The files in the repositories are signed, there is nothing that confirms that the line in your apt sources is actually connecting to someone you know.
True, having your system chatting with random servers about how it could really use an update isn't a good thing. My point/question was just that, even if you control the domain name the apt sources point to, you can't actually tamper with package payloads without apt freaking out about it, which at least mitigates the damage.
Architecturally, Chrome frame is pretty similar to just installing Chrome(it has to be, to support rendering pages as they would appear in Chrome). Mysteriously, though, the fact that it's shoved into IE soothes some reactionary IT departments.
Whether or not they are right about this, Google appears to be betting that people who were willing to install Chrome Frame to support something will just install Chrome. Their 'Legacy Browser Support' makes managing the distribution of troublesome pages between the two browsers relatively easy to manage.
Please correct me if I'm wrong for this specific one; but the official repositories and many of the 3rd party ones are signed, and you mark the corresponding public key as trusted when you add the repo. Unless the new owner got the domain name and the signing key, their ability to fuck with you is pretty much limited to breaking dependencies in assorted creative ways. Unless you speed through those annoying warnings about crypto issues, in which case you are executing god-knows-what as root. So don't do that.
Is anybody else struck by how ghastly the internal wiring is?
SFFs tend to be a little on the cluttered side; but that this is just grotesque, random cable bundles(not even clipped in place, as Dell's boring business models tend to be), teeny little fans that will inevitably make a high whining noise within six months, it's just dreadful.
Quoth James Clapper, director of national intelligence: "This has to do with of course somewhat of a semantic, perhaps some would say too cute by half. But it is—there are honest differences on the semantics of what—when someone says 'collection' to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him."
He also characterized denying 'collection' as "I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying 'no,'"
Given the ruthless efficiency with which the PRISM system collected communications, I'd compare it more closely to the former East German (DDR) Stasi
The Stasi were more competent than average; but what arguably makes the 'in capitalist America' system cleverer is how it can function as a (relatively) inexpensive appendage of free market incentives that already exist.
So much useful data gets generated, and sometimes compiled, purely for the convenience of self-sustaining private sector actors(the phone company routing calls to the correct cell and billing you, your credit card issuer keeping accounts in order, your ISP shepherding the little packets about, advertising weasels scrutinising your behavior to try to sell you stuff, Everything Facebook, people 'checking in' to random shit on foursquare, etc, etc.) You don't need to bother with the (impressive; but rather unsustainably expensive) 'more than 10% of the population acting as at least part-time informants' business. You just copy the data that the private sector generates automatically!
Now, copying, storage, and analysis aren't free, by any means; but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than having to gather the data yourself and then pay for storage and analysis. Plus(solving a second problem that commies always had trouble with) your intelligence apparatus doubles as your consumer-goods R&D and focus grouping apparatus, since large parts of it are shared between marketing weasels and spooks, so you don't run into those embarrassing bare shelves and unfashionable lifestyles...
That's what I ended up doing(call me a coward, or lazy, or too dumb for Debian; but why bother exhaustively scrubbing GNOME and then installing XFCE, all to save a fresh, 100%-not-yet-customized install that I could just pave over?)
is that Clarence Thomas said something (even writing an opinion). He's only been on the court, what, 10+ years or something?
Antonin Scalia's mind-meld field is vulnerable to disruption by sunspots, geomagnetic anomalies, and nearby homosexuals. Some mistakes are inevitable from time to time...
I am actually surprised by the ruling. I fully expected the courts to say you can patent anything, so long as you are first to file. Glad to hear it nonetheless.
I'd assume that you can, in fact, apply to patent anything; but one would hope that "Prior art older than human civilization, quite possibly older than humanity, depending on the DNA involved" would cause you problems...
If you can get them, security clearances seem to be a popular way of not getting outsourced and competing with a rather smaller(if alarmingly large, on a per-capita basis) pool of applicants.
GNOME definitely has a long way to go with the new UI theme. I found it fitting for Ubuntu (obviously), but as for Debian 7's default theme... I found myself caught off guard. As "conservative" as the Debian development team is, I'm surprised they defaulted to that.
