Story submitter here - I forgot the attribution (my bad); I picked this up from the Full Disclosure mailing list, specifically, this post by Richard M. Smith.
It seems unlikely the FSF would do anything in this situation, as the copyright for the Linux kernel belongs to Linus. Of course if the GNU toolchain's in there, it's a different story. But the FSF don't (AFAIK) pursue violations of any GPL'd software, only stuff that they own the copyright for. One reason why they request developers to assign tehm the copyright - it makes it easier for them to defend the GPL.
I was about to laugh at you very loudly, but I see others have beaten me to it. Let me only add, sir, that you should be careful what you wish for: you might get it. In this case, you've been modded up, and your stupidity and ignorance is now proudly displayed for all to see. Well done!
granted I sound a bit more confrontational there than I intended... look at it this way: karma! I *was* trying my best to fit in there, but it was (a) futile, (b) making me miserable, (c) pissing off my [idiot] manager. Now it would have been better for me if I'd found something else before getting fired, but the end result is both parties are happier: me cos I've got a great job, and "Moisty" because all his team have now left & he hasn't got a budget to replace us. Karma will get to him too, when he misses all his dev targets and releases buggy software... hopefully he'll be able to learn from the experience, as I hope I have.
>(Without reading that paper, I'd guess:) Life's what seems to have meaning to us? Cool.
No, it's deeper than that... insofar as I could grok it, he was saying that the Matrix is not real because the envatted Neo (etc) think it's real. If it were, then a psychotic who thinks that eg the CIA are in league with the martians to beam radio signals to him would be correct. It's.. ah hell, it's 8pm here and I'm just back from work; get into the paper, as I said it's heavy going in places but worth persevereing.
Black Iron Prison? Valiswww.am, right? Yeah, P.K.D. had some farout ideas, and considering his drug intake and mental instability, it's very interesting that so many of them have made films that ring true with the zeitgiest today, more than 20 years after his death. The "Philosophy of the Matrix" paper I linked to on the previous Matrix / Religion story here raises the profound question: how do we know that *our* reality is real? (The paper's counter-intuitive answer is that it IS real *even if we are living in a computer simulation*. Read the paper to find out why.
of course it's possible you're referring to another B.I.P. entirely:)
Well you totally misunderstood my post. I will NOT agree with a manager or anyone else if they're wilfully stupid or wrong. I WILL find myself another job where truth and correctness means something.
And how's that post incriminating? I left there ages ago...
I just read a fascinating (but somewhat heavy going for the layperson) paper by a professor of Philosophy inspired by the Matrix - I think someone actually linked to it from a previous/. Matrix story. There are lots of similar hypotheses to the idea that we are all brains in vats (or bits in a computer simulation.) For instance, if the god-botherers are right after all and there's a big guy with a white beard and we're all just figments of his imagination, how is this different from the Matrix? What about the Wolfram cellular automata work (and other less well-known work in the same field)? What about advances in cosmology and physics?
Any pointers from/.ers to similar material received with thanks:)
Not sure how to put it politely, but, well, "bollocks!"
> I think Io is probably a better bet to find extra-terran life. There > is definitely liquid water, and it is rich in complex organic > molecules (including RNA, I believe) it has a temperature comparable > to that of the early earth, and it has rich sources of the sulfur and > nitrogen compounds that early life probably used as food. >
Io has hotter lava than any on earth. Tidal forces from Jupiter flex the crust up and down so violently that the bits of the surface that aren't active volcanos are covered in (very cold) sulphurous lava. The volcanos are so powerful that there's the Io torus - a donut-shaped ring around Jupiter, the shape of io's orbit, composed of solidified particles ejected from volcanos so fast they left Io's gravity.
I think you might be getting confused with Europa, which does indeed have a lot of water ice with "salts" causing those bizarre colourations (yes I know the Galileo images are false colour...) but I have a sneaky suspicion that those salts are biogenic compounds from the sub-surface ocean, breaking through to the surface eitehr through tectonic activity or impacts. Mind you that's based on nothing but my own interested layperson's reading of the data and press releases...
