This is the reason why many advocate the "proportional" system. I dislike "proportional" voting in the primary legislative forum because I think that it is very important to have a connection with _my_ representative in the legislative house.
What about a hybrid system? One example might be one that gives the person with the most votes in any district a seat, and then allocates additional floating seats to the largest vote getters in each party to make the total number of representitives closer to the will of the voters. This still slightly biases for the larger parties in each district, but doesn't waste third/fourth party votes if you prefer voting your heart over getting the best of the two evils in the major parties.
No change will happen with either major party, both of them killed it in cities across the country by either saying it allowed blacks or communist jews to be elected, depending on the local fear profile. The only chance of reform is to either propel a new party into office on a reform platform or a traditional revolution. The former is more likely and less bloody, a new party has replaced an earlier party in the past, many attempted revolutions in the USA have been violently crushed. But, you don't hear much about Whigs these days in the USA. I think a two pronged attack might work best because we are so divided these days. We need one party on the "left" and one party on the "right" that both have this one thing in common, a desire and platform for a fair vote.
I personally want a more referendum based system, but not while the media is so poor. I think a better government for 30-40 years might create an environment where reporters are retrained to investigate the truth and report it. I don't understand why exactly this is but newspapers and sometimes even TV seem to be much better in PR systems than winner takes all systems like ours.
BTW I do like the instant runoff ballot, but only for positions like president and mayor, for a legislative body their views are more important than their personal likability. Of course, it does matter which is why you pick the top vote getters in each party.
1) Gore is the one that took the battle to the courts after Florida was ready to declare Bush the winner. 2) The Gore campaign wanted votes counted differently for areas where they felt they didn't get the vote they expected. The Supremes [of Florida] ruled simply that if there was to be a recount, ALL votes in the entire state would have to be recounted using the same standards (i.e. was a hanging "chad" a vote). 3) The Bush Sr./Reagan Supremes in a federal power grab prevented the Florida Supremes' fair recount giving Bush Jr. the electoral votes of Florida. 4) A union of Newspapers performed the count later and found that if the Florida's votes had been counted Gore we would have known Florida should have sent his electors instead of Bush's to the convention. 5) The government's electoral fraud commission came out with a report that let us know over 45,000 Democrats and 5,000 republicans were illegaly prevented from voting in that election. And we learned the chad machines were reprogrammed in Talahase to swallow over and undervotes in poor districts, while the same machines sent to more republican districts were programmed to spit them out to allow a revote. 6) Newspapers buried the news of massive fraud in the election in what we can only believe was a misguided attempt to rally behind the "president". 7) The Republican controlled house did not impeach the Bush, and the Justice Department did not convict the fellons involved.
I didn't vote for Gore and voted against Clinton in earlier elections. I even accused my Democrat friends of whining. But when the facts came out I was and remain furious. I think Gore proved he didn't deserve the presidency with his pussy footing and Bush should be in prison or hanged, depending on your POV with respect to treason. In an ideal world the House would have impeached him and appointed some level headed Republican in his place, we would all be better off for it.
Even if Bush had been a good president or at least a not so horrible president, JFK comes to mind, I still would have prefered he lay 6ft under. Our democracy is more important than any one man.
This is probably not legal in your jurisdiction. I know it's not in New York City because I noticed it and one of the poll workers went apeshit when he realized that table had been making people sign in with a pencil. He also gave me a pen.
But it was probably just an oversight of the poll worker in both our cases.
Did you know that the Diebold machine already have a printer installed?
I didn't think so.
Nice, but not enough. See if I can't see what it printed the screen can show me that I voted for "Ralph Nader"* but print "George W. Bush" on the receipt inside the metal cabinet.
Clever, no?
Of course just turning this on would allow random inspections by the poll workers, they could check their own votes, and allow random inspections by voters. A clever programmer could get around this, just change votes at times when lots of people are voting and not in the first hour after the first vote. Most likely poll workers will vote in the morning, and if not they are likely not to be voting and checking the receipt when there is a long queue of people waiting to use the machine. At least there would be a miniscule risk to the fixer's candidate of getting caught.
If I were in California I would have a hard time believing anyone that told me my vote would be counted. Thank goodness I live in New York where our electoral system guarantees that my vote is worthless and hence will likely be counted.
* I do not plan to vote for Ralph, it's just an example.
BTW Where are the class action suits? I know some of these governmental entitees have sovereign immunity, but Diebold is a big juicy target for the class of one hundred million disenfranchised voters, as are some of the cities involved in this mess. There seems to be plenty of evidence of uncredible levels of incompetence on every level. It also seems like a pretty jury friendly case, most states use their lists of registered voters as the main source for locating jury members.
[A] good explanation for it that I read at osnews.com was that the XFree86 and the Distros (commercial and community alike) started to increasingly have differences in priorities and culture. The license change was a like message from XFree86 to the distros that they didn't care one way or another for their support. The distros response is logical.
Yup, there is only one development team that is more of a pain in the ass than XFree86. But in mplayer's case they actually have kept up with the evolving needs of their users and developers. XFree86 seems to have been stuck in a timewarp for a few years now. That's not to belittle the past accomplishements, but standing still is not an option. The licensing change is just something concrete to point to when recruiting developers for your fork. I for one have been waiting for a good fork for a few years... um, now I gotta get back to coding... and then deciding which fork to patch...
