The kernel maintainers always announce the expected EOL date when they announce a new LTS kernel. This wasn't randomly decided. It was known for years in advance by people who, unlike you, know what they're talking about.
The problem here is that Wikileaks' edited version of the video doesn't let the facts stand for themselves. Instead they applied their own political agenda in order to influence the viewer's opinion.
Here are some of the *facts* that Wikileaks excludes in order to (IMO) purposely distort the viewer's impression to make this appear to be a clear-cut case of wrongdoing:
Fact #1) There were firefights ongoing in the immediate area where this took place. U.S. troops on the ground there had called the helicopters in for assistance. The ground troops identified this group of men as being armed and as being a threat (apparently believing they had been participants in earlier firefights).
Fact #2) Some of the men in the group *were* armed. They were carrying *at least* one AK-47 rifle and one RPG. They are clearly visible in the unedited video (They may also be visible in the edited version. I don't remember seeing them, but the video's editing may have simply drawn my attention away from them). They were recovered by the infantry who arrived on the scene after the attack. The RPG rounds were apparently later destroyed by explosives ordinance disposal personnel (i.e. "The Hurt Locker" guys).
Fact #3) The photographer peeked around the corner, pointed his camera at U.S. troops and vehicles down the street, and snapped at least three photographs of them. It's not clear in the video that this is what's happening; it became evident after the fact (when the camera was recovered). The helicopter crew saw this and mistook it as an attempt to target the U.S. troops and/or vehicles down the street. This is understandable from watching the video. It's not at all apparent that this person is a photographer. What the crew *did* see was a man definitely carrying an RPG disappear behind that building. Later they see someone carefully peeking around the corner aiming something at the position where the ground troops are.
Fact #4) The U.S. Army didn't cover this up. Reports were written up and investigations were done. They even apparently screened the gun camera video to some members of the press (I believe they can't publicly release unredacted video like this because it would violate the Geneva Convention regarding broadcasting images/video of wounded/killed enemies).
The other thing to keep in mind is that for most of us civilians, the men who were attacked look just like a bunch of regular guys. They don't look like enemy combatants to us. But to a soldier who has been in dozens of engagements with insurgents, these guys would look *exactly* like enemy combatants. They don't wear uniforms. They don't drive armored vehicles. They wear regular clothes and drive around in sedans, and pickup trucks. Perhaps the only ways insurgents can be distinguished from innocent civilians is that insurgents hang around an active combat zone while innocent civilians will generally try to make themselves scarce (notice in the video that the streets are empty, with the exception of this group of men), and insurgents can sometimes be spotted carrying weapons (as was the case here).
Wikileaks would have us believe that it was wrong for the helicopter to engage these men under these circumstances. I think any reasonable person who has even the slightest understanding of war would see that there was a (reaonable) perceived threat and that they took the appropriate action (i.e. they eliminated the perceived threat). Also, they used the most proportionate force they had at their disposal (the 30-mm gun). Wikileaks decries the usage of such an anti-vehicle weapon against personnel, but it's the smallest caliber weapon the helicopter has (the other option would have been a hellfire missile).
As for the van the picture is a little less clear. The helicopter crew did previously observe what looked like it could have been the same van prior to the attack. It's at the very beginning of the unedited video. There's not enough context to know exactly why they seemed suspicious of the van, but the impression it leaves is tha
Indeed. We should make fun of all ignorant people. Including the dumbfucks here who think that anybody from "down south" or "out west" who doesn't live on a coast is somehow mentally retarded or at a very minimum one variety of bible-thumping, goat raping, redneck or another. Why, I believe that kind of ignorance -- which leads to the bigotry previously mentioned here -- far outshines the alleged ignorance that you allude to. So lets have at it shall we? Let's make some serious god-damned fun of those ignoramuses. I'll let you start.
In the meantime, let me point out that Constellation's crew launch vehicle would not be "competing" with any "existing commercial rockets" as claimed in the summary. There's not a single commercial rocket certified for human transport and it will likely be some time (if ever) before any of the existing ones achieve that goal. Until then, they are talking about the spaceflight equivalent of vaporware.
Yours truly,
An allegedly ignorant redneck hillbilly from "the middle of fucking nowhere", Utah, who spends his spare time (between good goat fucks, of course) doing engineering work for MIT and their clients. And I like shooting guns too. How's that for stereoptypes?
Yeah, I stopped reading the article at that point. I immediately recognized that it was walking a linked list. I was expecting that his explanation would be something along the lines of, "Although this code *seems* to be walking a linked list, it actually does something *completely* unexpected... ". Nope... apparently it took him "a good deal of research" to figure that out. Which left me thinking, "Program much?"
