ok, let's say you prevail. zuckerberg gives turkey the middle finger and doesn't censor images

ok, now facebook is kicked out turkey

what have you "won" exactly?

how has turkey changed in any way? you've given the authoritarians a win: they've successfully excised the evil western cancer of facebook from glorious turkey

and how will turkey change in the future?

so you're for not opening diplomatic relations with cuba? we should just never ever ever reconcile or talk with cuba? how has that strategy paid off to change cuba?

we don't talk to iran? what is iran's attitude going to be then?

you are a dogmatic rigid ideologue

you are exactly the same as what you don't like in turkey

and the fruits of your ignorant stubbornness is you HELP the people you don't like

pragmatism always wins

"i know you are but what am i" went out of style as rhetorically effective sometime around the second grade of elementary school. you don't even make any logical sense

Which could be a good argument for replacing X. It is rather old technology, perhaps it is time to update it to something newer, rather than clinging to it and claiming it is all one needs.

Or how about adding a protocol extension to deal with this security problem as has been done a number of times in the past for authentication. I don't understand why X11 seems to get special treatment here.

Program has security flaw. Response "has it been patched yet"

X11 has security flaw: we can't possibly patch it we must discard everything and start again.

There's certainly some things wrong with X11, but this is one which could be solved easily. It could, for example, be done by having a "kill all grabs" command which is available to the window manager.

Uh.

Why can't I have my screen locker have a passive grab on Ctrl+Alt+Delete or shift+altgr+control+` or whatever, using XGrabKey. That way if someone else installs a screenlock faker then I'll know because it won't respond to the magic key presses.

The thing is on Windows it never worked as well as it ought to. The reason is that if the screen said something like:

"pls entar u r passwordz to login"
[ password box ]
[OK]

"pls wate wile redirecting to http://scamsite.ru/yourbank"

"Pls entar u r bank passwrd thx"

an appalingly large number of people would have dilligently followed those steps. the ctrl+alt+delete thing was fine but required more knowledge than 99.9% of users had.

Oh and the active grab thing: if you ever hear a wayland dev tout that as a problem, please kick them in the nuts because it XFree86 USED to have a feature for killing grabs from a keystroke, until the fuckers who went on to develop Wayland decided we didn't really need it because "it would only be needed if a program is buggy". Well, no fucking shit hotshot.

Why is this considered acceptable? Get physical access to my iPhone (for example - Android is probably the same?), good luck getting in.

Huh? This exploit only works if someone has already had access to your unlocked computer long enough to load and run malicious code. It's not like oyu can plonk down someone at a computer wit ha locked screen and have them hack in by being clever.

And if I had access to your unlocked iPhone, could I not root it or whatever the iPhone cracking is called and install a fake screenlocker too? Or hell, install a custom keyboard app which looks like the normal one but saves all passwords and sends them to the cloud. I might not even need to root it to do that.

Well, yes.

However, that only works if the attacker already has arbitrary local code execution. If they can do that then they can trojan every single program, by diddling with the PATH environment variable and/or pissing with LD_PRELOAD.

Basically yes, it's a hole but one that only kicks in if you're fucked 6 ways to Sunday already.

Or if you've done xhost+ and disabled your firewall. But that hasn't been the default in years.

people met on the street and in taverns and in private rooms, completely beyond the ability of anyone to eavesdrop

but enforcement against illegal activity proceeded by infiltrating groups and other methods

it seems the feds are complaining they might have to actually engage in hard work

do your damn job

if the positive influence outweighs the negative

the absence of facebook won't make those problems go away. how do you make those problems go away? with influence. like facebook. a bastardized influence, in order to exist, is still an influence, and better than no influence at all

this is called realism

it trumps ineffectual dogmatic idealism, which is just as authoritarian and extreme as what you are complaining about

compromise always wins

if you want to lose, hold fast to extreme adherence to difficult demands and never budge. there's no better way to make yourself marginalized, ineffectual, and ignored

they'll start blocking proxies

not possible?

http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...

yes, theoretically impossible to be watertight, but the whack-a-mole effort makes for a degraded dangerous existence for those seeking to use proxies

so you effectively banned facebook by forcing users to exert so much effort it's not worth it

culturally and politically, you've also antagonized turkey to go more silo

look at the constant "west is destroying us" ultranationalist bullshit in russia nowadays as an example of how turkey could go

so you let turkey have its way on the lightning rod topic of muhammad's face

then allow the more subtle influence to continue

time plus slow force can erode mountains

geologists should be in charge of topics like this

hard to tell if joking or not

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

if you're joking, thanks for the laugh

if not, well... you need help

you don't defeat authoritarianism or totalitarianism with the same sort of simplistic black-or-white ideological rigidity

it's not that simple

if he doesn't follow the laws turkey bans facebook. a facebook clone in turkey pops up instead. now all those connections to the outside world are greatly diminished. turkey becomes a social silo that stagnates

and so all the valuable positive subtle free speech influences that aren't live wire topics like muhammad's face are lost

by following turkey's authoritarian freedom crushing instructions that would otherwise get facebook banned, facebook remains influential in turkey in a positive way, in more subtle ways

you can't think of these nuanced complex issues in such blockheaded black-or-white "my way or the highway" rigid ways. that makes you something like turkey's authoritarianism actually

What happened?

