset of XHTML or Restructured Text (for XML haters), needs to be designed. It should only contain semantic elements. No style or scripting capabilities at all.
[1] I'm not sure if that's the actual markup it uses. It's an educated guess based on Microsoft's other tools. It's been trimmed a bit for readablity. The real version whould have all sorts of MS Office specifice attributes with magical namespaces floating around (and HTML doesn't even have namespaces, go figure).
Which makes me wonder why we haven't banned these patents altogether. It's not like it's difficult or anything. They don't seem to really serve any purpose besides promoting fear.
Then you just block access from the people looking through the telescope. Web browsers have these things called referers. Say I'm viewing a webpage at http://foo.org/some/page and it includes an image from another webserver (baz.org). When my browser goes to get that image it tells baz.org "Hey I'm coming from http://foo.org/some/page and I've come to get this image". It's perfectly fine for baz.org to reply with a 403 (in laymans terms: "No, go away") if the referer is from another website.
I agree that this can be anoying, but there's already a technological way to fix the problem. Going to the courts over this is somewhat retarted.
I think it's more acurate to say "appear convenient and powerful". There's nothing convient or powerful about data lost or computers infected with worms and trojans.
Well no, because (thank God) Flash is not installed by default. Also, this security bug in Flash. Plugins have just as much control over your computer as Firefox does (this is how it works with any browser) and it is up to the plugin's authors to keep their plugin secure. Macromedia/Adobe have failed but they probably couldn't care less. That's why plugins have to be installed and they have warning messsages.
That's why their trying to use Trademark law to attack these people. They're saying that in creating a new box that is openable by the key, you've voilated their trademark because the new box looks too much like their old one.
I took me a while to figure it out, but this is the best Engish translation I can come up with:
That sounds awfully close to thoughtcrime.
You're probably right, but only because millions of people are idiots and don't check their facts. Like you for example. Here are some facts that might help you.
I'm not saying that the current translations are all that good, but you should learn a thing or to be fore you start being critical next time.
No, they have absolutly no skill whatsovever, just about 8 to 12 years of post secondary education, a Ph. D., and a life-time of work on the translations. You might not agree with the content written in these translations (or in the original for that matter), but these probably are some of the most difficult and finnest pieces of translation to date.
And the line between a translation and a rewrite is incredibly fine. There is no perfect translation for anything. John 6:35 is an awesome example: "Then Jesus declared, 'I am the bread of life. He who comes to me will never go hungry, and he who believes in me will never be thirsty. . .'" (NIV translation). In Jesus' Palistine, bread was a staple food, yet in many Asian countries, bread is something that only the richer people eat (and it's often sweet, and used for deserts). If you just do a straight translation you'll lose a lot of the meaning, so many people have opted to use rice instead of bread, but that isn't perfect either.
Disclaimmer: Both of my parents are Bible Translators and I'm going for a minor in linuguistics.