What I mean by good at marketing is their ability to continue to recruit people. They have a rather, um, creative world view, which has both grown out of and in turn heavily influenced the, um, creative world view held in much of the Islamic world. For example, the perception that Islam is persecuted when Muslims are the ones pushing religious persecution all over the globe, even against other sects of Islam, and practicing conversion by the sword (well, Kalazhnikov these days). You'd think they could learn from the past mistakes of Buddhism and Christianity, but I guess not. Of course, unlike Buddhism and Christianity, the Koran explicitly condones (and IMO outright promotes) conversion by the sword, and even Mohammed himself allowed the practice. He also allowed robbing non-Muslims and pretty much "doing unto others" as long as they weren't Muslims. Robbery of caravans going to Mecca is how his followers supported themselves in the days when Mecca was pagan and they were seeking to conquer it and convert it by force, something they eventually succeeded in doing.
So yeah, they're very good at marketing. The reason most countries don't condemn us for knocking off a dictator who needed to be knocked off is because they know he had it coming, and they know that while everyone's belief (bolstered by Hussein's actions) that he had WMDs turned out to be wrong (note that wrong is not the same as a lie, and lest you want to pin it all on Bush, that the intelligence handed down on that is the same intelligence the Clinton administration had and they also were certain he had WMDs; the only difference is Clinton didn't do anything about it. But the world is still a better place with Hussein out of it), Hussein was certainly trying to get them, and he was certainly encouraging and even financing terrorism against Israel through paying bounties to the families of suicide bombers.
I got my start in computers in 7th grade, back in the 1970s when computer access in middle school was far from universal, and have spent my entire life since as a computer hobbyist and most of my working life in computers as well.
However, this strikes me as being a lot like compulsory foreign language study in school. I spent a few years as a foreign language teacher and have come to the firm conclusion that compulsory foreign language study is also a terrible idea, and for the same reasons this would be: most of the people in a required foreign language class don't want to be there, have no interest in it, have little or no talent for it (amplified by their lack of interest), do not benefit at all from it, and drag the experience down for the minority of students in the class who want to be there and are motivated and good at it. All this would also be true for compulsory CS study.
I certainly favor making it available - it made all the difference for me - but if I had been sitting in a class full of dolts with no interest in or talent for computers and who were forced to be there - it would have been much less beneficial. Instead, I was surrounded only be people who were passionate about computers, and it was wonderful. By comparison, I took French in middle school because I had to. I took German in high school because I had to. I speak none of French or German today, something I suspect is true of almost everyone else who took those classes.
On the other hand, when I studied Japanese in college, everyone in the class was there because they wanted to be. Nobody who was taking a language class to fulfill a requirement was taking Japanese. I continued my study after graduating, and today I speak Japanese well, am comfortable conversing with native speakers at native speed, and am comfortable getting around in Japan whenever I have the opportunity to travel there.
Definitely, have CS available for those who want it. But don't force it on anyone. It won't benefit most people, and isn't of vital importance to their lives the way being able to read and write well and be proficient in basic math are vital. So many public schools are doing such a bad job on the core skills already that the last thing we need is to further dilute the amount of time available for those things with another required field of study. Offer CS where ever you have teachers who can teach it, to be sure, but make it an elective, not a requirement.
No, I don't expect you would hear them speak about it. Better to have it just be a surprise to the bad guys, but I'd be very surprised if there isn't a plan. Also, in a small country like Dubai, it's easy to both know and control who goes in and out, and how they do so. Additionally, I expect that in Dubai, their laws probably give them rather broad authority in that are. Finally, Dubai is at least somewhat less of a target simply by virtue of the fact that it is an Islamic nation. That isn't to say that the terrorists have any qualms about killing other Muslims with whom they disagree - they most certainly have none - but it would make them look bad to attack an Islamic nation, and while they care not a whit for human lives, they do care about image and PR. Marketing, in fact, is probably the thing they are better at than anything else.
Yeah, what you said. Plus, I think most readers of/. appreciate the value of redundant systems. I supervise what games my kids are allowed to play, with whom they associate, what they read, and what they watch on TV, and provide input on what they do play/watch/read, and about their friends as appropriate. That's part of being a dad and getting it right.
Parental control systems serve as a back-up to that, giving me a redundant system.
I forgot to mention that Malta is also entirely missing from TFA's map. Maybe the cable cut was collateral damage and the real conspiracy is that they destroyed Malta.
Did anyone notice on their map of the Med that Sicily is mislabeled as Malta?
Malta is a much smaller island that lies roughly south by southeast of the southeastern corner of Sicily, about 1/4 of the way between Sicily and Libya.
With maps like this, I think we can attribute the cuts to a backhoe operator digging where the map said to;)
I've been running Linux for just over 10 years. I've run it on several pizza box SPARCs, an old DEC notebook with a 486-DX4 75, several Thinkpad 600s, a Thinkpad T30, a few Dell desktops, a MacBook Pro, a Lenovo ThinkCentre (which behaves and acts a lot like a Thinkpad motherboard in a small desktop case), various whitebox rackmount servers, more homebrew desktops than I can even think of, and this is not even a complete list of the hardware I've run it on.
I've never written a kernel patch. I'm not even competent to do so. In those ten years, I've only applied someone else's kernel patch once, and it was not to make it work on some hardware upon which it would not otherwise work; I just wanted to try out the low-latency patch at a time when it was not yet accepted into the kernel.
Today's state of the Linux kernel: it supports more hardware out of the box than any Microsoft (or Apple, or anyone else's) proprietary operating system ever shipped. The only thing out there that *maybe* supports more hardware out of the box is NetBSD.
