At the rate things are going, Christianity *will* be the One World Religion. And you would be surprised how much religions are willing to bend their principles when they're forced to work with a large group of people.
Whenever I hear people in "dear leader" positions throwing around words like purify, patriotism, freedom, etc, it makes me cringe. This is doublespeak; "purify" means "purge."
This is not new, people. What do you think was going on in universities during the Viet Nam War, when people actually had the backbone to stand up and protest like they meant it? This is just the next turn of the wheel; history flows like a river and events repeat themselves.
This sounds like the preliminary formalities before a very large, ugly war...this is making the metaphorical nasty little "cha-chick" noise of cocking weaponry, over and over again. People are taking sides. I'm no Nostradamus, but I have a few predictions about this.
First, the "sellouts" are going to be used as meatshields. They will be the first casualties; the small ones always are in wars like this. And they chose to ally with a group that wants them nothing. They're pissants anyway, given their size and mindshare, but they can still take a few bullets for the Borg. And their corpses, dead or unholily kept alive, will be waved as warnings. Picture ripe, impaled bodies on stakes.
Second, the big players are going to fight in a strange "indirect-alliance" manner. What I mean by that is that Canonical and RedHat, for example, aren't going to announce any formal alliances, and will fight the war on their own fronts, but when push comes to shove they'll lean on IBM. This is because IBM is in direct opposition to SCO (and hence Microsoft, because MS is funding SCO).
Third, IBM is something of a wildcard. I don't think they're quite as friendly to Linux as most people here seem to, or at least not for the reasons most people want to believe. It seems like another "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation. Assuming OSS wins this fight, I would advise the heads to watch their backs around IBM...Big Blue isn't exactly Evil-free (TM) itself. I just have this unnerving feeling that they're supporting OSS only for their own interests.
Lastly, I don't think Microsoft actually has that much in the way of violated IP, if anything. Their reluctance to release the supposedly infringing patents, combined with the reasons mentioned above for not doing so, makes it sound like they're bluffing on a handful of useless cards and giving the other players the hairy eyeball, waiting to see who folds.
Let's hope OSS comes out on top of this...whatever happens I have a bad feeling that it's going to damage the OSS community just because of how much FUD MS spews and how dumb the average marketer and manager is. The one positive thing I can see coming out of this is that it might cull the "weak" (read: weak-willed) players.
Beavis and Butthead summed this situation up nicely:
"I never wanted to be a scientist anyway...science sucks. Uh-huhuhuh-huh..." "Heh, m'yeah, hehheh-heh-heh."
The school system in this country is churning out people who would struggle to keep up with these two intellectually. I went to the Bronx High School of Science and I saw it. There! In Bronx Science! I don't even want to *know* what it would have been like if I had just gone to my zoned school...
In all fairness, it would be harder to create a nationwide botnet if there really was a Linux monoculture. I don't believe Linux makes you invincible -- beyond the inevitable buffer overflows, etc., in programs, there's the social engineering angle, which is really the main attack vector in Windows too. There's just no patch for human stupidity.
The thing about Unix-like OSes isn't that they protect you from malicious programs so much as that they limit the damage that can be done by them without user input (though if your account has cron privileges or other means of auto-running programs and you get taken over you personally are screwed anyway). Barring a privilege-escalation exploit, the worst most things can do is turn your personal account into a radioactive wasteland, or possibly a black hole.
I see the botnet problem as one more of ignorance and social engineering than of poor programming. The latter affects what happens when a computer is compromised, but the former is what causes most infections in the first place.
And that is that this man recently bought ten thousand shares of stock in ScatShine.Inc, world's largest distributor of turd polish. He can spin this all he wants, but even my computer-illiterate siblings know what DRM is (not what the TLA means, but what it *is*) and this wouldn't fool them. I suspect the public at large is getting there as well.
I really don't think Billy Grahm had anything to do with that, even if you seem to...
Re:What about the rest of your evolutionism?
on
The Human Mutation
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· Score: 1
Will someone please explain why the rabid Bible-thumpers seem to think evolution is a religion, and that it applies to *everything* instead of just the biological realm? Or for that matter, why they think science is a religion? Have they forgotten that Darwin was Christian for most of his life, or that Einstein was a Deist?
The ignorance on the Creationist side with regards to basic science is bad enough, and the ignorance of history worse still, but the arrogance on the "you're going to hell!" front is just staggering. Stop telling God what to do, say, be, and look like...and stop taking the Bible literally. It's actually blasphemy to do that, as anyone who actually reads the entire thing knows (instances of God forgetting things, etc).
