So except in some very rare cases, I can't see a reason to run a Linux distro that's over a year old.
Except in some very rare cases, I can't see a reason to install a linux distro that's over a year old. I can come up with at least one very valuable reas on to run a distro that's over a year old.
IT WORKS.
Like the old saying goes: If it ain't broke, don't fix it (much less replace it).
The last thing I want is to have to test and install my software on another OS, just because someone refuses to provide security updates for the current version.
but i dont understand while people are getting antsy and making m$ related accusations...
how about: 8/0 is obsolete in less than a year, but 8.1 isn't even out of beta yet!
Unlike Windows, Unix people are often used to running their machine for more than a year without a reboot. When you have to upgrade your OS more often than you would (otherwise) have to reboot it, there's something wrong with the EOL calendar.
My roommate (along with lots of other MS-bound friends) is still running win98. My box dual boots to '95. If this were done on the RH calendar, our OSs would have been EOL'd 5-7 years ago.
NOT going to replace their OS every year. OS boasts aside, things still break in the move. If I weren't a geek I'd have absolutely no interest in going through migration sickness every 10-14 months. As long as this calendar stands, there's no way that I can realisticly encourage friends and clients to move to RedHat. For some of them, it's going to take more than a year to convince them to change over. Providing a moving target simply makes things that much harder.
Can you understand the consternation of a non-geek friend running 7.1 being forced to move to 8.0 (the 8.1 beta refused to recognize his new HD) -- knowing that the OS is going to be obsolete by the end of the year? good reason to go ballistic.
This is one big step away from getting a solid foothold on the desktop.
This isn't that bad for a geek running a home box and willing to go through the upgrade cycle every year, but it's pretty bad to be EOLing a product (8.0) at the end of the year which starts with it's replacement is only beta.
I know some sites are still running Solaris 5.2 (which was de-emphasised about 5 years ago). It takes some companies almost a year to get their software really stable. Forcing them to replace their OS on a yearly basis is going to discourage movement to redhat
From a marketing (as well as technical) point of view, theis seem s like a really bad idea(tm).
About a year ago, my FTP server was owned by someone using a botnet. When I noticed this, I brought up my second machine, using ethereal, and followed what it was doing. using 'follow TCP stream', I was able to follow what these people were doing on the channel.
I was thinking that the data I gathered was probably useful to bust that botnet.
The problem was, I wasn't able to find anybody to throw the data to.
It would be nice if the owners DALnet (and others) would provide faq info on where to send such botnet data.
A Cobalt Raq looks pretty nice. If you're just using it for stereo, then you could probably hunt down something from the dot-bust period..
A couple hundred bucks; asthetically pleasing; nice LCD panel. I'm pretty sure it has a single PCI slot (for a sound card). Upgrade the hard disk and you're flying...
It'd be a little bit harder if you want to do both sound and video, but I'm pretty sure you could get a pretty Cobalt box with multiple slots.
Unless you're doing something nasty, a 500MZ processor should be more than enough for most work.
This comes upon reversal of the SCO Group statement according to Chief Executive Darl McBride of having not engaged Mr. Boies to take legal action against our fellow Linux vendors.
BZZZ! Rong!
When reading either a diplomatic or a PR statement (really the same thing), you have to pay attention to what is not said in the statement.
In the statements by both companies, they made it clear that Boies had not ((YET)) been employed by SCO. They never denied being in negotiations. From those omissions, I figured it was reasonably likely that Boies would be hired in relatively short order (anywhere from days to months).
If the two companies had never even been in negotiations I would have expected the denials to have been more sweeping -- if only by Boies' organization.
___
If Russia were to launch an ICBM at Washington, they would still have 12 minutes during which they could truthfully say:
"Russia has never dropped a bomb on an American city. If they had, I think that you would be the first to know"
Or consider the (true) straight-faced comment by a French diplomat:
In the article, Microsoft's Peter Houston says: ... and then there is the Unix approach, which is a piece-parts approach where the customer integrates those parts into the ultimate solution.
I think he shot himself in the foot on that one.
This wonderfully brings out the difference between Microsoft and the unix/linux philosophy of "there's more than one way to cat a file".
For a long time, I've been of the opinion that Microsoft's attitude toward their customers was pretty much the same as IBM's was in their (pre '80s) monopoly days.
