When you delete a file, the data stays exactly where it is on the disc; but the space it has been taking up is marked as "free for re-use". Windows usually tries to use this space up last of all, which makes it hard to be sure that a deleted file has been overwritten. {DOS used to re-use it straight away, until people complained that that made it harder to recover files.}
The basic objective is to create a load of junk files, taking up all the room on the hard disc drive, before you delete the files you want rid of. Then create some more junk; and because you created so much junk earlier, the only possible place your computer will have left to put this new junk will be over the top of where your unwanted files used to have been. Once magnetic data has been overwritten, it's gone forever. So don't delete anything yet!
You probably have loads of junk data lying around that you can use. Rip a music CD as.WAV files. These are uncompressed, therefore they take up lots of room -- about 2/3 of a gigabyte for a full CD album. On this occasion at least, big files are what you want. In fact, rip as many CDs as you can find. If you have a scanner, scan some pictures at a high DPI setting, and save them as uncompressed.BMP files.
Keep scanning and ripping -- or even just making copies of the files you created earlier {but note, they must be real copies, not shortcuts} -- until you run out of disc space. {Watch the disc usage meter}.
Now, and only now, delete the "sensitive" files.
Now you have some room again, create more junk files, until you run out of disk space again. Then try creating smaller files -- rip shorter songs, scan smaller bits of picture, or use a compressed format -- until you have absolutely no room to save anything else.
Delete just some of your junk files, defragmentate the hard disc -- this will shuffle things around the disc surface -- and delete the rest of the junk.
Now if anyone tries recovering anything from the drive, all they will get is the junk you put there.
It's not GREED to want to be healthy -- it's a basic right that we should expect to take for granted in any civilised society. It's GREED to want money for yourself more than you want other people to be healthy.
I am sorry, but the right of a sick person to receive medical treatment, and to receive it gratis, trumps the right of a corporation to make a profit any day.
I'd like to see you look a dying person square in the face and tell them that they have to die or else some faceless corporation will lose money.
Fitters of lamps to horse-drawn carriages became unemployed when motor cars became popular. Wages snatchers became unemployed when hole-in-the-wall machines became popular. What's your point?
To an extent -- the GPL is most definitely a form of legal jiu-jitsu, using your enemy's strength and weight to your own advantage: in this case, the law protects the right of a copyright holder to grant conditional permission for certain acts above and beyond fair use.
If copyright did not apply at all to computer software, there would be no need for the GPL. Try a thought experiment. Some authors -- the same ones who, under the existing regime, think Open Source is good -- would release their software in source code form. There would be binary-only software; but, if anyone saw the need, it would soon be decompiled and the retrieved source made available.
However, it has to be said that it's a vastly different regime to imagine.....
"No authorization for the analysis or modification of the system, or the analysis and use of circuit configurations, is provided."
But that's completely unenforcible anyway! If you paid money for the device, it's your property and you're within your rights to do almost anything you like with it {as long as you aren't infringing anyone else's property rights. For instance, throwing it through someone else's window would clearly be infringing the property rights of the window owner}.
Exactly. For many people, the only way of getting legal {if unauthorised copying of software actually is illegal in those countries..... did anyone bother to check?} is to switch to Open Source. Microsoft aren't going to like it, but them's the breaks.
Feet that have recently been encased in shoes, will smell for awhile after being removed from those shoes. The smell will eventually disappear.
Solution is obvious
on
VoIP Wiretapping
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· Score: 3, Insightful
We need secure VoIP!
SIP telephony is similar to HTTP. It's ordinarily unencrypted. But it can be tunnelled through any secure connection. Since there are open-source SIP clients in existence, it ought to be trivial to create a secure SIP using openSSL or some other cryptography library. It also ought to be possible to create a similar secure version of the IAX protocol {Inter-Asterisk eXchange} for when you have hardware SIP phones: use SIP from phone to PC running Asterisk, and S-IAX to the next link in the chain.
Depending upon the protocol, you would either use permanent public and private key pairs per person, or temporary session keys. Exchange of used session keys would give plausible deniability {since nobody can prove your correspondent didn't have the encrypting key when you sent them the message; so it might be total bollocks that they made up for reasons that don't concern you}.
Besides getting around Big Brother and the surveillance state, this sort of thing will also be useful in jurisdictions where governments are trying to ban VOIP altogether.
There are exactly two reasons why I ever visit a bank. {1} To draw out money through the hole-in-the-wall machine. {2} To pay in money and/or cheques through the HITW machine. I never need to check my balance: I know from my pay slip how much went in each month "behind my back". Every other transaction involved me writing a cheque, or standing at the HITW taking money out or {twice a year: once shortly after Christmas and again shortly after my birthday} putting it in.
