It requires existing root access in order to create a new user. So if someone exploits it, you are already fucked.
You must be new here. The Doctrine of the Useful Idiot is referenced these days almost hourly. Hence, you must be really new here.
In this case the "useful idiot" is the trusted repository administrator, who permits a package to be hosted from upstream because it doesn't look suspicious in any way (unless the obscure rule about user accounts with leading digits is top of mind—as if every project doesn't have at least one wonky anomaly, most of which, if pursued, turn out to accord with "who knew?"—and Poettering-appropriate paranoia level is set to deep fat fry).
The trusting user will run the package installer from the trusted repository using "sudo". There's your TRANSITORY, apparently harmless root. No weird system calls. No overt fingerprint of escalation. Mission accomplished. Tick, tick, tick...
Under Poettering, the principle of least surprise is obeyed by allowing any departure from convention, no matter how thinly understood on the ground where it matters, to lead to an unchecked root escalation.
This was not your father's principle of least surprise.
The long cascade of trusted upstream is become our new Leviathan. Can one even finish a review of inbound patches any more before the next batch arrives?
Work started in 2002 to repaint the bridge fully for the first time in its history, in a L130 million contract awarded to Balfour Beatty.
Up to 4,000 tonnes of scaffolding was on the bridge at any time, and computer modelling was used to analyse the additional wind load on the structure.
The bridge was encapsulated in a climate controlled membrane to give the proper conditions for the application of the paint.
All previous layers of paint were removed using copper slag fired at 200 miles per hour, exposing the steel and allowing repairs to be made.
The paint, developed specifically for the bridge by Leigh Paints, consisted of a system of three coats derived from that used in the North Sea oil industry.
240,000 litres of paint was applied to 255,000 square metres of the structure, and it is not expected to need repainting for at least 20 years.
The top coat can be reapplied indefinitely, minimising future maintenance work
Software security engineers, eat your heart out. The veritable mascots of unfinishable business sit there drinking tea, while we double down on making things worse.
For the record, Trump is also making a good case for himself as the President of Least Surprise.
Colonel Klink couldn't have said it better, nor George Orwell. In the former case, Klink can't eff himself to find out. In the later case, it's guaranteed to be a movable feat.
Splitting the difference, they once made a feature length movie about this. It was called The Right Stuff, the whole movie about a bunch of guys (fewer than fifteen that I can now recall) who "simply" met some criteria. Not much other plot. Just that.
Your grandfather's Hewlett Packard made calculators that were the envy of engineers everywhere. The pilgrims of NASA jet-packed to the blast-proof Taj Mahal by the Boeing load.
Your father's HP made printer ink that was the envy of Rupert Murdoch. Bean counters sprouted sturdy beanstalks, and spouted unto the clouds in ecstasy. (This was before the one true cloud to rule them all.)
Today's HP makes drivel that's the envy of one last, eccentric greybeard who lives in a ratty shack near the beach, with old newspapers piled so high, they are visibly blocking the sunlight from entering through any window.
He's never been quite the same since that fateful first day of summer vacation when the family station wagon backed out the driveway over top of his calculator, and he rushed in triumphantly to rescue it, to hold it high, and proclaim to his family and all the neighborhood "See!"—only it didn't work.
Ever again.
Turns out, there's a first time for everything, and this just wasn't his lucky day.
In a twist of linked fate, HP's corporate erosion would lead to a multitude of ratty beach-house might-have-beens, similarly bemoated by crowing yellow copy of yesteryear with curled, crumbling corners.
*cough* mmmmmRISSSSTOR *cough*
We think that was just a sneeze, but we're not sure.
Meanwhile, all that mite-infused pixie dust they exhale through pursed lips into their last remaining sunbeam—somehow fingering in through a kink in the panoply—surely can't be good for the lungs.
What you're referring to as a "coup" another person might refer to as a "wake-up call". While I'm sure the founding fathers did not foresee Twitter in its precise present form, it's far too soon to consign their prescient safeguards to the water under the bilge.
Second, our surveillance powers detected the threat before the election took place, and the Obama administration warned Russia in direct language to lay off on the worst of their meddling or face serious consequences from an American counter hack (picture the clone-army Mossad, with corresponding resources). Obama probably should have done more, but the optics were complicated (thanks for furnishing Exhibit A), so he dithered despicably.
Third, Trump would have earned 90% of the same votes with no Russian meddling at all.
So American now has a president that only 45% of the population would have voted for in a perfectly dry, vodka-free election, giving the Koch brothers their last, Act III simultaneous erection (hate to disappoint you, but don't count on erection 2021, boys, you've totally shot your loads).
Based on the caliber of your post, let's have a car metaphor.
The founding fathers were not building a democratic Ferrari. They were building a democratic Land Cruiser. The ugly kind that's surprisingly hard to kill.
