He was speaking in the context of a discussion of P2P use on University networks. With that in mind, it is not really so far out of line.
He is if the college goers are registered voters. I don't think the Texas A&M student body would appreciate being referred to as "these kids". Who would have thought that tactless politicians could come from Texas? Is there a precident to that?
A reasonable code escrow system will be a gov't office that recieves source code, and that enters it into the public domain once a pre-set revenue from the project is met.
So long as it is indeed based on revenue and not profits. We all know slippery companies can be when it comes to finances.
And don't tell me that companies aren't above offering software under a GPL wrapper to gain momentum or appear community friendly without ever intending to follow through.
The article isn't clear about this, but the entire exchange (money too) would have to be in the hands of the escrow entity. I know that's the definition of escrow, but that didn't seem obvious from the proposed solution...the escrow company would effectively have to have their own storefront or purchasing mechanism so they could keep track of the dollars.
it takes nearly five gallons of crude oil to produce one bushel of corn
I call bullshit on this one.
There is no way it takes 5 gallons of crude oil to create a bushel of corn. A gallon of crude costs about $.50, while a bushel of corn costs under $2.00. If this was true, every corn farmer in America would have gone broke a long time ago.
One need look no further than the $190 billion farm bill President Bush signed last month to wonder whose interests are really being served here. Under the 10-year program, taxpayers will pay farmers $4 billion a year to grow ever more corn, this despite the fact that we struggle to get rid of the surplus the plant already produces. The average bushel of corn (56 pounds) sells for about $2 today; it costs farmers more than $3 to grow it. But rather than design a program that would encourage farmers to plant less corn -- which would have the benefit of lifting the price farmers receive for it -- Congress has decided instead to subsidize corn by the bushel, thereby insuring that zea mays dominion over its 125,000-square mile American habitat will go unchallenged.
Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock in this country takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil -- 1.2 gallons for every bushel. So the modern feedlot is really a city floating on a sea of oil.
The corn, in breathtaking defiance of economic common sense, sells for 50 a bushel less than it costs to produce, without regard to the foregone value of the water.
The amount of fossil fuel needed to produce one bushel of corn has been estimated at anywhere from one to six gallons.... Today's farm requires fossil fuels to manufacture fertilizer, power machinery and transport the final product. The short-term benefit is the corn gets to market more economically. The long-term effects are pollution, soil destruction and the depletion of a non-renewable resource.
These are just a few references availabe. The point is that corn production is subsidized and it uses a huge number of natural resources. In the words of South Park's portrayal of Johnny Cochrane, "this does not make sinse".
This scares me too if implemented on a large scale. There was an article posted here a few months ago about the hypothesis that the earth was largely water-cooled (as opposed to primarily air/space-cooled as previously thought). If this hypothesis is true (I think it makes sense) and we stick enough resistance into the earth's water movement, it might be like slowing down the flow of coolant in your car or computer (not a good thing).
I don't mean to be a negative Nancy, but what people don't seem to realize is that no matter what they do, each of their actions have consequences (reverse osmosis using sea water leaves behind a higher salt/organism content, etc.). Unfortunately, most people (at least in consumer-based societies) don't have the ability to consider, much less understand their impact on their surroundings. It seems empathy hasn't (historically) been a good survival trait.
I just hope that we can up the ante for research done on improving our current methods. Our dependency on carbon-based fuels is huge. Our planet's CO2 converters (i.e., plants, etc.) can't keep up with our current output. Unfortunately, war seems to be a higher priority than harmonious survival and advancement (and I'm not talking solely about today in the US, this seems to be a theme throughout history for these curious man-animals).
One part of this equation I haven't heard about yet is: where are we going to get the Hydrogen? If fuel cells are to become ubiquitous, how much energy are we going to dedicate to farming the Hydrogen? And what methods are we going to use? Is there a procedure that won't use up more energy than is yielded by the "crop" it produces.
If I'm not being clear, try this analogy.... Some are big fans of using ethanol from corn as a fuel alternative. What they don't realize is that (in the US at least) with gov. subsidies, it takes nearly five gallons of crude oil to produce one bushel of corn which kind of flushes any efficiency gained from using corn fuel down the drain. I hope hydrogen fuel cells don't take this route.
