The purpose of a benchmark is to try to show how performance will be in the real world. If a given application has been programmed to do very well in a given benchmark yet does not do as well with a real-world situation, then the benchmark results are flawed.
If a benchmark is so easily gamed, then its ability to return meaningful results at all is basically nil.
Liberals generally want to give a man a fish, Libertarians would rather teach him to how to fish.
Liberals are happy to give a man a fish when he's starving. Libertarians will tell him if he'd only tried harder to catch more fish, he wouldn't be starving, even though he can't afford to buy a rod and reel.
Is that really correct? I'm generally in favor of laws and rules that prevent insiders from profiting on confidential information at the expense of the public, but the above seems really, really, harsh. The company does, at a minimum, four such statements a year (quarterly earnings), not counting other possible announcements (forecasts, Jobs doing his "one more thing" bit, etc). I mean, even just looking at quarterly announcements, assuming that they were equally spread across the year, you would prohibit anyone classified as an insider from trading for 244 calendar days, or 2/3rds of the year! Add on anything outside of this, and you are basically locked in or locked out of the market. completely.
You're only restricted from trading if you're high enough up the org chart to have access to important information - most people aren't. Further, you're only restricted from trading in the stock of that particularly company, so you're in no way "locked out of the market".
They were never called netbooks at first. They were called (sub/ultraportable) notebooks(1) and later some idiot invented "netbook" word which news sites like engadget and gizmodo propagated.
No, Ultraportables were (and remain) very small and light laptops that are still nearly full-featured, with mainstream-laptop-class (if lower clocked) CPUs, memory capacities and drive capacities. Ultraportables were (and remain) well-engineered and built premium products, aimed at professionals who place a very high value on portability but still need "full capabilities".
Netbooks are a different class - they are primarily built to be cheap and because of that the other aspects of the machine all suffer - CPU speed, disk space, build quality.
Please keep up with the conversation. Go re-read the thread leading up to this and you'll understand the security framework they would have to overcome. Then you can make an informed comment.
I did read the entire thread. You haven't outlined any "security hoops" that would apply more to malware than any other code.
Requiring signed apps to run on any Intel computer. Linux couldn't live without other FOSS software, and making running an unsigned app impossible in hardware would kill all open source.
Can you outline which part of Windows' DRM makes this possible, and, additionally, which part of the OSS model makes signed code impossible ?
As usual, money is the driving factor here, so there is something you can do to stop this practice if you have objections to it: Sign up as organ donor. If there are enough organ donors, the law of supply and demand will take care of the rest and make sure this practice is no longer profitable, so it will cease to exist.
Even better, lobby for laws making organ donation opt-out, rather than opt-in.
Once users no longer have to jump through hoops to perform computing tasks, they question why they are asked to jump through hoops in one particular case (malware) or they just don't bother out of laziness.
What hoops would users need to jump through to install malware ? Most of what it needs to do isn't any different from any other program.
Rather than solve something harder than the halting problem (you often don't have the full inputs to the program), you just get the programmers to declare upfront what access the programs need, and if declared OK, the OS enforces the sandboxes.
Application: "I need access to everything on your computer to properly display some dancing bunnies."
User: "Dancing Bunnies ? AWESOME !"
The problem is not the capability of the OS to restrict what programs can do. The problem is end users incapable of making an appropriate decision.
You cannot secure a general purpose system administered by an ignorant end user.
However, removing the right to load unsigned code without disabling part of the OS is unfair.
It doesn't "disable parts of the OS". They function exactly the way they have been designed and required to. If a protected path cannot be confirmed, then as per the content owner's directions that media will not be played.
There is no problem in the OS. It will continue to play back all types of media just fine. DRM encumberence is an attribute of the media, however, so if the publisher of said content has decided that their product shouldn't be available without a protected path, then the player will honour that directive.
So, what does an intruder sound like? Do they have a little bell or alarm on them? Do they walk around my house yelling "Intruder in your house!"?