Bottom line: especially today, if you have hardware that requires writing your own kernel patches to work, you're running some really unusual hardware (what is it, if I may ask?) such that your situation is hardly representative of what most people experience with Linux. That doesn't mean there aren't such areas (audio and video production come to mind, but that has more to do with the state of Linux apps for those purposes than with hardware support), but it's not what most people see. I've been using Linux as my exclusive desktop OS for nine years, with the only exception being that I also now have a MacBook Pro that my company issued my two years ago. I only use it for email, and that mostly because Entourage is a lot better than Evolution for talking to Exchange servers. Everything else, I do on Linux.
Moralizing religious nutter? Don't look now, but with friends like you, your friend the teacher certainly doesn't need enemies.
While I enjoy a good FPS as much as anyone else (well, OK, not as much as some people), I think he has a really good point.
OTOH, most of the killing that happens in FPS games is not murder, since most of them are either military simulations or involve shooting non-humans. Sure, there are some games where actual murders may take place, and those are the ones where your friend's comparison is most valid, but those are a minority of the games that involve shooting.
Say what?! Japan has only one commercial maglev line in the whole country, which runs in Aichi-ken. It's only about 6 or 7 miles long IIRC, and has a top speed of about 65 - 70 MPH. It went into service n 2005. JR has some on their test track, though, and they are really fast. But it was just last year that JR announced they plan to start commercial maglev shinkansen service in 2025. They don't have it now because, well, the maglev rail lines haven't even been built yet. China has a maglev line running between Shanghai and somewhere; Korea also has a single maglev line, and AFAIK those are the only commercial service maglevs in Asia. Everything else is on a test track.
Also, electric != emissions-free. All passenger rail in Tokyo is electric, but that doesn't make it emissions-free. That electricity still has to be generated, and not all of it comes from nuclear plants (although much of it does; Japan probably has the highest percentage of nuclear power in the world). The emissions from an electric train are produced at the point of power generation, but they're still produced. Is that better than diesel engines on the train? Probably, but it's not emissions-free. This goes for electric cars as well. Many people mistakenly state that electric vehicles are non-polluting, but they are just non-polluting at the place where they are being driven.
Finally, maglev trains do consume quite a bit of power; it's not like making it maglev will suddenly make it an energy sipper. Sure, you gain some efficiencies from doing away with rolling friction, but you add electromagnetic resistance, and because maglev trains in development are aimed at being faster than existing rolling stock (the trains at JR's test track in Yamanashi-ken are way faster than any shinkansen currently in service), there will be increased air resistance. Expect maglev to be somewhat more power efficient than wheeled trains, but it's not going to be a power panacea.
That's not why student government is a joke (not that I'm taking her side here, you understand). Student government is a joke because it's a joke. Allow me to elaborate a bit.
The first thing that's a joke is calling it "student government." It's purely a popularity contest, even worse than regular politics, where we at least pretend that people should be qualified for office, and where sometimes they even are qualified for office. There's no "government" involved; the students are not in charge, nor should they be, because they'd make a total mess of things. Curriculum? It's pretty hard for people who have yet to complete a college curriculum to effectively influence one. Sexual harassment? Not much student government can do about that, but (most) universities have clear and effective policies and procedures in place for dealing with it through the administration, which *can* do something about it. In cases where it can't or won't, you need a lawyer on your side, not your class president. Deportation? Gee, if you're not in the country legally, you *should* be deported and should not be taking the place in school of someone who is here legally. If student government takes any other position, they're just proving my point they aren't ready to be in charge of anything, even if they did have any actual power to govern. Drug use? Yeah, student government is all over that, I bet. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Tuition going up? Gee, we could keep it down some by eliminating funds for student government, maybe. Hey, prices go up, so do salaries. It's a fact of life, get used to it. You can't keep paying the same tuition forever. If you could, we'd still be at 1970 prices. Housing? OK, if there's something wrong with the dorms, student government could maybe help with this. But does it? Probably not.
The thing is, I went to university to get a good education. I got one, at UCSD. Nothing that anyone in student government did in any way furthered that. In fact, it just made it slightly more expensive. If there were no student government, fees would be lower and I could have spent the money on something more useful, like good coffee. Student government is a waste of time, except maybe for those planning to go into politics, in which case it's good training for how to become a professional wanker, not just an amateur, but why should that be on my dime?
You talk like Europeans never get phished. As one who makes his living in the anti-phishing space, I'd have to strongly disagree with that.
A really neat example was last year at at a security conference, there was a researched who had infiltrated a phishing ring that had defeated security at a European bank that used two-factor authentication. It wasn't easy or scalable, requiring a real person working in real time to mount a man-in-the-middle attack, but it worked.
I see phishing targeted against European banks regularly, and I'm sure some of it succeeds. I don't mean to imply that there aren't serious security issues in US online banking (one of which, of course, is end users who will fall for almost anything, a problem that exists all over the world), but Europe is hardly a bastion of online banking security. Being better than the US on that point doesn't mean they're good. It means they're less bad.
Saying it's ridiculous is not an ad hominem. It's an attack on the idea. And the idea that there is never a legitimate reason to stop information is ridiculous. There are tons of legitimate reasons to stop certain kinds of information, starting with confidentiality. Preventing crime would certainly be on that list, as well.
An example of an ad hominem: "I_am_the_cheese supports this thing, therefore it must be crap."
Stating that you are probably into child porn is not an ad hominem, either. It wasn't even a personal attack. It was, and is, a reasonable conclusion based on your statement that child pornography should be legal. Let's be very clear that to produce it, someone, somewhere has to rape or otherwise sexually assault a child. Since you advocate the legality of CP, you are taking a stand in favor of the sexual assault of children. You are, therefore, most likely a user and/or producer of it, or at least in sympathy with those who do so.
