The nice thing about Windows security ACLs is that they can in theory apply to anything. You can create your own DACLs and have security descriptors for your own application objects - not just files. You can also define the permissions for your own object and define a mapping from the generic read, write, to your own permission system. So in Windows, Printers have that ACL editor dialog to control permissions. Registry entries also have that ACL editor dialog to control permissions. And the permissions / allowable operations are different for printers and registry keys. Your app can also use the default Windows ACL editor (although it says on MSDN it's for Win2k Pro and XP Pro only).
"Those who do not understand unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly."
And here, in this pseudo-implementation of "everything is a file" where metadata such as security descriptors and attributes can be universally applied to data collections and devices, we see an example of just such a thing. The abstraction is insufficient without a universally accessible and intuitive file/device/object model; one that does not require specific application support. There are myriad possible reasons why I may not be able to use your application in a particular context to control such attributes. As it stands, the various components in NT, which can have such metadata applied, are littered across the landscape of the OS.
To be fair, I could say the same thing of the bsd socket api. Its ease-of-use and elegant, yet unfortunately isolated, interface made it a defacto standard which eventually mutated into the POSIX and Single Unix specifications. However, while it fails in one engineering aspect, it succeeds remarkably in another and thus is not the worst compromise that could be made.
In fact, Windows has a vastly, almost prohibitively more elegant security infrastructure than "Linux": File rights of "Full Control, Modify, Read & Execute, Read, Write," file attributes of "Read-Only, Archive, System, Hidden," very finely-grained ACL-based system security "Policies", a global Kerberos-based directory authentication scheme in Active Directory, etc etc etc.
Complexity does not equal elegance. If you find yourself uttering something as foolish as "prohibitively more elegant", you've stumbled into that territory.
"Linux" has rwx-rwx-rwx. That's it. [Now Linux combined with Novell Directory Services and a Novell File System would be an entirely different cup of tea, but that's a whole 'nother discussion. Although, I'd ask: Does Novell even have a "Policies" ACL-based security infrastructure for KDE or GNOME yet? Are they working on such a thing?]
I believe this is somewhat of a simplification. It may be applicable in terms of auditory perception and processing, but as everyone knows, language is much more than the sum of individual words.
Neurolinguistic events are examples of associative cascade events. This is illustrated by the classic example: "Don't think of an elephant." Immediately after reading and comprehending the linguistic elements of the sentence, each and every reader of this post made the applicable associative connections resulting in the contemplation (even if minor and short-lived) of one of our long-nosed pachyderm friends. Even if it was understood that the instruction was not to make the association, by the time this level of awareness was achieved, the cascade was already in progress and unstoppable.
The context of such associative cascades (especially more sophisticated varieties) is largely cultural; however the portions of the brain most likely to respond is based on each association in the chain and its relative contextual weight, rather than the phonetics of the original sound itself.
Lyrical forms of linguistics, such as poetry and song, are particularly powerful because they offer a way to rapidly trigger abstract associations not related to logic, speech or visual images.
The point of warrants is that the constitution recognized that the police have more power than ordinary citizens, and that power had to be kept in check by someone else. In the case of warrants that's the court, and more specifically an elected judge. If the cops become "too powerful" and start abusing their search privileges, we the people can elect a new judge who won't issue so many warrants.
At least that's the idea they teach in Civics 101. These days, warrants are these things that we don't need so much if there are terra'rists running about. Just wiretap 'em all and let God sort out the infidels.
Mmmm.. time for Civics 101 again, I think. Although elected judges do exist in certain parts of the modern judicial branch, this was never the intention. The purpose of the judicial is to impartially oversee the application of law as codified by We the People (i.e. congress) and enforced by the executive (law enforcement). At higher levels, the judicial also ensures that law fits the constraints imposed by the constitution and amendments. To this end, judges were not intended to be elected, as doing such creates implicit coercion by way of popular opinion. A safety check does exist however, in that the judicial may not act as any active legal force; they may only rule on cases that are brought before them from those external to the branch.
Conversely, there may be people who habitually doubt the truth of any statement (for example, scientists), so they may activate the same brain areas as liars even when forced to make such a simple statement as "I had lunch a week ago at Burger King". After all, was that exactly a week ago or the week before this one? Is that on East Coast time or California time?
And anyone who understands how memory works realizes that events from the relative distant past (months/years), those most often questioned in legal situations, have already drifted to one degree or another from what actually transpired. Thus, it's not possible to tell the real truth about the past from memory alone, only what you believe to be the truth. Your "truth" might be a lie to someone else, even if that is not your intention.
Nutshell: I think that possession of child porn *is* as bad as producing (in the movie or photography sense) it, and should be punished accordingly.
By that logic someone who has knowledge of an impending murder but does nothing to stop it, and is not the perpetrator, is guilty of murder? Sure, they're guilty of a crime (assuming due-process was applied and they were convicted in a criminal court) and they should be punished accordingly, but for a lesser crime than whomever committed the actual act. If the true perpatrator is in a different country and cannot be extradited, that is unfortunate, but has no bearing on the penalties imposed on the "accomplice."
To put it another way: On one hand you have someone who actually exploited children in the production of some work, and on the other you have someone who is contributing to the exploitation of children. Both unjustifiable, but don't you think one is worse than the other?
Lesson: Your fellow Americans don't care about your privacy, and trust the feds to decide whether or not to search you (and them), without court review, warrants, probable cause, or anything else. Where's PGPfone when we need it?
Yeah. I heard that some guys figured this out about 230 years ago. Their solution was something called a "republic." Not sure whatever happened with it though.
Disclosure: I am a conservative. I am not a republican. I have never voted republican in a national election. I've also never voted democrat. I think national politics in America is an institution rotten to its core.
Wow. A true conservative; I wasn't sure you guys still existed. Me, I'm a true liberal (and don't vote democrat, of course). Oddly (although not really), in this day and age of the "neocon" and "neoliberal", we have more in common with each other than we do with supposed "conservatives" and "liberals". (Hint to the label-slingers: True conservatism is friggin liberal).
Consider that situation: a user with total control over the system, who can change or overwrite anything, is using a single component for everything they do.
The same is true in Linux. Ever heard of a little thing called "glibc"?
