Unless the GPS is particularly dumb, the only thing that should be affected by the rollover is that old, cheap units won't be able to use their internal almanac and the approximate date and location to quickly scan for the satellites. The date and location will be correct, but the birds won't be in the same position as they were 2^10 weeks ago.
Instead, they'll have to scan the entire sky for GPS signals and I'll reacquire my position after 20 minutes or so. I then need to leave the GPS running for a while so (pieces of) the new almanac can be downloaded; IIRC it's included in a low-bandwidth data channel. Or I can simply download the new almanac via a free program and a non-free PC/GPS cable. (I've ordered the cable, but with my luck they may be out of stock.:-)
Aviation and marine units, unlike hiking units, usually have far better antennas and they should be able to perform a "where in the heck am I?!" search much faster. Aviation units, in particular, will already be updated since they must periodically load new aviation databases containing the location of airports, VORs, etc.
They're calling this a "search warrant approved by a judge" and something close to the current sealed search warrants for wiretaps, but there are two huge differences here.
First, wiretaps don't necessarily require entering the target's premises. The taps can put into the phone company's CO, at the external junction box, or in a basement area. Having to place a wiretap in the target's bedroom or home office is rare. This helps ensure that the cops don't take advantage of the opportunity to illegally browse through the target's possessions. In contrast, this idea *requires* that the police invade the target's most personal spaces, yet the "reasonable grounds" barrier to obtain the warrant will be lower than all others since the nominal target of the warrant is so specific - all of a target's passwords should easily fit on a 3x5 index card!
Second, the burden on the police in obtaining a wiretap warrant is already pretty low, precisely because it's relatively non-invasive. This is especially true for the warrants that "only" record numbers dialed (and oops, up to 90 seconds of the conversation). The justification for this warrant is that *it's used as a prelude to a subsequent wiretap* (according to the Washington Post). In other words, this ancillary warrant would actually have more sweeping powers than the warrant it nominally supports!
Hopefully this trial balloon will go down in flames immediately, but if not I hope the adminstration and Congress realizes that these warrants may result in some enlightened judges holding the police to higher standards of proving that their evidence is "clean" when they have early access to the suspect's premises. They could easily win the battle (collecting evidence) but lose the war (no conviction since evidence is thrown out).
A company can do a lot, especially in this case if the author is identified. Remember, that message was (allegedly) sent from a system on the Redmond campus. The author didn't even bother to log into his own ISP account and then connect to the free service. (Or maybe I'm just spoiled by my unix shell account.)
This means that an employee has:
1) used corporate resources to 2) publicly lie (about his affiliation with Microsoft, if not the buffer overflow problem), and thus 3) bring his employer into disrepute.
In the most extreme cases, Microsoft could dismiss such employees immediately. Any employee who inserts an actionable easter egg into a released product, *and* his immediate supervisor for failure to exercise sufficient oversight should be fired-for-cause, IMHO.
In this case, it would not be unreasonable for MS to insert a "written reprimand" for lying about his employment status in a message sent from MS property, with either a few days suspension and/or an explicit reduction in his next performance raise.
This response might sound extreme, but look at how much these antics are costing Microsoft. Right now it's only some techies who are outraged at "fluff" easter eggs in many (most?) MS applications, but what will happen if someone wins millions of dollars because one easter egg alleges that a particular individual is sexually assaulting his child, and it turns out that the egg was inserted by the spouse's new SO? Or thousands of users find their system compromised because a latter-day Excel flight simulator contains a serious security hole?
Several people have downplayed the significance of the Kansas Board of "Education" dropping the mandate for teaching evolutionary biology.
Let's try mapping that same logic to other areas, shall we.
TOPEKA, KANSAS The Kansas Board of Education has decided to drop the mandate for teaching the Bill of Rights in public schools. Districts are still free to teach basic Constitutional rights to students, but they are not required to do so if the local population finds them disagreeable. (Goodbye Second Amendment! Goodbye Free Exercise of "Weird" Religions! Goodbye Freedom of the Student Press!)
Or how about
TOPEKA, KANSAS. The Kansas Board of Education has decided to make references to the Theory of Relativity optional in all high school physics classes. Said the chairman, "If God wants to go a zillion miles per second, God can go a zillion miles per second. Who is this Einstein fellow to say that God *can't* do something?!"
Or finally
AUSTIN, TEXAS. The Texas Board of Education removed mandates that "home economics" classes cover vegetarian and "poor-man's beef" (fish, chicken, and pork) meals. The chairman explained that Texas is Cattle Country and there's nothing wrong with a juicy steak for breakfast, lunch *and* dinner!
The bottom line is that a biology class without evolutionary theory isn't a biology class in the view of 99% of all college biology departments. This means that the board of education is negligent in its duty to prepare its students for their adult roles and it deserves all of the condemnation it is getting.
No state ever actually ratified such a law. IIRC, one chamber of one state passed a law which defined an official value of "pi," but it actually contained multiple, mutually contradictory definitions for the value of pi. No one is really sure, since the language was unusually florid. The article also suggested that the bill was treated about as seriously as the current "debates" over the official state dinosaur fossil.
Besides, even if a state does define PI=3 it only hurts itself as all wheels turn into hexagons and commerce bumps to a halt.:-)
Hey, we at the Neanderthal Defence League are tired of you "oh so evolved" people making us out to be idiots.
No Neanderthal ever made, or supported, a law that flew in the face of established science.
No Neanderthal ever made, or supported, a law to restrict the peaceful use of strong cryptology.
No Neanderthal ever made a claim that the sun stopped in the sky for a day. (What's a day when the sun has stopped, anyway?)
But us Neanderthals are damn tired of you comparing us to the dredges of your own gene pool. It's YOUR people who are bunch of drooling idiots. It's YOUR people who fight the teaching of evolution in biology classes. It's YOUR people who keep buying Microsoft products. (This is slashdot, after all!)
Get over it.
