My thought is that the best thing to do would be to append your file to the Wolfenstein file. That way any settings that are new to Wolfenstein would get set to the defaults, but your own settings will override the settings in the first half of the file.
Hitler made it seem to the average German that the Jews were the threat. It matters not who/or what the real threat -- or, for that matter, that there even was a real threat. The people of germany were scared of the Jews by the time Hitler was finished.
Once he had them scared, it was easy to convince them that violations of human rights were necessary to stop the threat posed by the jews. Once the machinery for the violations were in place they were ultimately turned against the more general population.
This is the reason for the quote:
People who are willng to trade their rights for a sense of security deserve, and get, neither.
But what Israel's been doing precisely is targeted counterattacks, and targeted as well as anyone could ever reasonably expect.
They find a guy they know is trouble in an office, in a car, or wherever, and they kill him......
No. Israel's response is often targeted at people around the terrorist -- even at the population as a whole. They'll shoot kids with rocks, and bulldoze the houses of the families of people who did terrorist attacks -- even though the family didn't know what their relative was planning. They've destroyed entire communities, in some cases.
I have no problems with Israel going after the organizers of terrorist attacks, but when they go after the community, they leave behind people who are angry and desperate. They're essentially using random Palestinins as scapegoats -- to make Israelis feel comforted that something is being done, in response. It's that kind of action that creates latent terrorists.
A suicide bomber is someone who is so desperate ; so despondent over our {real or imagined} attacks against him, or his people that he's willing to kill himself over it. It's pretty much imposible to stop someone who is willing to die to get to you. The threat of a life behind bars isn't going to do much to stop someone who's not expecting to be alive for the trial.
There's a Spider Robinson story that starts with a guy who's about to comit suicide. A robber pulls a gun on the guy and says, "Your money or your life!" Well, our protagonist has no quams about losing his life, and damned if he's gonna let that bastard have his money......
Back in the '30s, the big threat wasn't Palistinians... It was Jews. Hitler instituted all sorts of restraints on human rights to combat that threat. Ask the people of Germany about how safe they were in the aftermath.
I think it was Malcom X who said that:
people who are willing to surrender their liberty in the name of some minimal safety get -- and deserve -- neither.
My parents are from Trinidad (just off the coast of South America). When I've been there, I've come across quite a variety of potatoes. Thes included 'sweet potatoes' which had a purple tint to them. They are sweeter than our 'white' potatoes, and had a slightly different texture.
Yams are also a variety of potato. We North Americans tend to get confused by the color. If you want to try the various styles and colors of potatoes available, skip the Safeway next time you go out to shop, and try some of the (South American) ethnic stores.
In fact, I'd say just try ethnic stores in general! There is a small Vietnamese grocery near my place. They have all sorts of interesting things that I have yet to try. I've been experimenting, lately with different varieties of rice. I've come to texture the texture of brown rice over plain white, and have started experimenting with sticky rice (wow, incredible!). Never would have tried it if I hadn't gotten curious walking through the store, and asked how to cook these things.
People are so willing to share their culture and food with us if we only ask. It's incredible what you can learn by asking someone in a store what to do with a 'strange' plant that they seem to know about.
Read the article. Its eat a genetically altered potato, or eat a potato dosed in chemicals.
You can also grow your own. Most cities sit on top of the most fertile land in their regions (having grown up around the rich farmers on their good land, and then eaten that land). Even people who live in apartments can often grow stuff on their balconies, or inside their windows.
It's nice eating something that you know where it's come from.
In many cases, our chemical laden farming methods are self-fulfilling cycles. The chemicals we spray on our farms don't just kill the pests. They also kill the predators against the pests. They're actually worse on the predators, because the pests are far more numerous and more likely to have a mutation among them that allows them some resistance to the pesticide. Thus the pest breeds itself into immunity, but the predator gets squeezed out of the space, so if you stop using chemicals for a short period of time, the pest population explodes until the predator can re-establish itself. Unless the farmer in question really knows what (s)he's doing, they're likely to restart the chemical program just as the predator is regaining a foothold in the area (and the chemical company PR rep will take on an "I told you so" attitude).
He didn't say that everybody died instantly. He said that most eferybody died instantly. I doubt that anybody in any of those planes lived as long as half a second into the impact. people who were trapped in the building when they collapsed... well the buildings colapsed, for the most part in about 30 seconds. That's an average of 1/3 of a second per floor.. Most people probably had about a second or 2 between realizing that their floor was colapsing and being squashed.
