[root@paladin root]# ls -l/bin/sh
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 4 May 15 2002/bin/sh -> bash*
Dude, if you're going to be nitpicky about the technical detail of a joke, at least don't be WRONG. Learn your linux before you start spouting off next time:)
case $Election_Outcome in
Kerry )
echo "The Patriot Act has had a significant impact on my life. Some of it has been indirect, like the Wiccan friend (who was my friend before she was even Wiccan) in another part of the country who warned me that knowing her might jepoardize my clearance...it already had for some of her other friends. And the only reason why is because of her affiliation with a Wiccan coven. I'd point out that the Supreme Court has ruled that Wicca is a valid religion, and that covens are eligible for tax-exempt status as such.";;
Bush )
"Ah, the glorious Patriot Act! It has done nothing but brought cheer and happiness to me since it was first conceived. My papers are in order, ja?";;
I just read the sample chapter, and I'm not entirely impressed. What disturbed me was how it played out; this guy (the criminal) goes for six months without paying his rent...okay, so far, so good, he's a scumbag. The landlord finally, after much effort, is able to evict him. So far so good there too. But then the landlord and the cop see......a home network! Oh my god! He must be dealing in stolen goods! Seal the room as evidence! And the author is called in, with the sole basis of suspicion being that this guy had a bunch of computers running in his home. I wonder how many of us would have our homes sealed and systems seized as potential evidence if these buffoons happened to visit our homes instead of this guys.
Now, of course, in this case it turned out the guy was a thorough scumbag and a crook, and in the course of things he also proceeded to do dumbass thing after dumbass thing, which helped the police. But finding a real witch here and there doesn't make a witch-hunt acceptable.
SCO doesn't get it. They just don't get it. People who are monitoring the SCO lawsuits follow Groklaw...but why? Because it's the only voice out there? No...they also go to the SCO website for press releases, and to all other interested/involved parties as well.
No, they go to Groklaw because the content is GOOD. While Groklaw may not even pretend to be impartial, what they DO succeed in doing is sticking to facts. They start with the extant nature of our law, and apply it to facts and statements that are put forth in public documents. This analysis is what the people go to Groklaw to read. And while the analysis tends to support Groklaw's supporters' views, I think that is actually a chicken-and-egg thing; if SCO wasn't wrong, the law wouldn't work against them, and Groklaw's volunteers wouldn't so dearly relish the thought of McBride being sodomized by a gorilla.
So SCO is coming up with a dog-and-pony show equivalent to their press releases? So what? It's just the same content that couldn't compete with Grokloaw in the first place, just fluffed out into more pages.
Okay, I've been spending too much time cleaning up my music collection today. I could have sworn for a moment that the topic was "Siemens Continues KMFDM Push"! Imagine my shock...
At first, my reaction to this article was along the lines of, "Holy crap...AOL users get two-factor authentication, and I can't get my bank to come up with anything better than a password and an SSN as the login ID!" But then, while I was repeatedly slamming my head in the file cabinet drawer to distract myself from such frustration, I thought about it. And when you really come down to it, I think that AOL accounts are heavily targeted, and that this is, on the whole, a case of strong authentication that makes overwhelming sense.
Think about it...how many times have you heard of people wanting to "hack aol so i cn read my girlfriends mail i think she is cheating on me can u help pls?" I've seen it over and over again. And then you have to consider things that are more likely (like shoulder-surfing) with AOL accounts. Using SecureID makes all of that FAR harder.
And what about the other less-obvious benefits? Little Timmy got in trouble in school today? Sure you could go into parental controls and block his use, but I think it'd be more poignant (and easier for the non-techie parent) to just have him surrender his token. I'm sure that there'll be other manifestations like this that I haven't even considered, also.
So on the whole, not only is this a good idea for security, I don't think it's even close to overkill to be doing it with AOL users. The benefits are that significant.
The more they stay the same. This is no different from problems that can result from any other use of productivity-enhancing technology. IM clients can result in someone being overloaded with messages from friends who just want to talk, without realizing that the person at the other end of the line is also trying to work as well, for example.
The problem I have with all of these "doomsday" views of such technology is that they make the assumption that a person will invariably overdose themselves with connectivity, and continue to do so. In reality, just as with all things in nature, they more typically find an equilibrium, from which a beneficial balance can result. Those who do not find this equilibrium fail to keep up, and thus a form of evolution takes place as they end up being less productive than their co-workers (the 21st century version of competition among hunter-gatherers).