That law is so bad it will certainly pass
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New Cyberlaws
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Because Congress has the collective spine of a jellyfish, that law (prohibiting links to drug information) will pass precisely because it is so bad. Among the crayon-law set it's a good idea, while the more sophisticated members will realize that that the courts will enjoin its implementation and ultimately declare it unconstitutional.
I can even give you likely arguments before The Supremes. Let's take the Library of Congress, a valuable resource that is clearly protected by the First Amendment. Now randomly shuffle all of the books within it and burn the card catalogue.
The value of the books is unchanged, but the value of the emergent *library* is completely lost. To be meaningful, the FA *requires* the ability to disclose the organization of a collection of protection works.
What's the nature of the web? If Congress has it's way, it will reduced to nothing more than another platform for corporate ad agencies. Who would invest thousands of hours in creating *and organizing* information if it's the least bit controversial and Congress may wipe it out an instance? The net effect will be a profound chilling of free speech, since the entry barriers to *meaningful* print publication is far higher than the entry barriers to publishing web pages. (I'm making a distinction here between printing out a couple copies of your thesis on your laser printer, and getting it printed, bound, and distributed to a bookstore, no matter how small, in each major city nationwide. If people can't get your thesis to read it, you might as well not written it.)
Extending this a bit further, I'm sure that even Congress isn't dumb enough to prohibit my publication of a *book* containing a printed list of URLs containing drug information. The same content, on the web, is illegal. This would change the FA from a protection of the *contents* to protection of the *presentation*, roughly akin to saying that indency (read: porn) is acceptable in print, but not on VCR tape. (N.B., the restrictions on electronic publication of strong cryptographic code do *not* apply domestically; the law only bans export of that material and the web, as implemented today, makes such restrictions extremely difficult to implement.)
We could go even further, if *all* links are prohibited that means that you can't even provide links between pages of material. That changes the FA from protection of *content* to protection of *binding*, roughly akin to saying that Ulysses can be published on a scroll, but not in a bound book.
In both cases, this is a profound and fundamental change in the way the FA is viewed, something that the courts (rightly) are hesistant to do. The fact that "conservatives" would suggest such major changes over a triffle exposes the philosophical corruption at the core of the modern "conservative" movement.
Finally, as if the prior arguments aren't enough, I'm sure the challengers will be able to locate a parent *demanding* to have access to a list of nearby sources of drugs and paraphenia. Not because he wants to score some drugs for himself, but so he can be a responsible parent who warns his child away from these areas. Or so he can form a "neighborhood watch" group with the intent of lawfully driving such business out of his neighborhood. There is damn little information which can't be used for both "good" and "bad" purposes.
I am not a lawyer, so you can imagine what experienced Constitutional Law experts could do with these arguments. And that's precisely why I'm concerned that this bill will soon be passed -- like the CDA, it's a way to get (mostly good) press back home without a shred of fear that the law would ever be enforced. Expect it to pass by a large margin.
That doesn't follow. Assuming you aren't talking about exploiting a bug in fingerd itself, simply knowing valid user names won't help much because you must still crack the password for that account (good luck).
Even if you manage to get in (not necessarily by brute-forcing the password), the shell may be a flytrap - a potemkin shell while the system logs everything it can about you while paging the sysop.
Worse, it's trivial to write a potemkin shell that escapes to a real shell only if the client is in a magic IP address range and the user knows the magic command. That means *every* shell could be trapped, but only people on the local subnet could enter the command "O$ks&*%kk1!" and escape to a real shell.
I don't know of any potemkin shells in a standard distribution, but a non-responsive one is trivial to write if you know basic socket programming. Even a responsive one can be quickly built if you use chroot() and are careful what commands you copy into your sandtrap.
For all the NT Admins breathlessly reading Slashdot to learn about The Opposition....
This is a major "D'oh!" since most (all?) distributions are configured so that telnetd *won't* allow "root" to log in over the network. Knowing the root password and a couple bucks will still only get you a cup of Starbucks coffee. "Root" is only permitted to log into a system from ports listed in the/etc/securetty file, and someone would have to be unusually braindead to add network ports to that file. (The normal procedure is to log in as a regular user, then 'su' to "root.")
Bottom line: a brute force attempt to telnet in as "root" has absolutely no chance of succeeding. The fact that someone is trying it simply highlights their own ignorance.
You said it. "The whole thing is basically a scam..."
But what you write about the guy playing by the rules PEPSI set up, we say about the Pepsi for making contest rules then refusing to abide by them.
I got a couple t-shirts and a gym bag from the same promotion. It also took many months, as I recall. But nevertheless Pepsi honored its promotion.
What about the expensive jackets? Had I sent in a check for $100+ for a jacket, wouldn't I have a reasonable expectation of getting that jacket? I don't know anyone who got one, but neither do I know anyone who *didn't* despite meeting the terms of the offer.
So what's different about the Harrier jet? The ads treated it in a humorous fashion, but that isn't an indication that the offer wasn't serious. The very fact that Pepsi changed the point value from 7 million to 700 million after this guy made his claim says that Pepsi recognized that the claim was not completely unreasonable.
Why is it so unreasonable for him to take up Pepsi on what appears to be a bona fide offer?
To tell you the truth, Pepsi is getting a lot of negative PR from this mess. It could have offered to quietly settle the case for under $2M, enough to make the investors happy enough to back out of the suit, but instead they're trying to go back on their word. I see little difference between this and Microsoft vaporware.
(Could Pepsi had made a reasonable offer that the investors refused? I doubt it, since this was such a speculative investment to begin with. Better to accept a 100% return than gamble that a court won't uphold a 2000% return.)
Military vehicles sold to the public have to be "demilitarized" (e.g., your MIG fighter won't come with cannon or cannon mounts). I believe some vehicles, by their nature, are considered impossible to render demilitarized and can't be sold to the public.
