I realize you were joking, but there isn't really anything conceptually difficult about recursion. It just means that part of the program refers back to itself. Whenever you have self-similarity in the program's control flow, including the trivial case of repetition, you have recursion.
I think part of the problem is that most students are introduced to specialized loop keywords and "the" stack (a mere implementation detail) first, and only exposed to explicit recursion later as an "advanced" concept. Recursion should come first. Really, which is easier to understand:
From a modern compiler's point of view (with support for tail-call optimization) these examples are exactly equivalent, but the recursive version doesn't require an understanding of mutation, which is counter-intuitive for many beginners, and makes the control flow explicit where the "while" statement hides the control flow behind a special keyword.
I was speaking from the point of view of one insurance company. They have to provide the various agencies that administer ACA the access that the agencies demand.
Under the system I described, the insurance company can provide any level of access required. Even a full database dump, if necessary—just make sure it's locked down so that such requests can only come the agency needing access. If they want to use their own transfer protocol, arrange for a hardened proxy server and do whatever protocol translation you need at that point. If your database gets hacked through an insecure interface demanded by some external agency, there will be a log entry recording that proxy as the source and everyone will know who is to blame.
If the IRS, the insurance company, the hospital, the state, and the billing company can read the data, the bad guy can read it too. The data may very well be encrypted on-disk, so if someone stole the hard drive they couldn't easily read it. It has to be decrypted by the system, though in order to be useful.
That isn't really true. A well-designed system (they do exist) would leave the decryption to a dedicated security module, separate from where the data is stored. To gain access to the data you first establish a secure connection to the data store, authenticate yourself, and retrieve the encrypted data. You then connect to the security module, re-authenticate, and present the encrypted data along with a (crypographically signed) request for decryption. The security module logs and validates the request, decrypts the data, and sends the plaintext back to the client through the encrypted connection. At no point does any system other than the security module and the client's computer have access to the plaintext, and the rules for validating requests can be as strict as you like.
The security module is an obvious target for attack, but it's also a single-purpose system on which you can focus all your security-hardening efforts.
What logical basis do you propose for this exception? Unvaccinated is unvaccinated. Those who were not vaccinated for perfectly good medical reasons are exactly as much a threat to you and your kids as those who were not vaccinated due to philosophical objections or any other reason.
When it comes down to it, your willingness to tolerate this exception shows that your intent is merely to punish people for not helping out with your vaccination program, not to protect yourself against any reasonable threat of infection.
But what of carriers (Typhoid Mary being the obvious example) and conditions where you can be contagious and asymptomatic?
Typhoid Mary is a particularly poor example here because she was well aware that she was contagious, having been informed of that fact on several occasions, and yet repeatedly placed herself in an ideal position to pass the disease on to others. That isn't negligence, it's deliberate harm.
As for the rare cases where one can be asymptomatic and yet contagious, that's a risk you'll just have to take. It's not like vaccination eliminates that risk; even ignoring the fact that it isn't 100% effective, those who are immune can still be carriers. The most effective response in this case is to practice basic sanitation measures and limit direct contact, regardless of vaccination status.
It is reasonable for society to impose certain restrictions upon your freedom in exchange for the privilege of being a participant.
Nonsense. Putting aside the slip into ambiguous collectivist language ("society" does nothing; only individuals are capable of making choices and taking action), it is reasonable for you to exercise your freedom and refrain from contact with the unvaccinated, if that is your choice. Your fears do not justify restricting the freedom of others.
I trust that when I let my child play with your child that you will do a whole list of things, and one of those is that you will do your best to ensure my child is not exposed to life threatening conditions.
Sure, and there's nothing wrong with that. The ability to trust in others on the basis of common experiences and values is a good thing, when it isn't being abused as an excuse for aggression. But don't trust blindly; it's up to you to take steps to ensure that the other parents you associate with are in agreement with you regarding what is reasonable and necessary for the protection of all your children. And if it happens that such agreement is lacking, to find a voluntary response to the situation rather than resorting to violence and threats.
As I said before, I am not opposed to vaccination per se. It's a great invention and most people should choose to be vaccinated and to vaccinate their children unless they have a good medical reason not to. All I'm saying is that people should not be forced to undergo a medical procedure against their will (or against their parents' will, in the case of children), and that the choice to avoid vaccination is not, in and of itself, an act of violence against others—negligent or otherwise.
