You can always get your password changed, just come up with a Strong Password and get the techs to vett it as strong.
That's impossible. A strong password is one for which there is no shortcut to brute force attacks. Once compromised, a password is no longer strong, even if it's immune to dictionary attacks.
If a user walks into IT and wants "rOp3b6ot" for a password, you have no way to know if that's strong or not. Even though it may appear random to you, you can't trust that he hasn't already compromised that password. What if he's already using the same string for logging into Slashdot and 10 other low-security websites? What if he used that password to log into his old laptop, which has since been sold on ebay?
Unless I consider the project unimportant, I would never allow users to pick a password. I'll roll the dice for them- and if that's too hard to remember, then he can just show his employee ID in my office M-F and I'll roll the dice again. The most important part of password security is to make it easy for a user to get his password reset by personal interaction, so that there's no incentive to either choose a obvious phrase, to re-use old ones, or to write it on the bottom of the keyboard.
the real usefulness of PDFs is that they are portable. I have a document, I can email it or FTP it or network-share it to any user on any platform and it will look exactly the same.
I would argue that you have just mentioned why PDFs are not portable.
Because the document always looks "exactly the same", that means that in some viewing environments it will be much harder to read, or even flat-out illegible. If the recipient has a tiny PDA screen, or has impaired vision, then an HTML file (or even a Microsoft Word DOC) can be reformatted on the client-side to have 30-pt text or unified columns, or whatever else is needed (including speech synthesis for the totally blind)
Why, PDFs aren't even portable between the USA and Europe! (because paper comes in different sizes across the Atlantic).
The format may not be an open standard, but it is well enough documented by Adobe that there are high quality Free Software implementations.
Untrue. Adobe has intentionally omitted certain "security" data from their specification, and has directed the arrest of people who publish reverse-engineered descriptions.
In practice, this means that there are many PDFs on public websites that Free Software (like xpdf and ghostview) cannot view at all, because the author decided to set a "No Clipboard" flag when exporting from Acrobat.
I haven't seen any "Free" PDF viewer that's earned "high quality". "Servicable for most uses", but not "high quality".
PDF versions should be considered supplementary to the HTML ones.
Correct- but it's really sad that there is no intermediate format. HTML has no ability to describe pagination at all, while PDF encodes layout so explicitly it may as well be a scanned PNG of the document.
Word processing software allows smart, dynamic pagination, by storing entities like hard/soft page breaks, headers/footers, column connections, etc. That knowledge allows the document to be reformatted reasonably for whatever paper/font size the reader wants.
But unfortunately, there is effectively only 1 Word Processing file format today, and it's too proprietary to use as a web document standard. I wish the assorted "Free" word processors could step back from chasing "Word Document" all the time and come up with a good, common format that web browsers can (eventually) view directly.
this same book says that Israel would again become a nation and Jews from around the world would return there, exactly like what's happened over the last 60 years or so
Yep. A fine example of how Christian voters in the USA have shaped foreign policy to support their worldview. (Where do you think the Zionists got the military hardware to complete their invasion?)
You're wrong, as is anyone who conflates "spectrum" and "bandwidth".
The latest research shows that in networks of smart transmitters/receivers, if you use all the available tricks, the total bandwidth of all the participants goes up proportional to the number of nodes in the network
And also, if everyone became vegetarian, world hunger would end.
If you're suggesting a fairly high level of technology be mandatory for every radio, then that is just a different approach to advocating for government regulation.
Smart networks will be crippled if someone fires up a large homebrew antenna, so there still must be regulation to protect spectrum and ensure bandwidth.
The fact that you believe an urban legend makes this and any future conversations between us totally pointless from my frame of reference.
It doesn't even approach the status of urban legend- the most it's achieved is "over-repeated joke that wasn't even funny the first time".
Since you've decided I'm pointless, I'll have to counter that with a free clue: compared to the general population, a Slashdot reader is much more likely to possess some of the following traits:
For any of those reasons, if you're going to plug a website in your Slashdot signature, consider making it one that appears as something other than a blank black page when viewed by a person without the Macromedia Flash plugin.
Even in the porn world, you have your big stars who can rake in the big bucks and then you have the other no name girls. There are conventions where you can go meet this big name actresses. That can't be replaced with CGI.
