They're not even American citizens so who cares what happens to them?
Uhm. The latest guy to be sent to a Navy brig without trial or access a lawyer -- Jose Padilla -- is an American citizen, and was arrested on US soil (when he de-planed at Chicago's O'Hare Airport).
It wasn't to protect criminals that the writers of the US Constitution were so concerned with due process and the rights of the accused. They were concerned because they had experienced tyrannical governments taking away those rights from -- criminal or not -- anyone who inconvenienced the tyrants.
Which is a long-winded way of saying: no matter how much you try to keep your nose clean while kissing the ass of authority, you may be next.
Jose Padilla probably is scum, he's almost certainly connected to the Taliban, and that's frightening. But I'm more frightened that he'll be a precedent for the (further) erosion of rights without which a free society cannot be maintained.
It's because I'm an American and a patriot, not despite that, that I insist Jose Padilla be afforded the right guaranteed all Americans in our Constitution.
Or this isn't ultrasonic: I can definitely hear Anti-MAL's sounds for all three pests. And the sounds aren't pretty: they're enough to repel me. BZZZZZZZZ....
I read "full disclosure unless bound by contract" as "full disclosure unless you pay us to hide what we found".
It can certainly be read that way. However, it can also be read as "We'll reveal the bug unless we discovered it as a result of work we did under the provisions of a Non-Disclosure Agreement."
In this interpretation, it looks like a commitment to the public to disclose so long as they possibly can without breaching an agreement and opening themselves to litigation.
So in this interpretation, it's a (perhaps unfortunately worded) pledge to do the best job they can to inform the public of bugs and vulnerabilities.
(A note to the skeptical: I'm not affiliated with BugTraq or HP ot the EFF in any way. I have no axe to grind, other than being deeply offended by HP's reported acrtions. Essentially, HP has threatened to (attempt to) imprison anyone who points out that HP's code makes HP's customers vulnerable. This is why the DMCA is such a threat to freedom, folks. This is why I'm not buying anything from HP until and unless they repudiate this position, fire those responsible, and take a public anti-DMCA position that includes an major grant to the EFF.)
it seems that people respond better to targeted, relevant advertising
No kidding.
I trust google.
One reason is that google produces relevant hits more often than other search sites.
The other reason is that google makes it unambiguously clear what is and what isn't an ad, and it puts the ad in a consistent place without being overly obtrusive.
Bottom line: if I'm in the mood to buy, I'm more likely to do so when I haven't been offended by an overly in-my-face ad, and where I already trust the seller of the ad space.
Wnat me not to buy? Try tricking me with a "you have one message waiting banner" or with a busy animated graphic. They I won't buy what's advertised, or browse the site selling it.
I regulary browse the web site of a preeminent American newspaper, nicknamed the "Gray Lady" (until it recently added color pictures), which claims it contains "all the news that's fit to print".
Let's not mention its name at this Times, er time, so that no webmaster there googles on this. But it's in the city that been led by Fiorella LaGuardia, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and lately Michael Bloomberg.
But I never see pop-ups, or pop-unders, or most other ads when I browse there.
Why? I have Proxomitron. And so I don't get bothered by ads. You could get it too.
Ahem. No, it's a cool idea, but it's a bit like the mechanical chess players of the 19th century: they played a good game, they moved the pieces by a clever clock-work mechanism, and some even had meachnaical faces able to form "expressions". But the ones that worked were all worked -- by little men inside their cramped interiors.
Let's walk before we run, perhaps literally: we're not up to mechanizing consciousness or even a very reasonable facsimile. But could we pass the Turing tests -- indistiguisible behaviors -- for spiders or inchworms? Possibly and probably, for those two examples. Could we contruct a neuron-by-neuron facsimile of an Aplysia? With some hard work, you might expect to see it at sourceforge in 2006.
