This is a pretty insightful comment for a peripheral reason: speed limits ("speeding") have nothing to do with a driver's ability to safely control a vehicle any more.
It is not the Chinese government's atheism that leads them to do horrible things. Most ardent atheists do not agree with the suppression of religious ideas by force.
Does anyone ever need to resolve units of temperature less than one degree celsius? "Oop, it's 43C outside, so much hotter than yesterday when it was 42.5C, time to stay inside!"*
I suppose the only reason you'd care is with fevers, where 1C is a little too coarse.
*Yes, I understand how hot this is. It's going to be that hot here in a month or so.
Write a version of Perl that handles units and I will. Until then, I'll just remember that all the lengths are in femtometers and the masses in MeV/c^2 and not put them in my data files, mmkay?
And despite their efforts it's still cheaper for Toyota to build a car in Japan, put it on a boat, ship it over here, pay tax on it, and then sell it to me than for Ford to make one and sell it to me.
(The car I bought a few years ago had a "100% Made in Japan" sticker on the window. I couldn't care either way as long as it runs well, but it's surprising.)
I'm an American (scientist), and I have trouble with the goddamn Imperial units in American cookbooks. No, I don't know how many ounces are in a pint off the top of my head, or how many tablespoons are in a cup.
Physical access is root access only if you are allowed enough time and tools. Sony made the PS3 pretty hard to root without the right key; why can't smartphones be 1% as hardened?
If the IT department is competent, sure -- then they can work with this fellow to get the job he needs done done. This is like my current university -- the physics department has a (wonderfully competent) IT guy, and he insists on having root (and nobody else having root) on all of the boxes connected to the building network. But he's competent and responsive, and nobody minds not having root because we can count on Mike to fix whatever we need fixed, and help us do whatever we need done.
But sometimes the IT departments are either overly bureaucratic or just plain incompetent, and the only way to get anything done is to subvert the way they want things done and do them yourself. I did my undergrad at a miserable place where the computers were so locked down (and so badly locked down) that the WinNT systems somehow didn't even have write access to their own paging files (I dunno how the hell you do that, but they did), so they'd just die as soon as physical RAM was exhausted (back when machines had 96MB).
At one point we came in to take an exam, and several of the computers we needed were locked down by the IT guys with a BIOS password. One of the students said "I can fix this, do you want me to?" to the professor; after getting permission he popped the case open, took out the motherboard battery, and booted the machine.
These guys also had public Win 98 machines on the same (unswitched) network segment as their central registration clerks, who logged into a server across campus using telnet (not ssh). Someone with a packet sniffer could grab that password in a few minutes and have complete access to student grades, financial information, etc.
If you're dealing with an IT department like this, sometimes the only option is to do it yourself.
The poster is a fucking doctor. If he wants to do something intentionally malicious there is far, far more room for malice in his medicine than in his system administration. If you don't trust this guy to not fuck you up then you should fire him, not restrict what sorts of bits he can send down the wire.
It's a fucking document. It's a series of bits which are converted into pixel values and shown on a screen, not code.
If you get your computer compromised by a document, then the only person who's fault it is is the one who wrote the document decoder (and/or the idiot who decided that documents should include embedded code, which is ridiculous).
You have your computer configured right now to accept documents that you're not expecting -- jpegs, all over the web. But you do this all the time, because you know that the folks who wrote your browser managed to not fuck up a jpeg decoder -- no matter what's in that file, the worst it can make you do is get in trouble with your boss.
Likewise, you feel, or you should feel, perfectly safe running vim on anything that comes your way, since going "vim virus.txt" is not going to do bad things to you, no matter what's in there -- because the people who wrote vim are not morons.
The same ought to be true for other document formats. Perhaps I am an old fuddy-duddy, but there is absolutely no reason that any responsible document format needs to contain executable code -- and if any document decoder mistakes data for code (via a buffer overrun or similar), then their ass is the one to blame.
OT: That inscription is CREEPY, if you know all the symbolism behind it.
All the other cathedrals are expressions of some sort of artistry, or aspiration to heaven, or whatever.
St. Peter's is this imposing thing that says I am the Pope; I am the most powerful man on Earth; do as I say or suffer the consequences. And then there's that inscription -- "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church", said by Jesus, for those who don't know the Latin -- inscribed above the canopy where only the Pope can say Mass, as if to say "I am Peter's descendant as Pope, and Peter is Jesus' successor, so to slight me is to slight Jesus, so do what I say!"
Slashdot Mirror
This is a pretty insightful comment for a peripheral reason: speed limits ("speeding") have nothing to do with a driver's ability to safely control a vehicle any more.
It is not the Chinese government's atheism that leads them to do horrible things. Most ardent atheists do not agree with the suppression of religious ideas by force.
Ugh, Fortran. :P
If they were educated they wouldn't be police.
All of this is founded on the fallacy that people driving more slowly is a legitimate public policy objective.
It's not, and shouldn't be considered as one.
That's also how shenanigans work -- they're not stopped until they are discovered.
Wow, are people really that picky?
My air conditioning has three settings: "off", "low", and "high", which correspond roughly to "winter", "spring", and "summer".
Is "klick" actually used much in common parlance?