It's similar to the logic that allows you to buy surplus small arms (since they can be used for non-military purposes), but not surplus artillery pieces. Although it would be interesting to go deer hunting with a small cannon...:-)
A classic example is probably tanks and perhaps armored personnel carriers. A tank can do a *lot* of damage even if it lacks a functional gun, as a rogue tank in San Diego(?) showed, and the cops find it impossible to stop. When's the last time you saw a tank for sale?
A Harrier jet probably falls under the same restrictions. It's a fighter in active use, unlike the aircraft popular among high-tech CEOs, and on top of that it's a VTOL. The jet wash alone might be considered a weapon.
On the one hand, I agree that no reasonable person could expect delivery of the jet since it's restricted military hardware.
On the other hand, I'm getting very tired of the hyperbole in current ads. It seems that the current cycle of hyperbole started with the Pepsi ad promising a Harrier jet.
I also think that the fact that the prize was a Harrier jet has muddled the judge's thinking. To draw an analogy, consider a Taco Bell ad that promised 10 tacos for $5, 100 tacos for $30, and 100,000 tacos for $1000. No reasonable person would ever buy 100k tacos, right? Wrong; it could be used as a promotion on large college campuses. (Free tacos for everyone if you come by our kiosk for information on time-share long distance calling!)
So, while I think the first guy was a bit opportunistic, I hope that he wins the cash equivalence just so the ad agencies will be more careful about making "just possible" claims. As countless other people have pointed out, Pepsi could have chosen a different point value of the jet -- and in fact later ads did show a much higher point value.
That's font antialiasing in action. It uses a trick of the human eye to "blur" each character in a way that it actually appears sharper. For a fuller explanation, pick up advanced book on computer graphics.
If the military (in a democracy) does its job, it's invisible and gets a lot of ill-placed flack from people who don't see all of the good things it does.
If an operating system does its job, it's also invisible. It takes technical knowledge to determine if a web or ftp server is running Solaris vs. Linux vs *BSD (excluding any banner messages, of course!)
In contrast, there are some operating systems which *don't* do their job well ("gee, this web page says that I should run this spreadsheet which contains an embedded command to download and install this virus program. I better do it!") and which are anything but invisible. In fact, most of us would say that one company in particular bends over backwards to ensure we know that it is singlehandledly responsible for the unusually long economic boom and that investigations into its alleged misdeeds threaten to bring on a depression worse than the 1930's....
I really don't intent this to be a Microso~1 flame, but I think you (and many others who complain about the military, the vast majority of gun owners who never commit a violent crime, etc.) have lost track of just how well our civilization works. I'm reminded of David Brin's observation that few prior civilizations could have survived gas stations on every street corner.
If anything, I think the OSS culture is a better fit with the military culture than the proprietary culture. We both want to get the job done with minimal fuss and disruption to all involved, and generally prefer to stay out of the limelight. Proprietary firms, on the other hand, want to leave you no doubt who was responsible.
("This village bombed thanks to the DuPont Company! Better living through chemistry!")
P.S., you'll find very few soldiers in the NATO nations that view the death of non-combatants as anything other than a horror -- and those soldiers are quickly removed when found. As for combatants, name one other historical period where attacks were timed to *minimize* casualties on *both* sides. (That's not the only reason for nighttime attacks, but it's a major one.)
I had a greying geek... come to my NT workstation and have difficulty navigating to the floppy drive.
Hey, I resemble that remark! I remember the condensation from our oh-so-wise NT sysadmins because I had trouble doing several basic tasks under NT.
They thought I was a stale old fogey; I thought it was proof that NT has serious useability flaws when experience with several other OSes is an active hinderance to a newcomer. (Quick, where do put the control to turn off the system?!)
But if I'm so out-of-touch, why were they terrified -- to the point of attempting to get management to stop me -- when I got fed up with their bullshit and picked up a couple O'Reilly NT/MSCE books? To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchhill, the next morning I was no longer ignorant, but they were still incompetent.
More generally, with experience you realize that the same things have to be done by every system. The only differences in how they are done. A lot of us fogeys (I'm 38) strongly dislike MS applications because the heavy emphasis on GUIs and "wizards" (a horrid corruption of hacker term) gets in our way *and* prevents the youngsters from developing the experience necessary to distinguish between the solution to the problem and the tools available to implement that solution.
As I recall, few people objected too much about that judge until he started making it clear that he did not see citizens before him, he saw Christians (harps playing) and damn heathens (faint whiff of brimstone).
This resulted in (reasonable) charges that the judge was biasing juries, and *definitely* biasing his rulings, on the basis of religious beliefs. This can be done in countless subtle ways (e.g., by explaining to the jury that a particular witness has to take a different oath than everyone else since he's a Godless atheist, but as good Christians they must give him the benefit of the doubt even though he refuses to accept God) and less than subtle ways (Mrs. Smith is unwilling to raise the kids in a God-fearing Christian home, so it's in their best interest for custody to be awarded to their father... a faithful deacon at his church.)
It's been so long that I don't recall the particular details of the cases in question, but I *do* recall several instances being mentioned in several newspaper reports. Naturally the supporters of the judge did not bring up his religious bigotry, and the mainstream media mostly dropped it from the discussion.
(P.S., I think his actions pretty clearly violates the "establishment clause." From what I know of the case, I don't think the judge should have been forced to remove the TC from his chambers -- I think he should have been immediately impeached and disbarred for violation of *his* oath of office!)
This is why Microsoft has already lost. The fact that entry-level programmers are migratating to OSS is disturbing. The fact that senior-level developers have seen the Microsoft-centric universe... and the fact that we have absolutely no role in it (other than as glorified button pushers) is fatal.
When I start my own software company, will I try to compete in the Windows environment where MS has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to obliterate any competition? Hell, no! Even if I didn't think OSS was technically superior, I would be *forced* to choose it since there's simply no viable alternative!