On the off chance that you are merely so libertarian that you believe that nothing should be illegal, no matter how heinous, simply because making anything illegal somehow suppresses someone's "freedom" (and without discussing basic principles like children should have freedom from being sexually assaulted, and anyone else's rights end where another person's begin, so there is no such thing as absolute freedom), then you are not only morally bankrupt beyond comprehension, but also stupid beyond comprehension. That being the case, you worthless piece of subhuman garbage who ought to stop taking up valuable air that someone else could use, you're hardly in a position to call anyone else stupid.
Finally, to make my own position on child porn completely clear, producers and distributors of CP should be executed. In public, and in a way so as to make an example. Hanging, beheading, and the firing squad are the least brutal means that should be considered. For those who couldn't attend the execution in person, put it on youtube.
Well, not really. At least, not unless you are very familiar with engine assembly already.
The guy sending the text messages was an experienced surgeon who had performed the type of amputation that needed to be done. The guy receiving the texts was also an experienced surgeon, but not in that area of medicine.
If you are very good at assembling small block Chevy engines and you're sitting in your garage with a disassembled Mopar 340, I could probably tell you how to put it together. At least, once upon a time; it's been a while and I might need one in front of me as a model, or at least a shop manual, these days. If you couldn't even put a valve cover on by yourself, the task would be a lot harder.
OTOH, assembling a carbureted overhead valve V-8 isn't that hard. A typical four-cyclinder engine today, with its four valves per cylinder, overhead cam(s) and computer-controlled fuel injection, is a lot more complicated. Someone who was both a real expert and good at remove instruction probably could talk a novice mechanic through assembling a 1960s American car engine and have it actually run.
Child pornography is not "information." Child pornography is a product made through the rape and other sexual abuse of children.
Since no one could possibly believe that CP is just "information" (and I have a very low opinion of the intelligence of most people), the most likely explanation for your position on this is that you are a consumer and/or producer of child pornography yourself.
Never a legitimate reason to stop information? That's so ridiculous it's beneath discussion.
I had a somewhat different experience, and one that is less easily explained by the hallucination hypothesis.
Many years ago, I had a child who died as an infant. That marriage, which was on the rocks anyway, went south as well. Some years later, when I'd healed, moved on, and had already met my present wife, I had a potentially life-threatening health problem, but not one that could in itself cause a hallucination (no fevers, etc., for example). During treatment, I was visited by the spirit of my deceased daughter - not as an infant, but as a young girl several years old. There was no visible manifestation, but I sensed her presence quite clearly and knew who it was. She placed her hands on my shoulders from behind, communicated to me (without words; it's difficult to explain; it was like knowing what another person was thinking) and told me everything was going to be fine. I say "as a young girl" because I could feel the size of the hands that were touching me.
The health problem instantly vanished - I could feel it - and I required no further treatment thereafter. There was no medical explanation for it. Afterwards, I didn't have any kind of illness - not even a cold, something I'm normally very prone to - for over two years.
That had never happened before, and never happened thereafter. It was a one-shot event, which also doesn't fit the hallucination profile.
As an added twist, years before, my ex-wife had told me that our deceased daughter had visted her twice in a similar manner, manifesting as an infant. I didn't believe it and thought it was just grief talking, although I had no explanation for how she knew something that no one in the world but I knew and that I had never recorded or spoke of to anyone. She claimed our daughter had told her, a claim which I did not believe at the time, putting the whole thing down to grief. That didn't explain how she knew what she knew, but it was my opinion of the whole thing.
After my own encounter, I had to reassess my opinion of her reported encounters. I went to some effort to locate her and tell her what had happened. The conversation that followed led to a lot of bitterness being put aside and parting as friends, a real change from the way we'd broken up.
That doesn't mean people don't have grief hallucinations - I'm sure many do - but it may also be the case that not all of these things are hallucinations. The difficult part is finding any way to test that idea.
The greatest difficulty with that is, assuming an actual visitation, that the whole thing may no longer be important to the deceased. Death has a way of removing the importance of earthly things.
You might also need a pretty large pool of testers, partly for the reason above and partly just to ensure you got some visitations.
You talk about ignorance but can't even spell "ads" correctly? Way to go. I have a degree in linguistics but have spent nearly my whole career in IT (worked in linguistics for a while, but always liked IT better and the pay is a lot better).
Since you are apparently one of the uneducated, please do us a favor and get out of IT. The natural talent for IT that is typically displayed by people working in IT without a degree in CS or related will run rings around your AC ass anytime.
Yeah, he really doesn't get it. Lack of centralized control is one of the reasons why, after I started using Linux 10 years ago, I quit using Windows 9 years ago. Sure, Windows still worked better for a lot of stuff in those days, but it was about freedom to make the system work the way I wanted.
You forgot to mention that he uses the term "commercial" when he means "proprietary." There are loads of successful commercial applications available for Linux: sendmail, and MySQL come to mind just offhand, but there are plenty more. Yes, those are commercial apps, produced and distributed by for-profit companies. There's not a whole lot of demand for proprietary Linux apps, though, and that demand seems lower than it was 10 years ago. I mean, c'mon, but in '98 when even reading an MS Word file was a problem, let alone producing one or editing one someone else produced, more than a few people would have liked to see Microsoft produce Word for Linux (never happen, but you know what I mean). Now, that's not a problem. One of the few areas where a lot of people would like to see a proprietary app for Linux is graphics: The Gimp is still just no match for Photoshop. Wine probably solves that problem, but that's a lot less satisfying than a native solution. Of course, The Gimp will probably eventually mostly catch up to Photoshop; that's happened in word processing, spreadsheets, desktop publishing, IDEs, HTML editing, pretty much every area where proprietary software was once way ahead.