Sorry, you don't qualify for coffee snob status. I'm not being judgemental here--just check out the alt.coffee.geek newsgroup and you'll see what I mean
Yeah, I don't really think of myself as a coffee snob. But, to the people who might think of drinking Folgers I certainly am. I sometimes feel like a coffee emisary, a friend of mine said she didn't like coffee so I brought her some organically grown Peruvian coffee from Cafe Zeta after convincing the manager to roast it hours before my flight. A few months later I get an e-mail from Alaska pleading with me to overnight some Jamaica Blue Mountain to her (not my favorite coffee, but that certainly qualifies as a convert, no?)
BTW I can't get a host name lookup on birdsandbeans.ca, are they censored by the USA for some reason, or is it just an internet hickup?
There is a simple option for those that don't get official permission from the Mozilla Foundation to use the trademarked artwork.
A simple "--enable-official-branding" flag can be used when building to include the official artwork. Otherwise, generic versions of the artwork are included (which are free/open).
This seems like a good compromise. I hope you also let the distributions use FireFox or in the icon names, such as "FireFox (Mandrake)" or "FireFox (Debian ed.)"
My main concern is for "Mozilla Coffee" though. This is the best mail order coffee I've tried, I doubt any other dealers can offer that level of quality. I've ordered a few other coffies online from vendors such as Gevalia, Cafe Britt, and my SO got some Gourmet Garage coffee with a donation to the local NPR station. These were all undrinkable, we tossed it all. But I put in a standing order for the Mozilla Coffee from R.J. Tarpleys, it's not quite as good as the same day roasted stuff I get from my local roaster, but it's good and they tell me some of the proceeds go to Mozilla. If you can get a fair licensing deal that keeps the quality as high, I implore you to make a US distributor excemption for them. Roasted coffee doesn't last many days, no one else online seems to be able to deliver it still fresh enough to drink.
I may be a coffee snob in your estimation, but you will profit more from 25 cents a pound on coffee I can drink than $2 a pound on lesser coffee.
Of course, for a small fee, I'll let you use my super-duper protocol that offers virtually unlimited bandwidth - a buttzillion times faster than DSL.. it's called UDP. (UDP is very low overhead, no transmission windows, or ACK's -- or guarantees of being received.. You can stuff them onto a line as fast as it will take them.)
Yeah, but then you'll really want to be familiar with these new TCP congestion models since you'll need to implement something. A few years ago I had to connect a few computers on a relatively fat, but very noisy pipe, after realizing TCP was using a tiny fraction of the pipe I switched to UDP. Which led to 2 months of reimplementing TCP (cuz you really can't stuff packets as fast as it will take it) with a little FEC (forward error correction to deal) thrown in to deal with the noisyness. It was a good review of old signals and systems fundamentals, but if I had to do it over again I'd have simply refused to work with the supercomputer until they rewired my network connection to it. I can't imagine that would have taken a quarter of the time. IANANE, if I were, I might have enjoyed implementing a network protocol.
Nobody's twisting your arm _forcing_ you to be an American citizen, therefore the draft is voluntary.
Not everyone has the option to take up another citizenship. Some people are shit out of luck in that department. Though I think I would enjoy my time in prison for refusing a draft; that's the most honorable way out of a compulsary service requirement. No one can accuse you of joining the national guard to get out of a draft if you spend a few years in the hole for your country. There is simply no other way to emerge from a period of unjust war with your honor completely intact. You can try to repair it after serving in the military like Kerry did, but that's just window dressing. Every innocent man, woman and child your service killed will never come back. You have to refuse service and refuse taxes and do your jail time for it, until your country is out of the mess, if you want to be able to say you are a patriot without further dishonoring yourself with a lie.
Not that I'm much for nationalism these days, I would go 'hiking in Maine' long before my number came up.
Yup, I've yet to vote for a presidential candidate that won. This may be the year, Bush turned out to be much worse than I could have possibly imagined (I voted third party last few times, not that my vote matters in New York). My only fear is that he may dump Ashcroft and 'find' Osama a few days before the election. I don't think that would make people vote for him, but might depress turn out against him.
I'm not a big fan of Kerry, in other years I would probably vote against him. But man I'd rather vote for O.J. than Bush, Jr. for president.
Even implementing hardware to prevent execution of non-executable code is insufficient, since all you do then is point at some executable code that can be exploited (e.g. -- buffer overflow to point at system(), and then execute your commands that way).
Some mothers can not produce milk, or not enough milk for their infant. We used to have wet nurses, but there is a problem there. The milk changes as the child grows, so milk from someone whose been nursing for 3 years is not as good as the milk of a mother that has just given birth for an infant. So formula is a good thing, it can suppliment the mother who can not produce any or enough milk, and it's better than the alternative in many cases. We also keep improving it as we find more and more things it's missing. It's only been a hundred and thirty years since it was invented, in another few hundred years it may be equal to real mothers milk. Today every mother knows mother's milk is better, hence the breast pumps and the like. There are even drugs to help a mother produce more milk when she can't keep up. Still formula fills a niche.
I thought the screaming about powerplant pollutants were PCBs and not mercury?
