It's *you* who devolved into crude sexual comments about AC's sister. All you are is some crude and disgusting idiot with an obviously strong bias for attention-seeking who goes by the pseudonymous handle "djlowe" and keeps posting repeatedly about the same thing. I'll trust the veracity of an AC's statement over anything you say any day of the week. That's the W behind your WTF. Happy to have helped.
Well, in the first place: A claim by an AC, about a sister, has no veracity: I can just as easily state this: My sister is a fucking slut. This, despite the fact that I have no sister. See how that works?
In addition, despite the fact that I have a pseudonymous handle "djlowe"? I've been here for a VERY long time, under that handle: I'd tend to think that that has more weight than all of you AC's:)
It's *you* who devolved into crude sexual comments about AC's sister
That was intentional - to point out the fact that there's NO way for any of us to know whether or not the AC's sister even exists. Can you prove that she does? Can you disprove that she didn't give me the clap? Or that she was a bad lay?
I'll trust the veracity of an AC's statement over anything you say any day of the week
Says the next AC *grin* Why doesn't that surprise me?
Tell you what - when you grow a pair, you come and post non-AC.
Regards,
dj
Okay, here I am. Again, I'll trust the veracity of something an AC says, who has nothing to gain or lose, over an immature attention-seeking poster any day of the week. Now you know for a fact that it's true.
I think I figured some stuff out - slashdot is indeed performing an HTTP connection back and trying to retrieve "ok.txt", but it's infrequent and has been going on for some time. The connections are all from slashdot.org 216.34.181.45 and started about 10 months ago. If I check slashdot itself for the file (http://slashdot.org/ok.txt) it exists, so a possibility is that slashdot is testing to see if my connection is coming from an anonymous web proxy, though I don't know why they'd care. The file returns "ok", so I'll try putting that in and see what happens. I'm surprised that nobody else is noticing this. I'm certain it's not just me.
The slowdown seems to be the result of a really massive pile of CSS/javascript stuff coinciding with a spam attack and my wimpy DSL line. I don't know if the CSS craziness is new, but I'm blocking it all, and slashdot works fine and is much cleaner and faster for me now.
I know this is completely offtopic. Apologies. Slashdot doesn't have a static user support thread that I'm aware of, or I'd have asked in it instead.
Something seems to have changed with slashdot recently. It started connecting back to me as if I were a web server to get a file called "ok.txt", so I started throwing some random stuff in that file to send back. Then I noticed a connection being made from my browser to c.fsdn.com to download 400K of something or other. This makes slashdot takes so long to come up that it's pretty much unusable. Is this happening to anyone else?
Does the embedded player contain DRM? If not, it sounds like a great piece of gear! If it's crippled with DRM, it has about as much value as microsoft's media player to me: $0.
I don't think there's anyone out there who never ever deals with distractions while driving. Having a sandwich, drinking something, changing tracks on a CD, driving while not having enough sleep... everyone does it on one level or another. All of it is dangerous, but the only thing that seems to get people keyed up is cell phone use. Can anyone explain to me why?
Certainly. It has to do with the level of concentration that the extraneous task takes away from your driving. The attention required to roll your window up to reduce the amount of wind in your car as you enter the freeway or to take a sip of coffee is far less than the attention that would be required to watch an episode of your favorite TV show or to read a passage of a really good book while driving. The latter activities are called "escapes", and for good reason. They are very powerful distractions for your attention.
Having a conversation on the phone falls somewhere between the two extremes - but it is close enough to the latter extreme to cause measurable distraction and accidents. Texting is considerably worse than having a phone conversation while driving.
There is a marked difference between having a conversation with someone who is inside the car with you and someone who is on the phone with you. The person in the car is aware of the same things you are, and will tend to shut their yap when the semitruck next to you covers your windshield with mist. The person on the other end of the phone will be oblivious to your immediate need to temporarily shift your attention from the conversation to your inability to see, and they will keep yakking, which, unless you drop the phone, will continue to consume your attention.
Also mod it down because the article is completely misleading - Lawrence Roberts doesn't want to gag P2P at all. He wants to help it survive in a practical manner.
