I saw a short documentary on him a while back (on a Canadian scifi/fantasy TV channel). From that, he seems like a nice, albeit slightly oddball, genuinely compassionate guy. For those who didn't bother to look him up, most of the time he takes is spent late at night on Vancouver's east side (lots of prostitutes, homeless, etc.) handing out water bottles, some granola bars, and occasionally blankets/similar.
You have to disallow sudo entirely (or to a carefully-patrolled whitelist of commands), not just "sudo su", "sudo -s" and "sudo -i". Otherwise you can do "sudo bash", "sudo busybox ash", "sudo passwd", "sudo writable-script.sh", "cd bash;./configure; make; sudo./bash", and all sorts of other little workarounds.
As far as security goes... I'd give this a shrug at best. At worst, you're in a situation where many people now need the actual root password and that makes logging and monitoring access a lot harder.
It's not socialism. It's a very, very liberal idea.
I won't try to teach all of introductory political science to you, but I'll summarize the argument for a basic income guarantee:
1. Liberalism, which western societies were founded on, places the individual highest -- everything else is to support the individual.
2. Providing an equality of opportunity on the individual level, for each individual is one of the biggest ideas coming from placing the individual first.
3. One of the biggest inequalities of opportunity is the ability for those born into rich families is to not work, and still survive. You can extend this to not needing to overwork themselves to have a good education, to end up with a good job, etc.
4. To balance this inequality, everyone should be given a basic income to allow them to also not need to work to survive. Again, this allows them to not need to overwork themselves trying to have a decent education.
It is so very, very not socialism. It's one of the best ideas of liberalism, as its implementation would also cut the government out of a lot of things -- you no longer need unemployment insurance, pension plans, disability insurance, health care can be cut back to only cover expensive procedures, etc. This is how you fund most of such a program, by using the money from elsewhere to a different purpose -- giving it directly to the citizens.
The income level needs to be tuned in such a way that you can live a basic life, but you wouldn't be able to buy, say, the latest iPad on it -- there is still significant incentive for working and making money. But you'd just never be able to dip below the level of basic livability, no matter how hard things got, or what you desired to do with your life.
I might agree with the notion that people would become inactive for a while
This is true. For a while, if such a system were implemented, there would likely be a significant (though not drastic) dip in employment, in hours worked, in everything. The novelty would soon wear off -- and, as anyone who's ever been totally idle for any period of time can tell you, the boredom and loneliness sets in surprisingly quickly. Everything would soon work itself to a basic equilibrium, with more people doing things they loved, at hours they could sustain a high level of good productivity at.
Instead of the crap situation we have, with most people being overworked (most families, unlike through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and even some of the 80s, need two working adults to survive, sometimes each working more than one job -- this is not right). Happier people, not needing to worry if they'll be able to put food on the table, not needing to take drugs to get through the work day... I'd take this.
A guaranteed income can draw most of the funds required from current social insurance programs. It should be every libertarian's wet dream -- the government, instead of inefficiently using all the money collected through taxes, simply gives everyone an equal share of it. Little healthcare (coverage of expensive procedures mainly), no unemployment insurance, no pension plans, no disability insurance, and the dismantling of most social programs (since they suddenly become redundant), in exchange for giving everyone a livable (livable is the key word, mind you -- it has to be livable, and consistently so, to work) amount of money, simply for being a citizen.
Also note the use of the word "citizen"... Most of these programs, including some places in the world they're used, use the citizen requirement, and have fairly strict immigration controls.
Or they're someone managing releases for something larger than themselves. Distribution packages and those working in medium to large businesses are all having a little bit of hell with the fast release schedules... Either you give your users admin rights so the software can update itself (BAD IDEA), or you use something else, unless there's a 'long term support' version. Which neither Chrome nor Firefox have.
Longer passwords are more secure than passwords with fancy characters
This depends on the length and randomness of the fancy character password. If you take a truly random ASCII-only password, you only need 7 characters to match the strength of that supposed 44-bit equivalent password.
While it's not viable to memorize a hundred logins with truly random passwords, that's the same issue you'd run into with correcthorsebatterystaple ("Now, Slashdot... Was that the horse and the battery, or the fruitfly and the baked beans?"), and is the one password managers should solve.
Basically what you're suggesting is... Package a brand and a configuration with an otherwise-entirely-standard Debian install (moreso than they already do).
There can be more than one problem with a government at once. In fact, there's usually quite a few, no matter what government, where, or who's running things.
It's a sneaky way of cutting social programs without actually doing such. If you don't have accurate demographic information, you can't properly predict population changes and the shifts in funding for social programs that come with it.
The problem I had with this was how the same thing seemed to happen in the first season. Rocky start, but the second half started building up to something decent... And then it felt like several reset buttons had been smashed as soon as the second season started... Only to begin slowly climbing back up there.
