ok, then. taking what you just said at face value, what you're failing to get in this instance is that the university in question does not have the authority to impose such constraints on tennants of an apartment complex they do not own.
Assume that a theoretical life support system was somehow adversely affected by a wireless access point, and that a person intentionally caused a patient's death by leaving a wireless access point on top of the life support system. According to your argument, the rascal would merely proclaim with a smile, "Oh, no, see the FCC certified this device as not causing harmful interference, so I'm sorry you can't hold me accountable." That seems like an utterly ridiculous argument. Furthermore, your argument is not so strong as to cause me to believe that a court will "dismiss the charges outright".
huh? this place isn't a hospital. it's a university. the FCC regs have provisions that detail what "harmful interference" is, and this includes issues of interfering with safety systems. this is why, e.g., airlines can require that you turn off your cell phone while the plane is in flight. if there was sensitive equipment in play here that could cause injury or death if interfered with, i'm sure that would fall under the "harmful interference" clause. since the university runs their own wireless network, somehow i doubt they could claim life-threatening interference.
furthermore, such a person in your analogy could not be held accountable unless he/she was breaking some rule or law in force on the premises of this imaginary life-support-system-haven. by your logic, if my neighbor's mom moved into her son's house to live out the last months of her life, assisted by numerous medical devices, and, unbeknownst to me, my wi-fi equipment caused her equipment to fail and killed her, i could be charged with a crime. ridiculous. if anything, it would be medical malpractice laid firmly at the feet of the doctor who allowed her to leave the hospital.
And the mistake that you're making is that believing that the FCC's exclusive authority to regulate the provisioning of a spectrum somehow grants them the rights to regulate any device that uses that spectrum. It does not. Your argument is tantamount to saying that a government agency that regulates the sale of bullets is the sole authority in determining how those bullets may or may not be used to harm others.
that's not a mistake, that's a correct assumption. your bullet analogy is flawed - there is no such agency that regulates bullet sales _in an exclusive capacity_. however, the FCC has been granted _exclusive_ and _absolute_ control over the frequency spectrum. this is somewhat different from most government regulatory bodies, but is nonetheless the case here. this regulatory control most certainly gives them regulatory powers over devices that use the spectrum. if not, what would be the point of such regulatory powers in the first place?
The college also does not own any independent academic material a student creates or shares with others, but yet may expel a student for helping another student cheat. By your argument, any student should be able to help any other student cheat under the First Amendment. Still don't buy your arguments.
and again, your analogy makes no sense in this context. the first amendment has nothing to do with your made-up case anyway - the bill of rights governs the _government's_ ability to curtail your freedoms (or rather, its _lack_ of such ability in certain circumstances). the university can make rules about what information about homework, tests, etc. you're allowed to share with your peers. this in no way infringes on students' first amendment rights.
please, try to think these things through. IANAL, but it's obvious that you lack quite a bit of common sense as well.
you might say that, but realise that being a tenant means signing a lease agreement, which is a binding contract. even with a binding, legal contract, the other party cannot require anything of you that is in conflict with local, state, or federal law.
at any rate, it's a moot point, because, in this case, the university doesn't own the housing. the students are living in apartments owned by a company called westview.
1) All over the mall
2) Up and down your street, in trees, etc.
3) In your neighbor's house
what does this have to do with anything? you don't own property at the mall. you don't own your street or the trees on other people's property. you don't own your neighbor's house. why should you be allowed to install hardware there without their permission? this has nothing to do with the issue at hand, or with the FCC or RF spectrum regulations.
Similarly, I've a right to use my cellphone, but if I try it on an airplane, they'll kick me off.
i'm really getting tired of this argument. try looking up the FCC's definition of "harmful interference" and how that applies to their regulations. hint: "Any emission, radiation or induction that endangers the functioning of a radio navigation service or of other safety services or seriously degrades, obstructs or repeatedly interrupts a radiocommunications service operating in accordance with this Chapter." it's not hard to see that a cell phone could interfere with an airplane's systems, which are specifically protected by this definition.
on a side note, do a little research, maybe RTFA. the students aren't living in university-owned buildings, and they aren't connecting the APs to the university network. it's not "their property".
