As an aside, if you allow the user to run a shell as the admin user with sudo, the user can purge the logs without logging a new security incident. For proper security, logs should be on a separate machine, and a separate person (ideally outside the IT department) should be the only one with root access. Separation of powers and all.
Depends on the courtroom. In most states, it is at the judge's discretion whether to allow the juror to be an active participant in the process or merely a passive observer. There are many judges that welcome juror questioning, but others do not. It's usually in the form of a written question passed to the bailiff, who them passes it to the judge, who then determines whether or not to allow the juror to ask the question, though as I understand it, in some (rare) courtrooms, the judges do allow spontaneous questions from the jurors.
Are the costs of renting office space, electrical power consumption, hiring managers to watch over those employees, etc. taken out of that four hundred bucks? If so, that's probably not as inflated as you think, particularly if folks frequently have downtime between projects where they're drawing salaries but not bringing in money.
This isn't surprising for a state with such asinine liquor laws such that regulate where you can purchase (previously mentioned), until recently had no sales on Sunday or on election days.
Wow. That must be hard on the loser. They lose the election and they're forced to leave the state!
I tend to agree, to a large extent. A government by the people cannot function unless the people have at least some reasonable idea of what the government is doing. I would caution, though, that the logical extension of that is the famous line, "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide," which is patently false when applied to an individual except in very narrow circumstances where it intersects with the rights of other people.
One would have thought detecting unusual access patterns to classified information would be the first thing you implement.
That would be the case if the information were actually classified by any real definition of the word. Typing the word "CLASSIFIED" on a message sent simultaneously to several million people does not make it so.
No, just as the government is erring too much on the side of paranoia, you're erring too much on the side of transparency. Governments do need some secrets. The names and identities of covert operatives in the field, for example, fall into that category (unless you believe that those folks should not exist, which is a different issue entirely). The names and identities of undercover police officers similarly qualify. These are long term secrets, and to the extent that information is released that potentially identifies those people, such a leak represents real harm to national security.
This is not, however, the norm. The vast majority of information is classified not because it puts anyone at risk, but because the government is unwilling to commit the time, effort, and expense necessary to go through the material and determine what is what, and is unwilling to accept the liability if it releases something that it shouldn't have released.
This is truly a baffling story from a media law perspective. Normally, the free press is fighting to prevent prior restraint over publication by the government. WikiLeaks actually invited prior restraint and the government refused. They were given the opportunity to comment, correct, or redact any information they deemed necessary, and they explicitly rejected that opportunity. That's definitely not typical. When this reaches the Supreme Court (and it probably will before it's over), this will make for a very fascinating case that has tremendous potential for setting interesting precedent.
In my personal view, by refusing to help redact the information, the government tacitly disclaimed any interest in the determination of national security risk, and tacitly agreed to accept the judgement of WikiLeaks. They, in turn, left it to the judgement of the mainstream press, who determined that the information wasn't secret and didn't need to be held back. Now the government is crying because they didn't have the foresight to get off their lazy butts and review the information prior to publication, and it contains information that casts them in a bad light. I would say that's too freaking bad. They should have taken the opportunity to redact the content when it was handed to them on a silver platter. At this point, they should no longer have the right to charge him with anything related to the leak.
And even if they were actual secrets, the government was given the opportunity to defend the secrecy of that information by participating in the redaction process. They chose not to do so.
If you don't appear in court, the court typically grants summary judgment for the other party. I see no reason our government should not be held to the same standards.
Where have I heard that logic before? Oh, yeah. Those ridiculous MPAA commercials that say "You wouldn't steal a DVD. You wouldn't steal a car." Repeat after me: stealing a copy of information is not the same thing as stealing property.
No, a better analogy is that they saw your car parked, broke into the trunk, and discovered the three bodies you had hidden there. They contact you and ask which of those murders you don't want them to report to the police. Sure, you might tell them where to go, but you are hardly on the moral high ground. And that's the point.
No, it's not silly at all. The natural endgame of any system of government is absolute tyranny. The only things standing between this country and tyranny are the constitution and the citizens' willingness to rebel. If the government had its way, it would keep everything it does secret. That's why freedom-loving members of government had to force through sunshine laws, FOIA, E-FOIA, and so on. Without such laws, the public would be kept in the dark on nearly everything. That's just the way government works. In particular, the military, were it possible to do so, would allow no information disclosure whatsoever. The same goes for law enforcement, which is why we have public records laws that mandate journalist access to police blotters. Indeed, it is the very nature of any group in a position of power to conceal information to the maximum degree possible. Some might even call it basic human nature.
