I'm normally the first guy to say, "oh leave people be", but this kind of thing is one where I think I'd be happier with a person having to have some kind of minor license to buy one... if only to just create some token hurdle to ownership.
These are every bit as dangerous to people's vision as a gun, and they're just as likely to cause serious damage in the wrong hands.
I would say that hand-held portable lasers that integrate a power supply and are stronger than 40mW should be classified as firearms.
And integrated lasers greater than 40mW that are not part of a 'closed' tamper-resistant system (such as a CD-ROM drive), should be classified as industrial equipment, and require a permit to own or operate, requiring mandatory training and safety standards.
Yes, that includes certain powerful lasers used in fiber optic cable applications such as CWDM / long-haul fiber runs, and fiber amplifiers, and potentially yes -- it does mean that everyone who steps in an area in a corporate datacenter where such fiber cables/transceivers are present might be required to have taken a 8 hour training program on the subject of lasers, laser safety, their employer's applications of laser technology, and passed a state-administered test.
As a prospective vendor of Google, I would like to dictate my terms for delivery of the product.
Namely (1) my private information is not part of the deal, Google's not to be allowed to sell or redistribute that further without my permission, and
(2) I demand to be fairly compensated in the form of payment in cash from Google to provide the
product of eyes to view customers' AdWords ad.
The Constitution was always intended to be, and IS, a living changing document. That's why it can be amended!
No.. the constitution is not a living, changing document.
Yes, it can be amended when that is the will of the people expressed by a 3/4 majority of the states.
It is exceedingly rare for that to happen, and has happened on less than 20 occurences in the past 220 years.
so let's make sure the people at risk have a chance to look through the cables, see if they're mentioned, and take appropriate self-defensive measures, since we don't have the resources to approach them all privately."
I would say it's nonsense to suggest Wikileaks did not have sufficient resources to approach the intelligence agencies privately.
The governments have plenty of resources to approach those effected privately, and, it's a smarter strategy than simultaneously revealing all the information to both potential good guys and bad guys....
Given that the standard procedure for getting a certificate for the domain issued (at least for GoDaddy, I assume others as well) is to ask the technical contact for the domain itself for authorization to grant the certificate I don't think a change to procedure is necessary.
You missed the point... that's a standard procedure for Some CAs
However, the results in actual reality are less consistent than that.
Therefore I'm saying an additional authority should ask, as an additional check against the CAs.
If the right person at GoDaddy feels like ignoring the verification requirement for a customer due to "special circumstances", and just issuing the cert -- that can happen, without performing the standard validation.
I'm saying what you refer to as standard validation should be mandatory as an additional validation (even if the CA does the exact same validation already).
Some CAs will issue a certificate if simply shown a driver's license photo copy or some papers that look legitimate at a glance, without any domain validation.
Some CAs will ignore their own policies.
A way you can force them to behave is to require a counter-signature by a Super-CA for every CA issued certificate.
Normal CAs should be precluded from being associated with a Super-CA in any way.
and Super CAs should be limited in number; a good set would probably be the major browser makers themselves --
being a Super CA for every certificate that their respective browser will recognize as valid.
That adds insult to injury there... either (A) their security/review practices aren't up to snuff, and they didn't ever detect they'd issued a compromised cert. OR (B) they knew about a problem and hid it for PR or other reasons.
I suppose browser policy guidelines possibly need to be revised to require that CAs perform additional certificate issuance monitoring,
requiring a third party to 'sign off' on any issuance before any certificate can finally be issued..
For example: I would like to see every CA required to submit to a Super-CA 3 details for every certificate:
(a) Certificate common name
(b) Requestor's real name
(c) Requestor's e-mail address
And await approval from the Super-CA for final issuance.
And by that, I mean, for example, the CA would submit the request,
and the Super-CA would check if _any_ certificate is already issued by any CA for
the common name or any subdomain of the common name, IF a cert was already issued,
the Super-CA contacts the domain owner before approving a CA's proposed certification.
