2) People *rarely* lose their wallets, because they know they've got important stuff in them, so they know to keep them safe. Adding a slip of paper with a password to the wallet means that it will benefit from the same relative care.
3) People generally know that if they lose a wallet with ID, bank cards, etc., that they should immediately report the loss of the bank cards, get replacement ID, etc. By association, it would make sense to change a password promptly, or to inform a system administrator it's been compromised and needs to be reset -- someone who's lost a wallet would be likely to do this in the same session at the desk when they're calling the bank, etc.
I've heard it said that a given still-life painting is influenced more by other still-life paintings than by the actual bowl of fruit.
I believe that this is a general truth about creativity. We start with something we saw before, add something else we saw somewhere else that makes it work a little better, and end up with something new, that's still clearly derived from other things. Fire predates humans, and the person who invented the wheel must have been familiar with using logs as rollers, or at least with round rocks rolling down hill.
Getting back to FLOSS, the classic example is the GNU system, which was an effort to re-implement Unix -- and as long as they were at it, to improve on it a little. We end up with an operating system that follows Unix conventions, but is improved in innumerable details.
Microsoft Word was derived from the first word processor, developed for the Alto. And so on.
FLOSS has the advantage that we don't have to lie, and claim we've invented something utterly new.
There's a tension intrinsic to the concept of a role-playing game, between "role-playing" and "game." I've found that it is nearly always resolved by abandoning one or the other aspect entirely, usually the "role-playing".
I've seen it pointed out that most combat soldiers never kill anyone -- that such is the case is pretty obvious, actually. But, in computer games, your avatar will kill hundreds or thousands of enemies in a short period of time. In an online roleplaying game, doing that isn't enough to be considered a competent fighter. This, in itself, profoundly undermines roleplaying. One usual consequence is that if you design a character so that the character makes sense in roleplaying terms, it's an ineffective character in game terms.
A lot of people get the idea that roleplaying means your character has stats and levels. That roleplaying is about collaborative storytelling, or even that there are tabletop roleplaying games without levels, seems to escape most. For those that have some inkling what roleplaying is, it's something that gets in the way of playing the game.
Occasionally, I've run into people who blow off the game aspect entirely, and just roleplay. I'm not crazy about that, either. Without the grounding of the game rules, it just drifts off into tedious wish fulfillment and soap opera.
I've come to think that true role-playing games are intrinsically unstable, and can only be continued with enormous effort. I don't see such efforts made by MMORPG developers. Consequently, I think MMORPGs are a waste of time.
By "squelch," I mean that they would completely ignore it. That's the usual treatment of anything where some other country is more progressive than the US. They reserve the "hippie commies" routine for legislation that's actually pending in the US, or when some locality passes relatively progressive legislation, and they want to humiliate it out of existence. (I live in San Francisco, and we get that treatment a lot. Just before Hurricane Katrina, I remember VP Dick Cheney saying of opposition to the Iraq War in San Francisco, that we're not really part of the US.)
There's a good chance that the fertilizer is about to hit the ventilation system.
While it's likely that the mass media in the US will decide to squelch any coverage of this, if it slips through, it's likely to lead to significant backlash, which would mean the US would have to back off a bit, at the least.
While the original summary is misleading, this is a good example of division-of-powers working to the public benefit. In order to be a meaningful entity, the European Parliament has to take a stand for open governance, in opposing a secret treaty. That's a stand for the general welfare, beyond the immediate consequences of ACTA.
There's a meme that people migrate TO the United States, to escape tyranny. Why wouldn't it make sense to migrate FROM the United States, to escape tyranny?
I'm generally of the opinion that it's best to stay and struggle "in the belly of the beast," but, there's a counterargument that worries me. In order to survive here -- to earn a living, especially -- I have to contribute to enterprises that I despise. What if, despite my best efforts and intentions, those negative contributions overwhelm any positive contributions I can make? In that case, wouldn't it be better to pick up and leave for somewhere that the balance is better?
There's the saying, good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. Good parenting and good educating take as premises that it's possible to establish good judgment without the young person experiencing disastrous consequences from bad judgment. You're not supposed to let toddlers play with hot coffee, and you can bar laptops from a classroom when they interfere with learning.
(I don't own a laptop, which is a minor disadvantage for some of the hands-on labs in some of my networking classes. That's a bit of a special case, though.)
The answer is, in itself, useful, if you're an XKCD fan, and if you're in a position to make use of the information, which a significant number of XKCD fans and Slashdot readers would be.
Step one: use Google Maps. Step two: use Google Calendar.
