One small point on my post above: I mis-clicked and associated it with the sibling of the post that I meant to follow up to. Still, I make the point I meant to make, and appologize to the person who I replied to for attributing to them comments which they never made.
So, by that logic, all 800 packages that I have installed shoudl feel free to hog up a gig of disk?! Sorry, no. I'm not going to buy a terabyte of disk just so that gaim can have a full copy of project guttenberg lying around, should it need it some day.
Any single package that takes up that much space is broken, and they can feel free to add as many megabytes of data to their distribution as they like, but many of us will seek alternatives. If we wanted bloatware, we'd be Windows users.
The apeal descision is a beautiful piece of legal work, and I recommend that you read it. I've, woefully, only had time to skim it.
The logic is this: the uploaders of the music commited an illegal act. The defendant in this case provided a place specifically for the purpose of adding links to these illegal copies. Because the mode of interaction was a click on his page that resulted in direct access to the file in question (in fact, immediate playback in correctly configured browsers), the site constituted a performance under norwegian law, and therefore was also infringing.
This is a well thought-out and, IMHO, correct assessment.
The judge left tons of loopholes by which any reasonable activity could have slipped past his ruling, but this page was, in fact, a performance of works which the page's author had no right to perform. Had he provided a set of links to web sites known to have such MP3s, he would have escaped the judgement. Had he provided a forum for the sharing of links in general with no particular bias toward music files, he would have escaped the judgement. Had he screened entries for free distributability he would have escaped the judgement. The judge even made allowances for the fact that the site was just collating submissions, and brought into question the role of the contributor of the link vs the runner of the site.
Folks, just because a ruling shuts down an illegal file-swapper doesn't mean it's wrong.
Many languages have native complex support including modern C++. Perl 6 will be offering an interesting array of options for complex support as a built-in type, and I'm pretty sure Python already does this.
Those are just some off the top of my head.
If you were to say that FORTRAN *was* the only language with native complex number support back when it was popular, then I would agree.
Some people have even written C/C++ interfaces to FORTRAN numerical libraries
MANY languages have wrappers around netlib and other giant fortran numerical libraries. The reason being that 99.9% of the programmers who need access to parts of that code could never even BEGIN to re-write it in another language. That code will likely be with us well after the name FORTRAN is forgotten.
Perl's PDL (Perl Data Language) is a very nice abstraction for dealing with almost any sort of numerical data, and it uses netlib as a back-end as well as serveral other tools in C and Perl.
The fact that warming has been occurring at an accelerating rate since 1800 (industrial revolution in Europe) strongly suggests a link with fossil fuels.
There it is again. Please, please, please people, if you're going to debate in public about an important topic like the climate of our planet, do some reading first.
The models used to suggest that I'M WRONG -- that is, the ones that suggest a strong anthropic element to global warming -- start off with a model for solar and geothermal influence on global temperatures that account ENTIRELY for warming up until the 1950s/1960s. The anthropic link is an extrapolation of an "anomoly" that begins in the 1950s/1960s. If that anomoly did not exist, the climate would still be in a warming trend that began, quite naturally and explainably in the late 1800s.
So, if you're going to debate on the side of anthropic global warming, you are going to have to either say that the model used by people who agree with your conclusions is wrong (could be, who knows), or you're going to tell me (here, I'll help by making your argument for you) that the period of unexplained warming (last 40-50 years) overlaps a giant increase in human industrial activity and the rise of popular air-travel, and thus it is reasonable to assume that the increase in human activity is responsible.
My concern with that line of reasoning is that it is firmly rooted in a humanocentric view of the world. We would very much like to assume that we're capable of having that much impact, but when we look back at the amount that we have learned about solar and geothermal impact on the climate in the last 20 years, we have to admit that the existance of an anomoly in temperatures is simply too little to go on. What's more, we have massive ecological and environmental problems that we need to resolve and which result in millions of deaths every year. THOSE are being back-burnered because global warming is such a hot topic.
Please hack open office's SIZE
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Hacking OpenOffice
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· Score: 3, Interesting
I had to remove OOo from my home box last night. I needed the disk space back. Why does a office suite on a Linux box have to take up a gig of disk?!