Does anyone ever need to resolve units of temperature less than one degree celsius? "Oop, it's 43C outside, so much hotter than yesterday when it was 42.5C, time to stay inside!"*
I suppose the only reason you'd care is with fevers, where 1C is a little too coarse.
*Yes, I understand how hot this is. It's going to be that hot here in a month or so.
Write a version of Perl that handles units and I will. Until then, I'll just remember that all the lengths are in femtometers and the masses in MeV/c^2 and not put them in my data files, mmkay?
And despite their efforts it's still cheaper for Toyota to build a car in Japan, put it on a boat, ship it over here, pay tax on it, and then sell it to me than for Ford to make one and sell it to me.
(The car I bought a few years ago had a "100% Made in Japan" sticker on the window. I couldn't care either way as long as it runs well, but it's surprising.)
The BBC often gives the weight of fat people in stones and pounds, I've noticed.
Are all your rocks the same size over there in the Isles?
I'm an American (scientist), and I have trouble with the goddamn Imperial units in American cookbooks. No, I don't know how many ounces are in a pint off the top of my head, or how many tablespoons are in a cup.
Ah, thanks. I knew it was 50 because all of the checkpoints I'm familiar with (in southern Arizona) are within 50 miles of Mexico.
And that's absurd. I bet that covers the homes of 90% of citizens.
Physical access is root access only if you are allowed enough time and tools. Sony made the PS3 pretty hard to root without the right key; why can't smartphones be 1% as hardened?
This is why Apple blows goats. There are other phones that don't have a gatekeeper for apps, no?
It turns out that simply being within 50 miles of the US-Mexico border (where lots of people live) is "probable cause" (which is bullshit).
Any smartphone that you have root on offers full encryption by default.
Sadly you don't get root on most of them.
This.
It's not good enough to just have the evidence be ruled inadmissible. The cop ought to be fired (or worse) and compensation paid to the victim.
If the IT department is competent, sure -- then they can work with this fellow to get the job he needs done done. This is like my current university -- the physics department has a (wonderfully competent) IT guy, and he insists on having root (and nobody else having root) on all of the boxes connected to the building network. But he's competent and responsive, and nobody minds not having root because we can count on Mike to fix whatever we need fixed, and help us do whatever we need done.
But sometimes the IT departments are either overly bureaucratic or just plain incompetent, and the only way to get anything done is to subvert the way they want things done and do them yourself. I did my undergrad at a miserable place where the computers were so locked down (and so badly locked down) that the WinNT systems somehow didn't even have write access to their own paging files (I dunno how the hell you do that, but they did), so they'd just die as soon as physical RAM was exhausted (back when machines had 96MB).
At one point we came in to take an exam, and several of the computers we needed were locked down by the IT guys with a BIOS password. One of the students said "I can fix this, do you want me to?" to the professor; after getting permission he popped the case open, took out the motherboard battery, and booted the machine.
These guys also had public Win 98 machines on the same (unswitched) network segment as their central registration clerks, who logged into a server across campus using telnet (not ssh). Someone with a packet sniffer could grab that password in a few minutes and have complete access to student grades, financial information, etc.
If you're dealing with an IT department like this, sometimes the only option is to do it yourself.
The poster is a fucking doctor. If he wants to do something intentionally malicious there is far, far more room for malice in his medicine than in his system administration. If you don't trust this guy to not fuck you up then you should fire him, not restrict what sorts of bits he can send down the wire.
Smells astroturfy, because you're making sure to call it "Google Chrome" every time instead of just "Chrome" like a normal slashdotter would.
Unsophisticated people use hundred-megabyte software packages to prepare documents.
Sophisticated people use vim and latex.
Why should I?
It's a fucking document. It's a series of bits which are converted into pixel values and shown on a screen, not code.
If you get your computer compromised by a document, then the only person who's fault it is is the one who wrote the document decoder (and/or the idiot who decided that documents should include embedded code, which is ridiculous).
You have your computer configured right now to accept documents that you're not expecting -- jpegs, all over the web. But you do this all the time, because you know that the folks who wrote your browser managed to not fuck up a jpeg decoder -- no matter what's in that file, the worst it can make you do is get in trouble with your boss.
Likewise, you feel, or you should feel, perfectly safe running vim on anything that comes your way, since going "vim virus.txt" is not going to do bad things to you, no matter what's in there -- because the people who wrote vim are not morons.
The same ought to be true for other document formats. Perhaps I am an old fuddy-duddy, but there is absolutely no reason that any responsible document format needs to contain executable code -- and if any document decoder mistakes data for code (via a buffer overrun or similar), then their ass is the one to blame.
OT: That inscription is CREEPY, if you know all the symbolism behind it.
All the other cathedrals are expressions of some sort of artistry, or aspiration to heaven, or whatever.
St. Peter's is this imposing thing that says I am the Pope; I am the most powerful man on Earth; do as I say or suffer the consequences. And then there's that inscription -- "You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church", said by Jesus, for those who don't know the Latin -- inscribed above the canopy where only the Pope can say Mass, as if to say "I am Peter's descendant as Pope, and Peter is Jesus' successor, so to slight me is to slight Jesus, so do what I say!"