When you go to college (if you do), an ethics professor will teach you that not everything that is moral is legal, and not everything that is legal is moral. Maybe it will take a real ethics class for you to realize that the mere observation that an activity is illegal according to some standard is no argument at all that there is anything wrong with it.
I suppose if you lived in the 60's you'd say "I don't care about your principles and arguments--the law is clear: Niggers go in the back of the bus!"
I think it would be great if FBI agents who set foot on Russian soil get thrown in jail for cracking. I mean, there is no question they're guilty; they confessed. Off to Siberia with them!
Petty? No, I think Bill Gates uses his money for evil. I mean, I think this literally. That's why I don't want anything he does to succeed. I don't think that's petty or even strange.
I just happen to have come to the surprising conclusion that satellite competitors to broadband providers would have been a greater good than the extra evil generated by the extra money in Bill Gates's bank account.
Actually, I think that anyone who fails to see danger that BillG presents to society must be morally blind. I mean, a real pervert, the sort that ends up working in a concentration camp. And yes, I really do see him as someone who is evil, probably more so than Hitler, because Hitler at least had a vision of the greater good which is supposed to come out of all the suffering he inflicted (a perverted vision, but still, at least he had one). BillG can't even pretend. He is an openly self-serving evil person, in the way that Hitler wasn't.
Now that I think about it, maybe I woldn't have bought his stupid satellite subscription. Fuck that bastard!
You know, Mozilla's implementation of mouse gestures are so incredibly useful, that every computer I use which doesn't have them seems hopelessly crippled.
Please, can't you Window Manager coders hack something together so that I could use my mouse gestures on ALL the windows? You can't imagine how many times I click-r-l-r on a window and get momentarily puzzled when I notice it's not closing.
Mouse gestures make so much damn sense that I want to spit on all the so-called "user interface experts" who don't see them as the absolute #1 priority for general implementation. As far as I'm concerned, those guys are frauds. Mouse gestures should have been in everything for a decade now.
No, seriously, I don't want any project of Bill Gates to succeed, but this thing could have been a good thing. With cable companies about to charge per byte transferred and DSL still sucking in my area, I think these "wire" companies need a good kick in the butt from outside competition. Seriously, I would have signed the contract with BillG the minute AOL/TW started charging per byte. Yeah, cut my palm, use my blood, whatever.
Does anyone know what the bandwith would have been? I dread to ask about ping...
I'm not a developer or anyone important, but I think it would be psychologically good for the developers to call it 2.6. If they call it 3.0 it will be an extra excuse to screw around with stuff they should be releasing--because, after all, we're expecting something really new in a major number revision. The thinking would be "hey, 3.0 sounds like a big deal, so I should take my time and mess with everything before we release it."
If the VM improvements are really so cool. just stick them into 2.6, get it out the door, and save your grand schemes for the next release. I know it must be tempting to stick in the next great idea that seems just around the corner, but that just leads to endless delays and demoralizes the hackers that finished their work "on time" as they're waiting out to feature freeze while everyone else is still cleaning their code for release.
Ideal would be, I think, to call a 2.6 feature freeze very soon, and very shortly thereafter, open a 2.7 (2.9?) unstable branch where "anything goes."
Re:What have we discovered in this exercise?
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RC5-64 Success
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· Score: 2
I do think the poster you replied to makes an interesting point: maybe what we learned is something about human nature, namely, that very many of them would be willing and/or able to waste significant personal resources for a totally predictable and trivial project. The more I think about that, the more interesting I find it. The lesson, then, is that there are tons of people in the wings, ready to do a numbercrunching project for (what they perceive as a) good cause.
I agree with you that SETI is pretty damn unlikely to turn up anything, but that in itself is sort of interesting too. I mean, why don't we hear other civilizations? And maybe, when people look at a computer overheating from SETI crunching, they think about how much alike we all are as human beings, and how the thought of interaction with aliens makes our terrestrial squabbles seem petty. Alright, I'm probably overstating the case.