The problem he wants to solve is how to make someone who's trying to bring up a quick mapquest page be able to do so without sitting there waiting and waiting, and eventually wondering whether there're five people on his subnet downloading the latest 18G celebrity midget porn video. If he solves that problem, then Comcast won't care about using more stupid methods of throttling our celebrity midget porn.
Present day Asia has more population that the entire planet did a few hundred years ago. Why doesn't Asia have an 18th century world's concentration of war, plague, and starvation?
It does. I have been to China. Poverty and starvation and the sheer overwhelming numbers of desperate, needy people everywhere you look is like nothing that many of us sitting in front of computers can even imagine. You'll need to look beyond Fox News, CNN, and Slashdot to see it though.
The answer, I would say, is that, while it is a factor, population is hardly the key determinant.
Yes, it is. In fact, it is the ONLY determinant. Anything else that you improve will only lead to more people, which will ultimately exacerbate the problem. There is no difference between humans on the planet and bacteria in a petri dish as far as behavior goes. We have the neuron bundles to believe that we can make choices to the contrary, but you will notice that in fact, we are unable to control our population even when faced with peril. This is also true of China - the one child policy is a political theory, yet I met a number of people who were brothers and sisters, and who were reticent to discuss it.
Rather, it is not the quantity of the civilization, but the quality. Given limited resources, a well managed, civil population of 10,000 will do far better than an uncivilized, chaotic population of 1000.
Only as long as they have sufficient food and space.
As for Glug, if he wanted to deny a treatment that would regenerate him on his deathbed, more power to him. The rest of us would much rather accept the treatment and strive to continue to improve the world's condition for everyone through means other than cutting the population.
Everybody wears out. You and I will both be on our deathbeds someday, just as my grandparents were, and we will be too exhausted to continue. Our joints will ache. Our bowels won't work. It will simply require too much effort to continue, and we will give up living. You can deny it, resist it, fight it all you want now, but if you are fortunate, it's going to happen exactly the way I have described.
May you be at peace with yourself and all that you have accomplished in a long, prosperous, and happy life when your time comes.
With 6.5 billion people on the planet, and all of the world's major problems (global warming, wars, famines, extinction of animal and plant life, etc etc) being a direct result of human overpopulation, the fight to end aging seems like the most idiotic endeavor of them all.
It sounds like the primary consideration to me. This isn't a DMCA story, it's a story about how the clueless enables identity theft. Here, she has posted some guy's birth certificate, complete with mother's maiden name and birthdate. She seems upset that he got drunk in her bar, so perhaps she's not that clueless and it's intentional instead.
Your response to Christopher Soghoian's Boarding Pass Generator makes little sense. Anyone who has a computer and a basic knowledge of image editing using tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel PhotoPaint has been able to do what his web site demonstrated ever since the airline industry began allowing people to print boarding passes in their own homes.
I am saddened that you would call for the arrest of a graduate student who was pointing out the serious security problems that home-printed boarding passes creates. You should be going after solving those problems, not going after Mr. Soghoian.
The chilling effect caused by your call for the arrest of security researchers like Mr. Soghoian will make us less safe, because it will silence those who would participate in the process of self-examination of our own security procedures.
I am particularly concerned about this because of your role related to Homeland Security. You appear to be more interested in silencing those who would strengthen America by shining a light on security flaws than you are in fixing those flaws. You have a responsibility to the American people to fix the flaws, not to jail those who point them out.
His movies would be more credible if he didn't try to present them as documentaries.
Huh? Better check your humor circuit for cold solder joints. Moore's movies are irony-laden comedies through and through, and Moore presents them as exactly that. He's never made a documentary, and I seriously doubt that he ever will.
I'm surprised that people don't see the First Amendment concerns. Be careful what you wish for. What if L.L. Bean where "taking the high road" by preventing their customers from being "accosted" with information such as L.L. Bean's use of sweatshop labor...
This is not a First Amendment issue. If the situation were that surfers were voluntarily using a popup-generating program (remember www.thirdvoice.com? (thirdvoice wiki) then it would be, but this situation is different: Surfers who did not authorize the placement of the spyware software on their PCs are being presented with Nordstrom's advertising.