There seems to be a common misconception that since 2.4GHz bands are unregulated, the FCC is the only entity that can restrict the usage of 2.4GHz devices. This, of course, is false.
correct. however, the FCC _is_ the only entity that can restrict the usage of 2.4GHz devices that comply with part 15 of the FCC rules and are registered as such. you ever see the little notice on most RF devices about their compilance with part 15 of the FCC rules? it usually goes something like this:
This device complies with Part 15 of the FCC Rules. Operation is subject to the following two conditions:
1. This device may not cause harmful interference.
2. This device must accept any interference received, including interference that may cause undesired operation.
note point (1) above. the FCC defines "harmful interference" as: "Any emission, radiation or induction that endangers the functioning of a radio navigation service or of other safety services or seriously degrades, obstructs or repeatedly interrupts a radiocommunications service operating in accordance with this Chapter." this clearly allows for the need to prohibit the use of a jamming device inside a police station. as for jamming your corporate network, the jammer is causing harmful interference based on the latter portion of the definition "a radiocommunications service operating in accordance with this Chapter."
as for signing an agreement that your enrollment in a university is contingent upon certain things, if those certain things come into conflict with any local, state, or federal laws, the laws win out. the FCC has been granted _exclusive authority_ to regulate the RF spectrum. any attempt to regulate the spectrum by a private entity, whether directly or indirectly, is disallowed. that's the mistake you're making - the "exclusive" part.
a wireless access point (operated according to US law and FCC regs) is not a "jamming device". they have been certified by the FCC not to cause harmful interference, and any attempt by the university to suggest otherwise will be dismissed outright.
the students and the university are, in fact, independent entites. the existence of a contract (such as terms of enrollment) between the two cannot change that fact. in any case, the situation is even more separate here - the college does not own the apartments that the students live in, nor do they provide or own the internet connection the students are using to connect the APs to the internet.
you make a convincing argument, but it's unfortunately based on incorrect assumptions.
you should take a long hard look at your apartment lease. if it gives _waterview_ the ability to arbitrarily restrict the use of consumer goods in your apartment, then you're stuck. if they restrict specific items (hot plates, grills, etc.), then they don't have a leg to stand on. the university is perfectly within its rights to _request_ that waterview _ask_ tennants to not use wireless APs, but neither the university, nor westview, has the authority to require you to stop using them.
even in the case that your lease explicitly states that you can't use wireless APs, it's quite possible that any such clause would be unenforceable, because the FCC has _exclusive_ regulation over the radio spectrum, and their position is that the 2.4GHz band is for use by anyone for whatever purpose, and devices using it are required to live with any interference they receive that causes problems. the only thing that should be able to ban your use of wireless APs is your contract with your internet provider, since in that case it's a possible theft of service issue. but IANAL, so what do i know...
after looking over the rockbox page, it appears that there's some sort of XOR "encryption" done in hardware. that is, some of the chips on the device communicate with each other using this "encryption." if this is something that's done in software, reverse engineering and reimplementing it could be considered a violation of the DMCA. is it stupid? absolutely. but it could cause problems if iriver wants to fight them. even if it won't hold up in court, i doubt rockbox wants to get into any kind of legal battle.
ok, that takes care of the DHCP client. and i'd argue that saying most home users are still using dialup is incorrect - at least in the US, as a fairly significant number are using broadband. but then again, i used to work for a university, where every dorm room gets an ethernet connection to the world. even then, disabling DHCP by default would cause a good 10,000 people right there to have to know how to enable it.
as for the DNS client, anyone who connects to the internet _at all_ will need it.
Re:One Dirty Bomb - you siad it..