How did you know they're there ? Do you normally carry a loaded shotgun with you to get a drink of water in the night on the off chance someone has broken in ?
What the hell should I do in the meantime while I wait for the police if the intruder stumbles upon me?
Stay out of the way. Stay in your room and lock the door.
What if he doesn't avoid me?
Then defend yourself.
Well, if you want to put your safety in your belief that you are statistically safe, that's your prerogative.
Those statistics say nothing to refute my argument or support yours. You need numbers that indicate how many home invasions result in something more than the perpetrator doing something worse than theft. Someone else posted such numbers much earlier in the discussion, and they showed that the vast, vast majority of such situations ended without any escalation (and most that did were because the homeowner confronted the criminal, IIRC).
It must be nice to live in a giant mansion with huge rooms that take time to cross. How big do you think a room in my house is? A few steps will cover the distance across most of my rooms. How do you know he didn't get close to me? What if he has a gun? He doesn't need to get too close to take me out.
Why did you get close to him ? Hear an intruder, call the police, avoid the intruder. Why are you getting into the same room with them in the first place ?
That's funny, that you think I escalated the situation when the other person actually broke into my house.
I think you need to look up what "escalate" means.
Another thing to consider: If I can get the jump on him before he sees me, it might be my only chance to take him out. If I go try to hide, and he later finds me, he now has an equal chance in a fight.
Chances are he has no interest in a fight unless provoked. The likelihood of someone invading a home with intent to harm the occupants is vanishingly small.
Because you are trying to make an ad-hominem attack.
No, it's because you're using the same logic a child does when trying to provoke a reaction.
Even if you look at it that way, what I am arguing is that the homeowner is allowed to escalate in those circumstances.
Whether they're allowed to is a separate issue to whether they should. They shouldn't. It just increases the likelihood someone (or multiple people) get hurt.
What you are describing is called the "Duty to Retreat [wikipedia.org]." Thankfully, I live in a jurisdiction where I am not bound to retreat and am allowed to "stand my ground" in my own home. I can't speak for where you live, but these types of laws are not limited to the U.S.
You are not advocating standing your ground, you are advocating going on the offensive.
I spoke with her again, and confirmed this wasn't a joke, although I did misunderstand the example. The professor was describing a situation in which a homeowner was threatened and beat the burglar unconscious with a cricket bat. Without evidence that the intruder was threatening, it would be simply the intruder's word against the homeowners that it was self-defense. By planting some evidence, the homeowner would be further in the clear, and that police forensics would not be able to prove that the knife was not wielded by the burglar.
Wow. And these are the people teaching lawyers how to do their job. No wonder they have a bad reputation.
It blows my mind that not only would such a thing be suggested, in apparent seriousness, but that not one of the students thought they should report their *law professor* for encouraging illegal and harmful behaviour. Fucking madness.
One example that immediately came to mind [...]
None of your examples describe anyone who justifiably defended themselves with lethal force and was charged with a crime for it. I think that's rather telling, as I'm sure you spent a reasonable amount of time looking.
Indeed, all the examples you have found are where people who went to far were rightfully punished for doing so.
Anyway, in the cases I have found, one big reason that the homeowners were convicted was that there were witnesses or people were shot in the back.
No, the reason they were convicted was because they broke the law and did the wrong thing . Breaking the law and not getting caught doesn't mean you're innocent, it means you're lucky. Trying to avoid witnesses is the mindset of a criminal.
That is misrepresenting what I said. Say I hear someone breaking in, then I arm myself, call the police and confront the intruder.
You shouldn't have confronted him. By doing so *you* are the one who has escalated the situation.
If he runs away, I won't shoot him in the back. But if he comes toward me - with or without harmful intent - I'd fire. My goal in the situation would be to make sure no more of my stuff is stolen, and if possible, detain the burglar until the police arrive.
