No. The parsing engine is not written well enough to deal with nonsense in a reasonable way.
Not parseable or almost-parseable == drop it, and report an error. Very simple.
Absolutely. That's about the total opposite of crashing though.
You aren't a security expert, are you? Now, your first lesson in computer security is, write this a hundred times: *crashing* on malicious code is *GOOD*, while *running* malicious code is *BAD*.
HTML in a browser isn't code. It's data. Running any HTML as code is *BAD*.
The fact that it does crash some browsers indicates that they probably are trying to run part of it as code - probably because of buffer overruns and the like. The whole reason it crashes is that it's running the code. That's very bad. It's not a matter of "either run, OR crash".
A good job by Microsoft, and the rest has work to do.
Was there anything wrong in June 13, 2004, when 156 million people voting with pen and paper elected 732 Members of the European Parliament to represents 450 million citizens?
I'm 30 now, I have been voting every electon (regional, national, EU) since I was 18, in the Netherlands. Always by machine, never by pen and paper. Although there are some districts where paper has been used longer.
It's not rocket science, you know. You press the button of your candidate, and press 'vote'. Your vote is printed to a log. The totals can be read out at the end of the day. Whoever decided these things should run Windows was on drugs.
in Holland Heineken is considered piss, according to the people I know who drink beer (I don't drink any alcohol out of principle) it is only slightly better then budweiser (which is described as pee from someone who drank Heineken). Brands like Dommelsch, Grolsch and even Bavaria are preferred over Heineken here....
Until you talk to someone else, who claims that only Heineken is perfect and all the other brands suck. Mostly which beer is considered best is regional (Heineken/Amstel in the west, Grolsch in much of the east).
In reality, all Dutch pilsener is very very close in taste (with a few exceptions, basically the really cheap C brand supermarket stuff - but perhaps I'm influenced by marketing even there). I've done many blind tests, where people get beer (from bottles) in glasses without a brand name, and had to guess what they were drinking. Generally people score about as well as you would expect from a random pick.
I've had someone who grew up with Grolsch, and claimed that was far better than Heineken, even though he had been running a bar with Heineken on tap for years now, mistake one for the other. Many of these "beer experts" claim that the difference between those two is huge...
In my opinion most (all major brands) are pretty much OK, if not very special. If you want to drink interesting beer, the Belgian stuff is available everywhere. German beers are much more varied as well. And of course there's plenty of great stuff in the Netherlands as well - but generally not the pilseners, and anybody who claims pilsener brand X is "piss" compared to brand Y is a marketing/groupthink victim.
Actually.. no. It's funny what you see when you mass download a bunch of.. uh... research material.
(Completely off-topic)
There is a band called Das Oath, which is a beautiful band name, and they have a song called Awesome Rape. Which I think is a great name for a rock song - can't get much more politically incorrect than that, in a few words.
So what's the first hit for "awesome rape" in Google? A page about "awesome rape comics".
Some people might exclaim that it is a genuine attempt by the government to shed and protect the US public from terrorists and if everyone followed the rules, sure it would. Terrorists follow the rules? No chance in hell,
Also, let's repeat once again that all the 9/11 terrorists were travelling on perfectly valid, non-faked passports. This wouldn't have helped one bit.
Creationists have no problem with evolution on this level. What they have a problem with is that evolution can account for the development of different species, or that it somehow allows a puddle of goo somewhere in France to became human.
It is perfectly reasonable to be critical about that sort of thing, even though it's often more a statement about the ignorance about biology of those Creationists than about deficiencies of the theory, and well, everything isn't completely explained yet, that is of course true.
What's ridiculous though, is that those Creationists then suddenly claim that some "God" created all of this, a theory for which the evidence is completely absent and therefore the gaps are infinitely larger... At least Evolution tries to actually explain things and thus be a scientific theory at all.
Hence the difference. One is a physical phenomenon. One is a psychological phenomenon.
That's not much of a difference, unless you believe psychology is about matters of the "soul" and has nothing to do with physical reality.
Everything psychological is also physical. It may not be easy to find, but it all happens in the brain.
Re:an observation about the OSS crowd
on
E-bike E-xperiences?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
I don't agree. If someone asks you for help doing something that is obviously stupid, you should tell them that it is stupid and why, and not help them do it - that's not "helping" at all!
