The only way to stand up to bullies like the drug cartels is to defy them
...and then your mutilated corpse is found hanging from a freeway overpass. This is not some schoolyard fight. We are past the point of standing up to the Zetas with blog posts and words, the only way to deal with them is with military force -- Mexico is in a state of what amounts to civil war.
Note that taking on the FBI or defense contractors does not entail a risk to your life. In the worst case, you are arrested, stand trial, and have potentially many opportunities to regain your freedom or to become a fugitive. The Zetas are not going to take you to prison, they are going to kill you and put your corpse on display -- and if they are feeling extra vengeful, they might torture you before you die.
FTFY. If you have secrets that might be worth using extralegal methods of obtaining, hiding it in a will may not be sufficient. Laws can only go so far in protecting people; sometimes you need to protect yourself.
Simplest solution is to encrypt the list with multiple keys (so they at least have to collaborate).
Close, but probably not going to work. You are relying on the availability of each person in the encryption chain, and you need their secret keys to be in a particular order. I am in my mid 20s, and I do not plan on dying for a long time -- people who receive a secret key now might be dead, missing, or otherwise unavailable when I die. Encrypting the secret in every possible order is prohibitively large except for a very small number of parties involved.
What you really want is called a secret sharing scheme. The idea is that each person receives a share, which on its own is insufficient to reconstruct the secret. Things are set up so that some number K of the N shares can be used to reconstruct the secret. You can then give shares to people you trust not to conspire against you, and perhaps leave a large number of shares on file with your lawyer (so that if only a small number of relatives/friends are available, they can go to the lawyer to get the necessary shares).
The challenge is finding a way of disclosing those passwords without the possibility of a subpoena getting at them
Unfortunately, there is no such thing. The best thing you can hope for is to force multiple subpoenas to be required i.e. by using a secret sharing system.
What you probably want is for your attorney to have all but one of the shares, and for a relative or trusted friend to have the last. Thus, the attorney and the relative must work together to recover the secret, and you are protected from a situation in which the attorney might be compromised. Depending on how sensitive your secrets are, you might also set things up so that the attorney has one less share than would be needed to recover the secret, but where your relatives together have enough shares to recover it -- the attorney may not be available when you die (what if 20 years from now, his office is blown up?).
If your secrets are so sensitive that you cannot even accept the risk that multiple relatives are compromised, then you just cannot share it, and your secret will die with you.
However, math on its own is not patentable, and it never has been. Hardware is not just math -- math explains why it works, but hardware physically exists.
Software, on the other hand, is purely abstract. It does not really exist anywhere, any more than the quadratic formula exists somewhere. You cannot infringe on a hardware patent by simply writing down a description of the hardware; yet that is exactly what infringing on a software patent is. That is why software is covered by copyright law -- it is no different from the text of a book, which is not patentable.
if they want to appeal to an audience other than power users
Which is exactly why Shuttleworth is dead wrong in his comments. This is not about being too cool, it is about not being the intended audience for Unity. Unity is not designed to appeal to power users, and there is no reason to pretend that it is.
I cannot help but wonder what is wrong with the community
People want to show off to their friends. Almost nobody is impressed by your 100k line.emacs file, almost nobody thinks that it is cool that you wrote some Python scripts that let you issue commands to a thousand computers at the same time. Yet if you can show your friends a shiny looking UI they suddenly think your nerd operating system is pretty cool. Wobbly windows and spinning cubes impress people, and people in the community feel the need to impress their friends outside of the community. Many people came to the community because they are more impressed by Emacs Lisp than by a desktop cube, and they (perhaps subconsciously) resent the fact that eye candy is more appreciated by many users than serious technical achievements.
In the 90s, we could use the reliability of GNU/Linux as a selling point -- here was an OS that would run on consumer computers with preemptive multitasking, a complete Unix-like environment, few viruses, and generally more stability than Windows or Mac OS X. Over the past 10 years, that selling point has been obliterated. Mac OS X is a certified Unix, many of the problems with Windows have been addressed, and the desktop itself has become irrelevant for most users as computing has shifted back in the direction of centralization. Now we must compete with Apple, which means trying to find the magic UI formula; yet those people who came to the community looking for a Unix-like OS that wouldn't break the bank are being ignored in the process.
