what scares the world's dictators, religious zealots, and oppressive regimes.
When did dictators, religious zealots, or oppressive regimes start fearing the USA? You basically have all of that rolled into one with Saudi Arabia, and they do not fear us. Take a look some time at the dictators the USA installed in South America; they did not fear us either. We also create the Shah of Iran, who feared his people more than the United States.
U.S. foreign policy should recognize this fact, and use it to its advantage.
US foreign policy is based on increasing corporate profits, not bringing freedom to others. The old Cold War signals intelligence equipment has been used to spy on foreign businesses and pass their secrets on to US companies. We only spread freedom for businesses; individual freedom never plays into the equation.
In theory, the government does not have the same profit motive as big corporations, and therefore should have less incentive to produce specific results. In practice, though, "The business of the United States is business."
That is twice as long as the MD5 hash; the logo has limited space, and I am guessing they did not want to force people to use a magnifying glass to see the numbers.
MD5 is "broken" in the sense that collisions can be found in certain situations. This makes MD5 bad for cryptographic purposes, yes, but it is not exactly useless. Also, considering that cyber command has limited space on its logo, a stronger hash function which generates longer hashes might have been difficult to use.
I mean, imagine that e-mail had been invented by Twitter, then all e-mail addresses would have been ending in "@twitter.com" and we would all rely on a private company that would have had insight into all our communications. How long would it have taken us to conclude that such a situation is absurd? Five years? Ten years? Forever?
That depends on who you mean by "us." There was once a time where email was confined to a single computer system; people realized that it would be nice to exchange email messages with users of other systems, and so they devised ways to get their computers to interoperate. These days, though, things are very different: Twitter and Facebook do not exist for the purpose of serving their users, they exist to turn ever higher profits, and interoperability would be detrimental to that. The user mindset is also different; instead of asking, "Why can't Facebook interoperate with Myspace?" they instead think, "I have friends who are not Facebook users, I will encourage them to join."
their "license agreement" doesn't allow stocking seeds for the next year,
They also have the ability to introduce terminator genes which prevent crops from producing viable seeds, but they have not yet attacked the world with that tactic. We have not yet seen the worst of Monsanto.
You may decry their legal attacks on seed saving, but Monsanto has been holding back their worst tactic: terminator genes. A few years ago, Monsanto acquired a company that developed plant genes which would prevent the formation of viable seeds.
Of course, here in the USA, that would not change much. Most of the crops we grow are hybrids, and farmers do not save hybrid seeds because of the unpredictability of future generations (you can see this for yourself if you want -- plant the seeds from some tomatoes you buy at the supermarket). The technology was actually developed to attack third world farmers who frequently save seeds, and whose countries do not respect patents on genes. Luckily, the resistance to the deployment of the technology was so strong that it remains unused, although it is still discussed at industry conventions.
However they do bear an eerie similarity to hybridization techniques that have been used for a long time now. Selecting traits from wild species in a particular region to produce domesticated species better adapted to that region is nothing new; the traditional way to do it is to create hybrids, then select for offspring that retain the wild trait in question and as much of the domestic traits as possible. After a few generations, you will have crops containing precisely the trait you were interested in.
The difference with modern genetic modification is that we can pull in traits from species that are not very closely related to our crops. Of course, in modern times we know the risks of invasive species and introducing foreign genetics into the wild (a side effect of growing foreign crops), so we really have no excuse for this sort of thing.
The kind that calls up her grandchild's parents a few weeks before his birthday and says, "Remind me, what is the name of that band on all of his T-shirts? You know what I mean, metal something or other?" Really, this is not at all unheard of -- my grandma used to ask my mom what I wanted for my birthday all the time when I was a kid.
Maybe you are buying the tickets as a gift to a friend. Maybe you were planning to go to the show, but something came up and now you have tickets you cannot use. Maybe your teenage daughter liked the act 6 months ago, but does not like it anymore and does not want to go to the show.
People should be able to transfer any item they purchase. We should not become a society in which everything is rented.
Well, you know, if they are going to pay for adequate customer service, then the upper level management will not be paid as many millions of dollars per year as they are paid now. Think of the suffering of executives and shareholders before you start worrying about customers!
