No one's sure how they got the warrants, but they *did* get them, so there must have been a reason. You can give me all the conspiracy theories you want, but they got warrants, we should presume they have reasonable evidence of something illegal. Going around blaming everything on the Republicans is not a valid way to explain everything. You may not think the best of our government, but it isn't *that* corrupt.
It will prevent those kinds of attacks at the expense of not teaching you how to write around them. It's really very easy to avoid sql injection attacks. magic_quote_gpc also has this "magic" thing, and you don't always want your data escaped. Sometimes, you do happen to do things other than database work with form data.
The second part allows the government to jam your equipment when they feel the need. And you may not employ any anti-jamming equipment.
Do you have any evidence to support that? It sounds awfully like a tin-hat theory. I would have thought that most equipment can't really be jammed (ie, you can't do much to jam my computer, wristwatch, etc). Do you have anything to support that claim?
I know you can't transmit anything to jam the jammers, but trying to filter out noise in your equipment is allowed.
Kinda OT, but: It's been said once, it's been said a million times: SpaceShipOne does not mean that NASA is a useless, wasteful government agency. SpaceShipOne did not go into orbit, a very major distinction (not to knock what they did). But it's a very different ball game, and NASA does quite a bit of other research as well. Who do you think did the inital research that developed many of the technologies that SpaceShipOne uses? It's not a nail in the coffin of government-sponsered spaceflight research.
There are several utilities to help you configure your video card, and they're getting better all the time. They may not be perfect yet, but they still work. Knoppix can auto-detect almost any video card, and it's only a matter of time (it's already happening, iirc) before that support gets ported to other distros. There are plenty of GUI configuration tools for linux, don't complain becuase you don't about them.
Just becuase we have the ability to do it, doesn't mean we'll use it. We have hundreds of nuclear missiles in the ground all across the west, but we don't use them. That doesn't mean we should get a rid of them. It's better to be able to do this kind of stuff and not use it than to need it but not have it. And besides, we've worked on this in the past, it's not like this is a new idea.
They are really saying that PC's sold without windows tend to have a copy of windows magically appear on them. That's all they are really saying, but of course, that doesn't slam linux in some way. That's where the "pre-installed linux" comes along, and by using that phrase, they can make their whole thing a slam on linux to a clueless media journalist. I wonder how many Penguin Computing computers end up with windows on them?
That's not what they mean, but that's what they want it to seem like it means. They want people (politicans, namely) to read it and say "Linux is just used to pirate windows, we better make laws against it and not use it in government." It's a piece of FUD that's trying to equate linux to piracy.
Linux using patented ideas may or may be a great problem. Some of these patents are probably in code contributed by companies. When you open up code under the GPL, you are also saying you won't use those patents against derivatives of that code (that's part of the GPL). So 'violating' may be the wrong word in this case, becuase is (hopefully all) of the cases, they've been given to the Linux movement.
Besides, I'm sure Microsoft has looked into patents that Linux might violate, becuase they're looking to destroy Linux, and a legimate patent claim would certaintly help. If they had found something, I'm sure they would have used it by now.
I know many people will disagree, but most linux desktops are 'easy friendly GUI'. You don't expect your boss to have to mess with the system configuration, and even for system configuration, there are more and more easy gui tools. Linux gui's aren't any harder than windows, they're just different, and most people expect linux to be exactly like windows.
Except the English didn't have a true democracy until shortly after the American civil war (it was 1867, iirc). They had a monarch with almost absolute power, and a Parliment. But it wasn't until 1867 that they got a rid of the monarch.
I completely agree with your last point. Writing a virus doesn't take much skill. I don't know the details, but I'd assume the kid just took an exploit off of a 0day list and put a couple of bits together to make the virus. That's not incredibally skilled, and lots of other 18year olds could do it. Why not hire them? They probably know just as much, and the y have the maturity not to use it in a dumb way.
Hiring some script kiddie becuase he can write a virus is dumb. Script kiddies aren't skilled or in a great demand. There are many, many other smart kids that can do just as much without the liability.
Hubble can't change its orbit, but it can point in different directions. Also, if a star you want to look at isn't visible immediately, just wait 45 minutes, and you'll be on the other side of the earth, and probably able to see it.
This isn't something that law enforcement would go after, it probably isn't a criminal penalty. However, the developer is free to sue people who use his program without paying. If he's poor, he could try to add legal fees to the case. The amount that he would win, however, is negligable.
Fine-grained security models exist- it's called SELinux. It's just not very common because it can require a bit of work to set up, and requires slightly more work to administer. But it does exist, and I will be installing it soon.