When I develop specifications for a new product for my employer, will I merrily tie my company's future to a company which has repeatedly shown a willingness to frivilously change APIs so ensure the market is forced to upgrade? Hell, no! Again, even if I didn't think OSS was technically superior, I would have to mark down the Microsoft solution since it would require constant maintainance due to the continually changing API.
When the software industry was a small piece of the economy a single company could effect a stranglehold on it. But now software is *everywhere*, and *no* single software company can long dominate the marketplace. I often think of this economic sector like a farm: the best way to ensure a solid harvest is to rotate your crops. Leaving a field fallow may look like a "waste," but those small plants inject valuable chemicals into the soil.
Microsoft is classic corporate farming. It keeps harvesting the same crop year after year, and it uses every bit of the plant while violently ripping out any non-crop plant. This depletes the soil, and its response is to pile on the shit. Sorry, the petrochemical fertilizers. But that will only work so long; it replaces the gross biomatter, but it still messes up the microculture.
This reminds me of the type I tried to explain the science fallacy that "vacuums suck" to a former girlfriend. Vacuums don't suck; it's the fact that there's fewer air molecules coming from a particular direction that results in the unbalanced pressure, and thence the "sucking" effect. Once the air pressure drops enough that the back pressure from the vacuum matches the internal pressure in the chamber you'll see no "sucking" effect -- and the air pressure in the chamber won't drop further.
This article contains a similar fallacy: "black holes suck in..." They do not, they *cannot* reach out with some mysterious force to yank unsuspecting atoms to their death.
They *do* have gravitational attraction, of course, but we're talking about a miniscule mass. Any singularity with this mass will be indescribably small, and even if it survives Hawking radiation it will only rarely hit a proton or electron just right to effect capture. I'm reminded of Rutherford's experiments shooting electrons at gold foil -- and in that case the few bounces where due to an electrostatic force many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity.
The dangers from such a black hole are non-existent. The risk of strange matter contaminating the earth are harder to quantify... but where are the strange *stars* from the same effect?
One approach is to redefine the problem. This approach will take some time, but you may find it worthwhile.
Instead of asking how your Linux server can back up Windows and Mac clients, why not ask how much you can move from your Windows and Mac systems to the Linux server?!
After my Windows system crashed yet again, I reinstalled the system (which, thanks to Toshiba, formats the disk so I lose any files which survived the crash) I set it up to use a network login - my "profile" and personal files are stored on my Linux system in an ext2 partition... and are backed up nightly. Likewise, I reinstalled all of my applications to a SAMBA "network" drive. I then changed the permissions so most of the files were read-only - no more Word viruses.
This isn't perfect, but I'm a lot more comfortable with my Window system mounting network drives from my Linux box than my Linux box trying to SMBMOUNT the Windows system for backups.
allow [people] to vote more than once, but where only their first vote counts. There would be no indication that [this is the vote that actually counts.]
Some protocols allow multiple votes, although it's usually the last vote that counts. A couple problems:
If you have no indication that you've already voted, you can't tell if someone has somehow already voted in your place. Ballot stuffing becomes trivial. A similar problem occurs with "last vote counts" semantics. That's why the consensus, last time I checked the journals, seemed to be that "vote once" is the preferred approach.
That voting party? It's actually an overnight prayer vigil, and everyone votes soon after the polls open. You don't have a chance to vote on your own first. (Likewise, a "last vote count" policy can be countered by having the voting party last until after the polls close.)
Book misses advances of last decade or so.
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I wouldn't call the book simplistic, but a reflection of the time it was written.
Today, any weight loss guide should include three things:
The UDSA encouragement that people get more of their calories from carbohydrates... and the subsequent bloating of the population, and
The profound effects of moderate protein diets (e.g., Zone, Paleo, Atkins) on many (not all) people.
The observation that some "thin" people still have an astonishingly high body fat level... and the related health effects. You don't necessarily need to be able to see abdominal muscles, but you *do* need to exercise regularly.
Not everyone gains weight on high carbohydrate diets. Not everyone quickly drops weight on a 40/30/30 diet. But it happens to enough people that no discussion of nutrition is complete without it. (And for the critics of the Zone diet out there, I tried it on the recommendation of a dietitian I consulted after gaining weight on a 1000 cal/day high carb, very low fat diet.)
Also, his monitoring techniques work even better with a Tanita scale. For those unfamiliar with them, they measure both weight and body fat.
I would hope that such university and corporate environments are using real system adminstrators (or students supervised by experienced sysadmins). They will know how to tune swap and real memory for their specific needs.
My point addresses the vast majority of SOHO users who either have a single user, or at most a family or small department. They should be hitting swap infrequently, if ever.
The current system has a large number of delays built into it for a reason. Every direct democracy/demarchy proposal I have seen has removed those delays without acknowledging their role.
As a concrete example of what happens when you remove delays, consider the aftermath of Pan Am 800. A jumbo jet blew up just after leaving New York City. The FBI investigated the possibility it was a terrorist act.
The president, using an executive order, immediately required that all US airports increase their security level. Passengers are now required to provide a photo ID. Luggage is checked more invasively. Etc.
We have now known, for at least a year, that the crash was almost certainly due to an electrical spark in a nearly empty fuel tank. Since the tank held a fuel/air mixture, it exploded. The professionals who actually investigate crashes felt this was the case since shortly after the investigation began, but the political agency (FBI) insisted on pursuing the terrorist angle.
US airports are still at heightened security. I now show my US Passport, *not* my driver's license, and make pointed comments about the internal passports required for travel in the Soviet Union. If Congress debates the issue and decides that such measures are appropriate, fine. But I do not like having these measures shoved down my throat because one person misinterpreted a single event!
If you want to know what direct democracy would be like, multiply that by a thousand fold. There was a shooting at a high school? Quick, outlaw black trenchcoats for teenagers nationwide! They played video games? Quick, outlaw video games! We can't delay a day, some kid's life hangs in the balance!!!