In the end, you want everyone else to be vaccinated so that you (and your kids) do not run the risk of accidentally contracting a disease against your will, which you consider harmful. To that end, you're willing to deliberately force others to undergo a medical procedure against their will, which they consider harmful. The hypocrisy in this position should be self-evident.
refusal to vaccinate your kids can easily be seen as an act of negligent violence against others (me).
No, it can't. Refusal to vaccinate yourself or your kids does not, by itself, cause harm to anyone else. If any harm does occur later on, it will be due to interacting with others while infected and contagious. Provided that the proper steps are taken, it is perfectly possible for the unvaccinated to avoid becoming infected, and even if infected, to avoid passing the disease on to others during the contagious period. Vaccination is certainly more convenient, but it is hardly the only way to avoid passing on diseases short of total isolation.
"Negligence" is a tenuous argument at the best of times; to apply it here, you would need to show that the individual had reason to believe that he or she (or his/her child) was actually contagious and chose to interact with others anyway without taking effective precautions to prevent the spread of the disease.
I favor vaccination, but I also feel very strongly that people have the right to decline any medical procedure they do not wish to undergo, vaccination included.
do libertarians believe that you shouldn't be forced to correct your eyesight before being granted a license to drive? vaccinations can be considered a similar public-health measure affording you the right to enter public spaces.
What libertarians generally believe, as a direct consequence of the Non-Aggression Principle, is that the owner of the road decides the terms for the use of his or her private property. Either a space is privately owned by someone, who has the right to determine who can enter it and how it can be used, or else it is unowned and thus available for anyone to homestead. There are no "public spaces", and no one has the authority to enact a "public-health measure" restricting the use of others' property.
How does that work?... If the driver doesn't review anyone, then no one can ever see the passengers reviews?
There's a simple solution for that: give both sides a fixed amount of time (several days) to enter a review. Reviews remain hidden until the time limit has passed.
The site should allow reviews to be edited until the time limit expires, rather than locking in reviews once both sides have submitted, to as a safeguard against coercion. Otherwise one party could force the other to enter a positive review while they watch, then lock it in by submitting their own review.
Oh how about a new protocol extension that allows one designated program to receive all keyboard inputs regardless of any other grabs. The X11 server can keep on pretending that the other grabbers still have such a grab.
I'm not really sure how creating yet another way for a "designated program" to monitor input events is supposed to address the problem that any X11 client can monitor keyboard events on any window in the absence of a grab, unless you intend to rewrite all existing software to grab the keyboard on receiving input focus, and force all the desktop environments to implement support for the extension and move their global keybindings into a specially designated client. At that point you might was well switch to a system designed for secure I/O from day one—like Wayland.
Look: X11 works on Windows even though windows can apparently REALLY gab the keyboard. X11 will we are told work on Wayland too despite the fact that wayland can apparently REALLY grab they keyboard. Do you really think it couldn't be extended to do that itself?
It's no different with a rootless X server on Windows. Input received by any X window can be observed by any X client, unless one client grabs the input. XWayland will probably work the same way, with native Wayland clients secure from each other and from X11 clients but no isolation between X11 clients and no support for grabbing input directed at non-X11 windows. XWayland is meant as a shim between the Wayland compositor and ordinary X clients; it doesn't support external window managers and isn't expected to host a full X11 desktop environment. You wouldn't run something like a screen locker as an X11 client under XWayland. It wouldn't be secure, for the same reasons that screen lockers aren't secure under X11 now, and similar compatibility problems would occur if you tried to implement the Wayland input model with X11 extensions.
It's easy to implement the insecure X11 model on top of a secure system. The reverse is much more difficult.
Some other window most likely does have the keyboard focus, but that's not the same as grabbing the keyboard. Having the focus doesn't prevent input events from also being delivered to other windows, it just tells the non-focused windows to ignore the events. Integrity and privacy for both input and output is a hard problem and something very few windowing systems manage to get right. The solutions tend to involve some degree of inconvenience for the user.
What exactly would you propose to add? This isn't a matter of implementing new functionality, but rather removing fundamental misfeatures. Any change to address this issue is going to end up breaking existing applications which depend on the original input behavior.