"
Do exactly as we say, and nobody will get hurt."
The Linux solution, on the other hand starts with the premise of user freedom.
(-: Two different Houstons -- both of whom think that Linux provides the necessary pieces for "the ultimate solution".:-)
How is helping the hungry like not throwing out food?
One hard fact is that the food that we give (back) to starving countries tends to be the extra. If we all cut back on food waste, there'd be more 'extra' food to punt back to the third world.
It's not like that one act by itself would make a big difference, but it's part of a series of actions and a (hopeful) change in attitude that could change the overall flow of food.
Americans and Canadians, on average, consume about as much overall resources as 25 Indians. That means that if you cut your own consumption by 10%, it frees up resources for 2 others in the third world.
Hmmm.. That's an interesting one... While it's legal to sing 'You ain't seen nothing yet' while you're making love to your girlfriend (presuming it's not part of a play or something) it would be technically illegal to keep whistling the song on the subway as you're going home.
If Microsoft is making the source code 'available', over the internet (to Russia), I'm betting that it's still something of a 'peek, don't touch' situation, where MS is the only one with the right to compile changes to their code.
Of course, under those conditions, you can't be sure that the code that MS compiles is the same as the code that Russia is seeing / submitting.
That's just what we need. Microsoft registered as an arms dealer.
And how many times has Windows blown up on your computer??? As far as I'm concerned the crime is that they're not already registered as an arms dealer.
Sean Stewart was only mentioned by one other person in passing, but a surprisingly high percentage of his books have either recieved or been runners up for reasonably prestigious awards. (He's also a friend of mine from about a decade ago).
When his first book Passion Play came out, I caught myself saying that "It's the best book I've read in a really long time, but that doesn't count, because I've been catching up on the classics of Science Fiction/Fantasy for the last while." Then I realized the implications of what I'd said.
Passion play occurs around the middle of what is now his 'rise and fall of magic' timeline, where magic is unleashed by the horrors of the second world war, almost overwhelms humanity (and human technology) and then subsides over a small number of generations. It concerns an empath bounty hunter in an empath-phobic world hunting the murderer of a TV religion superstar.
Resurrection Man occurs earlier on in the timeline. it's about a man who seems to have been stuck investigating his own murder.
Night Watch occurs as the magic is near it's peak, and starting to subside. It's set in the remains of Edmonton and Vancouver (Two Cities where Stuart spent a number of years) and concerns both the battle between humanity, technology and magic. It also concerns the facing of one's own demons (both figuratively and literally).
Mockingbird occurs in the deep south -- probably sometime between Passion Play and Night Watch. It seems very much a story of the society of the Rural deep south set in a world of burgeoning and misunderstood Magic.
Galveston is his most recent book. I haven't read it yet, but now that I know it's out, I'm going to go hunt for it.
Cloud's End Takes place in a universe different than the afformentioned.
I've spent some time with West Coast Native elders. Clouds End has very much the feel of the stories they tell of 'dream time' -- the beginning of the world in their mythology. A world of stories and ties and world-shaping responsibilities not always welcomed by their bearers. As I read Clouds End, I pictured it starting in the fogs of the Pacific North West and moving up and down what we now know as the Fraser River.
Nobody's Son takes place in something close to a Standard Fantasy Realm, but as Stewart put it: "Everybody expects a fantasy story to have a young knight fulfilling a quest, winning the hand of a beautiful princess and taking her off to his castle where they live happily ever after(tm). My solution was to put that in the first couple of chapters, so that I could get on with the real story. It's probably the 'lightest' of his books, and a very enjoyable read.
For further information on Sean Stewart, a quick Google search provides a pretty good starting point.
The court order only extends to the internet in an incedental way. It actually comes from what's called personal jurisdiction. It really applies directly to people inside of his courtroom.
The ban does not apply to all information about this case whatsoever. It only applies to information gleaned from inside of his courtroom. As such it really only applies to (would-be) reporters who step into his courtroom to listen to the hearing -- and then only until the trial is over, or the evidence comes out in full court.
In other words, it's completely legal for me to tell you that Picton is accused of luring women (mostly prostitutes and/or drug users) to his pig farm where they were tortured, (probably) raped, killed and then stuffed through a meat grinder (or something similar), with their ground-up remains possibly being fed to his pigs before being spread around his farm.