Sure, there are things that need work. Wireless, especially. That's the only part of Linux that I find remains a PITA: setting it up for use on a WPA network. Even nice apps like wicd are way behind what Windows and OS X can do, IMO. But in time, that too will be fixed, and without a central controlling committee to try and turn Linux into Windows (as if that were possible with free software).
You're suggesting that a 2.6 compatibility layer be added to the 2.4 kernel? There is one: it's called the 2.6 kernel. Seriously, you can't make an old and essentially fossilized kernel version "forward compatible." Well, you could, maybe, but it would be a ridiculous amount of work, would perform very poorly, and would be, well, just plain ridiculous.
To put that in perspective, it would be like suggesting that Microsoft revisit the Windows 9x kernel and added a Vista kernel compatibility layer, or that Apple do the same, adding an OS X compatibility layer to the OS 9 kernel. That's whack, even allowing for the fact that Microsoft and Apple have EOLed those old systems while the 2.4 kernel still has limited support.
WRT running 2.4 stuff on a 2.6 kernel, well, some of it will, some of it won't. I'd be surprised if that isn't also true for Apple and Microsoft. Things that depend on kernel ABIs for Windows 9x and OS 9 probably have a good chance of not working on Vista. Most (but not all) Windows 9x apps will run under XP and Vista, and Apple has a compatibility layer for older apps, too. Of course, older GNOME and KDE apps will generally run under newer versions of KDE, so there's the legacy application coverage most people are going to care about.
Ambrose Bierce said, "There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy."
I think dragging those idiots up and down the stairs a few times would qualify you for a Nobel Peace Prize, since it would improve the world so much, especially if they didn't survive.
After all, the generation that fought and WW II understood perfectly well that sometimes the best way to bring about peace is to kill the evildoers and make such an example of them that people are afraid to screw with you after that.
I work for one of the major anti-spam vendors, and our inbound volume dropped off by 75% within 24 hours of the McColo shutdown. Other sources in and out of the industry were reporting similar numbers.
One effect seen pretty much everywhere as a result of the McColo shutdown was that while absolute spam volumes were down, efficacy against what was left dropped for everyone. This is because pretty much every one of those bots was on at least one blocklist and/or had a very poor reputation and would have a hard time delivering mail past any good filtering solution. When those bots all went away, spam that had to be filtered by other means increased as a percentage of spam, which lowered everyone's efficacy. Not day and night, of course, but enough for (all of) us to notice. Certainly nothing like a 10X decrease in efficacy.
Your own tenfold increase is an interesting event; certainly an aberration and probably a coincidence. Are you at liberty to post any other info about that, such as how you're measuring it, where it's coming from, what kind of spam it is, etc.?
First of all, they haven't left. They still work there. I can see not reading TFA - this is Slashdot, after all - but it looks like you didn't even bother to read the OP, which says they are considering leaving the company to do this.
However, even if they had left, that changes nothing. Everything they did while they worked there belongs to the company. They produced a work for hire. Quitting and building a substantially identical but competing product probably carries legal risk. That's why they need to shell out some money for a consultation with a good IP lawyer. Maybe get a labor lawyer in on the act, too.
Oh, by the way, the letter "i" occurs only once in "period." Peri-fucking-od.
Seriously. If you are thinking about doing something like this, you (the group) need to spend the money for a consultation with a good intellectual property lawyer licensed to practice law in your state. You don't need/. for this, and the fact that you're posting this question here rather than just going to see a lawyer could be taken as an indication that you're either very half-baked on the whole idea at this point, or are really on a shoestring budget. Maybe both.
A lawyer can identify for you any areas where you current employer might be able to totally nail you in court, as well as things they could do just to harass you. A lawyer can also tell you the areas where you stand on very solid ground. The first harassment technique that comes to mind is suing you for anything they think might stick. At that point, you will spend a lot more than the price of a one-hour consultation with an IP lawyer. You'll spend the cost of hiring a good IP lawyer to defend yourself.
You'll need to bring copies of your employment agreements, IP agreements you've signed, and any relevant documents.
If your employer is like most, you've signed any IP agreement that says anything you invent at work belongs to the company, period. Re-writing a workalike app from scratch - even if you use a different language and nothing that looks even remotely like the original code - might be a tough sell in light of such an IP agreement. A good IP lawyer can tell you exactly how tough of a sell that might be. You really need to go into this with your eyes open.
I strongly second the "write it down on paper" approach. Most sites will do nothing to help the deceased's survivors access her/his accounts, and will usually actively oppose it. If they even get wind of the fact that the survivors have the password and are accessing the account, they may lock it. Tell the person(s) to whom you entrust your login credentials to keep it secret from the site operators that you have died, at least long enough for them to notify anyone they want to notify.
So, definitely write that stuff down. Forget what security professionals (including myself) say about password security in general. Write it down to be used in case of your death and keep it somewhere reasonably safe. Sitting in plain site in your bookcase is probably safe enough for most people, unless they have untrustworthy individuals in the house. Dealing with that situation is beyond the scope here. Plain sight may sound risky, but there is virtually no risk from outsiders. Anyone who breaks into your house is after stuff they can steal or sell, not some piece of paper in your book case. People that want to steal your passwords will break into your computer instead.
My wife has a sheet of paper with all that information on it. I suppose I should plan for really worst case and give a copy to my brother and my parents as well.
On the converse side, if anyone has anything electronic that they would prefer their survivors *not* know about (which is probably a pr0n collection for most people), keep that stuff encrypted and the passphrase secret.
