And, as long as we're on the subject of odd bits in documentation...
The manual for glibc, in the section on abort, has:
*Future Change Warning:* Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program.
The source to the manual has a comment that says "Put in by rms. Don't remove."
Yes, it is a big deal. It's supposed to be a one-way hash; there should be no decoding EVER. For passwords, the best way to decrypt them is supposed to be brute-force, and since the keyspace is normally very large, that makes it impractical to break. This program actually reverses the hash, which is bad news for the hash, since there is a constant-time (so it seems) way to find any password.
Except that I rather doubt this will be used to take anyone to court. It's to be handled by schools, which as we all should know have no standard of "proof beyond a reasonable doubt"...
No vote, no voice. This would be the simplest way to enact real reform. If you are not allowed to vote in an election you cannot run adds in support, lobby, or donate cash to pol.
Hmm. And consider when black people weren't allowed to vote. If they hadn't been able to lobby either, do you think they'd be able to vote today?
Not all those whose interests deserve consideration are legal voters.
Could it? I don't think a domain registrar employs all that many people. Besides, I rather doubt DotTV is going to make their investment back, so this would actually be a better deal for Tuvalu than if they had kept it home-owned.
Evolution violates the second law of thermodynamics because it claims that intelligent, higher-ordered structures came into being from structures with less order. This obviously violates the 2LOT.
The Second Law applies only to closed systems. Therefore, for more-ordered structures to proceed from less-ordered violates the Second Law only if no additional disorder was created in the process. But I don't think anyone claims that. A highly ordered creature like a mammal produces a lot of waste products, which are highly disordered and must be a part of the system.
It is perfectly possible for entropy to decrease locally, as long as it increases globally. Consider this example: An iron ore deposit is disordered. A steel skyscraper is highly ordered. Nevertheless, it is possible to produce one from the other. In the process, additional disorder is created in the form of wastes, it just isn't intermingled with the steel anymore.
As far as your comment about Creation violating the laws of thermodynamics, don't make me laugh. If you honestly think that God is constrained by these laws, you are denser than a fence post. He can do whatever he wants. He's God.
Of course. But if God can violate them, then they aren't really laws. A law by definition is completely free of violation. And your statement "Evolution violates the Second Law, therefore evolution is impossible" is valid only if the Second Law is never violated. So your arguments here contradict each other; you cannot validly argue both positions at once. Choose one.
None of them explain how evolution violates the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
Oh. Can you? I'd be interested to see this.
Incidentally, creation violates the First and Second laws:
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
So much for conservation of energy (First Law).
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
Hmm, order out of disorder. Entropy seems to have decreased. There goes the Second Law.
Note that I'm not claiming that creation is wrong, only that it seems to be inconsistent with the laws of physics. So it doesn't seem valid for you to argue your position on the basis of both.
Did you read the peacefire page? Apparently the program sends back not only the information you type in its registration dialog, but also the registration information for Windows itself.
Now admittedly you could have made that bogus as well, but presumably you weren't expecting it to be used like that. And the Windows install might have been far back in the depths of time. Or something.
I don't think the intent of that statement was that calculus is useless for computer science, just that other math is important too.
Really, though, I think your argument speaks on the usual education debate between "depth" and "breadth"; i.e. how much you know in a specific subject vs. how much you know in a variety of fields. One is important to be skilled in your field; the other is important to be a well-rounded educated person.
I'm at Harvey Mudd College, a science/engineering school. Even though I'm a probable math or CS major, I still have to take such "irrelevant" classes as chemistry, biology, and quite a lot of humanities and social science. Studying acid-base equilibria will probably not help me in any job I'm likely to hold in the future, but it will help make me a well-rounded scientist. And such classes as music theory, literature or economics will spread the learning around even more. Let's face it -- it's good to know stuff, all kinds of stuff. Who wants to be a famous computer scientist but have no idea what a sonata is, or what For Whom The Bell Tolls is about, or why the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates?
