The problem with supporting multiple init systems is that each
package that provides a daemon needs to support all of them.
I agree with you in theory. In this case SysV init has been
around for ages so SysV init scripts already exist for almost all
packages. Just don't remove those and there is very little
additional work required to maintain the SysV init scripts.
Yes, new packages will need to support both for a while, but
this is a tiny fraction of the work to create and maintain
a new service. It is a very small price to pay in order to
get some breathing room and a graceful transition period.
It will give people a chance to put down the torches and
pitchforks for a while. One of the biggest objections to
systemd was that it was being rammed down our throats whether
we wanted it or not, whether it was ready or not, etc.
Look at Pulse Audio. After a few painful years, it was
finally ready for non-beta use. Systemd should be given
a similar incubation period during which people can easily
choose to use it or not.
Before the creation of Arda (The World), Melkor was the most
powerful of the Ainur. Because of his unique station, he sought
to create wills in the manner of his own Creator, so he alone
would venture sometimes into the Void in search of the Flame
Imperishable, the Secret Fire, which would grant him this
ability. But he never found it, as it is with Eru only. He had
sought to fill the Void with sentient beings and was dissatisfied
with Eru's abandonment of it. Instead, in what he hoped would be
an expression of his own originality and creativity, he contended
with Eru (God) in the Music of the Ainur, introducing what he
perceived to be themes of his own.
Unlike his fellow Ainu Aule, Melkor was too proud to admit that
his creations were simply discoveries wholly made possible by,
and therefore "belonging" to, Eru. Instead, Melkor aspired to the
level of Eru, the true Creator of all possibilities.
During the Great Music of the Ainur, Melkor attempted to alter
the Music and introduced what he believed to be elements purely
of his own design. As part of these efforts, he drew many
weaker-willed Ainur to him, creating a counter to Eru's main
theme. Ironically, these attempts did not truly subvert the
Music, but only elaborated Eru's original intentions: the Music
of Eru took on depth and beauty precisely because of the strife
and sadness Melkor's disharmonies (and their rectification)
introduced.
Since the Great Music of the Ainur stood as template for all of
history and all of material creation in the Middle-earth cycle
(it was first sung before Time, and then the universe was made in
its image), there was an aspect of everything in Middle-earth
that came of Melkor's malign influence; everything had been
"corrupted". Tolkien elaborates on this in Morgoth's Ring,
drawing an analogy between the One Ring, into which Sauron
committed much of his power, and all of Arda -- "Morgoth's Ring"
-- which contains and is corrupted by the residue of Melkor's power
until the Remaking of the World.
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
The work on the Linux kernel by Linus is essentially the "first
time" which is why he prefers C. It can be used as a bottom-up
language. OOP and C++ are top-down. The BOSS-MOOL group are
rewriting something that already exists so they are using a
top-down approach. Both Linus and the BOSS-MOOL group are
using the right tool for the job. The jobs are different
so the right tool is different.
what does it mean for a particle to be its own antiparticle?
In theoretical calculations if you reverse the charge (C), the parity (P), and time (T) of a particle, you get its antiparticle. A simpler (and less accurate) way of saying this is that antiparticles are normal particles traveling backward in time. This is not just a novelty, it is important for doing quantum field theory calculations (see Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation).
So a particle is its own antiparticle if you reverse all three (CPT) and get the same thing. As the OP said, this is not unusual. It is only unusual for fermions. If two of them collide with each other then they can be annihilated and turn into another particle-antiparticle pair, just like photons can. Since they are neutral (I *think*, due to C symmetry) they don't attract each other like positrons and electrons do so you have to make special arrangements to get them to collide.
Does that mean that they're neutral to matter and anti-matter, or do they still somehow fall into one of those categories?
If there were an anti-matter universe then the photons there would be the same as the photons here. Same thing with Majorana fermions. I guess you could say they are both matter and anti-matter. You could also say they are neither matter nor anti-matter.
Yes, it is a publicity stunt, and yes, it won't convince people
who are invested in the conspiracy theory, and yes, it does not
prove the original photo was authentic. But as you said, it
does give a plausible explanation for the lighting in the
original photo.
The dissenting judge disagrees with the majority opinion. It is
ridiculous to use the dissenting opinion to explain the majority
opinion. Agent Logan was legally able to perform what would
normally be an Unconstitutional search when the search was
restricted to military personnel only. I said your
common sense should have told you that military personal don't
have the same Constitutional rights as normal citizens. I also
provided a link to a page that described this in detail.
Therefore your insinuation that I was relying solely on common
sense is another fabrication. If you disagree and think that
military personnel have the same Constitutional rights as normal
citizens, fine, let's discuss it. But don't insinuate I was
relying on common sense when I provided a link (and you could
just as easily use Google to get the same results).
Regardless of which laws were used by the defense to throw out
the results of a search that was clearly Unconstitutional [see
below], the following facts remain:
Military personnel have almost no rights regarding search
and seizure.
Agent Logan used these same standards to search "all computers
in the state of Washington" without probable cause or a warrant.
The majority opinion said there was a need to deter future
violations because there was evidence of widespread and repeated
violations. (For goodness sake, the government was arguing it had
a right to perform such massive searches. If they eventually
prevail is it conceivable that they would stop conducting such
searches?).
Your statement "the evidence was thrown out because a
military investigator found the material" implies that if
someone who was not in the military had performed the search then
it would have been legal.
The fundamental question is whether the US Government has the
right to search all of the computers in the United States without
a warrant and without probable cause. The majority ruled they
do not. The choice to use the Posse Comitatus Act was made by
the defense attorneys, not the judges. It is usually much cheaper
to avoid arguing things on Constitutional grounds. But the use
of the PCA by the defense does not at all imply that no
Constitutional rights were violated.
It boggles my mind that anyone would honestly think such a search
was Constitutional as long as it was performed by non-military
personnel. What possible use is the 4th Amendment if such
searches were legal? If you really want to argue that such a
broad search of normal people would be Constitutional then let's
do it. Don't hide behind implications and insinuations.
The evidence was thrown out because a military investigator found
the material, not because it was an unconstitutional search.
Nice try but that is not what the fine article says. It says:
The 2-1 majority rejected the government's argument that the
military is allowed to monitor and search all computers in a
state without prior knowledge that a computer's owner is even in
the military.