We are trying to satisfy too many people at the same time. There is no need for one operating system to rule them all, but Ubuntu is trying to be just that. I do not like it when my software tries to hold my hand; I know what I am doing with my computer, and I am willing to get my hands dirty. I do things that many users do not do with their computers. Thus, something like Unity does not really make sense for me -- so I do not use it (nor do I use Ubuntu). Ubuntu has its place, but we should stop pretending that it is the one OS that will unify the entire GNU/Linux community -- we have always been diverse, and we are not doing ourselves any favors by trying to consolidate.
I'm guessing they aim to create one singular OS that will satisfy both desktop, laptop and mobile users alike.
No such thing. No OS can satisfy such divergent goals. My desktop has 6G of RAM and a quad-core processor, and that is not even considered to be at the high end these days. My desktop is not a toy, it is something that I do serious work on and I need an operating system that is geared toward serious work.
Many experts have predicted that the future is going mobile
Experts also predicted the failure of iProducts. I would take the predictions of experts with a grain of salt.
If I wanted something "mobile," by which I assume you mean a smartphone or a tablet computer, I would not be using a desktop or a laptop. If I wanted a system that was nothing more than I toy, I would buy a toy.
I don't get why there is this push away from the program menu we have been using for over 15 years.
Apple. If Apple does it, everyone thinks it must be the right thing to do.
Just because it has been around a while doesn't mean it needs to be replaced.
How about technical reasons? Linear menus are terrible in terms of how people learn motions. Radial menus have always been superior, but it is hard to make radial menus work when you have dozens or even hundreds of items to choose from. Too bad Unity doesn't use a radial menu either (perhaps combined with some search features to reduce the number of options).
Too much, too late. It has been years since I touched KDE, and the other day I received an email from the bugzilla asking about a bug I opened. If bugs can remain open for that long, you know there is something wrong.
Sorry, but throwing away your entire codebase and starting from scratch is a universally bad idea, and focusing on cool looking features while failing to fix showstopper bugs makes things even worse. The KDE team said that the 3.5 branch was intended for people who wanted stability, and they did not even address critical bugs there. I need my software to work today, tomorrow, and next week, and I do not have time to fix showstopper bugs for the KDE team while they try to make useless desktop widgets look fancier.
There is a problem with using public debt as a way to provide wealthy investors with a safe place to put their money. Debt is an investment because it is repaid at interest; public debt is repaid using tax dollars. Using tax revenue as a way to create returns on investments for the wealthy amounts to the enslavement of the population.
Public debt is a tool for weathering hard economic times and paying one-time costs. When it becomes a shelter for the world's richest investors, there is a problem.
Tell that to the Greeks. Frankly, I doubt that the United States is in a position to win a potential war with its foreign creditors, considering how much of our manufacturing infrastructure has been sent abroad.
Where do you think the government gets the money to repay its debts? There are two possibilities: tax revenue, or printing more money. In the first case, it is pretty clear that all tax paying citizens are forced to assume the debt, which is unsurprising considering that it is publicly held. In the second case, the value of the money is decreased, and so the citizens still wind up paying -- their own savings become worth less than before. The second case also harms a nation's credit rating, since the bond holders wind up receiving less than they expected (in terms of the value of what they receive, rather than the number of units of currency).
Countries that fail to repay their debts wind up in the situation that Greece finds itself in now. Austerity measures, the sale of public assets, the loss of various social programs, etc. The public often winds up worse off than if they had simply not used bonds to pay for those programs -- tax revenue may very well cover some but not all of the programs that countries go into debt to support. The public winds up losing even more than if the debt had been repaid.
Really, publicly held debt is not much different from privately held debt. If your government owes money and fails to repay, the creditors will march in and demand their collateral. If the government fails to make good on that, all its credibility is lost, and there may even be a war (since such a situation amounts to theft and a breakdown of peaceful resolution). Public debt certainly does have its place -- it can be used to maintain budgets during recessions or pay one-time costs for new infrastructure. Basing the budget on accumulating more and more debt is not a sustainable economic plan, and claiming that investors must be able to buy bonds from a nation and that repaying the debt is bad amounts to saying that investors have a right to drain the wealth of a nation.
Public debt ensures that all tax paying citizens are on the hook. Even someone who is responsible and is able to manage their personal money suddenly become beholden to whoever holds the debt. What better way to hijack an entire country?
This is pretty far removed from the Land of the Brave I pledged allegiance to in gradeschool
You pledged allegiance to a flag, actually. What most people do not know is that the original solute during the pledge was to extend your right hand, like these children (note that this was taken in 1941):
Why should the Federal Government be involved with marriage at all?