Allow me to posit an alternative interpretation. DARPA is not interested in mapping our society. They're interested in learning what the most effective strategies are for quickly locating things that they *know* exist and are "out there", but don't know their exact locations. Perhaps the application of such a strategy could be useful for one of DoD's other pet projects. You know, the one where they're trying to find Osama bin Waldo and his Al Quaedian friends.
Nah, clearly that would just be too far-fetched a theory. Clearly, what we need is an explanation with a much higher dose of paranoia, hidden agendas, conspiracies, Big Brother, and a helluva lot of tin foil hats.
No, but they might try to use what they learn to figure out the best strategy for finding something else... or someone else... they'd like to find. *Cough* Osama bin Laden, et. al. *Cough*
So this talk of police investigations and possible criminal charges is ridiculous. If his activities caused as large an increase in electricity costs as the superintendent implies they had, then you'd think that at some point during the 10 years he was running SETI@Home that someone from the district's accounting department would have started wondering why their electric bills suddenly increased for seemingly no reason. I call bullshit.
At best, they could fire him (if he hadn't already resigned) for his making poor "business" decisions (in their view). But they certainly can't claim this software was "unauthorized", and therefore a criminal violation, when he is the guy who *they* appointed to make those decisions on behalf of the district.
You could just as easily argue that letting the CPUs, that they *paid good money for*, sit idle 75% of the time is a waste of resources that could otherwise be put to good use. No doubt, most people who run SETI@Home probably have used this, in part, as rationalization for their participation in the program. So, from a different point of view, his decision to maximize the utilization of the district's computing facilities was a good one.
The whole reaction to it reeks of some kind of grudge against the guy.
My first serious job was as a sysadmin for a small software company in the mid-nineties. At the time I was attending university pursuing a BS CS degree. I had no prior sysadmin experience, but worked my way up into the position doing technical support.
Fast forward to today, some 10 years later: I never finished my degree (only completed maybe 50-75%) and am earning ~$105k as a software engineer at a pretty prestigious institution that hires lots of PhDs and other advanced degree holders.
The bottom line is this: If you can prove yourself, there is hope for a decent IT career without a degree.
I know this is slashdot and all, but seriously... wtf is the matter with all these moronic posters here talking about "paranoia" and how stupid the army is that they don't "get" the Internet.
First of fscking all, the army knows what the Internet is good for, considering they're basically the ones who had the thing built for the very purposes we all use it for today (well, maybe not porn and shopping). Of course they are aware of its utility as a communications tool!
Second, the only paranoia here is emanating from you poor bastards who are worried that Twitter is gonna get banned. The army isn't paranoid that Twitter might be used by terrorists. They're pointing out the fact that its real-time broadcast ability makes it a really useful information dissemination tool. Hence the examples about how quickly it was used to inform about the earthquake, and its effectiveness at broadcasting police movements.
All this report is saying is that Twitter may become some terrorists' communications medium of choice. No talk of banning it. Nothing said about all Twitter users being terrorists or anarchists. This was just an intelligence report pointing out that maybe Twitter is something they should expect the enemy to be using for conducting operations. That's all. Not surprising. Not unreasonable. Not paranoid.
The way I see it, God wrote two books (from a Christian perspective, anyway): the Bible, and the Universe.
One of those books was written by human hands and minds and is prone to human error, tampering, or outright forgery. The other contains things that simply cannot be forged or manipulated, such as: evidence of the continued expansion of the universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation, the structure of the atom, etc.
One of the two is far older (closer to the original source?) than the other, as well.
Which book do you think would be the most reliable source of information? And BTW, it takes faith to believe in either one of these books.
Just looking for clarification here... after reading part of the appeals court's opinion, wasn't UMG et. al. arguing that it was the punitive damages that were unconstitutional?
In Jammie's case, she's looking at statutory damages, not punitive, right?
I understand that the Supreme Court has already established guidelines regarding the constitutionality and proportionality of punitive damages. But have they done the same for statutory damages?
I'd think that is still a hurdle that needs to be overcome. Personally I think that due process is due process regardless of whether it's labeled "punitive" or "statutory". So greater than 10x actual damages should be unconstitutional regardless, in my humble opinion.
But I guess I'm wondering whether the distinction between statutory and punitive here means that getting the award against Jammie reduced is going to be more difficult than it might at first appear.