There is a big case in New York on PCB's, but part of the reason is that GE was a manufacturer and spilled shitloads of excess production into the river. Mercury is a big problem everywhere. It's used in all kinds of industrial processes, while PCBs are no-longer used in new transformers and no longer mass produced. Even the Atlantic Ocean as a whole has too much mercury. Fortunately the South Pacific is still relatively safe, you can eat several fish a month from South America, while one a month is a safer figure from the Atlantic (a little more, depending on the diet of the fish, vegeterian fish are safer, as are non-bottomdwelers (i.e. not cod)). Farmed fishing is switching to feeds from South America, of course this is a bit of a problem as Peru has overfished sardines to near extinction there and Chile has exhausted their Chilean Sea Bass stocks. Incidentally the Peruvian fishmeal factory (singular) is located in a national park, where it's effects have been studied by very depressed park rangers.
Fishing quotas are one area of law where international government could be a godsend. The Peruvian scientists very much want Icelandic style resaleble fishing quotas, but the government rightly argues any fish stocks Peru doesn't plunder will be caught by Japanese and Russian trawlers. They don't have the money to police their sea like China or Iceland does. America just doesn't have an interest in policing it seas, instead we just buy fishermans' boats and give them welfare, they are not important enough to protect.
Even implementing hardware to prevent execution of non-executable code is insufficient, since all you do then is point at some executable code that can be exploited (e.g. -- buffer overflow to point at system(), and then execute your commands that way).
You could create seperate data and return address stacks. You could write a very simple OS coupled with a very simple processor to create a much more hardened system. This might not be the highest performing OS. It would also have to be an RTOS to harden it against CPU hogging. But it's not impossible, it's just a question of whether leaving the greater software ecosystem is worth the cost in duplicated effort. For networking gear it might be.
The article is pretty bad though, it sounds like they are just tossing around technical jargon, without knowing what the words mean.
The way I see it, is that buffer overflow exploits work when a buffer is defined too small for the amount of data used to fill it. yes.
The data 'overflows' into a region of memory that contains program code, the processor is currently executing. No, usually not. What you usually do is write past a buffer on the stack, until you reach the function's return pointer, then you overwrite that with the location of your own code. You can place this code either before or after the new return pointer, but the catch is that the stack must be marked as executable for you to run this code. Usually it is not possible to write into a region that contains program code with an overflow, those pages are in read-only pages/segments. (I'm assuming the text segments are read-only in XP, I may be wrong.)
In order to exploit a buffer overflow when the stack is in a non-executable page/segment you must find the code you need within the existing program or in the operating system, or in some other place marked executable. This can be much harder than just sticking your own code in there. However, if you just want to do a denial of service a non-executable stack is not a problem. Also a clever hacker can find those bits of useful code within a static binary or in the OS, or even within the normal course of execution by just stuffing the wrong data on to the stack. So compiling your own executables and operating system with random offsets is still a good idea, and it's an even better idea to fix the buffer overflows in the first place.
Still this is a very good idea, it's way too easy to exploit buffer overflows with an executable stack. It makes cracking just a cookie cutter operation. 1. find any overflow. 2. select one of many prewritten rootkit startups 3. profit. With page/segment protection it becomes 1. find an overflow. 2. ???? 3. profit.
JIT can still work, you just memmap/malloc the buffers for the code and then mark them as executable, instead of allocating little bits of code on the stack. This is probably already done this way in Java JIT engines, they might need to do a cleanup to make sure all the pages are allocated and marked properly.
Are there any limits on what you can put on a license? Or limits on the limits you can put on a customer/user so that s/he can _use_ the product s/he legally obtained/paid for (usage usually involves making copies of the software - coz it has to be copied somewhere - RAM etc)?
In the USA, you don't need a license to make a copy required to use the work. Copying a program into core is explicitly stated as an example in the US code.
Even if they had the authority to seize all the data, and it wouldn't surprise me if they in fact did not, they're MORONS for seizing everything. It's much easier to copy the data from on-site than to relocate everything and set it up, and THEN dump the data. It's also a lot less expensive. It also doesn't spread ill will among people who are helping your investigation.
I'm not surprised. I had a friend that had his machine hacked and had some threats left on his machine. He had hosted some political content. He called the FBI for help and talked to a reasonable sounding agent. Then they came to inspect his computer, after about an hour of looking around they wanted to take his computer with them. They didn't ask if they could copy the drive or anything of his files, but when he balked at the request to take his computer away they started accusing him hiding child porn. They never followed up on the case after he refused to have his computer diagnosed for an indeterminate time.
My guess is that the FBI is not being evil, they are just completely unqualified to deal with crimes involving computers. The solution might be to pass a rule that they must make a copies of the hard drives on site and give the victim/host/suspect a 2nd copy of the drives in a lockbox in addition to the original. This way they can't do any funny business that takes very long, and there is another copy to prove they didn't do any tampering off site. And this way their incompetence only costs us money not additional pain for the victims of crime or FBI investigations. If we had a legitamite government at this time I might even send them a letter suggesting such a thoughtful policy.
Restart X? whatever for? I often run two different X sessions on my system, with different configurations. startx --:1
I'm running two X servers right now(vt7 and vt8), but see the nvidia driver doesn't play well with other drivers for the same hardware. They are good as far as they go, but even now they are by no means open source quality.
You know, you CAN use the open-source NV-drivers that ship with Xfree. Or you could use the standard VESA-drivers. So it's not like you are forced to use those drivers. I for one haven't had any problems with NV-drivers.
I used to do this. I'm a graphics programmer, but I would run the nv driver until I actually needed to test something, then I would restart X with the nvidia driver. Thankfully the stability has of the drivers has improved over the years. But it sure did impact my development cycle when a test involved restarting X. I wish they would at least break up the proprietery stuff into smaller functional blocks so we could replace/fix just the broken parts when it was needed.