So will this fancy-pants home banking thingy actually let me print pound notes on my own printer? Can I upload digital photographs of cash and cheques and pay them into my account that way?
I'm guessing not, which is why I'm happy to give the whole internet banking thing a miss.
I can manage my own rights perfectly well, thank you.
Seriously, copy protection is mathematically impossible. That's not a limitation of present technology -- it's a limitation of the universe. At some stage of the process, the "protected" signal must be rendered into a form perceivable by human beings {and therefore copyable -- hopefully into a DRM-free format}.
The only way of stopping people making copies of material is to sell it at a low enough price that it's not worth the effort of making a copy. Whatever they can make blank CD-Rs for, they can make stamped CDs for the same price or slightly less {there is one process fewer with a stamped original}. But the blank CD isn't really the main issue: it's the time spent mastering and burning, plus the value-added stuff you only get with a store-bought original: a nice plastic box, a shiny booklet with the song lyrics and sleeve notes, and so forth. And the fact that record companies can afford to sell Walkman cassettes -- which cost more to manufacture than CDs -- at a lower price than CDs, should set a few alarm bells ringing.
DVDs are too expensive, watching a film in a cinema is too expensive..... movies are too expensive. Probably something to do with Hollywood actors and actresses losing the plot with their champagne lifestyles. Anytime soon, independent film-makers are going to break through.
In the case of TV programmes, people have already paid for a licence which allows them to watch -- and record -- them anyway. So downloading them ought not to be illegal, provided your TV-licence is paid up. Even if your licence is not paid up, it's hardly different than having an eidetic memory and so not needing a TV-recorder to be able to re-watch any TV show you have ever seen, or inviting a friend who has not paid for a TV-licence in to watch your TV.
I'm sick and tired of people complaining that the Internet is not suitable for children, so it needs to be cleaned up and made family-friendly.
Does it bollocks!
The Internet isn't suitable for kids, that's a given. But the conclusion is not the only one that fits the premise. My suggestion is, instead, ban children from using the Internet. It's not rocket science! Keeping kids off the Internet has got to be an easier proposition than keeping unsuitable material off the Internet. Face it, life isn't all that family-friendly. That's why you can't even go into a bar till you turn fourteen, and then you have to wait another four years drinking lemonade while you watch other people drink alcohol before they'll sell you any. That's why you can't have sex until you're sixteen, or watch other people having sex until you're eighteen, or drive a car till you're seventeen. There is such a thing as being too young.
Kids managed just fine {better, even?} before there was such a thing as the Internet, and they'll manage fine being barred from using it. They're kids; and growing up and dealing with things is Just What Kids Do.
I actually quite liked Hibachi. And not just for the animated logo! You can even run multiple instances on separate ports, and use NAT and port forwarding to get a poor man's virtual server setup.
I'd recommend you stick to v1.0 {which is actually PD}, for licencing reasons. The v2.8 licence is unnecessarily restrictive.
DNA analysis is done by human beings, using instruments that were built by human beings and according to procedures that were devised by human beings. It is thus prone to human errors on three levels. Yet people seem to see it as the be-all and end-all of forensic science: DNA evidence is never questioned.
We already know of one case where DNA evidence can give a false positive. Identical twins have exactly the same DNA. {Read: if you have a twin, you could frame them for a crime.} Unless we can be confident that every bit of information in DNA is being treated as significant {which is highly unlikely}, the probability of a false positive increases quadratically with the number of samples on file.
Bottom line: It's a matter of time before DNA cocks up.
If people are not checking signatures properly, then they need a polite talking-to at the very least. What it absolutely does not need is a system with one fault ripping out and replacing with a different system with worse faults.
It takes me an hour to learn to forge a signature {don't ask}, so I guess it would take about that long for any thief who stole my card. That gives me a window of about one hour from when the card goes missing before I have to do anything about it.
With chip and PIN, there is no signature, just the same 4-digit number as used at the HITW machine. However, unlike a HITW, there is not necessarily a security camera watching the transaction {and even if there is, it's the store's camera, not the bank's camera}. Given the readily availability of camera telephones {for recording PIN entries -- and shielding the keypad won't help, it's your shoulder and your elbow they're looking at}, and the ease with which a card can be stolen unnoticed, I don't think it's worth the risk of using chip and PIN. Of course, it's also possible to extract a four-digit number with a knife held against the throat..... that doesn't work for signatures.
I think computers are the worst thing ever to have been introduced into the classroom since Trendy Teaching Methods.
When I did my maths O-level, we weren't even allowed to use calculators. We made do with log tables. All the important bits were in the reasoning anyway -- knowing why you have to do a certain sequence of steps to get the answer was more important than the answer from the last step.