So, what are you waiting for? Get to work on OpenAplysia Mark II! Or if you're busy with something else, atttack the other end of the problem, and donate your spare CPU cycles to folding@home.
it does complex waveform analysis so that you can understand speech,
massively parallel image transformations to make two two-dimensional bitmaps (the photons that fall on your two retinas) into a single three-dimensional reconstruction (what you perceive),
and ballistic calculations involving dynamically changing multi-jointed launchers when you move the many muscles in arm and shoulder to throw a rock
What have these mathematical calculations have in common that isn't shared with calculating 10333 + 89677? The mathematical calculations the brain does effortlessly and with any awareness on your part were "designed" by at least six million years of evolution. Failures at this math didn't get to be ancestors, which is why you're so good at it.
Conscious math, on the other hand, has been a factor for at most 30,000 years or so, math with numbers larger than a handful probably for at most 8000 years -- and even today, not for anything more than a fraction of the population. So that ability isn't built in or improved by evolution.
So it's not that the brain can't do math; it does do math. It's just has never needed to do it consciously, and so it doesn't.
Instead the human brain runs a general problem solving "interpreted" program that can be laboriously trained to do math or many other forms of abstract thinking. The price for this flexibility is slowness and inaccuracy. But we don't say that our computers "don't do math" or complain they're made out of the wrong materials when an interpreted BASIC program calculates matrices VERY slowly, or when it introduces errors in floating-point calculations.
I've used Programer's File Editor, UltraEdit, Code-genie, among others.
SciTe wins hands down.
Why? Let's start with SciTE is based on scintilla, a free and open source edit control yuou can include in your own code.
Then let's talk features:
Use any font you like, proportionally spaced or monospaced (trust me, proportional is beter for code, given the right font)
Intelligent and configurable lexers for a plethora of langauges (even Apache configs),
Syntax highlighting (user customizable of course) using colors or fonts or background colors
Code folding: show or collapse everything between whatever delimits a block of code or some higher hierarchical strructure in your language of choice
Intuitive font size zooming, for those bleary-eyed late nights
Per-language configurable Compile, Make, Run, or other commands
User configurable (or just use what comes included) syntax completion and function hints ("calltips")
Line numbering and margins, if you want them
Regular, \escape, and regex search and replace
Unix (\n) or DOS (\r\n) line endings
Displays compiler output in seperate pane, with intellegent parsing of, and go to line of, compiler error messages, even in source files not already open in the editor
User configurable status line
Configuration via config files, not a GUI (This is a strength, not a weakness -- code-Genie does it too, and it works much better than a crowded GUI once the number of config options gets large)
A very responsive developer: when I had an issue (the mouse wheel didn't work consistently when set to scroll one page at a time), my email to the developer got a response in less than three hours. Three hours later, the developer had located newer versions of the mouse drivers, and had downloaded and installed them on his own machine to to test. The problem was fixed in the next release; in the meantime I'd compiled my own copy from the source. (My one quibble is that having researched the problem and provided a code fix, my name wasn't added to the conttributers' list:), but that's unimportant next to having been given the application, the source, and several hours of the developer's time.)
Other than for debugging, SciTE and a make file replace the IDE, and far more cleanly. It also replaces any text editor other than a word processor -- I use it for viewing or editing any text-type file in preference to Wordpad, notepad, etc.
Oh, and did I mention it's free and open source? And unlike GPL'd code, it can be used in commericial projects?
But don't take my word for it. Get yourself a copy here: SciTE
Well, that was rather why Gloria Steinem (?) invented the designation: to achieve parity with men, who aren't forced to reveal their personal social/sexual status just by introducing themselves.
Recall that up through the boomer generation, it was customary for a married woman not only to reveal this, not only to change her surname to her husband's, but also to refer to herself in formal situations by her husband's first name as well:Mrs. John Jones (nee Mary Smith).
My only quibble with the honorific "Ms." is that it has overshadowed and virtually done away with the useful and venerable former meaning of "ms.": manuscript, as in an a yet unpublished written work.
Oddly enough, I noted in yesterday's (24 July 2002) print edition of the NYTimes, an obituary for Dr. William Pierce. Pierce was the leader of the white supremacist National Alliance and author of the Timothy McVeigh-inspiring Turner Diaries.