As for Red Hat, I'm glad they chose classic mode. Maybe it will make the GNOME team step back and fix the annoyances associated with their modern mode.
You are much more diplomatic than I am. I did a Debian install yesterday, first non-headless one in a while, and narrowly avoided spraying acidic bile all over the keyboard when I saw what GNOME has become...
Then you haven't really transferred at all, have you? Plus, I have some rather severe doubts you can replace a functioning brain cell, much less replace all of the many, many billions - one (or a few) at a time. Do *you* want to go through ten thousand possibly fatal brain surgeries?
What happens if your brain cells reject the invaders and refuse to interact with them?
Oh, I don't think that incremental replacement is even remotely practical without technology-indistinguishable-from magic(whether nondestructive, or even destructive, imaging good enough to make a copy is practical without similar tech levels also leaves me pretty skeptical)
I was mostly commenting to note that the " 'original' vs. 'copy' " problem isn't as trivial as it first looks, and that this has been recognized(largely in toy form, since nobody has ever been remotely close to consciousness copying or transfer, and the examples mostly come down to semantic dickering over how much restoration of historical artifacts you can get away with) for a long, long, time.
They may not be spending as heavily on the actually-renowned-and-productive UC system; but they've been doing some amazing work in expanding graduate-level institutions for students enrolled in the school of hard knocks...
Professors Say Massive Open Online Courses Threaten Academic Freedom
threaten their monopoly on information... it's RIAA and MPAA whining of a different flavor.
I'm inclined to disagree: If anything, the universities (who are attempting to seize the copyrights on course material, because the new 'MOOC' format now makes course material valuable in absence of the person who developed it) are the ones in the position of the RIAA (a trade group that represents the owners of copyrighted music, not musicians.)
Professors have never(at least since printing became remotely cheap; maybe back in the early medieval university where technical constraints imposed a nearly oral-history model of knowledge transmission you could make a case) had a 'monopoly on information', you can get courses in established subjects just about anywhere, and new-hotness research will be encumbered by Reed-Elsevier, not Dr. Somebody. What they object to is universities(or online courseware companies) obtaining a monopoly on their specific teaching of a course. This hardly seems shocking, given that they could end up having to license back their own coursework if they change employers...
Really rather similar to the position of a musician or band whose entire back-catalog is encumbered by that EMI contract they signed when they were small.
They're not claiming the existence of MOOCs threatens academic freedom, but that the universities' IP grab, claiming ownership of course materials in order to license them to for-profit firms like Coursera, does so. The traditional IP agreement is that universities own a share of patentable inventions developed using university facilities, but do not own copyrights on materials, such as books, articles, course slides, tutorials, presentations, etc. produced by professors, which are supposed to be free of any university legal interference.
Luckily, as the noble history of K-12 textbooks demonstrates, course materials produced by committee under a stifling haze of IP never suck!
How long before existing ransomware is adapted to these bold robotic avatars, and the infected get the exciting opportunity to not have the sensation of full-body chemical burns replayed on loop in exchange for a modest and reasonable payment by Western Union?
Death is not a bug, it's a feature. It's the only way we get rid of old assholes.
Hypothetically, if we were implementing immortality-by-simulation, couldn't we resort to Instance dungeons? No reason why all the avatars have to coexist in one self-consistent reality, when we could instead fork the annoying ones off into an eternal 'The Good Old Days' where they can live out their crabbed fantasies in fuzzy black and white forever...
(Of course, if somebody's reality is dependent on simulation, and the requirement of self-consistency across all the simulants is dropped, you could could also theoretically cut the priority of everyone within a given instance, and run the in-sim passage of time at less than real time. As long as they don't have access to external timebases, they shouldn't even be able to tell.
Unless you can transfer your consciousness you're still going to be dead.
Spending your waning years of weakness, decay, and degradation, plagued by the constant cruel mockery of your ageless immortal doppelganger is just a fun extra feature!