I've been sacked twice, once explicitly for using Free/libre software (Apache and Perl rather than IIS and ASP - tho' I left the server running NT4, and if I hadn't told them, they wouldn't have known... it wasn't them that had to keep running up to the server room to reboot the damn thing!) and once partly because I kept banging on about Free software and how shit most closed code is. (There were a lot of other factors in the latter, too, like calling a co-worker a fuckwit - in email to my manager. Well, he *was* a fuckwit).
Naturally I've had a couple of lengthy, depressing & stressful periods of unemployment - 18 months of 24 more or less. I've now got a *fantastic* job doing exactly what I always wanted to do, with pleasant, intelligent & helpful colleagues. And if I hadn't been sacked from those other jobs I'd be grinding ASP for A.N. Major Management Consultancy, still. Or.Net, or whatnot.
These days you wouldn't be as reckless as I undoubtedly was. It was partly hubris and partly karma. I wouldn't have been happy working in those places in the long term, and me leaving really *was* for the best in the long term. No doubt -a-n are still an all-Microsoft shop, and spending zillions on support, licenses, helpdesk people etc etc just as they were back then. Well the tide has turned, and I don't believe it's going to slow down. The all-MS/Novell shops will still be around in 5 or 10 years' time but they'll be dinosaurs. No doubt there will be downsides to this - increased *nix clue amongst script kiddies, f'rinstance, and clueless paper-RHCEs rather than MSCEs, only in it for the money - but as far as my selfish concerns go, it means I should find it easier to earn a living doing in future doing something that doesn't make me feel my soul is turning to ashes every morning...:)
In summary: if they won't buy your sensible, well-reasoned arguments once you've put them, start looking for another gig.
> The only widely used encryption algo that the NSA can crack is 56bit DES ...and you know this... how, exactly?
Apart from their obvious technological advantage over the mostly amateur or academic (==low funding) cracking projects, there's no guarantee they haven't made some astonishing mathematical breakthrough. Did you know public key crypto was invented at GCHQ (aka MI7, mostly based in Cheltenham - I lived nearby for a while) in the early 70s; the work was never published, and in fact it's significance was only realised recently. (This being in the UK, naturally the idea was never productionised... *d'oh!*)
A spoiler would be something like, oh say, that Chewbacca is bald in this episode or that he's gay or something. That would be a spoiler...
Chewie's/gay/ ?! Wow! I have a friend who'll be very interested to hear that - she's had this thing about a "Han/Chewie sandwich" for years - but then she went to a terribly posh English girl's boarding school which explains a lot...
Should we exclude people from becoming doctors because they believe that Jesus came back from the dead - a belief which is both unscientific and contrary to our understanding of medical science?
Sure, why not? I don't like the thought of a superstitious fool taking a sharp knife to *my* innner workings, thank-you-very-much.
Tell you what - in the UK, the current craze is for metrics for everything. Let's see some hard statistics on recovery/survival rates for mumbo-jumbo adepts vs. those with a grounding in reality. Then let people make their own choices. If you choose to believe in a 2000 yearold fairy story, and are happy being chopped about by a fellow nutter, good luck to you. Remind me not to sell you life insurance.
"Go back to bed, America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators, watch this, shut up, go back to bed America, here is American Gladiators, here's 56 channels of it, watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on the living in the land of freedom. Here you go America - you are free - to do as well tell you! You are free - to do as we tell you!"
>It all depends on how much fight the iraqis put up. If we kill them >easy and install our companies in there to divvy up the war spoils then >we can move rapidly on iran.
It's rapidly becoming apparent that this just ain't gonna happen. Alas it seems that the way the Tao is moving is that lots and lots of people are going to die, it's going to be a slow & painful process 'liberating' Iraq. It's going to take many months, if not years. Strangely enough although the population DO largely hate & fear Saddam, they don't seem to like US Marines lobbing shells at them. Odd that...
