the worst part is that in an effort to appear smarter they try to come up with progressively more complex solutions.
Its almost like the purpose of government bureaucracy; take something simple and complicate it.
Seriously... the amount of times I've seen 'alpha geeks' introduce bleeding edge, over complicated solutions into a production environment... makes me shudder.
IMHO 'computer enthusiasts' should be doing R&D work, not operations and engineering. They are (typically) risk takers.
Operations and engineering are for people who don't take risks (with other peoples businesses or property).
Try changing your root password on 10 different servers on a regular basis.
You aren't thinking of putting your root login under LDAP are you?
Not meaning to be rude, but please, don't be such an idiot.
What happens when the LDAP server falls over and you are at the console and you try to login as root... and it can't authenticate root because the LDAP subsystem is down? Reboot and pray that LDAP starts up ok?
But, what happens when the LDAP service isn't available?
Indeed...
Where I work one of my 'genius' predecessors set up a Linux fileserver with LDAP 'authentication' (nice euphemism that). LDAP is only used for samba fileshares... and for login.
The LDAP server runs on the fileserver itself, so at least it doesn't have to connect to a remote LDAP server.
He did a lovely piece of work, hacking it into place on a debian woody system, butchering the PAM config to make it appear to work.
He is long gone but his legacy remains; if the LDAP system falls over you can't log onto the server at all.
Not as root, not on the console, not remotely, not even via a remote logon with ssh keys.
Fantastic. What a genius.
The best one can do is reboot it and hope that the LDAP system does come back up.
I'd fix it but its so hacked together and my LDAP knowledge is limited (as, evidently, was his) and the server is no longer mission critical (I'm about to strip it for parts).
I would never, *ever* use LDAP for logon 'authentication'. Maybe for samba but I'd be very careful about getting LDAP involved with a console logon.
corporations are in fact sociopathic and focused on one issue only- profit.
Oh come on now, not *all* corporations are all about profit.
Take Skype for example, people have a really hard time trying to get those guys to take their money from them.
Its as if they don't want your money; they'd rather have people using their free services than the chargeable services like SkypeOut...
(Of course that could be because they are running them at a loss in order to corner a market and every paying customer actually *costs* them money);)
But yeah I do agree with you. I mean come *on* if a corporation is a legal person surely a psychiatrist can commit them to an insane asylum as a danger to themselves and others due to them being psychopaths?
The tricky part would be where to insert the antipsychotic medications...
I'd be inclined to say that it should be up to the conscience of the researcher but I know, from experience, that the sort of people who do this kind of research rarely have any form of conscience regarding the suffering of the animals they deal with.
As for those who would advocate doing such experiments on humans, well that would only result in a generation of biologists with as much conscience regarding human life and suffering as they currently do for animals, ie very limited; it would produce a generation of monsters, much like the Nazi human research did.
How about inducing suffering or death simply because something tastes good? Is eating certain foods somehow more noble than increasing our scientific knowledge?
Depends. A couple of examples...
I'd say that eating brains scooped out of the skull of a live monkey would be totally equivalent to 'scientific' research for mere curiosity.
Veal, on the other hand, probably not.
Probably depends on a lot of things. Gorging yourself on anything, plant or animal, merely for the sake of satisfying gustatorial curiosity is contemptable by my standards though. I think its called 'gluttony' or something like that.
I went into biology from computer science, a very humbling experience I can tell you. Living systems are so sophisticated and efficient.
After a while though, I had to ask myself if it was worth it; when they 'euthanised' a dozen rats so that the students (including myself) could do experiments on their kidneys I thought 'sooner or later I am going to have to pay for this'.
I decided that some things are better left a mystery and if I have to kill a rat (or have someone else kill it for me) to learn something about cell biology then that element of cell biology is not worth knowing.
Curiosity is not worth the inducement of suffering or death.
A _lot_ of vivisection is done for *curiosity*, not for direct medical research or drug testing.
