Locking everything down is really easy: just don't give the user root/sudo permissions.
You have a strange definition of everything. There are still a lot of user-specific settings too you know.
Locking down stuff like wallpapers and whatnot is rather overdone by IT depts, but there are occasionally good reasons for stuff like that, for instance on customer-facing computers. Removing sudo rights does diddly squat for those settings.
I don't think that's true; you still need the password of the user you want to install under, not your own. In other words, I'd describe it as an on-demand su. (As opposed to user-requested. Also, it can at least apparently change permissions while a program is running, not just at the start.)
For corporate uses this makes a difference; for home users, I'd wager not so much.
People (normal people) are still compiling software for linux?
I have a couple gigs in my ~ directory it work because I don't have root, and last I checked there was only one package manager (from GoboLinux) that works without root, and a friend didn't have much success with it. At least with Windows before Vista, you had a reasonable chance that a program you wanted would install.
User-level software installation still sucks ass, especially on Linux. Welcome back to dependency hell.
The two aren't unrelated... depending on the type of music you listen too, a lot of the richness of the sound comes from higher harmonics. If you lose the ability to hear high frequencies the sound quality can still suffer even if the primary note is well within your range.
The "our house our rules" mentality is bullshit. They are taking peoples money, not offering a fair game. Whenever someone starts to win- they kick them out. That just simply isn't fair to whoever was winning.
"People who come to win but cut short their stay if they start to lose is bullshit. They are taking the casino's money, not playing a fair game. Whenever the house starts to win, they just leave. That just simply isn't fair to whoever was winning."
Not that I think that the tables should be necessarily even between the gambler and house, which is why things like minimum payout laws and such are probably a good idea.
But I don't think that applies here. I agree with the sibling post: If the gambler can, at will, get up and leave, I think the casino should be able to as well.
If someone's able to use their ability to their advantage, why the hell wouldn't they?
You mean like using the fact that you own the casino to your advantage by kicking people out who are counting cards?
Personally, I think the present situation is eminently fair. You are free to choose to go to Vegas and play blackjack or not, and the casino is free to provide service to you. You are free to count cards, and the casino is free to kick you out.
Put it this way: many swimming pools would probably kick you out if you were running around the deck of the pool. Because it's their ground, so they get to set the rules.
How do we-the-people benefit from patents and copyrights that don't expire in a useful amount of time (i.e. my lifetime)?
Copyrights, yes. Patents, no. Patents last for 20 years (except in limited cases). Unless you're near retirement, you probably don't have to worry about a new patent lasting beyond you.
That makes a lot more sense, considering that there are no x86-compatible 128-bit CPUs available or even being publicly discussed.
What about non-x86, 128-bit chips? Are there any of those? (I don't know of any, but I probably wouldn't anyway.)
The NT kernel has always run on other architectures... throughout the years, PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, and Itanium. If there are places out there with 128-bit chips, I could believe that MS might work on targeting them.
I've looked up SIGINFO (which doesn't exist as such on Linux), and I'm not sure why this would require several components to work together.
It requires (1) the kernel to know about SIGINFO, (2) the tty or whatever generates the SIGINFO to raise the signal, and (3) the program to catch it....there's nothing stopping them from linking the two.
(1) If the kernel doesn't know about SIGINFO, what would it send to the program? Sure, you could use SIGUSR1 or something, but on BSD it gets a distinguished signal that won't confuse other programs if you send it to them. (E.g. say ctrl-T sent SIGUSR1 to a program that responded to it in an entirely different way. As a user, you'd need to know what signals a program expects; you wouldn't be able to just safely try it and see if it works, because SIGINFO would be ignored if the program wasn't going to do something reasonable.)
(2) How would the shell know to raise the signal?
It's possible that this has answers I don't know; I don't know how, say, the SIGINT signal flows around when it's raised. But by my understanding, it at least starts out being noticed by the TTY driver = kernel = not something GNU could do on its own.
You don't think it's ridiculous that if a company gives me a pen, I have to disclose that any time I say anything positive about that company ever? Or you don't think that I'd have to do that?
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that if the FTC regulations truely will require what you're saying they wwill, then they're completely ridiculous and onerous.
Does this mean any time I mention something positive about Microsoft, VMware, Cray, NVidia, and several others, or anything bad about their competitors, I have to mention that I've been given interviews (and often job offers) from each of them? After all, I could just be saying something good about them because they scratched my back in the past. If I go to a job fair and geet a pen from some company, am I forever bound to say "So-and-so Inc gave me a pen" any time I say something favorable?