In short, over the years I've seen all sorts of communications technology (email, IM, cell phones, and so on) being blamed for various social maladies. But the only thing these connecting technologies give us are options; whatever good or bad comes from their use is our decision, not an inevitable result of the existence of the technology.
Wow...I remember being pretty pissed at the FBI for how they grabbed everything, essentially crippling the hosting provider. But considering the details, it makes sense; after several hours, the risk of evidence being deliberately destroyed was probably a pretty serious concern. I just can't wrap my brain around how stupid someone would have to be to get involved in something like this though. It's not exactly like nobody would notice (especially when DDoS'ing for weeks at a time) that all the traffic came from one network, regardless of spoofing. Standard procedure in killing a DDoS attack is to follow the flow of bandwidth, rather than the supposed "source" of the traffic.
The writer talks about how the average person has trouble with minor challenges in geography (true enough), but then goes on to talk about Microsoft programmers:
1, Not knowing where Jammu-Kashmir is, exactly, and not knowing that Indian law prohibits considering it part of anything but India. (Never mind that the law has its own counterpart in Pakistan; you can't avoid breaking the law on this one.)
2, In a similar vein, having to offend Kurds so as not to offend the Turks with regard to the depiction of Kurdistan.
3, Offending the Saudis by showing churches turned into mosques by invading Muslim armies...never mind that the exact opposite happens when a Christian army takes over a mosque in the game.
4, Didn't know that "woman" in one dialect of Spanish means "bitch" in another.
None of these things seem to me to be so hard to imagine. Do Nicaraguans know that the word "cracker" can be used as a racist term here? Do Indians know that the Argentines go completely apeshit when you refer to the Faulkand Islands as such, rather than by their preferred name for them? And his assertion that Microsoft leaves their employees facing arrest in other countries seems baseless; he didn't mention a single instance. The worst he came up with was "questioned," and that was for calling Taiwan by it's real name. It's not Microsoft's fault that China has a wild hair up their ass over that one, either.
This is a big setback for solar power advocates, especially as the blackout anniversary will pass with remedial legislation stranded in Congress.
I don't see what the two have to do with each other. Was he carrying the sponsoring Senator/Congressman in the car with him? And I don't know that the anniversary has anything to do with the bill...in fact, I'd overwhelmingly prefer as few arbitrary deadlines as possible when legislators are working on laws that affect my life, thank you.
I had a linux laptop from Dell (no, HP isn't really the first to do this) once, and it worked decently well, given a few crappy things. One, they had made it impossible to change the desktop background permanently...until you figured out that they'd cut back the rights on the config file (I forget which one) to prevent you from writing to it, even as root. And when I had to reinstall RedHat, suspend didn't work. There was apparently a very specific setting needed to get it working again, which Dell knew about, but it really would have been nice if they'd shared the knowledge they developed in setting the laptops up, so that it didn't revert to the same old problem as any other laptop as soon as a reinstall was needed.
I don't think this guy has ever really owned an aquarium. There's no way you could have it do double-duty like that, and I can sum up the problem in one word: algae.
Of course, since many innovations are first driven by sexual urges (e-commerce being a good example):
How about a contortionist sex doll specifically designed for those who wish to join the "hundred-mile-high club" but who can't find a willing partner?:)
It doesn't matter where they're made, packaged, or whatever. I'll give an example from the "crypto is munitions" situation:
I'm sitting in my office, and the mail guy comes around, dropping a package on my desk. It's the latest version of Checkpoint Firewall-1, which includes a VPN. It's got a big huge sticker on the outside stating that it is illegal to ship this package to an outside country without whatever the exemption is that needs to take place, yadda yadda yadda. But guess where it was shipped from? Ramat Gan, Israel, sent DHL Worldwide Express.
I think we need to be clear in the understanding that there's a potential disconnect between the intended actions of Orkut the programmer (as opposed to the service) and Google the company. It may well be that Google believed they were getting something written for them from scratch, when in fact the programmer was re-using a ridiculous (and legally actionable) amount of his old code. I tend to believe that if any infringement did occur, that this is the story behind it, rather than Google willfully and knowingly infringing.
Is it just me, or does this guy seem a little low on the common-sense scale? I mean, his logic is this:
1. Unpressurized rovers can't go too far because the astronauts will be limited by the air supply in their suits, so pressurized rovers that can go further are better.
Okay, good so far. On to the next part of the idea.
2. If something goes wrong with the rover, the guys inside are screwed. Being stranded on the moon with no AAA roadside assistance really sucks, so there should be two rovers.
