One clunker had an electronic dashboard that was cool as long as he was not driving faster than 50MPH. The dashboard just shuts down.
Sounds like a FEATURE to me.
At 50mph you should be looking at the road with your full attention, not at the dashboard.
A dashboard that shuts off at that speed and only comes back on if there's a problem like over heating or oil pressure etc would help keep your focus where it should be.
Actually your right, and in general I don't object in the least to the opening movie at the beginning of games.
Eternal Darkness on the gamecube was a game where you run from cutscene to cutscene and the story is told largely in the cutscenes, but it works, and its a great game because it knows that is what it is. The cutscenes contain crucial information and hints on how to solve the puzzles, etc.
Many other games purport to be FPSes and then keep INTERRUPTING the game play to show you a cutscene that by and large is uninteresting, irrelevant, and furthers a plot most players don't give a crap about.
Still other games are designed such that these disruptive cutscenes are stuck right before boss encounters or other death traps and then force you to watch them repeatedly as demented punishment for not getting through on your first attempt.
If CC employees don't like this new policy (which sucks, I'll admit), they should find a job somewhere else. Or better yet, develop some real skills and get a real job. There's a reason retail sales doesn't pay well: any monkey can do it.
Or unionize, and let management know that you won't stand for a policy like this. You may have low respect for retail sales, but it employs a LOT of people, and they deserve to be treated better than this. There simply isn't room in the 'professional' world to absorb everyone in retail, retail and service jobs are at the bottom of the pyramid after all.
Personally, I don't like unions either, or the sense of entitlement they often have, but when a management crosses into unethical terroritory, whether its CC firing everyone who makes more than $X, or Walmart locking employees in without any way to leave, even just the threat of unionization is enough to re-balance the system.
Then I quickly found a new job at a different company for 40% more. I didn't need a union to accomplish any of this.
I'm happy for you, but then you didn't need to get laid off first either. You could have found that new job regardless. What if you'd found a new job a different company for 40% LESS would you still be this upbeat about it? Of course not.
Additionally, since it appears you were being woefully underpaid before you got laid off perhaps if you'd had a decent union you'd have been making 40% more at your old job too.;)
The implementation varies from game to game. In the case of the first FPS crossplatform multiplayer game Shadowrun, they are giving console player auto-aim, while implementing cursor-speed penalties to handicap mouse twitch speeds so that there will be less value in fast and precision aiming and more emphasis on other factors.
Let me be the first to say that's not even a game I'd want to play on the PC.
I mean I agree that the playing field *should* be level but frankly I'd rather just not have xbox360 players connected to my PC game than put up with that kind of crap!
The article mentioned that all these services were manually turned on to perform the test so out of the box OS X is so secure they didn't even bother to test it out of the box.
But then they conclude OSX is rife with vulnerabilty during the patching process, which is pretty misleading if you ask me.
As for the -time- taken voting. Hardly. The whole thing would be fairly automated. 3 or 4 minutes would be ample time, and not suspicious at all.
As for opportunity to hack the CD your assuming they give you the live CD right there on the spot. Whereas I assumed I'd get it in the mail.
Giving it to me on the spot certainly could help elminate the opportunity to hack it. But it does underscore another vulnerability - the entire system goes to shit if someone somewhere can swap a few infected live CDs into the stacks lying around at all the voting centers.
To KNOW it worked, you'd have to audit the code on the live CD, and then verify each live CD was actually identical ON-SITE before using it, except of course for the hardcoded unique serial number in each of them...
1) An overly permissive future license allows other people to use and distribute your code in their product without providing source or with restrictions you find repugnant. Not very likely, but consider if the FSF got itself sued for software patent violations or something and Microsoft actually obtained control of it.
I see your point. I agree its extremely unlikely.
I'd be interested to know if there is ANY sort of official guidance from the FSF in terms of what can and cannot be done with the GPL. RMS is pretty bright, after all, you'd think there'd be some sort of contingency to prevent someone from authoring a GPLv34 that co-opts everything and gives lock stock and barrel to Microsoft or Novell or SCO or RedHat to do whatever they want with it.
And even if MS managed to coerce the FSF into writing: "GPLv4: All your base are belong to us!" I'm not sure it would stand up in court, where it would be surely challenged. Everyone who bought into the GPL and FSF philosophy has an implied understanding of what the spirit of the GPL is, and evolving into something completely different would be a violation of that understanding. I simply don't think Microsoft could just buy out the FSF, and then take the Vista EULA and label it GPLv4 and have that stand.
2) A more restrictive future license allows other people to use and distribute your code in their product without allowing you to use their code without those new restrictions. This is much more likely.
That is actually rather the point of the or 'later clause'. To allow future users flexibility of license.
If I release gplv2, you release gplv3, and someone else releases gplv4, then a project that uses our three projects can never exist in the first place. The 'or later clause' is to prevent the proliferation/evolution of F/OSS licenses from blocking users from creating new projects.
Yes I might be annoyed that someone elses combined project is v4, but I'd be more annoyed if I couldn't write a project because of different GPLs without the or later. Its a 'give and take' situation, and the whole FSF/copyleft philosophy supports give and take.
I, for one, am prepared to release with 'or later' because the fact that other people release with 'or later' will ultimately help me when I'm building projects. Its the same rationale one uses for the GPL in the first place. Its a good way of dealing with license proliferation, and is reasonably future proof.
fuck employees. No one is *entitled* to be treated with respect.
If I don't like the shirt you wore today I'll just take it and burn it. Don't like it? quit and move on. If I tell you to shave your head, you better shave it. Don't want to? quit and move on! If the forklift battery dies, I expect you to push it around. Don't want to? quit and move on! If I feel like whipping you, suck it up buttercup! If I think I'm paying you too much, I'll just fire you. Don't like it? What are you gonna do about it? Next week you're all working 20 hour shifts with no breaks. Don't like it? Watch me not care! Week after that your all working 20 hour shifts with no breaks, and I'm paying your wages with 2 for 1 McDonald's coupons.
