I am not a cryptographer, but it's not a terribly bright idea. All you have to do to break it is compare the cyphertext to a bunch of "ubiquitous" images.
Also, keys are supposed to be as random as possible. Plain text, images, and so on are rather redundant. The NSA was able to break a Soviet one time pad because of a bias in the random number generator used to create their key. God only knows what they're capable of now.
It might just be so dumb that it could actually work.
That's what the guy who set his password to "password" thought.
Such insane personal security does make sense if the whole internet hates you, or if you have issues with the government. I don't know the GP's situation, though.
20Gb is NOTHING. 20Gb is maybe 25 hours worth of video, not at DVD quality. I've pulled down 60 Gb in a week, easily. If people aren't going to cut back dramatically on their viewing, bandwidth caps will have to go.
Agreed. There is no legitimate reason to be using HTML email. None. Nobody wants to receive a graphics-heavy "newsletter". Nobody cares about image smileys, or that clip art that you just figured out how to use. It's a hideous breach of netiquitte, and it makes you look like the hotmail-using idiot you are.
I would really love to see this blossom into a good old fashioned KDE vs Gnome war.
Indeed. I haven't posted my Konqueror diatribe in over a month.
Seriously, though, Dell shipping Ubuntu could greatly escalate the existing tension. Ubuntu defaults to Gnome, so Gnome will be the "environment for newbies", and some people will try to differentiate themselves by running KDE. KDE users will probably become arrogant and fanboyish, with the influx of punks trying to be 1337. This, of course, will drive the old-school Gnome users insane. KDE 4 will eventually release some time in '08, pushing people completely over the edge. Next thing you know, we'll turn on the news and hear about people being trampled to death at a linux con.
After reading your post, I initially agreed with you. Then I remembered all the horrible, horrible crap I wrote in basic.
The problem with basic, as I experienced it, is that it never really taught me programming. I started out in QuickBASIC, screwed around for a bit, and then screwed around in Visual Basic. But nothing I wrote had any kind of structure at all. I would type in random statments, hit "run", have it fail to compile, attempt fix the compile errors, hit run again, get a runtime error, write a few more lines, and so on until it eventually worked. I never understood what I was writing, and I never really understood why certain things wouldn't work. That's the big problem with Visual Basic (besides being a hacked-together language): it makes it incredibly easy for beginners to write code that they don't understand.
I really don't think I made any progress until I started trying to write games in C++. The advantage with C++, of course, is that it forces you to prototype everything. It forces you to structure your code, at least a little. Since programs take a while to compile, unlike an interpreted language, it forces you to think about what you're typing instead of just trying different things until something works. IMHO the "shoot yourself in the foot" aspect of C++ is a very good thing -- it forces you to learn syntax instead of leaning on your compiler.
If I was going to teach a kid a language (yeah right) I'd probably start them in Java. There are loads of good introductory books, and it is relatively easy to do "cool" things with the standard library. But then after they'd worked out the urge to create little dancing applets, I'd have them build an LFS box. Once they'd achieved a usable environment, I'd have them learn assembly, then C, then C++. After that, any other language would be pretty trivial, because they'd really understand what was going on under the hood. It's only after you know how things work that you can start to think about learning "programming".
Yes, I probably sound like an elitist bastard, but I'm sick of hearing about this sort of thing in education. It's like how they have kids build model volcanoes and call it "science". That's not science. That's not even close. If you want to have kids grow up to become scientists, teach math, for God's sake. Make them do long division until the numbers seep into their little underage bones. Then get them doing calculus early. That way, they'll have a fighting chance when they have to take freshman physics.
