When you need the cheapest, most power-efficient servers you can find, to the point where you criticize your suppliers publicly, you're not willing to pay for the most expensive cables out there.
Besides, all the seal clubbers are buying those up.
That's the real reason the EU is against seal clubbing...
Actually, the presentation (http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/audio/08-09/crypto/gentry/index.html) claims that evaluating one logic gate takes in the order of k to the 7th operations, where k is the size of the key. For 128-bit keys that's around 10 to the 15th power. Which is most definitely not infinitely slower (whatever this "informative" sentence is supposed to mean), but also not exactly practical.
I was trying to figure out what he is talking about. Specifically, which major desktop redisigns Gnome, KDE, and Ubuntu are planning.
For kde, the "social desktop" thing, is just a bunch of desktop tools for helping users enter the kde user/developer community. May be cool or not, I don't know, but it's not a redisign of the desktop.
For gnome, the new thing is the "gnome shell". The screencasts here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Screencasts show that it looks pretty cool. I think it may even be useful. But again, from the user's perspective, it's not a radical redisign of the desktop. There are huge changes under the hood, and 3d-desktop effects are leveraged hopefully for something that is not just pretty but also useful.
About Ubuntu... I don't know what the guy is specifically talking about. The one thing I have seen so far is the new way that Ubuntu does notification icons. And I like it, I think it is much less intrusive than previous ways, and I just wish Thunderbird and Skype and other programs that do things "their own way" would also start using it.
And even on devices with a GenuineIntel or AuthenticAMD CPU, it's far from ready. From the release notes:
Support for the following browsers is not available at this time:
Internet Explorer
[...]
Native Client does not work on 64-bit versions of Windows.
Unfortunately, this is a more fundamental problem. Native Client makes use of x86 CPU's segmentation features to provide memory protection. These are not available on 64-bit CPUs (except when running a program in 32-bit mode). So native client will NEVER work for a fully 64-bit browser. I do not see any way of providing equivalent memory protection without segmentation, short of dynamic instruction rewriting (emulator-style) which has an order of magnitude more overhead (say, 2x overhead, versus 5% overhead for native client).
...but I didn't have a mac, so I had to use a vm with an unpatched linux (ubuntu 8.10 actually).
I tried to convince a guy with a mac in the audience to go to my exploit url, but he was not willing... One cool thing of this exploit is that it is pure java, so the same exploit can work on linux, mac and windows.
The only real difference between Java and C execution model (aside from better defined semantics in Java) is that Java does the translation in software, at run-time, taking into account performance characteristics of both the running program and the underlying hardware.
Java is a garbage-collected language. Garbage collection comes at a cost in performance AND memory. This cost may not be huge in most benchmarks, but there are some benchmarks where it is going to be. Which isn't to say the guys who came up with java were dumb... It so happens that you cannot be safe from pointer errors in a language where the programmer can free memory.
Also java has all that cool introspection/reflection functionality... The rather weaker but similar run time type information in C++ is a compile time switch, because it causes a significant memory overhead in some cases (when there are many small objects).
Some features have a price. You may want to pay that price (hell, I mostly program in python these days!), but don't delude yourself you're not paying any.
This is clearly a bug in Firefox, and a fix should be released immediately.
I'd think that firstly Firefox should default to considering the extension "unauthorized" and put up a big scary warning like "Unauthorized extension detected:
None of this is technically possible. Windows update runs with administrative privileges, and there is nothing firefox, or any application can stop it from doing. Firefox could make it harder for microsoft to add an addon, but it would basically be some kind of drm-style security-by-obscurity race against reverse engineering.
This is a social, not a technical problem.
Its a new team in town, with a different set of friends that need to be 'greased'.
Its just typical ( shortsighted ) politics at work here. Nothing new.
Hmm. I respect Steven Chu, maybe he is right that fuel cells are not the realistic solution to the car fuel problem. But I hightly doubt that the coal gasification thing scales (it basically relies on pumping the carbon dioxide underground and hope it stays there). Sounds like that has more to do with electoral prospects in some coal-heavy states...
Given the choice between two candidates for a job: candidate A has 2 years experience doing the job they are going for, candidate B has zero experience of the job they are going for but has a piece of paper that says they have a masters, which would you choose?
