I doubt that there's much in the way of real secrets that the US has that the chinese and every other country with a significant ethnic presence in the USA don't already know about. Having samples and knowing its capabilities (and what its weakness are) is one thing - needing to use it yourself and developing the ability to produce it is another.
After all, it's not as if the chinese feel threatened by american military might.
whats good and bad to save everyone else the bother
I don't have to decide - it already happens, all the time. For example road tax (the additional tax paid for the "privilege" of using the roads) is not linked to the amount of damage that a vehicle does. So 40 ton lorries that cause many thousands of times more wear to the roads than a small family car do not pay their share of the bill - they are subsidised by the "bad" vehicles (or the ones who aren't prepared to cause disruption and protests) who pay proportionately more.
Yes, fuel tax already does that. However it doesn't differentiate between "good" mileage (the lorries that transport food/goods around) and the "bad" mileage such as driving little Johnny a quarter of a mile to school in the 4x4 every day (and then back again, later).
This system also allows governments to adjust the tax paid by different groups according to their revenue-raising targets/public opinion/congestion reduction needs, in the same way they can target other groups with income and Value Added taxes.
Though you've got to wonder what the effect of one individual with a GPS jammer in a city centre at rush-hour would be?
As a community, we are far too lenient on poorly designed and buggy Linux software. What this guy has done is write a reasonably balanced and fair review of a product that appears to have been rushed out with some very visible shortcomings. That the supplier puts their hand up and acknowledges that a lot of the problems noted "will be fixed" or are known, supports this view.
This is very obviously a "version 1" product. Give it a few years and software revisions and it could be a worthwhile offering. Though personally I doubt that many of my frail, elderly relatives would find using a vertically mounted touchscreen to be in any way practical as the amount of strength needed to hold your hand up to the screen (try it) for extended periods of time is more than most of them can muster.
Since the lInux community consists of individuals each in it for his/her own reasons, there is no possibility of defining a coherent strategy or set of targets for the thing (you can't really consider it a product, or package or anything that implies there's an overall direction or design to it) that we call "Linux".
While some might reason that this is its greatest strength, it's also the reason why it has, does and will fail to be adopted outside the geek world. If you were creating a building you'd use materials that stuck together and formed strong shapes that could support each other. Where this happens in the Linux world, it's purely by accident or at best a localised phenomenon that lasts right up to the first forking. After that you've just got a collection of pebbles again. Each more-or-less strong in itself, but not usable en-masse to make a strong structure from.
Compare that with the MS products, or Apple's products. They might not have the strength of the individual Linux pebbles, but what there is does hang together to some extent and allows organisations to use those products as a foundation to build their businesses on.
Bomber gap, missile gap, mineshaft gap, Dr. Strangelove gap.
This is just another example of either someone who's feeling a little insecure or is trying to exploit the insecurity of others for their own ends.
Both strategies have a long tradition in the USA and all the defence related FUD has been found to be baseless when the truth leaks out (usually against the wishes of the govt/military).
Ultimately there is absolutely no need to fight a cyber war. if the USA was ever attacked, the most effective defence would simply be to pull the plug on all incoming/outgoing IP traffic. Most americans simply wouldn't notice (except when the amount of SPAM decreased, or their favourite porn sites became inaccessible) and for most facilities that are targets for attack, there's no legitimate reason to have them exposed to the internet anyway.
Since XP will be unsupported in about two years, I'm not sure I would be setting the little ones up for success
That doesn't mean it will stop working, or erase it's disks burn out the processor and stop (though if it could, that might come in handy too). All it means is that XP will revert to the normal state for pretty much every Linux distribution out there.
I'd leave it with XP. That gives whoever gets the machines the options of wiping them and installing something they prefer, rather than having your choice imposed on them. That's assuming of course that these machines last another 2 years.
A few months ago the western world wailed loudly when some arab countries terminated internet and mobile phone connections because it was thought to be assisting their local rioters. Here we have a supposedly democratic country where, at the first sign of trouble, government officials are suggesting exactly the same thing.
Your theory presumes that they have something we'd want to steal.
No, as I said: "it's about sticking the boot in to anyone who appears to be getting the upper hand." But to turn your question around, why would think they could NOT have something that other countries would want?
Let's not for a second think that this is a one-way street. If one nation is at it, you can bet that pretty much everyone else is, too (just like torture). That it's done under the radar and with no public acknowledgement just tells us that it falls under the category of black-ops, rather than ordinary warfare.