Computers are just the same. You can't teach programming by having kids move blocks around in a GUI. At best, it's just a feel-good sort of thing so you can say you're teaching programming. If you're going to teach kids something, REALLY teach them. The fact that they're young is no excuse to not be rigorous. Teach them the real thing. Otherwise, you're just wasting their supposedly precious time as kids.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Microsoft is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Microsoft corporation when IDC confirmed that Microsoft market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Microsoft has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Microsoft is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Microsoft's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Microsoft faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Microsoft because Microsoft is dying. Things are looking very bad for Microsoft. As many of us are already aware, Microsoft continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Windows is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Windows developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Microsoft is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft leader Steve Ballmer states that there are 7000 users of Windows XP. How many users of Vista are there? Let's see. The number of XP versus Vista posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Vista users. Windows 98 posts on Slashdot are about half of the volume of Windows Vista posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Windows 98. A recent article put Windows XP at about 80 percent of the Windows market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Windows users. This is consistent with the number of Windows XP slashdot posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Bungie went out of business and was taken over by Microsoft who sell other troubled games. Now Microsoft is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Microsoft has steadily declined in market share. Microsoft is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Windows is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Microsoft continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Microsoft is dead.
Get with the picture. The only real difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is the frequency of the laser, and thus, the density of the bits on the disk. AFAIK the encryption for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are just different enough to be incompatible. They were both "broken" pretty much simultaneously. However, all AACSLA has to do to "close" the hole is to change their keys, leading to a new cycle of cat-and mouse. AACS is no more broken than RSA; they just lost their key.
Blu-Ray has some extra stuff like BD+, which allows the player execute arbitrary code to search for debuggers, patch the player, install rootkits, and so on. Blu-Ray also has something called ROM Watermarking. However, I gather that these thing are just another annoyance, and not a serious problem.
No, as someone else said, this is probably political. Disney is associated with Jobs Who is associated with Apple, and Apple backs Blu-Ray. Their just digging their trenches deeper.
That's what public key is for. Just have every maintainer sign their package. Packages would be named in terms of version, key ID, patch version and architecture. And, might I add, you need to install packages from "anonymous people" anyway. The default debian repos just don't cut it. I don't remember what all the servers in my sources.list are all for anymore. When you have to add another repo for each "weird" program, it gets ridiculous rather quickly.
There's 6 billion people on earth, and 4 billion possible IP addresses (less, actually). Sooner or later, something is going to fail hard. At that point, they won't have a choice.
I have no clue why this is modded redundant. It's flamebait-ish, but not redundant. The problem is very real. At one point, there were no Debian packages for java. You could download someone's home-rolled packages off Ubuntu forums, but I sure as hell couldn't find a repo for them.
Likewise for the nvidia drivers. One day I rebooted my computer and X was broken. Not only that, none of the nvidia packages were supported by my kernel. I fucked around with it for about 10 hours, before giving up and switching to nv.
The hell of it is, not all distros are that authoritarian. Arch Linux not only has Java, nvidia, and decss in official repositories, it also has a repo of user-built packages.
I don't agree that autopackage is the way to go though. Probably the best way to go would be to have a distro with a package manager that got packages off bittorrent. That way we wouldn't have these issues of central control.
I hear a lot of people referring to "carnivore" without knowing what it is. Carnivore was basically a PII snort box that the FBI would plug in at the phone company. It filtered the stuff according to the warrant; if the warrant specified HTTP transactions, it would only record that. Supposedly, after they were done with the tap, they would take it down.
Carnivore is now obsolete. They have better stuff now. It is suspected that NSA agents can tap any call from the comfort of their office, and do things like keyword matching on the raw data.
In theory, it's not as pointless as all that. The Constitution is supposed to be a set of legal axioms, justifying all the rest of the laws. So, in theory, the constitution is the only legislation that you need, with everything else just being an implementation, a clarification, or a direct consequence. In practice, of course, it doesn't work that way.
Still, it does make sense to make illegal things illegal -- it's just a clarification of the Constitution. All law is just a clarification of the Constitution; that's why when they make sweeping changes like Prohibition, they have to change the Constitution -- there was no basis for such a law in the constitution of the time.
If this were a Japanese project I'd say it'd be useful for robotic secretaries new on the job, but since it's an American one I suppose it'll be used for automated SWAT teams.
More likely, you'd have a Japanese robot who is a waitress by day and a combat cyborg by night. And she happens to be a vampire from the future. And she wears a bunny suit. And she's also a suicidal paranoid schizophrenic.
At least, that's what I've learned from watching anime. For God's sake, if you're going to troll, at least try to get your stereotypes right.
I pine for the days of being able to uninstall a program fully from my system by deleting its folder. Or being able to simply copy a configuration file from one computer to the next and having all my settings preserved.