Hm. Maybe, but you've just doubled the resources needed to go look into something. If this logic had been followed before, we'd never have made it to the moon in the first place. At some point you need to just accept that setting up a base of operations on the moon HAS to involve risk. Why not have redundant systems on the rover instead of two rovers? But it really goes off the tracks here...
3. But what if something happens to both rovers? You really need three!
Wait, now...someone didn't pay attention in statistics class. If there's a 1% chance of the first rover failing, then the chance of two rovers failing isn't.5%; it's.01%. And as I said above, at some point you just need to accept that being an explorer on this level is dangerous stuff, and shit will happen. Also, any event big enough to nail both rovers at the same time (meteor strike, or solar radiation enough to overwhelm any protection the rovers have?) would nail three as well, so that kind fo risk isn't limited by this approach at all.
4. So just get rid of the rovers, and stick with one big mobile moonbase!
Okay, so now what you've done is gotten rid of the rovers, only to make the whole base just one big rover itself, or a whole group of interdependent rovers? And this is more reliable HOW? It seems to me that it takes the challenge of a moonbase and adds complexity to it. Not only do the pieces have to fit together to form a secure and reliable habitat, now they have to withstand coupling and uncoupling, as well as the challenge of mating when the respective pieces might not be exactly aligned due to terrain. So I'm thinking this guy is a little more into astrophysics and a little less into simple common-sense engineering than he should be. Thoughts, anyone?
Their stock is trading at a whopping $.39 per share. And the best part? It's OTC! "Over the counter" stocks are unregulated, and so ridiculously abused for scams that I've never heard a single investment guide of any repute (including, and especially, The Motley Fool) say anything except to run like hell away from them. I'm curious to see if this company really can do what it claims, given this shady bit of data...
This is so unlike any reaction I thought I might have to such an announcement, but I really do feel that Google, by giving us such a great search engine (and working so constantly to improve it) is giving us enough. I wouldn't want them to risk any of that by giving away bits of PageRank!
Slashdot Mirror
Dude, if you're going to be nitpicky about the technical detail of a joke, at least don't be WRONG. Learn your linux before you start spouting off next time
#!/bin/sh
;;
;;
case $Election_Outcome in
Kerry )
echo "The Patriot Act has had a significant impact on my life. Some of it has been indirect, like the Wiccan friend (who was my friend before she was even Wiccan) in another part of the country who warned me that knowing her might jepoardize my clearance...it already had for some of her other friends. And the only reason why is because of her affiliation with a Wiccan coven. I'd point out that the Supreme Court has ruled that Wicca is a valid religion, and that covens are eligible for tax-exempt status as such."
Bush )
"Ah, the glorious Patriot Act! It has done nothing but brought cheer and happiness to me since it was first conceived. My papers are in order, ja?"
esac
I just read the sample chapter, and I'm not entirely impressed. What disturbed me was how it played out; this guy (the criminal) goes for six months without paying his rent...okay, so far, so good, he's a scumbag. The landlord finally, after much effort, is able to evict him. So far so good there too. But then the landlord and the cop see......a home network! Oh my god! He must be dealing in stolen goods! Seal the room as evidence! And the author is called in, with the sole basis of suspicion being that this guy had a bunch of computers running in his home. I wonder how many of us would have our homes sealed and systems seized as potential evidence if these buffoons happened to visit our homes instead of this guys.
Now, of course, in this case it turned out the guy was a thorough scumbag and a crook, and in the course of things he also proceeded to do dumbass thing after dumbass thing, which helped the police. But finding a real witch here and there doesn't make a witch-hunt acceptable.
Hm. If only Mr. Howell had been a gadget freak, perhaps they all would have been rescued...
SCO doesn't get it. They just don't get it. People who are monitoring the SCO lawsuits follow Groklaw...but why? Because it's the only voice out there? No...they also go to the SCO website for press releases, and to all other interested/involved parties as well.
No, they go to Groklaw because the content is GOOD. While Groklaw may not even pretend to be impartial, what they DO succeed in doing is sticking to facts. They start with the extant nature of our law, and apply it to facts and statements that are put forth in public documents. This analysis is what the people go to Groklaw to read. And while the analysis tends to support Groklaw's supporters' views, I think that is actually a chicken-and-egg thing; if SCO wasn't wrong, the law wouldn't work against them, and Groklaw's volunteers wouldn't so dearly relish the thought of McBride being sodomized by a gorilla.