Granted, as more are produced, the process becomes more and more efficient, but if it will always takes an order of magnitude or more energy than it yields, we're still right back to the fossil fuels thing.
I guess all we can ask for is something that is slightly better/more efficient (or yields less pollutants) than what we have today, which makes me wonder why solar power (or a solar power hybrid) hasn't been thoroughly explored over the past fifty years.
Why wouldn't the networks "insert" (ie, flag) all of their commercials into your PVRed program? You can't tell me they would just sit back and only include "the important ones". From their point of view, they're all necessary.
AOL can then charge the advertisers/networks more $$$ for the "privilege" of having their advertisements be "unskipable".
"Contrary to popular opinion that the Web's a haven for porn, though, the study found that only 1.5 percent of Web sites contain pornographic content."
I think the intention of the original poster's question was related to bandwidth used rather than absolute content size. I'm not surprised by the 1.5% quoted in the article. However, the 1.5% figure offers no insight into the popularity of porn sites vs. other content.
That being said, an absolute bandwidth percentage will probably be skewed in the other direcation as porn probably takes up more disk space per website than most other sites (except for warez, I would guess), just because the medium is necessarily richer (more movies/pics than text).
I guess the real question is how much money are all consumers paying for porn (i.e., is the average consumer subsidizing a few users who consume a lot of bandwidth for porn, or is it negligible)? Should porn be treated differently (more like Pay-Per-View TV)? Should there be a market-imposed (as opposed to state-imposed) "sin tax" applied to bytes or are all bytes created equal? Should my apt-get upgrade cost as much as a wget http://sluts-r-us.com/big/ass/movie/archive/hillar y_clinton.mpg?
I have no idea what the answers are, I just thought I'd pose the questions....
Actually VMware itself has a "product" which does exactly what you're talking about. It's "headless", which I found out (after three separate e-mails to VMware sales) means "display-less" (i.e., you don't have to run it in X). It would be interesting to know what independent assessments of effectiveness of their product are out there....
However, it is ridiculously expensive (as in more than buying actual machines). So much so that ESX escapes VMware's pricing page. To get the price, you have to call so they can make sure you're sitting down before you hear it (ESX is more expensive than GSX).
By the way, if any of the information presented here is not correct, I can convincingly shift blame onto some of the ridiculous and confusing marketing speak on VMware's site. That being said, I run VMware 3.2 and like it for running a desktop version of Windoze until the world finishes rejecting it.
If all of what this article implies is a reasonable "comparison" between the way KDE and Gnome function, why is it that so many prefer Gnome over KDE?
Applications.
Seriously, you're never going to get rid of GNOME for (at least) one simple reason: GIMP.
I'm among the most disappointed with RedHat's choice to reduce desktop configurability to near zero (no, themes do not count as configurability...a real window manager with extensively modifiable behaviors does) in RH8.0. But what I *really* don't understand is why RedHat went with GNOME as the default base desktop (other than having invested a lot in GNOME with their custom apps).
I am a long time GNOME user and have to agree that one is constantly reminded of the vast inconsistencies among GNOME apps. Not so with the latest KDE. Of course you can always run KDE/GNOME applications side by side, but it can be really confusing for users without years of experience having to differentiate between the two. Even for experienced users it's a pain in the ass (why do I have to wait 10 seconds for the DCOP/MCOP/whatever server to start up when I run the first KDE app in a GNOME session; and then, after I quit the last KDE app, why does the server quit too even though my session is still alive?).
The sad thing is that unless GnuCash, GIMP, Galeon, Evolution, Red Carpet and the RedHat configuration/updates tools (e.g., the rhn applet) are rewritten for KDE, then GNOME is not going away (and don't tell me to use Konqueror or KMail).
If someone could come up with a way to make the look and (more importantly) the feel be configurable in both, and have a common behavior configuration interface (kind of analogous to what RedHat has with its GTK+/GTK+2 theme chooser), we'd probably be most of the way there (or at least be at the point of a passing grade).
Re:The only once inside the GNOME-community
on
Has GNOME Become LAME?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
It is basically a configuration database that provides notification, and can use any backend, where the default is pure XML-formatted text files.
