There are mainly two kinds of cryptography in use: secret key and public/private key.
Secret key cryptography are systems that use a single secret key both to encrypt and decrypt the message. That is, both the sender and the recipient need to arrange for both to have the secret key, over some kind of secure channel. This approach is not practical to use over the net, since transmitting the key over it would place the users in danger of it being intercepted.
Public/private key cryptography uses a pair of keys: one to encrypt messages, and a second one to decrypt them. This works the following way: suppose you want to send me an encrypted message. What you (or anyone) would have to do is get a copy of my public encryption key (which I could place in an accesible place, like my home page), and use that to encrypt the message. When I receive it, only I can read it, since it can only be decrypted with the private key I keep on a safe computer. Of course, I need to protect my private key from being stolen. But the main point is that I never have to transmit the private decryption key over the net, while my public encryption key can be wholly public.
This is the method used by PGP to encrypt email, by SSH for encrypted logins, and SSL for secure sockets (like when you use a secure web connection). A variant of it is used for PGP signatures (which can, in conjunction with a public key, cryptographically guarantee that some file has not been altered).
Rather than dealing with the problems of hacking encryption into MUAs, why not create a PGP encrypting/decrypting proxy that would work seamlessly with any MUA?
I assume you mean a proxy that will run on your same machine, and not on the network; otherwise, you're transmitting cleartext on the wires.
Last time I looked at Mew, I recall finding it very nice feature-wise, but completely backwards keymap-wise. (Who doesn't instinctively press the "r" key to "(r)eply" to a message, rather than the "a" key to "(a)nswer?)
Of course, one could remap it. But figuring out how to tweak an email agent is a waste of time unless you're already decided on it.
comm prints lines that are common, and lines that are unique, to two input files. The two files must be sorted before comm can be used. The file name `-' means the standard input.
With no options, comm produces three column output. Column one contains lines unique to file1, column two contains lines unique to file2, and column three contains lines common to both files.
So this one actually has a side-by-side display. This is from the GNU manpage, but I also have it from the Unix V7 manuals.
A nation that has a board to determine the proper french form of words such as CD-ROM doesn't attract a lot of sympathy....
Language planning is something many countries do. I'm not acquainted with the French Academy, but I do know about the Spanish Academy of Language, the counterpart for the Spanish language.
This kind of stuff is important to with international languages. Spanish, for example, is spoken in 20 countries, each with its own culture, national press, etc. It happens that sometimes people in one country spontaneously adopt some word from another language, say, English, but people in other countries do not, import a different word, or import the same word, but in a different form. For example, in Mexico people use the word troca (from the English "truck"); in Puerto Rico, people say troc. In some countries, there are even syntactical forms that don't exist in others!
The point is that there is a need for some organization to review the data on the language as its used in different places, and decide on general forms to be used by everyone when one needs to be sure to be understood everywhere. That is, there needs to be a general dictionary, which collects words that you can expect to be usable in all places, and a general grammar.
English speaking countries (well, at least Britain and the USA) also have this--- only that they are to be found in the form of the better known dictionaries (like the Oxford Dictionary) or grammar and composition guides.
A. Every language is a kludge, and the perceived "difficulty" of learning a language is a relative standard that differs from person to person.
I think what he meant was learning english orthography, as opposed to other languages. Hey, far more frequently than on would like, an english word pops up whose spelling has nothing to do with the way it's pronounced.
In this regard, French is easier to learn. And Spanish has them both beat;-).
... If not real: Slashdot has sunk to new lows of journalism. Actually, since it was posted without knowing how accurate it might be, this is true either way.
Welcome to Slashdot, dude. As someone once pointed out,/.'s motto should be changed to "Gossip for nerds. Stuff that matters."
I think you misread this guy. When I saw his post, I thought he meant that he prefers the GNU toolset to be standard rather that the BSD, and that he does not like every company X coming up with its own X Open Source License. Which are both respectable points, IMHO.
And, the fact is that the distros do use bash, and not, say, ash.
You could indeed boot up a system with the linux kernel and no GNU stuff (say, with BSD stuff). But then it would clearly not be a Linux-and-GNU-based system.
The shortcomings of the Linux kernel have been known for ages. Linux first appeared in late 1991. In early 1992 already Linus acknowledged that a microkernel design would have been better.
