To take control and use that for various purposes, like money making or DoS? Not really meaningful.
You're still thinking in a "people playing with computer networks" category.
Criminals could use it for extortion.
Criminal gangs and governments could use it for murder / assassination of high-value targets.
Terrorists ditto and they could also use killing or disrupting the health of random people or groups of them as a terror tactic.
Remember the gadget that sent out the infrared "turn off" code for a bunch of different makes of TVs and monitors? And how much fun some people had wandering around trade shows with it? Now imagine a radio key-fob that sends "cause fibrillation" to pacemakers, in the pocket of your friendly neighborhood terrorist as he walks or drives around the city (or just sends the signal occasionally via a BIG transmitter.)
Current linux versions are capable of encrypting the disk - files and swap - automatically. (Ubuntu, for instance, can install this feature from the "alternate" install disk.)
Only the boot partition is in the clear. Any passwords you stashed in Firefox's autocomplete mechanism are encrypted as well. You have to issue the filesystem password to boot or to come out of hybernation etc.
With this in place the bad guy has to get your laptop while it's running and use it before it sleeps or whatever. (Fancier attackers might be able to pull something out slightly longer - if they get to the RAM before the charge dissipates.) Even if you're only using browser autocomplete passwords this gives your system (and ALL the files it contains) another layer of protection.
DON'T forget the password or all your files are gone forever. Unlike commercial products there are no backup or backdoor passwords or challenge/response protocols. The passphrase you use when installing is the only one there is. Without it (or a cryptosystem crack) even the software has no way to decrypt your files.
Unless their is some legal compulsion to do so why not just destroy all traces of data that flows to a site every day or two? Just why is there any need to hang on to all of that information?
Because if there is technical trouble (or an attack) it may take longer than that for the report to work its way through the bureaucracy and the issue to be debugged. And if debugging starts near the purge time the workers are likely to make a copy of the relevant logs that is NOT automatically deleted as part of the debugging process (or as evidence to use in proceedings against attackers).
The trick is to keep only what is needed and only as long as necessary - and in the case of especially sensitive info to see if it can be deleted or anonymized without unacceptably hampering the operation of the site.
... why did it take [from Feb to Nov] to make into the press?
Perhaps because EFF was trading letters with the Justice department and getting all the ducks in a row so the IndyMedia people's legal position would be as strong as practical when the info was released?
That's a EULA.... And remember, EULAs are not enforceable.
Sorry, wrong.
It's not an End User License Agreement. It's a license to copy and distribute a copyrighted work.
Very different animal.
And it's not take-it-or-leave-it, either. If the work has an identifiable set of authors you can attempt to negotiate a non-GPL alternate license with them. (This will usually involve giving them some money and terms that don't screw up their FOSS-licensed product.) Some projects have such licenses as a standard offering.
The most i get from it is "If you distribute the Binderys, you must distribute the source code"
That's why I distribute the source code on loose sheets of paper. Binding is just too expensive these days.
Not to mention that binding non-LGPL GPLed libraries with your code and then distributing it puts your code under the GPL. So don't glue your listings to a GPLed library book and let somebody else check it out.
I put everything in the public domain, and I sleep well at night without having nightmares that someone might have violated my license.
Then here's a nightmare for you:
- A serious bug is discovered in your wonderful PD product. (Maybe some subtle security hole that the malware gangs find and exploit.)
- Somebody makes a fix AND COPYRIGHTS THE FIXED VERSION.
- You can't import the fix to YOUR version without violating the copyright.
- None of your users can fix the bug either. They have to migrate to the other guy's version - maybe for big bucks, drop the functionality, or go with some other product. They're screwed.
- Your left with no users of your stuff (except the ones that are using it as the other guy's version) and no way to expand and improve it (except to go to work for the other guy).
THIS is what GPL is designed to head off: Screwing the users and locking the original authors out of their own product's future. Under the current copyright law, public domain is BROKEN for any evolving software product.
A lot of things will drop on sections "of outdoor machinery". It seems that this LHC machine has been designed in such a way that will never get a chance to work.
