"There's no remedy for a U.S. citizen if his information is compromised." [California Sen. Joe Dunn, D-Garden Grove]
Nonsense. Plenty of countries have perfectly good laws on privacy -- especially, the privacy of medical records. This is just an attempt to score some points with outsorcing-scared electorate without upsetting the pro-business part of it too much.
Even if so, as long as the original customer (the hospital in this case) is in US, the victims have someone to sue. It should be left up to the hospital to decide, not mandated by law. Sooner or later WTO will demand, California drops this law... And I'll support them.
Plenty of vitally important stuff is being made abroad -- medical equipment, cars, food. By this Senator's logic, we should not be importing any of it because "there is no remedy" in case the manufacturer screws up.
Zeros and ones are not bits either... I tried. I tried hard. I mentioned the definition of bit in this thread and I gave you a link to one of the online dictionaries, which offers a different (simpler!), but equivalent definition. If you still don't get it and insist on the stupid "binary digit" crap, there is no hope for you. You are, officially, a moron, and I can only pray, I never have to depend on a program written with your participation.
Bzz. Wrong on both counts. Last time meter was defined in a way you describe was in 1795.
Meter is a measure of distance. Bit is a measure of information. Both have definitions.
Your not knowing this foundation of Informatics -- despite it being offered and discussed elsewhere in this very thread perfectly illustrates my original point (moderated off-topic by now).
[Your stubborn insistence on "1 or 0" (what happened to "left or right", "black or white", then?), coupled with calling me "Jackass" point at several personality flaws too, but that's really off-topic]
Most typicly wrong. You are merely explaining, where the word "bit" is coming from. I asked for the definition of the term. Try defining meter (as in kilometer) as a homework. And no: "It is something, that's metered," is not going to cut it.
There can be less. If I told you your name (or anything else you already knew) -- that would be zero information. If I told you something, you did not know, but suspected, it would be above zero, but, possibly (depending on the number of other choices) less than a bit.
Does not "with no prior knowledge" say, the values are equally probable? Certainly, that is an important part of the definition, and the explanation of, for example, why archiving (compressing) can exist...
Yes, everyone needs to know this. May be, not the "precise definition", but certainly something better than "binary digit".
This is -- as you point out -- the foundation of Informatics, a crucial part of the all-encompassing Computer Science.
Not knowing this causes DB tables with 15-character fields for IP-addresses, 32-characters for MD5 checksums, and other monstrocities all too common nowadays...
Anyone else's bandwidth jumps up and down?
on
NASA Tests X-43A
·
· Score: 1
My player shows a real saw on the bandwidth chart -- from the minimum of 32.1Kbps to the astounding maximum of 274.8Kbps with the average being 147.5Kbps -- just a notch below 150Kbps at which the thing is encoded:-(.
I'm wondering, is it the speedera.net -- NASA's ISP -- or speakeasy.net -- my ISP?
This is different from how I'd say it, but seems equivalent. Everyone else -- 4 other attempts at the time of this writing -- failed it. Scary, is not it?
Ok, so living in a city is "keeping human shields around you".
They don't merely "live in a city". Here is one example of Rantissi using human shields. And this photo
offers another. Hiding in the crowded apartment block, you mention, is another.
What is the proper term for "blowing up a crowded apartment block to kill one person"?
Two words: "collateral damage". The scumbag, they were after, had the option to surrender, but chose to hide in the apartment block thinking, Israelis wouldn't dare to do, what Palestinians wouldn't think twice of doing. He bluffed and they called...
Here, I'll help you out:
What's the proper term for killing a 67-year old blind quadriplegic? (Never mind over 400 bombings he organized and encouraged.)
What's the proper term for killing a 12 year old boy? (Never mind the rocks and Molotov cocktails he and dozens of his friends were throwing.)
What's the proper term for running an unarmed (American!!) woman over with a buldozer? (Never mind the countless attempts to convince her to leave and to phisically remove her.)
What's the proper term for preventing the ambulances from getting to the Palestinian wounded? (Never mind the countless occasions, when this ambulances were discovered carrying weapons, ammunition, and even the perfectly healthy reinforcements to the battlefield.)
One can always make a catchy rhetorical question, like you did, but once you bother to learn the details of the story, you realize, you can't blame Israelies for much -- if you accept their right to live there at all, of course.