Nordstrom would have the right to bitch about LL Bean's operations in a voluntary medium, but Nordstrom has no First Amendment rights in a medium that entails the unauthorized installation of spyware any more than I have the right to come into your home with a bullhorn and lecture you about the evils of the bush administration. If the allegation of Nordstrom's paying money to a spyware popup-vendor is true, then a reasonable person could argue that Nordstrom has engaged in computer trespass or other illegal behaviour, and it would certainly have no First Amendment rights to do that.
Heck, it's just that not everbody thinks thet hardware biometric schemes are as generically secure as you think they are. I dunno if they're all maroons. There might be some people on Slashdot who fritter away their home time coming up with faster ways to determine whether p mod n is primitive for large n and who like to analyze the power consumption of hardware devices to gain information about the bits that comprise the keys stored therein, or mebbe not.
You appear to be a mite irritated by the notion that everyone on Slashdot seems to be pretty ignorant of cryptography stuff. Here's how I'd use that against you:
I would create two files of the same size. The first file would contain stuff that I wanted to hide from you. The second file would contain the stuff that I wanted you to discover. I would use a cryptographically strong psuedorandom number generator seeded with a passphrase to make an XOR pad, and I'd encrypt and overwrite the first file with it. Then I'd use that as a pad and XOR and overwrite the second file. The result would be two files of random-looking gibberish that when XORed together, resulted in the second file. I'd leave the second file ciphertext out somewhere for you to find, and I'd scatter the first file ciphertext around in slack space or wherever to make it hard, but not impossible to find.
I think that your belief that other people are hayseeds would cause you to stop investigating when you found the XOR decryption pad for the second file and successfully decrypted the second file. I do not believe that you would pause to consider that a completely different file was stored within the decryption pad.
Among a larger audience however, like the set of Slashdotters, it would be virtually certain to occur to somebody. No matter how smart you are, there are always people who have different and potentially useful perspectives.
Anyway, it seems like the "if the system is properly implemented" could be a mighty big if. Doesn't it seem probable that there will be an error or two in a complex system's implementation?
The problem with drinking water is not the potential threat of a terrorist attack in one densely populated area, it's the constant ongoing damage to waterways everywhere done by chemical plants, pesticide use, logging, etc etc. There's an elephant in the room! Right here! RIGHT HERE!!!
Let's not notice the elephant, let's build some robots to see if we can detect any subtle hints of poisons in the water.
An uptime of 60 seconds sounds pretty good to me, but I never get the message that it's going to shut down. Are you saying I'd get that feature if I switched to a pirated copy of Windows?
The converse of your point is that print statements are also restricted to certain environments. When the code you're debugging is something like a high volume interrupt handler, print statements may perturb the system more drastically than the bug you're trying to find does.
I use print statements a lot too, but sometimes print statements simply will not work and I need to use Winice, Periscope, tcpdump, an HP 1600A logic analyzer, or sometimes even some TTL chips and a few LEDs instead. Saying print statements are all you ever need to debug is like saying you can build a house using only a hammer. Sure, you *can* mix concrete, cut rebar, and dig drainage ditches using a hammer, but you look a bit silly to the rest of the crew.
I would rephrase that to "Because employers place erroneous (and, alas, believed by the courts) claims of ownership on the code that programmers bring into a workplace in their heads and notebooks."
This allows them to take the best features/ideas of their historical library and integrate those ideas in new and better ways...
As you pointed out, taking features/ideas from their historical library and integrating them in new and better ways can be illegal.
The problem is not that programmers sometimes reuse some of their own source code to avoid wasting time by having to reimplement some mundane algorithm, but that IP law does not recognize that the line between what code an employer owns and what an employee owns must fall somewhere outside of the employee's head rather than within it. You simply cannot own people's minds, humourous examples involving the current presidential administration notwithstanding.
It is commonly known that we are nowhere near running out of space on earth.
