As technology improves, we are eventually going to forget about copyrights; the laws might remain on the books, and big corporations will be busy suing each other over copyrights, but the average citizen will no longer be affected by them. We are almost there already; high school and college students download music and movies without a thought to copyrights, and share the files with their friends. Once they grow up, copyrights will have virtually no meaning for the average person in society.
Actually, he probably would. People ask each other out all the time, it is part of being human. Women in open source, which is not necessarily a professional atmosphere all the time, can expect that heterosexual men in open source will ask them out. Likewise, men can expect that women will ask them out. There are many, many more men than women, and thus the frequency of men asking women out will be many times higher than visa versa.
After three years of not realizing they were violating a patent, Toyato is suddenly surprised to discover that their engineers reinvented an existed technology.
Not a creepy enough van. A creepy van is usually a single, solid color, with no decoration and few windows. Some rust is usually present. The color white is preferred, although other colors are possible. The back should contain random boxes of junk and something to tie a rope to, and room for at least one adult and one child.
Which is why OTR is so cool. It gives a discrete warning about being unauthenticated, and it integrates seamlessly with IM. Unfortunately, even OTR is too inconvenient for most people I have met, and they fail to understand why there is any benefit to using something that is not as "pretty" as the default AIM client (thank you AOL for screwing that one up for us).
It has those protections because people are so sensitive about those backward steps. Once people stop caring so much (which may have already happened with most people), those freedoms will be eroded.
Yeah but it is easy to spot them, because they all wear light colored jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, a baseball cap with the hood over it, sunglasses, and drive around in a white van!
The sad thing is, we can thwart these efforts, and we have been able to thwart these efforts for a long time. The majority of people, however, do not care as much about thwarting efforts at surveillance as they do about convenience. It is too inconvenient to carry a thumb drive with some software and crypto keys around*; the extra steps of inserting that device into a computer and running the software on it is more than most people are willing to deal with.
* Yes I know that this is not as secure as keeping your crypto keys on your own hardware, but it goes a hell of a lot further than any current methods do, and would require a lot of resources on the part of the government to break across the board (e.g. a targeted attack would work, but if they are going to the effort of targeting an individual they are going to break the crypto anyway, perhaps using the drugs+wrench method).
I personally use Emacs, with syntax highlighting and various other modes, because it is helpful and speeds up the process of writing code. There have been times, however, where I have not been able to use Emacs for some reason (e.g. I had to write some code on a system that did not have it installed). Once I was reduced to using a line editor to write some code (yes, in the 21st century), and while I hope to never experience such a situation again, I was able to deal with it and get the work done.
All too often I see programmers who are completely helpless when they cannot use their favorite IDE, which is the problem I was alluding to. An IDE is a great tool that can save a lot of time, but when it gets to the point where people cannot figure out how to run a Java program without starting up Eclipse, something very bad is going on.
"I'm sick and tired of the attacks on everyone who might go against the juvenile group-think on this website and actually feel some of the things microsoft produce have something to offer the world and would like to extend it."
Sorry, but after years of trying to undermine and bring an end to the free software and open source software movements, Microsoft needs to make the first move. Thus far, all they have done is contributed some drivers to Linux that make it easier to run Windows in a VM, and made it slightly easier for open source developers to develop software for Windows. Note their emphasis on running Windows. Note that Windows is more proprietary, more shackled than ever before.
Call me when Windows and/or MS Office have been GPLv3'ed.
It is difficult to be as trusting of Microsoft and their intentions as Miguel obviously is. This is the company that worked to discredit the entire free software movement, and still refuses to acknowledge that there is even such a movement. This is the company that wrote the playbook for break compatibility for everyone else. Microsoft has a habit of poaching developers until their competitors fall apart.
Why would we ever want to write code for their platform on their terms? I will not have much trust for Microsoft until MS Office is GPLed (v3) and I can get it working on GNU.
This is the same company that insisted it was illegal to run OS X on any computer that did not have an Apple logo on it. Why would you be surprised that they would try to claim that anything resembling an apple, even the logo for a grocery store chain (which undoubtedly sells apples) is an infringement on their trademark?
Your logic explains, of course, why my current phone is crippled in the following two ways:
Always returns CARRIER ERROR without actually dialing a number for ATDT commands sent over bluetooth (which would use the same service as a voice call).
Always returns ERROR for any attempt to sent or receive SMS messages over bluetooth (e.g. compose a message on my laptop and send it with the phone), even with the extended AT commands that Nokia lists in the phone's technical documents.
