HUH??? Oh, I keep on forgetting that the range of debate in mainstream American media is so small that they use "left" and "right" in a completely different sense than the rest of the world. Everything is shifted to the right. CNN is definitely right-wing, when compared to something that is *actually* leftist.
For all the confused people out there, I think the prolem can be broken down thus: In general CNN is actually fairly right leaning. At the same time, in American politics CNN is fairly Democrat leaning. This can appear confusing, because their general position is probably to the right of who they usually endorse politically in the US. Most of this comes down to the fact that the US political system is mostly made up of pointless partisan bickering attempting to create a perception of a much larger divide than actually exists.
Now what did they open source that wasn't open sourced before under a different company ?
Hmm, how about the two major closed source items (and hence revenue generating products) from the closed source companies they bought: Yast from SuSE, and Ximian Connector from Ximian. Both were kept closed source as a proprietary "this is the good stuff that you're paying for" part of each compnies offering. Both are now GPL and out in the wild in source form. I'd say that's significant.
Your defense is that since NPR mentioned Badnarik more than Fox News they aren't biased. Bullshit.
Read what I wrote carefully. On the issue of third party candidates I merely said NPR was the least biased. Sure Nader got a lot more coverage than he deserved even on NPR, but the fact remains that NPR was still much better than Fox.
So let's go over this carefully: least biased does not mean without bias. The statistics you give only further prove the point that, while not without bias, NPR was less biased than Fox.
And best of all, that ridiculous code is REALLY AMAZINGLY POWERFUL in many cases.
I only looked at the first entry, anonymous.c. It's 47 utterly incomprehensible lines. What it does is convert text into one of Tolkien's Elvish fonts
I was fairly impressed with Gavin.c. It's 165 lines of nicely indented/formatted C code that's pretty much incomprehensible. What does it do? It's a 32 bit multitasking operating system complete with a GUI, a shell, and a text viewer called vi.
Or perhaps Vik1.c - 63 lines (including a comment:-), that when compiled gives you an X11 racing game. But check out the feature list:
Drive on a road in a 3-d landscape with hills and curves
Mountains in the horizon
A sun in the sky when driving during the day.
Dark sky and reduced visibility when driving at night.
Snow when driving in the winter.
Slippery road when driving in the winter.
When driving off the road, the car slows down to a halt
Three different race tracks that takes about one minute to complete.
I'm not sure what NPR you listen to but I listen to them a lot. (1) I never heard them mention Badnarik once and I was listening for it because that's who I voted for.
When they ARE counted, the margin for error is 0 or very near 0. In each county the ballots are counted by election officialls, then checked by other officials. In each county the margin for error is pretty much 0, so why should it be any different on the national scale?
Pure drivel. The margin of error for each precinct or county can be as much as 1% because of things like spoiled ballots. Go and look up the figures for spoiled ballots - you'll find that on average around 1% to 2.5% of ballots are trashed because they are "spoiled". A ballot being spoiled is a subjective thing, so all of a sudden you have some margin for error.
You people arguing for 100% accuracy are mad. At the same time, we should reasonably expect very small margins of error on a per precinct basis. Why more effort hasn't been made to eliminate spoiled ballots I'll never know. When a preceinct, like one of the Ohio ones gives a 1000% error, I'd call that highly statistically significant, and very much worth worrying about (even if 4000 votes doesn't mean much nationally), especially if, as it appears, it may be a systemic error (and hence possibly duplicated elsewhere).
Yes a lot of claimed bias isn't real (just look at all the bias people claim about Fox). But your examples would be akin to calling the AJC (Atlanta Journal) balanced.
It just doesn't cut it.
Guessing that you're conservative, and quite possibly Christian, I'll quite a Bible passage.
Luke 6:42 "Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye." (KJV)
Your perception of bias is a function of your own bias. I would question how much PBS you watch and how much NPR you listen to to arrive at your suggestion that they are hopelessly biased. It all depends on what sort of bias yu are looking for. Not sure what I mean? Consider this: NPR and PBS gave far more coverage to Michael Badnarik and David Cobb than Fox. Badnarik, in particular, polled very strongly for a third party candidate in the election, and NPRs coverage was roughly in proportion to how votes were cast. In comparison Fox's coverage was far more limited, and not at all in proportion. ABCNNCBS were even worse than Fox in that respect.