Considering I have watched doormen try to crush people caught in doors during rush hour, that may not be a bad idea.
Except, of course, that a single person cannot evacuate a 600 foot train in enough time to ensure that people are safe in the event of a fire. There has not been a successful safety test yet for any full length train not crewed by two people, regardless of whether or not the conductors open and close the doors nicely. The tests also assume that the equipment is functional, which from what I hear is a shaky assumption with the R160s, which have broken down far more frequently than previous models.
Well admittedly I have been out of New York for a long time now, and some of that was second hand. The robotrains I was referring to were not the AirTrain units, but the R160 units down in the subways, which are still kept under manual control with 2 man crews.
Can government owned property be classed as private property
No, it is either public property, or it is restricted for security reasons (e.g. military bases, nuclear storage sites, the White House). The problem right now is that we are classifying too many things as "national security concerns," and restricting the rights of citizens in the process.
Can't speak for Florida, but in New York City the subways are managed by a "state authority." Basically, they receive tremendous amounts of money from the state to operate the subway, but are not answerable to any representatives, and there does not even seem to be a clear chain of command to the governor's office. The public is not allowed to know what is happening in the subway -- where their money is spent -- and for a while the police would confiscate cameras if you tried to take a photograph down there (but the mayor insisted they stop because it was aggravating the tourists).
Safety and security in that system is a joke. It was recently revealed that the security cameras the MTA installed, as part of a plan to replace the workers who used to be present in subway stations, were produced by several different companies and were not compatible with the display system that had been purchased from yet another company (essentially, the cameras were just for show). In another brilliant job-eliminating move, the MTA has been purchasing "robotrains" -- trains that can operate themselves automatically -- for $1 million per car...but so far, every single safety test has failed because the trains are too long for the single MTA employee who will be monitoring things to evacuate the entire train (currently, there are two employees on each train, one in the first car and one in the middle). Another plan to eliminate jobs is to consolidate the current switch and signal control system, which is distributed over the entire system in "towers" that are operated by MTA employees, into a single, centralized computer controlled system...but when they attempted to activate the new system, the entire system crashed when three emergency radio calls came in simultaneously (there are about 400 stations in this system, so three emergency calls is not a particularly rare event); they had to reactivate the old radio system, and never even had the chance to try controlling switches and signals from the new computer system.
Really, I do not find that to be so surprising. I bet that your father had never contacted the GIMP developers before, did not know who was responsible for what, and started by sending feature requests to the developers' mailing list. It would be as if I walked into your circle of friends and started talking about cool stuff that we should all do, without taking the time to become known or part of the group.
Someone who is not a developer really should not be posting on a developers' mailing list. Now, this is not to say that the GIMP community is innocent here, as they clearly did not make the procedure for submitting a feature request clear (I doubt that your father would have gone to the developers' list had he known where the proper place to submit feature requests was). ESR tried to make the point that users should be treated as co-developers in The Cathedral and The Bazaar, but the reality of open source development is that such a thing is not practical: most users are not in a position to fill the role of "co-developer."
There are two things I could see your father doing, if he is not in a position to learn how to write code (and dealing with the code behind GIMP is definitely not easy). One would be to send suggestions to the right place, wherever that may be, and hope for someone to pick up the issue. The other would be to make friends with other people in his position, who also happen to be programmers (there are quite a few), and have those people submit patches, thus growing the community and improving the state of affairs for everyone (and meanwhile he would not have to wait for those patches to be accepted into the mainline GIMP). That second one may be difficult, depending on the sorts of circles your father frequents (i.e. if he just does photography on his own, and not as part of a club).
Slashdot Mirror
what scares the world's dictators, religious zealots, and oppressive regimes.
When did dictators, religious zealots, or oppressive regimes start fearing the USA? You basically have all of that rolled into one with Saudi Arabia, and they do not fear us. Take a look some time at the dictators the USA installed in South America; they did not fear us either. We also create the Shah of Iran, who feared his people more than the United States.
U.S. foreign policy should recognize this fact, and use it to its advantage.
