-1 The article was submitted here by Laura Weinstein herself.

well conveniently the submitter and the author of the blog are the same person. Nice of the "editor" to put maximum trolling on the frontpage.

/ one of the worst articles I've ever seen on Slashdot. That's saying something since I was around during the Jon Katz days.

This isn't like Win 8 where you can't reach some features without going through the metro desktop. All the tools are still there, Apple hasn't threatened (yet) to prevent installation from other sources outside their app store. They aren't making you use their little app display thing (which is really the same thing as the start menu in windows) and they let you change the weird backwards scrolling they introduced.

I'm really not sure what your anger is about? That OS X has changed? It's been around for nearly 14 years, of course it's changed. Are you worried it's losing its unix roots? iOS is unix based as well!

Besides what would you switch to?

Ubuntu? It has the best support in terms of "just working" but they have ADD about their interface which has changed how many times over the last five years? And now they decided they didn't get enough derision over the Unity fiasco so they're going to go recreate it with the Mir/Wayland controversy.

Fedora/Redhat? Kind of ADD on features from time to time. Less easy to get some components working with normal hardware. Redhat especially isn't as bleeding edge. I guess if you're going linux that's the better route but either way you lose the polish.

Win7? I don't get this at all. MS isn't going to support Win 7 forever and you'll be forced into the nastiness that is whatever windows they come up with next. Microsoft is trying to recreate Apple's success with a worse interface. If you don't like Apple I can't understand why on earth you'd switch to MS.

I was getting this yesterday when reading an article on Mashible. I noticed that it stopped doing it by logging out of Facebook. Probably something I should be doing anyway to prevent them from tracking me all over the place

Is this true? Animal instincts seem very interesting to me. Please correct me if my interests are mistaken.

What is this...desire?

"Words are just labels, neutral representations of concepts."

Words may be, but *names* are selected by people to reflect what they feel is important to convey to the public about a project. Having been involved in several startups and launched a few products, names become contentious issues because they are the very, very first impression of a product to the customer.

Here we have some products where the important thing was clearly the author's inability to score a date, ever, and thus an obsession they have with images of what they can't have. If that is what people want to advertise, I agree they should be allowed to... but probably not on my server. Freedom of association and freedom of speech are a balancing act, and I prefer to associate with mature people. The fact that a package name is being used for trolling isn't a big deal, but clearly nobody needs to *distribute* it and associate with the images being conjured.

But hey, how are your contributions to Pedobear Security Software going?

I'm going to have to agree with you fully on this. The *reason* I still used Firefox was the plugins, otherwise I just use Chrome recently.

Now the plugins I want are disabled, some never becoming *4* compliant and here we are with *5* and even more plugins failing. This is the opposite of progress, unless the goal is to strip the browser of the reasons I use it over the alternatives.

Yes, it is a security problem. So why is this OK: https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.microsoft.com%2Fsilverlight%2Ffuture%2F%23graphics (specificially: "Immediate mode graphics API allows direct rendering to the GPU").

It isn't a security vulnerability when Silverlight gains access to the GPU. Hhmmm.

If this "will not happen for the vast majority" then why isn't this happening in parts of the world without a strong state presence? By "this" I mean specifically the use of this proposed "cheap security".

Genocide is far beyond my "taking of land" proposal, but there it is in the news. One would think that in the lawless areas that the raping, pillaging and burning of the communities would make such a "cheap security" a self fulfilling prophecy if it wasn't some Utopian fiction.

So, as Cyber Vandal says, you aren't selling this particularly well. The private security firm that you are paying can very easily be outclassed by a warlord as history and current events related in the stateless (or weak state) areas will attest. Really, there seems to be two outcomes historically: a strong state asserts its presence or small factions vie for domination via violence.

I wish your Utopia the best, but I suspect (even discounting statist action) Galt's Gulch will be razed and burning.

That is quite the Utopian description and quite the bit of typing, but it doesn't address the short, simple question I actually asked.

Someone is in conflict with you over your private ownership of the land. The group who disputes your ownership is not participating in a Utopia but are nothing more than organized criminals (a warlord and his muscle) looking for low hanging fruit to pluck. They are willing to use violence. In keeping with the lack of a state that can threaten violence, who is going to prevent them from taking over your land?

This isn't a theoretical question: during the heyday of the mob there were cities that were effectively ruled by warlords (mobster families). They were rooted out only with the application of force and they used force to fight against being rooted out. Mexico is under siege from internal warlords and stateless regions of our planet are rife with warlords.

Not everyone is going to internalize libertarian principles and without a way to fight those groups, I see those willing to use violence prevailing against those who spout platitudes. Your vision seems to frame criminals as individual actors that traditional (if private) policing can manage. I argue that such a Utopian society will fall prey to those organized groups without such deep thinking and fewer morals.

Returning to the direct question: who prevents your land from being taken over in this scenario?

Assuming as given the premise that the state can only exist if it is non-violent, who prevents the situation from degrading into warlords filling the violence vacuum. If you have a private police on your small chunk of land you live on, what is to stop another from simply taking your land by force? In a traditional state, we rely on the courts, police and laws (rules) thereof to establish the accepted norms and to enforce them.

Are you simply saying that your "private police" will be bigger than the aggressors?

I have followed alternative presentations of knowledge for a long time, dabbling in creating systems for pseudo-3D presentation of information, using various types of mind mapping and collaborative knowledge systems. The reality is that the web succeeded and the various competitors failed precisely because of the "poor" implementation choices of the current nightmare of kludged together technologies are "worse is better" type work. Would it be nice to have a better framework? Sure, but not at the cost of paralysis.

Xanadu wants to give strict copyright enforcement with a pay-as-you-eat system for consumption. The implementations have been plagued by pulling the rug out from under any implementer who gets "close" to a solution, usually with accusations that the implementer was trying to steal his technology. The Xanadu system is intended (as far as I have seen: the implementations never got far enough to tell for sure) to allow distributed content, but always with verification of the original source material's permissions and state. In short: the project is surrounded by control freak symptoms.

Maybe we will have such systems in the future, but they will stand along side the chaos that is the open Internet and I'm glad for it. For every neat feature I like about Xanadu, there is a control freak feature that takes away from the free-form nature of the existing Internet. Xanadu would make a great academic knowledge system, perhaps a real authoritative online Wikipedia where people with actual knowledge contributed and could avoid random yahoo intervention on their work. But I would never want to live with it as the only implementation of hyperlinking.

I'm not sure how it's even legal. Did the Samba team get all the contributors permission before switching to GPL 3? If they had switched to a new license all together I'm certain that legally they would have had to do that. Since the GPL 3 contains new requirements I don't see why it's not being treated as a new license. If I had contributed to Samba I would personally be very upset by the license change.

It's really unfortunate. FSF does a lot of good things and Stallman is no doubt brilliant. But Stallman is also an ideologue and he ultimately controls the licenses. Many people here and elsewhere have the opinion that v3 goes too far but he's been unwilling to listen to the concerns. The real way to deal with patent abuse is through the courts and congress.

Count me in the "no floating headers" bandwagon.