I'm mostly aware of the data that came out of the field up to about 2-3 years ago, and have followed some of the information coming out since. I do try to be educated on the points that I debate, so I'm pretty sure of what I stated above. Last I checked, the percentage of antropic influence on global warming was a negative proof. That is, we demonstrated sound theories that modeled global climate up to about 1950-1960, and then the models failed. The extrapolation was that the delta between the model and current warming was anthropic.
While that's a fine theory, it's hardly a conclusive proof. Like I said, I'll take a look at your link and see if there's new data that I'm not aware of. Thanks again!
Reduce/eliminate emissions and maybe scrub greenhouse gasses from the air. If man is responsible for global warming then temperatures will stop rising or decrease.
THIS... this right here, is what I was talking about above. No one with a shred of scientific credentials that I've read anywhere has suggested that man has the unbridled power to reverse or even halt global warming. It's unthinkable that we would have that kind of power. All that has been suggested is that the existing warming trend, that current models take as a given could be returned to the track that our current understanding of solar and geothermal forces predict. In plain english: the best we could do is go back to slower warming, not prevent what appears to be a natural period of global warming that began in the late 1800s.
But that's not a valid statement for an environmentalist to make. It *feels* better to say that we could "stop [...] or decrease" global warming, and so science be damned!
Like I said, in this climate, we are almost certain to be unable to extract real meaning from the data at our disposal. Instead, I suggest that we focus on the threats to the environment that are real, provable, and KILLING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE EVERY YEAR. Do that, and you are a real environmentalist. Do that as an environmentalist organization, and I will back you financially.
You're veering off-topic, but no. The US was most certainly not loved, as you point out, pre-Bush.
I think that began in the early 1800s, but certainly the actions taken by the US in Central/South America, Southeast Asia and in the Middle East over the last 40 years cemented our reputation as a ruthless manipulator of foreign governments. US/UK collusion over systems like Echelon, the Viet Nam war, the assassination of at the very least one foriegn leader and our backing and subsequent abandonment of the Afghani resistance against the Soviet Union are only some of our sins.
However, there was never a time in my adult lifetime where the first topic of discussion with foreigners was always along the lines of, "what's wrong with the US?" Our consistent baiting of Iraq and Iran in an obvious bid to go to war has made even our closest alies take a step back and dissociate themselves from the US. Blair is the only foreign leader who still actively endorses our actions, and he's taking tremendous amounts of political heat for it from his country.
The CIA and the cold war made the reputation of the US pretty dim, but Bush's neo-conservative White House has, quite possibly, tarnished it beyond repair for my generation at least.
I like how they kept talking about Dirty Bombs and duct tape, but neglected these few huge glaring targets.
They were not ignored.
What you're looking at is a document describing various tactics that could be used to enhance security. It is by no means the only step that has been taken.
First off, most of the security measures were taken DURING CONSTRUCTION of these plants. A bomb was, of course, a major concern, and these facillities were built with that in mind. Nothing is bomb-proof, but nuclear power plants are designed to be higly resistant to such attacks.
Plants have also tightened security since 9/11 and the government has made many recommendations along those lines.
The fact of the matter is that bombing a plant in such a way that any significant leakage would occur is HARD, and so smuggling a bomb (even a conventional one) into downtown [pick a city name] is a far more attractive target.
I don't give Bush credit for much (he's certainly devestated the reputation of the United States and made us a much more attractive target for terrorism), but I will grant that he's taken physical terrorism prevention as seriously as I would expect any president to.
Nope, I recall measurements in Australia showing the same thing, and Antartica has been in a warming trend for the last 10,000 years (since the last ice age). You are correct, though that, as we understand it, the North Atlantic and Mediteranian suffered a far stronger period of warming 500-100 years ago (Egypt, as I recall, was significantly impacted).
The grand (or is that grand, grand) parent was concerned that the Bush administration didn't realize that the EPA was saying that the temperatures were rising AND were predicting further rises.
The problem here is a misunderstanding of what the point of disagreement is (and it's really not a right-left issue at all: I'm a liberal democrat myself, but agree with the White House on this). The difference is based, not on the question, "is it getting warmer?" That was a real and significant question in the 80s when there were doubts about the measurements being used. However, at this point we are fairly certain that temperatures have been rising for the last 100 years and have been rising more sharply for the last 50.
