Um, WTF? GPL is absolutely not similar to public domain; the gpl-violations people repeatedly make this very clear.
A better answer is, "that's not very clear, could you give an example of what you mean?". About the only thing I think it can sanely mean, is how to prevent other people from claiming it as their work (ie, plagiarism) and suing people (kinda like SCO suing people over Novell's copyrighted code). Maybe something like CC-zero is the answer (you keep a copyright, so you can sue them for... I think it was "slander of title" that Novell used)
Um, WTF? being able to prevent other people from claiming it as their work is absolutely not similar to public domain; copyright lawyers repeatedly make this very clear.
Seriously, how does my post warrant a "WTF" and not yours? The original question wasn't clear. I was stating that if what if what he meant was that he wanted to be able to keep other people from closing up the work, then "public domain" wasn't the right thing, something like the GPL would be. I don't see how your assumption that he was asking how to keep other people from claiming the work as theirs is any clearer. The whole point is that his question is internally inconsistent. I was giving an answer to one interpretation with lots of "ifs" to be sure that's what he meant, while explaining exactly what public domain meant and why it wouldn't be proper in any interpretation of the original question.
You keep saying "public domain", but you are using it to define nearly the opposite concept.
Did you even read my post? That was my whole point, that you can't create a license to mandate that something stay in the public domain after someone else takes a hold of it because inherent in the definition of public domain is the ability for anyone to do whatever they want with it, including the ability to make their version not public domain. I was suggesting to the OP that if what he meant by "public domain" (notice the ironic quotes there and in my original post) was that the work would stay available for everyone even after someone else takes it and releases it as their own, then "public domain" is not the proper release strategy for him, and that he's probably looking for something like the GPL.
tend to be less restrictive in their licenses than the GPL (barring, of course, redistribution of the original source code).
I like how you use a whole paragraph explaining why commercial licenses are more free than the GPL and then gloss over the friggin huge reason for the GPL in the first place parenthetically as if it was an afterthought. The freedom of modification and redistribution is huge, and central to the GPL.
But maybe you're right, that software license I got from Microsoft for Windows was way more free than the one I got with Linux. There's nothing those Linux guys will let me do with their software, I can barely run it without giving up all my rights. Unlike Windows which has really set me free with what I can do with the software and source code.
How exactly do you put something into public domain legally, such that you can legally protect them to be in public domain? Really, serious question.
It is a very good question, and the answer is to use the GPL. But more to the point, if you put something into the public domain, then you by definition should be expecting that other people will take your work and close it up inside their own products/works. If you don't want that, then you don't want the public domain.
If what you want is "public domain" in the sense that it's open for anyone to look at, use, and modify and you want to keep it that way when others use/modify it, then what you want is the GPL.
Isn't this like legislating that PI is 3.14 because some people have problems with the idea of irrational numbers?
I get your point. But, to me it kind of seems like having leap seconds in the first place is more like legislating the value of pi because people have a hard time reconciling that 1 sec != 1/86400 of a day all the time. They basically want 1 second to always be constant and they want solar noon at Greenwich England to be 12:00:00 on their clocks. It would be like people wanting the diameter and circumference of a circle to both be rational numbers.
Different Daniel Lyons. This one is a professor of law at Boston College, not a reporter for Forbes.
Wow, thank you. I guess I just figured a writer named Daniel Lyons writing an inflammatory story about the law and technology would be the same Daniel Lyons who wrote other inflammatory stories about the law and technology. I guess I'll have to issue my own mea culpa on this one. The name had sounded familiar to me so I wikipedia'd it and only found the Danial Lyons that wrote about SCO. But as other replies mentioned, who would have guessed that two people with the same name would both be corporate shills? Maybe this is a pen name like Robert X. Cringely, but where you have to be an ass to write under it.
Please remember that this is the same Daniel Lyons that covered the SCO trial and (stripped from wikipedia),
claim[ed] that Groklaw was primarily created "to bash software maker SCO Group in its Linux patent lawsuit against IBM, producing laughably biased, pro-IBM coverage".
Between 2003 and 2007 he covered the SCO cases against IBM and against Linux. He published articles like "What SCO Wants, SCO Gets", where he stated that "like many religious folk, the Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement are a) convinced of their own righteousness, and b) sure the whole world, including judges, will agree. They should wake up."
We should wake up... to the fact that Daniel Lyons is just like John Dvorak, and will write the most inflammatory stories with the flimsiest amount of research, and doesn't deserve anyone's pageviews.