I agree that that's not the case here (saying e-bikes are always a bad idea is just wrong), but it is true of, for instance, some programming questions people ask, probably similar to the "OSS" stuff you're talking about.
If someone has variables named x0, x1, x2, x3, x4 etc and wants to do strange hacks with introspection and manipulation of namespace tables etc to change them all inside a loop, but has no idea how to do that - you don't explain how it could be done, you tell him "you don't want to do that, use a list" (I'm thinking of Python things). That is constructive.
What benefit, exactly, do Linux users get from the proliferation of distros?
No-one gets any benefit directly from the fact that there are a large number of distros.
However, for each specific distro, there is apparently at least one person who likes that distro better than the alternatives. Which is enough.
If someone decides he wants to make AbominationDistro, which is existing distro X but with the meaning of/etc and/usr switched around, and he creates it - more power to him, that doesn't influence me at all - and he has the distro he wants.
Why is it that so many Slashdotters piss and moan when any kind of system is released by commercial industry that isn't 100% flawless?
You talk like this is something that helps a bit, but has a few flaws that can be fixed over time.
The truth is that this is a braindead idea that has loads of easy to see fundamental problems that do not have a solution (see the rest of the threads). It can never work. It's a stupid idea. It deserves to be pissed on, it is worse than nothing at all.
I think that is the primary problem with law makers etc introducing schemes like this one - they think they can work, and even if opponents tell them why it will never work, they think that can be fixed over time, whatever the problems are. Braindead, the lot of them.
In most countries, credit card authentication was used to ensure one had reached the legal age...
I think that's mostly a US thing, not a "most countries" thing. Over here in the Netherlands (and as far as I know, most of Europe), nowhere near enough people have a credit card, they're just not that popular.
But it could be that it's my country that is the exception, of course:-)
Schwartz also states that he thinks Linux is a good proving ground, but Solaris is better, even at running Linux applications. Sounds like a good strategy, if people buy it.
The problem with that strategy is that even if that's true now (I can't judge that), it's highly probable that it won't be true in, say, two years. Linux is just improving too fast.
Do you realize howlong the circumference of the Earth REALLY is? The space elevator's length, assuming that it was actually physically possible for it to come down in one full strand, would not go around even once.
Earth's equator is +- 40,000 km. Geosynchronous orbit is +- 36,000 km. However, that's where the center of mass of the elevator will be. It will have to be quite a bit longer than that. Let's look at simplistically and simply make it double as long, then the ribbon would be easily long enough.
Of course it won't all fall down, and it may be shorter and tethered to something large (like an asteroid) although it's probably easier just to make the ribbon longer, since then you can launch stuff away from Earth by letting it go from the tail end.
Artificial intelligence was born... Filtering spam.
In Greg Egan's _Permutation City_, spam filters and spam become ever more intelligent. Your spam filter runs the interactive video mail in a sandbox trying to detect whether it's spam, the spam tries to detect that it is in a sandbox or that it is talking to an AI construct, so that it can hide its commercial intent. Your filter tries to mimic you (and you review its reactions now and then, try to get its facial expressions ever more like yours, etc), the spammers try to get more information about you so they can try to fool your filter by making the spam look like on of your friends, etc.
This is an obvious arms race and in that book, AI and uploaded individuals etc exist - but the trick is to make your AI spam filters as good as possible without making them actually self-conscious, since using self-conscious AI software for spam filtering would be torture.
In short, using capitalism to fight pollution is fine, as long as the pollution becomes part of the equation.
Every polluter must pay for cleanup. Make the cost of removing pollution part of the cost of every product you use and buy. *Then* capitalism will have an effect, and people will choose to buy the cleaner things because they're cheaper.
If that doesn't happen, and producers get to pollute for free, capitalism has no mechanism to deal with it.
But remember that Linux is different things to different people.
For those Linux demagogues, all they want is a system that is composed of Free software. Whether commercial, closed software will run on it is completely irrelevant to them because they don't want to use it anyway, and I don't think they deserve to be laughed at for that - they just have other interests. These ARE the people who caused most of it to happen in the first place.
Honestly, as a big Linux advocate, this is the biggest problem I see for the future of Linux.
