Why do you believe in rehabilitation if nobody has ever been able to do it, despite vast public expenditure, the best efforts of great minds, the concentration of man's greatest religions? Are you loopy?
The mass of criminality is 7/10ths genetic, 2/10th environment (unshared -- the kind we can't fix), and maybe 1/20th free will. It's unavoidable and unfixable.
Maybe I exaggerate. There is perhaps one way to do it, if you really want to stop crime. Invent a smart pill. Raise everybody's IQ by a standard deviation, and we'll probably be as docile as Asians.
Daggerfall can only be considered a classic by those who never actually played it. It was a buggy mess. The only people who enjoyed it were obsessive-compulsive types.
Strange, that's what online used book stores charge for most of their books anyway. Postage being $3 or $4 a book, of course. Is there some obscure tax or accounting reason that makes them do this? Or is it just that most people are too stupid to check how they're getting gouged on S&H?
I'm happy with people being parted with their money over something this stupid. All libraries and bookstores destroy books. There isn't enough room for them all. Stealing from the stupid is a good practice though. The more money that gets extracted from the stupid and the gullible, the harder it is for them to breed, and the better off the world is.
You misunderstand how those tools work. Qt, a non-GPL (though open-source) product has two versions: a free version and a non-free version. To use the free version, you agree to produce your code under the GPL. The non-free version has no such restriction.
Qt is not under the GPL itself, though it's used to create GPL code.
The original poster is correct. The LINA FAQ really does present a conundrum: are they releasing their code under GPL or aren't they?
Formation, terrain, supply, and morale are all strategy game possibilities that make for more interesting games (to me) than micromanagement. I like my RTS games cerebral. If I wanted micromanagement, I'd play Diablo.
Taking micromanagement out of the player's hands - and putting it in the computer's hands like it belongs - adds a dimension to the game instead of taking one away. Formation tactics, with direct combat units protecting artillery, etc., can really come to the fore. In Warcraft/Starcraft games, any attempt at formation falls apart immediately upon engagement. Due to the lack of formation tactics, vital military concepts such as "flank" and "rear" have significantly reduced importance in Starcraft. All that is left to emulate combined arms is unit mix.
The fact that your units are your perfect slaves, there for you to micromanage at will, takes away another big chunk of complexity from the game. Your units (and your enemy's units!) should balk at being sent to fight against an impossible foe. They should run away when their formations are shattered. The necessity to regroup, the importance of always leaving your enemies a path to retreat, breaking up enemy lines through artillery, all of these start to take on serious importance when morale matters.
Lines of supply nearly work in Starcraft. They just aren't emphasized. When battles last long enough, the importance of reinforcements arriving from base begin to dominate. With better gameplay engine support for actual lines of supply, this could make for far more interesting games.
They could make his life hell for the next 6 months. Then they could fire him after "finding" child porn and Al Queda bomb instruction manuals on his pirated-software laden work PC. Which they would turn over to the police department and local vigilante organizations.
Think they wouldn't do it? They're Pirates. Haven't you ever read Treasure Island?
What he should do is agree to do it and request a raise and/or promotion out of the money that is saved.
I don't think you read the sentence starting with "Once..."
Nor do I think you realize how bad a security breech really can be on a multi-user system. How do you "restore" what a user loses by having confidential information made public?
If a single account is owned on a multi-user system, it's almost always because that user did something stupid. And it's not too big a deal. When the system is owned, then every single one of your accounts has been breached, and you need to find out what was changed, what was seen, how to notify people, and how to pay all the lawsuits. It's a big deal. It's the difference between a Bank of America user getting their password stolen and Bank of America getting hacked, for instance.
As a Vista and Ubuntu user, let me inform you that the UAC frequency thing is FUD. In fact 90% of what you read about Vista is FUD -- the slashdot crowd is even worse now than they were with the XP release.
Also, your "current ordinary user" has the capability to delete your thesis, send hate mail to the president, spam to your grandmother, and infect your girlfriend. No, that's not least privilege by any standard.
You are making the mistake of thinking that just because a family has the capability to set up a home box as a multi-user system, that they have the ability to administer one. That level of computer skill exists in my or your household, sure, but not on average.
Yes, I agree that sudo provides some small protection if someone malacious gets physical access to your system. But re-read the last eight words of that sentence.
Your third suggestion is my suggestion from the parent post.
