Section 508 is what the US Government has to define "accessible" for their own stuff. They have an entire website dedicated to helping application designers meet the requirements. Here it is http://www.section508.gov/. While IANAL, I would guess that if you followed these guidelines, then you would be able to say that you made a bona fide effort and would be immune to lawsuites. If you are designing for the government (either web-apps or compiled desktop apps), then you are already required to follow these requirements (it should be in the contract).
Sadly the only thing I'm hearing that will cause users to upgrade to vista is DirectX 10 and of course graphics
Its the worms. The worms will make users upgrade. No I don't mean mind-controlling larvae, but the first XP-only internet worm that does not affect Vista (with its supposedly new security model) will send people scambling to upgrade.
Would it really? What is the lifespan on these things in read/write cycle terms? Showing my own ignorance here, but I've been concerned that flash just doesn't have what it takes it you are doing lots of read/write/erase/over-write actions. I have an idea for a fanless embedded device (where I have no real expeience) that will have a bunch of read/writes and I'm torn between the tradeoff of lots of heat but reliable HDD and low-heat but worse MTBF of flash (or so i've read). I've come to the conclusion that I can put the root file system mounted RO on flash (only gets read at boot and writtent to during a firmware upgrade ) and have the data all on an HDD (which will have frequent read/writes). Can flash really replace a HDD for heavy-duty operations?
the overwhelming lions share of open distortion percieved by the overwhelming majority of scientists has been unfortunately solidly Republican.
The overwhelming majority of scientists (who would describe themselves as working scientists versus simple degree holders in the field) are academics working in academic university environments, or even in the case of corporate research labs, are in the academic revolving door. It is no secret that major universities are basically immersed in left-wing culture both at the official level (such as having ethnic or women's studies departments, speech codes, etc) and at the unofficial level (such as students groups). So, these guys are working and living in what amounts to a left-wing echo chamber. They can not help but have a certain amount of cultural bias against conservatives or republicans. As in most social environments, there is great pressure to conform. In some cases, non-conforming academics have been ostracized as cretins or kooks, denied tenure, and passed up for promotion. So it is not surprising that a "majority" of scientists" would land of the left-wing side of any particular debate.
Also, without accusing anybody of consciously cooking the data, its easy to see what you want to see in data when you have pre-conceived notions. I would say that even the questions they ask or don't ask (i.e. what they choose to subject to a study or ignore) is influenced by their preconceived cultural notions.
When somebody says "science is on our side", I basically evaluate it the same as if they said "the statistics are on our side" (especially if its based on statistical models and not reproducable in the lab "hard" science).
I remember back in 95. Do you remember, Windows 95 had this thing built-in called "Dial Up Networking" that gave me a real IP address and I could use any applications I chose with it? Do you remember we could use Netscape for our web browser
Actually, if you remember back before Win95 to Win3.1, you could replace the AOL provided winsock.dll and use Netscape Navigator 2.0 while connected via AOL , which is what I did because the AOL organic browser (before they adopted IE) sucked even more than Netscape 2.0.....plus I had access to all the content from AOL, which is the point. Back in 95, internet content was scarce and AOL served a purpose for the time by providing both a internet connection and online service content. For example, you could get Newsweek stories from AOL that were not available on their website in 95.
but for the vast majority of us, AOL, and the lusers that came with it were a plague on the internet.
Somehow, I doubt you were in the "vast majority" in 1995 if you think everbody else is who used AOL back then is a "luser". But I guess that makes you 1337.
I know its very popular to bash AOL, but in their time they served a purpose.
Back in 95, I had Prodigy. It was terrible. My username and email were something like "85XZW9@prodigy.net" or some such un-memorable non-sense. I couldn't tell people my e-mail address because I couldn't even remember it myself. IIRC, there was no "screenname", just the account name. Their client software was very much a DOS type app (even when run under Win3.1) that could not be minimized and filled the whole screen with a single task. And they did not have IM or anything like it.