The obituary noted that Pierce, a physics Ph.D. and formerly a tenured professor at Oregon State University, "preferred to be called" Dr. Pierce, and he was so designated in the second and subsequent references in the obit. (The first reference, of course, gives his full name).
Interestingly, it appears Pierce (I don't feel like honoring him, I'm afraid) had been diagnosed with cancer and, according to an associate, died in his trailer home at noon. Of course, we all have to die at some hour on the clock, but dying at noon seems tidy enough to appeal to a megalomaniac; I wonder if he was a suicide?
I believe Ms. Lee's uncommon last name came up in an earlier/. discussion (where else might I have read about it?). According to a poster in that discussion, Ms. Lee's parents, who ethnic Chinese, gave her the numeral 8 as a middle name because eight is considered a very lucky number in Chinese.
An ethnic Chinese colleague once explained to me that eight is lucky because the sound for eight ("Ba"?) in Mandarin is a homophone for various good and worthy things; if I recall correctly, among them wealth and fatherhood.
(My former colleague is formerly a citizen of Taiwan; he's since been naturalized a US citizen, and with a fine and subtle humor, now declares that he prefers to be known not as a Chinese-American, not as a Taiwanese-American, but as an "Asian-American", thereby poking fun at the U.S. political correctness that, in attempting to be non-offensive, ends up lumping all diverse Mongoloid-appearing peoples -- regardless of whether or not their forebears hailed from Asia -- and excluding any Asians who are not Mongoloid -- into one fictive group that makes sense only in terms of U.S. racial politics.
He explains it almost as if it were a duty of citizenship, an honor and a source of pride, to accept a designation that makes little sense in terms of his life -- he feels little kinship with those strange-customed Cantonese, much less Hmong or Filipinos -- but which is fervently believed by his adopted country. Having embraced him in citizenship, allowing him to retire in a wide land sparsely populated enough -- compared with his experience -- that he can find broad lakes in which to fish in quiet solitude, he is content to not merely accept but to embrace in reciprocity our strange customs and odd ideas. He's a good man, a good citizen, and wise enough to find the humor in it as well.)
Well, the TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program is recruiting meter readers, and may recruit postal workers now that the USPS, which initially balked, is considering it
Now, I betcha' your meter reader -- or postman -- could be persuaded, in the interests of national security, of course, to lend his uniform and id to a gent who knows how to install a covert sattelite phone with a big sensitive microphone. Who knows how to hide it behind your meter, perhaps.
Maybe they'll slap a quick metal patch over it, maybe they'll slid it under the siding on your house, but it'll real inaccesable, as they'll know it's gonna be powered for 90 years on that pinch of plutonium.
I've got an old 386 with a 100 Mb HDD, which runs (ran) Windows 3.11.
If I wanted to install linux on that box, what would be my best bet, as far as distros and teh mechanics of it (it's got a 3.5 floppy, but if I was serious about this I'd probably sptring for a NIC card).
As importantly, what could I expect from a 386 linux box?
Slashdot Mirror
They're not even American citizens so who cares what happens to them?
Uhm. The latest guy to be sent to a Navy brig without trial or access a lawyer -- Jose Padilla -- is an American citizen, and was arrested on US soil (when he de-planed at Chicago's O'Hare Airport).
It wasn't to protect criminals that the writers of the US Constitution were so concerned with due process and the rights of the accused. They were concerned because they had experienced tyrannical governments taking away those rights from -- criminal or not -- anyone who inconvenienced the tyrants.
Which is a long-winded way of saying: no matter how much you try to keep your nose clean while kissing the ass of authority, you may be next.
Jose Padilla probably is scum, he's almost certainly connected to the Taliban, and that's frightening. But I'm more frightened that he'll be a precedent for the (further) erosion of rights without which a free society cannot be maintained.
It's because I'm an American and a patriot, not despite that, that I insist Jose Padilla be afforded the right guaranteed all Americans in our Constitution.