Now try this choice. Once candidate has 10 years work experience. The other has 8 years work experience, and a master. Which one would you choose?
A single feature in impress, and it's exactly the 1 feature I wanted. From TFA:
Impress now has convenient toolbar buttons to increase or decrease the font size of text quickly and easily. Make your text fit perfectly in seconds!
If this is what I think it is (make the whole slide text larger or smaller with 1 click) it was badly missed. This is IMHO better than the auto-resize approach powerpoint uses (at least by default) which leads a lot of people to inconsistency across their slides and generally too much content, because you can always fit more as it keeps autoshrinking.
If we're talking about CD's, then the user is already assuming the script writer has their best interests at heart - why else would they be sticking the CD in the drive?
Maybe the box said it was an audio CD, and the user rightly expects that playing music from an untrusted source can't harm his computer. Maybe it was supposed to be a data CD, with some pictures he expects to copy and watch, which again shouldn't be able to harm his computer.
When I hold a CD in my hand, I don't know if it has an autorun.inf file. So when the computer finds a CD with autorun.inf in the drive, it does not know the user intended for it to execute that disk.
Why wasn't this the default to begin with? There's no good reason to automatically run anything on media like hard disks or flash drives. It's an obvious virus vector.
This is just as bad on non-writable media. A simple social engineering attack is to send the target company a bunch of free CDs with supposedly something interesting in them, then just wait for some employee to autorun your trojan.
Anyhow I have been doing this for a while, using the TweakUI "powertool" from microsoft to totally disable all forms of autoexecution on all windows computers I touch. Which is sad because automatic default actions can be useful if done correctly. For instance ubuntu opens the folder for me when I insert a data CD, and it starts ripping sofware when I insert a music CD (this is the default, which is cool because ripping it is the only reason I would insert a CD in my computer). XP totally sucks at this, don't know about vista, only booted it twice or so on my laptop since it came pre-installed.
The problem I think you'd have is, even IF your ISP guaranteed they weren't leaving any logs behind, most of the other "big name" web sites you use *do* log your activity.
Yeah, but if the IP address cannot be associated to the user (because the ISP has deleted those logs) they won't be able to do much with those logs.
What I am saying is that this isn't such an exciting event. Tanenbaum will have been involved in many research projects of this sort during his career; every year or so, he will start another one. And each time he will say that he hopes to achieve something new, and give examples of what that might be. So it's business as usual.
Ehe, ok, agreed. Professor X got more funding is not really news, even by slashdot standards. But then again, Minix can always spark up a nice little controversy...
On bureaucracy: in order to get EU funding, you have to agree to be part of a wider project with research goals that don't necessarily match up with your own, and so you end up doing lots of donkey work simply to satisfy the EU. This is why I complain of bureaucracy, since the pseudo-research that is produced has negative value, wasting time that could be spent on real research. This may vary from project to project, but it can be very demoralising to work on projects (I work on two!) where most of the official work is just tedious box-ticking and the real research is not strictly part of the project. This is why I am whining about it on the Internet.
I guess I've had better luck on this than you. Probably because I am in a well-funded, applied field, where we don't have to stray too far from our interests to get funding. But I agree the huge consortium thing can be scary.
I know this is slashdot, but hey... I really encourage you all to RTFA. It's a near-death experience plus an in-depth analysis of the issue, with lots of links to additional information (not on wikipedia...). Worth the read.
The aim is not to produce a better operating system, the aim is to secure funding. This is what academics actually do; good research is (at best) a byproduct. This is business as usual for a research group.
Not really. The purpose is doing the research you are interested in doing (even if it's just for your career ambitions). For that you need funding. So of course you have to do some marketing to sell the research you want to do to the people deciding whom to fund. You think this guy has been doing MINIX for 20 years just to get funding? It's the other way around, you get funding, to be independent and have people work for you so you can get some interesting stuff done. Or, if you are more cynical, he's working on MINIX because it generated enough interest that he could get a ton of publications out of it.
The real research will be a low priority, because the group will need to satisfy the EU bureaucracy that they are doing something worthwhile. Consequently, most of their time will be spent writing reports.
From my experience this is a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that EU-funded projects have more strings attached than those from many other funding sources, but running the burocracy/reports/financials for an EU project that is funding 3 full time people at our university still only takes a rather small percentage of my time.