Unions have a legitimate purpose. They exist thanks to an era of capitalism run amok, where management literally abused their employees with impunity. Where employees only recourse was to band together and deal with management collectively. There was no 'quit and move on', because it was just as bad elsewhere.
Unions and Management are yin and yang. Yeah, these days a lot of unions are out of balance and have more power than they should, but before they existed the balance was FAR worse, as management had nothing keeping them in check and employees were treated as there are in 3rd world sweatshops. Why don't THEY just quit and move on?
CC's move is abusive. Where I live its illegal to reduce someones wages or to fire them without cause. And I were to be 'laid off' the theory is that they no longer need someone in my position, if they try to fill the position by hiring someone new, they have to instead give me the position back, at my old pay scale.
If CC tried this here, I expect there'd be lawsuits. And probably a call to unionize too.
Well, I'd hack MY live CD, and then when I'm behind the curtain I install a rootkit into the firmware of the PC, so that future voters live CDs print out the right paper, but what gets written to the hard drive is just republican, republican, republican!
Or perhaps, while I'm behind the curtain, I'll just run a utility to modify the contents of the hard drive, adjusting all the voters votes previous to mine.
Ok... ok... your system has a safegaurd in that people can verify their votes after the fact online. So my cheat will get busted if any of them actually do it. That's a gamble people would be willing to take. If it gets busted it would never get traced to me anyway, and if not... Republican FTW!
Or, instead I'll just set up my root kit to record a gazillion republican votes, and then allow each voter who votes to override it. Thus anyone who didn't actually bother to show up to vote, voted republican.
If they audited they'd see all the paper ballots lined up with the electronic record. Would they notice there were a few thousand extra votes for which they didn't have paper? If they did would they assume they misplaced a box of ballots or that the system was flawed?
Or, maybe, my hacked live CD will just crash the voting station and wipe the hard drive. Do this in a few dem dominated neighborhoods and maybe the tactic will tip the balance....
Yeah, there's ways of mitigating these attacks too. My point, however, is that the security is not exactly necessarily simple.
Simple Paper ballots counted by people with representatives from each party watching the proceedings is pretty foolproof. If its not broke, don't fix it.
It makes it sound like he's completely for switching to the GPLv3, when after reading the article I found he's still a bit skeptical.
I think it would MUCH easier, and just as useful to switch from "GPLv2" to simply "GPLv2 or later". This would require less permissions (as chunks are already 'gplv2 or later') and would offend far fewer people.
For example, Linus himself. He doesn't have "switch" to GPLv3, he merely has to agree to give people the choice. "GPLv2 or later" means it still, and always will be, available under v2, but the FSF etc will no longer be prevented from creating v3 based distros using it. (And the likes of Novell and Tivo can continue using the kernel, but become blocked from using the new versions of the FSF stuff, which will be licensed v3 as new versions come out.)
I suspect Linus and many of the kernel devs would be ok with that.
That's just insane and I don't understand why a "good" organization like FSF, which also probably tries to educate people, even has such a potentially dangerous clause in their license.
Why is it insane? There is nothing potentially dangerous about it.
Your code doesn't become 'GPLv3 or later' when GPLv3 comes out, it STAYS 'GPLv2 or later', meaning it is now available to someone who wants to use it under either the v2 or v3 licenses.
Thus there is no danger that at some point in the future someone won't be able to use your code with all the rights you assigned to it when you licensed it v2 or later.
However, if someone down the road likes v5, and starts up a GPLv5 project and they want to use your code, they can. Because at that point your code will be available under v2, v3, v4, and v5.
Thus the absolute WORST case of releasing your code as 'GPLv2 or later' is that one day the FSF will release a license you don't like, and people using it will still be allowed to use your code.
IE, the worst case is that future users will have MORE rights to use your code than they have today, if the GPL were to become even less restrictive (e.g. became, say, a BSD-like license). After all if the GPL gets more restrictive people can ALWAYS use your code with ALL the rights of GPLv2.
I think for nearly all of us, that is pretty much a non-issue. The odds the GPL will become less restrictive than v2 is practically zilch. And even if it did, no harm could come to people who want to use our code.
The first thing here is not to confuse broadband 'availability' with broadband 'subscribers'. Canada and Nordic countries have both high availability, and high subscription rates.
In the case of a region like NYC, I'm sure it has very high broadband *availability*. (Meaning that if you live in NYC you could get broadband if you decided to, and you probably even have a choice who you get it from.) But I concede that even in places like New York, the subscription rate falls short of other countries.
That said, to address your comment:
New York alone contains more people than all of Sweden and Norway combined. I am sure New York City takes up far less space than Norway and Sweden combined. So why don't cities like LA, New York and Chicago have at least as good broadband penetration as nordic countries? From what I read they don't.
You make a valid point.
New York, is actually the 4th most wired city in the United States, according to this article: http://www.internetworldstats.com/articles/art030. htm, and broadband penetration was nearly 70% (and that was in 2004!! So I'm sure the numbers are higher now).
That said, I don't know. If I were to speculate I would expect that the answer lies with social issues like poverty and illiteracy, and/or a lack of education. This strikes me as likely for two reasons:
Firstly, it seems logical to suggest that the poor/illiterate would be less likely to subscribe to high speed internet access
Secondly, this is an area where Canada and the Nordic countries differ from the US. Their inner city problems, poverty, and illiteracy rates are markedly lower than in the US, so its reasonable to suggest that it might be responsible for the difference.