Can someone please tell me what the fsck is wrong with text configuration files (automatically created by the application or not)? And no, don't talk to me about XML...XML is not human readable and is fragile enough to be non-hand editable in a lot of cases. What ever happened to:
At least, that is, until the protocol is fixed (if that's possible).
I stand corrected, the implementation (OpenSSL) is fixed (OpenSSL 0.9.7a). I just hope that sysadmins are better at keeping their OpenSSLs up to date than they are at patching their IIS installations....;-)
Apparantly the flow only affects webmail and not banking or credit card payments
Technically, the exploit was ideally suited to looking for password information in IMAP/SSL connections, since they are common and frequent. This does not mean the attack is limited to mail-related transactions.
Since most people's passwords are similar/the same for most of their online accounts, in theory, one could use a knowledge of traffic directed at certain sites under other circumstances originating from the same IP to do the same thing. It would take days/weeks instead of hours, but, since most people don't change their passwords that often, it's still conceivable.
This is much less likely to be feasible when it comes to ongoing sessions where the place of authentication is aribtrary (as it is with most e-commerce sites like Amazon and Ebay). However, some sites which use HTTP basic auth (since the username/password are in a well-known location) are now in danger.
What I'm really scared for is the security implication on the new web service protocols which do authentication in a regular, often and predictable way (much like IMAP used in the example), like XML-RPC, SOAP and REST. If SSL is compromised in situations like these, then we've just realized that we're a huge step backward in connection and integration from where we thought we were. At least, that is, until the protocol is fixed (if that's possible).
Remember, even a plain language comment in your code can introduce ambiguity. But show your code to another programmer who speaks the same language, and they will immediately understand the function, methodology, and limitations inherent.
Anyone who has dealt with lawyers (especially corporate contract attorneys) knows that the analogy of law to code or lawyers to programmers doesn't get very far. Every attorney (that I've ever dealt with) will take every chance he can to completely rewrite a contract. Granted, there's a lot of ways to write a conditional in a program, but how many coders want a complete rewrite after every code review?
The majority of lawyers are shitty coders. They produce so much ambiguity and so many "unintended" side-effects, sometimes I get the feeling they do it on purpose.
If anything, lawyer speak should be a severe sub-set of english to remove any ambiguities. Actually, it should be more like symbolic logic than latin. That way anyone who's taken high school geometery would have the tools necessary to interpret most law. Those who've taken a logic course in their college's philosophy department would be able to understand nearly all of it.
Of course, now that makes $0.04 in pot...anyone else?
Smith said. "I'm surprised this kind of thing hasn't been done more often."
What Smith meant was, "I'm surprised we haven't found the tens or hundreds of other attempts to do something similar."
Boston College IT must seriously blow. Even on a single user operating system (like Mac OS 9 or Windoze 9x), there are tools (some based on rdist) which you can use to completely restore the machine to some known state after a completed user session. It's not that hard to force users to initiate and kill individual sessions either. It's a hack, but it would have made an effort like this a little more difficult.
Baggage checks at airports, rooting out terrorists, and $20 CDs!
Okay, initially my comment was a half-hearted attempt at humor. However, I think Bush is much closer to tyrant than he is to pro-liberty. The guy is effectively initiating his own worldwide ethnic cleansing (sound familiar?). Tyranny comes in many forms.
We've enjoyed an environment of liberty for so long, that we don't know what real tyranny looks like.
I don't really want to know what real tyranny feels like. I'm going to bitch and moan and resist arrest and join up with the rebel army if the "leader of the free world" looks like he's thinking about revoking individual liberties. I don't want to wait to get to the point where he makes it policy (oops, too late). This is part of the vigilance necessary to preserve one's freedom.
If you don't want to whine now, then don't scream later when the lock you up for being non-white, non-christian, a redhead, too smart, left-handed, or whatever.
I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MAIL IF YOU DONT TAKE DOWN MY NEGATIVE RATIN I WILL SSUE YOU INTO THE GROUND.
Why is it that nearly every seller on ebay sounds like the same twelve year old kid who hang out in IRC/AOL chat rooms? Is this a coincidence? Maybe the under-15 demographic has more control over spending than we thought....
