Bah! What do I need Plasma for? I arrange small rocks in a grid and emulate xterm myself! My refresh rate is up to 0.00006 Hz! It's good enough for me, it's good enough for anyone!
Christ, what a bunch of e-peen waving. So you don't use KDE. Don't piss on all the users who like it and the developers who put so much work into it.
Don't be too worried. Mergers and acquisitions happen because the merged/acquired is either very strong or very weak. The weak get ingested, stripped of individuality in a spreadsheet driven attempt to 'improve efficiencies' and such. The strong get bought just because they're strong--it's worth having them as is, and beyond some HR and Finance integration, there's very little desire to screw up a good thing.
A lot of merged/acquired/grown by purchasing companies are little more than feudal arrangements where divisions operate by themselves and pay tribute to head office. As an example, EMC bought VMWare a couple years ago, and there's still almost zero integration--they're an independent fiefdom within EMC, and no one's going to hobble EMC's hottest property with an ill-conceived attempt to 'familize' them.
The collapse of the infrastructure is like the end of Moore's Law--always a couple years over the horizon.
As a general practice, I ignore any news story that relies upon "could", "may", "might" or "possibly" in its central premise. It always means that another lazy journalist is being willingly spoonfed a story by a PR flack.
Hushmail wasn't feeding a tainted applet, they were providing the keys of those who were identified and chose to use the server-side encryption option, rather than the applet.
What does the NSA use for encryption itself, to the extent that it can be known? Part of their charter is to provide public expertise in securing information (thus, SE Linux); contributing to open standards for encryption is part of that. But when you're talking about what they actually use, that should be indicative of where real crypto strength lies.
Years of downloading MP3s has warped your moral definition of theft. It's not the practical "deprivation of use by the rightful owner" that makes it theft, it's the "taking without right" that makes it theft. Besides, while the admins *could* replace the stolen virtual furniture, they probably won't because they don't know how to deal with proving that someone's stuff got stolen, and avoiding opening another avenue for fraud of reporting fake theft.
I'll admit that the fact that it's virtual, and the deprivation of use is minimal if not non-existant, does tend to mitigate the crime. But at root it's theft.
My sister-in-law isn't allowed to play Xbox with her son because she makes him cry. "Get the powerup, Tyler! Get it! You missed it! Jesus, Tyler, it's like you're not even trying..."
They have to find out to sue you; and as the other respondent noted, non-competes are of dubious enforcability anyway.
The purpose of a non-compete is twofold: keep valuable employees from going to a competitor (by definition, you're not valuable if you've been gone eight months); and something with which to threaten current employees if the employer feels like they're planning to switch en masse to a competitor.
Short version, it costs money to sue you and your new employer, and someone at your old employer has to think that they've got something to gain by preventing you from working there (something to gain that's worth more than the lawyers fees). Unless you're taking the crown jewels with you, don't worry about it.
If this is true, it's an extremely smart thing for them to do.
Re:Just so we don't call it "science"
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 1
I agree with your narrowing of the germ theory hypothesis to make it falsifiable, but the same can be done with SETI: "There is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe that is detectable by its obviously intelligent emissions in spectrums available to us." The phrase "obviously intelligent" can be similarly narrowed to a workable set of criteria such that the emission can be determinately included or excluded (e.g., shows an intelligible pattern known not to occur in nature, such as the prime numbers). Searching the available spectrum and failing to find any obviously intelligent emissions falsifies the hypothesis; finding obviously intelligent emissions confirms it in the same way that watching a germ infect a cell confirms the germ theory.
Granted, what looks obviously intelligent to us might turn out to not be--certain types of pulsars might emit the prime numbers; but by the same token, the germ theory faces criticism for not including diseases that aren't obviously germ-originated. That's the process of science.
I salute the attempt to tag pseudo-science clearly, so that we may more easily point and laugh, but I don't think there's as bright a line separating science from non-science as you'd like. Attempts to define such a line invariably include what was previously considered productive work that contributed to science in every practical sense.
