They think they have a right to re-configure the software you use, for their own convenience and profit. That they can install things and you should have no say in the matter.
It's impossible to fit in a Turing-complete pattern without infinite space; any finite amount of space is not enough. Although the pattern itself could be finitely large, it would try to modify things outside its own location as part of its processing. (Access to an infinite amount of memory is one of the things required for Turing-completeness; that's why the term "bounded-storage machine" exists, referring to something like a real-world computer which is Turing-complete except for limits on its storage.)
Legal tender does not mean what you think it is. Legal tender is money that has to be accepted to settle a debt; if you're in debt and you pay in legal tender, that settles it even if the person you were in debt to wanted payment via some other method. There are plenty of things which are valuable despite not being legal tender; checks are an obvious example. (If you're in debt, the person you're in debt to can insist you pay in cash or other legal tender rather than check, if they want to; they can't insist you pay by check rather than by cash.)
You got it the wrong way round: Microsoft paid Novell for the patent coverage, and Novell got patent coverage for Microsoft's patents as part of the deal. Basically, Novell got money out of the deal and Microsoft got a marketing boost.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crwth. And I've heard of the word before (in relation to other word puzzles), so I'm pretty sure it isn't someone just lying in Wiktionary this time.
Most websites don't accept it, in my experience (probably because their email validation regexps don't handle nested comments). Most low-level mailing stuff will strip the comments at some stage before it gets out of the computer sending it, meaning everything works fine; old-fashioned command-line mailing programs work fine with them, usually. More modern GUI stuff is a bit less good at handling it; Outlook gets completely confused, Thunderbird handles comments but not nested comments, and Evolution escapes the backslash in the comment, assuming I meant a literal backslash in the comment not to escape the paren, so the message bounces.
No, he's right. Prepared statements are how you block SQL Injection attacks.
Or parametrised statements are also an absolute defence against them; not as fast, but they're what I use for one-off quick programs that don't need to be efficient or production-quality. (I don't see why such quick programs should have to be insecure, though; using a technique that blocks SQL injection altogether - and let's face it, it's not difficult - is greatly preferable to having your website serving other people's viruses.)
I run ClamAV on my Linux laptop because my ISP's (a company ISP) terms of service say that computers that connect via it have to have virus scanners installed. It hasn't found anything yet, nor do I expect it to...
I wouldn't necessarily say that. And what's more, I would like to see tests like how it handles very large files.
I actually tried this a couple of years ago; it was slow on large files, but if the formatting gets messed up (say, unclosed tags, things pasted in from Word, or the like), it became unusable on a large file if there are multiple people editing at once; there were edit conflicts every few seconds. In the end we split it into something like 5 or 6 subdocuments, and I spent a few hours with Tidy and emacs sorting all the markup out. For all I know, though, Google's fixed this since.
Does that thing allow nested comments, and escaping inside them? It doesn't look like it, it isn't recursive. (I have some in the email address I typically put online, ais523(524\)(525)x)@bham.ac.uk; that could be a good test for your email client, and is useful because I've never come across a spambot that can parse it.)
Recent versions of Perl and Python regices allow you to write recursively; that probably qualifies as a stupid regex trick, especially as it makes them more computationally powerful so they can handle things like email addresses. Or you could just sit wondering why email addresses allow nested comments anyway...
$ mysql
[snip]
mysql> help analyse
Name: 'PROCEDURE ANALYSE'
[snip]
mysql> help analyze
Name: 'ANALYZE TABLE'
In other words, both "analyse" and "analyze" have a special meaning in MySQL, and they're two different special meanings. "PROCEDURE ANALYZE" and "ANALYSE TABLE" are both meaningless.
Not exactly. The people in charge of the servers can modify the database directly, obviously, but would likely be fired if caught doing that; ordinary administrators can delete revisions from history, but cannot create revisions with anyone's name but their own on, and aren't allowed to delete revisions if some text added there remains in the current version (for copyright reasons).
Surely such a watermark could easily be destroyed by using the same method to rewatermark the image with something else? The information has to be encoded in the image somehow, and if you know the watermarking scheme, you could just change the place where it's encoded easily enough.
Allegedly a similar tactic used to be used by companies in the UK to sell goods on a Sunday (back when that was still illegal, which is way before I was born); they would sell perishable goods like fruit (which could be legally sold on a Sunday) for a lot more than its real price, and throw in whatever product they actually wanted to sell free.