So that depends on what you think the future of Linux must be. You know, Linux isn't like other software. If all commercial support for it was dropped, Linux would just continue to exist, and it would still be developed. Don't confuse the future of Linux with the future of RedHat, and so on.
Of course, for those people who would really want to use Linux to run commercial apps so they can use it as an alternative for Windows, or for Solaris or whatever, of course it is very important. For most of the people who hack on Linux stuff as a job, it is very important. For the kids who want to see Microsoft destroyed by Linux, it is important.
But whatever happens to commercial apps on Linux, it will just continue to exist anyway.
In the meantime, commercial vendors shouldn't have too much trouble supporting the latest versions of the main commercial distros.
1. Ok, I didn't notice the 'foobay@mail'. I treat every # prompt as if it were root. That was perhaps a mistake here, but as far as I'm concerned, that doesn't make me a luser, that makes the setup of that machine braindead.
2. What the machine does is irrelevant.
3. I have no idea what your point is when you explain what root's home directory is.
4. My main point is that you just don't run a command just to see whether it exists. Do 'which rutine' or something. And at least do 'man rutine' first, sheesh. Just trying a command to see whether it exists without knowing what it does is a very bad habit to have, the habit of a luser. Even if you were just making a joke post on Slashdot and knew perfectly well that it didn't exist, it's a bad habit.
For all those people who had a nice moderation war giving me funny/troll/insightful mods: how about 'offtopic', or just ignoring my simple remark?:-)
Luser, trying to run a command you don't know as root.
Re:And now, for your delectation and delight...
on
RFID Not Just for Kids
·
· Score: 1, Insightful
Lost children is a convenient explanation. I'm sure the park can't actually use the technology to see which bits of the park are most popular, where the best place to put concessions, what ride lengths need shortening to maximize throughput or anything like that. Oh no.
Yes, but all of those sound like a good thing to me as well. Do you actually disagree with those?
Re:And now, for your delectation and delight...
on
RFID Not Just for Kids
·
· Score: 5, Funny
I agree, some people seem to overhype RFID privacy problems a bit.
There should be no problem with this, simply microwaving the children for a short period should be sufficient to disable the tag.
Slashdot Mirror
No. The parsing engine is not written well enough to deal with nonsense in a reasonable way. Not parseable or almost-parseable == drop it, and report an error. Very simple.
Absolutely. That's about the total opposite of crashing though.
You aren't a security expert, are you? Now, your first lesson in computer security is, write this a hundred times: *crashing* on malicious code is *GOOD*, while *running* malicious code is *BAD*.
HTML in a browser isn't code. It's data. Running any HTML as code is *BAD*.
The fact that it does crash some browsers indicates that they probably are trying to run part of it as code - probably because of buffer overruns and the like. The whole reason it crashes is that it's running the code. That's very bad. It's not a matter of "either run, OR crash".
A good job by Microsoft, and the rest has work to do.
Was there anything wrong in June 13, 2004, when 156 million people voting with pen and paper elected 732 Members of the European Parliament to represents 450 million citizens?
I'm 30 now, I have been voting every electon (regional, national, EU) since I was 18, in the Netherlands. Always by machine, never by pen and paper. Although there are some districts where paper has been used longer.
It's not rocket science, you know. You press the button of your candidate, and press 'vote'. Your vote is printed to a log. The totals can be read out at the end of the day. Whoever decided these things should run Windows was on drugs.
See wednesday's APOD.
in Holland Heineken is considered piss, according to the people I know who drink beer (I don't drink any alcohol out of principle) it is only slightly better then budweiser (which is described as pee from someone who drank Heineken). Brands like Dommelsch, Grolsch and even Bavaria are preferred over Heineken here....
Until you talk to someone else, who claims that only Heineken is perfect and all the other brands suck. Mostly which beer is considered best is regional (Heineken/Amstel in the west, Grolsch in much of the east).
In reality, all Dutch pilsener is very very close in taste (with a few exceptions, basically the really cheap C brand supermarket stuff - but perhaps I'm influenced by marketing even there). I've done many blind tests, where people get beer (from bottles) in glasses without a brand name, and had to guess what they were drinking. Generally people score about as well as you would expect from a random pick.
I've had someone who grew up with Grolsch, and claimed that was far better than Heineken, even though he had been running a bar with Heineken on tap for years now, mistake one for the other. Many of these "beer experts" claim that the difference between those two is huge...