They sure don't seem to have the concepts of "redundancy", "margins", and "checking the systems BEFORE you bring them up"
How DO you lose power to a cooler without noticing it until you need the cooling? Don't they have instrumentation that would tell them it's off?
Data centers, for instance, tend to be sited at the intersection of two power grids (in addition to having backup generators and dual power feeds to the machines.) How did they miss this on the cooling for the superconducting magnets? Letting THAT fail, even by a few degrees, and you'd better have the magnet current off or you've got another BIG repair to do.
I have traveled extensively inside the USA and have never seen one such occurence. Tell me, does it appear blue to color blind people only?
The red light has a nontrivial amount of yellow and the green light a nontrivial amount of blue, for the convenience of the red-blue color blind (the commonest type of color-blindness).
For people with "normal" color vision (the commonest form of color vision, that is - there are a considerable number of rarer color vision variants), it's a lot easier to see the blue in the green light than the yellow in the red. The red light isn't obviously orangeish. But the green light is almost "teal", a color that some "normally sighted" people identify as (greenish) blue and some as (bluish) green.
I was under the impression that RED YELLOW & GREEN colors were always in the same place to accomodate color-blind people, who can still see the light shine from each spot.
Yes the position is also standardized, as an aid for the (much rarer) totally color blind.
Humans & animals have not evolved with high amounts of toxins in the air.
Actually, we have evolved with high amounts of toxins in the air.
We used fire in residential enclosures (caves, tents) for long enough to evolve some AMAZING detoxification mechanisms.
At this point there are highly toxic chemicals (such as some dioxins) that kill darned near any other animal (except maybe dogs), to the point of causing birds in flight to fall from the sky, which are not a major issue for human beings (except perhaps as a long-term carcinogen).
Most of that is either (microscopic amounts of) heavy metal contamination (which you'll find plenty of in other fertilizers) or partially-burned fuel from an engine tuned to avoid making nitrogen oxides (which are perceived as a nasty pollutant due to their role in the formation of petrochemical smog).
The technology for DETECTING minute amounts of materials has been improving drastically - to the point that traces of darned near anything bad can be detected in darned near anything. That's where most of that list comes from.
What's a good way to fix nitrogen? How about compressing nitrogen and oxygen to high pressures while heating them to high temperatures? Exactly what happens in a diesel engine.
If the engine is deliberately tuned to run lean, the production of nitrogen oxides will be greatly enhanced, the fuel will be burned more completely (reducing those non-trace-element contaminants you fret over), and the efficiency as an engine will also increase.
I have no problem with this - or with eating this guy's produce.
Why don't you test some of his produce and that of nearby farms producing the same crops, and tell us what, if any, nasty stuff is higher in his crops than the others. I bet you'll find his are better on most things the natural foodies fret over.
any idea what plants consider NOx's? Diesels make them.
They consider them "fixed nitrogen". Alias "fertilizer" - or at least its arguably most important component.
You need one atom of fixed nitrogen for each amino-acid produced, to be strung together into protein. Lots of nitrogen in the air (it's the BULK of the air.) But plants don't "fix" it (react it into a form they can then use to make amino acids).
Some plants (legumes) have symboitc bacteria living in the roots which fix nitrogen. The rest have to get it from the ground - which means it has to get INTO the ground. Mineral nitrates, animal urine and feces (manure), ammonia (reacted from the air by a moderately expensive industrial process) all work.
But if the soil is alkaline enough that acidifying it a tad will make it no worse for the plants, injecting NOx (which becomes nitric, nitrus, and other acids on contact with water) and CO2 (which becomes carbonic acid) will improve the soil. The nitrogenous acids provide fixed nitrogen.
Further, it is a three-way win to adjust the engine to burn lean and be "more polluting". This increases the horsepower-minutes per gallon, greatly increases the NOx output, and reduces the other potential pollutants - partially-burned fuel - by completing their combustion to CO2. (Use high-sulfur fuel while you're at it to put sulphurous and sulphuric acids into the ground for making Lysine, too.)