That's flat-out incorrect. A reasonable definition of "running out of space on earth" is no longer being able to exist as a species without displacing other species to the point where we drive them to extinction. We have reached that point and passed it.
We don't need more people. We would do just well as a species with about 4 billion fewer of us shitting in the nest. Doing anything to improve either food production or food distribution for humans will only increase our population and is a step in the wrong direction.
(Our marketing you opt into while ordering, don't flame me, we do not purchase lists!)
Not a flame, just letting you know: If I place an order with a company, I never check any boxes that opt me in to receive advertising. If I get "defaulted" to receiving ads and do receive some later, then I report the spam to the company's upstream and, obviously, I never buy anything from that company again. You might check to see whether your order forms try to "default" people into receiving spam or not - it is possible that the opt-in list that your marketing department thinks it has accumulated is not an opt-in list at all, and that people are reporting your company's email as spam because your company is in fact sending them unsolicited bulk email.
If it wants to interoperate with any IPSec implementation other than itself, it will need to support negotiation through single DES (even if the tunnel doesn't wind up using it).
Refusal to support single DES was what made FreeS/WAN virtually useless, even for those who muddled through the endpoint configurations and could put up with ip:port combos occasionally being hung out to dry due to dropped connects until the next rekey.
According to the good legislators backing it, it would be for things of an adult nature that are harmful to innocent children.
I for one think it's a great idea. I'd love to see sites that are bad for children, such as www.mcdonalds.com (guys in clown suits making kids fat), www.fox.com (currently hyping The Girl Next Door to teach young girls about sex, and Playing It Straight to teach kids about a correlation between sexual preference and gold digging, or some sort of mindbending thing that I can't follow), and any other site that teaches kids something that someone else thinks it is bad for them to be exposed to.
Now that I think about it, we could save a lot of time and hassle by just moving everything to.sex or.xxx right away. Then, as we found things that were acceptable to everyone, we could move those to a TLD called.pablum or.bland or something.
I was going to nominate www.barney.pablum as the first, until it was pointed out to me that the child-hugging Barney is obviously the root cause of the phenomenon known as "Furries".
... not making much progress with its political goals of encrypting a significant portion of all Internet communications...
Part of the problem with the FreeS/WAN group was that they DIDN'T WANT TO INTEROPERATE. Their attitude toward single DES was that they refused to support it because it wasn't sufficiently secure. As I recall, they wouldn't even accept patches that provided it as an ifdef with the default turned off. So, they were a pain in the ass to use for any serious interoperative commercial development, which obviously requires stooping to single DES.
This quote from the FAQ at freeswan.org sums up their attitude regarding interoperability: "As we see it, it is more important to deliver real security than to comply with a standard which has been subverted into allowing use of inadequate methods."
FreeS/WAN saw it wrong. Sure, single DES is not macho enough, but interoperating is pretty damned important, even if that means supporting a protocol that is beneath your 'leetness.
This is a functional limitation. I do not want my CPUs crippled in this fashion.
Not allowing a sequence of instructions to modify the stack frame seems more like a pathetic bandaid for computer security than a solution. Nevermind software that deliberately patches stack frames, such as code containing its own overlay management, or the issues with JIT compilers that others have mentioned.
It seems that what's pushing this is all the buffer overrun problems in Windows. How about if Microsoft just fixes its buffer overflow bugs in its software as it finds them, like all the rest of us do? If a trend to build CPUs that make allowances for buggy software takes hold, the general level of software quality can be expected to decline, not improve. I don't see how this is a good thing in the long run.
Try raising your kids without buying any CDs and without letting them buy any CDs, and your views about that may change over several years.
Music is a luxury in the same way that reading and science are luxuries. Unfortunately, the dominant distribution medium today for music is largely controlled by a monopoly. If the RIAA were the PIAA (Publisher's Industry Association of America) instead, and they were suing kids who were scanning pages of the Berenstein Bears or Harry Potter, would you have the same view?