Even a modicum of common sense should tell you that people in
military service do not have the same Constitutional rights
as the general public even without the huge hint in the fine
article. From
Does the Constitution apply to rights of military members?:
But in other respects, even basic rights against unreasonable
searches and seizures are virtually non-existent [for military
personnel].
The problem was not that a person in the military was conducting
a search that would have been Constitutional had a non-military
person conducted it. The problem was that the search was
performed using the lax (and generally Unconstitutional)
standards the military uses for searching its own but it was
conducted on an entire state. If the government wins this case
then they will have a right to search all of your computers
without any warrant or any probable cause just by asking a member
of the military to conduct the search and then hand off anything
interesting to the police of FBI.
Please stop just making shit up in order to twist a story into
fitting your political agenda.
How is it a violation of rights or privacy to search a search
engine for files that you deliberately make public for the
purpose of sharing.
FTFA:
Using software called RoundUp from his office in Georgia, Logan
searched for "any computers located in Washington state sharing
known child pornography on the Gnutella file-sharing network,"
the ruling states.
Dear AC, I am not familiar with a search engine called "RoundUp".
Will you please provide a link? It looks useful.
More FTFA:
The 2-1 majority rejected the government's argument that the
military is allowed to monitor and search all computers in a
state without prior knowledge that a computer's owner is even
in the military.
Clearly the military has much fewer Constitutional restrictions
when they investigate military personnel. This case is
about whether the military can investigate the general public
with that same lack of Constitutional restraint.
If the court sided with NCIS agent Logan (Logan Cale?) then
unless the ruling was overturned by a higher court, the US
Government could use military personnel to scan all computers in
the US and simply turn over anything suspicious to the local
authorities. I don't know why you think it would be a good idea
to give the US government the right to constantly scan all of
your computers, smart phones, and tablets. I prefer that
such searches stay illegal without a proper search warrant.
Lem wrote about all kinds of possible futures. A small percentage
do match the description in the summary but the vast majority conflict
with it. Most of his work is about reaching out and exploring in
various ways. His work is so varied it is difficult to come up
with one theme that describes it all. If I were to try to come up
with major themes then I would give at least these:
Alien life is so different from our own that despite our
best efforts we are unable to communicate with it or understand it.
Mechanical life begets (creates) biological life which begets
mechanical life, and so on. The origins are lost in the shrouds
of pre-history.
People are mostly idiots and don't realize it. Present company not
excepted.
Therefore Microsoft is right in claiming that software is in fact
like a physical machine (since the 1s and 0s of software are real
whereas your abstract ideas can't be clearly represented like
that) that controls another physical machine (the CPU).
Fine. Then the patent only covers one configuration of ones and
zeros that implement the algorithm (corresponding to one physical
machine), not every possible configuration of ones and zeros that
implement the algorithm (which correspond to an infinite number
of different machines). This means the patent is only good for
their source code with their compiler with their set of compiler
optimizations on one specific CPU architecture. They would be far
better off using copyright instead.
The leap you make from protecting one configuration of ones and
zeros that implement an algorithm to protecting every possible
configuration of ones and zeros that implement the same algorithm
is exactly the part of the argument that I characterize as
"stupid and ill-informed".
Seriously, how is protecting every possible way to implement an
algorithm (on a computer) any different from protecting the
algorithm itself (on a computer)? The judges in that case can
hide behind the excuse of being completely ignorant of how
computers work. What's your excuse?
Thanks for the link. That paper discusses a system that has
C and A but not P. They are looking at fast transactions on
a distributed system that is never partitioned (no hardware or
network failures). When parts of the system go down they will
still have to choose between availability and strong consistency.
They tell us they chose C over A:
In its current implementation, Calvin handles hardware failures
by recovering the crashed machine from its most recent complete
snapshot and then replaying all more recent transactions. Since
other nodes within the same replica may depend on remote reads
from the afflicted machine, however, throughput in the rest of
the replica is apt to slow or halt until recovery is
complete.
If they were able to provide C and A and P then it would
be huge news. Most of our current databases both RDBMS and
NoSQL would instantly be obsolete. Most database design over
the past decade or more has involved using different tradeoffs
between C, A, and P. If someone really found a way to provide
all three at once then all of that work would have been for
naught.
You can patent pretty much anything under the sun that is made by
man except laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract
ideas. These categories are excluded subject matter from the
scope of patents.
...
What Are Abstract Ideas?
Abstract ideas are concepts like pure mathematics and algorithms.
You cannot patent a formula. However, you can patent an
application of that formula. Thus, while you cannot patent a
mathematical formula that produces nonrepeating patterns, you can
patent paper products that use that formula to prevent rolls of
paper from sticking together.
In the legal world it is widely accepted that ideas and
algorithms cannot be patented. The reason we have/had software
patents at all is that despite Bill Gates once saying that it
would have been impossible to create Microsoft if software
were patentable, Microsoft (and others I imagine) gave the
courts a bull shit argument that since running software affects
the physical state of the machine it is running on, software
is more like a physical object and less like an idea or
algorithm. Since the judges knew next to nothing about computers
they accepted this bullshit argument hook, line, and sinker.
The problem with Microsoft's argument is that different
implementations of the same algorithm create different physical
configurations (electrons and so on) of the hardware. Likewise
different CPU architectures create different physical
configurations and so on. Microsoft's argument ends up with
a patent that protects all possible implementations of a algorithm
on a computer which is indistinguishable from patenting the
algorithm itself.
That incredibly ill-informed and stupid decision opened the
floodgates for "... on a computer" patents. The Supreme Court
is now trying to rectify that mistake. Abstract ideas cannot
be patented. Mathematics cannot be patented. Algorithms cannot
be patented. However you can protect the expression of
an algorithm by using copyright to protect your particular
implementation. You cannot protect all possible implementations
of an abstract idea.
Unless you are incredibility stupid, or actually doing something
illegal, you have nothing to fear from 99.999% of law
enforcement, and for that 0.001% of the time there is a risk,
there isn't much you can do anyway. But you have the same things
at home I'll bet.
Are you deliberately lying or is the problem that you have
not yet learned to Google before posting extraordinary claims?
