the fact is, some of the phishing emails look really good.
And sometimes, it doesn't even have to look perfect to fool even experienced people. I like to think of myself as experienced, but I was taken in once. As I recall, I was saved by the fact that the provided link didn't work on Linux with whatever browser I was using at the time (probably Mozilla).
The scam used E-mail virus propagation methods so it came from a friend of mine, and it said something like "that was a great party; could you print out these pictures for me?" and had an apparent link to a Yahoo web site.
Thing is, I'd recently been at a party with this very friend, she had in fact taken pictures, she had a Yahoo account, and I had printed pictures for her before. Other than the fact that the link didn't work for me, the phisher was a freakin' lucky bastard!
Actually, I'm not sure if my example was a phishing scam per se, because I didn't follow up after I ran into the broken link. Then I looked closely at the URL and realized it was a scam. But it illustrates that all it takes is a few lucky breaks like this one, and a phishing scam can easily pay big time. And it can work on an educated public.
As good as my ergonomic mouse/keyboard combo is, less body movement is still a better replacement.
Just because you're moving less doesn't mean you'll be under less strain. It's the naturalness of the movement (however big or small) that's important.
Now, like any good Slashdottie, I haven't read the f...ing article, but if this "nouse" requires you to hold your head perfectly still, I can guarantee you that your neck muscles will be weeping by the end of the day.
If we're going to get pedantic, then it should be "GNU/SunOS," not "Solaris." To put it into Linux terms, Solaris is the distribution that's built on the SunOS kernel, just as Mandrake (for instance) is a distro that's built on the Linux kernel.
Firstly, I'm on your side with regards to nuclear power - In my opinion, the horror scenarios spouted by fearmongers, while not impossible, are unlikely, and are far less damaging than the real, 100% probability of horror we inflict on the earth with other forms of energy generation such as coal - I think it's probably worth the risk. So much anti-nuclear rhetoric is nothing less than FUD. We on Slashdot should be familiar with that.
The worst nuclear disaster in history, Cherynobl, killed a total of 3,000 people. [...] Coal mining on the other hand kills around 30,000 people every year in mining accidents alone.
On the other hand, these numbers are really quite disingenuous... apples and oranges. After all, uranium has to be mined, too. I don't think it's constructive to put it in such inflammatory terms as human lives. I'd prefer to talk about dollar cost, value for money, environmental impact and risk. Not that I have such numbers... I'm not an expert.
On the subject of catastrophic failures such as Chernobyl, I understand that AECL's Candu reactors (which is what China is looking at, I believe) are designed in a fashion that it is virtually impossible for that kind of meltdown to occur. I don't know the details... something about how the control rods are engaged in the reactor, I think.
As for the nuclear waste generated aftewards there are a number of clever idea's about how to deal with it including one which disposes of it in the giant fusion reaction that is our Sun.
I suspect the cost of such a disposal scheme would make it an absurd option.
Even if we have to sequester all our waste until we figure out how to dispose of it safely (or reuse it in some other fashion - more likely, IMHO), I would still prefer that to dumping our pollution openly into the air.
On a related, but more ominous note, I've heard that waste from Candu reactors are excellent weapons-grade fissile material...
"the first game to move beyond being 'user friendly'"... "It's actually 'user insulting' and because it lies to you as well it's also 'user mendacious,'" he said.
Best. Software project. Ever.
What I would have given to work on such a program. I bet they had programmers offering to work for free. Heck, I would have paid them...
"Please, just one printf, one insult, that's all I ask!"
Many fluently multilingual people will tell you that they are a slightly different person when they speak a different language.
I'm fluent in English and Japanese, and I can attest to this. In fact, there have been occasions when I was out of touch from Japanese speakers for a long time, and I began to miss my "Japanese self" because it hadn't had a chance to surface for so long.
Why does windows give regular Joes root access by default.
This is a legacy problem. Most older software installations (and I don't mean ancient, I mean just a couple of years old) have no idea of administrator access. Newer XP-compatible software is starting to address this problem.
