I'm not suggesting it has to do with filesystem placement, but that Microsoft's software has the ability to read and modify everything Firefox has access to. How do you propose creating an encrypted database that only Firefox has access to? Where do you plan to keep the key that Firefox can get it but Windows updates can't? This works (for a while) for proprietary software employing security through obscurity, but it could never work for open source software.
The DMCA applies to "technological measures used by copyright owners to protect their works." I think it would be hard to argue that it applies to this kind of protection.
I saw something a while back that suggested even that is insufficient, if they can demonstrate your camera filmed the video using an MPEG-LA covered technology. I don't think they've ever pursued such a case, but when you purchase a camera that records with MPEG-LA covered technology, your patent license sets limits on the content you record with it, regardless of what format it ends up in.
Personally, I'm hoping for some cameras that record WebM in the near future (of course, this hope hinges on the hope that WebM isn't eventually covered by its own patent pool).
How do you propose Firefox prevent the installation of an extension by software that has direct file system access? Firefox is open source, so anyone can look and see how an extension is installed. Third party software need only update the right files and the extension would be installed. Firefox had no control over any step.
Now, this doesn't make Firefox a good target for malware writers. Anyone who can execute arbitrary code on your system doesn't need Firefox to cause problems.
I disagree. I would argue that FOSS is the pinnacle of free market capitalism.
In a free market, price is dictated by supply and demand. With software, supply is effectively infinite, so the price should trend towards zero. Only by introducing artificial barriers are companies able to profit by selling software. If you assume that the costs of development can be covered without charging for software (which FOSS demonstrates to be the case) the per-unit price of software should fall to zero in a free market.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that the majority of people that do FOSS work do it unpaid on their own time. This may be true if you consider the sheer volume and variety of FOSS, but if you look at the most popular and widely used projects you'll see a different trend. The main contributors to the Linux kernel are paid by Novell and Redhat. The GNOME project is funded by the GNOME foundation, which charges for-profit corporations to be part of the advisory board. MySQL was funded by selling alternative licenses to customers who did not wish to be bound by the GPL. OpenOffice.org was developed primarily by Sun employees. Mozilla gets revenue from an ad deal with Google.
I could go on, but I think I've gotten the point across. The large open source projects that typical end users interact with are funded by companies because it helps their bottom line. Certainly, there are projects run by volunteers, and there are volunteer contributors to the projects I've just mentioned, but I believe a significant portion of the work is done by paid contributors.
I think it's worth pointing out that Ubuntu's repositories have always used 32-bit flash + nspluginwrapper even while 64-bit flash was available. I've never found either of these solutions to be particularly stable, but this doesn't mean 64-bit Linux is going without flash completely.
I remember reading a while back that someone had a problem where an application they had installed on their iPod touch automatically upgraded to a version that required the next version of the operating system. The next version of the operating system cost $9.99, so the person writing the article had to pay apple to keep using software he had already paid for.
I'm not an iPod/iPhone/iPad user, and I don't remember the details of the article, but I definitely remember someone complaining that he had to pay apple to upgrade his OS just to keep using the apps he already paid for.
This was my experience. I had a dispute with T-Mobile a while back, where an employee had made me a promise before I entered my contract, and the company subsequently refused to honor it. They tried to claim that the employee had no right to offer such a promise, but I argued that I wouldn't have entered the contract if she hadn't. They didn't care, because I had no proof of the promise. I went back to that store with a recorder hidden in my pocket and talked to the employee who made the promise (I checked out the law before hand, and in my state this can produce admissible evidence). She said she remembered making that offer, but apologized that she couldn't help me out. With the recording in hand, I called up T-Mobile's customer loyalty and told them that I was ready to file a claim and had a recording as evidence, and all I needed was their registered agent so I could serve them. Suddenly they were happy to work with me, despite three months of denying responsibility and refusing to help.
I'm not going to disagree with the idea of creating in-game tools, but modding doesn't have to be that difficult or frustrating. Certainly, modding is easier than creating your own game engine from scratch. I first started coding by working on my own TFC server-side mod, and I learned a lot. I was able to do quite a bit with the game's built in effects and models, and actively avoided doing any of my own artwork. I started out by changing simple little parameters within the game engine, such as setting smaller opacity values or decreasing the gravity for individual players. Eventually I figured out how to add my own guns and grenades, as well as manipulating other parts of the world. By the time real life took over and I got tired of it, my mod had a built in web-server that allowed the admin to log in and administer his game server from anywhere he had a browser.
I would say that doing the server side mods had a lot of the same results you attribute to in-game tools. It wasn't so much optimization, but manipulation of something I was already doing. It made play more fun (in my opinion), and my mod improved with each iteration.