The last thing I want to see is either of those two groups become more efficient killers.
You are wrong on two counts. First, the precise killing is a better killing, because a precise weapon reduces collateral damage -- the children, with which Rantissi and the like surround themselves in public suddenly become exposed to less risk.
Likewise Baghdad is still standing -- unlike some major German cities shortly after WWII -- because the precision of the bombing improved so much.
Second, you imply, that the two sides are somehow "equal". They are not. While Hamas and other "brigades" target civilians, Israel only targets its sworn enemies, who actively work on killing Israelis -- and it usually tries to arrest them first. True, sometimes innocent civilians die as the result of the Israel's actions, but they are never the intended targets...
Hey if you gave the Palestinians billions of US$ a year in military aid maybe they would.
This weapon, as well as Israel's famous gun (Uzi), and their tanks are of their own design.
Palestinians got a lot more than "military aid" in the past -- they got entire armies fighting for -- so it was claimed -- their cause. Israel's very existence hung on a hair against _hundreds_ of Egyptian and Syrian tanks.
Finally, the world certainly gives to Palestinians too -- food, medicine, buildings. Soviet Union and Arab nations were/are providing weapons and ammunition. As far as their weapon design -- well, adding chipped nails and bearing balls to the bombs for maximum maiming was quite an idea, was not it?
Rantissi and other scumbags are still alive only because they keep human shields around themselves most of the time. This trick would not have stopped Hamas, but it stops the Israelis.
So what's so 'cool' about this kind of murder?
If there can be anything 'cool' about murder, this is it -- the low "collateral damage"... This plane can approach the target quickly and the remote operator can decide -- up to the very last moment -- whether to blow up the charge depending on the probability of hurting a child, that the target keeps around himself.
(Flamebait my shiny one...)
You absolutely mount/home over NFS, and use local disk only for transient, unbacked up data --- like builds, scratch, swap.
Actually, the setup, I'm trying to develop, keeps everyone's home directory on their own desktop -- the machine, they are most likely to use most of the time. It is automounted elsewhere, when needed with automounter's map available through NIS. This gives the speed of local disk, the features of file system, that may not work through NFS, and reduces network traffic.
On the downside, you have to back things
up from many machines, which is fine, IMHO...
And yes, I'm in favor of netbooting and NFS mounted / and others -- the aproach made very easy by FreeBSD -- thanks in no small part to Matt Dillon before he started his own project.
Trying to make a net-bootable RedHat left me shaken and scarred for life...
You, Sir, stand out even among the SlashDot crowd.
"A lot" is two words. So is "you are"... The horrible slang replacement for "have got to" is usually spelled with two ts: "gotta". There is no a in "interfering".
Your grammar sucks too, BTW, but it is, probably, still within SlashDot's poor standards.
Install a decent OS for them -- FreeBSD or Linux will fit. MacOS is Ok too, I suppose, but that may not be your hardware.
There is a learning curve with this OSes, but it is not -- as I'm finding out with my own parents, and my (gasp!) significant other's grandparents -- any steeper than with Windows. Really... E-mail is e-mail and web-browsing is web-browsing. The added bonus is, I can get in from afar and fix whatever issue surfaces or add whatever program they want.
Insensitive clod (Re:Low Saxon)
on
KDE 3.2.1 Released
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Tajikistan is a populous -- if poor at the moment -- nation.
Hopefully, the horrible legacy of the USSR will diminish with years and the country will prosper. If someone from there found the time and translated parts of KDE to Tajik -- they should be applauded, rather than mocked.
Can't trolls be insightful, too? No I was not trolling. I'm just frustrated with Solaris and the number of steps it takes to make a command line on it helpful and convenient. The second I saw a subject of Solaris raised, I couldn't contain myself. Evidently, the "silent majority" of moderators feels likewise:-)
the thing is that you get three awk commands, so I just used a different one
That's my point! I unknowledged the availability of better awk, but it is annoying, that the good one is not the default. And "just use a diffeent one" does not cut it, because I want to change the default not only for myself, but for the 40+ other users... And there is no sure-fire way to change the environment (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH) for all users, the way you can on *BSD through/etc/login.conf (/etc/profile and friends are not quite the same).
