Hypocrites.. that's what I think those that support gay marriage are. They don't give a flip about equality, they only want to force their moral beliefs on those that disagree, and enable a very small group of select people to get benefits. If they truly wanted equality, they would fight to ELIMINATE all benefits tied to being married. Tax laws could be changed to allow for household incomes to be used. Social Security survivor-ship benefits could be simply modified to allow for one person to receive them, and set several rules (such as living together for a number of years while working and paying social security taxes). D
Well said. While I don't agree with everything you had to say, I agree with the sentiment almost entirely.
What we are seeing is a repetition of the pathologies that have driven witch hunts in the past. I think it's amazing how much power the press has given such a tiny percentage of the population to demand that they be obeyed lest bad things befall the dissenters. It's astounding to watch it in action, and mirrors many dark times in the history of our civilizations.
But it's not likely..... they can't be transmitting on cell phone frequencies from their station anyways, as the transmission outside frequencies within their operating privileges would be a FCC violation that could get their station licenses revoked.
Yup. So they couldn't do so openly. These days, there are plenty of ways to do so anonymously. Given some of the cool tools out there in the Ham world for connecting radios, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find an Elmer who could do some interesting things with cell phones if they wanted to.
Yeah, I'm a ham, but I'd never put my callsign on/.
A local police department in Swansea, Massachusetts, has paid cybercrooks behind the CryptoLocker ransomware attack to decrypt files locked up by the malware on police computer systems, according to local press reports.
The police department spokesman claimed that the infection had been mopped up and their systems secured, with no personal information stolen.
I'm sorry, you see a difference between Socialism and socialism slow? Because I don't. The two parties are more closely aligned than either of them admit. To the point where I can't tell the difference sometimes. GWB was worse than BHO, except on the things BHO is worse on, than GWB. In both cases, we haven't stopped the "worse" of either, and haven't held on to the "good" side of either.
Agreed. Republicans want to take away certain aspects of your liberty. Democrats want to take others. Neither has any desire whatsoever to actually increase liberty, because that would mean they would lose that much more control over your lives.
Both parties are two sides of the same coin.
We should just start referring to the 'two' political parties in America as the Janus party.
One of the points of a SD (or SDEX) card is that you can read it very simple in an other device. By formtitting it it in JFFS2 or YAFFS you cannot read/exchange the card in windows. Inconvinent, but technically possible.
Shouldn't that be considered a feature. Who wants their data to be infected by a windows device? I've formatted most of my sd cards that are not used in a camera or similar device to ext2 or ext3. To most ms-windows users, it would look like a bad card. I have no problem at all with that.
I wish this was a general practice among book publishers. Buy the dead tree version, and on the inside is a card one can scratch off, scan a QR code, and download the eBook version. Best of both worlds -- a paper copy for the bookshelf, and a copy on the E-reader.
Baen Publishing does essentially with some of their books. A couple of years ago, I bought the hardback of a book from their '1632' series, and it came with a CD that contained every other book from the series, plus some others. All with no DRM. It's one of the things that makes me a loyal customer. I reward companies that don't treat me like a potential thief.
I've tried lots of different mp3 players under Linux, but always eventually come back to rhythmbox. I've only got 18k songs or so, so I don't know how it handles larger loads. The thing that I like more than anything else, is how easy the search facility is to use. I mostly run it on a random walk, but if I want something specific, it is easy to find exactly what I want, either by artist, title, or album.
My biggest problem is getting it to exclude certain subdirectories for cataloguing.
As a former Marine, I have some experience with hand grenades, and I can assure you that every case of grenades comes with an entire booklet of warnings, written in dense legalese.
Once the legalese is stripped away it all boils down to "Once you pull the pin, Mr. Hand Grenade is not your friend!"
If the goal is merely to use words rather than digits, you can easily encode longitude and latitude to approximately 10x5m resolution (22 bits each) using four words from a standard 2048-word dictionary, deterministically, and without relying on a third-party database. That should be more than enough to identify a particular building or plot of land.
I think cameras on all cops will be awesome. But it needs to not be able to be turned off. And if it "malfunctions" there needs to be a look into what the cop was doing at that time. Because they turn off their cameras when its convenient for them. After all... why record yourself taking a bribe?
What would be even more effective is for juries to vote to acquit any time the camera "malfunctions", or the judge just throw the case out based on the 'malfunction'. I know that if I'm on a jury, and video evidence is 'missing', I sure as hell am not going to believe a word the cop says.