Your claim is directly contradicted by
an
article in the New Yorker that was probably pivotal in
raising the alarm. Here is a small sample:
Yet only a small portion of state and local forfeiture cases
target powerful entities. "There's this myth that they're
cracking down on drug cartels and kingpins," Lee McGrath, of the
Institute for Justice, who recently co-wrote a paper on Georgia's
aggressive use of forfeiture, says. "In reality, it's small
amounts, where people aren't entitled to a public defender, and
can't afford a lawyer, and the only rational response is to walk
away from your property, because of the infeasibility of getting
your money back." In 2011, he reports, fifty-eight local, county,
and statewide police forces in Georgia brought in $2.76 million
in forfeitures; more than half the items taken were worth less
than six hundred and fifty dollars. With minimal oversight,
police can then spend nearly all those proceeds, often without
reporting where the money has gone.
It takes only a pinch of common sense to realize that if you
allow a group of people the right to stop law abiding citizens
and take their money and possessions with no legal repercussions
then this right will be abused.
In some places it costs well over $1,000 for a citizen to start
fighting a seizure. If the cops took $500 or less then fighting
and winning will cost at least $500 and likely thousands of
dollars more.
In a backhanded way, you seem to be saying that the police in
America are a bunch of nincompoops who haven't yet figured out
that it is much easier to steal smaller amounts of money from
people who can't or won't fight back than it is to steal larger
amounts of money from people who can and will fight back.
The way the system is set up, it may be impossible to provide
accurate statistics on what percentage of these civil forfeitures
had anything at all to do with criminal activity because no
criminal charges need to be filed and there are big disincentives
that prevent even completely innocent people from fighting back.
Many of the anecdotal stories in the New Yorker article show how
easy it is for civil forfeiture laws to be systematically abused
by the police. Even if the original system was created with the
best of intentions it has devolved into us basically paying the
police handsomely to violate people's Constitutional rights.
She admits to having corresponded to a known terrorist. That may
not be the letter of the law in regards to having been an member,
but don't you think that she should have mentioned that
particular fact, knowing that she was applying for government
position that actually required more than a cursory background
check?
Hell no. Not unless they asked her about it. She certainly
should not have morphed the simple question they asked her
about her own group membership into a much larger question
about the group memberships of all the people she had ever
had any contact with.
The fine article says:
... Balagoon died in 1986 of an AIDS-related illness. (Barr says
she wrote to Balagoon occasionally while he was in prison---"it
would have been reprehensible for me to drop my correspondence
with a dying person," she explains---and visited him once.)
This has nothing to do with her own affiliations. It was also
almost 30 years ago. If her association with this man was
innocent (which no one is disputing) then it is very unrealistic
to expect her to dredge up this old memory during the interview
process when she is being bombarded with other questions.
Expecting her to answer a complicated question when she is asked
a simple question is also highly unrealistic.
I ran into a similar problem with the DIS (now the DSS). They
got upset because I had associated with people they thought were
communists when I was in graduate school. They were also upset
because after grad school a couple of Russians, along with other
foreigners stayed at my house for about a week after we all got
to know each other working on a volunteer trail crew for a week
or two. They were here as part of an exchange program. This was
right around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall when our
relationship with Russia was still frosty.
I had answered all of their questions honestly. I was not aware
of the political affiliations of all of the people I had worked
with. It never occurred to me that doing my patriotic duty by
showing a couple of Russians the benefits of the American system
was of any interest to the DIS until they accused me of
withholding this information.
If they had asked me directly about associating with communists
in graduate school, I would not have been able to answer to their
satisfaction because I just didn't know. If they had asked me
directly if I ever had contact with anyone from a communist
country then I might have remembered that short visit. But I
might not have remembered even if they had asked because for me
it was small, harmless, and inconsequential. When they asked me
directly about that particular visit then of course I remembered.
I found the entire process rather intimidating. I was
focused intently and racking my brain to answer all of their
questions as honestly as possible. It never occurred to me to
wonder about other questions they didn't ask that they might want
answers to especially since the stuff they got so upset about was
totally innocent and harmless. It was like dealing with a big
angry girlfriend who expects you to intuit every possible thing
she might get upset about even though she does not give you any
clues about what those things might be.
I think she may be telling the truth but omitting the fact that
she was continuing to contact those two is enough for them to
take action.
How is it her fault they asked her the wrong question? Do you
now have to be psychic to work for the NSF? They asked if she
belonged to any groups "dedicated to the use of violence".
She answered the question honestly. Do you really think she
should have interpreted that question to mean "ever visit a dying
person in jail who was convicted of murder"?
I think the OPM falsely claimed they rejected her for lying
because the real reason tramples on her constitutional right to
free association. The original question was about whether she
herself ever had a personal dedication to the use of violence. I
believe this is relevant to her suitability to work for the
government. The unconstitutional question they did not ask,
about her free associations, is not relevant by order of the
Constitution of the United States of America.
Answering the question that was actually asked should be very
easy for the vast majority of people. They need only search
their own hearts. Answering the unasked question is much more
difficult because you have to recall all of the people you have
ever had an association with and search their hearts. It makes
no sense for her to spend an hour (or ten minutes or whatever) to
answer the very simple question they asked her.
To me it seems like the particular special agent who questioned
her was effectively judging her on one question:
Yes, of course. Likewise when the entire system is down or the ATM
you want to use is unplugged, the ATM cannot perform any operation.
But that's not what we are talking about here. We are talking about
what happens when the database itself is spread out across many
nodes (servers) and one or more of those servers goes down. Do you
shutdown all the ATMs or do you let them keep handing out money
even if you may not be able to show the users a balance that is
100% correct in all cases? Banks choose to provide limited functionality
as long as it is safe because customers get really pissed off when
the ATMs seem to be broken a lot of the time.
Chasing around for compensation later cannot be an option in many
cases because it is going to be abused.
When the system is functioning normally, the difference
between strong consistency and eventual consistency is on the
order of a few milliseconds. I don't think that leaves much of a
window for abuse. The fundamental question is what do you do
when there is partitioning? Or as you call it, system
degradation. If you take an ACID approach then you shut down
everything until the partitioning has been repaired. If you take
a BASE approach then you still provide at least some
functionality by sacrificing strong consistency. The CAP theorem
says you cannot have both strong consistency and availability
when there is partitioning.
