Seriously, is this conversation about the real world or a fantasy world? In the real world, the US has nuclear weapons. It shouldn't use them for its defense? That's a fantasy solution, because it fails the primary responsibility of a government: protect its people.
To that end, is the US safer if Iran and the rest of the middle east go nuclear? Obviously, the answer is no.
So, what is true?
Certainly, the US has far more nuclear weapons than it need. Certainly, it should say it will not use them offensively. That is a very reasonable position to advocate--I'd agree with that wholeheartedly.
Do you disagree with the basic premises of my post? 1) Nuclear weapons are dangerous. 2) Ensuring that they are properly tracked, accounted for, and not accidentally used is a difficult, and relatively undersolved problem. 3) Having more countries with them multiplies the danger that an accident will happen. 4) The middle east is already unstable--would adding nuclear weapons make it more stable? 5)Does "mutual assured destruction" even work in a multi-party balance?
Nobody knows the answer to #5--and really, the consequences of being wrong are too awful to contemplate.
The real reason to try to prevent a nuclear Iran is not Iran. The real reason is that if Iran goes nuclear, Saudi Arabia will follow. If Saudi Arabia becomes a nuclear armed state, Egypt will follow, as will Syria....and so on. Suddenly it's half the nations of the area carrying nuclear weapons.
One of the things that's most striking, if you listen to old Cold Warriors like George Schultz or William Perry talk about nuclear weapons, is how close we came during the Cold War to global annihilation. Mistakes become so much more dangerous in a nuclear era. The time available between detection of "enemy" launch and when a retaliation needs to be ordered was (and continues to be) 15 minutes. It's hard to make a good decision in 15 minutes.
If Israel, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran all have nuclear arms, suddenly you're not looking at a two-nation mutual-assured-destruction standoff, you're looking at an extraordinarily complex international balancing act in which one misunderstanding can destroy an entire region.
Shockingly, this is one area that Exchange does a reasonable job. Since we know the behavior is "send files via email", you want an email system that doesn't croak under that kind of load. Exchange, with single-instance storage, actually gets this right.
If I send, via Exchange, the same email to 30 users, with an attachment to it, that email (and attachment) are stored once. With any other mail system I get 30 copies of it. THAT is a huge improvement.
(Zimbra may actually do single-instance storage, but I haven't done investigation enough yet to be sure)
It's important to remember, though, that when big basic discoveries are made, it's almost impossible to understand their implications and outcomes. When nuclear magnetic resonance was discovered, the folks who worked on the project were asked "So, what are the practical uses of this effect?" Their answer? Something to the effect of "Well, we think it might help in measurement of very small magnetic fields--so we could study how the earth's magnetic field is shifting, and that might be important."
Of course, NMR is the effect that enabled MRI, one of the most useful diagnostic tools of the last 20 years.
The moral of the story? Don't let speculation about what the discovery might be good for make you sick. Use it as an opportunity to think even bigger about what new frontiers opening up might conceivably mean.
Actually, just to be pedantic, Russia probably doesn't survive 1941-42 without Lend-Lease. We sent quite a few trucks and material to the USSR under the Lend-Lease act.
She/Dateline is still free to do their story. Nothing and nobody has removed the Constitutional rights you refer to.
Of course not! I'm commenting on the utter distaste the community seems to have for the fact that it was Dateline
The big problem here isn't the legality of the press pulling this stunt; it's that there are presenters at this conference that have potentially broken laws (copy protection circumvention anyone?) in the course of discovering weakness in systems and products we use everyday. The content of this conference is very "touchy"; with very little alteration it would be easy to misrepresent what is said by people at DefCon. I believe if you want a conference like DefCon to succeed (where success is defined by people that find weakness in software and hardware agreeing to present at DefCon), then you need to enforce that the press identify themselves. The premise of the show that this reporter worked for also doesn't even try to have any journalistic "protection of sources"; if they did and people could trust that the press would always hide the identities of those at DefCon (and just report on the content), I think the whole press-pass thing might be less of an issue with the conference organizers.
I think you're confusing two issues here. First is anonymous sourcing. If a person goes to Dateline and says "Keep me anonymous and I will tell you how I broke into Defense Department computers", Dateline will keep them anonymous. If a hacker goes to Las Vegas, presents on how he did the same thing, he is no longer anonymous.