Want to look at it another way? Compare the coverage Nader got, to the coverage Badnarik got. Now look at how many votes they got in the election? Note any discrepancy?
So on that particlar issue PBS and NPR were pretty clearly the least biased news media around. If you were a big Badnarik supporter, you'd have to say that NPR was the way to go, and the mainstream networks were horribly biased.
If you pick a different issue you will almost certainly find biases stacking up differently. In a large part your perception of bias will swing heavily on which issues you consider most important.
But trying to look at it objectively (as best we can) NPR and PBS spend most of their time reporting facts, and work hard to support their opinion pieces. You can claim bias in what you choose to report (which is where many of the claims of Fox bias come from), but if you actually compare coverage you'll find they are actually surprisingly even handed with what they report.
The NYT is, unfortunately another case, and I won't try arguing that one (in a large part sue to lack of knowledge of it).
You're quite correct. However, before such efforts are made one should consider if the errors are statistically significant to warrant the expense.
Pretty much all of those listed were statistically significant. Sure, on a national scale as a percentage they were not that significant, but that's the whole point of compartmentalizing into precincts for seperate counts - we can consider error rates on a per preceinct level, and thus expect a much greater degree of overall accuracy.
Pretty much all of the incidents listed were (a) potentially systemic, and thus possibly representative of similar errors throughout the system, (b) very statistically significant as far as the vote count for that preceinct is concerned.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect some amount of error in counting votes, but that error rate should be controlled at the precinct level. Having a 1000% error rate (such as one Ohio precinct) is not acceptable. I don;t care if it is detected after the fact - the fact that we're catching it is good, but we should be trying to eliminate it to begin with.
I don't quite get it how anyone in their right mind would really expect that any voting system registers all the votes correctly.
Things like that just don't happen.
But that's absolutely no excuse not to try and eliminate errors, especially systemic errors, wherever possible. I mean, why not just have the electoral officials in each precinct take a guess as to how the precinct voted. Sure there's a certain statistical error in that, but errors happen right, so we should just accept that...
This is the major point that is being missed by many here. Even if you think other LSM systems are better, even if you prefer some non LSM Mandatory Access Control system like RSBAC is better, you have to agree that any MAC system is a huge step forward for Linux security.
It doesn't even matter that the default SELinux policy for FC3 is very permissive (mostly it only places constraints of various daemons), what matters is that a major distribution has a Mandatory Access Control system in place by default.
This matter because it helps get developer buy in. That means more applications fixed so they don't do silly things that break under such systems, that means more developers actually using such systems to compartmentalize and strengthen the security of the applications themselves. This matter because right now we already have the architecture - several implementations of it in fact (SELinux, LIDS, RSBAC), what we don't have is applications that respect such systems, nor applications that take advantage of the extra security such system provide. As long as that is the case, we really aren't that much better off. People need to be paying attention to SELinux, and systems like it, and programming to use, or at the very least respect, such systems. Once that happens the difference between security in Linux and Windows really will be a night and day comparison.
This is a huge win for Linux if we can get it up and running, so let's take the time to make it work! Congratulations to everyone on the Fedora SELinux project! You've done a fantastic job, Thanks!
Whenever I see things like this I'm glad I dumped RedHat.
apt-get update apt-get dist-upgrade
One reason Debian users don't care much about the installer is they do it only once.
The catch is that that will actually work with Fedora Core 1 and 2 and well (presuming you bothered to install apt4rpm, but I mean everyone does right?)
In the end I still prefer downloading the isos because it means I have CD copies of the system so should disaster strike, or something gets corrupted or I run out of hard disk space, or my network card dies or... then I still have rescue CDs with all the base packages on them. I don't expect to ever need them, but they're comfoting to have none the less.
I successfully did a RH9 to FC2 upgrade when FC2 came out, and it was mostly quite painless. The only hassle was non Fedora/Redhat installed software. That included FreshRPMs material - which was easy to fix, after the core upgrade I just updated my apt sources in Synaptic, resynced, and all of those upgraded painlessly too - and some of the stuff I had compiled from source. Some source compiled stuff worked fine, presumably because the upgrades to the libraries on which it depended were not serious, others broke left and right. This was a hassle, but as I tend to keep a src directory with tar.bz2 archives of everything I have compiled from source it was simply a matter of going through and recompiling those apps that had broken.