On a specific note, your comment about antiderivatives calls for some response. Of course every function has an antiderivative, but not necessarily one that can be expressed in closed form. A classic example is e^(x^2). Try to integrate it by elementary methods and you will find that you cannot. But plug it into Maple and you get -1/2*I*sqrt(Pi)*erf(I*x), which is all very well until you look up the definition of erf, and find that it's defined in part as the antiderivative of e^(x^2)! So it's really somewhat of a circular argument.
As for your desire for a class to "correctly" find the answers to these things... with code.. -- it sounds like you're talking about a course in computer algebra systems, like Maple. I think this would normally be a graduate-level course, and would certainly require a lot more of the calculus and "goofy rules" that you despise so much. Like it or not, math is the foundation of quite a lot of science, and if your math background is poor, you won't be much of a scientist.
All of which are legitmately very useful for administration, debugging, security testing, etc. But yes, they can be used maliciously.
Oh, and every report of every security hole, and especially the exploits. Damn, the writeup of the new buffer overflow in sendmail (or whatever) could be used maliciously, guess it would be illegal to send it to bugtraq. Of course, it also won't be fixed, thus making things *less* secure...
I'm just curious, did you ever inform the LinuxOne sales drone that you were recording that conversation? If not, you could get into some serious, serious trouble.
You will note that nowhere in the posting does the author say anything about having recorded the conversation. It is quite possible he wrote down or typed the conversation as it took place. This would be perfectly legal. Of course, it also gives no assurance that the conversation actually took place as he says; we must take his word for it. That's the whole point.
It may be that the page had some mention of recording, in which case this would not apply. However, it now reads in its entirety "This page is not here yet" (shades of Transmeta) so I don't know.
Remember President Nixon?
This, of course, is an entirely different case. I don't believe he was ever accused of illegal taping. In fact, according to various Tom Clancy novels (always a reliable source:), it is still the case that every telephone call in and out of Washington DC is recorded by the government. (The tapes, however, are inadmissible in court as they are made without a warrant.)
Can anyone tell me about the potential security issues that arise once one is literally broadcasting their information? Is (for example) SSH just as secure over the airwaves as through an ethernet medium?
Why not? After all, the entire purpose of SSH is to provide secure communications over an insecure channel. You assume the bad guy is listening on the network, and make it secure anyway. With wireless, it's just a bit easier for that to actually be the case.
For normal unencrypted transmissions, though, it may be an issue as physical security is no longer sufficient to protect the network (you can't just lock the door). So then you may be vulnerable to eavesdroppers, spoofing, etc. If you're paranoid, you could tunnel everything else over ssh, which will avoid all that.
If I was a 'minority' I would take great offense to this. In an effort to attract minorities, they are foregoing tests which measure the intelligence of a person, in favor of 'building stuff with blocks'?
I wonder. Exactly who are you to say that SATs and such do in fact accurately measure one's intelligence, while this test does not? Keep in mind that at least the first part is widely disputed as it is.
And did you read the article? The Lego test was only one part of the complete battery. I would have liked to see details on the other parts (though what they did publish -- public speaking and the like -- seems perfectly reasonable). Of course, the Lego bit does make the best headlines, both on the Denver Post and here at Slashdot, although it's by no means the most significant part.
Just curious, but how do you know? For the NSA, and for something of this magnitude, I wouldn't even expect them to use Unix. I'd think of something more mainframe-like, and more paranoidally secure. (No, I'm not claiming Unix is very insecure, but there is always a tradeoff between security and usability, and in this case I'd suspect NSA wants to be closer to the "security" end of the spectrum than Unix can normally be.)
I've heard it attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. This page (which coincidentally belongs to a class at a neighboring college) gives it as: Reporter: What do you think of Western Civilization? Gandhi: Why, I think it might be a very good idea.
Slashdot Mirror
The FSF boycott of Apple was dropped in 1995. See http://www.gnu.org/bulletins/bull18. html#TOC13
The manual for glibc, in the section on abort, has:
*Future Change Warning:* Proposed Federal censorship regulations may prohibit us from giving you information about the possibility of calling this function. We would be required to say that this is not an acceptable way of terminating a program.
The source to the manual has a comment that says "Put in by rms. Don't remove."
What does this mean?