What is the bug in grep that you allude to?
None -- just lack of features, like -A and -B.
so that you 'need' command line history and editing
You do need them. If not you -- your users. If you re-read the subject of my original posting, I'm talking about "giving Unix a bad name". It is not among the ubermen, who pretend to not need to edit the command line. It is among the regular users, who anknowledge the fact, that they can make a type and don't want to retype the whole command (after Ctrl-U) or the whole word (after Ctrl-W -- if they even know about these shortcuts). Backspace is on the keyboard -- why does not it work by default?
The computers are many times more powerful today, than they were, when first versions of Unix were written. The utilities included in those versions grew features and fixed bugs during these years. Solaris is unforgivably slow in incorporating those improvements. That's my point.
Solaris supports unified diffs since version 8 or 9
# uname -a SunOS
kermit 5.8 Generic_108528-29 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V440
# diff -u/dev/null/dev/null
diff: illegal option -- u
May be, version 9 finally has it -- after, what, 5 years of it being in BSD and Linux?
vi included in solaris is krufty and old, but it will get you out a bind if you need it and prefer it to using ed.
Well, ed will get you out a bind too, for that matter. It is just easier with vi. And even easier with BSD's nvi (no licensing problems -- why not make it a standard?)...
it is a breeze to install. The same is true for all of the other examples you gave
Again, I aknowledge the ease of modifying the defaults. It is having to do these modifications, that annoys me. Why? Who is it, who honestly prefers sh over ksh (the modern version) or bash as his/her login shell (I don't like the scripts relying on bash-isms either)? Who wouldn't prefer the nvi over Solaris' vi any day? Who would reject the ability to produce unified diffs on occasion, even if context diffs are her/his personal preference?
/usr/bin,/usr/ucb,/usr/sfw, and/usr/xpg4 depending on what bugs you want.
I want none of the bugs and all of the features. Thank you -- I expect nothing less from a "commercial grade" operating system.
Solaris userland is actually not bad at all, but since you are probably a person who grew up in the GNU commune, you must think it really is right for vi have all sorts of fancy highlighting and rendering capabilities. Do you worship the autoconf god?
In what way is it "not bad at all"? In absolute terms? May be. In relative terms, however, every common Unix utility offered by Solaris is at best equal to, but usually -- worse than its counterpart in a *BSD or Linux offering.
autoconf has absolutely nothing to do with this. You know it and I know it -- don't switch the issues.
I hope that they do some research on this idea before they start handcuffing people.
Show me one person "handcuffed" in this country solely for speaking Arabic (or reading Koran verses)... Hundreds of honest and hardworking (if not always geography-savvy) taxi drivers in NYC alone are a counter example...
The sky is not falling, people. Not yet, at least.
Slashdot Mirror
From the article:
Nonsense. Plenty of countries have perfectly good laws on privacy -- especially, the privacy of medical records. This is just an attempt to score some points with outsorcing-scared electorate without upsetting the pro-business part of it too much.
Even if so, as long as the original customer (the hospital in this case) is in US, the victims have someone to sue. It should be left up to the hospital to decide, not mandated by law. Sooner or later WTO will demand, California drops this law... And I'll support them.
Plenty of vitally important stuff is being made abroad -- medical equipment, cars, food. By this Senator's logic, we should not be importing any of it because "there is no remedy" in case the manufacturer screws up.
Zeros and ones are not bits either... I tried. I tried hard. I mentioned the definition of bit in this thread and I gave you a link to one of the online dictionaries, which offers a different (simpler!), but equivalent definition. If you still don't get it and insist on the stupid "binary digit" crap, there is no hope for you. You are, officially, a moron, and I can only pray, I never have to depend on a program written with your participation.
Good bye...
Bzz. Wrong on both counts. Last time meter was defined in a way you describe was in 1795.
Meter is a measure of distance. Bit is a measure of information. Both have definitions.
Your not knowing this foundation of Informatics -- despite it being offered and discussed elsewhere in this very thread perfectly illustrates my original point (moderated off-topic by now).
[Your stubborn insistence on "1 or 0" (what happened to "left or right", "black or white", then?), coupled with calling me "Jackass" point at several personality flaws too, but that's really off-topic]
Try the 6th meaning in this page, for example...