I can understand the disappointment at not seeing any discussion of the problem, and the means of the solution. However, the meaning of the solution is very clear, and interesting to XKCD fans.
I agree. I hate it when people whinge about using the terminal. Writing a shell script is hard for a newbie. Copying and pasting "sudo apt-get install package" is easy.
I think the default Ubuntu desktop should have the terminal icon up next to the browser, email client, and help icons. It's not something to be hidden -- it's a core feature, and symbolic of the openness of the Linux architecture. The GUI is only part of an operating system, and I don't like that proprietary operating systems try to make the machinery of the operating system inaccessible.
A fundamental problem with DRM is that it's a constant irritant for legitimate users. So, many legitimate users will install the legitimately purchased game, then download the "cracked" version, to bypass the annoyance of DRM. Also, since the DRM is developed independently of the game itself, a frequent source of bugs is conflict between the DRM and the game, so installing a "cracked" version can be a way to overcome bugs. So, a lot of legitimate users will purchase and install the game, then download and install the "cracked" version, and will feel ethically justified in doing so.
Consequently, any game with DRM that frustrates legitimate users will create demand by legitimate users for "cracked" versions... which will be used by illegitimate users as well. DRM of this sort is self-defeating.
There's this persistent, recurring confused idea that the fundamental principle of socialism is state ownership. It isn't -- it's collective ownership. I've run into people, left and right, who fail to understand that critical distinction. It's most obnoxious when I hear avowed Marxists insisting it's all about state ownership, as Marx clearly and explicitly made that distinction -- there's a line about how if state ownership constituted socialism, than Bismarck, the conservative German statesman who suppressed socialists and unions, would have been a socialist champion.
My starting point as a socialist was believing that when one has to do what one's boss says, then that boss is the government, and it's unfair and undemocratic.
One of the odd things about US politics, and the media, is that there's a deliberate blackout of any coverage of politics outside the Democratic-to-Republican spectrum. There are a lot more organized activist groups that, mysteriously, are never even mentioned in media accounts of the public events they organize. I've seen some very peculiar jobs of cropping protest signs in newspaper photos, for instance. Once, I heard someone on Fox exclaiming about the involvement of socialists in a demonstration for immigrant rights, but the word "socialist" was left out of the published transcript of the interview.
Since the US lacks a social democratic party, as such, a lot of social democrats are involved in the Green Party. So, in Canada and Europe, from what I understand, there is generally a split in the left between the greens and the social democrats, whereas they're in the same group in the US -- which offers some hope, I think.
Anyway, speaking of Marx, I think it's a fundamental truth that one's material conditions determine one's world view. Orange County has a lot of middle class residents who make their money paving the planet, and they're disinclined to consider that it might not be a good idea in the long run.
ITS COMPUTERZ AND SCARY AND DIFFERENT AND I DONT UNDERSTAAAAAND is not sufficient reason to take away 2 years of a man's life, no matter how big an aspie asshole he might be.
I agree with the general principle here, that Childs's punishment has been grossly excessive.
But, in passing, it crosses my mind that the very reason people are likely to find computers scary and different and incomprehensible, is the sort of hypervigilance that this episode represents. How does it sound to most people that losing a single password is so dangerous to the entire city's welfare?
It also nags at me that there's something fundamentally anti-democratic in the secrecy and authority of network and system administrators, and that we need to think carefully about how to keep that sort of thing in check.
I'm partial to Ubuntu's default color scheme as well. It also stands out in comparison with the wedding cake color scheme of OS X, or the sky blue color scheme of almost every other OS I've seen.
I started out with Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron, and I loved the default wallpaper depicting a stylized heron. Intrepid Ibex's wallpaper was also good, but Jackalope and Koala just had abstract images that weren't much more than gradients. I'd like a really interesting graphic featuring a Lynx for the next one.
There's more to an election than who wins. Policies aren't determined simply by the identity of the candidate winning. There's a difference between winning by a wide margin, and winning by a narrow margin. And, it matters if a third-party candidate gets 10% of the vote. It means that the major party candidates are going to have to pay attention to the policy views that drew that much attention.
Consequently, I don't think people should vote for "the lesser of two evils." They ought to vote for the candidate whose views most closely resemble their own. If people actually voted based on their beliefs, rather than on this weird game theory where one assumes losing, maybe we'd start to get some approximation of democracy.
I found this post a relief, as it makes perfect sense to me.
I am, relatively late in life, studying for certification in system administration and LAMP administration. When some of the posts in here complain about the "pointy-clicky types" who ignorantly create security holes, I was afraid I'm setting myself up to be that sort of person.