Really? How do you tell if what they give you is in exchange for your endorsement? Suppose you make your endorsement, and it's particularly awesome for some reason. They spot it and send you some more Slap-Chop. That was in exchange for your endorsement; does that mean you need to disclose it? What if you want to post another nice comment? Do you have to disclose it then? For how many endorsements do you have to disclose that they gave you free stuff?
SSH private keys can't be guessed, they aren't compromised if you use them on more than one system (even untrusted systems), and you can revoke them if the machine they are on is compromised.
If you're relying on your private key to be able to ssh into your system, what happens when you're somewhere without your private key?
If you want to be able to log in anywhere, you have to start carrying your key on a USB stick or something -- at which point it's barely better than writing it down.
I also like the sentence "No other artist or institution I know of have come up with any real solution to this issue yet, so I thought Slashdot readers may have an idea."
There is no reason to make multiple partitions on a single drive. There are lots of myths floating around which are based on nonsense.
If you don't like the idea, whatever. But don't think that there's no reason to do so. I can think of at least one reason that it'd be necessary: you want to run both Linux and Windows. This can blow up a little bit more if you want Windows-only stuff to be on NTFS but a FAT partition for interoperability with Linux. (This is much less of an issue than it was a couple years ago, with NTFS-Fuse being basically stable nowadays.)
Myth 2. Separate partitions will make your system more reliable Bullshit, if the hard drive crashes the whole thing is gone. If you get a destructive virus all your files will be affected.
I had a hard drive crash a few years ago. I'm pretty sure it was hardware related since it made noise, but I could still access most of the data on it. What was the main thing that was corrupted? The MFT of one of my partitions. Had to use recovery software to read that partition (fortunately very little of importance was on it) but the other partitions were directly accessible.
Myth 6. You can reinstall windows (or upgrade windows) easier if you have data in a separate partition Bullshit, this is only true if you're idiotic enough to actually put all your data into random folders on the main drive. If you have a propensity to place your mp3 files in "c:\program files\" and your p0rn into "c:\windows\system32" then you have other problems and shouldn't be using a computer. All your data files on a Windows XP machine should be in "c:\documents and settings\username\", that's it.
Then what do you do when you want to reinstall Windows? If you want to wipe your system partition and start anew, you have to copy your data to a new drive, reformat, install, copy back.
What do I do when I want to reinstall Windows? I reformat my system partition and reinstall. All my personal files and such are preserved without me taking any action whatsoever, other than double- and triple-checking that I'm selecting the right partition to install to.
(BTW, way to have an elegant solution to files that logically belong to multiple users there.)
An A-list retail computer game in 1989 could easily cost 40-50 dollars.
Yeah... that's the surprising thing to me. I remember bugging my parents until they got some SimCity 2000 collection, and that was ~$50. Later when I bought games, they were often around $50. So I don't see $60 as unreasonable. I just don't buy many games.
My favorite, from here (recommended watching!) was telling someone who had robbed a house something like "you really affected this family; if you write an apology letter, the judge might go easier on you." (This is basically a lie.) He then says that he'll take the letter and enter it into evidence "as a signed confession... in the suspect's own handwriting."
In Britain, the truth is an affirmative defense. That means that you're allowed to prove that you told the truth, but it might not be enough to save you.
I don't know whether the second part of that is true, but I do know that's not what an "affirmative defense" means. (Well, at least in the US. But the US gets its legal system largely from the UK, so I would be very surprised if it were different.) An affirmative defense is one the defendant has to raise himself.
Take self defense. During an assault trial, the prosecution is not required by default to show that the defendant did not act in self defense, just that he punched/kicked/threatened/whatever the victim. The defense attorney can't get up in the closing statement and go "the prosecution never presented any evidence that the defendant didn't act in self defense, thus you must acquit." If the defendant wants to use self defense as a defense, they must file a motion with the court (probably before the trial begins, but IANAL and that's the sort of detail I forget/didn't really know in the first place) and convince the judge that it has a reasonable chance of success before it will be allowed.
Basically what I'm saying is that if you read that truth is an affirmative defense in the UK and took away from that the interpretation that showing truth in court isn't sufficient for an acquittal, then there's a very good chance you're mistaken.
Slashdot Mirror
Locking everything down is really easy: just don't give the user root/sudo permissions.
You have a strange definition of everything. There are still a lot of user-specific settings too you know.
Locking down stuff like wallpapers and whatnot is rather overdone by IT depts, but there are occasionally good reasons for stuff like that, for instance on customer-facing computers. Removing sudo rights does diddly squat for those settings.
The new vista UAC thing is more similar to sudo.