Or, if you're more cynical, remember that most intelligent people have lives and aren't willing to spend 8 hours a day keeping track of the latest political controversy. (Hell, I'm not willing to spend 8 hours/day keeping up on technical debates!) So who will be busy voting in a direct democracy? The people who are sitting at home, unemployed (and unemployable), and enjoying Jerry Springer.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless the GPS is particularly dumb, the only thing that should be affected by the rollover is that old, cheap units won't be able to use their internal almanac and the approximate date and location to quickly scan for the satellites. The date and location will be correct, but the birds won't be in the same position as they were 2^10 weeks ago.
:-)
Instead, they'll have to scan the entire sky for GPS signals and I'll reacquire my position after 20 minutes or so. I then need to leave the GPS running for a while so (pieces of) the new almanac can be downloaded; IIRC it's included in a low-bandwidth data channel. Or I can simply download the new almanac via a free program and a non-free PC/GPS cable. (I've ordered the cable, but with my luck they may be out of stock.
Aviation and marine units, unlike hiking units, usually have far better antennas and they should be able to perform a "where in the heck am I?!" search much faster. Aviation units, in particular, will already be updated since they must periodically load new aviation databases containing the location of airports, VORs, etc.
Of course, that means that your private key floppy will be on your person when they present you the search warrant for it - no chance to 'lose' it.
They're calling this a "search warrant approved by a judge" and something close to the current sealed search warrants for wiretaps, but there are two huge differences here.
First, wiretaps don't necessarily require entering the target's premises. The taps can put into the phone company's CO, at the external junction box, or in a basement area. Having to place a wiretap in the target's bedroom or home office is rare. This helps ensure that the cops don't take advantage of the opportunity to illegally browse through the target's possessions. In contrast, this idea *requires* that the police invade the target's most personal spaces, yet the "reasonable grounds" barrier to obtain the warrant will be lower than all others since the nominal target of the warrant is so specific - all of a target's passwords should easily fit on a 3x5 index card!
Second, the burden on the police in obtaining a wiretap warrant is already pretty low, precisely because it's relatively non-invasive. This is especially true for the warrants that "only" record numbers dialed (and oops, up to 90 seconds of the conversation). The justification for this warrant is that *it's used as a prelude to a subsequent wiretap* (according to the Washington Post). In other words, this ancillary warrant would actually have more sweeping powers than the warrant it nominally supports!
Hopefully this trial balloon will go down in flames immediately, but if not I hope the adminstration and Congress realizes that these warrants may result in some enlightened judges holding the police to higher standards of proving that their evidence is "clean" when they have early access to the suspect's premises. They could easily win the battle (collecting evidence) but lose the war (no conviction since evidence is thrown out).
Any certified developer who has submitted a bug for beta 3...
So, MS really is opening up their code base now. Beta testers can submit bugs of their choice... they aren't limited to the bugs provided by MS alone.
(Yes, I know AC meant "bug REPORTS", but it was *SO* much fun to take the statement literally.)
But what can you do?
A company can do a lot, especially in this case if the author is identified. Remember, that message was (allegedly) sent from a system on the Redmond campus. The author didn't even bother to log into his own ISP account and then connect to the free service. (Or maybe I'm just spoiled by my unix shell account.)
This means that an employee has:
1) used corporate resources to
2) publicly lie (about his affiliation with Microsoft, if not the buffer overflow problem), and thus
3) bring his employer into disrepute.
In the most extreme cases, Microsoft could dismiss such employees immediately. Any employee who inserts an actionable easter egg into a released product, *and* his immediate supervisor for failure to exercise sufficient oversight should be fired-for-cause, IMHO.
In this case, it would not be unreasonable for MS to insert a "written reprimand" for lying about his employment status in a message sent from MS property, with either a few days suspension and/or an explicit reduction in his next performance raise.
This response might sound extreme, but look at how much these antics are costing Microsoft. Right now it's only some techies who are outraged at "fluff" easter eggs in many (most?) MS applications, but what will happen if someone wins millions of dollars because one easter egg alleges that a particular individual is sexually assaulting his child, and it turns out that the egg was inserted by the spouse's new SO? Or thousands of users find their system compromised because a latter-day Excel flight simulator contains a serious security hole?
Several people have downplayed the significance of the Kansas Board of "Education" dropping the mandate for teaching evolutionary biology.
Let's try mapping that same logic to other areas, shall we.
TOPEKA, KANSAS The Kansas Board of Education has decided to drop the mandate for teaching the Bill of Rights in public schools. Districts are still free to teach basic Constitutional rights to students, but they are not required to do so if the local population finds them disagreeable. (Goodbye Second Amendment! Goodbye Free Exercise of "Weird" Religions! Goodbye Freedom of the Student Press!)
Or how about
TOPEKA, KANSAS. The Kansas Board of Education has decided to make references to the Theory of Relativity optional in all high school physics classes. Said the chairman, "If God wants to go a zillion miles per second, God can go a zillion miles per second. Who is this Einstein fellow to say that God *can't* do something?!"
Or finally
AUSTIN, TEXAS. The Texas Board of Education removed mandates that "home economics" classes cover vegetarian and "poor-man's beef" (fish, chicken, and pork) meals. The chairman explained that Texas is Cattle Country and there's nothing wrong with a juicy steak for breakfast, lunch *and* dinner!
The bottom line is that a biology class without evolutionary theory isn't a biology class in the view of 99% of all college biology departments. This means that the board of education is negligent in its duty to prepare its students for their adult roles and it deserves all of the condemnation it is getting.
No state ever actually ratified such a law. IIRC, one chamber of one state passed a law which defined an official value of "pi," but it actually contained multiple, mutually contradictory definitions for the value of pi. No one is really sure, since the language was unusually florid. The article also suggested that the bill was treated about as seriously as the current "debates" over the official state dinosaur fossil.
:-)
Besides, even if a state does define PI=3 it only hurts itself as all wheels turn into hexagons and commerce bumps to a halt.
