Hacker News Reader

bedigeron Mossad "pastes" a message for Anonymous

If the Mossad, MI6, NSA, TIARA etc etc know so dad gum much, why don't they KILL ALL THE SPAMMERS!?!?!??

Spammers do far more day-to-day damage than the 50 or 60 "terrorists" they named in that humorous piece of persiflage.

bedigeron Military Procurement is Not a Jobs Program

The last sentence in the article makes a lot of sense.

The article also explains the ridiculous secrecy surrounding almost anything "defense" related. The US citizens don't get value for their dollar. The B-1, B-2 and JSF are only the latest examples of Giant Pork. If we knew about the costs before hand and during, we'd freak out. We get ripped off by the defense contractors.

bedigeron Virginia school district considers ban on cross-dressing

What a load or rubbish. This is clearly just another move by autocratic school administrators to allow the administrators to discriminate and punish certain students. It's a lot like the "no gang uniforms" rules 10 or 15 years ago. If you read those in isolation, you'd say, "Wow, they're going to ban the Letter Club and the cheerleaders?" But of course, the rules are very selectively applied, and DON'T APPLY to children of wealthy parents, conformists and suck-ups. Rules against certain kinds of clothing only get applied to people who for whatever reason, fall outside the Circle of Insiders.

bedigeron VEVO CEO tries to explain their hypocritical act of piracy at Sundance

The real problem here is that Vevo (and the RIAA, when caught with an IP address that did BitTorrent) won't be persecuted under laws like SOPA/PIPA and whatever comes from ACTA and TPP. Since SOPA gives the DoJ and "rightsholders" discretion about who to shutdown, the situation will be more like the Great Firewall of China: "One eye open, one eye shut".

Some websites will mysteriously be allowed to stream video, others will get slapped down, hard. It will all depend on who you know, and what the transient policy of the moment is. I'm sure that MPAA and RIAA know that they will be allowed to act with discretion, I'm just not sure they know others will, as well, and what the fallout from that will be.

bedigeron Eight features Windows 8 'borrowed' from Linux (and improved?)

I think this is more of a case of Microsoft validating these ideas from open source (X11 dialogs are not exactly "Linux"), rather than "stealing" or "borrowing" them. Wow, extent-based filesystems not exactly the most resilient... the real question here is why Cutler and Co. "borrowed" ODS-11/Files-11 wholesale?

In a larger sense, the article has a clickbait title, and I fell for it. If it had read "Microsoft validates a few open source software choices", hardly anyone would have bothered reading it, I guess.

bedigeron Fasp versus FTP

Why on earth would anyone buy a data transfer protocol, especially one where the developers feel they need to put "TM" on every instance of its name?

Anyone remember the history of Zmodem? The wikipedia article doesn't mention it, but there were fewer implementations for fewer OSes than could have been, due to weird-beard legalistic threats. How would "faspTM" be any different?

Besides that, "fasping" sounds like some bad Sci-Fi euphemism for "shining the shaft".

bedigeron "Indicators of Terrorist Activities ... Internet Café" on sheriff's public site

I was not aware that enough terrorists had been apprehended to compile a checklist of suspicious activities.

In particular: http://www.osceola.org/sheriff/113-19137-19144/hobby_shop_te...

Can someone post articles about hobby shop terrorists? Did any of the 9/11 Terrorists purchase large R/C airplanes to practice? I can't find any answers in Google. Or Bing.

bedigeron 'Mob Mentality' Destroyed SOPA, Says Viacom CEO

'Elistist, Aristocratic Mentality Created SOPA' says everyone else.

Gee, these CxO people are really getting too big for their britches, as the midwestern USA metaphor goes. Maybe the "Occupy" people have a few good points after all.

bedigeron The ongoing fight against GPL enforcement

So much for the Holy Sacrament of "Intellectual Property". When it suits a corporation, the Most Holy Eye Pee Must Be Protected By Any Means, Including Taking Away of Civil Liberties. But when it also suits a corporation, they get to take what, if they owned it, would be Most Holy Eye Pee.