And unlike ordinary warfare, where it's pretty obvious who's shooting at you, in cyberwar I doubt that it's possible to tell who are your friends, or even if the concept of allies actually exists. It's not about ideology it's about sticking the boot in to anyone who appears to be getting the upper hand.
How many "John Smith"s or "Mohammed Khan"s are there in the world?
Just signing on to FB with the name your parents gave you doesn't uniquely identify you. In fact you couldn't distinguish if "Susan Jones 55" was the same physical person as "Imran Bin Laden 99" no matter how many tests you put in place - short of checking a notarised copy of his/her/its DNA, passport or state-issued photo identity card.
So the whole thing is not only unenforceable, but will lead the gullible and net-illiterate (or just too trusting) to assume that because they are communicating with someone else with a "real name" that they actually know something about that person and could pick them out of an internet crowd. The mistakes, crimes and cons that will follow will make todays anarchy seem like a beehive so far as ordered and controlled behaviour goes.
The difference between free and 0.01 is infinite. The sort of people who will come to the trough for a free download are not the sort who will pay money, unless there's something very, very special about the app.
In fact, giving it away (even for a day) can be harmful. It tells the people who did pay for it that they've been suckered. They are now lost customers if there's ever an updated version. They won't pay for that, they'll remember how they got shafted the first time and wait until it gets given away. Same with all the people who got it for free - the author has now defined the base price (i.e. 0.00) and people out there will not feel inclined to pay more than that for it.
The code appears to have been written on the company's time. No matter what license the guy chose to put on it, it seems he overstepped his authority (if he actually had any authority) and had no right to call the stuff GPL'd. Just because someone puts a GPL license on a piece of code doesn't make it GPL'd. You have to have the right to do that, and merely being the author doesn't make you the owner and doesn't confer that right on you.
Never, ever make the mistake of thinking you own any code you write, just because you created it.
If all PCs were fixed so they didn't catch or pass on viruses what would all the "security" companies do for a living? Maybe instead of spreading FUD they should just step up a gear. Since this survey has identified a nice big market (i.e. out of support/illegal and therefore un-upgradable O/S's) why don't they stop bleating and start creating products to satisfy this demand?
as long as the APIs, protocols and standards for the cloud are open
The key thing is to ensure that the APIs cannot be controlled, or changed or withdrawn or have conditions of use imposed on them. Open means more than just having them documented.
The only way to ensure that the APIs remain usable is to have the ability to rebuild the underlying software, rather than simply have a third party provide us with it - where the way the API is still under their sole control. To do that requires unencumbered access to the source code, and the entitlement to copy it and make other things that use it.
Without those abilities, there will always be the possibility that the original owner could arbitrarily change it, refuse to support it, add private functions and features or prevent certain classes of users from benefitting from it. These are the attributes that make free software valuable.
Most music systems these days are only designed to play MP3s - sure they can handle FLAC, but nobody cares much about that. Well nobody who's going to buy a music system over the internet, that they haven't auditioned, themselves.
So, since people are willing to listen to lossy compression and enhanced loudness, frequently on the tinny little earbuds that cost cents to make, there's little point in spending any more to faithfully reproduce the already distorted source.
In fact, there's little point buying high-end gear if all your music is encoded at 128kbps
I "suffer" from quite a common first/last name combination. People who google my name get several thousands of hits - only a few of which trace back to me. (And you'd be hard-pressed to know which few, unless you knew a lot about me, personally). In fact on FB by using my real name I just merge into the crowd of others with that name, or variants of it.
So it seems to me that in order to preserve anonymity on G+, all people have to do is make sure that their real name is a very popular one. It might make it a pain for your friends to find you - although if they really ARE friends, you'll have shown them where you're hiding - but it has a lot of advantages, too.
You've just illustrated the point. The iphone 5 isn't out yet, but you're saying it will be good - simply because that's what you think of the ones that preceded it (all their faults notwithstanding).
Maybe it WILL be a good phone, maybe the designers and marketeers will have learned all the lessons from past mistakes. Until it comes out, nobody knows. Therefore the only people who would buy it sight-unseen and price-unkown and without knowing what the voice/data package will cost appear to be people who put their faith, willingly, in an untried product without doing any sort of critical analysis or bothering to look around to see what else is available.