When people say that acts like the kamikaze attacks of this week are a logical result of our lackadazical attitude towards the rights of the palestinians, this does not justify any of the killing -- On either side. To say that the killing is only OK as long as it is us who benefits from the killing doesn't work. Whoever holds the gun, the knife or (in this case) the yoke is always the us for whom the killing is OK.
Either you stand against the killing of civilians and non-combatants, or you put up with the death striking both sides -- with the weight of suffering going back and forth with the whims of fate. This week was our week to put up with the results of our allowing and even supporting the violation of human rights, and the killing of non-combatants.
Human rights either exist, or they don't exist. Either we fight for the respect rights and freedoms, or we abdicate our rights when the "them" whom it is OK to opress and even kill turns out to be us. There are always going to be times when it appears convenient to allow the violation of rights and the opression of innocents. We should remember, however, that few weapons care which hands they are in.
If we have not set a standard of respect and even reverence for the rights and lives of the conveniently opressed, we will have nothing to rely on when the weapon is suddenly in the hands of those who once seemed firmly in the sights of ourselves or our allies.
We're not going into combat situations here. Skin tight mobility might be nice, but it's not entirely necessary. It's also unlikely, since insulation is more valuable. Having lived in Edmonton, where it sometimes goes down to -40 in mid winter, I wouldn't care much about a skin-tight suit in a hostile environment.
You can get very usable mobility with a few layers of clothing. It's a bit bulky and slows you down a bit, but not enough to be bothersome.
The one place where dexterity is really valuable is in the hands. Most people have no problems with a nice bulky (warm) parka, but you can pay big bucks for a really good pair of thin gloves that still keep your hands warm.
Physical security is about as difficult as computer security. In 1989, I came across a murphy's law on that subject. It said:
Investment in security will continue until costs exceed risks -- or until someone insists on some serious work done.
I don't think that the situation has changed much in 22 years. Security architects must measure inconvenience and usability against percieved risk. An absolutely secure system is also going to be absolutely unusable. At some point, the security work stops and the prayer starts.
My response in another article is my suggestion. I'm not calling for no response. I'm calling for the response to be limited to those who are actually responsible for violence.
Attacks upon random civilian targets (under the pretense that 'they may have supported the attackers') are a Gestapo=style tactic that will do more to create new enemies than to slow down the real enemies who don't get touched by such attacks.
Revenge may feel sweet, but if it only creates more (and more desperate) enemies, it's not worth it.
Re:Good idea, but this is not Utopia
on
Our New Pearl Harbor
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
The idea of no retalitation and just allowing for peace is definetly the utopian solution.
I'm not going to call for no retaliation. I am, however going to call for no random retaliation. Retaliation against civilian targets only vaguely associated with (the) terrorists will simply create more people, more desparate and more angry. It plays into the hands of the terrorist by creating even more people who are angry and/or desperate enough to work on suicide or other terrorist attacks.
Consider, for a moment, the kind of desperation it would take for someone to be a suicide attacker. Even in extreme situations, it is the rare person who would do something like this. It requires the willful creation of a desperate situation within a large population over a period of time.
Someone touched on this in an earlier post. What Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people in response to the Intifada has created a breeding ground for terrorists -- especially suicidal terrorists.
Retaliation should be strong and as swift as possible -- but against terrorists only. We are now experiencing, firsthand, the result of anger being directed against innocent civilian targets. If we take on the tactics of our attackers all we will do is feed the cycle of violence and hatred -- leading only to more death and destruction.
Break the circle. Stop violence against (innocent) civilians.
they've just given our government a green
light to massively increase defense (and offense) spending and completely obliterate them,
Oh, great! This sort of revenge attitude is precisely the kind of thing that which whe terrorists want, and the kind of thing that leads to more of these terrorist attacks.
We get attacked, and innocent people die, so
we go out and 'punnish' innocent people who are vaguely associated with the cause of the killers.
switch sides and go to step one.
Hatred and random violence are not the appropriate responses to violence. Hatred comes from fear. Generating fear in random people on the other side is only going to create an opening for those who wish to generate more hatred against us.
Most notably: attacks against innocents only vaguely associated with the terrorist only helps the cause of the terrorists. It makes more people desperate and angry -- feeding the machinery of the terrorists. This is the last thing we want.