So one-day I tried AOL 2.something. It had a windows interface, so I could have multiple tasks open (i.e. one with the news, another with the weather, and another with a browser). I had a real username that was memorable and that approximated my own (along with a few other screennames for chat). And they had IM (no buddy list yet, that would be another year or two away), so I could send private messages in chat. And there was more content than prodigy. The web based advertising and spamming business were still immature, so they were not as sophisticated or motivated to spy on their customers as they are now.
I also tried a few more services back then, MSN, still independantly run compuServe, something called WOW, etc. None of them were as good as AOL in 1995. Remember that pure ISP-only "web" was still young, web content was sparse, and search technology was immature, so it was hard to locate. Once cable-modem came to town in 1999, I keep AOL around for a few years for the email address. But I shut that down back in 2002.
In their time AOL was the best on-line + internet service around. Basic internet was just not developed enough and the other services just didn't match up.
After the counting fiasco in FL, Congress passed the "Help America Vote Act" to get rid of the "hanging chad" forever. The Act provides funds to states to buy electronic machines so they can retire the punch card machines.
As you can see here with the Roll Call Vote, Overwhelming majorities of both parties voted for it, but MORE DEMOCRATS than republicans voted for it, even though Democrats are the minority party.
Lots of companies have spent serious money fielding highly integrated applications based on the ability to use Visual Basic with Office. If might be an Office only app with VBA, or a third party app with VB that calls the various office components to build spreadsheets in Excel or forms in Word. Linux very possibly could break that.
Here is a question for the Office 2007 Beta users:
As of Office 2003, VBA was based on VB6. Does Office 2007 have a VBA based on.Net? Could all of those VB apps be ported to Mono?
MS would only do this is there was a critical mass of linux desktops. Overall there is too much danger to Microsoft in this because the Office and Windows monopolies are mutually supporting. There was a related story on this in 2004 IBM Wants to Port Office to Linux.
Can MS-Office be ported to Linux technically? I would say yes, because they were able to make a Mac OS X port, which has BSD-Unix underpinnings. Pretty much anything than can be done on BSD can be done on Linux. So no great feat of technology would be involved on getting MS-Office ported to Linux.
Now lets talk about why MS would or would not want to do this. If enough of a market existed (read: Corporate customers clamoring for a native Linux port), MS might have an opportunity to retain those customers (and maybe get a few new customers) and make some money doing it. So there is an opportunity for them there in the office suite market. The danger is this: MS-Office & MS-Windows are mutually supporting monopolies in the corporate world. . As long as Office effectively requires Windows, every corporate desktop sold with Office almost guarantees an accompanying windows license. So double the revenue for M$. A native Linux version of MS-Office would undermine Windows. Once Windows is undermined, then Office itself might be jeopardized because they are mutually supporting.
A native Linux port of MS-Office is just too much of a threat to the MS monopoly structure. MS knows this, so such a port will never see the light of day.
Considering the new Intel chips coming out now (Core 2 Duo) seem to be destorying AMD performance wise
I hope the progress for AMD will now be volume -> cash -> more R&D - > better products.
Over the years, I've gotten the vague feeling that AMD has better engineers who can do more with less. I hope the new volume will not only allow AMD to gear up the foundries, but all expand their R&D. I don't know the real figures, but I've always suspected the Intel has a lot more money to spend on research and development, and they still are only now starting to pull ahead on performance. I hope this deal will give AMD enough money to ramp up their R&D.
If AMD could be competative with a smaller program, consider what the should be able to do with more money.
Well... I wasn't talking about coding for the various bugs, but rather picking that sub-set of CSS that actually works as expected in IE6 (I don't think too many people are still using 5.5, IIRC IE6 was an available update to win98). That sub-set will also work in other browsers. As long as I stick to that sub-set of CSS, everything should work cross-browser.
Reality is....When something is 90 plus percent of the market, it is a standard all of its own. That may be "wrong" but it is the truth. I would love IE to fully support CSS standards so you can do a single mark-up/style-sheet that will work everywhere while being able to do cool tricks in CSS. MS may very well be arrogant bastards, but they are arrogant bastards who aren't going to disappear anytime soon. So unfortunately, we'll have to live with it, because 90+ percent of our customers will be using their stuff.