Whatever system you use locally will be checked live, usually
with a mainframe based system that is ACID compliant. If that
isn't possible then you have a gradual system degradation where
only certain types of transactions are processed.
The fact that you have any functionality at all when there is
non-trivial degradation is due to using an overall BASE
strategy instead of an ACID strategy. I have no doubt that one
or more ACID databases are used as parts of the system but
an overall BASE strategy is used by banks when there is
partitioning (system degradation).
Remember, this thread started with an AC claiming that you would
have to be an idiot to use anything other than ACID for storing
data. People responded by saying there is also a place for BASE
systems and that the banking industry uses an overall BASE
strategy. Perhaps I misunderstand what you are saying but it
seems like you are saying that as long as an ACID database is
part of the system (or a central part of the system) then the
overall system must be ACID which makes little sense to me.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting:
the article is [...] a
carte blanche to justify NoSQL systems or to do away with any
core systems that compromise ACID at their heart.
The point I've been trying to make is that just like there is a
place for ACID systems there is also a place for BASE systems.
In addition, as the data sets become larger and more complex and more
spread out, the ACID approach becomes more and more untenable due
to the CAP theorem. For most (but not all) cases,
high-availability and eventual consistency will trump strong
consistency.
There clearly seems to be a failure of communication here. Since
you did not like my dumbed down explanation, perhaps you would
prefer to hear what
Eric Brewer has to say. He seems to have gotten a whole lot
of
awards for someone who is a "NoSQL nutter".
Myth: Money is important, so banks must use transactions
to keep money safe and consistent, right?
Reality: Banking transactions are inconsistent,
particularly for ATMs. ATMs are designed to have a normal case
behaviour and a partition mode behaviour. In partition mode
Availability is chosen over Consistency.
There are more details here
and in many other places.
Acquainting a traditional RDBMS with a phrase like 'lower
availability' just highlights to kind of twilight zone you start
getting into when talking to any of the NoSQL crowd.
Are you saying you think the CAP theorem is false? I'm assuming
large distributed data sets so partitioning is inevitable.
According to CAP this means there is a trade off between
consistency and availability. RDBMS provide strong consistency
so they cannot also provide high availability when there
is partitioning.
You didn't work on Mt Gox's systems at any point did you?
Sarcastic ad hominem attacks are an extremely poor substitute for
reasoned debate.
... shipping lanes invariably opening up as the arctic ice cap disappears.
I think you missed the underlying reason. This is just another
facet of the elaborate internationally coordinated "global
warming" hoax. Once they convince you the ice caps are melting
then it is a slippery slope down to allowing Fluoride in our
drinking water or believing men landed on the moon or even
believing the Earth is round.
If a bank doesn't care about ACID, which means it doesn't care
about losing completed transactions, which means losing track
*OUR* money so they can get more profit.
Perhaps this is where you have gone astray. The opposite of ACID
is BASE where the "E" stands for eventual consistency.
The beauty of this is that it DOES NOT lose completed
transactions and at the same time it allows for high
availability.
Strict consistency (the "C" in ACID) is a much more stringent
requirement than eventual consistency. In particular it
conflicts with high availability. This is the essence of the CAP
theorem. In many industries, including banking, eventual
consistency plus high availability (NoSQL) is preferable to
strict consistency plus lower availability (RDBMS). Of course
there are many other factors involved in selecting a database
architecture.
One way to see this is by noting the three typical things you can
do at an ATM: deposit, withdrawal, and show balance, commute (in a
sense) when you are only worried about eventual consistency but
they don't commute when you require strict consistency. This is
why relaxing the requirement to eventual consistency gives you
higher availability (when the database is partitioned).
Transactions can be logged and later merged when the partition
has healed. It is true that "show balance" does not strictly
commute with deposits and withdrawals but: a) this does not cause
the system to lose track of your money, and b) no one expects it
to strictly commute. There is usually a warning that it may
take X hours or days before a transaction shows up on your
balance. IOW the balance will eventually be correct after
you stop making transactions.
The strict consistency alternative you think is better will mean
that all ATMs have to stop working whenever the database is
partitioned. For most customers this is totally unacceptable
especially since the only value it adds is ensuring that the
"show balance" function always includes all of the latest
transactions. Even the average person on the street would tell
you this approach is really "stupid". No one wants the ATMs
to be broken most of the time just to be sure "show balance" is
always perfectly up to date.
In general, because of communication delays, the banking system
depends not on consistency for correctness, but rather on
auditing and compensation. Another example of this is "check
kiting," in which a customer withdraws money from multiple
branches before they can communicate and then flees. The
overdraft will be caught later, perhaps leading to compensation
in the form of legal action.
You can claim Eric Brewer is a fucking idiot as much as you want.
Eventually all you will do is destroy your own credibility.
If you're storing data, you need to use a system that provides
atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability. Using anything
less is pure idiocy. [etc, etc]
They are using Riak which is
currently being used by 25% of the Fortune 50 (fifty, not
five-hundred).
The CAP theorem states there is a trade off between:
Consistency, Availability, and Partitioning
tolerance.
Riak sacrifices consistency (although it does have eventual
consistency) in favor of availability and partitioning. The
people who wrote Riak (in Erlang) actually seem to be very
smart. They say they are firmly in the "right-technology-for-the-right-job"
camp. They are not crusading to replace all RDBMS with NoSQL.
The availability and partitioning tolerance of Riak are
amazing. For certain applications these strengths greatly
outweigh sacrifices in atomicity and consistency. Due to the
CAP theorem, there is no one single database architecture that
will be optimal for all applications. Granted, a completely
different mindset is needed to use Riak if your previous database
experience is all RDBMS.
From a cursory look, Riak seems to have some excellent
documentation. I suggest you look at their page that
explains the
trade offs between using Riak and a traditional RDBMS.
It also contains links to similar documentation.
Correction: Bukkit contains decompiled, deobfuscated Minecraft
server code. This code is already being made available. Why on
earth would Mojang have to also make their original source code
available? At worst, Mojang will have to LGPL the decompiled
code they are already distributing as if it were LGPLed.
If I GPL a crippled version of my source code with all the comments
stripped out, I am not obligated to give you the commented
version for free.