I've experienced this, because when I first got my XP box, I discovered the different privilege levels and thought, "Cool! Microsoft has done something right." And then I wondered exactly what you wondered, which was why they give all users administrator access by default. But I went ahead and set up two accounts for myself, one with root access and one without, and I was off and running with my new machine.
I very quickly realized the answer to the question. You see, legacy programs assume that any user can modify any file in the system folders, like C:\Program Files. This, of course, is untrue if you installed the program as root. You will not believe the hoops I had to jump through to get older software to work. I needed to figure out which files were used by the application and individually open up permissions on them by using "CACLS" (Change Access Control Lists, a command that's not documented in XP Home) at the command prompt.
Of course, there were other options I could have followed: just install the program as myself instead of root - but this has the drawback that if I ever made other user-level accounts, they wouldn't be able to use that program; or I could have just given full access to all files and directories for the entire application - but this defeats the purpose of installing as root in the first place. And I was just being pig-headed about keeping a separate root account and user account. Personally, I feel it was worth the effort. But Joe user wouldn't have had the aptitude to even make the effort.
The other option for Microsoft was to immediately obsolete all legacy software and force everyone to upgrade to XP-compatible applications - but this would not have been palatable at all to the consumer public. They would not have been able to sell XP if they'd done that.
Like I said, newer programs expect you to use an administrator account to install programs, and a user account to do your daily work. If you try to install an XP application as an unprivileged user, it will bring up a dialog that lets you temporarily log in as an administrator just to perform the installation. It's actually very nice.
I'm expecting that when enough time has passed and enough applications have made this switch, Microsoft will do all the user education that will be required (and a LOT of education will be required), and switch the default such that user accounts don't have administrator access any more. I don't work at Microsoft, but I'd be willing to bet that this is their plan.
The computer worm he created continues to spread despite the fact that their creator has been taken out of the equation.
How on earth must one believe that a worm works (or think that one's readers believe that a worm works) in order for them make such a statement?
I'm reminded of a great quote by Charles Babbage. Babbage was asked (by a member of parliament... of course) whether his analytical engine will, in spite of being given erroneous input, nevertheless arrive at the desired answer. Babbage's response?
"I cannot rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that would provoke such a question."
You know, the limited communicative abilities of our cars is something that struck me when I visited my ancestral Japan. I witnessed my aunt, while driving, bowing to another driver - or trying to. I'm not sure if the other driver could actually see her very well. Bowing, of course, is ubiquitous in Asia, but there's no easy way to express that in a car. A horn obviously doesn't cut it.
I think adding more expressive communication to automobiles is a fantastic idea, although I don't know if glaring angrily and crying would be very constructive or useful...
So often, you would hear a beep, and you'd have no idea what it was supposed to mean. It's almost appalling, really.
What I would do is install two or three horns with different pitches (maybe just two to keep things simple) so that your honks can have intonation. You could honk expressively, like "!!", "???", or "....."
No. Life did or did not exist on Mars, but either way, its chances are over.
Well, statistics is all about reasoning with insufficient data. Given that we don't know whether life existed on Mars or not, I think we definitely can try and figure out the odds for and against.
There's no reason why you can't calculate the odds that you could have picked last year's winning lottery numbers. It really doesn't matter that it all happened in the past. You just calculate the odds based on what knowledge you had at the time. In the case of lottery numbers, this is, presumably, no prior knowledge at all.
In the case of life on Mars, the difficulty, of course, is establishing what conditions would necessary for life to have existed, and how likely it is that those conditions existed on Mars.
But given what we know about life, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the likely existence of liquid water increases the likelihood that life once existed there.
There is a lot of emotion and a lot of psychology in the market and I think we are starting to see some of that again. We are encouraged that the market is growing warmer, but it is not time to throw caution to the wind.
Oh, that's good to hear. I just need my advisor to tell me when it is time to throw caution to the wind.
If by "basically legal" you mean "in practice," then you're basically right. The police tend not to make much effort to prosecute for marijuana possession in Canada.