And that's a lot more freedom to do real research than in any company environment i've seen or heard of so far. Big companies (even the good ones) have IMHO more bureaucracy, not less, and short-term horizon (want returns in 3, 5 years at the most), which means very little of what is called "research and development" has anything to do with research.
Seriously, who the fuck actually uses water bongs with tobacco?
You haven't traveled a lot, have you, for an anonymous coward? Water-pipe is widely used all over egypt, tunisia, and other parts of north africa, to smoke tobacco (often apple-scented), and is widely available in europe because of immigration from north africa. It feels a lot better because the smoke is cooled by going through the water before getting to your throat, so it doesn't make non-smokers like myself cough. You'll still get cancer, but at least the process is a bit more fun...
I have a fancy ergonomic keyboard. It makes a soft click sound as soon as the key is HALF pressed. This is a sort of bio-feedback training to avoid hitting the key hard to feel the mechanical click when the key hits bottom. A keyboard where you need to put strength in each keypress to feel the click (the only way to be sure the keypress was registered) trains you to slam on your keys, and that's not going to do you hands/wrists/arms any good in the long run.
Fusion is very promising, if only because it has no proliferation worries, but other than that all of the advantages that count are already available in fission reactors.
The power is cheap and will scale: Many European countries get the majority of their power from it
We have plenty of nuclear fuel: There won't ever be a nuclear fuel crisis because before we've used the enrichable uranium ore, and then reprocessed and reused all of the nuclear waste in our breeder reactors, the sun will be dead.
Think solar is renewable? Not as renewable as nuclear.
It's safe: If the only reason for not going for it is an accident 30 years ago when the technology was in its infancy that's great
It's available now: We cannot wait for the perfect power supply. We need to change over now. We've got the fuel, the tech, the experience.
All we need is for the public to get their heads out of their asses and learn to accept compromise.
I think you are a bit over-optimistic about fission.
The power is cheap and will scale: Many European countries get the majority of their power from it
I don't think it is cheap... at least if coal is your benchmark of cheap (which seems to be the benchmark renewables are subjected to). It is only cheap when it is a by-product of military nuclear proliferation (as in france). But pure-civilian nuclear energy is probably more expensive than, say, current wind technology (although perhaps more scalable).
We have plenty of nuclear fuel: There won't ever be a nuclear fuel crisis because before we've used the enrichable uranium ore, and then reprocessed and reused all of the nuclear waste in our breeder reactors, the sun will be dead.
Think solar is renewable? Not as renewable as nuclear.
I may be wrong, but I don't think breeder reactors have been tested yet on a large scale. The current uranium-based nuclear economy has in fact an extremely limited supply of fuel. Don't have the citation, but I think I saw a report that put uranium supply for current plants to run out in some 35 year.
It's safe: If the only reason for not going for it is an accident 30 years ago when the technology was in its infancy that's great
Well.. chernobyl was the biggest accident, but there were quite a few smaller ones or near misses. The technology from 30 years ago is not so different from the current one, in the sense that chernobyl was a second generation reactor, which is what most of the installed base still is. But true, we now have a few 3rd generation, passive safety reactors already in operation that are supposed to be better.
That being said, I don't necessarily disagree with you that nuclear may be one path out of the shithole we are driving ourselves into.
In UK law, at least, which is what 90% of the world base their law systems on:
No it's not, most of the world's law systems are based on Roman Law, as established by emperor Justinian in the 6th century. Only a few of the world's law systems are based on anglo-saxon style common law (essentially the former British colonies), and anyways all of them owe a big debt to the romans.
At this point this discussion should probably be modded Flaimwar, but from the biased opinion of a self-publisher and a GPL content consumer, I think both arguments are correct. GPL advocates need to differentiate why they should be able to disable the rights claimed by DRM content or else it comes off as "we want freedom to do what we want (in the interests of consumers) AND to prevent you from doing what you want (in the interests of producers).
Not respecting the rights that DRM imposes isn't too far off from not respecting the right that GPL imposes. Either copyright is valuable, or it isn't. Pick a side.... and know that you can't have your cake and eat it too. There are benevolent and greedy consequences on each side of the copyright argument.