Impressive and all, but I take umbrage at calling it a "1 TB barrier". Is it disproportionately more difficult than sorting 0.99 TB?
Breaking "the sound barrier" was hard because of the inherent difficulty of going faster that sound in an atmosphere (sonic booms and whatnot). It was harder than simply travelling that fast would have been.
If this is just further evolution of sorting speed, it makes it a milestone, not a barrier.
Just think of it like the 4 minute mile. Nothing particularly sacred about running 1.61 kilometers in 240 seconds, but still seen as an important barrier to be crossed. I think sometimes there are coincidental points where round numbers and feats yet to be achieved exist, and I don't have a problem seeing them as barriers. Maybe they're more mental than real though.
Wi-Fi environment -- not only the name of the Wi-Fi hotspot you are logged into, but also the names and signal strengths of every Wi-Fi hotspot around you. In other words, the same things that those Google Street View cars were sucking up as they drove by your house.
This is complete BS. First of all, Latitude makes it exactly clear what they are doing, this is how the iPod Touch does location (btw, anyone else get really annoyed when people call it the iTouch, or is that just me?), along with many other implementations. The Google street view car got in trouble because it was recording *more* than just SSIDs and signal strengths. It was recording actual data being transmitted across these networks. Latitude is not instructing your phone to sniff all open wireless networks around you and send back a sample of TCP traffic to Google. The suggestion is ridiculous.
Someone got permission to sniff the wireless traffic during an MIT class. The professor: none other than Robert Morris, creator of the first internet worm! The lecture: computer security! I love it.
I'm sorry, what fuck was that? Was it a few short sentence fragments that amounted to little more than a crappy twitter post? Oh, it was supposed to be a summary? Are you fucking sure about that? Because it doesn't look like anything of the sort. It looks like shit. I'm glad you love it though! Really, really glad! Isn't it crazy that someone would be sniffing of wireless networks in a computer security class? I sure do think so! It's awesome! How about that! Now if only I could get a professional editor to edit my posting before it goes up and maybe I'll be able to approach your level of communication!
Yes, I checked wikipedia right after reading xkcd when the comic came out. I was pleasantly reassured when I saw that wikipedia did not have an article for Malamanteau prior to the xkcd comic being published. Simultaneously and unsurprisingly, I was saddened by the fact that some xkcd fan had decided that since Randall said it, it shall be so, and created the page. And then I was even more saddened the next day when a co-worker sent me the link to the talk page... Holy crap, what is wrong with you people? Just because it happened on xkcd doesn't mean it gets an encyclopedia entry. No, the wikipedia editors aren't being assholes, they aren't killjoys, they're doing what editors do (slashdot editors should take a note: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1651380&cid=32198120).
Also, it seems like half the people commenting here are saying that because this article even existed, however briefly, it shows how bad wikipedia is and that they'll never use it again (or have already abandoned it). Completely ignoring the fact that the article was deleted. While the other half is denouncing that very deletion. They claim it shows how bad wikipedia is because the editors don't have a sense of humor by not allowing the article to exist. If you want a wiki with a sense of humor, the sites are out there for you. Go add an entry to Uncyclopedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica or Everything2.
The company says it will directly answer 'millions of different fact-seeking searches' with short answers at the top of its results.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I thought google had this for at least at least a little while now. It seems like they started with word definitions and then more and more queries resulted in a direct answer just above the search results. Queries for city populations and other facts mostly pulled from wikipedia seem to be the most common.
Yup, hydrogen is just a battery: you charge it by removing the oxygen, then discharge it by burning it (which recombines the oxygen atoms and reforms water).
This is one of the weirdest arguments I've ever heard. How is hydrogen any different than any other fuel? I could say that oil is just a battery: you charge it by decomposing dinosaurs, then discharge it by burning it. Hydroelectric power: you charge it by bringing water up a mountain and discharge it by letting it fall through your hydro plant. Wind: you charge it by getting the air to expand in certain locations and discharge it by letting it go through windmills. How is any source of energy not exactly like this?
So you're saying I can send an email to a root CA, and as long as the clear, unsigned from field looks serious they'll sign my cert for a domain? Can you DEMONSTRATE this? TFA sure didn't.
You sure are angry for a Sunday morning. From the Betanews article:
Find a free Web mail provider.
Register an account such as ssladmin.
Go to RapidSSL.com and buy a certificate. When given the choice of what e-mail address to use, simply select ssladmin.
Go through certificate registration process (this takes about 20 minutes).