Or this isn't ultrasonic: I can definitely hear Anti-MAL's sounds for all three pests. And the sounds aren't pretty: they're enough to repel me. BZZZZZZZZ....
I read "full disclosure unless bound by contract" as "full disclosure unless you pay us to hide what we found".
It can certainly be read that way. However, it can also be read as "We'll reveal the bug unless we discovered it as a result of work we did under the provisions of a Non-Disclosure Agreement."
In this interpretation, it looks like a commitment to the public to disclose so long as they possibly can without breaching an agreement and opening themselves to litigation.
So in this interpretation, it's a (perhaps unfortunately worded) pledge to do the best job they can to inform the public of bugs and vulnerabilities.
(A note to the skeptical: I'm not affiliated with BugTraq or HP ot the EFF in any way. I have no axe to grind, other than being deeply offended by HP's reported acrtions. Essentially, HP has threatened to (attempt to) imprison anyone who points out that HP's code makes HP's customers vulnerable. This is why the DMCA is such a threat to freedom, folks. This is why I'm not buying anything from HP until and unless they repudiate this position, fire those responsible, and take a public anti-DMCA position that includes an major grant to the EFF.)
With Microsoft and most other vendors you get the notice & fix at the same time. If not, then they tend to provide a workaround
What, exactly, is the "workaround" for a buffer overrun?
Heading my SSL index.html page with
"Please Mr. H4x0r, don't send me strings longer than 512 bytes"?
I always reserve Good Friday for an "upgrade" to the latest Linux
Hmm.
Good Friday? Oh, isn't that the day they nailed, er, soldered Linus Torvald to a motherboard?
Get proxomitron.
It's free.
It's fast.
It comes with a bunch of filters.
More filters can be written if you can write a regex.
A single javascripted bookmark bypasses it if you want to bypass it.
Proxomitron has a clever filter than turns of pop-up ads.... unless they pop-up within two seconds of a mouse-up.
(If your mouse just went up, you just clicked on something, most likely the link to a pop-up you wanted.)
it seems that people respond better to targeted, relevant advertising
No kidding.
I trust google.
One reason is that google produces relevant hits more often than other search sites.
The other reason is that google makes it unambiguously clear what is and what isn't an ad, and it puts the ad in a consistent place without being overly obtrusive.
Bottom line: if I'm in the mood to buy, I'm more likely to do so when I haven't been offended by an overly in-my-face ad, and where I already trust the seller of the ad space.
Wnat me not to buy? Try tricking me with a "you have one message waiting banner" or with a busy animated graphic. They I won't buy what's advertised, or browse the site selling it.
I regulary browse the web site of a preeminent American newspaper, nicknamed the "Gray Lady" (until it recently added color pictures), which claims it contains "all the news that's fit to print".
Let's not mention its name at this Times, er time, so that no webmaster there googles on this. But it's in the city that been led by Fiorella LaGuardia, Ed Koch, Rudy Giuliani, and lately Michael Bloomberg.
But I never see pop-ups, or pop-unders, or most other ads when I browse there.
Why? I have Proxomitron. And so I don't get bothered by ads. You could get it too.
"No, I'm the geek behind the hunk you thought was talking to you. I'm beaming my voice around him with HyperSound!"
[The robot] is state-of-the-art with incredible hands
And we know all the geeks have been waiting for a robot with the slow hands, the easy touch....
"Please wait while Onanism 2.0 lubes -- er, boots -- up"
Show me three useless programmers....
And I'll show you two testers and an aspiring manager!
It is AAA: that's where the robots pick up their batteries.
Of course, that's http://folding.stanford.edu
And now we know why I didn't go there or any other Ivy League school, don't we?
Wake me up robot lady writes her speech.
Ahem. No, it's a cool idea, but it's a bit like the mechanical chess players of the 19th century: they played a good game, they moved the pieces by a clever clock-work mechanism, and some even had meachnaical faces able to form "expressions". But the ones that worked were all worked -- by little men inside their cramped interiors.