Truck to train has been going on for decades. A more feasible approach is to have buses that can be driven on to, or hooked up to trains. It wouldn't cover the kinds of distances planes can, but it would happen a lot sooner.
Which comes first, the lithium-xxx battery that will last 7 days, or the plane-train?
In the vein of 'already old news', why are they taking on the additional hurdles involved in building the modularity into the plane(an area where weight, fuel economy, regulatory certification, etc. are especially stringent.
Actually boarding an aircraft is pretty damn painless. Walk up the ramp, sit down. It's the rest of the airport that kind of blows, so why go after the aircraft?
Even today, it's pretty common(at smaller, less capital-intensive, occassionally thatch-roofed) airports for the plane to show up, a stairs-on-wheels unit to be rolled over, and the passengers then walk, or get bussed, depending on the size of the tarmac, to the plane.
If you wanted to adapt that to a larger airport, a small subway system(either connected to existing mass transit, or to one or more park-and-transfer locations) with pop-up exits to board planes when they arrive wouldn't be rocket surgery. It'd take a bunch of rebar and excavation equipement; but absolutely zero messing around with aircraft designs and all off-the-shelf engineering.
I wonder to what extent their other senses suffer? Video games provide only visuals and usually stereo sound (rather than full 3D like the real world). No touch, no smell, no sense of balance, no feeling the wind, no g-forces.
I assume that they don't get any serious practice(and so would deeply underperform against perfumers, ninjas, sculptors, and glider pilots); but it's not as though everyone gets only 20 Sense Points to distribute across all their sensory stats, making it so bumping one stat requires degrading a different one.
Oh, it's complex alright, it's just a question of how much of the complexity is unbelievably shoddy legacy code held together with little more than axons and optimism, and how much of that complexity can actually be deployed to some useful end.
Either way, I can hardly afford to have it work yet worse than it works now...
Slashdot Mirror
The files in the repositories are signed, there is nothing that confirms that the line in your apt sources is actually connecting to someone you know.
True, having your system chatting with random servers about how it could really use an update isn't a good thing. My point/question was just that, even if you control the domain name the apt sources point to, you can't actually tamper with package payloads without apt freaking out about it, which at least mitigates the damage.
Not everyone gets to use their choice of browser.
Architecturally, Chrome frame is pretty similar to just installing Chrome(it has to be, to support rendering pages as they would appear in Chrome). Mysteriously, though, the fact that it's shoved into IE soothes some reactionary IT departments.
Whether or not they are right about this, Google appears to be betting that people who were willing to install Chrome Frame to support something will just install Chrome. Their 'Legacy Browser Support' makes managing the distribution of troublesome pages between the two browsers relatively easy to manage.
Honestly, I try to avoid the 'amongst KGB alumni' state as much as I can...
Please correct me if I'm wrong for this specific one; but the official repositories and many of the 3rd party ones are signed, and you mark the corresponding public key as trusted when you add the repo. Unless the new owner got the domain name and the signing key, their ability to fuck with you is pretty much limited to breaking dependencies in assorted creative ways. Unless you speed through those annoying warnings about crypto issues, in which case you are executing god-knows-what as root. So don't do that.
Is anybody else struck by how ghastly the internal wiring is?
SFFs tend to be a little on the cluttered side; but that this is just grotesque, random cable bundles(not even clipped in place, as Dell's boring business models tend to be), teeny little fans that will inevitably make a high whining noise within six months, it's just dreadful.
Probably safer than the pharmacological approaches to achieving the same goal...
Quoth James Clapper, director of national intelligence: "This has to do with of course somewhat of a semantic, perhaps some would say too cute by half. But it is—there are honest differences on the semantics of what—when someone says 'collection' to me, that has a specific meaning, which may have a different meaning to him."
He also characterized denying 'collection' as "I responded in what I thought was the most truthful, or least untruthful, manner by saying 'no,'"
Given the ruthless efficiency with which the PRISM system collected communications, I'd compare it more closely to the former East German (DDR) Stasi
The Stasi were more competent than average; but what arguably makes the 'in capitalist America' system cleverer is how it can function as a (relatively) inexpensive appendage of free market incentives that already exist.