On the other hand, since those allowed access to the code probably had to sign the NDA-from-Hell, the schools, agencies, companies and individuals involved would probably be sued six ways from Sunday if they ever even though about touching competitor's code, specifically Linux.
It's probably a good way to get some additional QA resources using NDA'd John Q. Public to do the work. Perhaps their strategy is to focus immediately on whatever security holes are presented by outside eyes, so in a few years they'll be able to say, "See? We're just as good as GNU/Linux! Plus, we're a single company, so we're responsible*! That's the extra value you get when you pay for software!"
What I find odd is the advancement on both the "OpenSource is bad because exposed source code is a security concern!" front as well as the "Look! We're just as good as OpenSource because we release our code too!" front. Am I the only person having trouble understanding this apparent hypocrisy?
* NO WARRANTIES. TO THE MAXIMUM EXTENT PERMITTED BY APPLICABLE LAW, MICROSOFT AND ITS SUPPLIERS DISCLAIM ALL WARRANTIES AND CONDITIONS, EITHER EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE, TITLE AND NON-INFRINGEMENT, WITH REGARD TO THE SOFTWARE PRODUCT, AND THE PROVISION OF OR FAILURE TO PROVIDE SUPPORT SERVICES. THIS LIMITED WARRANTY GIVES YOU SPECIFIC LEGAL RIGHTS. YOU MAY HAVE OTHERS, WHICH VARY FROM STATE/JURISDICTION TO STATE/JURISDICTION....
Much as I agree with you, I'd just like to point out that in a logical argument, people who live in glass houses are allowed to propel hard objects through the air. Denying them this is a form of argumentum ad hominem.
Excellent reference! (That page is really cool.)
Of course the original saying is something to the effect of one who lives in a glass house shouldn't (not mustn't) walk around naked (or whatever). Besides, even if I did have the desire to deny SlashDotters (or anyone) the ability to demonstrate hypocrisy, it is (fortunately) beyond my abilities.
Slashdot Mirror
Uh...I think I'd bet against it.
Especially coming from the Texas political scene....
He was speaking in the context of a discussion of P2P use on University networks. With that in mind, it is not really so far out of line.
He is if the college goers are registered voters. I don't think the Texas A&M student body would appreciate being referred to as "these kids". Who would have thought that tactless politicians could come from Texas? Is there a precident to that?
A reasonable code escrow system will be a gov't office that recieves source code, and that enters it into the public domain once a pre-set revenue from the project is met.
So long as it is indeed based on revenue and not profits. We all know slippery companies can be when it comes to finances.
And don't tell me that companies aren't above offering software under a GPL wrapper to gain momentum or appear community friendly without ever intending to follow through.
The article isn't clear about this, but the entire exchange (money too) would have to be in the hands of the escrow entity. I know that's the definition of escrow, but that didn't seem obvious from the proposed solution...the escrow company would effectively have to have their own storefront or purchasing mechanism so they could keep track of the dollars.
it takes nearly five gallons of crude oil to produce one bushel of corn
.50, while a bushel of corn costs under $2.00. If this was true, every corn farmer in America would have gone broke a long time ago.
I call bullshit on this one.
There is no way it takes 5 gallons of crude oil to create a bushel of corn. A gallon of crude costs about $
From this article:
One need look no further than the $190 billion farm bill President Bush signed last month to wonder whose interests are really being served here. Under the 10-year program, taxpayers will pay farmers $4 billion a year to grow ever more corn, this despite the fact that we struggle to get rid of the surplus the plant already produces. The average bushel of corn (56 pounds) sells for about $2 today; it costs farmers more than $3 to grow it. But rather than design a program that would encourage farmers to plant less corn -- which would have the benefit of lifting the price farmers receive for it -- Congress has decided instead to subsidize corn by the bushel, thereby insuring that zea mays dominion over its 125,000-square mile American habitat will go unchallenged.
From this article:
Growing the vast quantities of corn used to feed livestock in this country takes vast quantities of chemical fertilizer, which in turn takes vast quantities of oil -- 1.2 gallons for every bushel. So the modern feedlot is really a city floating on a sea of oil.
From this article:
The corn, in breathtaking defiance of economic common sense, sells for 50 a bushel less than it costs to produce, without regard to the foregone value of the water.