Your numbers are possibly (probably?) way off. As you note, it depends on the definitions of rural and urban being the same, which according to this site:
Which indicates that Sweden considers regions of 200 people/km^2 urban, while the US considers regions of 2500 people/km^2 urban. If that's the case, I still think you have the right idea, but your actual numbers are probably meaningless.
To be truly useful for crunching numbers, we'd not only want a standard definition of urban, but ideally it should match the threshold at which providing broadband access is viable/profitable.
I'm more curious what the shotguns shells would be for myself, who is he planning on shooting? Or is it just for hunting? (in which case, why wait, he can use them now...)
Really keeping DNS info private is a relatively obscure application for the public internet, and can be resolved with VPNs and other ways.
Allowing the bank to sign dns records on the other hand is a worthwhile objective that could kill DNS spoofing.
The only trick to signed DNS records is that you'd need access to the banks public key to verify the signatures, which could be a problem, because you couldn't rely on unsigned dns to give you the address of the server from which to download the public key. A true chicken and egg problem.;)
But the same sort of solution that browsers use with embedded ssl root certificates could probably work. Known clearinghouses for public keys are established, where banks etc can host their public keys, and where the dns clients have the public keys for the clearinghouse built in. (And like browsers, additional authorities can be manually added/removed by the user, etc.)
A major corp like a bank would be effectively forced to use one of the built in key hosts to save their users the hassle of installing a key manually, but for private corporate uses etc that wouldnt' be necessary.
Of course, I wrote all that without knowing what DNSSEC actually does, so I might have just regurgitated the essentials of what DNSSEC already does.:)
That isn't insightful. Its an irrelevant statistic. Average population density as it correlates to broadband availability is meaningless if there is enough empty land to skew the statistics.
Canada, for example, has a population density of 3.2 on that chart. Yet it too has excellent broadband penetration (markedly superior to the united states) because despite having an average of 3.2 people per square kilometer, the vast majority of people live in dense cities along the southern border, while vast amounts of geography range from virtually to completely uninhabited.
Several of the nordic countries are similarly laid out. With dense urban populations, and large virtually unpopulated areas where its mountainous, glacial, or arctic tundra.
The GP's post which indicated that these countries had a higher population density than the US is of course patently false, however, he had the right idea. Broadband becomes viable as the population density reaches a threshold in the regions where the population density reaches that threshold. In a these Nordic countries (and Canada), nearly the entire population lives in regions where the population is "dense enough". While in regions where the population isn't that dense, there often isn't any population at all.
Thus despite Canada's excellent broadband availability to like 95% of its people, if you threw a dart at a map of canada, you'd more than likely hit a spot where there there wasn't access. Indeed, this is because you'd more than likely hit a spot where there wasn't any PEOPLE.
In the US, however, there are huge numbers of people living in regions that simply aren't that dense. You throw a dart at a map of the US and odds are there will be people living under it, but probably not enough of them to make broadband viable.
In other words, population density simply indicates the total number of people divided by the total amount of space, and says nothing about where they actually live. If you took everyone in the states and relocated them all to Texas the US would have the exact same population density it has now, but getting everybody broadband access would be comparatively trivial.
I do understand what SPF is supposed to do, but what I am saying is that what it does combined with the way people set up their records, it is pretty much useless to me.
But SPF does what its supposed to do. It gives you a way of allowing OTHER people to differentiate between spam and legitimate mail from your domain name. That is a huge benefit, even if most of them aren't doing it... yet.
The fact that you receive bounces of spams with forged email addresses just tells us that most mail servers aren't configured to check SPF properly. If they did, they could discard those messages as spam instead of bouncing them.
SPF isn't a failure, nor is it useless. But it requires wide-scale deployment to make any real dent in mail spoofing on the internet at large, and really it only prevents spoofing, not spam itself.
As for your panix domain example, that amounts to a pretty lame SPF record, and suggests they only have SPF to prevent getting rejected for not having SPF (which is a small step in the right direction at least), but they currently haven't taken the required steps to allow you to detect spoofing of their domain name. This is only REALLY a problem if their domain is getting spoofed to a relevant degree.
A domain like paypal, or ebay, or a bank has a big interest in giving mail admins the tools to detect spoofed mail from their domains, the average company, while they -do- likely have an interest in stopping spoofing of their domain, but have likely not been seriously afflicted with spoofing, and so don't simply care overmuch. Which of course, doesn't do mail admins like you any favours. But really, how much panix.net spoofed mail do you actually get, and is it really negatively affecting panix.net that you got it (beyond making their mail admin look like a lazy/incompetent twit)?
Point is SPF is an excellent anti-spoofing technology, and it works very well. It will never be successful as an anti-spam technology, because, as you yourself said, there is nothing stopping spammers from creating SPF records.
But any so-called legitimate marketeer can create an SPF record for their domains.
Right, but a properly set up SPF record means OTHER people have a trouble spoofing 'so called legitimate marketeer'. So if you get a message from 'so called legitimate marketeer' and he's set up an SPF record you are reasonably assured that the message isn't from someone else trying to spoof being from 'so called legitimate marketeer'.
If the value of that isn't clear consider the normal spf use-case scenario:
Let's say "yourdomain" is a 'paypal' or an 'ebay' or a bank and you've set up SPF properly.
Then if the guy at marketeer.com or even bot-103455 of some botnet sends someone an email claiming to be from "yourdomain" then the recipient can safely and automatically discard those messages because they are coming from a mail server you at "your domain" didn't authorize.
Thus the only way users using SPF are going to get spam from "yourdomain" is if: 1) YOU spam them 2) YOUR mail server has been compromised and spammers are using it, in which case you have a chance to fix it. 3) one of YOUR users, who is authorized to use YOUR mailserver has been compromised and spammers are using that host to send spam. (e.g. bot-103455 happens to actually be one of your own users)
This puts spam control in your hands. It doesn't protect end users from spam in general, but it does give you significant control over whether they have to receive spam from "yourdomain".