I suppose you could do something like this on a spacecraft...
while you are up there, where vacuum is really cheap, you open the valve and let all the vacuum in,then when you come down into the atmosphere, you have a source of highly, er, energetic vacuum to utilise!:)
When he mentioned 'vacuum energy' I thought it was like some kind of great big vacuum chamber and when you let the air back in, it turns a wind turbine.
instead of: With last week's announcement that the British government thwarted an alleged terrorist attack planned for flights from the U.K. to the U.S
With last week's announcement that the British government allegedly thwarted a terrorist attack planned for flights from the U.K. to the U.S
Slashdot Mirror
Just a guess, based on that last huge run-on sentence and the overall style and flavor of your /. posting; you are a regular on the debian-legal list?
Actually, this is one of the only real ways to do serious amounts of survelliance.
Nah you just do it in a distributed fashion.
First of all, you get people hooked on reality TV.
Then, you offer them all the reality TV they want, 24x7, the only catch being that you have to have your house wired up to be *on* reality TV.
People not only leap at the opportunity to watch all that reality TV but they also love the idea of being 'on TV'.
Et Voila, everyone watches everyone else.
Who cares, I could always throw knoppix in the CD drive, chroot and change the password and PAM settings.
;)
Dare to take a chance once in a while!
I can see that you don't look after enterprise systems on which many other peoples livelyhoods depends.
Or if you do, then you bloody well shouldn't.
t would never to be a proxy US state.
Hah!
No, of course not. The US would be a proxy *Israeli* state!
Man... if only Israel had massive oil reserves...
Just make sure there's an enabled root account in your /etc/(passwd|shadow),
/etc/pam.d/(system.auth|login),
/etc/nsswitch.conf has a line that says "passwd: files ldap"
Yep, there is.
make sure pam_unix is enabled in your
Yep, it is. Well, theres lines that say:
auth required pam_unix.so nullok
account required pam_unix.so
session required pam_unix.so
password required pam_unix.so nullok obscure min=4 max=8 md5
and your
It did say this:
passwd: compat ldap
which I've changed to:
passwd: files compat ldap
Would that be right?
(and thanks for the pointers)
the worst part is that in an effort to appear smarter they try to come up with progressively more complex solutions.
Its almost like the purpose of government bureaucracy; take something simple and complicate it.
Seriously... the amount of times I've seen 'alpha geeks' introduce bleeding edge, over complicated solutions into a production environment... makes me shudder.
IMHO 'computer enthusiasts' should be doing R&D work, not operations and engineering. They are (typically) risk takers.
Operations and engineering are for people who don't take risks (with other peoples businesses or property).
true democracy would result in chaos in most modern nations
;)
Thats why we have 'the media'.
Thats why its better termed 'mediacracy' than 'democracy'; because most voters decide how to spend their vote based on the input of the news media.
Its like the media presents a 'social engineering attack' on democracy. For its own good of course...
Try changing your root password on 10 different servers on a regular basis.
You aren't thinking of putting your root login under LDAP are you?
Not meaning to be rude, but please, don't be such an idiot.
What happens when the LDAP server falls over and you are at the console and you try to login as root... and it can't authenticate root because the LDAP subsystem is down? Reboot and pray that LDAP starts up ok?
But, what happens when the LDAP service isn't available?
Indeed...
Where I work one of my 'genius' predecessors set up a Linux fileserver with LDAP 'authentication' (nice euphemism that). LDAP is only used for samba fileshares... and for login.
The LDAP server runs on the fileserver itself, so at least it doesn't have to connect to a remote LDAP server.
He did a lovely piece of work, hacking it into place on a debian woody system, butchering the PAM config to make it appear to work.
He is long gone but his legacy remains; if the LDAP system falls over you can't log onto the server at all.
Not as root, not on the console, not remotely, not even via a remote logon with ssh keys.
Fantastic. What a genius.
The best one can do is reboot it and hope that the LDAP system does come back up.
I'd fix it but its so hacked together and my LDAP knowledge is limited (as, evidently, was his) and the server is no longer mission critical (I'm about to strip it for parts).
I would never, *ever* use LDAP for logon 'authentication'. Maybe for samba but I'd be very careful about getting LDAP involved with a console logon.
Yeah its what being human all comes down to; a gene for appreciating beer.
