Imagine if China were hauling WSJ into court for distributing articles on its American website that hadn't been approved by Chinese censors. And yes, the Dow Jones (parent company) does business in China.
Well, if that happened, then the WSJ would simply pull their staff out of China. Simple solution really, if the Chinese government won't allow something in China, don't take it into China.
Does that mean that a company has to follow the rules of the most restrictive country that it does business in?
Yes. Lets take another example. Suppose I'm living in a country which does not have laws against murder and I hire a hitman to kill you. I'm entirely safe from prosecution, because I haven't broken any laws in the country where I live.
If, however, I decided to catch a plane to the US, I could (and probably would) be arrested as soon as I stepped off the plane, because the murder I ordered was illegal in the US, even if it wasn't in the jurisdiction where I committed the act.
The parallel is exact; the web server was in the US, I was in my fictitious murder-is-legal nation; an act was committed (libel) which was illegal in Australia, an act was committed (murder, or perhaps conspiracy to murder) which was illegal in the US; Dow Jones established offices in Australia, I stepped off a plane into US-controlled territory.
And since laws on what you can legally say aloud or in print vary greatly from country to country, please make sure your words are only available in pre-screened jurisdictions.
As long as you do not conduct business in France/Australia/US/[insert name of country which is stepping close to the bounds of extraterritoriality here], this isn't a problem. On the other hand, it is always true that if you are conducting business in a nation you should know and abide by the laws of that nation.
For example, some nations have laws restricting ownership by private citizens of more than a given quantity of gold. Some nations do not. If you're carrying around fifty pounds of gold, you'd better stay out of countries where it is illegal... but as long as you stay out of said countries, you're entirely safe, because even if they attempted to extradite you they would fail (under most, if not all, extradition treaties, you cannot be extradited from a country if you have not committed an act which would have been criminal in that country).
Yahoo conducts business in France. Yahoo was breaking French laws. Bad Things happen to Yahoo. Dow Jones conducts business in Autralia (it may not be their primary place of business, but they conduct business there all the same). Dow Jones is accused of breaking Australian laws. Dow Jones has to face trial in Australia. I, on the other hand, reside in Canada, and will likely never go to Australia in my entire life, so I can completely ignore Australian libel/porn/encryption/etc laws.
Ping times no longer measure network speed except in very highly congested networks. For the past 5 years networks have been fast enough that the largest contributor to round-trip times is simply the speed of light. (in a fiber-optic cable, or the speed of an electronic signal down a copper wire, either way about 2/3 c).
High ping times making games unplayable mean that north americans will never enjoy playing against australians, but it really has very little to do with the quality or cost of their network connections.
It's a small point, but how long is 30 days of community service?
Whenever I've heard about people being ordered to perform community service it has always been a number of hours -- 50 hours, 100 hours, 250 hours, whatever. That way it is easy for people to keep track of how much service the person has done.
Does 30 days mean 30 x [mean number of hours worked per day] hours of community service? Does it mean that whenever he would be at work for the next 30 days he has to be doing community service instead? Or does it literally mean 30 *days*, ie 720 hours?
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that the middle of the night, when nobody is around, is the perfect time to run systems maintainance tasks. Quite apart from the tasks which would result in downtime (upgrading servers/network/etc.) the middle of the night is the ideal time to run tasks which might result in decreased performacen -- network backups, checking your server logs for any security issues, etc.
Ideally, it should be the day shift which is long and boring, because that's when you shouldn't be touching anything which could possibly cause downtime.
I don't think that's a good idea. If people are considering blocking P2P (or rather, trying to block P2P) because of people trading songs, what will happen if they hear that people are trading pornography?
Oh wait a moment, the people passing laws are primarily middle-aged males. Never mind then.
Twenty years? Dear God, the American rocketry program went from zero to the moon in eight years.
Yes, but the moon is much closer than Mars.
If we had rockets which could take us from earth to Mars in a couple days, we'd probably have men on Mars within a few years. When it takes at least 6 months to get to Mars -- which means at least 6 months for probes and equipment to get to Mars -- things are obviously going to go a bit slower.
Somehow I doubt we'll go from zero to Alpha Centauri in less than 8 years either.
(I love it when manuals tell you never to use any other power supply, 12vDC is 12vDC right.. sheesh, safety Nazi's to blame I think).
You're probably right in this case, but there is sometimes a technical justification. Some types of equipment have a tendancy to feed AC back up the power line (ie, they draw periodically varying current), and if you use an AC/DC converter which doesn't filter this out you could be in trouble. There was a discussion here a few weeks ago about what types of equipment could be run off of a UPS which centered mostly around this issue.