Protein folding... I don't know much about this project, but isn't it the case that your CPU simply becomes the bitch of a pharmaceutical company that's going to pantent the stuff they learn from your calculations? That really put me off. I am happy to serve mankind, but not to line the pockets of evil drug companies.
So, what does my computer do at night? It serves FTP. Sure, pretty laid back for the CPU, but I think it does a whole lot more for people than any relevant alternatives.
What have we discovered in this exercise?
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RC5-64 Success
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· Score: 2, Insightful
You know, anybody with a pencil can figure out how many computation cycles it will take to produce 50% probability that the key will crack. Then, it seems like the only trick to it is to sit there and wait a few months while your CPUs heat the room, and then you eventually find out whether it will crack before the 50% probability or after.
In the process, we have learned absolutely nothing. It's like a game where I say "I'm thinking of a place, can you guess where it is?" Then hundreds of thousands of you would send in guesses, and eventually you would get it. What a pointless exercise that would be! I'm sorry, but I don't see the difference here. In a way this is even less interesting, because you know that sometime the code will crack. There is no element of surprise at all in the results, and once we have it, we learn... nothing at all.
In the process, how much electricity do we waste chugging through the code? Did one of you clever people calculate how many fewer tons of CO2, soot and radioactive waste would have been produced if you had just left your Athlons turned off? How about all the air conditioners you used to cool the rooms the Athlons live in?
For the next challenge, I suggest that you just pretend your CPU is working, and in a few months (time determined randomly according to the probability of cracking if your computers had been on), the guy who issued the challenge will pretend that his code was cracked and announce what his oh-so-important secret message was. That would sure make me happier--and it's not like we'd lear any less that way.
(Notice also that my criticism doesn't apply to SETI or protein folding projects. At least they give us a chance of finding out something.)
I don't think a switch to x86 will happen for Apple, but if it did, WINE for OSX would be a huge win. By the time the switch is complete, WINE will be in a pretty highly usable state. This would really make the downside of using an Apple much smaller.
Also, while the guy is right that the transition would be a big pain for the developers, in the long run it might make things easier for them, because most of them keep a seperate branch of x86-optimized code because they also sell it for Windows. Post-transition, these two branches would be able to have much more in common. That might make things easier in the long run.
Alright--here is a reason for not making the transition: the upcoming desktop Power4's from IBM. I am almost certain these will be in Macs sometime in 2003, and when they are, most of our beige pc keyboards will be covered with drool.
I wish I could! But because only have a working permit in this crappy country, I can't really move. Still, I will seriously consider driving up to Toronto and catching my next trans-ocean flight there. It's not really all that far for me, and this summer, flights to Europe were cheaper from Toronto than from any other place in North America. Canada rules! (Oh, how terrible it is to say that without any sarcasm!)
I have no problem with people putting loudpeakers into anything. I mean, if you don't want to read up on the math and you have the cash to blow on trial and error, go nuts!
My objection this: Of all the thousands of how-to pages available on the internet, why did this one make it to the front page of Slashdot? A subpoint was that if the guy had discussed his work from a "nerd" angle, it would have made a good/. piece. As it was, I thought it failed as slashdot material, and I still stand by this.
I did indeed notice that the author points to a page where a more careful procedure is explained, and that just makes things worse. Why wasn't that page the subject of the/. article? Still better stuff is available, and I'm sure Google would help you find some of it, but that's not what I would do. When I was designing my speakers I actually (gasp) WENT TO THE LIBRARY! Do people still know how to use these? Anyway, I'd be shocked if there were stuff on the internet that comes close to the quality of what's published in peer-reviewed journals.
In any case, I made my speakers the nerdy way, and that should be the/. way. I don't want this place to degenerate into "news for short-attention-span nerds." For example, if there are speaker how-to's posted, they shouldn't gloss over the very stuff that distinguishes a crappy speaker enclosure from an outstanding one.