The question is: is this a natural warming trend, as observed 500-1000 years ago, is this human-induced or is it a combination of the two.
The most likely answer is that it's a combination, so the disagreement boils down to where you place the division of responsibility. If man is responsible for 0.00001% of the current warming trend then there's no point in worrying about it any more than we worry about tracking hurricanes. Do the math, warn the people, carry on.
If we're responsible for 50% of the current warming trend, then we should seriously re-think out interaction with the environment... and soon!
My personal belief is that, in the current climate of mud-slinging and political pressure, there is no reasonable way to determine the real answer, and so I am left with one overriding fact: for every form of influence man can exert on our world, nature routinely exerts far, far more influence. All of our factories, planes and cars pale in comparison to volcanoes, forest fires and various bilogical processes. The Sun's influence is still poorly understood. For example, what is the exact relationship between increases in solar output and evaporation? Since water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas, knowing if evaporation is a linear, logarithmic or step function with respect to solar radiation is KEY to understanding global warming, and yet the process of evaporation is so complex that we have yet to understand it even enough to describe simple weather phenomenon, much less climactic change.
So, do we change the way we live? We should, but we didn't need a global warming debate to tell us that. We desperately need to police the most obviously damaging influences that man has on the environment. Chemical dumping kills millions every year, around the world. Why is that less of a problem than the THEORY that global warming might have a human influence?! We're over-fishing our oceans. Why is that less of a danger to human quality of life? We've been preventing forest fires the wrong way for 100 years, leading to fires that burn orders of magnitude hotter and more dangerously.
The problem I have with environmentalism is that it is mostly focused on a FEELING that humans are doing the wrong thing, and research is used as a sort of background music to the movement rather than the driving force. I want to be an environmentalist, but as long as environmentalism is defined by owl-squeezers and doom predictors I guess I'll have to just be a concerned inhabitant of planet Earth.
This seems like a rather silly concern. There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of old cameras out there using digial or analog media to store images that won't be affected by such a device.
I also don't see how HP would market this. Any hint that this technology is in a camera would destroy its sales (pros wouldn't touch it and reviews would herd the unwashed masses away). Certainly it could not stop the paparazzi or stalkers (both of which would circumvent as described above), so what's the value in owning the technology? Stopping 20% of tourist snaps? Certainly no one's going to want to add this to disposables (ups the cost), so even there you miss most of the audience.
Nope, this is less of a rights issue and more of a matter of filing for a patent because that's the only potential value you could extract from a technology.
Your reply is a non-sequitor. The grandparent was simply drawing a comparison to Fedora's use of SELinux to demonstrate the kinds of social problems that security roles do not solve for.
With SELinux for example (or Multics or VMS or what-have-you), you are not only protected against the casual user, but the determined cracker who gets access to limited system authority. Let's say that such a user finds that your Web server is using some insecure module and gains access to the "apache" account. Well, that account has the ability to execute commands (perhaps only in certain areas) and can create/delete/modify files only in certain areas (tmp, certain cache directories, etc).
Regardless of how you became apache, you have these restrictions, so there's not much you can do. You probably don't even have permission to deface your own web site, even though you own the files! You can try to find a local compromise to use, but that has limited promise. After all, you can't even execute many of the commands that would give you likely bugs to exploit!
The best you can do is suck up whatever CPU cycles are allocated to apache and fill as much disk as apache is allowed to use, thus performing a simple denial of service.
With the sudo model, you can't at all control what someone does when they gain access to your system, other than to say that they're "not root" (i.e. non-0 UID). Using groups, ulimit, etc, you can do quite a bit more than the default, but even still, you have two problems: many resources simply cannot be limited and if the intruder becomes root, you're hosed.
By breaking up root's authority, you layer your security. This makes compromising your system a harder problem.
The key word is "recently". Even the USPS won't forward forever. I would be fine with (and I think ISPs would too, once they got over the initial outrage) forcing anyone who sells access to an email account to forward mail sent to that account to some other (e.g. set once, never change) for a period of 6 months after account termination. As long as they are allowed to filter based on spam, viruses and set some reasonable bandwidth cap, I think this would be fine.
