Sure, by "external" I meant something other than gravitational potential energy. Although muscles would never actually work, because they aren't 100% efficient. Even if you had strong enough muscles to overcome your total potential gravitational energy, so much waste heat would be generated in the process that you'd vaporize yourself:-)
Conservation of energy makes this impossible. Your speed after falling x meters is exactly enough, if you turn it back around again, to get you back up to a height of x meters. There's no physical way to fall under the influence of the moons gravity in such a way that you could reach escape velocity for that particular height.
The ONLY way to reach escape velocity is with an external power source like a rocket.
You're missing the point. A virus typically needs some level of user interaction to spread itself. Right now, Linux users tend to be a little more savvy than your average Windows user (ok, I'm being too generous!) They simply aren't naive enough to help spread viruses. It doesn't matter how "cool" it would be to infect Linux -- if the users aren't falling for it, what's the point?
On the other hand, when Linux begins to gain more acceptance as a day-to-day desktop operating system, we're going to start seeing naive users who are actually going to do stupid things like saving attachments then executing them. This is related to popularity, but specifically popularity among TYPICAL, NAIVE computer users.
Might I remind you of the horrific ptrace() bug which was a KERNEL exploit in Linux 2.2, and a similar ptrace()/kmod exploit that affected Linux 2.4. You might be vulnerable to the kmod kernel bug right now. This bug exists across distributions, across userspace software, even across kernel versions.
The fact is, it's very possible for local exploit conditions to exist in the kernel itself. That means it doesn't matter what software you might or might not have installed -- you are always potentially vulnerable. All it takes is a single point of weakness to get local access, and then the story's over.
It is a critical misjudgment to assume that Linux itself is somehow invincible.
I might be biased, but the truth is I also have a degree of direct experience that most people who comment on the situation lack...
It's too common for people to label those who disagree with them "idiots," so I won't do the same to you. However I would point out that by defining bias as "an opinion of opposite polarity to my own" you are clearly labelling YOURSELF as biased, also. Unless you are willing to admit that you're a total hypocrit.
I think the ONLY unbiased thing that can be said about the Israeli/Palestinian situation is that it's very sad. We don't disagree on that. But if you define my support (which is not total, by the way) for the Israeli side as "biased," then you're just as guilty as I am.
As far as Israel not having a chance... You must be kidding. I suppose you call what is happening in Iraq right now "victory?" Are you trying to tell me we'd have more success against Israel? The only way to decisively win would be to use nukes. Ain't gonna happen.
I'll grant you your second point (the User Agent string might not be truthful). But I'm not sure that virus writers are really targetting server systems anyway. Viruses usually require at least a minimal amount of "cooperation" from the user to spread themselves, be it clicking on an attachment or what have you. It makes more sense to target desktop systems, so I would say that it is the relative popularity of the operating system ON THE DESKTOP that controls how attractive it is to virus writers.
Of course I might be wrong...
And I hope nobody sees me as some kind of Microsoft evangelist for my comments, because that's about as far from truth as you can get:-)
Linux viruses? Do you have any examples of these beasties?
If you did a search for it, you'd find that there are. However they are mostly "theoretical" and nobody has yet seriously sat down to design a fast-spreading, damaging Linux virus. (As an aside: there are experimental viruses that are able to infect cross-platform -- i.e., they run on both Windows and Linux. Pretty crazy, huh?)
Microsoft's point is fundamentally correct however: there are no serious Linux viruses not because they are impossible on Linux, but because Linux just isn't popular enough yet to make it worth the virus writer's time. It makes much more sense to exploit that vast majority of Windows machines. (If you look at Google's Zeitgeist page, you'll see that only 1% of Google queries come from Linux boxes. I consider that a fairly good indicator of the popularity of Linux.)
