An acrobatic plane, at night/early morning (when visibility is not good), without proper acrobatic experience - that's not a good combination. I really do hope that he had some other reason for that type of aircraft. If it can travel very slowly, then it might be good for aerial photography, which would be relatively risk-free and might indeed require an unpredictable - and therefore unfileable - flight plan. At this point, though, we can only really guess. If he's not found alive - or not found at all - we'll never know what his reasons were.
Re:The winds were NOT very high this morning....
on
Steve Fossett Missing
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· Score: 3, Insightful
On the other hand, we can assume that his aircraft had a very respectable two-way radio. Whatever the misfortune was, it must have been fast enough that he was not able to send any kind of message. Well, yes, that assumes that there was no significant obstruction and there was anyone listening - neither of which can be guaranteed in a remote area - but it seems most likely that disaster struck fast.
Light aircraft parachutes have been around for some time now, and emergency beacons are practically a throw-away item. At this point in the light aircraft/experimental aircraft game, fatal crashes involving the ground (as opposed to buildings, mountains, seagulls, etc) should be relatively rare and rescuers should never be stumped.
Yes, I most definitely hope Steve Fossett is safe, but whether he is safe or not, I think that given the current state of technology, it would be good if questions were being asked as to why we don't even know. Are the parachutes so overpriced or unavailable that even someone like Mr. Fossett could not afford one? Are the laws on transmitters so onerous that only idiots would fly with a distress beacon of adequate power?
(Yes, people should be entitled to take whatever risks they like with their own lives, provided they understand what those are, but implicit in the concept of entitlement is that it is practical and lawful to mitigate those risks as much as possible when doing exactly the same thing. Otherwise, it is not the risk that has the entitlement, it's the activity. The risk is mandatory.)
I know cognitive dissonance in government is common, but this is mental.
After they closed many of the mental hospitals in America, they had to put the more dangerous lunatics somewhere, and they're far less of a threat to ordinary citizens being locked up in Congress than allowed out on the streets.
Microsoft was a religion and that Bill Gates was its God.
Seriously, it must be obvious to everyone why Microsoft is pulling this. We have an American election in which the right-wing conservatives have been "amiable" to Microsoft's continued monopoly and dubious practices (such as buying out standards bodies). It is in Microsoft's interests at exactly this time to be seen to be "friendly" to those same right-wing conservatives and to win support from the very power-base the politicians are relying on. They are losing support from some of their traditional sources and need to replace them.
That OLPC will need to sell in the US and doesn't (yet) have adequate filtering makes this a skillful move on Microsoft's part. Why? Because if the churches and assorted other fringe groups insist on this Microsoft-patented technology on any laptop provided to children, it completely kills off OLPC's own OS and requires the use of Windows. There will be no alternatives. Schools, libraries, Universities that receive money from religious or other censorus body and so on will likewise be forced to give up Linux or give up their funding. (The Golden Rule of Arts and Science is He Who Hath The Gold Makes The Rules.) If there's a right-wing President, the same will likely become true of all public schools "in the best interest of the kids".
Microsoft doesn't care two whits about the religious groups or the feelings of those involved. It's never cared about anyone's feelings before and I don't see it starting now. This is purely a tactical move to manipulate those feelings into having other people destroy Microsoft's competition. If others are conned into doing so, then Microsoft cannot be (so easily) be held liable, now that it's a declared monopoly.
Pressing a key changes your keyboard buffer, which is RAM. Running a program changes the L2 cache, which is also RAM. Now, the claim of RAM being storage was pulled in the UK some time back, during the Prince Philip Mailbox Hack scandal. The judge ruled that although permanent storage "existed" in a meaningful legal sense, transient storage did not. (This was important, as the case revolved around the argument that hacking an account was breaking and entering, and that the computer's RAM acted as a pick-lock. The judge, however, accepted instead the defense's claim that because RAM is transient and not a permanent storage mechanism, it could not be considered in the same light as a physical object.)
Another ruling in the UK, during the Poll Tax fiasco, also showed surprising resistance to technologically suspicious arguments. A prosecutor produced in court various printouts - e-mails, database entries, and so on. The judge threw out the evidence on the grounds that it was impossible to know if the printouts came from a legitimate source, if the data had been tampered with, and whether the bills sent were indeed the bills recorded on the printout. In other words, if it couldn't be authenticated and was subject to being trivially refuted, it was inadmissible as evidence.