> US is going to war to protect its own interests. There is nothing > wrong with that.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. The US is being completely thrashed in the propaganda war, not just in the Arab and Muslim countries (not the same thing of course) where they obviously have an uphill battle from the get-go, but in the rest of the world as well. The Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Perle/Wolfowitz regieme are really playing into the hands of the extremists who have been trying to depict this as a neo-colonial war of aggression and conquest - a 'crusade' (and Bush actually USED that word! What a schmuck!) In the last couple of days in the UK media there have been hints that the US wants to *run the country* after the war (which will no doubt be over by Christmas...) I cannot imagine anything they could do, short of rounding up and executing Muslims, more calculated to inculcate suspicion and hatred of the USA and by extension the UK, Australia, and, as far as the Al Qaeda types are concerned, all infidels.
This is shaping up to be the worst foreign policy blunder by the USA since... well, I can't remember a bigger screw-up. It's a disaster. And there's nothing to do but press on with the war.
Oddly enough, I once worked with someone who's previous employment was at the Hadley Centre, a very well-known UK climate research institute that's produced a lot of ground-breaking work over the years. He said the models were now getting so complex, and had been extended & adapted so many times, that they were becoming unmaintainable as no-one really understood how they worked. (This was a few years ago now, so they've probably fixed it all since then...)
But to answer your specific point: do you think that, say, writing guided missile code makes one an expert in international relations, or aerodynamics, or miltary strategy? I don't think so...
> He's a know leader of a network of individuals who are dedicated to > causing harm to untold millions of people whose biggest crime is > living in a country whose ideals he disagrees with.
> For a Christian, the Mark of the Beast IS intelligent discourse > because it is a very real concern.
For a Christian, there is no such thing as intelligent discourse, merely debate about which form of mumbo-jumbo is the right one. Come back when you've left the Dark Ages.
According to the SANS alert I was just forwarded, ISS told not CERT or the vendors, but the USGovt in the form of the Dept. of Homeland Defence . As a direct result,.mil sites had the patch LAST WEEK almost 7 days early. What is the explanation for this shameful state of affairs?
Slashdot Mirror
Story submitter here - I forgot the attribution (my bad); I picked this up from the Full Disclosure mailing list, specifically, this post by Richard M. Smith.
It seems unlikely the FSF would do anything in this situation, as the copyright for the Linux kernel belongs to Linus. Of course if the GNU toolchain's in there, it's a different story. But the FSF don't (AFAIK) pursue violations of any GPL'd software, only stuff that they own the copyright for. One reason why they request developers to assign tehm the copyright - it makes it easier for them to defend the GPL.
I was about to laugh at you very loudly, but I see others have beaten me to it. Let me only add, sir, that you should be careful what you wish for: you might get it. In this case, you've been modded up, and your stupidity and ignorance is now proudly displayed for all to see. Well done!
granted I sound a bit more confrontational there than I intended... look at it this way: karma! I *was* trying my best to fit in there, but it was (a) futile, (b) making me miserable, (c) pissing off my [idiot] manager. Now it would have been better for me if I'd found something else before getting fired, but the end result is both parties are happier: me cos I've got a great job, and "Moisty" because all his team have now left & he hasn't got a budget to replace us. Karma will get to him too, when he misses all his dev targets and releases buggy software... hopefully he'll be able to learn from the experience, as I hope I have.
>(Without reading that paper, I'd guess:) Life's what seems to have meaning to us? Cool.
:)
No, it's deeper than that... insofar as I could grok it, he was saying that the Matrix is not real because the envatted Neo (etc) think it's real. If it were, then a psychotic who thinks that eg the CIA are in league with the martians to beam radio signals to him would be correct. It's.. ah hell, it's 8pm here and I'm just back from work; get into the paper, as I said it's heavy going in places but worth persevereing.
Enjoy!
Black Iron Prison? Valiswww.am, right? Yeah, P.K.D. had some farout ideas, and considering his drug intake and mental instability, it's very interesting that so many of them have made films that ring true with the zeitgiest today, more than 20 years after his death. The "Philosophy of the Matrix" paper I linked to on the previous Matrix / Religion story here raises the profound question: how do we know that *our* reality is real? (The paper's counter-intuitive answer is that it IS real *even if we are living in a computer simulation*. Read the paper to find out why.