Such total secrecy, however, is contrary to the proper functioning of a free society, and as such, a government mandate to keep everything secret must be looked upon with suspicion and disdain. Anything less is a complete abrogation of the public's right to know what the government is doing, a complete abrogation of the right to a free press, and thus a complete abrogation of basic democratic principles. Such obscenity has no place in a free society.
The problem is, at what point do you draw the line between completely free journalism, and responsible journalism?
Easy. You don't. What part of "Congress shall pass no law... abridging... freedom of the press" is unclear? Besides, professional, responsible journalists went through this material and redacted anything they thought would put people at risk. This isn't about putting people at risk. It's about politicians and corporations getting embarrassed by having their dirty laundry aired for all to see. It falls very squarely on the legally acceptable side of the line. If you think you can show some piece of information that puts people at risk after dozens of journalists said that it doesn't, go for it. Otherwise, please stop believing everything that government mouthpieces tell you. They were lying before when they covered this stuff up. Why should we expect anything different from them now?
Hogwash. It MUST be true because they have successfully solved the time-travel paradox and are successfully not interfering with our timeline.
Nah. It is unprovable because any paradoxes they create caused by people discovering the machine could be solved by killing the people who discovered it before they could report it, thus creating a new paradox, but one that is undetectable by anyone who exists within the current timeline.
This is why you build each group of cores and the corresponding cache on a separate die, test and bin each die independently, then wire them together inside the package. Sure, there's the added potential for interconnect failure, but so long as you test the integrated module before you epoxy the lid on, you should be able to salvage those parts.
Well, at least they get them back. Without trackers, that's not nearly as likely when they're hidden in some kid's dorm room or some frat house basement.
Although you can do it that way, you have to be really careful that the interfaces between modules are maintainable and scalable. It's not at all uncommon for such things to cause real problems down the line as you suddenly realize that you need tighter integration between those modules. Even in cases where the functionality is completely distinct right now, you should at least have a contingency plan for when you find yourself needing to rewrite a critical chunk of code in another language to integrate it with another critical chunk of code. And my rule is: if in doubt, choose C. It's still in heavy use after almost forty years for a reason.
My attitude towards Python is that any language in which whitespace is significant is a bad programming language. It was a bad idea when Fortran did it, and it's a bad idea now. You can justify it all you want from a code readability perspective, but the fact remains that it leads to really awkward coding practices, like indenting function bodies sixteen spaces just in case you need to add another nesting level. It brings back memories of BASIC and line numbering every ten lines. Same basic principle. It's also inherently harder to actually follow what's happening once a function gets more than a few lines long because there is no way to quickly jump back and forth between both ends of an indentation block because there are no braces to match, and after a few lines, it gets really hard to uniquely identify indentation levels. (BTW, saying "don't write functions that long" is a copout. A function should be a reasonable functional unit that makes it easy to understand what function does what, not arbitrarily broken up to work around the syntactic limitations of a programming language; if function is never useful outside the context of a single line in a single caller, it generally shouldn't be a function in the first place.)
The absolute last thing I want in a programming language is one that decides how I should format my code. If someone cares about how the code is indented, they should run indent(1) on it. It should not be necessary for me as a programmer to reindent code for correct operation. As such, I view Python as a solution in search of a problem. Don't get me wrong, Perl's syntax is awful, but PHP does a much better job of providing Perl-compatible regular expressions and proper classes in a language that's easily readable and maintainable. In turn, PHP's biggest flaw, IMHO, is that people think of it as a web template language and ignore its ability to be used for real code (and the interpreters aren't all that optimized, last I checked), which brings us to Ruby.
Ruby is at least interesting intellectually in that it seems to be trying to be a pure OO language. It seems likely that Rails will be both its biggest win and its biggest downfall in that we run the risk of it being seen as PHP is---a language for web pages and nothing more. It also has the very awkward concept of having no real multiline comment markers, and the near-constant abuse of multiline strings by developers to emulate them. There are probably some other bizarre things about it, but I haven't done enough work with it to complain about them yet. I usually wouldn't choose it, simply because I find pure OO to be more of a burden than a blessing for about 80% of the stuff I do, but it is at least interesting.
As I understand it, smaller CMEs happen periodically. They can cause blackouts, satellite problems, and increased radiation risk to astronauts and air fliers, but otherwise they're a nonevent. Mostly just brighter aurorae. A big one could really wreck the power grid, but that's probably the extent of the impact as far as most people are concerned. At least that's the current thinking.
Watch your language! Code in a language you're familiar with (or at least one you've read about on the internet). Remember that some of them even have words that you can't use - I guess the First Amendment doesn't apply to programming!
