how facebook makes money. The real foldy stuff, not stock prices that are based on hopes of increased stock prices at some nebulous date in the future.
and what happens - you get attacked. This phenomenon is not unique to Indonedia or Islam, look at what happens if someone posts to slashdot and asserts that MicroSoft is NOT 100% evil.....
European Digital Rights has launched http://www.edri.org/ACTA_Week with 5 one page briefings that you can send to your National and Euro member of parliaments. Please do so, it will not take you long.
As I understand it this is about what the firmware loads having to be signed. It then trusts that program to do the right thing and apply tests to ensure that other operating systems or modues are correctly signed before loading them. Ie a chain of trust.
How long do you think it will be before a signed version of GRUB (that will happily load anything) appears on an FTP site somewhere ? Either by someone cracking the signing key, or someone working late at night at an office somewhere where they have the ability to generate signed binaries and doing a bit of unrecorded extra work.
There is a good chance that whoever does it will not be caught... just pass the binary down a chain of contacts the last of which puts it up somewhere.
Revoking a key will take a lot of work, it might not be possible to do on kit that is already out in the field. They might make using this signed GRUB illegal, but on what gounds ? They would need new laws.
There was a time when that greeting might have been true. However it now seems that the majority of politicians are there for what they can get out of it for their own personal benefit rather than the benefit of those who they claim to serve. This is, in part, why little has been done to prosecute those who caused huge financial destruction to the world in recent times -- they just keep the donations (== bribes) flowing to ensure that the politicos remember on which side their bread is buttered.
It is 2 that succeed in reproducing, the other 98 die... but the 98 were still born and the ones that have better genes are more likely to be amongst the 2 rather than the 98.
* Mutation rate is about 10^-8 per base pair per generation
* The number of genome base pairs 1.4x10^8 (fruit fly)
Multiply that and you get 10^18 insect offspring per year; a mutation rate of about 1 per individual per generation. So the number of mutations is a very large number. This means a large number of ''natural experiments'' done, one of which may result in an insect a bit more resistant to a GM crop, this will give the insect an advantage and so be able to have more offspring all of which carry the advantageous gene. So advantageous genes spread rapidy, through sexual reproduction are combined with other genes and the best combinations flourish.
WARNING: very rough calculations, most insects die before they have the chance to reproduce and so most mutations are 'lost'. The numbers that I obtained are very likely wrong - but even if each one is wrong by a factor of 100, it doesn't make a huge dent in a very large number.
I wonder how long it would take to discover some subtle malware/spyware/backdoor/... that was put into the RedHat codebase - on orders of the US Govt ?
Who independently audits all of the source code and then rebuilds and compares the binaries using a known clean tool chain ?
I doubt that anyone does it.
CentOS and Scientific Linux recompile the RedHat source code, but I doubt that they audit at the code + RedHat patches for clever ''tweaks''. They don't have the resources to do so.
I believe that Linux/FLOSS is unlikely to have government backdoors in it, but what evidence do I have ? We could probably do with a project to check compiles & patches for the popular distros... but I can't see it attracting many volunteers.
Governments may well do it, but they won't share their results and if they did I would not trust them.
I wish to state absolutely that I have no real suspicion that RedHat are/will do this - just using them as an example. But neither do I know that it is not happening.
1) Since they were marked private it is evident that they were released (to the social network) under a license that did not include reproduction on television.
2) Were the photographers of the pictures paid by the TV network a fee so that they could be broadcast ?
I suspect that the TV network did not even think of these points and would have ignored the issues anyway.
If these judges agree with Prometheus Labs then they will condemn many others to death and, unfortunately, probably not themselves -- which is what is really needed for a Darwin Award.
Maybe by allowing such stupidities you could give the Darwin Award to the USA - once they have killed themselves by such stupidity. Hopefully the meme will not infect European law makers - I don't want to die because of the idiocy of others.
Since it seems accepted by everyone that the domain was stolen and that the crook now wants money to give it back, surely the police can be involved (this is supposed to be what they are there for).
The crook wants money, the money needs to be paid into an account somewhere or perhaps one of these money transfer people.
Would it be really too hard to finger their thief's collar when he comes to collect ?
I'm guessing you don't live in the UK where this kind of reactionary "OMG someone got hurt let's ban something" vote-chasing by our politicians is a daily fact of life.
So: some nutter abuses something useful, what should we do ? Another nutter kills someone with a kitchen knife, should we ban all knives ? You use petrol to make a molotov cocktail so should we shut all petrol stations ?
We cannot tie everything down just because a few people abuse what we need for day to day life.
The result is that people just expect them to work flawlessly -- not to fail. They also ignore other risks. I put in a machine at some customers a couple of years ago. They did not want to pay extra for backups -- ''yes, we will do that later''. They knew that I configured mirrored (RAID 1) disks. I set up a backup from one part of the disk to another and reminded them every couple of months that they would loose everything if it was destroyed or stolen.