Selling an illegitimate item as an authintic item is probably against the law (fraud). Of course, there comes the difficulty of proving that an item is illegitimate, how it got created, and the fact that you bought it from person 'x' (as opposed to making it yourself).
If the people at Blizzard have ways of logging these things (the purchase would be logged by ebay, etc, but the game mechanics would pretty much have to be logged on battle net), it could make for a very interesting court case / slashdot article someday in the future.
Seeing someone sucessfully prosecuted for selling a fraudulent item would also be an interesting way of discouraging duping, etc.
Rather than coming at the situation from the point of complaint, come at it from the point of solution. Look for ways that you can liven up your work day, AND make the company more productive (profitable).
As an example:
If your work is repetetive, this indicates to me that there is room to automate parts of it. You might talk to your boses about setting aside 10% of your time to improving the website creation software. This could make your work time more interesting and make the company more profitable.. a win all the way 'round.
What's possible is only limited by your imagination. Just remember that the easier you make the change for your management, the more likely that they'll agree to it.
Do you get in an uproar because you can't pay $20 to watch a movie at a movie theater as many times as you want,...?
It actually costs the movie theatre money to run the theatre, pay the projectionist, etc. I think that $12 is a bit high to pay for the process, but I understand the need to pay something.
Once I buy a book, it doesn't cost the author, publisher or anybody but me if I read it 2 or 200 times. We are no longer paying a charge for a service provided... They are setting up to place a tax on the process of reading, listening or watching.
The original intent of the copyright amendment to the constitution was to give artists/publishers a reasonable incentive to publish their work, and then get those works into the public domain, after "a short period of time".
BTW: If I could afford the thousands of dollars cost of printing a movie reel, and had the equipment to view it at home, I could view it as often as I wanted.
Not really all that open. The cameras were allowed in to specific places at specific times. I'd bet that the people listening to Bin Laden's current cell phone conversatons just happened to be working on a different floor, that day. Remember that these people are issued office keys by machine every morning. They probably take it completely in stride to find that they're working in a different office -- or even in a different building -- this morinig.
Also: The cameras allowed in were video cameras. Compared to film, video has a very low resolution. You're not going to be able to blow up an image and discern much text on a screen that a video camera isn't obviously focused on.
One of the things about intelligence is designing when to let your adversaries know what information. Their computer outage was more than a year ago. There's not much that an enemy could do with that data now. Chances are that important data from that time was collected, stored, and has been decoded/dealt with by now.
Then there's the fact that the Europeans are releasing reports on joint signal collecting (I can't remember the name of the agreement, just now) this week. I timely moment to mention that the domestic spook agency feels powerless.
It's not a shock to me that the NSA is releasing information. My questions are:
Urg:
The guy said that he did not know of anybody who read email as root. Another way of putting it is: anybody who knows enough to get rid of the warnings about running KDE/GDM as root probably knows not to do random stuff as root.
That having been said, I do, sometimes read email as root-- but using Mail. Reading emails with attachments is always done as a lesser user. If it's not a plain-text email it shouldn't be going to root. If it's going to root, it should be readable on a dumb tty, serial console, or my palm pilot connecting through a sattelite phone from Botswana.
If I'm going to be brave/curious/stupid enough to run a random executable that arrived in the mail, I think that I'd set up some sort of sandbox user to do it with. (You don't expect me to risk my regular user account on a random executable, do you?)
One nice thing about UNIX is that Single User usage is the degenerate case of Multi-User mode, where N==1.
No. Even the universe may be a black hole. That's actually one of the big questions of cosmology.. Whether there's enough mass/energy density in the universe to make it a black hole. We're reasonably close to that point. At the moment, the error estimation in most calculations tends to be less than the difference between the calculated mass of the universe, and the minimal black-hole mass for the universe.
I did some calculations around black holes and gravity, many moons ago.. I came up with some interesting conclusions. In this case, my definition of the 'size' of a black hole is it's schwartzchild radius (it's event horizon).
The gravity differential of a black hole is very dependant on it's size. At normal sizes, that gravity differential is enough to rip most material objects to pieces. If you could get a black hole small enough, I'm sure that you could rip single attoms into their sub-atomic particles, but I'm not good enough at physics to figure out how high the differential has to be to do that.
I think that the tidal effect is part of what leads to Hawkings radiation.