The only reason ambiguity entered into it is because of marketing. Uh, I believe the ambiguity was introduced by computer programmers who decided to misuse standardized prefixes by reassigning them non-standard meanings.
By playing pretend and going against decades of precedent they realized they could sell less bang per buck without consumers knowing the difference. And actually it was these silly computer programmers who were playing pretend and went against a couple centuries of precedent when they started using "kilobyte" to mean a value other than exactly 1,000 bytes.
But the more important point that you are ignoring is that this ambiguity has caused confusion. And this confusion isn't going to go away until something is changed. There is no official standard anywhere that says that addressable units in computing are always base-2 and that any other units in computing are base-10. And there probably never will be. The KiB and MiB family of prefixes is a very logical solution to this problem.
A logical person would believe that 1MB of data transferred over a 1MB/s link would take precisely one second. And it should, but in many cases it won't. And that's just stupid because doing it any other way just complicates such calculations. If we use a more sensible unit, like MiB, then:
I'd argue though that the people who called telephone "Telephone" were wrong. There never was just one telephone. Maybe there was just one telephone network, but to refer to it simply as the "Telephone" would be ambiguous (it would properly be called the "Telephone Network").
Anyway, as for the Internet, there is only one global, public, IP-based network and it is called the Internet with a capital "I". Much as the "Pacific Ocean" is not the "pacific ocean" because people have been navigating it for a real long time now, just because it has fallen into common usage is no reason to start calling the Internet the "internet".
What's amazing to me is how few people -- even tech savvy people who have seen and "agreed" to many a EULA -- don't understand any of this at all.
The unfortunate consequence is that people have had the EULA wool pulled over their eyes for so long, that it has become accepted practice. Accepted enough that courts (in the US at least) seem to feel compelled to allow them to continue to be used (abused?) this way.
I just switched from NS to No-IP. So I haven't had my domain with them for very long yet, but I've used their other services (Dynamic DNS) for a long time now.
I've never read or heard about them doing anything overtly evil (unlike NS or GoDaddy).
Slashdot Mirror
The kernel maintainers always announce the expected EOL date when they announce a new LTS kernel. This wasn't randomly decided. It was known for years in advance by people who, unlike you, know what they're talking about.
Prepare for the onslaught of "In Soviet Russia ..." jokes.
Imagine a Beowulf Cluster of those!
The problem here is that Wikileaks' edited version of the video doesn't let the facts stand for themselves. Instead they applied their own political agenda in order to influence the viewer's opinion.
Here are some of the *facts* that Wikileaks excludes in order to (IMO) purposely distort the viewer's impression to make this appear to be a clear-cut case of wrongdoing:
Fact #1) There were firefights ongoing in the immediate area where this took place. U.S. troops on the ground there had called the helicopters in for assistance. The ground troops identified this group of men as being armed and as being a threat (apparently believing they had been participants in earlier firefights).
Fact #2) Some of the men in the group *were* armed. They were carrying *at least* one AK-47 rifle and one RPG. They are clearly visible in the unedited video (They may also be visible in the edited version. I don't remember seeing them, but the video's editing may have simply drawn my attention away from them). They were recovered by the infantry who arrived on the scene after the attack. The RPG rounds were apparently later destroyed by explosives ordinance disposal personnel (i.e. "The Hurt Locker" guys).
Fact #3) The photographer peeked around the corner, pointed his camera at U.S. troops and vehicles down the street, and snapped at least three photographs of them. It's not clear in the video that this is what's happening; it became evident after the fact (when the camera was recovered). The helicopter crew saw this and mistook it as an attempt to target the U.S. troops and/or vehicles down the street. This is understandable from watching the video. It's not at all apparent that this person is a photographer. What the crew *did* see was a man definitely carrying an RPG disappear behind that building. Later they see someone carefully peeking around the corner aiming something at the position where the ground troops are.
Fact #4) The U.S. Army didn't cover this up. Reports were written up and investigations were done. They even apparently screened the gun camera video to some members of the press (I believe they can't publicly release unredacted video like this because it would violate the Geneva Convention regarding broadcasting images/video of wounded/killed enemies).
The other thing to keep in mind is that for most of us civilians, the men who were attacked look just like a bunch of regular guys. They don't look like enemy combatants to us. But to a soldier who has been in dozens of engagements with insurgents, these guys would look *exactly* like enemy combatants. They don't wear uniforms. They don't drive armored vehicles. They wear regular clothes and drive around in sedans, and pickup trucks. Perhaps the only ways insurgents can be distinguished from innocent civilians is that insurgents hang around an active combat zone while innocent civilians will generally try to make themselves scarce (notice in the video that the streets are empty, with the exception of this group of men), and insurgents can sometimes be spotted carrying weapons (as was the case here).