This was what got me into coding (now a masters student in CS). I have very little artistic ability, so creating games that required me to do any 3D modeling or sprite animation was out of the question. But I was able to create a TFC server-side mod that added all sorts of weapons and special features to the game without doing any graphics design (I mainly used Half-Life models that weren't normally used in TFC). I had a great time, learned enough C++ to be dangerous, and my mod had a little bit of a following. More importantly, I discovered an interest that has evolved into both a hobby and career path.
I can't imagine many applications where the overhead of an entire virtualized operating system would be less resource intensive than running the application with a thin API layer. It might be necessary for some applications that don't work on wine, but I can't imagine it would be fruitful if the application functions properly on Wine.
But in today's world of general practitioners who spend as little time with their patients as possible, individuals must take some amount of the research on to themselves.
No kidding. My grandfather had cataracts. He had read about the condition in a magazine or something, and realized that he had similar symptoms. He went to the optometrist and was formally diagnosed with cataracts. Just a few weeks later, he went back to the same doctor regarding treatment, and the doctor wanted to know who had diagnosed him. My grandfather mentioned reading about it in a magazine, and the doctor started lecturing him about self diagnosis. My grandfather got really confused (which was a common state, as he was getting senile in old age), and my mom stepped in to explain to the doctor that he had diagnosed my grandfather with cataracts.
When doctors can't even remember a diagnosis they made a few weeks earlier, I have a hard time trusting them to make an accurate diagnosis.
How much difference does it actually make if you're the one using the cell phone vs being anywhere in the vicinity of a cell phone and tower? I'm not asking about cancer risk, because we've already seen those results were inconclusive, but I'm assuming we have some way to measure exposure to radiation. I would guess people who live closer to cell towers are exposed to more radiation than someone who is using a cell phone all day, but that could be a completely false assumption. If that guess is correct, however, I doubt there would be much correlation to radiation exposure and lifestyle factors.
I currently have a 5x500GB RAID 5, booting off of a cheap USB flash drive. I lost a disk a couple months ago, and discovered I had bad sectors on one of the surviving parity disks. I used dd_rescue to recover past them, but I've been discovering corrupted files ever since. At this point I'd probably recommend RAID-6, which gives you extra parity to help prevent against disk failures. If I ever have the money, I'll probably do a 4x2TB RAID-6. For now I've still got a few hundred GB on my RAID-5, and since I gave up cable MythTV hasn't been consuming my hard drives like crazy.
Right. The other requirements Hulu mentions are things that could be accomplished by open standards, but I have a hard time imagining any mechanism for implementing DRM in an open standard.
This was my thought. Both in the city where I grew up and the city I came to for college there are technical/vocational schools all over the place. Also in both cities, you've been able to take classes in these technical schools in lieu of high school classes. I had friends in high school who left half-way through the day for their Junior and Senior years and graduated high school a semester away from an associates degree.
The technical schools are definitely available. I'd say they're underutilized because of the common belief that a bachelor's degree is a necessity. The fault lies partly with students who think they can't be successful without a bachelors in something, and partly with employers who require a bachelors degree to get a job that doesn't really benefit from a bachelors degree.
I'm not trying to rationalize piracy, I'm disputing with pnewhook's argument that open source developers are the same people who advocate piracy. Assuming open source developers are at all interested in market share, then their interests are served when people use their software instead of pirating commercial software. When I say that pirating commercial software lets businesses keep their mindshare I'm not saying it's always a good thing for those businesses, just that it's a bad thing for their open source competitors.
I would agree with this. A friend of mine did his masters thesis on a new concept of mandatory access control. I tried to help implement this in the Linux kernel, taking charge of the Linux Security Module. I spent an entire summer doing researcher and worked on it for large parts of the adjacent school years, and I could never really get a grasp of how to write an LSM. There was some documentation from early on, but that was from when Linux Security Modules were actually modules, not statically compiled into the kernel as they are today. Everywhere I looked, the sentiment seemed to be that the only LSMs that anyone had written were part of the main stream kernel, so there was no reason for it to be modularized. All of the documentation was out of date, and nobody seemed to be interested in helping some newbie find his way through the kernel. After a while, interest in the project waned and I gave up on it.
I agree. Many people view open source software as a better alternative to pirated software. Also worth noting: pirating commercial software lets the business keep mindshare. Adobe doesn't pursue students who pirate Photoshop because they would rather hook kids on photoshop so they'll buy it later than see them get adapt to a cheaper (or open source) alternative and never become a customer. The same is true for Windows: Microsoft would rather see people pirate Windows than switch to Linux; at least that way they keep the mindshare.