Then a few weeks ago another unit on the industrial was torched -- arson. I have finally pursuaded them... I am putting in another machine on the far side of their factory that will take a daily rsync, and USB plugin disks that they will backup to weekly & take off site.
These guys are not stupid in what they do professionally, they have an annual turnover of more that £1 million. Why does it take a fire at a neighbour to make them see sense ?
Kids learn by doing things. Some things have nice results, some are unpleasant. They don't do the unpleasant things again.
Part of the reason for having them learn in a school is that it is an environment where they can be guided and with adults around the effects of the unpleasant can be switfly dealt with.
So kids will now not learn that intercepting a hard ball with your head might hurt. They will do that outside of school where if they get knocked down there will not be a responsible adult who can act swiftly -- on the rare occasion that it might be needed. Tell me: is that better or worse for the kids ?
What this is about is cowardly school staff that want to avoid any scintilla of responsibility for minor accidents. The are completely aborgating their responsibility, the responsibility that we expect them to take, the responsibility for which they are paid. Shame of these pathetic, lilly livered apologies for teachers. The only thing that they deserve is our utter contempt.
Their co-conspiritors in this are the money grabbing lawyers who encourage people to sue over exaggerated injuries. They do this not to recompense someone for a trivial bump on the head but to swell their own incomes.
At the end of it: society is poorer for this sort of mentality.
The article talks about the ''bigscreen'', not Hollywood! There are places other than Hollywood that are capable of producing films, some are excellent -- like the James Bond or Harry Potter films. They might need to move out of South Wales to Pinewood or Leavesden -- and thus hopefully avoid Americanisation, which would ruin it.
Over recent years there has been an accelerating plunge into rule by corporation in its interests rather than rule by government in the interests of all.
This has resulted in the loosening of regulation or oversight, laws allow corporations to do things that are effectively disallowed to individuals. The results of this include: the financial woes of recent times; copyright abuse; globalisation for corporation but not individuals (think: they buy where it is cheap in the world, but stop you doing so, eg by region encoding).
This has happened by a variety of means: bribing of law makers (whoops silly me, I mean - donations to campaigns and pet causes, promises of jobs on leaving office,...); threats to move to another country;...
Don't get me wrong: not everything about corporations is bad, not all corporations are problematic. A restoration of balance is needed.
First, in a modern Linux system you don't bother if the executables are in/bin/sbin/usr/bin or/usr/sbin or even/home/marvin/bin. You start the programs from a menu or quick start buttons (or how ever your UI has named its buttons).
Actually: No. Most programs that my systems start are out of scripts of one sort or another. You are talking about desktop systems, the Unix/Linux world is much bigger than that -- servers are very important.
how about making the filesystem a bit more intuitive, call it "Programs" or "Applications"
and break a gazillion programs out there that have been working for years. What about the transition -- some with have/bin/date and others/Programs/date -- it will make porting programs between systems much harder.
The separation of/bin from/usr/bin and/sbin from/usr/sbin is still valid if you are trying to make really robust systems. You have to start from the point of view that something horrible WILL happen and you need to fix the system. If your root file system is small then there is a good chance that it is not that damaged and you can bring the machine up with just the RFS mounted -- then set about fixing up the other file systems. I suspect that the Fedora recommendation would be to just reinstall -- that might be OK on Mickey Mouse systems but is often not an option on something mission critical.
There is a lot of talk about small disks - that was not the reason for splitting things off into/usr. I know that a lot of automatic installers try to partition the disk as one big partition (+ swap & maybe/boot) - but they do that because it is easier than calculating partition sizes. However: a competent sysadmin will know how big to make his partitions and install on top of that.
For the record I tend to partition the disk into these separate partitions:
/boot
RFS
/usr
/tmp
/home
/var
And then maybe some data specific partitions -- depending on what the purpose of the machine is. With disks divide & rule helps make robust systems.
Okay. Its not hard, its tedious, but you're basically describing what happens when I work in assembly.
I take it that you have not written programs in BCPL then. C is nicer in that the different data types (char, short, int,...) compile down to different machine level instructions. Handling characters (ie single bytes) in BCPL is not nice, floats - were single precision (assuming 32 bit words). So not the same as what you do in assembler.
I do miss a few things from BCPL like VALOF/RESULTIS almost anywhere, it also used ':=' for assignment - I wonder how many many years of debugging time would have been saved if C had used that rather than a simple '=' ?
Slashdot Mirror
Dump them & move on. Don't waste effort on the parasites.
how facebook makes money. The real foldy stuff, not stock prices that are based on hopes of increased stock prices at some nebulous date in the future.
and what happens - you get attacked. This phenomenon is not unique to Indonedia or Islam, look at what happens if someone posts to slashdot and asserts that MicroSoft is NOT 100% evil .....