If I ran an ISP, I would fight such a law, but only because it would cost me money and thus there's no point in NOT fighting it. When all is said and done, a universally applied law isn't going to hurt any one ISP, though, and it doesn't cost THAT much.
Not only that, but I recall this being done off of laser disc-based TV archives in the early-mid '90s at the MIT media lab. Does it really take us 10 years to adapt this kind of thing to the real world?
Yep, I still see a rotary from time to time. What's more, how young does this guy think Slashdot is? I think the founders are probably a tad (maybe 5-10 years) younger than me, and I grew up with rotary phones. Is the stereotype that all hackers are teenagers so ingrained that we even buy into it on Slashdot?!
You should read the article (I know, cliche... but true). In the speach, he explains that having fun is important. The problem arises where you allow yourself to be distracted from the options that you're throwing away. He first discusses the options that you throw away by not working on hard problems. He then talks about the options that you throw away by either conforming to or rebelling against the system. In short, he discussses how to craft your own life the way you want, and that's something that is so utterly subversive that I'm kind of stunned that he expected to be allowed to give the speach (which he was not, of course).
High school students are routinely protected from this kind of good advice because a school full of people who realized that school is a distraction from the important things that you should be considering are dangerously unpredictable people!
Re:IRC analysis fatally flawed
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Is IRC All Bad?
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· Score: 1
At work, I use IRC for communication with co-workers and our NOC for anything that needs to be real-time and cannot be done over third-party networks (e.g. IM). The ability to control the medium directly (running a server) secure it to a reasonable degree (passowrd protection, SSL, etc) make it the ideal transport for important real-time communication. As a result we almost never use "bridge" or "conference" calling, and stay in close touch with everything that's being done.
At home, I use IRC for open source development, social exchanges, etc.
So this article surprised me until I realized that it was not measuring connections, server-side commands or any other sort of reasonable metric. It was, instead, measuring byte-count. Well duh. If the "illegal" (and I'd like to know how THAT is determined) communications are all binary transfers of large software images and the "legal" exchanges are all hand-typed text, then of course a byte-count comparison will show that binary transfers are, in fact, large.
Sadly, this will likely become the sound bite that everyone hears about IRC for the next 10 years, and this guy will get a fair amount of money from talk show appearances about "Internet hackers colluding over chat channels like terrorist scum".
You're talking about the generic content of blogs, and that's not what I'm refering to at all. When you decide to selectively ignore the linking from user-contributed content, you start to see the interconnections between Web sites through the lense of corporate interests. One of google's big advantages, IMHO, is that you're getting a fairly balanced view of what's "interesting" to people.
To the other poster who said that this would only apply to comments: well, we'll see how it's used. I know that I found wikipedia through a Slashdot user comment, so I'm not sure how skewed Google will be if it's ignoring such things.... time will tell.
So, one of the things that Google really has going for it is the fact that they assign "value" of a link based on how it is referenced. If we mute the voice of the average blogger in that calculation, don't we lose quite a bit? Granted, the cost is having the first few links owned by content spammers, but that seems like a small price to pay, and there should be other, less absolute ways of dealing with it....
This problem is believed to be NP-complete, and any system which has attempted to do this in the past has met with great difficulty to say the least. In some cases, languages have differing syntax, but essentially the same semantics, and in those cases, a translator is possible (e.g. FORTRAN to C). In all other cases, your options are limited. You can compile down to some intermediate language and then simulate the intermediate langauge in your target language, but that's not the same as translating at all, and the result will be quite unmaintainable.
Parrot and CLR/Mono are probably better ways to go. These are virtual machines that are designed to support arbitrary language semantics. Everyone compiles down to byte-code and calls between functions, methods, etc of code in various languages can be made semi-transparent.
This allows your Java code to take advantage of PDL (Perl Data Language) from CPAN while some Python code takes advantage of a cool Ruby mix-in. No need to translate the elements, as long as API documentation allows users in any language to take advantage of your API.
All that said, the idea of translating code to XML for storage with the data is not completely stupid. Without translating between languages, it still gives you the ability to manipulate the code and data in ways that XML makes trivial, and that way people who want to write code that interacts with source code don't have to write a parser for the langauge. This might end up being a cool hack for language-dependent work.