I can tell you that, even though I live in Vancouver, because the information I have was gleaned via non-court sources. The minute I step into the courtroom, however, anything that I learn in there is Not-For-Publication. The internet just happens to be one of the methods by which I'm not allowed to publish that information. This would include sending it to my news editor in The States who then puts it onto an Internet site. If I glean information from somebody inside the courtroom, I'm similarly bound to non-disclosure (or my source is, at least, bound to ensure that I don't then publish it).
To give you an idea as to just how personal this 'personal jurisdiction' is: The judge specifically named some reporters in the room at the time who he considered to be problematic.
".... you have been warned"
and for anything sensitive they wipe it, then drill holes through the disk.
I've generally been of the opinion that the only way to be absolutely sure that old data could never be recovered from a disk was 'judicious application of a blast furnace'.
In any case, for the person who feels that triple-write was a bit excessive for today's bit densities: One poster back in the 80's noted that his company found that the rules for securely erasing disks that had been used on test systems by 'sensitive' government organizations was so onerous that it was cheaper to just melt them down. When you consider that, back then, a 40MB hard disk (on a 14" multihead platter) would set you back $5digits, I think it's fair to say that they did far more than 3 overwrites back then.
To give you an idea of the lengths to which spies will go to decode really sensitive data, some of the russian secret messages intercepted in the late 40's and thought to be about nuclear weapons espionage were still being decoded in the early 80's (as far forward as FOI requests for this sort of data will get you).
I just blow up my second hard disk just to test the script.
I do hope you were joking, because I just laughed my head off, when I read it.
Just in case you weren't joking, I'll reiterate the lesson that you (should have) learned here:
Never run random programs if you don't have at least a rudimentary understanding of what it'll do.
My social debt being paid, this gives me flashbacks to the days of BSD 4.0 (we're talking the original BSD -- not the freeBSD, openBSD, etc). It was back at a time when a color text terminal might have been a show-stopper at Comdex. Color not being available, the BSD people decided to set up ls(1) so that, when printing to a terminal, it would run in '-F' mode -- indicating directories with a trailing/, executables with a '*' and unprintable characters with a '?'.
This was also in the early days of rogue (precursor to hack). accidently hitting the 's'ave function read-filename routine was the one part of rogue where hitting 'esc' wouldn't back you out. If you hit 'esc' 'enter', it would save your rogue session with a name of 'esc'. For wierd anti-cheat reasons, the save file was also executable.
Well one day this new grad student walks by and asks me for some help. lots of his files were missing and, whenever he explained his predicament to any knowledgable user/sysadmin type, they would literally ROTFL.
After I solemnly promised not to laugh, he explained that rogue had created this wierd file and he'd wanted to delete it. Next thing he knows, he gets a bunch of error messages and all his files are gone. Since it appeard on his screen as '*?" (escape key as name, and executable), he'd typed in
rm *?
After the few seconds of silence that it took to hold down my composure, I explained to him that
*? was evaluated by the shell as a wildcard for any file with at least one character in it's name
(this was not long after star wars) There was a unix-universe StarWars spoof making the rounds of usenet (nee netnews).. In 'DecWars', Darth Vadic was building his deadly, filesystem crunching 'arem star' (pronounced 'rm *'). This poor sod, had managed to unwittingly managed to live Vadic's dream and unleashed the full power of "the Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star". -- albeit on his own file system.
The only consolation I could give him was that he'd brightened up many sysadin's days, and he hadn't used the '-r' (rebel base?) option, so his subdirectories were safe.
dd if=/dev/urand bs=100k count=100 of=garbage
while cat garbage garbage ; do true ; done | dd bs=100k of=/dev/hdaX
You could put it on a floppy Linux distribution and sell it to windows users who want to wipe their disks.. $20 a pop!
(or better yet -- a bootable CD business card so you could include the source).
Just don't let your 5 year old nephew get hold of it -- or else!
The legal logic system suffers from what I call ghoti-fish.. In the legal system, they use phrases like: "Good case, bad law". Think of it as code re-use with a vengance:
gh as in enough
o as in women
ti as in initiative
Given these legal precedents, it's clear that ghoti is pronounced the same as fish.