Yes, it is a big deal. It's supposed to be a one-way hash; there should be no decoding EVER. For passwords, the best way to decrypt them is supposed to be brute-force, and since the keyspace is normally very large, that makes it impractical to break. This program actually reverses the hash, which is bad news for the hash, since there is a constant-time (so it seems) way to find any password.
Except that I rather doubt this will be used to take anyone to court. It's to be handled by schools, which as we all should know have no standard of "proof beyond a reasonable doubt"...
"Microsoft's latest weapon: bland soap opera comic strip drama. How can the Justice Department stand up to this?"
Make mental note, avoid that AC's hairstylist...
(See this picture if in doubt.)
Hmm. And consider when black people weren't allowed to vote. If they hadn't been able to lobby either, do you think they'd be able to vote today?
Not all those whose interests deserve consideration are legal voters.
# mknod hda 3 1 # mount ./hda /foo # chroot /bin/sh /foo
Could it? I don't think a domain registrar employs all that many people. Besides, I rather doubt DotTV is going to make their investment back, so this would actually be a better deal for Tuvalu than if they had kept it home-owned.
The Second Law applies only to closed systems. Therefore, for more-ordered structures to proceed from less-ordered violates the Second Law only if no additional disorder was created in the process. But I don't think anyone claims that. A highly ordered creature like a mammal produces a lot of waste products, which are highly disordered and must be a part of the system.
It is perfectly possible for entropy to decrease locally, as long as it increases globally. Consider this example: An iron ore deposit is disordered. A steel skyscraper is highly ordered. Nevertheless, it is possible to produce one from the other. In the process, additional disorder is created in the form of wastes, it just isn't intermingled with the steel anymore.
As far as your comment about Creation violating the laws of thermodynamics, don't make me laugh. If you honestly think that God is constrained by these laws, you are denser than a fence post. He can do whatever he wants. He's God.
Of course. But if God can violate them, then they aren't really laws. A law by definition is completely free of violation. And your statement "Evolution violates the Second Law, therefore evolution is impossible" is valid only if the Second Law is never violated. So your arguments here contradict each other; you cannot validly argue both positions at once. Choose one.
And may we dispense with the ad hominem attacks?
Oh. Can you? I'd be interested to see this.
Incidentally, creation violates the First and Second laws:
And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
So much for conservation of energy (First Law).
And God said, Let the waters under the heaven be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
Hmm, order out of disorder. Entropy seems to have decreased. There goes the Second Law.
Note that I'm not claiming that creation is wrong, only that it seems to be inconsistent with the laws of physics. So it doesn't seem valid for you to argue your position on the basis of both.
Have a nice day!
Now admittedly you could have made that bogus as well, but presumably you weren't expecting it to be used like that. And the Windows install might have been far back in the depths of time. Or something.
Hmm... IMHO karma is a fairly central part of the moderation system. If you had no logins it would be impossible to keep track of karma...
Enjoy.
Really, though, I think your argument speaks on the usual education debate between "depth" and "breadth"; i.e. how much you know in a specific subject vs. how much you know in a variety of fields. One is important to be skilled in your field; the other is important to be a well-rounded educated person.
I'm at Harvey Mudd College, a science/engineering school. Even though I'm a probable math or CS major, I still have to take such "irrelevant" classes as chemistry, biology, and quite a lot of humanities and social science. Studying acid-base equilibria will probably not help me in any job I'm likely to hold in the future, but it will help make me a well-rounded scientist. And such classes as music theory, literature or economics will spread the learning around even more. Let's face it -- it's good to know stuff, all kinds of stuff. Who wants to be a famous computer scientist but have no idea what a sonata is, or what For Whom The Bell Tolls is about, or why the Federal Reserve is raising interest rates?
On a specific note, your comment about antiderivatives calls for some response. Of course every function has an antiderivative, but not necessarily one that can be expressed in closed form. A classic example is e^(x^2). Try to integrate it by elementary methods and you will find that you cannot. But plug it into Maple and you get -1/2*I*sqrt(Pi)*erf(I*x), which is all very well until you look up the definition of erf, and find that it's defined in part as the antiderivative of e^(x^2)! So it's really somewhat of a circular argument.