The biggest weakness in SPF, in my opinion, is that it doesn't help you against typosquatter domains. If I own paypal.com and set up SPF correctly, there is still nothing stopping a spammer from spoofing paypals.com, which won't get blocked by SPF. So a user might still be fooled by a spoof email if they don't observe that the domain name being spoofed isn't quite right in the first place.
The keyboard is misbehaving when she begins to type quickly: keys are sticking and the space bar does not always respond when pressed.
I think HP support is reasonable to request that she ensure it is not configuration or compatibility issues with linux by requiring her to use a supported os before offering her new hardware.
Its probably a hardware issue, but it might not be.
Its not the case that her warranty is void.
Only that they won't provide hardware support while its running Linux, because they have no way of determining that its actually a hardware issue vs a software configuration or compatibility issue. And anyone who has ever worked support knows that most problems are user or software related. Hardware does fail, but it is least likely to be the issue. Moreover, the customer insists its the hardware far more often than it really is.
Is it just that, at brick-and-mortar retail, the customer gains more information about what he's buying?
Yes. Incompetent staff aside, being able to see, and handle the item before buying it is crucial to a buying decision. I won't buy a new mouse for example, until I've felt its weight and buttons, or tried the scroll wheel, etc.
Is it that online stores have lousier return policies? Then let's fix them.
A good return policy won't make shipping charges go away. It will also drive online prices up.
Online sales in several industries are *parasitic* to retail. They benefit from the existence of retail, without which they'd have far fewer customers. If retail were to vanish online would suffer and have to open their own showrooms, expand return policies, and raise prices... becoming retail, and then falling victim to the next generation of online-only price competition.
I'm not saying we should 'save' retail. But retail needs to figure out how to compete with online parasites who use them as free showrooms, and then undercut them on price due to lower costs.
I'm all for supporting the local retailer, and many times, i'll pay more money to have a knowledgeable staff.
Right now, people can have both. They can go to the boutique to speak to knowledgeable staff, try the product, etc. Then they go home and google the best price. Trouble is, the boutique doesn't get compensated in this transaction, despite having rendered the superior service.
This has always been an issue, as the boutiques already compete with the walmart's, costco's, and the bestbuy's who'll under cut them, hell, who have a policy of undercutting them, but competing with online venders is worse. The online vendors have even lower costs than the bigboxes so the price difference is more pronounced, and you can access the online venders from home so after picking what you want, finding it online is fairly trivial and it gets shipped to your door. You don't have to drive around any more or hope the local BB has it in stock, etc.
The manufacturers have a big interest in making sure retail outlets survive - because people are more likely to buy something they can touch and test.
Exactly. Hell, *even* the online retailers want retail to survive despite the fact they are cutting retails throat. They thrive on the fact that their customers 'sell themselves' their product at retail before going online to find the best prices; if retail actually died, they'd need to find some other way to let their customers 'preview' their content, and they might even have to pay for it, instead of just "freeloading" off of retail outlets.
Maybe manufacturers can subsidise retail stores to make them more competitive.
Interesting concept. I definately think the nature of retail is set to change for certain types of goods.
Really though, this is about what you do with what you own and we should not undo a century of sensible policy. Once you buy something you own it and can do what you want, right down to giving it away. Why give up that right? So McSoft can make more money? No one but monopoly providers will benefit from this.
Large online clearinghouses benefit from this.
Local bookstores for example are starting to massively suffer from online competition. Customers walk in, browse, leave and order the book from amazon.com for 10-20% less. How do you combat this? Retail cannot lower their prices to the same level online companies can -- they have prime real-estate leases vs a warehouse in some grungy commercial district. They deal in hundreds of books per week in stead of per hour, etc, etc.
The proposed legislation prevents amazon.com from lowering the price of the books to less than the retailers can survive.
I don't know if that is a good idea, but I do think *something* needs to be done to protect retail. Retail is not an obsolete business model - online sales would suffer too if we couldn't kick the tires at retail. The issue here isn't that retail is 'obsolete', its that retail has to figure out how to make money from customrs who just come in to browse and try things on.
Would you pay 'cover' to get into a retail store? Would you pay a sales person even if you didn't buy something. ie... the bookstore or shoestore could lower their prices and compete with amazon if you paid $20 dollars at the door just to get into the store. There'd be no incentive to buy online as the price in the store would be the same. You could still avoid going into the store, and just buy online directly, and save money, but you lose out on the chance to browse etc.
Essentially, retail and online provide the same final product. retail costs more because of the extra service of bringing the inventory close to you, and having staff available to work with you with it. Retail needs to figure out how to get paid for that component because whats going on right now is that people use the retail outlet to decide what to buy, and then buy it online.
Or put another way online retailers are basically letting retail to all work, and bear all the costs, of making the sale, while swiping the actual transaction because their prices are cheaper. Right now retail bundles the cost of making the sale into the product, and are losing out to online competition who don't have that cost.
Retail needs to unbundle that cost, so they can offer the same product for the same price as online, while somehow charging directly for the service of letting you play with it, try it on, decide what to buy, etc.
Its sort of a bizarre model, but I can't see a better solution. regulated minimum pricing doesn't strike me as a solution.
As online shopping grows other markets will be hit by this, like sports equipment (runners (Nike/Addidas/Reebok), weights, skis, etc), electronics, designer clothing, etc. In fact pretty much anything where you can look at the product (at retail) to gauge its fit/quality/comfort/whatever and then order online and expect to receive an identical product.
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One clunker had an electronic dashboard that was cool as long as he was not driving faster than 50MPH. The dashboard just shuts down.
Sounds like a FEATURE to me.
At 50mph you should be looking at the road with your full attention, not at the dashboard.
A dashboard that shuts off at that speed and only comes back on if there's a problem like over heating or oil pressure etc would help keep your focus where it should be.
