And yes, after the Gates accords pretty much everyone here into Open Source sighed in resignation, but initiatives are still floating around. One district here in Lima (the capital), the district of Barranco, had begun deployment of an Open Source plan to replace its entire software infrastructure. Others were to follow, but i'm not sure how much they accomplished.
What about San Isidro and Miraflores? I would think some of the expats from the US and Europe would have brought Open Source with them.
Also, if Toledo is pro-Microsoft and his approval rating is 11 percent, doesn't it stand to reason that the next president may not support selling out his country in the same way?
Quote from article: "The intensity of each power beam is restricted to 20%, or less, of the intensity of noontime sunlight."
That is an ambiguous sentence there. See if it is 20% of noon-time sunlight per square meter, you might as well just stick a visible light solar cell at the earth site instead of a microwave light solar cell along with a complicated and expensive space based solar cell constructed on the moon. But if they mean your 10 square meter antenna will get the equivalent of 20% of the sunlight hitting the entire earth, then this both makes sense as a plan and makes the parent poster's concern about safety relevant.
It seems like this is just some crackpot here, even an impractically large antenna 50 miles up is going to have a huge beamwidth on earth. Besides, in the USA there is enough farmland only used qualify for half million dollar a year welfare checks that if we repurposed them we could create enough solar heating plants to supply the entire world with hydrogen and electricity and not make a dent in food prices.
nVidia does have an entry supporting 1280x960 out of the box which is commendable because 1280x1024 on a CRT results in non-square pixels and everything gets squashed by about 7% and makes things look weird, IMO
I don't know what kind of graphics you are talking about, but it is really easy to add a stretch to the transform matrix if you are working in 2D or 3D. I don't really use the consumer stuff, but I would assume that they adjust for the monitor dimensions to get the W/H ratio right. In fact I do recall as a kid some programs showed me a circle and asked me if it looked like an ellipse, though they shouldn't need that now that monitors report their physical dimensions to the graphics card.
Er, considering that you're most likely going to be listening to it through a car stereo or headphones, I don't think there's really a need for monstrous, extremely high-quality files.
1/ I know a few people with iPods that do plug them into their stereo, where you can hear that those things are not hi-fi.
2/ It's nice to not have to convert your music to lo-fi to put it on your portable music player.
That said, I wrote a script that converts my hi-fi MP3s (that I'm too lazy to re-encode) and OGGs to lo-fi MP3s as it transfers them to my flash MP3 player... But I paid $35 for it, which is a bit less than my SO paid for her iPod... I expect more from the iPod.
Oh yeah, and Diebold voting system made a debut in that election having effectively removed 18,000 votes from Al Gores totals.
Didn't they correct for this one though? The district where Gore lost by 18,000 votes only had 900 registered voters... More problematic where the democratic Diebold districts where not a single democrat got a single vote. On would presume at least they voted for themselves. Of course there was no audit trail...
The bubble-sheet voting in Leon County Florida where I live works flawlessly, I don't see why the rest can't its just a matter of good equipment. As I assume you are going to require me to define flawlessly I will. When I go to vote, the ballets simply have each canadates name with a bubble right after their name that you fill in, it is a large bubble and each name is well spaced from the next. Anyways once you are done you put the sheet into the scanning machine yourself, and if it is unsure how you voted, or you double voted, it will spit out the ballet so you can make corrections. Or get a new one and try again.
Those machines work great if you want them to. One of the problems with the Florida election was that Kathrin Harris had all those machines sent to Tallahassee where she programmed the ones in mostly Republican Counties to spit out the ballot for revoting if you made a mistake, and to swallow the ballots in mostly Democratic Counties. Same hardware, different software. This was reported widely in the British press, but came out on the back pages of American papers eight months after the election. (Jeb denied he fixed the election so CBS didn't have the guts to report what his workers said they had been ordered to do, until a government investigation confirmed the irregulaties were real. No I didn't vote for Gore, but fixing elections on a grand scale is much more dangerous than any differences between which cracker screews us over this time around.)
I say go back to paper ballots filled out in pen and counted by hand by all the parties involved. Locked boxes, etc. It's not like we have elections often enough for this to be expensive in the scheme of things.
I think this documents the right glibc bug. The 2.6 kernel makes TSC support optional. TSC suffers from clock drift which is especially a problem when using frequency scaling or on NUMA systems. Instead you can use another timer. But glibc compiled for i686 uses TSC without checking for availability, because it assumes all those on that platform would have one. The 2.4 kernels always offered it on that platform so it wasn't a problem, now it is.
Vi would coredump on exit - had to get the latest glibc* from Rawhide.
