[...] without needing some weird limiting technology to unlock the content.
I had a fairly simple idea for getting around the ereader (or indeed just about any other kind of) ebook encryption, using the analog hole:
Essentially, write a small script (using something like WinBatch on Windows) to automate paging through the book - with a nice clear large black font and white background - and take a screenshot for each page, saving as page001.bmp (or whatever). Then use an OCR program (eg. JOCR) to interpret the images into plain text.
I really should try it out sometime to see how badly it works:). It'd be interesting to see if ebook-DRM companies panicked and launched a DMCA assault.
EReader is a pretty decent option for ebooks - mainly because the DRM isn't painful, but also because they have a not-too-pathetic range and the prices aren't too unreasonable. But the extra trick you need to keep in mind is to subscribe to their emailed newsletter (every week or so). This always includes a "10% off all purchases" code - so effectively anyone using them gets at least 10% off the listed price on any purchase. This may even be a sneaky back way around publisher "list price" demands. If so, I strongly approve.:)
The downside, for me at least, is that (last I checked) the Windows version of their reader program doesn't work under Wine. Annoying, but I do most of my reading on my Palm, and it works fine on that.
However, now I've said all that, I've found that Fictionwise, as you mentioned, seems to offer a better range at a better price with more formats. I approve even more. Thanks for the tip.
From the summary: "...and exploit code is now running lose..."
For a second - just for a second - I thought this might be an extremely clever play on words, making fun both of Windows ("Win") by referring to it as "Lose" (as the exploit code would be running on Windows and controlling it, so you could (in a slightly ungrammatical way, but whatever) say the code is running Win, or indeed Lose) and combining this with a witty rejoinder at all the individuals who write "lose" instead of "loose" (and vice versa), emphasising what losers they are.
Ah, I see. Sorry, I did misunderstand your original post - but I can only suggest that your examples (of chunks of code without matching braces) would be pretty rare in most development environments (so there isn't necessarily a lot of value in being able to have that compile-time error). And having matching braces but in the wrong place (not a compile-time error) would surely be no less common a mistake?
I'd actually forgotten that some people use the one-statement unbraced-if in Java or C-ish code - I (and most of the teams I've worked with) use the always-brace-even-single-statements style.
But more generally (and more relevant to the original line of discussion:)) on Python's "safety" (relative to Java, etc.) in a team dev environment - I just last night reread Bruce Eckel's Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing article. You may also find it worth a (re-)read. It talks specifically about programmers coming from the Java mindset to the Python mindset (as Bruce did) and eventually concludes that a proper unit-testing regime completely supersedes compile-time syntax/type checks for verifying code correctness... and the same applies in Python. He emphasises his point of view with:
I came to feel so strongly about this that in the third edition of Thinking in Java, I wrote: If it's not tested, it's broken.
Of course, Bruce is a unit-testing nut. But that's not necessarily a bad thing to be.:)
[...] who in their right mind doesn't flag a warning for unbraced if? [...] But with python, it's literally impossible to compile time check for this error.
Erm - I may have misunderstood you, but this:
x = 2
if x == 1:
print "x == 1!"
...will result in an IndentationError exception in Python. Try it and see. The only way to have an empty (ie. no code) if-clause in Python is to use the (properly indented) keyword "pass". It's the same if you want to have an empty function or class body.
You may also find tools like PyChecker useful for more involved "compile" time checking.
I really like the default Gnome/Metacity environment from a look/feel perspective, especially WRT the Gnome HIG. But from a functionality perspective, specifically re: what I use, there's no major difference between KDE/XFCE/Gnome.
It's just that one detail of the Gnome/Metacity interface that irritates me enormously. Not being able to alt-rightclick-drag to resize drives me nuts (and it'd be the same, if not more so, if they'd changed alt-leftclick-drag to move windows).
Try to imagine how you'd feel if a bit of UI functionality that you used all the time was suddenly not available. For example, say you're used to using alt-tab to cycle through open windows, and suddenly your default GUI environment changed it to control-tab. Or changed the "copy" shortcut from control-C to control-J. And they didn't let you change that configuration back to "normal".