Hey, we at the Neanderthal Defence League are tired of you "oh so evolved" people making us out to be idiots.
No Neanderthal ever made, or supported, a law that flew in the face of established science.
No Neanderthal ever made, or supported, a law to restrict the peaceful use of strong cryptology.
No Neanderthal ever made a claim that the sun stopped in the sky for a day. (What's a day when the sun has stopped, anyway?)
But us Neanderthals are damn tired of you comparing us to the dredges of your own gene pool. It's YOUR people who are bunch of drooling idiots. It's YOUR people who fight the teaching of evolution in biology classes. It's YOUR people who keep buying Microsoft products. (This is slashdot, after all!)
Get over it.
Because Congress has the collective spine of a jellyfish, that law (prohibiting links to drug information) will pass precisely because it is so bad. Among the crayon-law set it's a good idea, while the more sophisticated members will realize that that the courts will enjoin its implementation and ultimately declare it unconstitutional.
I can even give you likely arguments before The Supremes. Let's take the Library of Congress, a valuable resource that is clearly protected by the First Amendment. Now randomly shuffle all of the books within it and burn the card catalogue.
The value of the books is unchanged, but the value of the emergent *library* is completely lost. To be meaningful, the FA *requires* the ability to disclose the organization of a collection of protection works.
What's the nature of the web? If Congress has it's way, it will reduced to nothing more than another platform for corporate ad agencies. Who would invest thousands of hours in creating *and organizing* information if it's the least bit controversial and Congress may wipe it out an instance? The net effect will be a profound chilling of free speech, since the entry barriers to *meaningful* print publication is far higher than the entry barriers to publishing web pages. (I'm making a distinction here between printing out a couple copies of your thesis on your laser printer, and getting it printed, bound, and distributed to a bookstore, no matter how small, in each major city nationwide. If people can't get your thesis to read it, you might as well not written it.)
Extending this a bit further, I'm sure that even Congress isn't dumb enough to prohibit my publication of a *book* containing a printed list of URLs containing drug information. The same content, on the web, is illegal. This would change the FA from a protection of the *contents* to protection of the *presentation*, roughly akin to saying that indency (read: porn) is acceptable in print, but not on VCR tape. (N.B., the restrictions on electronic publication of strong cryptographic code do *not* apply domestically; the law only bans export of that material and the web, as implemented today, makes such restrictions extremely difficult to implement.)
We could go even further, if *all* links are prohibited that means that you can't even provide links between pages of material. That changes the FA from protection of *content* to protection of *binding*, roughly akin to saying that Ulysses can be published on a scroll, but not in a bound book.
In both cases, this is a profound and fundamental change in the way the FA is viewed, something that the courts (rightly) are hesistant to do. The fact that "conservatives" would suggest such major changes over a triffle exposes the philosophical corruption at the core of the modern "conservative" movement.
Finally, as if the prior arguments aren't enough, I'm sure the challengers will be able to locate a parent *demanding* to have access to a list of nearby sources of drugs and paraphenia. Not because he wants to score some drugs for himself, but so he can be a responsible parent who warns his child away from these areas. Or so he can form a "neighborhood watch" group with the intent of lawfully driving such business out of his neighborhood. There is damn little information which can't be used for both "good" and "bad" purposes.
I am not a lawyer, so you can imagine what experienced Constitutional Law experts could do with these arguments. And that's precisely why I'm concerned that this bill will soon be passed -- like the CDA, it's a way to get (mostly good) press back home without a shred of fear that the law would ever be enforced. Expect it to pass by a large margin.
Of course it is all over if he opens up fingerd.
That doesn't follow. Assuming you aren't talking about exploiting a bug in fingerd itself, simply knowing valid user names won't help much because you must still crack the password for that account (good luck).
Even if you manage to get in (not necessarily by brute-forcing the password), the shell may be a flytrap - a potemkin shell while the system logs everything it can about you while paging the sysop.
Worse, it's trivial to write a potemkin shell that escapes to a real shell only if the client is in a magic IP address range and the user knows the magic command. That means *every* shell could be trapped, but only people on the local subnet could enter the command "O$ks&*%kk1!" and escape to a real shell.
I don't know of any potemkin shells in a standard distribution, but a non-responsive one is trivial to write if you know basic socket programming. Even a responsive one can be quickly built if you use chroot() and are careful what commands you copy into your sandtrap.
For all the NT Admins breathlessly reading Slashdot to learn about The Opposition....
/etc/securetty file, and someone would have to be unusually braindead to add network ports to that file. (The normal procedure is to log in as a regular user, then 'su' to "root.")
This is a major "D'oh!" since most (all?) distributions are configured so that telnetd *won't* allow "root" to log in over the network. Knowing the root password and a couple bucks will still only get you a cup of Starbucks coffee. "Root" is only permitted to log into a system from ports listed in the
Bottom line: a brute force attempt to telnet in as "root" has absolutely no chance of succeeding. The fact that someone is trying it simply highlights their own ignorance.
You said it. "The whole thing is basically a scam..."
But what you write about the guy playing by the rules PEPSI set up, we say about the Pepsi for making contest rules then refusing to abide by them.
I got a couple t-shirts and a gym bag from the same promotion. It also took many months, as I recall. But nevertheless Pepsi honored its promotion.
What about the expensive jackets? Had I sent in a check for $100+ for a jacket, wouldn't I have a reasonable expectation of getting that jacket? I don't know anyone who got one, but neither do I know anyone who *didn't* despite meeting the terms of the offer.
So what's different about the Harrier jet? The ads treated it in a humorous fashion, but that isn't an indication that the offer wasn't serious. The very fact that Pepsi changed the point value from 7 million to 700 million after this guy made his claim says that Pepsi recognized that the claim was not completely unreasonable.
Why is it so unreasonable for him to take up Pepsi on what appears to be a bona fide offer?