European Digital Rights has launched http://www.edri.org/ACTA_Week with 5 one page briefings that you can send to your National and Euro member of parliaments. Please do so, it will not take you long.
As I understand it this is about what the firmware loads having to be signed. It then trusts that program to do the right thing and apply tests to ensure that other operating systems or modues are correctly signed before loading them. Ie a chain of trust.
How long do you think it will be before a signed version of GRUB (that will happily load anything) appears on an FTP site somewhere ? Either by someone cracking the signing key, or someone working late at night at an office somewhere where they have the ability to generate signed binaries and doing a bit of unrecorded extra work. There is a good chance that whoever does it will not be caught ... just pass the binary down a chain of contacts the last of which puts it up somewhere.
Revoking a key will take a lot of work, it might not be possible to do on kit that is already out in the field. They might make using this signed GRUB illegal, but on what gounds ? They would need new laws.
What man can do - man can break.
The Honorable [congresscritter]:
There was a time when that greeting might have been true. However it now seems that the majority of politicians are there for what they can get out of it for their own personal benefit rather than the benefit of those who they claim to serve. This is, in part, why little has been done to prosecute those who caused huge financial destruction to the world in recent times -- they just keep the donations (== bribes) flowing to ensure that the politicos remember on which side their bread is buttered.
It is 2 that succeed in reproducing, the other 98 die ... but the 98 were still born and the ones that have better genes are more likely to be amongst the 2 rather than the 98.
To try to get some insight on how many genetic changes there are in insects I churned a few numbers:
Multiply that and you get 10^18 insect offspring per year; a mutation rate of about 1 per individual per generation. So the number of mutations is a very large number. This means a large number of ''natural experiments'' done, one of which may result in an insect a bit more resistant to a GM crop, this will give the insect an advantage and so be able to have more offspring all of which carry the advantageous gene. So advantageous genes spread rapidy, through sexual reproduction are combined with other genes and the best combinations flourish.
WARNING: very rough calculations, most insects die before they have the chance to reproduce and so most mutations are 'lost'. The numbers that I obtained are very likely wrong - but even if each one is wrong by a factor of 100, it doesn't make a huge dent in a very large number.
I wonder how long it would take to discover some subtle malware/spyware/backdoor/... that was put into the RedHat codebase - on orders of the US Govt ? Who independently audits all of the source code and then rebuilds and compares the binaries using a known clean tool chain ? I doubt that anyone does it.
CentOS and Scientific Linux recompile the RedHat source code, but I doubt that they audit at the code + RedHat patches for clever ''tweaks''. They don't have the resources to do so.
I believe that Linux/FLOSS is unlikely to have government backdoors in it, but what evidence do I have ? We could probably do with a project to check compiles & patches for the popular distros ... but I can't see it attracting many volunteers.
Governments may well do it, but they won't share their results and if they did I would not trust them.
I wish to state absolutely that I have no real suspicion that RedHat are/will do this - just using them as an example. But neither do I know that it is not happening.
There are 2 aspects to copyright:
1) Since they were marked private it is evident that they were released (to the social network) under a license that did not include reproduction on television.
2) Were the photographers of the pictures paid by the TV network a fee so that they could be broadcast ?
I suspect that the TV network did not even think of these points and would have ignored the issues anyway.
I am well aware that it can be hard to keep track of what small kids are up to, but I always kept small, swallowable items away from my kids.
For those parents who are not able to do this: Darwin will make it likely that your genes are kept out of future generations.
If Amazon have a patent on it then no one else will be able to do it (ahem) and so our privacy will be better preserved
I wish ...
If these judges agree with Prometheus Labs then they will condemn many others to death and, unfortunately, probably not themselves -- which is what is really needed for a Darwin Award.
Maybe by allowing such stupidities you could give the Darwin Award to the USA - once they have killed themselves by such stupidity. Hopefully the meme will not infect European law makers - I don't want to die because of the idiocy of others.
Since it seems accepted by everyone that the domain was stolen and that the crook now wants money to give it back, surely the police can be involved (this is supposed to be what they are there for). The crook wants money, the money needs to be paid into an account somewhere or perhaps one of these money transfer people. Would it be really too hard to finger their thief's collar when he comes to collect ?
I'm guessing you don't live in the UK where this kind of reactionary "OMG someone got hurt let's ban something" vote-chasing by our politicians is a daily fact of life.
I do -- but I don't read the Daily Mail.
So: some nutter abuses something useful, what should we do ? Another nutter kills someone with a kitchen knife, should we ban all knives ? You use petrol to make a molotov cocktail so should we shut all petrol stations ? We cannot tie everything down just because a few people abuse what we need for day to day life.