Actually half the purpose of ordinary user accounts being the default is to protect the system from the user. That's why admins routinely work out of ordinary accounts and reserve root for special occasions: as an ordinary user going to type "rm -rf./*" and accidentally getting "rm -rf/*" is recoverable, as root it wouldn't be.
Be clear about what part of sudo you are talking about here: for this purpose, all that matters is that it's a more annoying warning box than usual. And of course it doesn't help the stupid user any more than any other warning box. Users who ignore warning boxes also just type in their passwords without thinking.
There's also another layer of protection. Even if your ordinary user account gets owned, the system files that the root account depends on can't be altered by the malware. Since those system files and tools can't be infected, you can clean up an infection by logging in as root rather than the infected user and be sure that (modulo a local privilege-escalation vulnerability already having been exploited) your tools won't have been infected too. This makes recovery much easier.
Yes, I can clean it up. You can clean it up. Joe user can't clean it up. And it's not you or I who will get infected -- we know enough to keep our boxes up to date -- it's Joe user.
There's a third layer too: humans aren't the only users. Every service on a Unix system is also a user. Since those services typically run as ordinary non-privileged users just like everyone else, vulnerabilities in those services are less critical. If the service is remotely accessible an outsider can crack it, but they don't get any more privilege than an ordinary user (and not even enough privilege to nail the human user's files directly). This limits the amount of damage that can be done.
Now this is the right way to do it. But once again the real potential of this way of doing things has been hampered by the root user mentality. Least Privilege should be extended to every application you run, not just services. No application should have more priviliges than it needs. Or keep those privileges for longer than it needs them. It shouldn't matter whether the application was started by a user clicking on an icon or by the system on startup.
Single user Linux boxes are not more secure due to non-root users being default! After all, when was the last time your user account was owned?
UAC was a bad idea. So is sudo which it copies. So is running a single-user Windows XP box as anything but an Administrative user.
Root security privileges are just fine for a multi-user box. But they don't make sense on most home desktops. (I'm not talking about Slashdot readers who make their girlfriends change their password every 3 weeks, I'm talking about normal Joes.)
The most important data on a multi-user machine is the system data. It's far more important than any single user's data. Once system data integrity is breeched, all user's data is at risk. I'm a sysadmin, and I've seen Unix user accounts owned for various stupid reasons, but system security kept tight despite that.
The most important data on a single user machine is the user data. The system data can be restored from the factory install CDs. In the single user environment, you don't need sudo or root or to run as a non-Administrator. What you need is: 1) To be warned when you are doing something that might break the system. 2) To have programs run only with the privileges they need -- NOT with your full user privileges. Sudo is massive overkill for one -- anything more than a warning box is a dreadful UI decision. No, before you say it, the stupid users don't pay any more attention to "Enter your password:" than any other sort of warning box.
That is why I said "it would appear to kill Bohm's theory" and not "it kills Bohm's theory" (seriously, I changed the latter to the former in editing the post, and didn't bother to check because this is/., and simply having read and understood the primary point of the paper is above-and-beyond the call of duty.
I see. What you're trying to say is that someone who isn't paying attention (you) while reading will come up with a wrong conclusion. And that writing "appears" is just your way of letting us know when you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Thanks for the warning! It's much appreciated.
I note that you do not dispute anything else I have said...
I was trying to be kind. Here goes:
What they have shown is that any "reasonable" nonlocal theory cannot reproduce the results of experiment (which are correctly predicted by quantum mechanics.)
Slow down, cowboy. They've shown by experiment that a class of non-local theories, which they call the "Leggett-model" violate experiment. This is a broad and "reasonable" class of theories -- according to the authors -- but they certainly don't claim that it covers every reasonable theory. And their neglect to list actual theories that they've disproved should show you how much important Leggett-model theories really are to people studying the foundations of QM.
The rest of what you wrote in your comment was a decent summary of their introduction, with the exception of the Bohm comment where you showed that you didn't really read the rest of the paper.
Amongst other things it would appear to kill Bohm's theory because it will not be able to reproduce the predicted correlation results.
That's funny, because on page 872 they specifically exclude Bohmian mechanics from being one of the theories which fit the Leggett model of theories -- those being the theories they show to disagree with experiment. It's almost like you haven't read the Nature article. That couldn't be the case on Slashdot, could it?