Actually your right, and in general I don't object in the least to the opening movie at the beginning of games.
Eternal Darkness on the gamecube was a game where you run from cutscene to cutscene and the story is told largely in the cutscenes, but it works, and its a great game because it knows that is what it is. The cutscenes contain crucial information and hints on how to solve the puzzles, etc.
Many other games purport to be FPSes and then keep INTERRUPTING the game play to show you a cutscene that by and large is uninteresting, irrelevant, and furthers a plot most players don't give a crap about.
Still other games are designed such that these disruptive cutscenes are stuck right before boss encounters or other death traps and then force you to watch them repeatedly as demented punishment for not getting through on your first attempt.
Far more games get cutscenes wrong than right.
Can you really replace that game's opening movie with equally compelling gameplay that tells the same story?
Yes.
I ordered a set of these years ago when they came out...
l lectible%2BPostage%2BStamps%2BSouvenir%2BSheets/St ar-Wars-Sci-Fi-Collectible-postage-stamps.aspx?pag e=1
http://gallery.bcentral.com/GID4822370DD186320-Co
If CC employees don't like this new policy (which sucks, I'll admit), they should find a job somewhere else. Or better yet, develop some real skills and get a real job. There's a reason retail sales doesn't pay well: any monkey can do it.
;)
Or unionize, and let management know that you won't stand for a policy like this. You may have low respect for retail sales, but it employs a LOT of people, and they deserve to be treated better than this. There simply isn't room in the 'professional' world to absorb everyone in retail, retail and service jobs are at the bottom of the pyramid after all.
Personally, I don't like unions either, or the sense of entitlement they often have, but when a management crosses into unethical terroritory, whether its CC firing everyone who makes more than $X, or Walmart locking employees in without any way to leave, even just the threat of unionization is enough to re-balance the system.
Then I quickly found a new job at a different company for 40% more. I didn't need a union to accomplish any of this.
I'm happy for you, but then you didn't need to get laid off first either. You could have found that new job regardless. What if you'd found a new job a different company for 40% LESS would you still be this upbeat about it? Of course not.
Additionally, since it appears you were being woefully underpaid before you got laid off perhaps if you'd had a decent union you'd have been making 40% more at your old job too.
The implementation varies from game to game. In the case of the first FPS crossplatform multiplayer game Shadowrun, they are giving console player auto-aim, while implementing cursor-speed penalties to handicap mouse twitch speeds so that there will be less value in fast and precision aiming and more emphasis on other factors.
Let me be the first to say that's not even a game I'd want to play on the PC.
I mean I agree that the playing field *should* be level but frankly I'd rather just not have xbox360 players connected to my PC game than put up with that kind of crap!
The article mentioned that all these services were manually turned on to perform the test so out of the box OS X is so secure they didn't even bother to test it out of the box.
But then they conclude OSX is rife with vulnerabilty during the patching process, which is pretty misleading if you ask me.
As for the -time- taken voting. Hardly. The whole thing would be fairly automated. 3 or 4 minutes would be ample time, and not suspicious at all.
As for opportunity to hack the CD your assuming they give you the live CD right there on the spot. Whereas I assumed I'd get it in the mail.
Giving it to me on the spot certainly could help elminate the opportunity to hack it. But it does underscore another vulnerability - the entire system goes to shit if someone somewhere can swap a few infected live CDs into the stacks lying around at all the voting centers.
To KNOW it worked, you'd have to audit the code on the live CD, and then verify each live CD was actually identical ON-SITE before using it, except of course for the hardcoded unique serial number in each of them...
1) An overly permissive future license allows other people to use and distribute your code in their product without providing source or with restrictions you find repugnant. Not very likely, but consider if the FSF got itself sued for software patent violations or something and Microsoft actually obtained control of it.
I see your point. I agree its extremely unlikely.
I'd be interested to know if there is ANY sort of official guidance from the FSF in terms of what can and cannot be done with the GPL. RMS is pretty bright, after all, you'd think there'd be some sort of contingency to prevent someone from authoring a GPLv34 that co-opts everything and gives lock stock and barrel to Microsoft or Novell or SCO or RedHat to do whatever they want with it.
And even if MS managed to coerce the FSF into writing: "GPLv4: All your base are belong to us!" I'm not sure it would stand up in court, where it would be surely challenged. Everyone who bought into the GPL and FSF philosophy has an implied understanding of what the spirit of the GPL is, and evolving into something completely different would be a violation of that understanding. I simply don't think Microsoft could just buy out the FSF, and then take the Vista EULA and label it GPLv4 and have that stand.
2) A more restrictive future license allows other people to use and distribute your code in their product without allowing you to use their code without those new restrictions. This is much more likely.
That is actually rather the point of the or 'later clause'. To allow future users flexibility of license.
If I release gplv2, you release gplv3, and someone else releases gplv4, then a project that uses our three projects can never exist in the first place. The 'or later clause' is to prevent the proliferation/evolution of F/OSS licenses from blocking users from creating new projects.
Yes I might be annoyed that someone elses combined project is v4, but I'd be more annoyed if I couldn't write a project because of different GPLs without the or later. Its a 'give and take' situation, and the whole FSF/copyleft philosophy supports give and take.
I, for one, am prepared to release with 'or later' because the fact that other people release with 'or later' will ultimately help me when I'm building projects. Its the same rationale one uses for the GPL in the first place. Its a good way of dealing with license proliferation, and is reasonably future proof.
fuck employees. No one is *entitled* to be treated with respect.
If I don't like the shirt you wore today I'll just take it and burn it. Don't like it? quit and move on.
If I tell you to shave your head, you better shave it. Don't want to? quit and move on!
If the forklift battery dies, I expect you to push it around. Don't want to? quit and move on!
