How long until a Linux worm gets wise and tries to run sudo?
Modifying a user's.bashrc so that "su" and "sudo" are replaced with altered commands is a standard trick for hackers (although it demands a little more patience than a normal script kiddy has). The modified program is usually a wrapper which runs the actual command after sending your root password to the hacker.
Moderately paranoid people will never sudo or even su- they will only login as root directly.
Who? Certainly not Jesus... because he wasn't a human, he's God.
Christians believe that God is perfect, and demands the same level of perfection from us.
That's incoherent. To demand absolute perfect from others is to be harsh, unmerciful, and unrealistic- so whoever does that cannot himself be perfect.
And since he is a just God, he must punish the sins of those who he saves, and punished Jesus Christ as a substitute for them.
That whole sentence is so logically inconsistent that it's painful to even look at. It's the level of argument that can be refuted just by repeating it a few times.
"You've all done wrong, and I've got to punish you. Wouldn't be justice otherwise. Wait, no... I've got it. I'll punish someone else instead of you! That'll maintain justice, and still keep you from getting hurt. And I guess I can just punish one guy, instead of all million of you. No, wait... I won't even pick one guy. I'll punish Jesus, the only one who's innocent, instead of punishing those who are
I always thought that the copyright attached/applied/whatever at the time something is published
Wrong. Copyright begins when the work is created- in this case, as soon as the camera has written the JPEG file to the card.
(You might be thinking back to old-fashioned copyright, where protection began at publication, and then only if you had the correct "Copyright 1981" label attached)
I was playing a trick, and talking about some other President Bush, who was a bomber pilot.
If there hypothetically had been a passenger in his son's interceptor jet, then he actually probably couldn't have had a parachute, because they'd be sharing the only chair...
If you were trying to wreak havoc in another country and had a 75% chance of getting in through a given means, wouldn't you try it?
If I was trying to wreak havoc and had a 25% chance of getting caught on initial entry, I definitely wouldn't try it. Not when Canada is right there with an arrest chance of probably 2% or less.
You know that the occasional wealthy Mexicans who want to sneak into the USA fly to Canada first, right?
For a terrorist, there are pros and cons to both Canada and Mexico, though.
Mexico: if arrested, and you don't show up on a terrorist watch list, and you can convincingly act Mexican (the Spanish language will be tough for Al Quaida agents), and you're not carrying anything suspicious, then you have a good chance of being released to Mexico. Then, if the recieving Mexican police don't detect you're not one of them (again, a big obstacle for non-hispanic Al Quaida), you're free to try entering again.
Canada: On the other hand, people sneak in through Canada so rarely that there'd probably be a decent police investigation on anyone caught. But, if not caught, you can probably drive a pickup truck full of weapons over- while entering from Mexico only gets the shirt on your back. The chance of being caught entering via Canada is low, and if you have the luxury of a 10 day walk through the woods, it falls to zero.
The final advantage of Mexico is that foreigners arriving in Mexico by ship or plane will be less closely examined than visitors to Canada. That could really be the decisive factor for most terrorists. (Although if you were, for example, a North Korea team carrying a nuclear bomb, you'd want to come through Canada)
Aside from that are the costs of supporting illegal immigrants once they're here,
Actually, there's no such thing as an "illegal immigrant" in the USA right now. There are "unauthorized immigrants", but they're not really illegal. Otherwise, the normal police would be moderately interested in arresting those lawbreakers, and calling 911 to report an unauthorized alien wouldn't get you threatened with a fine for abusing emergency infrastructure.
Only if the government gets interested in cracking-down on unauthorized immigrants will it be fair to call them "illegal". But so far, small business owners in the USA are so happy to have a pool of employees that accept sub-minimum wage, that nobody wants to stop them.
why should a particular reproductive practise not be one of those?
I'm not going to address that question. But supposing you do believe that fertilized embryos deserve protection, as Bush claims to when justifying his opposition to new stem-cell lines. If so, then you should attack in-vitro fertilization first, since it's the much larger user of the technique.
To do otherwise is hypocrisy. The same kind of hypocrisy as animal rights activists who protest animal experimentation, but don't try to stop McDonalds or Walmart Supercenter. Scientists are an easy target to attack on "ethical" issues, because so few voters know scientists personally. They seem a disconnected elite.
Bush doesn't want to appear anti-family by going against in-vitro. After all, if he's anti-abortion, he should be pro-reproductive assistance, right?
There's also the possibility of reverse psychology (admittedly, such a concept seems beyond Bush's unintelligent facade, but he has clever staff).