Once the law is is place, it's essentially a logic exercise (although law contains a lot of normative decisions as well). Once it's decided that the law validates the gag-clause, the rest falls out (unless they somehow decide that the gag clause is unconstitutional/unreasonable).
If you think of legalese as a natural-language programming language, and the judges as a wet-ware execution processor (with one or two bits loose, here and there) then the legal system gets pretty easy to deal with. I was reasonably successful using that model up to the court of appeal level.
Like learning any new language style, it takes time to get up to speed, but once you do, it's no more difficult to understand than Java (just a lot more verbose).
Perhaps instead of responding to your post, I should hire someone to knock on your door tomorrow morning at 5:30am and scream "Your post was ignorant!". See the difference?
Sounds like the slashdot effect..... (=: but more expensive:-)
The amicability of the letter is the saccharine smile of a psychopath asking for your car key so he can park it for you.
"
Your website indicates that you are an employee of IBM, a PCI-SIG member. We therefore request that you
work through IBM to investigate the possibility of creating a similar database of BCI(r) Vendor ID numbe
rs which whould be available on the official PCI-SIG.
What they are asking him to do is to hand over his database to them for free, and allow them to (possibly) make it proprietary. That's probably the real purpose of the letter. I'm pretty sure that they know that use of the three letters 'pci' would never make it past a judge, and that the use of the PCI logo is also queationable.
I'd suggest (IANAL) that he simply remove any copies of the PCI logo and put up a disclaimer that he has absolutely no affiliation with the PCI-SIG group other than the fact that they tried to shut down his website and hi-jack the database from him.
Also, I don't believe that that the type of evil you describe will come from America.
Therein lies the basic weakness of human beings. It's hard for any group to "belive that we could be the bad ones". Whenever any group gets into the mob mentality, they are acting in the belief that they are the righteous and agrieved party, and there it is always possible to find proof that that is the case (especially if you are willing to bypass evidence that points in the other direction).
When the KKK Lynched their victims they always had 'a good cause'. When they rioted and destroyed entire communties, 'they had good reason'. We can look back now and realize that they, too, had ulterior motives -- that their actions were wrong. That does little good, however, for their innocent victims. Nor does it do any good for the civilian victims of the bombings of Dresden and Berlin that we (and the German people) can look back and realize that Hitler had evil intent from day one.
And don't kid yourself into believing that the US saw the evils of hitler from say one either. I remember reading s letter to the editor in the New York Times. It was glowing letter of support for the Nazis written by the US anbasador to Germany. At the beginning of the war, US industry was happy to help arm Germany -- Just like we armed Saddam's Iraq, and trained Bin Laden's terrorists.
The evil of Hitler is not that he invaded poland without reason -- he had a reason. The problem that we can see now, in hindsight, is that his overt reason was backed by hidden ulterior motive. It was those hidden motives that made the invasion a tempting idea.
The reason why
I find the US objections to Saddam's use of chemical and biological "weapons of mass destruction" a straw man argument is not that I don't find the actions despicible. My objection is that -- when those actions were occurring, the US (which had supplied Saddam with critical technologies and supplies) gave silent assent to the actions.
What I find straw-man about these complaints ia that now, 20 years after the fact, the US is suddenly demonizing Saddam for accepting US sid snd encouragement to create and use weapons of mass destruction. We're running around screaming (in not so many words):
"Saddam is an evil and nasty man because
he did what we taught him to do."
It would be funny if there weren't so many lives in the balance.
I wasn't using Hitler as an example because he was incredibly nasty. I was using him because World War II is a reasonably well known example.
To learn from history, and to avoid repeating (aspects of) it, we must be willing to examine it, and use it as a template against which to compare current events. To refuse to examine current events in the context of historical events because of the atrocities that followed the relevant historical events is to lose the entire benefit of that part of our history.
That the events here are similar to some of the similar events in Germany's early wars of conquest is not a smoking gun indicating that Bush is (or is going going to be) as evil as Hitler. It is simply an 'interesting event'. Analogous to something that, in a forensic investigation, would flagged by a little paper evidence-tent. It is something that is possibly worth further investigation.
When Hitler was first elected, he seemed a fine enough fellow.