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 1
i didn't really mean it in that way - that is, so specifically. i mean that generally, while the kid's driving, he's probably spending part of his time thinking "gotta be careful not to set the box off, gotta be careful not to set the box off". that alone can be a significant distraction.
and to use your example, if such a maneuver (getting out of a situation where he was cut off) causes the box to start buzzing at him, that alone might be distraction enough to cause an accident, at a time when he's trying to make a split second decision to _avoid_ an accident. especially if his knee-jerk reaction to hearing the warning causes him to take his mind off the task at hand, which i wouldn't blame him for in the least.
the bottom line - it's a distraction from driving that can - nay, is designed to - pop up at the absolute worst moments.
Re:One Dirty Bomb - you siad it..
on
Port-A-Nuke
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
i think the parent's point was that, in a developing country, where there's no (or little) existing infrastructure, we should be teaching them to develop cleaner, more renewable sources of energy, rather than just dumping a nuclear reactor on them. granted, this is still better than dumping a coal plant, but there must be better alternatives.
the problem i have with this is that whenever your friend drives, he probably wastes a bit of his focus and attention thinking about the black box. this isn't a cut on him; i'd do the same thing myself. his parents are, in a way, making him _less safe_ while he's driving by imposing this device on him.
now, the fact that he appears to have a speeding problem means this is somewhat equalised. but i really don't think this is the way to do it, as his parents are just trading the risk of his unsafe driving with the risk of less focus on driving.
if his parents really want him to stop speeding, they need to teach him better. or let him get a ticket or two, and see how he feels when he has to pay for it (and the increased insurance premiums). of course, the (unacceptable) risk here is that he'll die before he learns the lesson.
Then point to the logs the AP prolly keeps as to when various people connected using it, and say "Hey, wasn't me." There's at least an easy way to deny it.
many consumer-grade APs don't keep logs, and those that do have the feature disabled by default. usually these logging features involve dumping the log to a certain port on a PC, so that would mean having another machine running all the time with software to receive and store the logs.
If you have the thing encrypted up the wazoo, and they break it, then the courts are going to say "Sorry, not possible. It's using really good encryption."
for starters, if you configure the thing properly, your neighbors aren't going to be able to break it without some serious effort on their part. if you employ some common strategies (changing WEP keys every X days, for example), your risk is lowered even further.
If you're really worried about trusting your neighbors, then give them free access to it, and limit their speed somehow so it doesn't bother you. Voila, you're a carrier with no knowledge of what they did on your wires, and you can't be held responsible for their actions.
common-carrier laws are a bit more complicated than you think. you can's simply claim to be a carrier. at the very least, most ISPs contain clauses in their terms of use that specifically prohibit you from reselling their service (and no, giving it away for free doesn't exempt you from this clause).
if this guy really wants to give his neighbors access to his girlfriend's recipes or photo albums, he should put them on a webserver or something. running an unsecured wireless AP that is easily accessible by others outside your control is foolish and irresponsible, and there's no sane reason why anyone _needs_ to do so.
i'm not sure how this is relevant. perhaps i run a business from my home and use a business DSL line for my website, mail, etc. if the ISP isn't allowing outgoing SMTP, i have to relay through their servers and my SPF records have to reflect this. personally i find this a non-ideal scenario. i'm sure with a little effort i could come up with other examples.
This seems like common sense. Shouldn't all network admins be doing this anyway?
sure. but saying and doing are two very different things. there are lots of different things you can do to monitor your network, all with different costs (both in performance and cash), and all with different levels of required human intervention.
at the very least, i imagine many networks have an admin budget that is too small to allow as much thoroughness in securing the network as the Tao of NSM would recommend - both in money to buy proprietary products, and in manpower to set up, monitor, and maintain them.