I'm not familiar with how the porn business really works, so I'll accept your word on the importance of meeting the "actresses" in person at conventions. However, I doubt that this same factor applies to child porn. The 13-yr old girls who are taped in their uncle's bathrooms never seem to sign autographs for their fans...
I've been Slashdotted 6 or 7 times in the past year. I suppose that's not enough data for you though.
Of course it's not. You only have one website, and although you can put up different pages there, they all share an author and all are based on your personal interest. The degree to which Slashdotters click on those links is based on the correlation between their interests and yours. You seem to mostly review consumer-level FOSS and *nx software- so how would you know what the response is to a story on spaceflight, or anime movies, or ongoing corporate litigation?
Could the late Stephen King have looked at the sales of the last 7 of his books and judged the average sell-through for a hardback horror-fiction title?
The legal definition of pornography in the United States is based on whether the material is obscene or not.
Yes, but the legal definition of child pornography is based on whether or not a child was used in the production, not whether it just looks that way. See other replies for links.
Taking pictures, for instance, of a nude seventeen-year-old posing to go in some book called "Hot Babes of Florida" is mostly definitely the production of child pornography,
The police will manage to arrest you if you hire a 17-year old to strip for your pleasure, regardless of whether there's a camera. They'll call it "sexual abuse of children" or somesuch, even if you never touch her.
However, the point that's still disputable is so-called "naturist" photography.
I wish I could find a link to the story, but one guy was convicted of posession of child porn because of some fictional story he wrote that involved children.
Yes, I know. In fact, one guy was even re-arrested for writing more of that stuff while already in jail.
But that was then, this is now: those laws have been struck down in the USA. You are just one of many respondents who didn't follow state-of-the-law.
The uncrumpled piece of paper is attracted less slowly than the crumpled version despite the fact both contain the same amount of "earth". Thus, a counterexample to a previously accepted axiom.
That's also a counterexample to the currently-accepted theory of "gravitation"- both papers have the same mass, so their downward acceleration should be the same.
To rectify gravitation with the falling movement of paper, you must understand that air is matter and be able to concieve of a vacum- and that prequisitc concept is actually a greater mental leap.
The stupidity of the Pythagorean mystique was another source of grief.
You can't really attack the old Greeks for failing to reach the level of Newtonian Calculus. It seems that most North Amercians are unable to grasp it today, even though they have access to all of Newton's writings and 10 years of free education to explain it all.
Really, the only reason England reached calculus and Greece didn't is because they had more people to work on it. Not only does the larger total population increase the chance of producing a single special genius, but also (as Newton himself said), much previous work (including the best of Greece) was available for him to start from.
More people * more time = more results.
(Other beneficial factors, such as "oceangoing empire" and "no slavery" I attribute as results of "more time". The only other thing that pushed England over Greece was mineral resources... which were actually an important part of getting practical benefit from math)
just thought women weren't smart enough for men to have real relationships with them.
More precisely, the idea is was that two people with different levels of power (mental, physical, or social influence/money) couldn't really have an equal, loving relationship. One partner would inevitably be dominant, and there is an unavoidable element of coercion (as in rape).
But with a same-gendered couple, the attributes of power are more likely to be fair.
Wrong! For one thing, we'd have to destroy the condom industry... and obey the Catholic Church much more overall...
But seriously, humans are different from other mammals. They reproduce much less frequently, and take a whole lot longer to raise a child. (What other species would allow someone 3 years old to still be 100% dependent?)
Because of the longer maturation period, maintaining an affectionate family unit is important. The mother needs the father to stay with her, to provide for the children. And to promote male fidelity, you need frequent sex. That's why human females are rare amoung mammals in being sexually active even through non-fertile parts of the monthly cycle.
The increased importance of non-procreative sex is not due to any particular culture, but is just part of being human.
PS. Biologists have already gotten two female mice to have a child together. Expect that in 30 years, homosexual humans will have that option too. In that view, this current gay marriage thing is just planning ahead.
the U.S. wanted peace, and was willing to give the Sioux some reservations, so why'd they have to go and kill Custer?
And hey, Nazi German wanted peace, and was willing to give Britain some native governance, so why'd they go and bomb Bremen?