So much useful data gets generated, and sometimes compiled, purely for the convenience of self-sustaining private sector actors(the phone company routing calls to the correct cell and billing you, your credit card issuer keeping accounts in order, your ISP shepherding the little packets about, advertising weasels scrutinising your behavior to try to sell you stuff, Everything Facebook, people 'checking in' to random shit on foursquare, etc, etc.) You don't need to bother with the (impressive; but rather unsustainably expensive) 'more than 10% of the population acting as at least part-time informants' business. You just copy the data that the private sector generates automatically!
Now, copying, storage, and analysis aren't free, by any means; but it's a hell of a lot cheaper than having to gather the data yourself and then pay for storage and analysis. Plus(solving a second problem that commies always had trouble with) your intelligence apparatus doubles as your consumer-goods R&D and focus grouping apparatus, since large parts of it are shared between marketing weasels and spooks, so you don't run into those embarrassing bare shelves and unfashionable lifestyles...
That's what I ended up doing(call me a coward, or lazy, or too dumb for Debian; but why bother exhaustively scrubbing GNOME and then installing XFCE, all to save a fresh, 100%-not-yet-customized install that I could just pave over?)
is that Clarence Thomas said something (even writing an opinion). He's only been on the court, what, 10+ years or something?
Antonin Scalia's mind-meld field is vulnerable to disruption by sunspots, geomagnetic anomalies, and nearby homosexuals. Some mistakes are inevitable from time to time...
I am actually surprised by the ruling. I fully expected the courts to say you can patent anything, so long as you are first to file. Glad to hear it nonetheless.
I'd assume that you can, in fact, apply to patent anything; but one would hope that "Prior art older than human civilization, quite possibly older than humanity, depending on the DNA involved" would cause you problems...
If you can get them, security clearances seem to be a popular way of not getting outsourced and competing with a rather smaller(if alarmingly large, on a per-capita basis) pool of applicants.
GNOME definitely has a long way to go with the new UI theme. I found it fitting for Ubuntu (obviously), but as for Debian 7's default theme... I found myself caught off guard. As "conservative" as the Debian development team is, I'm surprised they defaulted to that.
As for Red Hat, I'm glad they chose classic mode. Maybe it will make the GNOME team step back and fix the annoyances associated with their modern mode.
You are much more diplomatic than I am. I did a Debian install yesterday, first non-headless one in a while, and narrowly avoided spraying acidic bile all over the keyboard when I saw what GNOME has become...
Where do you think you are?
An instance with really shitty drop rates, lots of grinding, and mean admins.
Then you haven't really transferred at all, have you?
Plus, I have some rather severe doubts you can replace a functioning brain cell, much less replace all of the many, many billions - one (or a few) at a time. Do *you* want to go through ten thousand possibly fatal brain surgeries?
What happens if your brain cells reject the invaders and refuse to interact with them?
Oh, I don't think that incremental replacement is even remotely practical without technology-indistinguishable-from magic(whether nondestructive, or even destructive, imaging good enough to make a copy is practical without similar tech levels also leaves me pretty skeptical)
I was mostly commenting to note that the " 'original' vs. 'copy' " problem isn't as trivial as it first looks, and that this has been recognized(largely in toy form, since nobody has ever been remotely close to consciousness copying or transfer, and the examples mostly come down to semantic dickering over how much restoration of historical artifacts you can get away with) for a long, long, time.
They may not be spending as heavily on the actually-renowned-and-productive UC system; but they've been doing some amazing work in expanding graduate-level institutions for students enrolled in the school of hard knocks...
Professors Say Massive Open Online Courses Threaten Academic Freedom
threaten their monopoly on information... it's RIAA and MPAA whining of a different flavor.
I'm inclined to disagree: If anything, the universities (who are attempting to seize the copyrights on course material, because the new 'MOOC' format now makes course material valuable in absence of the person who developed it) are the ones in the position of the RIAA (a trade group that represents the owners of copyrighted music, not musicians.)