And the most likely result is he stumbles when he turns, you perceive this as a threat and shoot, and someone ends up dead. All because you had to confront someone over a TV or a laptop that was probably covered by insurance.
Please back up the statement that an armed populace leads to an increase in violence during robberies. I haven't found anything to that effect.
I don't need to back it up because I didn't say it. Easy access to weapons is certainly a multiplicative factor, but the actual problem I described is one of attitude.
I'll tackle this in two parts. Firstly, I know that most burglars do not mean to harm the homeowner, and in fact, most burglars aren't seriously armed. But I subscribe to the philosophy that "it's better to have a gun and not need it, than to need a gun and not have it," and I'm also a fan of the castle doctrine. Secondly, I can't find statistics regarding how wel
I don't think that is correct. By confronting the person, I would be making a citizen's arrest, and most countries have provisions for such a thing. At this point, the intruder would be escalating the situation if he tries to attack, and I would be killing the person for attacking me, not carrying my TV out the door.
Why does this remind me of a child saying "well I'm just going to swing my arms and walk around, and if you happen to get hit, it's your fault" ?
By confronting the person, *you* are escalating the situation by changing it from a simple break-and-enter to an armed standoff, and then potentially to a homocide (or even multiple). Chances are extremely high that if you do nothing, they will take your TV or whatever and leave, especially if they realise the house is occupied. It's just like being mugged - your best chances of survival are giving the mugger your money and avoiding escalating the situation.
There are also practical considerations besides the legal ones. I was discussing this with an Australian friend of mine who at one time was studying to become a solicitor. She mentioned that one of her legal studies professors told the class that if they killed a burglar in their home, they should put a kitchen knife in their hand.
As a joke, obviously, since actually doing this would have anyone in serious, serious trouble if/when it was discovered, and even more so for someone with actual knowledge of the law.
If you have a genuine reason to fear for your life and kill an attacker, then you won't be going to gaol, even if you're charged with all sorts of things at the beginning. Not in Australia, not in the UK, not in Canada, not anywhere else. In fact, if you can find any examples of this actually transpiring, I'd be quite interested, because I certainly can't recall it ever happening.
On the other hand, if you sneak up behind an intruder and stab them in the back, then try to put a knife in their hand and pretend they attacked you first, when you get found out you'll likely be up for premeditated murder, as you should be. Similarly, if you're a large man and you do something like beat a 14 year old burglar into (and beyond) unconsciousness, you're probably going to be up on assault charges.
I should also point out that the nature of the crime in other countries seems to be different and has a much lower propensity to violence.
Yes. Because in other countries people aren't so keen to escalate it into a gunfight like people such as yourself are in America. Other major factors in the US and less significant in other countries are the larger poverty gap, lack of decent social services and massive difficulty re-entering society if you have ever been convicted of a crime.
My friend asked me why I was concerned about the issue and I gave a few examples; the biggest one that struck her was Fran Drescher's rape. Searching online, I have not been able to find similar situations happening in other 1st-world countries.
It certainly happens, but as in the US is relatively very uncommon for a break and enter to escalate to anything more serious (sans someone acting to cause that). Here's an example from the UK.
The assumption that someone who breaks into your house is likely there to hurt you (either pro-actively or reactively) has little basis in fact, and escalating the situation by acting on that assumption will almost always make things worse.
While your premise is correct, your conclusion is not. Downclocking wasn't added to CPUs to save electricity, but to reduce temperature. Saving electricity is a side effect.
Downclocking was first added to mobile CPUs, and you can rest assured it was to save electricity (= battery).
Er, yeah. Every 12 months I should go through the day-long (after prep, testing, etc - assuming nothing goes wrong of course) process of upgrading my several hundred servers. That sure is a valuable use of my time, and if I'm lucky I'll be finished just in time to start again !
Its a group of redhat users who use the GNU freedom to view the source and strip the Redhat copyrights and recompile it. They do not even mention Redhat at all on their site.