All of that took a week or so - not, because any of it was arduous, but more because you didn't always find the thing that was not working till some time later when you eventually run it.
So all up it took a while for the changes to shake themselves out, but really the basic upgrade was painless, and any issues I struck later were very easy to fix. I'd feel reasonably confident about upgrading to FC3 if I were you - I was nervous going in, but came away quite happy.
Why isn't protection for open source software and limitation of intelectual property law a political issue? I never heard it discussed in the presidential election. What can we do to force politicians to bring these issues to the forefront? Don't we want to put all the FUD behind us?
That's because you were busy being mesmerised by the main two political parties. Try looking here for an example of a reasonably major third party that takes the issue very seriously indeed, and in fact has views that very clearly align with most of the attitudes espoused on Slashdot. Of course David Cobb (and Michael Badnarik) weren't invited to the debates, so we never got a chance to hear what the two main parties would have to say if these issues were raised.
I had to get a car this year, so I chose a Toyota Prius. I'm buying a house, and I'm making sure it's entirely built with high efficiency thermal insulation, zoned HVAC, and energy-reflective 'low e' windows. I work from home office rather than commuting every day.
And interestingly while all of that is probably costing you a bit up front, the long term savings are easily going to outweigh that - particularly havign an energy efficient home. The cost of oil is most likely only ging up, and the cost of energy likewise. Spending extra money so you use less energy is going to save you a lot of cash in the long run.
Unfortunately, while many people seem to be able to see this on the personal level, they can't see it on the national or global scale - a little bit of outlay now can make the whole system more energy efficient and hence more productive in the long term.
so does this prove that your Goverment isn't as Liberist as you thought or isn't Government Spending that bad after all
This is the part that baffles me. Americans, like the person you were replying to, will often happily deride the "overtaxed" European countries, but really, they end up paying as much in tax over in the US, and don't get all the social services provided in Europe.
How close are the taxes? I can't say for sure with regard to European countries (and naturally it varies from country to country), but I can speak for New Zealand, which many Americans would place in a similar category (New Zealand has public health care etc.). My example is this: My brother was living in the US, and I was living in New Zealand. We were earning the same wage in local currency. Once you totaled up the Federal tax, state tax, social security levies, other tariffs and what not from my brothers tax statement he was paying more in tax than I was (New Zealand having a far simpler tax system, I didn't need to do any additions of various taxes). That's right, in the US you pay more in tax than socially liberal New Zealand.
(And for any familiar with New Zealand politics - Jim Anderton is calling for a decrease in the company tax rate! So taxes are going down.)
"US Suspects World not putting US Interests first"
Whitehouse evidence
International politicians and the media have blasted the U.S. for abandoning the Kyoto global warming treaty, despite the fact that the U.S. has explained the treaty would not be good for the U.S. economy."
Aren't Diffie-Hellman and El Gamal just key exchange methods? I didn't know they had anything to do with the encryption itself...
Diffie-Hellman is just key exchange, El-Gamal is effectively using Diffie-Hellman style operations for encryption. The important thing to remember is that PGP/GPG only uses the public key aspect for key exchange. The message itself in encrypted with a symmetric cipher scheme, and the public key is simply used to exchange the one time key for the symmetric cipher for that particular message.
They really need to get these things crackin on chaos theory... How many inhabited planets equals one amino acid chain? What are our odds of hitting the protein jackpot? You know?
Ah, Chaos Theory possibly the most widely popularised, yet least widely understood areas of mathematics ever. Exactly how is Chaos Theory going to help in counting extrasolar planets, or calculating probabilities? You need to actually have some understanding of the system before you can hope to actually apply any dynamical system theory to it at all. Presently, I don't think we do understand exactly how random chemicals manage to form proteins, and self replicating chemicals. I don't see how a fast computer and a fueld of math largely irrelevant to the subject at hand is going to help.
You really need something more than just a really fast/powerful computer to do PGP cracking. You're going to need something that can help you get your fingernails under the problem, because even this machine couldn't brute force PGP keys. There has been some papers written on theoretical weaknesses in RSA that, given a custom built machine, could be exploited. This is not a custom built RSA cracker. It may have enough raw power to make up for that of course, and that means you might manage 1024 bit RSA cracking if you are determined. Unfortunately any sane PGP/GPG users are using Diffie-Hellman/El-Gamal rather than RSA as their public key system, and for now there aren't any similar attacks for the discrete log problem as there are for factoring.