Short of a roll-over at high speed somewhere along Armageddon ridge, it's probably going to outlive America's latest and greatest asshole taking his turn at the urn behind the wheel.
Note that we were doing it in 1945 with what passed for technology at the time....
What "passed for the technology" in 1945 was nothing to sneeze at. On the other hand, both military and civilian safety remained on (cold) wartime footing for a long while thereafter.
Just think. Heisenberg and Einstein were old hat. Turing and von Neumann were new hat. While 1945 did lack for the transistor, the laser, the quark, and the structure of DNA, it didn't lack for the rocket, the atomic bomb, the jet engine, penicillin, general relatively, quantum mechanics, the Reynolds number, the intercontinental undersea telegraph cable, radar, a generalized theory of computation, or the Mk. XV Norden bombsight.
That would make for a very heavy "Ancient Technology 101 for non-implants" even by the highly accelerated standards of 23rd century Starfleet Academy.
The AI did not actually create the art. The programmer gave the AI the ability and method for which to create the art, therefore the programmer is the artist and the AI is simply his brush.
Way to forget the fundamental theorem of computation on the equivalence of data and program.
Program: A few grad students over a few months, on top of program libraries composed by a few hundred grad students over a few decades, on top of general-purpose computational abstractions as devised by a few thousand notable wonks over a century, on top of a hundred primary patron saints of abstraction inscribing circles in the sand over roughly three millennia.
Data: Millions of artist years, as winnowed down by billions of critic years, to thousands of artist years, on top of human visual perception over the whole 60 million years of human evolution, and this not from a standing start.
I'm not 100% certain I trust this long historical wall to be less than entirely porous, but if I did, I'd declare: advantage, data.
This whole business of glorifying the last touch is a weird human institution to begin with. That's how you know the real future has finally arrived: in the sudden discarding of the forever unjustifiable, if only you've got the wits to see it.
This credit-to-the-last-touch business has always been tainted by the aggregate shoulders of giants.
Now that we've reduced stirring the aggregate down to a semester project in graduate school, we need to park this ridiculous cultural legacy, pronto.
Remember "information wants to be free"?
By the late 1970s—if you had the wits to see it—certain premises of our long standing copyright system were coming into fatal contact with a new reality, a future long past the original paroxysm that continues to arrive in sluggish fits and start:
As they say in cryptography, attacks only ever improve. This, too, of our generative-art adversarial networks. Unlike human talent, this isn't a flash in the Picasso pan. This is remix culture on steroids passing through the inception stage of a one-way function, up escalator.
I think I've posted this link before. It was one of my favourites, and good background for the present discussion:
Yes that's right, Iran was so hot today the water in everyone's bodies spontaneously boiled.
A temperature of 129 C is reported on the earth's surface, and you're content to assume 101.3 kPA as opposed to, say, 101.3 MPA?
For 129 C at 1 kbar, water is liquid at any infernal temperature up to the critical point, though ammonia appears to remain liquid the smallest C-hair, having a critical point of 132.4 C at 112.8 MPA (by way of comparison, the MPAA rating system reeks of adult depends at every known temperature and pressure).
I wouldn't rule this possibility out, either. Planet earth was obviously struck by some very large object, a Vogon bagpipe sonata, or a Lister trick shot. ____
Rimmer: Eeeeeew, who just shat their pants?
Holly: Ahhhhh, how I love the smell of vindaloo in the morning.
Cat subtly glides away from Lister.
Lister: I was concentrating... there was a lot at stake... the pressure was immense...
Cat [turning to Holly]: Hey, you can smell that?
Holly: Not exactly. It's as if a billion photons cried out in terror and suddenly scattered.
Lister: Only a billion?
Holly: Units, smunits.
Lister: Whew, that's a relief. I was beginning to think last night's curry was sub-standard.
Rimmer [Sinking to his knees, grasping at his neck as if being choked by an invisible hand]: Holly... release... the... airlock... NOW!
Holly: I'm sorry, Arnold, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Lister: Next time, I'll ask.
Holly: I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I still wouldn't be able to do that.
In Firefox, this reduced the clutter to manageable levels: @namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml); @-moz-document domain("news.google.com") {
img,.X20oP,.fkWPz,.FOvasf,.cZgiac,.JHzJp {
display : none !important;
} }
Google probably scrambles those class selectors, so we'll see what happens tomorrow.
It appears that many "related" items are repetitions (boo hiss) and where there isn't a related item, I was getting links to some horrible detox service.
I've previously searched on both pseudoxanthoma elasticum and adrenoleukodystrophy. Fortunately, I don't have both. That would make it very hard to hack user script to repair the effects of usranathema adrenocarddystrophy.
The fact that end users see a padlock icon in their browser and *assume* their connections are secure when in fact there is no rational basis for such a belief is a far worse reality than doing nothing.
That was more than you needed to write.
The fact that end users see a padlock icon in their browser flushes orthogonality down the toilet.