I appreciate your argument that CDs are a luxury, but I respectfully disagree. Music is not a luxury. It's a significant portion of the Arts, which no human society has ever done without. I believe that the RIAA has before, and is currently, engaging in artificial price manipulation of the dominant distribution medium of our society's music.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, in the first place: A claim by an AC, about a sister, has no veracity: I can just as easily state this: My sister is a fucking slut. This, despite the fact that I have no sister. See how that works? In addition, despite the fact that I have a pseudonymous handle "djlowe"? I've been here for a VERY long time, under that handle: I'd tend to think that that has more weight than all of you AC's :)
That was intentional - to point out the fact that there's NO way for any of us to know whether or not the AC's sister even exists. Can you prove that she does? Can you disprove that she didn't give me the clap? Or that she was a bad lay?
Says the next AC *grin* Why doesn't that surprise me? Tell you what - when you grow a pair, you come and post non-AC. Regards, dj
Okay, here I am. Again, I'll trust the veracity of something an AC says, who has nothing to gain or lose, over an immature attention-seeking poster any day of the week. Now you know for a fact that it's true.
I think I figured some stuff out - slashdot is indeed performing an HTTP connection back and trying to retrieve "ok.txt", but it's infrequent and has been going on for some time. The connections are all from slashdot.org 216.34.181.45 and started about 10 months ago. If I check slashdot itself for the file (http://slashdot.org/ok.txt) it exists, so a possibility is that slashdot is testing to see if my connection is coming from an anonymous web proxy, though I don't know why they'd care. The file returns "ok", so I'll try putting that in and see what happens. I'm surprised that nobody else is noticing this. I'm certain it's not just me.
The slowdown seems to be the result of a really massive pile of CSS/javascript stuff coinciding with a spam attack and my wimpy DSL line. I don't know if the CSS craziness is new, but I'm blocking it all, and slashdot works fine and is much cleaner and faster for me now.
I know this is completely offtopic. Apologies. Slashdot doesn't have a static user support thread that I'm aware of, or I'd have asked in it instead.
Something seems to have changed with slashdot recently. It started connecting back to me as if I were a web server to get a file called "ok.txt", so I started throwing some random stuff in that file to send back. Then I noticed a connection being made from my browser to c.fsdn.com to download 400K of something or other. This makes slashdot takes so long to come up that it's pretty much unusable. Is this happening to anyone else?
Does the embedded player contain DRM? If not, it sounds like a great piece of gear! If it's crippled with DRM, it has about as much value as microsoft's media player to me: $0.
I don't think there's anyone out there who never ever deals with distractions while driving. Having a sandwich, drinking something, changing tracks on a CD, driving while not having enough sleep... everyone does it on one level or another. All of it is dangerous, but the only thing that seems to get people keyed up is cell phone use. Can anyone explain to me why?
Certainly. It has to do with the level of concentration that the extraneous task takes away from your driving. The attention required to roll your window up to reduce the amount of wind in your car as you enter the freeway or to take a sip of coffee is far less than the attention that would be required to watch an episode of your favorite TV show or to read a passage of a really good book while driving. The latter activities are called "escapes", and for good reason. They are very powerful distractions for your attention.
Having a conversation on the phone falls somewhere between the two extremes - but it is close enough to the latter extreme to cause measurable distraction and accidents. Texting is considerably worse than having a phone conversation while driving.
There is a marked difference between having a conversation with someone who is inside the car with you and someone who is on the phone with you. The person in the car is aware of the same things you are, and will tend to shut their yap when the semitruck next to you covers your windshield with mist. The person on the other end of the phone will be oblivious to your immediate need to temporarily shift your attention from the conversation to your inability to see, and they will keep yakking, which, unless you drop the phone, will continue to consume your attention.
Also mod it down because the article is completely misleading - Lawrence Roberts doesn't want to gag P2P at all. He wants to help it survive in a practical manner.
The problem he wants to solve is how to make someone who's trying to bring up a quick mapquest page be able to do so without sitting there waiting and waiting, and eventually wondering whether there're five people on his subnet downloading the latest 18G celebrity midget porn video. If he solves that problem, then Comcast won't care about using more stupid methods of throttling our celebrity midget porn.