I don't think that's true; you still need the password of the user you want to install under, not your own. In other words, I'd describe it as an on-demand su. (As opposed to user-requested. Also, it can at least apparently change permissions while a program is running, not just at the start.)
For corporate uses this makes a difference; for home users, I'd wager not so much.
...if you haven't got a CD drive hooked up (a surprisingly common scenario for some of us)...
You don't have a CD drive hooked up but you do have a floppy? I suspect that "some of us" is a pretty small set nowadays.
People (normal people) are still compiling software for linux?
I have a couple gigs in my ~ directory it work because I don't have root, and last I checked there was only one package manager (from GoboLinux) that works without root, and a friend didn't have much success with it. At least with Windows before Vista, you had a reasonable chance that a program you wanted would install.
User-level software installation still sucks ass, especially on Linux. Welcome back to dependency hell.
Apparently this company doesn't understand they're business very well...
Just like some people don't understand the difference between frequency and bitrate?
The two aren't unrelated... depending on the type of music you listen too, a lot of the richness of the sound comes from higher harmonics. If you lose the ability to hear high frequencies the sound quality can still suffer even if the primary note is well within your range.
The "our house our rules" mentality is bullshit. They are taking peoples money, not offering a fair game. Whenever someone starts to win- they kick them out. That just simply isn't fair to whoever was winning.
"People who come to win but cut short their stay if they start to lose is bullshit. They are taking the casino's money, not playing a fair game. Whenever the house starts to win, they just leave. That just simply isn't fair to whoever was winning."
Not that I think that the tables should be necessarily even between the gambler and house, which is why things like minimum payout laws and such are probably a good idea.
But I don't think that applies here. I agree with the sibling post: If the gambler can, at will, get up and leave, I think the casino should be able to as well.
I've never been to a casino, but isn't Blackjack merely between you and the house?
If someone's able to use their ability to their advantage, why the hell wouldn't they?
You mean like using the fact that you own the casino to your advantage by kicking people out who are counting cards?
Personally, I think the present situation is eminently fair. You are free to choose to go to Vegas and play blackjack or not, and the casino is free to provide service to you. You are free to count cards, and the casino is free to kick you out.
Put it this way: many swimming pools would probably kick you out if you were running around the deck of the pool. Because it's their ground, so they get to set the rules.
How do we-the-people benefit from patents and copyrights that don't expire in a useful amount of time (i.e. my lifetime)?
Copyrights, yes. Patents, no. Patents last for 20 years (except in limited cases). Unless you're near retirement, you probably don't have to worry about a new patent lasting beyond you.
Good thing words can't have two meanings.
Oh wait, they can. And "piracy" has been used to refer to copyright infringement for over three centuries now ("The practice of labeling the act of infringement as "piracy" actually predates copyright itself.") so I'd say it's a pretty damn well-established term. It's not like "intellectual property" or something that's been coined recently.
What a peculiar idea. At least it would probably come in a neat box.
That makes a lot more sense, considering that there are no x86-compatible 128-bit CPUs available or even being publicly discussed.
What about non-x86, 128-bit chips? Are there any of those? (I don't know of any, but I probably wouldn't anyway.)
The NT kernel has always run on other architectures... throughout the years, PowerPC, Alpha, MIPS, and Itanium. If there are places out there with 128-bit chips, I could believe that MS might work on targeting them.
I've looked up SIGINFO (which doesn't exist as such on Linux), and I'm not sure why this would require several components to work together.
It requires (1) the kernel to know about SIGINFO, (2) the tty or whatever generates the SIGINFO to raise the signal, and (3) the program to catch it. ...there's nothing stopping them from linking the two.
(1) If the kernel doesn't know about SIGINFO, what would it send to the program? Sure, you could use SIGUSR1 or something, but on BSD it gets a distinguished signal that won't confuse other programs if you send it to them. (E.g. say ctrl-T sent SIGUSR1 to a program that responded to it in an entirely different way. As a user, you'd need to know what signals a program expects; you wouldn't be able to just safely try it and see if it works, because SIGINFO would be ignored if the program wasn't going to do something reasonable.)
(2) How would the shell know to raise the signal?
It's possible that this has answers I don't know; I don't know how, say, the SIGINT signal flows around when it's raised. But by my understanding, it at least starts out being noticed by the TTY driver = kernel = not something GNU could do on its own.
You don't think it's ridiculous that if a company gives me a pen, I have to disclose that any time I say anything positive about that company ever? Or you don't think that I'd have to do that?
And yet... they seem to think I want a touchpad on a bump.
To be fair, they seem to think that some people want a touchpad on a bump.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is that if the FTC regulations truely will require what you're saying they wwill, then they're completely ridiculous and onerous.