Were you using a i686 version of glibc? There was an error where it assumed all i686 builds had some kind of timer code that is actually optional on newer hardware. I don't remember the datails, but I think the kernel hackers recomended using the same version of glibc, but compiled for i386, or using a newer glibc where the bug is fixed.
Could this have been part of your RPM problem too? glibc is a rather important library on your typical Linux machine... (I have a Linux box without it, but it's a router & x10 controller machine these days, and runs a 2.2 series kernel anyway.)
(Spitting on the sidewalk was a real issue when women wore long dresses and more people were into chewing tobacco than today, for example.)
Just so you know...those laws weren't about the annoyance of a messy dress. The spitting laws were important before the advent of penicillin due to nasties like TB. You would get all these dead people clogging the streets and people knew that if the infected just did some simple things like wash their hands after using the urinal, flush toilets after use, and to not spit in public then the infection would only spread to their friends and family and not the whole city. Since no one knew if they were carrying a deadly disease until it was too late, everyone needed to observe these common sense disease prevention measures and laws were passed to get the point across.
(I personally think those caught not washing their hands should be denied antibiotics and sent to island hospitals to recover, or not. Antibiotic resistance is screewing the rest of us over...)
I always thought there was something wrong when the investment bankers freak out about "over" production. Now I understand...too many damn communists on Wall Street.
Never really understood Wall Street's reaction to mergers either. When competition is reduced the shares of the companies in those markets should go up, but all their customers shares should plumet at a 5 to 50 times the the value created by the merger, a net loss. But you never hear, "Dow-Jones fell 250 points after Dow-Corning merger announced, Dow down 1 point, Corning up 5 points." I understand that markets aren't perfect because of information poverty (i.e. you don't know exactly what companies depend on Dow products.) Still you would think that amoung capitalists a merger would spread some generalized fear. If they are all closet Marxists who fear of competition though....
Why is electronic voting so tough??? Go in, cast a vote, verify a vote, print the result on a strip of paper, hell, two strips of paper and move on. What's the holdup here??? I don't get it.
The problem is that the Diebold has promised to deliver the next election to the Republicans. If they are required to print a verifiable ballot or open their systems up for auditing there is no way to make sure the electorate doesn't just vote for the wrong candidate. They made a promise and accepted the huge payments that followed, they have to deliver or they could be accused of fraud.
The only solution is to provide enough bandwidth. Sooner or later a limit on the amount of traffic will be reached as nobody is going to drive for more than 24 hours/day. That depends a little on where you live. If everyone in New York wanted to drive to work we would need 20 stories of roads. That's taller than some buildings. The cars would also have to be electric unless we all wanted to wear scuba gear. That would certainly bring up the cost, as would the overwater level switching interchanges.
If you live in a still rural area or an expanding suburb then sure more roads aren't a bad solution. And a 3-4 story road isn't a big problem if you're traveling large distances either, build it and they will come. =)
A nation founded by people seeking to worship God free from persecution.
Nope, the pilgrims came late to the party. Many of the people who came before them were godless heathens. Even some of the founders weren't to fond of all the god sillyness. Ironically, it was those god worshiping Quakers that fought to make our constitution a secular one. They had been persecuted in New York by Peter Stuyvesant, in part for harboring Jews and Muslims when Stuy went on his witchhunt. When his bosses learned of the episode they told him they established the colony to make money and if he couldn't leave his religion at the door they would replace him. If you told Franklin that a pledge of allegiance was now done in public schools he would spin furiously in his grave.
BTW I don't like the pledge in schools, but religion isn't even near the main reason. When I came to this country and was told to "pledge allegiance" I didn't even speak the language. That's even more meaningless than your standard enforced pledge. But it's not that either. We live in a democracy, and a pledge of allegiance has no place in a democracy. This is my country and I have a moral duty to help my countrymen destroy the flag and it's government if it does not follow our wishes. The pledge undermines the teaching of that duty. Teaching our children to rule their government is the most important function of our schools.
There was a discussion of keyboard problems on the kernel mailing list. You might want to read it and see what was discussed and whether it jibes with your experience, and to see if any proposed fixes work for you. These are the types of problems Linus is still accepting patches for.
As another poster wrote, todays terrorists are tomorrows heroes. Yes, the women in the Suffrage movement were considered to be terrorists... and indeed many of their actions would get them labelled as terrorists today.
I think people need to remember this. Both when considering someone for hero worship and when condemning today's terrorists. A bit of perspective can do a world of good, a bit of time tends to provide it, lets try to keep the number of deaths low and respect the balance between safety and freedom that we've painfully constructed, most of it in much scarrier times but also with much more thought.