None of what I just said should be construed to mean that Microsoft isn't responsible for the security of their operating system. There is a major difference between Windows and Linux viruses: on Windows it is very easy to obtain administrator priviledges, which makes Windows viruses much more dangerous. However, it is dishonest for people to claim that Linux is impervious to viruses. It's not true, and to boastfully make that claim is to court disaster.
Well, I got a billion answers all saying "Chilling Effects." I know about that site, the problem with it is that it's interspersed with a bunch of political commentary. I'm talking more about just a simple site with a list of names. Possibly with each name linking to a small description of what got that name onto the list.
Chilling Effects has a very weird format, and although it's a nice place to read headlines, the actual text of the entries is rather cryptic and more than a little ideological.
It looks like there probably isn't a site quite like what I'm talking about. Guess it's time to start planning one!
It's because Jews are a race, not just a religion.
No, they are a class of ethnicities, which is subtly different than a race. My girlfriend is Russian by blood but her family has been Jewish for several generations. And anybody can become Jewish through a certain process. While it is true that most Jews have a characteristic racial identity, they are not entirely defined by it.
Many Israeli Jews are atheists.
This is true, however most of them do participate in Jewish cultural activities regardless of whether they are secular. Quite a few keep kosher even though they aren't religious. But as I said, it is a CULTURE and not a race. The fact that there are strong racial identities associated with being Jewish is important, but incidental.
Re:Give whatever you feel they deserve.
on
Christmas Bonuses?
·
· Score: 1
never give your wife a vacuum cleaner as a 'gift', under pain of death
Not even if it's one of those Roomba things that does it automatically?
Yeah, I knew about Chilling Effects. But their presentation isn't quite what I am thinking of. I'm thinking more of a very simple page with a simple three-column list of organizations. No commentary or anything like that. A simple "Wall of Shame."
If I had the bandwidth to do it, I'd start one up myself. Unfortunately that's not possible right now... And it's definitely the type of site that would be Slashdotted eventually, and why the hell would I want to bring THAT shitstorm down on myself?;-)
Is there a site out there like a "Wall of Shame" where we can go to see a list of fuckheads who have C&D'd people using the DMCA as a threat?
It would be nice to have a list of all of them all in one place so I can make sure to never ever pay money to any organization that has used the DMCA against someone.
Hey, not knock the word glitch! From the dictionary:
2. A false or spurious electronic signal caused by a brief, unwanted surge of electric power.
THAT was the original definition. Unfortunately the term has been hijacked by computer programmers to mean something slightly different, and that usage is now the most common one. It's too bad, because the word "glitch" used to have a very specific and useful meaning. It should NOT be a general term for a fuckup.
In fact, when I first saw the article title I literally thought it meant that the faults were caused by some sort of electrical problem. It's too bad the meaning of the word has been polluted in this way. Sort of like what has happened to the term "hacker."
Those military projects from israel can't be sold to anyone unless it's approved by the US, so this one might have gone without the approval.
That's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. Israel is a sovereign nation. They are restricted in what they can due with funding from the U.S. and with U.S. built equipment. They can do whatever they damn well please with their own stuff.
And don't try to claim that Israeli technology is dependent on American brain power. If you say that, you're the most ignorant person in the world.
What's the U.S. gonna do if Israel breaks the rules? Invade them? Be realistic, we'd be blown to oblivion trying something like that. The U.S. can sit and shake it's finger at Israel, and Israel is free to say "How about you just fuck off friendly, 'kay?"
Ironically, with Israel's bans on inter-racial marriages...
The ban is not on inter-racial marriages, but inter-RELIGION marriages. You may find it surprising, but there are in fact Arab Jews (not many), and also Arab Christians living in Israel. The only recognized union is between two Jews. It has nothing to do with their race -- the fact that most Arabs are not Jews is incidental. I am not Jewish. I am a white American. However, I would NOT be allowed to legally marry my girlfriend in Israel. It's not because of my RACE, but because I'm not JEWISH.