On those rare occasions when I need to do markup w/ css, I'll try to keep it within the sub-set that IE supports, because 1) that is where the customers are at and 2) that sub-set will work fine in other browsers. I'll just have to stay away from all the cool, but unsupported tricks that a fully complient browswer can implement. Otherwise, I'll have to check agents and do multiple-hacks to support each browers, which is painfully inefficient.
Again like the AC, you are missing the point. My point is about they are using the same successful tactic, regardless of the actual merits of the individual cases. So now, what if the Euro-Court finds that the right to software patents has always existed under Euro-law because it falls within the unwritten penumbra of existing property and patent rights, and not issuing the patents violates the rights of the software developer who is seeking the patent?
You're missing the point. It's not about the merits of the policy (good or bad), but how the policy is enacted. The patent people have lost democratically, now they are using the courts to circumvent democracy. The g-grandparent post was about this being a novel tactic, but it is not novel, because it has been used repeatedly in America to get around a recalcitrant majority that simply refuses to enact certain policies that some people (including you apparently) feel strongly about. Abortion and contraception are simply illustrative examples of sucessful use of the same tactic of using the courts to override the majority in the legislature. The comparison is valid.
This is actually a tried-and-true strategy in America and might work in Europe. In Europe, the nation-states fill the position of the american states and the Euro-court will fill the posoition of the american Federal Supreme Court. Here is how it worked in America. Take your pick of favorite leftist causes. For illustration let's just use abortion (never mind the merits, just the strategy).
Try the Democratic Process:
The pubic policy position (allow contraception, abortions, affirmative action, etc) looses in elected state legislatures.
State courts recognize it as public policy (i.e. political) decision that is properly reserved to democratically elected legislatures and decline to get involved.
The elected federal legislature either refused to vote on the matter, or rejects it when it is voted on
Now Circumvent Democracy:
Redefine the battle not as public policy but as a "rights" battle.
File suit in a sympathetic court.
Unelected and unaccountable judge, while finding no explicit "right" in the text of law or constitution declares that this new right falls within the "emanations of penumbra" of other more defined rights.
The strategy is brilliant. While I disagree with circumventing democracy because I am a strong (little d) democrat, I have to admit it has been a very effective way of a minority imposing a public policy decision over the objections of the "less enlightened" majority. Over time (a few decades), the people become accustomed to the new "right" and forget that it was imposed on them. Not only is the policy not reversible by election because it was imposed by an unelected and unaccountable branch of government, but it takes precedence over all enacted laws everywhere because it is now a federal "right". Brilliant.
Are they not aware of the great things that have happened with UNIX once DARPA & BBN started funding the BSD extensions in v4.1 & v4.2? If the BSD Unix folks had this kind of thing in their licenses, then computing technology would have been set back by several years (and perhaps decades). So do they object to using TCP, hypertext (NLS was the precursor of http), and other technologies developed by DARPA? What if the military demands that its contractors reciprocate a la the GPL v3 retalitory patent clause, so that any project with this anti-military clause can not benefit from future military tech?
BTW... lots of military research is not into direct weapons technology, but into more benign management tech because they have to deal with such hugh logistics and managment issues that make Fortune 100 companies look like small business.
Change in Electrical Conductivity and Capacitance
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Skin Sensing Table Saw
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Flesh has certain properties of electrical conductivity and capacitance different from wood. When the metal saw touches flesh, it senses the change in conductivity and sends a stop signal.
The interesting thing is that the power tool industry refused the technology because it was too safe. They were afraid anybody without the technology would get sued for unsafe products, so they they collectively embargoed the technology.
From the NPR write up:
Industry sources say the major manufacturers also worry that adding the safety brake to some table saw models but not others would make them vulnerable to lawsuits.
Israel is not "attacking the civilian population"
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Lead PHP Developer Quits
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Civilians are caught in the crossfire. That is horrible. But Israel is not purposely "attacking the civilian population" as you allege. Israel is attacking military targets that Hezbollah has purposly intermingled amongst civilians. In fact, Israel has taken pains to inform civilians (and thereby tip off Hezbollah too) before attacks by dropping leaflets that basically say "We know there is a Hezbollah ammo dump here, flee now because we will attack soon". Hezbollah purposely endangers the civilans in Lebanon by hiding amongst them. It does this to 1) make the Israelis pause and be reluctant to immediately attack, and 2) when the Israelis do attack, Hezbollah wants to increase the civilian bodycount so they can say "See all the civilans Israel killed!".