The people that signed big made a mistake. Some genuinely did not understand the ramifactions, others might have, but were too greedy to care.
My favorite band "Pee Shy" signed up with a small label that promoted them and generally treated them well and got their music sold to people like me. Then the label was bought by one of the big RIAA labels and all of a sudden no one at the label knew they existed but their contract said they had to make more CD's that the label approved of before they could move on. After about a year the band's leader gave up on music and the rest of the band made a valiant effort to start a new band "Three Wheeler" that was now just missing something, like the fourth member. They were maybe gullible to sign a multi-album deal, but from where they sat at the time it made sense. I'm pretty sure they weren't just out to make a killing with the type of music they played but sure they wanted a wider audience, and this was before Napster so there you go. I like to have a wide audience for my software, I don't see anything wrong with that.
What's sad is that labels like Ani DiFranco's "Righteous Babe Records" that were formed because of the corruption in the industry in the end join the RIAA and play the corrupt game required to get their CD's into the Virgin Megastores. I don't think this guy will go that way, and by putting everything out in the open like he has and not making the artist's sign over their copyrights he might just end up doing the right thing 10 years from now and not just today for the publicity. I think we've seen with book publishers like O'Reilly that a moral person at the core of a company can end up doing more good than outside observers have the right to expect. (* a friend of mine published a book with O'Reilly and was treated like a human being throughout the whole process).
I don't get how they intend to limit the downloads to just Mandrake Club members. Its a lot easier to pass on a few hundred KB.torrent file than ISOs.
I think this is only going to be for a couple days. It's like the 'secret' Mandrake mirrors that they give members an urpmi string to. There is nothing preventing a non-member from discovering one of them and using it, except Mandrake asks their club members not to publish the addresses. I'm sure the bittorrent thing will be like that too, they will publish a.torrent file and ask us not to reveal it to the world. Then a few days later when we've all got copies they release it to the general public and not only do we serve as big huge mirror for the newbies but are also not suffereing 10KB/s downloads since we already have the iso's.
Who said the library has to be dynamically loaded? I know this is kinda of a big secret that maybe I'm not supposed to be sharing but it is possible to statically link against a library.
This doesn't solve the entire problem either. Whatever statically links in GPG would also have to lock pages, which might mean it needs SUID. It is also considered a bad idea in security to have a program any bigger than the absolute minimum size. As OpenSSH has shown lately, even when you do make a program tiny it can still have a flaw. And, as portable OpenSSH has shown, making the program any bigger can introduce even more flaws. If you statically link GPG you have to ensure that not only is GPG perfect, but so is whatever you are linking it into. It is safer to write small programs each of which is robust and then use them together in such a way that you meet your overall security goals. On a workstation it maybe sufficient to ensure that whatever you send out to the internet is encrypted, but you do not need to keep the swap file clean, so you use Mozilla mail to compose your messages and GPG to encrypt them. On a corporate server Mozilla mail + an encrypted swap file may be sufficient. On your NSA server you may want to only allow nano to compose the messages, with mail to send them, and you use a MAC enforcing OS over a 9600 baud terminal to ensure the least information leakage you can get away with.
BTW The GNU linker is not so good at static linking, you end up with entire object files in your executable for one function, and if you break up your code into one function or global per object file it often forgets to link in some stuff. Dynamic linking is the way to go unless you want to write a better linker...(Remember how slow linking used to be in the Borland days "when things were done right"TM ?) Note MSFT Fanboys: MSFT's linker blows too, I'd be rich if I had a dollar for every time I implemented my VC++ link algorithm "reorder functions in.c file, rebuild all, if no new internal compile error, see if link got further")
Excuse me for my ignorance of how GPG is called, but isn't just loading an executable from your path subject to the same sorts of attacks (really, easier onces) than the LD_LIBRARY_PATH modification? I can just as easily sneak something somewhere in the users PATH ahead of the real GPG...
I think the problem is that shared libraries are shared across users, so you just need to have a user account on the machine with debug access to mess with a library, while to change someone's path you need to compromise their account. The problem with this arguement is that if you have debug access you can mess with so many things that avoiding shared libraries isn't going to help much. The only thing it might do is force someone to crack X, pine, emacs or something else you are using to compose whatever you plan to GPG so while the system is compromised GPG can claim that their part of it wasn't.
Moral of the story is don't allow security to depend on a development machine's pristine state and don't enable ptrace, or loadable modules for that matter, on a production machine that is intended to be secure.