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains. That energy comes from fossil fuels. Ethanol is not an energy source; it is a different way to store energy, and not a particularly efficient one.
This is true in the USA. But Brazil uses much less energy to produce ethenol than they create. We will eventually reform our corporate wellfare programs to exclude farmers, and then we will quickly return to the high efficiency our farmers used to be known for, or we will buy our energy and food from better producers.
Re:But if it wasn't for the smoke...
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Hack Your Car
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Correct, catalytic converter removal will mess with emissions. I have never seen a catless car pass emissions, though I am sure it is possible with careful enough tuning (tho the car would probably run hot from the leanness necessary to burn enough the fuel to pass).
I had a car pass without the catalytic converter, it was an older car under less stringent emissions requirement, and it involved getting the mechanic to tune it with an emissions tester in the tailpipe. But it can be done, and yes it ran a little hot. (I was a busy and cheap high school student and some bridge construction material had ripped off my entire exhaust system, killing the cat in the process. The mechanic was a family friend.)
Mac standard total-system gamma is 1.8, asspipe. SGI is about 1.5. CRT gamma is 2.5.
Your numbers are right buttplug. But you miss the point. Macs have a lookup table before you get to the actual CRT, actually the gamma correction is 0.45 combine this with the CRT gamma of 2.5 and you get about 1.8 effective gamma in the framebuffer to CRT map (Even stupider than the 1.0 I gave it in my explination). But this is stupid because it happens after the 8 bit bottleneck. SGI can get away with even more gamma correction because they use 12 bits. The best thing for image quality is to do all your math with more bits and just do your own gamma correction before you send it to the display device.
I still can't figure out why the gamma on the PC and the Mac are so far apart. Hell, the gamma on a windows system is much lower than a Mac and even darker than a CRT TV!!!
The Gamma on Macs has traditionally been 1.0, this is good because a color value of 64 is half as bright as 128. This is really bad because a value of 1 is half as bright as 2. This results in stairstepping in dark areas of images. There is a standard for images in browsers BTW, any reasonable browser will show images at the same brightness. It comes down to the old Mac vs. PC thing, Mac's made things simple at a cost to quality and PC's did things right at a cost to ease of use. SGI's did both at a cost in dollars (they used 12 bits instead of 8 bits per channel, so you could have a gamma of 1.0 but still have good quality images, or not if you wanted great images to output to film).
Oh, LCD's are linear (gamma 1.0) while Monitors are not (1.7) so on an 8 bit per channel LCD you don't lose anything with the 1.0 gamma on Macs, since all the darks suck no matter what. With 12 bits, it again doesn't matter. That said 3 out of 5 screens I use regularly are LCDs, they take up less space and weigh a little less to boot.
But you can feel sick due to a flu shot, or any other vacination for that matter. The whole point is to mobilize your immune system against whatever you are getting vacinated for. So if you get a temperature, the sniffles, etc. That is perfectly normal. You are not sick if this is the flu shot, this response is what you want, it means that your immune system is now primed and ready to deal with the real thing.
There are vacinations that really can make you sick and even kill you, like the most common form of the Polio vaccine and the only current form of the Smallpox vaccine. These use less potent relatives of the more dangerous virus to innoculate. This is good in that the vaccine is actually contagious so you get the people you missed innuculated too, and bad in that you end up killing or debilitating a bunch of people who might have otherwise lived happy lives. The flu vaccine uses killed virus so unless something went horribly wrong you will not have a colony living within you. Polio and Smallpox are so deadly that it is/was considered a good risk to use the more potent live vaccine. This is why our service members are instructed not to spend too much time with their significant others for a few weeks after they get some of their shots. Why risk killing people when you don't have to?
I've never used Mandrake but didn't it start out as a version of RedHat compiled for the Pentium instead of the 486?
First it was based off debian. The real motivation was KDE. Of course the first Mandrake I used was based off Redhat and I used Gnome. It was compiled for i586, but more importantly for me as a developer, it had more up to date packages. This meant I only had to upgrade the components I was working on and not every library it depended on. I still use Mandrake at work, but at home where I do more tweaking I use Gentoo, which is too bleading edge for day-to-day, but great for developing for newish hardware. I tried Gentoo on my laptop, but while it was faster, it was too much work to keep up to date, so I went back to Mandrake. My main box at home just runs a script every night to keep up to date, it wouldn't be a big deal if it were rooted so I sleep well at night.
Yet, patents are something we just can't get rid of. Think of the medicine industry. To get a new drug, they have to do lots of research and testing...
The drug industry is a beast quite unlike anything else. It should be handled without harming everyone else along the way. Perhaps we could link it's monopolies to the approval process. If a company is the first to get a drug approved it could be given a license to be the only producer for a fixed number of years. It could even be evaluated based on the competitive environment. If there are no similar drugs available they could be given a 10 year license with compulsory percentage of consumer cost based licensing to generic companies (to assure efficient manufacture), if there are similar drugs a 3 year license but with no need to license to others. The grant could be lowered if the drug is based primarily of the research of others (such as university research).
PS1 I don't know if this could be done under our current constitution though, "general welfare" has a hard time containing the FDA as it is. Perhaps if the patent granting power were moved to the FDA?
PS2 The '95 WTO agreement is also at odds with this more reasonable approach, but that PoS needs to be scrapped anyway, European elites be damned. Patents are choking the lifeblood of the economy.