The difference between Gnome with Metacity and XFCE/KDE is pretty small for me. I like the default Gnome-Metacity look/feel and desktop layout better, but not enough to make up for that very significant (for me) UI wart.
I can still use my Gnome apps under KDE of course, so it's not like I'm sacrificing anything significant with this desktop choice.
Well, nothing other than what I feel is a slightly visually-nicer environment.
Hope you don't think I'm such a nutball now. But I don't mind that much if you do.;-)
The "admins" often have one-sided opinions on disputed subjects and use their admin powers to suppress other viewpoints.
Can you point to one or more specific examples that illustrate your point? This should of course be trivially easy for you, as you said it "often" happens.:)
But your point seems more than a little dicey to me, as "other viewpoints" are generally quite available in the discussion forums attached to "disputed" articles. And if an admin was blatantly breaking the neutral-point-of-view philosophy of Wikipedia, I suspect that admin would probably not be an admin for very long.
I suspect as Linus gets older he finds that being diplomatic is less of a priority, and occasionally he just wants to sound off. But I wouldn't take this case even remotely as seriously as the Bitkeeper reverse-engineering situation.
I think he's just flat-out wrong about Gnome though - even though I use KDE in preference to Gnome myself. I think the default Gnome desktop interface is a model of clarity and beauty, and most of the "official" Gnome apps have a really nice consistency (in both looks and usability). And I massively prefer having the "activate" button on the right-hand side of a dialog window.
Unfortunately, just one tiny little thing keeps me on KDE or XFCE instead of shifting to Gnome - I can't resize a window with alt-rightclick. Alt-middleclick resizes, but not alt-rightclick. And of course there's no preference setting to change this. Sigh. Ah well.
I think it's a good idea for this project to minimise configuration setting - it really does make the desktop environment feel cleaner and easier to use - but for me at least, the lack of that one tiny configuration option is a deal breaker. I love my alt-rightclick-to-resize too much.:)
The nature of laws in general is that they're flexible little bastards. And, most interestingly, those with the duty of prosecuting people tend to have quite a lot of latitude in deciding what specific charges to lay - or even to lay charges at all. And the result of seeing how the laws are used - especially in this specific case - is a massive chilling effect and self-censorship.
Well, it would be massive if Singapore weren't already a ludicruously controlled nanny state. Big Brother is watching.
Anyway, if you look at the motivation behind these sort of laws, they're meant more as a way to calm ethnic tensions and reduce the chance of race riots. The religion side of it is (almost certainly) totally irrelevant. I suspect referring to a "Muslim" in Singapore is just shorthand for "ethnic Malay".
Given that, it would be a little risky for, eg. a Singaporean atheist to make comments like "All Muslims are fucking delusional idiots", even if it was blindingly obvious that such a remark was intended in a "all religious types are fucking delusional idiots", not as an ethnic-Malay hate comment.
Mind you, it's probably a little risky for a Singaporean to make a comment about.. well, anything... Probably just best to stay completely silent, really.
After all, at least the economy's in good shape!... oops... *quickly self-censors, removing the "at least"*:-).
Well, the whole point is that the bomb in the backpack can be reliably detected with ordinary baggage/luggage screening. So you're unlikely to miss that guy in any case.
Or, to put it another way, you're much more likely to miss this guy with a half-assed "nervousness detector" test than you are to miss that large bomb-shaped object inside his bag (as shown by the bag xray screening process).
And falsely pulling out 1 in 10 people for "extensive searches" would be way too labour-intensive for the airport security - quite aside from the excessive and unjustifiable privacy invasion for ordinary travellers.
He added: "That's not going to satisfy a majority of people, but . . . I've had people say, you know, 'Hey, I don't care, I've done nothing to be concerned about. You can have me in your files and that's that.' Some people take that approach."
Now I must preface with this by saying that I don't necessarily support this kind of stuff, but honestly, it just isn't that big of a deal. [...]
I'm a more or less law-abiding citizen, and if my government wants to collect some information on me like whether I stayed at a hotel or not, I really just don't care that much.