Now, these standards are no longer really held to anywhere, but they do form the backbone that should exist for all computer-based evidence - that you are dealing with a highly mutable, impermanent environment (Buddhists should make excellent programmers) and that the standards required for admissibility should be that much higher. If RAM is to be admissible in court, then RAM makers should be required to embed the Tiger hashing function in hardware and hash every 4K of memory space, in order to provide some method of verifying that what is claimed of the RAM contents has any basis in reality.
Personally, I think the whole thing is as much a farce as the UK Government's attempt to have all ISPs log the contents of all packets and retain them for 7 years.
Oh, the US doesn't have an infrastructure, they just sprayed blacktop on the wagon trails and hoped nobody would notice.:) I'm also an expat, formerly of Stockport. Yes, a northerner. Not some Lancastrian or Yorkshire lad, but a true dyed-in-the-Goyt weirdo.
There is no "right to privacy" in the US, or even a "reasonable expectation of privacy". Indeed, under European law, no EU country should permit the export of personal data to the US due to the lack of sane privacy laws or even sane accuracy laws. Unlike the UK, where you can demand that inaccurate data be corrected and where you can sue people for retaining data without your authorization, the US has a proliferation of services where you can buy credit information, social security information or even entire identities but relatively little. Except in California, companies aren't even required to tell you when your personal data has been stolen or your bank account hacked.
Yes, I expect people to know their products are insecure by default, the same way they know an unlocked car is insecure by default. Yes, there is an obligation on developers to make products secure - if you can enable opportunistic encryption, so can the OEM - but users have obligations too.
I like the traditional UK view on trespass, for example. If you don't "break and enter" and cause no damage, you have almost totally unfettered access to open lands and lands of any kind that have a public footpath or bridleway through them. Back in the mid 1990s, there was a huge Traveler get-together in the north of England - a hundred thousand or so Travelers converged on a field for a festival that almost put Woodstock in the 1960s to shame. The police could do absolutely nothing, because no damage was being done and nobody broke into the field. The farmer could do nothing either. The home may well be an Englishman's castle, but that doesn't extend to fallow land.
(That particular incident led to a clause in the Criminal Justice Act, banning groups larger than four traveling with a common purpose. That clause was overturned in the House of Lords on the grounds that it unfairly restricted the freedom of the reincarnation of King Arthur and his knights. Yes, I am serious.)
The world the British live in, especially, is a world in which even ancient animal tracks that are under use but once in a single year cannot be obstructed, by law. Which is why there are so many bridges over motorways. Not all of them are roads, overhead pipes, or links between housing estates. Whether anyone likes it or not, computer networks won't ever be treated any differently. If you leave them as public rights of way, they will become public rights of way. If you don't want them to be public, then you can't go treating them as if they were.
Which gets back to my original point. If customers wanted secure devices, they could be adding the security themselves. They do so for their homes (most don't have alarms fitted as standard), they do so for their cars (steering wheel clamps are fairly popular add-ons), they do so for their bicycles (clamps and chains with combination locks proliferate). Alternately, they could be pressing the manufacturers to be adding it (cars with electronic keys, the provisions of the Data Protection Act, Swindon's experiment with Mondo).
But they don't. In the past few years, tens of millions of cases of identity theft have occurred over insecure computer systems - that we know about. Remember, most States have no reporting rule, so the actual number could be much higher. Wiretapping of the Internet has gone from being a national secret to being a national boast. SIGINT's activities are unknown but comments by senior officials in Canada and Australia suggest it's not entirely benign. Airbus even sued the US Government over industrial espionage. I forget what the recent inspection concluded in terms of abuses of FBI Letters to bypass the courts, but as I recall the percentage of abuses was very very high.
Opportunistic encryption uses D-H exchange, I believe. IKE (Internet Key Exchange) is the section used for this. There's an IKE2 floating around - see Freshmeat for links - but I'm not sure how it compares. I've not dug into the IKAMP (Internet Key And Management Protocol) stuff in some time. But, yeah, the code is all there, as are the RFCs. If you want to know, you can.