No. You totally fail to understand the issue, it is appalling that you are being modded insightful. Being against DRM is not the same as being against copyright, although many people who are against DRM are also critic of the current state of copyright law.
Compared to copyright law, DRM imposes, by technical means, additional restrictions to my use of a copyrighted work. On the other hand, the GPL allows me additional freedoms over a copyrighted work (namely, the right to redistribute it under certain conditions). How is this the same thing?
Copyright law allows the rights-holder to determine the conditions upon which they are willing to give you rights to use the content. If the rights-holder says "I'm not going to give you this content unless you give me $20," that's perfectly valid. As is "I'm not going to give you this content unless you give me $20 and agree to the following terms and conditions..."
So no, YOU fail, good sir, for not understanding the basic interactions of copyright and contract law here.
No, you fail again. What you are describing above is some kind of contract between the copyright owner and the user. The GPL is NOT a contract of any kind. It's not a EULA. Did you ever have to click-through a GPL license? Did you ever have to sign the GPL to be able to install linux? Since I did not sign it, the GPL cannot restrict my freedoms in any way. It can only allow me additional freedoms: namely, the right to redistribute the copyrighted work under certain conditions.
Opening up DRM'd media so that it can legally be used in more situations by someone with a valid license is not the same as rampant piracy.
As a rights-holder? Bull. Shit.
"You have the right to use content provided you do so in a manner consistent with the license provided with it."
That's the same basic principle protected in the GPL, as well as in DRM-licensing terms.
You fail (again). The GPL does not, in any way, restrict your use of the licensed code. It only restricts the way you redistribute that code (if you should choose to do so). And, newsflash, even if the GPL wanted to restrict your use, it couldn't, because the GPL is based on copyright law. A license can only grant you MORE freedom than is already allowed to you by copyright law. And copyright law regulates distribution, not private usage.
The clean desk policy and security stuff is something I have seen at other places with cube farms too.
And there are good reasons for it too. The last thing you want is some cleaner earning 5c a night spotting something someone left out on the desk labeled "confidential" and deciding to steal it and offer it to the highest bidder.
In my opinion, most stuff labeled "confidential" isn't really worth anything to anyone. Good luck trying to sell it... See the recent Cohen movie for instructions on how to (not) sell a former CIA agent's memoirs to the russians...
Slashdot Mirror
When you need the cheapest, most power-efficient servers you can find, to the point where you criticize your suppliers publicly, you're not willing to pay for the most expensive cables out there.
Besides, all the seal clubbers are buying those up.
That's the real reason the EU is against seal clubbing...
Actually, the presentation (http://www.fields.utoronto.ca/audio/08-09/crypto/gentry/index.html) claims that evaluating one logic gate takes in the order of k to the 7th operations, where k is the size of the key. For 128-bit keys that's around 10 to the 15th power. Which is most definitely not infinitely slower (whatever this "informative" sentence is supposed to mean), but also not exactly practical.
I was trying to figure out what he is talking about. Specifically, which major desktop redisigns Gnome, KDE, and Ubuntu are planning.
For kde, the "social desktop" thing, is just a bunch of desktop tools for helping users enter the kde user/developer community. May be cool or not, I don't know, but it's not a redisign of the desktop.
For gnome, the new thing is the "gnome shell". The screencasts here: http://live.gnome.org/GnomeShell/Screencasts show that it looks pretty cool. I think it may even be useful. But again, from the user's perspective, it's not a radical redisign of the desktop. There are huge changes under the hood, and 3d-desktop effects are leveraged hopefully for something that is not just pretty but also useful.
About Ubuntu... I don't know what the guy is specifically talking about. The one thing I have seen so far is the new way that Ubuntu does notification icons. And I like it, I think it is much less intrusive than previous ways, and I just wish Thunderbird and Skype and other programs that do things "their own way" would also start using it.
And even on devices with a GenuineIntel or AuthenticAMD CPU, it's far from ready. From the release notes:
Unfortunately, this is a more fundamental problem. Native Client makes use of x86 CPU's segmentation features to provide memory protection. These are not available on 64-bit CPUs (except when running a program in 32-bit mode). So native client will NEVER work for a fully 64-bit browser. I do not see any way of providing equivalent memory protection without segmentation, short of dynamic instruction rewriting (emulator-style) which has an order of magnitude more overhead (say, 2x overhead, versus 5% overhead for native client).