US foreign policy is based on increasing corporate profits, not bringing freedom to others. The old Cold War signals intelligence equipment has been used to spy on foreign businesses and pass their secrets on to US companies. We only spread freedom for businesses; individual freedom never plays into the equation.
In theory, the government does not have the same profit motive as big corporations, and therefore should have less incentive to produce specific results. In practice, though, "The business of the United States is business."
I think a SHA256 sum would have been too long to fit on the logo:
7521ea74913335fc0fb3a47dfa0ca32636ff59bceabadee0dcfbf25ad85a03eb
That is twice as long as the MD5 hash; the logo has limited space, and I am guessing they did not want to force people to use a magnifying glass to see the numbers.
Actually, it turns out that every paragraph USCYBERCOM publishes will have the same MD5 hash; they are showing off their ability to find collisions.
MD5 is "broken" in the sense that collisions can be found in certain situations. This makes MD5 bad for cryptographic purposes, yes, but it is not exactly useless. Also, considering that cyber command has limited space on its logo, a stronger hash function which generates longer hashes might have been difficult to use.
Looks like it is the same length as an MD5 sum...
I mean, imagine that e-mail had been invented by Twitter, then all e-mail addresses would have been ending in "@twitter.com" and we would all rely on a private company that would have had insight into all our communications. How long would it have taken us to conclude that such a situation is absurd? Five years? Ten years? Forever?
That depends on who you mean by "us." There was once a time where email was confined to a single computer system; people realized that it would be nice to exchange email messages with users of other systems, and so they devised ways to get their computers to interoperate. These days, though, things are very different: Twitter and Facebook do not exist for the purpose of serving their users, they exist to turn ever higher profits, and interoperability would be detrimental to that. The user mindset is also different; instead of asking, "Why can't Facebook interoperate with Myspace?" they instead think, "I have friends who are not Facebook users, I will encourage them to join."
If only there were a way to decentralize these things...
Really? I thought collages were fair use; how is it not fair use to combine music with an original video?
their "license agreement" doesn't allow stocking seeds for the next year,
They also have the ability to introduce terminator genes which prevent crops from producing viable seeds, but they have not yet attacked the world with that tactic. We have not yet seen the worst of Monsanto.
You may decry their legal attacks on seed saving, but Monsanto has been holding back their worst tactic: terminator genes. A few years ago, Monsanto acquired a company that developed plant genes which would prevent the formation of viable seeds.
Of course, here in the USA, that would not change much. Most of the crops we grow are hybrids, and farmers do not save hybrid seeds because of the unpredictability of future generations (you can see this for yourself if you want -- plant the seeds from some tomatoes you buy at the supermarket). The technology was actually developed to attack third world farmers who frequently save seeds, and whose countries do not respect patents on genes. Luckily, the resistance to the deployment of the technology was so strong that it remains unused, although it is still discussed at industry conventions.
However they do bear an eerie similarity to hybridization techniques that have been used for a long time now. Selecting traits from wild species in a particular region to produce domesticated species better adapted to that region is nothing new; the traditional way to do it is to create hybrids, then select for offspring that retain the wild trait in question and as much of the domestic traits as possible. After a few generations, you will have crops containing precisely the trait you were interested in.
The difference with modern genetic modification is that we can pull in traits from species that are not very closely related to our crops. Of course, in modern times we know the risks of invasive species and introducing foreign genetics into the wild (a side effect of growing foreign crops), so we really have no excuse for this sort of thing.
I pronounce it like the "o" in "own."
The kind that calls up her grandchild's parents a few weeks before his birthday and says, "Remind me, what is the name of that band on all of his T-shirts? You know what I mean, metal something or other?" Really, this is not at all unheard of -- my grandma used to ask my mom what I wanted for my birthday all the time when I was a kid.
Maybe you are buying the tickets as a gift to a friend. Maybe you were planning to go to the show, but something came up and now you have tickets you cannot use. Maybe your teenage daughter liked the act 6 months ago, but does not like it anymore and does not want to go to the show.
People should be able to transfer any item they purchase. We should not become a society in which everything is rented.