If you buy a company, you need to make sure all contributing
developers have signed a CLA [Contributor License Agreement]
where they give their rights to the company you buy.
This may be the most nonsensical thing posted thus far. If
company A is distributing my GPL or LGPL code then I don't have
to sign a damned thing in order for company B to buy company A.
Yes, company B should make sure there are no license violations
going on in company A, but that is all. Once my code released
under the GPL then I cannot revoke that license in order to try
to screw company B.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with supporting multiple init systems is that each package that provides a daemon needs to support all of them.
I agree with you in theory. In this case SysV init has been around for ages so SysV init scripts already exist for almost all packages. Just don't remove those and there is very little additional work required to maintain the SysV init scripts.
Yes, new packages will need to support both for a while, but this is a tiny fraction of the work to create and maintain a new service. It is a very small price to pay in order to get some breathing room and a graceful transition period.
It will give people a chance to put down the torches and pitchforks for a while. One of the biggest objections to systemd was that it was being rammed down our throats whether we wanted it or not, whether it was ready or not, etc. Look at Pulse Audio. After a few painful years, it was finally ready for non-beta use. Systemd should be given a similar incubation period during which people can easily choose to use it or not.
On a more poetic note::
Before the creation of Arda (The World), Melkor was the most powerful of the Ainur. Because of his unique station, he sought to create wills in the manner of his own Creator, so he alone would venture sometimes into the Void in search of the Flame Imperishable, the Secret Fire, which would grant him this ability. But he never found it, as it is with Eru only. He had sought to fill the Void with sentient beings and was dissatisfied with Eru's abandonment of it. Instead, in what he hoped would be an expression of his own originality and creativity, he contended with Eru (God) in the Music of the Ainur, introducing what he perceived to be themes of his own.
Unlike his fellow Ainu Aule, Melkor was too proud to admit that his creations were simply discoveries wholly made possible by, and therefore "belonging" to, Eru. Instead, Melkor aspired to the level of Eru, the true Creator of all possibilities.
During the Great Music of the Ainur, Melkor attempted to alter the Music and introduced what he believed to be elements purely of his own design. As part of these efforts, he drew many weaker-willed Ainur to him, creating a counter to Eru's main theme. Ironically, these attempts did not truly subvert the Music, but only elaborated Eru's original intentions: the Music of Eru took on depth and beauty precisely because of the strife and sadness Melkor's disharmonies (and their rectification) introduced.
Since the Great Music of the Ainur stood as template for all of history and all of material creation in the Middle-earth cycle (it was first sung before Time, and then the universe was made in its image), there was an aspect of everything in Middle-earth that came of Melkor's malign influence; everything had been "corrupted". Tolkien elaborates on this in Morgoth's Ring, drawing an analogy between the One Ring, into which Sauron committed much of his power, and all of Arda -- "Morgoth's Ring" -- which contains and is corrupted by the residue of Melkor's power until the Remaking of the World.
Alan Perlis said:
Everything should be built top-down, except the first time.
The work on the Linux kernel by Linus is essentially the "first time" which is why he prefers C. It can be used as a bottom-up language. OOP and C++ are top-down. The BOSS-MOOL group are rewriting something that already exists so they are using a top-down approach. Both Linus and the BOSS-MOOL group are using the right tool for the job. The jobs are different so the right tool is different.
what does it mean for a particle to be its own antiparticle?
In theoretical calculations if you reverse the charge (C), the parity (P), and time (T) of a particle, you get its antiparticle. A simpler (and less accurate) way of saying this is that antiparticles are normal particles traveling backward in time. This is not just a novelty, it is important for doing quantum field theory calculations (see Feynman-Stueckelberg interpretation).
So a particle is its own antiparticle if you reverse all three (CPT) and get the same thing. As the OP said, this is not unusual. It is only unusual for fermions. If two of them collide with each other then they can be annihilated and turn into another particle-antiparticle pair, just like photons can. Since they are neutral (I *think*, due to C symmetry) they don't attract each other like positrons and electrons do so you have to make special arrangements to get them to collide.
Does that mean that they're neutral to matter and anti-matter, or do they still somehow fall into one of those categories?
If there were an anti-matter universe then the photons there would be the same as the photons here. Same thing with Majorana fermions. I guess you could say they are both matter and anti-matter. You could also say they are neither matter nor anti-matter.
I'd mod you up if I had points.
Yes, it is a publicity stunt, and yes, it won't convince people who are invested in the conspiracy theory, and yes, it does not prove the original photo was authentic. But as you said, it does give a plausible explanation for the lighting in the original photo.
Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.
Unfortunately, many people (on both sides) seem to think science means "trust the experts". This is the gist of the fine article.
The dissenting judge disagrees with the majority opinion. It is ridiculous to use the dissenting opinion to explain the majority opinion. Agent Logan was legally able to perform what would normally be an Unconstitutional search when the search was restricted to military personnel only. I said your common sense should have told you that military personal don't have the same Constitutional rights as normal citizens. I also provided a link to a page that described this in detail. Therefore your insinuation that I was relying solely on common sense is another fabrication. If you disagree and think that military personnel have the same Constitutional rights as normal citizens, fine, let's discuss it. But don't insinuate I was relying on common sense when I provided a link (and you could just as easily use Google to get the same results).
Regardless of which laws were used by the defense to throw out the results of a search that was clearly Unconstitutional [see below], the following facts remain:
The fundamental question is whether the US Government has the right to search all of the computers in the United States without a warrant and without probable cause. The majority ruled they do not. The choice to use the Posse Comitatus Act was made by the defense attorneys, not the judges. It is usually much cheaper to avoid arguing things on Constitutional grounds. But the use of the PCA by the defense does not at all imply that no Constitutional rights were violated.
It boggles my mind that anyone would honestly think such a search was Constitutional as long as it was performed by non-military personnel. What possible use is the 4th Amendment if such searches were legal? If you really want to argue that such a broad search of normal people would be Constitutional then let's do it. Don't hide behind implications and insinuations.
The evidence was thrown out because a military investigator found the material, not because it was an unconstitutional search.
Nice try but that is not what the fine article says. It says:
The 2-1 majority rejected the government's argument that the military is allowed to monitor and search all computers in a state without prior knowledge that a computer's owner is even in the military.