But, I get the general concept of input validation. In fact, it's such a fundamental concept that I'm astonished that professional developers don't always get it. A few years ago, I decided I should go back to school and into IT when I used a shiny, new program developed in-house by my employers, that would crash if you pressed a letter key at a menu.
In fact, I thought the point of using Perl for Web development was the excellence of its its regexp features, facilitating input validation and manipulation.
I recommend Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem, the theme of which I took to be, how can we presume to understand a truly alien being, when we cannot understand ourselves?
Speaking as a FLOSS supporter -- Microsoft, and Bill Gates, have a strong line in support of proprietary software, against free software. I think FLOSS is one of the greatest ideas ever successfully put into practice, and so I'm at odds with Microsoft, et. al., on that issue.
That doesn't make Microsoft *evil*, as such. It's not like Gates ever killed anybody for his wealth -- and there are enough powerful and wealthy people and organizations around who have killed for it, that it seems a bit hyperbolic that Gates and Microsoft get singled out as evil so often.
The victory condition I hope for is not the destruction of Microsoft, but rather, Microsoft opening their source code.
The obvious reason the US would be attacked in a "cyber war" would be to prevent the US from attacking in a conventional war. So, there's an easy way to avoid being attacked -- don't attack anyone else.
Supposedly, the point of the UN was to end that sort of thing, anyway.
Someone registered a domain name for the site. Someone configured an http server to serve that domain name. Someone designed the web pages. Someone posted those web pages to the http server.
A series of deliberate actions were taken to publicly display the documents, before the journalists saw them.
It is completely absurd to compare the journalist's actions to anything like trespassing or theft.
Personally, I've been wanting to install and try out KDE on my preferred computer, but I haven't, because the menu systems will list Gnome apps and KDE apps both, in both desktops. If they could just standardize a tag that would say "gnome-only" or "kde-only", I'd be happy to install the Kubuntu desktop. Likewise for Xubuntu.
Slashdot Mirror
1) There's no perfect security.
2) People *rarely* lose their wallets, because they know they've got important stuff in them, so they know to keep them safe. Adding a slip of paper with a password to the wallet means that it will benefit from the same relative care.
3) People generally know that if they lose a wallet with ID, bank cards, etc., that they should immediately report the loss of the bank cards, get replacement ID, etc. By association, it would make sense to change a password promptly, or to inform a system administrator it's been compromised and needs to be reset -- someone who's lost a wallet would be likely to do this in the same session at the desk when they're calling the bank, etc.
I've heard it said that a given still-life painting is influenced more by other still-life paintings than by the actual bowl of fruit.
I believe that this is a general truth about creativity. We start with something we saw before, add something else we saw somewhere else that makes it work a little better, and end up with something new, that's still clearly derived from other things. Fire predates humans, and the person who invented the wheel must have been familiar with using logs as rollers, or at least with round rocks rolling down hill.
Getting back to FLOSS, the classic example is the GNU system, which was an effort to re-implement Unix -- and as long as they were at it, to improve on it a little. We end up with an operating system that follows Unix conventions, but is improved in innumerable details.
Microsoft Word was derived from the first word processor, developed for the Alto. And so on.
FLOSS has the advantage that we don't have to lie, and claim we've invented something utterly new.
Fascinating. It's social networking, Jim, but not as we know it.
There's a tension intrinsic to the concept of a role-playing game, between "role-playing" and "game." I've found that it is nearly always resolved by abandoning one or the other aspect entirely, usually the "role-playing".
I've seen it pointed out that most combat soldiers never kill anyone -- that such is the case is pretty obvious, actually. But, in computer games, your avatar will kill hundreds or thousands of enemies in a short period of time. In an online roleplaying game, doing that isn't enough to be considered a competent fighter. This, in itself, profoundly undermines roleplaying. One usual consequence is that if you design a character so that the character makes sense in roleplaying terms, it's an ineffective character in game terms.
A lot of people get the idea that roleplaying means your character has stats and levels. That roleplaying is about collaborative storytelling, or even that there are tabletop roleplaying games without levels, seems to escape most. For those that have some inkling what roleplaying is, it's something that gets in the way of playing the game.
Occasionally, I've run into people who blow off the game aspect entirely, and just roleplay. I'm not crazy about that, either. Without the grounding of the game rules, it just drifts off into tedious wish fulfillment and soap opera.
I've come to think that true role-playing games are intrinsically unstable, and can only be continued with enormous effort. I don't see such efforts made by MMORPG developers. Consequently, I think MMORPGs are a waste of time.
