Picketing isn't a bad idea either. Nor is publising (perhaps on a web page, and in the local newspaper) the reasons other might want to also not go to McDonalds (or buy a particular shoe, or brekfast cerial).
For example, see the McSpotlight site, with plenty of good anti-McD resources, based on the longest-running libel trial in a British court, in which McD's sued two under-resourced activists (who had approx nothing between them). This was due to McD's (and other large corporation's) usual tactic of threatening legal action against anyone who criticises them. In this case, the threat didn't work, and Steel and Morris called their bluff. It was a pretty big PR shot-in-foot for McDs.
You don't think that McD's ships beef and potatoes from the US over to France to turn into burgers and fries, do you?
Well, I'm not certain about the origin of the beef that McD's use for their fries, but you're right about the burgers. Typically, the beef is South American, from areas previously known as `rainforest'.
What do you mean? TCP/IP is a "strict standard"; there's a given set of behaviour that has to be implemented in order to conform. If people write non-conforming (read: 'buggy') implementations, things break. Strict standards enable interoperability between systems, portability across systems (POSIX), and so on.
The question of enforcement is different. TCP/IP is a de facto standard; if you don't use it, you can't play our game. RFCs, in general, document de facto standards. The principle is that "everyone else uses this standard, so if I don't, I'll be on my own". The fear with MS is that they're so big (in some sense), that they can make their own rules. If they don't conform to a particular standard, the reasoning goes, then it's the rest of the world who'll lose out. This fear could be well-founded if MS had more than a certain proportion of the `world' (for some value of world). We've seen this happen with Word documents; if StarOffice didn't read Word documents, it's be (even?) less popular than it is. Such is the nature of monopoly: if there's a particular gas company that has a large enough proportion of the market, they can fix the size of the underground pipes to suit themselves, causing problems for everyone else.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but NASA isn't the Fount of All Cosomological Knowledge. Scientists in lots of research organisations discover lots of things about the universe all the time, and then publish in the journals and conferences. The reason that information comes through little bits at a time is that it is discovered little bits at a time. People like Hawkings aren't revealing things that are already known, but publishing new information/theories that NASA find out about at the same time. If you want to get information quicker, contribute to the discovery of it by becoming a cosmologist. Science was open-source long before software was;)
Moving on, I don't understand how that Thompson compiler (which inserts malicious code into the login program, and into itself when recompiled) is a serious problem. I'm running Red Hat 6.0, and my version of gcc came straight off of the install CD. If, for whatever reason, I needed a new one, I'd see if I could get another precompiled version from Red Hat or the FSF. THEY aren't going to screw me over, and if they tried they WOULD be caught very quickly.
In the same way, presumably, that Microsoft aren't going to `screw you over' by leaving backdoors in their software? The MS backdoor was unofficial, and not policy.
I do agree with you that RedHat and the FSF are good guys and (should be) much less likely to do something like that, but you have no means of knowing unless you roll-your-own and read the source, not something that most poeple do.
Do you know that your current version of gcc does not have Thompson's backdoor? How about your version of login? (btw, I don't know about mine, either;)
Don't rely on it unless you know its been tested thouroughly.
Notwithstanding the fact that (in the words of Dijkstra) ``Testing can never prove the absence of bugs'' (including security `bugs'), and that at least half of good testing relies on seeing the source.
Dijkstra was talking about proving correctness of code, something which takes too long for most systems of any size today. It is, however, very difficult to prove anything about a program for which you don't have the source, Luke.
So, I guess, this argument is in favour of open-source software, in that examining the code is at least as important as testing it. All you have to do is make sure that the code is examined by competent people:)
It's not just the laws that cause problems; it's the lawyers (or, more accurately, the tendency of ISPs to be afraid of lawsuits). What we really need is at least one ISP who won't close down a site just because it is alleged that said site may publish something potentially libellous. Not submitting to such threats is plainly the right thing to do, but, in an increasingly litigious society, organisations (and individuals) are afraid of libel suits, and the threat of legal action is often used (for example, by McDonald's) to silence criticism.
In a newsmagazine survey taken earlier this year, 81 percent of Americans [surveyed] said they believed the Net was responsible for the Columbine massacre...
