Outside the US this is hardly a big deal: it's illegal to own, or make, weapons.
Now a machine shop could do it, and someone talented with home tools could do it, but what's the point? At the end of the day you have exactly 1 gun, which is going to look pretty obviously home-made, which when recovered by law enforcement will lead to either the guy they got it from rolling over on you, or the police will simply take a look at the map, do a bit of neighborhood scouting and door knocking, and then keep an eye on the shifty guy with a surprisingly large garage full of machine tools.
This would be a big deal if laser sintering printers were common, but they're not and won't be for a long time.
The other issue with "small number of users" bugs is that it's hard to determine how small they are. The bugs you see are just the ones someone could be bothered to report (or in the kernel's case, were eventually percolated up from users through distros as kernel issues).
Also good luck burning noxious chemical byproducts without having your entire neighborhood call the cops. You can't even burn leaves in your backyard without that happening.
Oh look, a noninvasive and effective approach to preventing bombings; It's almost as someone competent got hired.
If the objective is to catch idiots who do not do their research, it is a great approach. A shade better than catching them after they blow themselves up. Is not going to catch anybody serious who collects his waste and disposes it elsewhere, like down the drain of a rival.
Except that nobody's getting arrested on the basis of their drains. They're getting arrested on the basis of the all the drugs and the bags full of unexplained non-sequential bills. And frankly, who cares if we end up arresting their rivals. Because they're rivals in the drug/bomb trade are still drugmaker/bombmakers.
There's a whole field of chemometrics dedicated to the problem of how to deconvolute mixed chemical signatures from background noise. It's been used to identify heroin being warehoused offshore, since they were able to pick out the chemical signatures of several different types being mixed together against the background.
I would be very surprised if you couldn't apply a similar approach to explosives detection in sewerage - at the very least, a raised background would tell you to deploy some more upstream sensors to see if it's benign or localized to 1 property. Then you take a drive around and see if there's anywhere suspicious, then simply wander up to the door and see who answers.
The home bombmaker's going to have problems answering, and if you know it's them all you have to do is wait for them to try and move it.
I don't see this as invasive, if it is used to monitor the quality of the sewage (yeah, that sounds funny) where pipes join together. If there was an indication of bomb or drug making activity, then more pooper snoopers could be temporarily installed upstream. At some point there would be a need for search warrants or something like that, but on the whole, the natural blending of waste products is going to be an adequate protection against invasion of privacy.
Nobody is really going to know that you pigged out on burritos.
I would think this would be an excellent way to identify meth houses, etc. While I would rather see all drugs made legal so they could be taxed and the profits would go out of the illicit drug trade, until that happens I would kind of like to see every damn meth factory on the left coast raided.
Exactly. This isn't a targeted system, but its a good sieve for "something weird might be going on in this neighborhood".
As the article notes, the London bombers killed all the plants in their garden from from the fumes of the manufacturing process. The problem is, no one had any additional evidence to think "hmm that's weird" and take a closer look.
That's interesting since I remember the statement but couldn't remember the attribution (Aristotle didn't sound right in my head) so a quick Google later and here it is.
Sad that it doesn't have a more precise history, since it's harder to cram thousands of breathless opinion pieces over a few hundred years onto someone's wall.
Because it's a test for 5 year olds who have pretty much just started school. They are just learning English. They will struggle with the idea of metaphor for a long time.
Are we teaching them mathematics, i.e. basic theories about how numbers behave? Or are we teaching some other thing?
Did the curriculum include "how to determine if the question is unclear?" Because you know, later life people would see an unclear question and ask someone to clarify it. 5 year olds are yet to even have the concept that adults can ever be wrong.
It's intellectual laziness at it's finest: actually determining the results of tests, figuring out where students are weak or even changing your teaching approach is hard. It does not produce clear results. Modern capitalism shows quite apparently there's no real apparent 1:1 academic to fiscal success qualification, and you definitely can't pick one out during high school (beyond graduating > not graduating).
But if your kid can tell you really fast? Wow! He must be doing well! Because smart people use maths a lot and he maths fast!
Then just ask "what is 6 minus 5". Why make the question ridiculous?
Because that does not test if the student understands the concept. True story: I looked at a list of shipping containers, and the volumes listed were wildly inaccurate. So I talked to the responsible guy in the warehouse. It turns out that he had measured the width, length, and height, and then ADDED them together. He was fully capable of performing multiplication, but he obviously didn't grasp the concept.
What concept is being grasped by trying to decode someone's idiot iconography? There are wholly about 5 valid interpretations in the comments I've read so far. We're talking about 5 and 6 year olds here - they're still learning how to properly grasp the English language. We're teaching them mathematics separately - they sure as hell shouldn't be tested on whether they're smart enough yet to realize whichever adult wrote the question is an idiot.
It used to be that a lot of military spending included R&D that drove technology forward.