From this blurb about Frank Moore:
The amount of fossil fuel needed to produce one bushel of corn has been estimated at anywhere from one to six gallons.... Today's farm requires fossil fuels to manufacture fertilizer, power machinery and transport the final product. The short-term benefit is the corn gets to market more economically. The long-term effects are pollution, soil destruction and the depletion of a non-renewable resource.
These are just a few references availabe. The point is that corn production is subsidized and it uses a huge number of natural resources. In the words of South Park's portrayal of Johnny Cochrane, "this does not make sinse".
Tidal power, too.
This scares me too if implemented on a large scale. There was an article posted here a few months ago about the hypothesis that the earth was largely water-cooled (as opposed to primarily air/space-cooled as previously thought). If this hypothesis is true (I think it makes sense) and we stick enough resistance into the earth's water movement, it might be like slowing down the flow of coolant in your car or computer (not a good thing).
I don't mean to be a negative Nancy, but what people don't seem to realize is that no matter what they do, each of their actions have consequences (reverse osmosis using sea water leaves behind a higher salt/organism content, etc.). Unfortunately, most people (at least in consumer-based societies) don't have the ability to consider, much less understand their impact on their surroundings. It seems empathy hasn't (historically) been a good survival trait.
I just hope that we can up the ante for research done on improving our current methods. Our dependency on carbon-based fuels is huge. Our planet's CO2 converters (i.e., plants, etc.) can't keep up with our current output. Unfortunately, war seems to be a higher priority than harmonious survival and advancement (and I'm not talking solely about today in the US, this seems to be a theme throughout history for these curious man-animals).
One part of this equation I haven't heard about yet is: where are we going to get the Hydrogen? If fuel cells are to become ubiquitous, how much energy are we going to dedicate to farming the Hydrogen? And what methods are we going to use? Is there a procedure that won't use up more energy than is yielded by the "crop" it produces.
If I'm not being clear, try this analogy.... Some are big fans of using ethanol from corn as a fuel alternative. What they don't realize is that (in the US at least) with gov. subsidies, it takes nearly five gallons of crude oil to produce one bushel of corn which kind of flushes any efficiency gained from using corn fuel down the drain. I hope hydrogen fuel cells don't take this route.
Granted, as more are produced, the process becomes more and more efficient, but if it will always takes an order of magnitude or more energy than it yields, we're still right back to the fossil fuels thing.
I guess all we can ask for is something that is slightly better/more efficient (or yields less pollutants) than what we have today, which makes me wonder why solar power (or a solar power hybrid) hasn't been thoroughly explored over the past fifty years.
Why wouldn't the networks "insert" (ie, flag) all of their commercials into your PVRed program? You can't tell me they would just sit back and only include "the important ones". From their point of view, they're all necessary.
AOL can then charge the advertisers/networks more $$$ for the "privilege" of having their advertisements be "unskipable".
Theres more then just porn on the net?
wow. My brain just exploded..
You sure that was your brain?
Well, it did come out of his head. I'll let you guess which one....
Theres more then just porn on the net?
wow. My brain just exploded..
You sure that was your brain?
"Contrary to popular opinion that the Web's a haven for porn, though, the study found that only 1.5 percent of Web sites contain pornographic content."
r y_clinton.mpg?
I think the intention of the original poster's question was related to bandwidth used rather than absolute content size. I'm not surprised by the 1.5% quoted in the article. However, the 1.5% figure offers no insight into the popularity of porn sites vs. other content.
That being said, an absolute bandwidth percentage will probably be skewed in the other direcation as porn probably takes up more disk space per website than most other sites (except for warez, I would guess), just because the medium is necessarily richer (more movies/pics than text).
I guess the real question is how much money are all consumers paying for porn (i.e., is the average consumer subsidizing a few users who consume a lot of bandwidth for porn, or is it negligible)? Should porn be treated differently (more like Pay-Per-View TV)? Should there be a market-imposed (as opposed to state-imposed) "sin tax" applied to bytes or are all bytes created equal? Should my apt-get upgrade cost as much as a wget http://sluts-r-us.com/big/ass/movie/archive/hilla
I have no idea what the answers are, I just thought I'd pose the questions....