In general, I think piracy is as much an enemy of open source software as it is commercial software. There could be people who oppose software piracy but support movie and music piracy, but I think very often people take the same stance on piracy across the board.
As a colorblind guy, I would have no problem being asked this question, and no ill will towards people who say yes, but my answer would be "no thank you." I've been colorblind for 23 years so far, and I don't particularly care to alter my vision to "normal."
The thing is, after the first generation or two of patients your question no longer applies. Parents would want to have their at-risk children tested and cured during early childhood (if not infancy). Kids wouldn't have the opportunity to make the decision for themselves. Personally I don't have a problem with that, but I think the ethical question is more applicable to people who would be cured before they could make their own decision.
But if I'm buying a box of LEGO bricks that is advertised to be used, I'm going to be skeptical of anything advertised on the box that describes the new product. Marking something as used implies that it's not quite the same as it was when it was new, even if it comes with original packaging.
Mindless stenography (which is what the OP admits to doing) is hardly ignoring what is being taught. It implies taking notes that don't really stick at the time, but that doesn't mean you don't have them to refer to later. It's quite different from browsing facebook or slashdot during class.
I got a laptop my sophomore year in college, and started using it to take notes in all my classes (even in the math classes I used LaTeX markup for taking notes). I didn't always get a great grasp of the concepts during the lecture, but in general it was no worse than if I'd been taking notes by hand, plus I'd have much better notes to refer to later (not to mention searchable notes).
Also, I'm not sure where you get the idea that professors are graded on the success of their students. At my university professors are graded on the quality of their research and the quantity of their publications. A crappy teacher can get tenure if they do good research, and a great teacher can be denied tenure if they don't get published enough. I saw it happen both ways during my four years as an undergrad.
'We cheat. We get to read what [academics] publish. We do not publish what we research,'
That's all well and good for cryptanalysis, which is more or less provable, but for new encryption algorithms the more eyes you have looking at your algorithm the more certain you can be of its strengths. Not letting people look at your encryption algorithms seems to be relying on security through obscurity.
It seems a tad excessive to have all the overhead of an operating system for private browsing.
A technique I've used before was to use UnionFS with a ramdisk over my.mozilla folder. All changes during the session would be written to RAM, and once I no longer needed the session I'd destroy the RAM disk.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not suggesting it has to do with filesystem placement, but that Microsoft's software has the ability to read and modify everything Firefox has access to. How do you propose creating an encrypted database that only Firefox has access to? Where do you plan to keep the key that Firefox can get it but Windows updates can't? This works (for a while) for proprietary software employing security through obscurity, but it could never work for open source software.
The DMCA applies to "technological measures used by copyright owners to protect their works." I think it would be hard to argue that it applies to this kind of protection.
I saw something a while back that suggested even that is insufficient, if they can demonstrate your camera filmed the video using an MPEG-LA covered technology. I don't think they've ever pursued such a case, but when you purchase a camera that records with MPEG-LA covered technology, your patent license sets limits on the content you record with it, regardless of what format it ends up in.
Personally, I'm hoping for some cameras that record WebM in the near future (of course, this hope hinges on the hope that WebM isn't eventually covered by its own patent pool).
How do you propose Firefox prevent the installation of an extension by software that has direct file system access? Firefox is open source, so anyone can look and see how an extension is installed. Third party software need only update the right files and the extension would be installed. Firefox had no control over any step.
Now, this doesn't make Firefox a good target for malware writers. Anyone who can execute arbitrary code on your system doesn't need Firefox to cause problems.
I disagree. I would argue that FOSS is the pinnacle of free market capitalism.
In a free market, price is dictated by supply and demand. With software, supply is effectively infinite, so the price should trend towards zero. Only by introducing artificial barriers are companies able to profit by selling software. If you assume that the costs of development can be covered without charging for software (which FOSS demonstrates to be the case) the per-unit price of software should fall to zero in a free market.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that the majority of people that do FOSS work do it unpaid on their own time. This may be true if you consider the sheer volume and variety of FOSS, but if you look at the most popular and widely used projects you'll see a different trend. The main contributors to the Linux kernel are paid by Novell and Redhat. The GNOME project is funded by the GNOME foundation, which charges for-profit corporations to be part of the advisory board. MySQL was funded by selling alternative licenses to customers who did not wish to be bound by the GPL. OpenOffice.org was developed primarily by Sun employees. Mozilla gets revenue from an ad deal with Google.