The difference is, it's hard to forge a check, but writing a virus is very easy. Almost (if not all) of the programmers at Microsoft could have done the exact same thing, and most Slashdot readers also have the skill to write a virus. There aren't any shortage of people who can write viruses, but there are for check forgers, so that's why out-of-prison check forgers get employed.
Those things aren't very hard to implement. They've existed in the unix world for *years*. They're called 'grep' and 'find'. Once you learn how to use them, which isn't hard, you can do all of the things you mentioned. There are also probably some pretty gui eye-candy for those of you afraid of the command line.
Bottom line is, those features are nothing new to the rest of the computer world.
Their letters and slogan are probably trademarked or whatever the appropriate thing is, at least if the people running the radio station know what they're doing. So it would be illegal for Microsoft to use the station's call letters and slogans to mimick the station.
It's not just 'pride', the launch site was chosen during the hight of the Cold War. Using someone else's land could mean that at some point in the future, they could change their mind, and then you'd be SOL and Russia would have a new launch facility.
Hello, mods, that shouldn't be insightful, informative, or otherwise. Fact is, slashdot *is* a biased news source, and not everything gets posted. Don't mod this post up, mod the parent post offtopic/troll, which it is. If in his/her opinion there are better blogs, than he/she should go there and stop posting junk on our forum.
The solid granite is probably part of the reason why they don't use the Canadian Shield. I'd be it's prohibitively expensive to drill that much granite out.
Most of the work on the shuttle to prep it for launch is the heat shield. The engines, as far as I know, along with most of the rest of the shuttle, are quite reliable and don't require nearly as much maintence. It's also the manned spaceflight program, so *everything* is done *exactly* right, which takes a lot of time.
It also must be noted that he has to provide the source code to everyone who gets the shareware UNDER THE GPL LICENSE. So, if I get the shareware from him, I can take the code and put it on the internet. He can't force me to take it down; it's under the gpl. I am free to build it and release my own binaries, sans shareware time bomb. That's why you usually don't see much GPL shareware.
No, it was threat of a government rating system. The government said "come up with a rating system or we will," so the MPAA came up with a rating system. See the Wikipedia article on it if you have questions.
Slashdot Mirror
No one's sure how they got the warrants, but they *did* get them, so there must have been a reason. You can give me all the conspiracy theories you want, but they got warrants, we should presume they have reasonable evidence of something illegal. Going around blaming everything on the Republicans is not a valid way to explain everything. You may not think the best of our government, but it isn't *that* corrupt.
It will prevent those kinds of attacks at the expense of not teaching you how to write around them. It's really very easy to avoid sql injection attacks. magic_quote_gpc also has this "magic" thing, and you don't always want your data escaped. Sometimes, you do happen to do things other than database work with form data.
The second part allows the government to jam your equipment when they feel the need. And you may not employ any anti-jamming equipment.
Do you have any evidence to support that? It sounds awfully like a tin-hat theory. I would have thought that most equipment can't really be jammed (ie, you can't do much to jam my computer, wristwatch, etc). Do you have anything to support that claim?
I know you can't transmit anything to jam the jammers, but trying to filter out noise in your equipment is allowed.
Kinda OT, but:
It's been said once, it's been said a million times: SpaceShipOne does not mean that NASA is a useless, wasteful government agency. SpaceShipOne did not go into orbit, a very major distinction (not to knock what they did). But it's a very different ball game, and NASA does quite a bit of other research as well. Who do you think did the inital research that developed many of the technologies that SpaceShipOne uses? It's not a nail in the coffin of government-sponsered spaceflight research.
I have to tweak configuration files
There are several utilities to help you configure your video card, and they're getting better all the time. They may not be perfect yet, but they still work. Knoppix can auto-detect almost any video card, and it's only a matter of time (it's already happening, iirc) before that support gets ported to other distros. There are plenty of GUI configuration tools for linux, don't complain becuase you don't about them.
Just becuase we have the ability to do it, doesn't mean we'll use it. We have hundreds of nuclear missiles in the ground all across the west, but we don't use them. That doesn't mean we should get a rid of them. It's better to be able to do this kind of stuff and not use it than to need it but not have it. And besides, we've worked on this in the past, it's not like this is a new idea.
They are really saying that PC's sold without windows tend to have a copy of windows magically appear on them. That's all they are really saying, but of course, that doesn't slam linux in some way. That's where the "pre-installed linux" comes along, and by using that phrase, they can make their whole thing a slam on linux to a clueless media journalist. I wonder how many Penguin Computing computers end up with windows on them?