"True, linux is monolithic, and I agree that microkernels are nicer. [...] From a theoretical (and aesthetical) standpoint linux looses."
Man, this has to be one of the worst misrepresentations I have ever seen. Yes, Linus did write that in the famed "discussion" (really a flame) with Andrew Tannenbaum, but he was defending his architectural choice, not conceding a mistake.
Basically, the argument that popped up in the discussion was that a monolithic kernel is quicker and easier to implement.
If the GNU kernel had been ready last spring, I'd not have bothered to even start my project: the fact is that it wasn't and still isn't. Linux wins heavily on points of being available now. ---Linus
I kinda agree with you, but I kinda disagree with you. In my eyes, 2.3.1 is reportable. It marks the start of a new development cycle, and thus is news. (And that only because 2.3.0 was really the same as the stable kernel, with the version number changed.) 2.3.2 and so on shouldn't be reported, I think. The day someone posts a story titled "Kernel 2.3.45 is out" I'll be mad.
I don't really think you should need to do such a thing. I mean, writing an english-like language. Just invent a hypothetical programming language, and write encryption code in it, claiming it is an example of how encryption works, and that since there is no compiler or interpreter, it is not a functional device. Then, after the code has been disseminated, write a compiler for the language.
For that matter, write literate encryption code in Knuth's MIX language.
Which "theories" of Chomsky in particular do you have in mind? And what do you think is the counterevidence? I'd realy like more detail. Oh, for the record, I study linguistics.
"Arguing whether computers can think is like arguing whether submarines can swim"
I don't know either who said this, but I _do_ know that Noam Chomsky _could_ say it. I heard him talk about a month ago, and he mentioned, for example, the case of "airplanes flying" (vs. "birds flying). His argument is that we may well extend the meaning of the word "fly" (or "think") to include what airplanes (computers, respectively) do, but this is merely a terminological shift; the facts of the matter, whatever they are, remain the same. (His position was that arguments about whether machines can "really" think are senseless).
I actually have a vague recollection of him mentioning this phrase--- but don't quote me on it. And it wouldn't prove authorship.
I kinda agree with him on something--- these arguments tend to be senseless. Hell, I don't know whether my neighbors _really_ think. I think they think, though:-)
Bruce, this is not true. It's users who fit between some threshold of posting enough, yet not too much, who have lower user numbers, and positive alignment (average score of postings).
Today, despite having been, arguably, "exploited" by the US, its patron state, South Korea is relatively wealthy and stable; North Korea is a basket case, despite massive subsidization by _its_ patron state!
MYou are taking my logic backwards ("p implies q" does not imply "q implies p"). I don't hold that if an economy is subsidized, it will bloom. I only hold that subsidies are an advantage many US corporations have, that is systematically denied to count ries that wish to receive economic aid.
Today, despite having been, a rguably, "exploited" by the US, its patron state, South Korea is relatively wealthy and stable; North Korea is a basket case, despite massive subsidization by _ its_ patron state!
I think the fact the US came out on top, and not, say, Brazil, is due mainly to historical reasons. (Anyway, the fact the West ern world came out on top could very well be an historical accident. What if the Persians had beat the Greeks? What is Charles Martel (?) had not beat the Moors in France in 753 A.D.?)
However, this is not what I set out to do. I set out to explain why the Western powers stay on top, not why they came to be on top. My position is that there is a strong economic and militaty pressure to keep them down.
Let's examine current "exploitation", though. Suppose the US corporation Giganticorp sets up a factory in Malaysia, paying its workers X amount per hour, to make products which are then shipped back to the US. It's not clear precisely who loses here. Giganticorp pays less for manufacturing than it would for a US factory; these profits are passed either to the consumer in the form of lower costs, or the stockholders. The workers have a job that they would presumably not have otherwise; this money passes from the US economy into the Malaysian economy. The Malaysian government probably takes its share in taxes too. Plus, of course, there are all the associated costs and the jobs those create: electricity, shipping, etc. It's not clear who is being "exploited" here.
It is clear who is getting exploited. Those who are doing most of the work for the least pay.
(And yet somehow the Western world is po rtrayed as the one getting rich off this.)
This is not a "portrait"; this is a fact. How much money do you think corporations get out of the goods produced in the third world? How much stays in the local economy?