Modern systems are just too complicated for that. If you've got multiple users, the configuration is going to be scattered around. If it runs as a daemon or has shell hooks, it has to go somewhere too. If your program has any dependencies, it's going to have to install a shared library (DLL) in some system folder. Oh, sure, you could do like a Mac and put your shared libraries in the same folder as your program. But that defeats the whole purpose of having shared libraries in the first place.
Add to that the necessity of security updates, compatability, and so on, and you end up with a full-featured package manager. Which is also simple (sort of), but I wish they would provide an easier way of getting at the debian configuration database.
Rather than ask the user for permission on every operation, what other ways could Microsoft have improved Vista's security?
What's wrong with asking the user for permission on every operation? That's what my linux box does. It's called "su", and it makes me type in my password to make system changes. In fact, that's what every real operating system has ever done. Welcome to the real world.
A major reason for the "insecurity" of windows, IMHO, is the culture of its users. You get people who still remember 95 and 98, (and DOS) and who like to run everything as root. They don't want to be bothered with those nag boxes. But nag boxes are what it takes to secure a system. Security requires some effort on the part of the user, too. Funny how things work like that, isn't it?
See, in the beginning, a single user OS was perfectly OK. Even if you hooked your DOS machine up to the internet, it was probably a terminal, not as a computer in its own right. And really, they had so little RAM that a full-on operating system like linux would be massive overkill. A cell phone is a multimedia powerhouse compared to those machines.
But the microcomputers got bigger. They got a networking stack. People started using them like real systems instead of big, featureful, programmable calculators. They went mainstream, too. But the mindset of the users and developers was (and still is) somewhere way back in the 80s. The developers have gotten better; they add in UNIX features with every windows release. But the users, for the most part, just want to buy a box from Dell and have it work out of the box, like an appliance. Which is a fine thing to want, but those same users are also the kind of people who will install the purple monkey, become phishing victims, run binaries they got off P2P, and so on. And unless Microsoft locks people out of their own computers, there's not a damn thing they can do about that.
So while it was acceptable to bash Microsoft back in the day (no firewall, single-user mode, instability, etc), most of these problems have been fixed. Oh, sure, Windows is no OpenBSD. It's kind of kludgy, compared to linux, or OSX, or your *NIX-like system of choice. But at this point, if your system gets hacked, its probably your own dumb fault. Anymore, if you whine about windows without mentioning specifics, you just end up looking stupid, not 1337 and educated.
No, I am not a Windows fanboy. I don't dual boot, either, although I do use VMWare when I absolutely must. But it still pisses me off to see such obvious bullshit. Some of it is Apple propaganda, but a lot of it is propagated by windows users themselves. Which is understandable, I suppose, but not particularly productive.
Damn right. If data is too difficult to access, it's the same as if it didn't exist. The Ark of the Covenant might really be stored in some government warehouse, and it wouldn't make a difference. To be easily accessible, data must be indexed, redundant, and digital. Which, practically speaking, means it must be on the internet. You might have some nifty search routines, but I guarantee they're not half as good as google. This is my problem whenever I try to search an academic database: their search sucks. Even if you have a general idea of the title, an article can still be hard to find.
But more frightening is the rapid obsolescence of the physical medium. If you can't read the data, it also does you no good. Example: my parents recently mailed me a VHS tape. I don't have a VCR. Nobody I know has a VCR. My parents have a VCR. But when it breaks, there won't be any VCR repairmen left to fix it, or any companies making VCRs. They might be able to find something on ebay, but it would be a collector's item.
What happens when all those microfilm readers break? Do you order a device custom-built to read your data? No, as important as it may be, it probably isn't worth it. That data is effectively gone. Every time there is an article about archival on Slashdot, someone mentions how durable paper is. Of course, stone is even more durable, but it has massive problems with storage density. And of course, there's the fact that nobody will know how to read your runes in a couple hundred years. Hell, a hundred years from now, we'll probably be plugging ethernet into our skulls. We probably won't be able to read anymore.
Funny thing is, we (or my generation, anyway) like to think that the internet has always existed, and that every scrap of human knowledge is in there somewhere. It feels big, nebulous, and immortal. But try searching for things that happened before, say, 1995. Not big things, like wars and shootings. Try googling your grandparents. Or minor news, like some school being opened, or old radio shows, or something.
