> Another exercise: look up the ingredients in SALT and then > look up what happens when you mix Na with H2O.
Of the two major elements in table salt, the sodium is quite frankly not the one I'd be the more squeamish about. But in either case neither component element retains its enthusiastic reactivity in the salt, because it's already reacted with something from the opposite side of the periodic table. There are not very many things sodium would rather be with than the chlorine. Fluorine is one, but if you've got elemental fluorine wafting around at the dinner table, the last thing you're going to be worried about is that it might react with the table salt.
> How is microsoft abandoning patching IE6 any different than Mozilla abandoning patches for Firefox 2?
I'll tell you how. IE6 is a steaming heap of refuse that no sane developer would ever want to support in the first place, and furthermore it's now over seven and a half years old, so dropping support for it at the first opportunity is really the only way to go, and long overdue at that.
Firefox 2 is more arguable, since on the whole it's actually still a quite decent browser. (For the record, I don't blame the Mozilla people for not wanting to support Firefox 2 any more. It's understandable. They've moved on. I do wish they'd stop complaining about the fact that not quite everyone has upgraded, though. Not everyone upgrades punctually. This is not news. Deal with it.)
> You tried to cover yourself by saying "made of tungsten," but I'm going to > guess the deceleration would break or melt even the toughest of elements.
Toughness isn't the only issue. Density (hence "made of tungsten") and shape (hence, "telephone pole") are also very relevant, as is the trajectory of decent.
Bear in mind that the damage done at impact is not dependent on the hardness of the material, but on the momentum. For instance, if the tungsten telephone pole were to melt during reentry and become a long skinny blob of liquid tungsten as a result of atmospheric friction, this would make it harder to steer (assuming you're trying to make trajectory adjustments on the way down), but it would not significantly lessen the damage dealt wherever it hits.
I don't happen to know exactly what the terminal velocity of a tungsten telephone pole would be, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care to stand in its way.
Combination of several factors:
1. Practically everybody uses it.
2. It handles data from untrusted sources.
3. In the case of IE, there were fairly major design flaws.
4. The data changes constantly, not just in detail but in
form and feature. As web developers do new stuff, the
browser has to be updated to support the new stuff, just
to maintain the same level of functionality it had in the
first place. Try browsing the web with IE5 for an hour or
so and you'll see what I mean. It's broken. The world
has moved on. IE6 is on the verge of having this happen
to it as we speak; some sites already don't look quite
right. IE7 will follow, soon. It's three years old, for
crying out loud, and it was badly behind the times then.
Also, you may be misunderstanding what "critical" means in the context of Windows Updates (see below).
> shouldn't they patch the version XP shipped with instead?
IE6 isn't really fixable, not without major sweeping changes and breaking backward compatibility in a broad assortment of ways. Hence, IE8.
Rolling IE8 out via automatic update is the right thing to do, because it's the only way most users will ever get updated, and in the case of IE, it's much better for the web as a whole if most users are updated.
And the only way to get it to update _automatically_, under Windows, is to mark it as critical. Unlike some other update mechanisms (e.g., the one in Debian), Windows Update does not make a distinction between "security critical" updates and mere "bugfix updates" that people might still want to have applied automatically, and so it doesn't let the user or system administrator select which level of updates to apply automatically. All you've got is a toggle switch: either apply critical updates automatically, or don't. (Err, you can also have it download but not apply them if you want.) An update is either "critical" (and therefore available via Automatic Updates) or "optional" (and therefore only available if the administrator does Windows Updates manually, which is very tedious if you have any significant number of workstations to administer). There's no provision for updates to be "optional and not security critical but still automatic if you flipped the setting".
Consequently, however "critical" is ostensibly defined formally, in practice it has come to mean "available via Automatic Updates". Anything that's *not* critical is only available if the system administrator goes to Windows Update manually.
Users who specifically don't want the update can still avoid it easily enough, but most Windows users don't really know how to decide whether to apply an update, so they just get whatever is the default -- namely, "critical" updates only.
> There was a time, I'd put it somewhere between 1996 and 1998, when Geocities wasn't half bad. Few people > were really "up" on the technology, so they'd use Geocities to host real, actual pages that didn't suck.