Our tax code includes special provisions for marriage couples. Marriage has always been a legal matter; the idea that marriage is strictly about love and spending the rest of your life with your one true love is a relatively modern trend.
Goldstein was not the reason Big Brother's tyranny continued, and terrorists are not the reason the TSA's tyranny has continued. The constant threat of terrorism is just a propaganda tool used by the executive branch of government to justified ever expanding power. The TSA is never going to find anything of value through these pat-downs, they only hope to keep people terrified so that nobody stops to question what their government is doing.
Keeping people in a state of perpetual fear is a good way to ensure that the population remains under your control.
Then put a jumper on the motherboard to enable those modifications. The problem here is that they are only seeking to cater to users who want an appliance, and the people who want to be able to actually modify their system will be left out in the cold. This is the sort of situation that the PC was supposed to free everyone from.
Slashdot Mirror
The only way to stand up to bullies like the drug cartels is to defy them
...because Anonymous was really in a position to take on a brutal drug cartel? These guys were in way over their heads.
Note that taking on the FBI or defense contractors does not entail a risk to your life. In the worst case, you are arrested, stand trial, and have potentially many opportunities to regain your freedom or to become a fugitive. The Zetas are not going to take you to prison, they are going to kill you and put your corpse on display -- and if they are feeling extra vengeful, they might torture you before you die.
It can't legally be touched until you die
FTFY. If you have secrets that might be worth using extralegal methods of obtaining, hiding it in a will may not be sufficient. Laws can only go so far in protecting people; sometimes you need to protect yourself.
Simplest solution is to encrypt the list with multiple keys (so they at least have to collaborate).
Close, but probably not going to work. You are relying on the availability of each person in the encryption chain, and you need their secret keys to be in a particular order. I am in my mid 20s, and I do not plan on dying for a long time -- people who receive a secret key now might be dead, missing, or otherwise unavailable when I die. Encrypting the secret in every possible order is prohibitively large except for a very small number of parties involved.
What you really want is called a secret sharing scheme. The idea is that each person receives a share, which on its own is insufficient to reconstruct the secret. Things are set up so that some number K of the N shares can be used to reconstruct the secret. You can then give shares to people you trust not to conspire against you, and perhaps leave a large number of shares on file with your lawyer (so that if only a small number of relatives/friends are available, they can go to the lawyer to get the necessary shares).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing
The challenge is finding a way of disclosing those passwords without the possibility of a subpoena getting at them
Unfortunately, there is no such thing. The best thing you can hope for is to force multiple subpoenas to be required i.e. by using a secret sharing system.
What you probably want is for your attorney to have all but one of the shares, and for a relative or trusted friend to have the last. Thus, the attorney and the relative must work together to recover the secret, and you are protected from a situation in which the attorney might be compromised. Depending on how sensitive your secrets are, you might also set things up so that the attorney has one less share than would be needed to recover the secret, but where your relatives together have enough shares to recover it -- the attorney may not be available when you die (what if 20 years from now, his office is blown up?).
If your secrets are so sensitive that you cannot even accept the risk that multiple relatives are compromised, then you just cannot share it, and your secret will die with you.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shamir's_Secret_Sharing
Give shares to relatives and trusted friends.
However, math on its own is not patentable, and it never has been. Hardware is not just math -- math explains why it works, but hardware physically exists.
Software, on the other hand, is purely abstract. It does not really exist anywhere, any more than the quadratic formula exists somewhere. You cannot infringe on a hardware patent by simply writing down a description of the hardware; yet that is exactly what infringing on a software patent is. That is why software is covered by copyright law -- it is no different from the text of a book, which is not patentable.
if they want to appeal to an audience other than power users
Which is exactly why Shuttleworth is dead wrong in his comments. This is not about being too cool, it is about not being the intended audience for Unity. Unity is not designed to appeal to power users, and there is no reason to pretend that it is.
I cannot help but wonder what is wrong with the community
I'm guessing they aim to create one singular OS that will satisfy both desktop, laptop and mobile users alike.
No such thing. No OS can satisfy such divergent goals. My desktop has 6G of RAM and a quad-core processor, and that is not even considered to be at the high end these days. My desktop is not a toy, it is something that I do serious work on and I need an operating system that is geared toward serious work.
Many experts have predicted that the future is going mobile
I don't get why there is this push away from the program menu we have been using for over 15 years.
Apple. If Apple does it, everyone thinks it must be the right thing to do.
Just because it has been around a while doesn't mean it needs to be replaced.