The fair thing to do in a case where two candidates score equally is to decide randomly.
personally, i think the best thing to do here is ask the people who will have to deal with this manager who they feel they can work with better. when the objective scoring system gives you a tie, the only thing you have left is a random decision or a subjective decision (ignoring the aforementioned discriminatory decision). the random decision is "fair", but isn't necessarily pragmatic. the subjective decision may in the end turn out to be discriminatory (say for example, the people who will have to work with the manager feel more comfortable working with a woman than a man), but when it comes down to it, the important thing is that the new manager fits into the structure well - both professionally and personally. i see little reason to make people feel uncomfortable _solely_ in the name of non-discrimination.
unfortunately, it's hard to eliminate this entirely just by avoiding asking questions that could lead to discrimination. for example, a person's name can often give insight into their race or country of origin. what's needed is a multi-tiered admissions system, so that when a college recieves an application, something like this happens:
each application is assigned a unique identifier (such as a random number, or perhaps an MD5 or SHA1 hash of the person's name and address).
a database entry is created for the applicant, with all the personally-identifying data, linked to the ID generated in (1).
another database entry is created, this one for all the application materials (only that which is necessary to make an admissions decision). again, this is tied to the applicant via the ID.
the applicant ID alone, and access to the database in (3), is passed on to the appropriate admissions officials.
now, there are still some problems with this approach. first of all, it's up to the college to do this. the actual admissions people can only have access to the database referenced in (3), and of course the ID number. you can make a law that this needs to be the case, but i haven't a clue how you'd enforce this without spending tons of gov't money on audits (unless you want to make the colleges pay for the audits, which of course is basically asking the students and parents to foot the bill).
there's some information the admissions people need to have that could be considered personally identifiable. for example, it might be necessary to know what high school the applicant attended, so the admissions person can normalise their GPA based on the school's record for grade inflation/deflation.
the fact of the matter is that in some areas you just have to trust that the admissions official won't go out of his/her way to dig up info about particular applicants. i think this is acceptable, as long as it's made more than trivial to do so.
why require qt at all? you don't need a GUI library to do file searches. at the very least, put all the search functionality into a library, with a clean API, and then build a GUI on top of it. if the KDE devs care to try to make this THE linux file indexing system, this'll make it a lot easier for people to use it with other desktops, as they can write GUIs using whatever toolkit they want. hell, you could even write a commandline frontend, which i'm sure i (and others) would find useful.
if they want some kind of portable runtime to use, glib would be much more ideal than using the portable-runtime-y portions of qt, since glib doesn't contain any GUI code at all. and qt is a HUGE library (6.9MB on my machine), vs. glib (488kB). of course, this being a KDE project, i'm sure using glib is sacrilige.
(OT: i was somewhat curious after looking at the qt lib size, as to how it compares to a complete gtk solution. you can generally say that gtk consists of gtk, gdk, gdk-pixbuf, glib, atk, and pango. total size, including gdk-pixbuf loader modules, is 4.4MB. note that i didn't include all the various theme engines on my system, since they aren't all loaded simultaneously. for reference, the pixmap theme engine is 556kB. quite a bit of a difference, wouldn't you say?)
i started looking over your list of links to what you're presumably saying are "well-written, fast java apps", thinking that i hadn't heard of any of them, but i'd give them a look to see how nice they are.
then i see you linked to azureus. i think it's a damned good BT client as well. but for its functionality, not speed. it eats so much ram (don't recall the figures), and so much CPU (50-70%), my machine (1.33GHz athlon, 640MB ram - not a powerhouse, but certainly respectable) gets totally bogged down if i try to run more than 4 or 5 torrents at once. and this is even considering that the whole app isn't written in java. on linux, at least, it uses SWT, which appears to be compiled to native code. SWT itself uses gtk, which is definitely native.
now, part of this is the fact that the BT protocol itself is rather CPU-intensive (a lot of SHA hash calculating, and often). but still, i have yet to see a usable, resource-friendly GUI BT client for linux out there. my personal opinion of this is that it's because no one's yet written one in C. ctorrent seems to perform well (thought it lacks a GUI and doesn't seem to get the same download rates azureus or theshadow gets).
this is something i'm curious about. i can see full well why such a MOTD would be ineffective against law enforcement, but why shouldn't it work for a private entity (in this case the RIAA, etc.)?