Your paranoia is misplaced. You should be worried that the NSA has come up with a serious break in RSA and Diffie-Hellman schemes that let them be cracked by a nice ordinary supercomputer, rather than worried about computer power overtaking key size. Most key sizes are chosen to have a fairly long lifespan even with massive increases in computing power. You aren't going to brute force 128bit symmetric systems any time soon, no matter how much computing power you stack up against it. No, the fear is in breaks to the encryption scheme.
...those of us who simply don't like theaters?...why does there have to be a waiting period for watching something in an environment that isn't annoying?
And what about poor people who can't afford to see it in the theaters or buy a DVD - they have to wait till it comes to a free to air TV channel. And what about agoraphobics who are afraid to go outside to the theater, or to the store to buy a DVD? How can you discriminate against them?
Come up with all the bullshit excuses you like for why you have a "right" to download movies, but the fact remains, under current laws it is illegal, and you can be sued. If you're not willing to accept to consequences, then don't do it. If you want to protest unjust and stupid copyright laws (and let's face it, the current copyright laws are) then write to your representatives, get involved with the political process, or go with the civil disobedience approach - the important point with that last option is that it involves accepting the consequences of your actions.
If you actually believe in the wrongness of current copyright law, try actually doing something about it. When New Zealand (where I'm from) was reviewing copyright law, particularly with regard to digital content I got involved with a letter writing campaign makign submissions to protect fair use, time-shifting and format shifting... and interestingly enough as copyright issues have trickled into new laws in New Zealand we've actually seen those submissions acted upon! You can make a difference, but you have to actually try
The he would be depriving the original owner of the Ferarri of his car, which is definitely bad. If, on the other hand, Joe made a replica copy of the Ferarri for the $2000 in materials you claim it's worth I don't think people would complain t much - at least, nt until he tries to sell it to someone else as an actual Ferrari. It's a rather poor analogy. On the other hand...
Currently copyright infringement is illegal, and you can be sued for that and that's the way it is, so I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who knowingly break the law and then complain when they face the consequences. Civil disobedience is all about accepting the consequences of your actions to protest unjust laws.
Which brings us to the point - current copyright laws do seem to be seriously out of sync with how the public seems to want to treat easily replicable items. We need some reform of copyright law - not a complete elimination necessarily, just recognition that in its current form with the current lengthy expiry times it is just not working. But until such reform occurs, be aware that what you're doing is illegal, and you will face consequences.
So let it come out, listen to your friends, and then decide. Cuz it would suck to miss out on a good movie just because you want to stick it to Lucas.
I have no interest in "Sticking it to Lucas", I just have no interest in paying money to see a film that I have every expectation will be bad. Listening to early reviews doesn't help either. The people first coming out of Ep 1 thought it was great. The people coming out of Ep 2 were saying "Wow, so much better than Ep 1". To be honest I thought Ep 2 was no better than Ep 1. It had more interesting action scenes, but it also had far more cringe worthy scenes. They were both crap in my opinion. If you thought Ep 2 was an improvement, by all means go to Ep 3 as yo may find that to be improved yet again... myself, I saw no improvement, and no reason to waste money on Ep 3.
...is that the patent will have expired in 25 years.
Easy enough solution for that - simply keep makign adjustments and rolling new ideas into the base patent as you think of them. Doing this it is fairly easy to keep a patent in "pending" mode for years on end. Once things are actually underway and you have someone to sue, stop the prolonging, let the patent be accepted, and begin litigation. This has effectively been done, although admittedly not over a 25 year time frame (more in the 5-10 year range).
Slashdot Mirror
The NYT, BBC, Al-jazeera and the Washington Post all offer the same viewpoint.
You think Al-jazeera and the BBC report the same things with the same biases? run that by me again please...
Jedidiah.
HUH??? Oh, I keep on forgetting that the range of debate in mainstream American media is so small that they use "left" and "right" in a completely different sense than the rest of the world. Everything is shifted to the right. CNN is definitely right-wing, when compared to something that is *actually* leftist.