I don't remember it that way. I remember Geocities being a large collection of pages that basically said "Wow, look at my page, I know how to specify a black background and frames! And I really like fractals!" clear back when I was in college. I graduated in May of 1997.
Meh. Proportional fonts are great for word processing and desktop publishing, but on the internet? That'll never catch on. How would you do ASCII art signatures? Besides, most internet software doesn't even support them. Gnus does, but that's the exception (Gnus supports *everything*, including TeX formatting if you have AucTeX installed, but who would want to use formatting in messages on the internet when we already have perfectly good all-ASCII conventions for *bold* and _underline_?). Mutt and Pine and Lynx and so on and so forth are all fixed-width for a reason.
And then there's alcohol, which you can practically make (a small amount of) by accident if you stick a sliced apple in some Tupperware and forget it's there for a few days; scaling production up is not very much harder. Even 100+ proof stuff is WAY easier to make than any of the other drugs in this thread, but plain old fermentation is easier than flunking a physics exam while drunk.
It helps that the starting materials are all totally innocent normal off-the-shelf food products. Apples and grapes are particularly good because they have the yeast built into their peel, but yeast is easily obtained at any supermarket (people use it to make things like bread and pizza dough), so you can just buy some of that, culture it (so easy to do that a lot of homemade bread recipes call for it), and add that to any mixture of fruits and grains and sugar that you happen to think would make a good brewski. Heck, you could probably make beer out of Cheerios.
But the real issue is that there's no significant chemistry involved in the process. I mean, technically there IS, under the hood, but you don't have to actually mess with it. The yeast totally does it all for you. You don't have to know what a hydroxyl group is or anything.
The only hard part (short of refining your recipe to get a more pleasing flavor than the next guy's) is getting the amount of air in the container right so that you convert most of the sugar to alcohol just as the oxygen runs out. Too much oxygen and you start getting vinegar; an alcoholic will still drink a brew with some vinegar in it (up to a point), but it's widely considered to be an undesirable result.
Distillation is a little trickier, but as noted still nothing like as hard as refining opium or any of that other stuff upthread. Alcohol and water have *significantly* different boiling points.
Now, if you want to get pure 200-proof alcohol, that's actually kind of hard. (You reach an azeotropic situation around 190 proof IIRC.) But for the purpose of human recreational consumption, it's also completely unnecessary. The distilled stuff is quite potent enough to get you every bit as cognitively impaired as you should happen to want to be.
> a still takes more room than a small cannabis plantation (It is an appartment plant in a pot!)
A still takes a bit more room, yeah, but plain old fermentation takes very little room indeed.
And if by a "small cannabis plantation" you mean enough marijuana for one person to have an occasional joint, then sure, you can grow that much in a closet (hence my caveat about imperfect enforcement). But if you want to produce enough for distribution on any significant scale (which is the real goal of the law), it takes a bit more space, and tobacco even moreso, partly because of the difference in concentration of the drug within the plant, but mostly because of the difference in addictiveness. People who smoke tobacco need a hit every couple of hours. People who smoke weed routinely go an entire *day* without a joint. A tobacco smoker would be crawling out of his skin and driving everyone around him right up a wall after that amount of time. You can't keep even *one* smoker supplied with nicotine out of a closet, let alone produce enough to distribute to any meaningful number of addicts.
> Except that it bans fairly benign drugs while authorizing the dangerous > alcohol and the uninteresting dependency-hazard that is nicotine.
Alcohol is completely unbannable because a middle-school student can figure out how to make it in his bedroom using nothing more complicated than food and an airtight container. Even very strong distilled alcohol can be produced in a household kitchen using unremarkable equipment, especially if you're not concerned about violating USDA regulations.
I'm less sure about nicotine, though. Tobacco can be produced using almost no technology, but to grow any very significant amount of it you need pretty much a whole farm, which is a lot harder to hide than an indoor brewing operation. In theory, nicotine ought to be no harder to control than marijuana. Admittedly, you're never going to achieve *perfect* enforcement, but we don't have perfect enforcement for most illegal drugs.