If you want to talk about purposely "Attacking Civilians", then you should be pointing the finger at Hezbollah. They are lobbing unguided missles at Isreali cities. When they launch a missle, they can't tell in advance where it will land other than somewhere inside a city. This is indiscrimate bombing of a civlian population.
No state, including Israel, can tolerate either unprovoked attacks on its military or any attack at all on its civilian population. Hezbollah is not a state. It has no sovereign right to maintain an army or make war. Those are rights restricted to states. Any armed action at all by Hezbollah is illegal. Even if it had the right to maintain an army (which it does not) it engages in tactics that are forbidden by international law (hiding amongst civilians, purposely attacking civilians, etc). It's military arm exists for two illegal reasons : threaten Israel and intimidate other Lebanese.
If Israel stops before Hezbollah is either disarmed or destroyed, it will have a continuing military threat on its border; a threat that indiscriminatly attacks its civilian population. No reasonable state will tolerate that as an end solution.
Here is they way this should play out. The UN has already ordered Hezbollah to disarm. See UN resolution 1559. The resoluation calls for removal of Syrian troops (done), deployment of Lebanese Gov't forces in southern Lebanon, and disbanding of all Lebanese militias (meaning Hezbollah since they are the only one left). Hezbollah has refused to disband and has blocked deployment of the Lebanese Army (Hezbollah is stronger). For resolutation 1559 to be carried out, Hezbollah will have to be forecebly disarmed (by Lebanon [not going to happen], by a UN force [too squimish to happen], or by Israel [now you see what is going on]. Once Hezbollah is disarmed or distroyed, then a new stronger UN force (current UN force is a joke) or NATO force will occupy southern lebanon, and allow the Israelis to withdraw. Once the Israelis (and Hezbollah) are gone, then the Lebanese Army and Police will deploy into the south and secure the border. This is the only long term solution for peace. An immediate cease-fire and return to status-quo-ante is only a recipe for continued periodic warfare. Hezbollah must disarm or be destroyed for long term peace to have a chance.
i hope they didn't remove drivers from the kernel.... again.
I don't know if you are trolling or not, but I'll bite
As explained in this pdf file about the debian kernel here, they remove non-free drivers. I understand why they do it, but I could see where it would be annoying if your hardware was effected. Here is a quote from the pdf:
As the kernel is a core part of the Operating System it is in main
And thus must comply with the DFSG
Because of this, some source files are removed or modified
This generally means the removal of drivers that include binary firmware
blobs
On a related note, I sometimes get the feeling that they don't spend as much time polishing some of the rough edges off the kernel the way the Redhat people do with kernel patches and backports. But that is probably to be expected since they are (i'm guessing) mostly volunteers and not paid (like I'm sure the redhat engineers are). Regardless, I'm not looking a gift-horse in the mouth and I am thankful for their efforts. I'm a happy debian-stable user and look forward to etch.
That was exactly what I was thinking. IBM wanted to make sure its own house was clean, so it told its Linux developers not to have any versions of the UNIX source trees on their machines.
As far as deleting "draft" linux code, that might have been a case of playing it safe and making sure that nothing written by a developer with concurrent access to UNIX was contributed to their Linux projects (i.e. oh, you had access to UNIX source? Sorry we can't use your patches, please get rid of them and don't come back until UNIX is off your box.)
When you go to the jewlrey story, you'll find that the prettiest gems with the deepest color are the man-made gems. The natural gems look faded and washed-out in contrast to the "laboratory" made versions. The man-made emeralds are the deepest green, the man-made rubies are the deepest red, and man-made saphires are the brightest blue.
For some people the value might be in the scarcity of the natural gems, but for me the value is in the aesthetic decorative value of gem (with the lab gems being usually of better color).