In any case this is hardly the only reason to switch to Wayland. It's just one of many areas which highlights the drawbacks of trying to tack modern best practices on top of an aging framework. Better to adopt a clean and modern design as the base and confine the hackish workarounds needed to support older clients to a separate compatibility layer.
I'm not familiar with writing apps for X, but are you saying that every program that displays a window in X can log all keystrokes including in windows that are not associated with that program?
Yes. This isn't just X, by the way; it's a common design across most operating systems. Any client can register to receive keyboard and mouse input regardless of the current focus, unless another client has already "grabbed" the input device. This is how things like global keybindings are typically implemented. Windows used for password entry (including lock screens) can grab the keyboard to prevent other programs from listening in. The problem is that this only works if no other program has already grabbed the keyboard.
Secure input handling is one of the many reasons why everyone is eventually planning to switch to Wayland. Under Wayland, only the compositor has access to the raw input or the ability to inject simulated input events. The compositor manages any global keybindings and forwards the remaining events exclusively to the active window.
If you are calling trying to stop things like the Charlie Hebdo a Nanny State then I think your definitions are a bit off.
The concept of the "Nanny State" is more about means than ends. If a state's approach to "protecting" people involves restricting their freedom, then it's a Nanny State. The goal is laudable, but does not justify the means.
It's just like handing over keys to a storage cabinet you own. There's no Fifth Amendment protection here. You aren't being forced to testify against yourself.
You're assuming that they already know that you have the keys. If they don't know that, then demanding that you open the cabinet amounts to a call for self-incrimination—not because of the contents per se, but because it would show that you had access to the contents. (Perhaps you received a locked cabinet with no key, and have no idea what may be inside.)
Similarly, if they haven't already shown that you have access to the social media account in question, then simply revealing that you know the password would be self-incrimination. Perhaps someone else set up the account in an attempt to frame you.
If they know that an account was used for cyber-bullying, but don't know for sure that it was you using the account, revealing that you know the password would already be self-incrimination. You don't need to make up a convoluted password in order to plead the 5th.
Timezones exist because the world is curved around the axis of rotation, meaning that the angle to the Sun varies according to one's longitude. If the world were flat, but still rotating so as to allow for day and night, then the Sun would be at (very nearly) the same angle to the ground everywhere, and thus the time should be the same everywhere.
Unless there are people living on the back of the plane, that is, in which case there would be two diametrically opposed timezones rather than the continuous variation you get with a sphere or cylinder.
Please; this had nothing to do with systemd. It's about PackageKit, which has been around for quite a bit longer. The problem is with the part of their PackageKit configuration which apparently allows administrators to install software without authenticating first. It's rather like putting the line
%wheel ALL = (root) NOPASSWD:/usr/bin/yum
in your sudoers file. PolicyKit can also be configured to require authentication for each action, it just wasn't set up that way on their system. There's nothing wrong with identifying the members of the "wheel" group as administrators, but the policies should be configured such that administrators need to authenticate prior to installing new software. (This seems to be the default on CentOS 6.4; I have no idea what they were running. "pkcon install" does not work by default here without authentication, even for a member of the "wheel" group.)
They can very easily block anything that is not in plain text.
You can put whatever data you want inside a "plain text" message. Even under wartime conditions where all messages in and out are reviewed by actual humans, people still manage to get secrets through—and that approach doesn't scale. Any automated Internet censorship system (short of shutting down the Internet entirely) would leak like a sieve.
You can, however, mine iron more efficiently if you have plenty of information at hand regarding the locations of the richest deposits, the latest mining techniques, and the state of the futures markets. The same goes for crops—better information regarding the health of your fields, meteorological forecasts, market conditions, and the latest agricultural developments all make for higher yields, and that's before you even consider the information-heavy R&D required for modern GMO crops.
Rapid worldwide information networks take the guesswork out of the economy, so that you don't spend months mining iron ore or growing crops only to discover when you finally deliver your finished product to market half a world away that the demand lies elsewhere. Producers can find out about changes in supply and demand as they occur and adjust their investments accordingly. That alone is a major development in its own right.
What is the guarantee your digital format will be readable after 100 years?
Provided there's still anyone who cares about the data after 100 years, I'd say the odds of it surviving completely intact are fairly good, especially if you use the space recovered through digital compression to store error-correcting codes. It's unlikely that we'd forget how to decode popular formats like MP3, FLAC or JPEG in such a short time, absent a global catastrophe of sufficient order to drive the entire human race back into the stone age.
