Maybe I'm wrong here, but isn't it quite common in Canada to deliberately create a law proposal so bad it won't pass as that is some times easier than opposing it? I.e, if politics is such that you can't officially oppose something, then you just create a stooge proposal which is doomed to fail instead. At least that's what a Canadian friend of me claimed, so I figured maybe this is a bit like that? Of course I could be wrong, I don't really know enough about Canada to be sure.
Right, I shouldn't feed the trolls, but if you modify that a little bit:
"Your salary will be 10% lower than what our main competitor offer, but we let you use whatever operating system you please, you don't have to sign any NDAs or non-competes, you get to keep copyright and other IP rights for things you create in your spare time, and you will never ever have to touch exchange, office or Internet explorer to do your job."
I dunno about you, but compared to the bullshit some people have to deal with, such a contract would be rather appealing actually.
Scepticism without any rational argument to back it up is just as retarded as blind faith. In fact, they're just the same. To be sceptical about A without a good justification is equivalent to blindly trusting NOT(A). Did you get that? To be sceptical about the earth NOT being the centre of the universe is just the same as believing it is.
It is quite remarkable how many people fail to understand that scepticism is just a belief in itself. Apply that logic to ID, Global Warming Sceptics, Radiation fearmongering... It is all the same. The "sceptics" are promoting a belief without justification, claiming they don't have to give any evidence because "the burden of proof is not on the sceptics". This is of course nonsense.
Your entire post can be summarised as: "Think of the children!". The irony is that refusing to vaccinate your kids is many times more likely to cause them harm than the vaccination is. There's good reason to be sceptical about your scepticism ( and here "good reason" is a major understatement ).
This could theoretically be used in an acceptable non-evil manner. The problem is that when you have a choice of implementing a sensible system that doesn't interfere with customers' rights, and implementing a broken overzealous piece of crap which causes a hassle for everybody without really deterring copyright infringement, our incompetent friends among the record companies will choose the latter.
I wish legislators would just get off their ass and prohibit Microsoft from charging different prices for the stand-alone OS and the OEM versions. Sure, if Microsoft were playing nice they should have the privilege to set prices as they see fit. Problem is that they haven't been playing nice, rather they have used their OEM discounts and other bribes ( yeas that is what they are ) to force suppliers into installing Windows on every machine.
The consequences should be obvious, if they abuse their privilege to set different prices for different customers, then they should lose that privilege, end of story. You don't even have to force the vendors to unbundle windows, if there is a demand for machines without Windows it will sort itself out once you stop Microsoft from preventing it. Simply put, if they can make a profit selling the OS to OEMs for X then they are abusing their monopoly if they demand 2X from regular customers.
It wasn't as much intended as a way to create an easy to remember pin, as an easy way to get a very random number using minimal equipment. Books are very good for this because they are readily available, you can easily extract random data from them, and it is very hard / impossible for somebody to spy on you generating the key.
Of course, if you are bad at remembering passwords then you may have to use a different method.
Pin numbers: Open a large book on random pages and note down the LAST digit. Repeat until the pin is long enough.
For passphrases: Pick a book, open it on a random page and note down the first word on that page longer than 3 characters. Generate 2 pass phrases this way and insert the acronym of one of them into the other. Add some random special characters and numbers at random places (i.e chosen as for pin numbers ).
May well be vulnerabilities in there, but if you know enough about computer security to avoid exposing yourself to orders of magnitude greater ones, then chances are you are able to generate a good pass phrase.
Amusingly enough Microsoft has answered this question. In the leaked "Halloween documents" there was a number of suggested ways Sun and IBM could make money from open source. I quote:
There are 4 primary business models we have identified for Open Source Software.
1. Secondary Services - The vendor / developer of OSS makes their money on service contracts, customer integration, etc.
2. Loss Leader for Market Entry -- The vendor / developer of OSS uses OSS's process advantages (in particular credibility) as a lever against established commercial vendors.
3. Commoditizing Downstream Suppliers -- The vendor / developer of OSS is also the producer of a product / service further in the value chain and closer to the consumer.
4. Standards Preemption - Because OSS process are argued to be winner-take-all, it may suit the vendor / developer to seed the OSS market with their codebase to pre-empt a competitive codebase from taking hold.
I particularily like this quote:
Other worst case adoption scenarios are subsets of the Sun / IBM case and involve other PC vendors such as Compaq and Dell.
Note, however, that Compaq and Dell merely have to credibly threaten Linux adoption in order to push for lower OEM OS pricing.