How about technical reasons? Linear menus are terrible in terms of how people learn motions. Radial menus have always been superior, but it is hard to make radial menus work when you have dozens or even hundreds of items to choose from. Too bad Unity doesn't use a radial menu either (perhaps combined with some search features to reduce the number of options).
Am I the only one who uses KDE anymore?
Probably.
The latest in the KDE 4.x line is plenty stable
Too much, too late. It has been years since I touched KDE, and the other day I received an email from the bugzilla asking about a bug I opened. If bugs can remain open for that long, you know there is something wrong.
Sorry, but throwing away your entire codebase and starting from scratch is a universally bad idea, and focusing on cool looking features while failing to fix showstopper bugs makes things even worse. The KDE team said that the 3.5 branch was intended for people who wanted stability, and they did not even address critical bugs there. I need my software to work today, tomorrow, and next week, and I do not have time to fix showstopper bugs for the KDE team while they try to make useless desktop widgets look fancier.
There is a problem with using public debt as a way to provide wealthy investors with a safe place to put their money. Debt is an investment because it is repaid at interest; public debt is repaid using tax dollars. Using tax revenue as a way to create returns on investments for the wealthy amounts to the enslavement of the population.
Public debt is a tool for weathering hard economic times and paying one-time costs. When it becomes a shelter for the world's richest investors, there is a problem.
Tell that to the Greeks. Frankly, I doubt that the United States is in a position to win a potential war with its foreign creditors, considering how much of our manufacturing infrastructure has been sent abroad.
Where do you think the government gets the money to repay its debts? There are two possibilities: tax revenue, or printing more money. In the first case, it is pretty clear that all tax paying citizens are forced to assume the debt, which is unsurprising considering that it is publicly held. In the second case, the value of the money is decreased, and so the citizens still wind up paying -- their own savings become worth less than before. The second case also harms a nation's credit rating, since the bond holders wind up receiving less than they expected (in terms of the value of what they receive, rather than the number of units of currency).
Countries that fail to repay their debts wind up in the situation that Greece finds itself in now. Austerity measures, the sale of public assets, the loss of various social programs, etc. The public often winds up worse off than if they had simply not used bonds to pay for those programs -- tax revenue may very well cover some but not all of the programs that countries go into debt to support. The public winds up losing even more than if the debt had been repaid.
Really, publicly held debt is not much different from privately held debt. If your government owes money and fails to repay, the creditors will march in and demand their collateral. If the government fails to make good on that, all its credibility is lost, and there may even be a war (since such a situation amounts to theft and a breakdown of peaceful resolution). Public debt certainly does have its place -- it can be used to maintain budgets during recessions or pay one-time costs for new infrastructure. Basing the budget on accumulating more and more debt is not a sustainable economic plan, and claiming that investors must be able to buy bonds from a nation and that repaying the debt is bad amounts to saying that investors have a right to drain the wealth of a nation.
Public debt ensures that all tax paying citizens are on the hook. Even someone who is responsible and is able to manage their personal money suddenly become beholden to whoever holds the debt. What better way to hijack an entire country?
This is pretty far removed from the Land of the Brave I pledged allegiance to in gradeschool
You pledged allegiance to a flag, actually. What most people do not know is that the original solute during the pledge was to extend your right hand, like these children (note that this was taken in 1941):
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/7/73/Students_pledging_allegiance_to_the_American_flag_with_the_Bellamy_salute.jpg
Why should the Federal Government be involved with marriage at all?
Our tax code includes special provisions for marriage couples. Marriage has always been a legal matter; the idea that marriage is strictly about love and spending the rest of your life with your one true love is a relatively modern trend.
Goldstein was not the reason Big Brother's tyranny continued, and terrorists are not the reason the TSA's tyranny has continued. The constant threat of terrorism is just a propaganda tool used by the executive branch of government to justified ever expanding power. The TSA is never going to find anything of value through these pat-downs, they only hope to keep people terrified so that nobody stops to question what their government is doing.
Keeping people in a state of perpetual fear is a good way to ensure that the population remains under your control.
if this is illegal why is it still happening,
Those in power do not care about your rights. Is this really news to you?
Then put a jumper on the motherboard to enable those modifications. The problem here is that they are only seeking to cater to users who want an appliance, and the people who want to be able to actually modify their system will be left out in the cold. This is the sort of situation that the PC was supposed to free everyone from.
That was for string processing problems. I am not really surprised that Perl did so well -- it is a language for processing strings.