If I feel like whipping you, suck it up buttercup!
If I think I'm paying you too much, I'll just fire you. Don't like it? What are you gonna do about it?
Next week you're all working 20 hour shifts with no breaks. Don't like it? Watch me not care!
Week after that your all working 20 hour shifts with no breaks, and I'm paying your wages with 2 for 1 McDonald's coupons.
Unions have a legitimate purpose. They exist thanks to an era of capitalism run amok, where management literally abused their employees with impunity. Where employees only recourse was to band together and deal with management collectively. There was no 'quit and move on', because it was just as bad elsewhere.
Unions and Management are yin and yang. Yeah, these days a lot of unions are out of balance and have more power than they should, but before they existed the balance was FAR worse, as management had nothing keeping them in check and employees were treated as there are in 3rd world sweatshops. Why don't THEY just quit and move on?
CC's move is abusive. Where I live its illegal to reduce someones wages or to fire them without cause. And I were to be 'laid off' the theory is that they no longer need someone in my position, if they try to fill the position by hiring someone new, they have to instead give me the position back, at my old pay scale.
If CC tried this here, I expect there'd be lawsuits. And probably a call to unionize too.
Well, I'd hack MY live CD, and then when I'm behind the curtain I install a rootkit into the firmware of the PC, so that future voters live CDs print out the right paper, but what gets written to the hard drive is just republican, republican, republican!
... Republican FTW!
Or perhaps, while I'm behind the curtain, I'll just run a utility to modify the contents of the hard drive, adjusting all the voters votes previous to mine.
Ok... ok... your system has a safegaurd in that people can verify their votes after the fact online. So my cheat will get busted if any of them actually do it. That's a gamble people would be willing to take. If it gets busted it would never get traced to me anyway, and if not
Or, instead I'll just set up my root kit to record a gazillion republican votes, and then allow each voter who votes to override it. Thus anyone who didn't actually bother to show up to vote, voted republican.
If they audited they'd see all the paper ballots lined up with the electronic record. Would they notice there were a few thousand extra votes for which they didn't have paper? If they did would they assume they misplaced a box of ballots or that the system was flawed?
Or, maybe, my hacked live CD will just crash the voting station and wipe the hard drive. Do this in a few dem dominated neighborhoods and maybe the tactic will tip the balance....
Yeah, there's ways of mitigating these attacks too. My point, however, is that the security is not exactly necessarily simple.
Simple Paper ballots counted by people with representatives from each party watching the proceedings is pretty foolproof. If its not broke, don't fix it.
It makes it sound like he's completely for switching to the GPLv3, when after reading the article I found he's still a bit skeptical.
I think it would MUCH easier, and just as useful to switch from "GPLv2" to simply "GPLv2 or later". This would require less permissions (as chunks are already 'gplv2 or later') and would offend far fewer people.
For example, Linus himself. He doesn't have "switch" to GPLv3, he merely has to agree to give people the choice. "GPLv2 or later" means it still, and always will be, available under v2, but the FSF etc will no longer be prevented from creating v3 based distros using it. (And the likes of Novell and Tivo can continue using the kernel, but become blocked from using the new versions of the FSF stuff, which will be licensed v3 as new versions come out.)
I suspect Linus and many of the kernel devs would be ok with that.
That's just insane and I don't understand why a "good" organization like FSF, which also probably tries to educate people, even has such a potentially dangerous clause in their license.
Why is it insane? There is nothing potentially dangerous about it.
Your code doesn't become 'GPLv3 or later' when GPLv3 comes out, it STAYS 'GPLv2 or later', meaning it is now available to someone who wants to use it under either the v2 or v3 licenses.
Thus there is no danger that at some point in the future someone won't be able to use your code with all the rights you assigned to it when you licensed it v2 or later.
However, if someone down the road likes v5, and starts up a GPLv5 project and they want to use your code, they can. Because at that point your code will be available under v2, v3, v4, and v5.
Thus the absolute WORST case of releasing your code as 'GPLv2 or later' is that one day the FSF will release a license you don't like, and people using it will still be allowed to use your code.
IE, the worst case is that future users will have MORE rights to use your code than they have today, if the GPL were to become even less restrictive (e.g. became, say, a BSD-like license). After all if the GPL gets more restrictive people can ALWAYS use your code with ALL the rights of GPLv2.
I think for nearly all of us, that is pretty much a non-issue. The odds the GPL will become less restrictive than v2 is practically zilch. And even if it did, no harm could come to people who want to use our code.
I don't buy this playing with numbers
. htm, and broadband penetration was nearly 70% (and that was in 2004!! So I'm sure the numbers are higher now).
The first thing here is not to confuse broadband 'availability' with broadband 'subscribers'. Canada and Nordic countries have both high availability, and high subscription rates.
In the case of a region like NYC, I'm sure it has very high broadband *availability*. (Meaning that if you live in NYC you could get broadband if you decided to, and you probably even have a choice who you get it from.) But I concede that even in places like New York, the subscription rate falls short of other countries.
That said, to address your comment:
New York alone contains more people than all of Sweden and Norway combined. I am sure New York City takes up far less space than Norway and Sweden combined. So why don't cities like LA, New York and Chicago have at least as good broadband penetration as nordic countries? From what I read they don't.
You make a valid point.
New York, is actually the 4th most wired city in the United States, according to this article:
http://www.internetworldstats.com/articles/art030
That said, I don't know. If I were to speculate I would expect that the answer lies with social issues like poverty and illiteracy, and/or a lack of education. This strikes me as likely for two reasons:
Firstly, it seems logical to suggest that the poor/illiterate would be less likely to subscribe to high speed internet access
Secondly, this is an area where Canada and the Nordic countries differ from the US. Their inner city problems, poverty, and illiteracy rates are markedly lower than in the US, so its reasonable to suggest that it might be responsible for the difference.
regards
Your numbers are possibly (probably?) way off. As you note, it depends on the definitions of rural and urban being the same, which according to this site:
7 .htm
http://geography.about.com/library/weekly/aa06099
Which indicates that Sweden considers regions of 200 people/km^2 urban, while the US considers regions of 2500 people/km^2 urban. If that's the case, I still think you have the right idea, but your actual numbers are probably meaningless.