Slashdot Mirror
One small point on my post above: I mis-clicked and associated it with the sibling of the post that I meant to follow up to. Still, I make the point I meant to make, and appologize to the person who I replied to for attributing to them comments which they never made.
So, by that logic, all 800 packages that I have installed shoudl feel free to hog up a gig of disk?! Sorry, no. I'm not going to buy a terabyte of disk just so that gaim can have a full copy of project guttenberg lying around, should it need it some day.
Any single package that takes up that much space is broken, and they can feel free to add as many megabytes of data to their distribution as they like, but many of us will seek alternatives. If we wanted bloatware, we'd be Windows users.
The apeal descision is a beautiful piece of legal work, and I recommend that you read it. I've, woefully, only had time to skim it.
The logic is this: the uploaders of the music commited an illegal act. The defendant in this case provided a place specifically for the purpose of adding links to these illegal copies. Because the mode of interaction was a click on his page that resulted in direct access to the file in question (in fact, immediate playback in correctly configured browsers), the site constituted a performance under norwegian law, and therefore was also infringing.
This is a well thought-out and, IMHO, correct assessment.
The judge left tons of loopholes by which any reasonable activity could have slipped past his ruling, but this page was, in fact, a performance of works which the page's author had no right to perform. Had he provided a set of links to web sites known to have such MP3s, he would have escaped the judgement. Had he provided a forum for the sharing of links in general with no particular bias toward music files, he would have escaped the judgement. Had he screened entries for free distributability he would have escaped the judgement. The judge even made allowances for the fact that the site was just collating submissions, and brought into question the role of the contributor of the link vs the runner of the site.
Folks, just because a ruling shuts down an illegal file-swapper doesn't mean it's wrong.
Many languages have native complex support including modern C++. Perl 6 will be offering an interesting array of options for complex support as a built-in type, and I'm pretty sure Python already does this.
Those are just some off the top of my head.
If you were to say that FORTRAN *was* the only language with native complex number support back when it was popular, then I would agree.
Some people have even written C/C++ interfaces to FORTRAN numerical libraries
MANY languages have wrappers around netlib and other giant fortran numerical libraries. The reason being that 99.9% of the programmers who need access to parts of that code could never even BEGIN to re-write it in another language. That code will likely be with us well after the name FORTRAN is forgotten.
Perl's PDL (Perl Data Language) is a very nice abstraction for dealing with almost any sort of numerical data, and it uses netlib as a back-end as well as serveral other tools in C and Perl.
I'm sure other languages have similar tools.
There it is again. Please, please, please people, if you're going to debate in public about an important topic like the climate of our planet, do some reading first.
The models used to suggest that I'M WRONG -- that is, the ones that suggest a strong anthropic element to global warming -- start off with a model for solar and geothermal influence on global temperatures that account ENTIRELY for warming up until the 1950s/1960s. The anthropic link is an extrapolation of an "anomoly" that begins in the 1950s/1960s. If that anomoly did not exist, the climate would still be in a warming trend that began, quite naturally and explainably in the late 1800s.
So, if you're going to debate on the side of anthropic global warming, you are going to have to either say that the model used by people who agree with your conclusions is wrong (could be, who knows), or you're going to tell me (here, I'll help by making your argument for you) that the period of unexplained warming (last 40-50 years) overlaps a giant increase in human industrial activity and the rise of popular air-travel, and thus it is reasonable to assume that the increase in human activity is responsible.
My concern with that line of reasoning is that it is firmly rooted in a humanocentric view of the world. We would very much like to assume that we're capable of having that much impact, but when we look back at the amount that we have learned about solar and geothermal impact on the climate in the last 20 years, we have to admit that the existance of an anomoly in temperatures is simply too little to go on. What's more, we have massive ecological and environmental problems that we need to resolve and which result in millions of deaths every year. THOSE are being back-burnered because global warming is such a hot topic.
I had to remove OOo from my home box last night. I needed the disk space back. Why does a office suite on a Linux box have to take up a gig of disk?!
Thanks for the link, I'll take a look.
I'm mostly aware of the data that came out of the field up to about 2-3 years ago, and have followed some of the information coming out since. I do try to be educated on the points that I debate, so I'm pretty sure of what I stated above. Last I checked, the percentage of antropic influence on global warming was a negative proof. That is, we demonstrated sound theories that modeled global climate up to about 1950-1960, and then the models failed. The extrapolation was that the delta between the model and current warming was anthropic.
