I posted the same basic idea a little later (I though it was so original:-). Perhaps you can clear up the first catch and perhaps you'll want to consider the second. --
A long time ago, I had an idea for a propulsion system that doesn't eject any mass to accelerate. Unfortunately, I don't think it works.
A physics teacher will tell you that the mass of an object increases with its speed. An object accelerated to near light speed becomes more massive and more inert, i.e. harder to push. My idea was to make a module that alternates between being heavy and light by accelerating and decelerating internal masses. You could then push yourself away from the module when it's heavy and reel it in when it's light.
(An example of such a module would be a disc that spins fast or slow.)
I was pretty sure right away that there had to be a catch. I thought perhaps my physics teacher was just being imprecise when he said mass increases with speed and that the module couldn't change its mass as it appears to the object doing the pushing and pulling. Could it? I still haven't gotten a straight answer to that question.
I did however hear another idea why this wouldn't work. Even if you can alter the mass of the internal masses (the spinning wheel), that wouldn't necessarily equate to altering the mass of the whole module. You would need a lot of energy to spin that disc up, and you'd take a lot of it back when slowing it down. Whether the energy is in the disc or your energy storage device wouldn't matter. It would equate to mass either way (picture the energy storage device as an identical disc and this becomes clear). As far as I can see, you could get around that with a remote energy source.
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I don't know about America, but in the UK fake pictures are just as illegal as real ones.
It's my understanding that it's the same in the US because there was a story on Slashdot way back about a "comic" strip featuring a child in sexual situations with adults and the artist was being charged with distribution of child pornography. You may be thinking "Serves him right, the sick bastard!", but it wasn't like that. He was himself abused sexually as a child and was expressing his pain through the strip. It was all very dark and angry. I don't remember it being stated explicitly in what country this happened so, this being Slashdot, it must have been the US. --
The main point of the article, as I see it, isn't that it's bad that logging keystrokes is permitted, but that it's bad that there aren't the same limitations to that permit as there are with regular taps and audio/video surveillance.
Geophile isn't making up the idea that there should be limits to how much of a suspect's communications the investigators can monitor. That idea is already encoded in law, only the law is interpreted by the FBI not to cover the logging of keystrokes.
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Or maybe they just figure a banner ad won't bother people using text-only browsers and target the banner at people who use the text interface for other reasons (like avoiding the ads:-) --
Let's imagine global and correct adoption of unbreakable encryption is a guaranteed result of this proposed undertaking. (It most certainly isn't, but I'm just playing "what if" here.)
Would the combined effect of logging, encryption, and the RIP bill leave us better or worse off than we are now, in terms of privacy?
I haven't really made up my mind, but I see some arguments for "better": You'd be sure that only the government could read you communications and only by getting your passphrase from you. That way, anyone who had not been forced to give up their passphrase could be sure that their communications had not been read by their government, their ISP, industrial spies, foreign government spies, or script kiddies.
Of course, this assumes an impossibly strict definition of "correct" and "unbreakable" above.
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man on my Debian machine doesn't clear the screen on exit* so this must be configurable.
man hands the page to the program specified by $PAGER (or/usr/bin/pager) for viewing so your pager's configuration would be the one to look at.
BTW, I just checked less's man page and found the --quit-at-eof and --quit-if-one-screen options. Not the thing you're looking for but I was happy to discover them.
* at least not when I just checked it over ssh with ttssh. I can't recall if it behaves differently in the console or an xterm. --
Re:Programmers Make Computers Slower Year by Year
on
Netscape 6 Vs. 4.7x
·
· Score: 1
The fact is, that you're partially right. A hundred new features shouldn't significantly slow down a program if those features are not used. However, it WILL take up more space on your hard drive - there is absolutely no way around it, short of having a CD custom-made with the software compiled to exactly your specifications.
It's not quite true that there's "absolutely no way around it". An advanced system could feature automatic component downloads (or even remote execution of infrequently used components). Never used the chart wizard? Never download or store it on yout computer. In fact, isn't that what CORBA is about?
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I don't mean to excuse the way you were treated. Failing to ship you something you bought is not excusable. However, if I were in your shoes (which I'm not -- my OpenBSD CD and t-shirts arrived) I'd think of it this way: My main goal was to support OpenBSD. I've done that even if I didn't get the CD and I can legally get the CD some other way (copy some one else's, download disk images).
Again, you have every right to be upset that you didn't get your stuff (and probably some sort of legal remedy is available, though the cost and hassle of it is no doubt too high to be worth it). But you could choose not to be. That's all I'm saying.
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I agree that GNU's move to info is not helping, but I'd like to defend them a little by pointing out that their reasons for switching were valid and that it's "only" the execution that has failed.