> I would say that a scientist or detective without creativity could be hyper intelligent
I disagree. I don't think it's possible to be very intelligent without some creativity.
It's possible to be very good at memorization and arithmetic without much creativity, but we don't need human computers for that stuff; electronic computers are far better at it than even the most extreme autistic savants.
I'm pretty sure Macs used to ship without bash, but it might have been before OS X came out. I'm not sure. I never saw the first version of OS X. I do remember that once all new Macs started shipping with OS X as the default startup OS, bash was installed, but something else (csh or one of its relatives, IIRC) was the default shell.
But OS X would hardly have been alone in not having bash as the default shell. Last time I used FreeBSD, bash resided in/usr/local if you even installed it.
> I think even people paranoid of the commandline know how to copy and paste.
Actually, a lot of end users don't know how to copy and paste. They've heard of it, but usually they're not quite sure what it's for, and it sounds vaguely wizardly and impressive, and they definitely don't know how to do it.
No, I'm not joking. Hang out at a small-town public library sometime and watch ordinary people use the computers.
I think the developers are under the impression that if you were actually a system administrator you would be comfortable with the command-line interface. The idea that a system administrator might be more comfortable with a GUI comes from realms where the command-line interface traditionally was either non-existent (the Mac universe until eight or nine years ago) or extremely underpowered (the Windows universe until, umm, now). Who wants to use cmd.exe, or edit a config file in Notepad? So they do system administration in the GUI.
Bear in mind, the possibility that "the system administrator" might actually be a complete novice who just bought a new PC that came with Linux pre-installed has been kicking around for a few years, but it has been largely a theoretical concern until, umm, well, frankly, it's still mostly theoretical at this point. (One can easily buy a computer with Linux pre-installed these days, but most of the people who do so are not complete novices.) Large amounts of progress have been made toward making this *possible* (mostly through the use of default settings that are reasonable for novice users), but it's still not very deeply ingrained in Unix culture.
And yeah, if you're such a complete novice that you aren't even comfortable with the CLI, you *definitely* should not be manually editing xorg.conf. Making a mistake editing that file can leave you in a situation where the GUI won't start at all. If you can't work in the CLI, you should leave xorg.conf alone, no fooling.
> Unless you have some weirdo setup, a blank xorg.conf should pretty much suffice on modern distros
Unless you don't like the choices xorg makes by default, e.g., for what resolutions to use. Say, for instance, that some of the resolutions on its list have the wrong aspect ratio for my monitor, and when I zoom in (Ctrl-Alt-+), I prefer that resolutions with the incorrect aspect ratio not be used...
Yeah, I know, end users don't do anything complicated ("Zoom in? What's that? Windows can't do that, so why would I expect any software to do it?"), so they can probably get by without ever touching a config file, but there are always going to be reasons why an advanced user will need to manually adjust the configuration in order to do more advanced things.
Defaults are for novice end users. Options are for users with more experience. Config files are for advanced users.
> It seems to me that copyright terms should be reducing, as the dissemination, > proliferation, and hobbyist creation of media increases.
Oh, I don't see any reason to reduce it below the original fourteen years. That goes by before you know it.
I mean, yeah, I know that fourteen years sounds like an interminable aeon to teenagers ("What! Fourteen years ago I was in diapers!"), but quite frankly society also includes adults, and that's a good thing.
I do think it should count from first publication, though, not from the author's death.
Man, I sort of assumed Geocities must have ceased to exist back in the nineties, as more and more consumer ISPs started offering web hosting as part of their service package. In my mind, Geocities is closely associated with unnecessary framesets and "Get Netscape Navigator 3.0 Now" banners.
> So if you hire some company to allocate you a VM and you run Windows > 7 on it. And I can get remote control of the HOST, I now effectively > have physical access to YOUR Windows 7 VM.
One word: Duh.
Obviously, control of the host system implies control of any guest VMs that it hosts. This is not news.
> physical access to the machine doesn't mean meatspace access.
Actually, for security purposes, it still does. If the access is via the network, that's "remote access", and if the exploit worked under those circumstances we would classify it as a remote exploit.