IPSec, using opportunistic encryption, is trivial to set up. You set "opportunistic encryption" to enable. That's it. Alternatively, use Sun's SKIP protocol. Enskip for Linux has been out for a while and there are probably other implementations for it. I wonder if SSL and VPN would work over DCCP - that gives you the reliability whilst remaining UDP-like. So, overall, I don't see this as a particular issue. If people want encryption, they could have encryption. The problem is, people act as if they want to be bugged. Possibly so they have something to complain about. That's why the English mess up England so much. They needn't, they are extremely intelligent, but if they didn't have trains that wouldn't run on the "wrong type of snow" or when there are "leaves on the line", they'd run out of things to say.
What's love got to do, got to do with it? Love needs a protocol and a protocol can be broken.....
Ok, I'll never make the top 40, but seriously the most recent PCI "standards" (I think they're at 2.1) have a LOT of vendor extension hooks, making me think that PCI is going to go the way of CORBA and SQL - standards only on paper and not in practice. Besides, the latency is high (and that's according to Intel!) and the signaling system has become nightmarishly complicated.
The alternatives seem to be HyperTransport and VXI, neither of which are either widespread or perfect by any stretch.
I would argue that we need far better reliability. Not just in the kernel, but in the apps as well. Yes, Linux has one of the lowest bugs per thousand lines of code of any popular OS, by Coverity's metrics, but it is still higher than comfort should allow. Some of the recent 2.6.x kernels have not been too impressive, Firefox is getting sloppy and if KDE's QA had been more thorough, they'd be in a position to put more developers into the 4.x cycle rather than maintenance releases of 3.x.
This is not to say that new stuff shouldn't be integrated into the kernel or Firefox. Quite the opposite. I think it's time to be aggressive and add far far more. Provided additions are truly modular, bloat doesn't occur. Bloat only happens when you are compelled to include something. However, I feel that there also needs to be far better QA on everything. This is the area geeks tend to fall down on. Testing isn't exciting. In fact, it's mind-numbing at times. And once you get to the real, real low-level hard testing, it is painfully slow. Running a syscall or loading a web page is trivial, if painful after the first few thousand times, but that's nothing compared to validating the logic of code where potential side-effects can arise, or devising tests against slowly accumulating errors that may only arise on certain permutations of arc through the code.
Logic (and the eventual heat-death of the Universe) dictate that you cannot get code bug-free by testing alone, which means that thorough QA must also include mathematical techniques. And precisely how many of the hundreds of thousands of part- and full-time kernel hackers have mathematical proofs in their background? Of those, how many have the time, patience, skill, money, resources or sanity to actually apply those techniques to eliminate bugs where case-by-case testing won't work? Mathematical techniques can easily take two to three days for every hundred lines of code, if you're working on it full-time. It is the ONLY way some bugs will be found and fixed, but you'd need close to a million mathematical experts full-time for a year to just find the intra-function bugs in the kernel as it stands. If you wanted to test X, KDE, Gnome and a few standard applications as well, you'd best be prepared to convert a small nation into a gigantic QA factory.
For those arguing that the desktop applications are important, I agree. However, and this is important, nothing can be better than the foundations you build on. If the foundations are weak, what you build will be weaker. That is the lesson we should learn from a certain other OS. We need the foundations in Linux to be far stronger than they already are. The GUI is especially in need of a revamp, but there is no layer in Linux that I would consider to be sufficiently strong that it could endure the kind of abuse it WILL get when it has 99% of the users on it.
Hey, how do you know it's not a tropical resort? There was an island for sale on eBay recently and Bill Gates might have bought it. Besides, Blackpool is considered a resort, and there's a lot of similarities between that and Get The Facts. Since there's a replacement, all we can say is it's not the last resort.
Yes, you're absolutely right that there are only a few "core" licenses that others are derived from. NASA's Open Source license is based on the GPL, for example. However, there ARE a lot of licenses out there. It would be far, far better if there was some sort of inheritance mechanism for licenses. That way, it would be clear what had borrowed what from what, lawyers would be dealing with change sets (which they're familiar with) rather than re-written texts, and instead of a long linear list, we would have a much more compact tree.