Seriously, there's nothing remarkable about Microsoft's code reuse. Everybody does it. It's a good thing.
The issue is not code reuse, the issue is priviledge separation. Under the unix model, priviledge separation is simple, elegant and explicit with obvious and clear demarcation. While the NT model has made steps in the right direction (ala "RunAs"), the demarcation and operational details remain obscure and fairly nebulous. A few months ago I attempted (again) to run a standalone xp box in non-Administrator mode via the appropriate use of RunAs. It was a nightmare: basic desktop operation wasn't an issue, but most apps (including ms apps) would either fail to work w/out being run as Administrator or would log cryptic meaningless events. Even certain in-built os components would operate in a bizarre and non-intuitive fashion (again, complete w/ meaningless or underdocumented error events). I have no doubt that the issues were all resolvable, but in the end I decided it was not worth my time and that I would simply use the box as an X terminal or for gaming but run no real apps on it. An inexperienced user would certainly have been completely unable to resolve the majority of the issues I encountered.
Additionally, desktop-application-wide priviledge elevation is a poor solution to the separation problem (unix discovered this sometime ago during the era of the overused setuid + monolithic binary) as it is far too encompassing in scope. What is needed is something analogous to the OSX/KDE/GNOME model: default to unpriviledged operation and when required prompt the user (warning-inclusive) for additional temporary elevated credentials; utilizing them only for the absolutely minimum necessary isolated code/sub-app.
Because we still haven't figured out that all of our understanding of the universe is fettered by our unwillingness to admit that we don't know how to understand the universe we sometimes confuse observation with truth. We haven't yet recorded an instance such as you suggest, but we also do not know if we can. Is the speed of light a truth? Or is it merely a flawed observation on our part.
I'm not sure if you're making a philosophical argument or not. If so, its first year philosophy: See Descartes, he already went ahead and worked out the various permutations of "how can I believe anything I experience?" for you.
On the other hand, if you're suggesting a true scientific observation and causality model, its quite deeply flawed.
... "we sometimes confuse observation with truth."
I'm sorry, come again? Observation is truth, in the most direct sense. I think you're too freely intermixing prediction, observation and conclusion. Clearly, by its very nature, prediction is unsettled and unknown. Conclusion may be, and often is, partially or completely incorrect. Observation is the gold standard, its the one thing that can be counted on; the problem is that in many cases its not possible to make direct observations and indirect observation may have as-yet-unknown causality factors. If anything, the underlying challange to "understanding the universe" is an inability to directly observe detail.
But getting back to my original point (anything possible blab blah, show me entropy decrease in a closed system), you cannot so easily utter "we don't know the truth", wave your magic wand and make it disappear. This is not theory, this is law. We don't even need a closed system really, just take any system whose energy output is equal to or greater than any energy input and demonstrate a system-wide decrease in entropy. Hint: You can't without magic. If you could that would mean that we do not live in a consistent universe, that any perceived rules are subject to change at the drop of a hat and that the paranormal offers the only explanation for causality.
There are parts of our own world that have not been explored yet. There are creatures being discovered every year. How long have we been searching the earth? The universe is much bigger. I stopped doubting anything when Bush was elected. If a turd can get elected anything is possible.
Oh yeah? Go ahead and show me entropy decreasing in a closed system then, please.
You're talking about genetics, but I'm talking about a cultural heritage. Cultural pride is necessary in order to have a well-balanced self-identity. The trick is not to let your cultural pride override everything else: pride in your own culture goes hand-in-hand with the acceptance of other cultures.
I'm not talking about genetics strictly, I'm talking about anthropology.
What do you suppose is the motivating factor responsible for cultural formation and its descendant, heritage, in the first place? Higher-order mammals all have complex socialization instincts, humans are no exception.
Short version: cultural pride, in balance with cultural tolerance, makes for a balanced person. I'm more interested in culture than I am in pure genetics.
Amusing then that your interest is so keenly affected by genetics. When cultural "pride" turns for the worst and a culture (the majority anyway, or even a very loud minority) decides that they are superior and that others unlike themselves must be subjugated or extinguished we, too often in hindsight, judge such as morally reprehensible (understandably so). Yet, few seem to contemplate the root cause of this, despite the fact that it happens over and over and over again. Pride is a characteristic quite easily capable of turning (or being turned) malevolent. You yourself noted the potential pitfalls, yet the historical track-record for balancing cultural pride with respect is... less than stellar.
Personally, I disagree with your conclusion "cultural pride is necessary in order to have a well-balanced self-identity." Althougth I do believe that individual tolerance is of significant importance; thus I shall admit to respecting your opinion even if I do not agree with it. No good can come from stripping anyone of their cultural identity, for the ends do not justify the means; however, it is my wish that more individuals would critically evaluate motivation and underlying anthropologic principles.
Huh. Must be nice to be able to put your cultural identity in your pocket and fit in with the dominant culture once in a while. Some of us can't take off our skin colour. Having said that, if an employer doesn't want you because you're not white, it's not an employer worth working for. Be proud of your heritage!
"Be proud of your heritage!" Why? Your heritage is this: No matter the color of your skin, shape of your nose, curliness of your hair, you and every other person on the planet have a common female anscestor who lived about 200,000 years ago. Everything since then (or more accurately, since about 1M years BC) is just minor genetic fluctuation and homo sapien's inane desire to rationalize and/or justify its competitive nature.
Racism, and every other form of prejudice, will continue to exist for as long as humanity continues to be unable to accept and manage the dichotomy created when will and instinct are mixed inside a single mind.
Billions of people won't die. Billions of people will work together in voluntary cooperation of mutual profit (capitalism).
What prevents voluntary cooperation of mutual profit? Taxes, tariffs, regulations, licensing schemes, embargoes and war. These are all government's doing.
Indeed, they are goverment's doing. But why? What happens when voluntary cooperation for mutual profit is at odds with the potential to make short-term profit despite any long-term consequences? Or do you deny that many individuals exist who will, for whatever reason, take advantage of such situations?
When there is a new disease, who is it that prevents companies from bringing the solution to market? Government. Why? To save lives? Right. It has nothing to do with money, right?
