how important it was to stay out of the fucking 1980's with IT equipment that serves critical functions
Talk about blanket statements. I suspect that there is quite a bit of 1980s IT equipment in your life that you are not even aware of.
The problem is not what decade the equipment comes from, it is whether or not the equipment meets its requirements. If equipment from the 1980s is continuing to meet the requirements that governments face today, then there is no reason to spend enormous amounts of tax money to replace that equipment unless doing so will pay for itself before the next upgrade. Unfortunately, there are few cases where such upgrades actually do pay for themselves, so in terms of what is best to do with tax dollars, upgrading old equipment that continues to function as needed is questionable.
Now, if the equipment is not working, then it is time to replace it. The real problem is that government contracts are not typically given to companies deemed best for the job, and so these situations arise. Contracts are awarded to companies that bid low and to companies that are well-connected, even when better companies are available.
"270 mile range sounds fantastic (my car only gets 210 miles to a tank)."
You should get a better car. I drive a VW TDI, and on a half tank (somewhere between 12 and 13 gallons) I can do at least 200 miles -- and I do not exactly drive in a way that maximizes fuel efficiency. Diesel cars sound a bit different and smell a bit odd after short trips, but even with higher-priced fuel you are going to see a cost advantage to diesel (maintenance is a bit pricier too, but even factoring that in you'll have a cost advantage).
What I really want, though, is to take that diesel engine and plug it into an electric motor, like a railroad locomotive. Charge the battery when I can, get 400+ miles on a tank of diesel otherwise (probably even more, though, since the diesel engine could maintain its optimal RPM while generating electric power). I'd sacrifice my trunk space for it if I had to.
"the New York Times. They don't lie"
I think there is a bit of misplaced faith here. I would be wary of trusting *any* American news source, even one as famous as the New York Times.
Aside from potential dishonesty, the NYT employs reporters who routinely fail to have experts check their statements. Just read through the "Technology" section if you want examples (the most extreme examples can be found there). Like most American media, the NYT is desperate to get their story out there before their competitors; double checking facts and ensuring accurate statements are secondary objectives in the best case.
Even if the publishers were charities (which they aren't) there are still costs that still have to be covered.
Name those costs. Universities already archive scientific journals as a service, peer review is generally done by unpaid volunteers, editing is generally done by unpaid volunteers, and we know how to use peer to peer networks to distribute large amounts of data without paying a lot for bandwidth (imagine the major universities acting as seeds for bittorrent archives of each years' collection of published journal articles). So what cost do you think remains to be paid here?
Charging authors doesn't mean that it comes out of the authors personal pockets - generally, the money comes from the university, or more likely, from the funding body that paid for the research to take place.
In other words, we still have some of the problems that open access should solve. While we no longer have the issue of individuals being unable to access knowledge, we are still saying that research can only be done by those with university affiliations or who are wealthy.
Volunteers, which is basically what we do now. Anyone can submit a paper to the journals my group publishes in, and if the paper meets the requirements, it will be reviewed by volunteers, and if it is accepted it will be edited by volunteers too.
Charging authors to publish is not much better than charging people to read the articles. What we truly need is a system that is paid for by universities, cooperatively, that allows anyone to submit a paper and allows anyone to download as many or as few papers as they would like.
It's not the protest itself that is secret, but the planning. The point of spying on activists before they stage a protest is to crack down on the protest, to spread propaganda just before the protest, to move important meetings away from the protest site, etc.
It's not as simple as that. I saw a talk by a researcher a few months ago who discovered that Twitter posts could be used to predict spikes in crime. Basically, the example he demonstrated went something like this: when a lot of people are posting messages about being stuck in traffic, the probability of hit-and-run accidents increases. The researcher conjectured that the reason for this phenomenon was that drivers were taking detours, and that the combination of running late and being on an unfamiliar route increased the likelihood of a collision (and by extension, of a hit-and-run). He then went on to show a similar analysis for predicting drug crimes, and then one that predicted terrorist attacks in Iraq.