Even a modicum of common sense should tell you that people in military service do not have the same Constitutional rights as the general public even without the huge hint in the fine article. From Does the Constitution apply to rights of military members?:
But in other respects, even basic rights against unreasonable searches and seizures are virtually non-existent [for military personnel].
The problem was not that a person in the military was conducting a search that would have been Constitutional had a non-military person conducted it. The problem was that the search was performed using the lax (and generally Unconstitutional) standards the military uses for searching its own but it was conducted on an entire state. If the government wins this case then they will have a right to search all of your computers without any warrant or any probable cause just by asking a member of the military to conduct the search and then hand off anything interesting to the police of FBI.
Please stop just making shit up in order to twist a story into fitting your political agenda.
AC:
How is it a violation of rights or privacy to search a search engine for files that you deliberately make public for the purpose of sharing.
FTFA:
Using software called RoundUp from his office in Georgia, Logan searched for "any computers located in Washington state sharing known child pornography on the Gnutella file-sharing network," the ruling states.
Dear AC, I am not familiar with a search engine called "RoundUp". Will you please provide a link? It looks useful.
More FTFA:
The 2-1 majority rejected the government's argument that the military is allowed to monitor and search all computers in a state without prior knowledge that a computer's owner is even in the military.
Clearly the military has much fewer Constitutional restrictions when they investigate military personnel. This case is about whether the military can investigate the general public with that same lack of Constitutional restraint.
If the court sided with NCIS agent Logan (Logan Cale?) then unless the ruling was overturned by a higher court, the US Government could use military personnel to scan all computers in the US and simply turn over anything suspicious to the local authorities. I don't know why you think it would be a good idea to give the US government the right to constantly scan all of your computers, smart phones, and tablets. I prefer that such searches stay illegal without a proper search warrant.
Lem wrote about all kinds of possible futures. A small percentage do match the description in the summary but the vast majority conflict with it. Most of his work is about reaching out and exploring in various ways. His work is so varied it is difficult to come up with one theme that describes it all. If I were to try to come up with major themes then I would give at least these:
Therefore Microsoft is right in claiming that software is in fact like a physical machine (since the 1s and 0s of software are real whereas your abstract ideas can't be clearly represented like that) that controls another physical machine (the CPU).
Fine. Then the patent only covers one configuration of ones and zeros that implement the algorithm (corresponding to one physical machine), not every possible configuration of ones and zeros that implement the algorithm (which correspond to an infinite number of different machines). This means the patent is only good for their source code with their compiler with their set of compiler optimizations on one specific CPU architecture. They would be far better off using copyright instead.
The leap you make from protecting one configuration of ones and zeros that implement an algorithm to protecting every possible configuration of ones and zeros that implement the same algorithm is exactly the part of the argument that I characterize as "stupid and ill-informed".
Seriously, how is protecting every possible way to implement an algorithm (on a computer) any different from protecting the algorithm itself (on a computer)? The judges in that case can hide behind the excuse of being completely ignorant of how computers work. What's your excuse?
Thanks for the link. That paper discusses a system that has C and A but not P. They are looking at fast transactions on a distributed system that is never partitioned (no hardware or network failures). When parts of the system go down they will still have to choose between availability and strong consistency. They tell us they chose C over A:
In its current implementation, Calvin handles hardware failures by recovering the crashed machine from its most recent complete snapshot and then replaying all more recent transactions. Since other nodes within the same replica may depend on remote reads from the afflicted machine, however, throughput in the rest of the replica is apt to slow or halt until recovery is complete.
If they were able to provide C and A and P then it would be huge news. Most of our current databases both RDBMS and NoSQL would instantly be obsolete. Most database design over the past decade or more has involved using different tradeoffs between C, A, and P. If someone really found a way to provide all three at once then all of that work would have been for naught.
Legal Match explains:
You can patent pretty much anything under the sun that is made by man except laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas. These categories are excluded subject matter from the scope of patents.
What Are Abstract Ideas?
Abstract ideas are concepts like pure mathematics and algorithms. You cannot patent a formula. However, you can patent an application of that formula. Thus, while you cannot patent a mathematical formula that produces nonrepeating patterns, you can patent paper products that use that formula to prevent rolls of paper from sticking together.
In the legal world it is widely accepted that ideas and algorithms cannot be patented. The reason we have/had software patents at all is that despite Bill Gates once saying that it would have been impossible to create Microsoft if software were patentable, Microsoft (and others I imagine) gave the courts a bull shit argument that since running software affects the physical state of the machine it is running on, software is more like a physical object and less like an idea or algorithm. Since the judges knew next to nothing about computers they accepted this bullshit argument hook, line, and sinker.
The problem with Microsoft's argument is that different implementations of the same algorithm create different physical configurations (electrons and so on) of the hardware. Likewise different CPU architectures create different physical configurations and so on. Microsoft's argument ends up with a patent that protects all possible implementations of a algorithm on a computer which is indistinguishable from patenting the algorithm itself.
That incredibly ill-informed and stupid decision opened the floodgates for "... on a computer" patents. The Supreme Court is now trying to rectify that mistake. Abstract ideas cannot be patented. Mathematics cannot be patented. Algorithms cannot be patented. However you can protect the expression of an algorithm by using copyright to protect your particular implementation. You cannot protect all possible implementations of an abstract idea.
Unless you are incredibility stupid, or actually doing something illegal, you have nothing to fear from 99.999% of law enforcement, and for that 0.001% of the time there is a risk, there isn't much you can do anyway. But you have the same things at home I'll bet.
Are you deliberately lying or is the problem that you have not yet learned to Google before posting extraordinary claims?
Your claim is directly contradicted by an article in the New Yorker that was probably pivotal in raising the alarm. Here is a small sample:
Yet only a small portion of state and local forfeiture cases target powerful entities. "There's this myth that they're cracking down on drug cartels and kingpins," Lee McGrath, of the Institute for Justice, who recently co-wrote a paper on Georgia's aggressive use of forfeiture, says. "In reality, it's small amounts, where people aren't entitled to a public defender, and can't afford a lawyer, and the only rational response is to walk away from your property, because of the infeasibility of getting your money back." In 2011, he reports, fifty-eight local, county, and statewide police forces in Georgia brought in $2.76 million in forfeitures; more than half the items taken were worth less than six hundred and fifty dollars. With minimal oversight, police can then spend nearly all those proceeds, often without reporting where the money has gone.