You will now have a secure Web certificate for that Web mail provider
So, it's not the attacker sending an email from ssladmin@example.com to the certificate authority asking for a cert that does it. It's the attacker telling the certificate authority that ssladmin@example.com should be used to prove control over of the domain, then RapidSSL.com would send a confirmation email to that address assuming it was under control of the right people. I guess ssladmin is on a predetermined list of email addresses they allow for authentication.
In his own tests, Seifried says, it usually took only a half-hour to acquire a perfectly valid certificate for a major Web mail service.
I love Firefox because of its plugins (Firebug alone is the bee's knees)
You realize that Chrome has builtin features that basically duplicate everything Firebug does. It even uses the "Inspect Element" wording in the right-click menu.
Don't 'presume'. ARE they offering the source code for the gpl portions of the patches? If they are, get those. If they aren't, it isn't side stepping, it's flat out breaking.
I think you'll find that 'not presuming' is exactly what the parent is doing. The summary said, "What may be more interesting is how Oracle/Sun is able to sidestep GNU licensing requirements". And the poster is saying, "Hey lets slow down a second, are we sure Oracle isn't giving access to the source code to their customers?" Remember, there's nothing stopping Oracle from charging for GPL source code, and they only have to provide access to the source code to the people they distribute the binaries to. So if you don't have a support contract with Oracle, they don't have to provide you with the source code because they're not providing you with the binaries either. However, if one of their customers decides to redistribute the source code, there's nothing Oracle can do about that.
I wonder if the same could be said for people who get snail mail delivered to a Post Office Box?
Do you really wonder that? I mean do you sincerely have a burning desire to know that information? Because I don't think you really do, else you would have clicked the link and seen at the very beginning of the article, the very first section of the author's argument:
I. The Source of the Argument: Fourth Amendment Protection in Postal Mail
If you had read that, I'm pretty sure you would have your answer:
both the sender and receiver have Fourth Amendment rights in the contents of the mail when the postal service or private mail carrier is holding the mail on their mutual behalf.
Also in regards to your 'kicker' of what happens if the other party is using ISP hosted email. You always lose your 4th amendment protection as soon as the letter is delivered, whether by old fashioned mail delivered to the door, or to a PO box, or via email. As soon as the other party has your letter, you have no more rights to it, you never have. If it's my policy to plaster the outside of my house with every snail mail letter I receive you have no recourse if the government looks at something you've sent me.
Now don't take this as an endorsement of the finding. I think it's misguided, however it is consistent.
Don't get me wrong, the summary is accurate. Its crime is splicing together random sentences ripped directly from the article to try and form an original summary. A section from the article, in its full glory (<b> mine):
In food scientist Shirley O. Corriher's "CookWise: The Hows and Whys of Successful Cooking," she writes that even the minimal salt used in baking -- as little as one-third of a teaspoon per cup of flour -- plays four crucial roles in the development of dough: It enhances flavor, controls bacteria, slows yeast activity and strengthens dough by tightening gluten.
And the last two sentences of the summary:
Not only does salt enhance flavor, it controls bacteria, slows yeast activity and strengthens dough by tightening gluten. Salt also inhibits the growth of microbes that spoil cheese.
You can see that the poster or "editor" knew what they were doing because the beginning of the sentence was massaged extensively. And the next sentence was taken from an earlier part of the article. If you're going to restate the article in your own words, then do it in your own words. And if you're going to quote directly from the author, then make the quotes obvious, and don't change his words.
Re:I'd love to see...
on
The Wii Laptop
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I suspect he made this primarily because he is Ben Heck, and this is the kind of thing he does. Nonetheless I can't help but ask "what is the point".
It was posted to the benheck.com forums, but I don't think it was actually Ben Heck. My first clue was that this Wii based laptop is bulkier than Ben's XBox 360 Laptop, my second clue was that Ben Heck doesn't sound like a 15 year old British kid, and my third clue was that I didn't think Ben Heck would use the handle OMGpedobear on his own forums.
I indict this nation because I love it, or more specifically, I love the ideas it was founded on, and what I've read it used to be like. What I resent is that I was born a generation too late to appreciate that cultural flowering
You've 'read [what] it used to be like'? How old are you? 11? Did you happen to read about slavery in your extensive studies? Did you happen to read about women's rights? How about the native residents of this land? These groups were certainly not treated as if the ideals of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence really meant anything to many of those in power at the time.