to explain my reasoning, an analogy. sure, it's flawed, but maybe not too much:
say the front door to your house is open. a cop is driving by your house, and sees this, and (logically) thinks "hmm, there could be a burglary or something going on here." he stops his car, gets out, runs up your front lawn, and enters your house (cautiously, of course, and probably yelling "police!" or something as he enters). he moves out of the entryway of your house into the doorway into your kitchen, only to see you holding the knife you used to just stab some poor guy who is lying on the floor, dead. at this point, he arrests you and eventually you go to court and are proven to have killed this guy.
is there anything wrong with that? i don't think so - i think that's all perfectly legal. law enforcement officials have leave to enter your house if they have reason to believe a crime is in progress, correct?
now, let's take a similar story, but say it's not a cop driving by, but it's bob, the owner of some music store in town. and say you're not in your house knifing someone, but you have a big pile of CDs on your living room floor with a big sign on them that says "I JUST STOLE THESE CDS FROM BOB'S MUSIC STORE". so bob sees your open door, and, being depressed and sad that his entire stock has been stolen, and he's going to go out of business and lose his house and car, decides he's going to rob you. bob comes in, sees your sign and pile of CDs, takes a picture (yeah, he's a weirdo and carries around a camera all the time), and then sues you. assuming this picture does constitue enough evidence (work with me here), i see no reason why he shouldn't win the case. but i also see no reason why you can't sue bob - or even press charges against him - for unlawfully entering your home.
yeah, the analogy isn't perfect, but i think it should still hold. if you leave files on your computer open to the world, with a sign on them that says "if you are affiliated with the RIAA or any of its member labels, you are not authorised to enter this computer system", i don't see why they shouldn't be legally accountable if they do. if they find that you're infringing on their copyrights, sure, they can sue you, but you should also be able to sue them (or press charges?) for unlawfully accessing your computer.
Re:People still use a shell for Linux?
on
Bash 3.0 Released
·
· Score: 1
if you're preaching about "the right tool for the job", you'd recognise that python or perl is probably overkill for some of the more simpler tasks, such as the previous example of converting jpegs to pngs, or perhaps renaming a bunch of files, etc.
funny how you call shell scripts "hideous", when a not-insignificant number of people find perl syntax just as nasty (for the record, i happen to love perl).
They have done something that no one else in the *nix world has done: shit-hot gui. People can blather about this and that, but to deny that Apple has created one of the most user-friendly, beautiful, slick gui's for *nix is crazy.
welcome, class, to aesthetics 101. your first lesson: one man's perception of beauty is another's perception of ugliness.
where the OS X gui is concerned, my opinion falls in the latter category. not saying your opinion is invalid, just saying it's a bit arrogant to say your aesthetic sense is absolute truth (or at least the antithesis of crazy).
in all fairness, i don't think aqua is ugly, per se, i'm just not a big fan of the bubbliness and the pinstripiness. the fact that the whole thing is terribly slow on anything but top-of-the-line mac hardware doesn't help either.
The problem that everyone seems to be having is that the GPL applies to one thing and one thing only: the current binaries and source that are being distributed. If it applied to every version then license changes would be impossible. By pushing penalties off onto some later thing, the current version is fully unrestricted and GPL-compliant.
if sveasoft owned the original copyrights, then you'd be correct. but sveasoft _cannot_ change the license to what they are distributing at some point in the future. it is GPL for good, as long as it is based off a GPLed codebase owned (in the copyright sense) by someone else.
Slashdot Mirror
ok, then. taking what you just said at face value, what you're failing to get in this instance is that the university in question does not have the authority to impose such constraints on tennants of an apartment complex they do not own.