IIRC the consistent reference to Red Hat as the "upstream provider" is at Red Hat's request (presumably to avoid any mistaken assumptions of support or approval).
I often wonder the same thing. I am inclined to think they are using "i386" as a moniker for "32-bit Intel x86 processors." Will RHEL6 actually load on a honest-to-goodness 386 box from 1991? I have a feeling not, and that a i586-class, or perhaps even i1686-class, processor is really required to run the thing.
Numerous packages (like glibc) have both 'i386' and 'i686' packages available.
A person shouldn't have to think "Well, he's got a gun pointed at me and he looks like he's about to shoot, but I hope he doesn't flinch when I pull the trigger, because if he turns his back to me while I'm shooting him, it'll hit him in the back and I could be accused of murdering a fleeing intruder." Yes, this has happened prior to these laws.
If someone is breaking into your home, you can't possibly know their intent. Since they've demonstrated a willingness to ignore one law by breaking and entering, you should assume they're willing to break other laws.
Ah, so you agree the police should be able to shoot people torrenting MP3s on sight, just in case ?
Until they do something else to prove they're not a threat, you have to assume they are one, and treat them appropriately.
Shooting on sight is not an appropriate reaction. Precisely because it leads to things like drunken kids getting shot when they "broke into" the wrong house, or mundane break-and-enters turning into multiple homicides.
That said, if it was a young kid sneaking in through a doggy door, I'd probably just grab them by their ear and hold them until the police and/or their parents came to collect them.
Really ? Because just a few sentences ago you were saying that you had no way of divining their intention, so therefore the only safe conclusion to draw was that they were there to rape and pillage your house and act appropriately by killing them first.
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The purpose of a benchmark is to try to show how performance will be in the real world. If a given application has been programmed to do very well in a given benchmark yet does not do as well with a real-world situation, then the benchmark results are flawed.
If a benchmark is so easily gamed, then its ability to return meaningful results at all is basically nil.
Liberals generally want to give a man a fish, Libertarians would rather teach him to how to fish.
Liberals are happy to give a man a fish when he's starving. Libertarians will tell him if he'd only tried harder to catch more fish, he wouldn't be starving, even though he can't afford to buy a rod and reel.
Is that really correct? I'm generally in favor of laws and rules that prevent insiders from profiting on confidential information at the expense of the public, but the above seems really, really, harsh. The company does, at a minimum, four such statements a year (quarterly earnings), not counting other possible announcements (forecasts, Jobs doing his "one more thing" bit, etc). I mean, even just looking at quarterly announcements, assuming that they were equally spread across the year, you would prohibit anyone classified as an insider from trading for 244 calendar days, or 2/3rds of the year! Add on anything outside of this, and you are basically locked in or locked out of the market. completely.
You're only restricted from trading if you're high enough up the org chart to have access to important information - most people aren't. Further, you're only restricted from trading in the stock of that particularly company, so you're in no way "locked out of the market".
They were never called netbooks at first. They were called (sub/ultraportable) notebooks(1) and later some idiot invented "netbook" word which news sites like engadget and gizmodo propagated.
No, Ultraportables were (and remain) very small and light laptops that are still nearly full-featured, with mainstream-laptop-class (if lower clocked) CPUs, memory capacities and drive capacities. Ultraportables were (and remain) well-engineered and built premium products, aimed at professionals who place a very high value on portability but still need "full capabilities".
Netbooks are a different class - they are primarily built to be cheap and because of that the other aspects of the machine all suffer - CPU speed, disk space, build quality.
OS X is pretty good on the MacBook Air netbook, but Apple won't admit it's a netbook.
That's because it's not, it's an ultraportable.
The defining features of Netbooks is that they're underpowered and cheap. The Macbook Air 11 is neither.
Ubuntu Netbook doesn't work right. There are some great features, like taking advantage of virtualization to keep it at four cores all the time.
You need "virtualisation" for this ?