We've known for a couple decades that EPR made local hidden variable theories extremely unlikely. The real competitors are non-local. Bohmian mechanics (de-Broglie pilot wave theory, really) is one such. Bohmian mechanics make all the same experimental predictions as normal Quantum Mechanics. Bohmians tend to think of Quantum Mechanics as a non-local theory that only appears local because you talk about probabilities instead of positions. The probabilities of Bohmian mechanics are actually just as local as Quantum Mechanics...
Not that Bohmian mechanics should be viewed as a correct theory. It's clearly an artificial construct. But it's a better theory than QM for the simple fact that it talks about particle positions instead of observers. One assumes, after all, that physics goes on even when physicists aren't there to observe it.
We ran into a Postfix bug on our systems the other month. Apparently spammers can trigger a bounce by including an extra "Mailed-To" line, and that bounce will be sent to the target of their choice. This was exploited to send a bunch of bounce messages from our system to other systems. It's simply part of Postfix's loop detection. Spammers are beginning to use it more and more, but there aren't any plans to fix it by the developers, so far as I know. We wound up fixing this with a Postfix header filter.
I've been running Windows Vista since beta. When the release came out on MSDN, I ran the upgrade from XP to business edition on one of our client computers (we have approximately 100 apps that we support for users, all installed). The only thing that broke was McAfee and one other very minor app. I was extremely impressed. The problems with Vista are highly exaggerated. I bet that less than 5% of the posters to this thread have ever run Vista.
DVORAK is another way to show other people that you're different. Any benefits are minuscule and are outweighed by the incompatibility downsides. It's another symptom of the "geek" disease.
No, the problem was not bad math. The problem was that the engineering design specification did not take into account torsion forces acting upon the magnets. Bad engineering, if anything.
My friend Philip Greenspun constructed a filter at photo.net which bounced all those who misspelled the word "aperture," on the grounds that they did not know much about photography.
But there'd be no posts left if we did that on Slashdot!
It would be nothing but a disaster for GPL and non-GPL users if programmers could no longer read and learn from GPL'd code. Since that's a benefit of the GPL which sane people want to keep, you'll see issues like this crop up from time to time. It's a messy world. The solution is not to maintain a Chinese wall from all GPL'd code -- it's to do our best to keep our copying on the free use side, and not get too worked up when mistakes are made. Michael Buesch's idea that some sort of public shaming was necessary was entirely destructive, and I'm glad that Theo is the sort of guy who stands up for his developers. The punishment should fit the -- rather minor -- crime.
This isn't a "copy and paste" issue. Michael Buesch comes across as a bit of an asshole from all this. This isn't an issue of his code being copied exactly (a straight copyright violation), instead it's an issue of a certain amount of code in an as yet non-working driver being too derivative of a copyrighted product. I'm committing more copyright violation by pasting this mailing list reply from the accused on Slashdot than what has been alleged.
Picon Favicon
From: Marcus Glocker
Subject: Re: OpenBSD bcw: Possible GPL license violation issues
Newsgroups: gmane.linux.kernel.wireless.general, gmane.linux.drivers.bcm54xx.devel
Date: 2007-04-05 05:41:07 GMT (2 days, 12 hours and 27 minutes ago)
On Wed, Apr 04, 2007 at 10:08:13PM +0200, Michael Buesch wrote:
> I, Michael Buesch, am one of the maintainers of the GPL'd Linux
> wireless LAN driver for the Broadcom chip (bcm43xx).
> The Copyright holders of bcm43xx (which includes me) want to talk
> to you, OpenBSD bcw developers, about possible GPL license and therefore
> Copyright violations in your bcw driver.
>
> We believe that you might have directly copied code
> out of bcm43xx (licensed under GPL v2), without our explicit permission,
> into bcw (licensed under BSD license).
> There are implementation details in bcm43xx that appear exactly
> the same in bcw. These implementation details clearly don't come
> from the open specifications at bcm-specs.sipsolutions.net
> or bcm-v4.sipsolutions.net.
>
> We have always made and still make a great effort to keep our code clean
> of any Copyright issues (cleanroom design). Please make sure you also do.
>
> A few examples follow of what we think might be GPL violations.
> This list is far from being complete.
Michael,
I am aware that right now a lot of lines in bcw are written in a way
with a too close eye to your code. That's out of question, and I have
already informed Theo about that fact before you got in touch with
us.
I wanted to make some quick progress (maybe too quick), and rewrite
the functions in question after seeing some first success, e.g.
receivment of first frames, which isn't the case right now. But
still, the specs for some functions are so strict, writing tons
of registers in a strict order, some parts will still look similar.