Put it another way: If I, as a private citizen, not a journalist, go to DefCon, and see how something illegal was done, and I come home, and write about it in my blog, and thousands of people read about how Joe Bloggs hacked into Defense Department computers using X, Y, Z techniques--how is that any different than Dateline doing the same thing and broadcasting it on TV?
You don't get to discriminate a free press based on not liking the press outlet. You can protest that outlet directly, but you don't get to say that they're not entitled to do everything any other press outlet can do--not without setting yourself (or someone else) up as the arbiter of what content is worthwhile and what's not--and we know what's down that road.
But that's entirely beside the point. You don't get to say "The press is free only if it does things I think are valuable". You get a free press, you get all the ugliness of a free press. Otherwise someone gets to decide what's a valuable use of a free press and what's not--and who decides who that someone is?
On one hand, you have a tragically flawed and misguided news organization, which builds and runs shows like To Catch a Predator. They're a really unsympathetic party. On the other hand, as many have pointed out, you have the fundamental truth that sometimes, undercover reporting is vital to the functioning of a free society.
Personally? I'll risk the tragically flawed and misguided news organization if it means I have a better chance of learning when my rights are violated by my government.
I'm pretty shocked that that's so far from a unanimous view here, given Slashdot's libertarian bent.
Linux is THE dominant OS in the server space? Really?
Why do the IDC and Gartner number say that on x86, Linux has around 15-20% market share, and Windows has around 80%, then? That's not very dominant, whether you want to believe it or not.
Even at present, well after the end of the Cold War, if the DefCon level is high enough, the U. S. Strategic Air Command fleet is set up such that 1/3 of the bombers are in the air at all times, 1/3 are prepped or prepping for takeoff, and 1/3 are down.
This was certainly true during the height of the Cold War.
The cost of keeping 1 747-400 airborne is chickenfeed compared to the cost of keeping 50 B-52's airborne at all times.
Hmm. Let's see. TurboLinux had three products, as you've said.
Two of those were direct competitors with RedHat, an already established company. At least one of these also competed with debian, a well-established distribution.
The third, a product nobody else was making, cost significantly more to the end user and thus had a significantly higher profit margin.
In what universe would it seem like a good idea *not* to focus on the product where you're NOT competing with two large, popular distributions?
No, I'm not saying "Throw away the revenue generators" like you say the TL people did. But competing directly with RedHat and ignoring the opportunity to be a market leader in a space, well. That simply isn't good business, Kool-Aid or not.
That's funny--I've had the opposite experience with the Vaio's I've had in a corporate environment. Mine survived a drop onto asphalt, has pretty good (but not stellar) battery life and all in all performs precisely as I'd want one to.
I've never had one die on me at all, and everyone here has been happy with theirs, even the ones who commute with them (ie use them on a desk and on a train)
*shrug*
I don't doubt your experience, just that it may not be entirely representative, is all.
I'd disagree--I think that the three-company split made much more sense. The IE portion of the company has the potential to have *tremendous* value over the long term, significantly more than either of the other two portions.
Alright, this is the first time I've posted to Slashdot.
The trouble with the attitude presented in the rest of this thread that I've seen and in the above is that it completely misses the point.
Civilization, as it has evolved to this point, has protected people's ability to copyright their works, whether they be works of literature or software or even specifications of protocols.
The trouble with this scenario comes when the trend of law to this point runs into a force like the 'net, which encourages broad and expansive dispersal of information. It's this collision that produces the conflict slashdot is raging about even as we speak.
The suggestion that nothing be given Microsoft, not an inch, not a whisker of obedience is, quite simply, simpleminded and foolish. Material owned by Microsoft, duly copyrighted, has been distributed. This is, simply, illegal. It has been for a good couple hundred years--regardless of the medium by which that material is transmitted, the principle is the same. This isn't remotely the same as DeCSS, which others have compared it to. This is a principle of law that's been litigated and upheld for years upon years.
Microsoft is *entirely* within its both moral and legal rights to demand removal of its copyrighted documents.
Now, if you want to argue the morality of copyright law in general, have fun. I'm not gonna get involved in that discussion.
However, Microsoft demanding the removal of commentary on the spec? That's illegitimate, of course, and neither Andover nor Slashdot should agree to it.
Slashdot Mirror
I can sum up that post with one phrase:
"I want a pony."