This is way off-topic, but I want to dispel a misconception. Conan O'Brien once mentioned on his talk show that "Canada's parliament is considering legalizing marijuana..." This was so inaccurate as to be totally incorrect. In fact, at the time, there was a senate committee report that recommended that parliament consider decriminalizing marijuana.
So it wasn't parliament, by which one typically means the House of Commons (the elected lower house), it was the Senate (the unelected upper house). And it wasn't even the whole Senate, but just a committee. They weren't "considering," it was just a report that made a recommendation. And nobody was talking of legalization, just decriminalization, the difference being that it's still not legal, but you just wouldn't get thrown in jail, nor will you get a criminal record for possession - just a fine, rather like a traffic violation.
Some time later, a decriminalization bill was proposed in the House of Commons, but I believe it was dropped when the election was called about a month ago, so there has been no movement by the government in terms of actual legislation. So marijuana possession is, officially, still quite illegal here.
But we actually have the funny single-platform Marijuana Party fighting for legalization here in Canada, so who knows... Maybe someday it will be legal.
But I'm not convinced that most applications would benefit from 3d user interfaces.
I suspect it would be more a case of wholly new kinds of applications being developed thanks to the new capabilities of the interface. Can't think of any really good examples, though, I admit.
In fact I'm not convinced that most applications that use them benefit at all from shaped windows. And I'm afraid of the horrible possibilities of 3d skinnable applications.
Yeah, I agree. In fact, this thought tugged at my subconscious as I wrote my original post, but I pushed it roughly out of my way, lest I weaken my argument.:-)
I almost joined the ranks of people criticizing this project as a waste of time. Putting 2-D windows into a 3-D environment doesn't give you any advantages, especially if you just project it back onto a 2-D viewing screen.
But let's have some imagination. The idea is obviously to eventually make this environment immersive. This would allow you to place windows all around yourself. And instead of separate virtual (2-D) desktops, you would have separate virtual "rooms." Our current input device (mouse) is also 2-D, and we would need to move to something more practical in a 3-D environment.
Of course, it goes further. Windows are currently 2-D because the viewing screen is 2-D. If you have a 3-D viewing system, then your windows can be 3-D, too. Applications don't have to fit into rectangles; they could be cones, spheres, or dodecahedrons. They could even be irregularly shaped and have qualities like malleability and ductability.
Also, our widget sets are limited by the fact they're displayed on 2-D screens now. What kind of control widgets could we create when things can be moved in three dimensions? It opens up lots of possibilities.
It's just unfortunate that the screenshots they are showing don't actually take advantage of the fact that there are three dimensions. But this is only because application writers haven't caught up to the new "windowing system." It's not because the idea doesn't have merit.
...whats really needed is for more of the other crew members to adopt completely bemused expessions and ask "What the Fuck are you babbling about????"
Yeah, I'd pay to see that.
Something else I'd have paid to see in TNG would have been an exchange like this:
Data (staring at the phenomenon-of-the-week): It's like nothing I've ever seen before, sir.
Picard (incredulously): Oh, come on, Data. You can't be serious. You're on the flagship of the Federation of Planets, exploring new worlds and new civilizations. You have access to the Enterprise main computer, which contains the collective knowledge of hundreds of member planets; you've probably viewed the whole bloody thing twice through, and you probably remember it all photographically, too. And you're telling me that in everything you've seen and read and heard, there's nothing like what you're seeing here? Nothing?? Really, Data. It must be at least a TINY bit like SOMETHING you've seen before!
I suspect there's a lot more to it than that. Artists know that people are not perfectly symmetrical, and there's no reason why digital artists wouldn't already be making their characters intentionally asymmetrical.
Perhaps the ultimate solution would be to encrypt data as it is entered, before it is saved into RAM, and arrange for programs that use it to decrypt it first.
Huh? Does this make any sense to anybody? After all, once you've decrypted the text, you probably have it in RAM anyways, so you still have to deal with it in the same way.
You do know that in Mozilla (as with Mozilla Firefox) you can just middle click anywhere on the current page and the browser will go to what's in the clipboard
Unless the current page is a form, and you middle-click into an entry field or a text widget. In that case, of course, it pastes the text into the form. This has caused moments of confusion for me occasionally.