To be truly useful for crunching numbers, we'd not only want a standard definition of urban, but ideally it should match the threshold at which providing broadband access is viable/profitable.
cheers,
I'm more curious what the shotguns shells would be for myself, who is he planning on shooting?
Or is it just for hunting? (in which case, why wait, he can use them now...)
Really keeping DNS info private is a relatively obscure application for the public internet, and can be resolved with VPNs and other ways.
;)
:)
Allowing the bank to sign dns records on the other hand is a worthwhile objective that could kill DNS spoofing.
The only trick to signed DNS records is that you'd need access to the banks public key to verify the signatures, which could be a problem, because you couldn't rely on unsigned dns to give you the address of the server from which to download the public key. A true chicken and egg problem.
But the same sort of solution that browsers use with embedded ssl root certificates could probably work. Known clearinghouses for public keys are established, where banks etc can host their public keys, and where the dns clients have the public keys for the clearinghouse built in. (And like browsers, additional authorities can be manually added/removed by the user, etc.)
A major corp like a bank would be effectively forced to use one of the built in key hosts to save their users the hassle of installing a key manually, but for private corporate uses etc that wouldnt' be necessary.
Of course, I wrote all that without knowing what DNSSEC actually does, so I might have just regurgitated the essentials of what DNSSEC already does.
That isn't insightful. Its an irrelevant statistic. Average population density as it correlates to broadband availability is meaningless if there is enough empty land to skew the statistics.
Canada, for example, has a population density of 3.2 on that chart. Yet it too has excellent broadband penetration (markedly superior to the united states) because despite having an average of 3.2 people per square kilometer, the vast majority of people live in dense cities along the southern border, while vast amounts of geography range from virtually to completely uninhabited.
Several of the nordic countries are similarly laid out. With dense urban populations, and large virtually unpopulated areas where its mountainous, glacial, or arctic tundra.
The GP's post which indicated that these countries had a higher population density than the US is of course patently false, however, he had the right idea. Broadband becomes viable as the population density reaches a threshold in the regions where the population density reaches that threshold. In a these Nordic countries (and Canada), nearly the entire population lives in regions where the population is "dense enough". While in regions where the population isn't that dense, there often isn't any population at all.
Thus despite Canada's excellent broadband availability to like 95% of its people, if you threw a dart at a map of canada, you'd more than likely hit a spot where there there wasn't access. Indeed, this is because you'd more than likely hit a spot where there wasn't any PEOPLE.
In the US, however, there are huge numbers of people living in regions that simply aren't that dense. You throw a dart at a map of the US and odds are there will be people living under it, but probably not enough of them to make broadband viable.
In other words, population density simply indicates the total number of people divided by the total amount of space, and says nothing about where they actually live. If you took everyone in the states and relocated them all to Texas the US would have the exact same population density it has now, but getting everybody broadband access would be comparatively trivial.
cheers,
I do understand what SPF is supposed to do, but what I am saying is that what it does combined with the way people set up their records, it is pretty much useless to me.
... yet.
But SPF does what its supposed to do. It gives you a way of allowing OTHER people to differentiate between spam and legitimate mail from your domain name. That is a huge benefit, even if most of them aren't doing it
The fact that you receive bounces of spams with forged email addresses just tells us that most mail servers aren't configured to check SPF properly. If they did, they could discard those messages as spam instead of bouncing them.
SPF isn't a failure, nor is it useless. But it requires wide-scale deployment to make any real dent in mail spoofing on the internet at large, and really it only prevents spoofing, not spam itself.
As for your panix domain example, that amounts to a pretty lame SPF record, and suggests they only have SPF to prevent getting rejected for not having SPF (which is a small step in the right direction at least), but they currently haven't taken the required steps to allow you to detect spoofing of their domain name. This is only REALLY a problem if their domain is getting spoofed to a relevant degree.
A domain like paypal, or ebay, or a bank has a big interest in giving mail admins the tools to detect spoofed mail from their domains, the average company, while they -do- likely have an interest in stopping spoofing of their domain, but have likely not been seriously afflicted with spoofing, and so don't simply care overmuch. Which of course, doesn't do mail admins like you any favours. But really, how much panix.net spoofed mail do you actually get, and is it really negatively affecting panix.net that you got it (beyond making their mail admin look like a lazy/incompetent twit)?
Point is SPF is an excellent anti-spoofing technology, and it works very well. It will never be successful as an anti-spam technology, because, as you yourself said, there is nothing stopping spammers from creating SPF records.
But any so-called legitimate marketeer can create an SPF record for their domains.
Right, but a properly set up SPF record means OTHER people have a trouble spoofing 'so called legitimate marketeer'. So if you get a message from 'so called legitimate marketeer' and he's set up an SPF record you are reasonably assured that the message isn't from someone else trying to spoof being from 'so called legitimate marketeer'.
If the value of that isn't clear consider the normal spf use-case scenario:
Let's say "yourdomain" is a 'paypal' or an 'ebay' or a bank and you've set up SPF properly.
Then if the guy at marketeer.com or even bot-103455 of some botnet sends someone an email claiming to be from "yourdomain" then the recipient can safely and automatically discard those messages because they are coming from a mail server you at "your domain" didn't authorize.
Thus the only way users using SPF are going to get spam from "yourdomain" is if:
1) YOU spam them
2) YOUR mail server has been compromised and spammers are using it, in which case you have a chance to fix it.