Samuel Clemens said "There is no land that is owned that was not stolen"
Israel, like the U.S., is stolen land.
Unlike the US, the populations of conqueror and conqueree are similar. The "Indian" population of North America was miniscule compared to the number of arriving European settlers.
It can be argued that the conquest of the USA's territory was justified in that it brought the world closer to an equal distribution of real estate. Of course, that same reasoning would say that the "Palestinians" will have a right to Jerusalem in 2014 when they outnumber the Jews there.
The other critical difference between the development of modern Israel and the USA is that the American Indians eventually could, if they wished, leave those reservations and become standard US citizens with normal voting rights. The Palestinian people cannot vote to influence the government that rules them.
Oh please. Foppish, decadent Americans, cowering behind their oceans, versus mighty Germans, trained from early childhood as warriors? World War II was over before it began.
I haven't heard him advocate a withdraw from Iraq (right now)
Kerry's exact words on Iraq were "stay the course".
But that's the sort of perfectly ambiguous phrase politicians are infamous for. Since the stated goal of the US administration (safe democratic nationwide elections) is probably impossible by the stated deadline (June 30), "stay the course" can either mean one of two contradictory things: "stay there until the job is done", or "get out exactly when we planned".
Kerry wants wants voters to interpret him in whichever way matches their own beliefs.
strip out the trademarked material and redistribute it to your heart's content.
No need. Redistributing trademarked data is absolutely fine as long as you state very boldly that the presence of the data is not meant to imply that you are an authorized SUSE representative.
However, the graphics are probably also copyrighted, which means they couldn't be redistributed... but they can easily be erased/replaced.
The real problem that could arise is that some versions of SUSE include copyrighted, non-GPL software. Without some technical expertise, it would be hard to get the distro running once those parts are gone.
If the API for a certain kernel module becomes so complete that it amounts to message passing, then the kernel module might as well be outside the kernel.
Yes, if that were true. But there's nothing in Linux which approaches that point. Or at least, I don't see anything in the VFS area resembling message-passing.
(That is the well-behaved FS modules which don't reach into the kernel and do weird things)
The fact that the FS code doesn't reach into the kernel is irrelevant. What matters is that it could, if it made some kind of error (buffer overflow exploit or something)
The theoretical stability benefit of microkernel design is that even if an individual module becomes evil (through accident or sabotage), the damage it can inflict on the rest of the system is formally limited to the assigned responsibilities for that code.
With a microkernel, I could load up a binary-only driver/module that came with some weird hardware and be perfectly assured that it won't scan my TCP/IP traffic and send duplicates off to it's home base.
They call it a microkernel in the sense that its internal design is very modular.
By that argument, Linux could be a microkernel too, if you compiled everything as modules.
The other componants ntfs.sys, win32k.sys, etc all run in kernel space but are not part of the kernel image itself.
That is not the definition of "microkernel" as used in academic computer science. The fact that something was designed as separate components means nothing- only if there is master code active at runtime to ensure cooperation between those components is the "microkernel" name warranted. If they're in the same kernel space, then an error in ntfs.sys could crash win32k.sys, which would be impossible with real microkernels.
That's why Tanenbaum just admitted that a microkernel will always be slower than a monolithic design, because that active code requires some overhead. But he says the additional safety is worth it.
Wrong. Bill Gate's goal was to make money. Forsaking stability to boost speed helped Microsoft increase sales (and later cut costs by merging the separate Win9x and NT products into one codebase). A decision which produced the desired result cannot be called incompetent.
Actually, his argument is that a microkernel would make a better early-90s graduate-level compsci project
Wrong. Just read the last paragraph of the webpage he posted 2 days ago: it flat-out says that the security problems rampant in today's computer systems would've been partly prevented by microkernel design.
Slashdot Mirror
There really was no reason why the PC even needed a password.
Then what stops the janitor from installing a keylogger to grab the passwords that connect those PCs to Unix?
You can always get your password changed, just come up with a Strong Password and get the techs to vett it as strong.
That's impossible. A strong password is one for which there is no shortcut to brute force attacks. Once compromised, a password is no longer strong, even if it's immune to dictionary attacks.