Everywhere I go to look about PHP security, I see mysql_real_escape_string() as a panacea. But I don't use MySQL, I use Oracle and PostgreSQL. So, mysql_real_escape_string() is not a fix-all for all php programers.
A few years ago (circa 2002 - php v4.x) , I did a rapid application in PHP4 for a demo. It was never really meant to be deployed but was just to give an idea to our managers about what we could do with our data. The backend was Oracle and I used the OCI8 API with no abstraction and it was strictly procedural. Now, several years latter, I've decided to make it deployable in php 5 and PEAR::DB. (As an aside, try reading your own spagetti code several years latter, luckily). So I am busy rewritting the thing by encapsulating some of the logic in PHP5 classes and thinking about security (which was not a part of the orgininal demo). I've scoured the web and O'Reilly safari for sources on php security. From what I've gleaned from various sources, it fighting SQL injection basically seems to come down to the following:
Never accept data directly from $_POST or $_GET. Filter all input and allow only expected data, and then place the validated data into a "trusted" varible if it passes the validation filter. Nothing gets into the trusted variable unless it matches your filter criteria - if you are looking for a 5 character zipcode, then only allow a strlen of 5 with ctype_digit, otherwise raise an exception, discard the data, and kick the user back to the form with an error message.
do not attempt to sanitize data that fails the validation, reject it outright.
become expert at regex. It's the only effective way to filter for complex strings.
Only insert/update into the DB with prepared statements, because a prepared statement is pre-compiled and does not allow the db interpreter to expand or evaluate the variable (which is the mechanism that is exploited by the sql injection).
as you mentioned above, filter your output to prevent XSS. strip_tags() is useful but there are others like htmlentities()
I've checked out some of the validation classes such as pear::validate but I haven't found anything that really meets my needs. There are thousands of classes to validate email addresses, but fewer for specialized things like a National Motor Freight Conference Commodity, so I tend to fall back on writting my own functions with regex and ctypes and strlen.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you define 'accessible'.
Section 508 is what the US Government has to define "accessible" for their own stuff. They have an entire website dedicated to helping application designers meet the requirements. Here it is http://www.section508.gov/. While IANAL, I would guess that if you followed these guidelines, then you would be able to say that you made a bona fide effort and would be immune to lawsuites. If you are designing for the government (either web-apps or compiled desktop apps), then you are already required to follow these requirements (it should be in the contract).
Sadly the only thing I'm hearing that will cause users to upgrade to vista is DirectX 10 and of course graphics
Its the worms. The worms will make users upgrade. No I don't mean mind-controlling larvae, but the first XP-only internet worm that does not affect Vista (with its supposedly new security model) will send people scambling to upgrade.
useful replacement for a 2.5" hard drive
Would it really? What is the lifespan on these things in read/write cycle terms? Showing my own ignorance here, but I've been concerned that flash just doesn't have what it takes it you are doing lots of read/write/erase/over-write actions. I have an idea for a fanless embedded device (where I have no real expeience) that will have a bunch of read/writes and I'm torn between the tradeoff of lots of heat but reliable HDD and low-heat but worse MTBF of flash (or so i've read). I've come to the conclusion that I can put the root file system mounted RO on flash (only gets read at boot and writtent to during a firmware upgrade ) and have the data all on an HDD (which will have frequent read/writes). Can flash really replace a HDD for heavy-duty operations?
The overwhelming majority of scientists (who would describe themselves as working scientists versus simple degree holders in the field) are academics working in academic university environments, or even in the case of corporate research labs, are in the academic revolving door. It is no secret that major universities are basically immersed in left-wing culture both at the official level (such as having ethnic or women's studies departments, speech codes, etc) and at the unofficial level (such as students groups). So, these guys are working and living in what amounts to a left-wing echo chamber. They can not help but have a certain amount of cultural bias against conservatives or republicans. As in most social environments, there is great pressure to conform. In some cases, non-conforming academics have been ostracized as cretins or kooks, denied tenure, and passed up for promotion. So it is not surprising that a "majority" of scientists" would land of the left-wing side of any particular debate.