I'm not someone to look down on what our founding father's accomplished. The ideals they founded the nation on were grand. And they did an amazing job of putting them into an actual workable government framework. However many/most were not able to live up to these ideals themselves. It was not until the civil rights movement that the ideals of the founders were fully realized. Now some people will say the ideals are still not fully realized, and others will claim that we've lost some completely along the way. But, I'd say we're much closer than ever before.
I know their website shows off the incredibly complex molecular structures that VMD is capable of simulating, but it also does a great job with simpler structures that you're likely to run across in a high school course. It's also open source and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux (along with just about any other unix variant http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Download/download.cgi?PackageName=VMD).
What happens when you go to a virtual desktop? Do all the windows on both screens change? If yes, then you just failed to read the summary.
It seems that the poster is asking for two incompatible things at the same time (at least with 'classical' window managers, which he states he wants). I'm simply saying that he can probably get 90% of what he wants with approach A. It's not a failure to read, it's just a suggestion. Maybe that approach would be enough for him, maybe not. You can calm down.
gnome with two screens is just fine. you can maximize on either side and even use the window list say one panel per screen to show what windows are open on each display.
I just want to second this. I have two monitors and one desktop stretched over both, but with gnome if you maximize a window it will snap to the edges of just the monitor it's on. You can stretch any window across both monitors, but you don't have to. I also duplicated the top and bottom panels from the 'main' monitor (my left) to the 'secondary' (my right). The task bars (gnome calls them 'Window Lists') on each monitor show just the windows on that monitor. You could have the gnome menu at the top left of each monitor, and the fast user switcher and date/time at the top right so it would really feel like two separate desktops.
A strong hash of your password is, for all intents, random. The point of a hash is that it's very hard to go from the hash back to the input string to the hash.
But if what you're looking for is randomness why not just go out and get an actual random number? There's no reason to directly tie it to the password at all. All you're doing is opening yourself up to offline dictionary attacks and rainbow table lookups if someone gets a hold of the cookie, and hashes are being shown all the time to have various deficiencies and collisions. Why bother opening yourself to all of that if you don't need to?
Slashdot Mirror
Um, WTF? being able to prevent other people from claiming it as their work is absolutely not similar to public domain; copyright lawyers repeatedly make this very clear.
Seriously, how does my post warrant a "WTF" and not yours? The original question wasn't clear. I was stating that if what if what he meant was that he wanted to be able to keep other people from closing up the work, then "public domain" wasn't the right thing, something like the GPL would be. I don't see how your assumption that he was asking how to keep other people from claiming the work as theirs is any clearer. The whole point is that his question is internally inconsistent. I was giving an answer to one interpretation with lots of "ifs" to be sure that's what he meant, while explaining exactly what public domain meant and why it wouldn't be proper in any interpretation of the original question.
Did you even read my post? That was my whole point, that you can't create a license to mandate that something stay in the public domain after someone else takes a hold of it because inherent in the definition of public domain is the ability for anyone to do whatever they want with it, including the ability to make their version not public domain. I was suggesting to the OP that if what he meant by "public domain" (notice the ironic quotes there and in my original post) was that the work would stay available for everyone even after someone else takes it and releases it as their own, then "public domain" is not the proper release strategy for him, and that he's probably looking for something like the GPL.
I like how you use a whole paragraph explaining why commercial licenses are more free than the GPL and then gloss over the friggin huge reason for the GPL in the first place parenthetically as if it was an afterthought. The freedom of modification and redistribution is huge, and central to the GPL.
But maybe you're right, that software license I got from Microsoft for Windows was way more free than the one I got with Linux. There's nothing those Linux guys will let me do with their software, I can barely run it without giving up all my rights. Unlike Windows which has really set me free with what I can do with the software and source code.
It is a very good question, and the answer is to use the GPL. But more to the point, if you put something into the public domain, then you by definition should be expecting that other people will take your work and close it up inside their own products/works. If you don't want that, then you don't want the public domain.
If what you want is "public domain" in the sense that it's open for anyone to look at, use, and modify and you want to keep it that way when others use/modify it, then what you want is the GPL.
I get your point. But, to me it kind of seems like having leap seconds in the first place is more like legislating the value of pi because people have a hard time reconciling that 1 sec != 1/86400 of a day all the time. They basically want 1 second to always be constant and they want solar noon at Greenwich England to be 12:00:00 on their clocks. It would be like people wanting the diameter and circumference of a circle to both be rational numbers.