If you already know how to do something by hand, then however bad you are at it, you can be helped by having a machine to do it for you. If you don't already know how to do something by hand, then a machine won't help you at all. If anything, it will hinder you, because you won't fully understand in your own mind what you are attempting to achieve.
As a method for gaining wider-than-deserved acceptance of Microsoft {by pushing it to minors who by definition can't be expected to make an informed decision} and alienating the poorer sectors of society {by insisting that if they don't own a Windows PC, they are socially inadequate}, computers in the classroom are excellent. For anything else, no.
What's so controversial about "Origin of Species" ? It's a coherent and convincing explanation for a natural phenomenon, that does not depend on supernatural intervention.
How else would you explain the phenomenon of speciation, without invoking the supernatural?
CD-Digital Audio does not support any kind of DRM. It is an open, uncompressed, unencrypted format, just like the analogue vinyl LP from which it is directly descended. The only information that an audio CD player can read from the disc is a representation of the positions of the loudspeaker cones.
Burned CDs -- especially rewritables -- have a different contrast ratio than stamped ones, which can confuse some older players made before CD-R and CD-RW were invented. Ones and zeros just look too similar for the player to be certain which is which.
Another issue is finalisation. Some audio CD players {in my experience, mainly top loaders} can't handle an un-finalised disc, and no audio CD player can handle an un-finalised session. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Mac or Windows box, so I don't know how to check on either of those systems whether a disc is finalised or not; but, assuming you're using some fancy GUI software, just look for something like "disc info" in one of the menus.
It's an absolutely massive project. There are about ten thousand packages, all including metadata for full automatic dependency checking and resolution. Each of these packages is available for each of a dozen architectures, and there is consistency across all platforms. Debian is Debian; whether it's running on an Intel, a PPC, a Sparc, an ARM or whatever. The user need not know what lies beneath the skin of the machine; the procedure for doing something should be absolutely the same whatever is inside.
For a project of that sheer size to work, it's pretty much got to be ruled over with an iron fist -- if not literally, then those involved have to act as though it were so.
Woody is out-of-date for desktops; I don't think there is any question of that. KDE 2.2? Hello? And it's not exactly up to the minute for servers, either: it's still pushing Apache 1.3, for crying out loud!
The real problem stems from the fact that before a package can be accepted into the Stable release, it has to be shown to be bug-free on each of twelve architectures. So if it segfaults on a steam-powered toaster, it can't be deemed fit to run on an 80386.
But that's just the ideal for the Stable distribution. There are two other Debian distributions, Testing and Unstable. Whenever someone creates a brand-new.deb package, it goes into Unstable. The rules are, if you run packages from Unstable, and they break, you don't bitch: you fix them, or you keep your trap shut, but you don't bitch. Once a package has been in Unstable for awhile, it can go to Testing. When the project leaders are satisfied that the current state of the Testing distribution satisfies all the criteria and is fit to call Stable, then a new Stable distribution is born.
Testing is actually the Debian distribution you probably really want to be running if you have an 80386-type machine. Yes, security updates get ported into Stable in good time; but Testing probably has newer versions of packages anyway which are likely to have the security patch in by default. It's safe to run on servers iff you read the news and you know how to apply a patch and compile a package from source. {And if you don't, then what the hell are you doing running a server?} But Unstable is actually quite reasonable. I've found it to be no worse than Fedora or Mandrake: any problems I've had with packages not installing or not co-operating turned out to be due to mis-specified dependencies, requiring cunning use of manual override and package searches. So no worse than any RPM distro there:) It's not the packages themselves that are unstable; rather, the versions are unstable, simply because the maintainers keep putting in new versions as soon as the.debs are put together. I wouldn't run it on a server; but on my laptop, which is behind a firewall, it works very well, and I'm also using it on my work desktop {an AMD64}. All that being said, I am tempted to try Kubuntu -- it's just like Ubuntu but with a KDE desktop {sorry, but despite my best efforts, I really can't get to grips with GNOME}.
It's also worth remembering that every Debian-derivative -- Ubuntu, Linspire and so forth -- started out as a copy of the Unstable tree.
Apparently your definition of freedom doesn't include the freedom to create something and keep the details to oneself.
If you want to keep your creation to yourself, sure; I have no problem with that. However, if you want to share any part of it with others, you must share the whole of it with others. It's a simple enough concept: all or nothing.
[calling closed-source software a crime against humanity]
is a slap in the face to the victims of real crimes against humanity.
No it isn't.
You appear to have bought into the filthy lie, created by those who wish to usurp your freedom, that there are such things as greater or lesser violations of liberty.
