I managed to somehow create two Youtube accounts with no password (as in, it prompted me for the username, but never for the password). Kind-of obviously, I can't log into them. In the end, I had to try a different browser (I think Konqueror worked).
If they needed to break into a different market, one plausble method would be to buy a company already in that market. Imagine Google buying Amazon, or something like that...
As reported on Slashdot earlier, it was using a regex for date handling, that had the year 2010 hardcoded. (The irony here is that the SpamAssassin people had noticed in time and changed the date to a hardcoded 2020 instead, but forgotten to put the fix into the update channels, so nobody got it until after 2010 had already started. Of course, this is still the wrong way to do things...)
Re:idiocy? Incompetence?
on
Y2.01K
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· Score: 2, Insightful
Personally, I blame it on bad reverse-engineering. 9 looks the same in binary and binary-coded-decimal (the bit pattern for each is 00001001), but the bit pattern for 10 in binary-coded-decimal (00010000) is the same as the bit pattern for 16 in binary. I imagine what's going on here is people guessing at a protocol and not having enough information to distinguish binary from BCD. (If they do that because the protocol isn't available, it's forgivable; if they do it because they're too lazy to look it up, it's incompetence.)
No, if someone writes something that's plain wrong, the correct answer is to reply to it, rather than to try to censor it and leave people wondering why.
There's only a requirement to put a draft to the vote; I'm not entirely convinced it wouldn't be possible to slip in changes between an approved draft and the actual change. Also, even if the criminal offence requirement turns out to be unavoidable, (5) is dynamite:
(5) The power may be exercised so as to—
(a) confer a power or right or impose a duty on any person;
(b) modify or remove a power, right or duty of any person;
(c) require a person to pay fees.
See http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200910/ldbills/001/10001.13-19.html#j164. The proposal also gives the Secretary of State the rights to a) decide the punishment for copyright infringement, and b) redefine what a copyright infringement is. Therefore, he can effectively jail, or worse, anyone he likes for no reason. Also, the law gives him the power to rewrite the law itself; there are some restrictions, but he can just rewrite it to remove them. In short, passing this proposal would give Lord Mandelson a complete dictatorship over the UK. (If you don't believe me, read it yourself; the only meaningful restriction is to have a draft of the changes approved by parliament, and it would be easy enough to slip in a removal of that restriction at the same time as another change.)
It's because they had a huge high-profile launch, effectively Slashdotting themselves. It turns out that when Cuil is slashdotted, instead of just breaking altogether its results go utterly haywire (making them accurate, wildly inaccurate, or giving no results more or less at random). The result is that the launch was a huge embarassing failure and the Internet (including Slashdot) didn't stop collectively laughing at them for weeks; some forums were using cuil as a measure of hype failure at the time. Nowadays, though, people mostly forget about them rather than laughing at them, and it's no longer slashdotted. (But then I wrote this. Oops...)
Actually, it won't. Deleting / is such a ridiculous operation that most modern copies of rm need a special command-line option to let you do it. (I'm slightly worried that it might recurse and try to delete other files/directories, though.) (Incidentally, there was an interesting bit of POSIX rules-lawyering to show that that interpretation of rm was legal; the idea is that it necessarily deletes the current working directory, and rm is allowed to act differently when the user tries to delete the current directory.)
So, let me get this straight, those people can track down some college kid over the whole internet, what was probably using some dynamically assigned IP address, who may have moved a few times, etc.. and the CRIA can't find Bruce Springstein or even some lesser known artist because they haven't allocated enough resources?
Of course. It is in fact very easy to allocate resources insufficient to find Bruce Springstein. Cheaper than allocating resources that are sufficient, too.
If I say "jaywalkers should be put to death", and I jaywalk, would I be executed for it?
Only if your argument manages to convince the court into actually executing someone for it. Otherwise, you can claim that you've changed your mind due to the precedent set by the court when they rejected your argument. Also, that analogy doesn't really work, because I suspect (but don't know for certain) that the principle only applies to civil cases.
That would allow a publishing house to publish copies of everything it came across at cost; OK, so it wouldn't be making a profit and so wouldn't be publically owned, but it could very carefully break even, thus letting the people in charge of it do other things too and not have to fund it. That would pretty much have the same effect as removing copyright law altogether; I'll let the other Slashdotters argue about whether this would be a good thing or not.
Gotos aren't considered bad coding style in assembly language. (If they were, programs might be kind-of difficult to write...) The point is that using goto is a bad idea if there's another control structure that does the same thing more readably.