Would this reduce the number of licenses? Initially, no. You'd simply reorganize them into a structure. Would it improve understanding of the licenses? Yes. Understanding would increase exponentially, rather than linearly, as a person worked their way through. Would it eventually lead to a reduction in the number of licenses? Yes. A lot of them have trivial or insignificant change sets and making this obvious to all would create pressure to consolidate where appropriate.
Ok, but doesn't the sheer number also create pressure? Yes, but it may NOT always be appropriate, and there may be unexpected and undesirable results. Make thing clear FIRST, and THEN make changes, not the other way round.
The best "standard" explanation is that the gravity of surrounding objects simply ripped everything that was inside the hole out. One alternative explanation points out that superstrings would have negative gravity and therefore a large enough superstring must indeed create a void. Another notes that Black Holes eventually evaporate as Hawking Radiation and therefore if you start with a supermassive Black Hole that has eliminated all surrounding material and then evaporate it, you'll end up with nothing.
So there are plenty of explanations. What the scientific world is waiting for is not explanations - it has plenty - but some indication of which explanation is the most likely. When scientists say they are caught off-guard, they usually do not mean that whatever it is is actually inexplicable, what they mean is that they're in the theorum shopping center and everything's on sale.
Linux meets or exceeds Government standards - at least on platforms it has been certified for. Windows' certification is unclear, given the level of rewriting that has taken place and given the age. Remember, it is the combination of hardware and software that is certified, and certified components do not generally need re-certifying in later versions. How much hardware from the days of NT is still useful, let alone usable for Windows 2003 or Vista?
Notwithstanding why he would end up using Windows, his best bet is to buy a new hard drive, place his original in safe storage, then use the new one for Windows. It'll save losing installed apps and data.
Yes, the guy has committed a crime and I don't feel terribly sorry for him. He is guilty, he needs to face a consequence that will persuade him to choose a different path in life. I'm not sure home detention will be effective in doing that, but there aren't any generally accepted alternatives that are effective. Constructive punishments do not, yet, exist. Regardless, home detention was selected by the judge and home detention that has neither impact nor meaning is not much of anything. It is arguable, then, that the mandatory use of Windows is necessary for this to have any meaning to him.
However, by this logic, a Windows user should be compelled to use something alien to them, to drive home that they are not going to be rewarded for an act that is deemed unacceptable by society. This is only possible if the appropriate monitoring software exists.
I'd add one other thought: If the software is Windows-specific and is relatively trivial (it's just a sniffer/logger), then it is badly written. We're not talking about platform-specific operations, we're talking very basic I/O monitoring, and that will be almost identical on almost all OS'. If the software is, however, as badly written as all that, is it meaningful as evidence in a court of law? If there is a high risk of flaws that could potentially generate incorrect output, then courts should be deeming the evidence as unacceptable and throwing it out. They can do that. It is not required for a court to accept all evidence offered.
Well, it uses fluidics and can therefore use logic. Would YOU want to be in Germany and unable to go to the Oktoberfest? Consider the feelings of this poor, fluidic arm!
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An acrobatic plane, at night/early morning (when visibility is not good), without proper acrobatic experience - that's not a good combination. I really do hope that he had some other reason for that type of aircraft. If it can travel very slowly, then it might be good for aerial photography, which would be relatively risk-free and might indeed require an unpredictable - and therefore unfileable - flight plan. At this point, though, we can only really guess. If he's not found alive - or not found at all - we'll never know what his reasons were.
Light aircraft parachutes have been around for some time now, and emergency beacons are practically a throw-away item. At this point in the light aircraft/experimental aircraft game, fatal crashes involving the ground (as opposed to buildings, mountains, seagulls, etc) should be relatively rare and rescuers should never be stumped.
Yes, I most definitely hope Steve Fossett is safe, but whether he is safe or not, I think that given the current state of technology, it would be good if questions were being asked as to why we don't even know. Are the parachutes so overpriced or unavailable that even someone like Mr. Fossett could not afford one? Are the laws on transmitters so onerous that only idiots would fly with a distress beacon of adequate power?
(Yes, people should be entitled to take whatever risks they like with their own lives, provided they understand what those are, but implicit in the concept of entitlement is that it is practical and lawful to mitigate those risks as much as possible when doing exactly the same thing. Otherwise, it is not the risk that has the entitlement, it's the activity. The risk is mandatory.)