Freedom is digital: either you are as free as you can be, or you aren't. There is nothing inbetween.
Pretending that one abuse of liberty is somehow more acceptable than another, is what keeps the whole rotten system going. The fact is, they are all equally unacceptable; but those who seek to deny your freedom will always pretend that the ones it is easier to do something about are less terrible than the ones it is harder to do anything about, in order to dissuade you from doing anything about them.
NeroLinux is no good to me, I'm afraid. Not only is my new PC 64-bit, but I have made a conscious decision to run only OSI-certified software on it. Think of it as a kind of software analogue of vegetarianism, without the mortality-denial.
So I'm sticking with K3B. It's quite simply the most user-friendly piece of software ever written for any platform. If there's any guessing to be done, K3B does it rather than leaving you to do it. And at the end of the burn, it even shows you what commands you could have typed in an XTerm to accomplish the same effect {because of course that's what it's been doing anyway}. I think this is a great way to re-introduce the command line. GCombust, which I used to use on my old Mandrake 8.2 box, did pretty much the same thing, but used GTK1.2.
As for why there is no Win3B..... that's anybody's guess. Though an ejectable LiveCD with Linux and K3B probably would suffice {if someone's got a DVD-writer, the chances are good that they will have enough RAM for this to work. Can Linux mount a Windows swap partition?} One day, I've promised myself, I'll get into making bootdisks..... I've already done a Gentoo Stage One install, there's not much else that can be any harder! Maybe a K3B liveCD would be a good first project.
Clearly, the GPL is not about users' rights, it's about the rights of the author.
And I suppose you think rape laws are primarily for the benefit of cock-teasing bitches who enjoy getting a man excited and then frustrating him?
[the GPL is]
the perfect license for people who want to release their source code and still control an aspect of its destiny.
Now who's anthropomorphising? How can software not have freedom but have a destiny?
I have no problem with that, but let's not drape this self-interest with sanctimonious crap about benefiting humanity.
It's not "sanctimonious crap". It's something people genuinely believe. If I write a piece of software that does something useful, the whole of humanity deserves any benefit they can derive from it. Granted, some -- most, even -- won't physically be able to derive any benefit from it, but that is no reason to deny its benefits to the ones who can.
Everyone, without exception, may count amongst their most fundamental rights the right to share and improve any software they use. It's right up there, along with freedom of speech, freedom of association and all the other things that people living in modern liberal democracies quite properly take for granted. Just because not everyone can exercise this right, does not diminish its importance {after all, half the world's population cannot exercise the right to an abortion; that doesn't make it any less important a right}. As a consequence of this, closed source software -- which seeks to deny these rights -- must be evil, since it seeks directly to oppose a fundamental freedom.
The sense in which software is "free" or not is in the sense of preserving the freedom of its users. It's just one of a whole bunch of peculiarities in the English language; by the time you've learned how it works you find it easier to put up with it than change it {and why should your successors have an easier time than you did?}
The GPL is written from a specific, idealistic standpoint: that all of the benefits of all human endeavour rightfully belong to all of humankind, and it is therefore absolutely wrong to deny anybody the freedom to share and improve the software they use. The very idea of distributing software in a form which the user is not free to share and improve -- which means, for all practical purposes, source code bearing a licence explicitly permitting certain actions -- is anathema to the GNU project.
The BSD licence as written allows you to take code somebody wrote and make something not-free with it; however, you can't do anything to stop the person who originally wrote it from cloning your new, not-free software lock, stock and barrel and making that free.
The GPL specifically bars you from taking code somebody wrote and making something not-free with it.
If you are prepared to watch the software marketplace like a hawk, and code up free clones of any not-free software evidently based on something you wrote, then the BSD licence may be for you. {What was that about "the price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance" again?}
If, however, you feel that coding up a free clone of something not-free would be too much duplication of effort, or that making not-free software in the first place is just downright wrong, then go with the GPL.
If you want to make not-free software {which I happen to think is a crime against humanity in and of itself} and you expect other people to respect the restrictions you impose upon it, the least you could do is abide by any restrictions other people have imposed upon their software.
Two conductors of small cross-section in intimate proximity carrying equal currents in opposite directions make a very poor antenna.
Small cross-section isn't a problem. Opposite directions are easy to arrange: all you need is a resistor on the far end, bigger than the resistance of the cable {which depends on the cross-section; more area == less resistance}. Equal currents require differential drive arrangements {one goes high while other goes low -- think motor reversing circuit -- not hard} and that the terminating resistor on the far end is smaller than the input resistance of the receiver. {Spot the conflicting requirements here..... the whole of engineering is really just about finding the best compromises between incompatible "ideal" requirements to produce a solution that will work under real-world conditions.}
Intimate proximity is traditionally ensured by twisting the wires together, but bonding them side-by-side in a flat configuration works almost as well, if you can live with the fact that there is actually going to be some directional antenna functionality, but it's very directional.