Wikileaks would have us believe that it was wrong for the helicopter to engage these men under these circumstances. I think any reasonable person who has even the slightest understanding of war would see that there was a (reaonable) perceived threat and that they took the appropriate action (i.e. they eliminated the perceived threat). Also, they used the most proportionate force they had at their disposal (the 30-mm gun). Wikileaks decries the usage of such an anti-vehicle weapon against personnel, but it's the smallest caliber weapon the helicopter has (the other option would have been a hellfire missile).
As for the van the picture is a little less clear. The helicopter crew did previously observe what looked like it could have been the same van prior to the attack. It's at the very beginning of the unedited video. There's not enough context to know exactly why they seemed suspicious of the van, but the impression it leaves is tha
Your points are far too even-keeled and rational for a Slashdot post. Are you sure you didn't accidentally stumble on the wrong website?
Making fun of ignorance is always accepted.
Indeed. We should make fun of all ignorant people. Including the dumbfucks here who think that anybody from "down south" or "out west" who doesn't live on a coast is somehow mentally retarded or at a very minimum one variety of bible-thumping, goat raping, redneck or another. Why, I believe that kind of ignorance -- which leads to the bigotry previously mentioned here -- far outshines the alleged ignorance that you allude to. So lets have at it shall we? Let's make some serious god-damned fun of those ignoramuses. I'll let you start.
In the meantime, let me point out that Constellation's crew launch vehicle would not be "competing" with any "existing commercial rockets" as claimed in the summary. There's not a single commercial rocket certified for human transport and it will likely be some time (if ever) before any of the existing ones achieve that goal. Until then, they are talking about the spaceflight equivalent of vaporware.
Yours truly,
An allegedly ignorant redneck hillbilly from "the middle of fucking nowhere", Utah, who spends his spare time (between good goat fucks, of course) doing engineering work for MIT and their clients. And I like shooting guns too. How's that for stereoptypes?
Yeah, I stopped reading the article at that point. I immediately recognized that it was walking a linked list. I was expecting that his explanation would be something along the lines of, "Although this code *seems* to be walking a linked list, it actually does something *completely* unexpected... ". Nope... apparently it took him "a good deal of research" to figure that out. Which left me thinking, "Program much?"
Allow me to posit an alternative interpretation. DARPA is not interested in mapping our society. They're interested in learning what the most effective strategies are for quickly locating things that they *know* exist and are "out there", but don't know their exact locations. Perhaps the application of such a strategy could be useful for one of DoD's other pet projects. You know, the one where they're trying to find Osama bin Waldo and his Al Quaedian friends.
Nah, clearly that would just be too far-fetched a theory. Clearly, what we need is an explanation with a much higher dose of paranoia, hidden agendas, conspiracies, Big Brother, and a helluva lot of tin foil hats.
No, but they might try to use what they learn to figure out the best strategy for finding something else... or someone else... they'd like to find. *Cough* Osama bin Laden, et. al. *Cough*
Bingo.
So this talk of police investigations and possible criminal charges is ridiculous. If his activities caused as large an increase in electricity costs as the superintendent implies they had, then you'd think that at some point during the 10 years he was running SETI@Home that someone from the district's accounting department would have started wondering why their electric bills suddenly increased for seemingly no reason. I call bullshit.
At best, they could fire him (if he hadn't already resigned) for his making poor "business" decisions (in their view). But they certainly can't claim this software was "unauthorized", and therefore a criminal violation, when he is the guy who *they* appointed to make those decisions on behalf of the district.
You could just as easily argue that letting the CPUs, that they *paid good money for*, sit idle 75% of the time is a waste of resources that could otherwise be put to good use. No doubt, most people who run SETI@Home probably have used this, in part, as rationalization for their participation in the program. So, from a different point of view, his decision to maximize the utilization of the district's computing facilities was a good one.
The whole reaction to it reeks of some kind of grudge against the guy.
Yes, that would be copyright infringement.
Cygwin is the #1 best thing that Windows has going for itself.
So, if git causes a few more people to learn about Cygwin (and the HUGE benefits it provides Windows users), then that is a plus in my book.
My first serious job was as a sysadmin for a small software company in the mid-nineties. At the time I was attending university pursuing a BS CS degree. I had no prior sysadmin experience, but worked my way up into the position doing technical support.