Also, without accusing anybody of consciously cooking the data, its easy to see what you want to see in data when you have pre-conceived notions. I would say that even the questions they ask or don't ask (i.e. what they choose to subject to a study or ignore) is influenced by their preconceived cultural notions.
When somebody says "science is on our side", I basically evaluate it the same as if they said "the statistics are on our side" (especially if its based on statistical models and not reproducable in the lab "hard" science).
Actually, if you remember back before Win95 to Win3.1, you could replace the AOL provided winsock.dll and use Netscape Navigator 2.0 while connected via AOL , which is what I did because the AOL organic browser (before they adopted IE) sucked even more than Netscape 2.0
Somehow, I doubt you were in the "vast majority" in 1995 if you think everbody else is who used AOL back then is a "luser". But I guess that makes you 1337.
I know its very popular to bash AOL, but in their time they served a purpose.
Back in 95, I had Prodigy. It was terrible. My username and email were something like "85XZW9@prodigy.net" or some such un-memorable non-sense. I couldn't tell people my e-mail address because I couldn't even remember it myself. IIRC, there was no "screenname", just the account name. Their client software was very much a DOS type app (even when run under Win3.1) that could not be minimized and filled the whole screen with a single task. And they did not have IM or anything like it.
So one-day I tried AOL 2.something. It had a windows interface, so I could have multiple tasks open (i.e. one with the news, another with the weather, and another with a browser). I had a real username that was memorable and that approximated my own (along with a few other screennames for chat). And they had IM (no buddy list yet, that would be another year or two away), so I could send private messages in chat. And there was more content than prodigy. The web based advertising and spamming business were still immature, so they were not as sophisticated or motivated to spy on their customers as they are now.
I also tried a few more services back then, MSN, still independantly run compuServe, something called WOW, etc. None of them were as good as AOL in 1995. Remember that pure ISP-only "web" was still young, web content was sparse, and search technology was immature, so it was hard to locate. Once cable-modem came to town in 1999, I keep AOL around for a few years for the email address. But I shut that down back in 2002.
In their time AOL was the best on-line + internet service around. Basic internet was just not developed enough and the other services just didn't match up.
forgot to check the "post anon" box.. oh well
After the counting fiasco in FL, Congress passed the "Help America Vote Act" to get rid of the "hanging chad" forever. The Act provides funds to states to buy electronic machines so they can retire the punch card machines.
As you can see here with the Roll Call Vote, Overwhelming majorities of both parties voted for it, but MORE DEMOCRATS than republicans voted for it, even though Democrats are the minority party.
[posting as AC because I have mod points.]
Lots of companies have spent serious money fielding highly integrated applications based on the ability to use Visual Basic with Office. If might be an Office only app with VBA, or a third party app with VB that calls the various office components to build spreadsheets in Excel or forms in Word. Linux very possibly could break that.
.Net? Could all of those VB apps be ported to Mono?
Here is a question for the Office 2007 Beta users: As of Office 2003, VBA was based on VB6. Does Office 2007 have a VBA based on
Here is a cut and paste from my comment then:
I hope the progress for AMD will now be volume -> cash -> more R&D - > better products.
Over the years, I've gotten the vague feeling that AMD has better engineers who can do more with less. I hope the new volume will not only allow AMD to gear up the foundries, but all expand their R&D. I don't know the real figures, but I've always suspected the Intel has a lot more money to spend on research and development, and they still are only now starting to pull ahead on performance. I hope this deal will give AMD enough money to ramp up their R&D.
If AMD could be competative with a smaller program, consider what the should be able to do with more money.
Well... I wasn't talking about coding for the various bugs, but rather picking that sub-set of CSS that actually works as expected in IE6 (I don't think too many people are still using 5.5, IIRC IE6 was an available update to win98). That sub-set will also work in other browsers. As long as I stick to that sub-set of CSS, everything should work cross-browser.
Reality is....When something is 90 plus percent of the market, it is a standard all of its own. That may be "wrong" but it is the truth. I would love IE to fully support CSS standards so you can do a single mark-up/style-sheet that will work everywhere while being able to do cool tricks in CSS. MS may very well be arrogant bastards, but they are arrogant bastards who aren't going to disappear anytime soon. So unfortunately, we'll have to live with it, because 90+ percent of our customers will be using their stuff.