Actually VMware itself has a "product" which does exactly what you're talking about. It's "headless", which I found out (after three separate e-mails to VMware sales) means "display-less" (i.e., you don't have to run it in X). It would be interesting to know what independent assessments of effectiveness of their product are out there....
However, it is ridiculously expensive (as in more than buying actual machines). So much so that ESX escapes VMware's pricing page. To get the price, you have to call so they can make sure you're sitting down before you hear it (ESX is more expensive than GSX).
By the way, if any of the information presented here is not correct, I can convincingly shift blame onto some of the ridiculous and confusing marketing speak on VMware's site. That being said, I run VMware 3.2 and like it for running a desktop version of Windoze until the world finishes rejecting it.
If all of what this article implies is a reasonable "comparison" between the way KDE and Gnome function, why is it that so many prefer Gnome over KDE?
Applications.
Seriously, you're never going to get rid of GNOME for (at least) one simple reason: GIMP.
I'm among the most disappointed with RedHat's choice to reduce desktop configurability to near zero (no, themes do not count as configurability...a real window manager with extensively modifiable behaviors does) in RH8.0. But what I *really* don't understand is why RedHat went with GNOME as the default base desktop (other than having invested a lot in GNOME with their custom apps).
I am a long time GNOME user and have to agree that one is constantly reminded of the vast inconsistencies among GNOME apps. Not so with the latest KDE. Of course you can always run KDE/GNOME applications side by side, but it can be really confusing for users without years of experience having to differentiate between the two. Even for experienced users it's a pain in the ass (why do I have to wait 10 seconds for the DCOP/MCOP/whatever server to start up when I run the first KDE app in a GNOME session; and then, after I quit the last KDE app, why does the server quit too even though my session is still alive?).
The sad thing is that unless GnuCash, GIMP, Galeon, Evolution, Red Carpet and the RedHat configuration/updates tools (e.g., the rhn applet) are rewritten for KDE, then GNOME is not going away (and don't tell me to use Konqueror or KMail).
If someone could come up with a way to make the look and (more importantly) the feel be configurable in both, and have a common behavior configuration interface (kind of analogous to what RedHat has with its GTK+/GTK+2 theme chooser), we'd probably be most of the way there (or at least be at the point of a passing grade).
It is basically a configuration database that provides notification, and can use any backend, where the default is pure XML-formatted text files.
Can someone please tell me what the fsck is wrong with text configuration files (automatically created by the application or not)? And no, don't talk to me about XML...XML is not human readable and is fragile enough to be non-hand editable in a lot of cases. What ever happened to:
What was wrong with this paradigm?
At least, that is, until the protocol is fixed (if that's possible).
;-)
I stand corrected, the implementation (OpenSSL) is fixed (OpenSSL 0.9.7a). I just hope that sysadmins are better at keeping their OpenSSLs up to date than they are at patching their IIS installations....
Apparantly the flow only affects webmail and not banking or credit card payments
Technically, the exploit was ideally suited to looking for password information in IMAP/SSL connections, since they are common and frequent. This does not mean the attack is limited to mail-related transactions.
Since most people's passwords are similar/the same for most of their online accounts, in theory, one could use a knowledge of traffic directed at certain sites under other circumstances originating from the same IP to do the same thing. It would take days/weeks instead of hours, but, since most people don't change their passwords that often, it's still conceivable.
This is much less likely to be feasible when it comes to ongoing sessions where the place of authentication is aribtrary (as it is with most e-commerce sites like Amazon and Ebay). However, some sites which use HTTP basic auth (since the username/password are in a well-known location) are now in danger.
What I'm really scared for is the security implication on the new web service protocols which do authentication in a regular, often and predictable way (much like IMAP used in the example), like XML-RPC, SOAP and REST. If SSL is compromised in situations like these, then we've just realized that we're a huge step backward in connection and integration from where we thought we were. At least, that is, until the protocol is fixed (if that's possible).
Remember, even a plain language comment in your code can introduce ambiguity. But show your code to another programmer who speaks the same language, and they will immediately understand the function, methodology, and limitations inherent.