Fast forward to today, some 10 years later: I never finished my degree (only completed maybe 50-75%) and am earning ~$105k as a software engineer at a pretty prestigious institution that hires lots of PhDs and other advanced degree holders.
The bottom line is this: If you can prove yourself, there is hope for a decent IT career without a degree.
I know this is slashdot and all, but seriously... wtf is the matter with all these moronic posters here talking about "paranoia" and how stupid the army is that they don't "get" the Internet.
First of fscking all, the army knows what the Internet is good for, considering they're basically the ones who had the thing built for the very purposes we all use it for today (well, maybe not porn and shopping). Of course they are aware of its utility as a communications tool!
Second, the only paranoia here is emanating from you poor bastards who are worried that Twitter is gonna get banned. The army isn't paranoid that Twitter might be used by terrorists. They're pointing out the fact that its real-time broadcast ability makes it a really useful information dissemination tool. Hence the examples about how quickly it was used to inform about the earthquake, and its effectiveness at broadcasting police movements.
All this report is saying is that Twitter may become some terrorists' communications medium of choice. No talk of banning it. Nothing said about all Twitter users being terrorists or anarchists. This was just an intelligence report pointing out that maybe Twitter is something they should expect the enemy to be using for conducting operations. That's all. Not surprising. Not unreasonable. Not paranoid.
The way I see it, God wrote two books (from a Christian perspective, anyway): the Bible, and the Universe.
One of those books was written by human hands and minds and is prone to human error, tampering, or outright forgery. The other contains things that simply cannot be forged or manipulated, such as: evidence of the continued expansion of the universe, the cosmic microwave background radiation, the structure of the atom, etc.
One of the two is far older (closer to the original source?) than the other, as well.
Which book do you think would be the most reliable source of information? And BTW, it takes faith to believe in either one of these books.
My words exactly.
You mean, when can we run "Ubuntu GNU/QNX". And how many users will realize this is the name of some software, and not some strange foreign language?
Just looking for clarification here... after reading part of the appeals court's opinion, wasn't UMG et. al. arguing that it was the punitive damages that were unconstitutional?
In Jammie's case, she's looking at statutory damages, not punitive, right?
I understand that the Supreme Court has already established guidelines regarding the constitutionality and proportionality of punitive damages. But have they done the same for statutory damages?
I'd think that is still a hurdle that needs to be overcome. Personally I think that due process is due process regardless of whether it's labeled "punitive" or "statutory". So greater than 10x actual damages should be unconstitutional regardless, in my humble opinion.
But I guess I'm wondering whether the distinction between statutory and punitive here means that getting the award against Jammie reduced is going to be more difficult than it might at first appear.
But the more important point that you are ignoring is that this ambiguity has caused confusion. And this confusion isn't going to go away until something is changed. There is no official standard anywhere that says that addressable units in computing are always base-2 and that any other units in computing are base-10. And there probably never will be. The KiB and MiB family of prefixes is a very logical solution to this problem.
A logical person would believe that 1MB of data transferred over a 1MB/s link would take precisely one second. And it should, but in many cases it won't. And that's just stupid because doing it any other way just complicates such calculations. If we use a more sensible unit, like MiB, then:
1MB at 1MB/s = one second
and
1MiB at 1MiB/s = one second
Wouldn't that be convenient?
I'd argue though that the people who called telephone "Telephone" were wrong. There never was just one telephone. Maybe there was just one telephone network, but to refer to it simply as the "Telephone" would be ambiguous (it would properly be called the "Telephone Network").
Anyway, as for the Internet, there is only one global, public, IP-based network and it is called the Internet with a capital "I". Much as the "Pacific Ocean" is not the "pacific ocean" because people have been navigating it for a real long time now, just because it has fallen into common usage is no reason to start calling the Internet the "internet".
I applaud your efforts. That is exactly the way ALL software should be distributed.
What's amazing to me is how few people -- even tech savvy people who have seen and "agreed" to many a EULA -- don't understand any of this at all.
The unfortunate consequence is that people have had the EULA wool pulled over their eyes for so long, that it has become accepted practice. Accepted enough that courts (in the US at least) seem to feel compelled to allow them to continue to be used (abused?) this way.
Only 100 millibits? Where do I download the app that performs this amazing feat of data compression?
I just switched from NS to No-IP. So I haven't had my domain with them for very long yet, but I've used their other services (Dynamic DNS) for a long time now.
I've never read or heard about them doing anything overtly evil (unlike NS or GoDaddy).