furthermore, such a person in your analogy could not be held accountable unless he/she was breaking some rule or law in force on the premises of this imaginary life-support-system-haven. by your logic, if my neighbor's mom moved into her son's house to live out the last months of her life, assisted by numerous medical devices, and, unbeknownst to me, my wi-fi equipment caused her equipment to fail and killed her, i could be charged with a crime. ridiculous. if anything, it would be medical malpractice laid firmly at the feet of the doctor who allowed her to leave the hospital. that's not a mistake, that's a correct assumption. your bullet analogy is flawed - there is no such agency that regulates bullet sales _in an exclusive capacity_. however, the FCC has been granted _exclusive_ and _absolute_ control over the frequency spectrum. this is somewhat different from most government regulatory bodies, but is nonetheless the case here. this regulatory control most certainly gives them regulatory powers over devices that use the spectrum. if not, what would be the point of such regulatory powers in the first place? and again, your analogy makes no sense in this context. the first amendment has nothing to do with your made-up case anyway - the bill of rights governs the _government's_ ability to curtail your freedoms (or rather, its _lack_ of such ability in certain circumstances). the university can make rules about what information about homework, tests, etc. you're allowed to share with your peers. this in no way infringes on students' first amendment rights.
please, try to think these things through. IANAL, but it's obvious that you lack quite a bit of common sense as well.
at any rate, it's a moot point, because, in this case, the university doesn't own the housing. the students are living in apartments owned by a company called westview.
on a side note, do a little research, maybe RTFA. the students aren't living in university-owned buildings, and they aren't connecting the APs to the university network. it's not "their property".
as for signing an agreement that your enrollment in a university is contingent upon certain things, if those certain things come into conflict with any local, state, or federal laws, the laws win out. the FCC has been granted _exclusive authority_ to regulate the RF spectrum. any attempt to regulate the spectrum by a private entity, whether directly or indirectly, is disallowed. that's the mistake you're making - the "exclusive" part.
a wireless access point (operated according to US law and FCC regs) is not a "jamming device". they have been certified by the FCC not to cause harmful interference, and any attempt by the university to suggest otherwise will be dismissed outright.
the students and the university are, in fact, independent entites. the existence of a contract (such as terms of enrollment) between the two cannot change that fact. in any case, the situation is even more separate here - the college does not own the apartments that the students live in, nor do they provide or own the internet connection the students are using to connect the APs to the internet.
you make a convincing argument, but it's unfortunately based on incorrect assumptions.
you should take a long hard look at your apartment lease. if it gives _waterview_ the ability to arbitrarily restrict the use of consumer goods in your apartment, then you're stuck. if they restrict specific items (hot plates, grills, etc.), then they don't have a leg to stand on. the university is perfectly within its rights to _request_ that waterview _ask_ tennants to not use wireless APs, but neither the university, nor westview, has the authority to require you to stop using them.
even in the case that your lease explicitly states that you can't use wireless APs, it's quite possible that any such clause would be unenforceable, because the FCC has _exclusive_ regulation over the radio spectrum, and their position is that the 2.4GHz band is for use by anyone for whatever purpose, and devices using it are required to live with any interference they receive that causes problems. the only thing that should be able to ban your use of wireless APs is your contract with your internet provider, since in that case it's a possible theft of service issue. but IANAL, so what do i know...
after looking over the rockbox page, it appears that there's some sort of XOR "encryption" done in hardware. that is, some of the chips on the device communicate with each other using this "encryption." if this is something that's done in software, reverse engineering and reimplementing it could be considered a violation of the DMCA. is it stupid? absolutely. but it could cause problems if iriver wants to fight them. even if it won't hold up in court, i doubt rockbox wants to get into any kind of legal battle.
ok, that takes care of the DHCP client. and i'd argue that saying most home users are still using dialup is incorrect - at least in the US, as a fairly significant number are using broadband. but then again, i used to work for a university, where every dorm room gets an ethernet connection to the world. even then, disabling DHCP by default would cause a good 10,000 people right there to have to know how to enable it.
as for the DNS client, anyone who connects to the internet _at all_ will need it.
uhhhh... riiight. if you say so.