By "squelch," I mean that they would completely ignore it. That's the usual treatment of anything where some other country is more progressive than the US. They reserve the "hippie commies" routine for legislation that's actually pending in the US, or when some locality passes relatively progressive legislation, and they want to humiliate it out of existence. (I live in San Francisco, and we get that treatment a lot. Just before Hurricane Katrina, I remember VP Dick Cheney saying of opposition to the Iraq War in San Francisco, that we're not really part of the US.)
There's a good chance that the fertilizer is about to hit the ventilation system.
While it's likely that the mass media in the US will decide to squelch any coverage of this, if it slips through, it's likely to lead to significant backlash, which would mean the US would have to back off a bit, at the least.
While the original summary is misleading, this is a good example of division-of-powers working to the public benefit. In order to be a meaningful entity, the European Parliament has to take a stand for open governance, in opposing a secret treaty. That's a stand for the general welfare, beyond the immediate consequences of ACTA.
There's a meme that people migrate TO the United States, to escape tyranny. Why wouldn't it make sense to migrate FROM the United States, to escape tyranny?
I'm generally of the opinion that it's best to stay and struggle "in the belly of the beast," but, there's a counterargument that worries me. In order to survive here -- to earn a living, especially -- I have to contribute to enterprises that I despise. What if, despite my best efforts and intentions, those negative contributions overwhelm any positive contributions I can make? In that case, wouldn't it be better to pick up and leave for somewhere that the balance is better?
There's the saying, good judgment comes from experience; experience comes from bad judgment. Good parenting and good educating take as premises that it's possible to establish good judgment without the young person experiencing disastrous consequences from bad judgment. You're not supposed to let toddlers play with hot coffee, and you can bar laptops from a classroom when they interfere with learning.
(I don't own a laptop, which is a minor disadvantage for some of the hands-on labs in some of my networking classes. That's a bit of a special case, though.)
The answer is, in itself, useful, if you're an XKCD fan, and if you're in a position to make use of the information, which a significant number of XKCD fans and Slashdot readers would be.
Step one: use Google Maps.
Step two: use Google Calendar.
I can understand the disappointment at not seeing any discussion of the problem, and the means of the solution. However, the meaning of the solution is very clear, and interesting to XKCD fans.
That's the irony: the people in the US who make the most noise about "European heritage" generally despise modern European culture and politics.
I agree. I hate it when people whinge about using the terminal. Writing a shell script is hard for a newbie. Copying and pasting "sudo apt-get install package" is easy.
I think the default Ubuntu desktop should have the terminal icon up next to the browser, email client, and help icons. It's not something to be hidden -- it's a core feature, and symbolic of the openness of the Linux architecture. The GUI is only part of an operating system, and I don't like that proprietary operating systems try to make the machinery of the operating system inaccessible.
A fundamental problem with DRM is that it's a constant irritant for legitimate users. So, many legitimate users will install the legitimately purchased game, then download the "cracked" version, to bypass the annoyance of DRM. Also, since the DRM is developed independently of the game itself, a frequent source of bugs is conflict between the DRM and the game, so installing a "cracked" version can be a way to overcome bugs. So, a lot of legitimate users will purchase and install the game, then download and install the "cracked" version, and will feel ethically justified in doing so.
Consequently, any game with DRM that frustrates legitimate users will create demand by legitimate users for "cracked" versions ... which will be used by illegitimate users as well. DRM of this sort is self-defeating.
There's this persistent, recurring confused idea that the fundamental principle of socialism is state ownership. It isn't -- it's collective ownership. I've run into people, left and right, who fail to understand that critical distinction. It's most obnoxious when I hear avowed Marxists insisting it's all about state ownership, as Marx clearly and explicitly made that distinction -- there's a line about how if state ownership constituted socialism, than Bismarck, the conservative German statesman who suppressed socialists and unions, would have been a socialist champion.
My starting point as a socialist was believing that when one has to do what one's boss says, then that boss is the government, and it's unfair and undemocratic.
One of the odd things about US politics, and the media, is that there's a deliberate blackout of any coverage of politics outside the Democratic-to-Republican spectrum. There are a lot more organized activist groups that, mysteriously, are never even mentioned in media accounts of the public events they organize. I've seen some very peculiar jobs of cropping protest signs in newspaper photos, for instance. Once, I heard someone on Fox exclaiming about the involvement of socialists in a demonstration for immigrant rights, but the word "socialist" was left out of the published transcript of the interview.