The last thing I want is to start a license war with you guys,
and also I don't want to harm OpenBSD further with this issue.
And of course we want to solve that license issue ASAP.
So, I am suggestion three options:
You give me some time and I try to rewrite the code
in question. We keep in touch, and maybe we can split
up both parties in freedom afterwards.
Same as option one, but if my time resources keep
shrinking like they do right now, spending weekends
in the office and I can't fix up the driver soon,
I'll drop the driver.
We don't come to a point and I'll plain drop the driver
directly, very soon.
Slashdot Mirror
Why do you believe in rehabilitation if nobody has ever been able to do it, despite vast public expenditure, the best efforts of great minds, the concentration of man's greatest religions? Are you loopy?
The mass of criminality is 7/10ths genetic, 2/10th environment (unshared -- the kind we can't fix), and maybe 1/20th free will. It's unavoidable and unfixable.
Maybe I exaggerate. There is perhaps one way to do it, if you really want to stop crime. Invent a smart pill. Raise everybody's IQ by a standard deviation, and we'll probably be as docile as Asians.
Simple. You hang the bastards. All of them.
Daggerfall can only be considered a classic by those who never actually played it. It was a buggy mess. The only people who enjoyed it were obsessive-compulsive types.
I'm happy with people being parted with their money over something this stupid. All libraries and bookstores destroy books. There isn't enough room for them all. Stealing from the stupid is a good practice though. The more money that gets extracted from the stupid and the gullible, the harder it is for them to breed, and the better off the world is.
You misunderstand how those tools work. Qt, a non-GPL (though open-source) product has two versions: a free version and a non-free version. To use the free version, you agree to produce your code under the GPL. The non-free version has no such restriction.
Qt is not under the GPL itself, though it's used to create GPL code.
The original poster is correct. The LINA FAQ really does present a conundrum: are they releasing their code under GPL or aren't they?
Formation, terrain, supply, and morale are all strategy game possibilities that make for more interesting games (to me) than micromanagement. I like my RTS games cerebral. If I wanted micromanagement, I'd play Diablo.
Taking micromanagement out of the player's hands - and putting it in the computer's hands like it belongs - adds a dimension to the game instead of taking one away. Formation tactics, with direct combat units protecting artillery, etc., can really come to the fore. In Warcraft/Starcraft games, any attempt at formation falls apart immediately upon engagement. Due to the lack of formation tactics, vital military concepts such as "flank" and "rear" have significantly reduced importance in Starcraft. All that is left to emulate combined arms is unit mix.
The fact that your units are your perfect slaves, there for you to micromanage at will, takes away another big chunk of complexity from the game. Your units (and your enemy's units!) should balk at being sent to fight against an impossible foe. They should run away when their formations are shattered. The necessity to regroup, the importance of always leaving your enemies a path to retreat, breaking up enemy lines through artillery, all of these start to take on serious importance when morale matters.
Lines of supply nearly work in Starcraft. They just aren't emphasized. When battles last long enough, the importance of reinforcements arriving from base begin to dominate. With better gameplay engine support for actual lines of supply, this could make for far more interesting games.
Think they wouldn't do it? They're Pirates. Haven't you ever read Treasure Island?
What he should do is agree to do it and request a raise and/or promotion out of the money that is saved.
Could I be introduced to Sarah too?
I don't think you read the sentence starting with "Once..."
Nor do I think you realize how bad a security breech really can be on a multi-user system. How do you "restore" what a user loses by having confidential information made public?
If a single account is owned on a multi-user system, it's almost always because that user did something stupid. And it's not too big a deal. When the system is owned, then every single one of your accounts has been breached, and you need to find out what was changed, what was seen, how to notify people, and how to pay all the lawsuits. It's a big deal. It's the difference between a Bank of America user getting their password stolen and Bank of America getting hacked, for instance.
As a Vista and Ubuntu user, let me inform you that the UAC frequency thing is FUD. In fact 90% of what you read about Vista is FUD -- the slashdot crowd is even worse now than they were with the XP release.
Also, your "current ordinary user" has the capability to delete your thesis, send hate mail to the president, spam to your grandmother, and infect your girlfriend. No, that's not least privilege by any standard.
You are making the mistake of thinking that just because a family has the capability to set up a home box as a multi-user system, that they have the ability to administer one. That level of computer skill exists in my or your household, sure, but not on average.