I'll admit that analogue still images do have digital beat in one area, ease of access. For all its faults, at least film doesn't need a complicated decoder; just shine some light on it (or through it). Of course, that only works because you're not operating anywhere near the limits of your storage medium. How many analog images do you think you can fit in 15x11mm? My comparatively cheap 32GB micro-SD card can hold around 3,000 8MP raws (~10MB each), which is pushing the limits of consumer optics. With reasonable compression you could easily double that. At that scale I think you'd need a bit more than just a magnifying glass to see the individual images.
My response was really to this line, however:
But, we could do things with equally modern analog technology that would blow digital out of the water.
Any "modern analog technology" can be exploited for the storage of digital data, and thus benefits digital at least as much as analog. Analog is never going to "blow digital out of the water". It has its niche areas, like archival film for ease of access, and loses to digital everywhere else regardless of the recording technology.
You could use those same materials to store digital versions of the media far more compactly, with equivalent quality. Even lossless audio compression (FLAC) would reduce the amount of material required by 40-50%; the benefits are greater for video, much less something like a hologram. (Yes, you can store holograms digitally.)
Raw signals contain a lot of redundancy. Any real-world signal can be converted losslessly between analog and digital; a prime advantage of the digital representation is that it can be processed to remove that redundancy. Also, near-ideal filters can be implemented much more easily as DSP programs than as networks of analog components.
Non-action can never count as causing harm. The villains in this story are the diseases, not the unvaccinated. It's great that you want to fight diseases, but if your particular method of fighting disease requires others to undergo a medical procedure, that has to be their choice. You need to persuade them to cooperate; they've done nothing to justify the use of force against them.
Of course, this is all tied up with the taxation and mandatory education requirements (which, needless to say, are immoral to start with regardless of the vaccination issue). By accepting tax subsidies and requiring attendance the public schools have forfeited any right they might have otherwise had to turn anyone away. Their mandate is to provide education, not enforce vaccination.
Ergo, if you don't want to vaccinate your child you're free to do that, but be prepared to pay for private education.
The problem for the most part isn't the need to pay for a private education, it's that you are made to pay for both. You're still forced to pay for a public education even though your kids aren't eligible to attend. Without those taxes, the cost of attending a private school would be far less onerous. It's not like the private schools are that much more expensive to run; they just aren't subsidized the way the public schools are.
Education should be treated as just another cost of raising a child, to be paid for by the parents, no different keeping the child fed and clothed and under shelter. In cases of genuine hardship—as opposed to negligent planning—the parent can apply for charitable assistance, which may come with strings attached, such as vaccination and parental participation.
Why bother making the fee compulsory if you're going to allow people to just turn around and charge a fee of $0?
There's a simple answer to that: charge any publisher who wants to be relisted the mandatory compensation amount, plus 10%. Let the publishers pay their own subsidy.
On one hand, people should get paid for putting in extra hours.
No, and that misconception is part of the problem. People should get paid more for accomplishing more, regardless of how much time they spend on it. I'm no fan of long work weeks, but that just means that expectations ought to be set based on what an average employee can accomplish in 35-40 hours rather an 50-60. If you happen to be less productive than the average employee you can either put in more time or settle for a lower salary.
However, that's more or less how it already works for salaried positions. If most employees were already putting in 45-50 hours when you signed up, then you should have considered that when negotiating your salary. It's wrong to look at it as if you'd agreed to 40 hours and were later forced to work extra "for free". Even if the policy changed after you were already working there, you can always renegotiate. (And if that isn't an option due to competition for your job, it's a sign that you're already getting a relatively good deal which other candidates would be glad to accept.)
If they have a warrant, they'll have no problem with a consumer device. "We have a warrant. Decrypt your phone or we arrest you". This is similiar to "We have a search warrant. Tell your guards to step aside, and open your safe for us. Or we arrest you."
The warrant means that you have to stand aside while they perform the indicated search or seizure. It doesn't mean you have to help them. (You might choose to open the safe rather than see it destroyed when they're going to get into it one way or the other. That doesn't really apply to encrypted data.) If they want your assistance in gathering information then they need a subpoena, not a warrant, and that comes with a different set of restrictions and penalties for non-compliance.
Slashdot Mirror
It's recursion. Therefore fundamentally incomprehensible!