Let's walk before we run, perhaps literally: we're not up to mechanizing consciousness or even a very reasonable facsimile. But could we pass the Turing tests -- indistiguisible behaviors -- for spiders or inchworms? Possibly and probably, for those two examples. Could we contruct a neuron-by-neuron facsimile of an Aplysia? With some hard work, you might expect to see it at sourceforge in 2006.
So, what are you waiting for? Get to work on OpenAplysia Mark II! Or if you're busy with something else, atttack the other end of the problem, and donate your spare CPU cycles to folding@home.
s/effortlessly and with any awareness/effortlessly and withOUT any awareness
:) )
(And before anybody objects that the brain does even more math, no, I did not mean to imply this was anything like an exhaustive list.
it does complex waveform analysis so that you can understand speech,
massively parallel image transformations to make two two-dimensional bitmaps (the photons that fall on your two retinas) into a single three-dimensional reconstruction (what you perceive),
and ballistic calculations involving dynamically changing multi-jointed launchers when you move the many muscles in arm and shoulder to throw a rock
What have these mathematical calculations have in common that isn't shared with calculating 10333 + 89677? The mathematical calculations the brain does effortlessly and with any awareness on your part were "designed" by at least six million years of evolution. Failures at this math didn't get to be ancestors, which is why you're so good at it.
Conscious math, on the other hand, has been a factor for at most 30,000 years or so, math with numbers larger than a handful probably for at most 8000 years -- and even today, not for anything more than a fraction of the population. So that ability isn't built in or improved by evolution.
So it's not that the brain can't do math; it does do math. It's just has never needed to do it consciously, and so it doesn't.
Instead the human brain runs a general problem solving "interpreted" program that can be laboriously trained to do math or many other forms of abstract thinking. The price for this flexibility is slowness and inaccuracy. But we don't say that our computers "don't do math" or complain they're made out of the wrong materials when an interpreted BASIC program calculates matrices VERY slowly, or when it introduces errors in floating-point calculations.
after a few moments it's searing hot and starts smelling funny.
There's a double entendre in here somewhere. If only I were younger...
SciTe wins hands down.
Why? Let's start with SciTE is based on scintilla, a free and open source edit control yuou can include in your own code.
Then let's talk features:
Use any font you like, proportionally spaced or monospaced (trust me, proportional is beter for code, given the right font)
Intelligent and configurable lexers for a plethora of langauges (even Apache configs),
Syntax highlighting (user customizable of course) using colors or fonts or background colors
Code folding: show or collapse everything between whatever delimits a block of code or some higher hierarchical strructure in your language of choice
Intuitive font size zooming, for those bleary-eyed late nights
Per-language configurable Compile, Make, Run, or other commands
User configurable (or just use what comes included) syntax completion and function hints ("calltips")
Line numbering and margins, if you want them
Regular, \escape, and regex search and replace
Unix (\n) or DOS (\r\n) line endings
Displays compiler output in seperate pane, with intellegent parsing of, and go to line of, compiler error messages, even in source files not already open in the editor
User configurable status line
Configuration via config files, not a GUI (This is a strength, not a weakness -- code-Genie does it too, and it works much better than a crowded GUI once the number of config options gets large)
A very responsive developer: when I had an issue (the mouse wheel didn't work consistently when set to scroll one page at a time), my email to the developer got a response in less than three hours. Three hours later, the developer had located newer versions of the mouse drivers, and had downloaded and installed them on his own machine to to test. The problem was fixed in the next release; in the meantime I'd compiled my own copy from the source. (My one quibble is that having researched the problem and provided a code fix, my name wasn't added to the conttributers' list :), but that's unimportant next to having been given the application, the source, and several hours of the developer's time.)
Other than for debugging, SciTE and a make file replace the IDE, and far more cleanly. It also replaces any text editor other than a word processor -- I use it for viewing or editing any text-type file in preference to Wordpad, notepad, etc.
Oh, and did I mention it's free and open source? And unlike GPL'd code, it can be used in commericial projects?
