Indeed the FISC ruling said, repeatedly, that NSA could not keep the records for a civil suit _because_ the district court hadn't ordered them to. Now that the district court _has_ ordered them to to retain it, they must. FISC explicitly said they have a duty to preserve it if and when (but not before) a plaintiff or court asks them to.
So the "conflicting" orders are a non-story. The actual story is that the district court ordered them to retain it. FISC already acknowledged that district can and might do that.
> they know that a few hundred votes could sway an election
Absolutely. Especially since many districts are safe for one party, so the vote that matters is the primary.
What that means is that each *voter* can have a comparatively large influence over whether or not the state senator keeps their job. That's the ultimate accountability - I can fire my state senator by publicizing complaints among other likely voters. If only a few hundred of us agree that he needs to go, he's gone.
Give it a test. Try calling or emailing your state senator or rep, and try the same with the national one. In my experience, it's not difficult to get the state rep on the phone. The state senator is a little tougher - I've talked to him by calling the local radio station during his weekly visit and by posting on his Facebook wall and he replied. The federal senator? I'd be lucky to get one of his staffers instead of a recording.
> In a sense, the camaraderie of an OSS project negates much of the many-eyes potential to find flaws.
This is, I believe, a misunderstanding of the statement. I'm a little surprised ESR didn't clear this up, but the original statement is "with enough eyeballs bugs are shallow... the fix will be obvious to someone."
Linus' law (written by ESR) does not say "there will be no bugs". It says that if enough people look at a bug "the solution will be obvious to someone". Any programmer has had the experience of spending hours chasing a bug down, starting from the symptom and going through many functions in many files to eventually figure it out. That's a deep bug. This is a shallow bug:
You won't spend hours hunting down the bug in the code above, it's right there where you'd start looking. That's a shallow bug, the problem and solution is obvious. With enough programmers examining the code, one of them will solve a bug quickly, it will seem shallow to them. That's an entirely different statement from "there will be no bugs".
ESR is, among other things, the maintainer of the jargon file. A couple of weeks ago, the jargon file was entioned in a thread. One reader wasn't familiar with and asked for a link. I believe that reader who wanted to look at the jargon file very much belongs here.
I'll give you your second if you add in language to put in an upper limit of 60 years old and attach a rider declaring BMO from Adventure Time is awesome.
You wouldn't use an RPi in production, of course. x86 would be just as silly. A $3 hardware encryption chip attached to most any microcontroller would be several thousand times faster and an order of magnitude cheaper than x86. x86 is for general purpose computing - this is a single purpose device.
So why did they use a raspberry pi? Probably because they already had one, or several, already knew how to use it, and could put the code together in an hour or so to demonstrate the concept and have a little fun doing it.
Rotational speed is an engineering problem, but I bet there's an easy solution. One thing that comes to mind is the difference in strength between regular plastic packing tape vs filament tape, the plastic tape with a few strings of fiberglass on it. That little bit of glass string sure makes the tape a lot stronger, and it isn't too expensive. Current disks are just plastic. Adding three cents of fiberglass should make them about ten times stronger, so they can spin much faster.
CD, DVD, and Blu Ray have all been writable at about 16x, meaning you can burn a disk in two - three minutes. The write speed has scaled with capacity. I see no reason to think the next generation will be any different.
Just as with operating systems, with optical disks, windows destroy data. The sunlight slowly "burns" all the bits if a disk is stored when sunlight beams in. That's one pattern of failure that someone might not identify, but it is a known pattern you can avoid.
Let me guess, you live in a densely populated city, in a small country. (Where small means smaller than a US state, such as Texas.) Electric makes sense when you have many trains on relatively short tracks, so that a train passes every few minutes. US commuter systems like New York's subway benefit from being electric.
North Dakota is over 2,000 kilometers from the destination, the refineries south of Houston. Between the two locations, you'll find Dallas and a bunch of cattle. Not much else, just cattle and open plains for 2,000 Km. With nothing out there, there are no commuters, so the train goes by once per day or so. Building out thousands of kilometers of third rail for one train to use each day would be really, really silly.