And this, I think, is the point. You don't care about your privacy. Great. Fantastic. Some of the rest of us do care about our privacy.
I'm starting to feel it's like a left-handed/right-handed thing - some people are just born in a blissful (apathetic?) "i-don't-care-about-privacy" mode of thinking, and they can't seem to understand why the rest of us do care.
Ah well, if it makes you feel any better, I think you're in the majority. Well done. And mods, I don't think the parent post is actually a troll - I know far too many people who genuinely express the same thoughts. Most of them are polite enough to refrain from patronising us (privacy advocates) by implying we're stuck in a juvenile rebellion phase, but what the hell.:)
"So we had to put an OpenBSD firewall in front of Checkpoint," he said. "We saved seven salaries worth over one year. It was so dramatic they gave me a big raise and I was promoted from system administrator to IT manager."
I'm not completely certain, but it sounds like he was just a peon sysadmin at the time he did these OpenBSD installs.
There's god damn nothing wrong with the Passive Voice except that it has a stigmatic notion in English.
Yeah... and there's god damn nothing wrong with murder except that it has a stigmatic notion in most civilised societies. *ahem*:-)
I prefer the active voice in writing for one simple and personal reason - too much passive voice gives me a headache and makes it difficult for me to concentrate. A sprinkling of passive voice is fine for variety, but a document written predominantly (or exclusively) in passive voice is a horrible thing to read.
In German, it has a air of respectability to it over the active voice.
It's interesting that you emphasise the "respectability" aspect of passive voice in German, as in my experience people (over-)use passive voice in English for exactly the same reason. They think it makes the writing seem more formal, more detached. More "respectable".
I find overuse of passive voice in English is a hint that the writer is insecure about their writing - especially in a supposedly "formal" document. So they overcompensate by going nuts with the passive voice. Or, as you describe with your dad below, they've just been taught to use passive voice for certain kinds of writing (with really weak justifications for that teaching - but hey, what employee is going to argue with their bosses' justifications?).
He worked on process documents and reports. The idea is that you put everything in the passive, because the agents of the senteces are not to be indicated.
For most types of writing, one of the goals is to make it easy for the reader to understand - to omit needless words. For "process" documents or legal documents, however, the goal is exactly the opposite - the goal is to cause the reader maximum pain and to obscure useful information (while making sure that information is still technically present).
Given the above, your dad's experience in writing everything in passive voice is perfectly reasonable.;-)
Just acknowledging the mistake. The people who were (mistakenly) wiretapped suffered harm in that they had their privacy violated.
You can argue about the nature of the harm (in the privacy violation) if you want, but it's still there.
The other important aspect may be that if wiretappers know that they (or someone) has to acknowledge the mistake to the persons involved, they're likely to be more careful in getting it right. Conversely, if they know that any mistakes they make will automatically be covered up by the system, they won't care so much.
But anyway - I'd prefer to put the burden of justification on the other side. Why should "the wiretappers" be allowed to keep it quiet when they've illegally (accidentally or not) wiretapped somebody's phone?
I've used Rosegarden to enter a few pieces of music, and it's pretty good. I tend to focus more on tweaking the output to look exactly the way I want, and Rosegarden's output to Lilypond needed a fair bit of tweaking. Well, rewriting.:-)
There's probably a chance that Rosegarden's export to MUP or PMX or (various other options) works better. I've only recently started using Lilypond (after using MusixTeX for a while), so I'm probably not doing things in the most efficient way.
As mentioned by the AC, NoteEdit looks like a pretty good option too, though I haven't tried it myself. Hmmm... (reading features)... maybe I should.:)
Normally I wouldn't mention this, but as it's in the first sentence... in this context you'd definitely mean deprecated, not depreciated. The meanings of the two words are quite different.
But aside from spelling ("its wrath" not "it's rath":-)), I agree that the US system of government is horribly flawed in a few ways. Especially this Supreme Court judges appointed-for-life shit. That's just wrong.