At the time Hitler invaded his first couple of countries, the people of Germany did not know what he was about to do. He had convinced them that those
first invasions were completely necessary and appropriate.
By the time the invasions had gotten more questionable, dissent had been pretty
much expunged under cover of war fervor. The first to go were the Jews, followed by the Gypsies, Communists, Homosexuals, anybody complaining about the extinction of the former groups and then pretty much anybody who didn't just shut up and do what the government told them to do.
Examining the situation in hindsight, it's pretty obvious that Hitler was an evil crazed despot. In 1938, however, the only real hints available to most people would have been strange anomalies of word and action.. Being dismissive of transgressions by one group, but going ballistic at similar (or milder) transgressions by another (read: target) group.
Ignore, for a moment, the infamous nastiness of Hitler's actions subsequent to the invasions of Poland, etc. Consider, instead the process by which he took over Germany by feeding on their fears.
If the invasion of Afghanistan had stood on it's own -- If The US had worked to install a full democracy in the country and had quietly walked out afterwards, I would have thought little more about it. Instead, the precognitive rumblings about invading Afghanistan, the pending invasion of Iraq and the contextually anomalous treatment of N. Korea gnaw at me and worry me.
I doubt that the world could ever grow another short, dark-haired, mustached, swastika-saluting, Jew-hating warmonger, but we could easily grow a well-disguised analogy. Hitler was an echo of Napoleon. Napoleon was the echo of Robspierre and the terror of the French revolution. The echoes go back a long way, each one variably more or less evil than the previous. Each one variously both different and similar to the others. No incarnation of evil will be precisely like the other, but if you listen carefully, you may hear the echoes of it's predecessors.
Slashdot Mirror
Except in some very rare cases, I can't see a reason to install a linux distro that's over a year old. I can come up with at least one very valuable reas on to run a distro that's over a year old.
IT WORKS.
Like the old saying goes: If it ain't broke, don't fix it (much less replace it). The last thing I want is to have to test and install my software on another OS, just because someone refuses to provide security updates for the current version.
Not much use to having this stuff in archive, if it's all going to be copyright in the next 10 years...
how about: 8/0 is obsolete in less than a year, but 8.1 isn't even out of beta yet!
Unlike Windows, Unix people are often used to running their machine for more than a year without a reboot. When you have to upgrade your OS more often than you would (otherwise) have to reboot it, there's something wrong with the EOL calendar.
My roommate (along with lots of other MS-bound friends) is still running win98. My box dual boots to '95. If this were done on the RH calendar, our OSs would have been EOL'd 5-7 years ago.
NOT going to replace their OS every year. OS boasts aside, things still break in the move. If I weren't a geek I'd have absolutely no interest in going through migration sickness every 10-14 months. As long as this calendar stands, there's no way that I can realisticly encourage friends and clients to move to RedHat. For some of them, it's going to take more than a year to convince them to change over. Providing a moving target simply makes things that much harder.
Can you understand the consternation of a non-geek friend running 7.1 being forced to move to 8.0 (the 8.1 beta refused to recognize his new HD) -- knowing that the OS is going to be obsolete by the end of the year? good reason to go ballistic.
This is one big step away from getting a solid foothold on the desktop.
I know some sites are still running Solaris 5.2 (which was de-emphasised about 5 years ago). It takes some companies almost a year to get their software really stable. Forcing them to replace their OS on a yearly basis is going to discourage movement to redhat
From a marketing (as well as technical) point of view, theis seem s like a really bad idea(tm).
I was thinking that the data I gathered was probably useful to bust that botnet. The problem was, I wasn't able to find anybody to throw the data to.
It would be nice if the owners DALnet (and others) would provide faq info on where to send such botnet data.
It'd be a little bit harder if you want to do both sound and video, but I'm pretty sure you could get a pretty Cobalt box with multiple slots.
Unless you're doing something nasty, a 500MZ processor should be more than enough for most work.
BZZZ! Rong!
When reading either a diplomatic or a PR statement (really the same thing), you have to pay attention to what is not said in the statement.
In the statements by both companies, they made it clear that Boies had not ((YET)) been employed by SCO. They never denied being in negotiations. From those omissions, I figured it was reasonably likely that Boies would be hired in relatively short order (anywhere from days to months).