It takes only a pinch of common sense to realize that if you allow a group of people the right to stop law abiding citizens and take their money and possessions with no legal repercussions then this right will be abused.
In some places it costs well over $1,000 for a citizen to start fighting a seizure. If the cops took $500 or less then fighting and winning will cost at least $500 and likely thousands of dollars more.
In a backhanded way, you seem to be saying that the police in America are a bunch of nincompoops who haven't yet figured out that it is much easier to steal smaller amounts of money from people who can't or won't fight back than it is to steal larger amounts of money from people who can and will fight back.
The way the system is set up, it may be impossible to provide accurate statistics on what percentage of these civil forfeitures had anything at all to do with criminal activity because no criminal charges need to be filed and there are big disincentives that prevent even completely innocent people from fighting back.
Many of the anecdotal stories in the New Yorker article show how easy it is for civil forfeiture laws to be systematically abused by the police. Even if the original system was created with the best of intentions it has devolved into us basically paying the police handsomely to violate people's Constitutional rights.
She admits to having corresponded to a known terrorist. That may not be the letter of the law in regards to having been an member, but don't you think that she should have mentioned that particular fact, knowing that she was applying for government position that actually required more than a cursory background check?
Hell no. Not unless they asked her about it. She certainly should not have morphed the simple question they asked her about her own group membership into a much larger question about the group memberships of all the people she had ever had any contact with.
The fine article says:
... Balagoon died in 1986 of an AIDS-related illness. (Barr says she wrote to Balagoon occasionally while he was in prison---"it would have been reprehensible for me to drop my correspondence with a dying person," she explains---and visited him once.)
This has nothing to do with her own affiliations. It was also almost 30 years ago. If her association with this man was innocent (which no one is disputing) then it is very unrealistic to expect her to dredge up this old memory during the interview process when she is being bombarded with other questions. Expecting her to answer a complicated question when she is asked a simple question is also highly unrealistic.
I ran into a similar problem with the DIS (now the DSS). They got upset because I had associated with people they thought were communists when I was in graduate school. They were also upset because after grad school a couple of Russians, along with other foreigners stayed at my house for about a week after we all got to know each other working on a volunteer trail crew for a week or two. They were here as part of an exchange program. This was right around the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall when our relationship with Russia was still frosty.
I had answered all of their questions honestly. I was not aware of the political affiliations of all of the people I had worked with. It never occurred to me that doing my patriotic duty by showing a couple of Russians the benefits of the American system was of any interest to the DIS until they accused me of withholding this information.
If they had asked me directly about associating with communists in graduate school, I would not have been able to answer to their satisfaction because I just didn't know. If they had asked me directly if I ever had contact with anyone from a communist country then I might have remembered that short visit. But I might not have remembered even if they had asked because for me it was small, harmless, and inconsequential. When they asked me directly about that particular visit then of course I remembered.
I found the entire process rather intimidating. I was focused intently and racking my brain to answer all of their questions as honestly as possible. It never occurred to me to wonder about other questions they didn't ask that they might want answers to especially since the stuff they got so upset about was totally innocent and harmless. It was like dealing with a big angry girlfriend who expects you to intuit every possible thing she might get upset about even though she does not give you any clues about what those things might be.
I think she may be telling the truth but omitting the fact that she was continuing to contact those two is enough for them to take action.
How is it her fault they asked her the wrong question? Do you now have to be psychic to work for the NSF? They asked if she belonged to any groups "dedicated to the use of violence". She answered the question honestly. Do you really think she should have interpreted that question to mean "ever visit a dying person in jail who was convicted of murder"?
I think the OPM falsely claimed they rejected her for lying because the real reason tramples on her constitutional right to free association. The original question was about whether she herself ever had a personal dedication to the use of violence. I believe this is relevant to her suitability to work for the government. The unconstitutional question they did not ask, about her free associations, is not relevant by order of the Constitution of the United States of America.
Answering the question that was actually asked should be very easy for the vast majority of people. They need only search their own hearts. Answering the unasked question is much more difficult because you have to recall all of the people you have ever had an association with and search their hearts. It makes no sense for her to spend an hour (or ten minutes or whatever) to answer the very simple question they asked her.
To me it seems like the particular special agent who questioned her was effectively judging her on one question:
[ ] Are you now or have you ever been a liberal?
This is disturbing.
Yes, of course. Likewise when the entire system is down or the ATM you want to use is unplugged, the ATM cannot perform any operation. But that's not what we are talking about here. We are talking about what happens when the database itself is spread out across many nodes (servers) and one or more of those servers goes down. Do you shutdown all the ATMs or do you let them keep handing out money even if you may not be able to show the users a balance that is 100% correct in all cases? Banks choose to provide limited functionality as long as it is safe because customers get really pissed off when the ATMs seem to be broken a lot of the time.
You're misunderstanding what's been written in that article. This is exactly the scenario that banks *have* to prevent before and as it happens.
These excerpts from one of Brewer's talks seem to substantiate my "misunderstanding": Eric Brewer on Why Banks are BASE Not ACID - Availability Is Revenue
segedunum:
Chasing around for compensation later cannot be an option in many cases because it is going to be abused.
When the system is functioning normally, the difference between strong consistency and eventual consistency is on the order of a few milliseconds. I don't think that leaves much of a window for abuse. The fundamental question is what do you do when there is partitioning? Or as you call it, system degradation. If you take an ACID approach then you shut down everything until the partitioning has been repaired. If you take a BASE approach then you still provide at least some functionality by sacrificing strong consistency. The CAP theorem says you cannot have both strong consistency and availability when there is partitioning.
Whatever system you use locally will be checked live, usually with a mainframe based system that is ACID compliant. If that isn't possible then you have a gradual system degradation where only certain types of transactions are processed.
The fact that you have any functionality at all when there is non-trivial degradation is due to using an overall BASE strategy instead of an ACID strategy. I have no doubt that one or more ACID databases are used as parts of the system but an overall BASE strategy is used by banks when there is partitioning (system degradation).
