> You mentioned a boot loader and a kernel. It sounds like Linux to me unless you use Windows' piece of crap boot loader.
Windows has a boot loader and a kernel.
>Ctrl+S? Doesn't matter if the boot loader doesn't allow passing options to the kernel. It'll still work. Mac OS X included (trust me, I've tried it).
You can disable safe mode in Windows.
> Then again, even if you were talking about Windows XP/2000/NT,
Yes, I was. Win9x runs everything as root, so it doesn't matter about securing the boot sequence.
> You know, Safe Mode, log in as Administrator with no pass? It's pretty simple for any school or office administrator to neglect.
You don't even need safe mode to log in as administrator, Ctrl-Alt-Del will get you to a login where you can give Administrator as the username. The administrator will set a password on this account before permitting physical access.
> Also, you talked about BIOS loading orders.
No I didn't
> Any administrator in their right mind would make a floppy disk the first item to boot to.
Only if they don't grant physical access. If they grant physical access, they unlock the big hard box that they locked the computer in and reset the BIOS via jumpers on the mobo.
> The point is, while it's not always possible to gain root access remotely, it's pretty much always possible to gain root-access locally. I don't care if your case is made of titanium, I don't care if your case is boarded up with wood and the cables are nailed down.
Yes, but this is not made easier by granting physical access to the computer since the console can be locked down as hard as the network. You can always shoot the security guards and blow a hole in the building wall. I can grant you physical access to the computer and you still have to go through the same hoops as if I had not granted you *any* access.
> If someone has unrestricted physical access to your machine then you're already in serious trouble.
That's true, but what about if someone has *restricted* physical access. So they can bring their own data to work on but other than that only run the programs that you set with the privileges that you set. For starters, these USB drivers should be moved to user space. Indeed FUSE should help here for Linux.
This is not actually true. Most BIOS' can refuse to be configured without a password, so they go straight to boot loader. Then the bootloader is configured to prevent any choosing of options, etc and goes straight to kernel, which then goes to login.
There, boot but no root.
One should ensure that all cables cannot be removed. In fact, one should ensure that all cables go from one flush surface to another, in plain view of the user. so there is no way any sniffers can be added. And make sure that the computer itself is inside a really tough, immovable box attached fast to the underside of the desk so everything is contained. The powercable should go into a locked floorbox. The only way anybody can do anything is by breaking the peripherals or cutting through a live cable. Or exploiting bugs in the software.
Not sure though if USB hubs are safe. Somebody could attach a sniffer to a hub and I'm not sure if it could see traffic between host and device.
> With dozen of different distributions the Linux community is so diffuse that the power or significance of any specific entity is severally limited.
The author clearly missed the point of Open-Source. *The power or significance of any specific entity is severally[sic] limited* so the users have control. That is *why* people want to use Open-Source. Indeed there are few reasons apart from that one.
But if it had coloured balls moving rapidly so it couldn't count them, would it be able to comprehend a difference (if taught the vocabulary) between "None" and "Unknown"? That needs to be tested, otherwise this is just another example of bad science.
London has it's own county (Greater London), but also spreads out into five surrounding counties (the home counties). London encompasses many towns as well as the City of London. Oxfordshire is a long way away and there are vast tracts of beautiful countryside in between.
Sophos is on the far east side of Abingdon, very close to Radley village. Check out their website sophos.com and read about the company and it's headquarters - which are especially beautiful, with a very impressive entrance and a moat.
This is all just a big vodafone subsidy anyway. The government can't tax and subsidise them, so it will just introduce a compulsory "purchase the black box" law after the preordaned "success" of this trial. Ensures Britain stays a major player in the mobile communcations industry by indulging in blatant communism.
That wasn't a backup, that was the traffic all making progress at the speed limit. The only reason the traffic was more dense was that it had been going to fast and all congregated at the foremost region of their respective journeys. I bet there were vast regions in *front* with far less congestion than normal.
A report on a driver convicted for doing 30 in an adjacent 20mph zone due to the resolution of GPS being reduced with the outbreak of another war. A police spokesperson said "GPS, like biometric ID, is known to be infallible - that's why we use them to catch the terrorists and prostitute traffickers." The driver is due to be sentenced next week.
Addendum: If this were the case, it could be Tarantella's fault and could possibily open them up to a lawsuit from whatever is left of The SCO Group. Tarantella bosses either know The SCO Group is right, or they are quaking in their boots right now.
> TSCOG's second suit still did not claim any actual damage, only elaborated on their potential damages, but Novell totally ignored that in their motion. I don't know why...
Perhaps they *want* to go to trial? Perhaps they have some cast-iron evidence that TSCOG wouldn't have much of a chance to know about because Novell's UNIX business was sold to the company now known as Tarantella, who then sold it on to the company now known as The SCO Group. There is a large opportunity for discussions between Novell and Tarantella to be documented but Tarantella's documents to be treated without care as they were not of much use to them (carrying little benefit).