:)
of course it's possible you're referring to another B.I.P. entirely
Well you totally misunderstood my post. I will NOT agree with a manager or anyone else if they're wilfully stupid or wrong. I WILL find myself another job where truth and correctness means something.
And how's that post incriminating? I left there ages ago...
I just read a fascinating (but somewhat heavy going for the layperson) paper by a professor of Philosophy inspired by the Matrix - I think someone actually linked to it from a previous /. Matrix story. There are lots of similar hypotheses to the idea that we are all brains in vats (or bits in a computer simulation.) For instance, if the god-botherers are right after all and there's a big guy with a white beard and we're all just figments of his imagination, how is this different from the Matrix? What about the Wolfram cellular automata work (and other less well-known work in the same field)? What about advances in cosmology and physics?
/.ers to similar material received with thanks :)
Any pointers from
See also http://www.simulation-argument.com.
...as I said at the time. Boom, boom!
Not sure how to put it politely, but, well, "bollocks!"
> I think Io is probably a better bet to find extra-terran life. There
> is definitely liquid water, and it is rich in complex organic
> molecules (including RNA, I believe) it has a temperature comparable
> to that of the early earth, and it has rich sources of the sulfur and
> nitrogen compounds that early life probably used as food.
>
Io has hotter lava than any on earth. Tidal forces from Jupiter flex the crust up and down so violently that the bits of the surface that aren't active volcanos are covered in (very cold) sulphurous lava. The volcanos are so powerful that there's the Io torus - a donut-shaped ring around Jupiter, the shape of io's orbit, composed of solidified particles ejected from volcanos so fast they left Io's gravity.
I think you might be getting confused with Europa, which does indeed have a lot of water ice with "salts" causing those bizarre colourations (yes I know the Galileo images are false colour...) but I have a sneaky suspicion that those salts are biogenic compounds from the sub-surface ocean, breaking through to the surface eitehr through tectonic activity or impacts. Mind you that's based on nothing but my own interested layperson's reading of the data and press releases...
"..hats are on heads and ice-creams are in cornets." (Brian Kant, 1975)
Slow news day, huh?
I've been sacked twice, once explicitly for using Free/libre software (Apache and Perl rather than IIS and ASP - tho' I left the server running NT4, and if I hadn't told them, they wouldn't have known... it wasn't them that had to keep running up to the server room to reboot the damn thing!) and once partly because I kept banging on about Free software and how shit most closed code is. (There were a lot of other factors in the latter, too, like calling a co-worker a fuckwit - in email to my manager. Well, he *was* a fuckwit).
.Net, or whatnot.
Naturally I've had a couple of lengthy, depressing & stressful periods of unemployment - 18 months of 24 more or less. I've now got a *fantastic* job doing exactly what I always wanted to do, with pleasant, intelligent & helpful colleagues. And if I hadn't been sacked from those other jobs I'd be grinding ASP for A.N. Major Management Consultancy, still. Or
These days you wouldn't be as reckless as I undoubtedly was. It was partly hubris and partly karma. I wouldn't have been happy working in those places in the long term, and me leaving really *was* for the best in the long term. No doubt -a-n are still an all-Microsoft shop, and spending zillions on support, licenses, helpdesk people etc etc just as they were back then. Well the tide has turned, and I don't believe it's going to slow down. The all-MS/Novell shops will still be around in 5 or 10 years' time but they'll be dinosaurs. No doubt there will be downsides to this - increased *nix clue amongst script kiddies, f'rinstance, and clueless paper-RHCEs rather than MSCEs, only in it for the money - but as far as my selfish concerns go, it means I should find it easier to earn a living doing in future doing something that doesn't make me feel my soul is turning to ashes every morning...:)
In summary: if they won't buy your sensible, well-reasoned arguments once you've put them, start looking for another gig.
> The only widely used encryption algo that the NSA can crack is 56bit DES
Apart from their obvious technological advantage over the mostly amateur or academic (==low funding) cracking projects, there's no guarantee they haven't made some astonishing mathematical breakthrough. Did you know public key crypto was invented at GCHQ (aka MI7, mostly based in Cheltenham - I lived nearby for a while) in the early 70s; the work was never published, and in fact it's significance was only realised recently. (This being in the UK, naturally the idea was never productionised... *d'oh!*)
A spoiler would be something like, oh say, that Chewbacca is bald in this episode or that he's gay or something. That would be a spoiler...