Do you really find it surprising that in a Jewish religious state, there would be restrictions on how the religions can intermarry? I don't find it surprising at all. As for whether a religious state is a good thing, I really don't think it's your place to judge that.
By the way, it is not a big problem. Plenty of young people want to marry across religious lines in Israel. To do this, they fly to nearby Mediterreanean islands like Cyprus. Israel honors these marriages. So the "restriction" isn't really so restrictive.
You may also find it surprising that a lot of Israeli youth don't bear hatred toward Arabs (as obviously demonstrated by the fact that they are MARRYING them). Your surprise, however, is due to gross ignorance.
The basic problem with versioning in the file system is deciding when to commit. Do you commit for every byte written? Of course not, that would be a massive waste of time and disk space. Do you commit once for every write() call? That suffers the same problem, because sometimes writes are very small, and you can never predict in advance how large a write will be.
You can't automatically commit after every xxx bytes of data written, because that means there will be a bunch of intermediate states on disk, most of which are probably bogus (this argument applies to the above two options as well).
The only thing that even remotely makes sense is to commit on close(), but that doesn't make sense for applications like text editors which keep the file open for the entire duration. You want each SAVE to be a commit, not each CLOSE.
What this boils down to is that there must be application level support for the commit operation (i.e., a new commit() syscall). The application has to specifically be coded to tell the operating system "Ok, I'm done with the revision, commit this now." And that means every application on the system will have to be tweaked to make the necessary commit calls, not to mention the thought that goes into deciding WHEN it is appropriate to commit. I would wager that a lot of maintainers wouldn't bother to make those changes, and as a result those applications wouldn't support versioning.
I agree that a versioned file system would kick ass, and there are even some out there already (Google for "versioning filesystems"). But they tend to be special purpose. I don't see how it could be cleanly and transparently integrated into a general purpose system such as Linux.
Note that I didn't bother to check CiteSeer to see if there is academic work on this before posting this comment. So if anyone knows of any work toward that end, I'm sure a lot of us would appreciate a pointer to it.
I won't make any claim that it's "insightful" or that nobody else has had similar ideas.
I studied CS, not philosophy. At least I can claim to have rediscovered an idea without prompting from somebody else, right? How about a few inches of slack?
Well, AND and OR aren't reversible, but that doesn't mean there are no binary operations that aren't. It just means that a reversible computer is going to work a lot differently than you are used to.
In particular, most reversible logical operations have more than one output. The example of NOT is one of the few than has only a single output.
It means you can take the outputs and recover the inputs.
If I tell you that (x && y) == 0, can you tell me what x and y are? No: it could be (0, 0) or (0, 1) or (1, 0). Therefore, the operation AND is not reversible.
A reversible computer always performs operations that can be uncomputed. Given the outputs, you can reconstruct the inputs. This means, for one thing, that a reversible computer has no concept of boolean AND. Or OR, for that matter. NOT is reversible, though.
Because it seemed totally pointless. It was a theoretical curiosity.
People started looking at reversibility in earnest when quantum computing came on the scene. A quantum computer HAS to be reversible in order to function. That made it a very important field of study.
We only recently realized that reversible circuits are also more energy efficient. So basically, we didn't do it before because we didn't know. There is no "catch."
Slashdot Mirror
Palette shifting is against the rules.
Sure, by "external" I meant something other than gravitational potential energy. Although muscles would never actually work, because they aren't 100% efficient. Even if you had strong enough muscles to overcome your total potential gravitational energy, so much waste heat would be generated in the process that you'd vaporize yourself :-)
Because moving to an unstable, experimental platform is a bullshit answer, and we want a real one.
Russians get drunk on vodka, not beer.
The ONLY way to reach escape velocity is with an external power source like a rocket.
What kind of crack are the people at Red Hat smoking, and where can I get some?