> virtualized desktops by using small desktop boxes and low-end PCs > to connect to PCs in the datacenter over either RDP or other > proprietary protocols. With the proliferation of cloud-based > applications, it's only a matter of time before someone offers > a browser-based virtual desktop in the cloud. Once someone hacks > into some server up there, they have physical access to the > machines for all intents and purposes.
You should write movie scripts. The above paragraph sounds exactly like something a movie character would say, and then their screen would show the words "Hacking the cloud" and a progress bar.
> We hear about it all the time, laptops being stolen, left out, all with tons of sensitive data.
Fundamentally, the operating system can't fix this. If the attacker has physical control of the hardware, the software cannot really be protected. If you published a method for taking control of an OpenBSD system by having physical control of the hardware, the OpenBSD guys would shrug and say, basically, "Duh". In fact, I can tell you how to do that right now: boot from a live CD, mount the filesystem, and clear root's hashed password out of/etc/shadow, then take the CD out, boot from the hard drive, log in as root, and set whatever password you want. Congratulations, you've now rooted a default OpenBSD install. Woo.
If the system is not physically secure, it should not have enencrypted sensitive data on it.
If the system is not physically secure, it should not have enencrypted sensitive data on it.
If the system is not physically secure, it should not have enencrypted sensitive data on it.
Incidentally, the encryption passwords count as sensitive data, so it shouldn't have those either.
> > A digitized rendering of something, however, is an exact > > (as near as makes no odds, if done right) duplicate. > But doing it right isn't trivial.
Copyright law is not concerned with triviality versus painstaking effort and attention to detail. Copyright law is concerned with originality, or lack thereof. A digitized rendering, insofar as it is merely an accurate reproduction of the original, is not protected by copyright law (other than the copyright on the original, of course, which, if it is still in effect, is relevant to all copies however created).
However, the other poster is not exactly correct about translations. A translation is generally a derived work, meaning that the copyright on the original work is still relevant, but the translation is also eligible for copyright protection in its own right. This is because a translation is *not* just a reproduction.
Good translation requires quite significant creativity. Translation isn't just about trying to accurately depict the thoughts of the original author (though that *is* an important consideration), but also about making the whole thing work in the target language. If you've ever seen an interlinear text (that is, the original text written on every other line, and each word or phrase translated directly above or below), you will appreciate that no matter how much effort is put into making the interlinear text accurate, it is *not* the same thing as a real translation. The translator cannot just reproduce the original; he must essentially rewrite the entire text in the target language. For this reason, the final work is eligible for its own copyright protection, in addition to any protection already afforded by virtue of its derivation from the original.
One of the most impressive translations I've ever seen is Hedge's rendition in English of Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. Anything that follows a poetic metre is difficult to translate in the first place, lyrics doubly so. Not only does Hedge manage the metre and a consistent rhyming pattern handily, he also makes good use of poetic devices in the target language and makes the result flow very well (well enough to pass for prose if you read it out of meter, which is fairly difficult to do with song lyrics even when you're *not* translating somebody else's thoughts from another language), positions syllables that sound well when sung on a held note in all the necessary places, and just generally makes the whole thing sound like it was written in English in the first place, and written well.
> > An unconfirmed rumor also developed this weekend of an OS that > > is so carefully and explicitly restricted that consumers > > interaction with it is limited to attempting to install it > > Until a few months ago, I thought this was how Gentoo was designed.
I haven't installed Gentoo for a few years now, but I seem to recall its being pretty easy on the whole, certainly a good deal easier than any of the BSDs at the time. (This was back before Ubuntu existed, when Gentoo was still the hot new distro all the cool kids were trying. Some of the BSDs have since made the install process somewhat easier than it used to be, but at the time, in order to install them, you pretty much needed several months of experience using BSD so that you could understand its way of doing things in order to be able to understand the install documentation and complete the installation procedure. If you didn't understand the ins and outs of manually creating disklabels, you were sunk.)
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> Another exercise: look up the ingredients in SALT and then
;-)
> look up what happens when you mix Na with H2O.