That's not what they mean, but that's what they want it to seem like it means. They want people (politicans, namely) to read it and say "Linux is just used to pirate windows, we better make laws against it and not use it in government." It's a piece of FUD that's trying to equate linux to piracy.
Linux using patented ideas may or may be a great problem. Some of these patents are probably in code contributed by companies. When you open up code under the GPL, you are also saying you won't use those patents against derivatives of that code (that's part of the GPL). So 'violating' may be the wrong word in this case, becuase is (hopefully all) of the cases, they've been given to the Linux movement.
Besides, I'm sure Microsoft has looked into patents that Linux might violate, becuase they're looking to destroy Linux, and a legimate patent claim would certaintly help. If they had found something, I'm sure they would have used it by now.
I know many people will disagree, but most linux desktops are 'easy friendly GUI'. You don't expect your boss to have to mess with the system configuration, and even for system configuration, there are more and more easy gui tools. Linux gui's aren't any harder than windows, they're just different, and most people expect linux to be exactly like windows.
Except the English didn't have a true democracy until shortly after the American civil war (it was 1867, iirc). They had a monarch with almost absolute power, and a Parliment. But it wasn't until 1867 that they got a rid of the monarch.
I completely agree with your last point. Writing a virus doesn't take much skill. I don't know the details, but I'd assume the kid just took an exploit off of a 0day list and put a couple of bits together to make the virus. That's not incredibally skilled, and lots of other 18year olds could do it. Why not hire them? They probably know just as much, and the y have the maturity not to use it in a dumb way.
Hiring some script kiddie becuase he can write a virus is dumb. Script kiddies aren't skilled or in a great demand. There are many, many other smart kids that can do just as much without the liability.
Hubble can't change its orbit, but it can point in different directions. Also, if a star you want to look at isn't visible immediately, just wait 45 minutes, and you'll be on the other side of the earth, and probably able to see it.
All encryption schemes today can be brute-forced. Sure, it may take a while, but it can be done. You can't brute-force one-time pad.
This isn't something that law enforcement would go after, it probably isn't a criminal penalty. However, the developer is free to sue people who use his program without paying. If he's poor, he could try to add legal fees to the case. The amount that he would win, however, is negligable.
Fine-grained security models exist- it's called SELinux. It's just not very common because it can require a bit of work to set up, and requires slightly more work to administer. But it does exist, and I will be installing it soon.
The difference is, it's hard to forge a check, but writing a virus is very easy. Almost (if not all) of the programmers at Microsoft could have done the exact same thing, and most Slashdot readers also have the skill to write a virus. There aren't any shortage of people who can write viruses, but there are for check forgers, so that's why out-of-prison check forgers get employed.
Those things aren't very hard to implement. They've existed in the unix world for *years*. They're called 'grep' and 'find'. Once you learn how to use them, which isn't hard, you can do all of the things you mentioned. There are also probably some pretty gui eye-candy for those of you afraid of the command line.
Bottom line is, those features are nothing new to the rest of the computer world.
Their letters and slogan are probably trademarked or whatever the appropriate thing is, at least if the people running the radio station know what they're doing. So it would be illegal for Microsoft to use the station's call letters and slogans to mimick the station.
It's not just 'pride', the launch site was chosen during the hight of the Cold War. Using someone else's land could mean that at some point in the future, they could change their mind, and then you'd be SOL and Russia would have a new launch facility.
Hello, mods, that shouldn't be insightful, informative, or otherwise. Fact is, slashdot *is* a biased news source, and not everything gets posted. Don't mod this post up, mod the parent post offtopic/troll, which it is. If in his/her opinion there are better blogs, than he/she should go there and stop posting junk on our forum.
The solid granite is probably part of the reason why they don't use the Canadian Shield. I'd be it's prohibitively expensive to drill that much granite out.
Most of the work on the shuttle to prep it for launch is the heat shield. The engines, as far as I know, along with most of the rest of the shuttle, are quite reliable and don't require nearly as much maintence. It's also the manned spaceflight program, so *everything* is done *exactly* right, which takes a lot of time.
It also must be noted that he has to provide the source code to everyone who gets the shareware UNDER THE GPL LICENSE. So, if I get the shareware from him, I can take the code and put it on the internet. He can't force me to take it down; it's under the gpl. I am free to build it and release my own binaries, sans shareware time bomb. That's why you usually don't see much GPL shareware.
No, it was threat of a government rating system. The government said "come up with a rating system or we will," so the MPAA came up with a rating system. See the Wikipedia article on it if you have questions.