*wanders off, shaking head*
i didn't really mean it in that way - that is, so specifically. i mean that generally, while the kid's driving, he's probably spending part of his time thinking "gotta be careful not to set the box off, gotta be careful not to set the box off". that alone can be a significant distraction.
and to use your example, if such a maneuver (getting out of a situation where he was cut off) causes the box to start buzzing at him, that alone might be distraction enough to cause an accident, at a time when he's trying to make a split second decision to _avoid_ an accident. especially if his knee-jerk reaction to hearing the warning causes him to take his mind off the task at hand, which i wouldn't blame him for in the least.
the bottom line - it's a distraction from driving that can - nay, is designed to - pop up at the absolute worst moments.
i think the parent's point was that, in a developing country, where there's no (or little) existing infrastructure, we should be teaching them to develop cleaner, more renewable sources of energy, rather than just dumping a nuclear reactor on them. granted, this is still better than dumping a coal plant, but there must be better alternatives.
the problem i have with this is that whenever your friend drives, he probably wastes a bit of his focus and attention thinking about the black box. this isn't a cut on him; i'd do the same thing myself. his parents are, in a way, making him _less safe_ while he's driving by imposing this device on him.
now, the fact that he appears to have a speeding problem means this is somewhat equalised. but i really don't think this is the way to do it, as his parents are just trading the risk of his unsafe driving with the risk of less focus on driving.
if his parents really want him to stop speeding, they need to teach him better. or let him get a ticket or two, and see how he feels when he has to pay for it (and the increased insurance premiums). of course, the (unacceptable) risk here is that he'll die before he learns the lesson.
if this guy really wants to give his neighbors access to his girlfriend's recipes or photo albums, he should put them on a webserver or something. running an unsecured wireless AP that is easily accessible by others outside your control is foolish and irresponsible, and there's no sane reason why anyone _needs_ to do so.
i'm not sure how this is relevant. perhaps i run a business from my home and use a business DSL line for my website, mail, etc. if the ISP isn't allowing outgoing SMTP, i have to relay through their servers and my SPF records have to reflect this. personally i find this a non-ideal scenario. i'm sure with a little effort i could come up with other examples.
yeah, we knew what you meant. i'm just being nitpicky.
at the very least, i imagine many networks have an admin budget that is too small to allow as much thoroughness in securing the network as the Tao of NSM would recommend - both in money to buy proprietary products, and in manpower to set up, monitor, and maintain them.
- each application is assigned a unique identifier (such as a random number, or perhaps an MD5 or SHA1 hash of the person's name and address).
- a database entry is created for the applicant, with all the personally-identifying data, linked to the ID generated in (1).
- another database entry is created, this one for all the application materials (only that which is necessary to make an admissions decision). again, this is tied to the applicant via the ID.
- the applicant ID alone, and access to the database in (3), is passed on to the appropriate admissions officials.
now, there are still some problems with this approach. first of all, it's up to the college to do this. the actual admissions people can only have access to the database referenced in (3), and of course the ID number. you can make a law that this needs to be the case, but i haven't a clue how you'd enforce this without spending tons of gov't money on audits (unless you want to make the colleges pay for the audits, which of course is basically asking the students and parents to foot the bill).there's some information the admissions people need to have that could be considered personally identifiable. for example, it might be necessary to know what high school the applicant attended, so the admissions person can normalise their GPA based on the school's record for grade inflation/deflation.
the fact of the matter is that in some areas you just have to trust that the admissions official won't go out of his/her way to dig up info about particular applicants. i think this is acceptable, as long as it's made more than trivial to do so.
why require qt at all? you don't need a GUI library to do file searches. at the very least, put all the search functionality into a library, with a clean API, and then build a GUI on top of it. if the KDE devs care to try to make this THE linux file indexing system, this'll make it a lot easier for people to use it with other desktops, as they can write GUIs using whatever toolkit they want. hell, you could even write a commandline frontend, which i'm sure i (and others) would find useful.
if they want some kind of portable runtime to use, glib would be much more ideal than using the portable-runtime-y portions of qt, since glib doesn't contain any GUI code at all. and qt is a HUGE library (6.9MB on my machine), vs. glib (488kB). of course, this being a KDE project, i'm sure using glib is sacrilige.