For example, some pro-Bush commentators say: "The WMD claim wasn't a lie, Bush actually believed them. After all, he knew after an invasion the truth would come out, so he wouldn't have lied if it would be eventually revealed before the election".
But throw in the possibility of reverse psychology- that the administration was anticipating exactly that kind of exsculpatory response- and you can't judge sincerity at all.
Ah, now I see your difficulty. You're thinking of a "Giant Laser" in the sky to zap incoming missiles.
No, I'm thinking of the actual Pentagon project called NMD, as created by the prime contractor TRW. You are apparently thinking of all kinds of hypothetical other systems that might someday exist, but have no resemblance to the thing President Bush is deploying right now.
You don't mirandize the crew of an enemy ship, you send them to a water grave.
I was talking about terrorism, where the fact that a ship is actually an enemy is probably well disguised. With the overwhelming superiority of the US Navy, the idea that any ship would overtly attack the USA is almost less plausible than man-made meteors.
If I was going to kill 1000 kids in a school, I would think a submachine gun would be ideal.
If you want to kill a lot of children or other relatively non-threatening targets, a fully-automatic weapon is actually a mistake. You just waste ammo on bursts when single precise shots (at most, COM + head tap) is all you need. The best weapon for that is a short-barrel autoloading (not autofiring) carbine with a nice, big, 50-round mag. The kind of thing that's now legal to carry all over the USA. (Load it up with hollowpoint)
been very heavily restricted since 1934. If you don't believe me
I know all about J Dillenger and St. Valentine's Day, thanks.
You see, terrorists don't, by nature, obey laws and they get automatic illegal weapons on the black market or some such place.
Even though terrorists & other criminals are willing to break laws, they take risks of discovery whenever they do. Legalizing something makes it easier for criminals to carry and acquire.
Do you really think a criminal is going to buy a weapon (whether legal or not) through proper channels where they can be traced to the weapon?
No, I think they'll find a gun shop near the target city, and rob it just prior to the scheduled rampage. Although, since many terrorists don't expect to survive their own assaults, they won't care about leaving paper-trails traceable to themselves.
AK-47s are *still illegal*
Not all AK-47s are machine guns. There are semi-autos.
Meteors (both of interstellar and manmade origin) are somewhat dangerous,
Wrong. Meteors are by definition less than 10 meters in diameter, which isn't dangerous at all. Also, "interstellar" is the wrong way to classify them. "Interplanetary" is a little closer.
Manmade meteors are such far-off scifi that I'll ignore them.
Asteroids, on the other hand, can be much larger and are potentially very dangerous. But, the research going into national missile defense will do NOTHING to help us stop an asteroid. A better spaceflight program would, though. But the attacks that would stop a nuke won't bother an asteroid- and most of the work for NMD is in detecting/tracking the incoming missiles, something totally different from detecting objects from space.
Those (both shipboard and land-based) would be part of an integrated missile defense.
They're not part of Bush's current deployment plan, so they don't contribute any defensibility to his actions. Also, railguns for domestic missile defense is flawed for other reasons. But railgun research is overall useful, for spaceflight as well as military needs.
Another, more practical way a missile defense system could be used is to wipe out an incoming airplane, ship, sub, or anything else before it comes in offensive range.
No, NMD couldn't hit subs. And anything else on that list, we can easily knock out already. (Although you'd never want to blow up an enemy ship- instead capture it, and use it as evidence for who sponsored the attack)
But they did not use it themselves. the germans were the first develop rockets that could do some work (the v2), but of course, they could only see one use for it.
Rockets in war go back much earlier than Nazi Germany! Have you ever listened to the USA anthem?
Your freedom to be an ass is preserved at the point of a gun.
Nothing in Iraq, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia has any bearing on my freedom, thanks. I'm sure the US Army could've stopped Saddam Hussein from coming over and pushing everybody around, even without that whole $379 bil.
It may impact my gasoline prices, but that's another matter, isn't it?
If you learn to survive without needing the atmosphere, ocean, or biosphere, then you can do it just as well on a remote corner of Earth as on Mars. And you'll save rocket-fuel too.
Why, if you're in favor of securing the nation, is the southern US border among the most weakly patrolled in the western world?
Eh? The southern border is guarded a lot tighter than the northern one!
Terrorists would be stupid to come through Mexico, where a lucky DEA or INS agent might spot them, when the Canadian border is so much longer, and less defended. (Note: that only applies if they'd be recognized as terrorists if arrested, either by what they're carrying, or if their identities are known. If it's just unknown people entering the country, then blending in with migrant Mexican laborers is a fine plan)
One of Michael Moore's less famous films consisted of him "sneaking" increasingly larger crowds of suspicious-looking persons in from Canada.