I'm guessing that people got fed up with churn and started to realise that change for its own sake is annoying. Getting irritated at having to get used to a new system AGAIN that does things worse in many cases is not unreasonable. Being fed up with churn is not the same as fearing change.

Personally, I like to see "change" actually make things better, because if it doesn't then why bother with the change? And if it makes things worse, then WTF?

A lot is just uninspiring and meh. Going from flat to bevelled to bulbousd and back to flat (hello Athena!) user interface elements is just a huge meh. I mean sure, now they're coloured and antialiased and with nice fonts and whetever, but I really can't feel myself getting excited about "flat" design. Actually, personally I think it's a bit of a usability regression becase it's harder to explain to people which the active user interface elements are.

Change where it's an improvement I like. I like large, high res screens. I like running a modern kernel with all the new power saving features and better, newer filesystems and so on and so forth. I tend to run recentl builds of tools I like like vim and mplayer because the changes make them better than the old version. I keep promising myself I'll finally switch from Xterm to Terminology, but I can't get some of the features to work properly at the moment.

All those things, all those changes have made stuff better. On the other hand, I still run FVWM2. I've tried more modern things, but they all seem to make things worse in interesting ways. I've still adopted some changes, however which make it more modern.

I think there are quite a few people here with similar opinions to me. Another example: the reason that tablet stuff coming to laptops is bad is because a lot of the UI stuff is designed around single, non cooperating, full screen apps. I don't want that, not because I fear change, it's because I changed AWAY from it in the 90s and I have no desire to go back to the bad old days. I remember what it was like all too well (and my phone just keeps on reminding me). What I fear is being dragged back to something I know from experience is inferior.

Nope: there still needs to be a sliding contact between the wheel and a fixed cable somewhere.

Anyway, sliding contacts work just fine. See, e.g. trains with 3rd rail, 4th rail, pantograph and mixed mode trains and trolley busses and even some whacky covered contact trams.

The latter are particularly interesting. Some cities want an electric tram installed but don't want to have overhead cables or exposed foot level contacts. So, there are studs in the ground and they only switch on after the tram has made contact. The old systems were unreliable, but with modern arc-free power semiconductors, they work well and no arcing.

Indeed, and I think it's reasonable to call out the posters who say "oh they're idiots, why don't they just..." and so on and so forth.

However, it IS fun to speculate with a bunch of reasonably knowledgable people on mechanisms for going beyond what is currently technically feasible.

The powered lift with a rack and pinion is an interesting idea. I'm struggling to work out how much additional power it would take. With a short lift, you can discount the weight of the cable, and so you can have the lift counterbalanced easily and the motor must lift the ddifference between the two sides plus the friction.

With a long cable, the weight to be lifted changes with height: the further down the lift goes, the higher the weight. If you counterbalance with the same mechanism, then the balance will only be equal in the middle. At the bottom, you need to lift the entire weight of the cable, which in a high lift can be more than the lift.

At that point, having a motor which can lift the entire lift minus the cable isn't infeasible. Of course, you have to lift the motor too. And then there's the problem of power delivery. Maybe something like a train pickup could be adapted to work.

The power will be enormous, but one could offset it at a building scale using energy recovery, either have lifts run in oppsition where the descending one powers the rising one, or have the lifts all connected into a busbar which has some large piece of rotating flywheel storage to absorb or emit energy as required.

Apparently there are a few companies working on cableless elevators for exactly these reasons. Some have linear motors instead of a rack and pinion.

I tell this story to illustrate the truth of the statement I heard long ago in the Army: Plans are worthless, but planning is everything. There is a very great distinction because when you are planning for an emergency you must start with this one thing: the very definition of "emergency" is that it is unexpected, therefore it is not going to happen the way you are planning.

there's nothing like a real life emergency in programming but business culture is "get this done yesterday." no one can do that. but some programmers are very fragile and can only function according to one set of requirements/ work environment/ speed, and if you mess with that they get angry/ stressed/ tune out/ burnt out. while the "rock stars" can react to sudden and dramatic changes of requirement and need and crank out the changes relatively adroitly (not necessarily quickly). a sort of suppleness of mind and eerie lack of stress that's more about personality than training. and i say personality, and not training, because their code is a reflection of their personality: you can throw a curve ball at it from any direction and it can adapt without falling to pieces when "little" things (it's never little) change

your code is a reflection of how your mind works. which is your personality. and certain chilly stress proof people can generate flexible durable code that is almost like the redundancy and flexibility of logistics in war