In other words, what Microsoft considered "worst case scenario" 10 years ago has already happened. The only thing left for them is compatibility with third party software and existing documents. If they lose their office monopoly they are in serious trouble. With both ODF and PDF now ISO standards, things are looking bright. PDF is already a de-facto standard for publishing and with readily available tools to convert between the two... Be afraid Redmond, be very afraid.
It's not just that they bundle it. The fact that they don't let you opt out, and that there isn't any way to remove the software, is just as much part of the problem. Additionally, Microsoft keeping parts of their API secret so that only software they bundle can use it is further damning. If all Microsoft did was to install a media player by default, then chances are there wouldn't have been any issues. However, fusing their applications so tight into the system that you can't remove them even if you want to (simultaneously causing security problems ) and keeping parts of the API available to you secret from your competitors, while all along pushing for adoption of formats that you refuse to license to others... now that is QUITE a different thing.
Furthermore, case between Realplayer and Microsoft was settled out of court, the main quarrel about the anti trust case was the EU demand that Microsoft share their API documentation with competitors, which Microsoft pretended to be doing while in reality supplying useless information and misrepresenting it as "documentation". It was quite stupid to be honest. While this case may not have hurt them too bad, they have now generated A LOT of ill will inside the EU. Next time this happens ( and you know it will ) they will be judged by a series of legal experts who know them mainly as "The only company which has tried to refuse to comply with our orders".
Trying to defend a large abusive monopoly in an anti-trust case is hard. Trying to defend them when they have been convicted before is harder. Trying to defend them when the entire legal system has an axe to grind and have it on paper that they have tried to weasel out of court judgements before is going to be a nightmare. Now add in the OOXML case... I'm sort of hoping Microsoft will be stupid enough to attack Acrobat using Office... or better yet, push an OEM just a little bit too far..
"Cellphone contract changed its terms" - Go elsewhere "But my cellphone is locked" - Buy another phone "But my music doesn't play on other phones" - Buy music somewhere else "But my internet connection throttles other music stores' bandwidth" - Get another internet connection "But all the ISPs do it" - Start your own
See the problem now? ONE of these restrictions is not a problem because you can "take your business elsewhere" , but when you have this bullshit EVERYWHERE then there's nothing you can do. Now before people start mentioning we have unlocked phones. Yes, we have them TODAY , and laws against this bullshit is sensible to ensure we have them in the future. Now if you think the magical "free market" will save the day then you are mistaken on two counts:
a) That we have a free market. b) That if we had a free market, it would remain free without anybody stopping companies from doing bullshit like this.
NRK (our equivalent of BBC) is no less critical towards the gov't than the independent channels.
Being critical of the government is not a virtue if you do it blindly without any consideration of accuracy. That's the problem with Scandinavian media. The attitude seems to be that their ultimate job is to bash the government. Good reporting is about reporting things the way they are. The BBC does quite a good job ( in relative terms ) , while NRK fails spectacularly and tends to end up on a "the powers that be sucks" crusade.
If you don't believe me, consider how NRK covers the ME situation and compare it to Arab and Israeli media outlets like Al Jazeera or Haaretz. You know your media is fucked up when both Arab and Israeli news have a more balanced coverage.
Somewhere in between Gore and Bush lies the scientific truth behind the cause of the warming, but it seems everyone has already decided to "believe" one way or the other to the extreme anyways.
Written in layman terms, properly sourced, reviewed by god knows how many experts... Sure, it's not perfect but it is as close as you will come without a a university degree in the subject. It certainly beats any media outlet or politician.
The government can claim that they suspect you are a terrorist, and then imprison you for the rest of your life, without trial, without a lawyer, without any contact with the outside world, and without even telling your relatives why.
Effectively, they can take your life away without any justification, without having to have your case tested in court, without obeying the constitution, without caring about the geneva convention, without even giving any form of justification why they did this other than "suspected terrorist".
The fact that they have actually done this to a number of people ( some of which committed suecide while imrisoned ) makes this piece of paper absolutely irrelevant. If they can ignore the spirit ( and quite arguably letter ) of the constitution and international law, what makes you think they give a tiny rats ass about a non-binding paper they have written themselves?
It is really very simple. The government claims that once mistaken for a terrorist an innocent person has no rights. Now, unless you can keep a straight face and claim that the government doesn't make mistakes, you will have to conclude that the pressent administration considers it acceptable to maintain a policy which sees innocent people imprisioned without even the right to know why, for how long, or if they will ever be released again. They consider it acceptable to deprive innocent people of any form of contact with their loved ones, or any opportunity whatsoever to proove that they are innocent.