Seriously, is this conversation about the real world or a fantasy world? In the real world, the US has nuclear weapons. It shouldn't use them for its defense? That's a fantasy solution, because it fails the primary responsibility of a government: protect its people.
To that end, is the US safer if Iran and the rest of the middle east go nuclear?
Obviously, the answer is no.
So, what is true?
Certainly, the US has far more nuclear weapons than it need. Certainly, it should say it will not use them offensively. That is a very reasonable position to advocate--I'd agree with that wholeheartedly.
Do you disagree with the basic premises of my post?
1) Nuclear weapons are dangerous.
2) Ensuring that they are properly tracked, accounted for, and not accidentally used is a difficult, and relatively undersolved problem.
3) Having more countries with them multiplies the danger that an accident will happen.
4) The middle east is already unstable--would adding nuclear weapons make it more stable?
5)Does "mutual assured destruction" even work in a multi-party balance?
Nobody knows the answer to #5--and really, the consequences of being wrong are too awful to contemplate.
The real reason to try to prevent a nuclear Iran is not Iran. The real reason is that if Iran goes nuclear, Saudi Arabia will follow. If Saudi Arabia becomes a nuclear armed state, Egypt will follow, as will Syria....and so on. Suddenly it's half the nations of the area carrying nuclear weapons.
One of the things that's most striking, if you listen to old Cold Warriors like George Schultz or William Perry talk about nuclear weapons, is how close we came during the Cold War to global annihilation. Mistakes become so much more dangerous in a nuclear era. The time available between detection of "enemy" launch and when a retaliation needs to be ordered was (and continues to be) 15 minutes. It's hard to make a good decision in 15 minutes.
If Israel, Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Iran all have nuclear arms, suddenly you're not looking at a two-nation mutual-assured-destruction standoff, you're looking at an extraordinarily complex international balancing act in which one misunderstanding can destroy an entire region.
I think that's worth trying to avoid.
Shockingly, this is one area that Exchange does a reasonable job. Since we know the behavior is "send files via email", you want an email system that doesn't croak under that kind of load. Exchange, with single-instance storage, actually gets this right.
If I send, via Exchange, the same email to 30 users, with an attachment to it, that email (and attachment) are stored once. With any other mail system I get 30 copies of it. THAT is a huge improvement.
(Zimbra may actually do single-instance storage, but I haven't done investigation enough yet to be sure)
It's important to remember, though, that when big basic discoveries are made, it's almost impossible to understand their implications and outcomes. When nuclear magnetic resonance was discovered, the folks who worked on the project were asked "So, what are the practical uses of this effect?" Their answer? Something to the effect of "Well, we think it might help in measurement of very small magnetic fields--so we could study how the earth's magnetic field is shifting, and that might be important."
Of course, NMR is the effect that enabled MRI, one of the most useful diagnostic tools of the last 20 years.
The moral of the story? Don't let speculation about what the discovery might be good for make you sick. Use it as an opportunity to think even bigger about what new frontiers opening up might conceivably mean.
Actually, just to be pedantic, Russia probably doesn't survive 1941-42 without Lend-Lease. We sent quite a few trucks and material to the USSR under the Lend-Lease act.
She/Dateline is still free to do their story. Nothing and nobody has removed the Constitutional rights you refer to.
Of course not! I'm commenting on the utter distaste the community seems to have for the fact that it was Dateline
The big problem here isn't the legality of the press pulling this stunt; it's that there are presenters at this conference that have potentially broken laws (copy protection circumvention anyone?) in the course of discovering weakness in systems and products we use everyday. The content of this conference is very "touchy"; with very little alteration it would be easy to misrepresent what is said by people at DefCon. I believe if you want a conference like DefCon to succeed (where success is defined by people that find weakness in software and hardware agreeing to present at DefCon), then you need to enforce that the press identify themselves. The premise of the show that this reporter worked for also doesn't even try to have any journalistic "protection of sources"; if they did and people could trust that the press would always hide the identities of those at DefCon (and just report on the content), I think the whole press-pass thing might be less of an issue with the conference organizers. I think you're confusing two issues here. First is anonymous sourcing. If a person goes to Dateline and says "Keep me anonymous and I will tell you how I broke into Defense Department computers", Dateline will keep them anonymous. If a hacker goes to Las Vegas, presents on how he did the same thing, he is no longer anonymous. Put it another way: If I, as a private citizen, not a journalist, go to DefCon, and see how something illegal was done, and I come home, and write about it in my blog, and thousands of people read about how Joe Bloggs hacked into Defense Department computers using X, Y, Z techniques--how is that any different than Dateline doing the same thing and broadcasting it on TV? You don't get to discriminate a free press based on not liking the press outlet. You can protest that outlet directly, but you don't get to say that they're not entitled to do everything any other press outlet can do--not without setting yourself (or someone else) up as the arbiter of what content is worthwhile and what's not--and we know what's down that road.