Present day Asia has more population that the entire planet did a few hundred years ago. Why doesn't Asia have an 18th century world's concentration of war, plague, and starvation?
It does. I have been to China. Poverty and starvation and the sheer overwhelming numbers of desperate, needy people everywhere you look is like nothing that many of us sitting in front of computers can even imagine. You'll need to look beyond Fox News, CNN, and Slashdot to see it though.
The answer, I would say, is that, while it is a factor, population is hardly the key determinant.
Yes, it is. In fact, it is the ONLY determinant. Anything else that you improve will only lead to more people, which will ultimately exacerbate the problem. There is no difference between humans on the planet and bacteria in a petri dish as far as behavior goes. We have the neuron bundles to believe that we can make choices to the contrary, but you will notice that in fact, we are unable to control our population even when faced with peril. This is also true of China - the one child policy is a political theory, yet I met a number of people who were brothers and sisters, and who were reticent to discuss it.
Rather, it is not the quantity of the civilization, but the quality. Given limited resources, a well managed, civil population of 10,000 will do far better than an uncivilized, chaotic population of 1000.
Only as long as they have sufficient food and space.
As for Glug, if he wanted to deny a treatment that would regenerate him on his deathbed, more power to him. The rest of us would much rather accept the treatment and strive to continue to improve the world's condition for everyone through means other than cutting the population.
Everybody wears out. You and I will both be on our deathbeds someday, just as my grandparents were, and we will be too exhausted to continue. Our joints will ache. Our bowels won't work. It will simply require too much effort to continue, and we will give up living. You can deny it, resist it, fight it all you want now, but if you are fortunate, it's going to happen exactly the way I have described.
May you be at peace with yourself and all that you have accomplished in a long, prosperous, and happy life when your time comes.
With 6.5 billion people on the planet, and all of the world's major problems (global warming, wars, famines, extinction of animal and plant life, etc etc) being a direct result of human overpopulation, the fight to end aging seems like the most idiotic endeavor of them all.
Just a consideration that occurred to me..
e .html
It sounds like the primary consideration to me. This isn't a DMCA story, it's a story about how the clueless enables identity theft. Here, she has posted some guy's birth certificate, complete with mother's maiden name and birthdate. She seems upset that he got drunk in her bar, so perhaps she's not that clueless and it's intentional instead.
http://rachelhyman.blogspot.com/2007_02_01_archiv
I sent this:
Dear Senator Markey,
Your response to Christopher Soghoian's Boarding Pass Generator
makes little sense. Anyone who has a computer and a basic knowledge of image editing using tools such as Adobe Photoshop or Corel PhotoPaint has been able to do what his web site demonstrated ever since the airline industry began allowing people to print boarding passes in their own homes.
I am saddened that you would call for the arrest of a graduate student who was pointing out the serious security problems that home-printed boarding passes creates. You should be going after solving those problems, not going after Mr. Soghoian.
The chilling effect caused by your call for the arrest of security researchers like Mr. Soghoian will make us less safe, because it will silence those who would participate in the process of self-examination of our own security procedures.
I am particularly concerned about this because of your role related to Homeland Security. You appear to be more interested in silencing those who would strengthen America by shining a light on security flaws than you are in fixing those flaws. You have a responsibility to the American people to fix the flaws, not to jail those who point them out.
His movies would be more credible if he didn't try to present them as documentaries.
Huh? Better check your humor circuit for cold solder joints. Moore's movies are irony-laden comedies through and through, and Moore presents them as exactly that. He's never made a documentary, and I seriously doubt that he ever will.
Canola oil comes from rape seed, which in the Monsanto vs Schmeiser case seems oddly appropriate.
I'm surprised that people don't see the First Amendment concerns. Be careful what you wish for. What if L.L. Bean where "taking the high road" by preventing their customers from being "accosted" with information such as L.L. Bean's use of sweatshop labor...
This is not a First Amendment issue. If the situation were that surfers were voluntarily using a popup-generating program (remember www.thirdvoice.com? (thirdvoice wiki) then it would be, but this situation is different: Surfers who did not authorize the placement of the spyware software on their PCs are being presented with Nordstrom's advertising.