There is no reason for either of those features to be disabled -- they use the same services that my phone already receives! The only reason I can think of for this sort of crippling is an attempt to squeeze more money out of me and force me to pay for additional services or accessories for my phone; too bad, because I would rather go without those features than support that strategy.
Or, they need to find a new, workable revenue model for an age where people do not want to pay just to be informed about the world. The news itself must be subsidized by something else, some related business where the newspapers can use their reputation for quality journalism to boost sales. What that business might be, I do not personally know, but if it cannot be discovered, then you are right: journalists are going to be begging for money to do their work.
The leak was caused by an error in the sharing settings for the document. This is not specifically something that Google needs to change; sharing is the nature of Google docs. It is more a question of whether or not sensitive data should be processed on a publicly accessible, sharing oriented system. I would no sooner say Google was at fault than I would say that Microsoft would have been at fault had the document been leaked because someone left it on a publicly accessible Samba share.
Sounds like my alma mater. We had been using Cyrus and Squirrelmail when I arrived (I just used Kontact, but other students were using Squirrelmail), and it was working well, with some effort on the part of the IT staff. Then, one day, we hit an upper limit on the number of emails Cyrus could handle at a time -- and things got slow. Sadly, our IT staff had been taken over by some new managers, who preferred to buy proprietary, packaged solutions than to rely on our paid IT staff to solve these problems. $300k/year got us Mirapoint's black box rack mount mail system, which while pricey and proprietary, works very well. One year later, they decided to go for a better deal and just move everything to Google.
The article does not give many details on what their email system was before they sold their soul to Google. It may very well have been (or perceived to have been) worse, and this is an improvement in the eyes of upper management.
Google docs is another liability, when it comes to security. A while back, Columbia experienced a major data leak -- tens of thousands of social security numbers, names, dates of birth, etc. (everything you need to open a bank account) -- all because someone was using Google docs. Frankly, if you want the same level of document/email integration, there are a lot of free-libre and proprietary packages that will do that; MS Office, or KOffice+Kontact, for example. Being willing to put up with a slightly less convenient, but far more secure (in terms of data) method is all it really takes.
Slashdot Mirror
As technology improves, we are eventually going to forget about copyrights; the laws might remain on the books, and big corporations will be busy suing each other over copyrights, but the average citizen will no longer be affected by them. We are almost there already; high school and college students download music and movies without a thought to copyrights, and share the files with their friends. Once they grow up, copyrights will have virtually no meaning for the average person in society.
Actually, he probably would. People ask each other out all the time, it is part of being human. Women in open source, which is not necessarily a professional atmosphere all the time, can expect that heterosexual men in open source will ask them out. Likewise, men can expect that women will ask them out. There are many, many more men than women, and thus the frequency of men asking women out will be many times higher than visa versa.
We can't repel firepower of that magnitude! Their patent portfolio is operational!
With pride, I can say that I will not be violating this patent.
Until they screw up so massively that people are laughing at them. Like in this case.
Browser popups are a terrible idea. I already see "your PC is infected" popups all the time, this will just legitimize every malware author on earth.
Perhaps it played out more like this:
After three years of not realizing they were violating a patent, Toyato is suddenly surprised to discover that their engineers reinvented an existed technology.
Not a creepy enough van. A creepy van is usually a single, solid color, with no decoration and few windows. Some rust is usually present. The color white is preferred, although other colors are possible. The back should contain random boxes of junk and something to tie a rope to, and room for at least one adult and one child.
Which is why OTR is so cool. It gives a discrete warning about being unauthenticated, and it integrates seamlessly with IM. Unfortunately, even OTR is too inconvenient for most people I have met, and they fail to understand why there is any benefit to using something that is not as "pretty" as the default AIM client (thank you AOL for screwing that one up for us).
It has those protections because people are so sensitive about those backward steps. Once people stop caring so much (which may have already happened with most people), those freedoms will be eroded.
Yeah but it is easy to spot them, because they all wear light colored jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, a baseball cap with the hood over it, sunglasses, and drive around in a white van!
The sad thing is, we can thwart these efforts, and we have been able to thwart these efforts for a long time. The majority of people, however, do not care as much about thwarting efforts at surveillance as they do about convenience. It is too inconvenient to carry a thumb drive with some software and crypto keys around*; the extra steps of inserting that device into a computer and running the software on it is more than most people are willing to deal with.