If the two companies had never even been in negotiations I would have expected the denials to have been more sweeping -- if only by Boies' organization.
___
If Russia were to launch an ICBM at Washington, they would still have 12 minutes during which they could truthfully say:
Or consider the (true) straight-faced comment by a French diplomat:I think he shot himself in the foot on that one.
This wonderfully brings out the difference between Microsoft and the unix/linux philosophy of "there's more than one way to cat a file". For a long time, I've been of the opinion that Microsoft's attitude toward their customers was pretty much the same as IBM's was in their (pre '80s) monopoly days.
The Linux solution, on the other hand starts with the premise of user freedom.(-: Two different Houstons -- both of whom think that Linux provides the necessary pieces for "the ultimate solution". :-)
Put up the static image, call your victim into the room for some unrelated reason and then watch the look on their face.
You would, of course, also need appropriate sound effects -- and a well planned escape route.
One hard fact is that the food that we give (back) to starving countries tends to be the extra. If we all cut back on food waste, there'd be more 'extra' food to punt back to the third world.
It's not like that one act by itself would make a big difference, but it's part of a series of actions and a (hopeful) change in attitude that could change the overall flow of food.
Americans and Canadians, on average, consume about as much overall resources as 25 Indians. That means that if you cut your own consumption by 10%, it frees up resources for 2 others in the third world.
Hmmm.. That's an interesting one... While it's legal to sing 'You ain't seen nothing yet' while you're making love to your girlfriend (presuming it's not part of a play or something) it would be technically illegal to keep whistling the song on the subway as you're going home.
Of course, under those conditions, you can't be sure that the code that MS compiles is the same as the code that Russia is seeing / submitting.
And how many times has Windows blown up on your computer??? As far as I'm concerned the crime is that they're not already registered as an arms dealer.
When his first book Passion Play came out, I caught myself saying that "It's the best book I've read in a really long time, but that doesn't count, because I've been catching up on the classics of Science Fiction/Fantasy for the last while." Then I realized the implications of what I'd said.
Passion play occurs around the middle of what is now his 'rise and fall of magic' timeline, where magic is unleashed by the horrors of the second world war, almost overwhelms humanity (and human technology) and then subsides over a small number of generations. It concerns an empath bounty hunter in an empath-phobic world hunting the murderer of a TV religion superstar.
Resurrection Man occurs earlier on in the timeline. it's about a man who seems to have been stuck investigating his own murder.
Night Watch occurs as the magic is near it's peak, and starting to subside. It's set in the remains of Edmonton and Vancouver (Two Cities where Stuart spent a number of years) and concerns both the battle between humanity, technology and magic. It also concerns the facing of one's own demons (both figuratively and literally).
Mockingbird occurs in the deep south -- probably sometime between Passion Play and Night Watch. It seems very much a story of the society of the Rural deep south set in a world of burgeoning and misunderstood Magic.
Galveston is his most recent book. I haven't read it yet, but now that I know it's out, I'm going to go hunt for it.
Cloud's End Takes place in a universe different than the afformentioned. I've spent some time with West Coast Native elders. Clouds End has very much the feel of the stories they tell of 'dream time' -- the beginning of the world in their mythology. A world of stories and ties and world-shaping responsibilities not always welcomed by their bearers. As I read Clouds End, I pictured it starting in the fogs of the Pacific North West and moving up and down what we now know as the Fraser River.
Nobody's Son takes place in something close to a Standard Fantasy Realm, but as Stewart put it: "Everybody expects a fantasy story to have a young knight fulfilling a quest, winning the hand of a beautiful princess and taking her off to his castle where they live happily ever after(tm). My solution was to put that in the first couple of chapters, so that I could get on with the real story. It's probably the 'lightest' of his books, and a very enjoyable read.
For further information on Sean Stewart, a quick Google search provides a pretty good starting point.
The ban does not apply to all information about this case whatsoever.
It only applies to information gleaned from inside of his courtroom. As such it really only applies to (would-be) reporters who step into his courtroom to listen to the hearing -- and then only until the trial is over, or the evidence comes out in full court.