If a user walks into IT and wants "rOp3b6ot" for a password, you have no way to know if that's strong or not. Even though it may appear random to you, you can't trust that he hasn't already compromised that password. What if he's already using the same string for logging into Slashdot and 10 other low-security websites? What if he used that password to log into his old laptop, which has since been sold on ebay?
Unless I consider the project unimportant, I would never allow users to pick a password. I'll roll the dice for them- and if that's too hard to remember, then he can just show his employee ID in my office M-F and I'll roll the dice again. The most important part of password security is to make it easy for a user to get his password reset by personal interaction, so that there's no incentive to either choose a obvious phrase, to re-use old ones, or to write it on the bottom of the keyboard.
the real usefulness of PDFs is that they are portable. I have a document, I can email it or FTP it or network-share it to any user on any platform and it will look exactly the same.
I would argue that you have just mentioned why PDFs are not portable.
Because the document always looks "exactly the same", that means that in some viewing environments it will be much harder to read, or even flat-out illegible. If the recipient has a tiny PDA screen, or has impaired vision, then an HTML file (or even a Microsoft Word DOC) can be reformatted on the client-side to have 30-pt text or unified columns, or whatever else is needed (including speech synthesis for the totally blind)
Why, PDFs aren't even portable between the USA and Europe! (because paper comes in different sizes across the Atlantic).
The format may not be an open standard, but it is well enough documented by Adobe that there are high quality Free Software implementations.
Untrue. Adobe has intentionally omitted certain "security" data from their specification, and has directed the arrest of people who publish reverse-engineered descriptions.
In practice, this means that there are many PDFs on public websites that Free Software (like xpdf and ghostview) cannot view at all, because the author decided to set a "No Clipboard" flag when exporting from Acrobat.
I haven't seen any "Free" PDF viewer that's earned "high quality". "Servicable for most uses", but not "high quality".
PDF versions should be considered supplementary to the HTML ones.
Correct- but it's really sad that there is no intermediate format. HTML has no ability to describe pagination at all, while PDF encodes layout so explicitly it may as well be a scanned PNG of the document.
Word processing software allows smart, dynamic pagination, by storing entities like hard/soft page breaks, headers/footers, column connections, etc. That knowledge allows the document to be reformatted reasonably for whatever paper/font size the reader wants.
But unfortunately, there is effectively only 1 Word Processing file format today, and it's too proprietary to use as a web document standard. I wish the assorted "Free" word processors could step back from chasing "Word Document" all the time and come up with a good, common format that web browsers can (eventually) view directly.
this same book says that Israel would again become a nation and Jews from around the world would return there, exactly like what's happened over the last 60 years or so
Yep. A fine example of how Christian voters in the USA have shaped foreign policy to support their worldview. (Where do you think the Zionists got the military hardware to complete their invasion?)
Is it just me, or is NASA more of a marketing organization these days?
Just these days? As I recall, the focus of NASA back in it's heyday was scoring propaganda victories in the Cold War.
The single most practical reason for the moon landing was to show up the Soviets.
Um, wrong actually.
You're wrong, as is anyone who conflates "spectrum" and "bandwidth".
The latest research shows that in networks of smart transmitters/receivers, if you use all the available tricks, the total bandwidth of all the participants goes up proportional to the number of nodes in the network
And also, if everyone became vegetarian, world hunger would end.
If you're suggesting a fairly high level of technology be mandatory for every radio, then that is just a different approach to advocating for government regulation.
Smart networks will be crippled if someone fires up a large homebrew antenna, so there still must be regulation to protect spectrum and ensure bandwidth.
Does it take much effort to be that obtuse?
The fact that you believe an urban legend makes this and any future conversations between us totally pointless from my frame of reference.
It doesn't even approach the status of urban legend- the most it's achieved is "over-repeated joke that wasn't even funny the first time".
Since you've decided I'm pointless, I'll have to counter that with a free clue: compared to the general population, a Slashdot reader is much more likely to possess some of the following traits:
For any of those reasons, if you're going to plug a website in your Slashdot signature, consider making it one that appears as something other than a blank black page when viewed by a person without the Macromedia Flash plugin.
(because she LOOKS younger than 18)
Flatly wrong.
Even in the porn world, you have your big stars who can rake in the big bucks and then you have the other no name girls. There are conventions where you can go meet this big name actresses. That can't be replaced with CGI.