Thus my question is, how the fuck can you defend such a policy and still sleep at night?
I like to group them all together into one cathegory I refer to as "morons". It doesn't matter if you are dealing with neo-cons, green peace, ID promoters... It is all the same and it goes:
1)I think A 2)People with better qualifications say A is a bad idea 3)People with better qualifications have been wrong before 4)Therefore they are wrong now. 5)Thus A is a good idea. 6)People who don't want A are opposed to good ideas, so they must be evil. 7)It is all a conspiracy to tax/ruin our morals/benefit coorporations/steal your freedom/eat babies...
Really, from Homeopaths to Inteligent Designers, it is always the same. "Qualified people are sometimes wrong, so you should listen to my wacky idea instead." It is usually commbined with some conspiracy theory or general criticism of the scientific method interspersed with emotional or irrelevant arguments "Al gore is wasteful and just want to STEAL your tax dollars, hence GW isn't real." etc...
So you're saying Microsoft didn't consider the possibility that somebody would use 255 of their keyboards in one office? Or that they thought keyboards interfering in 1 out of 65025 cases was acceptable standards ? Well I guess if there was ONE company that would do that...
Similarly, encrypting the communications, even with a poor cipher, is better than nothing at all.
"Poor" cipher really doesn't cover this one. WEP is a poor cipher because it can be broken with readily available hardware and known algorithms. However, this "cipher" is so weak that I could crack it using pen and paper, doing the arithmetic in my head, in real time... Compressing the data stream with gzip would offer stronger protection. It is the computer equivalent of painting your doorknob the same colour as the door and hope nobody will see it. If this qualifies as encryption then I encrypted my CDs yesterday when I ripped them to FLAC. I mean do you seriously believe that somebody would go through the trouble of setting up a radio reciever, look at the data through a soundcard, and then be deterred by an 8bit substitution? If you tape down the lid of the shoebox that contains your money, can you call that a lock? If I park my car facing towards the house so a car thief has to know how to reverse in order to steal it ? Yes, this "encryption" is THAT pathetic. My handwriting is harder to decode (maybe I should patent it ).
Why did they even bother encrypting it? I mean seriously, with a cipher this weak what's the point of even implementing it? It is actually harder to pick up the signal than it is to break the cipher...
Ok, but EXCEPT anti trust, bribes, illegal threats, libel, deliberate fraud, privacy violations, abuse of the patent system, and corrupt behaviour abroad,.. what laws have Microsoft ever broken?
Using quantum interactions to transmit information also requires you to transmit a signal the old fashion way. This is essentially what prevents you from exceeding the speed of light. You would also need a way to distribute the entangled particles ( each pair can be used only once ). The advantage of quantum entanglement is completely down to its ability to transfer quantum states ( no set of classical information can completely describe a quantum mechanical system ) and it's security against eavesdropping and brute force attacks
Now, contrary to popular belief a man in the middle attack is still possible. That you are exchanging pairs of entangled particles rather than exchanging large integers doesn't matter. You still have to be careful about who you accept keys ( or particles ) from.
Slashdot Mirror
So can I, don't quite see your point thou
Maybe I'm wrong here, but isn't it quite common in Canada to deliberately create a law proposal so bad it won't pass as that is some times easier than opposing it? I.e, if politics is such that you can't officially oppose something, then you just create a stooge proposal which is doomed to fail instead. At least that's what a Canadian friend of me claimed, so I figured maybe this is a bit like that? Of course I could be wrong, I don't really know enough about Canada to be sure.
Right, I shouldn't feed the trolls, but if you modify that a little bit:
"Your salary will be 10% lower than what our main competitor offer, but we let you use whatever operating system you please, you don't have to sign any NDAs or non-competes, you get to keep copyright and other IP rights for things you create in your spare time, and you will never ever have to touch exchange, office or Internet explorer to do your job."
I dunno about you, but compared to the bullshit some people have to deal with, such a contract would be rather appealing actually.
Scepticism without any rational argument to back it up is just as retarded as blind faith. In fact, they're just the same. To be sceptical about A without a good justification is equivalent to blindly trusting NOT(A). Did you get that? To be sceptical about the earth NOT being the centre of the universe is just the same as believing it is.
It is quite remarkable how many people fail to understand that scepticism is just a belief in itself. Apply that logic to ID, Global Warming Sceptics, Radiation fearmongering... It is all the same. The "sceptics" are promoting a belief without justification, claiming they don't have to give any evidence because "the burden of proof is not on the sceptics". This is of course nonsense.