The Californians provide a document specifying their chosen Chicago Public School System,
which is digested by THE POWERS THAT BE to decide if the Californian is trusted to introduce
UAs (Utah and Alaskans) to servers and vice versa (partially based on their record of providing
the proper tip amounts to their servers).
The problem is, this particular Californian has taken to introducing fake servers to the UAs (Utahns and Alaskans).
Any CA that can't implement sufficient controls to prevent such shenanigans, should not be a CA in the first place.
Needless to say i've changed my browser and OS settings to distrust the CA.
I expect a serious explanation shortly, and short of some unusually extreme extenuating circumstances,
I think all browser vendors and OS vendors should evict the CA immediately, to make an example of them.
I am curious though.... did the CA fail to implement its CA CPSs, or did its Certification practice statement actually have a hole
where such a thing could happen?
Beach houses *did* get washed away; if people had stayed in them, the would have died. Tunnels in New York were flooded; if people had been in them, they would have died.
That's why during any tropical storm/above or other extreme weather, you (1) close the tunnels, (2) issue mandatory evacuation of beach properties/areas at risk of storm surge, and (3) patrol the area subject to mandatory evacuation, once the period allowed for evacuations has elapsed; roads/streets/etc will be closed in areas to be effected by high winds or water, and noone is allowed in until the storm has cleared and road infrastructure damage has been assessed/dealt with.
Those actions are fine... it is the media sensationalism that is objectionable.
Had people been on trains, they might still be there as much of that is still shut down.
Wait... a near Cat1 Hurricane event approaching/occuring, and someone would think about travelling on a train, rather than being hunkered down in a suitable shelter to ride out the storm?
Travelling during an ordinary thunderstorm is OK.
If a person is foolish enough to attempt travel in the middle of an extreme severe weather event that they have advance warning of, then they kind of deserve that in a way.
Certainly trains should not be operating during such conditions, whether an evacuation has to be ordered for the area or not.
It was a nasty severe weather event, but it wasn't a hurricane.
The point is it was orders of magnitude less significant a storm than the media had suggested.
If it wasn't even a hurricane and still resulted in billions of dollars in damage... imagine what
the damage would be if it had actually reached NYC as a full blown Cat1, Cat2, or Cat3 hurricane?
but perhaps they are weird because they are vegans!
Are you sure the microbes weren't controlling their mind and causing them to be and become vegans?
Which came first... the veganism or the bacteria that likes their host to be vegan?
Re:Mandriva isn't trusted by the community
on
Mandriva 2011 Out
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· Score: 2
RHEL and CentOS have so utterly out-of-date packages that many pieces of recent software can't even be compiled without updating the kernel or glibc.
What do you mean "out-of-date" packages?
They include versions of glibc and kernel that are not the latest major release, but they are not stale or out of date either.
These distributions are stable because they maintain binary compatibility within a major release, therefore updating them is safe; whereas on distros that are constantly making major glibc updates, updating those is unsafe, because major kernel and glibc updates break compatibility and often introduce bugs.
You might have some specialized software that won't work without manually compiling the software.
But I won't blame the Redhat team if some software developers are short sighted and only include support for
the latest bleeding edge glibc or kernel version that hasn't really even proven itself yet.
The distro for folks like you that want to live on the bleeding edge is called Fedora Linux.:)
These days there are plenty of Linux Distros that realize that if they can tell you what the dependencies are, then perhaps they should offer to download them for you.
And these days, Redhat is one of those distros.
yum is an integral part of the RPM package system on modern Redhat-based distros.
And in general... software publishers that provide proper support for the OS will either provide their own yum repository with their special dependencies, or depend only on software that can be installed from a standard yum repository (generally preferred).
Although on Fedora, indeed, you might occasionally run into RPM dependency upgrade hell, due to having inconsistent versions, if you install certain beta-quality packages.