What a bunch of hypocrites. If BusyBox made Sony money, they'd fight an attempt to replace it tooth and nail, as AT&T did with BSD.

bedigeron Set of 5 non-trasitive dice shows some remarkable properties (video)

Does some way exist to get these in the USA?

bedigeron The /bin/true Command and Copyright

How can we know? A mere veiled threat of litigation is enough to make a lot of corporations cower in fear, and stop doing whatever generated the threat. Does merely threatening a suit constitute "enforcing the copyright"?

bedigeron Angry Nerds: Copyright Theft Is Bad, When It Happens To People We Like

Copying isn't theft. At best, it's "infringement". See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dowling_v._United_States_%28198...

Please don't try to bring back the false-to-fact concept of "intellectual property". Independent invention happens all the time. Who gets to own such an idea? The first person to think of it? No, the first person to file on. Morally, that's just rubbish. Wait, the person who thought the hardest should get ownership. Bah, humbug.

bedigeron It’s Not Silicon Valley Versus Hollywood – It’s Greed Versus Greed

You could assert that not paying $25 for a season of Weeds is a whole different ballgame than taking down a website with hundreds of millions of users.

I do so assert. One might constitute (need a trial) copyright infringement, not even theft. The second is an abridgement of human rights on a mass scale, something to be ashamed of, and something to shame others for doing.

bedigeron Why Software Development Estimations Are Regularly Off

Not always the case, but sometimes Godel Incompleteness gets in the way, and other times, the problem is inadvertently made NP-hard, and other times, it's like a lambda calculus term, you can't tell if a term has a normal form without going ahead and reducing it.

You can think of this by imagining that you're asked to solve a Rubik's cube. You can look at 5 of the sides, but not touch it. Tell them how many moves it will take to solve. The theoretical maximum is 20, I believe. In this case, and many others in programming, you can't know how long it will take to get something done. The fastest way to find out how long it will take to finish a system, is to do the work and finish it.

bedigeron [dead]

That was the WORST gibberish I've ever read. I almost understood it.

bedigeron Software Security starts with Software Quality

For large enough values of "software quality".

All kinds of things can be called "quality": speed to market, meets specifications, bug-free, doesn't crash, does things fast, has a good/intuitive/powerful user interface, the list is potentially endless. What's more, the "software quality" people acknowledge this: they never ever define "quality", except maybe by saying "it's personal".

Supose my definition of quality is "first to market, and has a user interface that anybody can understand". Does this particular (personal) definition of quality mean that my software has started towards Software Security? No, we have a historical example or two in Microsoft Windows 95 and 98, and maybe in the first few versions of IIS and NT.

"Quality" is a meaningless buzzword with respect to software. Don't be a proffesional meeting-attender, use better defined words when building an argument.

bedigeron What's wrong with HR?

"HR" went wrong when they changed from "Personnel" to "Human Resources". The very name "resources" makes those people think that everyone is plug-compatible. Proceeding from that assumption, they feel they can winnow out candidates as if people were a commodity, where price and price alone lets you make a decision.

The "Harvard MBA" mindset of the late '80s, early '90s, where "management" made the difference to any business, and businesses only dealt in "product", also helped this sort of mind set along. "HR" has a "product" to churn out, at a minimum cost to the company.

bedigeron The Copyright Lobby Absolutely Loves Child Pornography

Somewhere along the line, and I hope it wasn't in a Hunter S Thompson story, I heard that Lyndon Johnson said "Never get caught sleeping with a live pig or a dead woman."

bedigeron C++11 will be introduced by B.Stroustrup at Microsoft Event

Isn't this a little weird, given that MSFT wants people to use "managed code", the CLI, and all the attendant software?

Or is it telling us that people who get to choose (free software) aren't going to be using C++11?

I can't tell.

bedigeron If feds can bust Megaupload, why bother with anti-piracy bills?

That's a darn good question. SOPA and PIPA did have rather broad wording, and provisions that broke security, had no built-in method of redress, and at least major parts of the penalties were totally administrative, no Judicial Branch oversight necessary.

A suspicious person might think "Why, the US Feds are trying to put in place the mechanism for widespread internet censorship!" But that's ridiculous. Three men may keep a secret as long as two of them are dead, as Ben Franklin once noted. Cock-up before conspiracy, as Penn and Teller once noted. Time Will Tell, But Epistemology Won't.

bedigeron Why I’m fighting SOPA: We need a solution, but a better solution

More rubbish that advocates the false-to-fact concept of "Intellectual Property". In my view, "IP" can't exist. Who invented the light bulb? Who invented radio? Who invented television? Who invented the linked list? Who invented the telegraph? Multiple people, all at about the same time.