Conversely, in the glorified idealized "free-market economy", what is it that prevents a company from claiming their medical product is a solution when in fact it is not? Before you supply the boilerplate "eventually they will be found out and market-forces will cause economic disincentive", consider that they may only be interested in maximizing short-term "profit" and exiting the market, cash-in-hand, as soon as their ploy is discovered. Or do you assert that confidence men do not exist?
Special relativity would indicate that, if one of the photons can be considered stationary, it would observe the speed of the other photon as being c. If the other photon were stationary, it would also observe the speed of the other photon as being c.
Indeed. Although its a little difficult to take a temporally based measurement, such as velocity, when your sample rate takes exactly one eternity. Of course, from the observing photon's reference frame this isn't noticable, it's just that any external reference frame will never be able to see the measurement as it will appear to never complete.
This is why the layperson "who says we can't achieve FTL, just because we haven't done it yet, anything is possible!" argument is so silly. If the SR model is correct, its pointless to contemplate FTL as its the same as asking "why can't I get task X completed sooner than right now?". It's a nonsense question with no possible meaningful answer.
However, both SR and GR show us that distance itself is somewhat "flexible.";) Combine that with the other aspect of ever-elusive gravity, just sitting around being all enigmatic and refusing to give up a universally applicable mechanism means that (probably) the inability to violate causality does not mean that traveling vast "distance" very rapidly isn't possible. But it won't be "Faster Than Light."
If I get this special license when I buy tracks just because I'm a DJ, where is it? What are the terms? Am I agreeing to those terms automatically by purchasing that music?
Lemme let you in on a DJ secret - we play what we get our hands on. Period. I buy acapellas and beats from iTunes and dig for tracks in discount bookstores and flea markets. Where is my license for public performance then?
A DJ that's concerned with the legal status of every little song and sample that they play wouldn't have very many tunes to play. In fact, I own records like "Unknown vs. Gwen Stefani" - Unknown because of the shady nature of an unlicensed sample. Definitely not cleared for public performance, but legitimately purchased from a record store.
I used to be involved with one of the few remaining commercial fm stations in the US that isn't an Infinity or Clear Channel affiliate. They payed the asscap tax like good little boys and girls, but it doesn't cover music that doesn't come off of vinyl or pressed cd. We were warned a few times not to play mp3s, but what can you do? Unless your format is top 40, over the past decade or so the supply of non-mainstream dj promo schwag has significantly shrunk. Bin hunting is fun and all, but its time consuming, and if you have a daily show to do there's just no way you can find fresh tracks without resorting to electronic measures. So, as you can imagine, the rule was silently ignored. The thing that gets me is it's not like the music isn't out there, it's just that the fucking Big Four are hell bent on making any music they don't produce disappear.
In fact, last I heard, sampling anything is illegal in the United States without explicit consent from the copyright holder. Since so many beats used in rap/hip-hop/electronic/industrial are sampled and not cleared, that pretty much makes the records illegal anyway, even if they were sold to you as playable. (BTW, is it illegal to be a cover band? I might just learn to play something...)
Yeah, god forbid an artist does something like oversample Tarantino and have the track end up on the billboards.;)
That is, it tracks reference counts for objects and calls __del__ when the last reference to the object goes away. If you don't create object reference cycles in your code, using __del__ for cleanup works great, but if you do, you then have to wait for the next run of the garbage collector to clean up the "lost" objects. The catch is that the garbage collector doesn't automatically reclaim the objects if you have a __del__ method - you have to manually determine the order to reclaim the objects in the cycle using the gc module (see here for more pedantic details).
That, and since the advent of weakrefs, destructors are wholly unncessary. Weakrefs will call back a function/method immediately after object finalization, which is slightly different than a true destructor that is called before finalization. Still, a simple closure or sep. cleanup object can provide references to any internals you need to cleanup. That and it has the advantage of cooperating very nicely with reference counting gc.
I believe you have misunderstood me, because of my own obscurity.
I understand that the entire concept behind the spectroscope(which is what we read a 'redshift' off of), is based on the assumption that light acts much like sound (we still do not fully understand light). It goes like this. The doppler effect says that, if you are sitting in your car at a red light, and there is a huge 18 wheeler doing 75 in front and to the left of you, about to go through the green light, you will hear the sound from the 18 wheeler at a higher pitch frequency when it is coming towards you (since it is compressing the sound waves), and at a lower frequency when it has past you and it is moving away(since it is refracting the sound waves). now, the theory is, that possibly light does the same thing. a spectroscope breaks the star light through a prism and displays black lines going through one of the colors (black lines shifted through the red area = the star is moving away or black lines shifted to the blue area = the star is moving closer to us). this is not documented to be true, since we still do not fully understand the nature of light, although many people think they do. (many people say "light travels at 186 miles per second." and it seems noone knows the end to that statement to actually make it scientific. "light travels at 186 miles per second IN A VACUUM.". Noone knows exactly what light is, nor do they know that it always travels at the same speed throughout all time, space, and matter. think about the theories regarding black holes, that light can be attracted by gravity-- well, if light can be attracted by gravity, obviously the speed of light is not a constant. In 1999 Dr. Hau at Harvard slowed light down to 38 MPH, in 2000 Dallas Morning News (2/28/2000) said that some folks there slowed it down to 1MPH, then in 2001 nytimes had an article that said that scientists completely stopped light, held it in place, and then sent it out on its way.
Yeah, ok, pure psuedo-science.
(probably just a typo, but you don't really think light travels at 186 miles per second, do you?)
The acoustic doppler effect you labor on about is a simplistic model that may help the layperson grossly visualize concepts like em redshift, but it should not be assumed that a remotely similar process is at work when considering topics like stellar spectroscope shift. Audible sound represents a compression wave which propogates through a medium; electromagnetic energy does not. It can interact with matter, but it exists as a separate entity and is not a mechanical process. While field equations share some fundamental aspects with wave mechanics, this does not make them the same thing. Mathematically, there are many instances in nature where similar functions and constants are "re-used"; and generally one can simply attribute such similarities to thermodynamics (i.e. if stars were naturally square, this would violate the laws of thermodynamics).
While inter-stellar distance calculations based on stellar spectroscopy are certainly capable of being inaccurate for a number of reasons, the science behind these is based on a number of core principals wherein the speed of light is largely irrelevant for determining that the model fits (in one form or another):
1. Spectroscopy: A well studied, deterministic science with which one is capable of determining elemental components based on electromagnetic frequency distribution. The spectroscopic fingerprint is "hard"; e.g. there exist no in-between spectroscopic gradients between two elements, any more than there exist magic elements "in-between" those identified on a periodic table.