Enough of this. This isn't getting anywhere, and you're convinced you're right come hell or high water, so to hell with it. I'm not even going to point out how you misinterpreted or otherwise misunderstood the last post. I'm done wasting my time on you.
Azuma - If you could stop hating Microsoft for a second, and understand the theme of the piece, the realities of security, then perhaps you could understand his point.
Stop making baseless assumptions. I'm not another frothing anti-Microsoft fanatic. I'm no sysadmin, but I understand "the realities of security" well enough to know that a broken product will not perform as well as a less-broken (notice I didn't say non-broken) one. That's a reality of security too.
You are the one, who is doing the name calling and slandering while missing the point of the piece. Just because someone writes something neutral about msft does not mean they are MS-apologist.
What other explanation do you have for this? It is not an opinion or a subjective judgment that, say, OpenBSD is more secure by design than Windows XP, for example; it is a cold, hard fact, backed up by years of testing and usage. I invite you to try the above experiment; I have, though on a much smaller scale.
And what has me convinced he is an MS apologist is the line about the "Trustworthy Computing Initiative." For someone to say, in effect, "grow some balls and realize security is vendor-independent" followed by "this company [which is known worldwide for its failures of security] has a plan! Joy!" is self-contradictory at best.
>>>.though he went one further and Godwin'd himself in paragraph 6. This proves undeniably that you did not read the article. Godwin's law is not an absolute. In fact, the Nazi proof was 100% appropriate.
I never said Godwin's Law was absolute, or wrong, or that a comparison to Nazis is never apropos; I've made some such comparisons myself in the past. And how the hell can you tell that I "undeniably did not read the article?" I clicked on the link, waited for it to load, and read the entire thing not once but three times.
And yes Azuma, you may want to see if you can write two sentences without being in full condescending mode.
Here's a mirror. Have a good long look. Oh, there's a pot and a kettle, and surprise, they're both black! (Guess I can't. Oh well, it's deserved in this case.)
with this. If you're worried about being deluged with ads, or being beholden to some tyrannical cable provider's policy on said ads, don't fucking watch TV anymore. Television is a wasteland; aside from a few things like the Discovery channel there is nothing of value to watch, and even that kind of content would be better presented in the form of books or on the Internet.
What people don't seem to understand is that TV subscribers are not the media industry's customers; the customers are the cable companies and other "providers." Cable subscribers are consumers, which is a very different thing from being a customer. To use a movie analogy, since the media seem so popular here: the cable service providers are the code and infrastructure of the Matrix, the media companies are the robots, and you, dear friend, are a giant hairless fetus with a coax cable down your throat, sucking down whatever liquefied crap your providers see fit to squeeze out. Pull the tube out and wake up.
The problem with accepting money from Sun is that, leaving aside their duplicitous licensing practices for the moment, it's far too easy to get caught up in an "offer you can't refuse"-type situation. OSS development is research, and like any research it needs money. But when you take someone's money, even if it's in the form of a donation along the lines of "Hey, OpenSSH kicks ass, here's some cash," it obligates you to them, even if only in the mind of the giver...and we all know what kind of reality-distortion fields corporations are capable of projecting around themselves (strong enough to bend and break laws).
What this means is that there will eventually form a class system in what is intended to be a more-or-less classless social sphere (OSS development). There will, in effect, be two tiers, the funded and the unfunded, and you can guess where most of the talent will go (there will be exceptions of course, but if you can get paid for it, why do it for free?). This will have the secondary effect of transforming funded OSS developers into basically another branch of corporate software development; it makes me think far too much of the human battery pods in the Matrix movies. Anyone who thinks any company or corporation truly cares about anything other than its bottom line is naive.
That *is* the whole article. Pay attention to what the man means, not just what he says.
The third paragraph, beginning "If you put computers on a network..." is where he drops into MS-apologist mode. In particular, this sentence fragment at the end: "...and it has made great strides since 2002, when it announced its Trustworthy Computing initiative" just completely gives away where this guy's loyalties lie.
The rest of the article is just the author regurgitating tautologies on basic security practice that any first-year Comp Sci or Info Tech major could tell you...though he went one further and Godwin'd himself in paragraph 6. This reads like a press release written by someone in Redmond's HR office who got dragooned into doing PR work.
Who let this crap in? This article is so completely, utterly, gratuitously, gaudily wrong that your average high-schooler would call bullshit on it. The entire premise of the article is that "market penetration" (which brings up disturbing if apt images in the context of Microsoft) is the sole determining factor of an OS's security. Bull. SHIT.
I have an idea: put a few hundred systems of every flavor imaginable, unhardened from the default install, on a network without a firewall and see how many of the Windows boxen get owned versus, say, the OpenBSD machines. This guy is saying design doesn't matter, as if a house made of tinkertoys is no more flammable than one made of brick.