Can't happen elsewhere? What about the history of the Knuth-Morris-Pratt string matching algorithm?

Independent invention nullifies the ownership of ideas. "Intellectual Property" - bah, humbug! A false concept to try to get governments to enforce monopolies.

bedigeron SOPA: Stop Grandstanding, Start Crafting An Alternative

Hear hear! The next step is NOT "craft an alternative", but rather define the problem. After that, let's see the step of demonstrating harm from the newly-defined problem.

bedigeron SOPA Compromise Proposed by Harvard Law Professor

I don't think a compromise on "anti-piracy" is a good idea. I'll illustrate with a small story.

Albert and Bertrand, two young boys, run into their mother's kitchen. A single, large cookie lies cooling on the table. Albert says the two boys should split the cookie in half, and each should receive a half.

Bertrand demands the entire cookie.

Albert and Bertrand's mother comes into the kitchen and settles the argument by splitting the difference: Albert gets one-quarter of the cookie, Bertrand gets three quarters.

How fair is that? Relative to Bertrand's demand it's "fair", but it's not fair on any kind of absolute scale. Unless Bertrand makes a case for getting more than his half, it's unfair.

Why should a SOPA compromise happen, just because some group asserts "Piracy is a problem" loudly enough and often enough? That's not at all moral.

bedigeron Put Down the Pitchforks on SOPA

Could you give us a summary of these fundamentals of copyright?

I read one of grellas' rants, and I wasn't impressed. he/she seems to be starting from an "onwership of ideas" standpoint, and that's a logical non-starter. Too many cases of independent invention have occurred for a moral basis for idea ownership to exist.

bedigeron Ask HN: Hate SOPA? What technological solutions do you propose?

Yeah! The second part of a prima facie case for policy change is to show that the proposed solution solves the problem. The third part is to show that the proposed solution doesn't cause more problems than it solves. That would be "cost/benefit analysis".

Show us that a problem exists, that someone gets harmed, and how much that harm amounts to. And please, don't use propaganda techniques. You'll just look bad.

bedigeron Larry Page's Grandfather Kept A Lead Pipe To Defend Against His Employers

The HN headline is dramatically wrong: My grandfather was an autoworker, and I have a weapon he manufactured to protect himself from the company,,,

Grandfather Page didn't have to protect himself from his employees, but rather from the auto-manufacturer where he worked. Big difference.

bedigeron Ask HN: Who is likely to benefit from SOPA?

Lawyers will benefit a lot. As a class, lawyers, especially those specializing in "Intellectual Property" will benefit financially the most.

bedigeron Sunk: How Hollywood Lost the PR Battle Over SOPA

Why didn’t anyone call Will Ferrell and Adam McKay to post a hilarious, viral video that would make the point?

I dunno, maybe someone tried, but they couldn't convince Ferrell and/or McKay to do such a self-defeating thing? That is, the article assumes that the MPAA has it's artists' best interests at heart, when it demonstrably doesn't.

bedigeron Why I'm a Pirate

Copyright, at its heart, is aimed at giving the person who creates something control over the creative work.

I'm certain this is just wrong, at least from a USA perspective. The first copyright in England was to control, that is, copyright is censorship.

In the USA historically copyright was a way to induce people to enlarge the public domain.

Giving "creative" people control has never really entered into it, in the USA. I'm given to understand this is different in continental Europoean cultures, but SOPA and PIPA are American, and based out of an English-speaking culture.

If you propose to add some kind of "moral right of control" to a "creative" work, you first need to define "creative work" so that I can tell a creative work from an un-creative work without referring to some authority, a list or an oracle or a government agent. Then we can discuss what moral rights might pertain, and how long they should last, etc etc. I personally think that the prevalence of independent invention invalidates any such "moral right of control", but you clearly believe otherwise.

bedigeron Wikipedia, other websites go dark in anti-piracy bill protest

Sure, that's what the name says and so forth, but haven't you ever heard to not judge a book by its cover? The internals of the bills are so weird, that you can't help but suspect that something else is going on there.