The worst bit is, as you say, when a party has (over a period of time) managed to eliminate all the checks and balances. There are rather a lot of sham-democracy one-party states around the world. It'd be rather depressing (to put it mildly) to see the US fall too far in that direction.
Real competition is a critical element in the capitalist marketplace - I think it's much more important in the political marketplace. It's a pity that the US have such a fucked-up voting system (ie. not that other voting systems are flawless, but the US system is really bad).
....I just wrote a screed ranting on about the stranger parts of the weird and bizarre US "system", but it was getting even further off topic, so I've cut it.:)
Absolutely agreed, both the joking and the non-joking parts.:)
I've used Linux since late '94, and Linux with X since mid-95... and I'd only ever had the vaguest idea of how the X-ish display systems and subsystems all hung together... until now. It's fantastic to see a detailed and lucid (and, as far as I can tell, fairly thorough) article like this, put together by someone who obviously knows the topic extremely well.
Slashdot Mirror
I had a fairly simple idea for getting around the ereader (or indeed just about any other kind of) ebook encryption, using the analog hole:
Essentially, write a small script (using something like WinBatch on Windows) to automate paging through the book - with a nice clear large black font and white background - and take a screenshot for each page, saving as page001.bmp (or whatever). Then use an OCR program (eg. JOCR) to interpret the images into plain text.
I really should try it out sometime to see how badly it worksYour ereader link is broken - try ereader.com :).
EReader is a pretty decent option for ebooks - mainly because the DRM isn't painful, but also because they have a not-too-pathetic range and the prices aren't too unreasonable. But the extra trick you need to keep in mind is to subscribe to their emailed newsletter (every week or so). This always includes a "10% off all purchases" code - so effectively anyone using them gets at least 10% off the listed price on any purchase. This may even be a sneaky back way around publisher "list price" demands. If so, I strongly approve. :)
The downside, for me at least, is that (last I checked) the Windows version of their reader program doesn't work under Wine. Annoying, but I do most of my reading on my Palm, and it works fine on that.
However, now I've said all that, I've found that Fictionwise, as you mentioned, seems to offer a better range at a better price with more formats. I approve even more. Thanks for the tip.
Begging for a question, perhaps. But begging the question is another thing.
You're welcome. :-)
For a second - just for a second - I thought this might be an extremely clever play on words, making fun both of Windows ("Win") by referring to it as "Lose" (as the exploit code would be running on Windows and controlling it, so you could (in a slightly ungrammatical way, but whatever) say the code is running Win, or indeed Lose) and combining this with a witty rejoinder at all the individuals who write "lose" instead of "loose" (and vice versa), emphasising what losers they are.
Then I remembered that this is Slashdot.
Sigh.
I'd actually forgotten that some people use the one-statement unbraced-if in Java or C-ish code - I (and most of the teams I've worked with) use the always-brace-even-single-statements style.
But more generally (and more relevant to the original line of discussion :)) on Python's "safety" (relative to Java, etc.) in a team dev environment - I just last night reread Bruce Eckel's Strong Typing vs. Strong Testing article. You may also find it worth a (re-)read. It talks specifically about programmers coming from the Java mindset to the Python mindset (as Bruce did) and eventually concludes that a proper unit-testing regime completely supersedes compile-time syntax/type checks for verifying code correctness... and the same applies in Python. He emphasises his point of view with:
Of course, Bruce is a unit-testing nut. But that's not necessarily a bad thing to be. :)
x = 2
if x == 1:
print "x == 1!"
You may also find tools like PyChecker useful for more involved "compile" time checking.
Though Java hasn't killed my dog yet, but maybe I just haven't given it enough of a chance. :)
I really like the default Gnome/Metacity environment from a look/feel perspective, especially WRT the Gnome HIG. But from a functionality perspective, specifically re: what I use, there's no major difference between KDE/XFCE/Gnome.
It's just that one detail of the Gnome/Metacity interface that irritates me enormously. Not being able to alt-rightclick-drag to resize drives me nuts (and it'd be the same, if not more so, if they'd changed alt-leftclick-drag to move windows).