This guy is obviously a pretty weak hardware hacker. I say "obviously" because if he knew what he were doing, his construction page would be covered with formulas about material desity, air volume, port circumferance, port length, and many other tuning-related issues. It look to me like this guy thought of a design that seemed right a priori, bought a driver, and started cutting. Pathetic!
This has to be the worst Slashdot how-to ever. There is absolutely nothing geeky about doing it blind like this, especially considering how much information is available about doing it the right way. So kids, don't do this at home; do better!
I think it would be lots of fun to rip on some of the "great" movies in the style of MST3K or Rocky Horror. Sure, doing it through subtitles is not ideal, but it could still be a lot of fun! It would sure make the recent Star Wars releases 5000X more watchable.
I don't see the risk to chip manufacturers. I do see a potential risk to Windows market share, because this will piss people off. If the really invasive incarnations of this conincide with the release of a very solid WINE embedded in a nice Linux distribution, it will make very little sense to keep buying Microsoft operating systems.
I hope that by the time Palladium is required for everything, WINE will be able to emulate all the Windows functions I currently need.
In a way, it really gives you a reason to dump Windows and invest in an alternative. If the scenario is headed for the bleakness you expect, DRM restrictions are going to cripple Windows usability to such a degree that it will become a rock attached to Microsoft's ankle. I would actually like to see this. It won't happen, though, because Microsoft, whether through incompetence or brilliant design, will make sure that its DRM protections are always hackable just enough to keep warez dudes from switching away.
I really like this idea of storing challenge/response pairs on the card and deleting them after the transaction. This is basically a one-time pad idea, and it is truly secure, as long as the "recharging" of the card is never compromised, and as long as there is no way to steal question/response pairs from the card itself and then "fake it," posing as the card.
Unfortunately, I think the system proposed will not be compatible with this, because I don't think it's overwritable/erasable in the way it would need to be for this sort of validation. The traditional "smart cards" would make more sense for this purpose. However, their problem is different: their chips can be read and duplicated, something that appears much harder to do in this system.
Here is my understanding of how credit card transactions work today. After your card is scanned, your account number gets encrypted and sent to the MasterCard servers, where they look in a database to check whether it's a valid account and whether your balance is high enough to make the purchase. If it is, they send back an OK.
If the card sent a query-response pair to the bank, how would the bank be sure that the pair is coming from the card? How would it know that it's not coming from some data server that previously read your card and saved all the card's query-response data in memory? It seems that if we want to avoid this, the query must come from the bank itself, a sort of check like: "are you the real card?" What question would be asked would not be known to the card; only the answer would.
One way to get it to work, I suppose: first make the card, then read it at the bank to see how it responds to 1000 different queries. Save that at the bank. Then, send out the card to the customer. When the customer makes the first purchase, send out the first query during card validation. If it's the right card, it will answer in the same way it did at the bank when it was initially scanned. So on for the next 999 queries. Once you get to transaction 900 or so, the bank might just send you a new card. I guess it does require a lot of data archiving, but the system really does very safe.
You're right that it's secure in cases where you use one of these cards in a retail store--in the sense that no one without your card can pose as you. However, what is to prevent the stores from saving your diffraction pattern (not the speckle pattern on the card but instead the resulting image) and then "using" your card as much as they want?
Also, if the connection between a store and the pattern validation server is ever intercepted, a hacker could just save your patterns and re-send them whenever they want to purchase pr0n or something. So I think the original poster was right: this is just like stealing credit card numbers. As long as validation is done by passing around a bunch of digital data, that will always be the point of weakness. Even now, the vast majority of credit card fraud happens not because somebody's magnetic strip gets duplicated, but because somebody's credit card numbers get stolen. It seems like making the physical cards harder to duplicate is barking up the wrong tree.