But yeah, this is a feature I really miss in Windows.
(or search Google with "I'm feeling lucky" if it's not a URL). Simplicity:)
I'm not sure, but I think this depends on your default search engine setting under "Navigator -> Internet Search" in your preferences.
I think you're missing his point. Microsoft, for example, doesn't require that each and every programmer certify that they haven't illegally copied anything every time they want to check something in.
You're right. In that sense, I don't think anybody else does this... Both open-source and proprietary projects. I was thinking of legal obligations.
However, in a proprietary project, you're presumably working for a company, and they are paying you to write code for them. If you steal code, the company has a great deal of leverage because they can fire you.
How often this has actually occurred is a different question, I admit.
In an open source project, there is no such agreement. Potentially, there is no relationship at all between the submitter and the submittee... This exposes the submittee to potential abuse.
The way I see it, Linus is establishing such a relationship. This makes the situation closer to the proprietary arrangement. IMHO.
"...Linux kernel contributors will have to certify the origins of their code before it can become part of the kernel."
Why? [...] Proprietary projects dont have to do this right?
Are you kidding me? Of course they have to. What matters is the license of the original code, not the project it's being copied into. If the license of the original code allows it, it's fine. If not, then you can't copy it, whether you're working on an open source project or not.
But open source projects always have the code available for the world to check over.
That's just it. It's obviously trivial to discover code theft in an open source project. The laundry is hung outside for all to see, so to speak. But just because you can hang your laundry in the basement, doesn't mean you don't need to wash your clothes.
Slashdot Mirror
the fact is, some of the phishing emails look really good.
And sometimes, it doesn't even have to look perfect to fool even experienced people. I like to think of myself as experienced, but I was taken in once. As I recall, I was saved by the fact that the provided link didn't work on Linux with whatever browser I was using at the time (probably Mozilla).
The scam used E-mail virus propagation methods so it came from a friend of mine, and it said something like "that was a great party; could you print out these pictures for me?" and had an apparent link to a Yahoo web site.
Thing is, I'd recently been at a party with this very friend, she had in fact taken pictures, she had a Yahoo account, and I had printed pictures for her before. Other than the fact that the link didn't work for me, the phisher was a freakin' lucky bastard!
Actually, I'm not sure if my example was a phishing scam per se, because I didn't follow up after I ran into the broken link. Then I looked closely at the URL and realized it was a scam. But it illustrates that all it takes is a few lucky breaks like this one, and a phishing scam can easily pay big time. And it can work on an educated public.
As good as my ergonomic mouse/keyboard combo is, less body movement is still a better replacement.
Just because you're moving less doesn't mean you'll be under less strain. It's the naturalness of the movement (however big or small) that's important.
Now, like any good Slashdottie, I haven't read the f...ing article, but if this "nouse" requires you to hold your head perfectly still, I can guarantee you that your neck muscles will be weeping by the end of the day.
If we're going to get pedantic, then it should be "GNU/SunOS," not "Solaris." To put it into Linux terms, Solaris is the distribution that's built on the SunOS kernel, just as Mandrake (for instance) is a distro that's built on the Linux kernel.
A while ago, I wrote a quiet little rant about how I broke up with Star Trek.
I think a hiatus would be a very good thing. It just might make my heart grow fonder. But I'm not holding my breath.
Pfbfbbbpfpffpbfbfppffpfpfbbffbfbfff... splat.
Firstly, I'm on your side with regards to nuclear power - In my opinion, the horror scenarios spouted by fearmongers, while not impossible, are unlikely, and are far less damaging than the real, 100% probability of horror we inflict on the earth with other forms of energy generation such as coal - I think it's probably worth the risk. So much anti-nuclear rhetoric is nothing less than FUD. We on Slashdot should be familiar with that.
The worst nuclear disaster in history, Cherynobl, killed a total of 3,000 people. [...] Coal mining on the other hand kills around 30,000 people every year in mining accidents alone.