Take a look at man tar (for a non-GNU version of tar) and info tar respectively. Newbies complain that man pages are hard to understand, being primarily references rather than teaching tools. I've read man pages that described in detail every option available, but neglected to say what the program was for! Very few (Linux) man pages explain how the program fits into the grand scheme of things or include a tutorial. Most don't even include examples. Furthermore, there's no toplevel man page or any man page equivalent to, say, the Shell Utilities info page, which are very useful for learning about how to use the system rather than an individual program (which you may not even know exists or is appropriate for the task at hand).
Now, mostly this can be fixed by writing more man pages and adding explanation and tutorial matter but if you're going to do that, you start wanting more structure and navigation than man provides and thus info was born. So, I disagree that man is superior to info. Info solves real problems with man.
The problem is that info hasn't been widely adopted and most people just end up using man (at least I did -- I don't even think to check info most of the time). When that happens, stubbornly refusing to write proper man pages and saying "use info, it's much better!" does no good.
(Plus, the standard info viewer sucks entirely too much, but at least there's pinfo.)
I suspect that whether it's info or man isn't the key point though. If you want really good documentation with examples, a tutorial, descriptions of concepts and common work procedures, links (navigatable or "see also") to related programs and so forth, then you're talking about a major effort in writing the documentation and that, I think, is the main reason such documentation doesn't exist in info or man for most programs.
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Apparently you have yet to learn the first rule of government: It never works both ways.
Actually, that's not really relevant here since you're talking about civil cases. In those, I imagine most people think the damages depend more on the defendant's wealth than the plaintiff's, even though they shouldn't, officially. I guess we've all heard about people suffering whiplash when read-ended by a wealthy stockbroker or something and receiving much higher damages (or settlemements) than they would have if my grandma had hit them (plus, of course, they might not have sued granny at all).
Macs are being counted in this discusion for the sake of assessing whether the number of BSD installations will exceed the number of Linux installations because of the adoption of OS X. OS X needs a newish PowerPC Mac to run and therefore pre-PPC Macs0 (which are not running recent versions of MacOS because they're not supported) don't enter into it.
This is not a discussion about the popularity or worth of Linux compared to MacOS. --
Try to at least skim the information linked to in the articles before replying. In this case, a quick glance reveals the clarifying phrase "without using the employer's resources".
And if you think an employer would never dream of taking ownership of an employee's off-hours work, just ask Evan Brown what he thinks of the idea. --
You know, when I boot into Windows, start up Counterstrike, and join a server, Windows concludes that it's a good time to interrupt me with a "You're running out of disk space on drive C:" dialog, leaving me without any sound when I switch back to cs. If only I had some way to inflict pain on Windows when it did that, it might have stopped.
The day when software is intelligent enough to learn from a good beating is the day we see the greatest single increase in its usability ever.
...or maybe I just really want to hurt Windows.
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I dunno. It would be awfully nice to have some of the common newsreader features available on Slashdot: killfiles, the ability to see only new posts, download headers only, download each message body once and only once, etc.
On the other hand, Slashdot, of course, has features not present in nntp such as moderation and, and,...what else?
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The difference is, in a democracy, people have *elected*, have chosen, to sell these rights.
I disagree. The people have elected the officials that made the deal. That much is true. But this was not a campaign issue in Iceland. We didn't know our elected officials would do this. Once their position was clear, we couldn't unelect them.
I for one want to see Decode succeed for the greater good of mankind and would have gladly given them access to my medical history and DNA samples. However, I don't propose to have any right to control whether other people do the same. It follows that I don't propose that the officials who derive their power from my vote have any right to do so either. --
Discriminating against rural areas is as unacceptable as discriminating against, say, hispanic
areas or native american areas.
The thing is, when a company chooses not to provide service where it's not cost effective, that isn't discrimination. It's good business. Forcing that company provide service is discrimination. If the true cost of access in your part of the country is $500 and you're paying $125, who pays the remaining $375?
Now, I'm not an absolutist. I can see how subsidising rural living to a point can be a worthy endeavor. I just think people who act like they have some natural right to those subsidies are pricks.
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Slashdot Mirror
I posted the same basic idea a little later (I though it was so original :-). Perhaps you can clear up the first catch and perhaps you'll want to consider the second.
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Congratulations! You have duplicated the information in the last paragraph of my post, minus the last sentence :-)
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It's the second one that really bothers me. I don't know either.
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A physics teacher will tell you that the mass of an object increases with its speed. An object accelerated to near light speed becomes more massive and more inert, i.e. harder to push. My idea was to make a module that alternates between being heavy and light by accelerating and decelerating internal masses. You could then push yourself away from the module when it's heavy and reel it in when it's light.
(An example of such a module would be a disc that spins fast or slow.)
I was pretty sure right away that there had to be a catch. I thought perhaps my physics teacher was just being imprecise when he said mass increases with speed and that the module couldn't change its mass as it appears to the object doing the pushing and pulling. Could it? I still haven't gotten a straight answer to that question.