There are a lot of systems in the world that have to work correctly to prevent disaster
Yes, indeed. And the trick to ensuring that they DO work correctly is rigourous testing. Component testing, systems testing, rehersals, live tests, worst case testing, accelerated life-tests and all the other techniques for finding the non-obvious/"ooops! we never thought of that", or "hmmm, that shouldn't have happened" type faults.
None of which can be applied to this vehicle, or many of the components of it. Sure, they can be tried out on the ground. Even in vacuum, even exposed to radiation of sorts and even in extreme cold, but until the craft actually gets to Mars, most of the critical systems will never have been fired up in their working environment.
Rather than infiltrating it, surely the american way is to try and buy it? Just offer enough members enough money and just like any good band of guns-for-hire they'll be persuaded to do your bidding. And if the carrot doesn't work, the other good old american tradition of the "big stick" in the shape of a photo of a Predator UAV posted to some members home addresses, can be even more effective.
I counted 8 systems where any problem at all would kill the mission:
Heatshield that has to protect, then deploy (or fall off in non-techno speak)
Guidance rockets that have to work just right
A parachute that mustn't rip or tangle
A hovering system that must balance,irrespective of any storms it may encounter
A winch that must not jam (after 40+ weeks in cold and vacuum) ... and pay out slowly enough ... and detach when the lander is down safely
and finally the hovering platform that must not run out of fuel and drop onto the lander, or think it's detached and fly off with the lander in tow (If they got that on video, I'd laugh for a week)
In short there are far too many ways it can fail, and far too many things that have to work perfectly. I think there's a bad case of hubris from having 2 landers out of 2 that not only survived the trip, but exceeded expectations. Sadly, I think this thing will even up the score.
This tells us that academics view of software is incompatible with the commercial world. So all that teaching CS in universities does is train CS graduates to think the same way - that the code is the product. This goes a long way towards explaining why there's so much poorly documented, badly explained and crappily designed stuff out there. Because the people who write it have never been educated in the importance of productising it.
While that shortcoming can be overcome in a commercial organisation, with lots of ancillary staff to write manuals., design UIs and even correct the spelling in the user interactions, there's little chance that freeware authors would have those skills, or even care about the lack of those qualities - it explains a lot.
Slashdot Mirror
So either it's not so terribly secret ...
I doubt that there's much in the way of real secrets that the US has that the chinese and every other country with a significant ethnic presence in the USA don't already know about. Having samples and knowing its capabilities (and what its weakness are) is one thing - needing to use it yourself and developing the ability to produce it is another.
After all, it's not as if the chinese feel threatened by american military might.
whats good and bad to save everyone else the bother
I don't have to decide - it already happens, all the time. For example road tax (the additional tax paid for the "privilege" of using the roads) is not linked to the amount of damage that a vehicle does. So 40 ton lorries that cause many thousands of times more wear to the roads than a small family car do not pay their share of the bill - they are subsidised by the "bad" vehicles (or the ones who aren't prepared to cause disruption and protests) who pay proportionately more.
This system also allows governments to adjust the tax paid by different groups according to their revenue-raising targets/public opinion/congestion reduction needs, in the same way they can target other groups with income and Value Added taxes.
Though you've got to wonder what the effect of one individual with a GPS jammer in a city centre at rush-hour would be?
As a community, we are far too lenient on poorly designed and buggy Linux software. What this guy has done is write a reasonably balanced and fair review of a product that appears to have been rushed out with some very visible shortcomings. That the supplier puts their hand up and acknowledges that a lot of the problems noted "will be fixed" or are known, supports this view.
This is very obviously a "version 1" product. Give it a few years and software revisions and it could be a worthwhile offering. Though personally I doubt that many of my frail, elderly relatives would find using a vertically mounted touchscreen to be in any way practical as the amount of strength needed to hold your hand up to the screen (try it) for extended periods of time is more than most of them can muster.
Yes, it's one of those strange irregular nouns:
I am a freedom fighter
You are an insurgent
He is a terrorist
Sit at home, wait until it gets cloudy, then attack.
Since the lInux community consists of individuals each in it for his/her own reasons, there is no possibility of defining a coherent strategy or set of targets for the thing (you can't really consider it a product, or package or anything that implies there's an overall direction or design to it) that we call "Linux".