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This is the reason why many advocate the "proportional" system. I dislike "proportional" voting in the primary legislative forum because I think that it is very important to have a connection with _my_ representative in the legislative house.
What about a hybrid system? One example might be one that gives the person with the most votes in any district a seat, and then allocates additional floating seats to the largest vote getters in each party to make the total number of representitives closer to the will of the voters. This still slightly biases for the larger parties in each district, but doesn't waste third/fourth party votes if you prefer voting your heart over getting the best of the two evils in the major parties.
No change will happen with either major party, both of them killed it in cities across the country by either saying it allowed blacks or communist jews to be elected, depending on the local fear profile. The only chance of reform is to either propel a new party into office on a reform platform or a traditional revolution. The former is more likely and less bloody, a new party has replaced an earlier party in the past, many attempted revolutions in the USA have been violently crushed. But, you don't hear much about Whigs these days in the USA. I think a two pronged attack might work best because we are so divided these days. We need one party on the "left" and one party on the "right" that both have this one thing in common, a desire and platform for a fair vote.
I personally want a more referendum based system, but not while the media is so poor. I think a better government for 30-40 years might create an environment where reporters are retrained to investigate the truth and report it. I don't understand why exactly this is but newspapers and sometimes even TV seem to be much better in PR systems than winner takes all systems like ours.
BTW I do like the instant runoff ballot, but only for positions like president and mayor, for a legislative body their views are more important than their personal likability. Of course, it does matter which is why you pick the top vote getters in each party.
1) Gore is the one that took the battle to the courts after Florida was ready to declare Bush the winner.
2) The Gore campaign wanted votes counted differently for areas where they felt they didn't get the vote they expected. The Supremes [of Florida] ruled simply that if there was to be a recount, ALL votes in the entire state would have to be recounted using the same standards (i.e. was a hanging "chad" a vote).
3) The Bush Sr./Reagan Supremes in a federal power grab prevented the Florida Supremes' fair recount giving Bush Jr. the electoral votes of Florida.
4) A union of Newspapers performed the count later and found that if the Florida's votes had been counted Gore we would have known Florida should have sent his electors instead of Bush's to the convention.
5) The government's electoral fraud commission came out with a report that let us know over 45,000 Democrats and 5,000 republicans were illegaly prevented from voting in that election. And we learned the chad machines were reprogrammed in Talahase to swallow over and undervotes in poor districts, while the same machines sent to more republican districts were programmed to spit them out to allow a revote.
6) Newspapers buried the news of massive fraud in the election in what we can only believe was a misguided attempt to rally behind the "president".
7) The Republican controlled house did not impeach the Bush, and the Justice Department did not convict the fellons involved.
I didn't vote for Gore and voted against Clinton in earlier elections. I even accused my Democrat friends of whining. But when the facts came out I was and remain furious. I think Gore proved he didn't deserve the presidency with his pussy footing and Bush should be in prison or hanged, depending on your POV with respect to treason. In an ideal world the House would have impeached him and appointed some level headed Republican in his place, we would all be better off for it.
Even if Bush had been a good president or at least a not so horrible president, JFK comes to mind, I still would have prefered he lay 6ft under. Our democracy is more important than any one man.
2) Sign your name IN PENCIL.
This is probably not legal in your jurisdiction. I know it's not in New York City because I noticed it and one of the poll workers went apeshit when he realized that table had been making people sign in with a pencil. He also gave me a pen.
But it was probably just an oversight of the poll worker in both our cases.
Did you know that the Diebold machine already have a printer installed?
I didn't think so.
Nice, but not enough. See if I can't see what it printed the screen can show me that I voted for "Ralph Nader"* but print "George W. Bush" on the receipt inside the metal cabinet.
Clever, no?
Of course just turning this on would allow random inspections by the poll workers, they could check their own votes, and allow random inspections by voters. A clever programmer could get around this, just change votes at times when lots of people are voting and not in the first hour after the first vote. Most likely poll workers will vote in the morning, and if not they are likely not to be voting and checking the receipt when there is a long queue of people waiting to use the machine. At least there would be a miniscule risk to the fixer's candidate of getting caught.
If I were in California I would have a hard time believing anyone that told me my vote would be counted. Thank goodness I live in New York where our electoral system guarantees that my vote is worthless and hence will likely be counted.
* I do not plan to vote for Ralph, it's just an example.
BTW Where are the class action suits? I know some of these governmental entitees have sovereign immunity, but Diebold is a big juicy target for the class of one hundred million disenfranchised voters, as are some of the cities involved in this mess. There seems to be plenty of evidence of uncredible levels of incompetence on every level. It also seems like a pretty jury friendly case, most states use their lists of registered voters as the main source for locating jury members.
[A] good explanation for it that I read at osnews.com was that the XFree86 and the Distros (commercial and community alike) started to increasingly have differences in priorities and culture. The license change was a like message from XFree86 to the distros that they didn't care one way or another for their support. The distros response is logical.
Yup, there is only one development team that is more of a pain in the ass than XFree86. But in mplayer's case they actually have kept up with the evolving needs of their users and developers. XFree86 seems to have been stuck in a timewarp for a few years now. That's not to belittle the past accomplishements, but standing still is not an option. The licensing change is just something concrete to point to when recruiting developers for your fork. I for one have been waiting for a good fork for a few years... um, now I gotta get back to coding... and then deciding which fork to patch...
