Please see Ken Thompson's totally moby hack of Unix, providing a back door even if a system was built from audited code.
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/back-door.htm l
A "Paper Trail" is worthless with computer based voting machines unless the entire system is completely transparent to outside observers.
When it comes to elections no one, no one company and no one thing can be trusted without massive public oversight.
And most specifically the governement itself is the entity least trustable to "certify" that an election process is fair and properly conducted. I'm an American but I've lived through "democratic" elections in a third world country.
If the the press cannot hire its own experts to completely examine the system and freely publish its results there is no democracy.
Well, the Eiffel Tower, once the tallest manmade structure of any kind, is nothing but architectural spire. That may have had some influence on how the "rules" developed.
Then there was that silly race between the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.
Yeah, ummmmmm, an airship mooring mast, that counts, doesn't it?
Things got silly, they decided to lay some basic ground rules and pretty much everybody has decided to stick to them, whether they always make sense or not.
The Whiskey Rebellion took place in Pennsylvania, not Mississippi, and was in response to Federal taxation. It has nothing to do with direct state control of alcohol distribution channels. Taxation does not imply government monopoly.
President Washington sent 13,000 troops to arrest a handful of men, whom he pardoned after they were tried and convicted.
As "rebellions" go it was pretty pitiful.
The "eurofag freak's" point stands. Have you by any chance counted your chromosomes lately? I think you may have one to spare.
KFG
Re:"My name was Robert Kidd, as I sailed. . .
on
Pirate Hunter
·
· Score: 1
Lord Bellomont, Governor of New York.
Backers included Sir John Somers, Keeper of the Great Seal and Sir Edward Russell, First Lord of the Admirality. The King himself promised backing but never delivered it.
This was a private business deal to hunt pirates, but before he sailed he was also issued letters of marque, one to hunt pirates and one to prey on French shipping. I have a photo of one of these as it still exists. The one to hunt pirates was a direct commission from the King and issued under the Great Seal.
His papers were impecable.
Kidd, as did all privateers really, made some ill considered moves in his campaign though, and had the bad luck to have these moves become public political embarassment to the men who backed him, and indeed applied great pressure against him to take the commission when he tried to back out of it in the first place.
KFG
"My name was Robert Kidd, as I sailed. . .
on
Pirate Hunter
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
. ..as I sailed, My name was Robert Kidd, as I sailed. My name was Robert Kidd, and God's laws I did forbid, And much wickedness I did, as I sailed."
Captain Kidd was no pirate. He was a privateer. Still, if you are the victim of such there is little to tell between them.
Many pirates were gentleman themselves and often acted to higher level of ethics and morality than their privateer cousins.
Privateers were no choir boys. They killed. They stole. They simply did it under the aegis of "law."
But certainly Kidd was no pirate and was ill used by his powerful patrons. In the words of Woody Guthrie, "Some rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen."
I know how the story ends already. My family comes from one of the areas where Kidd is reputed to have buried his treasure. There's nothing really new in this book that can't be found elsewhere. Still, it's a good telling of the story for those unfamiliar with it.
Mirosoft is the enemy. Microsoft has always been the enemy. Hell, Sun was founded with Microsoft as the the enemy. The concept goes right to their core.
Linux isn't the enemy. Linux is disease and death for Sun.
Look at it this way. Think of Sun as being besieged in a fort by Microsoft. Sun has a good fort. A supply chain that MS hasn't been able to cut. Fresh water wells inside the walls. Allies that occaisionally make harrassing raids against the besiegers.
But cholera breaks out.
You can't ignore it. You can't embrace it. You certainly can't just turn around and "make nice" with the barbarians at the gate. So now you have a "two front" war and nothing you can do about it.
Sun is a Unix company. Unix is now free. Not just Linux, but even the variant that Sun was founded upon is now free.
And running on Apple. So there goes the sexy hardware side of their business as well.
The only real future I can see for Sun is to make one more enenmy.
Apple.
Apple's niche is the only one still left open to Sun as a viable business market. Ubergeek, Ubercool, Ubertech, Uberapple.
Sun, hipper than hip. But most distinctly not a Dell direct competitor.
If you follow you outlined procedure what you will end up with is a several quart puddle of oil on the ground and a motor that siezes up within a matter of yards.
You neglected to a) carefully position the vehicle over a storm drain and b) apply Bubblicious (and only Watermelon Wave does the job right) properly over the drain hole in the oil pan.
Please leave this sort of complicated procedure to the pros, we know what we're doing. You don't.