There was an interesting suggestion in New Scientist that carbon extraction should be taxed at a relatively high rate, but then the money from the taxes redistributed equally to everyone in the country (and/or world, I suppose, but that would be too hard to organise). That way, governments can't just increase the tax to grab money from people, helping to leave the tax set at an appropriate rate.
$ man -k burn cd
brasero (1) - Simple and easy to use CD/DVD burning application for...
k3b (1) - KDE CD burning program
There were more answers than those two, but either of the first two looks a sensible choice for burning CDs. (The results quickly drop off in quality, though; the fourth was the Perl module Language::INTERCAL::Charset::EBCDIC, which I strongly hope can't burn CDs...)
Yes, it's pretty common to run an antivirus program on a Linux-based mail server, specifically to catch Windows viruses in messages it relays. (The Linux version of ClamAV, for instance, seems to be pretty rudimentary in every area but catching email viruses, presumably because there's nothing else it could plausibly do.)
And if it's a.py, then being a script, even if it were executable, double-clicking on it would typically ask whether to open or run it.
Even if it were a compiled executable, there'd be no way to get the icon looking right. In Windows,.exe files can embed their own icons, and so can look like a JPEG or whatever. In either Gnome or KDE, they'll look like executables.
Either way, it would be moderately tricky (although probably not impossible; you could send the file inside a zip or tarball with the executable bit already set, for instance, relying on the fact that most users won't realise there's no purpose in re-compressing a JPEG image) to get the user to set the +x bit on the file before double-clicking on it to try to open it.
Look up concatenative languages, such as Joy (http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy.html); I wrote Underload (http://esolangs.org/wiki/Underload) as a sort of minimal expression of the same idea. Both of those languages effectively allow you to create arbitrary first-class functions despite having no form of function literal, and no concept of a closure, and work fine without garbage collection. However, doing things that way you have to do things differently from more standard functional programming languages.
That character's there so you can delete a character in punched tape by punching out all the holes. (Likewise, you can put blocks of NULs in so that you can add new characters in them by punching holes in them.) When you can't easily add or remove characters in your data format, nor unset bits, that sort of precaution makes quite a bit of sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I managed to somehow create two Youtube accounts with no password (as in, it prompted me for the username, but never for the password). Kind-of obviously, I can't log into them. In the end, I had to try a different browser (I think Konqueror worked).
If they needed to break into a different market, one plausble method would be to buy a company already in that market. Imagine Google buying Amazon, or something like that...
I can't figure out if you came up against Muphry's Law there, or if Slashdot's parsing decided to do it for you...
As reported on Slashdot earlier, it was using a regex for date handling, that had the year 2010 hardcoded. (The irony here is that the SpamAssassin people had noticed in time and changed the date to a hardcoded 2020 instead, but forgotten to put the fix into the update channels, so nobody got it until after 2010 had already started. Of course, this is still the wrong way to do things...)
Personally, I blame it on bad reverse-engineering. 9 looks the same in binary and binary-coded-decimal (the bit pattern for each is 00001001), but the bit pattern for 10 in binary-coded-decimal (00010000) is the same as the bit pattern for 16 in binary. I imagine what's going on here is people guessing at a protocol and not having enough information to distinguish binary from BCD. (If they do that because the protocol isn't available, it's forgivable; if they do it because they're too lazy to look it up, it's incompetence.)
No, if someone writes something that's plain wrong, the correct answer is to reply to it, rather than to try to censor it and leave people wondering why.
The ability to impose arbitrary duties on anyone?
See http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld200910/ldbills/001/10001.13-19.html#j164. The proposal also gives the Secretary of State the rights to a) decide the punishment for copyright infringement, and b) redefine what a copyright infringement is. Therefore, he can effectively jail, or worse, anyone he likes for no reason. Also, the law gives him the power to rewrite the law itself; there are some restrictions, but he can just rewrite it to remove them. In short, passing this proposal would give Lord Mandelson a complete dictatorship over the UK. (If you don't believe me, read it yourself; the only meaningful restriction is to have a draft of the changes approved by parliament, and it would be easy enough to slip in a removal of that restriction at the same time as another change.)
It's because they had a huge high-profile launch, effectively Slashdotting themselves. It turns out that when Cuil is slashdotted, instead of just breaking altogether its results go utterly haywire (making them accurate, wildly inaccurate, or giving no results more or less at random). The result is that the launch was a huge embarassing failure and the Internet (including Slashdot) didn't stop collectively laughing at them for weeks; some forums were using cuil as a measure of hype failure at the time. Nowadays, though, people mostly forget about them rather than laughing at them, and it's no longer slashdotted. (But then I wrote this. Oops...)