On those rare occasions when I need to do markup w/ css, I'll try to keep it within the sub-set that IE supports, because 1) that is where the customers are at and 2) that sub-set will work fine in other browsers. I'll just have to stay away from all the cool, but unsupported tricks that a fully complient browswer can implement. Otherwise, I'll have to check agents and do multiple-hacks to support each browers, which is painfully inefficient.
Again like the AC, you are missing the point. My point is about they are using the same successful tactic, regardless of the actual merits of the individual cases. So now, what if the Euro-Court finds that the right to software patents has always existed under Euro-law because it falls within the unwritten penumbra of existing property and patent rights, and not issuing the patents violates the rights of the software developer who is seeking the patent?
You're missing the point. It's not about the merits of the policy (good or bad), but how the policy is enacted. The patent people have lost democratically, now they are using the courts to circumvent democracy. The g-grandparent post was about this being a novel tactic, but it is not novel, because it has been used repeatedly in America to get around a recalcitrant majority that simply refuses to enact certain policies that some people (including you apparently) feel strongly about. Abortion and contraception are simply illustrative examples of sucessful use of the same tactic of using the courts to override the majority in the legislature. The comparison is valid.
The strategy is brilliant. While I disagree with circumventing democracy because I am a strong (little d) democrat, I have to admit it has been a very effective way of a minority imposing a public policy decision over the objections of the "less enlightened" majority. Over time (a few decades), the people become accustomed to the new "right" and forget that it was imposed on them. Not only is the policy not reversible by election because it was imposed by an unelected and unaccountable branch of government, but it takes precedence over all enacted laws everywhere because it is now a federal "right". Brilliant.
Are they not aware of the great things that have happened with UNIX once DARPA & BBN started funding the BSD extensions in v4.1 & v4.2? If the BSD Unix folks had this kind of thing in their licenses, then computing technology would have been set back by several years (and perhaps decades). So do they object to using TCP, hypertext (NLS was the precursor of http), and other technologies developed by DARPA? What if the military demands that its contractors reciprocate a la the GPL v3 retalitory patent clause, so that any project with this anti-military clause can not benefit from future military tech?
BTW... lots of military research is not into direct weapons technology, but into more benign management tech because they have to deal with such hugh logistics and managment issues that make Fortune 100 companies look like small business.
Flesh has certain properties of electrical conductivity and capacitance different from wood. When the metal saw touches flesh, it senses the change in conductivity and sends a stop signal.
The interesting thing is that the power tool industry refused the technology because it was too safe. They were afraid anybody without the technology would get sued for unsafe products, so they they collectively embargoed the technology.
From the NPR write up:
Civilians are caught in the crossfire. That is horrible. But Israel is not purposely "attacking the civilian population" as you allege. Israel is attacking military targets that Hezbollah has purposly intermingled amongst civilians. In fact, Israel has taken pains to inform civilians (and thereby tip off Hezbollah too) before attacks by dropping leaflets that basically say "We know there is a Hezbollah ammo dump here, flee now because we will attack soon". Hezbollah purposely endangers the civilans in Lebanon by hiding amongst them. It does this to 1) make the Israelis pause and be reluctant to immediately attack, and 2) when the Israelis do attack, Hezbollah wants to increase the civilian bodycount so they can say "See all the civilans Israel killed!".
If you want to talk about purposely "Attacking Civilians", then you should be pointing the finger at Hezbollah. They are lobbing unguided missles at Isreali cities. When they launch a missle, they can't tell in advance where it will land other than somewhere inside a city. This is indiscrimate bombing of a civlian population.
No state, including Israel, can tolerate either unprovoked attacks on its military or any attack at all on its civilian population. Hezbollah is not a state. It has no sovereign right to maintain an army or make war. Those are rights restricted to states. Any armed action at all by Hezbollah is illegal. Even if it had the right to maintain an army (which it does not) it engages in tactics that are forbidden by international law (hiding amongst civilians, purposely attacking civilians, etc). It's military arm exists for two illegal reasons : threaten Israel and intimidate other Lebanese.