For all the confused people out there, I think the prolem can be broken down thus: In general CNN is actually fairly right leaning. At the same time, in American politics CNN is fairly Democrat leaning. This can appear confusing, because their general position is probably to the right of who they usually endorse politically in the US. Most of this comes down to the fact that the US political system is mostly made up of pointless partisan bickering attempting to create a perception of a much larger divide than actually exists.
Jedidiah.
Now what did they open source that wasn't open sourced before under a different company ?
Hmm, how about the two major closed source items (and hence revenue generating products) from the closed source companies they bought: Yast from SuSE, and Ximian Connector from Ximian. Both were kept closed source as a proprietary "this is the good stuff that you're paying for" part of each compnies offering. Both are now GPL and out in the wild in source form. I'd say that's significant.
Jedidiah.
Your defense is that since NPR mentioned Badnarik more than Fox News they aren't biased. Bullshit.
Read what I wrote carefully. On the issue of third party candidates I merely said NPR was the least biased. Sure Nader got a lot more coverage than he deserved even on NPR, but the fact remains that NPR was still much better than Fox.
So let's go over this carefully: least biased does not mean without bias. The statistics you give only further prove the point that, while not without bias, NPR was less biased than Fox.
Jedidiah.
I only looked at the first entry, anonymous.c. It's 47 utterly incomprehensible lines. What it does is convert text into one of Tolkien's Elvish fonts
I was fairly impressed with Gavin.c. It's 165 lines of nicely indented/formatted C code that's pretty much incomprehensible. What does it do? It's a 32 bit multitasking operating system complete with a GUI, a shell, and a text viewer called vi.
Or perhaps Vik1.c - 63 lines (including a comment
Not bad for 63 lines of C code.
Jedidiah.
There is nothing preventing us from getting zero error except fraud and incompetance.
Never underestimate human capacity for incompetence. There will be error, but yes, it should be a hell of a lot lower than it is now.
Jedidiah
I'm not sure what NPR you listen to but I listen to them a lot.
(1) I never heard them mention Badnarik once and I was listening for it because that's who I voted for.
Okay, try this. Search google
site:npr.org
Bush: 7700 hits
Kerry: 4080 hits
Badnarik: 9 hits
Okay, he definitely got less coverage, but he got some.
site:foxnews.com
Bush: 18400 hits
Kerry: 9980 hits
Badnarik: 7 hits
So even though fox news had a lot more election coverage, they had less on Badnarik. By comparison npr was doing quite well really.
Jedidiah.
When they ARE counted, the margin for error is 0 or very near 0. In each county the ballots are counted by election officialls, then checked by other officials. In each county the margin for error is pretty much 0, so why should it be any different on the national scale?
Pure drivel. The margin of error for each precinct or county can be as much as 1% because of things like spoiled ballots. Go and look up the figures for spoiled ballots - you'll find that on average around 1% to 2.5% of ballots are trashed because they are "spoiled". A ballot being spoiled is a subjective thing, so all of a sudden you have some margin for error.
You people arguing for 100% accuracy are mad. At the same time, we should reasonably expect very small margins of error on a per precinct basis. Why more effort hasn't been made to eliminate spoiled ballots I'll never know. When a preceinct, like one of the Ohio ones gives a 1000% error, I'd call that highly statistically significant, and very much worth worrying about (even if 4000 votes doesn't mean much nationally), especially if, as it appears, it may be a systemic error (and hence possibly duplicated elsewhere).
Jedidiah.
Yes a lot of claimed bias isn't real (just look at all the bias people claim about Fox). But your examples would be akin to calling the AJC (Atlanta Journal) balanced.
It just doesn't cut it.
Guessing that you're conservative, and quite possibly Christian, I'll quite a Bible passage.
Luke 6:42 "Either how canst thou say to thy brother, Brother, let me pull out the mote that is in thine eye, when thou thyself beholdest not the beam that is in thine own eye? Thou hypocrite, cast out first the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see clearly to pull out the mote that is in thy brother's eye." (KJV)
Your perception of bias is a function of your own bias. I would question how much PBS you watch and how much NPR you listen to to arrive at your suggestion that they are hopelessly biased. It all depends on what sort of bias yu are looking for. Not sure what I mean? Consider this: NPR and PBS gave far more coverage to Michael Badnarik and David Cobb than Fox. Badnarik, in particular, polled very strongly for a third party candidate in the election, and NPRs coverage was roughly in proportion to how votes were cast. In comparison Fox's coverage was far more limited, and not at all in proportion. ABCNNCBS were even worse than Fox in that respect.