Sorry, you don't qualify for coffee snob status. I'm not being judgemental here--just check out the alt.coffee.geek newsgroup and you'll see what I mean
Yeah, I don't really think of myself as a coffee snob. But, to the people who might think of drinking Folgers I certainly am. I sometimes feel like a coffee emisary, a friend of mine said she didn't like coffee so I brought her some organically grown Peruvian coffee from Cafe Zeta after convincing the manager to roast it hours before my flight. A few months later I get an e-mail from Alaska pleading with me to overnight some Jamaica Blue Mountain to her (not my favorite coffee, but that certainly qualifies as a convert, no?)
BTW I can't get a host name lookup on birdsandbeans.ca, are they censored by the USA for some reason, or is it just an internet hickup?
There is a simple option for those that don't get official permission from the Mozilla Foundation to use the trademarked artwork.
A simple "--enable-official-branding" flag can be used when building to include the official artwork. Otherwise, generic versions of the artwork are included (which are free/open).
This seems like a good compromise. I hope you also let the distributions use FireFox or in the icon names, such as "FireFox (Mandrake)" or "FireFox (Debian ed.)"
My main concern is for "Mozilla Coffee" though. This is the best mail order coffee I've tried, I doubt any other dealers can offer that level of quality. I've ordered a few other coffies online from vendors such as Gevalia, Cafe Britt, and my SO got some Gourmet Garage coffee with a donation to the local NPR station. These were all undrinkable, we tossed it all. But I put in a standing order for the Mozilla Coffee from R.J. Tarpleys, it's not quite as good as the same day roasted stuff I get from my local roaster, but it's good and they tell me some of the proceeds go to Mozilla. If you can get a fair licensing deal that keeps the quality as high, I implore you to make a US distributor excemption for them. Roasted coffee doesn't last many days, no one else online seems to be able to deliver it still fresh enough to drink.
I may be a coffee snob in your estimation, but you will profit more from 25 cents a pound on coffee I can drink than $2 a pound on lesser coffee.
Of course, for a small fee, I'll let you use my super-duper protocol that offers virtually unlimited bandwidth - a buttzillion times faster than DSL.. it's called UDP. (UDP is very low overhead, no transmission windows, or ACK's -- or guarantees of being received.. You can stuff them onto a line as fast as it will take them.)
Yeah, but then you'll really want to be familiar with these new TCP congestion models since you'll need to implement something. A few years ago I had to connect a few computers on a relatively fat, but very noisy pipe, after realizing TCP was using a tiny fraction of the pipe I switched to UDP. Which led to 2 months of reimplementing TCP (cuz you really can't stuff packets as fast as it will take it) with a little FEC (forward error correction to deal) thrown in to deal with the noisyness. It was a good review of old signals and systems fundamentals, but if I had to do it over again I'd have simply refused to work with the supercomputer until they rewired my network connection to it. I can't imagine that would have taken a quarter of the time. IANANE, if I were, I might have enjoyed implementing a network protocol.
Nobody's twisting your arm _forcing_ you to be an American citizen, therefore the draft is voluntary.
Not everyone has the option to take up another citizenship. Some people are shit out of luck in that department. Though I think I would enjoy my time in prison for refusing a draft; that's the most honorable way out of a compulsary service requirement. No one can accuse you of joining the national guard to get out of a draft if you spend a few years in the hole for your country. There is simply no other way to emerge from a period of unjust war with your honor completely intact. You can try to repair it after serving in the military like Kerry did, but that's just window dressing. Every innocent man, woman and child your service killed will never come back. You have to refuse service and refuse taxes and do your jail time for it, until your country is out of the mess, if you want to be able to say you are a patriot without further dishonoring yourself with a lie.
Not that I'm much for nationalism these days, I would go 'hiking in Maine' long before my number came up.
Yup, I've yet to vote for a presidential candidate that won. This may be the year, Bush turned out to be much worse than I could have possibly imagined (I voted third party last few times, not that my vote matters in New York). My only fear is that he may dump Ashcroft and 'find' Osama a few days before the election. I don't think that would make people vote for him, but might depress turn out against him.
I'm not a big fan of Kerry, in other years I would probably vote against him. But man I'd rather vote for O.J. than Bush, Jr. for president.
Even implementing hardware to prevent execution of non-executable code is insufficient, since all you do then is point at some executable code that can be exploited (e.g. -- buffer overflow to point at system(), and then execute your commands that way).
Some mothers can not produce milk, or not enough milk for their infant. We used to have wet nurses, but there is a problem there. The milk changes as the child grows, so milk from someone whose been nursing for 3 years is not as good as the milk of a mother that has just given birth for an infant. So formula is a good thing, it can suppliment the mother who can not produce any or enough milk, and it's better than the alternative in many cases. We also keep improving it as we find more and more things it's missing. It's only been a hundred and thirty years since it was invented, in another few hundred years it may be equal to real mothers milk. Today every mother knows mother's milk is better, hence the breast pumps and the like. There are even drugs to help a mother produce more milk when she can't keep up. Still formula fills a niche.
I thought the screaming about powerplant pollutants were PCBs and not mercury?
There is a big case in New York on PCB's, but part of the reason is that GE was a manufacturer and spilled shitloads of excess production into the river. Mercury is a big problem everywhere. It's used in all kinds of industrial processes, while PCBs are no-longer used in new transformers and no longer mass produced. Even the Atlantic Ocean as a whole has too much mercury. Fortunately the South Pacific is still relatively safe, you can eat several fish a month from South America, while one a month is a safer figure from the Atlantic (a little more, depending on the diet of the fish, vegeterian fish are safer, as are non-bottomdwelers (i.e. not cod)). Farmed fishing is switching to feeds from South America, of course this is a bit of a problem as Peru has overfished sardines to near extinction there and Chile has exhausted their Chilean Sea Bass stocks. Incidentally the Peruvian fishmeal factory (singular) is located in a national park, where it's effects have been studied by very depressed park rangers.