This is self consistent, but is of course only one possibility.
> none of those defintions are a quality of free software.
No, but the original point is battered to pieces by this:
>> Sense of "given without cost" is 1585, from notion of "free of cost."
That is "free of" => "without", so the assertion that "without cost" is the true and original meaning of the word free is wrong.
In fact, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (ninth edition - 1995) gives the first meaning as "not in bondage to or under the control of another; having personal rights and social and political liberty", the sixth sense is even better "unconstrained", only at sense number seven do we find "available without charge; costing nothing". Indeed, in all the adjective senses of the word (16 of the blighters), only one of them means without cost.
The post you replied to was modded down, so it went under my radar. It didn't appear to me that you were making that particular point, if it did I would not have made my post.
But one thing I am not is an idiot. If you can't cope with replies like that, quote the post you are replying to.
They obey robots.txt, so they are not accessing a computer system without authorisation. They are also not using open-proxies (another action recognised in law as hacking).
> Last time I checked 'computer brain' (cpu) cannot do multiple operations at the same time, unless you have dual core/cpus.
Yes it can, many have several ALUs and FPUs, and also more than one stage in their pipelines. The above hasn't been true since sometime in the nineties at the latest.
Section 2.1 (Simplifying Assumptions and Conventions Used in The Thesis) seems to make this thesis not-applicable to the theories of Eric Lerner - although IANAPP (I Am Not A Plasma Physicist).
In particular, it seems that the paper assumes the plasma is stable. Eric Lerner's proposed focus fusion device supposedly relies on an unstable plasma. So the paper seems to say nothing about the behaviour of this device.
The material at 2 billion K is only a few micrometres across, I gather. The only reason it is dangerous to enter the concrete chamber it is all in is due to high-energy x-rays and alpha radiation.
Slashdot Mirror
That's exactly what I meant :)
> You mentioned a boot loader and a kernel. It sounds like Linux to me unless you use Windows' piece of crap boot loader.
Windows has a boot loader and a kernel.
>Ctrl+S? Doesn't matter if the boot loader doesn't allow passing options to the kernel. It'll still work. Mac OS X included (trust me, I've tried it).
You can disable safe mode in Windows.
> Then again, even if you were talking about Windows XP/2000/NT,
Yes, I was. Win9x runs everything as root, so it doesn't matter about securing the boot sequence.
> You know, Safe Mode, log in as Administrator with no pass? It's pretty simple for any school or office administrator to neglect.
You don't even need safe mode to log in as administrator, Ctrl-Alt-Del will get you to a login where you can give Administrator as the username. The administrator will set a password on this account before permitting physical access.
> Also, you talked about BIOS loading orders.
No I didn't
> Any administrator in their right mind would make a floppy disk the first item to boot to.
Only if they don't grant physical access. If they grant physical access, they unlock the big hard box that they locked the computer in and reset the BIOS via jumpers on the mobo.
> The point is, while it's not always possible to gain root access remotely, it's pretty much always possible to gain root-access locally. I don't care if your case is made of titanium, I don't care if your case is boarded up with wood and the cables are nailed down.
Yes, but this is not made easier by granting physical access to the computer since the console can be locked down as hard as the network. You can always shoot the security guards and blow a hole in the building wall. I can grant you physical access to the computer and you still have to go through the same hoops as if I had not granted you *any* access.
> If someone has unrestricted physical access to your machine then you're already in serious trouble.
That's true, but what about if someone has *restricted* physical access. So they can bring their own data to work on but other than that only run the programs that you set with the privileges that you set. For starters, these USB drivers should be moved to user space. Indeed FUSE should help here for Linux.
This is not actually true. Most BIOS' can refuse to be configured without a password, so they go straight to boot loader. Then the bootloader is configured to prevent any choosing of options, etc and goes straight to kernel, which then goes to login.
There, boot but no root.
One should ensure that all cables cannot be removed. In fact, one should ensure that all cables go from one flush surface to another, in plain view of the user. so there is no way any sniffers can be added. And make sure that the computer itself is inside a really tough, immovable box attached fast to the underside of the desk so everything is contained. The powercable should go into a locked floorbox. The only way anybody can do anything is by breaking the peripherals or cutting through a live cable. Or exploiting bugs in the software.
Not sure though if USB hubs are safe. Somebody could attach a sniffer to a hub and I'm not sure if it could see traffic between host and device.
> With dozen of different distributions the Linux community is so diffuse that the power or significance of any specific entity is severally limited.