2. Red-shift occurs when an emitting object is receeding from the reference frame of an observer. This has been demonstrated experimentally and is reproducible.
3. Intersteller objects which are known to be receeding via parallax measurement exhibit redshift. Their spectroscopy
Dude, you're criticizing a Slashdot news summary. A summary on Slashdot is supposed to contain a blaring headline that may or may not be accurate followed by a body of text that tells a "story." The story should leave on a goofy "cliffhanger" as a lead-in to comments. In this case, ooh, Burst has had the patents for a decade, ooh, they've made apps! What will happen! Ooh! Cliffhanger! It's all for page hits and ad rates.
And yet here you are, obviously reading and posting on the site.
Maynard lyrics seem oddly appropriate at the moment.
"All you read and
Wear or see and
Hear on TV
Is a product
Begging for your
Fatass dirty dollar ...
So...Shut up and ...
Buy my new record
Send more money
Fuck you, buddy." -- Tool, Hooker with a Penis
Well, Linux somehow knows about it anyway. I assumed it came from NTP. From my logs:
Jan 1 12:59:59 sasha kernel: [4616786.935000] Clock: inserting leap second 23:59:60 UTC
(I'm currently in a +1300 timezone, hence it happening at 1pm)
Both myself and the OP were at least partially wrong w.r.t. NTP & leap-seconds. NTP actually does have a mechanism for transmitting a leap-second indicator, however it's not part of the ntp timecode. Each individual ntpd must pass the leap-second announcement along to its clients, however local host processing is platform-dependant (not all systems are capable of exact leap-second adjustments). There have been (at least two) different PLL implementations in the linux kernel; any relatively new kernel + ntpd is, obviously from your log, capable of atomically adjusting by one second so that the host's cpu clock never varies from the ntp code (which is sync'd to utc no matter what). Basically, the utc/ntp "time standing still for one second" event happened simultaneously with the receipt of the leap-second notification and ntpd told your kernel to make the correct adjustment. One the next timecode interval, the clock difference would then be no different than standard cpu drift that ntpd is already accounting for.
In this way, a scientific application, if endowed with the correct kernel interface, could detect leap-seconds and account for them for any intervals that may span the inserted/removed second. Thus, any remaining issues are solely the responsibility of application developers.;)
The NTP protocol that all of us cool kids use to synchronize our computers' clocks has a fundamental flaw -- the NTP time is tied to UTC, but contains no leap seconds at all, more like TAI, the atomic time standard. When there's a leap second, the system's solution is to ignore it.
So, as of today, any time stamp you have made using NTP, ever, has been retroactively displaced by one second. Intervals that included midnight (UTC) last night are all too short by one second.
This may not be a problem for handling your calendar appointments, but it can muck up all kinds of scientific applications that require high precision.
You are confusing transport with content. NTP, by itself, has no inherent concept of leap-seconds, leap-years or any other sort of temporal leapage; it simply provides a way to statistically analyze time sources, account for latency, jitter and dispersion and keep a local clock as closely synced as possible to one or more remote clocks. When making adjustments to the local clock, it is careful to not introduce large amounts of skew which might wreak havoc on time sensitive running processes Iinstead it will slowly "bump" the clock towards what it currently thinks is the most accurate time.
To make NTP useful, of course, it must be provided with one or more ultimately trusted authoritative time source (these can be stratified [stratums] in terms of network closeness to the original time reference). As you noted, major reference clocks on the net use a UTC time source, which makes more sense for common applications than TAI, as non-scientific-clocks world-wide are based on UTC.
When the leap second was added at the beginning of this year (this morning -- or perhaps the very end of last year), the UTC was simply adjusted by one second. stratum 1 NTP servers which are directly hardwired to reference clocks (ultimately, that means atomic clocks), adjusted by the UTC-TAI offset, trust their reference clocks above all else; thus when they saw the UTC adjustment they simply assumed that their local cpu clock was off and began adjusting it accordingly (from the reference frame of the NTP timescale, time "stood still" for one second). Simultanously, any new broadcasts or query-responses sent out on a network interface used the newly offset time. Downstream NTP daemons would make a similar conclusion; that their local clock had drifted one second off and should be slowly adjusted towards the correct time.
The net effect is that if you were to view NTP as a continous set of incrementing ticks beginning on 0h Jan 1, 1900 GMT (UTC origin is TAI -10s 0h Jan 1, 1972, and thus technically is meaningless for timescales that originate prior to the epoch), historical timecodes are effectively lost on each update where a leap second has been inserted, however the current timecode is in sync with UTC.
Sensitive scientific applications will likely simply avoid the UTC offset completely and use a direct TAI reference clock.
I disagree, Right and Wrong are completely subjective. There is no absolute right and absolute wrong. No system, be it religion, or science, can tell a person how to behave, it is up to the individual to decide how to act. There in lies the problem, religion believes that all people should act and feel the same, whereas human behavior is complex an intricate. Religion is basically one or a select few people who believe they have the absolute answer to a completely relative question, and religious people spend most of their lives living like sheep and convincing others to do the same through fear and coersion. There is no one set of beliefs which is right, each person must choose to act how they feel is the proper way and experiance the consequences, weather those consequences are viewed by ones self as good or bad.
Other than from a purely philosphical perspective, basic core "Rights" and "Wrongs" are absolutely not subjective; but in the ultimate twist, we can thank evolution for them. All cultures carry a certain set of values which are pretty much universal (there are always individual exceptions in chaotic systems), and these values are those which are in harmony with socialization and reproduction. In higher order mammals, socialization is a key survival trait (esp. when you're a weak little simian w/ no super-speed, mandibles-of-doom or other physically superior attributes).
In other cases, these values exist to overcome a specific limitation of the species. For example: pair-bonding ("marriage"). Homo Sapiens requires a significant post-gestational period before offspring is fully viable and self-sustaining. Simultaneously, unlike almost every other mammal, human females tend to be considerably weaker physically (strengh, not endurance) than the male of the species. These two facets do not mesh well for the purposes of reproduction quality and yield; e.g. the typical mammalian sole-female-caregiver is insufficient in a primitive competitive environment. Pair-bonding helps solve this issue, while simultanously dampening same-gender competition thus allowing larger and more closely knit social groups to form (many other mammals commonly have one gender in a nearly continuous state of isolation due to extreme reproductive competition).
