My understanding is that the GTA video makes a reference to a "lawyer who dislikes violent games" and Thompson thinks it is obviously a parody of him.
FIRST -- parody's are not slanderous, particularly when they are true to the real life version.
SECOND -- GTA gets heat from many researchers and lawyers who have much better reputations then Thompson, so it is naive of him to think they would single out him for the joke.
THIRD -- It is funny, laugh. Geez... show me a guy who can't laugh at a joke about himself and I will show you a guy who'll never be the life of ANY party.
"The Universe" has a really bizarre online distribution model where they always have an assortment of "short" interesting clips and one or two old "full length episodes" posted for streaming.
For instance, the Full Episodes that are up now are "Nebulas" and "Cosmic Collisions"... and you can expect CC to be replaced by something else a week from now. For a 7-year old, I would venture to guess that watching this streaming over the internet isn't optimal though.
Another alternative is to just order the first season of DVDs and then watch the second season which is currently being shown.
Having said all that, the discussions on The Universe are definitely geared towards laymen and I wouldn't have a doubt that young teens would be able to grasp the concepts that they talk about. Plus, as an engineer in his mid-20's the show has taught me quite a lot about how exploration of "The Universe" has advanced in the last twenty years (an example at the top of my head is the presentation of hard evidence of the asteroid that struck the Yucatan and killed the dinosaurs -- hint: a layer of glass at the impact site).
So... even if your 7-year old seems too young for it, you would still probably learn a thing or two and become more equipped to answer her questions about science, space, creation, and the Universe.
Not satisfied with what they can extract from their own citizens, they want to force out-of-state businesses to do their dirty work for them. As far as I am concerned, they can all go to hell.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about the economic plans that have been increasingly proposed by Republican presidential candidates to get rid of the IRS (eliminating Income Tax) and increase the sales tax to 40-50% to compensate?
And how do you respond to the thought that you could be murdered in cold blood with no repercussions for the assailant if you and your community stopped paying taxes to support your local police and judicial offices? Or how about, "Sorry, we can't afford to educate your kid because of budget cutbacks."
Just food for thought to give you some idea that tax dollars are actually money that serves a very important public function and saying "go to hell" is counter-productive to the argument.
A better argument is to claim that taxes you have paid are being used to fund things that you specifically do not approve of... but I got a sense that you were bitter towards paying ANY tax and that is just wrong.
as one of our politicians in the UK said to another a short while ago "you cannot have it both ways, you were either ignorant or incompetent - and neither is acceptable".
I searched on Google for your quote and it linked back to your post.
Could you please find the name and source for the original quote? Otherwise, I will have to attribute it to "apodyopsis" and I fear that others will just look at me weird.
The easy solution would be to have 2 paper print-outs: 1 that the voter tears off (like a receipt) and can examine to verify that they voted the way they intended, and 1 that is automatically ripped off and deposited in the 'lock box' for any audits or recounts that might need to be done. (I'm thinking a system that automatically tears the receipt paper and drops it within the sealed system--no human hand touches it, though you can see it through glass/plastic.)
Wrong, wrong, wrong! One print-out that the voter must hold in his hands and then drop into a lock box. There is NO reason for the voter to go home with a receipt of who he voted for. There is only a need for a sealed and secure bin to sit in the polling place.
And SECURE means that the bin is under the vision of a security camera so that any vote tampering can be tracked and prosecuted. And the lock combo should only be known by a small group of people who know damned well that they will see jail time for messing anything up.
And even though the electronic output is quicker, I want to see every polling place hand-count at least one November election anytime a "Software Update" happens because I will be damned if I trust Version 1.1 in 2008 and Version 2.1 in 2009 --- however I would trust Version 1.1 in 2009 if it had been fully validated by hand counts in 2008.
What is on the USB drive is software though, and software can be made remotely. Evil computer haxxors don't care about procedure, and they don't need physical access to use that hole.
Good point, but I think there are enough security holes in Windows that adding this extra one won't affect the hacker community.
An interesting twist: This security hole is being called a "Feature".
After all, if you have nothing to hide then you have nothing to fear
You are making the incredibly naive assumption that the Congresscritters who would vote for legislation like that don't have anything to hide.