This is yet another reason AOL sucks. Their software sucks, their user support sucks, their users (with a few exceptions) and now their legal department sucks. Seriously, what the hell is the point of doing this, and why do it NOW, after Gaim's been around so long?
I do have to agree with the person who said #gaim is a hellhole though. I came in to ask a question about a segfaulting beta, got asked what distro I was using, replied "Gentoo," and was instantly kickbanned. The reason? "We don't like your kind here." And I'm not one of those ricing idiots who uses insane CFLAGS either. Now if only someone would write a simple GTK-based IM client, I would happily drop Gaim off by the side of the ditch like a hitchhiker with a massive case of BO.
Seriously, the entire article read like I imagine conservative AM talk radio sounds. Nothing but appeals to emotion, straw men, ad hominem, and a whole host of other Latin debate no-nos. It even had a deliberately provocative title, only banal and irritating instead of truly provocative. The whole thing was one giant whinge like what your average inbred redneck dribbles out whenever someone mentions gun control laws. I could piss better journalism than this and I'm not even through university yet.
You know, one major problem I see with this (DRM schemes) is that if enough keys are found, especially Device or Player types, it could essentially DDoS the industry. If I were one of these hackers I would do my damndest to find as many keys as possible in as short a time as possible and get them revoked immediately, thus causing the maximum amount of damage in terms of disgruntled customers whose media will no longer play. Every extra moving part is another chink in the armor, another point of failure....
It's been said several times, but hardness != toughness != strength. In particular, the composition of this material reminds me a lot of tempered glass, in that there's a core of material that is held in a non-relaxed (and therefore higher-energy) state. Anyone remember what happens to tempered glass when it gets a scratch? Sure it's good at resisting pressure, but once a crack hits the inner core of material, the whole sheet/lens/object breaks into pixie dust. I don't think this stuff is going to replace diamond anywhere, though it is a nifty bit of materials science.
Slashdot Mirror
At the rate things are going, Christianity *will* be the One World Religion. And you would be surprised how much religions are willing to bend their principles when they're forced to work with a large group of people.
"Mars needs mass."
I thought Mars needed lumberjacks...maybe it will in a couple of centuries? [/wiseass]
Whenever I hear people in "dear leader" positions throwing around words like purify, patriotism, freedom, etc, it makes me cringe. This is doublespeak; "purify" means "purge."
This is not new, people. What do you think was going on in universities during the Viet Nam War, when people actually had the backbone to stand up and protest like they meant it? This is just the next turn of the wheel; history flows like a river and events repeat themselves.
This sounds like the preliminary formalities before a very large, ugly war...this is making the metaphorical nasty little "cha-chick" noise of cocking weaponry, over and over again. People are taking sides. I'm no Nostradamus, but I have a few predictions about this.
First, the "sellouts" are going to be used as meatshields. They will be the first casualties; the small ones always are in wars like this. And they chose to ally with a group that wants them nothing. They're pissants anyway, given their size and mindshare, but they can still take a few bullets for the Borg. And their corpses, dead or unholily kept alive, will be waved as warnings. Picture ripe, impaled bodies on stakes.
Second, the big players are going to fight in a strange "indirect-alliance" manner. What I mean by that is that Canonical and RedHat, for example, aren't going to announce any formal alliances, and will fight the war on their own fronts, but when push comes to shove they'll lean on IBM. This is because IBM is in direct opposition to SCO (and hence Microsoft, because MS is funding SCO).
Third, IBM is something of a wildcard. I don't think they're quite as friendly to Linux as most people here seem to, or at least not for the reasons most people want to believe. It seems like another "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" situation. Assuming OSS wins this fight, I would advise the heads to watch their backs around IBM...Big Blue isn't exactly Evil-free (TM) itself. I just have this unnerving feeling that they're supporting OSS only for their own interests.
Lastly, I don't think Microsoft actually has that much in the way of violated IP, if anything. Their reluctance to release the supposedly infringing patents, combined with the reasons mentioned above for not doing so, makes it sound like they're bluffing on a handful of useless cards and giving the other players the hairy eyeball, waiting to see who folds.
Let's hope OSS comes out on top of this...whatever happens I have a bad feeling that it's going to damage the OSS community just because of how much FUD MS spews and how dumb the average marketer and manager is. The one positive thing I can see coming out of this is that it might cull the "weak" (read: weak-willed) players.
Try Galeon or Epiphany? ...or Links, if you're a real curmudgeon. Kids, lawn, off, etc.
o wsers can be of some use?