I could go on, but I think I've gotten the point across. The large open source projects that typical end users interact with are funded by companies because it helps their bottom line. Certainly, there are projects run by volunteers, and there are volunteer contributors to the projects I've just mentioned, but I believe a significant portion of the work is done by paid contributors.
I think it's worth pointing out that Ubuntu's repositories have always used 32-bit flash + nspluginwrapper even while 64-bit flash was available. I've never found either of these solutions to be particularly stable, but this doesn't mean 64-bit Linux is going without flash completely.
I remember reading a while back that someone had a problem where an application they had installed on their iPod touch automatically upgraded to a version that required the next version of the operating system. The next version of the operating system cost $9.99, so the person writing the article had to pay apple to keep using software he had already paid for.
I'm not an iPod/iPhone/iPad user, and I don't remember the details of the article, but I definitely remember someone complaining that he had to pay apple to upgrade his OS just to keep using the apps he already paid for.
This was my experience. I had a dispute with T-Mobile a while back, where an employee had made me a promise before I entered my contract, and the company subsequently refused to honor it. They tried to claim that the employee had no right to offer such a promise, but I argued that I wouldn't have entered the contract if she hadn't. They didn't care, because I had no proof of the promise. I went back to that store with a recorder hidden in my pocket and talked to the employee who made the promise (I checked out the law before hand, and in my state this can produce admissible evidence). She said she remembered making that offer, but apologized that she couldn't help me out. With the recording in hand, I called up T-Mobile's customer loyalty and told them that I was ready to file a claim and had a recording as evidence, and all I needed was their registered agent so I could serve them. Suddenly they were happy to work with me, despite three months of denying responsibility and refusing to help.
I'm not going to disagree with the idea of creating in-game tools, but modding doesn't have to be that difficult or frustrating. Certainly, modding is easier than creating your own game engine from scratch. I first started coding by working on my own TFC server-side mod, and I learned a lot. I was able to do quite a bit with the game's built in effects and models, and actively avoided doing any of my own artwork. I started out by changing simple little parameters within the game engine, such as setting smaller opacity values or decreasing the gravity for individual players. Eventually I figured out how to add my own guns and grenades, as well as manipulating other parts of the world. By the time real life took over and I got tired of it, my mod had a built in web-server that allowed the admin to log in and administer his game server from anywhere he had a browser.
I would say that doing the server side mods had a lot of the same results you attribute to in-game tools. It wasn't so much optimization, but manipulation of something I was already doing. It made play more fun (in my opinion), and my mod improved with each iteration.
This was what got me into coding (now a masters student in CS). I have very little artistic ability, so creating games that required me to do any 3D modeling or sprite animation was out of the question. But I was able to create a TFC server-side mod that added all sorts of weapons and special features to the game without doing any graphics design (I mainly used Half-Life models that weren't normally used in TFC). I had a great time, learned enough C++ to be dangerous, and my mod had a little bit of a following. More importantly, I discovered an interest that has evolved into both a hobby and career path.
The main thing I use swap for these days is hibernating my laptop. What I need is persistent storage - the quicker the better.
I can't imagine many applications where the overhead of an entire virtualized operating system would be less resource intensive than running the application with a thin API layer. It might be necessary for some applications that don't work on wine, but I can't imagine it would be fruitful if the application functions properly on Wine.
No kidding. My grandfather had cataracts. He had read about the condition in a magazine or something, and realized that he had similar symptoms. He went to the optometrist and was formally diagnosed with cataracts. Just a few weeks later, he went back to the same doctor regarding treatment, and the doctor wanted to know who had diagnosed him. My grandfather mentioned reading about it in a magazine, and the doctor started lecturing him about self diagnosis. My grandfather got really confused (which was a common state, as he was getting senile in old age), and my mom stepped in to explain to the doctor that he had diagnosed my grandfather with cataracts.
When doctors can't even remember a diagnosis they made a few weeks earlier, I have a hard time trusting them to make an accurate diagnosis.
How much difference does it actually make if you're the one using the cell phone vs being anywhere in the vicinity of a cell phone and tower? I'm not asking about cancer risk, because we've already seen those results were inconclusive, but I'm assuming we have some way to measure exposure to radiation. I would guess people who live closer to cell towers are exposed to more radiation than someone who is using a cell phone all day, but that could be a completely false assumption. If that guess is correct, however, I doubt there would be much correlation to radiation exposure and lifestyle factors.
I currently have a 5x500GB RAID 5, booting off of a cheap USB flash drive. I lost a disk a couple months ago, and discovered I had bad sectors on one of the surviving parity disks. I used dd_rescue to recover past them, but I've been discovering corrupted files ever since. At this point I'd probably recommend RAID-6, which gives you extra parity to help prevent against disk failures. If I ever have the money, I'll probably do a 4x2TB RAID-6. For now I've still got a few hundred GB on my RAID-5, and since I gave up cable MythTV hasn't been consuming my hard drives like crazy.