Most typicly wrong. You are merely explaining, where the word "bit" is coming from. I asked for the definition of the term. Try defining meter (as in kilometer) as a homework. And no: "It is something, that's metered," is not going to cut it.
Thanks, moron.
There can be less. If I told you your name (or anything else you already knew) -- that would be zero information. If I told you something, you did not know, but suspected, it would be above zero, but, possibly (depending on the number of other choices) less than a bit.
Does not "with no prior knowledge" say, the values are equally probable? Certainly, that is an important part of the definition, and the explanation of, for example, why archiving (compressing) can exist...
Yes, everyone needs to know this. May be, not the "precise definition", but certainly something better than "binary digit".
This is -- as you point out -- the foundation of Informatics, a crucial part of the all-encompassing Computer Science.
Not knowing this causes DB tables with 15-character fields for IP-addresses, 32-characters for MD5 checksums, and other monstrocities all too common nowadays...
"Looks like we are in a shooting war with the Ruskies." Loved that guy...
My player shows a real saw on the bandwidth chart -- from the minimum of 32.1Kbps to the astounding maximum of 274.8Kbps with the average being 147.5Kbps -- just a notch below 150Kbps at which the thing is encoded :-(.
I'm wondering, is it the speedera.net -- NASA's ISP -- or speakeasy.net -- my ISP?
This is different from how I'd say it, but seems equivalent. Everyone else -- 4 other attempts at the time of this writing -- failed it. Scary, is not it?
I mean the "bit" as in "1 byte is 8 bits".
Only somewhat off-topic...
Kyiv is the capital of Ukraine ...
They don't merely "live in a city". Here is one example of Rantissi using human shields. And this photo offers another. Hiding in the crowded apartment block, you mention, is another.
Two words: "collateral damage". The scumbag, they were after, had the option to surrender, but chose to hide in the apartment block thinking, Israelis wouldn't dare to do, what Palestinians wouldn't think twice of doing. He bluffed and they called...
Here, I'll help you out:
One can always make a catchy rhetorical question, like you did, but once you bother to learn the details of the story, you realize, you can't blame Israelies for much -- if you accept their right to live there at all, of course.
You are wrong on two counts. First, the precise killing is a better killing, because a precise weapon reduces collateral damage -- the children, with which Rantissi and the like surround themselves in public suddenly become exposed to less risk.
Likewise Baghdad is still standing -- unlike some major German cities shortly after WWII -- because the precision of the bombing improved so much.
Second, you imply, that the two sides are somehow "equal". They are not. While Hamas and other "brigades" target civilians, Israel only targets its sworn enemies, who actively work on killing Israelis -- and it usually tries to arrest them first. True, sometimes innocent civilians die as the result of the Israel's actions, but they are never the intended targets...
Now, let's see some troll-heavy "moderation"...
This weapon, as well as Israel's famous gun (Uzi), and their tanks are of their own design.
Palestinians got a lot more than "military aid" in the past -- they got entire armies fighting for -- so it was claimed -- their cause. Israel's very existence hung on a hair against _hundreds_ of Egyptian and Syrian tanks.
Finally, the world certainly gives to Palestinians too -- food, medicine, buildings. Soviet Union and Arab nations were/are providing weapons and ammunition. As far as their weapon design -- well, adding chipped nails and bearing balls to the bombs for maximum maiming was quite an idea, was not it?
Rantissi and other scumbags are still alive only because they keep human shields around themselves most of the time. This trick would not have stopped Hamas, but it stops the Israelis.
If there can be anything 'cool' about murder, this is it -- the low "collateral damage"... This plane can approach the target quickly and the remote operator can decide -- up to the very last moment -- whether to blow up the charge depending on the probability of hurting a child, that the target keeps around himself. (Flamebait my shiny one...)
Why -- Expedia is rather decent...
Actually, the setup, I'm trying to develop, keeps everyone's home directory on their own desktop -- the machine, they are most likely to use most of the time. It is automounted elsewhere, when needed with automounter's map available through NIS. This gives the speed of local disk, the features of file system, that may not work through NFS, and reduces network traffic.
On the downside, you have to back things up from many machines, which is fine, IMHO...
