3 ms·

How valuable is the information on your laptop to the NSA? If it's under $100k you're probably ok doing what Stallman does https://stallman.org/stallman-computi

How valuable is the information on your laptop to the NSA? If it's under $100k you're probably ok doing what Stallman does https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html https://stallman.org/stallman-computing.html . If you have information worth over $5M to the NSA, then you better get physical security personnel as well as network and hardware security personnel; maybe ally yourself with a different powerful state or corporate actor. In other words you need to make their expected cost of getting that information significantly higher than it's worth.

tornadoboy55 10y ago
I knew the FSF people could be dicks, but this guy.. holy shit
- hololight 10y ago
  Yes, he really is... Once listened to him criticize one of the old hosts of the Linux action show because he worked for a company as a developer and was writing non-open source software... He felt he should quit and not support his family or get a job outsiders of development rather than not writing open software... Was an a$& about it too...
  - tehwebguy 10y ago
    He thinks writing closed source code is morally wrong. So he doesn't care if it's done for supposedly good or bad reasons, it's just bad to him.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
- hololight 10y ago
  Yes, he really is... Once listened to him criticize one of the old hosts of the Linux action show because he worked for a company as a developer and was writing non-open source software... He felt he should quit and not support his family or get a job outsiders of development rather than not writing open software... Was an a$& about it too...
saghm 10y ago
"The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Lisp, you will see what is lacking in most other languages....I have not had time or occasion to learn newer languages such as Perl, Python, PHP or Ruby." Glad to know his opinion is here well-informed. Perl only came out 30 years ago, so I guess I can understand not having had the time to learn it and just assume that it and other languages must be inferior.
- kazinator 10y ago
  Though the attitude may be bad, that author guessed right; he didn't miss anything by avoiding those. I also didn't learn those in the sense of working with them, but I studied their reference material and numerous examples. That is more than enough for me to see what the underlying requirements are which these languages implement. I don't agree with most of the requirements (by which I mean the detailed specifics, not generalities like "we would like a useful language with good libraries for a wide range of applications" which is a universal). I've borrowed from some of these languages into my own Lisp dialect. For instance, I like Python's array indexing, with how negative indices work backwards from the end, so I copied it.
  - saghm 10y ago
    > Though the attitude may be bad, that author guessed right; he didn't miss anything by avoiding those. I don't claim to say he's correct or not; rather, I'm saying that a bad attitude is inexcusable regardless of correctness. It's perfectly fine to not want to try a language (or even to dislike it), but in that case there aren't any grounds to criticize it.
    - kazinator 10y ago
      We don't know that the author means that he literally knows nothing (as in, given four programs, and three bubbles labeled Perl, Python, PHP and Perl, wouldn't be able to draw arrows connecting the programs to the correct bubbles).

tornadoboy55 10y ago

I knew the FSF people could be dicks, but this guy.. holy shit

hololight 10y ago
Yes, he really is... Once listened to him criticize one of the old hosts of the Linux action show because he worked for a company as a developer and was writing non-open source software... He felt he should quit and not support his family or get a job outsiders of development rather than not writing open software... Was an a$& about it too...
- tehwebguy 10y ago
  He thinks writing closed source code is morally wrong. So he doesn't care if it's done for supposedly good or bad reasons, it's just bad to him.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
hololight 10y ago
Yes, he really is... Once listened to him criticize one of the old hosts of the Linux action show because he worked for a company as a developer and was writing non-open source software... He felt he should quit and not support his family or get a job outsiders of development rather than not writing open software... Was an a$& about it too...

saghm 10y ago

"The most powerful programming language is Lisp. If you don't know Lisp (or its variant, Scheme), you don't know what it means for a programming language to be powerful and elegant. Once you learn Lisp, you will see what is lacking in most other languages....I have not had time or occasion to learn newer languages such as Perl, Python, PHP or Ruby." Glad to know his opinion is here well-informed. Perl only came out 30 years ago, so I guess I can understand not having had the time to learn it and just assume that it and other languages must be inferior.

kazinator 10y ago
Though the attitude may be bad, that author guessed right; he didn't miss anything by avoiding those. I also didn't learn those in the sense of working with them, but I studied their reference material and numerous examples. That is more than enough for me to see what the underlying requirements are which these languages implement. I don't agree with most of the requirements (by which I mean the detailed specifics, not generalities like "we would like a useful language with good libraries for a wide range of applications" which is a universal). I've borrowed from some of these languages into my own Lisp dialect. For instance, I like Python's array indexing, with how negative indices work backwards from the end, so I copied it.
- saghm 10y ago
  > Though the attitude may be bad, that author guessed right; he didn't miss anything by avoiding those. I don't claim to say he's correct or not; rather, I'm saying that a bad attitude is inexcusable regardless of correctness. It's perfectly fine to not want to try a language (or even to dislike it), but in that case there aren't any grounds to criticize it.
  - kazinator 10y ago
    We don't know that the author means that he literally knows nothing (as in, given four programs, and three bubbles labeled Perl, Python, PHP and Perl, wouldn't be able to draw arrows connecting the programs to the correct bubbles).