I realize you were joking, but there isn't really anything conceptually difficult about recursion. It just means that part of the program refers back to itself. Whenever you have self-similarity in the program's control flow, including the trivial case of repetition, you have recursion.
I think part of the problem is that most students are introduced to specialized loop keywords and "the" stack (a mere implementation detail) first, and only exposed to explicit recursion later as an "advanced" concept. Recursion should come first. Really, which is easier to understand:
From a modern compiler's point of view (with support for tail-call optimization) these examples are exactly equivalent, but the recursive version doesn't require an understanding of mutation, which is counter-intuitive for many beginners, and makes the control flow explicit where the "while" statement hides the control flow behind a special keyword.
I was speaking from the point of view of one insurance company. They have to provide the various agencies that administer ACA the access that the agencies demand.
Under the system I described, the insurance company can provide any level of access required. Even a full database dump, if necessary—just make sure it's locked down so that such requests can only come the agency needing access. If they want to use their own transfer protocol, arrange for a hardened proxy server and do whatever protocol translation you need at that point. If your database gets hacked through an insecure interface demanded by some external agency, there will be a log entry recording that proxy as the source and everyone will know who is to blame.
If the IRS, the insurance company, the hospital, the state, and the billing company can read the data, the bad guy can read it too. The data may very well be encrypted on-disk, so if someone stole the hard drive they couldn't easily read it. It has to be decrypted by the system, though in order to be useful.
That isn't really true. A well-designed system (they do exist) would leave the decryption to a dedicated security module, separate from where the data is stored. To gain access to the data you first establish a secure connection to the data store, authenticate yourself, and retrieve the encrypted data. You then connect to the security module, re-authenticate, and present the encrypted data along with a (crypographically signed) request for decryption. The security module logs and validates the request, decrypts the data, and sends the plaintext back to the client through the encrypted connection. At no point does any system other than the security module and the client's computer have access to the plaintext, and the rules for validating requests can be as strict as you like.
The security module is an obvious target for attack, but it's also a single-purpose system on which you can focus all your security-hardening efforts.
(*)except those who have a medical condition
What logical basis do you propose for this exception? Unvaccinated is unvaccinated. Those who were not vaccinated for perfectly good medical reasons are exactly as much a threat to you and your kids as those who were not vaccinated due to philosophical objections or any other reason.
When it comes down to it, your willingness to tolerate this exception shows that your intent is merely to punish people for not helping out with your vaccination program, not to protect yourself against any reasonable threat of infection.
But what of carriers (Typhoid Mary being the obvious example) and conditions where you can be contagious and asymptomatic?
Typhoid Mary is a particularly poor example here because she was well aware that she was contagious, having been informed of that fact on several occasions, and yet repeatedly placed herself in an ideal position to pass the disease on to others. That isn't negligence, it's deliberate harm.
As for the rare cases where one can be asymptomatic and yet contagious, that's a risk you'll just have to take. It's not like vaccination eliminates that risk; even ignoring the fact that it isn't 100% effective, those who are immune can still be carriers. The most effective response in this case is to practice basic sanitation measures and limit direct contact, regardless of vaccination status.
It is reasonable for society to impose certain restrictions upon your freedom in exchange for the privilege of being a participant.
Nonsense. Putting aside the slip into ambiguous collectivist language ("society" does nothing; only individuals are capable of making choices and taking action), it is reasonable for you to exercise your freedom and refrain from contact with the unvaccinated, if that is your choice. Your fears do not justify restricting the freedom of others.
I trust that when I let my child play with your child that you will do a whole list of things, and one of those is that you will do your best to ensure my child is not exposed to life threatening conditions.
Sure, and there's nothing wrong with that. The ability to trust in others on the basis of common experiences and values is a good thing, when it isn't being abused as an excuse for aggression. But don't trust blindly; it's up to you to take steps to ensure that the other parents you associate with are in agreement with you regarding what is reasonable and necessary for the protection of all your children. And if it happens that such agreement is lacking, to find a voluntary response to the situation rather than resorting to violence and threats.
As I said before, I am not opposed to vaccination per se. It's a great invention and most people should choose to be vaccinated and to vaccinate their children unless they have a good medical reason not to. All I'm saying is that people should not be forced to undergo a medical procedure against their will (or against their parents' will, in the case of children), and that the choice to avoid vaccination is not, in and of itself, an act of violence against others—negligent or otherwise.