Nordstrom would have the right to bitch about LL Bean's operations in a voluntary medium, but Nordstrom has no First Amendment rights in a medium that entails the unauthorized installation of spyware any more than I have the right to come into your home with a bullhorn and lecture you about the evils of the bush administration. If the allegation of Nordstrom's paying money to a spyware popup-vendor is true, then a reasonable person could argue that Nordstrom has engaged in computer trespass or other illegal behaviour, and it would certainly have no First Amendment rights to do that.
Heck, it's just that not everbody thinks thet hardware biometric schemes are as generically secure as you think they are. I dunno if they're all maroons. There might be some people on Slashdot who fritter away their home time coming up with faster ways to determine whether p mod n is primitive for large n and who like to analyze the power consumption of hardware devices to gain information about the bits that comprise the keys stored therein, or mebbe not.
You appear to be a mite irritated by the notion that everyone on Slashdot seems to be pretty ignorant of cryptography stuff. Here's how I'd use that against you:
I would create two files of the same size. The first file would contain stuff that I wanted to hide from you. The second file would contain the stuff that I wanted you to discover. I would use a cryptographically strong psuedorandom number generator seeded with a passphrase to make an XOR pad, and I'd encrypt and overwrite the first file with it. Then I'd use that as a pad and XOR and overwrite the second file. The result would be two files of random-looking gibberish that when XORed together, resulted in the second file. I'd leave the second file ciphertext out somewhere for you to find, and I'd scatter the first file ciphertext around in slack space or wherever to make it hard, but not impossible to find.
I think that your belief that other people are hayseeds would cause you to stop investigating when you found the XOR decryption pad for the second file and successfully decrypted the second file. I do not believe that you would pause to consider that a completely different file was stored within the decryption pad.
Among a larger audience however, like the set of Slashdotters, it would be virtually certain to occur to somebody. No matter how smart you are, there are always people who have different and potentially useful perspectives.
Anyway, it seems like the "if the system is properly implemented" could be a mighty big if. Doesn't it seem probable that there will be an error or two in a complex system's implementation?
The problem with drinking water is not the potential threat of a terrorist attack in one densely populated area, it's the constant ongoing damage to waterways everywhere done by chemical plants, pesticide use, logging, etc etc. There's an elephant in the room! Right here! RIGHT HERE!!!
Let's not notice the elephant, let's build some robots to see if we can detect any subtle hints of poisons in the water.
An uptime of 60 seconds sounds pretty good to me, but I never get the message that it's going to shut down. Are you saying I'd get that feature if I switched to a pirated copy of Windows?
The converse of your point is that print statements are also restricted to certain environments. When the code you're debugging is something like a high volume interrupt handler, print statements may perturb the system more drastically than the bug you're trying to find does.
I use print statements a lot too, but sometimes print statements simply will not work and I need to use Winice, Periscope, tcpdump, an HP 1600A logic analyzer, or sometimes even some TTL chips and a few LEDs instead. Saying print statements are all you ever need to debug is like saying you can build a house using only a hammer. Sure, you *can* mix concrete, cut rebar, and dig drainage ditches using a hammer, but you look a bit silly to the rest of the crew.
Because it's illegal?
I would rephrase that to "Because employers place erroneous (and, alas, believed by the courts) claims of ownership on the code that programmers bring into a workplace in their heads and notebooks."
This allows them to take the best features/ideas of their historical library and integrate those ideas in new and better ways...
As you pointed out, taking features/ideas from their historical library and integrating them in new and better ways can be illegal.
The problem is not that programmers sometimes reuse some of their own source code to avoid wasting time by having to reimplement some mundane algorithm, but that IP law does not recognize that the line between what code an employer owns and what an employee owns must fall somewhere outside of the employee's head rather than within it. You simply cannot own people's minds, humourous examples involving the current presidential administration notwithstanding.
It is commonly known that we are nowhere near running out of space on earth.
That's flat-out incorrect. A reasonable definition of "running out of space on earth" is no longer being able to exist as a species without displacing other species to the point where we drive them to extinction. We have reached that point and passed it.