It won't be there. And your radio station or newspaper isn't about to digitize all their archives, if they still have them. In theory, there's a record, but in practice, it never happened. Written history has given way to "internet history", just as the oral tradition gave way to written history. And it's like we're not writing down the Odyssey because the Bards Association of America will sue us if we do. So only information worth risking a DMCA is getting saved.
Thus, Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons from the 60s are easily available. But the news? You're pretty much out of luck.
It wasn't a hoax. There was no intent of malice. The city was just being dumb. And even after they informed the city that it was not a hoax, the city continued to investigate.
If people are now directly responsible for the stupidity of elected officials, It's definitely a strange world.
With enemy combatants, they can simply declare you to be one and at that point your guilt or innocence is irrelevent. The mere fact that they thought you were an enemy fighter is enough for them to do whatever they want.
To be fair, we've always had this. If you happen to be a Russian spy (or whatever) trying to steal state secrets or blow up bridges, I'm sure they wouldn't give you a jury of your peers. They never have. No, you're going to have one of those friendly counseling session with the bright lights and the big, mean, sargent. That's the way terrorism and espionage works. And it probably was legal back then, too.
Yes, this means that you could be whisked away at any minute, held without trial, raped with sharp pointy objects, and then fed to the fishes. Welcome to the NHK.
Practically speaking, nothing has changed. If you annoy the government enough, they WILL nail you.
It was clearly not inadvertent, but, but it was Boston's fault, not Cartoon Network's. After Boston got its panties in a twist, Cartoon Network told them it was an advertising stunt. Boston _continued_ to investigate them as bombs. This video is pretty telling. What they want to do is put execs in jail for the government's own stupidity. Which is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Linking to a shared library written in C at runtime definitely counts as a "derived work" under the GPL. That's why I can't write a closed source app in Qt without paying Trolltech, as Qt is GPLed. This is _no_ different from Java. The only difference with Java is that it packages the interface for the shared library with the library itself. It's like tarring a C header to a shared library, except it's Java. Whether you use inheritance or whether you use method calls makes no difference. You're still linking to a library.
However: just because Java _can_ be licensed under the GPL does not mean that it _must_ be licensed under the GPL. It can also be licensed under Sun's Special License(tm). And Sun's license lets you link to it all you want. Just like how, if I pay Trolltech, I can link to QT all I want. Because, of course, the GPL is not an agreement between a corporation and some nebulous community. It's an agreement between the licensee and the holder of the copyright. The licensee is free to pursue a different (non GPL) contract with the copyright holder.
Because each OS has a different way of doing fonts, widgets, and so on. And they all behave slightly differently. The point with java is that you can render some glyphs, and have the pixels look exactly the same. Yes, this is slow and sucky. But meta-widget sets are much worse. Try running firefox using your KDE theme if you don't know what I mean. I DEFINITELY prefer a special UI that clashes with my fancy-pants theme to a UI that tries and fails to emulate my fancy-pants theme, introducing bugs in the process.
And yes, Eclipse does screw up too. I don't remember exactly what went wrong (I tried eclipse once and hated it), but it gave me the general impression of a huge, strung-together-with-duct-tape, buggy, monolith that tried and failed to integrate with gnome. I can't imagine what it would look like if I tried to run it with my QT theme.
Realistically, the no-fly list probably has nothing to do with being anti-government. I doubt they have the time for that. Most likely, it has to do with calling someone who called someone else who called someone else who is an al-Quaida agent. Which is also bad, but a different kind of bad.
Frankly, the OP is full of shit. While blender development is a bit slow, they have made substantial progress. Recently (as in 2005) they rewrote the framework in order to allow 3dsmax-style widgets. They've added fluid simulation, scripting -- all kinds of stuff. They made an animated short, partly to see what features artists wanted, and partly to promote blender. This article is on par with the "BSD is dying" troll, except it's more like saying "Linux is dying", as Blender is easily the most advanced OSS modeler out there.