...but I didn't have a mac, so I had to use a vm with an unpatched linux (ubuntu 8.10 actually). I tried to convince a guy with a mac in the audience to go to my exploit url, but he was not willing... One cool thing of this exploit is that it is pure java, so the same exploit can work on linux, mac and windows.
Here is a writeup on the vulnerability: http://blog.cr0.org/2009/05/write-once-own-everyone.html
And here is a proof-of-concept exploit: http://landonf.bikemonkey.org/code/macosx/CVE-2008-5353.20090519.html
You can decompile it to see what's going on exactly.
Enjoy.
The only real difference between Java and C execution model (aside from better defined semantics in Java) is that Java does the translation in software, at run-time, taking into account performance characteristics of both the running program and the underlying hardware.
Java is a garbage-collected language. Garbage collection comes at a cost in performance AND memory. This cost may not be huge in most benchmarks, but there are some benchmarks where it is going to be. Which isn't to say the guys who came up with java were dumb... It so happens that you cannot be safe from pointer errors in a language where the programmer can free memory.
Also java has all that cool introspection/reflection functionality... The rather weaker but similar run time type information in C++ is a compile time switch, because it causes a significant memory overhead in some cases (when there are many small objects).
Some features have a price. You may want to pay that price (hell, I mostly program in python these days!), but don't delude yourself you're not paying any.
This is clearly a bug in Firefox, and a fix should be released immediately. I'd think that firstly Firefox should default to considering the extension "unauthorized" and put up a big scary warning like "Unauthorized extension detected:
None of this is technically possible. Windows update runs with administrative privileges, and there is nothing firefox, or any application can stop it from doing. Firefox could make it harder for microsoft to add an addon, but it would basically be some kind of drm-style security-by-obscurity race against reverse engineering. This is a social, not a technical problem.
You can always tell a religion from a cult. A cult is a set of rules designed to get certain men laid.
I think we can extend this a bit... if instead of getting them laid, it gets them rich, it's still a cult...
Its a new team in town, with a different set of friends that need to be 'greased'.
Its just typical ( shortsighted ) politics at work here. Nothing new.
Hmm. I respect Steven Chu, maybe he is right that fuel cells are not the realistic solution to the car fuel problem. But I hightly doubt that the coal gasification thing scales (it basically relies on pumping the carbon dioxide underground and hope it stays there). Sounds like that has more to do with electoral prospects in some coal-heavy states...
Given the choice between two candidates for a job: candidate A has 2 years experience doing the job they are going for, candidate B has zero experience of the job they are going for but has a piece of paper that says they have a masters, which would you choose?
Now try this choice. Once candidate has 10 years work experience. The other has 8 years work experience, and a master. Which one would you choose?
Impress now has convenient toolbar buttons to increase or decrease the font size of text quickly and easily. Make your text fit perfectly in seconds!
If this is what I think it is (make the whole slide text larger or smaller with 1 click) it was badly missed. This is IMHO better than the auto-resize approach powerpoint uses (at least by default) which leads a lot of people to inconsistency across their slides and generally too much content, because you can always fit more as it keeps autoshrinking.
If we're talking about CD's, then the user is already assuming the script writer has their best interests at heart - why else would they be sticking the CD in the drive?
Maybe the box said it was an audio CD, and the user rightly expects that playing music from an untrusted source can't harm his computer. Maybe it was supposed to be a data CD, with some pictures he expects to copy and watch, which again shouldn't be able to harm his computer.
When I hold a CD in my hand, I don't know if it has an autorun.inf file. So when the computer finds a CD with autorun.inf in the drive, it does not know the user intended for it to execute that disk.
Why wasn't this the default to begin with? There's no good reason to automatically run anything on media like hard disks or flash drives. It's an obvious virus vector.
This is just as bad on non-writable media. A simple social engineering attack is to send the target company a bunch of free CDs with supposedly something interesting in them, then just wait for some employee to autorun your trojan.
Anyhow I have been doing this for a while, using the TweakUI "powertool" from microsoft to totally disable all forms of autoexecution on all windows computers I touch. Which is sad because automatic default actions can be useful if done correctly. For instance ubuntu opens the folder for me when I insert a data CD, and it starts ripping sofware when I insert a music CD (this is the default, which is cool because ripping it is the only reason I would insert a CD in my computer). XP totally sucks at this, don't know about vista, only booted it twice or so on my laptop since it came pre-installed.
