Re: The Coming Greater Depression

"travisgod@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx" <travisgod@xxxxxxx> writes:

Even if I was a specialist (which I am not of course), I would still
qualify myself by that term, since it is always possible to be in
error.

Maybe nemo can learn something from you as well.

Heck, even I could learn something from reading that every morning
before utterning my first syllables :-)

Um, yes and no. Sometimes it is really hard (I work in IT) and the "in
principle it can be done" breaks down in practice. At least as far as
the resources of the people trying to do the proving go: also, what I
tried to get across is that if one party pushes things the other
counters since both parties are infringing on each others' and many
other patents. both deciding to leave things as they are is part of a
mutual live and let live approach.

If company A believes company B is infringing upon their work or has
"stolen" it, then the proof of this is not THAT hard to do with some
certainty.

Given enough resources, in principle yes. In the cases that I have in
mind, the problem is that neither party wants to open the barrel of
worms.

I mean, true theft is obviously far harder to prove than
infringement. This is one of the reasons software patentability even
exists. I, too, consider it a sort of abomination, but the real facts
were that people were plagiarizing others' code like it was
Christmas. The copyright laws were ineffective to prevent what was
clear theft. So in is ushered a world of patentable algorithms. Now,
for techniques like LZW compression, for one, I think this is
warranted, but "one click" solutions and this other BS? They
stretched this FAR too far since in re Allapat.

We are probably in agreement there. The dividing line is not well
demarcated and the system, like any, is abused. The thing is, code is
literate in the sense that while the algorithms and so forth, in
mathematical terms, are unambiguous, code itself is written in
something language-like which with a bit of changing can express the
same thing in many ways. This is of course the essence of flexibility
to be able to implement things that the rules do not make necessarily
easy, or to circumvent various problems of implementation and use;
programmers worth their salt do not "reuse" others' code, they
"recode" it. The sharing of code that does some task is vital to bring
across an idea, and the recoding is something that every programming
does in order to make the idea his own, in his particular situation
and for a particular purpose. Once enough changes are made it is no
longer plagiarism.... Now, this is something that is
necessary, whether the community is a company or a larger community,
to generate code that is robust for its purpose. While I have no dog
in the fight with people wanting to sell code and make money from it,
I think it is highly irresponsible (and banking on the continued
ignorange of millions) to refuse to let others' see it and improve
it. Each to his own I understand, but from my point of view, if the
companies want to rely on laws to protect IP and guard against theft,
then they should go the whole way and let the law try to protect them
rather than relying on binary-only gunk which may is guaranteed to be
full of holes (every software is: source code simply assures us that
the holes will be found by the good guys as well, quickly, and
fixed). End rant...

No, I never objected to programmers being paid. In fact, I do not
object to paying money for programs. For some programs I am even
prepared to pay when they are closed source. But for many, I will not
trust the programs unless I (and others) can see and verify it. Open
source, not gratis work. And as I stated before, niche things that
cannot cause much damage can happily be different. But not, for
example, the entire OS, or critical drivers, etc. Information security
is just too important to allow that. The fact that many people do
allow it speaks volumes for how naive they are, for how easy it is for
crackers to obtain information, and how big a business IT security
is. It is going to grow more and more so, since systems are going to
become more and more complex, not simpler, in a ever higher spiral.
--
Gernot Hassenpflug

I have contracted in high security environments for some time. It's a
joke.

Fuckin passwords are written on postit notes. The network becomes
functionally inoperative. Why not just turn ALL the computers off and
then we'll have impenetrable security?? There were OSes built for
this sort of thing, DEC led this charge back in the mini days with
VMS.

I know the situation. I work at the national institute for information
and communications for christ's sake and it could just as well be a
happy meeting of "the middle-aged veterans of business parties in the
late evenings" for all the knowledge of computer security there
is. No, for real understanding of security you have to go to system
administrators of certain companies (Amazon comes to mind, as do
various good ISPs and so on that I know here in Tokyo), or join for
example a linux user group mailing list to find out what is going on...

Apropos code: "on time, within budget, complete specs: pick two of
three". That is another excellent reason to have openness in order to
get quicker resolution of the missing stuff that is bound to be there
at any release date.

And, open source...gawd. These communities come up with
insanity...look at what a bloated, useless pig Java has become.
Linux? GTFO of here; the fucking thing can't function except from a
command line. It's like the mentality of developers is similar to
pilots, stuck in the 1950s.

:-) That's my baby, don't insult it too hard :-) One thing that is
sure, and please believe me, the command line is the most powerful
thing you'll ever get (scripting). Nobody can program all the power of
a command line into a graphical user interface, it would be just as
hard to work with as remembering all the command options and reading
the manual pages every now and again. Yes, you can do without it to
some extent, but only at the price of a) far less power, and b) far
more complexity, and c) you will need operators who have at their
disposal special tools that *do* give access to the command line to do
all the missing stuff. Companies can do that sort of thing, but an OS
like linux which is supposed to be individually maintained, you have
to give users the entire power if they need it. This is not to
diminish th wonderful advances in GUI and usability that Microsoft and
Apple and others have made; but one must not forget the underlying
platform to which access must remain.
--
BOFH excuse #62:

need to wrap system in aluminum foil to fix problem
.