The argument that ballistic missile defense is useless because there are other ways to deliver nuclear weapons is spurious.
That argument is spurious, like many of the Black & White justifications used by the Bush administration.
you don't take the locks off your front door just because a burglar could use a window.
But I don't spend $1,000,000 on a titantium-alloy door with retinal scanners and active electronic countermeasures, because a burglar could use a window.
NMD is not a cheap project. Considering the tremendous cost, the low rate of effectiveness, the many other less expensive and less tracable ways an enemy could deliver a bomb, and the fact that building it cannot possibly be done without the enemy's knowledge... there's just no justification for pouring in more money.
With Linux you have a distinctive Error-Message for most failures
No you don't. I just now watched a Mozilla browser spontaneously vanish from a Linux desktop with no message at all.
Frequently, if a Linux application dies, it'll just print a message to stderr and terminate. And if you weren't running it from a text console, then that error text is lost into nothingness.
Clients can "lock" the server, which means it'll only pay attention to protocol requests from that client.
They can also grab all input events, which from the user's perspective is quite the same as locking up the whole screen (ok, so other programs might continue running animations, but so what- you can't click on them)
The old Motif toolkit does this whenever a menu is opened, which means that if a programmer is so careless as to put a debugger breakpoint into a menu-handler, she's deadlocked out of her own session.
I just SAID that I, a lowly developer, can fix the majority of such problems myself with no IT department
Developers are smarter than IT. In college, flunking out of Computer Engineering puts you in Computer Science. Flunk again and you move to Information Technology...
the explanations of what programs and services do are much better and more immediate in Windows.
What does LSASS.EXE do, then? I guess it's not quite obvious enough for me... all I can tell is that killing it kills the OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Which begs the question...
No. It RAISES the question. Learn what "beg" means.
How long until a Linux worm gets wise and tries to run sudo?
.bashrc so that "su" and "sudo" are replaced with altered commands is a standard trick for hackers (although it demands a little more patience than a normal script kiddy has). The modified program is usually a wrapper which runs the actual command after sending your root password to the hacker.
Modifying a user's
Moderately paranoid people will never sudo or even su- they will only login as root directly.
Who? Certainly not Jesus... because he wasn't a human, he's God.
Christians believe that God is perfect, and demands the same level of perfection from us.
That's incoherent. To demand absolute perfect from others is to be harsh, unmerciful, and unrealistic- so whoever does that cannot himself be perfect.
And since he is a just God, he must punish the sins of those who he saves, and punished Jesus Christ as a substitute for them.
That whole sentence is so logically inconsistent that it's painful to even look at. It's the level of argument that can be refuted just by repeating it a few times.
was nothing new
You can go back even further. Phantasy Star 2 on the original (8 bit) Nintendo permanently killed a female party member during the game.
The U.S. doesn't have jurisdiction in other countries' governments
Tell that to "sovereign" Iraq.
I always thought that the copyright attached/applied/whatever at the time something is published
Wrong. Copyright begins when the work is created- in this case, as soon as the camera has written the JPEG file to the card.
(You might be thinking back to old-fashioned copyright, where protection began at publication, and then only if you had the correct "Copyright 1981" label attached)
OK, here's an anecdote totally unfamiliar to me.
I was playing a trick, and talking about some other President Bush, who was a bomber pilot.
If there hypothetically had been a passenger in his son's interceptor jet, then he actually probably couldn't have had a parachute, because they'd be sharing the only chair...
All the military people that I know of
Have you heard of John McCain? Max Cleland?
dislikes Kerry for turning his back on the troops in Vietnam
Kerry's testimony was the truth. If you consider truth to be a betrayle, then you didn't deserve loyalty in the first place.
How does that differentiate him from President Bush?
Well, one main distinction is that all but one of the crewmen who served on Kerry's vehicle in the war still support him today.
By comparison, all the crewmen on Bush's vehicle in the war died in it, because he jumped out knowing he was the only one wearing a parachute.
I don't remember any story of Kerry leaving his men behind to save his own skin.
If you were trying to wreak havoc in another country and had a 75% chance of getting in through a given means, wouldn't you try it?
If I was trying to wreak havoc and had a 25% chance of getting caught on initial entry, I definitely wouldn't try it. Not when Canada is right there with an arrest chance of probably 2% or less.
You know that the occasional wealthy Mexicans who want to sneak into the USA fly to Canada first, right?
For a terrorist, there are pros and cons to both Canada and Mexico, though.