But then we have to ask why it is that the workers take the jobs. Is it unreasonable to assume that they regard the jobs as preferable to whatever else they have an opportunity to do?
What about the opportunities that the industrial powers have systematically tried to kill for third world workers? Like, union organization, popular democratic movements, and so on. The industrialized nations have a long story of attacking these movements in the third world, by means of tactics like supporting oppressive dictatorships, by terrorism, or by infiltrating popular movements.
Thus you are taking "opportunities" in a much too narrow sense here. If you mean "opportunities" as in the choices they have within the political and economical circumstances the first world countries actively attemp to restrict them to, well, then the "opportunities" (a horrible euphemism here, I think: working for 15 cents an hour, 12-14 hours a day, at some menial job, making some american executive earn millions a year, and missing out on chances to work to improve living conditions for their own country) are preferable. However, when you step out of that narrow view, you realize that these people's real opportunities are squashed by the power of a ruthless economical elite at every step of their lives.
This is perhaps the most irritating thing about Western liberalism in this area: it reduces the people it supposedly is the most concerned about, the "exploited" workers, to the level of children or morons, portraying them not as rational human beings making choices, but as objects used by Westerners. (Interesting that it always requires Westerners to "save" the people, no matter what the problem or the time...)
I don't see where my argument is reducing them to children or morons. I just argued that current first world economic, military and politic policies are directed towards keeping the third world poor, so that the industrial economic elite can profit. This has nothing to do with the great talents of third world people.
And I don't necessarily ask anyone to "save" the third world. I ask, as a minimum, not to screw them over. That's very different.
If the working conditions are frankly _abusive_, or the workers are forcibly prevented from organizing, yes, this is a problem - _but then the issue of First World/Third World is a red herring_. These things would be abuses wherever they occurred; there's nothing about the FW/TW relationship that makes these abuses peculiar to that relationship. If the government of Malaysia is corrupt and permits or even commits abuses against the workers, for the sake of having Giganticorp remain there, then yes, this is a Bad Thing - but again, it's nothing inherent to the relationship.
The possibility to abuse is inherent to the relationship. The power to abuse is inherent to the relationship, that's why. These relationships were set up by force, and are kept as they are by force, be it exerted by explicit means (shooting union leaders) or implicit (threats of firing workers, depriving them oif their means for subsistence).
You talk about laboral abuses as if something incidental when they occur in third world countries (they can, and do occur, in the first world). Then, why is it that the industrial powers, and in particular the US, support governments that permit and encourage such abuses, and attack those who resist them? Think Guatemala, Indonesia, El Salvador, Nicaragua.
Three hundred years ago, life expectancy in the US was much lower than it is today, formal education much rarer, and the nation in general less wealthy. Is the argument that we became so by "exploiting" others?
In great part, yes. The native americans were forcefully expelled from their lands, which, in the case of the south, were planted by black slaves.
The US is also a militaristic power that derives great riches from the sales of military equipment. More often than not, to third world nations with questionable human rights records.
But of course, history is always more complex than that.
100-\infty% is a better estimate. The factory wouldn't be here and the prospective employees, lacking the money for the overseas trip, would need to find employment in the local economy.
Well, if the industrialized countries didn't try so goddamned hard to undermine the local economies, maybe this would be an argument.
But, as it stands, this argument loses legitimacy with every dollar (pound, franc, mark, whatever) spent by the first-world on guerrillas, dictators, bribes, and economic advantages.
Slashdot Mirror
Secret key cryptography are systems that use a single secret key both to encrypt and decrypt the message. That is, both the sender and the recipient need to arrange for both to have the secret key, over some kind of secure channel. This approach is not practical to use over the net, since transmitting the key over it would place the users in danger of it being intercepted.
Public/private key cryptography uses a pair of keys: one to encrypt messages, and a second one to decrypt them. This works the following way: suppose you want to send me an encrypted message. What you (or anyone) would have to do is get a copy of my public encryption key (which I could place in an accesible place, like my home page), and use that to encrypt the message. When I receive it, only I can read it, since it can only be decrypted with the private key I keep on a safe computer. Of course, I need to protect my private key from being stolen. But the main point is that I never have to transmit the private decryption key over the net, while my public encryption key can be wholly public.
This is the method used by PGP to encrypt email, by SSH for encrypted logins, and SSL for secure sockets (like when you use a secure web connection). A variant of it is used for PGP signatures (which can, in conjunction with a public key, cryptographically guarantee that some file has not been altered).