On Rehat Enterprise Linux / CentOS installs, I never ran into dependency hell with Yum, except when something really odd I did caused it (e.g. when I installed a package from a 3rd party yum repository, force installed a package against warnings, then disabled that repository).
I recently checked out the Mandrivel Free edition. It works and all, but there's really nothing that sets it apart. It feels like another Kubuntu.
Or maybe... you should say 'Nothing really sets Kubuntu apart', it's just another Mandrivel ?
Mandrivel is certainly an earlier goer to that particular party; it's not as if Mandrivel was trying
to create a clone of Kubuntu, since, uh, they were there first....
Re:Mandriva isn't trusted by the community
on
Mandriva 2011 Out
·
· Score: 1
You had problems with Ubuntu... Debian...SuSE... did you ever try RHEL or CentOS ?
Either that or this is a marketing promotion, to go even further.
So they "removed" a free game from competitor coupon and included their own coupon
for a "game from us", for the dilligent customers who learned about this whole thing.
How is this not a marketing thing to benefit Gamestop at further expense to the competitor?
Why aren't we doing it? Because it's a lot more complicated than the author makes it out to be.
First of all... many people are not that bright, and the DST proposition doesn't work at all.. the workday is something like a de-facto standard.
If you don't change the clock, the complexity of people having to remember every day for 6 months, that they now need to get at work at a different time creates all sorts of chaos. It's a lot easier for _everyone_ to have to know to change their clocks, and the change to the start/end of their work day is IMPLIED by the time rather than decided by each individual company.
A decision to eliminate time zones and DST, is essentially a decision to eliminate changes of school work start/end times at various times of the year
(not that I am saying that I oppose the elimination of DST, on the contrary, DST is kind of silly IMO)
Time zones provide us with consistency, especially for travellers. Wherever you go you just change your clock,
and the timing of daily customs such as lunch or work will be at similar predictable times displayed on the clock.
The time change alone lets you know what times correspond to morning, afternoon, evening, and night.
Speaking of "afternoon"; the term becomes a little bit meaningless if time zones are eliminated.
I like your idea of a more permanent indication of the seal being removed, but GS/EB would probably just put a big sticker over it saying 'new game, really,
Dang.... well, you need something to attach the sticker to.
I'm thinking along the lines of a transparent clamshell, that when first open, some text appears all over it...
saying something like: "This package has been opened", "Used product", "Not to be sold",
etc
The coupon is not a necessary part of the game though. It's an extraneous addition. As I said, one would have a claim, but it's up to a jury/judge to decide if the coupon constitutes a substantial part of purchase interest.
Who gets to decide if the coupon is a "necessary" part of the game?
If I was on the fence, and the manufacturer including coupons was what tipped the scales to me buying a new copy of the game, I would call that fairly necessary.
I suppose based on this "not a necessary part" logic; a bookseller could sell you a "new" book and "cut out" the last page.... it's not a "necessary part" of the book,
just an extraneous addition; you can still read the book, you just don't get to read the epilogue, or maybe the ending, is all.
In this case it's even worse - don't they have to break the security seal to get the coupon? In the old days they could just re-shrink wrap it, these days most games come with a security seal as well.
What square needs to do is invent an outer package that cannot be resealed without obvious signs of tampering;
some kind of "permanently" welded clamshell that can be open only by cutting or tearing the plastic.
Maybe something that changes color once the seal is broken and the interior is exposed to air.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm normally the first guy to say, "oh leave people be", but this kind of thing is one where I think I'd be happier with a person having to have some kind of minor license to buy one... if only to just create some token hurdle to ownership.
These are every bit as dangerous to people's vision as a gun, and they're just as likely to cause serious damage in the wrong hands.
I would say that hand-held portable lasers that integrate a power supply and are stronger than 40mW should be classified as firearms.
And integrated lasers greater than 40mW that are not part of a 'closed' tamper-resistant system (such as a CD-ROM drive), should be classified as industrial equipment, and require a permit to own or operate, requiring mandatory training and safety standards.