...so it must be true. After all, 81% of surveyed Americans can't be wrong, can they. I'm sure that they know all the facts and weren't just presented with the question ``Was The Net responsible etc... Yes/No''.
Now, as a simple matter of logic, it is easier to find an exploit on a Open-Source system than a closed source system, everything else being equal. It's that simple. You've got the code right in front of you, so it's easy to verify that there is indeed a flaw.
True, but that's not necessarily a bad thing: It's easier for nasty people to find exploits, but it's also easier for the White Hats to find them before they get exploited.
I've always thought it would be a good idea to put the toolbars, taskbars, and titlebars at the side of the screen rather than the top and bottom.
That's exactly what I do, using GNOME. I've got a panel on the right hand side with the tasklist, and gkrellm below it. I've also got a theme for E (spiffE) that uses as little height as possible for the window title-bars. I don't really appreciate having vertical space taken up with candy, as I like to be able to read lots of stuff without scrolling. I even went as far (?) as removing the toolbar thingy from XEmacs, to give me more writing space. I make no claims to be typical, though:)
Thanks for the link to ``Thirteen Ways to Loath Visual Basic''. I learned to program in a very good version of Basic (Acorn's BBC Basic 4 or 5, can't quite remember now), which had (gasp) local variables, properish procedures and functions, arrays accessed with a[n], and so on (I've never used a GOTO in my life, your honour). I'd assumed that VB would be sort-of half-decent. Sadly it's not true. Assuming that the article is correct, VB seems such a huge step backwards from the mid-eighties. Such dreadful last-century thinking. So many inconsistencies, so little design.
However, most text editors (at least the ones I use on a regular basis) will get you a new inode when you save because they don't actually edit the file contents in place.
AFAICT, neither emacs nor vi get you a new inode. Try the example I gave above, this time using vi or emacs to edit the file. Seems to keep the hard link on my system.
What do you mean, you doubt many people edit config files with cat >>? I saw a slightly stressed sysadmin here edit/etc/passwd with cat> (he missed the 2nd >). Not a happy man!
In your example, if I say "ln foo.conf foo.conf.old", no new storage is taken up, but it looks like there are two copies. Then when I edit foo.conf, the underlying file is de-referenced, but hangs around because foo.conf.old still references it. A new file is created to hold my edited version.
Pardon? $ cat > a Hello... $ ln a b $ cat >> b ...mum! $ cat a Hello... ...mum!
Hard links don't get dereferenced, unless (in the example above), you do something like $ cp a c $ cat >> c and Dad, too! $ cat a Hello... ...mum! $ cat c Hello... ...mum! and Dad, too!
Buying machines of massive quality just because you can is just silly. I have never ran an app that actually took that much processor power...
I expect, then, that you don't run a bank (That's a fairly safe bet, from the rest of the comment:). Your standard university programming problems typically don't need to process millions of transactions a day, have uptimes of over a decade, keep multiple off-site backups (securely), print reams of paper in seconds flat, support thousands of concurrent database accesses etc., etc. Big transaction-processing applications use mainframes because they have to, not because they can.
and I haven't actually wrote one myself that could do anything that I would like. Programming is quite difficult
What do these sentences mean? That you've not written a program that needs a mainframe? Few people do on their own. Or do you mean that you've not written a program that does what it's supposed to? I'm sure we've all written progs that don't behave well...
I say that Reagan's morals do make him a "great man"
From this side of the `pond', what I remember Reagan for is him, very kindly, sending us some nice missiles to store at Greenham Common, and other military bases, so that we could be upgraded with a few more first-strike targets. Good of him and Maggie to arrange such important status for us.
I think the first crash happened in the local power-supply company.
I think I could have made this a bit clearer in my original post: There was a power-cut here at the weekend. What with having no UPS on my box, it went down.
Corresponding with your experience, I've never had Linux itself die on me. I was hoping for a champion uptime before the weekend, but then the power went off.
And we ALL know that Linux is by NO means bug-free
Indeed. My box crashed yesterday when it really shouldn't have. I mean, if this amateur OS can't run when the power's out, how can anyone claim that it's reliable?