The 'surface' gravity of a black hole decreases as it's size increases. You can actually have a black hole with a surface gravity of 1 Earth Gravity, but it would have a 3 light-month radius. (our solar system is less than one light-day in radius, and the galactic core black hole would fit comfortably inside of mars's orbit.
The 1 G black hole would have an average density less than water. (i.e. it would float -- presuming that it were solid, and you could find a big enough ocean to float it in.
Oh, yeah -- I can just see trying to get all Australians and Austrians who already have nationalistic domain names to switch over to a new suffex! One of my former employers is relinquishing it's old Domain name next month. They started hounding customers to switch their email addresses almost 2 years ago (they're an ISP). They are STILL fighting to get people to switch.
The only reason we (software engineers) get away with this
scam is the general public cannot see inside of software systems.
A friend of mine's father is a Civil engineer who does a lot of work on bridges. He refuses to use the Lions Gate Bridge between Vancouver andNorth Vancouver (he lives in North Van, and there are only two bridges between North Van and Van.).
I think that it was mentioned in the articles that their stuff is often used in "low end" (read: crap) systems..
I wouldn't quite call them crap, but they definitely seem to be far from the high end. I guess that, for someone used to a 32M graphics board, something like the trident style chipsets are gonna seem like crap.
E books cannot be 'checked out' of a library. You cannot 'lend' them to a friend (unless you lend him your whole laptop). As other people have pointed out, If E-Book technology had been much older, most libraries would have been impossible.
Imagine what life would be like if, every time you wanted to fix your car, you had to pay a royalty to the writer of the 'fix it yourself' book...
Imagine how impoverished we would be if, having read a wonderful book, we were unable to loan it to a friend to read... In fact, if we wanted to read it a second time, we'd have to 'buy' (OK, License) the book a second time!
Imagine if, everytime you listened to a record that you'd paid good money for, your bank account shrank -- and if you were broke, you wouldn't be allowed to read, listen to music or watch TV.
This is what the Sklyarov case is about -- that, and providing a 'chilling environment' for anybody -- inside or outside of the USA -- who even thinks of putting together software what would allow people to exercise 'fair use' of their artistic purchases.
$ units '260ft/5406mph' seconds
* 0.032791847
/ 30.495385
Given that only 1 significant digit was given,.03 seconds is appropriate for mach 7.1. (remember your rounding rules). I presume that nasa's measurements were more accureate than 1/100th of a second, but they just didn't bother to print all those extra digits in the news release. Most news releases are edited by english majors, not physicists or mathematicians. They probably thought that.03 seconds was as accurate as mach 7.1 (fewer significant digits, but the same number of printed digits).
Honor action. Re:How are his wife and kids?
on
Sklyarov Update
·
· Score: 2
(I guess I wasn't done).
Each person does what is appropriate to him or her. One person may give $100 to cover personal hardship. Another person may organize a demo. Someone else may have access to directly (or indirectly) lobby a Senator. Some other person may have the expertise to research for the defence.
NONE of those actions is bad. ALL of them are needed. Very few people are going to be able to do all of them. What each person does may be unique to his or her own circumstances.It may also be uniquely valuable to the process.
Giving money to Sklyarov may give him the financial breathing space that he needs to stay put and really fight this issue, rather than bowing to some plea bargain so that he can get back to a normal life. This is no less important than any of the other political work that is going on around this issue.
If someone could arrange for his family to come out here, it might also make it easier for him to fight this issue powerfully.
I think that we should be thankful for anything that moves this issue forward, and then look to what's needed next.
Re:How are his wife and kids?
on
Sklyarov Update
·
· Score: 2
Yes. The 'right thing' is to make sure that he doesn't go to prison.. but in the meantime he, and his family are going through some probably high-stress times. I would expect that most of the people who would consider sending money to help out him and his family are people who have also been to / organized rallys and / or written letters to various people.
This is almost as bad as the people who say 'don't vote because there are better things you can do'.
My activism started with voting. It didn't end there. Similarly, I think that helping the person who has been personally affected by this DMCA bullsh*t is an appropriate thing to do. A more reasonable admonition would be simply to remind people that their activism shouldn't end there...
Encourage action. Don't discourage action that is different than your own preferred path.
Slashdot Mirror
My thought is that the best thing to do would be to append your file to the Wolfenstein file. That way any settings that are new to Wolfenstein would get set to the defaults, but your own settings will override the settings in the first half of the file.