Yes, that includes certain powerful lasers used in fiber optic cable applications such as CWDM / long-haul fiber runs, and fiber amplifiers, and potentially yes -- it does mean that everyone who steps in an area in a corporate datacenter where such fiber cables/transceivers are present might be required to have taken a 8 hour training program on the subject of lasers, laser safety, their employer's applications of laser technology, and passed a state-administered test.
As a prospective vendor of Google, I would like to dictate my terms for delivery of the product. Namely (1) my private information is not part of the deal, Google's not to be allowed to sell or redistribute that further without my permission, and (2) I demand to be fairly compensated in the form of payment in cash from Google to provide the product of eyes to view customers' AdWords ad.
The Constitution was always intended to be, and IS, a living changing document. That's why it can be amended!
No.. the constitution is not a living, changing document.
Yes, it can be amended when that is the will of the people expressed by a 3/4 majority of the states. It is exceedingly rare for that to happen, and has happened on less than 20 occurences in the past 220 years.
so let's make sure the people at risk have a chance to look through the cables, see if they're mentioned, and take appropriate self-defensive measures, since we don't have the resources to approach them all privately."
I would say it's nonsense to suggest Wikileaks did not have sufficient resources to approach the intelligence agencies privately. The governments have plenty of resources to approach those effected privately, and, it's a smarter strategy than simultaneously revealing all the information to both potential good guys and bad guys....
Given that the standard procedure for getting a certificate for the domain issued (at least for GoDaddy, I assume others as well) is to ask the technical contact for the domain itself for authorization to grant the certificate I don't think a change to procedure is necessary.
You missed the point... that's a standard procedure for Some CAs
However, the results in actual reality are less consistent than that. Therefore I'm saying an additional authority should ask, as an additional check against the CAs.
If the right person at GoDaddy feels like ignoring the verification requirement for a customer due to "special circumstances", and just issuing the cert -- that can happen, without performing the standard validation.
I'm saying what you refer to as standard validation should be mandatory as an additional validation (even if the CA does the exact same validation already).
Some CAs will issue a certificate if simply shown a driver's license photo copy or some papers that look legitimate at a glance, without any domain validation.
Some CAs will ignore their own policies.
A way you can force them to behave is to require a counter-signature by a Super-CA for every CA issued certificate.
Normal CAs should be precluded from being associated with a Super-CA in any way. and Super CAs should be limited in number; a good set would probably be the major browser makers themselves -- being a Super CA for every certificate that their respective browser will recognize as valid.
That adds insult to injury there... either (A) their security/review practices aren't up to snuff, and they didn't ever detect they'd issued a compromised cert. OR (B) they knew about a problem and hid it for PR or other reasons.
I suppose browser policy guidelines possibly need to be revised to require that CAs perform additional certificate issuance monitoring, requiring a third party to 'sign off' on any issuance before any certificate can finally be issued..
For example: I would like to see every CA required to submit to a Super-CA 3 details for every certificate:
(a) Certificate common name
(b) Requestor's real name
(c) Requestor's e-mail address
And await approval from the Super-CA for final issuance.
And by that, I mean, for example, the CA would submit the request, and the Super-CA would check if _any_ certificate is already issued by any CA for the common name or any subdomain of the common name, IF a cert was already issued, the Super-CA contacts the domain owner before approving a CA's proposed certification.
The Californians provide a document specifying their chosen Chicago Public School System, which is digested by THE POWERS THAT BE to decide if the Californian is trusted to introduce UAs (Utah and Alaskans) to servers and vice versa (partially based on their record of providing the proper tip amounts to their servers).
The problem is, this particular Californian has taken to introducing fake servers to the UAs (Utahns and Alaskans).