The problem I think you'd have is, even IF your ISP guaranteed they weren't leaving any logs behind, most of the other "big name" web sites you use *do* log your activity.
Yeah, but if the IP address cannot be associated to the user (because the ISP has deleted those logs) they won't be able to do much with those logs.
Good points.
What I am saying is that this isn't such an exciting event. Tanenbaum will have been involved in many research projects of this sort during his career; every year or so, he will start another one. And each time he will say that he hopes to achieve something new, and give examples of what that might be. So it's business as usual.
Ehe, ok, agreed. Professor X got more funding is not really news, even by slashdot standards. But then again, Minix can always spark up a nice little controversy...
On bureaucracy: in order to get EU funding, you have to agree to be part of a wider project with research goals that don't necessarily match up with your own, and so you end up doing lots of donkey work simply to satisfy the EU. This is why I complain of bureaucracy, since the pseudo-research that is produced has negative value, wasting time that could be spent on real research. This may vary from project to project, but it can be very demoralising to work on projects (I work on two!) where most of the official work is just tedious box-ticking and the real research is not strictly part of the project. This is why I am whining about it on the Internet.
I guess I've had better luck on this than you. Probably because I am in a well-funded, applied field, where we don't have to stray too far from our interests to get funding. But I agree the huge consortium thing can be scary.
I know this is slashdot, but hey... I really encourage you all to RTFA. It's a near-death experience plus an in-depth analysis of the issue, with lots of links to additional information (not on wikipedia...). Worth the read.
The aim is not to produce a better operating system, the aim is to secure funding. This is what academics actually do; good research is (at best) a byproduct. This is business as usual for a research group.
Not really. The purpose is doing the research you are interested in doing (even if it's just for your career ambitions). For that you need funding. So of course you have to do some marketing to sell the research you want to do to the people deciding whom to fund. You think this guy has been doing MINIX for 20 years just to get funding? It's the other way around, you get funding, to be independent and have people work for you so you can get some interesting stuff done. Or, if you are more cynical, he's working on MINIX because it generated enough interest that he could get a ton of publications out of it.
The real research will be a low priority, because the group will need to satisfy the EU bureaucracy that they are doing something worthwhile. Consequently, most of their time will be spent writing reports.
From my experience this is a bit of an exaggeration. It's true that EU-funded projects have more strings attached than those from many other funding sources, but running the burocracy/reports/financials for an EU project that is funding 3 full time people at our university still only takes a rather small percentage of my time.
And that's a lot more freedom to do real research than in any company environment i've seen or heard of so far. Big companies (even the good ones) have IMHO more bureaucracy, not less, and short-term horizon (want returns in 3, 5 years at the most), which means very little of what is called "research and development" has anything to do with research.
Seriously, who the fuck actually uses water bongs with tobacco?
You haven't traveled a lot, have you, for an anonymous coward? Water-pipe is widely used all over egypt, tunisia, and other parts of north africa, to smoke tobacco (often apple-scented), and is widely available in europe because of immigration from north africa. It feels a lot better because the smoke is cooled by going through the water before getting to your throat, so it doesn't make non-smokers like myself cough. You'll still get cancer, but at least the process is a bit more fun...
I have a fancy ergonomic keyboard. It makes a soft click sound as soon as the key is HALF pressed. This is a sort of bio-feedback training to avoid hitting the key hard to feel the mechanical click when the key hits bottom. A keyboard where you need to put strength in each keypress to feel the click (the only way to be sure the keypress was registered) trains you to slam on your keys, and that's not going to do you hands/wrists/arms any good in the long run.
Fusion is very promising, if only because it has no proliferation worries, but other than that all of the advantages that count are already available in fission reactors.
I think you are a bit over-optimistic about fission.
The power is cheap and will scale: Many European countries get the majority of their power from it
I don't think it is cheap... at least if coal is your benchmark of cheap (which seems to be the benchmark renewables are subjected to). It is only cheap when it is a by-product of military nuclear proliferation (as in france). But pure-civilian nuclear energy is probably more expensive than, say, current wind technology (although perhaps more scalable).