"Non-refundable" seems to be printed on the ticket stubs I have lying around.
Well, you know, if they are going to pay for adequate customer service, then the upper level management will not be paid as many millions of dollars per year as they are paid now. Think of the suffering of executives and shareholders before you start worrying about customers!
Considering I have watched doormen try to crush people caught in doors during rush hour, that may not be a bad idea.
Except, of course, that a single person cannot evacuate a 600 foot train in enough time to ensure that people are safe in the event of a fire. There has not been a successful safety test yet for any full length train not crewed by two people, regardless of whether or not the conductors open and close the doors nicely. The tests also assume that the equipment is functional, which from what I hear is a shaky assumption with the R160s, which have broken down far more frequently than previous models.
Well admittedly I have been out of New York for a long time now, and some of that was second hand. The robotrains I was referring to were not the AirTrain units, but the R160 units down in the subways, which are still kept under manual control with 2 man crews.
We must not have any disloyalty in the TSA!
Can government owned property be classed as private property
No, it is either public property, or it is restricted for security reasons (e.g. military bases, nuclear storage sites, the White House). The problem right now is that we are classifying too many things as "national security concerns," and restricting the rights of citizens in the process.
Can't speak for Florida, but in New York City the subways are managed by a "state authority." Basically, they receive tremendous amounts of money from the state to operate the subway, but are not answerable to any representatives, and there does not even seem to be a clear chain of command to the governor's office. The public is not allowed to know what is happening in the subway -- where their money is spent -- and for a while the police would confiscate cameras if you tried to take a photograph down there (but the mayor insisted they stop because it was aggravating the tourists).
Safety and security in that system is a joke. It was recently revealed that the security cameras the MTA installed, as part of a plan to replace the workers who used to be present in subway stations, were produced by several different companies and were not compatible with the display system that had been purchased from yet another company (essentially, the cameras were just for show). In another brilliant job-eliminating move, the MTA has been purchasing "robotrains" -- trains that can operate themselves automatically -- for $1 million per car...but so far, every single safety test has failed because the trains are too long for the single MTA employee who will be monitoring things to evacuate the entire train (currently, there are two employees on each train, one in the first car and one in the middle). Another plan to eliminate jobs is to consolidate the current switch and signal control system, which is distributed over the entire system in "towers" that are operated by MTA employees, into a single, centralized computer controlled system...but when they attempted to activate the new system, the entire system crashed when three emergency radio calls came in simultaneously (there are about 400 stations in this system, so three emergency calls is not a particularly rare event); they had to reactivate the old radio system, and never even had the chance to try controlling switches and signals from the new computer system.
Prior to the copyright act, anyone could copy anything on whatever scale they wanted. The copyright act restricted the ability to legally do so.
So at what point did copying suddenly become a right granted by law?
Then what should I call my computers? None of them run Windows, and none of them run Mac OS.
Really, I do not find that to be so surprising. I bet that your father had never contacted the GIMP developers before, did not know who was responsible for what, and started by sending feature requests to the developers' mailing list. It would be as if I walked into your circle of friends and started talking about cool stuff that we should all do, without taking the time to become known or part of the group.
Someone who is not a developer really should not be posting on a developers' mailing list. Now, this is not to say that the GIMP community is innocent here, as they clearly did not make the procedure for submitting a feature request clear (I doubt that your father would have gone to the developers' list had he known where the proper place to submit feature requests was). ESR tried to make the point that users should be treated as co-developers in The Cathedral and The Bazaar, but the reality of open source development is that such a thing is not practical: most users are not in a position to fill the role of "co-developer."
There are two things I could see your father doing, if he is not in a position to learn how to write code (and dealing with the code behind GIMP is definitely not easy). One would be to send suggestions to the right place, wherever that may be, and hope for someone to pick up the issue. The other would be to make friends with other people in his position, who also happen to be programmers (there are quite a few), and have those people submit patches, thus growing the community and improving the state of affairs for everyone (and meanwhile he would not have to wait for those patches to be accepted into the mainline GIMP). That second one may be difficult, depending on the sorts of circles your father frequents (i.e. if he just does photography on his own, and not as part of a club).