Your entire post can be summarised as: "Think of the children!". The irony is that refusing to vaccinate your kids is many times more likely to cause them harm than the vaccination is. There's good reason to be sceptical about your scepticism ( and here "good reason" is a major understatement ).
Yea, even the chimps remember Microsoft ...
This could theoretically be used in an acceptable non-evil manner. The problem is that when you have a choice of implementing a sensible system that doesn't interfere with customers' rights, and implementing a broken overzealous piece of crap which causes a hassle for everybody without really deterring copyright infringement, our incompetent friends among the record companies will choose the latter.
...
Still waiting for Google-Tunes
I wish legislators would just get off their ass and prohibit Microsoft from charging different prices for the stand-alone OS and the OEM versions. Sure, if Microsoft were playing nice they should have the privilege to set prices as they see fit. Problem is that they haven't been playing nice, rather they have used their OEM discounts and other bribes ( yeas that is what they are ) to force suppliers into installing Windows on every machine.
The consequences should be obvious, if they abuse their privilege to set different prices for different customers, then they should lose that privilege, end of story. You don't even have to force the vendors to unbundle windows, if there is a demand for machines without Windows it will sort itself out once you stop Microsoft from preventing it. Simply put, if they can make a profit selling the OS to OEMs for X then they are abusing their monopoly if they demand 2X from regular customers.
It wasn't as much intended as a way to create an easy to remember pin, as an easy way to get a very random number using minimal equipment. Books are very good for this because they are readily available, you can easily extract random data from them, and it is very hard / impossible for somebody to spy on you generating the key.
Of course, if you are bad at remembering passwords then you may have to use a different method.
Pin numbers:
Open a large book on random pages and note down the LAST digit. Repeat until the pin is long enough.
For passphrases:
Pick a book, open it on a random page and note down the first word on that page longer than 3 characters. Generate 2 pass phrases this way and insert the acronym of one of them into the other. Add some random special characters and numbers at random places (i.e chosen as for pin numbers ).
May well be vulnerabilities in there, but if you know enough about computer security to avoid exposing yourself to orders of magnitude greater ones, then chances are you are able to generate a good pass phrase.
I particularily like this quote:
In other words, what Microsoft considered "worst case scenario" 10 years ago has already happened. The only thing left for them is compatibility with third party software and existing documents. If they lose their office monopoly they are in serious trouble. With both ODF and PDF now ISO standards, things are looking bright. PDF is already a de-facto standard for publishing and with readily available tools to convert between the two... Be afraid Redmond, be very afraid.
It's not just that they bundle it. The fact that they don't let you opt out, and that there isn't any way to remove the software, is just as much part of the problem. Additionally, Microsoft keeping parts of their API secret so that only software they bundle can use it is further damning. If all Microsoft did was to install a media player by default, then chances are there wouldn't have been any issues. However, fusing their applications so tight into the system that you can't remove them even if you want to (simultaneously causing security problems ) and keeping parts of the API available to you secret from your competitors, while all along pushing for adoption of formats that you refuse to license to others... now that is QUITE a different thing.
... or better yet, push an OEM just a little bit too far..
Furthermore, case between Realplayer and Microsoft was settled out of court, the main quarrel about the anti trust case was the EU demand that Microsoft share their API documentation with competitors, which Microsoft pretended to be doing while in reality supplying useless information and misrepresenting it as "documentation". It was quite stupid to be honest. While this case may not have hurt them too bad, they have now generated A LOT of ill will inside the EU. Next time this happens ( and you know it will ) they will be judged by a series of legal experts who know them mainly as "The only company which has tried to refuse to comply with our orders".
Trying to defend a large abusive monopoly in an anti-trust case is hard. Trying to defend them when they have been convicted before is harder. Trying to defend them when the entire legal system has an axe to grind and have it on paper that they have tried to weasel out of court judgements before is going to be a nightmare. Now add in the OOXML case... I'm sort of hoping Microsoft will be stupid enough to attack Acrobat using Office
That's supposed to be "We're Pentium of Borg. Division is futile, you will be approximated."
"Cellphone contract changed its terms" - Go elsewhere
"But my cellphone is locked" - Buy another phone
"But my music doesn't play on other phones" - Buy music somewhere else
"But my internet connection throttles other music stores' bandwidth" - Get another internet connection
"But all the ISPs do it" - Start your own
See the problem now? ONE of these restrictions is not a problem because you can "take your business elsewhere" , but when you have this bullshit EVERYWHERE then there's nothing you can do. Now before people start mentioning we have unlocked phones. Yes, we have them TODAY , and laws against this bullshit is sensible to ensure we have them in the future. Now if you think the magical "free market" will save the day then you are mistaken on two counts:
a) That we have a free market.
b) That if we had a free market, it would remain free without anybody stopping companies from doing bullshit like this.