But don't take my word for it. Get yourself a copy here: SciTE
Well, that was rather why Gloria Steinem (?) invented the designation: to achieve parity with men, who aren't forced to reveal their personal social/sexual status just by introducing themselves.
Recall that up through the boomer generation, it was customary for a married woman not only to reveal this, not only to change her surname to her husband's, but also to refer to herself in formal situations by her husband's first name as well: Mrs. John Jones (nee Mary Smith).
My only quibble with the honorific "Ms." is that it has overshadowed and virtually done away with the useful and venerable former meaning of "ms.": manuscript, as in an a yet unpublished written work.
Oddly enough, I noted in yesterday's (24 July 2002) print edition of the NYTimes, an obituary for Dr. William Pierce. Pierce was the leader of the white supremacist National Alliance and author of the Timothy McVeigh-inspiring Turner Diaries.
The obituary noted that Pierce, a physics Ph.D. and formerly a tenured professor at Oregon State University, "preferred to be called" Dr. Pierce, and he was so designated in the second and subsequent references in the obit. (The first reference, of course, gives his full name).
Interestingly, it appears Pierce (I don't feel like honoring him, I'm afraid) had been diagnosed with cancer and, according to an associate, died in his trailer home at noon. Of course, we all have to die at some hour on the clock, but dying at noon seems tidy enough to appeal to a megalomaniac; I wonder if he was a suicide?
I believe Ms. Lee's uncommon last name came up in an earlier /. discussion (where else might I have read about it?). According to a poster in that discussion, Ms. Lee's parents, who ethnic Chinese, gave her the numeral 8 as a middle name because eight is considered a very lucky number in Chinese.
An ethnic Chinese colleague once explained to me that eight is lucky because the sound for eight ("Ba"?) in Mandarin is a homophone for various good and worthy things; if I recall correctly, among them wealth and fatherhood.
(My former colleague is formerly a citizen of Taiwan; he's since been naturalized a US citizen, and with a fine and subtle humor, now declares that he prefers to be known not as a Chinese-American, not as a Taiwanese-American, but as an "Asian-American", thereby poking fun at the U.S. political correctness that, in attempting to be non-offensive, ends up lumping all diverse Mongoloid-appearing peoples -- regardless of whether or not their forebears hailed from Asia -- and excluding any Asians who are not Mongoloid -- into one fictive group that makes sense only in terms of U.S. racial politics.
He explains it almost as if it were a duty of citizenship, an honor and a source of pride, to accept a designation that makes little sense in terms of his life -- he feels little kinship with those strange-customed Cantonese, much less Hmong or Filipinos -- but which is fervently believed by his adopted country. Having embraced him in citizenship, allowing him to retire in a wide land sparsely populated enough -- compared with his experience -- that he can find broad lakes in which to fish in quiet solitude, he is content to not merely accept but to embrace in reciprocity our strange customs and odd ideas. He's a good man, a good citizen, and wise enough to find the humor in it as well.)
blackula, I hear you can buy a sense of humor, slightly used, on eBay.
IT WUZ A JOKE!! (I sincerely hope it was, anyway.)
Well, the TIPS (Terrorism Information and Prevention System) program is recruiting meter readers, and may recruit postal workers now that the USPS, which initially balked, is considering it
Now, I betcha' your meter reader -- or postman -- could be persuaded, in the interests of national security, of course, to lend his uniform and id to a gent who knows how to install a covert sattelite phone with a big sensitive microphone. Who knows how to hide it behind your meter, perhaps.
Maybe they'll slap a quick metal patch over it, maybe they'll slid it under the siding on your house, but it'll real inaccesable, as they'll know it's gonna be powered for 90 years on that pinch of plutonium.
I've got an old 386 with a 100 Mb HDD, which runs (ran) Windows 3.11.
If I wanted to install linux on that box, what would be my best bet, as far as distros and teh mechanics of it (it's got a 3.5 floppy, but if I was serious about this I'd probably sptring for a NIC card).
As importantly, what could I expect from a 386 linux box?
Thanks.