Regards,
Pclminion
On the other hand, when Linux begins to gain more acceptance as a day-to-day desktop operating system, we're going to start seeing naive users who are actually going to do stupid things like saving attachments then executing them. This is related to popularity, but specifically popularity among TYPICAL, NAIVE computer users.
The fact is, it's very possible for local exploit conditions to exist in the kernel itself. That means it doesn't matter what software you might or might not have installed -- you are always potentially vulnerable. All it takes is a single point of weakness to get local access, and then the story's over.
It is a critical misjudgment to assume that Linux itself is somehow invincible.
It's too common for people to label those who disagree with them "idiots," so I won't do the same to you. However I would point out that by defining bias as "an opinion of opposite polarity to my own" you are clearly labelling YOURSELF as biased, also. Unless you are willing to admit that you're a total hypocrit.
I think the ONLY unbiased thing that can be said about the Israeli/Palestinian situation is that it's very sad. We don't disagree on that. But if you define my support (which is not total, by the way) for the Israeli side as "biased," then you're just as guilty as I am.
As far as Israel not having a chance... You must be kidding. I suppose you call what is happening in Iraq right now "victory?" Are you trying to tell me we'd have more success against Israel? The only way to decisively win would be to use nukes. Ain't gonna happen.
Of course I might be wrong...
And I hope nobody sees me as some kind of Microsoft evangelist for my comments, because that's about as far from truth as you can get :-)
If you did a search for it, you'd find that there are. However they are mostly "theoretical" and nobody has yet seriously sat down to design a fast-spreading, damaging Linux virus. (As an aside: there are experimental viruses that are able to infect cross-platform -- i.e., they run on both Windows and Linux. Pretty crazy, huh?)
Microsoft's point is fundamentally correct however: there are no serious Linux viruses not because they are impossible on Linux, but because Linux just isn't popular enough yet to make it worth the virus writer's time. It makes much more sense to exploit that vast majority of Windows machines. (If you look at Google's Zeitgeist page, you'll see that only 1% of Google queries come from Linux boxes. I consider that a fairly good indicator of the popularity of Linux.)
None of what I just said should be construed to mean that Microsoft isn't responsible for the security of their operating system. There is a major difference between Windows and Linux viruses: on Windows it is very easy to obtain administrator priviledges, which makes Windows viruses much more dangerous. However, it is dishonest for people to claim that Linux is impervious to viruses. It's not true, and to boastfully make that claim is to court disaster.
Chilling Effects has a very weird format, and although it's a nice place to read headlines, the actual text of the entries is rather cryptic and more than a little ideological.
It looks like there probably isn't a site quite like what I'm talking about. Guess it's time to start planning one!
No, they are a class of ethnicities, which is subtly different than a race. My girlfriend is Russian by blood but her family has been Jewish for several generations. And anybody can become Jewish through a certain process. While it is true that most Jews have a characteristic racial identity, they are not entirely defined by it.
Many Israeli Jews are atheists.
This is true, however most of them do participate in Jewish cultural activities regardless of whether they are secular. Quite a few keep kosher even though they aren't religious. But as I said, it is a CULTURE and not a race. The fact that there are strong racial identities associated with being Jewish is important, but incidental.
Not even if it's one of those Roomba things that does it automatically?
Tell me, is that THE most bizarre Chinese legend, or do they get even weirder than that? ;-)
If I had the bandwidth to do it, I'd start one up myself. Unfortunately that's not possible right now... And it's definitely the type of site that would be Slashdotted eventually, and why the hell would I want to bring THAT shitstorm down on myself? ;-)
It would be nice to have a list of all of them all in one place so I can make sure to never ever pay money to any organization that has used the DMCA against someone.
2. A false or spurious electronic signal caused by a brief, unwanted surge of electric power.
THAT was the original definition. Unfortunately the term has been hijacked by computer programmers to mean something slightly different, and that usage is now the most common one. It's too bad, because the word "glitch" used to have a very specific and useful meaning. It should NOT be a general term for a fuckup.