The result is that people just expect them to work flawlessly -- not to fail. They also ignore other risks. I put in a machine at some customers a couple of years ago. They did not want to pay extra for backups -- ''yes, we will do that later''. They knew that I configured mirrored (RAID 1) disks. I set up a backup from one part of the disk to another and reminded them every couple of months that they would loose everything if it was destroyed or stolen.
Then a few weeks ago another unit on the industrial was torched -- arson. I have finally pursuaded them ... I am putting in another machine on the far side of their factory that will take a daily rsync, and USB plugin disks that they will backup to weekly & take off site.
These guys are not stupid in what they do professionally, they have an annual turnover of more that £1 million. Why does it take a fire at a neighbour to make them see sense ?
Kids learn by doing things. Some things have nice results, some are unpleasant. They don't do the unpleasant things again. Part of the reason for having them learn in a school is that it is an environment where they can be guided and with adults around the effects of the unpleasant can be switfly dealt with.
So kids will now not learn that intercepting a hard ball with your head might hurt. They will do that outside of school where if they get knocked down there will not be a responsible adult who can act swiftly -- on the rare occasion that it might be needed. Tell me: is that better or worse for the kids ?
What this is about is cowardly school staff that want to avoid any scintilla of responsibility for minor accidents. The are completely aborgating their responsibility, the responsibility that we expect them to take, the responsibility for which they are paid. Shame of these pathetic, lilly livered apologies for teachers. The only thing that they deserve is our utter contempt.
Their co-conspiritors in this are the money grabbing lawyers who encourage people to sue over exaggerated injuries. They do this not to recompense someone for a trivial bump on the head but to swell their own incomes.
At the end of it: society is poorer for this sort of mentality.
The article talks about the ''bigscreen'', not Hollywood! There are places other than Hollywood that are capable of producing films, some are excellent -- like the James Bond or Harry Potter films. They might need to move out of South Wales to Pinewood or Leavesden -- and thus hopefully avoid Americanisation, which would ruin it.
Over recent years there has been an accelerating plunge into rule by corporation in its interests rather than rule by government in the interests of all. This has resulted in the loosening of regulation or oversight, laws allow corporations to do things that are effectively disallowed to individuals. The results of this include: the financial woes of recent times; copyright abuse; globalisation for corporation but not individuals (think: they buy where it is cheap in the world, but stop you doing so, eg by region encoding).
This has happened by a variety of means: bribing of law makers (whoops silly me, I mean - donations to campaigns and pet causes, promises of jobs on leaving office, ...); threats to move to another country; ...
Don't get me wrong: not everything about corporations is bad, not all corporations are problematic. A restoration of balance is needed.
You are posting as A/C, Ballmer is that you ?
First, in a modern Linux system you don't bother if the executables are in /bin /sbin /usr/bin or /usr/sbin or even /home/marvin/bin. You start the programs from a menu or quick start buttons (or how ever your UI has named its buttons).
Actually: No. Most programs that my systems start are out of scripts of one sort or another. You are talking about desktop systems, the Unix/Linux world is much bigger than that -- servers are very important.
how about making the filesystem a bit more intuitive, call it "Programs" or "Applications"
and break a gazillion programs out there that have been working for years. What about the transition -- some with have /bin/date and others /Programs/date -- it will make porting programs between systems much harder.
The separation of /bin from /usr/bin and /sbin from /usr/sbin is still valid if you are trying to make really robust systems. You have to start from the point of view that something horrible WILL happen and you need to fix the system. If your root file system is small then there is a good chance that it is not that damaged and you can bring the machine up with just the RFS mounted -- then set about fixing up the other file systems. I suspect that the Fedora recommendation would be to just reinstall -- that might be OK on Mickey Mouse systems but is often not an option on something mission critical.
There is a lot of talk about small disks - that was not the reason for splitting things off into /usr. I know that a lot of automatic installers try to partition the disk as one big partition (+ swap & maybe /boot) - but they do that because it is easier than calculating partition sizes. However: a competent sysadmin will know how big to make his partitions and install on top of that.
For the record I tend to partition the disk into these separate partitions:
And then maybe some data specific partitions -- depending on what the purpose of the machine is. With disks divide & rule helps make robust systems.
Okay. Its not hard, its tedious, but you're basically describing what happens when I work in assembly.
I take it that you have not written programs in BCPL then. C is nicer in that the different data types (char, short, int, ...) compile down to different machine level instructions. Handling characters (ie single bytes) in BCPL is not nice, floats - were single precision (assuming 32 bit words). So not the same as what you do in assembler.
I do miss a few things from BCPL like VALOF/RESULTIS almost anywhere, it also used ':=' for assignment - I wonder how many many years of debugging time would have been saved if C had used that rather than a simple '=' ?