Mexico: if arrested, and you don't show up on a terrorist watch list, and you can convincingly act Mexican (the Spanish language will be tough for Al Quaida agents), and you're not carrying anything suspicious, then you have a good chance of being released to Mexico. Then, if the recieving Mexican police don't detect you're not one of them (again, a big obstacle for non-hispanic Al Quaida), you're free to try entering again.
Canada: On the other hand, people sneak in through Canada so rarely that there'd probably be a decent police investigation on anyone caught. But, if not caught, you can probably drive a pickup truck full of weapons over- while entering from Mexico only gets the shirt on your back. The chance of being caught entering via Canada is low, and if you have the luxury of a 10 day walk through the woods, it falls to zero.
The final advantage of Mexico is that foreigners arriving in Mexico by ship or plane will be less closely examined than visitors to Canada. That could really be the decisive factor for most terrorists. (Although if you were, for example, a North Korea team carrying a nuclear bomb, you'd want to come through Canada)
Aside from that are the costs of supporting illegal immigrants once they're here,
Actually, there's no such thing as an "illegal immigrant" in the USA right now. There are "unauthorized immigrants", but they're not really illegal. Otherwise, the normal police would be moderately interested in arresting those lawbreakers, and calling 911 to report an unauthorized alien wouldn't get you threatened with a fine for abusing emergency infrastructure.
Only if the government gets interested in cracking-down on unauthorized immigrants will it be fair to call them "illegal". But so far, small business owners in the USA are so happy to have a pool of employees that accept sub-minimum wage, that nobody wants to stop them.
why should a particular reproductive practise not be one of those?
I'm not going to address that question. But supposing you do believe that fertilized embryos deserve protection, as Bush claims to when justifying his opposition to new stem-cell lines. If so, then you should attack in-vitro fertilization first, since it's the much larger user of the technique.
To do otherwise is hypocrisy. The same kind of hypocrisy as animal rights activists who protest animal experimentation, but don't try to stop McDonalds or Walmart Supercenter. Scientists are an easy target to attack on "ethical" issues, because so few voters know scientists personally. They seem a disconnected elite.
Bush doesn't want to appear anti-family by going against in-vitro. After all, if he's anti-abortion, he should be pro-reproductive assistance, right?
Thus there are only a few alternatives:
There's also the possibility of reverse psychology (admittedly, such a concept seems beyond Bush's unintelligent facade, but he has clever staff).
For example, some pro-Bush commentators say: "The WMD claim wasn't a lie, Bush actually believed them. After all, he knew after an invasion the truth would come out, so he wouldn't have lied if it would be eventually revealed before the election".
But throw in the possibility of reverse psychology- that the administration was anticipating exactly that kind of exsculpatory response- and you can't judge sincerity at all.
Ah, now I see your difficulty. You're thinking of a "Giant Laser" in the sky to zap incoming missiles.
No, I'm thinking of the actual Pentagon project called NMD, as created by the prime contractor TRW. You are apparently thinking of all kinds of hypothetical other systems that might someday exist, but have no resemblance to the thing President Bush is deploying right now.
You don't mirandize the crew of an enemy ship, you send them to a water grave.
I was talking about terrorism, where the fact that a ship is actually an enemy is probably well disguised. With the overwhelming superiority of the US Navy, the idea that any ship would overtly attack the USA is almost less plausible than man-made meteors.
If I was going to kill 1000 kids in a school, I would think a submachine gun would be ideal.
If you want to kill a lot of children or other relatively non-threatening targets, a fully-automatic weapon is actually a mistake. You just waste ammo on bursts when single precise shots (at most, COM + head tap) is all you need. The best weapon for that is a short-barrel autoloading (not autofiring) carbine with a nice, big, 50-round mag. The kind of thing that's now legal to carry all over the USA. (Load it up with hollowpoint)
been very heavily restricted since 1934. If you don't believe me
I know all about J Dillenger and St. Valentine's Day, thanks.
You see, terrorists don't, by nature, obey laws and they get automatic illegal weapons on the black market or some such place.
Even though terrorists & other criminals are willing to break laws, they take risks of discovery whenever they do. Legalizing something makes it easier for criminals to carry and acquire.
Do you really think a criminal is going to buy a weapon (whether legal or not) through proper channels where they can be traced to the weapon?
No, I think they'll find a gun shop near the target city, and rob it just prior to the scheduled rampage. Although, since many terrorists don't expect to survive their own assaults, they won't care about leaving paper-trails traceable to themselves.
AK-47s are *still illegal*
Not all AK-47s are machine guns. There are semi-autos.
Yes, but our rockets were simply redesigns on the Chinese rockets.