Besides, it wouldn't be allowed because a green-eyed, three-toe New Mexico mosquito lizard might electrocute himself.
> Java is definitely the preferred language over those for reliability, uptime, performance, security, and manageability and maintainability of the source code.
I would have believed you if you didn't say performance and security. Since you claimed Java has great performance and security I kow you're just trolling.:)
Mechanical engineering is applied math. Therefore, if you have a math background, you're all set to be an engineer - no engineering classes required, right?
A good math background will make CS much easier. It is, however, a distinct discipline. For example, to study algorithmic complexity, some math is needed, so someone who already understands the pure math will have a head start. However, they still need to learn the patterns to quickly estimate complexity and be able to "see" which type of algorithm might have lower complexity.
In many ways, CompSci is to finite math as finite math is to arithmetic. You need arithmetic to learn all of finite math, because it's based on arithmetic, but it goes beyond arithmetic. So to CompSci requires knowledge of set theory and other finite math, but it goes beyond. See for example SQL, aka relational algebra and relational calculus. A math background will teach you about set operations, but SQL is set algebra on sets on tuples. You don't normally restrict sets of projected tuples in math class.
You're not going to write much useful software in bash without calling expr, sed, awk, grep, etc. - all separate programs. When you use echo, basename, etc. you don't necessarily KNOW whether you're calling an external program or not.
On the other hand, an experienced Perl programmer rarely calls external programs. The full functionality of sed, awk, grep, basename, echo, and most other system utilities is available within the Perl language itself. The one notable thing Perl often opens a pipe to is sendmail, for configuration purposes. You could write sendmail in pure Perl. In shell, even "hello world" may well call/bin/echo . Perl is an interpreted language, shell is a scripting language.
This most certainly does not mean shell is BAD. She'll scripts are very useful. They are useful SCRIPTS.
With the discount for on-time payments, I pay $35 for unlimited talk, text, and web on the Sprint network. That's no contract, so certainly good prices are available.
Of course, many people pay $85 for the phone subsidy that comes with a three year contract. An extra $50 / month will certainly increase the bill. $50 for 36 months is $1,800 for a "free" phone that's worth $250. No thanks. I don't recall how often you can get a new phone subsidized, but if it's a $200 credit once a year and people are paying $50 / month for that benefit...
Also, no matter what makes sense, new refineries aren't allowed. Only half-billion dollar solar boondoggles are allowed. Obama's campaign contributors have to end up with the money.
The Obama administration recently completed the THIRD environmental impact study of the pipeline. Like the first two, it concluded that piping oil is better for the environment than what's happening now - rail cars crashing, leaking , occasionally exploding , while burning tons of diesel to power the trains.
You had a typo, you left off the "d" in "lived". You're right, though, only people who have some experience are likely to appreciate how horrible Java really is.
Why should crude oil be carried to the refineries on closed tank cars on trains anyway? That seems dangerous. Don't we have pipelines going to the refineries for that purpose?
What we do, and have done for many years, is just pad to the nearest X bytes, where X is roughly size / 30. That's small enough that it makes little difference in speed, but many resources end up being the same size.
Consider as an example the Mayo clinic web site. Each page is maybe 5KB for the html itself. The graphics for the logo, nav bar, etc.are separate requests, cached after the home page. 80% of the html is template stuff - the header, the footer, the nav bar, overall page structure. Maybe 20%, or 1KB, is different on each page. Most pages have 500-1,000 bytes of unique content. So pad up to the nearest 100 bytes. You aren't going to notice any slowdown from an extra 50 bytes, but if most pages are an even multiple of 100 and their sizes generally don't differ by more than 1,000 bytes, about 10% of all the pages on the site will pad out to the same size as the requested page - foiling the attack.
It seems to have worked. The bad guys discuss our security system on the crack forums regularly, but there's been no mention of a successful sized-based attack.
You'll note the second amendment says "Congress shall not", it says what Congrss may not do. It does not claim to give citizens any right at all. Instead, it says Congress may not abridge THE right. Not that they must give you some new right, but that they must not violate THE right, the right you already have, by virtue of being human.