So it is not just that people who engage in protests will leak data. Someone working at a deli where activists like to meet might post a comment to the effect of, "A bunch of weirdo hippies just walked in the door and they are not buying anything!" If you had a lot of people making Twitter posts that indicated that activist groups were holding meetings of increasing size and frequency, you could probably conclude that a major protest is being planned.
Above you talked about 6-12 months, now it suddenly changed to 7 years...
Read a little more closely. Fedora releases stop being supported after 12 months, and new releases come out every 6 months. RHEL releases lose support after 7 years, with new releases every 3 years or so.
Do you seriously use that old disk images carried over to new HW, or do you perhaps re-install the OS from scratch to new HW a bit more often than that, after all?
This is exactly the point: the support cycle is long enough that I will generally have to reinstall at some point before the 7 years are up, and I can do so at my discretion, when I have time available. I do not buy a new machine every 6-12 months; were I to stick with Fedora, I would be reinstalling (or praying that the upgrade option will work) on the same hardware year after year, and then having to take a few days away from work to rewrite configuration files, find workarounds for deleted features (or worse yet, added "features"), get my machine to connect to the network, etc.
I'm glad to here Ubuntu LTS works for you and lets you get your work done. I'll be over in here RHEL land getting my work done, and I'll be ignoring Google and their efforts to get me to do something else.
I guess I just do not see that problem on my own systems. I have a few EPEL and RPMFusion packages, and otherwise everything I need is already in the repositories.
Basically, the problem is this: Chromium depends on extensions to libraries that have not been merged with the main releases of those libraries, and so having Chromium on Fedora would require either static linking (giant packages) or maintain separate sets of libraries just for Chromium. Neither of those options is something that Fedora will do, and if Fedora is unwilling to include a package in its repositories the package as almost no chance of being included in RHEL. Years have passed since the problem was first discussed with Google (see the link), and there has not really been much progress, mostly for the same reasons that RHEL6 is not supported by Chrome: Google does things their way and is not going to change that for someone else (regardless of that other person's reasoning).
Does Debian stable promise a 7 year support cycle? When last I checked, Debian stable releases will only be supported for three years, but I am not really a Debian user some perhaps someone can correct me.
What I have trouble understanding is why you are so dismissive of the idea that someone would run RHEL on a workstation. I see a lot of researchers do it, and they all say essentially the same thing I said: they lack the time needed to upgrade frequently and new features are less important than stability. Debian stable may deliver that, but so does RHEL; what exactly do you think makes Debian better for workstations than RHEL?
Fedora is not better suited for all workstation tasks. I simply do not have time to deal with things breaking every few weeks, nor do I have time to upgrade my entire OS every year and go through the process of dealing with things breaking as a result. I switched from Fedora to ScientificLinux (a RHEL clone, more or less) for that reason: I have better things to do than to deal with a distro that thinks I should reformat my hard drive every 6 or 12 months. I am not alone in this either; I know a lot of other people who need a reliable workstation more than the latest features of every package.
Instead of legalizing a practice that would otherwise be illegal to protect obsolete businesses, why not legalize a practice that is otherwise illegal to rid ourselves of those obsolete businesses?
Aaron Swartz wrote a program that automatically downloaded journal articles, and faced 13 felony charges for it. Weev noticed that by adding one to a number in a URL, you could see the information of other people, with no attempt to secure that information.
You're right, totally different! Aaron actually did some hacking; Weev did about as much hacking as a kindergardener might do. Yet he now faces prison time for it.
The fact that thieves may (and do) steal legally held weapons is an argument for stricter gun control.