Wow, thank you. I guess I just figured a writer named Daniel Lyons writing an inflammatory story about the law and technology would be the same Daniel Lyons who wrote other inflammatory stories about the law and technology. I guess I'll have to issue my own mea culpa on this one. The name had sounded familiar to me so I wikipedia'd it and only found the Danial Lyons that wrote about SCO. But as other replies mentioned, who would have guessed that two people with the same name would both be corporate shills? Maybe this is a pen name like Robert X. Cringely, but where you have to be an ass to write under it.
Please remember that this is the same Daniel Lyons that covered the SCO trial and (stripped from wikipedia),
claim[ed] that Groklaw was primarily created "to bash software maker SCO Group in its Linux patent lawsuit against IBM, producing laughably biased, pro-IBM coverage".
Between 2003 and 2007 he covered the SCO cases against IBM and against Linux. He published articles like "What SCO Wants, SCO Gets", where he stated that "like many religious folk, the Linux-loving crunchies in the open-source movement are a) convinced of their own righteousness, and b) sure the whole world, including judges, will agree. They should wake up."
We should wake up... to the fact that Daniel Lyons is just like John Dvorak, and will write the most inflammatory stories with the flimsiest amount of research, and doesn't deserve anyone's pageviews.
Just think of it like the 4 minute mile. Nothing particularly sacred about running 1.61 kilometers in 240 seconds, but still seen as an important barrier to be crossed. I think sometimes there are coincidental points where round numbers and feats yet to be achieved exist, and I don't have a problem seeing them as barriers. Maybe they're more mental than real though.
Good jeorb editors.
This is complete BS. First of all, Latitude makes it exactly clear what they are doing, this is how the iPod Touch does location (btw, anyone else get really annoyed when people call it the iTouch, or is that just me?), along with many other implementations. The Google street view car got in trouble because it was recording *more* than just SSIDs and signal strengths. It was recording actual data being transmitted across these networks. Latitude is not instructing your phone to sniff all open wireless networks around you and send back a sample of TCP traffic to Google. The suggestion is ridiculous.
I'm sorry, what fuck was that? Was it a few short sentence fragments that amounted to little more than a crappy twitter post? Oh, it was supposed to be a summary? Are you fucking sure about that? Because it doesn't look like anything of the sort. It looks like shit. I'm glad you love it though! Really, really glad! Isn't it crazy that someone would be sniffing of wireless networks in a computer security class? I sure do think so! It's awesome! How about that! Now if only I could get a professional editor to edit my posting before it goes up and maybe I'll be able to approach your level of communication!
Yes, I checked wikipedia right after reading xkcd when the comic came out. I was pleasantly reassured when I saw that wikipedia did not have an article for Malamanteau prior to the xkcd comic being published. Simultaneously and unsurprisingly, I was saddened by the fact that some xkcd fan had decided that since Randall said it, it shall be so, and created the page. And then I was even more saddened the next day when a co-worker sent me the link to the talk page... Holy crap, what is wrong with you people? Just because it happened on xkcd doesn't mean it gets an encyclopedia entry. No, the wikipedia editors aren't being assholes, they aren't killjoys, they're doing what editors do (slashdot editors should take a note: http://news.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1651380&cid=32198120).
Also, it seems like half the people commenting here are saying that because this article even existed, however briefly, it shows how bad wikipedia is and that they'll never use it again (or have already abandoned it). Completely ignoring the fact that the article was deleted. While the other half is denouncing that very deletion. They claim it shows how bad wikipedia is because the editors don't have a sense of humor by not allowing the article to exist. If you want a wiki with a sense of humor, the sites are out there for you. Go add an entry to Uncyclopedia or Encyclopedia Dramatica or Everything2.
I don't know about the rest of you, but I thought google had this for at least at least a little while now. It seems like they started with word definitions and then more and more queries resulted in a direct answer just above the search results. Queries for city populations and other facts mostly pulled from wikipedia seem to be the most common.
This is one of the weirdest arguments I've ever heard. How is hydrogen any different than any other fuel? I could say that oil is just a battery: you charge it by decomposing dinosaurs, then discharge it by burning it. Hydroelectric power: you charge it by bringing water up a mountain and discharge it by letting it fall through your hydro plant. Wind: you charge it by getting the air to expand in certain locations and discharge it by letting it go through windmills. How is any source of energy not exactly like this?
I'd just like to add to that list Pulp Fiction and Slaughterhouse Five. Hell all of: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nonlinear_(arts)
You sure are angry for a Sunday morning. From the Betanews article:
So, it's not the attacker sending an email from ssladmin@example.com to the certificate authority asking for a cert that does it. It's the attacker telling the certificate authority that ssladmin@example.com should be used to prove control over of the domain, then RapidSSL.com would send a confirmation email to that address assuming it was under control of the right people. I guess ssladmin is on a predetermined list of email addresses they allow for authentication.