Right. The other requirements Hulu mentions are things that could be accomplished by open standards, but I have a hard time imagining any mechanism for implementing DRM in an open standard.
This was my thought. Both in the city where I grew up and the city I came to for college there are technical/vocational schools all over the place. Also in both cities, you've been able to take classes in these technical schools in lieu of high school classes. I had friends in high school who left half-way through the day for their Junior and Senior years and graduated high school a semester away from an associates degree.
The technical schools are definitely available. I'd say they're underutilized because of the common belief that a bachelor's degree is a necessity. The fault lies partly with students who think they can't be successful without a bachelors in something, and partly with employers who require a bachelors degree to get a job that doesn't really benefit from a bachelors degree.
I'm not trying to rationalize piracy, I'm disputing with pnewhook's argument that open source developers are the same people who advocate piracy. Assuming open source developers are at all interested in market share, then their interests are served when people use their software instead of pirating commercial software. When I say that pirating commercial software lets businesses keep their mindshare I'm not saying it's always a good thing for those businesses, just that it's a bad thing for their open source competitors.
I would agree with this. A friend of mine did his masters thesis on a new concept of mandatory access control. I tried to help implement this in the Linux kernel, taking charge of the Linux Security Module. I spent an entire summer doing researcher and worked on it for large parts of the adjacent school years, and I could never really get a grasp of how to write an LSM. There was some documentation from early on, but that was from when Linux Security Modules were actually modules, not statically compiled into the kernel as they are today. Everywhere I looked, the sentiment seemed to be that the only LSMs that anyone had written were part of the main stream kernel, so there was no reason for it to be modularized. All of the documentation was out of date, and nobody seemed to be interested in helping some newbie find his way through the kernel. After a while, interest in the project waned and I gave up on it.
I agree. Many people view open source software as a better alternative to pirated software. Also worth noting: pirating commercial software lets the business keep mindshare. Adobe doesn't pursue students who pirate Photoshop because they would rather hook kids on photoshop so they'll buy it later than see them get adapt to a cheaper (or open source) alternative and never become a customer. The same is true for Windows: Microsoft would rather see people pirate Windows than switch to Linux; at least that way they keep the mindshare.
In general, I think piracy is as much an enemy of open source software as it is commercial software. There could be people who oppose software piracy but support movie and music piracy, but I think very often people take the same stance on piracy across the board.
As a colorblind guy, I would have no problem being asked this question, and no ill will towards people who say yes, but my answer would be "no thank you." I've been colorblind for 23 years so far, and I don't particularly care to alter my vision to "normal."
The thing is, after the first generation or two of patients your question no longer applies. Parents would want to have their at-risk children tested and cured during early childhood (if not infancy). Kids wouldn't have the opportunity to make the decision for themselves. Personally I don't have a problem with that, but I think the ethical question is more applicable to people who would be cured before they could make their own decision.
But if I'm buying a box of LEGO bricks that is advertised to be used, I'm going to be skeptical of anything advertised on the box that describes the new product. Marking something as used implies that it's not quite the same as it was when it was new, even if it comes with original packaging.
Mindless stenography (which is what the OP admits to doing) is hardly ignoring what is being taught. It implies taking notes that don't really stick at the time, but that doesn't mean you don't have them to refer to later. It's quite different from browsing facebook or slashdot during class.
I got a laptop my sophomore year in college, and started using it to take notes in all my classes (even in the math classes I used LaTeX markup for taking notes). I didn't always get a great grasp of the concepts during the lecture, but in general it was no worse than if I'd been taking notes by hand, plus I'd have much better notes to refer to later (not to mention searchable notes).
Also, I'm not sure where you get the idea that professors are graded on the success of their students. At my university professors are graded on the quality of their research and the quantity of their publications. A crappy teacher can get tenure if they do good research, and a great teacher can be denied tenure if they don't get published enough. I saw it happen both ways during my four years as an undergrad.
That's all well and good for cryptanalysis, which is more or less provable, but for new encryption algorithms the more eyes you have looking at your algorithm the more certain you can be of its strengths. Not letting people look at your encryption algorithms seems to be relying on security through obscurity.
It seems a tad excessive to have all the overhead of an operating system for private browsing.
A technique I've used before was to use UnionFS with a ramdisk over my .mozilla folder. All changes during the session would be written to RAM, and once I no longer needed the session I'd destroy the RAM disk.