Anyone who has dealt with lawyers (especially corporate contract attorneys) knows that the analogy of law to code or lawyers to programmers doesn't get very far. Every attorney (that I've ever dealt with) will take every chance he can to completely rewrite a contract. Granted, there's a lot of ways to write a conditional in a program, but how many coders want a complete rewrite after every code review?
The majority of lawyers are shitty coders. They produce so much ambiguity and so many "unintended" side-effects, sometimes I get the feeling they do it on purpose.
If anything, lawyer speak should be a severe sub-set of english to remove any ambiguities. Actually, it should be more like symbolic logic than latin. That way anyone who's taken high school geometery would have the tools necessary to interpret most law. Those who've taken a logic course in their college's philosophy department would be able to understand nearly all of it.
Of course, now that makes $0.04 in pot...anyone else?
Smith said. "I'm surprised this kind of thing hasn't been done more often."
What Smith meant was, "I'm surprised we haven't found the tens or hundreds of other attempts to do something similar."
Boston College IT must seriously blow. Even on a single user operating system (like Mac OS 9 or Windoze 9x), there are tools (some based on rdist) which you can use to completely restore the machine to some known state after a completed user session. It's not that hard to force users to initiate and kill individual sessions either. It's a hack, but it would have made an effort like this a little more difficult.
Baggage checks at airports, rooting out terrorists, and $20 CDs!
Okay, initially my comment was a half-hearted attempt at humor. However, I think Bush is much closer to tyrant than he is to pro-liberty. The guy is effectively initiating his own worldwide ethnic cleansing (sound familiar?). Tyranny comes in many forms.
We've enjoyed an environment of liberty for so long, that we don't know what real tyranny looks like.
I don't really want to know what real tyranny feels like. I'm going to bitch and moan and resist arrest and join up with the rebel army if the "leader of the free world" looks like he's thinking about revoking individual liberties. I don't want to wait to get to the point where he makes it policy (oops, too late). This is part of the vigilance necessary to preserve one's freedom.
If you don't want to whine now, then don't scream later when the lock you up for being non-white, non-christian, a redhead, too smart, left-handed, or whatever.
I AM NOT RESPONSIBLE FOR THE MAIL IF YOU DONT TAKE DOWN MY NEGATIVE RATIN I WILL SSUE YOU INTO THE GROUND.
Why is it that nearly every seller on ebay sounds like the same twelve year old kid who hang out in IRC/AOL chat rooms? Is this a coincidence? Maybe the under-15 demographic has more control over spending than we thought....
About 12 percent of the queries received by the root server on Oct. 4, were for nonexistent top-level domains, such as ".elvis"
I wonder how many of these requests can be directly related to bogus addresses found in all the SPAM floating around....
The phrase "difficult and confusing" goes hand-in-hand with any flexible or powerful computer utilities.
;o)
You mean like UNIX pipes or the everything-is-a-file abstraction...terribly difficult and confusing....
...that's exactly what we need: another fanatical tyrant for a president.
On the other hand, since those allowed access to the code probably had to sign the NDA-from-Hell, the schools, agencies, companies and individuals involved would probably be sued six ways from Sunday if they ever even though about touching competitor's code, specifically Linux.
...
It's probably a good way to get some additional QA resources using NDA'd John Q. Public to do the work. Perhaps their strategy is to focus immediately on whatever security holes are presented by outside eyes, so in a few years they'll be able to say, "See? We're just as good as GNU/Linux! Plus, we're a single company, so we're responsible*! That's the extra value you get when you pay for software!"
What I find odd is the advancement on both the "OpenSource is bad because exposed source code is a security concern!" front as well as the "Look! We're just as good as OpenSource because we release our code too!" front. Am I the only person having trouble understanding this apparent hypocrisy?
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Much as I agree with you, I'd just like to point out that in a logical argument, people who live in glass houses are allowed to propel hard objects through the air. Denying them this is a form of argumentum ad hominem.
Excellent reference! (That page is really cool.)
Of course the original saying is something to the effect of one who lives in a glass house shouldn't (not mustn't) walk around naked (or whatever). Besides, even if I did have the desire to deny SlashDotters (or anyone) the ability to demonstrate hypocrisy, it is (fortunately) beyond my abilities.
SlashDot is the only MMO(RP)G I'll ever need!