But that's entirely beside the point. You don't get to say "The press is free only if it does things I think are valuable". You get a free press, you get all the ugliness of a free press. Otherwise someone gets to decide what's a valuable use of a free press and what's not--and who decides who that someone is?
On one hand, you have a tragically flawed and misguided news organization, which builds and runs shows like To Catch a Predator. They're a really unsympathetic party. On the other hand, as many have pointed out, you have the fundamental truth that sometimes, undercover reporting is vital to the functioning of a free society.
Personally? I'll risk the tragically flawed and misguided news organization if it means I have a better chance of learning when my rights are violated by my government.
I'm pretty shocked that that's so far from a unanimous view here, given Slashdot's libertarian bent.
Linux is THE dominant OS in the server space?
Really?
Why do the IDC and Gartner number say that on x86, Linux has around 15-20% market share, and Windows has around 80%, then? That's not very dominant, whether you want to believe it or not.
Even at present, well after the end of the Cold War, if the DefCon level is high enough, the U. S. Strategic Air Command fleet is set up such that 1/3 of the bombers are in the air at all times, 1/3 are prepped or prepping for takeoff, and 1/3 are down.
This was certainly true during the height of the Cold War.
The cost of keeping 1 747-400 airborne is chickenfeed compared to the cost of keeping 50 B-52's airborne at all times.
Co-worker.
Hmm. Let's see. TurboLinux had three products, as you've said.
Two of those were direct competitors with RedHat, an already established company. At least one of these also competed with debian, a well-established distribution.
The third, a product nobody else was making, cost significantly more to the end user and thus had a significantly higher profit margin.
In what universe would it seem like a good idea *not* to focus on the product where you're NOT competing with two large, popular distributions?
No, I'm not saying "Throw away the revenue generators" like you say the TL people did. But competing directly with RedHat and ignoring the opportunity to be a market leader in a space, well. That simply isn't good business, Kool-Aid or not.
That's funny--I've had the opposite experience with the Vaio's I've had in a corporate environment. Mine survived a drop onto asphalt, has pretty good (but not stellar) battery life and all in all performs precisely as I'd want one to.
I've never had one die on me at all, and everyone here has been happy with theirs, even the ones who commute with them (ie use them on a desk and on a train)
*shrug*
I don't doubt your experience, just that it may not be entirely representative, is all.
I'd disagree--I think that the three-company split made much more sense. The IE portion of the company has the potential to have *tremendous* value over the long term, significantly more than either of the other two portions.
Alright, this is the first time I've posted to Slashdot.
The trouble with the attitude presented in the rest of this thread that I've seen and in the above is that it completely misses the point.
Civilization, as it has evolved to this point, has protected people's ability to copyright their works, whether they be works of literature or software or even specifications of protocols.
The trouble with this scenario comes when the trend of law to this point runs into a force like the 'net, which encourages broad and expansive dispersal of information. It's this collision that produces the conflict slashdot is raging about even as we speak.
The suggestion that nothing be given Microsoft, not an inch, not a whisker of obedience is, quite simply, simpleminded and foolish. Material owned by Microsoft, duly copyrighted, has been distributed. This is, simply, illegal. It has been for a good couple hundred years--regardless of the medium by which that material is transmitted, the principle is the same. This isn't remotely the same as DeCSS, which others have compared it to. This is a principle of law that's been litigated and upheld for years upon years.
Microsoft is *entirely* within its both moral and legal rights to demand removal of its copyrighted documents.
Now, if you want to argue the morality of copyright law in general, have fun. I'm not gonna get involved in that discussion.
However, Microsoft demanding the removal of commentary on the spec? That's illegitimate, of course, and neither Andover nor Slashdot should agree to it.
I dunno, this seems awful simple to me.