We have plenty of nuclear fuel: There won't ever be a nuclear fuel crisis because before we've used the enrichable uranium ore, and then reprocessed and reused all of the nuclear waste in our breeder reactors, the sun will be dead. Think solar is renewable? Not as renewable as nuclear.
I may be wrong, but I don't think breeder reactors have been tested yet on a large scale. The current uranium-based nuclear economy has in fact an extremely limited supply of fuel. Don't have the citation, but I think I saw a report that put uranium supply for current plants to run out in some 35 year.
It's safe: If the only reason for not going for it is an accident 30 years ago when the technology was in its infancy that's great
Well.. chernobyl was the biggest accident, but there were quite a few smaller ones or near misses. The technology from 30 years ago is not so different from the current one, in the sense that chernobyl was a second generation reactor, which is what most of the installed base still is. But true, we now have a few 3rd generation, passive safety reactors already in operation that are supposed to be better.
That being said, I don't necessarily disagree with you that nuclear may be one path out of the shithole we are driving ourselves into.
In UK law, at least, which is what 90% of the world base their law systems on:
No it's not, most of the world's law systems are based on Roman Law, as established by emperor Justinian in the 6th century. Only a few of the world's law systems are based on anglo-saxon style common law (essentially the former British colonies), and anyways all of them owe a big debt to the romans.
At this point this discussion should probably be modded Flaimwar, but from the biased opinion of a self-publisher and a GPL content consumer, I think both arguments are correct. GPL advocates need to differentiate why they should be able to disable the rights claimed by DRM content or else it comes off as "we want freedom to do what we want (in the interests of consumers) AND to prevent you from doing what you want (in the interests of producers).
Not respecting the rights that DRM imposes isn't too far off from not respecting the right that GPL imposes. Either copyright is valuable, or it isn't. Pick a side.... and know that you can't have your cake and eat it too. There are benevolent and greedy consequences on each side of the copyright argument.
No. You totally fail to understand the issue, it is appalling that you are being modded insightful. Being against DRM is not the same as being against copyright, although many people who are against DRM are also critic of the current state of copyright law.
Compared to copyright law, DRM imposes, by technical means, additional restrictions to my use of a copyrighted work. On the other hand, the GPL allows me additional freedoms over a copyrighted work (namely, the right to redistribute it under certain conditions). How is this the same thing?
Copyright law allows the rights-holder to determine the conditions upon which they are willing to give you rights to use the content. If the rights-holder says "I'm not going to give you this content unless you give me $20," that's perfectly valid. As is "I'm not going to give you this content unless you give me $20 and agree to the following terms and conditions..." So no, YOU fail, good sir, for not understanding the basic interactions of copyright and contract law here.
No, you fail again. What you are describing above is some kind of contract between the copyright owner and the user. The GPL is NOT a contract of any kind. It's not a EULA. Did you ever have to click-through a GPL license? Did you ever have to sign the GPL to be able to install linux? Since I did not sign it, the GPL cannot restrict my freedoms in any way. It can only allow me additional freedoms: namely, the right to redistribute the copyrighted work under certain conditions.
Opening up DRM'd media so that it can legally be used in more situations by someone with a valid license is not the same as rampant piracy.
As a rights-holder? Bull. Shit. "You have the right to use content provided you do so in a manner consistent with the license provided with it." That's the same basic principle protected in the GPL, as well as in DRM-licensing terms.
You fail (again). The GPL does not, in any way, restrict your use of the licensed code. It only restricts the way you redistribute that code (if you should choose to do so). And, newsflash, even if the GPL wanted to restrict your use, it couldn't, because the GPL is based on copyright law. A license can only grant you MORE freedom than is already allowed to you by copyright law. And copyright law regulates distribution, not private usage.
The clean desk policy and security stuff is something I have seen at other places with cube farms too. And there are good reasons for it too. The last thing you want is some cleaner earning 5c a night spotting something someone left out on the desk labeled "confidential" and deciding to steal it and offer it to the highest bidder.
In my opinion, most stuff labeled "confidential" isn't really worth anything to anyone. Good luck trying to sell it... See the recent Cohen movie for instructions on how to (not) sell a former CIA agent's memoirs to the russians...