The plain wording of the Constitution simply recognizes that you have these rights and the government shouldn't violate them. Nowhere dies it define what exactly "the freedom of speech" is. Perhaps the reason the founders didn't feel the need to define these rights is because they were already defined in the existing law, English common law. I think you'll find that at the time they wrote "THE freedom of speech", they understood that freedom to include unpopular speech, but not shouting fire in a crowded theatre, libel, and a few other things.
This fact, that the ConConstitution speaks of protecting pre-existing rights, is crucially important. If your rights were not pre-existing as part of bring human, they must have been given to you by government. What government can give, government can take away. The Constitution rejects that view. Because your rights are endowed by your creator, legal documents can neither remove the nor define them. The Constitution doesn't define the freedom of speech because it can't. If it could, it could define freedom of speech as freedom to say approved things. The definition is elsewhere, as it must be.
The Jones family of northwest Arkansas is rich from their trucking company. They are well known amongst people who follow the trucking industry. How many unstable people are passionate about trucking compared to how many unstable people are passionate about bitcoin?
I'm not saying that everyone who uses bitcoin is unstable - most aren't. But of the people who are unstable, more will be iinterested in bitcoin, Marilyn Manson, and Ron Paul than in Walmart, Jewel Kilcher, and Marco Rubio.
Both the reporter thought Mozilla was involved and also people posting here said they saw the headline and got mad at Mozilla. Out of our very small sample, we know more than one person thought it was Mozilla's doing, and it hurt Mozilla's reputation.
You might wonder much likelihood of confusion is allowed under the law. Google "moron in a hurry" for the answer. If you're selling cans of Coke at a garage sale, only a moron in hurry would think for a second that your sale of warm Coke was endorsed by Coca-Cola, so that would be allowed.
Slashdot Mirror
Indeed the FISC ruling said, repeatedly, that NSA could not keep the records for a civil suit _because_ the district court hadn't ordered them to. Now that the district court _has_ ordered them to to retain it, they must. FISC explicitly said they have a duty to preserve it if and when (but not before) a plaintiff or court asks them to.
So the "conflicting" orders are a non-story. The actual story is that the district court ordered them to retain it. FISC already acknowledged that district can and might do that.
The apathy of public in general sucks, agreed.
> they know that a few hundred votes could sway an election
Absolutely. Especially since many districts are safe for one party, so the vote that matters is the primary.
What that means is that each *voter* can have a comparatively large influence over whether or not the state senator keeps their job. That's the ultimate accountability - I can fire my state senator by publicizing complaints among other likely voters. If only a few hundred of us agree that he needs to go, he's gone.
Give it a test. Try calling or emailing your state senator or rep, and try the same with the national one. In my experience, it's not difficult to get the state rep on the phone. The state senator is a little tougher - I've talked to him by calling the local radio station during his weekly visit and by posting on his Facebook wall and he replied. The federal senator? I'd be lucky to get one of his staffers instead of a recording.
Don't believe me? Try it.
> In a sense, the camaraderie of an OSS project negates much of the many-eyes potential to find flaws.
This is, I believe, a misunderstanding of the statement. I'm a little surprised ESR didn't clear this up, but the original statement is "with enough eyeballs bugs are shallow ... the fix will be obvious to someone."
Linus' law (written by ESR) does not say "there will be no bugs". It says that if enough people look at a bug "the solution will be obvious to someone".
Any programmer has had the experience of spending hours chasing a bug down, starting from the symptom and going through many functions in many files to eventually figure it out. That's a deep bug. This is a shallow bug:
if ($password_entered == $correct_password) {
deny_access();
} else {
allow_access();
}
You won't spend hours hunting down the bug in the code above, it's right there where you'd start looking. That's a shallow bug, the problem and solution is obvious.
With enough programmers examining the code, one of them will solve a bug quickly, it will seem shallow to them. That's an entirely different statement from "there will be no bugs".