In my opinion most (all major brands) are pretty much OK, if not very special. If you want to drink interesting beer, the Belgian stuff is available everywhere. German beers are much more varied as well. And of course there's plenty of great stuff in the Netherlands as well - but generally not the pilseners, and anybody who claims pilsener brand X is "piss" compared to brand Y is a marketing/groupthink victim.
Actually.. no. It's funny what you see when you mass download a bunch of.. uh... research material.
(Completely off-topic)
There is a band called Das Oath, which is a beautiful band name, and they have a song called Awesome Rape. Which I think is a great name for a rock song - can't get much more politically incorrect than that, in a few words.
So what's the first hit for "awesome rape" in Google? A page about "awesome rape comics".
The Internet beats rock music, once again.
Or even "If I have failed to see further, it is because I am standing in a giant's footsteps."
Some people might exclaim that it is a genuine attempt by the government to shed and protect the US public from terrorists and if everyone followed the rules, sure it would. Terrorists follow the rules? No chance in hell,
Also, let's repeat once again that all the 9/11 terrorists were travelling on perfectly valid, non-faked passports. This wouldn't have helped one bit.
Now the only thing remaining is that the punishment is totally disproportionate compared to the crime.
Creationists have no problem with evolution on this level. What they have a problem with is that evolution can account for the development of different species, or that it somehow allows a puddle of goo somewhere in France to became human.
It is perfectly reasonable to be critical about that sort of thing, even though it's often more a statement about the ignorance about biology of those Creationists than about deficiencies of the theory, and well, everything isn't completely explained yet, that is of course true.
What's ridiculous though, is that those Creationists then suddenly claim that some "God" created all of this, a theory for which the evidence is completely absent and therefore the gaps are infinitely larger... At least Evolution tries to actually explain things and thus be a scientific theory at all.
Hence the difference. One is a physical phenomenon. One is a psychological phenomenon.
That's not much of a difference, unless you believe psychology is about matters of the "soul" and has nothing to do with physical reality.
Everything psychological is also physical. It may not be easy to find, but it all happens in the brain.
I don't agree. If someone asks you for help doing something that is obviously stupid, you should tell them that it is stupid and why, and not help them do it - that's not "helping" at all!
I agree that that's not the case here (saying e-bikes are always a bad idea is just wrong), but it is true of, for instance, some programming questions people ask, probably similar to the "OSS" stuff you're talking about.
If someone has variables named x0, x1, x2, x3, x4 etc and wants to do strange hacks with introspection and manipulation of namespace tables etc to change them all inside a loop, but has no idea how to do that - you don't explain how it could be done, you tell him "you don't want to do that, use a list" (I'm thinking of Python things). That is constructive.
SOA still means "start of authority" to me
That's nothing, in Dutch it's the acronym for sexually transmitted disease... I had never heard of this buzzword meaning either.
What benefit, exactly, do Linux users get from the proliferation of distros?
No-one gets any benefit directly from the fact that there are a large number of distros.
However, for each specific distro, there is apparently at least one person who likes that distro better than the alternatives. Which is enough.
If someone decides he wants to make AbominationDistro, which is existing distro X but with the meaning of /etc and /usr switched around, and he creates it - more power to him, that doesn't influence me at all - and he has the distro he wants.
Why is it that so many Slashdotters piss and moan when any kind of system is released by commercial industry that isn't 100% flawless?
You talk like this is something that helps a bit, but has a few flaws that can be fixed over time.
The truth is that this is a braindead idea that has loads of easy to see fundamental problems that do not have a solution (see the rest of the threads). It can never work. It's a stupid idea. It deserves to be pissed on, it is worse than nothing at all.
I think that is the primary problem with law makers etc introducing schemes like this one - they think they can work, and even if opponents tell them why it will never work, they think that can be fixed over time, whatever the problems are. Braindead, the lot of them.
In most countries, credit card authentication was used to ensure one had reached the legal age...
I think that's mostly a US thing, not a "most countries" thing. Over here in the Netherlands (and as far as I know, most of Europe), nowhere near enough people have a credit card, they're just not that popular.
But it could be that it's my country that is the exception, of course :-)
Schwartz also states that he thinks Linux is a good proving ground, but Solaris is better, even at running Linux applications. Sounds like a good strategy, if people buy it.