After they closed many of the mental hospitals in America, they had to put the more dangerous lunatics somewhere, and they're far less of a threat to ordinary citizens being locked up in Congress than allowed out on the streets.
As for the giant alien lizards, I have to disagree. Deranged creatures from the corridors of time seem much more likely.
Cambridge was founded by a bunch of criminals escaping from Oxford in the 7th century. Maybe Oxford is simply charging the interest on the fines.
Seriously, it must be obvious to everyone why Microsoft is pulling this. We have an American election in which the right-wing conservatives have been "amiable" to Microsoft's continued monopoly and dubious practices (such as buying out standards bodies). It is in Microsoft's interests at exactly this time to be seen to be "friendly" to those same right-wing conservatives and to win support from the very power-base the politicians are relying on. They are losing support from some of their traditional sources and need to replace them.
That OLPC will need to sell in the US and doesn't (yet) have adequate filtering makes this a skillful move on Microsoft's part. Why? Because if the churches and assorted other fringe groups insist on this Microsoft-patented technology on any laptop provided to children, it completely kills off OLPC's own OS and requires the use of Windows. There will be no alternatives. Schools, libraries, Universities that receive money from religious or other censorus body and so on will likewise be forced to give up Linux or give up their funding. (The Golden Rule of Arts and Science is He Who Hath The Gold Makes The Rules.) If there's a right-wing President, the same will likely become true of all public schools "in the best interest of the kids".
Microsoft doesn't care two whits about the religious groups or the feelings of those involved. It's never cared about anyone's feelings before and I don't see it starting now. This is purely a tactical move to manipulate those feelings into having other people destroy Microsoft's competition. If others are conned into doing so, then Microsoft cannot be (so easily) be held liable, now that it's a declared monopoly.
Because that was one of the trashed episodes. Duh. :)
I would have thought Hardy Heron would need a Stanley joke in there somewhere.
Another ruling in the UK, during the Poll Tax fiasco, also showed surprising resistance to technologically suspicious arguments. A prosecutor produced in court various printouts - e-mails, database entries, and so on. The judge threw out the evidence on the grounds that it was impossible to know if the printouts came from a legitimate source, if the data had been tampered with, and whether the bills sent were indeed the bills recorded on the printout. In other words, if it couldn't be authenticated and was subject to being trivially refuted, it was inadmissible as evidence.
Now, these standards are no longer really held to anywhere, but they do form the backbone that should exist for all computer-based evidence - that you are dealing with a highly mutable, impermanent environment (Buddhists should make excellent programmers) and that the standards required for admissibility should be that much higher. If RAM is to be admissible in court, then RAM makers should be required to embed the Tiger hashing function in hardware and hash every 4K of memory space, in order to provide some method of verifying that what is claimed of the RAM contents has any basis in reality.
Personally, I think the whole thing is as much a farce as the UK Government's attempt to have all ISPs log the contents of all packets and retain them for 7 years.
...why they named it AAK!
There is no "right to privacy" in the US, or even a "reasonable expectation of privacy". Indeed, under European law, no EU country should permit the export of personal data to the US due to the lack of sane privacy laws or even sane accuracy laws. Unlike the UK, where you can demand that inaccurate data be corrected and where you can sue people for retaining data without your authorization, the US has a proliferation of services where you can buy credit information, social security information or even entire identities but relatively little. Except in California, companies aren't even required to tell you when your personal data has been stolen or your bank account hacked.
Yes, I expect people to know their products are insecure by default, the same way they know an unlocked car is insecure by default. Yes, there is an obligation on developers to make products secure - if you can enable opportunistic encryption, so can the OEM - but users have obligations too.
I like the traditional UK view on trespass, for example. If you don't "break and enter" and cause no damage, you have almost totally unfettered access to open lands and lands of any kind that have a public footpath or bridleway through them. Back in the mid 1990s, there was a huge Traveler get-together in the north of England - a hundred thousand or so Travelers converged on a field for a festival that almost put Woodstock in the 1960s to shame. The police could do absolutely nothing, because no damage was being done and nobody broke into the field. The farmer could do nothing either. The home may well be an Englishman's castle, but that doesn't extend to fallow land.
