What to do.. what to do... English majors having a cardiovascular accident at a misspelling would be "stroking out", but "stroking off" *does* go better with the invitation to go fornicating.
"So you're ok with a couple of thousand people dying from an attack every so often?"
The fact is that we as a society have decided that *much* higher preventable losses are in fact acceptable.
The 3,000 or so we lost in one attack a decade ago averages out to 300 per year. Compare this to the 36,000 a year that die in car crashes, or the 400,000 that die from smoking-related deaths, or the 300,000 due to obesity - maybe we should be declaring war on cars, cigarettes and food instead. Oh, and several hundred people die of bee stings a year, and 50 or so from lightning strikes - time to declare war on them too?
And there's something to be said for the idea that we as a nation should just man up and *not* insist on getting bent out of shape - remember that stuff like pissing away trillions in 2 wars, the Patriot act, the security theater that is the TSA - those are all things the terrorists *want* us to do. Osama bin Laden is probably laughing his ass off - all he has to do is send 1 incompetent guy every 2-3 years to light his underwear on fire, and let us do the work of destroying ourselves.
Since 9/11, some 4 million US residents have died because we as a nation think that's an acceptable loss to preserve people's right to smoke tobacco. Surely, 300 per year is an acceptable loss to preserve people's rights as a free society.
You know, waving "It's called FUCKING EMULATION" around is one thing. Figuring out exactly how to actually *do* it os something else entirely. How do you emulate stuff you don't have full tech details for? What the hell is this totally undocumented code that scribbles 3 integers into a 15 year old NVidia card's control registers? Remember that there's a lot of stuff like device drivers from that era that we don't have source to emulate, and we never will. Make it kind of hard to emulate when you don't know what the emulated code actually does.
Anybody with a few benjamins or so can charter a helicopter for a ride over the location and see whatever's visible from up there. Ordinary citizens certainly have access to it. See for example http://www.newyorkhelicopter.com/helicopter_tours.html
Another point is that even in a helicopter, the cops are still constrained by the "in plain sight" requirement - they can't act on anything they see down there unless it's something that anybody else who happened to do a fly-over would see. If they do a fly-over with special imaging gear, that's still going to need a warrant.
And they cops usually need a warrant for that phone tap that ordinary citizens *don't* have access to.
Overlooking the fact that no police department will admit to a quota of speeding tickets..;)
If there *is* a quota for speeding tickets, it's conceivably fulfillable - the town I live in has a police department of around 20 patrolmen, and if you require each to write 3 speeding tickets a day, they can probably do it because in a town of several tens of thousands of people, at least 60 a day will be speeding - it's a relatively common occurence.
However, you can't say "Catch N terrorists a month" because there simply aren't enough actual terrorists out there actually flying. Even if you set the quota at 1 per airport per month, there's several hundred airports in the US (counting all the little regional airports), and most months there are *not* several hundred terrorists actually on planes in US airspace. Maybe 1 or 2. All the rest get to bust somebody innocent.
Think - in all the years since 9/11, we've had a shoe bomber who couldn't light his shoe, a testicle bomber who managed to blow up his junk, and maybe a few others that the plot failed without anybody noticing. I think it's safe to say there's approximately one terrorist per year in the entire air transport system.
"The governmnet can't even be relied on to deliver the frickin' mail."
OK, and how often does the United States Postal Service *actually* screw up? Think about it - you get a frikking *pizza* delivered 2 miles, you're looking at tipping the driver a few bucks. But you stick a 44 cent stamp on a letter, they'll get it across the country in a reasonable amount of time, with a hell of a lot better accuracy (I've had a lot more pizza drivers not find my place than USPS employees).
"Economics generally failed to predict the mortgage meltdown."
Um. No.
There were a *lot* of economists that were saying a decade ago that nothing good could come from the deregulation craze, and the almost total lack of effective oversight over at the SEC.
You want to hang somebody out to dry, go after the financial execs that did the stuff, and the government people that acted as facilitators.
"but maybe they could have cut him off after the first dozen random suits, no ?"
Actually, there's provisions for that:
"Under 28 U.S.C. 1915A(b)(1), the court is directed to dismiss a suit brought in forma pauperis at any time if the court determines that it is frivolous or malicious, fails to state a claim on which relief may be granted, or seeks monetary relief against a defendant who is immune from such relief.