Most regular guys use something in the $3000-6000 range
Well, I'm just a `regular guy' (I'm sure that some girls listen to records too...), and my turntable was bought before I was born, and maybe even in (UK) shillings,:) Certainly less than $3000, anyway; more like 100 ukp (which was quite a large chunk of cash in the 1970s)
FWIW, it's a Technics [something], and still performs perfectly, though I've replaced the needle a couple of times (as expected, and easier than replacing the laser on a CD player:), and bought a new drive belt last year.
Sigh for proper vinyl; there's nothing quite the same, for some unquantifiable reason.
The good Dr Yu recommends ``double wet and vacuum cleaning using carbon fiber record brush, after initial cleaning using the vacuum cleaner'', which sounds like an awful lot of hassle to me, and probably doesn't do much for the lifespan of the records.
There's something Deeply Wrong if anyone (not just M$) can patent a language, what with `language being the tool of thought', and all.
With respect to Basic, according to Foldoc, it was ``designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963''. I assume that even the infamous US Patent Office would recognise that as Prior Art. Whether Basic is an Art form at all is a moot point...
Having said that, I learned to program in Basic, and my brain isn't as damaged as some people claim it should be. That could be because I learned a reasonably structured Basic (Acorn's BBC Basic V), complete with (gasp) local variables, (ooh) procedures, (aah) and other nice features. I managed to write some reasonable size programs with not a single GOTO. The type system was a bit basic (pun intended), though.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about VB, and long may it stay that way.
A lot of stores have strict return policies - if you open the CD then you can't return it. At most, you can exchange it with an identical album
OTOH, if it's not 'fit for purpose', you can (in the UK at least; I imagine it's much the same elsewhere), you're entitled to your money back (i.e., not just a credit note).
Of course, whether a CD is or isn't fit for purpose because it won't play in certain conditions is a moot point. If you [sound like you] know what you're on about when you complain (say things like 'Trading Standards Officer' and 'Trade Descriptions Act' in a UK shop), you can usually wangle pretty much anything:)
...I would not be surprised if a real AI is created within the next 10-20 years.
Come back in 20 years; people will still be saying that, as they were 20 years ago:)
Of course, that all depends on what your definition of 'real AI' is. We don't really have a good idea of what intelligence really is; the best definition that I've seen is in Hofstadter's 'Goedel, Escher, Bach', and goes something like "Intelligence is anything we can't yet automate; as soon as something is automated, it becomes clear that it's not the key to intelligence".
It's not really an `ergo' keyboard, but I miss my Sun (5?) keyboard; it had tonnes of function keys, all of which I had bound to some ctwm function. I hardly ever used the mouse with that setup.
I now find the traditional PC keyboard (with function keys exclusively at the top) more of a pain; I have to move my hands to press the f-keys now.
I believe the correct response to this is ``Cobblers''.
It is obvious from your mis-guided rant that you understand neither communism, socialism, or European politics (at either the continental or country scale).
On the point of ``mass executions'', perhaps you could compare the use and abuse of the death penalty in the U.S.A. with that in European countries.
The use of Trolls in such countries has not been investigated, so I shall waste no further time in replying to this one:)
INTERCAL, OTOH, is not. It's about time the INTERCAL users of the world had an operating system embodying the same concepts, in the same way that (early versions, at least) of UNIX embodied C concepts (or was that vice versa?).
Just think, a shell with INTERCAL syntax; that'd be a start:)
Slashdot Mirror
What do you mean? TCP/IP is a "strict standard"; there's a given set of behaviour that has to be implemented in order to conform. If people write non-conforming (read: 'buggy') implementations, things break. Strict standards enable interoperability between systems, portability across systems (POSIX), and so on.