In the end, you want everyone else to be vaccinated so that you (and your kids) do not run the risk of accidentally contracting a disease against your will, which you consider harmful. To that end, you're willing to deliberately force others to undergo a medical procedure against their will, which they consider harmful. The hypocrisy in this position should be self-evident.
refusal to vaccinate your kids can easily be seen as an act of negligent violence against others (me).
No, it can't. Refusal to vaccinate yourself or your kids does not, by itself, cause harm to anyone else. If any harm does occur later on, it will be due to interacting with others while infected and contagious. Provided that the proper steps are taken, it is perfectly possible for the unvaccinated to avoid becoming infected, and even if infected, to avoid passing the disease on to others during the contagious period. Vaccination is certainly more convenient, but it is hardly the only way to avoid passing on diseases short of total isolation.
"Negligence" is a tenuous argument at the best of times; to apply it here, you would need to show that the individual had reason to believe that he or she (or his/her child) was actually contagious and chose to interact with others anyway without taking effective precautions to prevent the spread of the disease.
I favor vaccination, but I also feel very strongly that people have the right to decline any medical procedure they do not wish to undergo, vaccination included.
do libertarians believe that you shouldn't be forced to correct your eyesight before being granted a license to drive? vaccinations can be considered a similar public-health measure affording you the right to enter public spaces.
What libertarians generally believe, as a direct consequence of the Non-Aggression Principle, is that the owner of the road decides the terms for the use of his or her private property. Either a space is privately owned by someone, who has the right to determine who can enter it and how it can be used, or else it is unowned and thus available for anyone to homestead. There are no "public spaces", and no one has the authority to enact a "public-health measure" restricting the use of others' property.
How does that work? ... If the driver doesn't review anyone, then no one can ever see the passengers reviews?
There's a simple solution for that: give both sides a fixed amount of time (several days) to enter a review. Reviews remain hidden until the time limit has passed.
The site should allow reviews to be edited until the time limit expires, rather than locking in reviews once both sides have submitted, to as a safeguard against coercion. Otherwise one party could force the other to enter a positive review while they watch, then lock it in by submitting their own review.
Oh how about a new protocol extension that allows one designated program to receive all keyboard inputs regardless of any other grabs. The X11 server can keep on pretending that the other grabbers still have such a grab.
I'm not really sure how creating yet another way for a "designated program" to monitor input events is supposed to address the problem that any X11 client can monitor keyboard events on any window in the absence of a grab, unless you intend to rewrite all existing software to grab the keyboard on receiving input focus, and force all the desktop environments to implement support for the extension and move their global keybindings into a specially designated client. At that point you might was well switch to a system designed for secure I/O from day one—like Wayland.
Look: X11 works on Windows even though windows can apparently REALLY gab the keyboard. X11 will we are told work on Wayland too despite the fact that wayland can apparently REALLY grab they keyboard. Do you really think it couldn't be extended to do that itself?
It's no different with a rootless X server on Windows. Input received by any X window can be observed by any X client, unless one client grabs the input. XWayland will probably work the same way, with native Wayland clients secure from each other and from X11 clients but no isolation between X11 clients and no support for grabbing input directed at non-X11 windows. XWayland is meant as a shim between the Wayland compositor and ordinary X clients; it doesn't support external window managers and isn't expected to host a full X11 desktop environment. You wouldn't run something like a screen locker as an X11 client under XWayland. It wouldn't be secure, for the same reasons that screen lockers aren't secure under X11 now, and similar compatibility problems would occur if you tried to implement the Wayland input model with X11 extensions.
It's easy to implement the insecure X11 model on top of a secure system. The reverse is much more difficult.
Some other window most likely does have the keyboard focus, but that's not the same as grabbing the keyboard. Having the focus doesn't prevent input events from also being delivered to other windows, it just tells the non-focused windows to ignore the events. Integrity and privacy for both input and output is a hard problem and something very few windowing systems manage to get right. The solutions tend to involve some degree of inconvenience for the user.
What exactly would you propose to add? This isn't a matter of implementing new functionality, but rather removing fundamental misfeatures. Any change to address this issue is going to end up breaking existing applications which depend on the original input behavior.