The other big issue is with how so many of the characters are unlikable, unremarkable, or uninteresting.
That article, which I think I've seen before, uses terrible methodology. They think that "setting all bits to zero" (an OSX "secure erase") is the same thing as "ATA SECURITY ERASE" when it comes to SSDs. It's not, and couldn't be further from the truth. Instead, what they're doing is to make the drive perpetually in its "most worn" state, instead of actually getting it into a "like new" state that ATA SECURITY ERASE does.
Basically, any conclusions they draw about wear-over-time are utterly useless because of the piss-poor methodology.
Honestly, I used to be around TV Tropes a lot. Then I wasn't, because of some of the things I'll mention...
In general, the administrative situation over there is terrible, and impossible for any outsiders to assist with. A lack of financing is one of the obvious results of that, likely for several reasons. To start with, there are a grand total of two administrators -- only one of two generally seems active at any given time.
The situation with the site code, design, and maintenance seems a total mess. The code, based on pmWiki, isn't publicly available (using the "application service provider" loophole of the GPL), but I'd hazard a guess at it being absurdly inefficient and poorly coded home-brew schlock. I personally uncovered several major security flaws (the 'learn anyone's password' sort), most of which were utterly ignored until they were publicly discussed by others, and I've also observed that the site is apparently running on a Windows server, which is not very encouraging of the server administration or resource usage. All of that leads me to the assumption that whatever server it's run on is likely vastly overpowered (and over-expensive) for what it would need, even with high traffic, if it were better managed. I mean, there's not even proper client caching headers sent. Setup a proper server-side cache (several sorts for different bits, probably), send proper client-side caching headers, and the traffic load would probably be cut in half right there.
As far as design goes, it's also terrible. JavaScript is used for functions that it is in no way required for, and there is zero graceful degradation in anything that wasn't inherited from pmWiki. Bring up these issues as accessibility problems, and you're brushed off every time. It's very, very poorly indexed by search engines, most of which could be fixed with some simple design changes (such as canonical URL tags, fixing the messy URL path setup in general, and changing some cases of very poor HTML, like not using h# tags for headers). They also allow Flash ads on pages -- and then bitch when people say they use an ad blocker for exactly that reason.
There's also quite a bit of an authoritarian, anti-'commons' sentiment. When inquiring about potential issues with the attribution part of the Attribution/Share Alike licence they use, the initial response was essentially "Okay, we'll just remove the CC licence from everything, we only used that so people wouldn't steal our content." (?!?) -- and this was in the context of removing edit logs because they were 'too long', some of which included notes of text imported from other sources. There's also a huge anti-Wikimedia sentiment -- in itself not necessarily a negative thing for such a website -- which leads to a bizarre sort of elitism about how their pmWiki-based home-brewed wiki software is so much better than Mediawiki (which is built to scale for large websites).
Basically what I'm saying is when you bring up any problems, you'll hit the same 'oh look, there's two people trying to run everything with no community input or help' wall, which was the most frustrating thing I've ever experienced. If things were better run, there's absolutely no reason they couldn't be much closer to self-sufficient without advertisements.
Can we say that not every download is a loss of sale, but some losses of sale can be attributed to downloading?
With porn, it is almost entirely a 'black and white' situation -- far more so than even mainstream media, where a huge portion would be, at best, lost rentals. If an average person decides to not download a specific porn title, would they proceed to: a) walk to their local porn shop and purchase that movie, or b) download a different pornographic movie/image (such as a non-studio 'production')? I'd almost be willing to stake my life on 'b' being true the vast majority of the time.
Speaking of corporate insanity, remember that the corporate version of 'lost sales' isn't 'sales are down from last year', but 'sales aren't up by as much as we wanted'. The wonderfully unsustainable capitalist dream of increasing profits (sales) by, say, 10% the first year, and 20% (on top of last year's 10%) the following year.
It sandboxes Java and Flash until we tell them to run, too.
You're saying two different things in this sentence, only one of which is true. NoScript does only load plugins if you click on them (assuming it's configured to do so), but it does not "sandbox" plugins in any way. If you allow a malicious object to be loaded in a plugin (such as by clicking on it), NoScript does nothing to stop it.
Might want to at least finish reading the summary next time, as you've missed the point entirely.
Advertisers will be allowed to purchase placement in lists of 'who to follow' recommendations targeted to users with particular interests on Twitter.
This is fairly literal version of Twitter "selling followers" (not just information about users) -- it's companies being able to 'buy' followers (with the caveat that they're not 'auto-followed', just show up as a 'recommended to follow' for the user). The emphasis on providing the usage information to advertisers seems like it's just a sloppy summary write-up, as it's only important in the context of 'planning' a purchase for these companies.
Slashdot Mirror
There shouldn't be 'out of court' settlements for rape. Simple as that.
You do like your kneecaps how they are right? As in unshattered?