While some might reason that this is its greatest strength, it's also the reason why it has, does and will fail to be adopted outside the geek world. If you were creating a building you'd use materials that stuck together and formed strong shapes that could support each other. Where this happens in the Linux world, it's purely by accident or at best a localised phenomenon that lasts right up to the first forking. After that you've just got a collection of pebbles again. Each more-or-less strong in itself, but not usable en-masse to make a strong structure from.
Compare that with the MS products, or Apple's products. They might not have the strength of the individual Linux pebbles, but what there is does hang together to some extent and allows organisations to use those products as a foundation to build their businesses on.
This is just another example of either someone who's feeling a little insecure or is trying to exploit the insecurity of others for their own ends.
Both strategies have a long tradition in the USA and all the defence related FUD has been found to be baseless when the truth leaks out (usually against the wishes of the govt/military).
Ultimately there is absolutely no need to fight a cyber war. if the USA was ever attacked, the most effective defence would simply be to pull the plug on all incoming/outgoing IP traffic. Most americans simply wouldn't notice (except when the amount of SPAM decreased, or their favourite porn sites became inaccessible) and for most facilities that are targets for attack, there's no legitimate reason to have them exposed to the internet anyway.
Since XP will be unsupported in about two years, I'm not sure I would be setting the little ones up for success
That doesn't mean it will stop working, or erase it's disks burn out the processor and stop (though if it could, that might come in handy too). All it means is that XP will revert to the normal state for pretty much every Linux distribution out there.
I'd leave it with XP. That gives whoever gets the machines the options of wiping them and installing something they prefer, rather than having your choice imposed on them. That's assuming of course that these machines last another 2 years.
A few months ago the western world wailed loudly when some arab countries terminated internet and mobile phone connections because it was thought to be assisting their local rioters. Here we have a supposedly democratic country where, at the first sign of trouble, government officials are suggesting exactly the same thing.
Your theory presumes that they have something we'd want to steal.
No, as I said: "it's about sticking the boot in to anyone who appears to be getting the upper hand." But to turn your question around, why would think they could NOT have something that other countries would want?
Let's not for a second think that this is a one-way street. If one nation is at it, you can bet that pretty much everyone else is, too (just like torture). That it's done under the radar and with no public acknowledgement just tells us that it falls under the category of black-ops, rather than ordinary warfare.
And unlike ordinary warfare, where it's pretty obvious who's shooting at you, in cyberwar I doubt that it's possible to tell who are your friends, or even if the concept of allies actually exists. It's not about ideology it's about sticking the boot in to anyone who appears to be getting the upper hand.
How many "John Smith"s or "Mohammed Khan"s are there in the world?
Just signing on to FB with the name your parents gave you doesn't uniquely identify you. In fact you couldn't distinguish if "Susan Jones 55" was the same physical person as "Imran Bin Laden 99" no matter how many tests you put in place - short of checking a notarised copy of his/her/its DNA, passport or state-issued photo identity card.
So the whole thing is not only unenforceable, but will lead the gullible and net-illiterate (or just too trusting) to assume that because they are communicating with someone else with a "real name" that they actually know something about that person and could pick them out of an internet crowd. The mistakes, crimes and cons that will follow will make todays anarchy seem like a beehive so far as ordered and controlled behaviour goes.
The difference between free and 0.01 is infinite. The sort of people who will come to the trough for a free download are not the sort who will pay money, unless there's something very, very special about the app.
In fact, giving it away (even for a day) can be harmful. It tells the people who did pay for it that they've been suckered. They are now lost customers if there's ever an updated version. They won't pay for that, they'll remember how they got shafted the first time and wait until it gets given away. Same with all the people who got it for free - the author has now defined the base price (i.e. 0.00) and people out there will not feel inclined to pay more than that for it.
It may not be possible to build your own reactor, but it is possible to cause some serious concern.
The code appears to have been written on the company's time. No matter what license the guy chose to put on it, it seems he overstepped his authority (if he actually had any authority) and had no right to call the stuff GPL'd. Just because someone puts a GPL license on a piece of code doesn't make it GPL'd. You have to have the right to do that, and merely being the author doesn't make you the owner and doesn't confer that right on you.
Never, ever make the mistake of thinking you own any code you write, just because you created it.
If all PCs were fixed so they didn't catch or pass on viruses what would all the "security" companies do for a living? Maybe instead of spreading FUD they should just step up a gear. Since this survey has identified a nice big market (i.e. out of support/illegal and therefore un-upgradable O/S's) why don't they stop bleating and start creating products to satisfy this demand?
as long as the APIs, protocols and standards for the cloud are open
The key thing is to ensure that the APIs cannot be controlled, or changed or withdrawn or have conditions of use imposed on them. Open means more than just having them documented.