Since the US lacks a social democratic party, as such, a lot of social democrats are involved in the Green Party. So, in Canada and Europe, from what I understand, there is generally a split in the left between the greens and the social democrats, whereas they're in the same group in the US -- which offers some hope, I think.
Anyway, speaking of Marx, I think it's a fundamental truth that one's material conditions determine one's world view. Orange County has a lot of middle class residents who make their money paving the planet, and they're disinclined to consider that it might not be a good idea in the long run.
ITS COMPUTERZ AND SCARY AND DIFFERENT AND I DONT UNDERSTAAAAAND is not sufficient reason to take away 2 years of a man's life, no matter how big an aspie asshole he might be.
I agree with the general principle here, that Childs's punishment has been grossly excessive.
But, in passing, it crosses my mind that the very reason people are likely to find computers scary and different and incomprehensible, is the sort of hypervigilance that this episode represents. How does it sound to most people that losing a single password is so dangerous to the entire city's welfare?
It also nags at me that there's something fundamentally anti-democratic in the secrecy and authority of network and system administrators, and that we need to think carefully about how to keep that sort of thing in check.
I'm partial to Ubuntu's default color scheme as well. It also stands out in comparison with the wedding cake color scheme of OS X, or the sky blue color scheme of almost every other OS I've seen.
I started out with Ubuntu 8.04, Hardy Heron, and I loved the default wallpaper depicting a stylized heron. Intrepid Ibex's wallpaper was also good, but Jackalope and Koala just had abstract images that weren't much more than gradients. I'd like a really interesting graphic featuring a Lynx for the next one.
There's more to an election than who wins. Policies aren't determined simply by the identity of the candidate winning. There's a difference between winning by a wide margin, and winning by a narrow margin. And, it matters if a third-party candidate gets 10% of the vote. It means that the major party candidates are going to have to pay attention to the policy views that drew that much attention.
Consequently, I don't think people should vote for "the lesser of two evils." They ought to vote for the candidate whose views most closely resemble their own. If people actually voted based on their beliefs, rather than on this weird game theory where one assumes losing, maybe we'd start to get some approximation of democracy.
I found this post a relief, as it makes perfect sense to me.
I am, relatively late in life, studying for certification in system administration and LAMP administration. When some of the posts in here complain about the "pointy-clicky types" who ignorantly create security holes, I was afraid I'm setting myself up to be that sort of person.
But, I get the general concept of input validation. In fact, it's such a fundamental concept that I'm astonished that professional developers don't always get it. A few years ago, I decided I should go back to school and into IT when I used a shiny, new program developed in-house by my employers, that would crash if you pressed a letter key at a menu.
In fact, I thought the point of using Perl for Web development was the excellence of its its regexp features, facilitating input validation and manipulation.
They've opened *some* of their source: Mono.
There's certainly grounds to suspect it's some sort of trap. But, what if it's just what it looks like?
Call me an optimist, but I think the FLOSS community should consider the possibility that it's winning.
I recommend Solaris, by Stanislaw Lem, the theme of which I took to be, how can we presume to understand a truly alien being, when we cannot understand ourselves?
N.B. I am recommending the book, not the movies.
Speaking as a FLOSS supporter -- Microsoft, and Bill Gates, have a strong line in support of proprietary software, against free software. I think FLOSS is one of the greatest ideas ever successfully put into practice, and so I'm at odds with Microsoft, et. al., on that issue.
That doesn't make Microsoft *evil*, as such. It's not like Gates ever killed anybody for his wealth -- and there are enough powerful and wealthy people and organizations around who have killed for it, that it seems a bit hyperbolic that Gates and Microsoft get singled out as evil so often.
The victory condition I hope for is not the destruction of Microsoft, but rather, Microsoft opening their source code.
The obvious reason the US would be attacked in a "cyber war" would be to prevent the US from attacking in a conventional war. So, there's an easy way to avoid being attacked -- don't attack anyone else.
Supposedly, the point of the UN was to end that sort of thing, anyway.
Someone registered a domain name for the site. Someone configured an http server to serve that domain name. Someone designed the web pages. Someone posted those web pages to the http server.
A series of deliberate actions were taken to publicly display the documents, before the journalists saw them.
It is completely absurd to compare the journalist's actions to anything like trespassing or theft.
Personally, I've been wanting to install and try out KDE on my preferred computer, but I haven't, because the menu systems will list Gnome apps and KDE apps both, in both desktops. If they could just standardize a tag that would say "gnome-only" or "kde-only", I'd be happy to install the Kubuntu desktop. Likewise for Xubuntu.