People like to bitch about the interface -- yes, it is confusing at first. But you have to use it for more than a few hours. Do the blender tutorial. After playing with blender, I took a class in 3dsmax -- seriously, once you learn the keystrokes for blender, you never want to go back. In this, it's comparable to vi or emacs.
Most likely, the OP got his nose bent out of joint because they wouldn't switch over to XML, so he decided to slander the project on slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
I am not a cryptographer, but it's not a terribly bright idea. All you have to do to break it is compare the cyphertext to a bunch of "ubiquitous" images.
Also, keys are supposed to be as random as possible. Plain text, images, and so on are rather redundant. The NSA was able to break a Soviet one time pad because of a bias in the random number generator used to create their key. God only knows what they're capable of now.
That's what the guy who set his password to "password" thought.Such insane personal security does make sense if the whole internet hates you, or if you have issues with the government. I don't know the GP's situation, though.
20Gb is NOTHING. 20Gb is maybe 25 hours worth of video, not at DVD quality. I've pulled down 60 Gb in a week, easily. If people aren't going to cut back dramatically on their viewing, bandwidth caps will have to go.
Agreed. There is no legitimate reason to be using HTML email. None. Nobody wants to receive a graphics-heavy "newsletter". Nobody cares about image smileys, or that clip art that you just figured out how to use. It's a hideous breach of netiquitte, and it makes you look like the hotmail-using idiot you are.
Indeed. I haven't posted my Konqueror diatribe in over a month.
Seriously, though, Dell shipping Ubuntu could greatly escalate the existing tension. Ubuntu defaults to Gnome, so Gnome will be the "environment for newbies", and some people will try to differentiate themselves by running KDE. KDE users will probably become arrogant and fanboyish, with the influx of punks trying to be 1337. This, of course, will drive the old-school Gnome users insane. KDE 4 will eventually release some time in '08, pushing people completely over the edge. Next thing you know, we'll turn on the news and hear about people being trampled to death at a linux con.
No joke.
[Accidentally posted AC, reposting b/c I'm a filthy rotten karma whore]
After reading your post, I initially agreed with you. Then I remembered all the horrible, horrible crap I wrote in basic.
The problem with basic, as I experienced it, is that it never really taught me programming. I started out in QuickBASIC, screwed around for a bit, and then screwed around in Visual Basic. But nothing I wrote had any kind of structure at all. I would type in random statments, hit "run", have it fail to compile, attempt fix the compile errors, hit run again, get a runtime error, write a few more lines, and so on until it eventually worked. I never understood what I was writing, and I never really understood why certain things wouldn't work. That's the big problem with Visual Basic (besides being a hacked-together language): it makes it incredibly easy for beginners to write code that they don't understand.
I really don't think I made any progress until I started trying to write games in C++. The advantage with C++, of course, is that it forces you to prototype everything. It forces you to structure your code, at least a little. Since programs take a while to compile, unlike an interpreted language, it forces you to think about what you're typing instead of just trying different things until something works. IMHO the "shoot yourself in the foot" aspect of C++ is a very good thing -- it forces you to learn syntax instead of leaning on your compiler.
If I was going to teach a kid a language (yeah right) I'd probably start them in Java. There are loads of good introductory books, and it is relatively easy to do "cool" things with the standard library. But then after they'd worked out the urge to create little dancing applets, I'd have them build an LFS box. Once they'd achieved a usable environment, I'd have them learn assembly, then C, then C++. After that, any other language would be pretty trivial, because they'd really understand what was going on under the hood. It's only after you know how things work that you can start to think about learning "programming".
Yes, I probably sound like an elitist bastard, but I'm sick of hearing about this sort of thing in education. It's like how they have kids build model volcanoes and call it "science". That's not science. That's not even close. If you want to have kids grow up to become scientists, teach math, for God's sake. Make them do long division until the numbers seep into their little underage bones. Then get them doing calculus early. That way, they'll have a fighting chance when they have to take freshman physics.
Computers are just the same. You can't teach programming by having kids move blocks around in a GUI. At best, it's just a feel-good sort of thing so you can say you're teaching programming. If you're going to teach kids something, REALLY teach them. The fact that they're young is no excuse to not be rigorous. Teach them the real thing. Otherwise, you're just wasting their supposedly precious time as kids.