I'm not familiar with how the porn business really works, so I'll accept your word on the importance of meeting the "actresses" in person at conventions. However, I doubt that this same factor applies to child porn. The 13-yr old girls who are taped in their uncle's bathrooms never seem to sign autographs for their fans...
All of them choked equally.
Really? They all executed the remainder in shell?
Because if not, just failing to delete a malformed message is a weak form of a security flaw. (Although it does open a DOS vulnerability of sorts)
I've been Slashdotted 6 or 7 times in the past year. I suppose that's not enough data for you though.
Of course it's not. You only have one website, and although you can put up different pages there, they all share an author and all are based on your personal interest. The degree to which Slashdotters click on those links is based on the correlation between their interests and yours. You seem to mostly review consumer-level FOSS and *nx software- so how would you know what the response is to a story on spaceflight, or anime movies, or ongoing corporate litigation?
Could the late Stephen King have looked at the sales of the last 7 of his books and judged the average sell-through for a hardback horror-fiction title?
The legal definition of pornography in the United States is based on whether the material is obscene or not.
Yes, but the legal definition of child pornography is based on whether or not a child was used in the production, not whether it just looks that way. See other replies for links.
Taking pictures, for instance, of a nude seventeen-year-old posing to go in some book called "Hot Babes of Florida" is mostly definitely the production of child pornography,
The police will manage to arrest you if you hire a 17-year old to strip for your pleasure, regardless of whether there's a camera. They'll call it "sexual abuse of children" or somesuch, even if you never touch her.
However, the point that's still disputable is so-called "naturist" photography.
I wish I could find a link to the story, but one guy was convicted of posession of child porn because of some fictional story he wrote that involved children.
Yes, I know. In fact, one guy was even re-arrested for writing more of that stuff while already in jail.
But that was then, this is now: those laws have been struck down in the USA. You are just one of many respondents who didn't follow state-of-the-law.
The uncrumpled piece of paper is attracted less slowly than the crumpled version despite the fact both contain the same amount of "earth". Thus, a counterexample to a previously accepted axiom.
That's also a counterexample to the currently-accepted theory of "gravitation"- both papers have the same mass, so their downward acceleration should be the same.
To rectify gravitation with the falling movement of paper, you must understand that air is matter and be able to concieve of a vacum- and that prequisitc concept is actually a greater mental leap.
The stupidity of the Pythagorean mystique was another source of grief.
You can't really attack the old Greeks for failing to reach the level of Newtonian Calculus. It seems that most North Amercians are unable to grasp it today, even though they have access to all of Newton's writings and 10 years of free education to explain it all.
Really, the only reason England reached calculus and Greece didn't is because they had more people to work on it. Not only does the larger total population increase the chance of producing a single special genius, but also (as Newton himself said), much previous work (including the best of Greece) was available for him to start from.
More people * more time = more results.
(Other beneficial factors, such as "oceangoing empire" and "no slavery" I attribute as results of "more time". The only other thing that pushed England over Greece was mineral resources... which were actually an important part of getting practical benefit from math)
just thought women weren't smart enough for men to have real relationships with them.
More precisely, the idea is was that two people with different levels of power (mental, physical, or social influence/money) couldn't really have an equal, loving relationship. One partner would inevitably be dominant, and there is an unavoidable element of coercion (as in rape).
But with a same-gendered couple, the attributes of power are more likely to be fair.
The purpose of sex is to procreate
Wrong! For one thing, we'd have to destroy the condom industry... and obey the Catholic Church much more overall...
But seriously, humans are different from other mammals. They reproduce much less frequently, and take a whole lot longer to raise a child. (What other species would allow someone 3 years old to still be 100% dependent?)
Because of the longer maturation period, maintaining an affectionate family unit is important. The mother needs the father to stay with her, to provide for the children. And to promote male fidelity, you need frequent sex. That's why human females are rare amoung mammals in being sexually active even through non-fertile parts of the monthly cycle.
The increased importance of non-procreative sex is not due to any particular culture, but is just part of being human.
PS. Biologists have already gotten two female mice to have a child together. Expect that in 30 years, homosexual humans will have that option too. In that view, this current gay marriage thing is just planning ahead.
the U.S. wanted peace, and was willing to give the Sioux some reservations, so why'd they have to go and kill Custer?