As a former Jet Blue customer I am very concerned that they may have released customer data in violation of their privacy policy. Is anyone here aware of what kind of fraud or other laws might be applicable here for me to bring to my attorney general's attention (Eliot Spitzer)?
I will also be sending educational letters to my representative (Carolyn Maloney-D) and senators (Hillary Clinton-D & Charles Schumer-D), about the DMCA and possibly the need for greater criminal sanctions for the type of activity Jet Blue is accused of engaging in. Any one care to educate me?
1) Is there any plan to change this? 2) I see comments indicating that Apple did this successfully. If so, can we learn from their implementation and do something similar? 3) What do BSD, and that various Unices do? Do they all have this limitation?
1) People talk about it, but as someone else noted it makes for ugly logs if you start services in parallel without some kind of management of the output from each service. 2) probably 3) Gentoo has dependencies, but only so it can start required services before the one you request, I believe the same is true of one or more of the BSD's. It shouldn't be too hard to add a "fastboot" option to the init scripts that defaults to on to systems that already track dependencies. But we do need some better dependency editing than offered by Gentoo. I gave up on it on my laptop because it has only hard dependencies, when my WiFi card can't find a network at bootup it neglects to start-up all the things you might prefer to have a network connection for first, like ntpd and sshd. But I want these things started up anyway so that my clock stays more accurate via the cached drift file and so that I can remotely log in once it has found a network. It also tried to start up the network before pcmcia, which was easy for me to fix for a laptop, but wouldn't be for a newbie.
Mandrake takes one page from Windows and starts up X before some services X doesn't need, this annoys some, but I like it most of the time.
Secondly, since when is it unethical for a scientist to aid the military? Not always, but there are public policy implications. And there are some weapons that society questions the need for. The H-Bomb is one, I think the jury is still out on whether it's ability to prevent a A-Bomb war outweighs it's potential for sheer destruction. Let's hope a few don't go missing.
The world is not a nice place, and if we accept that a military is necessary, then why not have the best damn military in the world?
I have nothing against this, but I also also think an overwhelmingly strong force is corrupting. I don't want our men and women regarded as toy soldiers shooting plastic indians. What bothers me more is that we spend way too much money on military technologies while regular research funding is starved. This is good for someone in our industry, we all benefit indirectly from more jobs. But it also means other research doesn't get done or gets done very slowly. Archeology is one, some archeologists in Peru discovered an Incan irrigation technique that tripled the crop output in the mountains while using none of the expensive chemicals that modern farming had introduced. Better coffee and chocolate may not interest you, but I think overall we would have been better off with more archeologists doing their work than we do now.
Our political leaders seem to view the military as the answer to all foreign problems instead of actively engaging with the world or even working out military coordination for problems like Rwanda, where the large troop numbers of the Chinese or even North Korean military could have been combined with western transport and logistics to deliver enough troops and enough expertise to put an end to the conflict. Even having such plans in place might have had a serious effect. Our military is not geared for such a mission and it would be expensive, and I think ill-advised, to repurpose them for occupation.
Accepting the money to do more of what our military already does well is not just wasting our tax dollars, but also unethical if you think the military is being missused and abused by our politicians.
I was until recently paid out of a military grant. It bothered me, but basically over the course of two years I did maybe a month of work to that I wouldn't have done without the grant. The major impact of the money was that I directed them to my papers and may give them a paper that didn't pass peer review in the final report. It'll get published eventually anyway, either rewritten as two papers more likely to be sent to the right reviewers, or as a tech report should we give up on it.
For those asking why not take the money if you are going to do the work anyway, you still legitimize military spending by accepting the money and, in so doing, lending your name to them. But if you accept the money and then speak out about how you think basic research should be funded directly and not via the military budget, their giving money to you might lend you some legitimacy in the eyes of congress members too.
I priced a Sun PCI SCSI card last week. $500. No RAID, no cache, just a vanila SCSI card with a Sun sticker (and solaris support). Thats just insane.
So why? Why would anyone ever go to Sun for anything?
Because the only alternative in many cases is an IBM AIX Server, just try to keep one running without very expensive IBM tech on site every week or so. Sun is like the Macintosh of servers, it just works. Of course, you try to use Linux/BSD whenever possible so you don't ever have to see a $995 pricetag for a replacement keyboard. I bet that PCI card is hot swappable and well tested. It's the well tested that you are really paying for. IBM might get some of those Sun shops back, but most shops have someone there in power who remembers experience of working with the old IBM. Only when Sun gets worse will they really consider that option.