Please keep up with the conversation. Go re-read the thread leading up to this and you'll understand the security framework they would have to overcome. Then you can make an informed comment.
I did read the entire thread. You haven't outlined any "security hoops" that would apply more to malware than any other code.
Requiring signed apps to run on any Intel computer. Linux couldn't live without other FOSS software, and making running an unsigned app impossible in hardware would kill all open source.
Can you outline which part of Windows' DRM makes this possible, and, additionally, which part of the OSS model makes signed code impossible ?
As usual, money is the driving factor here, so there is something you can do to stop this practice if you have objections to it: Sign up as organ donor. If there are enough organ donors, the law of supply and demand will take care of the rest and make sure this practice is no longer profitable, so it will cease to exist.
Even better, lobby for laws making organ donation opt-out, rather than opt-in.
My property goes to my heirs at my death. My body is my property.
Slavery is illegal. No-one else can own your body except you.
It's an attempt to cripple Linux
By...?
Once users no longer have to jump through hoops to perform computing tasks, they question why they are asked to jump through hoops in one particular case (malware) or they just don't bother out of laziness.
What hoops would users need to jump through to install malware ? Most of what it needs to do isn't any different from any other program.
Rather than solve something harder than the halting problem (you often don't have the full inputs to the program), you just get the programmers to declare upfront what access the programs need, and if declared OK, the OS enforces the sandboxes.
Application: "I need access to everything on your computer to properly display some dancing bunnies."
User: "Dancing Bunnies ? AWESOME !"
The problem is not the capability of the OS to restrict what programs can do. The problem is end users incapable of making an appropriate decision.
You cannot secure a general purpose system administered by an ignorant end user.
However, removing the right to load unsigned code without disabling part of the OS is unfair.
It doesn't "disable parts of the OS". They function exactly the way they have been designed and required to. If a protected path cannot be confirmed, then as per the content owner's directions that media will not be played.
There is no problem in the OS. It will continue to play back all types of media just fine. DRM encumberence is an attribute of the media, however, so if the publisher of said content has decided that their product shouldn't be available without a protected path, then the player will honour that directive.
So, what does an intruder sound like? Do they have a little bell or alarm on them? Do they walk around my house yelling "Intruder in your house!"?
How did you know they're there ? Do you normally carry a loaded shotgun with you to get a drink of water in the night on the off chance someone has broken in ?
What the hell should I do in the meantime while I wait for the police if the intruder stumbles upon me?
Stay out of the way. Stay in your room and lock the door.
What if he doesn't avoid me?
Then defend yourself.
Well, if you want to put your safety in your belief that you are statistically safe, that's your prerogative.
Those statistics say nothing to refute my argument or support yours. You need numbers that indicate how many home invasions result in something more than the perpetrator doing something worse than theft. Someone else posted such numbers much earlier in the discussion, and they showed that the vast, vast majority of such situations ended without any escalation (and most that did were because the homeowner confronted the criminal, IIRC).
It must be nice to live in a giant mansion with huge rooms that take time to cross. How big do you think a room in my house is? A few steps will cover the distance across most of my rooms. How do you know he didn't get close to me? What if he has a gun? He doesn't need to get too close to take me out.
Why did you get close to him ? Hear an intruder, call the police, avoid the intruder. Why are you getting into the same room with them in the first place ?
That's funny, that you think I escalated the situation when the other person actually broke into my house.
I think you need to look up what "escalate" means.
Another thing to consider: If I can get the jump on him before he sees me, it might be my only chance to take him out. If I go try to hide, and he later finds me, he now has an equal chance in a fight.
Chances are he has no interest in a fight unless provoked. The likelihood of someone invading a home with intent to harm the occupants is vanishingly small.
Because you are trying to make an ad-hominem attack.
No, it's because you're using the same logic a child does when trying to provoke a reaction.
Even if you look at it that way, what I am arguing is that the homeowner is allowed to escalate in those circumstances.
