Posts by Six_Degrees 155 publicly visible posts • joined 7 Mar 2015
Uh - I receive a constant stream of security patches for my Linux systems - just as I do for my Windows systems.
The only problem I see with Linux is its supporters irrational insistence that it is some magically invincible. They don't even bother looking for problems - and as recent events indicate, there are plenty of problems out there. They just aren't being noticed, out of a profound, willful ignorance.
Yes, I'm well aware of Stallman's hatred of private ownership of pretty much anything at all.
The point is, earlier versions of the GPL and many other open source licenses allow developers to protect their own code, and don't demand that it be released into the public domain as GPL3 does.. It's an impediment to the entire open source movement when its largest proponent goes off the deep end as Stallman has, and winds up driving people away instead.
I disagree. The decision to use a given bit of code based on licensing isn't often made by the legal department; it's made by developers, or by management, who will often extend the nuances of GPL3 malignancy to a simple, "Don't use anything GPL'd." GPL3's harm extends beyond its immediate threats as a result.
Well, no. It's not up to you. Many packages are only available under a single license; those available under multiple licensing agreements are rare indeed. And, if you make the mistake of brushing up against GPL3 without realizing it, you have just kissed your code goodbye, even in cases of tangential contact.
As a result, a huge number of developers simply refuse to go anywhere near code that may be tainted with the GPL3 blight. It has done more to stifle the FOSS movement than any other single cause.
I agree that this is a persistent myth of open source development. That "million sets of eyes" that are supposed to be overlooking your code simply don't exist. In very nearly every case, the only eyes looking at your code are yours. It's actually very rare for anyone to bother looking at open source code except those who are already actively developing it.
We released a Fourier-domain image processing library into the open source world several years ago, with the hope that it would be improved and added to by the "community." It sat like a lump, unchanged, for years. Despite being actively downloaded and used, no one took the time to contribute any code changes beyond our own development team.
And I'm not aware of any studies showing significant differences between open and closed source development in this regard. Which isn't really surprising, since there is no effective metric available for measuring such a thing in the first place.
Not so much. Those same companies are happy to make use of other open source licenses - MIT, the LGPL, and so on - because unlike GPL3, those licenses allow them to keep their own proprietary code proprietary. GPL3, on the other hand, demands that anything it touches be released to the public domain. It is poisonous in the extreme, and it's outrageously expansive demands have smothered the open source movement. GPL3 is specifically designed to metastisize and malignantly infect everything it touches. It has nothing whatsoever to do with "your benefit"; it benefits one thing and one thing only, and that thing is Dick Stallman's enormously overinflated ego.
Consider what the landscape would look like without GPL3. People might actually be using FOSS, instead of keeping themselves as far away from a crippling licensing agreement as possible. Most commerical software houses I'm familiar with now completely forbid the use of anything bearing this license, thanks to Stallman's penchant for lawsuits and his many attempts to seize ownership of software that so much as shares the same room with a GPL3 license.
Stallman has single-handledly stifled the spread of FOSS through the spread of his tumorous bilge.
Count yourself lucky. My experience, and the experience of many other Java developers, has been that it is "Write once, debug everywhere," with scores of platform-dependent quirks and outright bugs that drive implementation to the lowest common denominator, rather than a single, elegant solution.
"The trade watchdog has courted hackers to track down companies making automated calls and at one point put a $50,000 bounty on offer for researchers who could develop a method for blocking robocalls."
Can't phone companies simply take note that one of their customers is making tens or hundreds of thousands of calls per day that last an average of seconds? How hard a problem is this, really?
Oh, bullshit.
Every single Apple release over the last several years has proclaimed itself the victim of "shortages." We're supposed to believe that the Masters of Supply Chain Management can't do a simple estimate of demand.
This is manufactured scarcity, created deliberately in order to gin up excitement and buzz. Period.
Uh - the US and the rest of the world also has cancer vaccines. For a tiny handful of very specific cancers. They've been available for years, and are cheap. This is not news.
Your blanket statement that "Cuba has a vaccine for cancer," however, is a gross distortion of reality, making it seem as though a vaccine exists that prevents all cancer. And frankly, I'm being kind referring to it as a distortion; in actuality, it is far more likely to be a flat-out lie on your part.