Indeed, but the key thing to recognize here is that the kind of guns that thieves steal are handguns, not rifles. Unfortunately, people keep talking about "military grade" rifles (which is a deliberately deceptive term to use) and the urgent need to keep those kinds of guns out of the hands of lunatics, while ignoring the fact that most gun murders involve low-caliber handguns. I am glad people are talking about gun control; now we just need them to stop making idiotic statements like, "We're not talking about taking away anyone's right to defend their homes with a handgun, we just want to restrict access to military rifles!"
Publish a map of handgun owners promotes criminal use of guns, by telling thieves where they should go to get handguns to sell on the black market. Criminals want handguns -- not rifles, not shotguns, handguns.
This is entirely the wrong issue to focus on. Rampage killers are a rarity: a mere seven in 2012 was considered unusually high. Compare that to the number of homicides in 2010: 14,748. If you ignore firearms, that number is still almost 5,000 -- 700 times higher than an unusual cluster of rampage killings. Source: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html
Handguns are the preferred weapon of criminals, and there is a huge black market for handguns. Why should we distract ourselves with the occasional massacre when we have a very real problem with criminal gun use? Criminals almost never use rifles -- rifles are too big to conceal easily, they make too much noise, and their accuracy at long distances is useless for the kind of fights criminals deal with. People need to stop wasting their time being terrified of guns that look scary and start focusing on the guns that are routinely used to murder people.
Slashdot Mirror
Bitcoin will always be a fringe currency. What Google is doing is encouraging a return to peer-to-peer filesharing, which I have no problem with.
Sorry, that should be read as a half tank being between 6 and 7 gallons of fuel; the entire tank is somewhere between 12 and 13 gallons.
how important it was to stay out of the fucking 1980's with IT equipment that serves critical functions
Talk about blanket statements. I suspect that there is quite a bit of 1980s IT equipment in your life that you are not even aware of.
The problem is not what decade the equipment comes from, it is whether or not the equipment meets its requirements. If equipment from the 1980s is continuing to meet the requirements that governments face today, then there is no reason to spend enormous amounts of tax money to replace that equipment unless doing so will pay for itself before the next upgrade. Unfortunately, there are few cases where such upgrades actually do pay for themselves, so in terms of what is best to do with tax dollars, upgrading old equipment that continues to function as needed is questionable.
Now, if the equipment is not working, then it is time to replace it. The real problem is that government contracts are not typically given to companies deemed best for the job, and so these situations arise. Contracts are awarded to companies that bid low and to companies that are well-connected, even when better companies are available.
"270 mile range sounds fantastic (my car only gets 210 miles to a tank)." You should get a better car. I drive a VW TDI, and on a half tank (somewhere between 12 and 13 gallons) I can do at least 200 miles -- and I do not exactly drive in a way that maximizes fuel efficiency. Diesel cars sound a bit different and smell a bit odd after short trips, but even with higher-priced fuel you are going to see a cost advantage to diesel (maintenance is a bit pricier too, but even factoring that in you'll have a cost advantage).
What I really want, though, is to take that diesel engine and plug it into an electric motor, like a railroad locomotive. Charge the battery when I can, get 400+ miles on a tank of diesel otherwise (probably even more, though, since the diesel engine could maintain its optimal RPM while generating electric power). I'd sacrifice my trunk space for it if I had to.
Right now a hacker can cause billions in damages
Example?
pull potentially millions of dollars in ill-gotten loot
Example?
He broke the law
Swartz who was planning to distribute
Oh Lord no! He was planning to distribute academic papers to people! The potential damage is unthinkable! PEOPLE MIGHT LEARN!
"the New York Times. They don't lie" I think there is a bit of misplaced faith here. I would be wary of trusting *any* American news source, even one as famous as the New York Times.
Aside from potential dishonesty, the NYT employs reporters who routinely fail to have experts check their statements. Just read through the "Technology" section if you want examples (the most extreme examples can be found there). Like most American media, the NYT is desperate to get their story out there before their competitors; double checking facts and ensuring accurate statements are secondary objectives in the best case.