While that's a fine theory, it's hardly a conclusive proof. Like I said, I'll take a look at your link and see if there's new data that I'm not aware of. Thanks again!
THIS... this right here, is what I was talking about above. No one with a shred of scientific credentials that I've read anywhere has suggested that man has the unbridled power to reverse or even halt global warming. It's unthinkable that we would have that kind of power. All that has been suggested is that the existing warming trend, that current models take as a given could be returned to the track that our current understanding of solar and geothermal forces predict. In plain english: the best we could do is go back to slower warming, not prevent what appears to be a natural period of global warming that began in the late 1800s.
But that's not a valid statement for an environmentalist to make. It *feels* better to say that we could "stop [...] or decrease" global warming, and so science be damned!
Like I said, in this climate, we are almost certain to be unable to extract real meaning from the data at our disposal. Instead, I suggest that we focus on the threats to the environment that are real, provable, and KILLING MILLIONS OF PEOPLE EVERY YEAR. Do that, and you are a real environmentalist. Do that as an environmentalist organization, and I will back you financially.
You're veering off-topic, but no. The US was most certainly not loved, as you point out, pre-Bush.
I think that began in the early 1800s, but certainly the actions taken by the US in Central/South America, Southeast Asia and in the Middle East over the last 40 years cemented our reputation as a ruthless manipulator of foreign governments. US/UK collusion over systems like Echelon, the Viet Nam war, the assassination of at the very least one foriegn leader and our backing and subsequent abandonment of the Afghani resistance against the Soviet Union are only some of our sins.
However, there was never a time in my adult lifetime where the first topic of discussion with foreigners was always along the lines of, "what's wrong with the US?" Our consistent baiting of Iraq and Iran in an obvious bid to go to war has made even our closest alies take a step back and dissociate themselves from the US. Blair is the only foreign leader who still actively endorses our actions, and he's taking tremendous amounts of political heat for it from his country.
The CIA and the cold war made the reputation of the US pretty dim, but Bush's neo-conservative White House has, quite possibly, tarnished it beyond repair for my generation at least.
I like how they kept talking about Dirty Bombs and duct tape, but neglected these few huge glaring targets.
They were not ignored.
What you're looking at is a document describing various tactics that could be used to enhance security. It is by no means the only step that has been taken.
First off, most of the security measures were taken DURING CONSTRUCTION of these plants. A bomb was, of course, a major concern, and these facillities were built with that in mind. Nothing is bomb-proof, but nuclear power plants are designed to be higly resistant to such attacks.
Plants have also tightened security since 9/11 and the government has made many recommendations along those lines.
The fact of the matter is that bombing a plant in such a way that any significant leakage would occur is HARD, and so smuggling a bomb (even a conventional one) into downtown [pick a city name] is a far more attractive target.
I don't give Bush credit for much (he's certainly devestated the reputation of the United States and made us a much more attractive target for terrorism), but I will grant that he's taken physical terrorism prevention as seriously as I would expect any president to.
Nope, I recall measurements in Australia showing the same thing, and Antartica has been in a warming trend for the last 10,000 years (since the last ice age). You are correct, though that, as we understand it, the North Atlantic and Mediteranian suffered a far stronger period of warming 500-100 years ago (Egypt, as I recall, was significantly impacted).
The grand (or is that grand, grand) parent was concerned that the Bush administration didn't realize that the EPA was saying that the temperatures were rising AND were predicting further rises.
The problem here is a misunderstanding of what the point of disagreement is (and it's really not a right-left issue at all: I'm a liberal democrat myself, but agree with the White House on this). The difference is based, not on the question, "is it getting warmer?" That was a real and significant question in the 80s when there were doubts about the measurements being used. However, at this point we are fairly certain that temperatures have been rising for the last 100 years and have been rising more sharply for the last 50.
The question is: is this a natural warming trend, as observed 500-1000 years ago, is this human-induced or is it a combination of the two.
The most likely answer is that it's a combination, so the disagreement boils down to where you place the division of responsibility. If man is responsible for 0.00001% of the current warming trend then there's no point in worrying about it any more than we worry about tracking hurricanes. Do the math, warn the people, carry on.