With the right crops and soil types it's entirely reasonable that buring the exhaust might reduce or eliminate the need for added fertilizer.
As to sequestering carbon: Maybe some as carbonates and soot particles. Certainly more than venting it into the air. But without some study by a chemist I wouldn't put any money on it being a significant level of sequesteration.
The remaining 35,880 acres will still be prime viable agricultural space.
Unless T. Boone uses the power - electric and political - to pump the water away, turning it into a desert. Other than that I agree completely.
I think we need a decision that water rights to use water in the area where the water is obtained do not include water rights to pump the water out of the watershed. B-)
WHY DON'T WE GET SOME DAMN POWER LINES FIRST!!!! I am so sick of driving around seeing all these turbines just sitting there idle on windy days because we don't have the transmission lines to get the energy out of here.
How about concurrently?
I'm sure the people who invest in the company stringing the lines would be just as unhappy seeing their money tied up in a power line to the site of a proposed wind farm that isn't there yet - or a failed wind farm project.
Having said the previous - I WILL agree with you that, with the faster processors, larger memory, and more capable peripherals, there's a lot more that CAN be done. And thus there's a lot more code to do it.
Perhaps we can agree that BOTH effects are present and together they account for the bloat?
It's a matter of cost-benefit. Modern software is far more bloated for a given functionality than software of a couple decades ago. This is because there is little benefit to spending extra effort to de-bloat it.
When machines were slower or smaller such effort would make perceptible improvements in performance or make something fit that otherwise would not. Now you can get to something with excellent performance that "rattles around" in the large storage available without such effort. So a programmer can move on to other things while his employer stops paying to have the product developed and starts making revenue by shipping it.
Of course when you try to stuff a lot of such programs together on a distribution medium or run them simultaneously the bloat adds up enough to notice - and sometimes cause problems.
And as a programmer from the '60s until I mostly transitioned back to the "hard side of the force" in the late '90s I've watched this happen.
In my own programming - even 'way back then - I would (unlike my colleagues) normally go for the straightforward solution first, rather than trying to pull subtle stunts to shrink or speed the code. Then I'd go back and check where the bottlenecks and bloat were. Per Knuth's law they weren't where they were expected - and the straightforward solution USUALLY turned out to also be the tight and fast one. A little work in the right spots - possibly replacing a chunk if it turned out to be a bottleneck and there was an algorithm with a better ORDER of execution time - and it was tight, clean, and fast.
But nowadays there's little point in the "go back and tighten it up" step. If it runs at all it's usually product-ready.
Also why have OSes gotten so large they required DVDs!
Because RAM is now cheaper than programmer time - even when you're programming once for millions of machines - and RAM cost is dropping faster than humans, or even programs, can tighten the code.
And OSes come with lots of extra applications, which take up most of the distribution media.
Even with that, Ubuntu (which doesn't include non-open drivers and apps on the distribution even when it recommends you download and use them) is still slim enough to fit on a CD. You only need the DVD if you want to include ALL the language options on one install disk. (But it has gotten big enough that several distribution flavors - graphic install & run from (live) CD vs. typewriter-picture menu install for small RAM machines & encrypted disk support ("alternate"), for instance - require separate CDs.)
There's no obvious alternatives to salaried journalists in national papers who are willing to dig in and develop a good story.
Given that few of the salaried journalists of the legacy media are willing to dig in and develop a story, I'm happy to settle for stories dug and developed by entrepreneurs, dedicated hobbyists, and people with a political axe to grind.
Slashdot Mirror
FOX News doesn't distort the facts for their agenda as much as this guy has. (Well, not all the time, anyway). ...
Well, in their defense, usually they just lie about stuff rather than distort it.
And this is different from CBS, NBC, ABC, Reuters, UPI, New York Times, Time-Warner, and CNN how?
... was when a colleague (in a discussion on software quality) said I was the only person he'd trust to program his pacemaker.
Looks like the "web of trust" is getting spun a bit wide these days.
To take control and use that for various purposes, like money making or DoS? Not really meaningful.
You're still thinking in a "people playing with computer networks" category.