(That particular incident led to a clause in the Criminal Justice Act, banning groups larger than four traveling with a common purpose. That clause was overturned in the House of Lords on the grounds that it unfairly restricted the freedom of the reincarnation of King Arthur and his knights. Yes, I am serious.)
The world the British live in, especially, is a world in which even ancient animal tracks that are under use but once in a single year cannot be obstructed, by law. Which is why there are so many bridges over motorways. Not all of them are roads, overhead pipes, or links between housing estates. Whether anyone likes it or not, computer networks won't ever be treated any differently. If you leave them as public rights of way, they will become public rights of way. If you don't want them to be public, then you can't go treating them as if they were.
Which gets back to my original point. If customers wanted secure devices, they could be adding the security themselves. They do so for their homes (most don't have alarms fitted as standard), they do so for their cars (steering wheel clamps are fairly popular add-ons), they do so for their bicycles (clamps and chains with combination locks proliferate). Alternately, they could be pressing the manufacturers to be adding it (cars with electronic keys, the provisions of the Data Protection Act, Swindon's experiment with Mondo).
But they don't. In the past few years, tens of millions of cases of identity theft have occurred over insecure computer systems - that we know about. Remember, most States have no reporting rule, so the actual number could be much higher. Wiretapping of the Internet has gone from being a national secret to being a national boast. SIGINT's activities are unknown but comments by senior officials in Canada and Australia suggest it's not entirely benign. Airbus even sued the US Government over industrial espionage. I forget what the recent inspection concluded in terms of abuses of FBI Letters to bypass the courts, but as I recall the percentage of abuses was very very high.
Despite all of this, ther
Opportunistic encryption uses D-H exchange, I believe. IKE (Internet Key Exchange) is the section used for this. There's an IKE2 floating around - see Freshmeat for links - but I'm not sure how it compares. I've not dug into the IKAMP (Internet Key And Management Protocol) stuff in some time. But, yeah, the code is all there, as are the RFCs. If you want to know, you can.
IPSec, using opportunistic encryption, is trivial to set up. You set "opportunistic encryption" to enable. That's it. Alternatively, use Sun's SKIP protocol. Enskip for Linux has been out for a while and there are probably other implementations for it. I wonder if SSL and VPN would work over DCCP - that gives you the reliability whilst remaining UDP-like. So, overall, I don't see this as a particular issue. If people want encryption, they could have encryption. The problem is, people act as if they want to be bugged. Possibly so they have something to complain about. That's why the English mess up England so much. They needn't, they are extremely intelligent, but if they didn't have trains that wouldn't run on the "wrong type of snow" or when there are "leaves on the line", they'd run out of things to say.
Ok, I'll never make the top 40, but seriously the most recent PCI "standards" (I think they're at 2.1) have a LOT of vendor extension hooks, making me think that PCI is going to go the way of CORBA and SQL - standards only on paper and not in practice. Besides, the latency is high (and that's according to Intel!) and the signaling system has become nightmarishly complicated.
The alternatives seem to be HyperTransport and VXI, neither of which are either widespread or perfect by any stretch.
Monkey, Great Sage, equal of Heaven, may be visiting. But in that case, the cloud would be pink.
Google is a gamma ray detector? Well, I suppose they would index high energy radiation - they index everything else.
I would argue that we need far better reliability. Not just in the kernel, but in the apps as well. Yes, Linux has one of the lowest bugs per thousand lines of code of any popular OS, by Coverity's metrics, but it is still higher than comfort should allow. Some of the recent 2.6.x kernels have not been too impressive, Firefox is getting sloppy and if KDE's QA had been more thorough, they'd be in a position to put more developers into the 4.x cycle rather than maintenance releases of 3.x.
This is not to say that new stuff shouldn't be integrated into the kernel or Firefox. Quite the opposite. I think it's time to be aggressive and add far far more. Provided additions are truly modular, bloat doesn't occur. Bloat only happens when you are compelled to include something. However, I feel that there also needs to be far better QA on everything. This is the area geeks tend to fall down on. Testing isn't exciting. In fact, it's mind-numbing at times. And once you get to the real, real low-level hard testing, it is painfully slow. Running a syscall or loading a web page is trivial, if painful after the first few thousand times, but that's nothing compared to validating the logic of code where potential side-effects can arise, or devising tests against slowly accumulating errors that may only arise on certain permutations of arc through the code.