Funny, your other posts didn't sound British.
Meteors (both of interstellar and manmade origin) are somewhat dangerous,
Wrong. Meteors are by definition less than 10 meters in diameter, which isn't dangerous at all. Also, "interstellar" is the wrong way to classify them. "Interplanetary" is a little closer.
Manmade meteors are such far-off scifi that I'll ignore them.
Asteroids, on the other hand, can be much larger and are potentially very dangerous. But, the research going into national missile defense will do NOTHING to help us stop an asteroid. A better spaceflight program would, though. But the attacks that would stop a nuke won't bother an asteroid- and most of the work for NMD is in detecting/tracking the incoming missiles, something totally different from detecting objects from space.
Those (both shipboard and land-based) would be part of an integrated missile defense.
They're not part of Bush's current deployment plan, so they don't contribute any defensibility to his actions. Also, railguns for domestic missile defense is flawed for other reasons. But railgun research is overall useful, for spaceflight as well as military needs.
Another, more practical way a missile defense system could be used is to wipe out an incoming airplane, ship, sub, or anything else before it comes in offensive range.
No, NMD couldn't hit subs. And anything else on that list, we can easily knock out already. (Although you'd never want to blow up an enemy ship- instead capture it, and use it as evidence for who sponsored the attack)
But they did not use it themselves. the germans were the first develop rockets that could do some work (the v2), but of course, they could only see one use for it.
Rockets in war go back much earlier than Nazi Germany! Have you ever listened to the USA anthem?
Your freedom to be an ass is preserved at the point of a gun.
Nothing in Iraq, Kuwait, or Saudi Arabia has any bearing on my freedom, thanks. I'm sure the US Army could've stopped Saddam Hussein from coming over and pushing everybody around, even without that whole $379 bil.
It may impact my gasoline prices, but that's another matter, isn't it?
there's so much less to damage when it hits.
If you learn to survive without needing the atmosphere, ocean, or biosphere, then you can do it just as well on a remote corner of Earth as on Mars. And you'll save rocket-fuel too.
Why, if you're in favor of securing the nation, is the southern US border among the most weakly patrolled in the western world?
Eh? The southern border is guarded a lot tighter than the northern one!
Terrorists would be stupid to come through Mexico, where a lucky DEA or INS agent might spot them, when the Canadian border is so much longer, and less defended. (Note: that only applies if they'd be recognized as terrorists if arrested, either by what they're carrying, or if their identities are known. If it's just unknown people entering the country, then blending in with migrant Mexican laborers is a fine plan)
One of Michael Moore's less famous films consisted of him "sneaking" increasingly larger crowds of suspicious-looking persons in from Canada.
The argument that ballistic missile defense is useless because there are other ways to deliver nuclear weapons is spurious.
That argument is spurious, like many of the Black & White justifications used by the Bush administration.
you don't take the locks off your front door just because a burglar could use a window.
But I don't spend $1,000,000 on a titantium-alloy door with retinal scanners and active electronic countermeasures, because a burglar could use a window.
NMD is not a cheap project. Considering the tremendous cost, the low rate of effectiveness, the many other less expensive and less tracable ways an enemy could deliver a bomb, and the fact that building it cannot possibly be done without the enemy's knowledge... there's just no justification for pouring in more money.
With Linux you have a distinctive Error-Message for most failures
No you don't. I just now watched a Mozilla browser spontaneously vanish from a Linux desktop with no message at all.
Frequently, if a Linux application dies, it'll just print a message to stderr and terminate. And if you weren't running it from a text console, then that error text is lost into nothingness.
Clients can "lock" the server, which means it'll only pay attention to protocol requests from that client.
They can also grab all input events, which from the user's perspective is quite the same as locking up the whole screen (ok, so other programs might continue running animations, but so what- you can't click on them)
The old Motif toolkit does this whenever a menu is opened, which means that if a programmer is so careless as to put a debugger breakpoint into a menu-handler, she's deadlocked out of her own session.
I just SAID that I, a lowly developer, can fix the majority of such problems myself with no IT department
Developers are smarter than IT. In college, flunking out of Computer Engineering puts you in Computer Science. Flunk again and you move to Information Technology...
the explanations of what programs and services do are much better and more immediate in Windows.
What does LSASS.EXE do, then? I guess it's not quite obvious enough for me... all I can tell is that killing it kills the OS.
My Win2k machine at home hasn't been reboot since last Christmas.
What's your IP address? I've got some scripts to try out...
You can't even change video settings in KDE without restarting the X-server
Since KDE 3.2, you can change resolution or refresh rate, but not color-depth.