I think it is telling that the Republican Party uses their "Party e-mail accounts" instead of their government accounts. By promising to make it impossible to truly secure a system, Microsoft could be construed as a threat to the policy wonks who live in their Ivory Towers on Capitol Hill -- or at least the ones that do things that are corrupt (which I would argue is 40-60%).
if Microsoft ponies up a few buckazoids and delivers some value to OLPC
It isn't about money. If it were, then I would run Windows on my home laptop. It is about future lock-in and choice restriction down the road.
It is also about the freedom to tinker. A kid running an Open Source OS can recompile it and make changes to the way it works. These changes can ultimately help the entire world. If MSFT gives children stripped down copies of XP running on inexpensive hardware, the kids will be limited to producing Powerpoint presentations and Word documents. That mindset denies them the freedom to express themselves creatively and stifles entire populations.
Heck, even first world countries with the MSFT mindset are creatively stifled and suffer because of it.
if the people's rights, liberties and freedoms are caught in the crossfire, so be it
The artists signed their rights away when they signed the non-lucrative contracts with the RIAA member companies. The customers pay for an individual license to listen to tracks on a well-defined set of devices.
Let's not confuse things... the music industry is not in the business of taking away rights. They have never given any rights which they can take away at this point.
(A) they don't work in the interests of the artists, and (B) their approach to their customers is insulting, intimidating, disdainful and invasive. Good summary! That's a business plan that shouldn't have succeeded in the first place.
I was in the process of getting amped up about Mario Kart over the weekend and came across "SuperTuxKart".
I downloaded it from SourceForge and couldn't figure out what they wanted me to do with the separate library download (./configure wasn't working for it), so I gave up with the install for that night.
Then, the next day I saw something that prompted me to go look for FreeCiv. For that, I actually thought to check the Ubuntu application installer listing and found it under the "All Applications" menu for Games (this was for Ubuntu 7.10). Low and behold, SuperTuxKart was there too, as well as a game where you slide a Penguin down an ice track collecting fishes.
Anyway, these games have vastly different levels of enjoyment/graphics/features (for what I could tell, SuperTuxKart didn't have sound)... but they are all FREE and LEGAL and Ubuntu *really* makes them trivially painless to install.
Fork it! Redevelop "girlfriend" to work around this dependency. And while you are at it, I think reducing the size of the shoes and shopping modules would be prudent too.
In other words, you can't rely on the site you are visiting to be safe.. so the onus is on the end user to make sure their PC is fully patched and as secure as possible.
The above quote is from the article link which lists "important sites that have been compromised". I think the important thing is that any site running MSSQL could potentially be compromised in a way that would affect a reader of that site who (a) does not have an updated web browser, or (b) doesn't have script disabled.
In 2008... why is it really so easy to put a damned single or double quote into a SQL form and then make it possible to execute your malicious code on that server? Shouldn't disabling this be a fundamental security rule for databases?
Of course, their voting products do suck, although I don't think that cost has terribly much to do with it.
I agree. It is bad design if the basic security measures taken for ATMs are not also implemented in voting machines.
Diebold's expertise in serving the banks with ATM machines should translate nicely into serving the gov't with voting machines (much of the security, hardware, and software is similar between the two devices).
Thus, the argument that it is a "cost issue" is bullcrap. The fact that the case in NJ proves that THE DAMNED THINGS DO NOT COUNT RELIABLY is further evidence that the issues with Diebold are deeper than costs.
Open source does not have a corporate cost associated with it.
The biggest contributors to Open Source and Free Software are large corporations like Red Hat, IBM, Novell, and Sun. [...] They pay for it because they get value in return.
I like you analogy but it leaves a bit of a bad taste in the mouth.
I think the analogy works if you imagine Pfizer having a 90% stake of all Heart and Brain medicine and charging huge fees for access to it. Then imagine J&J, Merck, and others collaborating on research in those areas. Sure, they could each invest huge amounts to unseat the lumbering giant, but it would be more efficient to share their resources to increase the competitive pressure they can exert and decrease the overall individual investments that they each need to make.
And if Pfizer did have all their eggs in the Heart and Brain medicine basket, you better believe that they would lash out against the collaborative pressure from any competitors who seek to take their monopoly away from them, just like Gates/Microsoft is doing.
It is too bad that Clarke passed away a month ago. I'm sure he would have loved to see that the military was making a death ray based on his design.
article here
Immediately following the announcement, the MPAA and RIAA each sued Seagate for 5 quintillion dollars in contributory and vicarious copyright infringement.
This was already discussed... and the going rate for that many Mp3s is actually only $1.8 Quadrillion dollars (though, I wouldn't put it passed them to ask for more so that they can "negotiation a settlement" for only $10 Quadrillion dollars).