Once he had them scared, it was easy to convince them that violations of human rights were necessary to stop the threat posed by the jews. Once the machinery for the violations were in place they were ultimately turned against the more general population.
This is the reason for the quote:
People who are willng to trade their rights for a sense of security deserve, and get, neither.
No. Israel's response is often targeted at people around the terrorist -- even at the population as a whole. They'll shoot kids with rocks, and bulldoze the houses of the families of people who did terrorist attacks -- even though the family didn't know what their relative was planning. They've destroyed entire communities, in some cases.
I have no problems with Israel going after the organizers of terrorist attacks, but when they go after the community, they leave behind people who are angry and desperate. They're essentially using random Palestinins as scapegoats -- to make Israelis feel comforted that something is being done, in response. It's that kind of action that creates latent terrorists.
There's a Spider Robinson story that starts with a guy who's about to comit suicide. A robber pulls a gun on the guy and says, "Your money or your life!" Well, our protagonist has no quams about losing his life, and damned if he's gonna let that bastard have his money......
Back in the '30s, the big threat wasn't Palistinians... It was Jews. Hitler instituted all sorts of restraints on human rights to combat that threat. Ask the people of Germany about how safe they were in the aftermath.
I think it was Malcom X who said that:
people who are willing to surrender their liberty in the name of some minimal safety get -- and deserve -- neither.
Yams are also a variety of potato. We North Americans tend to get confused by the color. If you want to try the various styles and colors of potatoes available, skip the Safeway next time you go out to shop, and try some of the (South American) ethnic stores.
In fact, I'd say just try ethnic stores in general! There is a small Vietnamese grocery near my place. They have all sorts of interesting things that I have yet to try. I've been experimenting, lately with different varieties of rice. I've come to texture the texture of brown rice over plain white, and have started experimenting with sticky rice (wow, incredible!). Never would have tried it if I hadn't gotten curious walking through the store, and asked how to cook these things.
People are so willing to share their culture and food with us if we only ask. It's incredible what you can learn by asking someone in a store what to do with a 'strange' plant that they seem to know about.
You can also grow your own. Most cities sit on top of the most fertile land in their regions (having grown up around the rich farmers on their good land, and then eaten that land). Even people who live in apartments can often grow stuff on their balconies, or inside their windows.
It's nice eating something that you know where it's come from.
In many cases, our chemical laden farming methods are self-fulfilling cycles. The chemicals we spray on our farms don't just kill the pests. They also kill the predators against the pests. They're actually worse on the predators, because the pests are far more numerous and more likely to have a mutation among them that allows them some resistance to the pesticide. Thus the pest breeds itself into immunity, but the predator gets squeezed out of the space, so if you stop using chemicals for a short period of time, the pest population explodes until the predator can re-establish itself. Unless the farmer in question really knows what (s)he's doing, they're likely to restart the chemical program just as the predator is regaining a foothold in the area (and the chemical company PR rep will take on an "I told you so" attitude).
When people say that acts like the kamikaze attacks of this week are a logical result of our lackadazical attitude towards the rights of the palestinians, this does not justify any of the killing -- On either side. To say that the killing is only OK as long as it is us who benefits from the killing doesn't work. Whoever holds the gun, the knife or (in this case) the yoke is always the us for whom the killing is OK.
Either you stand against the killing of civilians and non-combatants, or you put up with the death striking both sides -- with the weight of suffering going back and forth with the whims of fate. This week was our week to put up with the results of our allowing and even supporting the violation of human rights, and the killing of non-combatants.
Human rights either exist, or they don't exist. Either we fight for the respect rights and freedoms, or we abdicate our rights when the "them" whom it is OK to opress and even kill turns out to be us. There are always going to be times when it appears convenient to allow the violation of rights and the opression of innocents. We should remember, however, that few weapons care which hands they are in.
If we have not set a standard of respect and even reverence for the rights and lives of the conveniently opressed, we will have nothing to rely on when the weapon is suddenly in the hands of those who once seemed firmly in the sights of ourselves or our allies.
The one place where dexterity is really valuable is in the hands. Most people have no problems with a nice bulky (warm) parka, but you can pay big bucks for a really good pair of thin gloves that still keep your hands warm.
Investment in security will continue until costs exceed risks -- or until someone insists on some serious work done.