The Supreme Court emphasized in Neitzke v. Williams, 490 U.S. 319, 325 (1989), that the term frivolous as used in 1915(d) "embraces not only the inarguable legal conclusion, but also the fanciful factual allegation." Federal courts are thus empowered to summarily dismiss as frivolous "claims describing fantastic or delusional scenarios." Id. at 328. Riches's complaint is obviously delusional.
This suit is accordingly dismissed for failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted. Riches is warned that if a prisoner has had a total of three federal cases or appeals dismissed as frivolous, malicious, or failing to state a claim, he may not file suit in federal court without prepaying the filing fee unless he is in imminent danger of serious physical injury. 28 U.S.C. 1915(g)."
"limited only by string length". Exactly. "If you can form coded sequences, you can code both random numbers and irrational numbers". Well, only sort of - what you'd have to do is come up with some sort of coding that allows you to *reference* values - so for instance, being able to encode a square-root sign followed by a 2, or for getting pi/4, or so on.
Because you're never gonna get a string long enough to actually spell out sqrt(2) or pi directly.
Of course, once you go that route, some fool is going to Godelize it and hand you a shoestring that says "This number can't be written out on a shoestring".;)
Just for the record, if you're dealing with "machine readable language", what you want is the Turing Halting Problem, which is essentially the same mathematical derivation Godel used for theorems, but applied to algorithms.
If glass *actually* sagged visibly on 100-year timeframes in windows, how long would it take for a large telescope mirror to deform to useless?
The 200 inch mirror of the Hale telescope at Palomar is currently 60 years old. That's over 16 feet wide, and some 14 tons of glass. Telescope mirrors are usually within a few *millionth* of an inch of "perfect" - even an amateur can easily get within 1/4 wavelengh of perfect, and within 1/10 of a wavelenth is achievable.
I was there while the LSM hooks into the Linux kernel were designed, and while SELinux got started (you guys think it's hard to use now, you should have seen the *first* few releases).
Rest assured that although a good 1/2 to 2/3 of the work came from NSA staff, the people involved were competent, and understood the importance of peer review in security design. So the NSA guys didn't get any code or policy in there that didn't get reviewed by a good number of non-NSA people who had reason to expect and look for underhanded code.
And strictly speaking, you *can* build a 2.6 kernel without SELinux - in fact, if you're using the AppArmor or SMACK or Tomoyo security modules, you need to build it without SELinux (basically, the composition of two different security models is not a well-understood field, and fraught with danger. Consider two modules, each of which denies access to the/sys file that disables the other... Whoops). What you can't easily opt out of is the LSM hooks (although even *that* is doable if you're clever and understand Kconfig).
Actually, we've done a *lot* better than -260C - to get to liquid helium you need to be down below about 3K, which is -268C or so, and any good university research lab should be able to get there. You get to some of the more exotic cooling systems that form Bose-Einstein condensates, you can get down to literally a few millionths of a degree K away from absolute zero, so -271.15 and a smidgen....
One has to wonder though. Given a userbase that often doesn't RTFA, why should we expect the editors to do better?
Serious question, that. These days, there's plenty of other news aggregator feeds out there, many of which hold themselves to much higher editorial standards than Slashdot does. You have to seriously ask if "editor posts wildly misleading description, and hilarity ensues" is perceived by the user community as a feature rather than a bug...
"but make the editors write the summaries themselves so they have to read the material and hopefully drive the story quality up."
My brain is having a severe attack of Cognitive Dissonance Disorder trying to comprehend the concept "Obviously new here, with a 6-digit user number". Let's face it - if the editors aren't *already* clicking on the links in the article, to make sure they work and that the summary matches the article, *that* is your root cause, and that's what needs fixing.
The *real* fun comes when you encounter a system that has been kept up-to-date patchwise, and configuration changes made as needed, but never rebooted.
Then when you *do* need to reboot, you discover that some misapplied patch or config change from 2 years before was working as long as the the system kept running - but there was no possible way to get a clean correct startup.
Blegga.:)
(Another reason to have a spare system - that way you can *test* this stuff in a controlled fashion....)
Actually, I *do* work in a data center. Our server room is over a quarter of an acre in size - so we *do* have the "patch and reboot hundreds/thousands problem" (you want fun? Try rebooting an 1,100 node cluster without anybody noticing;) And if I deployed a system that couldn't tolerate a reboot without having a hot-failover or loadbalancing solution in place, I'd have my head handed to me on a platter.