On the other hand, these numbers are really quite disingenuous... apples and oranges. After all, uranium has to be mined, too. I don't think it's constructive to put it in such inflammatory terms as human lives. I'd prefer to talk about dollar cost, value for money, environmental impact and risk. Not that I have such numbers... I'm not an expert.
On the subject of catastrophic failures such as Chernobyl, I understand that AECL's Candu reactors (which is what China is looking at, I believe) are designed in a fashion that it is virtually impossible for that kind of meltdown to occur. I don't know the details... something about how the control rods are engaged in the reactor, I think.
As for the nuclear waste generated aftewards there are a number of clever idea's about how to deal with it including one which disposes of it in the giant fusion reaction that is our Sun.
I suspect the cost of such a disposal scheme would make it an absurd option.
Even if we have to sequester all our waste until we figure out how to dispose of it safely (or reuse it in some other fashion - more likely, IMHO), I would still prefer that to dumping our pollution openly into the air.
On a related, but more ominous note, I've heard that waste from Candu reactors are excellent weapons-grade fissile material...
"the first game to move beyond being 'user friendly'"... "It's actually 'user insulting' and because it lies to you as well it's also 'user mendacious,'" he said.
Best. Software project. Ever.
What I would have given to work on such a program. I bet they had programmers offering to work for free. Heck, I would have paid them...
"Please, just one printf, one insult, that's all I ask!"
Sawyer predicts global hegemony under ruthless Canadian authority.
That's right! And here in Canada, "ruthless" means we won't even say "please!"
Many fluently multilingual people will tell you that they are a slightly different person when they speak a different language.
I'm fluent in English and Japanese, and I can attest to this. In fact, there have been occasions when I was out of touch from Japanese speakers for a long time, and I began to miss my "Japanese self" because it hadn't had a chance to surface for so long.
Why does windows give regular Joes root access by default.
This is a legacy problem. Most older software installations (and I don't mean ancient, I mean just a couple of years old) have no idea of administrator access. Newer XP-compatible software is starting to address this problem.
I've experienced this, because when I first got my XP box, I discovered the different privilege levels and thought, "Cool! Microsoft has done something right." And then I wondered exactly what you wondered, which was why they give all users administrator access by default. But I went ahead and set up two accounts for myself, one with root access and one without, and I was off and running with my new machine.
I very quickly realized the answer to the question. You see, legacy programs assume that any user can modify any file in the system folders, like C:\Program Files. This, of course, is untrue if you installed the program as root. You will not believe the hoops I had to jump through to get older software to work. I needed to figure out which files were used by the application and individually open up permissions on them by using "CACLS" (Change Access Control Lists, a command that's not documented in XP Home) at the command prompt.
Of course, there were other options I could have followed: just install the program as myself instead of root - but this has the drawback that if I ever made other user-level accounts, they wouldn't be able to use that program; or I could have just given full access to all files and directories for the entire application - but this defeats the purpose of installing as root in the first place. And I was just being pig-headed about keeping a separate root account and user account. Personally, I feel it was worth the effort. But Joe user wouldn't have had the aptitude to even make the effort.
The other option for Microsoft was to immediately obsolete all legacy software and force everyone to upgrade to XP-compatible applications - but this would not have been palatable at all to the consumer public. They would not have been able to sell XP if they'd done that.
Like I said, newer programs expect you to use an administrator account to install programs, and a user account to do your daily work. If you try to install an XP application as an unprivileged user, it will bring up a dialog that lets you temporarily log in as an administrator just to perform the installation. It's actually very nice.
I'm expecting that when enough time has passed and enough applications have made this switch, Microsoft will do all the user education that will be required (and a LOT of education will be required), and switch the default such that user accounts don't have administrator access any more. I don't work at Microsoft, but I'd be willing to bet that this is their plan.
The computer worm he created continues to spread despite the fact that their creator has been taken out of the equation.
How on earth must one believe that a worm works (or think that one's readers believe that a worm works) in order for them make such a statement?