I don't think that the situation has changed much in 22 years. Security architects must measure inconvenience and usability against percieved risk. An absolutely secure system is also going to be absolutely unusable. At some point, the security work stops and the prayer starts.
Attacks upon random civilian targets (under the pretense that 'they may have supported the attackers') are a Gestapo=style tactic that will do more to create new enemies than to slow down the real enemies who don't get touched by such attacks.
Revenge may feel sweet, but if it only creates more (and more desperate) enemies, it's not worth it.
I'm not going to call for no retaliation. I am, however going to call for no random retaliation. Retaliation against civilian targets only vaguely associated with (the) terrorists will simply create more people, more desparate and more angry. It plays into the hands of the terrorist by creating even more people who are angry and/or desperate enough to work on suicide or other terrorist attacks.
Consider, for a moment, the kind of desperation it would take for someone to be a suicide attacker. Even in extreme situations, it is the rare person who would do something like this. It requires the willful creation of a desperate situation within a large population over a period of time.
Someone touched on this in an earlier post. What Israel has been doing to the Palestinian people in response to the Intifada has created a breeding ground for terrorists -- especially suicidal terrorists.
Retaliation should be strong and as swift as possible -- but against terrorists only. We are now experiencing, firsthand, the result of anger being directed against innocent civilian targets. If we take on the tactics of our attackers all we will do is feed the cycle of violence and hatred -- leading only to more death and destruction.
Break the circle. Stop violence against (innocent) civilians.
Oh, great! This sort of revenge attitude is precisely the kind of thing that which whe terrorists want, and the kind of thing that leads to more of these terrorist attacks.
-
We get attacked, and innocent people die, so
- we go out and 'punnish' innocent people who are vaguely associated with the cause of the killers.
- switch sides and go to step one.
Hatred and random violence are not the appropriate responses to violence. Hatred comes from fear. Generating fear in random people on the other side is only going to create an opening for those who wish to generate more hatred against us.Most notably: attacks against innocents only vaguely associated with the terrorist only helps the cause of the terrorists. It makes more people desperate and angry -- feeding the machinery of the terrorists. This is the last thing we want.
If the people at Blizzard have ways of logging these things (the purchase would be logged by ebay, etc, but the game mechanics would pretty much have to be logged on battle net), it could make for a very interesting court case / slashdot article someday in the future.
Seeing someone sucessfully prosecuted for selling a fraudulent item would also be an interesting way of discouraging duping, etc.
As an example:
If your work is repetetive, this indicates to me that there is room to automate parts of it. You might talk to your boses about setting aside 10% of your time to improving the website creation software. This could make your work time more interesting and make the company more profitable.. a win all the way 'round.
What's possible is only limited by your imagination. Just remember that the easier you make the change for your management, the more likely that they'll agree to it.
It actually costs the movie theatre money to run the theatre, pay the projectionist, etc. I think that $12 is a bit high to pay for the process, but I understand the need to pay something.
Once I buy a book, it doesn't cost the author, publisher or anybody but me if I read it 2 or 200 times. We are no longer paying a charge for a service provided... They are setting up to place a tax on the process of reading, listening or watching.
The original intent of the copyright amendment to the constitution was to give artists/publishers a reasonable incentive to publish their work, and then get those works into the public domain, after "a short period of time".
BTW: If I could afford the thousands of dollars cost of printing a movie reel, and had the equipment to view it at home, I could view it as often as I wanted.
Also: The cameras allowed in were video cameras. Compared to film, video has a very low resolution. You're not going to be able to blow up an image and discern much text on a screen that a video camera isn't obviously focused on.
One of the things about intelligence is designing when to let your adversaries know what information. Their computer outage was more than a year ago. There's not much that an enemy could do with that data now. Chances are that important data from that time was collected, stored, and has been decoded/dealt with by now.
Then there's the fact that the Europeans are releasing reports on joint signal collecting (I can't remember the name of the agreement, just now) this week. I timely moment to mention that the domestic spook agency feels powerless.
It's not a shock to me that the NSA is releasing information. My questions are:
The guy said that he did not know of anybody who read email as root. Another way of putting it is: anybody who knows enough to get rid of the warnings about running KDE/GDM as root probably knows not to do random stuff as root.
That having been said, I do, sometimes read email as root-- but using Mail. Reading emails with attachments is always done as a lesser user. If it's not a plain-text email it shouldn't be going to root. If it's going to root, it should be readable on a dumb tty, serial console, or my palm pilot connecting through a sattelite phone from Botswana.