Criminals could use it for extortion.
Criminal gangs and governments could use it for murder / assassination of high-value targets.
Terrorists ditto and they could also use killing or disrupting the health of random people or groups of them as a terror tactic.
Remember the gadget that sent out the infrared "turn off" code for a bunch of different makes of TVs and monitors? And how much fun some people had wandering around trade shows with it? Now imagine a radio key-fob that sends "cause fibrillation" to pacemakers, in the pocket of your friendly neighborhood terrorist as he walks or drives around the city (or just sends the signal occasionally via a BIG transmitter.)
Current linux versions are capable of encrypting the disk - files and swap - automatically. (Ubuntu, for instance, can install this feature from the "alternate" install disk.)
Only the boot partition is in the clear. Any passwords you stashed in Firefox's autocomplete mechanism are encrypted as well. You have to issue the filesystem password to boot or to come out of hybernation etc.
With this in place the bad guy has to get your laptop while it's running and use it before it sleeps or whatever. (Fancier attackers might be able to pull something out slightly longer - if they get to the RAM before the charge dissipates.) Even if you're only using browser autocomplete passwords this gives your system (and ALL the files it contains) another layer of protection.
DON'T forget the password or all your files are gone forever. Unlike commercial products there are no backup or backdoor passwords or challenge/response protocols. The passphrase you use when installing is the only one there is. Without it (or a cryptosystem crack) even the software has no way to decrypt your files.
Unless their is some legal compulsion to do so why not just destroy all traces of data that flows to a site every day or two? Just why is there any need to hang on to all of that information?
Because if there is technical trouble (or an attack) it may take longer than that for the report to work its way through the bureaucracy and the issue to be debugged. And if debugging starts near the purge time the workers are likely to make a copy of the relevant logs that is NOT automatically deleted as part of the debugging process (or as evidence to use in proceedings against attackers).
The trick is to keep only what is needed and only as long as necessary - and in the case of especially sensitive info to see if it can be deleted or anonymized without unacceptably hampering the operation of the site.
... why did it take [from Feb to Nov] to make into the press?
Perhaps because EFF was trading letters with the Justice department and getting all the ducks in a row so the IndyMedia people's legal position would be as strong as practical when the info was released?
That's a EULA. ... And remember, EULAs are not enforceable.
Sorry, wrong.
It's not an End User License Agreement. It's a license to copy and distribute a copyrighted work.
Very different animal.
And it's not take-it-or-leave-it, either. If the work has an identifiable set of authors you can attempt to negotiate a non-GPL alternate license with them. (This will usually involve giving them some money and terms that don't screw up their FOSS-licensed product.) Some projects have such licenses as a standard offering.
The most i get from it is "If you distribute the Binderys, you must distribute the source code"
That's why I distribute the source code on loose sheets of paper. Binding is just too expensive these days.
Not to mention that binding non-LGPL GPLed libraries with your code and then distributing it puts your code under the GPL. So don't glue your listings to a GPLed library book and let somebody else check it out.
I put everything in the public domain, and I sleep well at night without having nightmares that someone might have violated my license.
Then here's a nightmare for you:
- A serious bug is discovered in your wonderful PD product. (Maybe some subtle security hole that the malware gangs find and exploit.)
- Somebody makes a fix AND COPYRIGHTS THE FIXED VERSION.
- You can't import the fix to YOUR version without violating the copyright.
- None of your users can fix the bug either. They have to migrate to the other guy's version - maybe for big bucks, drop the functionality, or go with some other product. They're screwed.
- Your left with no users of your stuff (except the ones that are using it as the other guy's version) and no way to expand and improve it (except to go to work for the other guy).
THIS is what GPL is designed to head off: Screwing the users and locking the original authors out of their own product's future. Under the current copyright law, public domain is BROKEN for any evolving software product.
And you can use the side of a building in Europe.
THAT would be impressive.
3. 2. 1. ...
A lot of things will drop on sections "of outdoor machinery". It seems that this LHC machine has been designed in such a way that will never get a chance to work.