You cannot justify spending on weapons because some of the money trickles down to R&D. If you want R&D, then you should just spend the money directly on R&D. DARPA seems to put our tax dollars to good use. Spending billions on SR-72s to spy on hermits in Afghanistan is probably not so wise.
Though conversely, more investment in hypersonic engine physics would be great for progress towards a workable SSTO launch vehicle. But I very much doubt secret military spy planes are the most efficient way to get it.
I did not claim that I'd be allowed to distribute the binary without source. Rather I claimed that if I distribute the binary, then I distribute code, and therefore I'm then bound to the GPL which then requires me to give also the source.
Please read more carefully.
You know we're actually in agreement, but you're using exceptionally obtuse language to make your point. Please communicate more clearly.
Reliable? If you're changing the system I would expect Upstart to do a lot better job with SysV init. Otherwise on a static system where you don't change the configuration, everything is reliable (except perhaps SystemD, which still seems to crash - never had it happen with Upstart).
The world we live is one where we have to change things usually frequently - a system which adds a sensible way to ignore the specifics of other scripts in the boot process is a good one because at the end of the day the worst case scenario is no more difficult to comprehend then SysV-init to start with - Upstart's verbose output is quite comprehendable.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
- Socrates
Seriously this needs in 100pt or larger font in front of every editor.
Sure, everything is possible with BSD, but it requires a lot more good will to keep it going - the default when private companies get involved is not that they have to contribute back and you leave open this massive opportunity for the managers and executives of the programmers involved to say "no we don't want you sending out those modifications" (itself, a problem for those programmers since they can't build up that public credit).
With GPL, since there's no choice, the problem is closed - no one has to be convinced.
No you'd be violating the GPL because the gcc source code is not machine-code only. You would be obliged to prove you only ever hex edited the binaries.
The underlying complexity of upstart has no bearing on whether or not it's "easier".
I love Upstart - SysVinit might "work" but that's for some definition of "work". Its very difficult to tune it, it's difficult to figure out how it's meant to function, and it is utterly obtuse at managing dependencies.
Upstart solves that in an excellent way: I write upstart conf file, and set it's start conditions. Upstart does the rest automatically. It's not completely perfect yet (for example, I'd really like to see some system to add machine-specific modifiers to upstart "start on" stanzas to ease when you have a non-standard filesystem layout or the like) but it's a heck of an improvement that's very easy to comprehend. The "cruft" is the left over need to support SysV init.
GPL does one very important thing well: it keeps the community alive. As long as people are modifying GPL code, they're obliged to contribute those modifications back.
The problem with the BSD license is, as soon as Apple feels they have the market sewn up, those patches are going to stop flowing very quickly and probably not for the most rational reasons - remember, it's managers and executives who make these decisions, not coders.
Actually it is considered unacceptable for allies to spy on each other's heads of state. Countries are not supposed to treat their friends this way.
On the subject of the French government's surprise, it isn't because French citizens are being spied on like the summary says. It is that there is mass surveillance of millions of French citizens by another friendly member of NATO.
Of course it's considered "unacceptable". Because the sheep (in this case, tech nerds) just love to lap up the righteous indignation of having their privacy violated, while simultaneously thinking wikileaks is the greatest thing ever (you know, the organization headed by the guy which decided there wasn't too much danger disclosing the names of allied informants in warzones in Afgahnistan and Iraq).
Meanwhile, anyone who can do it is doing it and those who can't are trying to.
That is one thing that really gets under my skin -- when I am visiting with someone (i.e., I took the effort to go over to their space, whether it is a co-worker's office, or visiting with family), and their phone rings. No matter what we're in the middle of talking about, that phone call always gets priority.
I had this sort of issue with one particular boss. He would constantly place our conversations "on hold" so that he could take a phone call. He got the point though when I left his office during one such interruption and called him on the phone so that we could continue the conversation.
You realize of course that just because you go into someone's space, you don't automatically get priority? It's equally as invasive as a phonecall, arguably more so.
Because it's a town full of people with specializations in a growth field (so they think its as easy for anyone else as they perceived it to be), and then they became rich so now there worldviews will never be challenged, nor will they ever experience any of the issues anyone else ever does.
As was noted in an article on the Great Depression, perspective colors everything: if you were rich and didn't lose everything, and lived in the right neighbourhood then "there were no bread lines".
Slashdot Mirror
Outside the US this is hardly a big deal: it's illegal to own, or make, weapons.
Now a machine shop could do it, and someone talented with home tools could do it, but what's the point? At the end of the day you have exactly 1 gun, which is going to look pretty obviously home-made, which when recovered by law enforcement will lead to either the guy they got it from rolling over on you, or the police will simply take a look at the map, do a bit of neighborhood scouting and door knocking, and then keep an eye on the shifty guy with a surprisingly large garage full of machine tools.