(I find that unless you are really willing to lay out for a very good gigabit switch (as opposed to hub)
Wow, where can I get a gigabit *hub*??
I think it goes something like:
"United Kingdom" =
"Britain and Northern Ireland" =
"England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland"
Too many high-profile cases are now "Trial by Media"
Hah!
The whole of western *democracy* is 'trial by media'!
People complain about the insecurity of electronic voting machines when democracy is *already* subverted by a massive social engineering attack.
Democracy is being undermined at the point where people form the desire to vote.
Justice is being undermined in the same way.
Its not 'democracy' its 'mediacracy'.
corporations are in fact sociopathic and focused on one issue only- profit.
;)
Oh come on now, not *all* corporations are all about profit.
Take Skype for example, people have a really hard time trying to get those guys to take their money from them.
Its as if they don't want your money; they'd rather have people using their free services than the chargeable services like SkypeOut...
(Of course that could be because they are running them at a loss in order to corner a market and every paying customer actually *costs* them money)
But yeah I do agree with you. I mean come *on* if a corporation is a legal person surely a psychiatrist can commit them to an insane asylum as a danger to themselves and others due to them being psychopaths?
The tricky part would be where to insert the antipsychotic medications...
How would you feel if you got barred from a restaurant based on whether or not you're religious?
That might explain why there are so few restaurants that serve only meals with pork...
No I don't think that research was justified.
I'd be inclined to say that it should be up to the conscience of the researcher but I know, from experience, that the sort of people who do this kind of research rarely have any form of conscience regarding the suffering of the animals they deal with.
As for those who would advocate doing such experiments on humans, well that would only result in a generation of biologists with as much conscience regarding human life and suffering as they currently do for animals, ie very limited; it would produce a generation of monsters, much like the Nazi human research did.
How about inducing suffering or death simply because something tastes good? Is eating certain foods somehow more noble than increasing our scientific knowledge?
Depends. A couple of examples...
I'd say that eating brains scooped out of the skull of a live monkey would be totally equivalent to 'scientific' research for mere curiosity.
Veal, on the other hand, probably not.
Probably depends on a lot of things. Gorging yourself on anything, plant or animal, merely for the sake of satisfying gustatorial curiosity is contemptable by my standards though. I think its called 'gluttony' or something like that.
I studied biology at university for a few years.
I went into biology from computer science, a very humbling experience I can tell you. Living systems are so sophisticated and efficient.
After a while though, I had to ask myself if it was worth it; when they 'euthanised' a dozen rats so that the students (including myself) could do experiments on their kidneys I thought 'sooner or later I am going to have to pay for this'.
I decided that some things are better left a mystery and if I have to kill a rat (or have someone else kill it for me) to learn something about cell biology then that element of cell biology is not worth knowing.
Curiosity is not worth the inducement of suffering or death.
A _lot_ of vivisection is done for *curiosity*, not for direct medical research or drug testing.
I suppose you could do something like this on a spacecraft...
:)
while you are up there, where vacuum is really cheap, you open the valve and let all the vacuum in,then when you come down into the atmosphere, you have a source of highly, er, energetic vacuum to utilise!
Shit.
When he mentioned 'vacuum energy' I thought it was like some kind of great big vacuum chamber and when you let the air back in, it turns a wind turbine.
How wrong can you be...
if it wasn't for set theory, computing would be practically non-existant. At best it would be clockwork...
This guy sounds as if he needs to do an introductory course in discrete mathematics.
And he gets published????
What a crazy fsck'd up world
The Soviet Politburo is still in charge, just under a new name.
Except that they seem to have totally lost their sense of humor...
Indeed, the 'terrorists' and the 'government' are, together, doing a great job of turning international travel into a dehumanising experience.
The net effect has to be a reduction in international travel and the containment of national populations within their borders.
I bet that there are former members of the Soviet politburo who are wishing that they'd thought of it.
instead of:
With last week's announcement that the British government thwarted an alleged terrorist attack planned for flights from the U.K. to the U.S
With last week's announcement that the British government allegedly thwarted a terrorist attack planned for flights from the U.K. to the U.S