The question of enforcement is different. TCP/IP is a de facto standard; if you don't use it, you can't play our game. RFCs, in general, document de facto standards. The principle is that "everyone else uses this standard, so if I don't, I'll be on my own". The fear with MS is that they're so big (in some sense), that they can make their own rules. If they don't conform to a particular standard, the reasoning goes, then it's the rest of the world who'll lose out. This fear could be well-founded if MS had more than a certain proportion of the `world' (for some value of world). We've seen this happen with Word documents; if StarOffice didn't read Word documents, it's be (even?) less popular than it is. Such is the nature of monopoly: if there's a particular gas company that has a large enough proportion of the market, they can fix the size of the underground pipes to suit themselves, causing problems for everyone else.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but NASA isn't the Fount of All Cosomological Knowledge. Scientists in lots of research organisations discover lots of things about the universe all the time, and then publish in the journals and conferences. The reason that information comes through little bits at a time is that it is discovered little bits at a time. People like Hawkings aren't revealing things that are already known, but publishing new information/theories that NASA find out about at the same time. If you want to get information quicker, contribute to the discovery of it by becoming a cosmologist. Science was open-source long before software was ;)
The jurisdiction over which the satellite was travelling at the time of the alleged action :)
IANAL, but I have read `The Man Who Sold the Moon' by Robert Heinlein.
I do agree with you that RedHat and the FSF are good guys and (should be) much less likely to do something like that, but you have no means of knowing unless you roll-your-own and read the source, not something that most poeple do.
Do you know that your current version of gcc does not have Thompson's backdoor? How about your version of login? (btw, I don't know about mine, either ;)
Notwithstanding the fact that (in the words of Dijkstra) ``Testing can never prove the absence of bugs'' (including security `bugs'), and that at least half of good testing relies on seeing the source.
Dijkstra was talking about proving correctness of code, something which takes too long for most systems of any size today. It is, however, very difficult to prove anything about a program for which you don't have the source, Luke.
So, I guess, this argument is in favour of open-source software, in that examining the code is at least as important as testing it. All you have to do is make sure that the code is examined by competent people :)
It's not just the laws that cause problems; it's the lawyers (or, more accurately, the tendency of ISPs to be afraid of lawsuits). What we really need is at least one ISP who won't close down a site just because it is alleged that said site may publish something potentially libellous. Not submitting to such threats is plainly the right thing to do, but, in an increasingly litigious society, organisations (and individuals) are afraid of libel suits, and the threat of legal action is often used (for example, by McDonald's) to silence criticism.
That's exactly what I do, using GNOME. I've got a panel on the right hand side with the tasklist, and gkrellm below it. I've also got a theme for E (spiffE) that uses as little height as possible for the window title-bars. I don't really appreciate having vertical space taken up with candy, as I like to be able to read lots of stuff without scrolling. I even went as far (?) as removing the toolbar thingy from XEmacs, to give me more writing space. I make no claims to be typical, though :)
Thanks for the link to ``Thirteen Ways to Loath Visual Basic''. I learned to program in a very good version of Basic (Acorn's BBC Basic 4 or 5, can't quite remember now), which had (gasp) local variables, properish procedures and functions, arrays accessed with a[n], and so on (I've never used a GOTO in my life, your honour). I'd assumed that VB would be sort-of half-decent. Sadly it's not true. Assuming that the article is correct, VB seems such a huge step backwards from the mid-eighties. Such dreadful last-century thinking. So many inconsistencies, so little design.
Just my 2 euros.
AFAICT, neither emacs nor vi get you a new inode. Try the example I gave above, this time using vi or emacs to edit the file. Seems to keep the hard link on my system.
What do you mean, you doubt many people edit config files with cat >>? I saw a slightly stressed sysadmin here edit /etc/passwd with cat> (he missed the 2nd >). Not a happy man!
Pardon?
$ cat > a
Hello...
$ ln a b
$ cat >> b
...mum!
$ cat a
Hello...
...mum!
Hard links don't get dereferenced, unless (in the example above), you do something like
$ cp a c
$ cat >> c
and Dad, too!
$ cat a
Hello...
...mum!
$ cat c
Hello...
...mum!
and Dad, too!
I expect, then, that you don't run a bank (That's a fairly safe bet, from the rest of the comment :). Your standard university programming problems typically don't need to process millions of transactions a day, have uptimes of over a decade, keep multiple off-site backups (securely), print reams of paper in seconds flat, support thousands of concurrent database accesses etc., etc. Big transaction-processing applications use mainframes because they have to, not because they can.
and I haven't actually wrote one myself that could do anything that I would like. Programming is quite difficult
What do these sentences mean? That you've not written a program that needs a mainframe? Few people do on their own. Or do you mean that you've not written a program that does what it's supposed to? I'm sure we've all written progs that don't behave well...