I'm reminded of a great quote by Charles Babbage. Babbage was asked (by a member of parliament... of course) whether his analytical engine will, in spite of being given erroneous input, nevertheless arrive at the desired answer. Babbage's response?
"I cannot rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that would provoke such a question."
Japan is so funny. Anthropomorphic cars.
You know, the limited communicative abilities of our cars is something that struck me when I visited my ancestral Japan. I witnessed my aunt, while driving, bowing to another driver - or trying to. I'm not sure if the other driver could actually see her very well. Bowing, of course, is ubiquitous in Asia, but there's no easy way to express that in a car. A horn obviously doesn't cut it.
I think adding more expressive communication to automobiles is a fantastic idea, although I don't know if glaring angrily and crying would be very constructive or useful...
So often, you would hear a beep, and you'd have no idea what it was supposed to mean. It's almost appalling, really.
What I would do is install two or three horns with different pitches (maybe just two to keep things simple) so that your honks can have intonation. You could honk expressively, like "!!", "???", or "....."
re: automoticons
Didn't the Autobots beat them up?
Nah, you're thinking of the Deceptibots.
No. Life did or did not exist on Mars, but either way, its chances are over.
Well, statistics is all about reasoning with insufficient data. Given that we don't know whether life existed on Mars or not, I think we definitely can try and figure out the odds for and against.
There's no reason why you can't calculate the odds that you could have picked last year's winning lottery numbers. It really doesn't matter that it all happened in the past. You just calculate the odds based on what knowledge you had at the time. In the case of lottery numbers, this is, presumably, no prior knowledge at all.
In the case of life on Mars, the difficulty, of course, is establishing what conditions would necessary for life to have existed, and how likely it is that those conditions existed on Mars.
But given what we know about life, I think it's perfectly reasonable to say that the likely existence of liquid water increases the likelihood that life once existed there.
There is a lot of emotion and a lot of psychology in the market and I think we are starting to see some of that again. We are encouraged that the market is growing warmer, but it is not time to throw caution to the wind.
Oh, that's good to hear. I just need my advisor to tell me when it is time to throw caution to the wind.
Wheeeee!!
not to mention bud is basically legal there!
If by "basically legal" you mean "in practice," then you're basically right. The police tend not to make much effort to prosecute for marijuana possession in Canada.
This is way off-topic, but I want to dispel a misconception. Conan O'Brien once mentioned on his talk show that "Canada's parliament is considering legalizing marijuana..." This was so inaccurate as to be totally incorrect. In fact, at the time, there was a senate committee report that recommended that parliament consider decriminalizing marijuana.
So it wasn't parliament, by which one typically means the House of Commons (the elected lower house), it was the Senate (the unelected upper house). And it wasn't even the whole Senate, but just a committee. They weren't "considering," it was just a report that made a recommendation. And nobody was talking of legalization, just decriminalization, the difference being that it's still not legal, but you just wouldn't get thrown in jail, nor will you get a criminal record for possession - just a fine, rather like a traffic violation.
Some time later, a decriminalization bill was proposed in the House of Commons, but I believe it was dropped when the election was called about a month ago, so there has been no movement by the government in terms of actual legislation. So marijuana possession is, officially, still quite illegal here.
But we actually have the funny single-platform Marijuana Party fighting for legalization here in Canada, so who knows... Maybe someday it will be legal.
But I'm not convinced that most applications would benefit from 3d user interfaces.
I suspect it would be more a case of wholly new kinds of applications being developed thanks to the new capabilities of the interface. Can't think of any really good examples, though, I admit.
In fact I'm not convinced that most applications that use them benefit at all from shaped windows. And I'm afraid of the horrible possibilities of 3d skinnable applications.
Yeah, I agree. In fact, this thought tugged at my subconscious as I wrote my original post, but I pushed it roughly out of my way, lest I weaken my argument. :-)
I almost joined the ranks of people criticizing this project as a waste of time. Putting 2-D windows into a 3-D environment doesn't give you any advantages, especially if you just project it back onto a 2-D viewing screen.