In spite of your attempt to mock the original tips as overly simplistic and obvious, you're actually touching on the most important rule of all with that comment:
Choose the right language for the job.
It amazes me how often people say, "I'm going to write this whole thing in Python or Ruby" simply because it's the latest "cool" language. These are the same people who built monstrosities in Perl just a few years back. These are the same people who in a few years will be lamenting that their giant blob of.NET C# code that ties together code in eight other programming languages is hard to maintain. And so on. You should choose the language based on what will best do the job, not based on what's popular today, and you should choose one language for the entire project before you start writing the first line of code.
No matter how esoteric the programming language, a programmer can learn enough of the the basics to start coding in a few days. You don't really need to worry about not being able to find programmers because not enough people know what you think is the ideal programming language for the project. Future hiring really shouldn't even be in the list of considerations. They're going to be learning a truckload of information on the job in their first few weeks anyway. In that context, learning a new programming language is just not a big enough hurdle to worry about.
Pick the language that best suits the size of your data sets, the structure of your data, and the tasks you need to perform on it. If you need to do regular expression processing, pick a language that supports them well. If you need to do XML parsing and walking through nodes of an XML tree, pick a language with true objects and a good garbage collector (read "not Perl"). And so on. Pick a language based on having features and functionality that will improve your ability to write the project in question and expand it to meet future needs, period. To do anything else is madness.
I'm sure dissatisfaction has a lot to do with the iPhone antenna issue.
Doubtful. Customer satisfaction with AT&T was in bad shape long before iPhone 4 came out. It is, however, regional.
For a great way to check your coverage in many major cities, go to CNet's cell coverage map. As soon as you look at the San Francisco Bay area, you'll understand why the reviews are so negative. Verizon's data service map looks awful, but their voice service map looks good. AT&T is the reverse. Guess who is optimizing for what?
My room mate just had to drop AT&T as her carrier because conversations were garbled and she could not understand about one word in four. She tried three different phones while trying to resolve the problem, and borrowed my HTC from Sprint a couple of times. She just switched over to Sprint, problem solved.
I'd be curious if your roommate's cell tower is forcing all her calls into half rate encoding. Could be the case if the tower is highly congested or if the phone's battery is low. Moving to a different area would probably solve the problem, though it isn't a great solution. Calling the phone company and complaining about the sound quality might even help, particularly if you can tell the techs which tower is giving you trouble (by tower and cell ID). It might simply be that they haven't upgraded that specific tower to support newer codecs like AMR or EFR, and they might just need a swift kick in the pants to get them to upgrade the tower.
Slashdot Mirror
As an aside, if you allow the user to run a shell as the admin user with sudo, the user can purge the logs without logging a new security incident. For proper security, logs should be on a separate machine, and a separate person (ideally outside the IT department) should be the only one with root access. Separation of powers and all.
Don't forget the quadruple ROT-13 requirement.
You're right. Those extra 11 words were a dead giveaway. :-D
Depends on the courtroom. In most states, it is at the judge's discretion whether to allow the juror to be an active participant in the process or merely a passive observer. There are many judges that welcome juror questioning, but others do not. It's usually in the form of a written question passed to the bailiff, who them passes it to the judge, who then determines whether or not to allow the juror to ask the question, though as I understand it, in some (rare) courtrooms, the judges do allow spontaneous questions from the jurors.
more info
Are the costs of renting office space, electrical power consumption, hiring managers to watch over those employees, etc. taken out of that four hundred bucks? If so, that's probably not as inflated as you think, particularly if folks frequently have downtime between projects where they're drawing salaries but not bringing in money.
Wow. That must be hard on the loser. They lose the election and they're forced to leave the state!
I tend to agree, to a large extent. A government by the people cannot function unless the people have at least some reasonable idea of what the government is doing. I would caution, though, that the logical extension of that is the famous line, "If you've done nothing wrong, you have nothing to hide," which is patently false when applied to an individual except in very narrow circumstances where it intersects with the rights of other people.
Maybe this explains the Simpsons.
Ah. You see, I interpreted your question to mean that it was silly to assume that it was reasonable to post anyway.
That would be the case if the information were actually classified by any real definition of the word. Typing the word "CLASSIFIED" on a message sent simultaneously to several million people does not make it so.
No, just as the government is erring too much on the side of paranoia, you're erring too much on the side of transparency. Governments do need some secrets. The names and identities of covert operatives in the field, for example, fall into that category (unless you believe that those folks should not exist, which is a different issue entirely). The names and identities of undercover police officers similarly qualify. These are long term secrets, and to the extent that information is released that potentially identifies those people, such a leak represents real harm to national security.