Even if the publishers were charities (which they aren't) there are still costs that still have to be covered.
Name those costs. Universities already archive scientific journals as a service, peer review is generally done by unpaid volunteers, editing is generally done by unpaid volunteers, and we know how to use peer to peer networks to distribute large amounts of data without paying a lot for bandwidth (imagine the major universities acting as seeds for bittorrent archives of each years' collection of published journal articles). So what cost do you think remains to be paid here?
Charging authors doesn't mean that it comes out of the authors personal pockets - generally, the money comes from the university, or more likely, from the funding body that paid for the research to take place.
In other words, we still have some of the problems that open access should solve. While we no longer have the issue of individuals being unable to access knowledge, we are still saying that research can only be done by those with university affiliations or who are wealthy.
Volunteers, which is basically what we do now. Anyone can submit a paper to the journals my group publishes in, and if the paper meets the requirements, it will be reviewed by volunteers, and if it is accepted it will be edited by volunteers too.
Charging authors to publish is not much better than charging people to read the articles. What we truly need is a system that is paid for by universities, cooperatively, that allows anyone to submit a paper and allows anyone to download as many or as few papers as they would like.
It's not the protest itself that is secret, but the planning. The point of spying on activists before they stage a protest is to crack down on the protest, to spread propaganda just before the protest, to move important meetings away from the protest site, etc.
It's not as simple as that. I saw a talk by a researcher a few months ago who discovered that Twitter posts could be used to predict spikes in crime. Basically, the example he demonstrated went something like this: when a lot of people are posting messages about being stuck in traffic, the probability of hit-and-run accidents increases. The researcher conjectured that the reason for this phenomenon was that drivers were taking detours, and that the combination of running late and being on an unfamiliar route increased the likelihood of a collision (and by extension, of a hit-and-run). He then went on to show a similar analysis for predicting drug crimes, and then one that predicted terrorist attacks in Iraq.
So it is not just that people who engage in protests will leak data. Someone working at a deli where activists like to meet might post a comment to the effect of, "A bunch of weirdo hippies just walked in the door and they are not buying anything!" If you had a lot of people making Twitter posts that indicated that activist groups were holding meetings of increasing size and frequency, you could probably conclude that a major protest is being planned.
Frankly it annoys me that there are no desktop distros that are maintained for longer than a year or two
Allow me to rid you of your annoyance:
https://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/desktop/
Above you talked about 6-12 months, now it suddenly changed to 7 years...
Read a little more closely. Fedora releases stop being supported after 12 months, and new releases come out every 6 months. RHEL releases lose support after 7 years, with new releases every 3 years or so.
Do you seriously use that old disk images carried over to new HW, or do you perhaps re-install the OS from scratch to new HW a bit more often than that, after all?
This is exactly the point: the support cycle is long enough that I will generally have to reinstall at some point before the 7 years are up, and I can do so at my discretion, when I have time available. I do not buy a new machine every 6-12 months; were I to stick with Fedora, I would be reinstalling (or praying that the upgrade option will work) on the same hardware year after year, and then having to take a few days away from work to rewrite configuration files, find workarounds for deleted features (or worse yet, added "features"), get my machine to connect to the network, etc.
I'm glad to here Ubuntu LTS works for you and lets you get your work done. I'll be over in here RHEL land getting my work done, and I'll be ignoring Google and their efforts to get me to do something else.
I guess I just do not see that problem on my own systems. I have a few EPEL and RPMFusion packages, and otherwise everything I need is already in the repositories.
Red Hat - or anybody else, for that matter - is free to take the pure open source Chromium and port it to RHEL
There is a reason Chromium has not made it into Fedora's repositories (and by extension, RHEL):
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Chromium
Basically, the problem is this: Chromium depends on extensions to libraries that have not been merged with the main releases of those libraries, and so having Chromium on Fedora would require either static linking (giant packages) or maintain separate sets of libraries just for Chromium. Neither of those options is something that Fedora will do, and if Fedora is unwilling to include a package in its repositories the package as almost no chance of being included in RHEL. Years have passed since the problem was first discussed with Google (see the link), and there has not really been much progress, mostly for the same reasons that RHEL6 is not supported by Chrome: Google does things their way and is not going to change that for someone else (regardless of that other person's reasoning).