The only solution I can see is this: There wouldn't be a unique resultant diffraction pattern that gets passed around, but rather a two-way conversation between the validation server and the card reader. The server would ask three random questions of the sort "what pattern is produced when the laser shines from angle 1, what about angle 2, etc. The problem with this is that the validation server would have to know what the right answers are to all of the possible questions, and that creates a problem: either there would be waay too much data stored for each card, or there would only be a limited number of "questions" the server could ask. In the latter case, a thief's computer could just memorize all the answers to the few questions, and produce them without the card whenever the validation server actually asks.
Actually, this makes more sense for solar cells here on earth. People think that power generation with solar cells is free after you set them up, because they have no moving parts, etc. Actually though, it turns out that the most important reason why solar power is expensive in the long run is because somebody needs to periodically clean the damn solar cells. You might not think this is a big deal but when you consider the surface area of solar cells you would need to generate enough electricity to power a city, it really does become daunting.
With this coating, maybe we could just plug 'em in and leave 'em alone. Well, that would be awesome--though I still think it wouldn't solve all the problems, and that the best way to go solar is to build collectors in space.
I think the Prime Directive stuff strikes the wrong chord in an age when our leaders are perfectly willing to bomb the shit out of less advanced cultures--for money. If you like that sort of stuff, you're not going to like the Prime Directive.
However, the way I interpret the situation is that the Prime Directive is exactly right, and our current leaders are perverted shithead bastards.
Although, having said that, I do think it's a bit hard to draw this analogy with regard to helping less technologically advanced cultures here on Earth. The Prime Directive presupposes that we are dealing with an insulated society that has not been tampered with by the technologically advanced powers. As a matter of fact, there is no such society on Earth right now. So the question of whether we should do something to undo some of the poverty and diseases in Africa can't be seen in a Prime Directive context, because we are responsible in large part for their social ills. (By "we" I mean, again, the technologically advanced powers.) We bully their economies and leave them to dig in diamond mines, if we leave any work for them at all... We sell them weapons and watch them blow holes in each other. So yes, the Prime Directive allows the Federation to undo the damage they cause to societies. That's why "charity" for Africa is a moral imperative, but interference with an undisturbed culture is a moral transgression. These values make perfect sense in my opinion.
Troi? Oh no! You really ruined it for me! There is nothing at all sexy about Troi. In fact, she has great "limpening powers" if you know what I mean. I'll agree with you about Seven of Nine. I'm still not convinced by the Vulcan chick--she seems like a shallow Seven-of-Nine wannabe.... sofar. But she's no Troi. She doesn't yet cause me to scream when she opens her mouth.
Actually, the history of the expression, as I understand it, is quite sinister. It goes back to the days of US slavery, when a "red-headed stepchild" was the offspring produced by the pairing of a married white woman and a slave. The angry husbands typically made slaves of these stepchildren, and in any case, did not treat them well. I understand it was common that at some point in their childhood, their hair would have a reddish tint, explaining the expression.
Anyway, this is not a nice or cute expression, and though you may think yourself clever for using it, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
No, don't worry, nothing actually traveled faster than the speed of light, and nobody can send information faster than the speed of light. You have to read pretty far down in the story to get that... Well, either that, or you had to have gone to school.
You know, non-physical object can travel faster than the speed of light. You can do these experiments very cheaply. Take a laser, point it at the moon, and shake it around. The image you make with it traverses the surface faster than the speed of light. That doesn't mean anything is actually moving faster than c. The experiment described is of the same sort. Interesting, but packaged in a terribly misleading way.
desktop users shouldn't need to know about things like library dependencies
I'm sorry. I really don't think that's right. Linux is a system with shared libraries. That's something which doesn't need fixing. But as long as that's the case, I see no reason to insulate the user from this fact. Yast2 seems to reveal dependencies in a very straightforward way, so noobs only need to press OK whenever they don't understand something, and all will go well. However, at no expense to them, they learn something about the internal structure of their software environment. This is exactly what they need if they are one day going to graduate from the noob status and start seeing the real power of *nix. BTW, this graduation is not going to happen for someone on OSX unless they really work at it. I think SuSE's utility does a much better job informing them what's under their hood without asking them to do anything more than press "OK". How this could be a bad thing, I don't understand.