Of the two major elements in table salt, the sodium is quite frankly not the one I'd be the more squeamish about. But in either case neither component element retains its enthusiastic reactivity in the salt, because it's already reacted with something from the opposite side of the periodic table. There are not very many things sodium would rather be with than the chlorine. Fluorine is one, but if you've got elemental fluorine wafting around at the dinner table, the last thing you're going to be worried about is that it might react with the table salt.
> Can't believe people eat that stuff, ugh.
Soy sauce tastes so much better
> How is microsoft abandoning patching IE6 any different than Mozilla abandoning patches for Firefox 2?
I'll tell you how. IE6 is a steaming heap of refuse that no sane developer would ever want to support in the first place, and furthermore it's now over seven and a half years old, so dropping support for it at the first opportunity is really the only way to go, and long overdue at that.
Firefox 2 is more arguable, since on the whole it's actually still a quite decent browser. (For the record, I don't blame the Mozilla people for not wanting to support Firefox 2 any more. It's understandable. They've moved on. I do wish they'd stop complaining about the fact that not quite everyone has upgraded, though. Not everyone upgrades punctually. This is not news. Deal with it.)
> I work for a large financial institution and we still only support ie6 =(
I hope you're talking about intranet apps that nobody else needs to access.
> You tried to cover yourself by saying "made of tungsten," but I'm going to
> guess the deceleration would break or melt even the toughest of elements.
Toughness isn't the only issue. Density (hence "made of tungsten") and shape (hence, "telephone pole") are also very relevant, as is the trajectory of decent.
Bear in mind that the damage done at impact is not dependent on the hardness of the material, but on the momentum. For instance, if the tungsten telephone pole were to melt during reentry and become a long skinny blob of liquid tungsten as a result of atmospheric friction, this would make it harder to steer (assuming you're trying to make trajectory adjustments on the way down), but it would not significantly lessen the damage dealt wherever it hits.
I don't happen to know exactly what the terminal velocity of a tungsten telephone pole would be, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't care to stand in its way.
> what's so critical about a web browser?
Combination of several factors:
1. Practically everybody uses it.
2. It handles data from untrusted sources.
3. In the case of IE, there were fairly major design flaws.
4. The data changes constantly, not just in detail but in
form and feature. As web developers do new stuff, the
browser has to be updated to support the new stuff, just
to maintain the same level of functionality it had in the
first place. Try browsing the web with IE5 for an hour or
so and you'll see what I mean. It's broken. The world
has moved on. IE6 is on the verge of having this happen
to it as we speak; some sites already don't look quite
right. IE7 will follow, soon. It's three years old, for
crying out loud, and it was badly behind the times then.
Also, you may be misunderstanding what "critical" means in the context of Windows Updates (see below).
> shouldn't they patch the version XP shipped with instead?
IE6 isn't really fixable, not without major sweeping changes and breaking backward compatibility in a broad assortment of ways. Hence, IE8.
Rolling IE8 out via automatic update is the right thing to do, because it's the only way most users will ever get updated, and in the case of IE, it's much better for the web as a whole if most users are updated.
And the only way to get it to update _automatically_, under Windows, is to mark it as critical. Unlike some other update mechanisms (e.g., the one in Debian), Windows Update does not make a distinction between "security critical" updates and mere "bugfix updates" that people might still want to have applied automatically, and so it doesn't let the user or system administrator select which level of updates to apply automatically. All you've got is a toggle switch: either apply critical updates automatically, or don't. (Err, you can also have it download but not apply them if you want.) An update is either "critical" (and therefore available via Automatic Updates) or "optional" (and therefore only available if the administrator does Windows Updates manually, which is very tedious if you have any significant number of workstations to administer). There's no provision for updates to be "optional and not security critical but still automatic if you flipped the setting".
Consequently, however "critical" is ostensibly defined formally, in practice it has come to mean "available via Automatic Updates". Anything that's *not* critical is only available if the system administrator goes to Windows Update manually.
Users who specifically don't want the update can still avoid it easily enough, but most Windows users don't really know how to decide whether to apply an update, so they just get whatever is the default -- namely, "critical" updates only.
> There was a time, I'd put it somewhere between 1996 and 1998, when Geocities wasn't half bad. Few people
> were really "up" on the technology, so they'd use Geocities to host real, actual pages that didn't suck.