Remember, this thread started with an AC claiming that you would have to be an idiot to use anything other than ACID for storing data. People responded by saying there is also a place for BASE systems and that the banking industry uses an overall BASE strategy. Perhaps I misunderstand what you are saying but it seems like you are saying that as long as an ACID database is part of the system (or a central part of the system) then the overall system must be ACID which makes little sense to me.
I don't think anyone here is suggesting:
the article is [...] a carte blanche to justify NoSQL systems or to do away with any core systems that compromise ACID at their heart.
The point I've been trying to make is that just like there is a place for ACID systems there is also a place for BASE systems. In addition, as the data sets become larger and more complex and more spread out, the ACID approach becomes more and more untenable due to the CAP theorem. For most (but not all) cases, high-availability and eventual consistency will trump strong consistency.
There clearly seems to be a failure of communication here. Since you did not like my dumbed down explanation, perhaps you would prefer to hear what Eric Brewer has to say. He seems to have gotten a whole lot of awards for someone who is a "NoSQL nutter".
Eric Brewer on Why Banks are BASE Not ACID - Availability Is Revenue:
Myth: Money is important, so banks must use transactions to keep money safe and consistent, right?
Reality: Banking transactions are inconsistent, particularly for ATMs. ATMs are designed to have a normal case behaviour and a partition mode behaviour. In partition mode Availability is chosen over Consistency.
There are more details here and in many other places.
Acquainting a traditional RDBMS with a phrase like 'lower availability' just highlights to kind of twilight zone you start getting into when talking to any of the NoSQL crowd.
Are you saying you think the CAP theorem is false? I'm assuming large distributed data sets so partitioning is inevitable. According to CAP this means there is a trade off between consistency and availability. RDBMS provide strong consistency so they cannot also provide high availability when there is partitioning.
You didn't work on Mt Gox's systems at any point did you?
Sarcastic ad hominem attacks are an extremely poor substitute for reasoned debate.
... shipping lanes invariably opening up as the arctic ice cap disappears.
I think you missed the underlying reason. This is just another facet of the elaborate internationally coordinated "global warming" hoax. Once they convince you the ice caps are melting then it is a slippery slope down to allowing Fluoride in our drinking water or believing men landed on the moon or even believing the Earth is round.
If a bank doesn't care about ACID, which means it doesn't care about losing completed transactions, which means losing track *OUR* money so they can get more profit.
Perhaps this is where you have gone astray. The opposite of ACID is BASE where the "E" stands for eventual consistency. The beauty of this is that it DOES NOT lose completed transactions and at the same time it allows for high availability.
Strict consistency (the "C" in ACID) is a much more stringent requirement than eventual consistency. In particular it conflicts with high availability. This is the essence of the CAP theorem. In many industries, including banking, eventual consistency plus high availability (NoSQL) is preferable to strict consistency plus lower availability (RDBMS). Of course there are many other factors involved in selecting a database architecture.
One way to see this is by noting the three typical things you can do at an ATM: deposit, withdrawal, and show balance, commute (in a sense) when you are only worried about eventual consistency but they don't commute when you require strict consistency. This is why relaxing the requirement to eventual consistency gives you higher availability (when the database is partitioned). Transactions can be logged and later merged when the partition has healed. It is true that "show balance" does not strictly commute with deposits and withdrawals but: a) this does not cause the system to lose track of your money, and b) no one expects it to strictly commute. There is usually a warning that it may take X hours or days before a transaction shows up on your balance. IOW the balance will eventually be correct after you stop making transactions.
The strict consistency alternative you think is better will mean that all ATMs have to stop working whenever the database is partitioned. For most customers this is totally unacceptable especially since the only value it adds is ensuring that the "show balance" function always includes all of the latest transactions. Even the average person on the street would tell you this approach is really "stupid". No one wants the ATMs to be broken most of the time just to be sure "show balance" is always perfectly up to date.
I also suggest you read CAP Twelve Years Later: How the "Rules" Have Changed by Eric Brewer. He concludes with:
In general, because of communication delays, the banking system depends not on consistency for correctness, but rather on auditing and compensation. Another example of this is "check kiting," in which a customer withdraws money from multiple branches before they can communicate and then flees. The overdraft will be caught later, perhaps leading to compensation in the form of legal action.
You can claim Eric Brewer is a fucking idiot as much as you want. Eventually all you will do is destroy your own credibility.
If you're storing data, you need to use a system that provides atomicity, consistency, isolation and durability. Using anything less is pure idiocy. [etc, etc]
They are using Riak which is currently being used by 25% of the Fortune 50 (fifty, not five-hundred).
The CAP theorem states there is a trade off between: Consistency, Availability, and Partitioning tolerance. Riak sacrifices consistency (although it does have eventual consistency) in favor of availability and partitioning. The people who wrote Riak (in Erlang) actually seem to be very smart. They say they are firmly in the "right-technology-for-the-right-job" camp. They are not crusading to replace all RDBMS with NoSQL.
The availability and partitioning tolerance of Riak are amazing. For certain applications these strengths greatly outweigh sacrifices in atomicity and consistency. Due to the CAP theorem, there is no one single database architecture that will be optimal for all applications. Granted, a completely different mindset is needed to use Riak if your previous database experience is all RDBMS.
From a cursory look, Riak seems to have some excellent documentation. I suggest you look at their page that explains the trade offs between using Riak and a traditional RDBMS. It also contains links to similar documentation.
RMS seat space
2. Bukkit contains Minecraft server code.
Correction: Bukkit contains decompiled, deobfuscated Minecraft server code. This code is already being made available. Why on earth would Mojang have to also make their original source code available? At worst, Mojang will have to LGPL the decompiled code they are already distributing as if it were LGPLed.
If I GPL a crippled version of my source code with all the comments stripped out, I am not obligated to give you the commented version for free.
If you buy a company, you need to make sure all contributing developers have signed a CLA [Contributor License Agreement] where they give their rights to the company you buy.
This may be the most nonsensical thing posted thus far. If company A is distributing my GPL or LGPL code then I don't have to sign a damned thing in order for company B to buy company A. Yes, company B should make sure there are no license violations going on in company A, but that is all. Once my code released under the GPL then I cannot revoke that license in order to try to screw company B.