ESR is, among other things, the maintainer of the jargon file. A couple of weeks ago, the jargon file was entioned in a thread. One reader wasn't familiar with and asked for a link. I believe that reader who wanted to look at the jargon file very much belongs here.
I'll give you your second if you add in language to put in an upper limit of 60 years old and attach a rider declaring BMO from Adventure Time is awesome.
If you add a limit on BHO you've got my vote.
You wouldn't use an RPi in production, of course. x86 would be just as silly. A $3 hardware encryption chip attached to most any microcontroller would be several thousand times faster and an order of magnitude cheaper than x86. x86 is for general purpose computing - this is a single purpose device.
So why did they use a raspberry pi? Probably because they already had one, or several, already knew how to use it, and could put the code together in an hour or so to demonstrate the concept and have a little fun doing it.
Rotational speed is an engineering problem, but I bet there's an easy solution. One thing that comes to mind is the difference in strength between regular plastic packing tape vs filament tape, the plastic tape with a few strings of fiberglass on it. That little bit of glass string sure makes the tape a lot stronger, and it isn't too expensive. Current disks are just plastic. Adding three cents of fiberglass should make them about ten times stronger, so they can spin much faster.
CD, DVD, and Blu Ray have all been writable at about 16x, meaning you can burn a disk in two - three minutes. The write speed has scaled with capacity. I see no reason to think the next generation will be any different.
Just as with operating systems, with optical disks, windows destroy data. The sunlight slowly "burns" all the bits if a disk is stored when sunlight beams in. That's one pattern of failure that someone might not identify, but it is a known pattern you can avoid.
Let me guess, you live in a densely populated city, in a small country. (Where small means smaller than a US state, such as Texas.) Electric makes sense when you have many trains on relatively short tracks, so that a train passes every few minutes. US commuter systems like New York's subway benefit from being electric.
North Dakota is over 2,000 kilometers from the destination, the refineries south of Houston. Between the two locations, you'll find Dallas and a bunch of cattle. Not much else, just cattle and open plains for 2,000 Km. With nothing out there, there are no commuters, so the train goes by once per day or so. Building out thousands of kilometers of third rail for one train to use each day would be really, really silly.
Besides, it wouldn't be allowed because a green-eyed, three-toe New Mexico mosquito lizard might electrocute himself.
> Java is definitely the preferred language over those for reliability, uptime, performance, security, and manageability and maintainability of the source code.
I would have believed you if you didn't say performance and security. Since you claimed Java has great performance and security I kow you're just trolling. :)
Mechanical engineering is applied math.
Therefore, if you have a math background, you're all set to be an engineer - no engineering classes required, right?
A good math background will make CS much easier. It is, however, a distinct discipline. For example, to study algorithmic complexity, some math is needed, so someone who already understands the pure math will have a head start. However, they still need to learn the patterns to quickly estimate complexity and be able to "see" which type of algorithm might have lower complexity.
In many ways, CompSci is to finite math as finite math is to arithmetic. You need arithmetic to learn all of finite math, because it's based on arithmetic, but it goes beyond arithmetic. So to CompSci requires knowledge of set theory and other finite math, but it goes beyond. See for example SQL, aka relational algebra and relational calculus. A math background will teach you about set operations, but SQL is set algebra on sets on tuples. You don't normally restrict sets of projected tuples in math class.
You're not going to write much useful software in bash without calling expr, sed, awk, grep, etc. - all separate programs. When you use echo, basename, etc. you don't necessarily KNOW whether you're calling an external program or not.
On the other hand, an experienced Perl programmer rarely calls external programs. The full functionality of sed, awk, grep, basename, echo, and most other system utilities is available within the Perl language itself. The one notable thing Perl often opens a pipe to is sendmail, for configuration purposes. You could write sendmail in pure Perl. In shell, even "hello world" may well call /bin/echo . Perl is an interpreted language, shell is a scripting language.
This most certainly does not mean shell is BAD. She'll scripts are very useful. They are useful SCRIPTS.
With the discount for on-time payments, I pay $35 for unlimited talk, text, and web on the Sprint network. That's no contract, so certainly good prices are available.