Slashdot Mirror
And yes, after the Gates accords pretty much everyone here into Open Source sighed in resignation, but initiatives are still floating around. One district here in Lima (the capital), the district of Barranco, had begun deployment of an Open Source plan to replace its entire software infrastructure. Others were to follow, but i'm not sure how much they accomplished.
What about San Isidro and Miraflores? I would think some of the expats from the US and Europe would have brought Open Source with them.
Also, if Toledo is pro-Microsoft and his approval rating is 11 percent, doesn't it stand to reason that the next president may not support selling out his country in the same way?
Quote from article: "The intensity of each power beam is restricted to 20%, or less, of the intensity of noontime sunlight."
That is an ambiguous sentence there. See if it is 20% of noon-time sunlight per square meter, you might as well just stick a visible light solar cell at the earth site instead of a microwave light solar cell along with a complicated and expensive space based solar cell constructed on the moon. But if they mean your 10 square meter antenna will get the equivalent of 20% of the sunlight hitting the entire earth, then this both makes sense as a plan and makes the parent poster's concern about safety relevant.
It seems like this is just some crackpot here, even an impractically large antenna 50 miles up is going to have a huge beamwidth on earth. Besides, in the USA there is enough farmland only used qualify for half million dollar a year welfare checks that if we repurposed them we could create enough solar heating plants to supply the entire world with hydrogen and electricity and not make a dent in food prices.
nVidia does have an entry supporting 1280x960 out of the box which is commendable because 1280x1024 on a CRT results in non-square pixels and everything gets squashed by about 7% and makes things look weird, IMO
I don't know what kind of graphics you are talking about, but it is really easy to add a stretch to the transform matrix if you are working in 2D or 3D. I don't really use the consumer stuff, but I would assume that they adjust for the monitor dimensions to get the W/H ratio right. In fact I do recall as a kid some programs showed me a circle and asked me if it looked like an ellipse, though they shouldn't need that now that monitors report their physical dimensions to the graphics card.
Er, considering that you're most likely going to be listening to it through a car stereo or headphones, I don't think there's really a need for monstrous, extremely high-quality files.
1/ I know a few people with iPods that do plug them into their stereo, where you can hear that those things are not hi-fi.
2/ It's nice to not have to convert your music to lo-fi to put it on your portable music player.
That said, I wrote a script that converts my hi-fi MP3s (that I'm too lazy to re-encode) and OGGs to lo-fi MP3s as it transfers them to my flash MP3 player... But I paid $35 for it, which is a bit less than my SO paid for her iPod... I expect more from the iPod.
Oh yeah, and Diebold voting system made a debut in that election having effectively removed 18,000 votes from Al Gores totals.
Didn't they correct for this one though? The district where Gore lost by 18,000 votes only had 900 registered voters... More problematic where the democratic Diebold districts where not a single democrat got a single vote. On would presume at least they voted for themselves. Of course there was no audit trail...
The bubble-sheet voting in Leon County Florida where I live works flawlessly, I don't see why the rest can't its just a matter of good equipment.
As I assume you are going to require me to define flawlessly I will.
When I go to vote, the ballets simply have each canadates name with a bubble right after their name that you fill in, it is a large bubble and each name is well spaced from the next. Anyways once you are done you put the sheet into the scanning machine yourself, and if it is unsure how you voted, or you double voted, it will spit out the ballet so you can make corrections. Or get a new one and try again.
Those machines work great if you want them to. One of the problems with the Florida election was that Kathrin Harris had all those machines sent to Tallahassee where she programmed the ones in mostly Republican Counties to spit out the ballot for revoting if you made a mistake, and to swallow the ballots in mostly Democratic Counties. Same hardware, different software. This was reported widely in the British press, but came out on the back pages of American papers eight months after the election. (Jeb denied he fixed the election so CBS didn't have the guts to report what his workers said they had been ordered to do, until a government investigation confirmed the irregulaties were real. No I didn't vote for Gore, but fixing elections on a grand scale is much more dangerous than any differences between which cracker screews us over this time around.)
I say go back to paper ballots filled out in pen and counted by hand by all the parties involved. Locked boxes, etc. It's not like we have elections often enough for this to be expensive in the scheme of things.
I think this documents the right glibc bug. The 2.6 kernel makes TSC support optional. TSC suffers from clock drift which is especially a problem when using frequency scaling or on NUMA systems. Instead you can use another timer. But glibc compiled for i686 uses TSC without checking for availability, because it assumes all those on that platform would have one. The 2.4 kernels always offered it on that platform so it wasn't a problem, now it is.
Vi would coredump on exit - had to get the latest glibc* from Rawhide.