Twisting helps to cancel this out somewhat, by ensuring that any radiated fields tend to cancel one another out: somewhere further along the cable, a signal will be emitted with the opposite phase; and if the twists are close enough that the conductor is in intimate proximity to its opposite counterpart, the two will cancel out.
Exactly how close is "intimate" depends on the wavelength, of course.
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When you delete a file, the data stays exactly where it is on the disc; but the space it has been taking up is marked as "free for re-use". Windows usually tries to use this space up last of all, which makes it hard to be sure that a deleted file has been overwritten. {DOS used to re-use it straight away, until people complained that that made it harder to recover files.}
.WAV files. These are uncompressed, therefore they take up lots of room -- about 2/3 of a gigabyte for a full CD album. On this occasion at least, big files are what you want. In fact, rip as many CDs as you can find. If you have a scanner, scan some pictures at a high DPI setting, and save them as uncompressed .BMP files.
The basic objective is to create a load of junk files, taking up all the room on the hard disc drive, before you delete the files you want rid of. Then create some more junk; and because you created so much junk earlier, the only possible place your computer will have left to put this new junk will be over the top of where your unwanted files used to have been. Once magnetic data has been overwritten, it's gone forever. So don't delete anything yet!
You probably have loads of junk data lying around that you can use. Rip a music CD as
Keep scanning and ripping -- or even just making copies of the files you created earlier {but note, they must be real copies, not shortcuts} -- until you run out of disc space. {Watch the disc usage meter}.
Now, and only now, delete the "sensitive" files.
Now you have some room again, create more junk files, until you run out of disk space again. Then try creating smaller files -- rip shorter songs, scan smaller bits of picture, or use a compressed format -- until you have absolutely no room to save anything else.
Delete just some of your junk files, defragmentate the hard disc -- this will shuffle things around the disc surface -- and delete the rest of the junk.
Now if anyone tries recovering anything from the drive, all they will get is the junk you put there.
How can you say that with a straight face?
It's not GREED to want to be healthy -- it's a basic right that we should expect to take for granted in any civilised society. It's GREED to want money for yourself more than you want other people to be healthy.
I am sorry, but the right of a sick person to receive medical treatment, and to receive it gratis, trumps the right of a corporation to make a profit any day.
I'd like to see you look a dying person square in the face and tell them that they have to die or else some faceless corporation will lose money.
Fitters of lamps to horse-drawn carriages became unemployed when motor cars became popular. Wages snatchers became unemployed when hole-in-the-wall machines became popular. What's your point?
To an extent -- the GPL is most definitely a form of legal jiu-jitsu, using your enemy's strength and weight to your own advantage: in this case, the law protects the right of a copyright holder to grant conditional permission for certain acts above and beyond fair use.
.....
If copyright did not apply at all to computer software, there would be no need for the GPL. Try a thought experiment. Some authors -- the same ones who, under the existing regime, think Open Source is good -- would release their software in source code form. There would be binary-only software; but, if anyone saw the need, it would soon be decompiled and the retrieved source made available.
However, it has to be said that it's a vastly different regime to imagine
Exactly. For many people, the only way of getting legal {if unauthorised copying of software actually is illegal in those countries ..... did anyone bother to check?} is to switch to Open Source. Microsoft aren't going to like it, but them's the breaks.
Feet that are kept bare do not smell.
Feet that have recently been encased in shoes, will smell for awhile after being removed from those shoes. The smell will eventually disappear.
We need secure VoIP!
SIP telephony is similar to HTTP. It's ordinarily unencrypted. But it can be tunnelled through any secure connection. Since there are open-source SIP clients in existence, it ought to be trivial to create a secure SIP using openSSL or some other cryptography library. It also ought to be possible to create a similar secure version of the IAX protocol {Inter-Asterisk eXchange} for when you have hardware SIP phones: use SIP from phone to PC running Asterisk, and S-IAX to the next link in the chain.
Depending upon the protocol, you would either use permanent public and private key pairs per person, or temporary session keys. Exchange of used session keys would give plausible deniability {since nobody can prove your correspondent didn't have the encrypting key when you sent them the message; so it might be total bollocks that they made up for reasons that don't concern you}.
Besides getting around Big Brother and the surveillance state, this sort of thing will also be useful in jurisdictions where governments are trying to ban VOIP altogether.