Yes, I agree that sudo provides some small protection if someone malacious gets physical access to your system. But re-read the last eight words of that sentence.
Your third suggestion is my suggestion from the parent post.
Single user Linux boxes are not more secure due to non-root users being default! After all, when was the last time your user account was owned?
UAC was a bad idea. So is sudo which it copies. So is running a single-user Windows XP box as anything but an Administrative user.
Root security privileges are just fine for a multi-user box. But they don't make sense on most home desktops. (I'm not talking about Slashdot readers who make their girlfriends change their password every 3 weeks, I'm talking about normal Joes.)
The most important data on a multi-user machine is the system data. It's far more important than any single user's data. Once system data integrity is breeched, all user's data is at risk. I'm a sysadmin, and I've seen Unix user accounts owned for various stupid reasons, but system security kept tight despite that.
The most important data on a single user machine is the user data. The system data can be restored from the factory install CDs. In the single user environment, you don't need sudo or root or to run as a non-Administrator. What you need is: 1) To be warned when you are doing something that might break the system. 2) To have programs run only with the privileges they need -- NOT with your full user privileges. Sudo is massive overkill for one -- anything more than a warning box is a dreadful UI decision. No, before you say it, the stupid users don't pay any more attention to "Enter your password:" than any other sort of warning box.
I see. What you're trying to say is that someone who isn't paying attention (you) while reading will come up with a wrong conclusion. And that writing "appears" is just your way of letting us know when you don't know what the hell you're talking about. Thanks for the warning! It's much appreciated.
I was trying to be kind. Here goes:
Slow down, cowboy. They've shown by experiment that a class of non-local theories, which they call the "Leggett-model" violate experiment. This is a broad and "reasonable" class of theories -- according to the authors -- but they certainly don't claim that it covers every reasonable theory. And their neglect to list actual theories that they've disproved should show you how much important Leggett-model theories really are to people studying the foundations of QM.
The rest of what you wrote in your comment was a decent summary of their introduction, with the exception of the Bohm comment where you showed that you didn't really read the rest of the paper.
We've known for a couple decades that EPR made local hidden variable theories extremely unlikely. The real competitors are non-local. Bohmian mechanics (de-Broglie pilot wave theory, really) is one such. Bohmian mechanics make all the same experimental predictions as normal Quantum Mechanics. Bohmians tend to think of Quantum Mechanics as a non-local theory that only appears local because you talk about probabilities instead of positions. The probabilities of Bohmian mechanics are actually just as local as Quantum Mechanics...
Not that Bohmian mechanics should be viewed as a correct theory. It's clearly an artificial construct. But it's a better theory than QM for the simple fact that it talks about particle positions instead of observers. One assumes, after all, that physics goes on even when physicists aren't there to observe it.
We ran into a Postfix bug on our systems the other month. Apparently spammers can trigger a bounce by including an extra "Mailed-To" line, and that bounce will be sent to the target of their choice. This was exploited to send a bunch of bounce messages from our system to other systems. It's simply part of Postfix's loop detection. Spammers are beginning to use it more and more, but there aren't any plans to fix it by the developers, so far as I know. We wound up fixing this with a Postfix header filter.
I've been running Windows Vista since beta. When the release came out on MSDN, I ran the upgrade from XP to business edition on one of our client computers (we have approximately 100 apps that we support for users, all installed). The only thing that broke was McAfee and one other very minor app. I was extremely impressed. The problems with Vista are highly exaggerated. I bet that less than 5% of the posters to this thread have ever run Vista.
Is that you, Al Roker?
DVORAK is another way to show other people that you're different. Any benefits are minuscule and are outweighed by the incompatibility downsides. It's another symptom of the "geek" disease.
No, the problem was not bad math. The problem was that the engineering design specification did not take into account torsion forces acting upon the magnets. Bad engineering, if anything.
It would be nothing but a disaster for GPL and non-GPL users if programmers could no longer read and learn from GPL'd code. Since that's a benefit of the GPL which sane people want to keep, you'll see issues like this crop up from time to time. It's a messy world. The solution is not to maintain a Chinese wall from all GPL'd code -- it's to do our best to keep our copying on the free use side, and not get too worked up when mistakes are made. Michael Buesch's idea that some sort of public shaming was necessary was entirely destructive, and I'm glad that Theo is the sort of guy who stands up for his developers. The punishment should fit the -- rather minor -- crime.