And hey, Nazi German wanted peace, and was willing to give Britain some native governance, so why'd they go and bomb Bremen?
Samuel Clemens said "There is no land that is owned that was not stolen"
Israel, like the U.S., is stolen land.
Unlike the US, the populations of conqueror and conqueree are similar. The "Indian" population of North America was miniscule compared to the number of arriving European settlers.
It can be argued that the conquest of the USA's territory was justified in that it brought the world closer to an equal distribution of real estate. Of course, that same reasoning would say that the "Palestinians" will have a right to Jerusalem in 2014 when they outnumber the Jews there.
The other critical difference between the development of modern Israel and the USA is that the American Indians eventually could, if they wished, leave those reservations and become standard US citizens with normal voting rights. The Palestinian people cannot vote to influence the government that rules them.
Oh please. Foppish, decadent Americans, cowering behind their oceans, versus mighty Germans, trained from early childhood as warriors? World War II was over before it began.
I haven't heard him advocate a withdraw from Iraq (right now)
Kerry's exact words on Iraq were "stay the course".
But that's the sort of perfectly ambiguous phrase politicians are infamous for. Since the stated goal of the US administration (safe democratic nationwide elections) is probably impossible by the stated deadline (June 30), "stay the course" can either mean one of two contradictory things: "stay there until the job is done", or "get out exactly when we planned".
Kerry wants wants voters to interpret him in whichever way matches their own beliefs.
strip out the trademarked material and redistribute it to your heart's content.
No need. Redistributing trademarked data is absolutely fine as long as you state very boldly that the presence of the data is not meant to imply that you are an authorized SUSE representative.
However, the graphics are probably also copyrighted, which means they couldn't be redistributed... but they can easily be erased/replaced.
The real problem that could arise is that some versions of SUSE include copyrighted, non-GPL software. Without some technical expertise, it would be hard to get the distro running once those parts are gone.
If the API for a certain kernel module becomes so complete that it amounts to message passing, then the kernel module might as well be outside the kernel.
Yes, if that were true. But there's nothing in Linux which approaches that point. Or at least, I don't see anything in the VFS area resembling message-passing.
(That is the well-behaved FS modules which don't reach into the kernel and do weird things)
The fact that the FS code doesn't reach into the kernel is irrelevant. What matters is that it could, if it made some kind of error (buffer overflow exploit or something)
The theoretical stability benefit of microkernel design is that even if an individual module becomes evil (through accident or sabotage), the damage it can inflict on the rest of the system is formally limited to the assigned responsibilities for that code.
With a microkernel, I could load up a binary-only driver/module that came with some weird hardware and be perfectly assured that it won't scan my TCP/IP traffic and send duplicates off to it's home base.
For example almost all mail clients are prone to buffer overflow errors on the subject line, for one.
Name one.
(Better yet, since I count 8 popular Linux mailreaders, name 5 and then MAYBE you'll be believed)
They call it a microkernel in the sense that its internal design is very modular.
By that argument, Linux could be a microkernel too, if you compiled everything as modules.
The other componants ntfs.sys, win32k.sys, etc all run in kernel space but are not part of the kernel image itself.
That is not the definition of "microkernel" as used in academic computer science. The fact that something was designed as separate components means nothing- only if there is master code active at runtime to ensure cooperation between those components is the "microkernel" name warranted. If they're in the same kernel space, then an error in ntfs.sys could crash win32k.sys, which would be impossible with real microkernels.
That's why Tanenbaum just admitted that a microkernel will always be slower than a monolithic design, because that active code requires some overhead. But he says the additional safety is worth it.
Yet another blatantly incompetent decision
Wrong. Bill Gate's goal was to make money. Forsaking stability to boost speed helped Microsoft increase sales (and later cut costs by merging the separate Win9x and NT products into one codebase). A decision which produced the desired result cannot be called incompetent.
Actually, his argument is that a microkernel would make a better early-90s graduate-level compsci project
Wrong. Just read the last paragraph of the webpage he posted 2 days ago: it flat-out says that the security problems rampant in today's computer systems would've been partly prevented by microkernel design.