Slashdot Mirror
What I mean by good at marketing is their ability to continue to recruit people. They have a rather, um, creative world view, which has both grown out of and in turn heavily influenced the, um, creative world view held in much of the Islamic world. For example, the perception that Islam is persecuted when Muslims are the ones pushing religious persecution all over the globe, even against other sects of Islam, and practicing conversion by the sword (well, Kalazhnikov these days). You'd think they could learn from the past mistakes of Buddhism and Christianity, but I guess not. Of course, unlike Buddhism and Christianity, the Koran explicitly condones (and IMO outright promotes) conversion by the sword, and even Mohammed himself allowed the practice. He also allowed robbing non-Muslims and pretty much "doing unto others" as long as they weren't Muslims. Robbery of caravans going to Mecca is how his followers supported themselves in the days when Mecca was pagan and they were seeking to conquer it and convert it by force, something they eventually succeeded in doing.
So yeah, they're very good at marketing. The reason most countries don't condemn us for knocking off a dictator who needed to be knocked off is because they know he had it coming, and they know that while everyone's belief (bolstered by Hussein's actions) that he had WMDs turned out to be wrong (note that wrong is not the same as a lie, and lest you want to pin it all on Bush, that the intelligence handed down on that is the same intelligence the Clinton administration had and they also were certain he had WMDs; the only difference is Clinton didn't do anything about it. But the world is still a better place with Hussein out of it), Hussein was certainly trying to get them, and he was certainly encouraging and even financing terrorism against Israel through paying bounties to the families of suicide bombers.
I got my start in computers in 7th grade, back in the 1970s when computer access in middle school was far from universal, and have spent my entire life since as a computer hobbyist and most of my working life in computers as well.
However, this strikes me as being a lot like compulsory foreign language study in school. I spent a few years as a foreign language teacher and have come to the firm conclusion that compulsory foreign language study is also a terrible idea, and for the same reasons this would be: most of the people in a required foreign language class don't want to be there, have no interest in it, have little or no talent for it (amplified by their lack of interest), do not benefit at all from it, and drag the experience down for the minority of students in the class who want to be there and are motivated and good at it. All this would also be true for compulsory CS study.
I certainly favor making it available - it made all the difference for me - but if I had been sitting in a class full of dolts with no interest in or talent for computers and who were forced to be there - it would have been much less beneficial. Instead, I was surrounded only be people who were passionate about computers, and it was wonderful. By comparison, I took French in middle school because I had to. I took German in high school because I had to. I speak none of French or German today, something I suspect is true of almost everyone else who took those classes.
On the other hand, when I studied Japanese in college, everyone in the class was there because they wanted to be. Nobody who was taking a language class to fulfill a requirement was taking Japanese. I continued my study after graduating, and today I speak Japanese well, am comfortable conversing with native speakers at native speed, and am comfortable getting around in Japan whenever I have the opportunity to travel there.
Definitely, have CS available for those who want it. But don't force it on anyone. It won't benefit most people, and isn't of vital importance to their lives the way being able to read and write well and be proficient in basic math are vital. So many public schools are doing such a bad job on the core skills already that the last thing we need is to further dilute the amount of time available for those things with another required field of study. Offer CS where ever you have teachers who can teach it, to be sure, but make it an elective, not a requirement.
No, I don't expect you would hear them speak about it. Better to have it just be a surprise to the bad guys, but I'd be very surprised if there isn't a plan. Also, in a small country like Dubai, it's easy to both know and control who goes in and out, and how they do so. Additionally, I expect that in Dubai, their laws probably give them rather broad authority in that are. Finally, Dubai is at least somewhat less of a target simply by virtue of the fact that it is an Islamic nation. That isn't to say that the terrorists have any qualms about killing other Muslims with whom they disagree - they most certainly have none - but it would make them look bad to attack an Islamic nation, and while they care not a whit for human lives, they do care about image and PR. Marketing, in fact, is probably the thing they are better at than anything else.
Yeah, what you said. Plus, I think most readers of /. appreciate the value of redundant systems. I supervise what games my kids are allowed to play, with whom they associate, what they read, and what they watch on TV, and provide input on what they do play/watch/read, and about their friends as appropriate. That's part of being a dad and getting it right.
Parental control systems serve as a back-up to that, giving me a redundant system.
I forgot to mention that Malta is also entirely missing from TFA's map. Maybe the cable cut was collateral damage and the real conspiracy is that they destroyed Malta.
Did anyone notice on their map of the Med that Sicily is mislabeled as Malta?
Malta is a much smaller island that lies roughly south by southeast of the southeastern corner of Sicily, about 1/4 of the way between Sicily and Libya.
With maps like this, I think we can attribute the cuts to a backhoe operator digging where the map said to ;)
I've been running Linux for just over 10 years. I've run it on several pizza box SPARCs, an old DEC notebook with a 486-DX4 75, several Thinkpad 600s, a Thinkpad T30, a few Dell desktops, a MacBook Pro, a Lenovo ThinkCentre (which behaves and acts a lot like a Thinkpad motherboard in a small desktop case), various whitebox rackmount servers, more homebrew desktops than I can even think of, and this is not even a complete list of the hardware I've run it on.
I've never written a kernel patch. I'm not even competent to do so. In those ten years, I've only applied someone else's kernel patch once, and it was not to make it work on some hardware upon which it would not otherwise work; I just wanted to try out the low-latency patch at a time when it was not yet accepted into the kernel.
Today's state of the Linux kernel: it supports more hardware out of the box than any Microsoft (or Apple, or anyone else's) proprietary operating system ever shipped. The only thing out there that *maybe* supports more hardware out of the box is NetBSD.