Want to look at it another way? Compare the coverage Nader got, to the coverage Badnarik got. Now look at how many votes they got in the election? Note any discrepancy?
So on that particlar issue PBS and NPR were pretty clearly the least biased news media around. If you were a big Badnarik supporter, you'd have to say that NPR was the way to go, and the mainstream networks were horribly biased.
If you pick a different issue you will almost certainly find biases stacking up differently. In a large part your perception of bias will swing heavily on which issues you consider most important.
But trying to look at it objectively (as best we can) NPR and PBS spend most of their time reporting facts, and work hard to support their opinion pieces. You can claim bias in what you choose to report (which is where many of the claims of Fox bias come from), but if you actually compare coverage you'll find they are actually surprisingly even handed with what they report.
The NYT is, unfortunately another case, and I won't try arguing that one (in a large part sue to lack of knowledge of it).
Jedidiah.
You're quite correct. However, before such efforts are made one should consider if the errors are statistically significant to warrant the expense.
Pretty much all of those listed were statistically significant. Sure, on a national scale as a percentage they were not that significant, but that's the whole point of compartmentalizing into precincts for seperate counts - we can consider error rates on a per preceinct level, and thus expect a much greater degree of overall accuracy.
Pretty much all of the incidents listed were (a) potentially systemic, and thus possibly representative of similar errors throughout the system, (b) very statistically significant as far as the vote count for that preceinct is concerned.
It is perfectly reasonable to expect some amount of error in counting votes, but that error rate should be controlled at the precinct level. Having a 1000% error rate (such as one Ohio precinct) is not acceptable. I don;t care if it is detected after the fact - the fact that we're catching it is good, but we should be trying to eliminate it to begin with.
Jedidiah.
I don't quite get it how anyone in their right mind would really expect that any voting system registers all the votes correctly.
Things like that just don't happen.
But that's absolutely no excuse not to try and eliminate errors, especially systemic errors, wherever possible. I mean, why not just have the electoral officials in each precinct take a guess as to how the precinct voted. Sure there's a certain statistical error in that, but errors happen right, so we should just accept that...
Jedidiah.
-selinux is enabled by default & *just works*
This is the major point that is being missed by many here. Even if you think other LSM systems are better, even if you prefer some non LSM Mandatory Access Control system like RSBAC is better, you have to agree that any MAC system is a huge step forward for Linux security.
It doesn't even matter that the default SELinux policy for FC3 is very permissive (mostly it only places constraints of various daemons), what matters is that a major distribution has a Mandatory Access Control system in place by default.
This matter because it helps get developer buy in. That means more applications fixed so they don't do silly things that break under such systems, that means more developers actually using such systems to compartmentalize and strengthen the security of the applications themselves. This matter because right now we already have the architecture - several implementations of it in fact (SELinux, LIDS, RSBAC), what we don't have is applications that respect such systems, nor applications that take advantage of the extra security such system provide. As long as that is the case, we really aren't that much better off. People need to be paying attention to SELinux, and systems like it, and programming to use, or at the very least respect, such systems. Once that happens the difference between security in Linux and Windows really will be a night and day comparison.
This is a huge win for Linux if we can get it up and running, so let's take the time to make it work! Congratulations to everyone on the Fedora SELinux project! You've done a fantastic job, Thanks!
Jedidiah.
Whenever I see things like this I'm glad I dumped RedHat.
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
One reason Debian users don't care much about the installer is they do it only once.
The catch is that that will actually work with Fedora Core 1 and 2 and well (presuming you bothered to install apt4rpm, but I mean everyone does right?)
In the end I still prefer downloading the isos because it means I have CD copies of the system so should disaster strike, or something gets corrupted or I run out of hard disk space, or my network card dies or... then I still have rescue CDs with all the base packages on them. I don't expect to ever need them, but they're comfoting to have none the less.
Jedidiah.