~:) bc
bc 1.06.95
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
4427007044615115050034854648525685871587 / 1409160108506276783085718440252375099653
3
^D
I'd like to point out that there is another Pobox out there, which is a US company (pobox.com), that is apparently not affiliated with this British "Pobox" company.
I'm not affiliated with either company. I've used pobox.com for email forwarding for about 17 years though, which is one thing that made me investigate this, as the UK company's claim of having used 'python' for 17 years seemed to me like about how long the US company had been around.
But what professional-quality ebooks are lawfully distributed DRM-free? I can see pre-1923 works, Baen Books, works of Cory Doctorow and a few other authors who have embraced Creative Commons, and what else?
Most Project Gurenberg etexts/ebooks are every bit as good as "commercial" ebooks. As a matter of fact they tend to have less typos and other artifacts of that nature. Sometimes the quality of "professional-quality ebooks" is often crap.
"ID for voters" is common-sense, you want to ensure voters are eligible. OTOH attaching the ID to a particular vote destroys the secret part in what is supposed to be a secret ballot.
I don't believe that is what the OP was talking about. The ID is to be able to get the ballot. The ID# is not attached to the ballot at that point.The ballot itself is still secret, but we've validated that the person casting it is eligible to do so.
The inked finger (as used in Iraq) is another good way to ensure people don't vote more than once, but stained fingers do nothing to confirm their eligibility to vote.
You want depressing fantasy? I nominate the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The main character is a leper. Start with that, and it goes downhill from there. I know more about leprosy after forcing myself to finish the series than I ever wanted to know.
Except it does nothing about that. Physical access still == owned unless you lock the bios/uefi and physically lock the machine. Otherwise the attacker can either take out the HDD or boot up a Linux live CD or other HDD by adding a new key. That's no different from the current state of affairs where we change the boot order, lock down the bios and lock the machine. That means the purpose for Secure Boot has to be something else... and easy money is on market dominance (even just joe-user home market dominance).
It's also going to put an end to people being able to use Linux "Live" CDs as emergency recovery tools. I know of several instances where the only way to get data of a crapped out windows install was to boot off a live disk, then copy stuff to USB. Looks like going forward, if your windows install craps out, as it is wont to do more so than any other system I've seen, you're SOL unless you have backups.
That would be a good thing, but people are generally too stupid to have current backups.
I don't know much about OSX, but I know a clean install of Windows 7 takes a bit longer than a clean install of Ubuntu, mostly because of the extra rebooting.
I'd say it takes a heck of a lot longer, if you factor in all the stuff you get with Linux that you don't get with MS-Windows. How long is it going to take you to install all that extra software that you get for free with Ubuntu, or just about any other Linux distribution? Did your version of MS-Windows even come with an http, ssh, and (anonymous) ftp server? Some people might not want these, but I do, and it just comes with Linux. How about word processor(s), spreadsheet program(s), html editors, multiple email clients, a password management program, multiple browsers, image editors, batch image processors, multiple compilers, and an actual shell that allows you to do real work in if you're so inclined? All this stuff and much more is installable all at once with Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, or whatever it is that you like to use, yet for the most part, they are separate installs in the MS-Windows environment, which in addition to being a serious pain in the ass, is very time consuming.
If your time is worth nothing, run MS-windows, and deal with all the separate programs, whose updates are all also tracked, downloaded and managed separately as well. Not to mention the time you'll waste dealing with various kinds of malware detection software.
Your comments about Baen Publishing were very similar to what I was going to say, however I'd also like to point out that Baen also includes CD-ROM disks in some of their novels as well. For instance, I bought one of the 1632 novels in hardback. (The Baltic War I think), and it contained a CD that had the entire series on it. Printed right there on the label it said that you are free to copy and distribute the disk as long as you don't charge for it. Baen rocks, and really gets it. I've picked up several of these disks when I've purchased the hardbacks and have actually made a disk of my own that I keep as an archive of all their stuff. I can't tell you how many people I've introduced to a couple of their series' because all I have to do is point to their website and folks can download the first couple of books of a series and see if they like it.
I know for a fact that because they do not treat their customers as potential thieves, they have made sales they would not otherwise made.