Slashdot Mirror
I suppose if you lived in the 60's you'd say "I don't care about your principles and arguments--the law is clear: Niggers go in the back of the bus!"
I think it would be great if FBI agents who set foot on Russian soil get thrown in jail for cracking. I mean, there is no question they're guilty; they confessed. Off to Siberia with them!
I just happen to have come to the surprising conclusion that satellite competitors to broadband providers would have been a greater good than the extra evil generated by the extra money in Bill Gates's bank account.
Actually, I think that anyone who fails to see danger that BillG presents to society must be morally blind. I mean, a real pervert, the sort that ends up working in a concentration camp. And yes, I really do see him as someone who is evil, probably more so than Hitler, because Hitler at least had a vision of the greater good which is supposed to come out of all the suffering he inflicted (a perverted vision, but still, at least he had one). BillG can't even pretend. He is an openly self-serving evil person, in the way that Hitler wasn't.
Now that I think about it, maybe I woldn't have bought his stupid satellite subscription. Fuck that bastard!
Please, can't you Window Manager coders hack something together so that I could use my mouse gestures on ALL the windows? You can't imagine how many times I click-r-l-r on a window and get momentarily puzzled when I notice it's not closing.
Mouse gestures make so much damn sense that I want to spit on all the so-called "user interface experts" who don't see them as the absolute #1 priority for general implementation. As far as I'm concerned, those guys are frauds. Mouse gestures should have been in everything for a decade now.
Does anyone know what the bandwith would have been? I dread to ask about ping...
If the VM improvements are really so cool. just stick them into 2.6, get it out the door, and save your grand schemes for the next release. I know it must be tempting to stick in the next great idea that seems just around the corner, but that just leads to endless delays and demoralizes the hackers that finished their work "on time" as they're waiting out to feature freeze while everyone else is still cleaning their code for release.
Ideal would be, I think, to call a 2.6 feature freeze very soon, and very shortly thereafter, open a 2.7 (2.9?) unstable branch where "anything goes."
I agree with you that SETI is pretty damn unlikely to turn up anything, but that in itself is sort of interesting too. I mean, why don't we hear other civilizations? And maybe, when people look at a computer overheating from SETI crunching, they think about how much alike we all are as human beings, and how the thought of interaction with aliens makes our terrestrial squabbles seem petty. Alright, I'm probably overstating the case.
Protein folding... I don't know much about this project, but isn't it the case that your CPU simply becomes the bitch of a pharmaceutical company that's going to pantent the stuff they learn from your calculations? That really put me off. I am happy to serve mankind, but not to line the pockets of evil drug companies.
So, what does my computer do at night? It serves FTP. Sure, pretty laid back for the CPU, but I think it does a whole lot more for people than any relevant alternatives.
In the process, we have learned absolutely nothing. It's like a game where I say "I'm thinking of a place, can you guess where it is?" Then hundreds of thousands of you would send in guesses, and eventually you would get it. What a pointless exercise that would be! I'm sorry, but I don't see the difference here. In a way this is even less interesting, because you know that sometime the code will crack. There is no element of surprise at all in the results, and once we have it, we learn... nothing at all.
In the process, how much electricity do we waste chugging through the code? Did one of you clever people calculate how many fewer tons of CO2, soot and radioactive waste would have been produced if you had just left your Athlons turned off? How about all the air conditioners you used to cool the rooms the Athlons live in?
For the next challenge, I suggest that you just pretend your CPU is working, and in a few months (time determined randomly according to the probability of cracking if your computers had been on), the guy who issued the challenge will pretend that his code was cracked and announce what his oh-so-important secret message was. That would sure make me happier--and it's not like we'd lear any less that way.
(Notice also that my criticism doesn't apply to SETI or protein folding projects. At least they give us a chance of finding out something.)