It is official; Netcraft confirms: Microsoft is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Microsoft corporation when IDC confirmed that Microsoft market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that Microsoft has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Microsoft is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict Microsoft's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Microsoft faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Microsoft because Microsoft is dying. Things are looking very bad for Microsoft. As many of us are already aware, Microsoft continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Windows is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Windows developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: Microsoft is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
Microsoft leader Steve Ballmer states that there are 7000 users of Windows XP. How many users of Vista are there? Let's see. The number of XP versus Vista posts on Slashdot is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Vista users. Windows 98 posts on Slashdot are about half of the volume of Windows Vista posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Windows 98. A recent article put Windows XP at about 80 percent of the Windows market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 Windows users. This is consistent with the number of Windows XP slashdot posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, Bungie went out of business and was taken over by Microsoft who sell other troubled games. Now Microsoft is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that Microsoft has steadily declined in market share. Microsoft is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Windows is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Microsoft continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Microsoft is dead.
Fact: Microsoft is dying
Get with the picture. The only real difference between Blu-Ray and HD-DVD is the frequency of the laser, and thus, the density of the bits on the disk. AFAIK the encryption for Blu-Ray and HD-DVD are just different enough to be incompatible. They were both "broken" pretty much simultaneously. However, all AACSLA has to do to "close" the hole is to change their keys, leading to a new cycle of cat-and mouse. AACS is no more broken than RSA; they just lost their key.
Blu-Ray has some extra stuff like BD+, which allows the player execute arbitrary code to search for debuggers, patch the player, install rootkits, and so on. Blu-Ray also has something called ROM Watermarking. However, I gather that these thing are just another annoyance, and not a serious problem.
No, as someone else said, this is probably political. Disney is associated with Jobs Who is associated with Apple, and Apple backs Blu-Ray. Their just digging their trenches deeper.
That's what public key is for. Just have every maintainer sign their package. Packages would be named in terms of version, key ID, patch version and architecture. And, might I add, you need to install packages from "anonymous people" anyway. The default debian repos just don't cut it. I don't remember what all the servers in my sources.list are all for anymore. When you have to add another repo for each "weird" program, it gets ridiculous rather quickly.
There's 6 billion people on earth, and 4 billion possible IP addresses (less, actually). Sooner or later, something is going to fail hard. At that point, they won't have a choice.
I have no clue why this is modded redundant. It's flamebait-ish, but not redundant. The problem is very real. At one point, there were no Debian packages for java. You could download someone's home-rolled packages off Ubuntu forums, but I sure as hell couldn't find a repo for them.
Likewise for the nvidia drivers. One day I rebooted my computer and X was broken. Not only that, none of the nvidia packages were supported by my kernel. I fucked around with it for about 10 hours, before giving up and switching to nv.
The hell of it is, not all distros are that authoritarian. Arch Linux not only has Java, nvidia, and decss in official repositories, it also has a repo of user-built packages.
I don't agree that autopackage is the way to go though. Probably the best way to go would be to have a distro with a package manager that got packages off bittorrent. That way we wouldn't have these issues of central control.
I hear a lot of people referring to "carnivore" without knowing what it is. Carnivore was basically a PII snort box that the FBI would plug in at the phone company. It filtered the stuff according to the warrant; if the warrant specified HTTP transactions, it would only record that. Supposedly, after they were done with the tap, they would take it down. Carnivore is now obsolete. They have better stuff now. It is suspected that NSA agents can tap any call from the comfort of their office, and do things like keyword matching on the raw data.
In theory, it's not as pointless as all that. The Constitution is supposed to be a set of legal axioms, justifying all the rest of the laws. So, in theory, the constitution is the only legislation that you need, with everything else just being an implementation, a clarification, or a direct consequence. In practice, of course, it doesn't work that way.
Still, it does make sense to make illegal things illegal -- it's just a clarification of the Constitution. All law is just a clarification of the Constitution; that's why when they make sweeping changes like Prohibition, they have to change the Constitution -- there was no basis for such a law in the constitution of the time.
More likely, you'd have a Japanese robot who is a waitress by day and a combat cyborg by night. And she happens to be a vampire from the future. And she wears a bunny suit. And she's also a suicidal paranoid schizophrenic.