Fishing quotas are one area of law where international government could be a godsend. The Peruvian scientists very much want Icelandic style resaleble fishing quotas, but the government rightly argues any fish stocks Peru doesn't plunder will be caught by Japanese and Russian trawlers. They don't have the money to police their sea like China or Iceland does. America just doesn't have an interest in policing it seas, instead we just buy fishermans' boats and give them welfare, they are not important enough to protect.
Even implementing hardware to prevent execution of non-executable code is insufficient, since all you do then is point at some executable code that can be exploited (e.g. -- buffer overflow to point at system(), and then execute your commands that way).
You could create seperate data and return address stacks. You could write a very simple OS coupled with a very simple processor to create a much more hardened system. This might not be the highest performing OS. It would also have to be an RTOS to harden it against CPU hogging. But it's not impossible, it's just a question of whether leaving the greater software ecosystem is worth the cost in duplicated effort. For networking gear it might be.
The article is pretty bad though, it sounds like they are just tossing around technical jargon, without knowing what the words mean.
The way I see it, is that buffer overflow exploits work when a buffer is defined too small for the amount of data used to fill it.
yes.
The data 'overflows' into a region of memory that contains program code, the processor is currently executing.
No, usually not. What you usually do is write past a buffer on the stack, until you reach the function's return pointer, then you overwrite that with the location
of your own code. You can place this code either before or after the new return pointer, but the catch is that the stack must be marked as executable for you to run this code. Usually it is not possible to write into a region that contains program code with an overflow, those pages are in read-only pages/segments. (I'm assuming the text segments are read-only in XP, I may be wrong.)
In order to exploit a buffer overflow when the stack is in a non-executable page/segment you must find the code you need within the existing program or in the operating system, or in some other place marked executable. This can be much harder than just sticking your own code in there. However, if you just want to do a denial of service a non-executable stack is not a problem. Also a clever hacker can find those bits of useful code within a static binary or in the OS, or even within the normal course of execution by just stuffing the wrong data on to the stack. So compiling your own executables and operating system with random offsets is still a good idea, and it's an even better idea to fix the buffer overflows in the first place.
Still this is a very good idea, it's way too easy to exploit buffer overflows with an executable stack. It makes cracking just a cookie cutter operation. 1. find any overflow. 2. select one of many prewritten rootkit startups 3. profit. With page/segment protection it becomes 1. find an overflow. 2. ???? 3. profit.
JIT can still work, you just memmap/malloc the buffers for the code and then mark them as executable, instead of allocating little bits of code on the stack. This is probably already done this way in Java JIT engines, they might need to do a cleanup to make sure all the pages are allocated and marked properly.
Are there any limits on what you can put on a license? Or limits on the limits you can put on a customer/user so that s/he can _use_ the product s/he legally obtained/paid for (usage usually involves making copies of the software - coz it has to be copied somewhere - RAM etc)?
In the USA, you don't need a license to make a copy required to use the work. Copying a program into core is explicitly stated as an example in the US code.
Even if they had the authority to seize all the data, and it wouldn't surprise me if they in fact did not, they're MORONS for seizing everything. It's much easier to copy the data from on-site than to relocate everything and set it up, and THEN dump the data. It's also a lot less expensive. It also doesn't spread ill will among people who are helping your investigation.
I'm not surprised. I had a friend that had his machine hacked and had some threats left on his machine. He had hosted some political content. He called the FBI for help and talked to a reasonable sounding agent. Then they came to inspect his computer, after about an hour of looking around they wanted to take his computer with them. They didn't ask if they could copy the drive or anything of his files, but when he balked at the request to take his computer away they started accusing him hiding child porn. They never followed up on the case after he refused to have his computer diagnosed for an indeterminate time.
My guess is that the FBI is not being evil, they are just completely unqualified to deal with crimes involving computers. The solution might be to pass a rule that they must make a copies of the hard drives on site and give the victim/host/suspect a 2nd copy of the drives in a lockbox in addition to the original. This way they can't do any funny business that takes very long, and there is another copy to prove they didn't do any tampering off site. And this way their incompetence only costs us money not additional pain for the victims of crime or FBI investigations. If we had a legitamite government at this time I might even send them a letter suggesting such a thoughtful policy.
Restart X? whatever for? I often run two different X sessions on my system, with different configurations. :1
startx --
I'm running two X servers right now(vt7 and vt8), but see the nvidia driver doesn't play well with other drivers for the same hardware. They are good as far as they go, but even now they are by no means open source quality.
You know, you CAN use the open-source NV-drivers that ship with Xfree. Or you could use the standard VESA-drivers. So it's not like you are forced to use those drivers. I for one haven't had any problems with NV-drivers.
I used to do this. I'm a graphics programmer, but I would run the nv driver until I actually needed to test something, then I would restart X with the nvidia driver. Thankfully the stability has of the drivers has improved over the years. But it sure did impact my development cycle when a test involved restarting X. I wish they would at least break up the proprietery stuff into smaller functional blocks so we could replace/fix just the broken parts when it was needed.