And yes, I'm in favor of netbooting and NFS mounted / and others -- the aproach made very easy by FreeBSD -- thanks in no small part to Matt Dillon before he started his own project.
Trying to make a net-bootable RedHat left me shaken and scarred for life...
That's my feeling too. Those, who wish to put their work into public domain are welcome to do that -- Lessig's FAQ is somewhat misleading at that.
The case is about people, who don't care to indicate their intentions...
The best way to kill an idea is to let a government do it.
Especially the government of the People's Republic of Massachusetts. Even with the best of intentions they will screw up.
Presumably, God can spell -- in any language...
You, Sir, stand out even among the SlashDot crowd.
"A lot" is two words. So is "you are"... The horrible slang replacement for "have got to" is usually spelled with two ts: "gotta". There is no a in "interfering".
Your grammar sucks too, BTW, but it is, probably, still within SlashDot's poor standards.
Install a decent OS for them -- FreeBSD or Linux will fit. MacOS is Ok too, I suppose, but that may not be your hardware.
There is a learning curve with this OSes, but it is not -- as I'm finding out with my own parents, and my (gasp!) significant other's grandparents -- any steeper than with Windows. Really... E-mail is e-mail and web-browsing is web-browsing. The added bonus is, I can get in from afar and fix whatever issue surfaces or add whatever program they want.
Tajikistan is a populous -- if poor at the moment -- nation.
Hopefully, the horrible legacy of the USSR will diminish with years and the country will prosper. If someone from there found the time and translated parts of KDE to Tajik -- they should be applauded, rather than mocked.
Can't trolls be insightful, too? No I was not trolling. I'm just frustrated with Solaris and the number of steps it takes to make a command line on it helpful and convenient. The second I saw a subject of Solaris raised, I couldn't contain myself. Evidently, the "silent majority" of moderators feels likewise :-)
That's my point! I unknowledged the availability of better awk, but it is annoying, that the good one is not the default. And "just use a diffeent one" does not cut it, because I want to change the default not only for myself, but for the 40+ other users... And there is no sure-fire way to change the environment (PATH, LD_LIBRARY_PATH) for all users, the way you can on *BSD through /etc/login.conf (/etc/profile and friends are not quite the same).
None -- just lack of features, like -A and -B.
You do need them. If not you -- your users. If you re-read the subject of my original posting, I'm talking about "giving Unix a bad name". It is not among the ubermen, who pretend to not need to edit the command line. It is among the regular users, who anknowledge the fact, that they can make a type and don't want to retype the whole command (after Ctrl-U) or the whole word (after Ctrl-W -- if they even know about these shortcuts). Backspace is on the keyboard -- why does not it work by default?
The computers are many times more powerful today, than they were, when first versions of Unix were written. The utilities included in those versions grew features and fixed bugs during these years. Solaris is unforgivably slow in incorporating those improvements. That's my point.
# uname -a SunOSkermit 5.8
Generic_108528-29 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire-V440
# diff -u
diff: illegal option -- u
May be, version 9 finally has it -- after, what, 5 years of it being in BSD and Linux?
Well, ed will get you out a bind too, for that matter. It is just easier with vi. And even easier with BSD's nvi (no licensing problems -- why not make it a standard?)...
Again, I aknowledge the ease of modifying the defaults. It is having to do these modifications, that annoys me. Why? Who is it, who honestly prefers sh over ksh (the modern version) or bash as his/her login shell (I don't like the scripts relying on bash-isms either)? Who wouldn't prefer the nvi over Solaris' vi any day? Who would reject the ability to produce unified diffs on occasion, even if context diffs are her/his personal preference?
Mr. Piddle continues:
I want none of the bugs and all of the features. Thank you -- I expect nothing less from a "commercial grade" operating system.
In what way is it "not bad at all"? In absolute terms? May be. In relative terms, however, every common Unix utility offered by Solaris is at best equal to, but usually -- worse than its counterpart in a *BSD or Linux offering.
autoconf has absolutely nothing to do with this. You know it and I know it -- don't switch the issues.
Show me one person "handcuffed" in this country solely for speaking Arabic (or reading Koran verses)... Hundreds of honest and hardworking (if not always geography-savvy) taxi drivers in NYC alone are a counter example...
The sky is not falling, people. Not yet, at least.