I mean, come *on* - if you have an older-hardware system that "a reboot is too much of an outage', WTF are you going to do when (not if, when) that sucker blows a CPU or a memory card or a disk drive or a fan or a.....
And if you have a boss who won't sign off on the cost of hot-failover, ask him for it in writing, so your ass is covered when it becomes a problem.
Actually, the Y2K problem *does* still exist, and is waiting to go off in zillions of little detonations over the next 50 years or so. Amazingly enough, although the *obvious* solution was to widen the year field from 2 digits to 4, most estimates are that from 60% to 75% of all the Y2K fixes employed "windowing" instead.
In other words, there's millions of lines of code that have crap like:
if yr > 30 then year = yr + 1900 else year = yr + 2000;
Which of course is going to crap out at the end of the year 2029. And of course, come November 2029, nobody is going to be doing code reviews for what windows will expire that year...;)
The Evil Bit is fully documented in RFC3514, which coincidentally enough came out 3 years ago today.
One other thing to try... Glucosamine
on
Preventing RSI?
·
· Score: 1
Programmer for a quarter century, 4 guitars... you can see it coming, right?:)
I've been fighting with RSI for well over a decade now, and I have to agree with the following advice others have mentioned:
There is no single magic bullet
Proper arm support
Split keyboards help. I've got a number of Microsoft Natural keyboards.
I found a trackball helps too. Microsoft Trackball Optical is great for the price. In fact, for a sucky software company, Microsoft makes good hardware.;)
Posture while sleeping matters a lot - if things are flaring up, wrist splints at night actually matter more than during the day.
The one other thing I recommend is taking glucosamine to help rebuild the joint surfaces. If there's any sort of arthritis or gout causing inflammation, the swelling will cause pressure on the nerves in the wrist, leading to trouble. Since I started taking 1000mg of glucosamine every day a few years ago, I haven't needed to get a refill of Naprosyn for use as an anti-inflammatory. Check with your doctor first, and all that....
Slashdot Mirror
Or ports. Or plugs.
Sorry, had to be said.
What to do.. what to do... English majors having a cardiovascular accident at a misspelling would be "stroking out", but "stroking off" *does* go better with the invitation to go fornicating.
Hmm.. if Microsoft became a monopole, that would be... interesting. Monopoles are very hard to find, ya know. What if the same happened to Microsoft?
"So you're ok with a couple of thousand people dying from an attack every so often?"
The fact is that we as a society have decided that *much* higher preventable losses are in fact acceptable.
The 3,000 or so we lost in one attack a decade ago averages out to 300 per year. Compare this to the 36,000 a year that die in car crashes, or the 400,000 that die from smoking-related deaths, or the 300,000 due to obesity - maybe we should be declaring war on cars, cigarettes and food instead. Oh, and several hundred people die of bee stings a year, and 50 or so from lightning strikes - time to declare war on them too?
And there's something to be said for the idea that we as a nation should just man up and *not* insist on getting bent out of shape - remember that stuff like pissing away trillions in 2 wars, the Patriot act, the security theater that is the TSA - those are all things the terrorists *want* us to do. Osama bin Laden is probably laughing his ass off - all he has to do is send 1 incompetent guy every 2-3 years to light his underwear on fire, and let us do the work of destroying ourselves.
Since 9/11, some 4 million US residents have died because we as a nation think that's an acceptable loss to preserve people's right to smoke tobacco. Surely, 300 per year is an acceptable loss to preserve people's rights as a free society.
You know, waving "It's called FUCKING EMULATION" around is one thing. Figuring out exactly how to actually *do* it os something else entirely. How do you emulate stuff you don't have full tech details for? What the hell is this totally undocumented code that scribbles 3 integers into a 15 year old NVidia card's control registers? Remember that there's a lot of stuff like device drivers from that era that we don't have source to emulate, and we never will. Make it kind of hard to emulate when you don't know what the emulated code actually does.
"Do not taunt Happy Fun LCI". ;)
Anybody with a few benjamins or so can charter a helicopter for a ride over the location and see whatever's visible from up there. Ordinary citizens certainly have access to it. See for example http://www.newyorkhelicopter.com/helicopter_tours.html
Another point is that even in a helicopter, the cops are still constrained by the "in plain sight" requirement - they can't act on anything they see down there unless it's something that anybody else who happened to do a fly-over would see. If they do a fly-over with special imaging gear, that's still going to need a warrant.