In fact, when I first saw the article title I literally thought it meant that the faults were caused by some sort of electrical problem. It's too bad the meaning of the word has been polluted in this way. Sort of like what has happened to the term "hacker."
That's one of the most ridiculous things I've ever heard. Israel is a sovereign nation. They are restricted in what they can due with funding from the U.S. and with U.S. built equipment. They can do whatever they damn well please with their own stuff.
And don't try to claim that Israeli technology is dependent on American brain power. If you say that, you're the most ignorant person in the world.
What's the U.S. gonna do if Israel breaks the rules? Invade them? Be realistic, we'd be blown to oblivion trying something like that. The U.S. can sit and shake it's finger at Israel, and Israel is free to say "How about you just fuck off friendly, 'kay?"
The ban is not on inter-racial marriages, but inter-RELIGION marriages. You may find it surprising, but there are in fact Arab Jews (not many), and also Arab Christians living in Israel. The only recognized union is between two Jews. It has nothing to do with their race -- the fact that most Arabs are not Jews is incidental. I am not Jewish. I am a white American. However, I would NOT be allowed to legally marry my girlfriend in Israel. It's not because of my RACE, but because I'm not JEWISH.
Do you really find it surprising that in a Jewish religious state, there would be restrictions on how the religions can intermarry? I don't find it surprising at all. As for whether a religious state is a good thing, I really don't think it's your place to judge that.
By the way, it is not a big problem. Plenty of young people want to marry across religious lines in Israel. To do this, they fly to nearby Mediterreanean islands like Cyprus. Israel honors these marriages. So the "restriction" isn't really so restrictive.
You may also find it surprising that a lot of Israeli youth don't bear hatred toward Arabs (as obviously demonstrated by the fact that they are MARRYING them). Your surprise, however, is due to gross ignorance.
Yes, I've spent time in Israel.
You can't automatically commit after every xxx bytes of data written, because that means there will be a bunch of intermediate states on disk, most of which are probably bogus (this argument applies to the above two options as well).
The only thing that even remotely makes sense is to commit on close(), but that doesn't make sense for applications like text editors which keep the file open for the entire duration. You want each SAVE to be a commit, not each CLOSE.
What this boils down to is that there must be application level support for the commit operation (i.e., a new commit() syscall). The application has to specifically be coded to tell the operating system "Ok, I'm done with the revision, commit this now." And that means every application on the system will have to be tweaked to make the necessary commit calls, not to mention the thought that goes into deciding WHEN it is appropriate to commit. I would wager that a lot of maintainers wouldn't bother to make those changes, and as a result those applications wouldn't support versioning.
I agree that a versioned file system would kick ass, and there are even some out there already (Google for "versioning filesystems"). But they tend to be special purpose. I don't see how it could be cleanly and transparently integrated into a general purpose system such as Linux.
Note that I didn't bother to check CiteSeer to see if there is academic work on this before posting this comment. So if anyone knows of any work toward that end, I'm sure a lot of us would appreciate a pointer to it.
I studied CS, not philosophy. At least I can claim to have rediscovered an idea without prompting from somebody else, right? How about a few inches of slack?
In particular, most reversible logical operations have more than one output. The example of NOT is one of the few than has only a single output.
If I tell you that (x && y) == 0, can you tell me what x and y are? No: it could be (0, 0) or (0, 1) or (1, 0). Therefore, the operation AND is not reversible.
A reversible computer always performs operations that can be uncomputed. Given the outputs, you can reconstruct the inputs. This means, for one thing, that a reversible computer has no concept of boolean AND. Or OR, for that matter. NOT is reversible, though.
People started looking at reversibility in earnest when quantum computing came on the scene. A quantum computer HAS to be reversible in order to function. That made it a very important field of study.
We only recently realized that reversible circuits are also more energy efficient. So basically, we didn't do it before because we didn't know. There is no "catch."