I did however hear another idea why this wouldn't work. Even if you can alter the mass of the internal masses (the spinning wheel), that wouldn't necessarily equate to altering the mass of the whole module. You would need a lot of energy to spin that disc up, and you'd take a lot of it back when slowing it down. Whether the energy is in the disc or your energy storage device wouldn't matter. It would equate to mass either way (picture the energy storage device as an identical disc and this becomes clear). As far as I can see, you could get around that with a remote energy source.
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What, no "Hackers have been using Jolt propulsion in a production environment for YEARS" jokes?
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Geophile isn't making up the idea that there should be limits to how much of a suspect's communications the investigators can monitor. That idea is already encoded in law, only the law is interpreted by the FBI not to cover the logging of keystrokes.
--
Or maybe they just figure a banner ad won't bother people using text-only browsers and target the banner at people who use the text interface for other reasons (like avoiding the ads :-)
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"the entire Linux industry" - lol!
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You know, this is the only positive news about the environment I can recall ever reading.
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Would the combined effect of logging, encryption, and the RIP bill leave us better or worse off than we are now, in terms of privacy?
I haven't really made up my mind, but I see some arguments for "better": You'd be sure that only the government could read you communications and only by getting your passphrase from you. That way, anyone who had not been forced to give up their passphrase could be sure that their communications had not been read by their government, their ISP, industrial spies, foreign government spies, or script kiddies.
Of course, this assumes an impossibly strict definition of "correct" and "unbreakable" above.
--
--
man hands the page to the program specified by $PAGER (or /usr/bin/pager) for viewing so your pager's configuration would be the one to look at.
BTW, I just checked less's man page and found the --quit-at-eof and --quit-if-one-screen options. Not the thing you're looking for but I was happy to discover them.
* at least not when I just checked it over ssh with ttssh. I can't recall if it behaves differently in the console or an xterm.
--
--
Again, you have every right to be upset that you didn't get your stuff (and probably some sort of legal remedy is available, though the cost and hassle of it is no doubt too high to be worth it). But you could choose not to be. That's all I'm saying.
--
Take a look at man tar (for a non-GNU version of tar) and info tar respectively. Newbies complain that man pages are hard to understand, being primarily references rather than teaching tools. I've read man pages that described in detail every option available, but neglected to say what the program was for! Very few (Linux) man pages explain how the program fits into the grand scheme of things or include a tutorial. Most don't even include examples. Furthermore, there's no toplevel man page or any man page equivalent to, say, the Shell Utilities info page, which are very useful for learning about how to use the system rather than an individual program (which you may not even know exists or is appropriate for the task at hand).
Now, mostly this can be fixed by writing more man pages and adding explanation and tutorial matter but if you're going to do that, you start wanting more structure and navigation than man provides and thus info was born. So, I disagree that man is superior to info. Info solves real problems with man.
The problem is that info hasn't been widely adopted and most people just end up using man (at least I did -- I don't even think to check info most of the time). When that happens, stubbornly refusing to write proper man pages and saying "use info, it's much better!" does no good.
(Plus, the standard info viewer sucks entirely too much, but at least there's pinfo.)
I suspect that whether it's info or man isn't the key point though. If you want really good documentation with examples, a tutorial, descriptions of concepts and common work procedures, links (navigatable or "see also") to related programs and so forth, then you're talking about a major effort in writing the documentation and that, I think, is the main reason such documentation doesn't exist in info or man for most programs.
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Actually, that's not really relevant here since you're talking about civil cases. In those, I imagine most people think the damages depend more on the defendant's wealth than the plaintiff's, even though they shouldn't, officially. I guess we've all heard about people suffering whiplash when read-ended by a wealthy stockbroker or something and receiving much higher damages (or settlemements) than they would have if my grandma had hit them (plus, of course, they might not have sued granny at all).
That doesn't quite sit right with me.
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This is not a discussion about the popularity or worth of Linux compared to MacOS.
--
And if you think an employer would never dream of taking ownership of an employee's off-hours work, just ask Evan Brown what he thinks of the idea.
--
The day when software is intelligent enough to learn from a good beating is the day we see the greatest single increase in its usability ever.
--
...is this Paula person as annoying to listen to as Katz is to read?
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A little Kharma whoring forya (well, actually mine's frozen): http://www.besttoilets.com/
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On the other hand, Slashdot, of course, has features not present in nntp such as moderation and, and, ...what else?
--
I for one want to see Decode succeed for the greater good of mankind and would have gladly given them access to my medical history and DNA samples. However, I don't propose to have any right to control whether other people do the same. It follows that I don't propose that the officials who derive their power from my vote have any right to do so either.
--
Now, I'm not an absolutist. I can see how subsidising rural living to a point can be a worthy endeavor. I just think people who act like they have some natural right to those subsidies are pricks.
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