The author clearly missed the point of Open-Source. *The power or significance of any specific entity is severally[sic] limited* so the users have control. That is *why* people want to use Open-Source. Indeed there are few reasons apart from that one.
But if it had coloured balls moving rapidly so it couldn't count them, would it be able to comprehend a difference (if taught the vocabulary) between "None" and "Unknown"? That needs to be tested, otherwise this is just another example of bad science.
That means they can resolve features as small as two millimetres. Phew, I was worried they'd be able to see my willy.
London has it's own county (Greater London), but also spreads out into five surrounding counties (the home counties). London encompasses many towns as well as the City of London. Oxfordshire is a long way away and there are vast tracts of beautiful countryside in between.
Sophos is on the far east side of Abingdon, very close to Radley village. Check out their website sophos.com and read about the company and it's headquarters - which are especially beautiful, with a very impressive entrance and a moat.
This is all just a big vodafone subsidy anyway. The government can't tax and subsidise them, so it will just introduce a compulsory "purchase the black box" law after the preordaned "success" of this trial. Ensures Britain stays a major player in the mobile communcations industry by indulging in blatant communism.
That wasn't a backup, that was the traffic all making progress at the speed limit. The only reason the traffic was more dense was that it had been going to fast and all congregated at the foremost region of their respective journeys. I bet there were vast regions in *front* with far less congestion than normal.
A report on a driver convicted for doing 30 in an adjacent 20mph zone due to the resolution of GPS being reduced with the outbreak of another war. A police spokesperson said "GPS, like biometric ID, is known to be infallible - that's why we use them to catch the terrorists and prostitute traffickers." The driver is due to be sentenced next week.
> 1. Could the slander of title case end with the decision that SCO does not own UNIX?
It is possible, but I think the judge could find in favour of Novell without making any statement about the copyright.
> 2. If so, what happens to SCO's other lawsuits?
They sue Tarantella for everything they've got.
Addendum: If this were the case, it could be Tarantella's fault and could possibily open them up to a lawsuit from whatever is left of The SCO Group. Tarantella bosses either know The SCO Group is right, or they are quaking in their boots right now.
BTW: I am not a lawyer.
> TSCOG's second suit still did not claim any actual damage, only elaborated on their potential damages, but Novell totally ignored that in their motion. I don't know why...
Perhaps they *want* to go to trial? Perhaps they have some cast-iron evidence that TSCOG wouldn't have much of a chance to know about because Novell's UNIX business was sold to the company now known as Tarantella, who then sold it on to the company now known as The SCO Group. There is a large opportunity for discussions between Novell and Tarantella to be documented but Tarantella's documents to be treated without care as they were not of much use to them (carrying little benefit).
This is self consistent, but is of course only one possibility.
> none of those defintions are a quality of free software.
No, but the original point is battered to pieces by this:
>> Sense of "given without cost" is 1585, from notion of "free of cost."
That is "free of" => "without", so the assertion that "without cost" is the true and original meaning of the word free is wrong.
In fact, the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Current English (ninth edition - 1995) gives the first meaning as "not in bondage to or under the control of another; having personal rights and social and political liberty", the sixth sense is even better "unconstrained", only at sense number seven do we find "available without charge; costing nothing". Indeed, in all the adjective senses of the word (16 of the blighters), only one of them means without cost.
I was referring to google and yahoo, didn't quote properly, sorry.
> You are one stupid idiot.
The post you replied to was modded down, so it went under my radar. It didn't appear to me that you were making that particular point, if it did I would not have made my post.
But one thing I am not is an idiot. If you can't cope with replies like that, quote the post you are replying to.
They obey robots.txt, so they are not accessing a computer system without authorisation. They are also not using open-proxies (another action recognised in law as hacking).
How does it cope with sticking plasters (Band-aids for the Americans)?
> Last time I checked 'computer brain' (cpu) cannot do multiple operations at the same time, unless you have dual core/cpus.
Yes it can, many have several ALUs and FPUs, and also more than one stage in their pipelines. The above hasn't been true since sometime in the nineties at the latest.
Don't forget to gather entropy from meatspace.
In other news, the sky is blue...
Come on, it's not like this is neuroscience... Oh.
Section 2.1 (Simplifying Assumptions and Conventions Used in The Thesis) seems to make this thesis not-applicable to the theories of Eric Lerner - although IANAPP (I Am Not A Plasma Physicist).
In particular, it seems that the paper assumes the plasma is stable. Eric Lerner's proposed focus fusion device supposedly relies on an unstable plasma. So the paper seems to say nothing about the behaviour of this device.
The material at 2 billion K is only a few micrometres across, I gather. The only reason it is dangerous to enter the concrete chamber it is all in is due to high-energy x-rays and alpha radiation.
Hey, if you were standing right by it, you would have developed seven forms of cancer before the leak even happened.