Thanatos in Vancouver, look HIM up!
I saw a short documentary on him a while back (on a Canadian scifi/fantasy TV channel). From that, he seems like a nice, albeit slightly oddball, genuinely compassionate guy. For those who didn't bother to look him up, most of the time he takes is spent late at night on Vancouver's east side (lots of prostitutes, homeless, etc.) handing out water bottles, some granola bars, and occasionally blankets/similar.
To be fair, most economics theories these days are wishful thinking.
You have to disallow sudo entirely (or to a carefully-patrolled whitelist of commands), not just "sudo su", "sudo -s" and "sudo -i". Otherwise you can do "sudo bash", "sudo busybox ash", "sudo passwd", "sudo writable-script.sh", "cd bash; ./configure; make; sudo ./bash", and all sorts of other little workarounds.
As far as security goes... I'd give this a shrug at best. At worst, you're in a situation where many people now need the actual root password and that makes logging and monitoring access a lot harder.
It's not socialism. It's a very, very liberal idea.
I won't try to teach all of introductory political science to you, but I'll summarize the argument for a basic income guarantee:
It is so very, very not socialism. It's one of the best ideas of liberalism, as its implementation would also cut the government out of a lot of things -- you no longer need unemployment insurance, pension plans, disability insurance, health care can be cut back to only cover expensive procedures, etc. This is how you fund most of such a program, by using the money from elsewhere to a different purpose -- giving it directly to the citizens.
The income level needs to be tuned in such a way that you can live a basic life, but you wouldn't be able to buy, say, the latest iPad on it -- there is still significant incentive for working and making money. But you'd just never be able to dip below the level of basic livability, no matter how hard things got, or what you desired to do with your life.
I might agree with the notion that people would become inactive for a while
This is true. For a while, if such a system were implemented, there would likely be a significant (though not drastic) dip in employment, in hours worked, in everything. The novelty would soon wear off -- and, as anyone who's ever been totally idle for any period of time can tell you, the boredom and loneliness sets in surprisingly quickly. Everything would soon work itself to a basic equilibrium, with more people doing things they loved, at hours they could sustain a high level of good productivity at.
Instead of the crap situation we have, with most people being overworked (most families, unlike through the 50s, 60s, 70s, and even some of the 80s, need two working adults to survive, sometimes each working more than one job -- this is not right). Happier people, not needing to worry if they'll be able to put food on the table, not needing to take drugs to get through the work day... I'd take this.
A guaranteed income can draw most of the funds required from current social insurance programs. It should be every libertarian's wet dream -- the government, instead of inefficiently using all the money collected through taxes, simply gives everyone an equal share of it. Little healthcare (coverage of expensive procedures mainly), no unemployment insurance, no pension plans, no disability insurance, and the dismantling of most social programs (since they suddenly become redundant), in exchange for giving everyone a livable (livable is the key word, mind you -- it has to be livable, and consistently so, to work) amount of money, simply for being a citizen.
Also note the use of the word "citizen"... Most of these programs, including some places in the world they're used, use the citizen requirement, and have fairly strict immigration controls.
I think the summary confuses 'plugin' with 'extension'.
Don't you mean "for all intense porpoises"?
Endearingly quirky, while having lots and lots of sex, I imagine.
Or they're someone managing releases for something larger than themselves. Distribution packages and those working in medium to large businesses are all having a little bit of hell with the fast release schedules... Either you give your users admin rights so the software can update itself (BAD IDEA), or you use something else, unless there's a 'long term support' version. Which neither Chrome nor Firefox have.
cause some of us have to create stuff not just watch adorable videos of cats on youtube
Precisely! We're the ones who edited and uploaded the adorable videos of cats!
Does that mean we can sue the ISPs for over charging for providing us with internet access too?!
Longer passwords are more secure than passwords with fancy characters
This depends on the length and randomness of the fancy character password. If you take a truly random ASCII-only password, you only need 7 characters to match the strength of that supposed 44-bit equivalent password.
While it's not viable to memorize a hundred logins with truly random passwords, that's the same issue you'd run into with correcthorsebatterystaple ("Now, Slashdot... Was that the horse and the battery, or the fruitfly and the baked beans?"), and is the one password managers should solve.
Basically what you're suggesting is... Package a brand and a configuration with an otherwise-entirely-standard Debian install (moreso than they already do).
There can be more than one problem with a government at once. In fact, there's usually quite a few, no matter what government, where, or who's running things.
It's a sneaky way of cutting social programs without actually doing such. If you don't have accurate demographic information, you can't properly predict population changes and the shifts in funding for social programs that come with it.
The problem I had with this was how the same thing seemed to happen in the first season. Rocky start, but the second half started building up to something decent... And then it felt like several reset buttons had been smashed as soon as the second season started... Only to begin slowly climbing back up there.