In the event you're not using Linux or *BSD, maybe the browser comparison chart on Wikipedia http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_web_br
Beavis and Butthead summed this situation up nicely:
"I never wanted to be a scientist anyway...science sucks. Uh-huhuhuh-huh..."
"Heh, m'yeah, hehheh-heh-heh."
The school system in this country is churning out people who would struggle to keep up with these two intellectually. I went to the Bronx High School of Science and I saw it. There! In Bronx Science! I don't even want to *know* what it would have been like if I had just gone to my zoned school...
In all fairness, it would be harder to create a nationwide botnet if there really was a Linux monoculture. I don't believe Linux makes you invincible -- beyond the inevitable buffer overflows, etc., in programs, there's the social engineering angle, which is really the main attack vector in Windows too. There's just no patch for human stupidity.
The thing about Unix-like OSes isn't that they protect you from malicious programs so much as that they limit the damage that can be done by them without user input (though if your account has cron privileges or other means of auto-running programs and you get taken over you personally are screwed anyway). Barring a privilege-escalation exploit, the worst most things can do is turn your personal account into a radioactive wasteland, or possibly a black hole.
I see the botnet problem as one more of ignorance and social engineering than of poor programming. The latter affects what happens when a computer is compromised, but the former is what causes most infections in the first place.
My head is going to explode. I actually want Microsoft to win a lawsuit. Hold me, mommy, I'm scared...
And that is that this man recently bought ten thousand shares of stock in ScatShine.Inc, world's largest distributor of turd polish. He can spin this all he wants, but even my computer-illiterate siblings know what DRM is (not what the TLA means, but what it *is*) and this wouldn't fool them. I suspect the public at large is getting there as well.
I really don't think Billy Grahm had anything to do with that, even if you seem to...
Will someone please explain why the rabid Bible-thumpers seem to think evolution is a religion, and that it applies to *everything* instead of just the biological realm? Or for that matter, why they think science is a religion? Have they forgotten that Darwin was Christian for most of his life, or that Einstein was a Deist?
The ignorance on the Creationist side with regards to basic science is bad enough, and the ignorance of history worse still, but the arrogance on the "you're going to hell!" front is just staggering. Stop telling God what to do, say, be, and look like...and stop taking the Bible literally. It's actually blasphemy to do that, as anyone who actually reads the entire thing knows (instances of God forgetting things, etc).
Enough of this. This isn't getting anywhere, and you're convinced you're right come hell or high water, so to hell with it. I'm not even going to point out how you misinterpreted or otherwise misunderstood the last post. I'm done wasting my time on you.
Azuma - If you could stop hating Microsoft for a second, and understand the theme of the piece, the realities of security, then perhaps you could understand his point.
Stop making baseless assumptions. I'm not another frothing anti-Microsoft fanatic. I'm no sysadmin, but I understand "the realities of security" well enough to know that a broken product will not perform as well as a less-broken (notice I didn't say non-broken) one. That's a reality of security too.
You are the one, who is doing the name calling and slandering while missing the point of the piece. Just because someone writes something neutral about msft does not mean they are MS-apologist.
What other explanation do you have for this? It is not an opinion or a subjective judgment that, say, OpenBSD is more secure by design than Windows XP, for example; it is a cold, hard fact, backed up by years of testing and usage. I invite you to try the above experiment; I have, though on a much smaller scale.
And what has me convinced he is an MS apologist is the line about the "Trustworthy Computing Initiative." For someone to say, in effect, "grow some balls and realize security is vendor-independent" followed by "this company [which is known worldwide for its failures of security] has a plan! Joy!" is self-contradictory at best.
>>>.though he went one further and Godwin'd himself in paragraph 6. This proves undeniably that you did not read the article. Godwin's law is not an absolute. In fact, the Nazi proof was 100% appropriate.
I never said Godwin's Law was absolute, or wrong, or that a comparison to Nazis is never apropos; I've made some such comparisons myself in the past. And how the hell can you tell that I "undeniably did not read the article?" I clicked on the link, waited for it to load, and read the entire thing not once but three times.
And yes Azuma, you may want to see if you can write two sentences without being in full condescending mode.
Here's a mirror. Have a good long look. Oh, there's a pot and a kettle, and surprise, they're both black! (Guess I can't. Oh well, it's deserved in this case.)
with this. If you're worried about being deluged with ads, or being beholden to some tyrannical cable provider's policy on said ads, don't fucking watch TV anymore. Television is a wasteland; aside from a few things like the Discovery channel there is nothing of value to watch, and even that kind of content would be better presented in the form of books or on the Internet.