This is not, however, the norm. The vast majority of information is classified not because it puts anyone at risk, but because the government is unwilling to commit the time, effort, and expense necessary to go through the material and determine what is what, and is unwilling to accept the liability if it releases something that it shouldn't have released.
This is truly a baffling story from a media law perspective. Normally, the free press is fighting to prevent prior restraint over publication by the government. WikiLeaks actually invited prior restraint and the government refused. They were given the opportunity to comment, correct, or redact any information they deemed necessary, and they explicitly rejected that opportunity. That's definitely not typical. When this reaches the Supreme Court (and it probably will before it's over), this will make for a very fascinating case that has tremendous potential for setting interesting precedent.
In my personal view, by refusing to help redact the information, the government tacitly disclaimed any interest in the determination of national security risk, and tacitly agreed to accept the judgement of WikiLeaks. They, in turn, left it to the judgement of the mainstream press, who determined that the information wasn't secret and didn't need to be held back. Now the government is crying because they didn't have the foresight to get off their lazy butts and review the information prior to publication, and it contains information that casts them in a bad light. I would say that's too freaking bad. They should have taken the opportunity to redact the content when it was handed to them on a silver platter. At this point, they should no longer have the right to charge him with anything related to the leak.
And even if they were actual secrets, the government was given the opportunity to defend the secrecy of that information by participating in the redaction process. They chose not to do so.
If you don't appear in court, the court typically grants summary judgment for the other party. I see no reason our government should not be held to the same standards.
Where have I heard that logic before? Oh, yeah. Those ridiculous MPAA commercials that say "You wouldn't steal a DVD. You wouldn't steal a car." Repeat after me: stealing a copy of information is not the same thing as stealing property.
No, a better analogy is that they saw your car parked, broke into the trunk, and discovered the three bodies you had hidden there. They contact you and ask which of those murders you don't want them to report to the police. Sure, you might tell them where to go, but you are hardly on the moral high ground. And that's the point.
No, it's not silly at all. The natural endgame of any system of government is absolute tyranny. The only things standing between this country and tyranny are the constitution and the citizens' willingness to rebel. If the government had its way, it would keep everything it does secret. That's why freedom-loving members of government had to force through sunshine laws, FOIA, E-FOIA, and so on. Without such laws, the public would be kept in the dark on nearly everything. That's just the way government works. In particular, the military, were it possible to do so, would allow no information disclosure whatsoever. The same goes for law enforcement, which is why we have public records laws that mandate journalist access to police blotters. Indeed, it is the very nature of any group in a position of power to conceal information to the maximum degree possible. Some might even call it basic human nature.
Such total secrecy, however, is contrary to the proper functioning of a free society, and as such, a government mandate to keep everything secret must be looked upon with suspicion and disdain. Anything less is a complete abrogation of the public's right to know what the government is doing, a complete abrogation of the right to a free press, and thus a complete abrogation of basic democratic principles. Such obscenity has no place in a free society.
Easy. You don't. What part of "Congress shall pass no law... abridging... freedom of the press" is unclear? Besides, professional, responsible journalists went through this material and redacted anything they thought would put people at risk. This isn't about putting people at risk. It's about politicians and corporations getting embarrassed by having their dirty laundry aired for all to see. It falls very squarely on the legally acceptable side of the line. If you think you can show some piece of information that puts people at risk after dozens of journalists said that it doesn't, go for it. Otherwise, please stop believing everything that government mouthpieces tell you. They were lying before when they covered this stuff up. Why should we expect anything different from them now?
Nah. It is unprovable because any paradoxes they create caused by people discovering the machine could be solved by killing the people who discovered it before they could report it, thus creating a new paradox, but one that is undetectable by anyone who exists within the current timeline.
This is why you build each group of cores and the corresponding cache on a separate die, test and bin each die independently, then wire them together inside the package. Sure, there's the added potential for interconnect failure, but so long as you test the integrated module before you epoxy the lid on, you should be able to salvage those parts.
Well, at least they get them back. Without trackers, that's not nearly as likely when they're hidden in some kid's dorm room or some frat house basement.
Although you can do it that way, you have to be really careful that the interfaces between modules are maintainable and scalable. It's not at all uncommon for such things to cause real problems down the line as you suddenly realize that you need tighter integration between those modules. Even in cases where the functionality is completely distinct right now, you should at least have a contingency plan for when you find yourself needing to rewrite a critical chunk of code in another language to integrate it with another critical chunk of code. And my rule is: if in doubt, choose C. It's still in heavy use after almost forty years for a reason.