Any competent tech can instantly see where you went wrong. Tying a heatsink to the motherboard with insulated wire might work with a PC, but not a Mac. Macs are too high tech for that.
Next time use Bazooka brand bubblegum. ONLY Bazooka brand will work due to the peculiar properties of the confectioner's sugar they use; and of course the bubblegum itself acts as a gap filler.
This is why you should always pay an expert. $50 would have saved you a grand in the long run. You pay to have the oil changed in your car, don't you? You understand that oil changing is a precise process in an expensive and highly sensitive machine. Your Mac is much higher tech than your car and only a trained and experienced tech nows all the little tricks, gained over years in the field.
At least before you do something like this go to alt.comp.sci.screwthenewb. A lot of us hang out there just to forward information like this to people such as yourself.
No, this is pretty much China just minding its own business. For some reason they seem to think they have status as a sovreign nation; and one just as capable as any other. They have a long, long history of such.
Google on "Mercury Project+space flight" and "Alan Shepard".
Wouldn't hurt to throw in "Yuri Gagarin" either.
These short and simple early launches aren't grand experimental missions. You go up. You come down. Kind of a Sunday drive without oxygen, but less chance of being blown up then you'd have in a Pinto.
The astronauts don't really have anything to do other than be there. Hence the derogatory term pilots applied to them; "Spam in a can."
Microsoft and Israel made prior agreement that Microsoft's status in Israel would be determined by the outcome of the US case.
Since they were found to be a monopoly in the US and guilty of illegal abuse of that power, then yes, they are, by definition, a monopoly in Israel.
Making a product that only supports the native language in their own operating system but not doing so in versions of the same product for other operating systems is an abuse of monopoly powers under Israeli law.
It's a pretty clear cut issue.
OpenOffice has no such problems becasue a) they have not been found to be a monopoly b) had engaged in no specific agreement with the Israeli government as such and c) treat all versions for different operating systems equally.
If Microsoft wishes to do business in Israel all they have to do is provide equal language support in their products. Please note that they've already taken the time and spent the money to make the translations.
If they're too cheap, or too malicious as a monopoly, to comply, well, they can just take their business elsewhere.
"Ah, well, we see you have Cystic Fibrosis. That pretty much means we can expect you to be dead soon. So yeah, we'll sell you $250k life insurance. It'll only run you about. . . $250k. Private medical insurance? Yeah, right Bob. Blow me."
And of course since my genetic disease is already diagnosed potential employers don't have to rely on testing to pretend they didn't hire me because of my condition.
Laws like this one will actually help a lot of people from being unjustifiably discriminated against, but if you're already known to actually have a disease you're pretty well hosed, no matter what the laws say.
Finding plausable reasons for not hiring someone isn't exactly hard.
Now if we could only get Kimi to move his lips or blink his eyes or something during post race interviews.
He makes Mika look positively effervescent in retrospect.
KFG
My mom remembers Pepsi at a nickle
on
Silicon Artwork
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
I'm from the "Dime Generation" myself.
On the other hand I also remember what we got payed in those days. Comes to about the same thing; and we didn't have 2 litre bottles for a buck.
You had to pull the bottle out of the machine just right too, or you lost your dime. I always hated that. Or the cup machines, you had to watch to make sure the cup came down properly or you just watched your soda spray all over the place.
Ah the good old days, immortalized in invisible etchings.
"Hey sweet thing, wanna seem my etchings? Bring your scanning electron microscope over sometime."
Somehow that just doesn't sound right.
KFG
(P.S. For those that haven't seen the pages this post is not offtopic.)
Slashdot Mirror
Along those lines it's interesting to note that the Mandrake 9.2 PowerPack and ProSuite come with the Intel compiler.
KFG
And Linux has run on Alpha for years.
Sorry, but this just isn't a Linux story.
KFG
Or more effectively KFG^3
Ummmmmmmmmm, would you belive that what I tell you three times is true?
Now where did that snark get to anyway?
KFG
Please see Ken Thompson's totally moby hack of Unix, providing a back door even if a system was built from audited code.
m l
http://catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/B/back-door.ht
A "Paper Trail" is worthless with computer based voting machines unless the entire system is completely transparent to outside observers.
When it comes to elections no one, no one company and no one thing can be trusted without massive public oversight.
And most specifically the governement itself is the entity least trustable to "certify" that an election process is fair and properly conducted. I'm an American but I've lived through "democratic" elections in a third world country.
If the the press cannot hire its own experts to completely examine the system and freely publish its results there is no democracy.
KFG
KFG
KFG
Well, the Eiffel Tower, once the tallest manmade structure of any kind, is nothing but architectural spire. That may have had some influence on how the "rules" developed.