The best way to understand "morality" is to watch canine behavior. While much less sophisticated than human, it is quite apparent that similar underlying urges are at work.
There were only three people (and their staffs) proclaiming that, without a
doubt, Saddam had WMD
What a lie. What a downright despicable, arrogant,
so-WRONG-it-couldn't-be-wronger-if-it-claimed-2-pl us-2-equals-five fucking
lie. And you have either the balls or the stupidity to say Bush lied? What
damned planet have you been on, anyway?
Ad hominem. And partially misrepresentative of my actual post, specifically:
"There can be no mistake, this was a catastrophic intelligence failure (or we
are being completely lied to -- but I prefer to give one who holds the office
of Commander and Chief the benefit of the doubt, out of respect for tradition
and the responsibility it represents (emphasis added)
In the context of what I actually wrote, care to explain how
this could be interpreted as an accusal of presidential deceit?
In response to your litany of quotes: Most of them predate both commencement
of hostilities and public statements made by the Bush administration by at
leat four years. It is disingenuous to suggest that such statments
are linked to the administration's decision to invade or any recent specific
intelligence that lead to the invasion.The remainder of relevant quotes are all either misrepresented out of context,
or do not actually specifically make bold statements along the lines of
without a doubt. In the future, you are encouraged to more
carefully select quotes based on their actual relevence to the discussion at
hand.
A number of these quotes are excellent examples which speak to my original
point; specifically those that are likely unrelated to any intelligence
offered to Senators (and thus responsible for their respective viewpoints):
"What is at stake is how to answer the potential threat Iraq represents with
the risk of proliferation of WMD. Baghdad's regime did use such weapons in the
past. Today, a number of evidences may lead to think that, over the past four
years, in the absence of international inspectors, this country has continued
armament programs." -- Jacques Chirac, October 16, 2002
Notice how this doesn't even begin to resemble a "without a
doubt" statement? One wonders what argugment exactly you were offering this
in support of.
"We are in possession of what I think to be compelling evidence that Saddam
Hussein has, and has had for a number of years, a developing capacity for the
production and storage of weapons of mass destruction." -- Bob Graham,
December 2002
Again, absolutely not a statement of complete and total assuredness. Note
that key phrase "compelling evidence." This indicates that a partcular
situation is likely true, but not known to be an absolutely certainty.
"We have known for many years that Saddam Hussein is seeking and developing
weapons of mass destruction." -- Ted Kennedy, September 27, 2002
Oddly enough, the phrase "seeking and developing" does not actually mean the
same thing as a "sure thing." Sorry.
you don't go to war without a vetting your intelligence.
It was vetted. By everyone. Everyone on the damn planet thought Saddam had WMDs. Here's what the BBC had to say about Saddam's nuclear weapons program.
I'm not sure you understand what "vetted" means in the context of sensitive security intel. You think that the BBC has access to NSA, CIA or MI5 sources? If they do, they probably shouldn't and the leak should be plugged, that's the whole point of security intelligence. Bush and Blair, rightly or wrongly, stood before us and announced that a clear and present danger existed; that intelligence unanimously indicated Saddam had WMDs of some fashion. When the leader of a country makes such a proclamation, private citizens and corporations usually have absolutely no way to prove or disprove it. So don't tell me that it was vetted, the process those reporting the information to Bush/Blair would have used for vetting is intentionally (and properly, imo) not public..
The point remains: If, in good faith, one has reason to believe a security situation exists which is so severe as to require all out invasion, one must triple/quadruple-check that intel against multiple sources and apply reliability weight factors to all of them -- while simultaneously having a differenct non-confluent intel organization independently perform the same. Anything less than this is gross misconduct for a high-ranking intelligence officer or cabinet member. If by some god-awful chance you or those below you have completely and totally fumbled; you resign. Period. (and take those subordinates who may have screwed up with you). We're talking about stuff that is so critical, so important, that you are not allowed to make mistakes. To err is human, but there are aspects of some jobs where even occasional human error is not tolerable.
How much historical revisionism is getting pulled out of anal sphincters everywhere just to attack Bush anyway?
Wow. Talk about revisionism. This isn't ancient history; we saw this happen live. There were only three people (and their staffs) proclaiming that, without a doubt, Saddam had WMD: Bush, Blair and Cheney. Hell, Blix made his report to the UN just days after Cheney declared complete and total certainty of US/UK intel, and in that report he stated, as had never done previously that Iraq was considerably more cooperative than they *ever* had been in the past. I know Blix was "had" before, in 1991, by the Baathists, but it would appear that Saddam wasn't confident he could pull the wool over his eyes again. Certainly, Saddam wanted to remain WMD-capable for some future point (like I said, no disputing he is a total fucknut), but we now know that he was much more worried about the toll economic sanctions were having as well as the pontential for US invasion.
There can be no mistake, this was a catastrophic intelligence failure (or we are being completely lied to -- but I prefer to give one who holds the office of Commander and Chief the benefit of the doubt, out of respect for tradition and the responsibility it represents), yet here we are in an extended ground conflict w/ over 2000 US troop deaths to date, and all we get is spin.
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"Those who do not understand unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly."
And here, in this pseudo-implementation of "everything is a file" where metadata such as security descriptors and attributes can be universally applied to data collections and devices, we see an example of just such a thing. The abstraction is insufficient without a universally accessible and intuitive file/device/object model; one that does not require specific application support. There are myriad possible reasons why I may not be able to use your application in a particular context to control such attributes. As it stands, the various components in NT, which can have such metadata applied, are littered across the landscape of the OS.
To be fair, I could say the same thing of the bsd socket api. Its ease-of-use and elegant, yet unfortunately isolated, interface made it a defacto standard which eventually mutated into the POSIX and Single Unix specifications. However, while it fails in one engineering aspect, it succeeds remarkably in another and thus is not the worst compromise that could be made.
Complexity does not equal elegance. If you find yourself uttering something as foolish as "prohibitively more elegant", you've stumbled into that territory.