3) one of YOUR users, who is authorized to use YOUR mailserver has been compromised and spammers are using that host to send spam. (e.g. bot-103455 happens to actually be one of your own users)
This puts spam control in your hands. It doesn't protect end users from spam in general, but it does give you significant control over whether they have to receive spam from "yourdomain".
The biggest weakness in SPF, in my opinion, is that it doesn't help you against typosquatter domains. If I own paypal.com and set up SPF correctly, there is still nothing stopping a spammer from spoofing paypals.com, which won't get blocked by SPF. So a user might still be fooled by a spoof email if they don't observe that the domain name being spoofed isn't quite right in the first place.
From the article:
The keyboard is misbehaving when she begins to type quickly: keys are sticking and the space bar does not always respond when pressed.
I think HP support is reasonable to request that she ensure it is not configuration or compatibility issues with linux by requiring her to use a supported os before offering her new hardware.
Its probably a hardware issue, but it might not be.
Its not the case that her warranty is void.
Only that they won't provide hardware support while its running Linux, because they have no way of determining that its actually a hardware issue vs a software configuration or compatibility issue. And anyone who has ever worked support knows that most problems are user or software related. Hardware does fail, but it is least likely to be the issue. Moreover, the customer insists its the hardware far more often than it really is.
Is it just that, at brick-and-mortar retail, the customer gains more information about what he's buying?
Yes. Incompetent staff aside, being able to see, and handle the item before buying it is crucial to a buying decision. I won't buy a new mouse for example, until I've felt its weight and buttons, or tried the scroll wheel, etc.
Is it that online stores have lousier return policies? Then let's fix them.
A good return policy won't make shipping charges go away. It will also drive online prices up.
Online sales in several industries are *parasitic* to retail. They benefit from the existence of retail, without which they'd have far fewer customers. If retail were to vanish online would suffer and have to open their own showrooms, expand return policies, and raise prices... becoming retail, and then falling victim to the next generation of online-only price competition.
I'm not saying we should 'save' retail. But retail needs to figure out how to compete with online parasites who use them as free showrooms, and then undercut them on price due to lower costs.
I'm all for supporting the local retailer, and many times, i'll pay more money to have a knowledgeable staff.
Right now, people can have both. They can go to the boutique to speak to knowledgeable staff, try the product, etc. Then they go home and google the best price. Trouble is, the boutique doesn't get compensated in this transaction, despite having rendered the superior service.
This has always been an issue, as the boutiques already compete with the walmart's, costco's, and the bestbuy's who'll under cut them, hell, who have a policy of undercutting them, but competing with online venders is worse. The online vendors have even lower costs than the bigboxes so the price difference is more pronounced, and you can access the online venders from home so after picking what you want, finding it online is fairly trivial and it gets shipped to your door. You don't have to drive around any more or hope the local BB has it in stock, etc.
The manufacturers have a big interest in making sure retail outlets survive - because people are more likely to buy something they can touch and test.
Exactly. Hell, *even* the online retailers want retail to survive despite the fact they are cutting retails throat. They thrive on the fact that their customers 'sell themselves' their product at retail before going online to find the best prices; if retail actually died, they'd need to find some other way to let their customers 'preview' their content, and they might even have to pay for it, instead of just "freeloading" off of retail outlets.
Maybe manufacturers can subsidise retail stores to make them more competitive.
Interesting concept. I definately think the nature of retail is set to change for certain types of goods.
Really though, this is about what you do with what you own and we should not undo a century of sensible policy. Once you buy something you own it and can do what you want, right down to giving it away. Why give up that right? So McSoft can make more money? No one but monopoly providers will benefit from this.
Large online clearinghouses benefit from this.
Local bookstores for example are starting to massively suffer from online competition. Customers walk in, browse, leave and order the book from amazon.com for 10-20% less. How do you combat this? Retail cannot lower their prices to the same level online companies can -- they have prime real-estate leases vs a warehouse in some grungy commercial district. They deal in hundreds of books per week in stead of per hour, etc, etc.
The proposed legislation prevents amazon.com from lowering the price of the books to less than the retailers can survive.
I don't know if that is a good idea, but I do think *something* needs to be done to protect retail. Retail is not an obsolete business model - online sales would suffer too if we couldn't kick the tires at retail. The issue here isn't that retail is 'obsolete', its that retail has to figure out how to make money from customrs who just come in to browse and try things on.
Would you pay 'cover' to get into a retail store? Would you pay a sales person even if you didn't buy something. ie... the bookstore or shoestore could lower their prices and compete with amazon if you paid $20 dollars at the door just to get into the store. There'd be no incentive to buy online as the price in the store would be the same. You could still avoid going into the store, and just buy online directly, and save money, but you lose out on the chance to browse etc.
Essentially, retail and online provide the same final product. retail costs more because of the extra service of bringing the inventory close to you, and having staff available to work with you with it. Retail needs to figure out how to get paid for that component because whats going on right now is that people use the retail outlet to decide what to buy, and then buy it online.
Or put another way online retailers are basically letting retail to all work, and bear all the costs, of making the sale, while swiping the actual transaction because their prices are cheaper. Right now retail bundles the cost of making the sale into the product, and are losing out to online competition who don't have that cost.
Retail needs to unbundle that cost, so they can offer the same product for the same price as online, while somehow charging directly for the service of letting you play with it, try it on, decide what to buy, etc.
Its sort of a bizarre model, but I can't see a better solution. regulated minimum pricing doesn't strike me as a solution.
As online shopping grows other markets will be hit by this, like sports equipment (runners (Nike/Addidas/Reebok), weights, skis, etc), electronics, designer clothing, etc. In fact pretty much anything where you can look at the product (at retail) to gauge its fit/quality/comfort/whatever and then order online and expect to receive an identical product.