Any CA that can't implement sufficient controls to prevent such shenanigans, should not be a CA in the first place. Needless to say i've changed my browser and OS settings to distrust the CA. I expect a serious explanation shortly, and short of some unusually extreme extenuating circumstances, I think all browser vendors and OS vendors should evict the CA immediately, to make an example of them.
I am curious though.... did the CA fail to implement its CA CPSs, or did its Certification practice statement actually have a hole where such a thing could happen?
Beach houses *did* get washed away; if people had stayed in them, the would have died. Tunnels in New York were flooded; if people had been in them, they would have died.
That's why during any tropical storm/above or other extreme weather, you (1) close the tunnels, (2) issue mandatory evacuation of beach properties/areas at risk of storm surge, and (3) patrol the area subject to mandatory evacuation, once the period allowed for evacuations has elapsed; roads/streets/etc will be closed in areas to be effected by high winds or water, and noone is allowed in until the storm has cleared and road infrastructure damage has been assessed/dealt with.
Those actions are fine... it is the media sensationalism that is objectionable.
Had people been on trains, they might still be there as much of that is still shut down.
Wait... a near Cat1 Hurricane event approaching/occuring, and someone would think about travelling on a train, rather than being hunkered down in a suitable shelter to ride out the storm?
Travelling during an ordinary thunderstorm is OK. If a person is foolish enough to attempt travel in the middle of an extreme severe weather event that they have advance warning of, then they kind of deserve that in a way.
Certainly trains should not be operating during such conditions, whether an evacuation has to be ordered for the area or not.
It was a nasty severe weather event, but it wasn't a hurricane.
The point is it was orders of magnitude less significant a storm than the media had suggested. If it wasn't even a hurricane and still resulted in billions of dollars in damage... imagine what the damage would be if it had actually reached NYC as a full blown Cat1, Cat2, or Cat3 hurricane?
I started taking a probiotic supplement yesterday (that contains Lactobacillus), how long until I'm under control?
You already are... you were under their control right before you got the probiotic supplement (which they caused you to get and take) <EG>
See... while it's true bacteria at the console (gut) can effect mind control, there is a SSH equivalent as well (remote mind control)
but perhaps they are weird because they are vegans!
Are you sure the microbes weren't controlling their mind and causing them to be and become vegans?
Which came first... the veganism or the bacteria that likes their host to be vegan?
RHEL and CentOS have so utterly out-of-date packages that many pieces of recent software can't even be compiled without updating the kernel or glibc.
What do you mean "out-of-date" packages? They include versions of glibc and kernel that are not the latest major release, but they are not stale or out of date either.
These distributions are stable because they maintain binary compatibility within a major release, therefore updating them is safe; whereas on distros that are constantly making major glibc updates, updating those is unsafe, because major kernel and glibc updates break compatibility and often introduce bugs.
You might have some specialized software that won't work without manually compiling the software. But I won't blame the Redhat team if some software developers are short sighted and only include support for the latest bleeding edge glibc or kernel version that hasn't really even proven itself yet.
The distro for folks like you that want to live on the bleeding edge is called Fedora Linux. :)
These days there are plenty of Linux Distros that realize that if they can tell you what the dependencies are, then perhaps they should offer to download them for you.
And these days, Redhat is one of those distros. yum is an integral part of the RPM package system on modern Redhat-based distros.
And in general... software publishers that provide proper support for the OS will either provide their own yum repository with their special dependencies, or depend only on software that can be installed from a standard yum repository (generally preferred).
Although on Fedora, indeed, you might occasionally run into RPM dependency upgrade hell, due to having inconsistent versions, if you install certain beta-quality packages.
On Rehat Enterprise Linux / CentOS installs, I never ran into dependency hell with Yum, except when something really odd I did caused it (e.g. when I installed a package from a 3rd party yum repository, force installed a package against warnings, then disabled that repository).
I recently checked out the Mandrivel Free edition. It works and all, but there's really nothing that sets it apart. It feels like another Kubuntu.
Or maybe... you should say 'Nothing really sets Kubuntu apart', it's just another Mandrivel ?
