Well, it could possibly be pulled off by having the developer provide proofs or auxiliary lemmata (is that really a word?) or restricting the expressable pre-/postconditions. I agree that this would go a long way, but the biggest problem (as I see it) is that there is lots and lots of code which does not really lend itself to easy proof (e.g. timing-dependant networking code, GUI code, parallel/distributed code, etc.). I suppose we can always dream though.:)
It doesn't matter. The person passing along a request is still guilty.
They have been unwittingly (and randomly because of the way the network works) been made accomplices in the crime. Nobody knows if the node you connected to contained the illegal material before you connected, or if it now contains the illegal material because of your request for it. If the police is doing the requesting, then this is called entrapment, ie. the police enticed (forced, really but I digress...) you to commit a crime which you were never originally going to commit! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
The init files are stupid half perl. It looks like a sysV init. It should be a sysV init with real shell scripts.
WTF are you talking about? They are regular shell scripts. Have you not noticed the #!... line at the top?!? Change that to #!/bin/sh and off you go. The current system eliminates redundancy, as in: why does each and every init script need to parse the command line explicitly? Why not do have a bit of common code which does the parsing for you? Also, it enables all the init scripts to automatically source/etc/conf.d files which IMHO is a very neat solution to the problem of setting options for daemons in a central location instead of messing about editing the init scripts themselves.
I can understand why the developers would want to do something different. But then they should have made the init system different.
Actually I'm wondering why more distros don't use the system of dependencies in their startup scripts instead of assigning arbitrary (priority) numbers to their init scripts. The dependency system also neatly avoids problems when e.g. a service won't start, and several other services depend on it.
Personally I love the dependency system for the init scripts. It's actually one of the things (along with portage) that made me choose Gentoo, but of course there's no accounting for personal taste.
If someone spends an average of $100-$200/year, he can keep his computer reasonably modern.
... and have fvwm start in 0.01s instead of 0.02s. Why not spend those $'s on something which will have a perceivable effect instead? Why not wait until you actually need a faster computer?
i doubt you will ever be in a position to hire anyone.
I have already proved you wrong on that prediction.
Then $DEITY help us all.
Anyway, who the hell cares if software is modern? I run software that works. For example, I'm running TeX version 3.14159 which was released around 1995. I have never, ever encountered a bug (and by all indications noone else has, either) with this "non-modern" piece of software, so why should I change? The fact that I haven't changed doesn't mean that I'm not interested in software, it means that I don't need to change. Simple as that.
draconian refers to harsh punishment, not intrusiveness.
Heh, I'm not a native english speaker, so kill me.:-)
Anyway, even if this gets passed into law, what's to stop the terrorists (how's that for a straw man?) from simply using the "encrypted" message "My cat's name is Mittens" to mean "We attack tomorrow at dawn"? You can construct quite elaborate ciphers in which anything which is encrypted looks like relatively normal speech. (Remember the "spam encryption"?).
My point is this: This simply WILL NOT stop terrorists (or anyone conspiring to commit crime). They can trivially circumvent this by using a "plaintext-like" cypher and no-one will be any the wiser. This WILL, however, make legitimate, lawful uses of encryption much more difficult. There are legitimate reasons for wanting to keep secrets from government (as others have pointed out in other threads).
The basic principle here is: Why regulate something when the regulations will only inconvenience law-obiding citizens, and be trivially circumventable (is that even a word?) for criminals? Because they want to control you, not the terrorists. The terrorists just provided a convenient straw man.
Sound paranoid? Well, maybe I am, but that doesn't mean that they're not out to get me/us.
Well, I will be sending (from somewhere without these draconian proposed laws) a lot of encrypted mail (using the "unapproved" encryption, of course) to John Ashcroft and anyone else who supports this legislation.
Let's see how they like being snooped upon by the FBI/CIA/whatever through no fault of their own.
Remember: You can do this to whomever you want, so long as you are in a country which doesn't enforce effective regulation.
> And, of course, sometimes boss monsters get to be triple immune.
That would be a very rare occurence, and (asumming you're not in a party, in which case you would probably have a necro/barb/pally/amazon to help you) you could just start a new multiplayer game to get a reroll of the boss properties. Annoying yes, but not an insurmountable obstacle.
> Third, they've totally changed blocking. To get maximun block out of your shield, you need to add 2.5 skill points to dex every level up. Otherwise, it soon drops to almost nothing. Don't feel like pumping dex? Then don't plan on blocking anything.
So the old blocking was much better? Should you be able to block 74% (sigon's + twitchthroe) of all physical attacks just because you have the strength to equip a tower shield? Oh, puh-leeze! What I think Blizzard should have done is used the difference between your level and monster level to compute the new blocking percentages. Now they just use your level which leads to the absurd situation that you actually become worse at blocking when you gain levels. Now, that's absurd, but blocking was waaaaay too powerful in CD2. Anyway, defense has become much more useful now (i.e. defense is actually taken into account when walking/running).
> [...] but, overall, the sorc is the only character that will have a really dificult time in the expansion.