If I'm going to be brave/curious/stupid enough to run a random executable that arrived in the mail, I think that I'd set up some sort of sandbox user to do it with. (You don't expect me to risk my regular user account on a random executable, do you?)
One nice thing about UNIX is that Single User usage is the degenerate case of Multi-User mode, where N==1.
I did some calculations around black holes and gravity, many moons ago.. I came up with some interesting conclusions. In this case, my definition of the 'size' of a black hole is it's schwartzchild radius (it's event horizon).
The gravity differential of a black hole is very dependant on it's size. At normal sizes, that gravity differential is enough to rip most material objects to pieces. If you could get a black hole small enough, I'm sure that you could rip single attoms into their sub-atomic particles, but I'm not good enough at physics to figure out how high the differential has to be to do that.
I think that the tidal effect is part of what leads to Hawkings radiation.
The 'surface' gravity of a black hole decreases as it's size increases. You can actually have a black hole with a surface gravity of 1 Earth Gravity, but it would have a 3 light-month radius. (our solar system is less than one light-day in radius, and the galactic core black hole would fit comfortably inside of mars's orbit.
The 1 G black hole would have an average density less than water. (i.e. it would float -- presuming that it were solid, and you could find a big enough ocean to float it in.
Oh, yeah -- I can just see trying to get all Australians and Austrians who already have nationalistic domain names to switch over to a new suffex! One of my former employers is relinquishing it's old Domain name next month. They started hounding customers to switch their email addresses almost 2 years ago (they're an ISP). They are STILL fighting to get people to switch.
A friend of mine's father is a Civil engineer who does a lot of work on bridges. He refuses to use the Lions Gate Bridge between Vancouver andNorth Vancouver (he lives in North Van, and there are only two bridges between North Van and Van.).
I wouldn't quite call them crap, but they definitely seem to be far from the high end. I guess that, for someone used to a 32M graphics board, something like the trident style chipsets are gonna seem like crap.
Imagine what life would be like if, every time you wanted to fix your car, you had to pay a royalty to the writer of the 'fix it yourself' book...
Imagine how impoverished we would be if, having read a wonderful book, we were unable to loan it to a friend to read... In fact, if we wanted to read it a second time, we'd have to 'buy' (OK, License) the book a second time!
Imagine if, everytime you listened to a record that you'd paid good money for, your bank account shrank -- and if you were broke, you wouldn't be allowed to read, listen to music or watch TV.
This is what the Sklyarov case is about -- that, and providing a 'chilling environment' for anybody -- inside or outside of the USA -- who even thinks of putting together software what would allow people to exercise 'fair use' of their artistic purchases.
$ units '260ft/5406mph' seconds
.03 seconds is appropriate for mach 7.1. (remember your rounding rules). I presume that nasa's measurements were more accureate than 1/100th of a second, but they just didn't bother to print all those extra digits in the news release. Most news releases are edited by english majors, not physicists or mathematicians. They probably thought that .03 seconds was as accurate as mach 7.1 (fewer significant digits, but the same number of printed digits).
* 0.032791847
/ 30.495385
Given that only 1 significant digit was given,
Each person does what is appropriate to him or her. One person may give $100 to cover personal hardship. Another person may organize a demo. Someone else may have access to directly (or indirectly) lobby a Senator. Some other person may have the expertise to research for the defence.
NONE of those actions is bad. ALL of them are needed. Very few people are going to be able to do all of them. What each person does may be unique to his or her own circumstances.It may also be uniquely valuable to the process.
Giving money to Sklyarov may give him the financial breathing space that he needs to stay put and really fight this issue, rather than bowing to some plea bargain so that he can get back to a normal life. This is no less important than any of the other political work that is going on around this issue. If someone could arrange for his family to come out here, it might also make it easier for him to fight this issue powerfully.
I think that we should be thankful for anything that moves this issue forward, and then look to what's needed next.
This is almost as bad as the people who say 'don't vote because there are better things you can do'.
My activism started with voting. It didn't end there. Similarly, I think that helping the person who has been personally affected by this DMCA bullsh*t is an appropriate thing to do. A more reasonable admonition would be simply to remind people that their activism shouldn't end there...
Encourage action. Don't discourage action that is different than your own preferred path.