Were you using a i686 version of glibc? There was an error where it assumed all i686 builds had some kind of timer code that is actually optional on newer hardware. I don't remember the datails, but I think the kernel hackers recomended using the same version of glibc, but compiled for i386, or using a newer glibc where the bug is fixed.
Could this have been part of your RPM problem too? glibc is a rather important library on your typical Linux machine... (I have a Linux box without it, but it's a router & x10 controller machine these days, and runs a 2.2 series kernel anyway.)
(Spitting on the sidewalk was a real issue when women wore long dresses and more people were into chewing tobacco than today, for example.)
Just so you know...those laws weren't about the annoyance of a messy dress. The spitting laws were important before the advent of penicillin due to nasties like TB. You would get all these dead people clogging the streets and people knew that if the infected just did some simple things like wash their hands after using the urinal, flush toilets after use, and to not spit in public then the infection would only spread to their friends and family and not the whole city. Since no one knew if they were carrying a deadly disease until it was too late, everyone needed to observe these common sense disease prevention measures and laws were passed to get the point across.
(I personally think those caught not washing their hands should be denied antibiotics and sent to island hospitals to recover, or not. Antibiotic resistance is screewing the rest of us over...)
hehehehe
I always thought there was something wrong when the investment bankers freak out about "over" production. Now I understand...too many damn communists on Wall Street.
Never really understood Wall Street's reaction to mergers either. When competition is reduced the shares of the companies in those markets should go up, but all their customers shares should plumet at a 5 to 50 times the the value created by the merger, a net loss. But you never hear, "Dow-Jones fell 250 points after Dow-Corning merger announced, Dow down 1 point, Corning up 5 points." I understand that markets aren't perfect because of information poverty (i.e. you don't know exactly what companies depend on Dow products.) Still you would think that amoung capitalists a merger would spread some generalized fear. If they are all closet Marxists who fear of competition though....
Why is electronic voting so tough??? Go in, cast a vote, verify a vote, print the result on a strip of paper, hell, two strips of paper and move on. What's the holdup here??? I don't get it.
The problem is that the Diebold has promised to deliver the next election to the Republicans. If they are required to print a verifiable ballot or open their systems up for auditing there is no way to make sure the electorate doesn't just vote for the wrong candidate. They made a promise and accepted the huge payments that followed, they have to deliver or they could be accused of fraud.
The only solution is to provide enough bandwidth. Sooner or later a limit on the amount of traffic will be reached as nobody is going to drive for more than 24 hours/day.
That depends a little on where you live. If everyone in New York wanted to drive to work we would need 20 stories of roads. That's taller than some buildings. The cars would also have to be electric unless we all wanted to wear scuba gear. That would certainly bring up the cost, as would the overwater level switching interchanges.
If you live in a still rural area or an expanding suburb then sure more roads aren't a bad solution. And a 3-4 story road isn't a big problem if you're traveling large distances either, build it and they will come. =)
A nation founded by people seeking to worship God free from persecution.
Nope, the pilgrims came late to the party. Many of the people who came before them were godless heathens. Even some of the founders weren't to fond of all the god sillyness. Ironically, it was those god worshiping Quakers that fought to make our constitution a secular one. They had been persecuted in New York by Peter Stuyvesant, in part for harboring Jews and Muslims when Stuy went on his witchhunt. When his bosses learned of the episode they told him they established the colony to make money and if he couldn't leave his religion at the door they would replace him. If you told Franklin that a pledge of allegiance was now done in public schools he would spin furiously in his grave.
BTW I don't like the pledge in schools, but religion isn't even near the main reason. When I came to this country and was told to "pledge allegiance" I didn't even speak the language. That's even more meaningless than your standard enforced pledge. But it's not that either. We live in a democracy, and a pledge of allegiance has no place in a democracy. This is my country and I have a moral duty to help my countrymen destroy the flag and it's government if it does not follow our wishes. The pledge undermines the teaching of that duty. Teaching our children to rule their government is the most important function of our schools.
Gentoo is patching the nVidia drivers successfully for 2.6.0-test5 for me, you might want to look at their
patchset (look in the files directory).
There was a discussion of keyboard problems on the kernel mailing list. You might want to read it and see what was discussed and whether it jibes with your experience, and to see if any proposed fixes work for you. These are the types of problems Linus is still accepting patches for.
As another poster wrote, todays terrorists are tomorrows heroes. Yes, the women in the Suffrage movement were considered to be terrorists... and indeed many of their actions would get them labelled as terrorists today.