Being critical of the government is not a virtue if you do it blindly without any consideration of accuracy. That's the problem with Scandinavian media. The attitude seems to be that their ultimate job is to bash the government. Good reporting is about reporting things the way they are. The BBC does quite a good job ( in relative terms ) , while NRK fails spectacularly and tends to end up on a "the powers that be sucks" crusade.
If you don't believe me, consider how NRK covers the ME situation and compare it to Arab and Israeli media outlets like Al Jazeera or Haaretz. You know your media is fucked up when both Arab and Israeli news have a more balanced coverage.
Al Jazeera: http://english.aljazeera.net/English
Haaretz: http://www.haaretz.com/
Really, calling NRK balanced is ignorant at best.
Somewhat ironically, the most balanced summary the public will ever get about this is available here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming
Written in layman terms, properly sourced, reviewed by god knows how many experts... Sure, it's not perfect but it is as close as you will come without a a university degree in the subject. It certainly beats any media outlet or politician.
At the gist of it, the situation is as follows:
The government can claim that they suspect you are a terrorist, and then imprison you for the rest of your life, without trial, without a lawyer, without any contact with the outside world, and without even telling your relatives why.
Effectively, they can take your life away without any justification, without having to have your case tested in court, without obeying the constitution, without caring about the geneva convention, without even giving any form of justification why they did this other than "suspected terrorist".
The fact that they have actually done this to a number of people ( some of which committed suecide while imrisoned ) makes this piece of paper absolutely irrelevant. If they can ignore the spirit ( and quite arguably letter ) of the constitution and international law, what makes you think they give a tiny rats ass about a non-binding paper they have written themselves?
It is really very simple. The government claims that once mistaken for a terrorist an innocent person has no rights. Now, unless you can keep a straight face and claim that the government doesn't make mistakes, you will have to conclude that the pressent administration considers it acceptable to maintain a policy which sees innocent people imprisioned without even the right to know why, for how long, or if they will ever be released again. They consider it acceptable to deprive innocent people of any form of contact with their loved ones, or any opportunity whatsoever to proove that they are innocent.
Thus my question is, how the fuck can you defend such a policy and still sleep at night?
I like to group them all together into one cathegory I refer to as "morons". It doesn't matter if you are dealing with neo-cons, green peace, ID promoters... It is all the same and it goes:
1)I think A
2)People with better qualifications say A is a bad idea
3)People with better qualifications have been wrong before
4)Therefore they are wrong now.
5)Thus A is a good idea.
6)People who don't want A are opposed to good ideas, so they must be evil.
7)It is all a conspiracy to tax/ruin our morals/benefit coorporations/steal your freedom/eat babies...
Really, from Homeopaths to Inteligent Designers, it is always the same. "Qualified people are sometimes wrong, so you should listen to my wacky idea instead." It is usually commbined with some conspiracy theory or general criticism of the scientific method interspersed with emotional or irrelevant arguments "Al gore is wasteful and just want to STEAL your tax dollars, hence GW isn't real." etc...
So you're saying Microsoft didn't consider the possibility that somebody would use 255 of their keyboards in one office? Or that they thought keyboards interfering in 1 out of 65025 cases was acceptable standards ? Well I guess if there was ONE company that would do that ...
Why did they even bother encrypting it? I mean seriously, with a cipher this weak what's the point of even implementing it? It is actually harder to pick up the signal than it is to break the cipher...
Fixed it for you.
Ok, but EXCEPT anti trust, bribes, illegal threats, libel, deliberate fraud, privacy violations, abuse of the patent system, and corrupt behaviour abroad, .. what laws have Microsoft ever broken?
Using quantum interactions to transmit information also requires you to transmit a signal the old fashion way. This is essentially what prevents you from exceeding the speed of light. You would also need a way to distribute the entangled particles ( each pair can be used only once ). The advantage of quantum entanglement is completely down to its ability to transfer quantum states ( no set of classical information can completely describe a quantum mechanical system ) and it's security against eavesdropping and brute force attacks
Now, contrary to popular belief a man in the middle attack is still possible. That you are exchanging pairs of entangled particles rather than exchanging large integers doesn't matter. You still have to be careful about who you accept keys ( or particles ) from.