If copyright ever was an "agreement", it has been violated, over and over again, by the other side. Not just with the laws above, but by interminable copyright extension and the re-copyrighting of out-of-copyright works. In fact, however, it's not an agreement at all; it's just an exercise of power. There's no dishonor in violating it.
Worth repeating.
Big Media has bought enough congresscritters to make sure that copyright terms will eventually be the heat-death of the universe minus one day, so as to fall under the concept of "limited time" as specified in the constitution. I long ago lost all respect for copyright and the organizations that push it well beyond its intended terms. There is no logical reason why the entire beatles catalog should not currently exist in the public domain, which is its rightful place.
The only good news I see on the horizon is that a lot of youger folk have a similar lack of faith in copyright or the legislooters who seem to think perpetual copyright is beneficial to society.
The supreme Court of the U.S. recently made (IMO) a pretty bad ruling regarding the extension of copyright to works previously in the public domain. Slashdotters might be interested in reading the Opinion. I think the dissent is much better argued.
"In Windows Server 8, users can transition between Server Core and Server Graphical Shell at any time, with a single command and a single reboot."
You're supposed to be thankful that it doesn't take 3 or 4 reboots just to start the Gui.
Don't they EVER learn? It took them literally years to be able to do application and driver installs without required endless reboots. Not poor windows admins need to reboot just to start the GUI?? Why on earth can't MS come up with the equivalent of "xinit" to kick off the GUI?? This is 1980s level functionality FFS!
Indeed. It's just another example of how poorly designed MS-windows is from the ground up.
Slashdot Mirror
My Dad won't read Wikipedia either. He gets his information from Fox News.
Wikipedia is useless for anything political unless you happen to agree with the political slant of the article.
Want information about metalurgy, great. Wikipedia rocks for that.
Want formation about anything where there is political finger pointing? Not so much.
Hypocrites .. that's what I think those that support gay marriage are. They don't give a flip about equality, they only want to force their moral beliefs on those that disagree, and enable a very small group of select people to get benefits. If they truly wanted equality, they would fight to ELIMINATE all benefits tied to being married. Tax laws could be changed to allow for household incomes to be used. Social Security survivor-ship benefits could be simply modified to allow for one person to receive them, and set several rules (such as living together for a number of years while working and paying social security taxes). D
Well said. While I don't agree with everything you had to say, I agree with the sentiment almost entirely.
What we are seeing is a repetition of the pathologies that have driven witch hunts in the past. I think it's amazing how much power the press has given such a tiny percentage of the population to demand that they be obeyed lest bad things befall the dissenters. It's astounding to watch it in action, and mirrors many dark times in the history of our civilizations.
But it's not likely..... they can't be transmitting on cell phone frequencies from their station anyways, as the transmission outside frequencies within their operating privileges would be a FCC violation that could get their station licenses revoked.
Yup. So they couldn't do so openly. These days, there are plenty of ways to do so anonymously. Given some of the cool tools out there in the Ham world for connecting radios, I wouldn't be at all surprised to find an Elmer who could do some interesting things with cell phones if they wanted to.
Yeah, I'm a ham, but I'd never put my callsign on /.
So, you made a donation to organized crime. How charitable.
As did this police department ...
US local police department pays CryptoLocker ransom
=snip=
A local police department in Swansea, Massachusetts, has paid cybercrooks behind the CryptoLocker ransomware attack to decrypt files locked up by the malware on police computer systems, according to local press reports.
The police department spokesman claimed that the infection had been mopped up and their systems secured, with no personal information stolen.
=end snip=
I'm sorry, you see a difference between Socialism and socialism slow? Because I don't. The two parties are more closely aligned than either of them admit. To the point where I can't tell the difference sometimes. GWB was worse than BHO, except on the things BHO is worse on, than GWB. In both cases, we haven't stopped the "worse" of either, and haven't held on to the "good" side of either.
Agreed. Republicans want to take away certain aspects of your liberty. Democrats want to take others. Neither has any desire whatsoever to actually increase liberty, because that would mean they would lose that much more control over your lives.
Both parties are two sides of the same coin.
We should just start referring to the 'two' political parties in America as the Janus party.
One of the points of a SD (or SDEX) card is that you can read it very simple in an other device. By formtitting it it in JFFS2 or YAFFS you cannot read/exchange the card in windows. Inconvinent, but technically possible.