I successfully did a RH9 to FC2 upgrade when FC2 came out, and it was mostly quite painless. The only hassle was non Fedora/Redhat installed software. That included FreshRPMs material - which was easy to fix, after the core upgrade I just updated my apt sources in Synaptic, resynced, and all of those upgraded painlessly too - and some of the stuff I had compiled from source. Some source compiled stuff worked fine, presumably because the upgrades to the libraries on which it depended were not serious, others broke left and right. This was a hassle, but as I tend to keep a src directory with tar.bz2 archives of everything I have compiled from source it was simply a matter of going through and recompiling those apps that had broken.
All of that took a week or so - not, because any of it was arduous, but more because you didn't always find the thing that was not working till some time later when you eventually run it.
So all up it took a while for the changes to shake themselves out, but really the basic upgrade was painless, and any issues I struck later were very easy to fix. I'd feel reasonably confident about upgrading to FC3 if I were you - I was nervous going in, but came away quite happy.
Jedidiah.
Why isn't protection for open source software and limitation of intelectual property law a political issue? I never heard it discussed in the presidential election. What can we do to force politicians to bring these issues to the forefront? Don't we want to put all the FUD behind us?
That's because you were busy being mesmerised by the main two political parties. Try looking here for an example of a reasonably major third party that takes the issue very seriously indeed, and in fact has views that very clearly align with most of the attitudes espoused on Slashdot. Of course David Cobb (and Michael Badnarik) weren't invited to the debates, so we never got a chance to hear what the two main parties would have to say if these issues were raised.
Jedidiah
I had to get a car this year, so I chose a Toyota Prius. I'm buying a house, and I'm making sure it's entirely built with high efficiency thermal insulation, zoned HVAC, and energy-reflective 'low e' windows. I work from home office rather than commuting every day.
And interestingly while all of that is probably costing you a bit up front, the long term savings are easily going to outweigh that - particularly havign an energy efficient home. The cost of oil is most likely only ging up, and the cost of energy likewise. Spending extra money so you use less energy is going to save you a lot of cash in the long run.
Unfortunately, while many people seem to be able to see this on the personal level, they can't see it on the national or global scale - a little bit of outlay now can make the whole system more energy efficient and hence more productive in the long term.
Jedidiah.
so does this prove that your Goverment isn't as Liberist as you thought or isn't Government Spending that bad after all
This is the part that baffles me. Americans, like the person you were replying to, will often happily deride the "overtaxed" European countries, but really, they end up paying as much in tax over in the US, and don't get all the social services provided in Europe.
How close are the taxes? I can't say for sure with regard to European countries (and naturally it varies from country to country), but I can speak for New Zealand, which many Americans would place in a similar category (New Zealand has public health care etc.). My example is this: My brother was living in the US, and I was living in New Zealand. We were earning the same wage in local currency. Once you totaled up the Federal tax, state tax, social security levies, other tariffs and what not from my brothers tax statement he was paying more in tax than I was (New Zealand having a far simpler tax system, I didn't need to do any additions of various taxes). That's right, in the US you pay more in tax than socially liberal New Zealand.
(And for any familiar with New Zealand politics - Jim Anderton is calling for a decrease in the company tax rate! So taxes are going down.)
Jedidiah.
Reminds me vaguely of this.
For a taste:
"US Suspects World not putting US Interests first"
Whitehouse evidence
International politicians and the media have blasted the U.S. for abandoning the Kyoto global warming treaty, despite the fact that the U.S. has explained the treaty would not be good for the U.S. economy."
Jedidiah.
Aren't Diffie-Hellman and El Gamal just key exchange methods? I didn't know they had anything to do with the encryption itself...
Diffie-Hellman is just key exchange, El-Gamal is effectively using Diffie-Hellman style operations for encryption. The important thing to remember is that PGP/GPG only uses the public key aspect for key exchange. The message itself in encrypted with a symmetric cipher scheme, and the public key is simply used to exchange the one time key for the symmetric cipher for that particular message.
Jedidiah.
They really need to get these things crackin on chaos theory... How many inhabited planets equals one amino acid chain? What are our odds of hitting the protein jackpot? You know?
Ah, Chaos Theory possibly the most widely popularised, yet least widely understood areas of mathematics ever. Exactly how is Chaos Theory going to help in counting extrasolar planets, or calculating probabilities? You need to actually have some understanding of the system before you can hope to actually apply any dynamical system theory to it at all. Presently, I don't think we do understand exactly how random chemicals manage to form proteins, and self replicating chemicals. I don't see how a fast computer and a fueld of math largely irrelevant to the subject at hand is going to help.