Essentially, primary keys are things you index by. Take a dictionary, for example: it is a database containing pairs (word, meaning), and has word as its primary key.
If you want to look up something in your database and you have a primary key, you can just jump to the correct location in the database and find the data; if you want don't use primary keys, (eg, looking for a definition in a dictionary in order to find the word) you have to examine every element individually.
Basically, primary keys are obvious to anyone who has never taken a database course, so you've probably been using them all this time anyway.
These things are great, I suppose, but people are forgetting the ultimate purpose of a lightweight portable computer: providing a secure terminal. Even if you carry around a floppy disk with PuTTY everywhere you go, you're still trusting the system you run it on; in contrast, if you carry around a laptop running OpenBSD, you can plug it in anywhere and have a reasonable expectation of security.
CDRs are great I suppose for burning the latest insert-your-favorite-OS-here ISO images, but they are a bit small for backup purposes, in these days of 180GB hard drives.
Anyone have a clue when DVDR prices are going to come down to a level where they can compete on a $/GB basis with CDRs?
Let's say Canada gets satisfactory data protection laws. Since most of Canada's packets go through the US, will be be cut off too?
This raises a point worth making. At one point there were Canadian laws which stated that data traffic which originated and terminated within Canada could only be carried on Canadian networks. It was illegal to send data from Ontario to BC via the USA, because this would hurt Canada's telecommunications companies.
These laws were removed some time (IIRC, about 10 years?) ago, when Canada realized that by forcing Canadian companies to do business with Canadian telecoms they were causing companies to move down to the US to evade these laws.
I think the same is likely to happen with the internet as well: if countries start imposing heavy restrictions on what dot-coms can do, they'll just move to the next jurisdiction.
We need some international treaties -- like those regarding Antarctica and the moon -- which tell nation-states to keep their hands off the internet. Legislators don't understand the internet, so the only way intelligent regulations are going to be put in place is when they come from the internet community (eg, IESG).
I'm not sure about this, but I think what they mean is that there have been no vulnerabilities discovered before they were fixed -- that is to say, I think that root exploit you are talking about was fixed during routine code auditing before anyone realized that it could be exploited.
But I don't keep up to date on OpenBSD stuff so I may be totally wrong here.
The most obvious candidate would be e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0. Everyone agrees about the beauty of this formula, and it also has the advantage of compactness.
Another option would be \pi = \sum_{i=0}^{\infty}{(\frac{1}{16})^i(\frac{4}{8i+1 }-\frac{2}{8i+4}-\frac{1}{8i+5}-\frac{1}{8i+6})}. While this dates back only six years, and is rather less compact, it is arguably very beautiful because it relates Pi to the simple polylogarithmic constants.
If you want something statistical, how about \sqrt{\pi} = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty}{e^{-x^2} dx} ?
OTOH, if you have lots of space, the Peano axioms (or, even better, the axioms of ZF set theory) would be really cool...
Social engineering shouldn't be a problem. The worst that a stupid luser can do is limited to what a malicious luser can do, and you should create your security policies based on the assumption that any of your lusers might be a spy from a different company/working for the NSA/about to go on a destructive rampage when they find out they've lost their job/etc.
Security ==> Correctness: If you can't break something deliberately, you can't break it by accident.
Example: Internet Explorer. MS doesn't charge for it, but should they not be responsible for the damages it causes?
Only when I can hold Redhat legally responsible for the costs resulting from their insecure software. I don't use their software, but I have certainly been harmed by it -- probably several thousand dollars of harm if you add up all the time I've spent reporting cracked redhat systems to their owners.
Slashdot Mirror
the romans watched gladiators fight to the death for sport. how far away from that are we really?
Not far at all. The arenas are covered in ice and the gladiators are called "hockey players", but it is still entirely a blood sport.
How about "$NAME, Smart Cookie"?
I'm sure there are quite a few people for whom that phrase would be both more concise and more accurate than the alternatives.
Imagine if China were hauling WSJ into court for distributing articles on its American website that hadn't been approved by Chinese censors. And yes, the Dow Jones (parent company) does business in China.
Well, if that happened, then the WSJ would simply pull their staff out of China. Simple solution really, if the Chinese government won't allow something in China, don't take it into China.
I fail to see what the problem is.
Does that mean that a company has to follow the rules of the most restrictive country that it does business in?