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I assume you mean a proxy that will run on your same machine, and not on the network; otherwise, you're transmitting cleartext on the wires.
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Of course, one could remap it. But figuring out how to tweak an email agent is a waste of time unless you're already decided on it.
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That's my recipe! And I'm what you might consider a "kid" ;-).
It's amazing what one can do with these programs and the basic Unix toolkit-- shell scripts, the command line utilities, cron and at.
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Language planning is something many countries do. I'm not acquainted with the French Academy, but I do know about the Spanish Academy of Language, the counterpart for the Spanish language.
This kind of stuff is important to with international languages. Spanish, for example, is spoken in 20 countries, each with its own culture, national press, etc. It happens that sometimes people in one country spontaneously adopt some word from another language, say, English, but people in other countries do not, import a different word, or import the same word, but in a different form. For example, in Mexico people use the word troca (from the English "truck"); in Puerto Rico, people say troc. In some countries, there are even syntactical forms that don't exist in others!
The point is that there is a need for some organization to review the data on the language as its used in different places, and decide on general forms to be used by everyone when one needs to be sure to be understood everywhere. That is, there needs to be a general dictionary, which collects words that you can expect to be usable in all places, and a general grammar.
English speaking countries (well, at least Britain and the USA) also have this--- only that they are to be found in the form of the better known dictionaries (like the Oxford Dictionary) or grammar and composition guides.
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I think what he meant was learning english orthography, as opposed to other languages. Hey, far more frequently than on would like, an english word pops up whose spelling has nothing to do with the way it's pronounced.
In this regard, French is easier to learn. And Spanish has them both beat ;-).
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find / -perm +4000
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Welcome to Slashdot, dude. As someone once pointed out, /.'s motto should be changed to "Gossip for nerds. Stuff that matters."
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And, the fact is that the distros do use bash, and not, say, ash.
You could indeed boot up a system with the linux kernel and no GNU stuff (say, with BSD stuff). But then it would clearly not be a Linux-and-GNU-based system.
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Man, this has to be one of the worst misrepresentations I have ever seen. Yes, Linus did write that in the famed "discussion" (really a flame) with Andrew Tannenbaum, but he was defending his architectural choice, not conceding a mistake.
Basically, the argument that popped up in the discussion was that a monolithic kernel is quicker and easier to implement.
Anyway, people can go read the USENET thread in question themselves.
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For that matter, write literate encryption code in Knuth's MIX language.
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I'd realy like more detail. Oh, for the record, I study linguistics.
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I don't know either who said this, but I _do_ know that Noam Chomsky _could_ say it. I heard him talk about a month ago, and he mentioned, for example, the case of "airplanes flying" (vs. "birds flying). His argument is that we may well extend the meaning of the word "fly" (or "think") to include what airplanes (computers, respectively) do, but this is merely a terminological shift; the facts of the matter, whatever they are, remain the same. (His position was that arguments about whether machines can "really" think are senseless).
I actually have a vague recollection of him mentioning this phrase--- but don't quote me on it. And it wouldn't prove authorship.
I kinda agree with him on something--- these arguments tend to be senseless. Hell, I don't know whether my neighbors _really_ think. I think they think, though :-)
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Where can one find that one? Sounds interesting...
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Bruce, this is not true. It's users who fit between some threshold of posting enough, yet not too much, who have lower user numbers, and positive alignment (average score of postings).
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MYou are taking my logic backwards ("p implies q" does not imply "q implies p"). I don't hold that if an economy is subsidized, it will bloom. I only hold that subsidies are an advantage many US corporations have, that is systematically denied to count ries that wish to receive economic aid.
Today, despite having been, a rguably, "exploited" by the US, its patron state, South Korea is relatively wealthy and stable; North Korea is a basket case, despite massive subsidization by _ its_ patron state!
I think the fact the US came out on top, and not, say, Brazil, is due mainly to historical reasons. (Anyway, the fact the West ern world came out on top could very well be an historical accident. What if the Persians had beat the Greeks? What is Charles Martel (?) had not beat the Moors in France in 753 A.D.?)
However, this is not what I set out to do. I set out to explain why the Western powers stay on top, not why they came to be on top. My position is that there is a strong economic and militaty pressure to keep them down.