The only way to ensure that the APIs remain usable is to have the ability to rebuild the underlying software, rather than simply have a third party provide us with it - where the way the API is still under their sole control. To do that requires unencumbered access to the source code, and the entitlement to copy it and make other things that use it.
Without those abilities, there will always be the possibility that the original owner could arbitrarily change it, refuse to support it, add private functions and features or prevent certain classes of users from benefitting from it. These are the attributes that make free software valuable.
Most music systems these days are only designed to play MP3s - sure they can handle FLAC, but nobody cares much about that. Well nobody who's going to buy a music system over the internet, that they haven't auditioned, themselves.
So, since people are willing to listen to lossy compression and enhanced loudness, frequently on the tinny little earbuds that cost cents to make, there's little point in spending any more to faithfully reproduce the already distorted source.
In fact, there's little point buying high-end gear if all your music is encoded at 128kbps
I "suffer" from quite a common first/last name combination. People who google my name get several thousands of hits - only a few of which trace back to me. (And you'd be hard-pressed to know which few, unless you knew a lot about me, personally). In fact on FB by using my real name I just merge into the crowd of others with that name, or variants of it.
So it seems to me that in order to preserve anonymity on G+, all people have to do is make sure that their real name is a very popular one. It might make it a pain for your friends to find you - although if they really ARE friends, you'll have shown them where you're hiding - but it has a lot of advantages, too.
choose an iPhone b/c it's a good phone
You've just illustrated the point. The iphone 5 isn't out yet, but you're saying it will be good - simply because that's what you think of the ones that preceded it (all their faults notwithstanding).
Maybe it WILL be a good phone, maybe the designers and marketeers will have learned all the lessons from past mistakes. Until it comes out, nobody knows. Therefore the only people who would buy it sight-unseen and price-unkown and without knowing what the voice/data package will cost appear to be people who put their faith, willingly, in an untried product without doing any sort of critical analysis or bothering to look around to see what else is available.
Sounds like you're their ideal customer
There are a lot of systems in the world that have to work correctly to prevent disaster
Yes, indeed. And the trick to ensuring that they DO work correctly is rigourous testing. Component testing, systems testing, rehersals, live tests, worst case testing, accelerated life-tests and all the other techniques for finding the non-obvious/"ooops! we never thought of that", or "hmmm, that shouldn't have happened" type faults.
None of which can be applied to this vehicle, or many of the components of it. Sure, they can be tried out on the ground. Even in vacuum, even exposed to radiation of sorts and even in extreme cold, but until the craft actually gets to Mars, most of the critical systems will never have been fired up in their working environment.
Rather than infiltrating it, surely the american way is to try and buy it? Just offer enough members enough money and just like any good band of guns-for-hire they'll be persuaded to do your bidding. And if the carrot doesn't work, the other good old american tradition of the "big stick" in the shape of a photo of a Predator UAV posted to some members home addresses, can be even more effective.
I counted 8 systems where any problem at all would kill the mission:
Heatshield that has to protect, then deploy (or fall off in non-techno speak)
... and pay out slowly enough
... and detach when the lander is down safely
Guidance rockets that have to work just right
A parachute that mustn't rip or tangle
A hovering system that must balance,irrespective of any storms it may encounter
A winch that must not jam (after 40+ weeks in cold and vacuum)
and finally the hovering platform that must not run out of fuel and drop onto the lander, or think it's detached and fly off with the lander in tow (If they got that on video, I'd laugh for a week)
In short there are far too many ways it can fail, and far too many things that have to work perfectly. I think there's a bad case of hubris from having 2 landers out of 2 that not only survived the trip, but exceeded expectations. Sadly, I think this thing will even up the score.
This tells us that academics view of software is incompatible with the commercial world. So all that teaching CS in universities does is train CS graduates to think the same way - that the code is the product. This goes a long way towards explaining why there's so much poorly documented, badly explained and crappily designed stuff out there. Because the people who write it have never been educated in the importance of productising it.
While that shortcoming can be overcome in a commercial organisation, with lots of ancillary staff to write manuals., design UIs and even correct the spelling in the user interactions, there's little chance that freeware authors would have those skills, or even care about the lack of those qualities - it explains a lot.