Also, while the guy is right that the transition would be a big pain for the developers, in the long run it might make things easier for them, because most of them keep a seperate branch of x86-optimized code because they also sell it for Windows. Post-transition, these two branches would be able to have much more in common. That might make things easier in the long run.
Alright--here is a reason for not making the transition: the upcoming desktop Power4's from IBM. I am almost certain these will be in Macs sometime in 2003, and when they are, most of our beige pc keyboards will be covered with drool.
I wish I could! But because only have a working permit in this crappy country, I can't really move. Still, I will seriously consider driving up to Toronto and catching my next trans-ocean flight there. It's not really all that far for me, and this summer, flights to Europe were cheaper from Toronto than from any other place in North America. Canada rules! (Oh, how terrible it is to say that without any sarcasm!)
My objection this: Of all the thousands of how-to pages available on the internet, why did this one make it to the front page of Slashdot? A subpoint was that if the guy had discussed his work from a "nerd" angle, it would have made a good /. piece. As it was, I thought it failed as slashdot material, and I still stand by this.
I did indeed notice that the author points to a page where a more careful procedure is explained, and that just makes things worse. Why wasn't that page the subject of the /. article? Still better stuff is available, and I'm sure Google would help you find some of it, but that's not what I would do. When I was designing my speakers I actually (gasp) WENT TO THE LIBRARY! Do people still know how to use these? Anyway, I'd be shocked if there were stuff on the internet that comes close to the quality of what's published in peer-reviewed journals.
In any case, I made my speakers the nerdy way, and that should be the /. way. I don't want this place to degenerate into "news for short-attention-span nerds." For example, if there are speaker how-to's posted, they shouldn't gloss over the very stuff that distinguishes a crappy speaker enclosure from an outstanding one.
This has to be the worst Slashdot how-to ever. There is absolutely nothing geeky about doing it blind like this, especially considering how much information is available about doing it the right way. So kids, don't do this at home; do better!
Hey, thank you for this great response. This stuff is interesting!
I think it would be lots of fun to rip on some of the "great" movies in the style of MST3K or Rocky Horror. Sure, doing it through subtitles is not ideal, but it could still be a lot of fun! It would sure make the recent Star Wars releases 5000X more watchable.
I don't see the risk to chip manufacturers. I do see a potential risk to Windows market share, because this will piss people off. If the really invasive incarnations of this conincide with the release of a very solid WINE embedded in a nice Linux distribution, it will make very little sense to keep buying Microsoft operating systems.
In a way, it really gives you a reason to dump Windows and invest in an alternative. If the scenario is headed for the bleakness you expect, DRM restrictions are going to cripple Windows usability to such a degree that it will become a rock attached to Microsoft's ankle. I would actually like to see this. It won't happen, though, because Microsoft, whether through incompetence or brilliant design, will make sure that its DRM protections are always hackable just enough to keep warez dudes from switching away.
Unfortunately, I think the system proposed will not be compatible with this, because I don't think it's overwritable/erasable in the way it would need to be for this sort of validation. The traditional "smart cards" would make more sense for this purpose. However, their problem is different: their chips can be read and duplicated, something that appears much harder to do in this system.
Here is my understanding of how credit card transactions work today. After your card is scanned, your account number gets encrypted and sent to the MasterCard servers, where they look in a database to check whether it's a valid account and whether your balance is high enough to make the purchase. If it is, they send back an OK.
If the card sent a query-response pair to the bank, how would the bank be sure that the pair is coming from the card? How would it know that it's not coming from some data server that previously read your card and saved all the card's query-response data in memory? It seems that if we want to avoid this, the query must come from the bank itself, a sort of check like: "are you the real card?" What question would be asked would not be known to the card; only the answer would.