And they cops usually need a warrant for that phone tap that ordinary citizens *don't* have access to.
Overlooking the fact that no police department will admit to a quota of speeding tickets.. ;)
If there *is* a quota for speeding tickets, it's conceivably fulfillable - the town I live in has a police department of around 20 patrolmen, and if you require each to write 3 speeding tickets a day, they can probably do it because in a town of several tens of thousands of people, at least 60 a day will be speeding - it's a relatively common occurence.
However, you can't say "Catch N terrorists a month" because there simply aren't enough actual terrorists out there actually flying. Even if you set the quota at 1 per airport per month, there's several hundred airports in the US (counting all the little regional airports), and most months there are *not* several hundred terrorists actually on planes in US airspace. Maybe 1 or 2. All the rest get to bust somebody innocent.
Think - in all the years since 9/11, we've had a shoe bomber who couldn't light his shoe, a testicle bomber who managed to blow up his junk, and maybe a few others that the plot failed without anybody noticing. I think it's safe to say there's approximately one terrorist per year in the entire air transport system.
Kinda hard to set quotas for something that rare.
"The governmnet can't even be relied on to deliver the frickin' mail."
OK, and how often does the United States Postal Service *actually* screw up? Think about it - you get a frikking *pizza* delivered 2 miles, you're looking at tipping the driver a few bucks. But you stick a 44 cent stamp on a letter, they'll get it across the country in a reasonable amount of time, with a hell of a lot better accuracy (I've had a lot more pizza drivers not find my place than USPS employees).
"Economics generally failed to predict the mortgage meltdown."
Um. No.
There were a *lot* of economists that were saying a decade ago that nothing good could come from the deregulation craze, and the almost total lack of effective oversight over at the SEC.
You want to hang somebody out to dry, go after the financial execs that did the stuff, and the government people that acted as facilitators.
No, what you *wanted* to say was:
This sentence no verb.
"but maybe they could have cut him off after the first dozen random suits, no ?"
Actually, there's provisions for that:
"Under 28 U.S.C. 1915A(b)(1), the court is directed to dismiss a suit brought in forma pauperis at any
time if the court determines that it is frivolous or malicious, fails to state a claim on which relief may be granted,
or seeks monetary relief against a defendant who is immune from such relief.
The Supreme Court emphasized in Neitzke v. Williams, 490 U.S. 319, 325 (1989), that the term frivolous
as used in 1915(d) "embraces not only the inarguable legal conclusion, but also the fanciful factual allegation."
Federal courts are thus empowered to summarily dismiss as frivolous "claims describing fantastic or delusional
scenarios." Id. at 328. Riches's complaint is obviously delusional.
This suit is accordingly dismissed for failure to state a claim upon which relief may be granted. Riches is
warned that if a prisoner has had a total of three federal cases or appeals dismissed as frivolous, malicious, or failing
to state a claim, he may not file suit in federal court without prepaying the filing fee unless he is in imminent danger
of serious physical injury. 28 U.S.C. 1915(g)."
http://docs.justia.com/cases/federal/district-courts/illinois/ilndce/1:2007cv04192/211173/5/
"limited only by string length". Exactly. "If you can form coded sequences, you can code both random numbers and irrational numbers". Well, only sort of - what you'd have to do is come up with some sort of coding that allows you to *reference* values - so for instance, being able to encode a square-root sign followed by a 2, or for getting pi/4, or so on.
Because you're never gonna get a string long enough to actually spell out sqrt(2) or pi directly.
Of course, once you go that route, some fool is going to Godelize it and hand you a shoestring that says "This number can't be written out on a shoestring". ;)
Just for the record, if you're dealing with "machine readable language", what you want is the Turing Halting Problem, which is essentially the same mathematical derivation Godel used for theorems, but applied to algorithms.
If glass *actually* sagged visibly on 100-year timeframes in windows, how long would it take for a large telescope mirror to deform to useless?
The 200 inch mirror of the Hale telescope at Palomar is currently 60 years old. That's over 16 feet wide, and some 14 tons of glass.