I don't know about you, but I enjoy a difficult game. Where's the fun in playing a barb who mows down everything in his path without any effort?
Blizzard promised us a more difficult game, and that is what we shall have. Yay!
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it could possibly be pulled off by having the developer provide proofs or auxiliary lemmata (is that really a word?) or restricting the expressable pre-/postconditions. I agree that this would go a long way, but the biggest problem (as I see it) is that there is lots and lots of code which does not really lend itself to easy proof (e.g. timing-dependant networking code, GUI code, parallel/distributed code, etc.). I suppose we can always dream though. :)
Unfortunately, that is an undecidable (in the Turing sense) problem in the general case.
HAND.
They have been unwittingly (and randomly because of the way the network works) been made accomplices in the crime. Nobody knows if the node you connected to contained the illegal material before you connected, or if it now contains the illegal material because of your request for it. If the police is doing the requesting, then this is called entrapment, ie. the police enticed (forced, really but I digress...) you to commit a crime which you were never originally going to commit! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it.
WTF are you talking about? They are regular shell scripts. Have you not noticed the #!... line at the top?!? Change that to #!/bin/sh and off you go. The current system eliminates redundancy, as in: why does each and every init script need to parse the command line explicitly? Why not do have a bit of common code which does the parsing for you? Also, it enables all the init scripts to automatically source /etc/conf.d files which IMHO is a very neat solution to the problem of setting options for daemons in a central location instead of messing about editing the init scripts themselves.
Actually I'm wondering why more distros don't use the system of dependencies in their startup scripts instead of assigning arbitrary (priority) numbers to their init scripts. The dependency system also neatly avoids problems when e.g. a service won't start, and several other services depend on it. Personally I love the dependency system for the init scripts. It's actually one of the things (along with portage) that made me choose Gentoo, but of course there's no accounting for personal taste.
... and have fvwm start in 0.01s instead of 0.02s. Why not spend those $'s on something which will have a perceivable effect instead? Why not wait until you actually need a faster computer?
Then $DEITY help us all.
Anyway, who the hell cares if software is modern? I run software that works. For example, I'm running TeX version 3.14159 which was released around 1995. I have never, ever encountered a bug (and by all indications noone else has, either) with this "non-modern" piece of software, so why should I change? The fact that I haven't changed doesn't mean that I'm not interested in software, it means that I don't need to change. Simple as that.
Ah well, guess IHBT.
Heh, I'm not a native english speaker, so kill me.
Anyway, even if this gets passed into law, what's to stop the terrorists (how's that for a straw man?) from simply using the "encrypted" message "My cat's name is Mittens" to mean "We attack tomorrow at dawn"? You can construct quite elaborate ciphers in which anything which is encrypted looks like relatively normal speech. (Remember the "spam encryption"?).
My point is this: This simply WILL NOT stop terrorists (or anyone conspiring to commit crime). They can trivially circumvent this by using a "plaintext-like" cypher and no-one will be any the wiser. This WILL, however, make legitimate, lawful uses of encryption much more difficult. There are legitimate reasons for wanting to keep secrets from government (as others have pointed out in other threads).
The basic principle here is: Why regulate something when the regulations will only inconvenience law-obiding citizens, and be trivially circumventable (is that even a word?) for criminals? Because they want to control you, not the terrorists. The terrorists just provided a convenient straw man.
Sound paranoid? Well, maybe I am, but that doesn't mean that they're not out to get me/us.
Well, I will be sending (from somewhere without these draconian proposed laws) a lot of encrypted mail (using the "unapproved" encryption, of course) to John Ashcroft and anyone else who supports this legislation.
Let's see how they like being snooped upon by the FBI/CIA/whatever through no fault of their own.
Remember: You can do this to whomever you want, so long as you are in a country which doesn't enforce effective regulation.
So there.
Disclaimer: I have not played the beta.
> And, of course, sometimes boss monsters get to be triple immune.
That would be a very rare occurence, and (asumming you're not in a party, in which case you would probably have a necro/barb/pally/amazon to help you) you could just start a new multiplayer game to get a reroll of the boss properties. Annoying yes, but not an insurmountable obstacle.
> Third, they've totally changed blocking. To get maximun block out of your shield, you need to add 2.5 skill points to dex every level up. Otherwise, it soon drops to almost nothing. Don't feel like pumping dex? Then don't plan on blocking anything.
So the old blocking was much better? Should you be able to block 74% (sigon's + twitchthroe) of all physical attacks just because you have the strength to equip a tower shield? Oh, puh-leeze! What I think Blizzard should have done is used the difference between your level and monster level to compute the new blocking percentages. Now they just use your level which leads to the absurd situation that you actually become worse at blocking when you gain levels. Now, that's absurd, but blocking was waaaaay too powerful in CD2. Anyway, defense has become much more useful now (i.e. defense is actually taken into account when walking/running).
> [...] but, overall, the sorc is the only character that will have a really dificult time in the expansion.
I don't know about you, but I enjoy a difficult game. Where's the fun in playing a barb who mows down everything in his path without any effort? Blizzard promised us a more difficult game, and that is what we shall have. Yay!