I don't remember it that way. I remember Geocities being a large collection of pages that basically said "Wow, look at my page, I know how to specify a black background and frames! And I really like fractals!" clear back when I was in college. I graduated in May of 1997.
Meh. Proportional fonts are great for word processing and desktop publishing, but on the internet? That'll never catch on. How would you do ASCII art signatures? Besides, most internet software doesn't even support them. Gnus does, but that's the exception (Gnus supports *everything*, including TeX formatting if you have AucTeX installed, but who would want to use formatting in messages on the internet when we already have perfectly good all-ASCII conventions for *bold* and _underline_?). Mutt and Pine and Lynx and so on and so forth are all fixed-width for a reason.
Yeah.
And then there's alcohol, which you can practically make (a small amount of) by accident if you stick a sliced apple in some Tupperware and forget it's there for a few days; scaling production up is not very much harder. Even 100+ proof stuff is WAY easier to make than any of the other drugs in this thread, but plain old fermentation is easier than flunking a physics exam while drunk.
It helps that the starting materials are all totally innocent normal off-the-shelf food products. Apples and grapes are particularly good because they have the yeast built into their peel, but yeast is easily obtained at any supermarket (people use it to make things like bread and pizza dough), so you can just buy some of that, culture it (so easy to do that a lot of homemade bread recipes call for it), and add that to any mixture of fruits and grains and sugar that you happen to think would make a good brewski. Heck, you could probably make beer out of Cheerios.
But the real issue is that there's no significant chemistry involved in the process. I mean, technically there IS, under the hood, but you don't have to actually mess with it. The yeast totally does it all for you. You don't have to know what a hydroxyl group is or anything.
The only hard part (short of refining your recipe to get a more pleasing flavor than the next guy's) is getting the amount of air in the container right so that you convert most of the sugar to alcohol just as the oxygen runs out. Too much oxygen and you start getting vinegar; an alcoholic will still drink a brew with some vinegar in it (up to a point), but it's widely considered to be an undesirable result.
Distillation is a little trickier, but as noted still nothing like as hard as refining opium or any of that other stuff upthread. Alcohol and water have *significantly* different boiling points.
Now, if you want to get pure 200-proof alcohol, that's actually kind of hard. (You reach an azeotropic situation around 190 proof IIRC.) But for the purpose of human recreational consumption, it's also completely unnecessary. The distilled stuff is quite potent enough to get you every bit as cognitively impaired as you should happen to want to be.
> a still takes more room than a small cannabis plantation (It is an appartment plant in a pot!)
A still takes a bit more room, yeah, but plain old fermentation takes very little room indeed.
And if by a "small cannabis plantation" you mean enough marijuana for one person to have an occasional joint, then sure, you can grow that much in a closet (hence my caveat about imperfect enforcement). But if you want to produce enough for distribution on any significant scale (which is the real goal of the law), it takes a bit more space, and tobacco even moreso, partly because of the difference in concentration of the drug within the plant, but mostly because of the difference in addictiveness. People who smoke tobacco need a hit every couple of hours. People who smoke weed routinely go an entire *day* without a joint. A tobacco smoker would be crawling out of his skin and driving everyone around him right up a wall after that amount of time. You can't keep even *one* smoker supplied with nicotine out of a closet, let alone produce enough to distribute to any meaningful number of addicts.
> Except that it bans fairly benign drugs while authorizing the dangerous
> alcohol and the uninteresting dependency-hazard that is nicotine.
Alcohol is completely unbannable because a middle-school student can figure out how to make it in his bedroom using nothing more complicated than food and an airtight container. Even very strong distilled alcohol can be produced in a household kitchen using unremarkable equipment, especially if you're not concerned about violating USDA regulations.
I'm less sure about nicotine, though. Tobacco can be produced using almost no technology, but to grow any very significant amount of it you need pretty much a whole farm, which is a lot harder to hide than an indoor brewing operation. In theory, nicotine ought to be no harder to control than marijuana. Admittedly, you're never going to achieve *perfect* enforcement, but we don't have perfect enforcement for most illegal drugs.
> I would say that a scientist or detective without creativity could be hyper intelligent
I disagree. I don't think it's possible to be very intelligent without some creativity.