But let's have some imagination. The idea is obviously to eventually make this environment immersive. This would allow you to place windows all around yourself. And instead of separate virtual (2-D) desktops, you would have separate virtual "rooms." Our current input device (mouse) is also 2-D, and we would need to move to something more practical in a 3-D environment.
Of course, it goes further. Windows are currently 2-D because the viewing screen is 2-D. If you have a 3-D viewing system, then your windows can be 3-D, too. Applications don't have to fit into rectangles; they could be cones, spheres, or dodecahedrons. They could even be irregularly shaped and have qualities like malleability and ductability.
Also, our widget sets are limited by the fact they're displayed on 2-D screens now. What kind of control widgets could we create when things can be moved in three dimensions? It opens up lots of possibilities.
It's just unfortunate that the screenshots they are showing don't actually take advantage of the fact that there are three dimensions. But this is only because application writers haven't caught up to the new "windowing system." It's not because the idea doesn't have merit.
Yeah, I'd pay to see that.
Something else I'd have paid to see in TNG would have been an exchange like this:
Data (staring at the phenomenon-of-the-week): It's like nothing I've ever seen before, sir.
Picard (incredulously): Oh, come on, Data. You can't be serious. You're on the flagship of the Federation of Planets, exploring new worlds and new civilizations. You have access to the Enterprise main computer, which contains the collective knowledge of hundreds of member planets; you've probably viewed the whole bloody thing twice through, and you probably remember it all photographically, too. And you're telling me that in everything you've seen and read and heard, there's nothing like what you're seeing here? Nothing?? Really, Data. It must be at least a TINY bit like SOMETHING you've seen before!
Real humans don't have such perfect symetry.
I suspect there's a lot more to it than that. Artists know that people are not perfectly symmetrical, and there's no reason why digital artists wouldn't already be making their characters intentionally asymmetrical.
From the article:
Perhaps the ultimate solution would be to encrypt data as it is entered, before it is saved into RAM, and arrange for programs that use it to decrypt it first.
Huh? Does this make any sense to anybody? After all, once you've decrypted the text, you probably have it in RAM anyways, so you still have to deal with it in the same way.
You do know that in Mozilla (as with Mozilla Firefox) you can just middle click anywhere on the current page and the browser will go to what's in the clipboard
Unless the current page is a form, and you middle-click into an entry field or a text widget. In that case, of course, it pastes the text into the form. This has caused moments of confusion for me occasionally.
But yeah, this is a feature I really miss in Windows.
(or search Google with "I'm feeling lucky" if it's not a URL). Simplicity :)
I'm not sure, but I think this depends on your default search engine setting under "Navigator -> Internet Search" in your preferences.
To avoid horrible confusion perhaps we should call him GNU/RMS.
(Score:15, Freakin Hilarious)
I think you're missing his point. Microsoft, for example, doesn't require that each and every programmer certify that they haven't illegally copied anything every time they want to check something in.
You're right. In that sense, I don't think anybody else does this... Both open-source and proprietary projects. I was thinking of legal obligations.
However, in a proprietary project, you're presumably working for a company, and they are paying you to write code for them. If you steal code, the company has a great deal of leverage because they can fire you.
How often this has actually occurred is a different question, I admit.
In an open source project, there is no such agreement. Potentially, there is no relationship at all between the submitter and the submittee... This exposes the submittee to potential abuse.
The way I see it, Linus is establishing such a relationship. This makes the situation closer to the proprietary arrangement. IMHO.
"...Linux kernel contributors will have to certify the origins of their code before it can become part of the kernel."
Why? [...] Proprietary projects dont have to do this right?
Are you kidding me? Of course they have to. What matters is the license of the original code, not the project it's being copied into. If the license of the original code allows it, it's fine. If not, then you can't copy it, whether you're working on an open source project or not.
But open source projects always have the code available for the world to check over.
That's just it. It's obviously trivial to discover code theft in an open source project. The laundry is hung outside for all to see, so to speak. But just because you can hang your laundry in the basement, doesn't mean you don't need to wash your clothes.