Then there was that silly race between the Chrysler Building and the Empire State Building.
Yeah, ummmmmm, an airship mooring mast, that counts, doesn't it?
Things got silly, they decided to lay some basic ground rules and pretty much everybody has decided to stick to them, whether they always make sense or not.
KFG
The Whiskey Rebellion took place in Pennsylvania, not Mississippi, and was in response to Federal taxation. It has nothing to do with direct state control of alcohol distribution channels. Taxation does not imply government monopoly.
President Washington sent 13,000 troops to arrest a handful of men, whom he pardoned after they were tried and convicted.
As "rebellions" go it was pretty pitiful.
The "eurofag freak's" point stands. Have you by any chance counted your chromosomes lately? I think you may have one to spare.
KFG
Lord Bellomont, Governor of New York.
Backers included Sir John Somers, Keeper of the Great Seal and Sir Edward Russell, First Lord of the Admirality. The King himself promised backing but never delivered it.
This was a private business deal to hunt pirates, but before he sailed he was also issued letters of marque, one to hunt pirates and one to prey on French shipping. I have a photo of one of these as it still exists. The one to hunt pirates was a direct commission from the King and issued under the Great Seal.
His papers were impecable.
Kidd, as did all privateers really, made some ill considered moves in his campaign though, and had the bad luck to have these moves become public political embarassment to the men who backed him, and indeed applied great pressure against him to take the commission when he tried to back out of it in the first place.
KFG
. . .as I sailed,
My name was Robert Kidd, as I sailed.
My name was Robert Kidd, and God's laws I did forbid,
And much wickedness I did, as I sailed."
Captain Kidd was no pirate. He was a privateer. Still, if you are the victim of such there is little to tell between them.
Many pirates were gentleman themselves and often acted to higher level of ethics and morality than their privateer cousins.
Privateers were no choir boys. They killed. They stole. They simply did it under the aegis of "law."
But certainly Kidd was no pirate and was ill used by his powerful patrons. In the words of Woody Guthrie, "Some rob you with a six gun, some with a fountain pen."
I know how the story ends already. My family comes from one of the areas where Kidd is reputed to have buried his treasure. There's nothing really new in this book that can't be found elsewhere. Still, it's a good telling of the story for those unfamiliar with it.
KFG
Darl McBride himself claims that they began this action when vendors of propriatary software came to them and asked for aid in "monitizing" Linux.
Microsoft and Sun are the only real players in that game.
And, as it happens, Sun and Microsoft are the only ones to have purchased SCO licenses.
Thoreau once had something to say about circumstantial evidence as relates to finding a trout in the milk.
Well, there's a trout in the milk, and I know damned well I didn't put it there.
KFG
"Will Microsoft find a way to fight the beast?"
Where would you like to SCO today?
KFG
Mirosoft is the enemy. Microsoft has always been the enemy. Hell, Sun was founded with Microsoft as the the enemy. The concept goes right to their core.
Linux isn't the enemy. Linux is disease and death for Sun.
Look at it this way. Think of Sun as being besieged in a fort by Microsoft. Sun has a good fort. A supply chain that MS hasn't been able to cut. Fresh water wells inside the walls. Allies that occaisionally make harrassing raids against the besiegers.
But cholera breaks out.
You can't ignore it. You can't embrace it. You certainly can't just turn around and "make nice" with the barbarians at the gate. So now you have a "two front" war and nothing you can do about it.
Sun is a Unix company. Unix is now free. Not just Linux, but even the variant that Sun was founded upon is now free.
And running on Apple. So there goes the sexy hardware side of their business as well.
The only real future I can see for Sun is to make one more enenmy.
Apple.
Apple's niche is the only one still left open to Sun as a viable business market. Ubergeek, Ubercool, Ubertech, Uberapple.
Sun, hipper than hip. But most distinctly not a Dell direct competitor.
KFG
Or, to rephrase your post slightly:
It's not a Linux distro. It's a GNU/Linux distro.
Well, that's different.
KFG
"Strunk and White's Elements of Style addresses the type of verbose writing used in this book review.
To dev/null.
But I'll give him the benefit of the doubt, maybe he's just practicing up for his Doctoral Thesis in Philosophy.
Doesn't matter. He lost most of us here in the first paragraph anyway when he accused us of a fondness for email HTML.
I'd hazard a guess that Ratpoison isn't his favorite WM.
KFG
"Unlike many 3-letter unix/linux types (rms, esr, jwz, bdp, dek, etc) Dan is not a stuck up prick!"