It's possible to be very good at memorization and arithmetic without much creativity, but we don't need human computers for that stuff; electronic computers are far better at it than even the most extreme autistic savants.
> Umm, now? Did OS X ever ship without bash?
/usr/local if you even installed it.
I'm pretty sure Macs used to ship without bash, but it might have been before OS X came out. I'm not sure. I never saw the first version of OS X. I do remember that once all new Macs started shipping with OS X as the default startup OS, bash was installed, but something else (csh or one of its relatives, IIRC) was the default shell.
But OS X would hardly have been alone in not having bash as the default shell. Last time I used FreeBSD, bash resided in
> I think even people paranoid of the commandline know how to copy and paste.
Actually, a lot of end users don't know how to copy and paste. They've heard of it, but usually they're not quite sure what it's for, and it sounds vaguely wizardly and impressive, and they definitely don't know how to do it.
No, I'm not joking. Hang out at a small-town public library sometime and watch ordinary people use the computers.
> Switch to Admin button.
I think the developers are under the impression that if you were actually a system administrator you would be comfortable with the command-line interface. The idea that a system administrator might be more comfortable with a GUI comes from realms where the command-line interface traditionally was either non-existent (the Mac universe until eight or nine years ago) or extremely underpowered (the Windows universe until, umm, now). Who wants to use cmd.exe, or edit a config file in Notepad? So they do system administration in the GUI.
Bear in mind, the possibility that "the system administrator" might actually be a complete novice who just bought a new PC that came with Linux pre-installed has been kicking around for a few years, but it has been largely a theoretical concern until, umm, well, frankly, it's still mostly theoretical at this point. (One can easily buy a computer with Linux pre-installed these days, but most of the people who do so are not complete novices.) Large amounts of progress have been made toward making this *possible* (mostly through the use of default settings that are reasonable for novice users), but it's still not very deeply ingrained in Unix culture.
And yeah, if you're such a complete novice that you aren't even comfortable with the CLI, you *definitely* should not be manually editing xorg.conf. Making a mistake editing that file can leave you in a situation where the GUI won't start at all. If you can't work in the CLI, you should leave xorg.conf alone, no fooling.
> Unless you have some weirdo setup, a blank xorg.conf should pretty much suffice on modern distros
Unless you don't like the choices xorg makes by default, e.g., for what resolutions to use. Say, for instance, that some of the resolutions on its list have the wrong aspect ratio for my monitor, and when I zoom in (Ctrl-Alt-+), I prefer that resolutions with the incorrect aspect ratio not be used...
Yeah, I know, end users don't do anything complicated ("Zoom in? What's that? Windows can't do that, so why would I expect any software to do it?"), so they can probably get by without ever touching a config file, but there are always going to be reasons why an advanced user will need to manually adjust the configuration in order to do more advanced things.
Defaults are for novice end users. Options are for users with more experience. Config files are for advanced users.
> It seems to me that copyright terms should be reducing, as the dissemination,
> proliferation, and hobbyist creation of media increases.
Oh, I don't see any reason to reduce it below the original fourteen years. That goes by before you know it.
I mean, yeah, I know that fourteen years sounds like an interminable aeon to teenagers ("What! Fourteen years ago I was in diapers!"), but quite frankly society also includes adults, and that's a good thing.
I do think it should count from first publication, though, not from the author's death.
Man, I sort of assumed Geocities must have ceased to exist back in the nineties, as more and more consumer ISPs started offering web hosting as part of their service package. In my mind, Geocities is closely associated with unnecessary framesets and "Get Netscape Navigator 3.0 Now" banners.
1996 called. They want their insightful story about new spam trends back.
> So if you hire some company to allocate you a VM and you run Windows
> 7 on it. And I can get remote control of the HOST, I now effectively
> have physical access to YOUR Windows 7 VM.
One word: Duh.
Obviously, control of the host system implies control of any guest VMs that it hosts. This is not news.
> physical access to the machine doesn't mean meatspace access.
Actually, for security purposes, it still does. If the access is via the network, that's "remote access", and if the exploit worked under those circumstances we would classify it as a remote exploit.