Try to imagine how you'd feel if a bit of UI functionality that you used all the time was suddenly not available. For example, say you're used to using alt-tab to cycle through open windows, and suddenly your default GUI environment changed it to control-tab. Or changed the "copy" shortcut from control-C to control-J. And they didn't let you change that configuration back to "normal".
The difference between Gnome with Metacity and XFCE/KDE is pretty small for me. I like the default Gnome-Metacity look/feel and desktop layout better, but not enough to make up for that very significant (for me) UI wart. I can still use my Gnome apps under KDE of course, so it's not like I'm sacrificing anything significant with this desktop choice.
Well, nothing other than what I feel is a slightly visually-nicer environment.
Hope you don't think I'm such a nutball now. But I don't mind that much if you do. ;-)
Can you point to one or more specific examples that illustrate your point? This should of course be trivially easy for you, as you said it "often" happens. :)
But your point seems more than a little dicey to me, as "other viewpoints" are generally quite available in the discussion forums attached to "disputed" articles. And if an admin was blatantly breaking the neutral-point-of-view philosophy of Wikipedia, I suspect that admin would probably not be an admin for very long.
I suspect as Linus gets older he finds that being diplomatic is less of a priority, and occasionally he just wants to sound off. But I wouldn't take this case even remotely as seriously as the Bitkeeper reverse-engineering situation.
I think he's just flat-out wrong about Gnome though - even though I use KDE in preference to Gnome myself. I think the default Gnome desktop interface is a model of clarity and beauty, and most of the "official" Gnome apps have a really nice consistency (in both looks and usability). And I massively prefer having the "activate" button on the right-hand side of a dialog window.
Unfortunately, just one tiny little thing keeps me on KDE or XFCE instead of shifting to Gnome - I can't resize a window with alt-rightclick. Alt-middleclick resizes, but not alt-rightclick. And of course there's no preference setting to change this. Sigh. Ah well.
I think it's a good idea for this project to minimise configuration setting - it really does make the desktop environment feel cleaner and easier to use - but for me at least, the lack of that one tiny configuration option is a deal breaker. I love my alt-rightclick-to-resize too much. :)
The nature of laws in general is that they're flexible little bastards. And, most interestingly, those with the duty of prosecuting people tend to have quite a lot of latitude in deciding what specific charges to lay - or even to lay charges at all. And the result of seeing how the laws are used - especially in this specific case - is a massive chilling effect and self-censorship.
Well, it would be massive if Singapore weren't already a ludicruously controlled nanny state. Big Brother is watching.
Anyway, if you look at the motivation behind these sort of laws, they're meant more as a way to calm ethnic tensions and reduce the chance of race riots. The religion side of it is (almost certainly) totally irrelevant. I suspect referring to a "Muslim" in Singapore is just shorthand for "ethnic Malay".
Given that, it would be a little risky for, eg. a Singaporean atheist to make comments like "All Muslims are fucking delusional idiots", even if it was blindingly obvious that such a remark was intended in a "all religious types are fucking delusional idiots", not as an ethnic-Malay hate comment.
Mind you, it's probably a little risky for a Singaporean to make a comment about.. well, anything... Probably just best to stay completely silent, really. After all, at least the economy's in good shape!... oops... *quickly self-censors, removing the "at least"* :-).
Especially if I draw a smiley face on it. :)
Or, to put it another way, you're much more likely to miss this guy with a half-assed "nervousness detector" test than you are to miss that large bomb-shaped object inside his bag (as shown by the bag xray screening process).
And falsely pulling out 1 in 10 people for "extensive searches" would be way too labour-intensive for the airport security - quite aside from the excessive and unjustifiable privacy invasion for ordinary travellers.
eg. It's flapped its wings. ;-)
From Py to the Wiz:
And this, I think, is the point. You don't care about your privacy. Great. Fantastic. Some of the rest of us do care about our privacy.
I'm starting to feel it's like a left-handed/right-handed thing - some people are just born in a blissful (apathetic?) "i-don't-care-about-privacy" mode of thinking, and they can't seem to understand why the rest of us do care.