So SCO is coming up with a dog-and-pony show equivalent to their press releases? So what? It's just the same content that couldn't compete with Grokloaw in the first place, just fluffed out into more pages.
Okay, I've been spending too much time cleaning up my music collection today. I could have sworn for a moment that the topic was "Siemens Continues KMFDM Push"! Imagine my shock...
I don't know...it looks like it's working for me. It's supposed to be a 'static image', right? :)
At first, my reaction to this article was along the lines of, "Holy crap...AOL users get two-factor authentication, and I can't get my bank to come up with anything better than a password and an SSN as the login ID!" But then, while I was repeatedly slamming my head in the file cabinet drawer to distract myself from such frustration, I thought about it. And when you really come down to it, I think that AOL accounts are heavily targeted, and that this is, on the whole, a case of strong authentication that makes overwhelming sense.
Think about it...how many times have you heard of people wanting to "hack aol so i cn read my girlfriends mail i think she is cheating on me can u help pls?" I've seen it over and over again. And then you have to consider things that are more likely (like shoulder-surfing) with AOL accounts. Using SecureID makes all of that FAR harder.
And what about the other less-obvious benefits? Little Timmy got in trouble in school today? Sure you could go into parental controls and block his use, but I think it'd be more poignant (and easier for the non-techie parent) to just have him surrender his token. I'm sure that there'll be other manifestations like this that I haven't even considered, also.
So on the whole, not only is this a good idea for security, I don't think it's even close to overkill to be doing it with AOL users. The benefits are that significant.
Cue the silly jokes about "a ring around Uranus".
The more they stay the same. This is no different from problems that can result from any other use of productivity-enhancing technology. IM clients can result in someone being overloaded with messages from friends who just want to talk, without realizing that the person at the other end of the line is also trying to work as well, for example.
The problem I have with all of these "doomsday" views of such technology is that they make the assumption that a person will invariably overdose themselves with connectivity, and continue to do so. In reality, just as with all things in nature, they more typically find an equilibrium, from which a beneficial balance can result. Those who do not find this equilibrium fail to keep up, and thus a form of evolution takes place as they end up being less productive than their co-workers (the 21st century version of competition among hunter-gatherers).
In short, over the years I've seen all sorts of communications technology (email, IM, cell phones, and so on) being blamed for various social maladies. But the only thing these connecting technologies give us are options; whatever good or bad comes from their use is our decision, not an inevitable result of the existence of the technology.
Wow...I remember being pretty pissed at the FBI for how they grabbed everything, essentially crippling the hosting provider. But considering the details, it makes sense; after several hours, the risk of evidence being deliberately destroyed was probably a pretty serious concern. I just can't wrap my brain around how stupid someone would have to be to get involved in something like this though. It's not exactly like nobody would notice (especially when DDoS'ing for weeks at a time) that all the traffic came from one network, regardless of spoofing. Standard procedure in killing a DDoS attack is to follow the flow of bandwidth, rather than the supposed "source" of the traffic.
The writer talks about how the average person has trouble with minor challenges in geography (true enough), but then goes on to talk about Microsoft programmers:
1, Not knowing where Jammu-Kashmir is, exactly, and not knowing that Indian law prohibits considering it part of anything but India. (Never mind that the law has its own counterpart in Pakistan; you can't avoid breaking the law on this one.)
2, In a similar vein, having to offend Kurds so as not to offend the Turks with regard to the depiction of Kurdistan.
3, Offending the Saudis by showing churches turned into mosques by invading Muslim armies...never mind that the exact opposite happens when a Christian army takes over a mosque in the game.
4, Didn't know that "woman" in one dialect of Spanish means "bitch" in another.
None of these things seem to me to be so hard to imagine. Do Nicaraguans know that the word "cracker" can be used as a racist term here? Do Indians know that the Argentines go completely apeshit when you refer to the Faulkand Islands as such, rather than by their preferred name for them? And his assertion that Microsoft leaves their employees facing arrest in other countries seems baseless; he didn't mention a single instance. The worst he came up with was "questioned," and that was for calling Taiwan by it's real name. It's not Microsoft's fault that China has a wild hair up their ass over that one, either.
This is a big setback for solar power advocates, especially as the blackout anniversary will pass with remedial legislation stranded in Congress.
I don't see what the two have to do with each other. Was he carrying the sponsoring Senator/Congressman in the car with him? And I don't know that the anniversary has anything to do with the bill...in fact, I'd overwhelmingly prefer as few arbitrary deadlines as possible when legislators are working on laws that affect my life, thank you.