Bottom line: especially today, if you have hardware that requires writing your own kernel patches to work, you're running some really unusual hardware (what is it, if I may ask?) such that your situation is hardly representative of what most people experience with Linux. That doesn't mean there aren't such areas (audio and video production come to mind, but that has more to do with the state of Linux apps for those purposes than with hardware support), but it's not what most people see. I've been using Linux as my exclusive desktop OS for nine years, with the only exception being that I also now have a MacBook Pro that my company issued my two years ago. I only use it for email, and that mostly because Entourage is a lot better than Evolution for talking to Exchange servers. Everything else, I do on Linux.
What do you mean, "If programming languages were religions?" Next, you'll be trying to convince us that vi and emacs aren't religions either :p
Moralizing religious nutter? Don't look now, but with friends like you, your friend the teacher certainly doesn't need enemies.
While I enjoy a good FPS as much as anyone else (well, OK, not as much as some people), I think he has a really good point.
OTOH, most of the killing that happens in FPS games is not murder, since most of them are either military simulations or involve shooting non-humans. Sure, there are some games where actual murders may take place, and those are the ones where your friend's comparison is most valid, but those are a minority of the games that involve shooting.
Say what?! Japan has only one commercial maglev line in the whole country, which runs in Aichi-ken. It's only about 6 or 7 miles long IIRC, and has a top speed of about 65 - 70 MPH. It went into service n 2005. JR has some on their test track, though, and they are really fast. But it was just last year that JR announced they plan to start commercial maglev shinkansen service in 2025. They don't have it now because, well, the maglev rail lines haven't even been built yet. China has a maglev line running between Shanghai and somewhere; Korea also has a single maglev line, and AFAIK those are the only commercial service maglevs in Asia. Everything else is on a test track.
Also, electric != emissions-free. All passenger rail in Tokyo is electric, but that doesn't make it emissions-free. That electricity still has to be generated, and not all of it comes from nuclear plants (although much of it does; Japan probably has the highest percentage of nuclear power in the world). The emissions from an electric train are produced at the point of power generation, but they're still produced. Is that better than diesel engines on the train? Probably, but it's not emissions-free. This goes for electric cars as well. Many people mistakenly state that electric vehicles are non-polluting, but they are just non-polluting at the place where they are being driven.
Finally, maglev trains do consume quite a bit of power; it's not like making it maglev will suddenly make it an energy sipper. Sure, you gain some efficiencies from doing away with rolling friction, but you add electromagnetic resistance, and because maglev trains in development are aimed at being faster than existing rolling stock (the trains at JR's test track in Yamanashi-ken are way faster than any shinkansen currently in service), there will be increased air resistance. Expect maglev to be somewhat more power efficient than wheeled trains, but it's not going to be a power panacea.
That's not why student government is a joke (not that I'm taking her side here, you understand). Student government is a joke because it's a joke. Allow me to elaborate a bit.
The first thing that's a joke is calling it "student government." It's purely a popularity contest, even worse than regular politics, where we at least pretend that people should be qualified for office, and where sometimes they even are qualified for office. There's no "government" involved; the students are not in charge, nor should they be, because they'd make a total mess of things. Curriculum? It's pretty hard for people who have yet to complete a college curriculum to effectively influence one. Sexual harassment? Not much student government can do about that, but (most) universities have clear and effective policies and procedures in place for dealing with it through the administration, which *can* do something about it. In cases where it can't or won't, you need a lawyer on your side, not your class president. Deportation? Gee, if you're not in the country legally, you *should* be deported and should not be taking the place in school of someone who is here legally. If student government takes any other position, they're just proving my point they aren't ready to be in charge of anything, even if they did have any actual power to govern. Drug use? Yeah, student government is all over that, I bet. Nudge nudge, wink wink. Tuition going up? Gee, we could keep it down some by eliminating funds for student government, maybe. Hey, prices go up, so do salaries. It's a fact of life, get used to it. You can't keep paying the same tuition forever. If you could, we'd still be at 1970 prices. Housing? OK, if there's something wrong with the dorms, student government could maybe help with this. But does it? Probably not.
The thing is, I went to university to get a good education. I got one, at UCSD. Nothing that anyone in student government did in any way furthered that. In fact, it just made it slightly more expensive. If there were no student government, fees would be lower and I could have spent the money on something more useful, like good coffee. Student government is a waste of time, except maybe for those planning to go into politics, in which case it's good training for how to become a professional wanker, not just an amateur, but why should that be on my dime?
You talk like Europeans never get phished. As one who makes his living in the anti-phishing space, I'd have to strongly disagree with that.
A really neat example was last year at at a security conference, there was a researched who had infiltrated a phishing ring that had defeated security at a European bank that used two-factor authentication. It wasn't easy or scalable, requiring a real person working in real time to mount a man-in-the-middle attack, but it worked.
I see phishing targeted against European banks regularly, and I'm sure some of it succeeds. I don't mean to imply that there aren't serious security issues in US online banking (one of which, of course, is end users who will fall for almost anything, a problem that exists all over the world), but Europe is hardly a bastion of online banking security. Being better than the US on that point doesn't mean they're good. It means they're less bad.
Saying it's ridiculous is not an ad hominem. It's an attack on the idea. And the idea that there is never a legitimate reason to stop information is ridiculous. There are tons of legitimate reasons to stop certain kinds of information, starting with confidentiality. Preventing crime would certainly be on that list, as well.
An example of an ad hominem: "I_am_the_cheese supports this thing, therefore it must be crap."
Stating that you are probably into child porn is not an ad hominem, either. It wasn't even a personal attack. It was, and is, a reasonable conclusion based on your statement that child pornography should be legal. Let's be very clear that to produce it, someone, somewhere has to rape or otherwise sexually assault a child. Since you advocate the legality of CP, you are taking a stand in favor of the sexual assault of children. You are, therefore, most likely a user and/or producer of it, or at least in sympathy with those who do so.