I think people need to remember this. Both when considering someone for hero worship and when condemning today's terrorists. A bit of perspective can do a world of good, a bit of time tends to provide it, lets try to keep the number of deaths low and respect the balance between safety and freedom that we've painfully constructed, most of it in much scarrier times but also with much more thought.
The people that signed big made a mistake. Some genuinely did not understand the ramifactions, others might have, but were too greedy to care.
My favorite band "Pee Shy" signed up with a small label that promoted them and generally treated them well and got their music sold to people like me. Then the label was bought by one of the big RIAA labels and all of a sudden no one at the label knew they existed but their contract said they had to make more CD's that the label approved of before they could move on. After about a year the band's leader gave up on music and the rest of the band made a valiant effort to start a new band "Three Wheeler" that was now just missing something, like the fourth member. They were maybe gullible to sign a multi-album deal, but from where they sat at the time it made sense. I'm pretty sure they weren't just out to make a killing with the type of music they played but sure they wanted a wider audience, and this was before Napster so there you go. I like to have a wide audience for my software, I don't see anything wrong with that.
What's sad is that labels like Ani DiFranco's "Righteous Babe Records" that were formed because of the corruption in the industry in the end join the RIAA and play the corrupt game required to get their CD's into the Virgin Megastores. I don't think this guy will go that way, and by putting everything out in the open like he has and not making the artist's sign over their copyrights he might just end up doing the right thing 10 years from now and not just today for the publicity. I think we've seen with book publishers like O'Reilly that a moral person at the core of a company can end up doing more good than outside observers have the right to expect. (* a friend of mine published a book with O'Reilly and was treated like a human being throughout the whole process).
I don't get how they intend to limit the downloads to just Mandrake Club members. Its a lot easier to pass on a few hundred KB .torrent file than ISOs.
.torrent file and ask us not to reveal it to the world. Then a few days later when we've all got copies they release it to the general public and not only do we serve as big huge mirror for the newbies but are also not suffereing 10KB/s downloads since we already have the iso's.
I think this is only going to be for a couple days. It's like the 'secret' Mandrake mirrors that they give members an urpmi string to. There is nothing preventing a non-member from discovering one of them and using it, except Mandrake asks their club members not to publish the addresses. I'm sure the bittorrent thing will be like that too, they will publish a
Who said the library has to be dynamically loaded? I know this is kinda of a big secret that maybe I'm not supposed to be sharing but it is possible to statically link against a library.
.c file, rebuild all, if no new internal compile error, see if link got further")
This doesn't solve the entire problem either. Whatever statically links in GPG would also have to lock pages, which might mean it needs SUID. It is also considered a bad idea in security to have a program any bigger than the absolute minimum size. As OpenSSH has shown lately, even when you do make a program tiny it can still have a flaw. And, as portable OpenSSH has shown, making the program any bigger can introduce even more flaws. If you statically link GPG you have to ensure that not only is GPG perfect, but so is whatever you are linking it into. It is safer to write small programs each of which is robust and then use them together in such a way that you meet your overall security goals. On a workstation it maybe sufficient to ensure that whatever you send out to the internet is encrypted, but you do not need to keep the swap file clean, so you use Mozilla mail to compose your messages and GPG to encrypt them. On a corporate server Mozilla mail + an encrypted swap file may be sufficient. On your NSA server you may want to only allow nano to compose the messages, with mail to send them, and you use a MAC enforcing OS over a 9600 baud terminal to ensure the least information leakage you can get away with.
BTW The GNU linker is not so good at static linking, you end up with entire object files in your executable for one function, and if you break up your code into one function or global per object file it often forgets to link in some stuff. Dynamic linking is the way to go unless you want to write a better linker...(Remember how slow linking used to be in the Borland days "when things were done right"TM ?) Note MSFT Fanboys: MSFT's linker blows too, I'd be rich if I had a dollar for every time I implemented my VC++ link algorithm "reorder functions in
Excuse me for my ignorance of how GPG is called, but isn't just loading an executable from your path subject to the same sorts of attacks (really, easier onces) than the LD_LIBRARY_PATH modification? I can just as easily sneak something somewhere in the users PATH ahead of the real GPG...
I think the problem is that shared libraries are shared across users, so you just need to have a user account on the machine with debug access to mess with a library, while to change someone's path you need to compromise their account. The problem with this arguement is that if you have debug access you can mess with so many things that avoiding shared libraries isn't going to help much. The only thing it might do is force someone to crack X, pine, emacs or something else you are using to compose whatever you plan to GPG so while the system is compromised GPG can claim that their part of it wasn't.
Moral of the story is don't allow security to depend on a development machine's pristine state and don't enable ptrace, or loadable modules for that matter, on a production machine that is intended to be secure.