* Yes I know that this is not as secure as keeping your crypto keys on your own hardware, but it goes a hell of a lot further than any current methods do, and would require a lot of resources on the part of the government to break across the board (e.g. a targeted attack would work, but if they are going to the effort of targeting an individual they are going to break the crypto anyway, perhaps using the drugs+wrench method).
I personally use Emacs, with syntax highlighting and various other modes, because it is helpful and speeds up the process of writing code. There have been times, however, where I have not been able to use Emacs for some reason (e.g. I had to write some code on a system that did not have it installed). Once I was reduced to using a line editor to write some code (yes, in the 21st century), and while I hope to never experience such a situation again, I was able to deal with it and get the work done.
All too often I see programmers who are completely helpless when they cannot use their favorite IDE, which is the problem I was alluding to. An IDE is a great tool that can save a lot of time, but when it gets to the point where people cannot figure out how to run a Java program without starting up Eclipse, something very bad is going on.
If a programmer needs to use an IDE, as opposed to just using one for convenience, something is very wrong.
"I'm sick and tired of the attacks on everyone who might go against the juvenile group-think on this website and actually feel some of the things microsoft produce have something to offer the world and would like to extend it."
Sorry, but after years of trying to undermine and bring an end to the free software and open source software movements, Microsoft needs to make the first move. Thus far, all they have done is contributed some drivers to Linux that make it easier to run Windows in a VM, and made it slightly easier for open source developers to develop software for Windows. Note their emphasis on running Windows. Note that Windows is more proprietary, more shackled than ever before.
Call me when Windows and/or MS Office have been GPLv3'ed.
It is difficult to be as trusting of Microsoft and their intentions as Miguel obviously is. This is the company that worked to discredit the entire free software movement, and still refuses to acknowledge that there is even such a movement. This is the company that wrote the playbook for break compatibility for everyone else. Microsoft has a habit of poaching developers until their competitors fall apart.
Why would we ever want to write code for their platform on their terms? I will not have much trust for Microsoft until MS Office is GPLed (v3) and I can get it working on GNU.
This is the same company that insisted it was illegal to run OS X on any computer that did not have an Apple logo on it. Why would you be surprised that they would try to claim that anything resembling an apple, even the logo for a grocery store chain (which undoubtedly sells apples) is an infringement on their trademark?
There is no reason for either of those features to be disabled -- they use the same services that my phone already receives! The only reason I can think of for this sort of crippling is an attempt to squeeze more money out of me and force me to pay for additional services or accessories for my phone; too bad, because I would rather go without those features than support that strategy.
Hey! This is Slashdot! What are you doing cheering for Microsoft? You be cheering for...software patents? STOP CHEERING!
Or, they need to find a new, workable revenue model for an age where people do not want to pay just to be informed about the world. The news itself must be subsidized by something else, some related business where the newspapers can use their reputation for quality journalism to boost sales. What that business might be, I do not personally know, but if it cannot be discovered, then you are right: journalists are going to be begging for money to do their work.
The license says that they are required to release the code, even if they do not modify it, or to indicate where the code can be obtained...
The leak was caused by an error in the sharing settings for the document. This is not specifically something that Google needs to change; sharing is the nature of Google docs. It is more a question of whether or not sensitive data should be processed on a publicly accessible, sharing oriented system. I would no sooner say Google was at fault than I would say that Microsoft would have been at fault had the document been leaked because someone left it on a publicly accessible Samba share.
Sounds like my alma mater. We had been using Cyrus and Squirrelmail when I arrived (I just used Kontact, but other students were using Squirrelmail), and it was working well, with some effort on the part of the IT staff. Then, one day, we hit an upper limit on the number of emails Cyrus could handle at a time -- and things got slow. Sadly, our IT staff had been taken over by some new managers, who preferred to buy proprietary, packaged solutions than to rely on our paid IT staff to solve these problems. $300k/year got us Mirapoint's black box rack mount mail system, which while pricey and proprietary, works very well. One year later, they decided to go for a better deal and just move everything to Google.
The article does not give many details on what their email system was before they sold their soul to Google. It may very well have been (or perceived to have been) worse, and this is an improvement in the eyes of upper management.
Google docs is another liability, when it comes to security. A while back, Columbia experienced a major data leak -- tens of thousands of social security numbers, names, dates of birth, etc. (everything you need to open a bank account) -- all because someone was using Google docs. Frankly, if you want the same level of document/email integration, there are a lot of free-libre and proprietary packages that will do that; MS Office, or KOffice+Kontact, for example. Being willing to put up with a slightly less convenient, but far more secure (in terms of data) method is all it really takes.