At least, that's what I've learned from watching anime. For God's sake, if you're going to troll, at least try to get your stereotypes right.
Modern systems are just too complicated for that. If you've got multiple users, the configuration is going to be scattered around. If it runs as a daemon or has shell hooks, it has to go somewhere too. If your program has any dependencies, it's going to have to install a shared library (DLL) in some system folder. Oh, sure, you could do like a Mac and put your shared libraries in the same folder as your program. But that defeats the whole purpose of having shared libraries in the first place.
Add to that the necessity of security updates, compatability, and so on, and you end up with a full-featured package manager. Which is also simple (sort of), but I wish they would provide an easier way of getting at the debian configuration database.
What's wrong with asking the user for permission on every operation? That's what my linux box does. It's called "su", and it makes me type in my password to make system changes. In fact, that's what every real operating system has ever done. Welcome to the real world.
A major reason for the "insecurity" of windows, IMHO, is the culture of its users. You get people who still remember 95 and 98, (and DOS) and who like to run everything as root. They don't want to be bothered with those nag boxes. But nag boxes are what it takes to secure a system. Security requires some effort on the part of the user, too. Funny how things work like that, isn't it?
See, in the beginning, a single user OS was perfectly OK. Even if you hooked your DOS machine up to the internet, it was probably a terminal, not as a computer in its own right. And really, they had so little RAM that a full-on operating system like linux would be massive overkill. A cell phone is a multimedia powerhouse compared to those machines.
But the microcomputers got bigger. They got a networking stack. People started using them like real systems instead of big, featureful, programmable calculators. They went mainstream, too. But the mindset of the users and developers was (and still is) somewhere way back in the 80s. The developers have gotten better; they add in UNIX features with every windows release. But the users, for the most part, just want to buy a box from Dell and have it work out of the box, like an appliance. Which is a fine thing to want, but those same users are also the kind of people who will install the purple monkey, become phishing victims, run binaries they got off P2P, and so on. And unless Microsoft locks people out of their own computers, there's not a damn thing they can do about that.
So while it was acceptable to bash Microsoft back in the day (no firewall, single-user mode, instability, etc), most of these problems have been fixed. Oh, sure, Windows is no OpenBSD. It's kind of kludgy, compared to linux, or OSX, or your *NIX-like system of choice. But at this point, if your system gets hacked, its probably your own dumb fault. Anymore, if you whine about windows without mentioning specifics, you just end up looking stupid, not 1337 and educated.
No, I am not a Windows fanboy. I don't dual boot, either, although I do use VMWare when I absolutely must. But it still pisses me off to see such obvious bullshit. Some of it is Apple propaganda, but a lot of it is propagated by windows users themselves. Which is understandable, I suppose, but not particularly productive.
YAY! The Major is going to let us post on slashdot today!
RESET THE WORLD!
Damn right. If data is too difficult to access, it's the same as if it didn't exist. The Ark of the Covenant might really be stored in some government warehouse, and it wouldn't make a difference. To be easily accessible, data must be indexed, redundant, and digital. Which, practically speaking, means it must be on the internet. You might have some nifty search routines, but I guarantee they're not half as good as google. This is my problem whenever I try to search an academic database: their search sucks. Even if you have a general idea of the title, an article can still be hard to find.
But more frightening is the rapid obsolescence of the physical medium. If you can't read the data, it also does you no good. Example: my parents recently mailed me a VHS tape. I don't have a VCR. Nobody I know has a VCR. My parents have a VCR. But when it breaks, there won't be any VCR repairmen left to fix it, or any companies making VCRs. They might be able to find something on ebay, but it would be a collector's item.
What happens when all those microfilm readers break? Do you order a device custom-built to read your data? No, as important as it may be, it probably isn't worth it. That data is effectively gone. Every time there is an article about archival on Slashdot, someone mentions how durable paper is. Of course, stone is even more durable, but it has massive problems with storage density. And of course, there's the fact that nobody will know how to read your runes in a couple hundred years. Hell, a hundred years from now, we'll probably be plugging ethernet into our skulls. We probably won't be able to read anymore.