What people don't seem to understand is that TV subscribers are not the media industry's customers; the customers are the cable companies and other "providers." Cable subscribers are consumers, which is a very different thing from being a customer. To use a movie analogy, since the media seem so popular here: the cable service providers are the code and infrastructure of the Matrix, the media companies are the robots, and you, dear friend, are a giant hairless fetus with a coax cable down your throat, sucking down whatever liquefied crap your providers see fit to squeeze out. Pull the tube out and wake up.
The problem with accepting money from Sun is that, leaving aside their duplicitous licensing practices for the moment, it's far too easy to get caught up in an "offer you can't refuse"-type situation. OSS development is research, and like any research it needs money. But when you take someone's money, even if it's in the form of a donation along the lines of "Hey, OpenSSH kicks ass, here's some cash," it obligates you to them, even if only in the mind of the giver...and we all know what kind of reality-distortion fields corporations are capable of projecting around themselves (strong enough to bend and break laws).
What this means is that there will eventually form a class system in what is intended to be a more-or-less classless social sphere (OSS development). There will, in effect, be two tiers, the funded and the unfunded, and you can guess where most of the talent will go (there will be exceptions of course, but if you can get paid for it, why do it for free?). This will have the secondary effect of transforming funded OSS developers into basically another branch of corporate software development; it makes me think far too much of the human battery pods in the Matrix movies. Anyone who thinks any company or corporation truly cares about anything other than its bottom line is naive.
OpenSSH. Perhaps OpenSSH itself is not directly generating the revenue, but it is damn well helping the companies that use it do so.
That *is* the whole article. Pay attention to what the man means, not just what he says. The third paragraph, beginning "If you put computers on a network..." is where he drops into MS-apologist mode. In particular, this sentence fragment at the end: "...and it has made great strides since 2002, when it announced its Trustworthy Computing initiative" just completely gives away where this guy's loyalties lie. The rest of the article is just the author regurgitating tautologies on basic security practice that any first-year Comp Sci or Info Tech major could tell you...though he went one further and Godwin'd himself in paragraph 6. This reads like a press release written by someone in Redmond's HR office who got dragooned into doing PR work.
Who let this crap in? This article is so completely, utterly, gratuitously, gaudily wrong that your average high-schooler would call bullshit on it. The entire premise of the article is that "market penetration" (which brings up disturbing if apt images in the context of Microsoft) is the sole determining factor of an OS's security. Bull. SHIT.
I have an idea: put a few hundred systems of every flavor imaginable, unhardened from the default install, on a network without a firewall and see how many of the Windows boxen get owned versus, say, the OpenBSD machines. This guy is saying design doesn't matter, as if a house made of tinkertoys is no more flammable than one made of brick.
They made authority figures look bad. It's as simple as that.
Serves Them Right (TM). I hope they go down hard and painfully.
This is yet another reason AOL sucks. Their software sucks, their user support sucks, their users (with a few exceptions) and now their legal department sucks. Seriously, what the hell is the point of doing this, and why do it NOW, after Gaim's been around so long?
I do have to agree with the person who said #gaim is a hellhole though. I came in to ask a question about a segfaulting beta, got asked what distro I was using, replied "Gentoo," and was instantly kickbanned. The reason? "We don't like your kind here." And I'm not one of those ricing idiots who uses insane CFLAGS either. Now if only someone would write a simple GTK-based IM client, I would happily drop Gaim off by the side of the ditch like a hitchhiker with a massive case of BO.
...what the fuck?
Seriously, the entire article read like I imagine conservative AM talk radio sounds. Nothing but appeals to emotion, straw men, ad hominem, and a whole host of other Latin debate no-nos. It even had a deliberately provocative title, only banal and irritating instead of truly provocative. The whole thing was one giant whinge like what your average inbred redneck dribbles out whenever someone mentions gun control laws. I could piss better journalism than this and I'm not even through university yet.
You know, one major problem I see with this (DRM schemes) is that if enough keys are found, especially Device or Player types, it could essentially DDoS the industry. If I were one of these hackers I would do my damndest to find as many keys as possible in as short a time as possible and get them revoked immediately, thus causing the maximum amount of damage in terms of disgruntled customers whose media will no longer play. Every extra moving part is another chink in the armor, another point of failure....
It's been said several times, but hardness != toughness != strength. In particular, the composition of this material reminds me a lot of tempered glass, in that there's a core of material that is held in a non-relaxed (and therefore higher-energy) state. Anyone remember what happens to tempered glass when it gets a scratch? Sure it's good at resisting pressure, but once a crack hits the inner core of material, the whole sheet/lens/object breaks into pixie dust. I don't think this stuff is going to replace diamond anywhere, though it is a nifty bit of materials science.