Works exactly the same way on Linux, except you use mount, umount and eject instead of diskutil.
Who was it that pointed out that all you really needed to do to get your mind control working globally was to infiltrate a tinfoil factory?
Actually, it won't. Deleting / is such a ridiculous operation that most modern copies of rm need a special command-line option to let you do it. (I'm slightly worried that it might recurse and try to delete other files/directories, though.) (Incidentally, there was an interesting bit of POSIX rules-lawyering to show that that interpretation of rm was legal; the idea is that it necessarily deletes the current working directory, and rm is allowed to act differently when the user tries to delete the current directory.)
The issue is that if you remove it from the list, it adds itself back. Installing a cronjob to do that seems really rather suspicious...
So, let me get this straight, those people can track down some college kid over the whole internet, what was probably using some dynamically assigned IP address, who may have moved a few times, etc.. and the CRIA can't find Bruce Springstein or even some lesser known artist because they haven't allocated enough resources?
Of course. It is in fact very easy to allocate resources insufficient to find Bruce Springstein. Cheaper than allocating resources that are sufficient, too.
If I say "jaywalkers should be put to death", and I jaywalk, would I be executed for it?
Only if your argument manages to convince the court into actually executing someone for it. Otherwise, you can claim that you've changed your mind due to the precedent set by the court when they rejected your argument. Also, that analogy doesn't really work, because I suspect (but don't know for certain) that the principle only applies to civil cases.
That would allow a publishing house to publish copies of everything it came across at cost; OK, so it wouldn't be making a profit and so wouldn't be publically owned, but it could very carefully break even, thus letting the people in charge of it do other things too and not have to fund it. That would pretty much have the same effect as removing copyright law altogether; I'll let the other Slashdotters argue about whether this would be a good thing or not.
Gotos aren't considered bad coding style in assembly language. (If they were, programs might be kind-of difficult to write...) The point is that using goto is a bad idea if there's another control structure that does the same thing more readably.
There was an interesting suggestion in New Scientist that carbon extraction should be taxed at a relatively high rate, but then the money from the taxes redistributed equally to everyone in the country (and/or world, I suppose, but that would be too hard to organise). That way, governments can't just increase the tax to grab money from people, helping to leave the tax set at an appropriate rate.
Interestingly, "dir" works on most desktop Linux systems (it's an alias to ls with a few options).
$ man -k burn cd ...
brasero (1) - Simple and easy to use CD/DVD burning application for
k3b (1) - KDE CD burning program
There were more answers than those two, but either of the first two looks a sensible choice for burning CDs. (The results quickly drop off in quality, though; the fourth was the Perl module Language::INTERCAL::Charset::EBCDIC, which I strongly hope can't burn CDs...)
Yes, it's pretty common to run an antivirus program on a Linux-based mail server, specifically to catch Windows viruses in messages it relays. (The Linux version of ClamAV, for instance, seems to be pretty rudimentary in every area but catching email viruses, presumably because there's nothing else it could plausibly do.)
It's mostly confined to specific areas; you just have to know where to avoid. Like every other country in the world, really.
And if it's a .py, then being a script, even if it were executable, double-clicking on it would typically ask whether to open or run it.
Even if it were a compiled executable, there'd be no way to get the icon looking right. In Windows, .exe files can embed their own icons, and so can look like a JPEG or whatever. In either Gnome or KDE, they'll look like executables.
Either way, it would be moderately tricky (although probably not impossible; you could send the file inside a zip or tarball with the executable bit already set, for instance, relying on the fact that most users won't realise there's no purpose in re-compressing a JPEG image) to get the user to set the +x bit on the file before double-clicking on it to try to open it.
Look up concatenative languages, such as Joy (http://www.latrobe.edu.au/philosophy/phimvt/joy.html); I wrote Underload (http://esolangs.org/wiki/Underload) as a sort of minimal expression of the same idea. Both of those languages effectively allow you to create arbitrary first-class functions despite having no form of function literal, and no concept of a closure, and work fine without garbage collection. However, doing things that way you have to do things differently from more standard functional programming languages.
That character's there so you can delete a character in punched tape by punching out all the holes. (Likewise, you can put blocks of NULs in so that you can add new characters in them by punching holes in them.) When you can't easily add or remove characters in your data format, nor unset bits, that sort of precaution makes quite a bit of sense.