As for your desire for a class to "correctly" find the answers to these things... with code.. -- it sounds like you're talking about a course in computer algebra systems, like Maple. I think this would normally be a graduate-level course, and would certainly require a lot more of the calculus and "goofy rules" that you despise so much. Like it or not, math is the foundation of quite a lot of science, and if your math background is poor, you won't be much of a scientist.
List of Jargon Resources Mirror Sites USA:
Australia:
- http://ecco.bsee.swin.edu.au/text/jargon/
- http://ecco.bsee.swin.edu.au/text/jargon
Austria: http://www.snafu.priv.at/jargon/Czechoslovakia: ttp://www.instinct.org/texts/jargon-file/
Finland: http://zone.pspt.fi/jargon/
Germany:
Gret Britain: http://jargon.strugglers.net
Greece: http://www.hack.gr/jargon
Italy: http://beatles.cselt.stet.it/mirrors/jargon
Japan: http://www.vacia.is.tohoku.ac.jp/jargon/
Norway: http://www.pvv.ntnu.no/misc/jargon/ Poland: http://www.uci.agh.edu.pl/jargon/
Spain: http://www.undersec.com/jargon
Sweden: http://ftp.sunet.se/jargon/
U.K.:
But it sounds much cooler!
That's a rather scary thought. Say goodbye to:
* ping -f
* saint
* tcpdump
* crashme
* crack
* nmap
All of which are legitmately very useful for administration, debugging, security testing, etc. But yes, they can be used maliciously.
Oh, and every report of every security hole, and especially the exploits. Damn, the writeup of the new buffer overflow in sendmail (or whatever) could be used maliciously, guess it would be illegal to send it to bugtraq. Of course, it also won't be fixed, thus making things *less* secure...
I really hope you're wrong.
I've see "h4x0r" suggested... after all, it's what they call themselves. And I think the mere term is appropriately derogatory...
You will note that nowhere in the posting does the author say anything about having recorded the conversation. It is quite possible he wrote down or typed the conversation as it took place. This would be perfectly legal. Of course, it also gives no assurance that the conversation actually took place as he says; we must take his word for it. That's the whole point.
It may be that the page had some mention of recording, in which case this would not apply. However, it now reads in its entirety "This page is not here yet" (shades of Transmeta) so I don't know.
Remember President Nixon?
This, of course, is an entirely different case. I don't believe he was ever accused of illegal taping. In fact, according to various Tom Clancy novels (always a reliable source :), it is still the case that every telephone call in and out of Washington DC is recorded by the government. (The tapes, however, are inadmissible in court as they are made without a warrant.)
IANAL
Why not? After all, the entire purpose of SSH is to provide secure communications over an insecure channel. You assume the bad guy is listening on the network, and make it secure anyway. With wireless, it's just a bit easier for that to actually be the case.
For normal unencrypted transmissions, though, it may be an issue as physical security is no longer sufficient to protect the network (you can't just lock the door). So then you may be vulnerable to eavesdroppers, spoofing, etc. If you're paranoid, you could tunnel everything else over ssh, which will avoid all that.
I wonder. Exactly who are you to say that SATs and such do in fact accurately measure one's intelligence, while this test does not? Keep in mind that at least the first part is widely disputed as it is.
And did you read the article? The Lego test was only one part of the complete battery. I would have liked to see details on the other parts (though what they did publish -- public speaking and the like -- seems perfectly reasonable). Of course, the Lego bit does make the best headlines, both on the Denver Post and here at Slashdot, although it's by no means the most significant part.
Hmm, emmett, evidently the smiley you thought was obviously implied wasn't...
Just curious, but how do you know? For the NSA, and for something of this magnitude, I wouldn't even expect them to use Unix. I'd think of something more mainframe-like, and more paranoidally secure. (No, I'm not claiming Unix is very insecure, but there is always a tradeoff between security and usability, and in this case I'd suspect NSA wants to be closer to the "security" end of the spectrum than Unix can normally be.)
I've heard it attributed to Mahatma Gandhi. This page (which coincidentally belongs to a class at a neighboring college) gives it as: Reporter: What do you think of Western Civilization? Gandhi: Why, I think it might be a very good idea.