Whether they're allowed to is a separate issue to whether they should. They shouldn't. It just increases the likelihood someone (or multiple people) get hurt.
What you are describing is called the "Duty to Retreat [wikipedia.org]." Thankfully, I live in a jurisdiction where I am not bound to retreat and am allowed to "stand my ground" in my own home. I can't speak for where you live, but these types of laws are not limited to the U.S.
You are not advocating standing your ground, you are advocating going on the offensive.
I spoke with her again, and confirmed this wasn't a joke, although I did misunderstand the example. The professor was describing a situation in which a homeowner was threatened and beat the burglar unconscious with a cricket bat. Without evidence that the intruder was threatening, it would be simply the intruder's word against the homeowners that it was self-defense. By planting some evidence, the homeowner would be further in the clear, and that police forensics would not be able to prove that the knife was not wielded by the burglar.
Wow. And these are the people teaching lawyers how to do their job. No wonder they have a bad reputation.
It blows my mind that not only would such a thing be suggested, in apparent seriousness, but that not one of the students thought they should report their *law professor* for encouraging illegal and harmful behaviour. Fucking madness.
One example that immediately came to mind [...]
None of your examples describe anyone who justifiably defended themselves with lethal force and was charged with a crime for it. I think that's rather telling, as I'm sure you spent a reasonable amount of time looking.
Indeed, all the examples you have found are where people who went to far were rightfully punished for doing so.
Anyway, in the cases I have found, one big reason that the homeowners were convicted was that there were witnesses or people were shot in the back.
No, the reason they were convicted was because they broke the law and did the wrong thing . Breaking the law and not getting caught doesn't mean you're innocent, it means you're lucky. Trying to avoid witnesses is the mindset of a criminal.
That is misrepresenting what I said. Say I hear someone breaking in, then I arm myself, call the police and confront the intruder.
You shouldn't have confronted him. By doing so *you* are the one who has escalated the situation.
If he runs away, I won't shoot him in the back. But if he comes toward me - with or without harmful intent - I'd fire. My goal in the situation would be to make sure no more of my stuff is stolen, and if possible, detain the burglar until the police arrive.
And the most likely result is he stumbles when he turns, you perceive this as a threat and shoot, and someone ends up dead. All because you had to confront someone over a TV or a laptop that was probably covered by insurance.
Please back up the statement that an armed populace leads to an increase in violence during robberies. I haven't found anything to that effect.
I don't need to back it up because I didn't say it. Easy access to weapons is certainly a multiplicative factor, but the actual problem I described is one of attitude.
I'll tackle this in two parts. Firstly, I know that most burglars do not mean to harm the homeowner, and in fact, most burglars aren't seriously armed. But I subscribe to the philosophy that "it's better to have a gun and not need it, than to need a gun and not have it," and I'm also a fan of the castle doctrine. Secondly, I can't find statistics regarding how wel
Why did you get close enough to be stabbed ? Why did you escalate the situation by confronting them ?
I don't think that is correct. By confronting the person, I would be making a citizen's arrest, and most countries have provisions for such a thing. At this point, the intruder would be escalating the situation if he tries to attack, and I would be killing the person for attacking me, not carrying my TV out the door.
Why does this remind me of a child saying "well I'm just going to swing my arms and walk around, and if you happen to get hit, it's your fault" ?
By confronting the person, *you* are escalating the situation by changing it from a simple break-and-enter to an armed standoff, and then potentially to a homocide (or even multiple). Chances are extremely high that if you do nothing, they will take your TV or whatever and leave, especially if they realise the house is occupied. It's just like being mugged - your best chances of survival are giving the mugger your money and avoiding escalating the situation.
There are also practical considerations besides the legal ones. I was discussing this with an Australian friend of mine who at one time was studying to become a solicitor. She mentioned that one of her legal studies professors told the class that if they killed a burglar in their home, they should put a kitchen knife in their hand.