In other words, it's completely legal for me to tell you that Picton is accused of luring women (mostly prostitutes and/or drug users) to his pig farm where they were tortured, (probably) raped, killed and then stuffed through a meat grinder (or something similar), with their ground-up remains possibly being fed to his pigs before being spread around his farm.
I can tell you that, even though I live in Vancouver, because the information I have was gleaned via non-court sources. The minute I step into the courtroom, however, anything that I learn in there is Not-For-Publication. The internet just happens to be one of the methods by which I'm not allowed to publish that information. This would include sending it to my news editor in The States who then puts it onto an Internet site. If I glean information from somebody inside the courtroom, I'm similarly bound to non-disclosure (or my source is, at least, bound to ensure that I don't then publish it).
To give you an idea as to just how personal this 'personal jurisdiction' is: The judge specifically named some reporters in the room at the time who he considered to be problematic.
".... you have been warned"
I've generally been of the opinion that the only way to be absolutely sure that old data could never be recovered from a disk was 'judicious application of a blast furnace'.
In any case, for the person who feels that triple-write was a bit excessive for today's bit densities: One poster back in the 80's noted that his company found that the rules for securely erasing disks that had been used on test systems by 'sensitive' government organizations was so onerous that it was cheaper to just melt them down. When you consider that, back then, a 40MB hard disk (on a 14" multihead platter) would set you back $5digits, I think it's fair to say that they did far more than 3 overwrites back then.
To give you an idea of the lengths to which spies will go to decode really sensitive data, some of the russian secret messages intercepted in the late 40's and thought to be about nuclear weapons espionage were still being decoded in the early 80's (as far forward as FOI requests for this sort of data will get you).
I do hope you were joking, because I just laughed my head off, when I read it.
Just in case you weren't joking, I'll reiterate the lesson that you (should have) learned here:
My social debt being paid, this gives me flashbacks to the days of BSD 4.0 (we're talking the original BSD -- not the freeBSD, openBSD, etc). It was back at a time when a color text terminal might have been a show-stopper at Comdex. Color not being available, the BSD people decided to set up ls(1) so that, when printing to a terminal, it would run in '-F' mode -- indicating directories with a trailing /, executables with a '*' and unprintable characters with a '?'.
This was also in the early days of rogue (precursor to hack). accidently hitting the 's'ave function read-filename routine was the one part of rogue where hitting 'esc' wouldn't back you out. If you hit 'esc' 'enter', it would save your rogue session with a name of 'esc'. For wierd anti-cheat reasons, the save file was also executable.
Well one day this new grad student walks by and asks me for some help. lots of his files were missing and, whenever he explained his predicament to any knowledgable user/sysadmin type, they would literally ROTFL.
After I solemnly promised not to laugh, he explained that rogue had created this wierd file and he'd wanted to delete it. Next thing he knows, he gets a bunch of error messages and all his files are gone. Since it appeard on his screen as '*?" (escape key as name, and executable), he'd typed in
After the few seconds of silence that it took to hold down my composure, I explained to him that- *? was evaluated by the shell as a wildcard for any file with at least one character in it's name
- (this was not long after star wars) There was a unix-universe StarWars spoof making the rounds of usenet (nee netnews)
.. In 'DecWars', Darth Vadic was building his deadly, filesystem crunching 'arem star' (pronounced 'rm *'). This poor sod, had managed to unwittingly managed to live Vadic's dream and unleashed the full power of "the Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star". -- albeit on his own file system.
The only consolation I could give him was that he'd brightened up many sysadin's days, and he hadn't used the '-r' (rebel base?) option, so his subdirectories were safe.should be
dd if=/dev/urandom bs=100k count=100 of=garbage
(I was sure that I'd fixed that)
while cat garbage garbage ; do true ; done | dd bs=100k of=/dev/hdaX
You could put it on a floppy Linux distribution and sell it to windows users who want to wipe their disks .. $20 a pop!
(or better yet -- a bootable CD business card so you could include the source).
Just don't let your 5 year old nephew get hold of it -- or else!
- gh as in enough
- o as in women
- ti as in initiative
Given these legal precedents, it's clear that ghoti is pronounced the same as fish.The prosecution rests (er, um, nanosleep(2)s).
If you think of legalese as a natural-language programming language, and the judges as a wet-ware execution processor (with one or two bits loose, here and there) then the legal system gets pretty easy to deal with. I was reasonably successful using that model up to the court of appeal level.