The problem with that strategy is that even if that's true now (I can't judge that), it's highly probable that it won't be true in, say, two years. Linux is just improving too fast.
Do you realize howlong the circumference of the Earth REALLY is? The space elevator's length, assuming that it was actually physically possible for it to come down in one full strand, would not go around even once.
Earth's equator is +- 40,000 km. Geosynchronous orbit is +- 36,000 km. However, that's where the center of mass of the elevator will be. It will have to be quite a bit longer than that. Let's look at simplistically and simply make it double as long, then the ribbon would be easily long enough.
Of course it won't all fall down, and it may be shorter and tethered to something large (like an asteroid) although it's probably easier just to make the ribbon longer, since then you can launch stuff away from Earth by letting it go from the tail end.
Artificial intelligence was born... Filtering spam.
In Greg Egan's _Permutation City_, spam filters and spam become ever more intelligent. Your spam filter runs the interactive video mail in a sandbox trying to detect whether it's spam, the spam tries to detect that it is in a sandbox or that it is talking to an AI construct, so that it can hide its commercial intent. Your filter tries to mimic you (and you review its reactions now and then, try to get its facial expressions ever more like yours, etc), the spammers try to get more information about you so they can try to fool your filter by making the spam look like on of your friends, etc.
This is an obvious arms race and in that book, AI and uploaded individuals etc exist - but the trick is to make your AI spam filters as good as possible without making them actually self-conscious, since using self-conscious AI software for spam filtering would be torture.
I rather liked that idea.
In short, using capitalism to fight pollution is fine, as long as the pollution becomes part of the equation.
Every polluter must pay for cleanup. Make the cost of removing pollution part of the cost of every product you use and buy. *Then* capitalism will have an effect, and people will choose to buy the cleaner things because they're cheaper.
If that doesn't happen, and producers get to pollute for free, capitalism has no mechanism to deal with it.
This is a big problem and it needs to be fixed.
But remember that Linux is different things to different people.
For those Linux demagogues, all they want is a system that is composed of Free software. Whether commercial, closed software will run on it is completely irrelevant to them because they don't want to use it anyway, and I don't think they deserve to be laughed at for that - they just have other interests. These ARE the people who caused most of it to happen in the first place.
Honestly, as a big Linux advocate, this is the biggest problem I see for the future of Linux.
So that depends on what you think the future of Linux must be. You know, Linux isn't like other software. If all commercial support for it was dropped, Linux would just continue to exist, and it would still be developed. Don't confuse the future of Linux with the future of RedHat, and so on.
Of course, for those people who would really want to use Linux to run commercial apps so they can use it as an alternative for Windows, or for Solaris or whatever, of course it is very important. For most of the people who hack on Linux stuff as a job, it is very important. For the kids who want to see Microsoft destroyed by Linux, it is important.
But whatever happens to commercial apps on Linux, it will just continue to exist anyway.
In the meantime, commercial vendors shouldn't have too much trouble supporting the latest versions of the main commercial distros.
1. Ok, I didn't notice the 'foobay@mail'. I treat every # prompt as if it were root. That was perhaps a mistake here, but as far as I'm concerned, that doesn't make me a luser, that makes the setup of that machine braindead.
2. What the machine does is irrelevant.
3. I have no idea what your point is when you explain what root's home directory is.
4. My main point is that you just don't run a command just to see whether it exists. Do 'which rutine' or something. And at least do 'man rutine' first, sheesh. Just trying a command to see whether it exists without knowing what it does is a very bad habit to have, the habit of a luser. Even if you were just making a joke post on Slashdot and knew perfectly well that it didn't exist, it's a bad habit.
For all those people who had a nice moderation war giving me funny/troll/insightful mods: how about 'offtopic', or just ignoring my simple remark? :-)
Luser, trying to run a command you don't know as root.
Lost children is a convenient explanation. I'm sure the park can't actually use the technology to see which bits of the park are most popular, where the best place to put concessions, what ride lengths need shortening to maximize throughput or anything like that. Oh no.
Yes, but all of those sound like a good thing to me as well. Do you actually disagree with those?
I agree, some people seem to overhype RFID privacy problems a bit.
There should be no problem with this, simply microwaving the children for a short period should be sufficient to disable the tag.