My attitude towards Python is that any language in which whitespace is significant is a bad programming language. It was a bad idea when Fortran did it, and it's a bad idea now. You can justify it all you want from a code readability perspective, but the fact remains that it leads to really awkward coding practices, like indenting function bodies sixteen spaces just in case you need to add another nesting level. It brings back memories of BASIC and line numbering every ten lines. Same basic principle. It's also inherently harder to actually follow what's happening once a function gets more than a few lines long because there is no way to quickly jump back and forth between both ends of an indentation block because there are no braces to match, and after a few lines, it gets really hard to uniquely identify indentation levels. (BTW, saying "don't write functions that long" is a copout. A function should be a reasonable functional unit that makes it easy to understand what function does what, not arbitrarily broken up to work around the syntactic limitations of a programming language; if function is never useful outside the context of a single line in a single caller, it generally shouldn't be a function in the first place.)
The absolute last thing I want in a programming language is one that decides how I should format my code. If someone cares about how the code is indented, they should run indent(1) on it. It should not be necessary for me as a programmer to reindent code for correct operation. As such, I view Python as a solution in search of a problem. Don't get me wrong, Perl's syntax is awful, but PHP does a much better job of providing Perl-compatible regular expressions and proper classes in a language that's easily readable and maintainable. In turn, PHP's biggest flaw, IMHO, is that people think of it as a web template language and ignore its ability to be used for real code (and the interpreters aren't all that optimized, last I checked), which brings us to Ruby.
Ruby is at least interesting intellectually in that it seems to be trying to be a pure OO language. It seems likely that Rails will be both its biggest win and its biggest downfall in that we run the risk of it being seen as PHP is---a language for web pages and nothing more. It also has the very awkward concept of having no real multiline comment markers, and the near-constant abuse of multiline strings by developers to emulate them. There are probably some other bizarre things about it, but I haven't done enough work with it to complain about them yet. I usually wouldn't choose it, simply because I find pure OO to be more of a burden than a blessing for about 80% of the stuff I do, but it is at least interesting.
As I understand it, smaller CMEs happen periodically. They can cause blackouts, satellite problems, and increased radiation risk to astronauts and air fliers, but otherwise they're a nonevent. Mostly just brighter aurorae. A big one could really wreck the power grid, but that's probably the extent of the impact as far as most people are concerned. At least that's the current thinking.
In spite of your attempt to mock the original tips as overly simplistic and obvious, you're actually touching on the most important rule of all with that comment:
Choose the right language for the job.
It amazes me how often people say, "I'm going to write this whole thing in Python or Ruby" simply because it's the latest "cool" language. These are the same people who built monstrosities in Perl just a few years back. These are the same people who in a few years will be lamenting that their giant blob of .NET C# code that ties together code in eight other programming languages is hard to maintain. And so on. You should choose the language based on what will best do the job, not based on what's popular today, and you should choose one language for the entire project before you start writing the first line of code.
No matter how esoteric the programming language, a programmer can learn enough of the the basics to start coding in a few days. You don't really need to worry about not being able to find programmers because not enough people know what you think is the ideal programming language for the project. Future hiring really shouldn't even be in the list of considerations. They're going to be learning a truckload of information on the job in their first few weeks anyway. In that context, learning a new programming language is just not a big enough hurdle to worry about.
Pick the language that best suits the size of your data sets, the structure of your data, and the tasks you need to perform on it. If you need to do regular expression processing, pick a language that supports them well. If you need to do XML parsing and walking through nodes of an XML tree, pick a language with true objects and a good garbage collector (read "not Perl"). And so on. Pick a language based on having features and functionality that will improve your ability to write the project in question and expand it to meet future needs, period. To do anything else is madness.
True, but they should have given the owner the option anyway.
Ah. Actually, that .1% was a delta, not a total dropped call percent. Makes more sense that way.
Doubtful. Customer satisfaction with AT&T was in bad shape long before iPhone 4 came out. It is, however, regional.
For a great way to check your coverage in many major cities, go to CNet's cell coverage map. As soon as you look at the San Francisco Bay area, you'll understand why the reviews are so negative. Verizon's data service map looks awful, but their voice service map looks good. AT&T is the reverse. Guess who is optimizing for what?
I'd be curious if your roommate's cell tower is forcing all her calls into half rate encoding. Could be the case if the tower is highly congested or if the phone's battery is low. Moving to a different area would probably solve the problem, though it isn't a great solution. Calling the phone company and complaining about the sound quality might even help, particularly if you can tell the techs which tower is giving you trouble (by tower and cell ID). It might simply be that they haven't upgraded that specific tower to support newer codecs like AMR or EFR, and they might just need a swift kick in the pants to get them to upgrade the tower.