This would be a big deal if laser sintering printers were common, but they're not and won't be for a long time.
The other issue with "small number of users" bugs is that it's hard to determine how small they are. The bugs you see are just the ones someone could be bothered to report (or in the kernel's case, were eventually percolated up from users through distros as kernel issues).
So they're certainly important.
Also good luck burning noxious chemical byproducts without having your entire neighborhood call the cops. You can't even burn leaves in your backyard without that happening.
Oh look, a noninvasive and effective approach to preventing bombings; It's almost as someone competent got hired.
If the objective is to catch idiots who do not do their research, it is a great approach. A shade better than catching them after they blow themselves up. Is not going to catch anybody serious who collects his waste and disposes it elsewhere, like down the drain of a rival.
Except that nobody's getting arrested on the basis of their drains. They're getting arrested on the basis of the all the drugs and the bags full of unexplained non-sequential bills. And frankly, who cares if we end up arresting their rivals. Because they're rivals in the drug/bomb trade are still drugmaker/bombmakers.
There's a whole field of chemometrics dedicated to the problem of how to deconvolute mixed chemical signatures from background noise. It's been used to identify heroin being warehoused offshore, since they were able to pick out the chemical signatures of several different types being mixed together against the background.
I would be very surprised if you couldn't apply a similar approach to explosives detection in sewerage - at the very least, a raised background would tell you to deploy some more upstream sensors to see if it's benign or localized to 1 property. Then you take a drive around and see if there's anywhere suspicious, then simply wander up to the door and see who answers.
The home bombmaker's going to have problems answering, and if you know it's them all you have to do is wait for them to try and move it.
I don't see this as invasive, if it is used to monitor the quality of the sewage (yeah, that sounds funny) where pipes join together. If there was an indication of bomb or drug making activity, then more pooper snoopers could be temporarily installed upstream. At some point there would be a need for search warrants or something like that, but on the whole, the natural blending of waste products is going to be an adequate protection against invasion of privacy.
Nobody is really going to know that you pigged out on burritos.
I would think this would be an excellent way to identify meth houses, etc. While I would rather see all drugs made legal so they could be taxed and the profits would go out of the illicit drug trade, until that happens I would kind of like to see every damn meth factory on the left coast raided.
Exactly. This isn't a targeted system, but its a good sieve for "something weird might be going on in this neighborhood".
As the article notes, the London bombers killed all the plants in their garden from from the fumes of the manufacturing process. The problem is, no one had any additional evidence to think "hmm that's weird" and take a closer look.
That's interesting since I remember the statement but couldn't remember the attribution (Aristotle didn't sound right in my head) so a quick Google later and here it is.
Sad that it doesn't have a more precise history, since it's harder to cram thousands of breathless opinion pieces over a few hundred years onto someone's wall.
Because it's a test for 5 year olds who have pretty much just started school. They are just learning English. They will struggle with the idea of metaphor for a long time.
Are we teaching them mathematics, i.e. basic theories about how numbers behave? Or are we teaching some other thing?
Did the curriculum include "how to determine if the question is unclear?" Because you know, later life people would see an unclear question and ask someone to clarify it. 5 year olds are yet to even have the concept that adults can ever be wrong.
It's intellectual laziness at it's finest: actually determining the results of tests, figuring out where students are weak or even changing your teaching approach is hard. It does not produce clear results. Modern capitalism shows quite apparently there's no real apparent 1:1 academic to fiscal success qualification, and you definitely can't pick one out during high school (beyond graduating > not graduating).
But if your kid can tell you really fast? Wow! He must be doing well! Because smart people use maths a lot and he maths fast!
Putting ANY sort of "requirement" on a 15 year old is outrageous. Children develop at a different pace.
You think you're being clever, but what do you plan to do with the ones who fail your requirements?
Think carefully now, since inner-city crime and how dead you get from being mugged hinge on your answer.
Then just ask "what is 6 minus 5". Why make the question ridiculous?
Because that does not test if the student understands the concept. True story: I looked at a list of shipping containers, and the volumes listed were wildly inaccurate. So I talked to the responsible guy in the warehouse. It turns out that he had measured the width, length, and height, and then ADDED them together. He was fully capable of performing multiplication, but he obviously didn't grasp the concept.
What concept is being grasped by trying to decode someone's idiot iconography? There are wholly about 5 valid interpretations in the comments I've read so far. We're talking about 5 and 6 year olds here - they're still learning how to properly grasp the English language. We're teaching them mathematics separately - they sure as hell shouldn't be tested on whether they're smart enough yet to realize whichever adult wrote the question is an idiot.
It used to be that a lot of military spending included R&D that drove technology forward.
You cannot justify spending on weapons because some of the money trickles down to R&D. If you want R&D, then you should just spend the money directly on R&D. DARPA seems to put our tax dollars to good use. Spending billions on SR-72s to spy on hermits in Afghanistan is probably not so wise.