So, yes, he can demonstrate this.
You realize that Chrome has builtin features that basically duplicate everything Firebug does. It even uses the "Inspect Element" wording in the right-click menu.
I think you'll find that 'not presuming' is exactly what the parent is doing. The summary said, "What may be more interesting is how Oracle/Sun is able to sidestep GNU licensing requirements". And the poster is saying, "Hey lets slow down a second, are we sure Oracle isn't giving access to the source code to their customers?" Remember, there's nothing stopping Oracle from charging for GPL source code, and they only have to provide access to the source code to the people they distribute the binaries to. So if you don't have a support contract with Oracle, they don't have to provide you with the source code because they're not providing you with the binaries either. However, if one of their customers decides to redistribute the source code, there's nothing Oracle can do about that.
Do you really wonder that? I mean do you sincerely have a burning desire to know that information? Because I don't think you really do, else you would have clicked the link and seen at the very beginning of the article, the very first section of the author's argument:
If you had read that, I'm pretty sure you would have your answer:
Also in regards to your 'kicker' of what happens if the other party is using ISP hosted email. You always lose your 4th amendment protection as soon as the letter is delivered, whether by old fashioned mail delivered to the door, or to a PO box, or via email. As soon as the other party has your letter, you have no more rights to it, you never have. If it's my policy to plaster the outside of my house with every snail mail letter I receive you have no recourse if the government looks at something you've sent me.
Now don't take this as an endorsement of the finding. I think it's misguided, however it is consistent.
Don't get me wrong, the summary is accurate. Its crime is splicing together random sentences ripped directly from the article to try and form an original summary. A section from the article, in its full glory (<b> mine):
And the last two sentences of the summary:
You can see that the poster or "editor" knew what they were doing because the beginning of the sentence was massaged extensively. And the next sentence was taken from an earlier part of the article. If you're going to restate the article in your own words, then do it in your own words. And if you're going to quote directly from the author, then make the quotes obvious, and don't change his words.
It was posted to the benheck.com forums, but I don't think it was actually Ben Heck. My first clue was that this Wii based laptop is bulkier than Ben's XBox 360 Laptop, my second clue was that Ben Heck doesn't sound like a 15 year old British kid, and my third clue was that I didn't think Ben Heck would use the handle OMGpedobear on his own forums.
You've 'read [what] it used to be like'? How old are you? 11? Did you happen to read about slavery in your extensive studies? Did you happen to read about women's rights? How about the native residents of this land? These groups were certainly not treated as if the ideals of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence really meant anything to many of those in power at the time.
I'm not someone to look down on what our founding father's accomplished. The ideals they founded the nation on were grand. And they did an amazing job of putting them into an actual workable government framework. However many/most were not able to live up to these ideals themselves. It was not until the civil rights movement that the ideals of the founders were fully realized. Now some people will say the ideals are still not fully realized, and others will claim that we've lost some completely along the way. But, I'd say we're much closer than ever before.
I know their website shows off the incredibly complex molecular structures that VMD is capable of simulating, but it also does a great job with simpler structures that you're likely to run across in a high school course. It's also open source and runs on Windows, Mac, Linux (along with just about any other unix variant http://www.ks.uiuc.edu/Development/Download/download.cgi?PackageName=VMD).
It seems that the poster is asking for two incompatible things at the same time (at least with 'classical' window managers, which he states he wants). I'm simply saying that he can probably get 90% of what he wants with approach A. It's not a failure to read, it's just a suggestion. Maybe that approach would be enough for him, maybe not. You can calm down.
I just want to second this. I have two monitors and one desktop stretched over both, but with gnome if you maximize a window it will snap to the edges of just the monitor it's on. You can stretch any window across both monitors, but you don't have to. I also duplicated the top and bottom panels from the 'main' monitor (my left) to the 'secondary' (my right). The task bars (gnome calls them 'Window Lists') on each monitor show just the windows on that monitor. You could have the gnome menu at the top left of each monitor, and the fast user switcher and date/time at the top right so it would really feel like two separate desktops.
But if what you're looking for is randomness why not just go out and get an actual random number? There's no reason to directly tie it to the password at all. All you're doing is opening yourself up to offline dictionary attacks and rainbow table lookups if someone gets a hold of the cookie, and hashes are being shown all the time to have various deficiencies and collisions. Why bother opening yourself to all of that if you don't need to?