Does this mean any time I mention something positive about Microsoft, VMware, Cray, NVidia, and several others, or anything bad about their competitors, I have to mention that I've been given interviews (and often job offers) from each of them? After all, I could just be saying something good about them because they scratched my back in the past. If I go to a job fair and geet a pen from some company, am I forever bound to say "So-and-so Inc gave me a pen" any time I say something favorable?
Really? How do you tell if what they give you is in exchange for your endorsement? Suppose you make your endorsement, and it's particularly awesome for some reason. They spot it and send you some more Slap-Chop. That was in exchange for your endorsement; does that mean you need to disclose it? What if you want to post another nice comment? Do you have to disclose it then? For how many endorsements do you have to disclose that they gave you free stuff?
SSH private keys can't be guessed, they aren't compromised if you use them on more than one system (even untrusted systems), and you can revoke them if the machine they are on is compromised.
If you're relying on your private key to be able to ssh into your system, what happens when you're somewhere without your private key?
If you want to be able to log in anywhere, you have to start carrying your key on a USB stick or something -- at which point it's barely better than writing it down.
I also like the sentence "No other artist or institution I know of have come up with any real solution to this issue yet, so I thought Slashdot readers may have an idea."
There is no reason to make multiple partitions on a single drive. There are lots of myths floating around which are based on nonsense.
If you don't like the idea, whatever. But don't think that there's no reason to do so. I can think of at least one reason that it'd be necessary: you want to run both Linux and Windows. This can blow up a little bit more if you want Windows-only stuff to be on NTFS but a FAT partition for interoperability with Linux. (This is much less of an issue than it was a couple years ago, with NTFS-Fuse being basically stable nowadays.)
Myth 2. Separate partitions will make your system more reliable
Bullshit, if the hard drive crashes the whole thing is gone. If you get a destructive virus all your files will be affected.
I had a hard drive crash a few years ago. I'm pretty sure it was hardware related since it made noise, but I could still access most of the data on it. What was the main thing that was corrupted? The MFT of one of my partitions. Had to use recovery software to read that partition (fortunately very little of importance was on it) but the other partitions were directly accessible.
Myth 6. You can reinstall windows (or upgrade windows) easier if you have data in a separate partition
Bullshit, this is only true if you're idiotic enough to actually put all your data into random folders on the main drive. If you have a propensity to place your mp3 files in "c:\program files\" and your p0rn into "c:\windows\system32" then you have other problems and shouldn't be using a computer. All your data files on a Windows XP machine should be in "c:\documents and settings\username\", that's it.
Then what do you do when you want to reinstall Windows? If you want to wipe your system partition and start anew, you have to copy your data to a new drive, reformat, install, copy back.
What do I do when I want to reinstall Windows? I reformat my system partition and reinstall. All my personal files and such are preserved without me taking any action whatsoever, other than double- and triple-checking that I'm selecting the right partition to install to.
(BTW, way to have an elegant solution to files that logically belong to multiple users there.)
An A-list retail computer game in 1989 could easily cost 40-50 dollars.
Yeah... that's the surprising thing to me. I remember bugging my parents until they got some SimCity 2000 collection, and that was ~$50. Later when I bought games, they were often around $50. So I don't see $60 as unreasonable. I just don't buy many games.
My favorite, from here (recommended watching!) was telling someone who had robbed a house something like "you really affected this family; if you write an apology letter, the judge might go easier on you." (This is basically a lie.) He then says that he'll take the letter and enter it into evidence "as a signed confession... in the suspect's own handwriting."
In Britain, the truth is an affirmative defense. That means that you're allowed to prove that you told the truth, but it might not be enough to save you.
I don't know whether the second part of that is true, but I do know that's not what an "affirmative defense" means. (Well, at least in the US. But the US gets its legal system largely from the UK, so I would be very surprised if it were different.) An affirmative defense is one the defendant has to raise himself.
Take self defense. During an assault trial, the prosecution is not required by default to show that the defendant did not act in self defense, just that he punched/kicked/threatened/whatever the victim. The defense attorney can't get up in the closing statement and go "the prosecution never presented any evidence that the defendant didn't act in self defense, thus you must acquit." If the defendant wants to use self defense as a defense, they must file a motion with the court (probably before the trial begins, but IANAL and that's the sort of detail I forget/didn't really know in the first place) and convince the judge that it has a reasonable chance of success before it will be allowed.
Basically what I'm saying is that if you read that truth is an affirmative defense in the UK and took away from that the interpretation that showing truth in court isn't sufficient for an acquittal, then there's a very good chance you're mistaken.