Ah well, if it makes you feel any better, I think you're in the majority. Well done. And mods, I don't think the parent post is actually a troll - I know far too many people who genuinely express the same thoughts. Most of them are polite enough to refrain from patronising us (privacy advocates) by implying we're stuck in a juvenile rebellion phase, but what the hell. :)
I'm not completely certain, but it sounds like he was just a peon sysadmin at the time he did these OpenBSD installs.
Yeah... and there's god damn nothing wrong with murder except that it has a stigmatic notion in most civilised societies. *ahem* :-)
I prefer the active voice in writing for one simple and personal reason - too much passive voice gives me a headache and makes it difficult for me to concentrate. A sprinkling of passive voice is fine for variety, but a document written predominantly (or exclusively) in passive voice is a horrible thing to read.
It's interesting that you emphasise the "respectability" aspect of passive voice in German, as in my experience people (over-)use passive voice in English for exactly the same reason. They think it makes the writing seem more formal, more detached. More "respectable".
I find overuse of passive voice in English is a hint that the writer is insecure about their writing - especially in a supposedly "formal" document. So they overcompensate by going nuts with the passive voice. Or, as you describe with your dad below, they've just been taught to use passive voice for certain kinds of writing (with really weak justifications for that teaching - but hey, what employee is going to argue with their bosses' justifications?).
For most types of writing, one of the goals is to make it easy for the reader to understand - to omit needless words. For "process" documents or legal documents, however, the goal is exactly the opposite - the goal is to cause the reader maximum pain and to obscure useful information (while making sure that information is still technically present).
Given the above, your dad's experience in writing everything in passive voice is perfectly reasonable. ;-)
I suspect it was just a really bad misspelling of cancellable - ie. something that can be cancelled.
You can argue about the nature of the harm (in the privacy violation) if you want, but it's still there.
The other important aspect may be that if wiretappers know that they (or someone) has to acknowledge the mistake to the persons involved, they're likely to be more careful in getting it right. Conversely, if they know that any mistakes they make will automatically be covered up by the system, they won't care so much.
But anyway - I'd prefer to put the burden of justification on the other side. Why should "the wiretappers" be allowed to keep it quiet when they've illegally (accidentally or not) wiretapped somebody's phone?
I've used Rosegarden to enter a few pieces of music, and it's pretty good. I tend to focus more on tweaking the output to look exactly the way I want, and Rosegarden's output to Lilypond needed a fair bit of tweaking. Well, rewriting. :-)
There's probably a chance that Rosegarden's export to MUP or PMX or (various other options) works better. I've only recently started using Lilypond (after using MusixTeX for a while), so I'm probably not doing things in the most efficient way.
As mentioned by the AC, NoteEdit looks like a pretty good option too, though I haven't tried it myself. Hmmm... (reading features)... maybe I should. :)
Normally I wouldn't mention this, but as it's in the first sentence... in this context you'd definitely mean deprecated, not depreciated. The meanings of the two words are quite different.
But aside from spelling ("its wrath" not "it's rath" :-)), I agree that the US system of government is horribly flawed in a few ways. Especially this Supreme Court judges appointed-for-life shit. That's just wrong.
The worst bit is, as you say, when a party has (over a period of time) managed to eliminate all the checks and balances. There are rather a lot of sham-democracy one-party states around the world. It'd be rather depressing (to put it mildly) to see the US fall too far in that direction.
Real competition is a critical element in the capitalist marketplace - I think it's much more important in the political marketplace. It's a pity that the US have such a fucked-up voting system (ie. not that other voting systems are flawless, but the US system is really bad).
I've used Linux since late '94, and Linux with X since mid-95... and I'd only ever had the vaguest idea of how the X-ish display systems and subsystems all hung together... until now. It's fantastic to see a detailed and lucid (and, as far as I can tell, fairly thorough) article like this, put together by someone who obviously knows the topic extremely well.
Pete's Brain: Ah well, I'm already on a pedantic roll in my comments for this story, so why not respond to this? :)
Almost a decade and a half later, I think you mean. :)