In any case this is hardly the only reason to switch to Wayland. It's just one of many areas which highlights the drawbacks of trying to tack modern best practices on top of an aging framework. Better to adopt a clean and modern design as the base and confine the hackish workarounds needed to support older clients to a separate compatibility layer.
I'm not familiar with writing apps for X, but are you saying that every program that displays a window in X can log all keystrokes including in windows that are not associated with that program?
Yes. This isn't just X, by the way; it's a common design across most operating systems. Any client can register to receive keyboard and mouse input regardless of the current focus, unless another client has already "grabbed" the input device. This is how things like global keybindings are typically implemented. Windows used for password entry (including lock screens) can grab the keyboard to prevent other programs from listening in. The problem is that this only works if no other program has already grabbed the keyboard.
Secure input handling is one of the many reasons why everyone is eventually planning to switch to Wayland. Under Wayland, only the compositor has access to the raw input or the ability to inject simulated input events. The compositor manages any global keybindings and forwards the remaining events exclusively to the active window.
If you are calling trying to stop things like the Charlie Hebdo a Nanny State then I think your definitions are a bit off.
The concept of the "Nanny State" is more about means than ends. If a state's approach to "protecting" people involves restricting their freedom, then it's a Nanny State. The goal is laudable, but does not justify the means.
It's just like handing over keys to a storage cabinet you own. There's no Fifth Amendment protection here. You aren't being forced to testify against yourself.
You're assuming that they already know that you have the keys. If they don't know that, then demanding that you open the cabinet amounts to a call for self-incrimination—not because of the contents per se, but because it would show that you had access to the contents. (Perhaps you received a locked cabinet with no key, and have no idea what may be inside.)
Similarly, if they haven't already shown that you have access to the social media account in question, then simply revealing that you know the password would be self-incrimination. Perhaps someone else set up the account in an attempt to frame you.
If they know that an account was used for cyber-bullying, but don't know for sure that it was you using the account, revealing that you know the password would already be self-incrimination. You don't need to make up a convoluted password in order to plead the 5th.
Timezones exist because the world is curved around the axis of rotation, meaning that the angle to the Sun varies according to one's longitude. If the world were flat, but still rotating so as to allow for day and night, then the Sun would be at (very nearly) the same angle to the ground everywhere, and thus the time should be the same everywhere.
Unless there are people living on the back of the plane, that is, in which case there would be two diametrically opposed timezones rather than the continuous variation you get with a sphere or cylinder.
Please; this had nothing to do with systemd. It's about PackageKit, which has been around for quite a bit longer. The problem is with the part of their PackageKit configuration which apparently allows administrators to install software without authenticating first. It's rather like putting the line
%wheel ALL = (root) NOPASSWD: /usr/bin/yum
in your sudoers file. PolicyKit can also be configured to require authentication for each action, it just wasn't set up that way on their system. There's nothing wrong with identifying the members of the "wheel" group as administrators, but the policies should be configured such that administrators need to authenticate prior to installing new software. (This seems to be the default on CentOS 6.4; I have no idea what they were running. "pkcon install" does not work by default here without authentication, even for a member of the "wheel" group.)
They can very easily block anything that is not in plain text.
You can put whatever data you want inside a "plain text" message. Even under wartime conditions where all messages in and out are reviewed by actual humans, people still manage to get secrets through—and that approach doesn't scale. Any automated Internet censorship system (short of shutting down the Internet entirely) would leak like a sieve.
You can, however, mine iron more efficiently if you have plenty of information at hand regarding the locations of the richest deposits, the latest mining techniques, and the state of the futures markets. The same goes for crops—better information regarding the health of your fields, meteorological forecasts, market conditions, and the latest agricultural developments all make for higher yields, and that's before you even consider the information-heavy R&D required for modern GMO crops.
Rapid worldwide information networks take the guesswork out of the economy, so that you don't spend months mining iron ore or growing crops only to discover when you finally deliver your finished product to market half a world away that the demand lies elsewhere. Producers can find out about changes in supply and demand as they occur and adjust their investments accordingly. That alone is a major development in its own right.
What is the guarantee your digital format will be readable after 100 years?
Provided there's still anyone who cares about the data after 100 years, I'd say the odds of it surviving completely intact are fairly good, especially if you use the space recovered through digital compression to store error-correcting codes. It's unlikely that we'd forget how to decode popular formats like MP3, FLAC or JPEG in such a short time, absent a global catastrophe of sufficient order to drive the entire human race back into the stone age.