There are exactly two reasons why I ever visit a bank. {1} To draw out money through the hole-in-the-wall machine. {2} To pay in money and/or cheques through the HITW machine. I never need to check my balance: I know from my pay slip how much went in each month "behind my back". Every other transaction involved me writing a cheque, or standing at the HITW taking money out or {twice a year: once shortly after Christmas and again shortly after my birthday} putting it in.
So will this fancy-pants home banking thingy actually let me print pound notes on my own printer? Can I upload digital photographs of cash and cheques and pay them into my account that way?
I'm guessing not, which is why I'm happy to give the whole internet banking thing a miss.
They don't need to take your word for it. They can read the source code and be sure.
I can manage my own rights perfectly well, thank you.
..... movies are too expensive. Probably something to do with Hollywood actors and actresses losing the plot with their champagne lifestyles. Anytime soon, independent film-makers are going to break through.
Seriously, copy protection is mathematically impossible. That's not a limitation of present technology -- it's a limitation of the universe. At some stage of the process, the "protected" signal must be rendered into a form perceivable by human beings {and therefore copyable -- hopefully into a DRM-free format}.
The only way of stopping people making copies of material is to sell it at a low enough price that it's not worth the effort of making a copy. Whatever they can make blank CD-Rs for, they can make stamped CDs for the same price or slightly less {there is one process fewer with a stamped original}. But the blank CD isn't really the main issue: it's the time spent mastering and burning, plus the value-added stuff you only get with a store-bought original: a nice plastic box, a shiny booklet with the song lyrics and sleeve notes, and so forth. And the fact that record companies can afford to sell Walkman cassettes -- which cost more to manufacture than CDs -- at a lower price than CDs, should set a few alarm bells ringing.
DVDs are too expensive, watching a film in a cinema is too expensive
In the case of TV programmes, people have already paid for a licence which allows them to watch -- and record -- them anyway. So downloading them ought not to be illegal, provided your TV-licence is paid up. Even if your licence is not paid up, it's hardly different than having an eidetic memory and so not needing a TV-recorder to be able to re-watch any TV show you have ever seen, or inviting a friend who has not paid for a TV-licence in to watch your TV.
I'm sick and tired of people complaining that the Internet is not suitable for children, so it needs to be cleaned up and made family-friendly.
.....
Does it bollocks!
The Internet isn't suitable for kids, that's a given. But the conclusion is not the only one that fits the premise. My suggestion is, instead, ban children from using the Internet. It's not rocket science! Keeping kids off the Internet has got to be an easier proposition than keeping unsuitable material off the Internet. Face it, life isn't all that family-friendly. That's why you can't even go into a bar till you turn fourteen, and then you have to wait another four years drinking lemonade while you watch other people drink alcohol before they'll sell you any. That's why you can't have sex until you're sixteen, or watch other people having sex until you're eighteen, or drive a car till you're seventeen. There is such a thing as being too young.
Kids managed just fine {better, even?} before there was such a thing as the Internet, and they'll manage fine being barred from using it. They're kids; and growing up and dealing with things is Just What Kids Do.
It's just a pity those in authority can't
I actually quite liked Hibachi. And not just for the animated logo! You can even run multiple instances on separate ports, and use NAT and port forwarding to get a poor man's virtual server setup.
I'd recommend you stick to v1.0 {which is actually PD}, for licencing reasons. The v2.8 licence is unnecessarily restrictive.
DNA analysis is done by human beings, using instruments that were built by human beings and according to procedures that were devised by human beings. It is thus prone to human errors on three levels. Yet people seem to see it as the be-all and end-all of forensic science: DNA evidence is never questioned.
We already know of one case where DNA evidence can give a false positive. Identical twins have exactly the same DNA. {Read: if you have a twin, you could frame them for a crime.} Unless we can be confident that every bit of information in DNA is being treated as significant {which is highly unlikely}, the probability of a false positive increases quadratically with the number of samples on file.
Bottom line: It's a matter of time before DNA cocks up.
If people are not checking signatures properly, then they need a polite talking-to at the very least. What it absolutely does not need is a system with one fault ripping out and replacing with a different system with worse faults.
..... that doesn't work for signatures.
It takes me an hour to learn to forge a signature {don't ask}, so I guess it would take about that long for any thief who stole my card. That gives me a window of about one hour from when the card goes missing before I have to do anything about it.
With chip and PIN, there is no signature, just the same 4-digit number as used at the HITW machine. However, unlike a HITW, there is not necessarily a security camera watching the transaction {and even if there is, it's the store's camera, not the bank's camera}. Given the readily availability of camera telephones {for recording PIN entries -- and shielding the keypad won't help, it's your shoulder and your elbow they're looking at}, and the ease with which a card can be stolen unnoticed, I don't think it's worth the risk of using chip and PIN. Of course, it's also possible to extract a four-digit number with a knife held against the throat
I think computers are the worst thing ever to have been introduced into the classroom since Trendy Teaching Methods.