Shouldn't that be considered a feature. Who wants their data to be infected by a windows device? I've formatted most of my sd cards that are not used in a camera or similar device to ext2 or ext3. To most ms-windows users, it would look like a bad card. I have no problem at all with that.
I wish this was a general practice among book publishers. Buy the dead tree version, and on the inside is a card one can scratch off, scan a QR code, and download the eBook version. Best of both worlds -- a paper copy for the bookshelf, and a copy on the E-reader.
Baen Publishing does essentially with some of their books. A couple of years ago, I bought the hardback of a book from their '1632' series, and it came with a CD that contained every other book from the series, plus some others. All with no DRM. It's one of the things that makes me a loyal customer. I reward companies that don't treat me like a potential thief.
I've tried lots of different mp3 players under Linux, but always eventually come back to rhythmbox. I've only got 18k songs or so, so I don't know how it handles larger loads. The thing that I like more than anything else, is how easy the search facility is to use. I mostly run it on a random walk, but if I want something specific, it is easy to find exactly what I want, either by artist, title, or album.
My biggest problem is getting it to exclude certain subdirectories for cataloguing.
As a former Marine, I have some experience with hand grenades, and I can assure you that every case of grenades comes with an entire booklet of warnings, written in dense legalese.
Once the legalese is stripped away it all boils down to "Once you pull the pin, Mr. Hand Grenade is not your friend!"
If the goal is merely to use words rather than digits, you can easily encode longitude and latitude to approximately 10x5m resolution (22 bits each) using four words from a standard 2048-word dictionary, deterministically, and without relying on a third-party database. That should be more than enough to identify a particular building or plot of land.
This would actually be useful.
Code that up and get back to us.
I'll bet it could be done in a shell script.
I think cameras on all cops will be awesome. But it needs to not be able to be turned off. And if it "malfunctions" there needs to be a look into what the cop was doing at that time. Because they turn off their cameras when its convenient for them. After all... why record yourself taking a bribe?
What would be even more effective is for juries to vote to acquit any time the camera "malfunctions", or the judge just throw the case out based on the 'malfunction'. I know that if I'm on a jury, and video evidence is 'missing', I sure as hell am not going to believe a word the cop says.
~ :) bc
bc 1.06.95
Copyright 1991-1994, 1997, 1998, 2000, 2004, 2006 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY.
For details type `warranty'.
4427007044615115050034854648525685871587 / 1409160108506276783085718440252375099653
3
^D
See, it really is 3!
I'd like to point out that there is another Pobox out there, which is a US company (pobox.com), that is apparently not affiliated with this British "Pobox" company.
From their blog:
=snip=
We support @ThePSF in their fight for Python trademarks in the EU. @pobox is *not* http://pobox.co.uk. Learn more: http://pyfound.blogspot.nl/2013/02/python-trademark-at-risk-in-europe-we.htmlâ¦
=end snip=
I'm not affiliated with either company. I've used pobox.com for email forwarding for about 17 years though, which is one thing that made me investigate this, as the UK company's claim of having used 'python' for 17 years seemed to me like about how long the US company had been around.
But what professional-quality ebooks are lawfully distributed DRM-free? I can see pre-1923 works, Baen Books, works of Cory Doctorow and a few other authors who have embraced Creative Commons, and what else?
Most Project Gurenberg etexts/ebooks are every bit as good as "commercial" ebooks. As a matter of fact they tend to have less typos and other artifacts of that nature. Sometimes the quality of "professional-quality ebooks" is often crap.
every once in a blue moon you need Windows.
I thought that was what VMs were for.
"ID for voters" is common-sense, you want to ensure voters are eligible. OTOH attaching the ID to a particular vote destroys the secret part in what is supposed to be a secret ballot.
I don't believe that is what the OP was talking about. The ID is to be able to get the ballot. The ID# is not attached to the ballot at that point.The ballot itself is still secret, but we've validated that the person casting it is eligible to do so.
The inked finger (as used in Iraq) is another good way to ensure people don't vote more than once, but stained fingers do nothing to confirm their eligibility to vote.
Personally, I'm all for that as well.
You want depressing fantasy? I nominate the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The main character is a leper. Start with that, and it goes downhill from there. I know more about leprosy after forcing myself to finish the series than I ever wanted to know.