On the off chance that you are merely so libertarian that you believe that nothing should be illegal, no matter how heinous, simply because making anything illegal somehow suppresses someone's "freedom" (and without discussing basic principles like children should have freedom from being sexually assaulted, and anyone else's rights end where another person's begin, so there is no such thing as absolute freedom), then you are not only morally bankrupt beyond comprehension, but also stupid beyond comprehension. That being the case, you worthless piece of subhuman garbage who ought to stop taking up valuable air that someone else could use, you're hardly in a position to call anyone else stupid.
Finally, to make my own position on child porn completely clear, producers and distributors of CP should be executed. In public, and in a way so as to make an example. Hanging, beheading, and the firing squad are the least brutal means that should be considered. For those who couldn't attend the execution in person, put it on youtube.
Well, not really. At least, not unless you are very familiar with engine assembly already.
The guy sending the text messages was an experienced surgeon who had performed the type of amputation that needed to be done. The guy receiving the texts was also an experienced surgeon, but not in that area of medicine.
If you are very good at assembling small block Chevy engines and you're sitting in your garage with a disassembled Mopar 340, I could probably tell you how to put it together. At least, once upon a time; it's been a while and I might need one in front of me as a model, or at least a shop manual, these days. If you couldn't even put a valve cover on by yourself, the task would be a lot harder.
OTOH, assembling a carbureted overhead valve V-8 isn't that hard. A typical four-cyclinder engine today, with its four valves per cylinder, overhead cam(s) and computer-controlled fuel injection, is a lot more complicated. Someone who was both a real expert and good at remove instruction probably could talk a novice mechanic through assembling a 1960s American car engine and have it actually run.
Child pornography is not "information." Child pornography is a product made through the rape and other sexual abuse of children.
Since no one could possibly believe that CP is just "information" (and I have a very low opinion of the intelligence of most people), the most likely explanation for your position on this is that you are a consumer and/or producer of child pornography yourself.
Never a legitimate reason to stop information? That's so ridiculous it's beneath discussion.
I had a somewhat different experience, and one that is less easily explained by the hallucination hypothesis.
Many years ago, I had a child who died as an infant. That marriage, which was on the rocks anyway, went south as well. Some years later, when I'd healed, moved on, and had already met my present wife, I had a potentially life-threatening health problem, but not one that could in itself cause a hallucination (no fevers, etc., for example). During treatment, I was visited by the spirit of my deceased daughter - not as an infant, but as a young girl several years old. There was no visible manifestation, but I sensed her presence quite clearly and knew who it was. She placed her hands on my shoulders from behind, communicated to me (without words; it's difficult to explain; it was like knowing what another person was thinking) and told me everything was going to be fine. I say "as a young girl" because I could feel the size of the hands that were touching me.
The health problem instantly vanished - I could feel it - and I required no further treatment thereafter. There was no medical explanation for it. Afterwards, I didn't have any kind of illness - not even a cold, something I'm normally very prone to - for over two years.
That had never happened before, and never happened thereafter. It was a one-shot event, which also doesn't fit the hallucination profile.
As an added twist, years before, my ex-wife had told me that our deceased daughter had visted her twice in a similar manner, manifesting as an infant. I didn't believe it and thought it was just grief talking, although I had no explanation for how she knew something that no one in the world but I knew and that I had never recorded or spoke of to anyone. She claimed our daughter had told her, a claim which I did not believe at the time, putting the whole thing down to grief. That didn't explain how she knew what she knew, but it was my opinion of the whole thing.
After my own encounter, I had to reassess my opinion of her reported encounters. I went to some effort to locate her and tell her what had happened. The conversation that followed led to a lot of bitterness being put aside and parting as friends, a real change from the way we'd broken up.
That doesn't mean people don't have grief hallucinations - I'm sure many do - but it may also be the case that not all of these things are hallucinations. The difficult part is finding any way to test that idea.
The greatest difficulty with that is, assuming an actual visitation, that the whole thing may no longer be important to the deceased. Death has a way of removing the importance of earthly things.
You might also need a pretty large pool of testers, partly for the reason above and partly just to ensure you got some visitations.
You talk about ignorance but can't even spell "ads" correctly? Way to go. I have a degree in linguistics but have spent nearly my whole career in IT (worked in linguistics for a while, but always liked IT better and the pay is a lot better).
Since you are apparently one of the uneducated, please do us a favor and get out of IT. The natural talent for IT that is typically displayed by people working in IT without a degree in CS or related will run rings around your AC ass anytime.
Yeah, he really doesn't get it. Lack of centralized control is one of the reasons why, after I started using Linux 10 years ago, I quit using Windows 9 years ago. Sure, Windows still worked better for a lot of stuff in those days, but it was about freedom to make the system work the way I wanted.
You forgot to mention that he uses the term "commercial" when he means "proprietary." There are loads of successful commercial applications available for Linux: sendmail, and MySQL come to mind just offhand, but there are plenty more. Yes, those are commercial apps, produced and distributed by for-profit companies. There's not a whole lot of demand for proprietary Linux apps, though, and that demand seems lower than it was 10 years ago. I mean, c'mon, but in '98 when even reading an MS Word file was a problem, let alone producing one or editing one someone else produced, more than a few people would have liked to see Microsoft produce Word for Linux (never happen, but you know what I mean). Now, that's not a problem. One of the few areas where a lot of people would like to see a proprietary app for Linux is graphics: The Gimp is still just no match for Photoshop. Wine probably solves that problem, but that's a lot less satisfying than a native solution. Of course, The Gimp will probably eventually mostly catch up to Photoshop; that's happened in word processing, spreadsheets, desktop publishing, IDEs, HTML editing, pretty much every area where proprietary software was once way ahead.