Re:Just so we don't call it "science"
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 1
The germ theory of disease was first proposed in 1546. When Leeuwenhoek went looking for micro-organisms in his first primitive microscope over a century later, he was working with an unfalsifiable hypothesis: that there are tiny entities in the blood that transmit disease. Just like SETI, if he hadn't found any with his microscope, that wouldn't have falsified the hypothesis because he might not be looking with a powerful enough microscope, or in the right place. Does that mean that Leeuwenhoek wasn't doing science when he went looking for experimental confirmation of the hypothesis?
Re:Just so we don't call it "science"
on
Is SETI Worth It?
·
· Score: 1
The hypothesis "there is no intelligent life elsewhere in the universe" is falsifiable if an intelligence-directed signal is found. That makes the opposite hypothesis provable, which is sufficient.
A strict requirement of falsifiability is a Popperian view of science that has been widely criticized on the grounds that it misrepresents both the actual practice of science and the theoretical framework of empiricism. In practice, science proceeds inductively.
That's a tricky call. The Senate allows for these "gentlemen's agreement" filibusters, where a Senator only has to indicate that he wants to filibuster, just so the Senate doesn't grind to a halt while Senators read recipe books into the Congressional record. When business is ordinary, and there's a general collegiality indicating that compromise is possible, this allows for both filibusters and things to still get done.
It does break down in these cases, though, when pure obstructionism is the goal. The "nuclear option" that the Pubs were discussing three years ago when Dems were using the filibuster was just this: making them actually talk.
The Dems *are* passing the bills they said they would in the House; it's in the Senate that they die, where the Pubs are filibustering at triple the normal rate in order to prevent the Dems from looking effective going into the 2008 elections.
In a way, capturing the Senate by the razor-thin majority that they did is the worst possible outcome for them, because it allows just this sort of tactic--the Dems are technically in charge, so they look responsible for the lack of action, but they just don't have the numbers to actually do anything Dem-ish.
Salon is a bit of a sad case for advertising supported sites. I actually stopped reading them years ago because it was like vacationing in South Dakota--not bad, but the glare of all the advertising gave me a headache.
That said, I think that article is worth struggling through to read.
I wouldn't be too sad about this--I don't think it indicates a blasé attitude. People have long made jokes like that at dark times, as part of coping, or just from a sense that life goes on. Salon has a great article on the venal, silly, and generally unworthy things that many thought on 9/11: Forbidden Thoughts on 9/11.
I see: because perfect accountability is impossible, no attempt at accountability can ever succeed, even partially. It's just not possible for there to a cumulative effect that raises the overall level somewhat, even if there exist failures of its accountability scheme.
So let me understand this: You're saying that it's his own fault he was falsely imprisoned on the basis of a bogus confession because he believed, with good reason, that his family was threatened with torture? The absurdity of this result in the war on terror is his fault, not the totally counter-productive strategy of those who are supposed to, you know, lock up (real) terrorists?
Higazy wasn't a bad guy--he was completely innocent. He had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorism. The coerced confession wasn't just legally problematic, it actually sent a completely innocent man to jail. If he hadn't been lucky enough for the pilot who owned the radio to show up and say "hey, that's mine", he'd be in jail today.
The baby Jesus weeps for humanity when slobberers like you open your mouth.
Because a website tracking users and the NSA tapping your phone without a warrant with the willing co-operation of telcos are exactly the same degree in concerns over privacy.
"D&D books releasing" implies, grammatically, that the books themselves are the thing doing the releasing. It's a semantic error, not grammatical, but a decent writer would still have said that the books are being released.
Sure, there's a lot of things they could do analytically beforehand. And then a Columbine happens, where the police set up a perimeter and try to initiate contact, while Klebold and Harris continue shooting students, and a teacher who was already shot bleeds to death. Police were on the scene at 11:24 a.m.; *after* their arrival, the two killed or injured 21 students. SWAT didn't enter the building until 1:30 p.m. As a direct result of the deaths that occurred, a lot of police departments changed doctrine to immediate entry.
It's easy to second guess in a situation like this and say they should be more cautious, but there'll always be situations where the opposite should have been done. Personally, if I call 9-1-1 and tell the cops there's someone in my house with gun trying to shoot my family, I hope they don't knock on my neighbor's door first to ensure that it's not a crank call.
Slashdot Mirror
This person needs to learn more about security
You think Bruce Schneier needs to learn more about security?