Telescope mirrors are usually within a few *millionth* of an inch of "perfect" - even an amateur can easily get within 1/4 wavelengh of perfect,
and within 1/10 of a wavelenth is achievable.
http://home.thezone.net/~dbourgeo/feb/foucault.html
So if a 16 foot wide piece of glass is still within millionths of an inch after 60 years, how long will it take for it to deform a visible amount?
I was there while the LSM hooks into the Linux kernel were designed, and while SELinux got started (you guys think it's hard to use now, you should have seen the *first* few releases).
/sys file that disables the other... Whoops). What you can't easily opt out of is the LSM hooks (although even *that* is doable if you're clever and understand Kconfig).
Rest assured that although a good 1/2 to 2/3 of the work came from NSA staff, the people involved were competent, and understood the importance of peer review in security design. So the NSA guys didn't get any code or policy in there that didn't get reviewed by a good number of non-NSA people who had reason to expect and look for underhanded code.
And strictly speaking, you *can* build a 2.6 kernel without SELinux - in fact, if you're using the AppArmor or SMACK or Tomoyo security modules, you need to build it without SELinux (basically, the composition of two different security models is not a well-understood field, and fraught with danger. Consider two modules, each of which denies access to the
Actually, we've done a *lot* better than -260C - to get to liquid helium you need to be down below about 3K, which is -268C or so, and any good university research lab should be able to get there. You get to some of the more exotic cooling systems that form Bose-Einstein condensates, you can get down to literally a few millionths of a degree K away from absolute zero, so -271.15 and a smidgen....
One has to wonder though. Given a userbase that often doesn't RTFA, why should we expect the editors to do better?
Serious question, that. These days, there's plenty of other news aggregator feeds out there, many of which hold themselves to much higher editorial standards than Slashdot does. You have to seriously ask if "editor posts wildly misleading description, and hilarity ensues" is perceived by the user community as a feature rather than a bug...
My brain is having a severe attack of Cognitive Dissonance Disorder trying to comprehend the concept "Obviously new here, with a 6-digit user number". Let's face it - if the editors aren't *already* clicking on the links in the article, to make sure they work and that the summary matches the article, *that* is your root cause, and that's what needs fixing.
The *real* fun comes when you encounter a system that has been kept up-to-date patchwise, and configuration changes made as needed, but never rebooted.
:)
Then when you *do* need to reboot, you discover that some misapplied patch or config change from 2 years before was working as long as the the system kept running - but there was no possible way to get a clean correct startup.
Blegga.
(Another reason to have a spare system - that way you can *test* this stuff in a controlled fashion....)
Actually, I *do* work in a data center. Our server room is over a quarter of an acre in size - so we *do* have the "patch and reboot hundreds/thousands problem" (you want fun? Try rebooting an 1,100 node cluster without anybody noticing ;) And if I deployed a system that couldn't tolerate a reboot without having a hot-failover or loadbalancing solution in place, I'd have my head handed to me on a platter.
I mean, come *on* - if you have an older-hardware system that "a reboot is too much of an outage', WTF are you going to do when (not if, when) that sucker blows a CPU or a memory card or a disk drive or a fan or a.....
And if you have a boss who won't sign off on the cost of hot-failover, ask him for it in writing, so your ass is covered when it becomes a problem.
Slashdot reported the summary line thusly:
Developers: Multi-threaded Programming Makes You Crazy? 79 of 78 comments
What's wrong with this picture?
Actually, the Y2K problem *does* still exist, and is waiting to go off in zillions of little detonations over the next 50 years or so. Amazingly enough, although the *obvious* solution was to widen the year field from 2 digits to 4, most estimates are that from 60% to 75% of all the Y2K fixes employed "windowing" instead.
;)
In other words, there's millions of lines of code that have crap like:
if yr > 30 then year = yr + 1900 else year = yr + 2000;
Which of course is going to crap out at the end of the year 2029. And of course, come November 2029, nobody is going to be doing code reviews for what windows will expire that year...
The Evil Bit is fully documented in RFC3514, which coincidentally enough came out 3 years ago today.
I've been fighting with RSI for well over a decade now, and I have to agree with the following advice others have mentioned:
The one other thing I recommend is taking glucosamine to help rebuild the joint surfaces. If there's any sort of arthritis or gout causing inflammation, the swelling will cause pressure on the nerves in the wrist, leading to trouble. Since I started taking 1000mg of glucosamine every day a few years ago, I haven't needed to get a refill of Naprosyn for use as an anti-inflammatory. Check with your doctor first, and all that....