It most certainly does use fossil fuels.
Ethanol takes energy to make. Lots of energy, possibly more than it contains. That energy comes from fossil fuels. Ethanol is not an energy source; it is a different way to store energy, and not a particularly efficient one.
This is true in the USA. But Brazil uses much less energy to produce ethenol than they create. We will eventually reform our corporate wellfare programs to exclude farmers, and then we will quickly return to the high efficiency our farmers used to be known for, or we will buy our energy and food from better producers.
Correct, catalytic converter removal will mess with emissions. I have never seen a catless car pass emissions, though I am sure it is possible with careful enough tuning (tho the car would probably run hot from the leanness necessary to burn enough the fuel to pass).
I had a car pass without the catalytic converter, it was an older car under less stringent emissions requirement, and it involved getting the mechanic to tune it with an emissions tester in the tailpipe. But it can be done, and yes it ran a little hot. (I was a busy and cheap high school student and some bridge construction material had ripped off my entire exhaust system, killing the cat in the process. The mechanic was a family friend.)
Mac standard total-system gamma is 1.8, asspipe. SGI is about 1.5. CRT gamma is 2.5.
Your numbers are right buttplug. But you miss the point. Macs have a lookup table before you get to the actual CRT, actually the gamma correction is 0.45 combine this with the CRT gamma of 2.5 and you get about 1.8 effective gamma in the framebuffer to CRT map (Even stupider than the 1.0 I gave it in my explination). But this is stupid because it happens after the 8 bit bottleneck. SGI can get away with even more gamma correction because they use 12 bits. The best thing for image quality is to do all your math with more bits and just do your own gamma correction before you send it to the display device.
I still can't figure out why the gamma on the PC and the Mac are so far apart. Hell, the gamma on a windows system is much lower than a Mac and even darker than a CRT TV!!!
The Gamma on Macs has traditionally been 1.0, this is good because a color value of 64 is half as bright as 128. This is really bad because a value of 1 is half as bright as 2. This results in stairstepping in dark areas of images. There is a standard for images in browsers BTW, any reasonable browser will show images at the same brightness. It comes down to the old Mac vs. PC thing, Mac's made things simple at a cost to quality and PC's did things right at a cost to ease of use. SGI's did both at a cost in dollars (they used 12 bits instead of 8 bits per channel, so you could have a gamma of 1.0 but still have good quality images, or not if you wanted great images to output to film).
Oh, LCD's are linear (gamma 1.0) while Monitors are not (1.7) so on an 8 bit per channel LCD you don't lose anything with the 1.0 gamma on Macs, since all the darks suck no matter what. With 12 bits, it again doesn't matter. That said 3 out of 5 screens I use regularly are LCDs, they take up less space and weigh a little less to boot.
You can't get sick from the flu shot.
But you can feel sick due to a flu shot, or any other vacination for that matter. The whole point is to mobilize your immune system against whatever you are getting vacinated for. So if you get a temperature, the sniffles, etc. That is perfectly normal. You are not sick if this is the flu shot, this response is what you want, it means that your immune system is now primed and ready to deal with the real thing.
There are vacinations that really can make you sick and even kill you, like the most common form of the Polio vaccine and the only current form of the Smallpox vaccine. These use less potent relatives of the more dangerous virus to innoculate. This is good in that the vaccine is actually contagious so you get the people you missed innuculated too, and bad in that you end up killing or debilitating a bunch of people who might have otherwise lived happy lives. The flu vaccine uses killed virus so unless something went horribly wrong you will not have a colony living within you. Polio and Smallpox are so deadly that it is/was considered a good risk to use the more potent live vaccine. This is why our service members are instructed not to spend too much time with their significant others for a few weeks after they get some of their shots. Why risk killing people when you don't have to?
I've never used Mandrake but didn't it start out as a version of RedHat compiled for the Pentium instead of the 486?
First it was based off debian. The real motivation was KDE. Of course the first Mandrake I used was based off Redhat and I used Gnome. It was compiled for i586, but more importantly for me as a developer, it had more up to date packages. This meant I only had to upgrade the components I was working on and not every library it depended on. I still use Mandrake at work, but at home where I do more tweaking I use Gentoo, which is too bleading edge for day-to-day, but great for developing for newish hardware. I tried Gentoo on my laptop, but while it was faster, it was too much work to keep up to date, so I went back to Mandrake. My main box at home just runs a script every night to keep up to date, it wouldn't be a big deal if it were rooted so I sleep well at night.
Yet, patents are something we just can't get rid of. Think of the medicine industry. To get a new drug, they have to do lots of research and testing...
The drug industry is a beast quite unlike anything else. It should be handled without harming everyone else along the way. Perhaps we could link it's monopolies to the approval process. If a company is the first to get a drug approved it could be given a license to be the only producer for a fixed number of years. It could even be evaluated based on the competitive environment. If there are no similar drugs available they could be given a 10 year license with compulsory percentage of consumer cost based licensing to generic companies (to assure efficient manufacture), if there are similar drugs a 3 year license but with no need to license to others. The grant could be lowered if the drug is based primarily of the research of others (such as university research).
PS1 I don't know if this could be done under our current constitution though, "general welfare" has a hard time containing the FDA as it is. Perhaps if the patent granting power were moved to the FDA?
PS2 The '95 WTO agreement is also at odds with this more reasonable approach, but that PoS needs to be scrapped anyway, European elites be damned. Patents are choking the lifeblood of the economy.