Professors have never(at least since printing became remotely cheap; maybe back in the early medieval university where technical constraints imposed a nearly oral-history model of knowledge transmission you could make a case) had a 'monopoly on information', you can get courses in established subjects just about anywhere, and new-hotness research will be encumbered by Reed-Elsevier, not Dr. Somebody. What they object to is universities(or online courseware companies) obtaining a monopoly on their specific teaching of a course. This hardly seems shocking, given that they could end up having to license back their own coursework if they change employers...
Really rather similar to the position of a musician or band whose entire back-catalog is encumbered by that EMI contract they signed when they were small.
They're not claiming the existence of MOOCs threatens academic freedom, but that the universities' IP grab, claiming ownership of course materials in order to license them to for-profit firms like Coursera, does so. The traditional IP agreement is that universities own a share of patentable inventions developed using university facilities, but do not own copyrights on materials, such as books, articles, course slides, tutorials, presentations, etc. produced by professors, which are supposed to be free of any university legal interference.
Luckily, as the noble history of K-12 textbooks demonstrates, course materials produced by committee under a stifling haze of IP never suck!
How long before existing ransomware is adapted to these bold robotic avatars, and the infected get the exciting opportunity to not have the sensation of full-body chemical burns replayed on loop in exchange for a modest and reasonable payment by Western Union?
Death is not a bug, it's a feature. It's the only way we get rid of old assholes.
Hypothetically, if we were implementing immortality-by-simulation, couldn't we resort to Instance dungeons? No reason why all the avatars have to coexist in one self-consistent reality, when we could instead fork the annoying ones off into an eternal 'The Good Old Days' where they can live out their crabbed fantasies in fuzzy black and white forever...
(Of course, if somebody's reality is dependent on simulation, and the requirement of self-consistency across all the simulants is dropped, you could could also theoretically cut the priority of everyone within a given instance, and run the in-sim passage of time at less than real time. As long as they don't have access to external timebases, they shouldn't even be able to tell.
Unless you can transfer your consciousness you're still going to be dead.
Spending your waning years of weakness, decay, and degradation, plagued by the constant cruel mockery of your ageless immortal doppelganger is just a fun extra feature!
Another idiot that doesn't realize the difference between a copy and themself.
What if you implemented the copy by gradual replacement?
Truck to train has been going on for decades. A more feasible approach is to have buses that can be driven on to, or hooked up to trains. It wouldn't cover the kinds of distances planes can, but it would happen a lot sooner.
Which comes first, the lithium-xxx battery that will last 7 days, or the plane-train?
In the vein of 'already old news', why are they taking on the additional hurdles involved in building the modularity into the plane(an area where weight, fuel economy, regulatory certification, etc. are especially stringent.
Actually boarding an aircraft is pretty damn painless. Walk up the ramp, sit down. It's the rest of the airport that kind of blows, so why go after the aircraft?
Even today, it's pretty common(at smaller, less capital-intensive, occassionally thatch-roofed) airports for the plane to show up, a stairs-on-wheels unit to be rolled over, and the passengers then walk, or get bussed, depending on the size of the tarmac, to the plane.
If you wanted to adapt that to a larger airport, a small subway system(either connected to existing mass transit, or to one or more park-and-transfer locations) with pop-up exits to board planes when they arrive wouldn't be rocket surgery. It'd take a bunch of rebar and excavation equipement; but absolutely zero messing around with aircraft designs and all off-the-shelf engineering.
I wonder to what extent their other senses suffer? Video games provide only visuals and usually stereo sound (rather than full 3D like the real world). No touch, no smell, no sense of balance, no feeling the wind, no g-forces.
I assume that they don't get any serious practice(and so would deeply underperform against perfumers, ninjas, sculptors, and glider pilots); but it's not as though everyone gets only 20 Sense Points to distribute across all their sensory stats, making it so bumping one stat requires degrading a different one.
Oh, it's complex alright, it's just a question of how much of the complexity is unbelievably shoddy legacy code held together with little more than axons and optimism, and how much of that complexity can actually be deployed to some useful end.
Either way, I can hardly afford to have it work yet worse than it works now...