Yes. Lets take another example. Suppose I'm living in a country which does not have laws against murder and I hire a hitman to kill you. I'm entirely safe from prosecution, because I haven't broken any laws in the country where I live.
If, however, I decided to catch a plane to the US, I could (and probably would) be arrested as soon as I stepped off the plane, because the murder I ordered was illegal in the US, even if it wasn't in the jurisdiction where I committed the act.
The parallel is exact; the web server was in the US, I was in my fictitious murder-is-legal nation; an act was committed (libel) which was illegal in Australia, an act was committed (murder, or perhaps conspiracy to murder) which was illegal in the US; Dow Jones established offices in Australia, I stepped off a plane into US-controlled territory.
And since laws on what you can legally say aloud or in print vary greatly from country to country, please make sure your words are only available in pre-screened jurisdictions.
As long as you do not conduct business in France/Australia/US/[insert name of country which is stepping close to the bounds of extraterritoriality here], this isn't a problem. On the other hand, it is always true that if you are conducting business in a nation you should know and abide by the laws of that nation.
For example, some nations have laws restricting ownership by private citizens of more than a given quantity of gold. Some nations do not. If you're carrying around fifty pounds of gold, you'd better stay out of countries where it is illegal... but as long as you stay out of said countries, you're entirely safe, because even if they attempted to extradite you they would fail (under most, if not all, extradition treaties, you cannot be extradited from a country if you have not committed an act which would have been criminal in that country).
Yahoo conducts business in France. Yahoo was breaking French laws. Bad Things happen to Yahoo. Dow Jones conducts business in Autralia (it may not be their primary place of business, but they conduct business there all the same). Dow Jones is accused of breaking Australian laws. Dow Jones has to face trial in Australia. I, on the other hand, reside in Canada, and will likely never go to Australia in my entire life, so I can completely ignore Australian libel/porn/encryption/etc laws.
I really fail to see what the big deal is here.
Plutonium has been created in nuclear reactors, how about we destroy it in nuclear reactors?
CANDU reactors can safely burn fuel consisting of mixed uranium and plutonium. If all the CANDU reactors around the world were fed the appropriate mixture, the entire 270 ton stockpile of plutonium could safely be disposed of within a couple years.
I know it's a bit odd to complain about my own post being moderated up, but...
That post was NOT informative. Funny, maybe. Insightful or troll, possibly. But there is no way that post can reasonably be classified as informative.
So what's the discount for running OpenBSD?
Oh wait, I almost forgot: If you're running OpenBSD, you don't need cracker insurance.
Ping times no longer measure network speed except in very highly congested networks. For the past 5 years networks have been fast enough that the largest contributor to round-trip times is simply the speed of light. (in a fiber-optic cable, or the speed of an electronic signal down a copper wire, either way about 2/3 c).
High ping times making games unplayable mean that north americans will never enjoy playing against australians, but it really has very little to do with the quality or cost of their network connections.
It's a small point, but how long is 30 days of community service?
Whenever I've heard about people being ordered to perform community service it has always been a number of hours -- 50 hours, 100 hours, 250 hours, whatever. That way it is easy for people to keep track of how much service the person has done.
Does 30 days mean 30 x [mean number of hours worked per day] hours of community service? Does it mean that whenever he would be at work for the next 30 days he has to be doing community service instead? Or does it literally mean 30 *days*, ie 720 hours?
I don't know about you, but it seems to me that the middle of the night, when nobody is around, is the perfect time to run systems maintainance tasks. Quite apart from the tasks which would result in downtime (upgrading servers/network/etc.) the middle of the night is the ideal time to run tasks which might result in decreased performacen -- network backups, checking your server logs for any security issues, etc.
Ideally, it should be the day shift which is long and boring, because that's when you shouldn't be touching anything which could possibly cause downtime.
[we need to start trading] .picturesofmomanddad
I don't think that's a good idea. If people are considering blocking P2P (or rather, trying to block P2P) because of people trading songs, what will happen if they hear that people are trading pornography?
Oh wait a moment, the people passing laws are primarily middle-aged males. Never mind then.
Twenty years? Dear God, the American rocketry program went from zero to the moon in eight years.
Yes, but the moon is much closer than Mars.
If we had rockets which could take us from earth to Mars in a couple days, we'd probably have men on Mars within a few years. When it takes at least 6 months to get to Mars -- which means at least 6 months for probes and equipment to get to Mars -- things are obviously going to go a bit slower.
Somehow I doubt we'll go from zero to Alpha Centauri in less than 8 years either.