BTW - Cuba has had a very serious problem over the last few decades retaining their own medical personnel. They were sending them overseas, mainly to south and central america, to train doctors in those regions, and once they hit the ground outside of Cuba they never came back. Most of them, in fact, made a beeline for the US.
"The NSA doesn't sell data, your grocery store does," he said. "But I don't hear anyone complaining about the grocery store's discount card, because you get a discount."
1) I can shop somewhere else, or otherwise opt out of my grocery store's data collection.
2) My grocer can't put me in prison.
The Patriot Act has never once connected any dots. Not once. When asked, not a single person in government or any of its intelligence or law enforcement agencies has been able to produce even one example of such utility.
McConnell is flat-out lying here when he claims otherwise. If he wants to prove me wrong, all he has to do is show the nation a solitary instance of such connections made because of this odious piece of legislation.
They're relying on most people's aversion to being associated with porn. There's no legal merit at all behind their threats. They are, as the judge rightly noted, flat-out extortion.
Fortunately for society as a whole, Prenda has an attorney who apparently has "Supreme Chucklehead" printed below his name on his business cards.
Why is this hard? There are, at most, a small handful of frame rates. If it's just impossible for Google engineers to figure out which one to use, the make it user-selectable from the short list of possibilities.
I guess all that Khan Academy interview filtering isn't working' out as well as hoped.
If you want access, go get a court order. That allows you to threaten the withholder with prison if they refuse to comply. It's strong leverage, and it has worked extremely well in the past on many other fronts.
Giving police carte blanche to pry into your information is a bad idea right from the outset, and weakening encryption implementations to facilitate it just makes it that much worse.
Correct. This is called "parallel construction," in order to make it sound more appealing. If found out in court, though, it is still poisoned fruit that will be excluded from trial.
It's just that police have gotten better at hiding those connections, aided by the up-front knowledge that what they're doing is strictly illegal.
"The suitcase-sized gadgets allow authorities to spoof a mobile base station in order to collect locational information on nearby phones."
Probably not. If location were all that was needed, that's trivially and quickly obtained through an ordinary warrant, direct from the cellular carriers.
The secrecy surrounding stingrays strongly suggests that something far less legal is involved. Possibilities include: insertion of malicious software onto phones; activation of microphones and cameras for additional surveillance; access to local, even air-gapped networks via WiFi; siphoning of the phone's data content, like its contact lists and other databases.
They're sure not using them for the purpose of location detection and monitoring. There's no point at all in keeping such activities a closely guarded secret.
I'm not sure whether Google's algorithms are trade secrets or patented. If the latter, then public disclosure has already been made. And Google holds a ton of patents.
Now, the method for determining what bubbles to the top of their search lists may be completely fluid and ad hoc. I'd bet that, whatever it is, it changes a lot. And I'm not sure that making it public serves the public well; such disclosure could just allow gaming the system.
Overall, this seems like a pointless bit of legislation.
While there's merit to these arguments against obsessive self-monitoring, there are cases where it is desirable. One that leaps to mind is continuous or near-continuous blood sugar monitoring for diabetics, who currently get by on a small handful of measurements per day and the skewed sampling that brings to the table. Automated monitoring, even on the order of once every half-hour, would be a game-changer.
What's missing, at present, is a sensor capable of such a thing, although there are a coupld of implantable options available. Accuracy, at present, is not very good, though.
"Comcast and Time Warner Cable should be broken up--not allowed to merge."
Absolutely correct. It is especially troublesome that such an enormous provider of Internet access as this would create would also be one of the nation's largest content providers as well - effectively spelling doom for any hope of net neutrality. If TWC/Comcast is shoving its own entertainment media down your pipes and has to also shove competitor's entertainment media down those same pipes, guess how that's going to work out for everyone.
Although Feinstein is an idiot, the Anarchist's Cookbook has probably been more of a friend to anti-terrorist efforts than otherwise. It's recipes are notoriously wrong - and dangerous for those following them. It's probably responsible for more missing fingers and hands in the terrorist community than any other source of bad information.