If we're responsible for 50% of the current warming trend, then we should seriously re-think out interaction with the environment... and soon!
My personal belief is that, in the current climate of mud-slinging and political pressure, there is no reasonable way to determine the real answer, and so I am left with one overriding fact: for every form of influence man can exert on our world, nature routinely exerts far, far more influence. All of our factories, planes and cars pale in comparison to volcanoes, forest fires and various bilogical processes. The Sun's influence is still poorly understood. For example, what is the exact relationship between increases in solar output and evaporation? Since water vapor is the most potent greenhouse gas, knowing if evaporation is a linear, logarithmic or step function with respect to solar radiation is KEY to understanding global warming, and yet the process of evaporation is so complex that we have yet to understand it even enough to describe simple weather phenomenon, much less climactic change.
So, do we change the way we live? We should, but we didn't need a global warming debate to tell us that. We desperately need to police the most obviously damaging influences that man has on the environment. Chemical dumping kills millions every year, around the world. Why is that less of a problem than the THEORY that global warming might have a human influence?! We're over-fishing our oceans. Why is that less of a danger to human quality of life? We've been preventing forest fires the wrong way for 100 years, leading to fires that burn orders of magnitude hotter and more dangerously.
The problem I have with environmentalism is that it is mostly focused on a FEELING that humans are doing the wrong thing, and research is used as a sort of background music to the movement rather than the driving force. I want to be an environmentalist, but as long as environmentalism is defined by owl-squeezers and doom predictors I guess I'll have to just be a concerned inhabitant of planet Earth.
This seems like a rather silly concern. There are hundreds of thousands (millions?) of old cameras out there using digial or analog media to store images that won't be affected by such a device.
I also don't see how HP would market this. Any hint that this technology is in a camera would destroy its sales (pros wouldn't touch it and reviews would herd the unwashed masses away). Certainly it could not stop the paparazzi or stalkers (both of which would circumvent as described above), so what's the value in owning the technology? Stopping 20% of tourist snaps? Certainly no one's going to want to add this to disposables (ups the cost), so even there you miss most of the audience.
Nope, this is less of a rights issue and more of a matter of filing for a patent because that's the only potential value you could extract from a technology.
I find that people do still use Linked In, which I've been pretty good about adding others to. It's a nice job-networking site, but not much more.
Your reply is a non-sequitor. The grandparent was simply drawing a comparison to Fedora's use of SELinux to demonstrate the kinds of social problems that security roles do not solve for.
Please read before posting.
sudo is not sufficient.
With SELinux for example (or Multics or VMS or what-have-you), you are not only protected against the casual user, but the determined cracker who gets access to limited system authority. Let's say that such a user finds that your Web server is using some insecure module and gains access to the "apache" account. Well, that account has the ability to execute commands (perhaps only in certain areas) and can create/delete/modify files only in certain areas (tmp, certain cache directories, etc).
Regardless of how you became apache, you have these restrictions, so there's not much you can do. You probably don't even have permission to deface your own web site, even though you own the files! You can try to find a local compromise to use, but that has limited promise. After all, you can't even execute many of the commands that would give you likely bugs to exploit!
The best you can do is suck up whatever CPU cycles are allocated to apache and fill as much disk as apache is allowed to use, thus performing a simple denial of service.
With the sudo model, you can't at all control what someone does when they gain access to your system, other than to say that they're "not root" (i.e. non-0 UID). Using groups, ulimit, etc, you can do quite a bit more than the default, but even still, you have two problems: many resources simply cannot be limited and if the intruder becomes root, you're hosed.
By breaking up root's authority, you layer your security. This makes compromising your system a harder problem.
The key word is "recently". Even the USPS won't forward forever. I would be fine with (and I think ISPs would too, once they got over the initial outrage) forcing anyone who sells access to an email account to forward mail sent to that account to some other (e.g. set once, never change) for a period of 6 months after account termination. As long as they are allowed to filter based on spam, viruses and set some reasonable bandwidth cap, I think this would be fine.
If I ran an ISP, I would fight such a law, but only because it would cost me money and thus there's no point in NOT fighting it. When all is said and done, a universally applied law isn't going to hurt any one ISP, though, and it doesn't cost THAT much.