Logic (and the eventual heat-death of the Universe) dictate that you cannot get code bug-free by testing alone, which means that thorough QA must also include mathematical techniques. And precisely how many of the hundreds of thousands of part- and full-time kernel hackers have mathematical proofs in their background? Of those, how many have the time, patience, skill, money, resources or sanity to actually apply those techniques to eliminate bugs where case-by-case testing won't work? Mathematical techniques can easily take two to three days for every hundred lines of code, if you're working on it full-time. It is the ONLY way some bugs will be found and fixed, but you'd need close to a million mathematical experts full-time for a year to just find the intra-function bugs in the kernel as it stands. If you wanted to test X, KDE, Gnome and a few standard applications as well, you'd best be prepared to convert a small nation into a gigantic QA factory.
For those arguing that the desktop applications are important, I agree. However, and this is important, nothing can be better than the foundations you build on. If the foundations are weak, what you build will be weaker. That is the lesson we should learn from a certain other OS. We need the foundations in Linux to be far stronger than they already are. The GUI is especially in need of a revamp, but there is no layer in Linux that I would consider to be sufficiently strong that it could endure the kind of abuse it WILL get when it has 99% of the users on it.
I disagree. Do you know how much those knives had to suffer, cutting up rather overweight medieval lords who usually died otherwise from obesity?
Hey, how do you know it's not a tropical resort? There was an island for sale on eBay recently and Bill Gates might have bought it. Besides, Blackpool is considered a resort, and there's a lot of similarities between that and Get The Facts. Since there's a replacement, all we can say is it's not the last resort.
I hear if you use the -f flag, they kick you out.
Use something everyone will love/hate equally. Arch.
I've a different song in mind - Bad Karma in the UK. Getting the lyrics to work is much easier when they never made any sense anyway.
Would this reduce the number of licenses? Initially, no. You'd simply reorganize them into a structure. Would it improve understanding of the licenses? Yes. Understanding would increase exponentially, rather than linearly, as a person worked their way through. Would it eventually lead to a reduction in the number of licenses? Yes. A lot of them have trivial or insignificant change sets and making this obvious to all would create pressure to consolidate where appropriate.
Ok, but doesn't the sheer number also create pressure? Yes, but it may NOT always be appropriate, and there may be unexpected and undesirable results. Make thing clear FIRST, and THEN make changes, not the other way round.
So there are plenty of explanations. What the scientific world is waiting for is not explanations - it has plenty - but some indication of which explanation is the most likely. When scientists say they are caught off-guard, they usually do not mean that whatever it is is actually inexplicable, what they mean is that they're in the theorum shopping center and everything's on sale.
Notwithstanding why he would end up using Windows, his best bet is to buy a new hard drive, place his original in safe storage, then use the new one for Windows. It'll save losing installed apps and data.
Yes, the guy has committed a crime and I don't feel terribly sorry for him. He is guilty, he needs to face a consequence that will persuade him to choose a different path in life. I'm not sure home detention will be effective in doing that, but there aren't any generally accepted alternatives that are effective. Constructive punishments do not, yet, exist. Regardless, home detention was selected by the judge and home detention that has neither impact nor meaning is not much of anything. It is arguable, then, that the mandatory use of Windows is necessary for this to have any meaning to him.
However, by this logic, a Windows user should be compelled to use something alien to them, to drive home that they are not going to be rewarded for an act that is deemed unacceptable by society. This is only possible if the appropriate monitoring software exists.
I'd add one other thought: If the software is Windows-specific and is relatively trivial (it's just a sniffer/logger), then it is badly written. We're not talking about platform-specific operations, we're talking very basic I/O monitoring, and that will be almost identical on almost all OS'. If the software is, however, as badly written as all that, is it meaningful as evidence in a court of law? If there is a high risk of flaws that could potentially generate incorrect output, then courts should be deeming the evidence as unacceptable and throwing it out. They can do that. It is not required for a court to accept all evidence offered.
Well, it uses fluidics and can therefore use logic. Would YOU want to be in Germany and unable to go to the Oktoberfest? Consider the feelings of this poor, fluidic arm!