We don't need more people. We would do just well as a species with about 4 billion fewer of us shitting in the nest. Doing anything to improve either food production or food distribution for humans will only increase our population and is a step in the wrong direction.
(Our marketing you opt into while ordering, don't flame me, we do not purchase lists!)
Not a flame, just letting you know: If I place an order with a company, I never check any boxes that opt me in to receive advertising. If I get "defaulted" to receiving ads and do receive some later, then I report the spam to the company's upstream and, obviously, I never buy anything from that company again. You might check to see whether your order forms try to "default" people into receiving spam or not - it is possible that the opt-in list that your marketing department thinks it has accumulated is not an opt-in list at all, and that people are reporting your company's email as spam because your company is in fact sending them unsolicited bulk email.
If it wants to interoperate with any IPSec implementation other than itself, it will need to support negotiation through single DES (even if the tunnel doesn't wind up using it).
Refusal to support single DES was what made FreeS/WAN virtually useless, even for those who muddled through the endpoint configurations and could put up with ip:port combos occasionally being hung out to dry due to dropped connects until the next rekey.
According to the good legislators backing it, it would be for things of an adult nature that are harmful to innocent children.
.sex or .xxx right away. Then, as we found things that were acceptable to everyone, we could move those to a TLD called .pablum or .bland or something.
I for one think it's a great idea. I'd love to see sites that are bad for children, such as www.mcdonalds.com (guys in clown suits making kids fat), www.fox.com (currently hyping The Girl Next Door to teach young girls about sex, and Playing It Straight to teach kids about a correlation between sexual preference and gold digging, or some sort of mindbending thing that I can't follow), and any other site that teaches kids something that someone else thinks it is bad for them to be exposed to.
Now that I think about it, we could save a lot of time and hassle by just moving everything to
I was going to nominate www.barney.pablum as the first, until it was pointed out to me that the child-hugging Barney is obviously the root cause of the phenomenon known as "Furries".
... not making much progress with its political goals of encrypting a significant portion of all Internet communications ...
Part of the problem with the FreeS/WAN group was that they DIDN'T WANT TO INTEROPERATE. Their attitude toward single DES was that they refused to support it because it wasn't sufficiently secure. As I recall, they wouldn't even accept patches that provided it as an ifdef with the default turned off. So, they were a pain in the ass to use for any serious interoperative commercial development, which obviously requires stooping to single DES.
This quote from the FAQ at freeswan.org sums up their attitude regarding interoperability:
"As we see it, it is more important to deliver real security than to comply with a standard which has been subverted into allowing use of inadequate methods."
FreeS/WAN saw it wrong. Sure, single DES is not macho enough, but interoperating is pretty damned important, even if that means supporting a protocol that is beneath your 'leetness.
This is a functional limitation. I do not want my CPUs crippled in this fashion.
Not allowing a sequence of instructions to modify the stack frame seems more like a pathetic bandaid for computer security than a solution. Nevermind software that deliberately patches stack frames, such as code containing its own overlay management, or the issues with JIT compilers that others have mentioned.
It seems that what's pushing this is all the buffer overrun problems in Windows. How about if Microsoft just fixes its buffer overflow bugs in its software as it finds them, like all the rest of us do? If a trend to build CPUs that make allowances for buggy software takes hold, the general level of software quality can be expected to decline, not improve. I don't see how this is a good thing in the long run.
They're selling luxeries.
Try raising your kids without buying any CDs and without letting them buy any CDs, and your views about that may change over several years.
Music is a luxury in the same way that reading and science are luxuries. Unfortunately, the dominant distribution medium today for music is largely controlled by a monopoly. If the RIAA were the PIAA (Publisher's Industry Association of America) instead, and they were suing kids who were scanning pages of the Berenstein Bears or Harry Potter, would you have the same view?
I appreciate your argument that CDs are a luxury, but I respectfully disagree. Music is not a luxury. It's a significant portion of the Arts, which no human society has ever done without. I believe that the RIAA has before, and is currently, engaging in artificial price manipulation of the dominant distribution medium of our society's music.