Let's examine current "exploitation", though. Suppose the US corporation Giganticorp sets up a factory in Malaysia, paying its workers X amount per hour, to make products which are then shipped back to the US. It's not clear precisely who loses here. Giganticorp pays less for manufacturing than it would for a US factory; these profits are passed either to the consumer in the form of lower costs, or the stockholders. The workers have a job that they would presumably not have otherwise; this money passes from the US economy into the Malaysian economy. The Malaysian government probably takes its share in taxes too. Plus, of course, there are all the associated costs and the jobs those create: electricity, shipping, etc. It's not clear who is being "exploited" here.
It is clear who is getting exploited. Those who are doing most of the work for the least pay.
(And yet somehow the Western world is po rtrayed as the one getting rich off this.)
This is not a "portrait"; this is a fact. How much money do you think corporations get out of the goods produced in the third world? How much stays in the local economy?
But then we have to ask why it is that the workers take the jobs. Is it unreasonable to assume that they regard the jobs as preferable to whatever else they have an opportunity to do?
What about the opportunities that the industrial powers have systematically tried to kill for third world workers? Like, union organization, popular democratic movements, and so on. The industrialized nations have a long story of attacking these movements in the third world, by means of tactics like supporting oppressive dictatorships, by terrorism, or by infiltrating popular movements.
Thus you are taking "opportunities" in a much too narrow sense here. If you mean "opportunities" as in the choices they have within the political and economical circumstances the first world countries actively attemp to restrict them to, well, then the "opportunities" (a horrible euphemism here, I think: working for 15 cents an hour, 12-14 hours a day, at some menial job, making some american executive earn millions a year, and missing out on chances to work to improve living conditions for their own country) are preferable. However, when you step out of that narrow view, you realize that these people's real opportunities are squashed by the power of a ruthless economical elite at every step of their lives.
This is perhaps the most irritating thing about Western liberalism in this area: it reduces the people it supposedly is the most concerned about, the "exploited" workers, to the level of children or morons, portraying them not as rational human beings making choices, but as objects used by Westerners. (Interesting that it always requires Westerners to "save" the people, no matter what the problem or the time...)
I don't see where my argument is reducing them to children or morons. I just argued that current first world economic, military and politic policies are directed towards keeping the third world poor, so that the industrial economic elite can profit. This has nothing to do with the great talents of third world people.
And I don't necessarily ask anyone to "save" the third world. I ask, as a minimum, not to screw them over. That's very different.
If the working conditions are frankly _abusive_, or the workers are forcibly prevented from organizing, yes, this is a problem - _but then the issue of First World/Third World is a red herring_. These things would be abuses wherever they occurred; there's nothing about the FW/TW relationship that makes these abuses peculiar to that relationship. If the government of Malaysia is corrupt and permits or even commits abuses against the workers, for the sake of having Giganticorp remain there, then yes, this is a Bad Thing - but again, it's nothing inherent to the relationship.
The possibility to abuse is inherent to the relationship. The power to abuse is inherent to the relationship, that's why. These relationships were set up by force, and are kept as they are by force, be it exerted by explicit means (shooting union leaders) or implicit (threats of firing workers, depriving them oif their means for subsistence).
You talk about laboral abuses as if something incidental when they occur in third world countries (they can, and do occur, in the first world). Then, why is it that the industrial powers, and in particular the US, support governments that permit and encourage such abuses, and attack those who resist them? Think Guatemala, Indonesia, El Salvador, Nicaragua.
Three hundred years ago, life expectancy in the US was much lower than it is today, formal education much rarer, and the nation in general less wealthy. Is the argument that we became so by "exploiting" others?
In great part, yes. The native americans were forcefully expelled from their lands, which, in the case of the south, were planted by black slaves.
The US is also a militaristic power that derives great riches from the sales of military equipment. More often than not, to third world nations with questionable human rights records.
But of course, history is always more complex than that.
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100-\infty% is a better estimate. The factory wouldn't be here and the prospective employees, lacking the money for the overseas trip, would need to find employment in the local economy.
Well, if the industrialized countries didn't try so goddamned hard to undermine the local economies, maybe this would be an argument.
But, as it stands, this argument loses legitimacy with every dollar (pound, franc, mark, whatever) spent by the first-world on guerrillas, dictators, bribes, and economic advantages.
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