Indeed. It would appear that the world has moved on since you last looked at "Linux" in the 90s. POSIX 1003.1e/1003.2c access control lists: http://www.suse.de/~agruen/acl/linux-acls/online/
I believe this is somewhat of a simplification. It may be applicable in terms of auditory perception and processing, but as everyone knows, language is much more than the sum of individual words.
Neurolinguistic events are examples of associative cascade events. This is illustrated by the classic example: "Don't think of an elephant." Immediately after reading and comprehending the linguistic elements of the sentence, each and every reader of this post made the applicable associative connections resulting in the contemplation (even if minor and short-lived) of one of our long-nosed pachyderm friends. Even if it was understood that the instruction was not to make the association, by the time this level of awareness was achieved, the cascade was already in progress and unstoppable.
The context of such associative cascades (especially more sophisticated varieties) is largely cultural; however the portions of the brain most likely to respond is based on each association in the chain and its relative contextual weight, rather than the phonetics of the original sound itself.
Lyrical forms of linguistics, such as poetry and song, are particularly powerful because they offer a way to rapidly trigger abstract associations not related to logic, speech or visual images.
Mmmm.. time for Civics 101 again, I think. Although elected judges do exist in certain parts of the modern judicial branch, this was never the intention. The purpose of the judicial is to impartially oversee the application of law as codified by We the People (i.e. congress) and enforced by the executive (law enforcement). At higher levels, the judicial also ensures that law fits the constraints imposed by the constitution and amendments. To this end, judges were not intended to be elected, as doing such creates implicit coercion by way of popular opinion. A safety check does exist however, in that the judicial may not act as any active legal force; they may only rule on cases that are brought before them from those external to the branch.
By that logic someone who has knowledge of an impending murder but does nothing to stop it, and is not the perpetrator, is guilty of murder? Sure, they're guilty of a crime (assuming due-process was applied and they were convicted in a criminal court) and they should be punished accordingly, but for a lesser crime than whomever committed the actual act. If the true perpatrator is in a different country and cannot be extradited, that is unfortunate, but has no bearing on the penalties imposed on the "accomplice."
To put it another way: On one hand you have someone who actually exploited children in the production of some work, and on the other you have someone who is contributing to the exploitation of children. Both unjustifiable, but don't you think one is worse than the other?
Yeah. I heard that some guys figured this out about 230 years ago. Their solution was something called a "republic." Not sure whatever happened with it though.
Wow. A true conservative; I wasn't sure you guys still existed. Me, I'm a true liberal (and don't vote democrat, of course). Oddly (although not really), in this day and age of the "neocon" and "neoliberal", we have more in common with each other than we do with supposed "conservatives" and "liberals". (Hint to the label-slingers: True conservatism is friggin liberal).
The issue is not code reuse, the issue is priviledge separation. Under the unix model, priviledge separation is simple, elegant and explicit with obvious and clear demarcation. While the NT model has made steps in the right direction (ala "RunAs"), the demarcation and operational details remain obscure and fairly nebulous. A few months ago I attempted (again) to run a standalone xp box in non-Administrator mode via the appropriate use of RunAs. It was a nightmare: basic desktop operation wasn't an issue, but most apps (including ms apps) would either fail to work w/out being run as Administrator or would log cryptic meaningless events. Even certain in-built os components would operate in a bizarre and non-intuitive fashion (again, complete w/ meaningless or underdocumented error events). I have no doubt that the issues were all resolvable, but in the end I decided it was not worth my time and that I would simply use the box as an X terminal or for gaming but run no real apps on it. An inexperienced user would certainly have been completely unable to resolve the majority of the issues I encountered.
Additionally, desktop-application-wide priviledge elevation is a poor solution to the separation problem (unix discovered this sometime ago during the era of the overused setuid + monolithic binary) as it is far too encompassing in scope. What is needed is something analogous to the OSX/KDE/GNOME model: default to unpriviledged operation and when required prompt the user (warning-inclusive) for additional temporary elevated credentials; utilizing them only for the absolutely minimum necessary isolated code/sub-app.
I'm not sure if you're making a philosophical argument or not. If so, its first year philosophy: See Descartes, he already went ahead and worked out the various permutations of "how can I believe anything I experience?" for you.
On the other hand, if you're suggesting a true scientific observation and causality model, its quite deeply flawed.
I'm sorry, come again? Observation is truth, in the most direct sense. I think you're too freely intermixing prediction, observation and conclusion. Clearly, by its very nature, prediction is unsettled and unknown. Conclusion may be, and often is, partially or completely incorrect. Observation is the gold standard, its the one thing that can be counted on; the problem is that in many cases its not possible to make direct observations and indirect observation may have as-yet-unknown causality factors. If anything, the underlying challange to "understanding the universe" is an inability to directly observe detail.
But getting back to my original point (anything possible blab blah, show me entropy decrease in a closed system), you cannot so easily utter "we don't know the truth", wave your magic wand and make it disappear. This is not theory, this is law. We don't even need a closed system really, just take any system whose energy output is equal to or greater than any energy input and demonstrate a system-wide decrease in entropy. Hint: You can't without magic. If you could that would mean that we do not live in a consistent universe, that any perceived rules are subject to change at the drop of a hat and that the paranormal offers the only explanation for causality.
Oh yeah? Go ahead and show me entropy decreasing in a closed system then, please.
I'm not talking about genetics strictly, I'm talking about anthropology.
What do you suppose is the motivating factor responsible for cultural formation and its descendant, heritage, in the first place? Higher-order mammals all have complex socialization instincts, humans are no exception.
Amusing then that your interest is so keenly affected by genetics. When cultural "pride" turns for the worst and a culture (the majority anyway, or even a very loud minority) decides that they are superior and that others unlike themselves must be subjugated or extinguished we, too often in hindsight, judge such as morally reprehensible (understandably so). Yet, few seem to contemplate the root cause of this, despite the fact that it happens over and over and over again. Pride is a characteristic quite easily capable of turning (or being turned) malevolent. You yourself noted the potential pitfalls, yet the historical track-record for balancing cultural pride with respect is
Personally, I disagree with your conclusion "cultural pride is necessary in order to have a well-balanced self-identity." Althougth I do believe that individual tolerance is of significant importance; thus I shall admit to respecting your opinion even if I do not agree with it. No good can come from stripping anyone of their cultural identity, for the ends do not justify the means; however, it is my wish that more individuals would critically evaluate motivation and underlying anthropologic principles.