Not only that, but I recall this being done off of laser disc-based TV archives in the early-mid '90s at the MIT media lab. Does it really take us 10 years to adapt this kind of thing to the real world?
Yep, I still see a rotary from time to time. What's more, how young does this guy think Slashdot is? I think the founders are probably a tad (maybe 5-10 years) younger than me, and I grew up with rotary phones. Is the stereotype that all hackers are teenagers so ingrained that we even buy into it on Slashdot?!
You should read the article (I know, cliche... but true). In the speach, he explains that having fun is important. The problem arises where you allow yourself to be distracted from the options that you're throwing away. He first discusses the options that you throw away by not working on hard problems. He then talks about the options that you throw away by either conforming to or rebelling against the system. In short, he discussses how to craft your own life the way you want, and that's something that is so utterly subversive that I'm kind of stunned that he expected to be allowed to give the speach (which he was not, of course).
High school students are routinely protected from this kind of good advice because a school full of people who realized that school is a distraction from the important things that you should be considering are dangerously unpredictable people!
At work, I use IRC for communication with co-workers and our NOC for anything that needs to be real-time and cannot be done over third-party networks (e.g. IM). The ability to control the medium directly (running a server) secure it to a reasonable degree (passowrd protection, SSL, etc) make it the ideal transport for important real-time communication. As a result we almost never use "bridge" or "conference" calling, and stay in close touch with everything that's being done.
At home, I use IRC for open source development, social exchanges, etc.
So this article surprised me until I realized that it was not measuring connections, server-side commands or any other sort of reasonable metric. It was, instead, measuring byte-count. Well duh. If the "illegal" (and I'd like to know how THAT is determined) communications are all binary transfers of large software images and the "legal" exchanges are all hand-typed text, then of course a byte-count comparison will show that binary transfers are, in fact, large.
Sadly, this will likely become the sound bite that everyone hears about IRC for the next 10 years, and this guy will get a fair amount of money from talk show appearances about "Internet hackers colluding over chat channels like terrorist scum".
Sigh.
"Who wants to live forever, when love must die?"
-Queen, "Who Wants To Live Forever?" from the Highlander soundtrack and generic Queen album, "A Kind of Magic" Music and lyrics: Brian May
You're talking about the generic content of blogs, and that's not what I'm refering to at all. When you decide to selectively ignore the linking from user-contributed content, you start to see the interconnections between Web sites through the lense of corporate interests. One of google's big advantages, IMHO, is that you're getting a fairly balanced view of what's "interesting" to people.
To the other poster who said that this would only apply to comments: well, we'll see how it's used. I know that I found wikipedia through a Slashdot user comment, so I'm not sure how skewed Google will be if it's ignoring such things.... time will tell.
So, one of the things that Google really has going for it is the fact that they assign "value" of a link based on how it is referenced. If we mute the voice of the average blogger in that calculation, don't we lose quite a bit? Granted, the cost is having the first few links owned by content spammers, but that seems like a small price to pay, and there should be other, less absolute ways of dealing with it....
You're correct, but not going quite far enough.
This problem is believed to be NP-complete, and any system which has attempted to do this in the past has met with great difficulty to say the least. In some cases, languages have differing syntax, but essentially the same semantics, and in those cases, a translator is possible (e.g. FORTRAN to C). In all other cases, your options are limited. You can compile down to some intermediate language and then simulate the intermediate langauge in your target language, but that's not the same as translating at all, and the result will be quite unmaintainable.
Parrot and CLR/Mono are probably better ways to go. These are virtual machines that are designed to support arbitrary language semantics. Everyone compiles down to byte-code and calls between functions, methods, etc of code in various languages can be made semi-transparent.
This allows your Java code to take advantage of PDL (Perl Data Language) from CPAN while some Python code takes advantage of a cool Ruby mix-in. No need to translate the elements, as long as API documentation allows users in any language to take advantage of your API.
All that said, the idea of translating code to XML for storage with the data is not completely stupid. Without translating between languages, it still gives you the ability to manipulate the code and data in ways that XML makes trivial, and that way people who want to write code that interacts with source code don't have to write a parser for the langauge. This might end up being a cool hack for language-dependent work.