To tell you the truth, Pepsi is getting a lot of negative PR from this mess. It could have offered to quietly settle the case for under $2M, enough to make the investors happy enough to back out of the suit, but instead they're trying to go back on their word. I see little difference between this and Microsoft vaporware.
(Could Pepsi had made a reasonable offer that the investors refused? I doubt it, since this was such a speculative investment to begin with. Better to accept a 100% return than gamble that a court won't uphold a 2000% return.)
Military vehicles sold to the public have to be "demilitarized" (e.g., your MIG fighter won't come with cannon or cannon mounts). I believe some vehicles, by their nature, are considered impossible to render demilitarized and can't be sold to the public.
:-)
It's similar to the logic that allows you to buy surplus small arms (since they can be used for non-military purposes), but not surplus artillery pieces. Although it would be interesting to go deer hunting with a small cannon...
A classic example is probably tanks and perhaps armored personnel carriers. A tank can do a *lot* of damage even if it lacks a functional gun, as a rogue tank in San Diego(?) showed, and the cops find it impossible to stop. When's the last time you saw a tank for sale?
A Harrier jet probably falls under the same restrictions. It's a fighter in active use, unlike the aircraft popular among high-tech CEOs, and on top of that it's a VTOL. The jet wash alone might be considered a weapon.
On the one hand, I agree that no reasonable person could expect delivery of the jet since it's restricted military hardware.
On the other hand, I'm getting very tired of the hyperbole in current ads. It seems that the current cycle of hyperbole started with the Pepsi ad promising a Harrier jet.
I also think that the fact that the prize was a Harrier jet has muddled the judge's thinking. To draw an analogy, consider a Taco Bell ad that promised 10 tacos for $5, 100 tacos for $30, and 100,000 tacos for $1000. No reasonable person would ever buy 100k tacos, right? Wrong; it could be used as a promotion on large college campuses. (Free tacos for everyone if you come by our kiosk for information on time-share long distance calling!)
So, while I think the first guy was a bit opportunistic, I hope that he wins the cash equivalence just so the ad agencies will be more careful about making "just possible" claims. As countless other people have pointed out, Pepsi could have chosen a different point value of the jet -- and in fact later ads did show a much higher point value.
That's font antialiasing in action. It uses a trick of the human eye to "blur" each character in a way that it actually appears sharper. For a fuller explanation, pick up advanced book on computer graphics.
If the military (in a democracy) does its job, it's invisible and gets a lot of ill-placed flack from people who don't see all of the good things it does.
If an operating system does its job, it's also invisible. It takes technical knowledge to determine if a web or ftp server is running Solaris vs. Linux vs *BSD (excluding any banner messages, of course!)
In contrast, there are some operating systems which *don't* do their job well ("gee, this web page says that I should run this spreadsheet which contains an embedded command to download and install this virus program. I better do it!") and which are anything but invisible. In fact, most of us would say that one company in particular bends over backwards to ensure we know that it is singlehandledly responsible for the unusually long economic boom and that investigations into its alleged misdeeds threaten to bring on a depression worse than the 1930's....
I really don't intent this to be a Microso~1 flame, but I think you (and many others who complain about the military, the vast majority of gun owners who never commit a violent crime, etc.) have lost track of just how well our civilization works. I'm reminded of David Brin's observation that few prior civilizations could have survived gas stations on every street corner.
If anything, I think the OSS culture is a better fit with the military culture than the proprietary culture. We both want to get the job done with minimal fuss and disruption to all involved, and generally prefer to stay out of the limelight. Proprietary firms, on the other hand, want to leave you no doubt who was responsible.
("This village bombed thanks to the DuPont Company! Better living through chemistry!")
P.S., you'll find very few soldiers in the NATO nations that view the death of non-combatants as anything other than a horror -- and those soldiers are quickly removed when found. As for combatants, name one other historical period where attacks were timed to *minimize* casualties on *both* sides. (That's not the only reason for nighttime attacks, but it's a major one.)
I had a greying geek... come to my NT workstation and have difficulty navigating to the floppy drive.
Hey, I resemble that remark! I remember the condensation from our oh-so-wise NT sysadmins because I had trouble doing several basic tasks under NT.
They thought I was a stale old fogey; I thought it was proof that NT has serious useability flaws when experience with several other OSes is an active hinderance to a newcomer. (Quick, where do put the control to turn off the system?!)
But if I'm so out-of-touch, why were they terrified -- to the point of attempting to get management to stop me -- when I got fed up with their bullshit and picked up a couple O'Reilly NT/MSCE books? To paraphrase Sir Winston Churchhill, the next morning I was no longer ignorant, but they were still incompetent.
More generally, with experience you realize that the same things have to be done by every system. The only differences in how they are done. A lot of us fogeys (I'm 38) strongly dislike MS applications because the heavy emphasis on GUIs and "wizards" (a horrid corruption of hacker term) gets in our way *and* prevents the youngsters from developing the experience necessary to distinguish between the solution to the problem and the tools available to implement that solution.
As I recall, few people objected too much about that judge until he started making it clear that he did not see citizens before him, he saw Christians (harps playing) and damn heathens (faint whiff of brimstone).
This resulted in (reasonable) charges that the judge was biasing juries, and *definitely* biasing his rulings, on the basis of religious beliefs. This can be done in countless subtle ways (e.g., by explaining to the jury that a particular witness has to take a different oath than everyone else since he's a Godless atheist, but as good Christians they must give him the benefit of the doubt even though he refuses to accept God) and less than subtle ways (Mrs. Smith is unwilling to raise the kids in a God-fearing Christian home, so it's in their best interest for custody to be awarded to their father... a faithful deacon at his church.)
It's been so long that I don't recall the particular details of the cases in question, but I *do* recall several instances being mentioned in several newspaper reports. Naturally the supporters of the judge did not bring up his religious bigotry, and the mainstream media mostly dropped it from the discussion.