There's an extension for MediaWiki (FlaggedRevs) that does this, IIRC the German Wikipedia is using it at the moment. If you go to a random page at http://de.wikipedia.org/, you're likely to see "Gesichtete Versionen" on a bar at the top, showing that that version is "sighted" and approved to be shown to the public by someone with sighting privileges (a special group of users over there, but based on the way Wikimedia wikis normally work I imagine it's quite large). Anyone can view either the sighted version or (if it exists) the unsighted version (the sighters there seem quite good at their job, so most unsighted edits are quickly either sighted or reverted), but it's always clear which is which.
I frequently need root access, to test the installer for the (open-source) programs that I write. But I sudo each time; even though this is a single-user computer, I sudo to save me from myself as lines that don't start "sudo" (or are escalated another way) can't be run as root. So it's make followed by sudo make install for me, and the password gives me time to check that I'm not about to do something terribly stupid (and I have caught myself doing that sort of thing on occasion in time to stop before...) For me, sudo's much safer than running as root, even though I do need root access quite a lot.
It would also mean you'd get about 100 comments at once when the timeout ended, all saying "first post!"; at the moment that's less of a problem due to the need to actually come across the article at the right time.
A few years ago I wrote a web page which was simply a recursive frameset; each frame was the webpage itself. On the version of IE available at the time (I think it was IE4, maybe IE3), this was quite effective at crashing not just IE but the computer it was running on, because it would use up all available memory, and then crash both IE and Explorer. (The kicker here was that it realised it was running low on memory and put up a dialog box asking if you wanted to stop, but it continued whether you said yes or no until it actually ran out.) This bug was fixed years ago too (IE6 shows a blank page if it sees that sort of thing), so I don't mind telling people about it (and I never did anything with the resulting HTML other than run it myself to see what would happen).
Slashdot Mirror
Funny doesn't boost karma.
They think they have a right to re-configure the software you use, for their own convenience and profit. That they can install things and you should have no say in the matter.
They do. Read the EULA.
(I find myself middle-clicking on links automatically ... like a robot ... and then close those extra tabs later without reading.)
Hey, now we know how sites get Slashdotted despite nobody reading TFA!
It's impossible to fit in a Turing-complete pattern without infinite space; any finite amount of space is not enough. Although the pattern itself could be finitely large, it would try to modify things outside its own location as part of its processing. (Access to an infinite amount of memory is one of the things required for Turing-completeness; that's why the term "bounded-storage machine" exists, referring to something like a real-world computer which is Turing-complete except for limits on its storage.)
Legal tender does not mean what you think it is. Legal tender is money that has to be accepted to settle a debt; if you're in debt and you pay in legal tender, that settles it even if the person you were in debt to wanted payment via some other method. There are plenty of things which are valuable despite not being legal tender; checks are an obvious example. (If you're in debt, the person you're in debt to can insist you pay in cash or other legal tender rather than check, if they want to; they can't insist you pay by check rather than by cash.)
You got it the wrong way round: Microsoft paid Novell for the patent coverage, and Novell got patent coverage for Microsoft's patents as part of the deal. Basically, Novell got money out of the deal and Microsoft got a marketing boost.
http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/crwth. And I've heard of the word before (in relation to other word puzzles), so I'm pretty sure it isn't someone just lying in Wiktionary this time.
Most websites don't accept it, in my experience (probably because their email validation regexps don't handle nested comments). Most low-level mailing stuff will strip the comments at some stage before it gets out of the computer sending it, meaning everything works fine; old-fashioned command-line mailing programs work fine with them, usually. More modern GUI stuff is a bit less good at handling it; Outlook gets completely confused, Thunderbird handles comments but not nested comments, and Evolution escapes the backslash in the comment, assuming I meant a literal backslash in the comment not to escape the paren, so the message bounces.
No, he's right. Prepared statements are how you block SQL Injection attacks.
Or parametrised statements are also an absolute defence against them; not as fast, but they're what I use for one-off quick programs that don't need to be efficient or production-quality. (I don't see why such quick programs should have to be insecure, though; using a technique that blocks SQL injection altogether - and let's face it, it's not difficult - is greatly preferable to having your website serving other people's viruses.)
I run ClamAV on my Linux laptop because my ISP's (a company ISP) terms of service say that computers that connect via it have to have virus scanners installed. It hasn't found anything yet, nor do I expect it to...
I wouldn't necessarily say that. And what's more, I would like to see tests like how it handles very large files.