(I love it when manuals tell you never to use any other power supply, 12vDC is 12vDC right.. sheesh, safety Nazi's to blame I think).
You're probably right in this case, but there is sometimes a technical justification. Some types of equipment have a tendancy to feed AC back up the power line (ie, they draw periodically varying current), and if you use an AC/DC converter which doesn't filter this out you could be in trouble. There was a discussion here a few weeks ago about what types of equipment could be run off of a UPS which centered mostly around this issue.
Essentially, primary keys are things you index by. Take a dictionary, for example: it is a database containing pairs (word, meaning), and has word as its primary key.
If you want to look up something in your database and you have a primary key, you can just jump to the correct location in the database and find the data; if you want don't use primary keys, (eg, looking for a definition in a dictionary in order to find the word) you have to examine every element individually.
Basically, primary keys are obvious to anyone who has never taken a database course, so you've probably been using them all this time anyway.
These things are great, I suppose, but people are forgetting the ultimate purpose of a lightweight portable computer: providing a secure terminal. Even if you carry around a floppy disk with PuTTY everywhere you go, you're still trusting the system you run it on; in contrast, if you carry around a laptop running OpenBSD, you can plug it in anywhere and have a reasonable expectation of security.
Interesting they call it a serial port and not FireWire, wonder if it means something or was a simple mistake
Yes, it does mean something. It means that this isn't made by Apple. FireWire is simply Apple's trademark for the standard which is IEEE1394.
CDRs are great I suppose for burning the latest insert-your-favorite-OS-here ISO images, but they are a bit small for backup purposes, in these days of 180GB hard drives.
Anyone have a clue when DVDR prices are going to come down to a level where they can compete on a $/GB basis with CDRs?
Let's say Canada gets satisfactory data protection laws. Since most of Canada's packets go through the US, will be be cut off too?
This raises a point worth making. At one point there were Canadian laws which stated that data traffic which originated and terminated within Canada could only be carried on Canadian networks. It was illegal to send data from Ontario to BC via the USA, because this would hurt Canada's telecommunications companies.
These laws were removed some time (IIRC, about 10 years?) ago, when Canada realized that by forcing Canadian companies to do business with Canadian telecoms they were causing companies to move down to the US to evade these laws.
I think the same is likely to happen with the internet as well: if countries start imposing heavy restrictions on what dot-coms can do, they'll just move to the next jurisdiction.
We need some international treaties -- like those regarding Antarctica and the moon -- which tell nation-states to keep their hands off the internet. Legislators don't understand the internet, so the only way intelligent regulations are going to be put in place is when they come from the internet community (eg, IESG).
I'm not sure about this, but I think what they mean is that there have been no vulnerabilities discovered before they were fixed -- that is to say, I think that root exploit you are talking about was fixed during routine code auditing before anyone realized that it could be exploited.
But I don't keep up to date on OpenBSD stuff so I may be totally wrong here.
\int{\frac{1}{cabin} d(cabin)} = houseboat.
(For those who haven't seen this before, the left side evaluates to log cabin + C.)
The most obvious candidate would be e^{i \pi} + 1 = 0. Everyone agrees about the beauty of this formula, and it also has the advantage of compactness.
1 }-\frac{2}{8i+4}-\frac{1}{8i+5}-\frac{1}{8i+6})}. While this dates back only six years, and is rather less compact, it is arguably very beautiful because it relates Pi to the simple polylogarithmic constants.
Another option would be \pi = \sum_{i=0}^{\infty}{(\frac{1}{16})^i(\frac{4}{8i+
If you want something statistical, how about \sqrt{\pi} = \int_{-\infty}^{\infty}{e^{-x^2} dx} ?
OTOH, if you have lots of space, the Peano axioms (or, even better, the axioms of ZF set theory) would be really cool...
Social engineering shouldn't be a problem. The worst that a stupid luser can do is limited to what a malicious luser can do, and you should create your security policies based on the assumption that any of your lusers might be a spy from a different company/working for the NSA/about to go on a destructive rampage when they find out they've lost their job/etc.
Security ==> Correctness: If you can't break something deliberately, you can't break it by accident.
Example: Internet Explorer. MS doesn't charge for it, but should they not be responsible for the damages it causes?
Only when I can hold Redhat legally responsible for the costs resulting from their insecure software. I don't use their software, but I have certainly been harmed by it -- probably several thousand dollars of harm if you add up all the time I've spent reporting cracked redhat systems to their owners.