Except it does nothing about that. Physical access still == owned unless you lock the bios/uefi and physically lock the machine. Otherwise the attacker can either take out the HDD or boot up a Linux live CD or other HDD by adding a new key. That's no different from the current state of affairs where we change the boot order, lock down the bios and lock the machine. That means the purpose for Secure Boot has to be something else... and easy money is on market dominance (even just joe-user home market dominance).
It's also going to put an end to people being able to use Linux "Live" CDs as emergency recovery tools. I know of several instances where the only way to get data of a crapped out windows install was to boot off a live disk, then copy stuff to USB. Looks like going forward, if your windows install craps out, as it is wont to do more so than any other system I've seen, you're SOL unless you have backups.
That would be a good thing, but people are generally too stupid to have current backups.
Our Sharepoint project was begat due to the fact that it was "free".
Sharepoint is where perfectly good information goes to die.
I don't know much about OSX, but I know a clean install of Windows 7 takes a bit longer than a clean install of Ubuntu, mostly because of the extra rebooting.
I'd say it takes a heck of a lot longer, if you factor in all the stuff you get with Linux that you don't get with MS-Windows. How long is it going to take you to install all that extra software that you get for free with Ubuntu, or just about any other Linux distribution? Did your version of MS-Windows even come with an http, ssh, and (anonymous) ftp server? Some people might not want these, but I do, and it just comes with Linux. How about word processor(s), spreadsheet program(s), html editors, multiple email clients, a password management program, multiple browsers, image editors, batch image processors, multiple compilers, and an actual shell that allows you to do real work in if you're so inclined? All this stuff and much more is installable all at once with Fedora, Ubuntu, Mint, or whatever it is that you like to use, yet for the most part, they are separate installs in the MS-Windows environment, which in addition to being a serious pain in the ass, is very time consuming.
If your time is worth nothing, run MS-windows, and deal with all the separate programs, whose updates are all also tracked, downloaded and managed separately as well. Not to mention the time you'll waste dealing with various kinds of malware detection software.
Your comments about Baen Publishing were very similar to what I was going to say, however I'd also like to point out that Baen also includes CD-ROM disks in some of their novels as well. For instance, I bought one of the 1632 novels in hardback. (The Baltic War I think), and it contained a CD that had the entire series on it. Printed right there on the label it said that you are free to copy and distribute the disk as long as you don't charge for it. Baen rocks, and really gets it. I've picked up several of these disks when I've purchased the hardbacks and have actually made a disk of my own that I keep as an archive of all their stuff. I can't tell you how many people I've introduced to a couple of their series' because all I have to do is point to their website and folks can download the first couple of books of a series and see if they like it.
I know for a fact that because they do not treat their customers as potential thieves, they have made sales they would not otherwise made.
you can still buy a box of floppies?
I'm sorry, but the algorithm you described above is patented. You'll have to cease using it until proper royalties are paid.
Actually, you were doing just fine until that last step. Humans are notoriously bad at picking random numbers.
If copyright ever was an "agreement", it has been violated, over and over again, by the other side. Not just with the laws above, but by interminable copyright extension and the re-copyrighting of out-of-copyright works. In fact, however, it's not an agreement at all; it's just an exercise of power. There's no dishonor in violating it.
Worth repeating.
Big Media has bought enough congresscritters to make sure that copyright terms will eventually be the heat-death of the universe minus one day, so as to fall under the concept of "limited time" as specified in the constitution. I long ago lost all respect for copyright and the organizations that push it well beyond its intended terms. There is no logical reason why the entire beatles catalog should not currently exist in the public domain, which is its rightful place.
The only good news I see on the horizon is that a lot of youger folk have a similar lack of faith in copyright or the legislooters who seem to think perpetual copyright is beneficial to society.
The supreme Court of the U.S. recently made (IMO) a pretty bad ruling regarding the extension of copyright to works previously in the public domain. Slashdotters might be interested in reading the Opinion. I think the dissent is much better argued.
"In Windows Server 8, users can transition between Server Core and Server Graphical Shell at any time, with a single command and a single reboot."
You're supposed to be thankful that it doesn't take 3 or 4 reboots just to start the Gui.
Don't they EVER learn? It took them literally years to be able to do application and driver installs without required endless reboots. Not poor windows admins need to reboot just to start the GUI?? Why on earth can't MS come up with the equivalent of "xinit" to kick off the GUI?? This is 1980s level functionality FFS!
Indeed. It's just another example of how poorly designed MS-windows is from the ground up.