1.2 trillion hours of MP3 songs
the RIAA has been cheated out of at least $1.8e17 in revenue
To put that into perspective, that is $180,000 Trillion Dollars, or approximately 100 times larger than the annual budget of the United States ($2-3 Trillion) ref.
To put it in a different perspective, each of the Internet's approximately Three Billion users (based on estimates I have seen that ~50% of the world is connected) would only have to illegally download 400 songs to serve up that type of damage.
If sex was used to diffuse social tension, I think you'd see people start arguments over nothing just to end up in bed after their night at the bar.
Man: Hey lady! You are sitting in my seat! Woman: But I've been here all night. Man: Doesn't matter. That seat is my territory and you'd better move or I will get real angry. Woman: You know what? Fuck you, too. And you can can have your stupid chair because their is too much tension here. Man: By any chance, could I help you relieve your tension? Woman: I don't see why not. My hotel is across the street. Follow me!
So go find a description in the spec and figure out how the new Microsoft Office *doesn't* implement it as described.
I'll link to you in my blog.
I haven't got the time/energy/desire to troll through the 7,000+ page "standard" and actually check to see that the features described in it are implemented.
It's the socialeconomic structure that's broken, mostly because it *requires* penniless and poor and impoverished people in order to work.
Society's real middle-long-term problem is to get those unskilled laborers a few Skills so they can do something useful and won't be completely obsoleted by a robot some day that's more cost-effective.
I have to interject and rephrase your statement of the "problem" as being biased and closed-minded. --- "Society's real middle-long-term opportunity is to get develop automated systems that have the useful skills to free society's intellectual vanguard to ponder bigger-better problems instead of mundane, repetitive shit." (Show of hands - how many have re-implemented a 5 to 25 year old designs for "modern" tech?).
Meanwhile, with costs driven down by automated systems producing everything from food to electronics each unskilled human laborer won't have to work as many hours to pay their way. Thus, society in general will have more free time AND a higher standard of living. Thus, it won't matter that almost everybody is unskilled and those people can spend time doing what they love instead of flipping burgers at McParadise or manning the teller window at the bank.
I have (one year) written off hours spent developing Open Source as "independent business losses" to avoid sending Uncle Sam a check for $1000 that my tax software told me I owed. The real value of my Open Source time contribution is obviously quite undefined, but I certainly could have spent the time (200-300 hours) that I estimate that I spent doing something for a much more profitable project - so I think it was justified.
Really, what would be great would be if Shuttleworth could create a "Non-for-profit" organization that we could register hours with and then take a tax deduction in April. In a fair economy, my time value of 300 hours would legitimately add up to a $10,000 deduction and that would be a huge boon to justify me to work harder developing Open Source (to "cost" proprietary software companies even MORE!!!).
[But seriously, I saw the number $60 Billion quoted earlier in the thread, and I read that as "Open Source software SAVES the national community of software buyers $60 Billion that they can allocate to more profitable areas of their business."]
Slashdot Mirror
My understanding is that the GTA video makes a reference to a "lawyer who dislikes violent games" and Thompson thinks it is obviously a parody of him.
FIRST -- parody's are not slanderous, particularly when they are true to the real life version.
SECOND -- GTA gets heat from many researchers and lawyers who have much better reputations then Thompson, so it is naive of him to think they would single out him for the joke.
THIRD -- It is funny, laugh. Geez... show me a guy who can't laugh at a joke about himself and I will show you a guy who'll never be the life of ANY party.
"The Universe" has a really bizarre online distribution model where they always have an assortment of "short" interesting clips and one or two old "full length episodes" posted for streaming.
For instance, the Full Episodes that are up now are "Nebulas" and "Cosmic Collisions"... and you can expect CC to be replaced by something else a week from now. For a 7-year old, I would venture to guess that watching this streaming over the internet isn't optimal though.
Another alternative is to just order the first season of DVDs and then watch the second season which is currently being shown.
Having said all that, the discussions on The Universe are definitely geared towards laymen and I wouldn't have a doubt that young teens would be able to grasp the concepts that they talk about. Plus, as an engineer in his mid-20's the show has taught me quite a lot about how exploration of "The Universe" has advanced in the last twenty years (an example at the top of my head is the presentation of hard evidence of the asteroid that struck the Yucatan and killed the dinosaurs -- hint: a layer of glass at the impact site).