As a joke, obviously, since actually doing this would have anyone in serious, serious trouble if/when it was discovered, and even more so for someone with actual knowledge of the law.
If you have a genuine reason to fear for your life and kill an attacker, then you won't be going to gaol, even if you're charged with all sorts of things at the beginning. Not in Australia, not in the UK, not in Canada, not anywhere else. In fact, if you can find any examples of this actually transpiring, I'd be quite interested, because I certainly can't recall it ever happening.
On the other hand, if you sneak up behind an intruder and stab them in the back, then try to put a knife in their hand and pretend they attacked you first, when you get found out you'll likely be up for premeditated murder, as you should be. Similarly, if you're a large man and you do something like beat a 14 year old burglar into (and beyond) unconsciousness, you're probably going to be up on assault charges.
I should also point out that the nature of the crime in other countries seems to be different and has a much lower propensity to violence.
Yes. Because in other countries people aren't so keen to escalate it into a gunfight like people such as yourself are in America. Other major factors in the US and less significant in other countries are the larger poverty gap, lack of decent social services and massive difficulty re-entering society if you have ever been convicted of a crime.
My friend asked me why I was concerned about the issue and I gave a few examples; the biggest one that struck her was Fran Drescher's rape. Searching online, I have not been able to find similar situations happening in other 1st-world countries.
It certainly happens, but as in the US is relatively very uncommon for a break and enter to escalate to anything more serious (sans someone acting to cause that). Here's an example from the UK.
The assumption that someone who breaks into your house is likely there to hurt you (either pro-actively or reactively) has little basis in fact, and escalating the situation by acting on that assumption will almost always make things worse.
While your premise is correct, your conclusion is not. Downclocking wasn't added to CPUs to save electricity, but to reduce temperature. Saving electricity is a side effect.
Downclocking was first added to mobile CPUs, and you can rest assured it was to save electricity (= battery).
Just upgrade your box every 12 months.
Er, yeah. Every 12 months I should go through the day-long (after prep, testing, etc - assuming nothing goes wrong of course) process of upgrading my several hundred servers. That sure is a valuable use of my time, and if I'm lucky I'll be finished just in time to start again !
Its a group of redhat users who use the GNU freedom to view the source and strip the Redhat copyrights and recompile it. They do not even mention Redhat at all on their site.
IIRC the consistent reference to Red Hat as the "upstream provider" is at Red Hat's request (presumably to avoid any mistaken assumptions of support or approval).
I often wonder the same thing. I am inclined to think they are using "i386" as a moniker for "32-bit Intel x86 processors." Will RHEL6 actually load on a honest-to-goodness 386 box from 1991? I have a feeling not, and that a i586-class, or perhaps even i1686-class, processor is really required to run the thing.
Numerous packages (like glibc) have both 'i386' and 'i686' packages available.
A person shouldn't have to think "Well, he's got a gun pointed at me and he looks like he's about to shoot, but I hope he doesn't flinch when I pull the trigger, because if he turns his back to me while I'm shooting him, it'll hit him in the back and I could be accused of murdering a fleeing intruder." Yes, this has happened prior to these laws.
For example ?
If someone is breaking into your home, you can't possibly know their intent. Since they've demonstrated a willingness to ignore one law by breaking and entering, you should assume they're willing to break other laws.
Ah, so you agree the police should be able to shoot people torrenting MP3s on sight, just in case ?
Until they do something else to prove they're not a threat, you have to assume they are one, and treat them appropriately.
Shooting on sight is not an appropriate reaction. Precisely because it leads to things like drunken kids getting shot when they "broke into" the wrong house, or mundane break-and-enters turning into multiple homicides.
That said, if it was a young kid sneaking in through a doggy door, I'd probably just grab them by their ear and hold them until the police and/or their parents came to collect them.
Really ? Because just a few sentences ago you were saying that you had no way of divining their intention, so therefore the only safe conclusion to draw was that they were there to rape and pillage your house and act appropriately by killing them first.