Jedidiah.
So no PGP key cracking. At least officially.
You really need something more than just a really fast/powerful computer to do PGP cracking. You're going to need something that can help you get your fingernails under the problem, because even this machine couldn't brute force PGP keys. There has been some papers written on theoretical weaknesses in RSA that, given a custom built machine, could be exploited. This is not a custom built RSA cracker. It may have enough raw power to make up for that of course, and that means you might manage 1024 bit RSA cracking if you are determined. Unfortunately any sane PGP/GPG users are using Diffie-Hellman/El-Gamal rather than RSA as their public key system, and for now there aren't any similar attacks for the discrete log problem as there are for factoring.
Your paranoia is misplaced. You should be worried that the NSA has come up with a serious break in RSA and Diffie-Hellman schemes that let them be cracked by a nice ordinary supercomputer, rather than worried about computer power overtaking key size. Most key sizes are chosen to have a fairly long lifespan even with massive increases in computing power. You aren't going to brute force 128bit symmetric systems any time soon, no matter how much computing power you stack up against it. No, the fear is in breaks to the encryption scheme.
Jedidiah.
And what about poor people who can't afford to see it in the theaters or buy a DVD - they have to wait till it comes to a free to air TV channel. And what about agoraphobics who are afraid to go outside to the theater, or to the store to buy a DVD? How can you discriminate against them?
Come up with all the bullshit excuses you like for why you have a "right" to download movies, but the fact remains, under current laws it is illegal, and you can be sued. If you're not willing to accept to consequences, then don't do it. If you want to protest unjust and stupid copyright laws (and let's face it, the current copyright laws are) then write to your representatives, get involved with the political process, or go with the civil disobedience approach - the important point with that last option is that it involves accepting the consequences of your actions.
If you actually believe in the wrongness of current copyright law, try actually doing something about it. When New Zealand (where I'm from) was reviewing copyright law, particularly with regard to digital content I got involved with a letter writing campaign makign submissions to protect fair use, time-shifting and format shifting
Jedidiah.
If Joe stole a Ferarri he couldn't pay for...
The he would be depriving the original owner of the Ferarri of his car, which is definitely bad. If, on the other hand, Joe made a replica copy of the Ferarri for the $2000 in materials you claim it's worth I don't think people would complain t much - at least, nt until he tries to sell it to someone else as an actual Ferrari. It's a rather poor analogy. On the other hand...
Currently copyright infringement is illegal, and you can be sued for that and that's the way it is, so I don't have a lot of sympathy for people who knowingly break the law and then complain when they face the consequences. Civil disobedience is all about accepting the consequences of your actions to protest unjust laws.
Which brings us to the point - current copyright laws do seem to be seriously out of sync with how the public seems to want to treat easily replicable items. We need some reform of copyright law - not a complete elimination necessarily, just recognition that in its current form with the current lengthy expiry times it is just not working. But until such reform occurs, be aware that what you're doing is illegal, and you will face consequences.
Jedidiah.
So let it come out, listen to your friends, and then decide. Cuz it would suck to miss out on a good movie just because you want to stick it to Lucas.
I have no interest in "Sticking it to Lucas", I just have no interest in paying money to see a film that I have every expectation will be bad. Listening to early reviews doesn't help either. The people first coming out of Ep 1 thought it was great. The people coming out of Ep 2 were saying "Wow, so much better than Ep 1". To be honest I thought Ep 2 was no better than Ep 1. It had more interesting action scenes, but it also had far more cringe worthy scenes. They were both crap in my opinion. If you thought Ep 2 was an improvement, by all means go to Ep 3 as yo may find that to be improved yet again... myself, I saw no improvement, and no reason to waste money on Ep 3.
Jedidiah.
...is that the patent will have expired in 25 years.
Easy enough solution for that - simply keep makign adjustments and rolling new ideas into the base patent as you think of them. Doing this it is fairly easy to keep a patent in "pending" mode for years on end. Once things are actually underway and you have someone to sue, stop the prolonging, let the patent be accepted, and begin litigation. This has effectively been done, although admittedly not over a 25 year time frame (more in the 5-10 year range).
Jedidiah.