Like learning any new language style, it takes time to get up to speed, but once you do, it's no more difficult to understand than Java (just a lot more verbose).
Sounds like the slashdot effect..... (=: but more expensive :-)
I'd suggest (IANAL) that he simply remove any copies of the PCI logo and put up a disclaimer that he has absolutely no affiliation with the PCI-SIG group other than the fact that they tried to shut down his website and hi-jack the database from him.
Therein lies the basic weakness of human beings. It's hard for any group to "belive that we could be the bad ones". Whenever any group gets into the mob mentality, they are acting in the belief that they are the righteous and agrieved party, and there it is always possible to find proof that that is the case (especially if you are willing to bypass evidence that points in the other direction).
When the KKK Lynched their victims they always had 'a good cause'. When they rioted and destroyed entire communties, 'they had good reason'. We can look back now and realize that they, too, had ulterior motives -- that their actions were wrong. That does little good, however, for their innocent victims. Nor does it do any good for the civilian victims of the bombings of Dresden and Berlin that we (and the German people) can look back and realize that Hitler had evil intent from day one.
And don't kid yourself into believing that the US saw the evils of hitler from say one either. I remember reading s letter to the editor in the New York Times. It was glowing letter of support for the Nazis written by the US anbasador to Germany. At the beginning of the war, US industry was happy to help arm Germany -- Just like we armed Saddam's Iraq, and trained Bin Laden's terrorists.
The evil of Hitler is not that he invaded poland without reason -- he had a reason. The problem that we can see now, in hindsight, is that his overt reason was backed by hidden ulterior motive. It was those hidden motives that made the invasion a tempting idea.
The reason why I find the US objections to Saddam's use of chemical and biological "weapons of mass destruction" a straw man argument is not that I don't find the actions despicible. My objection is that -- when those actions were occurring, the US (which had supplied Saddam with critical technologies and supplies) gave silent assent to the actions.
What I find straw-man about these complaints ia that now, 20 years after the fact, the US is suddenly demonizing Saddam for accepting US sid snd encouragement to create and use weapons of mass destruction. We're running around screaming (in not so many words):
It would be funny if there weren't so many lives in the balance.That the events here are similar to some of the similar events in Germany's early wars of conquest is not a smoking gun indicating that Bush is (or is going going to be) as evil as Hitler. It is simply an 'interesting event'. Analogous to something that, in a forensic investigation, would flagged by a little paper evidence-tent. It is something that is possibly worth further investigation.
When Hitler was first elected, he seemed a fine enough fellow. At the time Hitler invaded his first couple of countries, the people of Germany did not know what he was about to do. He had convinced them that those first invasions were completely necessary and appropriate. By the time the invasions had gotten more questionable, dissent had been pretty much expunged under cover of war fervor. The first to go were the Jews, followed by the Gypsies, Communists, Homosexuals, anybody complaining about the extinction of the former groups and then pretty much anybody who didn't just shut up and do what the government told them to do. Examining the situation in hindsight, it's pretty obvious that Hitler was an evil crazed despot. In 1938, however, the only real hints available to most people would have been strange anomalies of word and action.. Being dismissive of transgressions by one group, but going ballistic at similar (or milder) transgressions by another (read: target) group.
Ignore, for a moment, the infamous nastiness of Hitler's actions subsequent to the invasions of Poland, etc. Consider, instead the process by which he took over Germany by feeding on their fears.
If the invasion of Afghanistan had stood on it's own -- If The US had worked to install a full democracy in the country and had quietly walked out afterwards, I would have thought little more about it. Instead, the precognitive rumblings about invading Afghanistan, the pending invasion of Iraq and the contextually anomalous treatment of N. Korea gnaw at me and worry me.
I doubt that the world could ever grow another short, dark-haired, mustached, swastika-saluting, Jew-hating warmonger, but we could easily grow a well-disguised analogy. Hitler was an echo of Napoleon. Napoleon was the echo of Robspierre and the terror of the French revolution. The echoes go back a long way, each one variably more or less evil than the previous. Each one variously both different and similar to the others. No incarnation of evil will be precisely like the other, but if you listen carefully, you may hear the echoes of it's predecessors.