/gay/ ?! Wow! I have a friend who'll be very interested to hear that - she's had this thing about a "Han/Chewie sandwich" for years - but then she went to a terribly posh English girl's boarding school which explains a lot...
Chewie's
Sure, why not? I don't like the thought of a superstitious fool taking a sharp knife to *my* innner workings, thank-you-very-much.
Tell you what - in the UK, the current craze is for metrics for everything. Let's see some hard statistics on recovery/survival rates for mumbo-jumbo adepts vs. those with a grounding in reality. Then let people make their own choices. If you choose to believe in a 2000 yearold fairy story, and are happy being chopped about by a fellow nutter, good luck to you. Remind me not to sell you life insurance.
To quote the late great Bill Hicks:
"Go back to bed, America, your government has figured out how it all transpired. Go back to bed, America, your government is in control again. Here, here's American Gladiators, watch this, shut up, go back to bed America, here is American Gladiators, here's 56 channels of it, watch these pituitary retards bang their fucking skulls together and congratulate you on the living in the land of freedom. Here you go America - you are free - to do as well tell you! You are free - to do as we tell you!"
(in *1992/3*...)
But the important question... IS IT ANY GOOD? I thought''Black Market Music' a bit of a let-down after the excellent 'Without You I'm Nothing'.
>It all depends on how much fight the iraqis put up. If we kill them >easy and install our companies in there to divvy up the war spoils then >we can move rapidly on iran.
It's rapidly becoming apparent that this just ain't gonna happen. Alas it seems that the way the Tao is moving is that lots and lots of people are going to die, it's going to be a slow & painful process 'liberating' Iraq. It's going to take many months, if not years. Strangely enough although the population DO largely hate & fear Saddam, they don't seem to like US Marines lobbing shells at them. Odd that...
> US is going to war to protect its own interests. There is nothing
> wrong with that.
Up to a point, Lord Copper. The US is being completely thrashed in the propaganda war, not just in the Arab and Muslim countries (not the same thing of course) where they obviously have an uphill battle from the get-go, but in the rest of the world as well. The Bush/Cheney/Ashcroft/Perle/Wolfowitz regieme are really playing into the hands of the extremists who have been trying to depict this as a neo-colonial war of aggression and conquest - a 'crusade' (and Bush actually USED that word! What a schmuck!) In the last couple of days in the UK media there have been hints that the US wants to *run the country* after the war (which will no doubt be over by Christmas...) I cannot imagine anything they could do, short of rounding up and executing Muslims, more calculated to inculcate suspicion and hatred of the USA and by extension the UK, Australia, and, as far as the Al Qaeda types are concerned, all infidels.
This is shaping up to be the worst foreign policy blunder by the USA since... well, I can't remember a bigger screw-up. It's a disaster. And there's nothing to do but press on with the war.
But to answer your specific point: do you think that, say, writing guided missile code makes one an expert in international relations, or aerodynamics, or miltary strategy? I don't think so...
Wow, I had no idea so many computer geeks were such experts at climate modelling and prediction.
This is what Roger Waters called "the bravery of being out of range" in the really good album "Amused to Death", written after the first Gulf War.
> He's a know leader of a network of individuals who are dedicated to
> causing harm to untold millions of people whose biggest crime is
> living in a country whose ideals he disagrees with.
So's your president. What's your point?
> For a Christian, the Mark of the Beast IS intelligent discourse
> because it is a very real concern.
For a Christian, there is no such thing as intelligent discourse, merely debate about which form of mumbo-jumbo is the right one. Come back when you've left the Dark Ages.
According to the SANS alert I was just forwarded, ISS told not CERT or the vendors, but the USGovt in the form of the Dept. of Homeland Defence . As a direct result, .mil sites had the patch LAST WEEK almost 7 days early. What is the explanation for this shameful state of affairs?