Sure, there are things that need work. Wireless, especially. That's the only part of Linux that I find remains a PITA: setting it up for use on a WPA network. Even nice apps like wicd are way behind what Windows and OS X can do, IMO. But in time, that too will be fixed, and without a central controlling committee to try and turn Linux into Windows (as if that were possible with free software).
You're suggesting that a 2.6 compatibility layer be added to the 2.4 kernel? There is one: it's called the 2.6 kernel. Seriously, you can't make an old and essentially fossilized kernel version "forward compatible." Well, you could, maybe, but it would be a ridiculous amount of work, would perform very poorly, and would be, well, just plain ridiculous.
To put that in perspective, it would be like suggesting that Microsoft revisit the Windows 9x kernel and added a Vista kernel compatibility layer, or that Apple do the same, adding an OS X compatibility layer to the OS 9 kernel. That's whack, even allowing for the fact that Microsoft and Apple have EOLed those old systems while the 2.4 kernel still has limited support.
WRT running 2.4 stuff on a 2.6 kernel, well, some of it will, some of it won't. I'd be surprised if that isn't also true for Apple and Microsoft. Things that depend on kernel ABIs for Windows 9x and OS 9 probably have a good chance of not working on Vista. Most (but not all) Windows 9x apps will run under XP and Vista, and Apple has a compatibility layer for older apps, too. Of course, older GNOME and KDE apps will generally run under newer versions of KDE, so there's the legacy application coverage most people are going to care about.
Ambrose Bierce said, "There are four kinds of Homicide: felonious, excusable, justifiable, and praiseworthy."
I think dragging those idiots up and down the stairs a few times would qualify you for a Nobel Peace Prize, since it would improve the world so much, especially if they didn't survive.
After all, the generation that fought and WW II understood perfectly well that sometimes the best way to bring about peace is to kill the evildoers and make such an example of them that people are afraid to screw with you after that.
I work for one of the major anti-spam vendors, and our inbound volume dropped off by 75% within 24 hours of the McColo shutdown. Other sources in and out of the industry were reporting similar numbers.
One effect seen pretty much everywhere as a result of the McColo shutdown was that while absolute spam volumes were down, efficacy against what was left dropped for everyone. This is because pretty much every one of those bots was on at least one blocklist and/or had a very poor reputation and would have a hard time delivering mail past any good filtering solution. When those bots all went away, spam that had to be filtered by other means increased as a percentage of spam, which lowered everyone's efficacy. Not day and night, of course, but enough for (all of) us to notice. Certainly nothing like a 10X decrease in efficacy.
Your own tenfold increase is an interesting event; certainly an aberration and probably a coincidence. Are you at liberty to post any other info about that, such as how you're measuring it, where it's coming from, what kind of spam it is, etc.?
First of all, they haven't left. They still work there. I can see not reading TFA - this is Slashdot, after all - but it looks like you didn't even bother to read the OP, which says they are considering leaving the company to do this.
However, even if they had left, that changes nothing. Everything they did while they worked there belongs to the company. They produced a work for hire. Quitting and building a substantially identical but competing product probably carries legal risk. That's why they need to shell out some money for a consultation with a good IP lawyer. Maybe get a labor lawyer in on the act, too.
Oh, by the way, the letter "i" occurs only once in "period." Peri-fucking-od.
Seriously. If you are thinking about doing something like this, you (the group) need to spend the money for a consultation with a good intellectual property lawyer licensed to practice law in your state. You don't need /. for this, and the fact that you're posting this question here rather than just going to see a lawyer could be taken as an indication that you're either very half-baked on the whole idea at this point, or are really on a shoestring budget. Maybe both.
A lawyer can identify for you any areas where you current employer might be able to totally nail you in court, as well as things they could do just to harass you. A lawyer can also tell you the areas where you stand on very solid ground. The first harassment technique that comes to mind is suing you for anything they think might stick. At that point, you will spend a lot more than the price of a one-hour consultation with an IP lawyer. You'll spend the cost of hiring a good IP lawyer to defend yourself.
You'll need to bring copies of your employment agreements, IP agreements you've signed, and any relevant documents.
If your employer is like most, you've signed any IP agreement that says anything you invent at work belongs to the company, period. Re-writing a workalike app from scratch - even if you use a different language and nothing that looks even remotely like the original code - might be a tough sell in light of such an IP agreement. A good IP lawyer can tell you exactly how tough of a sell that might be. You really need to go into this with your eyes open.
I strongly second the "write it down on paper" approach. Most sites will do nothing to help the deceased's survivors access her/his accounts, and will usually actively oppose it. If they even get wind of the fact that the survivors have the password and are accessing the account, they may lock it. Tell the person(s) to whom you entrust your login credentials to keep it secret from the site operators that you have died, at least long enough for them to notify anyone they want to notify.
So, definitely write that stuff down. Forget what security professionals (including myself) say about password security in general. Write it down to be used in case of your death and keep it somewhere reasonably safe. Sitting in plain site in your bookcase is probably safe enough for most people, unless they have untrustworthy individuals in the house. Dealing with that situation is beyond the scope here. Plain sight may sound risky, but there is virtually no risk from outsiders. Anyone who breaks into your house is after stuff they can steal or sell, not some piece of paper in your book case. People that want to steal your passwords will break into your computer instead.
My wife has a sheet of paper with all that information on it. I suppose I should plan for really worst case and give a copy to my brother and my parents as well.
On the converse side, if anyone has anything electronic that they would prefer their survivors *not* know about (which is probably a pr0n collection for most people), keep that stuff encrypted and the passphrase secret.