If Israel stops before Hezbollah is either disarmed or destroyed, it will have a continuing military threat on its border; a threat that indiscriminatly attacks its civilian population. No reasonable state will tolerate that as an end solution.
Here is they way this should play out. The UN has already ordered Hezbollah to disarm. See UN resolution 1559. The resoluation calls for removal of Syrian troops (done), deployment of Lebanese Gov't forces in southern Lebanon, and disbanding of all Lebanese militias (meaning Hezbollah since they are the only one left). Hezbollah has refused to disband and has blocked deployment of the Lebanese Army (Hezbollah is stronger). For resolutation 1559 to be carried out, Hezbollah will have to be forecebly disarmed (by Lebanon [not going to happen], by a UN force [too squimish to happen], or by Israel [now you see what is going on]. Once Hezbollah is disarmed or distroyed, then a new stronger UN force (current UN force is a joke) or NATO force will occupy southern lebanon, and allow the Israelis to withdraw. Once the Israelis (and Hezbollah) are gone, then the Lebanese Army and Police will deploy into the south and secure the border. This is the only long term solution for peace. An immediate cease-fire and return to status-quo-ante is only a recipe for continued periodic warfare. Hezbollah must disarm or be destroyed for long term peace to have a chance.
I don't know if you are trolling or not, but I'll bite
As explained in this pdf file about the debian kernel here, they remove non-free drivers. I understand why they do it, but I could see where it would be annoying if your hardware was effected. Here is a quote from the pdf:
On a related note, I sometimes get the feeling that they don't spend as much time polishing some of the rough edges off the kernel the way the Redhat people do with kernel patches and backports. But that is probably to be expected since they are (i'm guessing) mostly volunteers and not paid (like I'm sure the redhat engineers are). Regardless, I'm not looking a gift-horse in the mouth and I am thankful for their efforts. I'm a happy debian-stable user and look forward to etch.
That was exactly what I was thinking. IBM wanted to make sure its own house was clean, so it told its Linux developers not to have any versions of the UNIX source trees on their machines.
As far as deleting "draft" linux code, that might have been a case of playing it safe and making sure that nothing written by a developer with concurrent access to UNIX was contributed to their Linux projects (i.e. oh, you had access to UNIX source? Sorry we can't use your patches, please get rid of them and don't come back until UNIX is off your box.)
When you go to the jewlrey story, you'll find that the prettiest gems with the deepest color are the man-made gems. The natural gems look faded and washed-out in contrast to the "laboratory" made versions. The man-made emeralds are the deepest green, the man-made rubies are the deepest red, and man-made saphires are the brightest blue.
For some people the value might be in the scarcity of the natural gems, but for me the value is in the aesthetic decorative value of gem (with the lab gems being usually of better color).
There are several libraries from the PEAR project
= Authentication
Try this : http://pear.php.net/packages.php?catpid=1&catname
Everywhere I go to look about PHP security, I see mysql_real_escape_string() as a panacea. But I don't use MySQL, I use Oracle and PostgreSQL. So, mysql_real_escape_string() is not a fix-all for all php programers.
A few years ago (circa 2002 - php v4.x) , I did a rapid application in PHP4 for a demo. It was never really meant to be deployed but was just to give an idea to our managers about what we could do with our data. The backend was Oracle and I used the OCI8 API with no abstraction and it was strictly procedural. Now, several years latter, I've decided to make it deployable in php 5 and PEAR::DB. (As an aside, try reading your own spagetti code several years latter, luckily). So I am busy rewritting the thing by encapsulating some of the logic in PHP5 classes and thinking about security (which was not a part of the orgininal demo). I've scoured the web and O'Reilly safari for sources on php security. From what I've gleaned from various sources, it fighting SQL injection basically seems to come down to the following:
I've checked out some of the validation classes such as pear::validate but I haven't found anything that really meets my needs. There are thousands of classes to validate email addresses, but fewer for specialized things like a National Motor Freight Conference Commodity, so I tend to fall back on writting my own functions with regex and ctypes and strlen.