Of course, many people pay $85 for the phone subsidy that comes with a three year contract. An extra $50 / month will certainly increase the bill. $50 for 36 months is $1,800 for a "free" phone that's worth $250. No thanks. I don't recall how often you can get a new phone subsidized, but if it's a $200 credit once a year and people are paying $50 / month for that benefit ...
Also, no matter what makes sense, new refineries aren't allowed. Only half-billion dollar solar boondoggles are allowed. Obama's campaign contributors have to end up with the money.
The Obama administration recently completed the THIRD environmental impact study of the pipeline. Like the first two, it concluded that piping oil is better for the environment than what's happening now - rail cars crashing, leaking , occasionally exploding , while burning tons of diesel to power the trains.
You're blabbering nonsense words in week old threads. Take your meds so you can put together a sentence.
You had a typo, you left off the "d" in "lived". You're right, though, only people who have some experience are likely to appreciate how horrible Java really is.
Why should crude oil be carried to the refineries on closed tank cars on trains anyway? That seems dangerous. Don't we have pipelines going to the refineries for that purpose?
What we do, and have done for many years, is just pad to the nearest X bytes, where X is roughly size / 30. That's small enough that it makes little difference in speed, but many resources end up being the same size.
Consider as an example the Mayo clinic web site. Each page is maybe 5KB for the html itself. The graphics for the logo, nav bar, etc.are separate requests, cached after the home page. 80% of the html is template stuff - the header, the footer, the nav bar, overall page structure. Maybe 20%, or 1KB, is different on each page. Most pages have 500-1,000 bytes of unique content. So pad up to the nearest 100 bytes. You aren't going to notice any slowdown from an extra 50 bytes, but if most pages are an even multiple of 100 and their sizes generally don't differ by more than 1,000 bytes, about 10% of all the pages on the site will pad out to the same size as the requested page - foiling the attack.
It seems to have worked. The bad guys discuss our security system on the crack forums regularly, but there's been no mention of a successful sized-based attack.
You'll note the second amendment says "Congress shall not", it says what Congrss may not do. It does not claim to give citizens any right at all. Instead, it says Congress may not abridge THE right. Not that they must give you some new right, but that they must not violate THE right, the right you already have, by virtue of being human.
The plain wording of the Constitution simply recognizes that you have these rights and the government shouldn't violate them. Nowhere dies it define what exactly "the freedom of speech" is. Perhaps the reason the founders didn't feel the need to define these rights is because they were already defined in the existing law, English common law. I think you'll find that at the time they wrote "THE freedom of speech", they understood that freedom to include unpopular speech, but not shouting fire in a crowded theatre, libel, and a few other things.
This fact, that the ConConstitution speaks of protecting pre-existing rights, is crucially important. If your rights were not pre-existing as part of bring human, they must have been given to you by government. What government can give, government can take away. The Constitution rejects that view. Because your rights are endowed by your creator, legal documents can neither remove the nor define them. The Constitution doesn't define the freedom of speech because it can't. If it could, it could define freedom of speech as freedom to say approved things. The definition is elsewhere, as it must be.
Soros is welcome to buy elections in his country, Hungary.
The Jones family of northwest Arkansas is rich from their trucking company. They are well known amongst people who follow the trucking industry. How many unstable people are passionate about trucking compared to how many unstable people are passionate about bitcoin?
I'm not saying that everyone who uses bitcoin is unstable - most aren't. But of the people who are unstable, more will be iinterested in bitcoin, Marilyn Manson, and Ron Paul than in Walmart, Jewel Kilcher, and Marco Rubio.
Both the reporter thought Mozilla was involved and also people posting here said they saw the headline and got mad at Mozilla. Out of our very small sample, we know more than one person thought it was Mozilla's doing, and it hurt Mozilla's reputation.
You might wonder much likelihood of confusion is allowed under the law. Google "moron in a hurry" for the answer. If you're selling cans of Coke at a garage sale, only a moron in hurry would think for a second that your sale of warm Coke was endorsed by Coca-Cola, so that would be allowed.