So... even if your 7-year old seems too young for it, you would still probably learn a thing or two and become more equipped to answer her questions about science, space, creation, and the Universe.
Out of curiosity, how do you feel about the economic plans that have been increasingly proposed by Republican presidential candidates to get rid of the IRS (eliminating Income Tax) and increase the sales tax to 40-50% to compensate?
And how do you respond to the thought that you could be murdered in cold blood with no repercussions for the assailant if you and your community stopped paying taxes to support your local police and judicial offices? Or how about, "Sorry, we can't afford to educate your kid because of budget cutbacks."
Just food for thought to give you some idea that tax dollars are actually money that serves a very important public function and saying "go to hell" is counter-productive to the argument.
A better argument is to claim that taxes you have paid are being used to fund things that you specifically do not approve of... but I got a sense that you were bitter towards paying ANY tax and that is just wrong.
What isn't descriptive about the Graphical Image Manipulation Program?
I searched on Google for your quote and it linked back to your post.
Could you please find the name and source for the original quote? Otherwise, I will have to attribute it to "apodyopsis" and I fear that others will just look at me weird.
Wrong, wrong, wrong! One print-out that the voter must hold in his hands and then drop into a lock box. There is NO reason for the voter to go home with a receipt of who he voted for. There is only a need for a sealed and secure bin to sit in the polling place.
And SECURE means that the bin is under the vision of a security camera so that any vote tampering can be tracked and prosecuted. And the lock combo should only be known by a small group of people who know damned well that they will see jail time for messing anything up.
And even though the electronic output is quicker, I want to see every polling place hand-count at least one November election anytime a "Software Update" happens because I will be damned if I trust Version 1.1 in 2008 and Version 2.1 in 2009 --- however I would trust Version 1.1 in 2009 if it had been fully validated by hand counts in 2008.
Is that too much to ask?
Good point, but I think there are enough security holes in Windows that adding this extra one won't affect the hacker community.
An interesting twist: This security hole is being called a "Feature".
You are making the incredibly naive assumption that the Congresscritters who would vote for legislation like that don't have anything to hide.
I think it is telling that the Republican Party uses their "Party e-mail accounts" instead of their government accounts. By promising to make it impossible to truly secure a system, Microsoft could be construed as a threat to the policy wonks who live in their Ivory Towers on Capitol Hill -- or at least the ones that do things that are corrupt (which I would argue is 40-60%).
It isn't about money. If it were, then I would run Windows on my home laptop. It is about future lock-in and choice restriction down the road.
It is also about the freedom to tinker. A kid running an Open Source OS can recompile it and make changes to the way it works. These changes can ultimately help the entire world. If MSFT gives children stripped down copies of XP running on inexpensive hardware, the kids will be limited to producing Powerpoint presentations and Word documents. That mindset denies them the freedom to express themselves creatively and stifles entire populations.
Heck, even first world countries with the MSFT mindset are creatively stifled and suffer because of it.
Never heard of "embrace, extend, extinguish", have you?
The artists signed their rights away when they signed the non-lucrative contracts with the RIAA member companies. The customers pay for an individual license to listen to tracks on a well-defined set of devices.
Let's not confuse things... the music industry is not in the business of taking away rights. They have never given any rights which they can take away at this point.
(A) they don't work in the interests of the artists, and (B) their approach to their customers is insulting, intimidating, disdainful and invasive. Good summary! That's a business plan that shouldn't have succeeded in the first place.I was in the process of getting amped up about Mario Kart over the weekend and came across "SuperTuxKart".
I downloaded it from SourceForge and couldn't figure out what they wanted me to do with the separate library download (./configure wasn't working for it), so I gave up with the install for that night.
Then, the next day I saw something that prompted me to go look for FreeCiv. For that, I actually thought to check the Ubuntu application installer listing and found it under the "All Applications" menu for Games (this was for Ubuntu 7.10). Low and behold, SuperTuxKart was there too, as well as a game where you slide a Penguin down an ice track collecting fishes.
Anyway, these games have vastly different levels of enjoyment/graphics/features (for what I could tell, SuperTuxKart didn't have sound)... but they are all FREE and LEGAL and Ubuntu *really* makes them trivially painless to install.
Hoorah!
Fork it! Redevelop "girlfriend" to work around this dependency. And while you are at it, I think reducing the size of the shoes and shopping modules would be prudent too.