Funny thing is, we (or my generation, anyway) like to think that the internet has always existed, and that every scrap of human knowledge is in there somewhere. It feels big, nebulous, and immortal. But try searching for things that happened before, say, 1995. Not big things, like wars and shootings. Try googling your grandparents. Or minor news, like some school being opened, or old radio shows, or something.
It won't be there. And your radio station or newspaper isn't about to digitize all their archives, if they still have them. In theory, there's a record, but in practice, it never happened. Written history has given way to "internet history", just as the oral tradition gave way to written history. And it's like we're not writing down the Odyssey because the Bards Association of America will sue us if we do. So only information worth risking a DMCA is getting saved.
Thus, Rocky and Bullwinkle cartoons from the 60s are easily available. But the news? You're pretty much out of luck.
It wasn't a hoax. There was no intent of malice. The city was just being dumb. And even after they informed the city that it was not a hoax, the city continued to investigate.
If people are now directly responsible for the stupidity of elected officials, It's definitely a strange world.
Yes, this means that you could be whisked away at any minute, held without trial, raped with sharp pointy objects, and then fed to the fishes. Welcome to the NHK.
Practically speaking, nothing has changed. If you annoy the government enough, they WILL nail you.
It was clearly not inadvertent, but, but it was Boston's fault, not Cartoon Network's. After Boston got its panties in a twist, Cartoon Network told them it was an advertising stunt. Boston _continued_ to investigate them as bombs. This video is pretty telling. What they want to do is put execs in jail for the government's own stupidity. Which is wrong, wrong, wrong.
Linking to a shared library written in C at runtime definitely counts as a "derived work" under the GPL. That's why I can't write a closed source app in Qt without paying Trolltech, as Qt is GPLed. This is _no_ different from Java. The only difference with Java is that it packages the interface for the shared library with the library itself. It's like tarring a C header to a shared library, except it's Java. Whether you use inheritance or whether you use method calls makes no difference. You're still linking to a library.
However: just because Java _can_ be licensed under the GPL does not mean that it _must_ be licensed under the GPL. It can also be licensed under Sun's Special License(tm). And Sun's license lets you link to it all you want. Just like how, if I pay Trolltech, I can link to QT all I want. Because, of course, the GPL is not an agreement between a corporation and some nebulous community. It's an agreement between the licensee and the holder of the copyright. The licensee is free to pursue a different (non GPL) contract with the copyright holder.
Because each OS has a different way of doing fonts, widgets, and so on. And they all behave slightly differently. The point with java is that you can render some glyphs, and have the pixels look exactly the same. Yes, this is slow and sucky. But meta-widget sets are much worse. Try running firefox using your KDE theme if you don't know what I mean. I DEFINITELY prefer a special UI that clashes with my fancy-pants theme to a UI that tries and fails to emulate my fancy-pants theme, introducing bugs in the process.
And yes, Eclipse does screw up too. I don't remember exactly what went wrong (I tried eclipse once and hated it), but it gave me the general impression of a huge, strung-together-with-duct-tape, buggy, monolith that tried and failed to integrate with gnome. I can't imagine what it would look like if I tried to run it with my QT theme.
Realistically, the no-fly list probably has nothing to do with being anti-government. I doubt they have the time for that. Most likely, it has to do with calling someone who called someone else who called someone else who is an al-Quaida agent. Which is also bad, but a different kind of bad.
Frankly, the OP is full of shit. While blender development is a bit slow, they have made substantial progress. Recently (as in 2005) they rewrote the framework in order to allow 3dsmax-style widgets. They've added fluid simulation, scripting -- all kinds of stuff. They made an animated short, partly to see what features artists wanted, and partly to promote blender. This article is on par with the "BSD is dying" troll, except it's more like saying "Linux is dying", as Blender is easily the most advanced OSS modeler out there.
People like to bitch about the interface -- yes, it is confusing at first. But you have to use it for more than a few hours. Do the blender tutorial. After playing with blender, I took a class in 3dsmax -- seriously, once you learn the keystrokes for blender, you never want to go back. In this, it's comparable to vi or emacs.
Most likely, the OP got his nose bent out of joint because they wouldn't switch over to XML, so he decided to slander the project on slashdot.