Though conversely, more investment in hypersonic engine physics would be great for progress towards a workable SSTO launch vehicle. But I very much doubt secret military spy planes are the most efficient way to get it.
I did not claim that I'd be allowed to distribute the binary without source. Rather I claimed that if I distribute the binary, then I distribute code, and therefore I'm then bound to the GPL which then requires me to give also the source.
Please read more carefully.
You know we're actually in agreement, but you're using exceptionally obtuse language to make your point. Please communicate more clearly.
Reliable? If you're changing the system I would expect Upstart to do a lot better job with SysV init. Otherwise on a static system where you don't change the configuration, everything is reliable (except perhaps SystemD, which still seems to crash - never had it happen with Upstart).
The world we live is one where we have to change things usually frequently - a system which adds a sensible way to ignore the specifics of other scripts in the boot process is a good one because at the end of the day the worst case scenario is no more difficult to comprehend then SysV-init to start with - Upstart's verbose output is quite comprehendable.
The children now love luxury; they have bad manners, contempt for authority; they show disrespect for elders and love chatter in place of exercise. Children are now tyrants, not the servants of their households. They no longer rise when elders enter the room. They contradict their parents, chatter before company, gobble up dainties at the table, cross their legs, and tyrannize their teachers.
- Socrates
Seriously this needs in 100pt or larger font in front of every editor.
Sure, everything is possible with BSD, but it requires a lot more good will to keep it going - the default when private companies get involved is not that they have to contribute back and you leave open this massive opportunity for the managers and executives of the programmers involved to say "no we don't want you sending out those modifications" (itself, a problem for those programmers since they can't build up that public credit).
With GPL, since there's no choice, the problem is closed - no one has to be convinced.
No you'd be violating the GPL because the gcc source code is not machine-code only. You would be obliged to prove you only ever hex edited the binaries.
Upstart has had support for user upstart conf files for a long time now - Ubuntu keeps it disabled by default at the moment.
The underlying complexity of upstart has no bearing on whether or not it's "easier".
I love Upstart - SysVinit might "work" but that's for some definition of "work". Its very difficult to tune it, it's difficult to figure out how it's meant to function, and it is utterly obtuse at managing dependencies.
Upstart solves that in an excellent way: I write upstart conf file, and set it's start conditions. Upstart does the rest automatically. It's not completely perfect yet (for example, I'd really like to see some system to add machine-specific modifiers to upstart "start on" stanzas to ease when you have a non-standard filesystem layout or the like) but it's a heck of an improvement that's very easy to comprehend. The "cruft" is the left over need to support SysV init.
GPL does one very important thing well: it keeps the community alive. As long as people are modifying GPL code, they're obliged to contribute those modifications back.
The problem with the BSD license is, as soon as Apple feels they have the market sewn up, those patches are going to stop flowing very quickly and probably not for the most rational reasons - remember, it's managers and executives who make these decisions, not coders.
Actually it is considered unacceptable for allies to spy on each other's heads of state. Countries are not supposed to treat their friends this way.
On the subject of the French government's surprise, it isn't because French citizens are being spied on like the summary says. It is that there is mass surveillance of millions of French citizens by another friendly member of NATO.
Of course it's considered "unacceptable". Because the sheep (in this case, tech nerds) just love to lap up the righteous indignation of having their privacy violated, while simultaneously thinking wikileaks is the greatest thing ever (you know, the organization headed by the guy which decided there wasn't too much danger disclosing the names of allied informants in warzones in Afgahnistan and Iraq).
Meanwhile, anyone who can do it is doing it and those who can't are trying to.
The smart watch is never ever taking off.
It requires two hands to use (one supports the watch, the other hand to operate it's buttons).
A smartphone requires one hand - that can both support the device and operate it.
I really don't understand what is so hard about this limitation for people to understand.
What is it with Slashdot, new technology and psychotic violent outbursts?
That is one thing that really gets under my skin -- when I am visiting with someone (i.e., I took the effort to go over to their space, whether it is a co-worker's office, or visiting with family), and their phone rings. No matter what we're in the middle of talking about, that phone call always gets priority.
I had this sort of issue with one particular boss. He would constantly place our conversations "on hold" so that he could take a phone call. He got the point though when I left his office during one such interruption and called him on the phone so that we could continue the conversation.
You realize of course that just because you go into someone's space, you don't automatically get priority? It's equally as invasive as a phonecall, arguably more so.
Because it's a town full of people with specializations in a growth field (so they think its as easy for anyone else as they perceived it to be), and then they became rich so now there worldviews will never be challenged, nor will they ever experience any of the issues anyone else ever does.
As was noted in an article on the Great Depression, perspective colors everything: if you were rich and didn't lose everything, and lived in the right neighbourhood then "there were no bread lines".