Bah! What do I need Plasma for? I arrange small rocks in a grid and emulate xterm myself! My refresh rate is up to 0.00006 Hz! It's good enough for me, it's good enough for anyone!
Christ, what a bunch of e-peen waving. So you don't use KDE. Don't piss on all the users who like it and the developers who put so much work into it.
Don't be too worried. Mergers and acquisitions happen because the merged/acquired is either very strong or very weak. The weak get ingested, stripped of individuality in a spreadsheet driven attempt to 'improve efficiencies' and such. The strong get bought just because they're strong--it's worth having them as is, and beyond some HR and Finance integration, there's very little desire to screw up a good thing.
A lot of merged/acquired/grown by purchasing companies are little more than feudal arrangements where divisions operate by themselves and pay tribute to head office. As an example, EMC bought VMWare a couple years ago, and there's still almost zero integration--they're an independent fiefdom within EMC, and no one's going to hobble EMC's hottest property with an ill-conceived attempt to 'familize' them.
You broke the needle on my 'smug elitist' detector.
The collapse of the infrastructure is like the end of Moore's Law--always a couple years over the horizon.
As a general practice, I ignore any news story that relies upon "could", "may", "might" or "possibly" in its central premise. It always means that another lazy journalist is being willingly spoonfed a story by a PR flack.
Hushmail wasn't feeding a tainted applet, they were providing the keys of those who were identified and chose to use the server-side encryption option, rather than the applet.
What does the NSA use for encryption itself, to the extent that it can be known? Part of their charter is to provide public expertise in securing information (thus, SE Linux); contributing to open standards for encryption is part of that. But when you're talking about what they actually use, that should be indicative of where real crypto strength lies.
Years of downloading MP3s has warped your moral definition of theft. It's not the practical "deprivation of use by the rightful owner" that makes it theft, it's the "taking without right" that makes it theft. Besides, while the admins *could* replace the stolen virtual furniture, they probably won't because they don't know how to deal with proving that someone's stuff got stolen, and avoiding opening another avenue for fraud of reporting fake theft.
I'll admit that the fact that it's virtual, and the deprivation of use is minimal if not non-existant, does tend to mitigate the crime. But at root it's theft.
My sister-in-law isn't allowed to play Xbox with her son because she makes him cry. "Get the powerup, Tyler! Get it! You missed it! Jesus, Tyler, it's like you're not even trying..."
They have to find out to sue you; and as the other respondent noted, non-competes are of dubious enforcability anyway.
The purpose of a non-compete is twofold: keep valuable employees from going to a competitor (by definition, you're not valuable if you've been gone eight months); and something with which to threaten current employees if the employer feels like they're planning to switch en masse to a competitor.
Short version, it costs money to sue you and your new employer, and someone at your old employer has to think that they've got something to gain by preventing you from working there (something to gain that's worth more than the lawyers fees). Unless you're taking the crown jewels with you, don't worry about it.
If this is true, it's an extremely smart thing for them to do.
I agree with your narrowing of the germ theory hypothesis to make it falsifiable, but the same can be done with SETI: "There is intelligent life elsewhere in the universe that is detectable by its obviously intelligent emissions in spectrums available to us." The phrase "obviously intelligent" can be similarly narrowed to a workable set of criteria such that the emission can be determinately included or excluded (e.g., shows an intelligible pattern known not to occur in nature, such as the prime numbers). Searching the available spectrum and failing to find any obviously intelligent emissions falsifies the hypothesis; finding obviously intelligent emissions confirms it in the same way that watching a germ infect a cell confirms the germ theory.
Granted, what looks obviously intelligent to us might turn out to not be--certain types of pulsars might emit the prime numbers; but by the same token, the germ theory faces criticism for not including diseases that aren't obviously germ-originated. That's the process of science.
I salute the attempt to tag pseudo-science clearly, so that we may more easily point and laugh, but I don't think there's as bright a line separating science from non-science as you'd like. Attempts to define such a line invariably include what was previously considered productive work that contributed to science in every practical sense.