I actually tried this a couple of years ago; it was slow on large files, but if the formatting gets messed up (say, unclosed tags, things pasted in from Word, or the like), it became unusable on a large file if there are multiple people editing at once; there were edit conflicts every few seconds. In the end we split it into something like 5 or 6 subdocuments, and I spent a few hours with Tidy and emacs sorting all the markup out. For all I know, though, Google's fixed this since.
Does that thing allow nested comments, and escaping inside them? It doesn't look like it, it isn't recursive. (I have some in the email address I typically put online, ais523(524\)(525)x)@bham.ac.uk; that could be a good test for your email client, and is useful because I've never come across a spambot that can parse it.)
Recent versions of Perl and Python regices allow you to write recursively; that probably qualifies as a stupid regex trick, especially as it makes them more computationally powerful so they can handle things like email addresses. Or you could just sit wondering why email addresses allow nested comments anyway...
If you're going to be pedantic ... Google is not a company. Google is the name of a company.
Yes I'm sure someone can one up my pedantry, something about visual representations of sound tokens representing names, or somesuch ...
Nope. Google is a company. "Google" is the name of a company. The use-mention distinction strikes again!
Probably my favourite MySQL stupidity:
$ mysql
[snip]
mysql> help analyse
Name: 'PROCEDURE ANALYSE'
[snip]
mysql> help analyze
Name: 'ANALYZE TABLE'
In other words, both "analyse" and "analyze" have a special meaning in MySQL, and they're two different special meanings. "PROCEDURE ANALYZE" and "ANALYSE TABLE" are both meaningless.
And also spark unsuppressable rumours about a merge with Apple's marketing department.
Probably OpenOffice is the easiest way to create PDFs on Windows, there's a save-as-PDF button on the toolbar.
Not exactly. The people in charge of the servers can modify the database directly, obviously, but would likely be fired if caught doing that; ordinary administrators can delete revisions from history, but cannot create revisions with anyone's name but their own on, and aren't allowed to delete revisions if some text added there remains in the current version (for copyright reasons).
Surely such a watermark could easily be destroyed by using the same method to rewatermark the image with something else? The information has to be encoded in the image somehow, and if you know the watermarking scheme, you could just change the place where it's encoded easily enough.
Allegedly a similar tactic used to be used by companies in the UK to sell goods on a Sunday (back when that was still illegal, which is way before I was born); they would sell perishable goods like fruit (which could be legally sold on a Sunday) for a lot more than its real price, and throw in whatever product they actually wanted to sell free.
There's an extension for MediaWiki (FlaggedRevs) that does this, IIRC the German Wikipedia is using it at the moment. If you go to a random page at http://de.wikipedia.org/, you're likely to see "Gesichtete Versionen" on a bar at the top, showing that that version is "sighted" and approved to be shown to the public by someone with sighting privileges (a special group of users over there, but based on the way Wikimedia wikis normally work I imagine it's quite large). Anyone can view either the sighted version or (if it exists) the unsighted version (the sighters there seem quite good at their job, so most unsighted edits are quickly either sighted or reverted), but it's always clear which is which.
Use /dev/urandom instead, save entropy! Some day it's possible your system will be low on entropy for whatever reason and /dev/random will block.
I frequently need root access, to test the installer for the (open-source) programs that I write. But I sudo each time; even though this is a single-user computer, I sudo to save me from myself as lines that don't start "sudo" (or are escalated another way) can't be run as root. So it's make followed by sudo make install for me, and the password gives me time to check that I'm not about to do something terribly stupid (and I have caught myself doing that sort of thing on occasion in time to stop before...) For me, sudo's much safer than running as root, even though I do need root access quite a lot.
It would also mean you'd get about 100 comments at once when the timeout ended, all saying "first post!"; at the moment that's less of a problem due to the need to actually come across the article at the right time.
A few years ago I wrote a web page which was simply a recursive frameset; each frame was the webpage itself. On the version of IE available at the time (I think it was IE4, maybe IE3), this was quite effective at crashing not just IE but the computer it was running on, because it would use up all available memory, and then crash both IE and Explorer. (The kicker here was that it realised it was running low on memory and put up a dialog box asking if you wanted to stop, but it continued whether you said yes or no until it actually ran out.) This bug was fixed years ago too (IE6 shows a blank page if it sees that sort of thing), so I don't mind telling people about it (and I never did anything with the resulting HTML other than run it myself to see what would happen).
I'd mod Microsoft -1 troll but +2 funny if I could.
...and reduce their karma whilst giving the comment a positive score? Normally I consider that to be broken, but in the case of Microsoft, go for it!