The other big issue is with how so many of the characters are unlikable, unremarkable, or uninteresting.
That article, which I think I've seen before, uses terrible methodology. They think that "setting all bits to zero" (an OSX "secure erase") is the same thing as "ATA SECURITY ERASE" when it comes to SSDs. It's not, and couldn't be further from the truth. Instead, what they're doing is to make the drive perpetually in its "most worn" state, instead of actually getting it into a "like new" state that ATA SECURITY ERASE does.
Basically, any conclusions they draw about wear-over-time are utterly useless because of the piss-poor methodology.
or running annoying Flash ads [. . .] AdSense works because it has some amount of trust.
It lost what little trust I had in it when it started running Flash ads.
Honestly, I used to be around TV Tropes a lot. Then I wasn't, because of some of the things I'll mention...
In general, the administrative situation over there is terrible, and impossible for any outsiders to assist with. A lack of financing is one of the obvious results of that, likely for several reasons. To start with, there are a grand total of two administrators -- only one of two generally seems active at any given time.
The situation with the site code, design, and maintenance seems a total mess. The code, based on pmWiki, isn't publicly available (using the "application service provider" loophole of the GPL), but I'd hazard a guess at it being absurdly inefficient and poorly coded home-brew schlock. I personally uncovered several major security flaws (the 'learn anyone's password' sort), most of which were utterly ignored until they were publicly discussed by others, and I've also observed that the site is apparently running on a Windows server, which is not very encouraging of the server administration or resource usage. All of that leads me to the assumption that whatever server it's run on is likely vastly overpowered (and over-expensive) for what it would need, even with high traffic, if it were better managed. I mean, there's not even proper client caching headers sent. Setup a proper server-side cache (several sorts for different bits, probably), send proper client-side caching headers, and the traffic load would probably be cut in half right there.
As far as design goes, it's also terrible. JavaScript is used for functions that it is in no way required for, and there is zero graceful degradation in anything that wasn't inherited from pmWiki. Bring up these issues as accessibility problems, and you're brushed off every time. It's very, very poorly indexed by search engines, most of which could be fixed with some simple design changes (such as canonical URL tags, fixing the messy URL path setup in general, and changing some cases of very poor HTML, like not using h# tags for headers). They also allow Flash ads on pages -- and then bitch when people say they use an ad blocker for exactly that reason.
There's also quite a bit of an authoritarian, anti-'commons' sentiment. When inquiring about potential issues with the attribution part of the Attribution/Share Alike licence they use, the initial response was essentially "Okay, we'll just remove the CC licence from everything, we only used that so people wouldn't steal our content." (?!?) -- and this was in the context of removing edit logs because they were 'too long', some of which included notes of text imported from other sources. There's also a huge anti-Wikimedia sentiment -- in itself not necessarily a negative thing for such a website -- which leads to a bizarre sort of elitism about how their pmWiki-based home-brewed wiki software is so much better than Mediawiki (which is built to scale for large websites).
Basically what I'm saying is when you bring up any problems, you'll hit the same 'oh look, there's two people trying to run everything with no community input or help' wall, which was the most frustrating thing I've ever experienced. If things were better run, there's absolutely no reason they couldn't be much closer to self-sufficient without advertisements.
Can we say that not every download is a loss of sale, but some losses of sale can be attributed to downloading?
With porn, it is almost entirely a 'black and white' situation -- far more so than even mainstream media, where a huge portion would be, at best, lost rentals. If an average person decides to not download a specific porn title, would they proceed to: a) walk to their local porn shop and purchase that movie, or b) download a different pornographic movie/image (such as a non-studio 'production')? I'd almost be willing to stake my life on 'b' being true the vast majority of the time.
Speaking of corporate insanity, remember that the corporate version of 'lost sales' isn't 'sales are down from last year', but 'sales aren't up by as much as we wanted'. The wonderfully unsustainable capitalist dream of increasing profits (sales) by, say, 10% the first year, and 20% (on top of last year's 10%) the following year.
It sandboxes Java and Flash until we tell them to run, too.
You're saying two different things in this sentence, only one of which is true. NoScript does only load plugins if you click on them (assuming it's configured to do so), but it does not "sandbox" plugins in any way. If you allow a malicious object to be loaded in a plugin (such as by clicking on it), NoScript does nothing to stop it.
Might want to at least finish reading the summary next time, as you've missed the point entirely.
Advertisers will be allowed to purchase placement in lists of 'who to follow' recommendations targeted to users with particular interests on Twitter.
This is fairly literal version of Twitter "selling followers" (not just information about users) -- it's companies being able to 'buy' followers (with the caveat that they're not 'auto-followed', just show up as a 'recommended to follow' for the user). The emphasis on providing the usage information to advertisers seems like it's just a sloppy summary write-up, as it's only important in the context of 'planning' a purchase for these companies.