I'll admit that analogue still images do have digital beat in one area, ease of access. For all its faults, at least film doesn't need a complicated decoder; just shine some light on it (or through it). Of course, that only works because you're not operating anywhere near the limits of your storage medium. How many analog images do you think you can fit in 15x11mm? My comparatively cheap 32GB micro-SD card can hold around 3,000 8MP raws (~10MB each), which is pushing the limits of consumer optics. With reasonable compression you could easily double that. At that scale I think you'd need a bit more than just a magnifying glass to see the individual images.
My response was really to this line, however:
But, we could do things with equally modern analog technology that would blow digital out of the water.
Any "modern analog technology" can be exploited for the storage of digital data, and thus benefits digital at least as much as analog. Analog is never going to "blow digital out of the water". It has its niche areas, like archival film for ease of access, and loses to digital everywhere else regardless of the recording technology.
You could use those same materials to store digital versions of the media far more compactly, with equivalent quality. Even lossless audio compression (FLAC) would reduce the amount of material required by 40-50%; the benefits are greater for video, much less something like a hologram. (Yes, you can store holograms digitally.)
Raw signals contain a lot of redundancy. Any real-world signal can be converted losslessly between analog and digital; a prime advantage of the digital representation is that it can be processed to remove that redundancy. Also, near-ideal filters can be implemented much more easily as DSP programs than as networks of analog components.
Non-action can never count as causing harm. The villains in this story are the diseases, not the unvaccinated. It's great that you want to fight diseases, but if your particular method of fighting disease requires others to undergo a medical procedure, that has to be their choice. You need to persuade them to cooperate; they've done nothing to justify the use of force against them.
Of course, this is all tied up with the taxation and mandatory education requirements (which, needless to say, are immoral to start with regardless of the vaccination issue). By accepting tax subsidies and requiring attendance the public schools have forfeited any right they might have otherwise had to turn anyone away. Their mandate is to provide education, not enforce vaccination.
Ergo, if you don't want to vaccinate your child you're free to do that, but be prepared to pay for private education.
The problem for the most part isn't the need to pay for a private education, it's that you are made to pay for both. You're still forced to pay for a public education even though your kids aren't eligible to attend. Without those taxes, the cost of attending a private school would be far less onerous. It's not like the private schools are that much more expensive to run; they just aren't subsidized the way the public schools are.
Education should be treated as just another cost of raising a child, to be paid for by the parents, no different keeping the child fed and clothed and under shelter. In cases of genuine hardship—as opposed to negligent planning—the parent can apply for charitable assistance, which may come with strings attached, such as vaccination and parental participation.
Why bother making the fee compulsory if you're going to allow people to just turn around and charge a fee of $0?
There's a simple answer to that: charge any publisher who wants to be relisted the mandatory compensation amount, plus 10%. Let the publishers pay their own subsidy.
On one hand, people should get paid for putting in extra hours.
No, and that misconception is part of the problem. People should get paid more for accomplishing more, regardless of how much time they spend on it. I'm no fan of long work weeks, but that just means that expectations ought to be set based on what an average employee can accomplish in 35-40 hours rather an 50-60. If you happen to be less productive than the average employee you can either put in more time or settle for a lower salary.
However, that's more or less how it already works for salaried positions. If most employees were already putting in 45-50 hours when you signed up, then you should have considered that when negotiating your salary. It's wrong to look at it as if you'd agreed to 40 hours and were later forced to work extra "for free". Even if the policy changed after you were already working there, you can always renegotiate. (And if that isn't an option due to competition for your job, it's a sign that you're already getting a relatively good deal which other candidates would be glad to accept.)
If they have a warrant, they'll have no problem with a consumer device. "We have a warrant. Decrypt your phone or we arrest you". This is similiar to "We have a search warrant. Tell your guards to step aside, and open your safe for us. Or we arrest you."
The warrant means that you have to stand aside while they perform the indicated search or seizure. It doesn't mean you have to help them. (You might choose to open the safe rather than see it destroyed when they're going to get into it one way or the other. That doesn't really apply to encrypted data.) If they want your assistance in gathering information then they need a subpoena, not a warrant, and that comes with a different set of restrictions and penalties for non-compliance.