One way to get it to work, I suppose: first make the card, then read it at the bank to see how it responds to 1000 different queries. Save that at the bank. Then, send out the card to the customer. When the customer makes the first purchase, send out the first query during card validation. If it's the right card, it will answer in the same way it did at the bank when it was initially scanned. So on for the next 999 queries. Once you get to transaction 900 or so, the bank might just send you a new card. I guess it does require a lot of data archiving, but the system really does very safe.
yeah... wasn't it terrible how they hopped on pop?
Also, if the connection between a store and the pattern validation server is ever intercepted, a hacker could just save your patterns and re-send them whenever they want to purchase pr0n or something. So I think the original poster was right: this is just like stealing credit card numbers. As long as validation is done by passing around a bunch of digital data, that will always be the point of weakness. Even now, the vast majority of credit card fraud happens not because somebody's magnetic strip gets duplicated, but because somebody's credit card numbers get stolen. It seems like making the physical cards harder to duplicate is barking up the wrong tree.
The only solution I can see is this: There wouldn't be a unique resultant diffraction pattern that gets passed around, but rather a two-way conversation between the validation server and the card reader. The server would ask three random questions of the sort "what pattern is produced when the laser shines from angle 1, what about angle 2, etc. The problem with this is that the validation server would have to know what the right answers are to all of the possible questions, and that creates a problem: either there would be waay too much data stored for each card, or there would only be a limited number of "questions" the server could ask. In the latter case, a thief's computer could just memorize all the answers to the few questions, and produce them without the card whenever the validation server actually asks.
With this coating, maybe we could just plug 'em in and leave 'em alone. Well, that would be awesome--though I still think it wouldn't solve all the problems, and that the best way to go solar is to build collectors in space.
However, the way I interpret the situation is that the Prime Directive is exactly right, and our current leaders are perverted shithead bastards.
Although, having said that, I do think it's a bit hard to draw this analogy with regard to helping less technologically advanced cultures here on Earth. The Prime Directive presupposes that we are dealing with an insulated society that has not been tampered with by the technologically advanced powers. As a matter of fact, there is no such society on Earth right now. So the question of whether we should do something to undo some of the poverty and diseases in Africa can't be seen in a Prime Directive context, because we are responsible in large part for their social ills. (By "we" I mean, again, the technologically advanced powers.) We bully their economies and leave them to dig in diamond mines, if we leave any work for them at all... We sell them weapons and watch them blow holes in each other. So yes, the Prime Directive allows the Federation to undo the damage they cause to societies. That's why "charity" for Africa is a moral imperative, but interference with an undisturbed culture is a moral transgression. These values make perfect sense in my opinion.
Troi? Oh no! You really ruined it for me! There is nothing at all sexy about Troi. In fact, she has great "limpening powers" if you know what I mean. I'll agree with you about Seven of Nine. I'm still not convinced by the Vulcan chick--she seems like a shallow Seven-of-Nine wannabe.... sofar. But she's no Troi. She doesn't yet cause me to scream when she opens her mouth.
Anyway, this is not a nice or cute expression, and though you may think yourself clever for using it, it leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
You know, non-physical object can travel faster than the speed of light. You can do these experiments very cheaply. Take a laser, point it at the moon, and shake it around. The image you make with it traverses the surface faster than the speed of light. That doesn't mean anything is actually moving faster than c. The experiment described is of the same sort. Interesting, but packaged in a terribly misleading way.
I'm sorry. I really don't think that's right. Linux is a system with shared libraries. That's something which doesn't need fixing. But as long as that's the case, I see no reason to insulate the user from this fact. Yast2 seems to reveal dependencies in a very straightforward way, so noobs only need to press OK whenever they don't understand something, and all will go well. However, at no expense to them, they learn something about the internal structure of their software environment. This is exactly what they need if they are one day going to graduate from the noob status and start seeing the real power of *nix. BTW, this graduation is not going to happen for someone on OSX unless they really work at it. I think SuSE's utility does a much better job informing them what's under their hood without asking them to do anything more than press "OK". How this could be a bad thing, I don't understand.