:)
Careful son, I could resemble that remark.
Got a nickel or should I just paypal you one?
KFG
If you follow you outlined procedure what you will end up with is a several quart puddle of oil on the ground and a motor that siezes up within a matter of yards.
You neglected to a) carefully position the vehicle over a storm drain and b) apply Bubblicious (and only Watermelon Wave does the job right) properly over the drain hole in the oil pan.
Please leave this sort of complicated procedure to the pros, we know what we're doing. You don't.
Q.E.D.
KFG
Any competent tech can instantly see where you went wrong. Tying a heatsink to the motherboard with insulated wire might work with a PC, but not a Mac. Macs are too high tech for that.
Next time use Bazooka brand bubblegum. ONLY Bazooka brand will work due to the peculiar properties of the confectioner's sugar they use; and of course the bubblegum itself acts as a gap filler.
This is why you should always pay an expert. $50 would have saved you a grand in the long run. You pay to have the oil changed in your car, don't you? You understand that oil changing is a precise process in an expensive and highly sensitive machine. Your Mac is much higher tech than your car and only a trained and experienced tech nows all the little tricks, gained over years in the field.
At least before you do something like this go to alt.comp.sci.screwthenewb. A lot of us hang out there just to forward information like this to people such as yourself.
We're, what you call, altruistic.
KFG
No, this is pretty much China just minding its own business. For some reason they seem to think they have status as a sovreign nation; and one just as capable as any other. They have a long, long history of such.
The sleeping dragon stirs.
Invest in Nomex underwear. You might need it.
KFG
Google on "Mercury Project+space flight" and "Alan Shepard".
Wouldn't hurt to throw in "Yuri Gagarin" either.
These short and simple early launches aren't grand experimental missions. You go up. You come down. Kind of a Sunday drive without oxygen, but less chance of being blown up then you'd have in a Pinto.
The astronauts don't really have anything to do other than be there. Hence the derogatory term pilots applied to them; "Spam in a can."
KFG
Their next project is going to be a "space elevator," constructed by standing on each other's shoulders.
That should get 'em to Mars before us.
KFG
Microsoft and Israel made prior agreement that Microsoft's status in Israel would be determined by the outcome of the US case.
Since they were found to be a monopoly in the US and guilty of illegal abuse of that power, then yes, they are, by definition, a monopoly in Israel.
Making a product that only supports the native language in their own operating system but not doing so in versions of the same product for other operating systems is an abuse of monopoly powers under Israeli law.
It's a pretty clear cut issue.
OpenOffice has no such problems becasue a) they have not been found to be a monopoly b) had engaged in no specific agreement with the Israeli government as such and c) treat all versions for different operating systems equally.
If Microsoft wishes to do business in Israel all they have to do is provide equal language support in their products. Please note that they've already taken the time and spent the money to make the translations.
If they're too cheap, or too malicious as a monopoly, to comply, well, they can just take their business elsewhere.
Just like every other business.
KFG
"Ah, well, we see you have Cystic Fibrosis. That pretty much means we can expect you to be dead soon. So yeah, we'll sell you $250k life insurance. It'll only run you about. . . $250k. Private medical insurance? Yeah, right Bob. Blow me."
And of course since my genetic disease is already diagnosed potential employers don't have to rely on testing to pretend they didn't hire me because of my condition.
Laws like this one will actually help a lot of people from being unjustifiably discriminated against, but if you're already known to actually have a disease you're pretty well hosed, no matter what the laws say.
Finding plausable reasons for not hiring someone isn't exactly hard.
KFG
Weeeell, unless you're on the Bulgarian Women's Shotput team.
KFG
Now if we could only get Kimi to move his lips or blink his eyes or something during post race interviews.
He makes Mika look positively effervescent in retrospect.
KFG
I'm from the "Dime Generation" myself.
On the other hand I also remember what we got payed in those days. Comes to about the same thing; and we didn't have 2 litre bottles for a buck.
You had to pull the bottle out of the machine just right too, or you lost your dime. I always hated that. Or the cup machines, you had to watch to make sure the cup came down properly or you just watched your soda spray all over the place.
Ah the good old days, immortalized in invisible etchings.
"Hey sweet thing, wanna seem my etchings? Bring your scanning electron microscope over sometime."
Somehow that just doesn't sound right.
KFG
(P.S. For those that haven't seen the pages this post is not offtopic.)
To, once again, paraphrase Basil Fawlty:
"It's ok. He's from Finland."
These are people who try to tango without embaressingly acknowledging that they have a partner.
For a Fin he's actually quite animated.
KFG