They sure don't seem to have the concepts of "redundancy", "margins", and "checking the systems BEFORE you bring them up"
How DO you lose power to a cooler without noticing it until you need the cooling? Don't they have instrumentation that would tell them it's off?
Data centers, for instance, tend to be sited at the intersection of two power grids (in addition to having backup generators and dual power feeds to the machines.) How did they miss this on the cooling for the superconducting magnets? Letting THAT fail, even by a few degrees, and you'd better have the magnet current off or you've got another BIG repair to do.
... for the convenience of the red-blue color blind (the commonest type of color-blindness).
Typo: For the convenience of the red-GREEN color blind ...
I have traveled extensively inside the USA and have never seen one such occurence. Tell me, does it appear blue to color blind people only?
The red light has a nontrivial amount of yellow and the green light a nontrivial amount of blue, for the convenience of the red-blue color blind (the commonest type of color-blindness).
For people with "normal" color vision (the commonest form of color vision, that is - there are a considerable number of rarer color vision variants), it's a lot easier to see the blue in the green light than the yellow in the red. The red light isn't obviously orangeish. But the green light is almost "teal", a color that some "normally sighted" people identify as (greenish) blue and some as (bluish) green.
I was under the impression that RED YELLOW & GREEN colors were always in the same place to accomodate color-blind people, who can still see the light shine from each spot.
Yes the position is also standardized, as an aid for the (much rarer) totally color blind.
Humans & animals have not evolved with high amounts of toxins in the air.
Actually, we have evolved with high amounts of toxins in the air.
We used fire in residential enclosures (caves, tents) for long enough to evolve some AMAZING detoxification mechanisms.
At this point there are highly toxic chemicals (such as some dioxins) that kill darned near any other animal (except maybe dogs), to the point of causing birds in flight to fall from the sky, which are not a major issue for human beings (except perhaps as a long-term carcinogen).
Most of that is either (microscopic amounts of) heavy metal contamination (which you'll find plenty of in other fertilizers) or partially-burned fuel from an engine tuned to avoid making nitrogen oxides (which are perceived as a nasty pollutant due to their role in the formation of petrochemical smog).
The technology for DETECTING minute amounts of materials has been improving drastically - to the point that traces of darned near anything bad can be detected in darned near anything. That's where most of that list comes from.
What's a good way to fix nitrogen? How about compressing nitrogen and oxygen to high pressures while heating them to high temperatures? Exactly what happens in a diesel engine.
If the engine is deliberately tuned to run lean, the production of nitrogen oxides will be greatly enhanced, the fuel will be burned more completely (reducing those non-trace-element contaminants you fret over), and the efficiency as an engine will also increase.
I have no problem with this - or with eating this guy's produce.
Why don't you test some of his produce and that of nearby farms producing the same crops, and tell us what, if any, nasty stuff is higher in his crops than the others. I bet you'll find his are better on most things the natural foodies fret over.
any idea what plants consider NOx's? Diesels make them.
They consider them "fixed nitrogen". Alias "fertilizer" - or at least its arguably most important component.
You need one atom of fixed nitrogen for each amino-acid produced, to be strung together into protein. Lots of nitrogen in the air (it's the BULK of the air.) But plants don't "fix" it (react it into a form they can then use to make amino acids).
Some plants (legumes) have symboitc bacteria living in the roots which fix nitrogen. The rest have to get it from the ground - which means it has to get INTO the ground. Mineral nitrates, animal urine and feces (manure), ammonia (reacted from the air by a moderately expensive industrial process) all work.
But if the soil is alkaline enough that acidifying it a tad will make it no worse for the plants, injecting NOx (which becomes nitric, nitrus, and other acids on contact with water) and CO2 (which becomes carbonic acid) will improve the soil. The nitrogenous acids provide fixed nitrogen.
Further, it is a three-way win to adjust the engine to burn lean and be "more polluting". This increases the horsepower-minutes per gallon, greatly increases the NOx output, and reduces the other potential pollutants - partially-burned fuel - by completing their combustion to CO2. (Use high-sulfur fuel while you're at it to put sulphurous and sulphuric acids into the ground for making Lysine, too.)