When I did my maths O-level, we weren't even allowed to use calculators. We made do with log tables. All the important bits were in the reasoning anyway -- knowing why you have to do a certain sequence of steps to get the answer was more important than the answer from the last step.
If you already know how to do something by hand, then however bad you are at it, you can be helped by having a machine to do it for you. If you don't already know how to do something by hand, then a machine won't help you at all. If anything, it will hinder you, because you won't fully understand in your own mind what you are attempting to achieve.
As a method for gaining wider-than-deserved acceptance of Microsoft {by pushing it to minors who by definition can't be expected to make an informed decision} and alienating the poorer sectors of society {by insisting that if they don't own a Windows PC, they are socially inadequate}, computers in the classroom are excellent. For anything else, no.
What's so controversial about "Origin of Species" ? It's a coherent and convincing explanation for a natural phenomenon, that does not depend on supernatural intervention.
How else would you explain the phenomenon of speciation, without invoking the supernatural?
CD-Digital Audio does not support any kind of DRM. It is an open, uncompressed, unencrypted format, just like the analogue vinyl LP from which it is directly descended. The only information that an audio CD player can read from the disc is a representation of the positions of the loudspeaker cones.
Burned CDs -- especially rewritables -- have a different contrast ratio than stamped ones, which can confuse some older players made before CD-R and CD-RW were invented. Ones and zeros just look too similar for the player to be certain which is which.
Another issue is finalisation. Some audio CD players {in my experience, mainly top loaders} can't handle an un-finalised disc, and no audio CD player can handle an un-finalised session. Unfortunately, I don't have access to a Mac or Windows box, so I don't know how to check on either of those systems whether a disc is finalised or not; but, assuming you're using some fancy GUI software, just look for something like "disc info" in one of the menus.
Debian is a victim of its own success.
.deb package, it goes into Unstable. The rules are, if you run packages from Unstable, and they break, you don't bitch: you fix them, or you keep your trap shut, but you don't bitch. Once a package has been in Unstable for awhile, it can go to Testing. When the project leaders are satisfied that the current state of the Testing distribution satisfies all the criteria and is fit to call Stable, then a new Stable distribution is born.
:) It's not the packages themselves that are unstable; rather, the versions are unstable, simply because the maintainers keep putting in new versions as soon as the .debs are put together. I wouldn't run it on a server; but on my laptop, which is behind a firewall, it works very well, and I'm also using it on my work desktop {an AMD64}. All that being said, I am tempted to try Kubuntu -- it's just like Ubuntu but with a KDE desktop {sorry, but despite my best efforts, I really can't get to grips with GNOME}.
It's an absolutely massive project. There are about ten thousand packages, all including metadata for full automatic dependency checking and resolution. Each of these packages is available for each of a dozen architectures, and there is consistency across all platforms. Debian is Debian; whether it's running on an Intel, a PPC, a Sparc, an ARM or whatever. The user need not know what lies beneath the skin of the machine; the procedure for doing something should be absolutely the same whatever is inside.
For a project of that sheer size to work, it's pretty much got to be ruled over with an iron fist -- if not literally, then those involved have to act as though it were so.
Woody is out-of-date for desktops; I don't think there is any question of that. KDE 2.2? Hello? And it's not exactly up to the minute for servers, either: it's still pushing Apache 1.3, for crying out loud!
The real problem stems from the fact that before a package can be accepted into the Stable release, it has to be shown to be bug-free on each of twelve architectures. So if it segfaults on a steam-powered toaster, it can't be deemed fit to run on an 80386.
But that's just the ideal for the Stable distribution. There are two other Debian distributions, Testing and Unstable. Whenever someone creates a brand-new
Testing is actually the Debian distribution you probably really want to be running if you have an 80386-type machine. Yes, security updates get ported into Stable in good time; but Testing probably has newer versions of packages anyway which are likely to have the security patch in by default. It's safe to run on servers iff you read the news and you know how to apply a patch and compile a package from source. {And if you don't, then what the hell are you doing running a server?} But Unstable is actually quite reasonable. I've found it to be no worse than Fedora or Mandrake: any problems I've had with packages not installing or not co-operating turned out to be due to mis-specified dependencies, requiring cunning use of manual override and package searches. So no worse than any RPM distro there
It's also worth remembering that every Debian-derivative -- Ubuntu, Linspire and so forth -- started out as a copy of the Unstable tree.