(P.S., I think his actions pretty clearly violates the "establishment clause." From what I know of the case, I don't think the judge should have been forced to remove the TC from his chambers -- I think he should have been immediately impeached and disbarred for violation of *his* oath of office!)
This is why Microsoft has already lost. The fact that entry-level programmers are migratating to OSS is disturbing. The fact that senior-level developers have seen the Microsoft-centric universe... and the fact that we have absolutely no role in it (other than as glorified button pushers) is fatal.
When I start my own software company, will I try to compete in the Windows environment where MS has repeatedly demonstrated a willingness to obliterate any competition? Hell, no! Even if I didn't think OSS was technically superior, I would be *forced* to choose it since there's simply no viable alternative!
When I develop specifications for a new product for my employer, will I merrily tie my company's future to a company which has repeatedly shown a willingness to frivilously change APIs so ensure the market is forced to upgrade? Hell, no! Again, even if I didn't think OSS was technically superior, I would have to mark down the Microsoft solution since it would require constant maintainance due to the continually changing API.
When the software industry was a small piece of the economy a single company could effect a stranglehold on it. But now software is *everywhere*, and *no* single software company can long dominate the marketplace. I often think of this economic sector like a farm: the best way to ensure a solid harvest is to rotate your crops. Leaving a field fallow may look like a "waste," but those small plants inject valuable chemicals into the soil.
Microsoft is classic corporate farming. It keeps harvesting the same crop year after year, and it uses every bit of the plant while violently ripping out any non-crop plant. This depletes the soil, and its response is to pile on the shit. Sorry, the petrochemical fertilizers. But that will only work so long; it replaces the gross biomatter, but it still messes up the microculture.
This reminds me of the type I tried to explain the science fallacy that "vacuums suck" to a former girlfriend. Vacuums don't suck; it's the fact that there's fewer air molecules coming from a particular direction that results in the unbalanced pressure, and thence the "sucking" effect. Once the air pressure drops enough that the back pressure from the vacuum matches the internal pressure in the chamber you'll see no "sucking" effect -- and the air pressure in the chamber won't drop further.
This article contains a similar fallacy: "black holes suck in..." They do not, they *cannot* reach out with some mysterious force to yank unsuspecting atoms to their death.
They *do* have gravitational attraction, of course, but we're talking about a miniscule mass. Any singularity with this mass will be indescribably small, and even if it survives Hawking radiation it will only rarely hit a proton or electron just right to effect capture. I'm reminded of Rutherford's experiments shooting electrons at gold foil -- and in that case the few bounces where due to an electrostatic force many orders of magnitude stronger than gravity.
The dangers from such a black hole are non-existent. The risk of strange matter contaminating the earth are harder to quantify... but where are the strange *stars* from the same effect?
One approach is to redefine the problem. This approach will take some time, but you may find it worthwhile.
Instead of asking how your Linux server can back up Windows and Mac clients, why not ask how much you can move from your Windows and Mac systems to the Linux server?!
After my Windows system crashed yet again, I reinstalled the system (which, thanks to Toshiba, formats the disk so I lose any files which survived the crash) I set it up to use a network login - my "profile" and personal files are stored on my Linux system in an ext2 partition... and are backed up nightly. Likewise, I reinstalled all of my applications to a SAMBA "network" drive. I then changed the permissions so most of the files were read-only - no more Word viruses.
This isn't perfect, but I'm a lot more comfortable with my Window system mounting network drives from my Linux box than my Linux box trying to SMBMOUNT the Windows system for backups.
P.S., I use Amanda.
Some protocols allow multiple votes, although it's usually the last vote that counts. A couple problems:
Today, any weight loss guide should include three things:
Not everyone gains weight on high carbohydrate diets. Not everyone quickly drops weight on a 40/30/30 diet. But it happens to enough people that no discussion of nutrition is complete without it. (And for the critics of the Zone diet out there, I tried it on the recommendation of a dietitian I consulted after gaining weight on a 1000 cal/day high carb, very low fat diet.)
Also, his monitoring techniques work even better with a Tanita scale. For those unfamiliar with them, they measure both weight and body fat.
I would hope that such university and corporate environments are using real system adminstrators (or students supervised by experienced sysadmins). They will know how to tune swap and real memory for their specific needs.
My point addresses the vast majority of SOHO users who either have a single user, or at most a family or small department. They should be hitting swap infrequently, if ever.
The current system has a large number of delays built into it for a reason. Every direct democracy/demarchy proposal I have seen has removed those delays without acknowledging their role.
As a concrete example of what happens when you remove delays, consider the aftermath of Pan Am 800. A jumbo jet blew up just after leaving New York City. The FBI investigated the possibility it was a terrorist act.
The president, using an executive order, immediately required that all US airports increase their security level. Passengers are now required to provide a photo ID. Luggage is checked more invasively. Etc.
We have now known, for at least a year, that the crash was almost certainly due to an electrical spark in a nearly empty fuel tank. Since the tank held a fuel/air mixture, it exploded. The professionals who actually investigate crashes felt this was the case since shortly after the investigation began, but the political agency (FBI) insisted on pursuing the terrorist angle.
US airports are still at heightened security. I now show my US Passport, *not* my driver's license, and make pointed comments about the internal passports required for travel in the Soviet Union. If Congress debates the issue and decides that such measures are appropriate, fine. But I do not like having these measures shoved down my throat because one person misinterpreted a single event!
If you want to know what direct democracy would be like, multiply that by a thousand fold. There was a shooting at a high school? Quick, outlaw black trenchcoats for teenagers nationwide! They played video games? Quick, outlaw video games! We can't delay a day, some kid's life hangs in the balance!!!
Or, if you're more cynical, remember that most intelligent people have lives and aren't willing to spend 8 hours a day keeping track of the latest political controversy. (Hell, I'm not willing to spend 8 hours/day keeping up on technical debates!) So who will be busy voting in a direct democracy? The people who are sitting at home, unemployed (and unemployable), and enjoying Jerry Springer.