> virtualized desktops by using small desktop boxes and low-end PCs
> to connect to PCs in the datacenter over either RDP or other
> proprietary protocols. With the proliferation of cloud-based
> applications, it's only a matter of time before someone offers
> a browser-based virtual desktop in the cloud. Once someone hacks
> into some server up there, they have physical access to the
> machines for all intents and purposes.
You should write movie scripts. The above paragraph sounds exactly like something a movie character would say, and then their screen would show the words "Hacking the cloud" and a progress bar.
> We hear about it all the time, laptops being stolen, left out, all with tons of sensitive data.
/etc/shadow, then take the CD out, boot from the hard drive, log in as root, and set whatever password you want. Congratulations, you've now rooted a default OpenBSD install. Woo.
Fundamentally, the operating system can't fix this. If the attacker has physical control of the hardware, the software cannot really be protected. If you published a method for taking control of an OpenBSD system by having physical control of the hardware, the OpenBSD guys would shrug and say, basically, "Duh". In fact, I can tell you how to do that right now: boot from a live CD, mount the filesystem, and clear root's hashed password out of
If the system is not physically secure, it should not have enencrypted sensitive data on it.
If the system is not physically secure, it should not have enencrypted sensitive data on it.
If the system is not physically secure, it should not have enencrypted sensitive data on it.
Incidentally, the encryption passwords count as sensitive data, so it shouldn't have those either.
> > A digitized rendering of something, however, is an exact
> > (as near as makes no odds, if done right) duplicate.
> But doing it right isn't trivial.
Copyright law is not concerned with triviality versus painstaking effort and attention to detail. Copyright law is concerned with originality, or lack thereof. A digitized rendering, insofar as it is merely an accurate reproduction of the original, is not protected by copyright law (other than the copyright on the original, of course, which, if it is still in effect, is relevant to all copies however created).
However, the other poster is not exactly correct about translations. A translation is generally a derived work, meaning that the copyright on the original work is still relevant, but the translation is also eligible for copyright protection in its own right. This is because a translation is *not* just a reproduction.
Good translation requires quite significant creativity. Translation isn't just about trying to accurately depict the thoughts of the original author (though that *is* an important consideration), but also about making the whole thing work in the target language. If you've ever seen an interlinear text (that is, the original text written on every other line, and each word or phrase translated directly above or below), you will appreciate that no matter how much effort is put into making the interlinear text accurate, it is *not* the same thing as a real translation. The translator cannot just reproduce the original; he must essentially rewrite the entire text in the target language. For this reason, the final work is eligible for its own copyright protection, in addition to any protection already afforded by virtue of its derivation from the original.
One of the most impressive translations I've ever seen is Hedge's rendition in English of Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott. Anything that follows a poetic metre is difficult to translate in the first place, lyrics doubly so. Not only does Hedge manage the metre and a consistent rhyming pattern handily, he also makes good use of poetic devices in the target language and makes the result flow very well (well enough to pass for prose if you read it out of meter, which is fairly difficult to do with song lyrics even when you're *not* translating somebody else's thoughts from another language), positions syllables that sound well when sung on a held note in all the necessary places, and just generally makes the whole thing sound like it was written in English in the first place, and written well.
> > An unconfirmed rumor also developed this weekend of an OS that
> > is so carefully and explicitly restricted that consumers
> > interaction with it is limited to attempting to install it
>
> Until a few months ago, I thought this was how Gentoo was designed.
I haven't installed Gentoo for a few years now, but I seem to recall its being pretty easy on the whole, certainly a good deal easier than any of the BSDs at the time. (This was back before Ubuntu existed, when Gentoo was still the hot new distro all the cool kids were trying. Some of the BSDs have since made the install process somewhat easier than it used to be, but at the time, in order to install them, you pretty much needed several months of experience using BSD so that you could understand its way of doing things in order to be able to understand the install documentation and complete the installation procedure. If you didn't understand the ins and outs of manually creating disklabels, you were sunk.)
> wow, wish i had modpoints for that.
Meh. The slashdot moderation system doesn't support moderating a comment as Obvious.
How sharp is the gravel?