From this side of the `pond', what I remember Reagan for is him, very kindly, sending us some nice missiles to store at Greenham Common, and other military bases, so that we could be upgraded with a few more first-strike targets. Good of him and Maggie to arrange such important status for us.
I think the first crash happened in the local power-supply company.
I think I could have made this a bit clearer in my original post: There was a power-cut here at the weekend. What with having no UPS on my box, it went down.
Corresponding with your experience, I've never had Linux itself die on me. I was hoping for a champion uptime before the weekend, but then the power went off.
Indeed. My box crashed yesterday when it really shouldn't have. I mean, if this amateur OS can't run when the power's out, how can anyone claim that it's reliable?
Well, I'm just a `regular guy' (I'm sure that some girls listen to records too...), and my turntable was bought before I was born, and maybe even in (UK) shillings, :) Certainly less than $3000, anyway; more like 100 ukp (which was quite a large chunk of cash in the 1970s)
FWIW, it's a Technics [something], and still performs perfectly, though I've replaced the needle a couple of times (as expected, and easier than replacing the laser on a CD player :), and bought a new drive belt last year.
Sigh for proper vinyl; there's nothing quite the same, for some unquantifiable reason.
The good Dr Yu recommends ``double wet and vacuum cleaning using carbon fiber record brush, after initial cleaning using the vacuum cleaner'', which sounds like an awful lot of hassle to me, and probably doesn't do much for the lifespan of the records.
There's something Deeply Wrong if anyone (not just M$) can patent a language, what with `language being the tool of thought', and all.
With respect to Basic, according to Foldoc, it was ``designed by John G. Kemeny and Thomas E. Kurtz at Dartmouth College in 1963''. I assume that even the infamous US Patent Office would recognise that as Prior Art. Whether Basic is an Art form at all is a moot point...
Having said that, I learned to program in Basic, and my brain isn't as damaged as some people claim it should be. That could be because I learned a reasonably structured Basic (Acorn's BBC Basic V), complete with (gasp) local variables, (ooh) procedures, (aah) and other nice features. I managed to write some reasonable size programs with not a single GOTO. The type system was a bit basic (pun intended), though.
Disclaimer: I know nothing about VB, and long may it stay that way.
So there you go...
Stephen
OTOH, if it's not 'fit for purpose', you can (in the UK at least; I imagine it's much the same elsewhere), you're entitled to your money back (i.e., not just a credit note).
Of course, whether a CD is or isn't fit for purpose because it won't play in certain conditions is a moot point. If you [sound like you] know what you're on about when you complain (say things like 'Trading Standards Officer' and 'Trade Descriptions Act' in a UK shop), you can usually wangle pretty much anything :)
HTH, but IANAL,
Stephen
Come back in 20 years; people will still be saying that, as they were 20 years ago :)
Of course, that all depends on what your definition of 'real AI' is. We don't really have a good idea of what intelligence really is; the best definition that I've seen is in Hofstadter's 'Goedel, Escher, Bach', and goes something like "Intelligence is anything we can't yet automate; as soon as something is automated, it becomes clear that it's not the key to intelligence".
HTH, but I doubt that it does,
Stephen
I now find the traditional PC keyboard (with function keys exclusively at the top) more of a pain; I have to move my hands to press the f-keys now.
One thing I don't miss is the 50 MHz processor :)
It is obvious from your mis-guided rant that you understand neither communism, socialism, or European politics (at either the continental or country scale).
On the point of ``mass executions'', perhaps you could compare the use and abuse of the death penalty in the U.S.A. with that in European countries.
The use of Trolls in such countries has not been investigated, so I shall waste no further time in replying to this one :)
Steve
INTERCAL, OTOH, is not. It's about time the INTERCAL users of the world had an operating system embodying the same concepts, in the same way that (early versions, at least) of UNIX embodied C concepts (or was that vice versa?).
Just think, a shell with INTERCAL syntax; that'd be a start :)