"Be proud of your heritage!" Why? Your heritage is this: No matter the color of your skin, shape of your nose, curliness of your hair, you and every other person on the planet have a common female anscestor who lived about 200,000 years ago. Everything since then (or more accurately, since about 1M years BC) is just minor genetic fluctuation and homo sapien's inane desire to rationalize and/or justify its competitive nature.
Racism, and every other form of prejudice, will continue to exist for as long as humanity continues to be unable to accept and manage the dichotomy created when will and instinct are mixed inside a single mind.
Indeed, they are goverment's doing. But why? What happens when voluntary cooperation for mutual profit is at odds with the potential to make short-term profit despite any long-term consequences? Or do you deny that many individuals exist who will, for whatever reason, take advantage of such situations?
Conversely, in the glorified idealized "free-market economy", what is it that prevents a company from claiming their medical product is a solution when in fact it is not? Before you supply the boilerplate "eventually they will be found out and market-forces will cause economic disincentive", consider that they may only be interested in maximizing short-term "profit" and exiting the market, cash-in-hand, as soon as their ploy is discovered. Or do you assert that confidence men do not exist?
Indeed. Although its a little difficult to take a temporally based measurement, such as velocity, when your sample rate takes exactly one eternity. Of course, from the observing photon's reference frame this isn't noticable, it's just that any external reference frame will never be able to see the measurement as it will appear to never complete.
This is why the layperson "who says we can't achieve FTL, just because we haven't done it yet, anything is possible!" argument is so silly. If the SR model is correct, its pointless to contemplate FTL as its the same as asking "why can't I get task X completed sooner than right now?". It's a nonsense question with no possible meaningful answer.
However, both SR and GR show us that distance itself is somewhat "flexible."
I used to be involved with one of the few remaining commercial fm stations in the US that isn't an Infinity or Clear Channel affiliate. They payed the asscap tax like good little boys and girls, but it doesn't cover music that doesn't come off of vinyl or pressed cd. We were warned a few times not to play mp3s, but what can you do? Unless your format is top 40, over the past decade or so the supply of non-mainstream dj promo schwag has significantly shrunk. Bin hunting is fun and all, but its time consuming, and if you have a daily show to do there's just no way you can find fresh tracks without resorting to electronic measures. So, as you can imagine, the rule was silently ignored. The thing that gets me is it's not like the music isn't out there, it's just that the fucking Big Four are hell bent on making any music they don't produce disappear.
Yeah, god forbid an artist does something like oversample Tarantino and have the track end up on the billboards.
That, and since the advent of weakrefs, destructors are wholly unncessary. Weakrefs will call back a function/method immediately after object finalization, which is slightly different than a true destructor that is called before finalization. Still, a simple closure or sep. cleanup object can provide references to any internals you need to cleanup. That and it has the advantage of cooperating very nicely with reference counting gc.
Yeah, ok, pure psuedo-science.
(probably just a typo, but you don't really think light travels at 186 miles per second, do you?)
The acoustic doppler effect you labor on about is a simplistic model that may help the layperson grossly visualize concepts like em redshift, but it should not be assumed that a remotely similar process is at work when considering topics like stellar spectroscope shift. Audible sound represents a compression wave which propogates through a medium; electromagnetic energy does not. It can interact with matter, but it exists as a separate entity and is not a mechanical process. While field equations share some fundamental aspects with wave mechanics, this does not make them the same thing. Mathematically, there are many instances in nature where similar functions and constants are "re-used"; and generally one can simply attribute such similarities to thermodynamics (i.e. if stars were naturally square, this would violate the laws of thermodynamics).
While inter-stellar distance calculations based on stellar spectroscopy are certainly capable of being inaccurate for a number of reasons, the science behind these is based on a number of core principals wherein the speed of light is largely irrelevant for determining that the model fits (in one form or another):
1. Spectroscopy: A well studied, deterministic science with which one is capable of determining elemental components based on electromagnetic frequency distribution. The spectroscopic fingerprint is "hard"; e.g. there exist no in-between spectroscopic gradients between two elements, any more than there exist magic elements "in-between" those identified on a periodic table.
2. Red-shift occurs when an emitting object is receeding from the reference frame of an observer. This has been demonstrated experimentally and is reproducible.
3. Intersteller objects which are known to be receeding via parallax measurement exhibit redshift. Their spectroscopy
And yet here you are, obviously reading and posting on the site.
Maynard lyrics seem oddly appropriate at the moment.
"All you read and
Wear or see and
Hear on TV
Is a product
Begging for your
Fatass dirty dollar
So...Shut up and
Buy my new record
Send more money
Fuck you, buddy." -- Tool, Hooker with a Penis
Both myself and the OP were at least partially wrong w.r.t. NTP & leap-seconds. NTP actually does have a mechanism for transmitting a leap-second indicator, however it's not part of the ntp timecode. Each individual ntpd must pass the leap-second announcement along to its clients, however local host processing is platform-dependant (not all systems are capable of exact leap-second adjustments). There have been (at least two) different PLL implementations in the linux kernel; any relatively new kernel + ntpd is, obviously from your log, capable of atomically adjusting by one second so that the host's cpu clock never varies from the ntp code (which is sync'd to utc no matter what). Basically, the utc/ntp "time standing still for one second" event happened simultaneously with the receipt of the leap-second notification and ntpd told your kernel to make the correct adjustment. One the next timecode interval, the clock difference would then be no different than standard cpu drift that ntpd is already accounting for.
In this way, a scientific application, if endowed with the correct kernel interface, could detect leap-seconds and account for them for any intervals that may span the inserted/removed second. Thus, any remaining issues are solely the responsibility of application developers.
You are confusing transport with content. NTP, by itself, has no inherent concept of leap-seconds, leap-years or any other sort of temporal leapage; it simply provides a way to statistically analyze time sources, account for latency, jitter and dispersion and keep a local clock as closely synced as possible to one or more remote clocks. When making adjustments to the local clock, it is careful to not introduce large amounts of skew which might wreak havoc on time sensitive running processes Iinstead it will slowly "bump" the clock towards what it currently thinks is the most accurate time.