(OT: i was somewhat curious after looking at the qt lib size, as to how it compares to a complete gtk solution. you can generally say that gtk consists of gtk, gdk, gdk-pixbuf, glib, atk, and pango. total size, including gdk-pixbuf loader modules, is 4.4MB. note that i didn't include all the various theme engines on my system, since they aren't all loaded simultaneously. for reference, the pixmap theme engine is 556kB. quite a bit of a difference, wouldn't you say?)
i started looking over your list of links to what you're presumably saying are "well-written, fast java apps", thinking that i hadn't heard of any of them, but i'd give them a look to see how nice they are.
then i see you linked to azureus. i think it's a damned good BT client as well. but for its functionality, not speed. it eats so much ram (don't recall the figures), and so much CPU (50-70%), my machine (1.33GHz athlon, 640MB ram - not a powerhouse, but certainly respectable) gets totally bogged down if i try to run more than 4 or 5 torrents at once. and this is even considering that the whole app isn't written in java. on linux, at least, it uses SWT, which appears to be compiled to native code. SWT itself uses gtk, which is definitely native.
now, part of this is the fact that the BT protocol itself is rather CPU-intensive (a lot of SHA hash calculating, and often). but still, i have yet to see a usable, resource-friendly GUI BT client for linux out there. my personal opinion of this is that it's because no one's yet written one in C. ctorrent seems to perform well (thought it lacks a GUI and doesn't seem to get the same download rates azureus or theshadow gets).
this is something i'm curious about. i can see full well why such a MOTD would be ineffective against law enforcement, but why shouldn't it work for a private entity (in this case the RIAA, etc.)?
to explain my reasoning, an analogy. sure, it's flawed, but maybe not too much:
say the front door to your house is open. a cop is driving by your house, and sees this, and (logically) thinks "hmm, there could be a burglary or something going on here." he stops his car, gets out, runs up your front lawn, and enters your house (cautiously, of course, and probably yelling "police!" or something as he enters). he moves out of the entryway of your house into the doorway into your kitchen, only to see you holding the knife you used to just stab some poor guy who is lying on the floor, dead. at this point, he arrests you and eventually you go to court and are proven to have killed this guy.
is there anything wrong with that? i don't think so - i think that's all perfectly legal. law enforcement officials have leave to enter your house if they have reason to believe a crime is in progress, correct?
now, let's take a similar story, but say it's not a cop driving by, but it's bob, the owner of some music store in town. and say you're not in your house knifing someone, but you have a big pile of CDs on your living room floor with a big sign on them that says "I JUST STOLE THESE CDS FROM BOB'S MUSIC STORE". so bob sees your open door, and, being depressed and sad that his entire stock has been stolen, and he's going to go out of business and lose his house and car, decides he's going to rob you. bob comes in, sees your sign and pile of CDs, takes a picture (yeah, he's a weirdo and carries around a camera all the time), and then sues you. assuming this picture does constitue enough evidence (work with me here), i see no reason why he shouldn't win the case. but i also see no reason why you can't sue bob - or even press charges against him - for unlawfully entering your home.
yeah, the analogy isn't perfect, but i think it should still hold. if you leave files on your computer open to the world, with a sign on them that says "if you are affiliated with the RIAA or any of its member labels, you are not authorised to enter this computer system", i don't see why they shouldn't be legally accountable if they do. if they find that you're infringing on their copyrights, sure, they can sue you, but you should also be able to sue them (or press charges?) for unlawfully accessing your computer.
if you're preaching about "the right tool for the job", you'd recognise that python or perl is probably overkill for some of the more simpler tasks, such as the previous example of converting jpegs to pngs, or perhaps renaming a bunch of files, etc.
funny how you call shell scripts "hideous", when a not-insignificant number of people find perl syntax just as nasty (for the record, i happen to love perl).
where the OS X gui is concerned, my opinion falls in the latter category. not saying your opinion is invalid, just saying it's a bit arrogant to say your aesthetic sense is absolute truth (or at least the antithesis of crazy).
in all fairness, i don't think aqua is ugly, per se, i'm just not a big fan of the bubbliness and the pinstripiness. the fact that the whole thing is terribly slow on anything but top-of-the-line mac hardware doesn't help either.