Is SCO really all that bad? I mean, they're just some hardworking company...HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAA!
:)
Sorry, Darl...here's your money back, I just couldn't pull it off with a straight face.
If they consider giving it to federal workers?
I had a linux laptop from Dell (no, HP isn't really the first to do this) once, and it worked decently well, given a few crappy things. One, they had made it impossible to change the desktop background permanently...until you figured out that they'd cut back the rights on the config file (I forget which one) to prevent you from writing to it, even as root. And when I had to reinstall RedHat, suspend didn't work. There was apparently a very specific setting needed to get it working again, which Dell knew about, but it really would have been nice if they'd shared the knowledge they developed in setting the laptops up, so that it didn't revert to the same old problem as any other laptop as soon as a reinstall was needed.
I'm onsite at a federal agency. So I guess I'd be like everyone else is here.
Jeez, the reviews all sound like James Lipton on In The Actors' Studio!
I don't think this guy has ever really owned an aquarium. There's no way you could have it do double-duty like that, and I can sum up the problem in one word: algae.
Of course, since many innovations are first driven by sexual urges (e-commerce being a good example):
:)
How about a contortionist sex doll specifically designed for those who wish to join the "hundred-mile-high club" but who can't find a willing partner?
It doesn't matter where they're made, packaged, or whatever. I'll give an example from the "crypto is munitions" situation:
I'm sitting in my office, and the mail guy comes around, dropping a package on my desk. It's the latest version of Checkpoint Firewall-1, which includes a VPN. It's got a big huge sticker on the outside stating that it is illegal to ship this package to an outside country without whatever the exemption is that needs to take place, yadda yadda yadda. But guess where it was shipped from? Ramat Gan, Israel, sent DHL Worldwide Express.
I think we need to be clear in the understanding that there's a potential disconnect between the intended actions of Orkut the programmer (as opposed to the service) and Google the company. It may well be that Google believed they were getting something written for them from scratch, when in fact the programmer was re-using a ridiculous (and legally actionable) amount of his old code. I tend to believe that if any infringement did occur, that this is the story behind it, rather than Google willfully and knowingly infringing.
Is it just me, or does this guy seem a little low on the common-sense scale? I mean, his logic is this:
.5%; it's .01%. And as I said above, at some point you just need to accept that being an explorer on this level is dangerous stuff, and shit will happen. Also, any event big enough to nail both rovers at the same time (meteor strike, or solar radiation enough to overwhelm any protection the rovers have?) would nail three as well, so that kind fo risk isn't limited by this approach at all.
1. Unpressurized rovers can't go too far because the astronauts will be limited by the air supply in their suits, so pressurized rovers that can go further are better.
Okay, good so far. On to the next part of the idea.
2. If something goes wrong with the rover, the guys inside are screwed. Being stranded on the moon with no AAA roadside assistance really sucks, so there should be two rovers.
Hm. Maybe, but you've just doubled the resources needed to go look into something. If this logic had been followed before, we'd never have made it to the moon in the first place. At some point you need to just accept that setting up a base of operations on the moon HAS to involve risk. Why not have redundant systems on the rover instead of two rovers? But it really goes off the tracks here...
3. But what if something happens to both rovers? You really need three!
Wait, now...someone didn't pay attention in statistics class. If there's a 1% chance of the first rover failing, then the chance of two rovers failing isn't
4. So just get rid of the rovers, and stick with one big mobile moonbase!
Okay, so now what you've done is gotten rid of the rovers, only to make the whole base just one big rover itself, or a whole group of interdependent rovers? And this is more reliable HOW? It seems to me that it takes the challenge of a moonbase and adds complexity to it. Not only do the pieces have to fit together to form a secure and reliable habitat, now they have to withstand coupling and uncoupling, as well as the challenge of mating when the respective pieces might not be exactly aligned due to terrain. So I'm thinking this guy is a little more into astrophysics and a little less into simple common-sense engineering than he should be. Thoughts, anyone?
Their stock is trading at a whopping $.39 per share. And the best part? It's OTC! "Over the counter" stocks are unregulated, and so ridiculously abused for scams that I've never heard a single investment guide of any repute (including, and especially, The Motley Fool) say anything except to run like hell away from them. I'm curious to see if this company really can do what it claims, given this shady bit of data...
This is so unlike any reaction I thought I might have to such an announcement, but I really do feel that Google, by giving us such a great search engine (and working so constantly to improve it) is giving us enough. I wouldn't want them to risk any of that by giving away bits of PageRank!