The above quote is from the article link which lists "important sites that have been compromised". I think the important thing is that any site running MSSQL could potentially be compromised in a way that would affect a reader of that site who (a) does not have an updated web browser, or (b) doesn't have script disabled.
In 2008... why is it really so easy to put a damned single or double quote into a SQL form and then make it possible to execute your malicious code on that server? Shouldn't disabling this be a fundamental security rule for databases?
I agree. It is bad design if the basic security measures taken for ATMs are not also implemented in voting machines.
Diebold's expertise in serving the banks with ATM machines should translate nicely into serving the gov't with voting machines (much of the security, hardware, and software is similar between the two devices).
Thus, the argument that it is a "cost issue" is bullcrap. The fact that the case in NJ proves that THE DAMNED THINGS DO NOT COUNT RELIABLY is further evidence that the issues with Diebold are deeper than costs.
I think the analogy works if you imagine Pfizer having a 90% stake of all Heart and Brain medicine and charging huge fees for access to it. Then imagine J&J, Merck, and others collaborating on research in those areas. Sure, they could each invest huge amounts to unseat the lumbering giant, but it would be more efficient to share their resources to increase the competitive pressure they can exert and decrease the overall individual investments that they each need to make.
And if Pfizer did have all their eggs in the Heart and Brain medicine basket, you better believe that they would lash out against the collaborative pressure from any competitors who seek to take their monopoly away from them, just like Gates/Microsoft is doing.
It is too bad that Clarke passed away a month ago. I'm sure he would have loved to see that the military was making a death ray based on his design. article here
This was already discussed... and the going rate for that many Mp3s is actually only $1.8 Quadrillion dollars (though, I wouldn't put it passed them to ask for more so that they can "negotiation a settlement" for only $10 Quadrillion dollars).
To put that into perspective, that is $180,000 Trillion Dollars, or approximately 100 times larger than the annual budget of the United States ($2-3 Trillion) ref.
To put it in a different perspective, each of the Internet's approximately Three Billion users (based on estimates I have seen that ~50% of the world is connected) would only have to illegally download 400 songs to serve up that type of damage.
If sex was used to diffuse social tension, I think you'd see people start arguments over nothing just to end up in bed after their night at the bar.
Man: Hey lady! You are sitting in my seat!
Woman: But I've been here all night.
Man: Doesn't matter. That seat is my territory and you'd better move or I will get real angry.
Woman: You know what? Fuck you, too. And you can can have your stupid chair because their is too much tension here.
Man: By any chance, could I help you relieve your tension?
Woman: I don't see why not. My hotel is across the street. Follow me!
So go find a description in the spec and figure out how the new Microsoft Office *doesn't* implement it as described.
I'll link to you in my blog.
I haven't got the time/energy/desire to troll through the 7,000+ page "standard" and actually check to see that the features described in it are implemented.
Okay... thanks. :)
2 girls 1 document standard? I'd buy that.
I have to interject and rephrase your statement of the "problem" as being biased and closed-minded. --- "Society's real middle-long-term opportunity is to get develop automated systems that have the useful skills to free society's intellectual vanguard to ponder bigger-better problems instead of mundane, repetitive shit." (Show of hands - how many have re-implemented a 5 to 25 year old designs for "modern" tech?).
Meanwhile, with costs driven down by automated systems producing everything from food to electronics each unskilled human laborer won't have to work as many hours to pay their way. Thus, society in general will have more free time AND a higher standard of living. Thus, it won't matter that almost everybody is unskilled and those people can spend time doing what they love instead of flipping burgers at McParadise or manning the teller window at the bank.
I have (one year) written off hours spent developing Open Source as "independent business losses" to avoid sending Uncle Sam a check for $1000 that my tax software told me I owed. The real value of my Open Source time contribution is obviously quite undefined, but I certainly could have spent the time (200-300 hours) that I estimate that I spent doing something for a much more profitable project - so I think it was justified.
Really, what would be great would be if Shuttleworth could create a "Non-for-profit" organization that we could register hours with and then take a tax deduction in April. In a fair economy, my time value of 300 hours would legitimately add up to a $10,000 deduction and that would be a huge boon to justify me to work harder developing Open Source (to "cost" proprietary software companies even MORE!!!).
[But seriously, I saw the number $60 Billion quoted earlier in the thread, and I read that as "Open Source software SAVES the national community of software buyers $60 Billion that they can allocate to more profitable areas of their business."]