Mandrivel is certainly an earlier goer to that particular party; it's not as if Mandrivel was trying to create a clone of Kubuntu, since, uh, they were there first....
You had problems with Ubuntu... Debian...SuSE... did you ever try RHEL or CentOS ?
I'm not sure they're using it as an argument to favor Mandriva over Ubuntu.... but it is true.
It boils down to "Use Mandriva because it's more mature".... well, in that respect, you could say "Use DOS 6.0 or Windows NT, because it's older"
Anyways... if an OS is more mature, and the newcomer doesn't offer a significant advantage, what is the reason to not use the older solution, again?
Especially when Ubuntu has done some, err.... unwanted things with their GUI :-/
What did Torvalds say about Gnome3 (the new solution) again? Something about it being an 'unholy mess', right?
Either that or this is a marketing promotion, to go even further. So they "removed" a free game from competitor coupon and included their own coupon for a "game from us", for the dilligent customers who learned about this whole thing.
How is this not a marketing thing to benefit Gamestop at further expense to the competitor?
Why aren't we doing it? Because it's a lot more complicated than the author makes it out to be.
First of all... many people are not that bright, and the DST proposition doesn't work at all.. the workday is something like a de-facto standard. If you don't change the clock, the complexity of people having to remember every day for 6 months, that they now need to get at work at a different time creates all sorts of chaos. It's a lot easier for _everyone_ to have to know to change their clocks, and the change to the start/end of their work day is IMPLIED by the time rather than decided by each individual company.
A decision to eliminate time zones and DST, is essentially a decision to eliminate changes of school work start/end times at various times of the year (not that I am saying that I oppose the elimination of DST, on the contrary, DST is kind of silly IMO)
Time zones provide us with consistency, especially for travellers. Wherever you go you just change your clock, and the timing of daily customs such as lunch or work will be at similar predictable times displayed on the clock. The time change alone lets you know what times correspond to morning, afternoon, evening, and night.
Speaking of "afternoon"; the term becomes a little bit meaningless if time zones are eliminated.
You know, when I first saw this headline, I misread and thought it said Apple CEO Declares a Tablets Bubble
And I was wondering... what the h**** ?
I would of more expected to see the Apple CEO making a big show to unveil the latest Pad to an audience of drooling Apple developers
A part of the product is retained (even if it's disposed of), rather than sold on.
If they remove the coupon and destroy the coupon, or return the coupon to the manufacturer, then by definition, they have not retained it.
Anyways, the coupon's a promotional gimmick of no commercial value, the sales tax due on it would be $0.
I like your idea of a more permanent indication of the seal being removed, but GS/EB would probably just put a big sticker over it saying 'new game, really,
Dang.... well, you need something to attach the sticker to.
I'm thinking along the lines of a transparent clamshell, that when first open, some text appears all over it... saying something like: "This package has been opened", "Used product", "Not to be sold", etc
The coupon is not a necessary part of the game though. It's an extraneous addition. As I said, one would have a claim, but it's up to a jury/judge to decide if the coupon constitutes a substantial part of purchase interest.
Who gets to decide if the coupon is a "necessary" part of the game? If I was on the fence, and the manufacturer including coupons was what tipped the scales to me buying a new copy of the game, I would call that fairly necessary.
I suppose based on this "not a necessary part" logic; a bookseller could sell you a "new" book and "cut out" the last page.... it's not a "necessary part" of the book, just an extraneous addition; you can still read the book, you just don't get to read the epilogue, or maybe the ending, is all.
In this case it's even worse - don't they have to break the security seal to get the coupon? In the old days they could just re-shrink wrap it, these days most games come with a security seal as well.
What square needs to do is invent an outer package that cannot be resealed without obvious signs of tampering; some kind of "permanently" welded clamshell that can be open only by cutting or tearing the plastic.
Maybe something that changes color once the seal is broken and the interior is exposed to air.