With the right crops and soil types it's entirely reasonable that buring the exhaust might reduce or eliminate the need for added fertilizer.
As to sequestering carbon: Maybe some as carbonates and soot particles. Certainly more than venting it into the air. But without some study by a chemist I wouldn't put any money on it being a significant level of sequesteration.
The remaining 35,880 acres will still be prime viable agricultural space.
Unless T. Boone uses the power - electric and political - to pump the water away, turning it into a desert. Other than that I agree completely.
I think we need a decision that water rights to use water in the area where the water is obtained do not include water rights to pump the water out of the watershed. B-)
WHY DON'T WE GET SOME DAMN POWER LINES FIRST!!!! I am so sick of driving around seeing all these turbines just sitting there idle on windy days because we don't have the transmission lines to get the energy out of here.
How about concurrently?
I'm sure the people who invest in the company stringing the lines would be just as unhappy seeing their money tied up in a power line to the site of a proposed wind farm that isn't there yet - or a failed wind farm project.
Having said the previous - I WILL agree with you that, with the faster processors, larger memory, and more capable peripherals, there's a lot more that CAN be done. And thus there's a lot more code to do it.
Perhaps we can agree that BOTH effects are present and together they account for the bloat?
Bollocks right back at you.
It's a matter of cost-benefit. Modern software is far more bloated for a given functionality than software of a couple decades ago. This is because there is little benefit to spending extra effort to de-bloat it.
When machines were slower or smaller such effort would make perceptible improvements in performance or make something fit that otherwise would not. Now you can get to something with excellent performance that "rattles around" in the large storage available without such effort. So a programmer can move on to other things while his employer stops paying to have the product developed and starts making revenue by shipping it.
Of course when you try to stuff a lot of such programs together on a distribution medium or run them simultaneously the bloat adds up enough to notice - and sometimes cause problems.
And as a programmer from the '60s until I mostly transitioned back to the "hard side of the force" in the late '90s I've watched this happen.
In my own programming - even 'way back then - I would (unlike my colleagues) normally go for the straightforward solution first, rather than trying to pull subtle stunts to shrink or speed the code. Then I'd go back and check where the bottlenecks and bloat were. Per Knuth's law they weren't where they were expected - and the straightforward solution USUALLY turned out to also be the tight and fast one. A little work in the right spots - possibly replacing a chunk if it turned out to be a bottleneck and there was an algorithm with a better ORDER of execution time - and it was tight, clean, and fast.
But nowadays there's little point in the "go back and tighten it up" step. If it runs at all it's usually product-ready.
...that the very first even to occur on the Internet was a **buffer overflow**? Talk about a zero-day exploit.
This sounds more like a memory leak than a buffer overflow.
Also why have OSes gotten so large they required DVDs!
Because RAM is now cheaper than programmer time - even when you're programming once for millions of machines - and RAM cost is dropping faster than humans, or even programs, can tighten the code.
And OSes come with lots of extra applications, which take up most of the distribution media.
Even with that, Ubuntu (which doesn't include non-open drivers and apps on the distribution even when it recommends you download and use them) is still slim enough to fit on a CD. You only need the DVD if you want to include ALL the language options on one install disk. (But it has gotten big enough that several distribution flavors - graphic install & run from (live) CD vs. typewriter-picture menu install for small RAM machines & encrypted disk support ("alternate"), for instance - require separate CDs.)
Is there a ppa out there for this? Doesn't seem to be in the standard repos.
The address of the repository is posted in Diagon Alley.
Question: would Wired and the Huffington Post have broken the Watergate scandal?
Two names: Matt Drudge and Monica Lewinsky
Three more: Powerline, Little Green Footballs", and Dan Rather.
I could keep this up for pages.
There's no obvious alternatives to salaried journalists in national papers who are willing to dig in and develop a good story.
Given that few of the salaried journalists of the legacy media are willing to dig in and develop a story, I'm happy to settle for stories dug and developed by entrepreneurs, dedicated hobbyists, and people with a political axe to grind.