To make NTP useful, of course, it must be provided with one or more ultimately trusted authoritative time source (these can be stratified [stratums] in terms of network closeness to the original time reference). As you noted, major reference clocks on the net use a UTC time source, which makes more sense for common applications than TAI, as non-scientific-clocks world-wide are based on UTC.
When the leap second was added at the beginning of this year (this morning -- or perhaps the very end of last year), the UTC was simply adjusted by one second. stratum 1 NTP servers which are directly hardwired to reference clocks (ultimately, that means atomic clocks), adjusted by the UTC-TAI offset, trust their reference clocks above all else; thus when they saw the UTC adjustment they simply assumed that their local cpu clock was off and began adjusting it accordingly (from the reference frame of the NTP timescale, time "stood still" for one second). Simultanously, any new broadcasts or query-responses sent out on a network interface used the newly offset time. Downstream NTP daemons would make a similar conclusion; that their local clock had drifted one second off and should be slowly adjusted towards the correct time.
The net effect is that if you were to view NTP as a continous set of incrementing ticks beginning on 0h Jan 1, 1900 GMT (UTC origin is TAI -10s 0h Jan 1, 1972, and thus technically is meaningless for timescales that originate prior to the epoch), historical timecodes are effectively lost on each update where a leap second has been inserted, however the current timecode is in sync with UTC.
Sensitive scientific applications will likely simply avoid the UTC offset completely and use a direct TAI reference clock.
Other than from a purely philosphical perspective, basic core "Rights" and "Wrongs" are absolutely not subjective; but in the ultimate twist, we can thank evolution for them. All cultures carry a certain set of values which are pretty much universal (there are always individual exceptions in chaotic systems), and these values are those which are in harmony with socialization and reproduction. In higher order mammals, socialization is a key survival trait (esp. when you're a weak little simian w/ no super-speed, mandibles-of-doom or other physically superior attributes).
In other cases, these values exist to overcome a specific limitation of the species. For example: pair-bonding ("marriage"). Homo Sapiens requires a significant post-gestational period before offspring is fully viable and self-sustaining. Simultaneously, unlike almost every other mammal, human females tend to be considerably weaker physically (strengh, not endurance) than the male of the species. These two facets do not mesh well for the purposes of reproduction quality and yield; e.g. the typical mammalian sole-female-caregiver is insufficient in a primitive competitive environment. Pair-bonding helps solve this issue, while simultanously dampening same-gender competition thus allowing larger and more closely knit social groups to form (many other mammals commonly have one gender in a nearly continuous state of isolation due to extreme reproductive competition).
The best way to understand "morality" is to watch canine behavior. While much less sophisticated than human, it is quite apparent that similar underlying urges are at work.
Ad hominem. And partially misrepresentative of my actual post, specifically:
In the context of what I actually wrote, care to explain how this could be interpreted as an accusal of presidential deceit?
In response to your litany of quotes: Most of them predate both commencement of hostilities and public statements made by the Bush administration by at leat four years. It is disingenuous to suggest that such statments are linked to the administration's decision to invade or any recent specific intelligence that lead to the invasion.The remainder of relevant quotes are all either misrepresented out of context, or do not actually specifically make bold statements along the lines of without a doubt. In the future, you are encouraged to more carefully select quotes based on their actual relevence to the discussion at hand.
A number of these quotes are excellent examples which speak to my original point; specifically those that are likely unrelated to any intelligence offered to Senators (and thus responsible for their respective viewpoints):
Notice how this doesn't even begin to resemble a "without a doubt" statement? One wonders what argugment exactly you were offering this in support of.
Again, absolutely not a statement of complete and total assuredness. Note that key phrase "compelling evidence." This indicates that a partcular situation is likely true, but not known to be an absolutely certainty.
Oddly enough, the phrase "seeking and developing" does not actually mean the same thing as a "sure thing." Sorry.
I'm not sure you understand what "vetted" means in the context of sensitive security intel. You think that the BBC has access to NSA, CIA or MI5 sources? If they do, they probably shouldn't and the leak should be plugged, that's the whole point of security intelligence. Bush and Blair, rightly or wrongly, stood before us and announced that a clear and present danger existed; that intelligence unanimously indicated Saddam had WMDs of some fashion. When the leader of a country makes such a proclamation, private citizens and corporations usually have absolutely no way to prove or disprove it. So don't tell me that it was vetted, the process those reporting the information to Bush/Blair would have used for vetting is intentionally (and properly, imo) not public..
The point remains: If, in good faith, one has reason to believe a security situation exists which is so severe as to require all out invasion, one must triple/quadruple-check that intel against multiple sources and apply reliability weight factors to all of them -- while simultaneously having a differenct non-confluent intel organization independently perform the same. Anything less than this is gross misconduct for a high-ranking intelligence officer or cabinet member. If by some god-awful chance you or those below you have completely and totally fumbled; you resign. Period. (and take those subordinates who may have screwed up with you). We're talking about stuff that is so critical, so important, that you are not allowed to make mistakes. To err is human, but there are aspects of some jobs where even occasional human error is not tolerable.
Wow. Talk about revisionism. This isn't ancient history; we saw this happen live. There were only three people (and their staffs) proclaiming that, without a doubt, Saddam had WMD: Bush, Blair and Cheney. Hell, Blix made his report to the UN just days after Cheney declared complete and total certainty of US/UK intel, and in that report he stated, as had never done previously that Iraq was considerably more cooperative than they *ever* had been in the past. I know Blix was "had" before, in 1991, by the Baathists, but it would appear that Saddam wasn't confident he could pull the wool over his eyes again. Certainly, Saddam wanted to remain WMD-capable for some future point (like I said, no disputing he is a total fucknut), but we now know that he was much more worried about the toll economic sanctions were having as well as the pontential for US invasion.
There can be no mistake, this was a catastrophic intelligence failure (or we are being completely lied to -- but I prefer to give one who holds the office of Commander and Chief the benefit of the doubt, out of respect for tradition and the responsibility it represents), yet here we are in an extended ground conflict w/ over 2000 US troop deaths to date, and all we get is spin.
I reiterate: Something is very very wrong.