Does Debian stable promise a 7 year support cycle? When last I checked, Debian stable releases will only be supported for three years, but I am not really a Debian user some perhaps someone can correct me.
What I have trouble understanding is why you are so dismissive of the idea that someone would run RHEL on a workstation. I see a lot of researchers do it, and they all say essentially the same thing I said: they lack the time needed to upgrade frequently and new features are less important than stability. Debian stable may deliver that, but so does RHEL; what exactly do you think makes Debian better for workstations than RHEL?
Fedora is not better suited for all workstation tasks. I simply do not have time to deal with things breaking every few weeks, nor do I have time to upgrade my entire OS every year and go through the process of dealing with things breaking as a result. I switched from Fedora to ScientificLinux (a RHEL clone, more or less) for that reason: I have better things to do than to deal with a distro that thinks I should reformat my hard drive every 6 or 12 months. I am not alone in this either; I know a lot of other people who need a reliable workstation more than the latest features of every package.
Instead of legalizing a practice that would otherwise be illegal to protect obsolete businesses, why not legalize a practice that is otherwise illegal to rid ourselves of those obsolete businesses?
Just "vote with your wallet".
Sounds like rich people get more of a vote than poor people.
It's like going to the mechanic for an oil change, and being charged for a new transmission.
Aaron Swartz wrote a program that automatically downloaded journal articles, and faced 13 felony charges for it. Weev noticed that by adding one to a number in a URL, you could see the information of other people, with no attempt to secure that information.
You're right, totally different! Aaron actually did some hacking; Weev did about as much hacking as a kindergardener might do. Yet he now faces prison time for it.
The fact that thieves may (and do) steal legally held weapons is an argument for stricter gun control.
Indeed, but the key thing to recognize here is that the kind of guns that thieves steal are handguns, not rifles. Unfortunately, people keep talking about "military grade" rifles (which is a deliberately deceptive term to use) and the urgent need to keep those kinds of guns out of the hands of lunatics, while ignoring the fact that most gun murders involve low-caliber handguns. I am glad people are talking about gun control; now we just need them to stop making idiotic statements like, "We're not talking about taking away anyone's right to defend their homes with a handgun, we just want to restrict access to military rifles!"
Publish a map of handgun owners promotes criminal use of guns, by telling thieves where they should go to get handguns to sell on the black market. Criminals want handguns -- not rifles, not shotguns, handguns.
This is entirely the wrong issue to focus on. Rampage killers are a rarity: a mere seven in 2012 was considered unusually high. Compare that to the number of homicides in 2010: 14,748. If you ignore firearms, that number is still almost 5,000 -- 700 times higher than an unusual cluster of rampage killings. Source: https://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/data-and-analysis/homicide.html
Why is New York focusing on rifles anyway? Just before the Newtown massacre, a man was shot execution-style on one of New York City's streets with a handgun in broad daylight: http://pix11.com/2012/12/12/mystery-behind-execution-style-shooting-in-midtown-deepens-even-as-investigators-learn-more/
Handguns are the preferred weapon of criminals, and there is a huge black market for handguns. Why should we distract ourselves with the occasional massacre when we have a very real problem with criminal gun use? Criminals almost never use rifles -- rifles are too big to conceal easily, they make too much noise, and their accuracy at long distances is useless for the kind of fights criminals deal with. People need to stop wasting their time being terrified of guns that look scary and start focusing on the guns that are routinely used to murder people.
So hiding a laptop in a closet in order to download scientific articles is a crime worthy of decades in prison?