As a former Jet Blue customer I am very concerned that they may have released customer data in violation of their privacy policy. Is anyone here aware of what kind of fraud or other laws might be applicable here for me to bring to my attorney general's attention (Eliot Spitzer)?
I will also be sending educational letters to my representative (Carolyn Maloney-D) and senators (Hillary Clinton-D & Charles Schumer-D), about the DMCA and possibly the need for greater criminal sanctions for the type of activity Jet Blue is accused of engaging in. Any one care to educate me?
1) Is there any plan to change this?
2) I see comments indicating that Apple did this successfully. If so, can we learn from their implementation and do something similar?
3) What do BSD, and that various Unices do? Do they all have this limitation?
1) People talk about it, but as someone else noted it makes for ugly logs if you start services in parallel without some kind of management of the output from each service.
2) probably
3) Gentoo has dependencies, but only so it can start required services before the one you request, I believe the same is true of one or more of the BSD's. It shouldn't be too hard to add a "fastboot" option to the init scripts that defaults to on to systems that already track dependencies. But we do need some better dependency editing than offered by Gentoo. I gave up on it on my laptop because it has only hard dependencies, when my WiFi card can't find a network at bootup it neglects to start-up all the things you might prefer to have a network connection for first, like ntpd and sshd. But I want these things started up anyway so that my clock stays more accurate via the cached drift file and so that I can remotely log in once it has found a network. It also tried to start up the network before pcmcia, which was easy for me to fix for a laptop, but wouldn't be for a newbie.
Mandrake takes one page from Windows and starts up X before some services X doesn't need, this annoys some, but I like it most of the time.
Secondly, since when is it unethical for a scientist to aid the military?
Not always, but there are public policy implications. And there are some weapons that society questions the need for. The H-Bomb is one, I think the jury is still out on whether it's ability to prevent a A-Bomb war outweighs it's potential for sheer destruction. Let's hope a few don't go missing.
The world is not a nice place, and if we accept that a military is necessary, then why not have the best damn military in the world?
I have nothing against this, but I also also think an overwhelmingly strong force is corrupting. I don't want our men and women regarded as toy soldiers shooting plastic indians. What bothers me more is that we spend way too much money on military technologies while regular research funding is starved. This is good for someone in our industry, we all benefit indirectly from more jobs. But it also means other research doesn't get done or gets done very slowly. Archeology is one, some archeologists in Peru discovered an Incan irrigation technique that tripled the crop output in the mountains while using none of the expensive chemicals that modern farming had introduced. Better coffee and chocolate may not interest you, but I think overall we would have been better off with more archeologists doing their work than we do now.
Our political leaders seem to view the military as the answer to all foreign problems instead of actively engaging with the world or even working out military coordination for problems like Rwanda, where the large troop numbers of the Chinese or even North Korean military could have been combined with western transport and logistics to deliver enough troops and enough expertise to put an end to the conflict. Even having such plans in place might have had a serious effect. Our military is not geared for such a mission and it would be expensive, and I think ill-advised, to repurpose them for occupation.
Accepting the money to do more of what our military already does well is not just wasting our tax dollars, but also unethical if you think the military is being missused and abused by our politicians.
I was until recently paid out of a military grant. It bothered me, but basically over the course of two years I did maybe a month of work to that I wouldn't have done without the grant. The major impact of the money was that I directed them to my papers and may give them a paper that didn't pass peer review in the final report. It'll get published eventually anyway, either rewritten as two papers more likely to be sent to the right reviewers, or as a tech report should we give up on it.
For those asking why not take the money if you are going to do the work anyway, you still legitimize military spending by accepting the money and, in so doing, lending your name to them. But if you accept the money and then speak out about how you think basic research should be funded directly and not via the military budget, their giving money to you might lend you some legitimacy in the eyes of congress members too.
I priced a Sun PCI SCSI card last week. $500. No RAID, no cache, just a vanila SCSI card with a Sun sticker (and solaris support). Thats just insane.
So why? Why would anyone ever go to Sun for anything?
Because the only alternative in many cases is an IBM AIX Server, just try to keep one running without very expensive IBM tech on site every week or so. Sun is like the Macintosh of servers, it just works. Of course, you try to use Linux/BSD whenever possible so you don't ever have to see a $995 pricetag for a replacement keyboard. I bet that PCI card is hot swappable and well tested. It's the well tested that you are really paying for. IBM might get some of those Sun shops back, but most shops have someone there in power who remembers experience of working with the old IBM. Only when Sun gets worse will they really consider that option.