You appear to have bought into the filthy lie, created by those who wish to usurp your freedom, that there are such things as greater or lesser violations of liberty.
Freedom is digital: either you are as free as you can be, or you aren't. There is nothing inbetween.
Pretending that one abuse of liberty is somehow more acceptable than another, is what keeps the whole rotten system going. The fact is, they are all equally unacceptable; but those who seek to deny your freedom will always pretend that the ones it is easier to do something about are less terrible than the ones it is harder to do anything about, in order to dissuade you from doing anything about them.
NeroLinux is no good to me, I'm afraid. Not only is my new PC 64-bit, but I have made a conscious decision to run only OSI-certified software on it. Think of it as a kind of software analogue of vegetarianism, without the mortality-denial.
..... that's anybody's guess. Though an ejectable LiveCD with Linux and K3B probably would suffice {if someone's got a DVD-writer, the chances are good that they will have enough RAM for this to work. Can Linux mount a Windows swap partition?} One day, I've promised myself, I'll get into making bootdisks ..... I've already done a Gentoo Stage One install, there's not much else that can be any harder! Maybe a K3B liveCD would be a good first project.
So I'm sticking with K3B. It's quite simply the most user-friendly piece of software ever written for any platform. If there's any guessing to be done, K3B does it rather than leaving you to do it. And at the end of the burn, it even shows you what commands you could have typed in an XTerm to accomplish the same effect {because of course that's what it's been doing anyway}. I think this is a great way to re-introduce the command line. GCombust, which I used to use on my old Mandrake 8.2 box, did pretty much the same thing, but used GTK1.2.
As for why there is no Win3B
Everyone, without exception, may count amongst their most fundamental rights the right to share and improve any software they use. It's right up there, along with freedom of speech, freedom of association and all the other things that people living in modern liberal democracies quite properly take for granted. Just because not everyone can exercise this right, does not diminish its importance {after all, half the world's population cannot exercise the right to an abortion; that doesn't make it any less important a right}. As a consequence of this, closed source software -- which seeks to deny these rights -- must be evil, since it seeks directly to oppose a fundamental freedom.
The sense in which software is "free" or not is in the sense of preserving the freedom of its users. It's just one of a whole bunch of peculiarities in the English language; by the time you've learned how it works you find it easier to put up with it than change it {and why should your successors have an easier time than you did?}
The GPL is written from a specific, idealistic standpoint: that all of the benefits of all human endeavour rightfully belong to all of humankind, and it is therefore absolutely wrong to deny anybody the freedom to share and improve the software they use. The very idea of distributing software in a form which the user is not free to share and improve -- which means, for all practical purposes, source code bearing a licence explicitly permitting certain actions -- is anathema to the GNU project.
The BSD licence as written allows you to take code somebody wrote and make something not-free with it; however, you can't do anything to stop the person who originally wrote it from cloning your new, not-free software lock, stock and barrel and making that free.
The GPL specifically bars you from taking code somebody wrote and making something not-free with it.
If you are prepared to watch the software marketplace like a hawk, and code up free clones of any not-free software evidently based on something you wrote, then the BSD licence may be for you. {What was that about "the price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance" again?}
If, however, you feel that coding up a free clone of something not-free would be too much duplication of effort, or that making not-free software in the first place is just downright wrong, then go with the GPL.
If you want to make not-free software {which I happen to think is a crime against humanity in and of itself} and you expect other people to respect the restrictions you impose upon it, the least you could do is abide by any restrictions other people have imposed upon their software.
Two conductors of small cross-section in intimate proximity carrying equal currents in opposite directions make a very poor antenna.
..... the whole of engineering is really just about finding the best compromises between incompatible "ideal" requirements to produce a solution that will work under real-world conditions.}
Small cross-section isn't a problem. Opposite directions are easy to arrange: all you need is a resistor on the far end, bigger than the resistance of the cable {which depends on the cross-section; more area == less resistance}. Equal currents require differential drive arrangements {one goes high while other goes low -- think motor reversing circuit -- not hard} and that the terminating resistor on the far end is smaller than the input resistance of the receiver. {Spot the conflicting requirements here
Intimate proximity is traditionally ensured by twisting the wires together, but bonding them side-by-side in a flat configuration works almost as well, if you can live with the fact that there is actually going to be some directional antenna functionality, but it's very directional.
Twisting helps to cancel this out somewhat, by ensuring that any radiated fields tend to cancel one another out: somewhere further along the cable, a signal will be emitted with the opposite phase; and if the twists are close enough that the conductor is in intimate proximity to its opposite counterpart, the two will cancel out.
Exactly how close is "intimate" depends on the wavelength, of course.