The germ theory of disease was first proposed in 1546. When Leeuwenhoek went looking for micro-organisms in his first primitive microscope over a century later, he was working with an unfalsifiable hypothesis: that there are tiny entities in the blood that transmit disease. Just like SETI, if he hadn't found any with his microscope, that wouldn't have falsified the hypothesis because he might not be looking with a powerful enough microscope, or in the right place. Does that mean that Leeuwenhoek wasn't doing science when he went looking for experimental confirmation of the hypothesis?
The hypothesis "there is no intelligent life elsewhere in the universe" is falsifiable if an intelligence-directed signal is found. That makes the opposite hypothesis provable, which is sufficient.
A strict requirement of falsifiability is a Popperian view of science that has been widely criticized on the grounds that it misrepresents both the actual practice of science and the theoretical framework of empiricism. In practice, science proceeds inductively.
That's a tricky call. The Senate allows for these "gentlemen's agreement" filibusters, where a Senator only has to indicate that he wants to filibuster, just so the Senate doesn't grind to a halt while Senators read recipe books into the Congressional record. When business is ordinary, and there's a general collegiality indicating that compromise is possible, this allows for both filibusters and things to still get done.
It does break down in these cases, though, when pure obstructionism is the goal. The "nuclear option" that the Pubs were discussing three years ago when Dems were using the filibuster was just this: making them actually talk.
The Dems *are* passing the bills they said they would in the House; it's in the Senate that they die, where the Pubs are filibustering at triple the normal rate in order to prevent the Dems from looking effective going into the 2008 elections.
In a way, capturing the Senate by the razor-thin majority that they did is the worst possible outcome for them, because it allows just this sort of tactic--the Dems are technically in charge, so they look responsible for the lack of action, but they just don't have the numbers to actually do anything Dem-ish.
Salon is a bit of a sad case for advertising supported sites. I actually stopped reading them years ago because it was like vacationing in South Dakota--not bad, but the glare of all the advertising gave me a headache.
That said, I think that article is worth struggling through to read.
I wouldn't be too sad about this--I don't think it indicates a blasé attitude. People have long made jokes like that at dark times, as part of coping, or just from a sense that life goes on. Salon has a great article on the venal, silly, and generally unworthy things that many thought on 9/11: Forbidden Thoughts on 9/11.
We've switched HermMunster's coffee for pure metamphetines. Let's see if he notices...
I see: because perfect accountability is impossible, no attempt at accountability can ever succeed, even partially. It's just not possible for there to a cumulative effect that raises the overall level somewhat, even if there exist failures of its accountability scheme.
So let me understand this: You're saying that it's his own fault he was falsely imprisoned on the basis of a bogus confession because he believed, with good reason, that his family was threatened with torture? The absurdity of this result in the war on terror is his fault, not the totally counter-productive strategy of those who are supposed to, you know, lock up (real) terrorists?
You fucking moron.
Higazy wasn't a bad guy--he was completely innocent. He had nothing to do with 9/11 or terrorism. The coerced confession wasn't just legally problematic, it actually sent a completely innocent man to jail. If he hadn't been lucky enough for the pilot who owned the radio to show up and say "hey, that's mine", he'd be in jail today.
The baby Jesus weeps for humanity when slobberers like you open your mouth.
Because a website tracking users and the NSA tapping your phone without a warrant with the willing co-operation of telcos are exactly the same degree in concerns over privacy.
"D&D books releasing" implies, grammatically, that the books themselves are the thing doing the releasing. It's a semantic error, not grammatical, but a decent writer would still have said that the books are being released.
Sure, there's a lot of things they could do analytically beforehand. And then a Columbine happens, where the police set up a perimeter and try to initiate contact, while Klebold and Harris continue shooting students, and a teacher who was already shot bleeds to death. Police were on the scene at 11:24 a.m.; *after* their arrival, the two killed or injured 21 students. SWAT didn't enter the building until 1:30 p.m. As a direct result of the deaths that occurred, a lot of police departments changed doctrine to immediate entry.
It's easy to second guess in a situation like this and say they should be more cautious, but there'll always be situations where the opposite should have been done. Personally, if I call 9-1-1 and tell the cops there's someone in my house with gun trying to shoot my family, I hope they don't knock on my neighbor's door first to ensure that it's not a crank call.