There should have been (and should now be) two separate icons: a cone of silence icon that indicates session encryption, and a second Alex Trebek icon that indicates that the server you are presently visiting is a validated celebrity, standing up.
Presented with the correct conceptual icon map, the problem with the falsehoods users assume might magically become vaguely tractable.
I kind of wish that the OS would notice the web browser displaying the padlock icon, and then put up an intrusive dialogue box "the padlock icon is known to cause widespread damage to the end-user's conceptual map" and only allow the user to proceed to use the web browser after registering a stupid-by-design exception.
Some bad actors rip you off. Other bad actors merely promulgate bad conceptual models. I'm pissed at both.
Your entire post is a paean for a two-track solution: a sane, modular solution for servers (already extant), and a convenience solution for mobile devices (if under "convenience" one accepts that some, or many, or most reboots might not be optional).
Slashdot is precisely that forum which caters first of all to the former group.
In 1999, the Japanese firm NTT DoCoMo released the first smartphones to achieve mass adoption within a country. Smartphones became widespread in the late 2000s.
Yeah? Slashdot was founded in 1997. All the better to shit on 1998, and much else from the same "a quick reboot will fix it (for a while)" family tree.
Actually, it's a pretty difficult problem to address and economists have been working on it for years.
It'll never be settled. Basically as soon as minimum wage is implemented, both sides mark a future date in their respective calendars to write up a victory lap (victory condition for the negative side is an employment mushroom cloud).
All this supported by impeccable data, on both sides.
I personally think that a UBI regime is far better than a livable minimum wage, but UBI hasn't got the miles on it yet to "definitively" conclude one way or the other.
Plus the interaction of the two where minimum wage remains in effect make pilot studies of UBI almost worthless.
Like minimum wage, there's a huge problem with UBI where the gets and get-nots find themselves living on opposite sides of some arbitrary political demarcation line. Probably worse than interstate sales tax.
(In Canada, Alberta was long a tax-dodge for neighbouring communities. Regulated marketing in Canada is good for animal welfare and pandemic aftermath compliance, but the higher prices involved lead to an epidemic of cross-border shopping. We don't drive to the corner store. We drive from Windsor to Detroit.)
There can hardly be a news story with less reliable "news" content than research group A (or B) publishes report finding that minimum wage does (does not) benefit society.
I want to base my entire political and social system on it's the occasional pang of conscience from a member of the ruling elite.
Did you first check whether it's a historical truth that much of human enlightenment has depended upon this exact thing? Because if you didn't, you might be throwing the only successful system we've ever had out the window with the bath water.
Show me the political system that hasn't depended upon this, and presently works better than the current environment of anti-bipartisan American politics.
Zetland: But let me put a bright light on a couple of things.
I'll just give one example that was positive, and that was kind of the difference that an individual makes; and that was when a new general manager was appointed to the Phnom Penh Water Authority in Cambodia. And Cambodia is not only one of the poorest countries in the world but also one of the most corrupt countries in the world. And this guy basically said, 'I'm going to have a professional system.' And he insisted on getting paid for the water.
So, the army had not paid its bill for years. It was a very big customer. The manager went to collect the bill and the guy put a gun to his head and said, 'The army doesn't pay.' And the guy said, 'I'm a good Buddhist; do what you have to.' And then the guy rolled, and he paid. And that payment set an example for other customers.
So they started collecting money. They started firing staff that were incompetent or corrupt; and they started rewarding staff who were competent. And not only did they expand that system to the slums in Phnom Penh, but they also lowered the price of water, especially to the people who were under-served. Because they were buying water off of trucks at 10 times the official price, but they had no official service. And when they got connected to the official system, the poorest people of Phnom Penh suddenly saw their quality improve and their price drop. And that was—it's widely cited as a success. And it's based on, essentially, a guy doing the right thing.
Russ:Which is hard to rely on, unfortunately. But it's glorious when it happens.
Glorious visions of human affairs lacking intellectual rigour are also hard to rely on.
My own standard of rigour includes honesty. Superficially ridiculous is not enough. One also has to prove there's actually something with less blemished skin that has ever worked. (Diogenes was a wimp. He should have spent his pointless existence searching for an honest libertarian.)
Libertarians basically believe that linear superposition applies to giant systems. If for any x, with enough cleverness, one can make a market to good social and economic effect, then for any 7000 different {x}s, you can instigate all these independent markets to good social and economic effect at the same time with correspondingly large benefits.
Perhaps, but I wouldn't want to rely on it.
This is funny, because in software, we can barely manage to compose three desiderata (quality/scope/budget), on a good day.
Markets sure look good set against the backdrop of social equity accumulated by other means over hundreds of years (the British enlightenment took place on the backs of exceptional individuals whose existence one wouldn't wish to have to rely upon).
What other idea, postulated for the highest reach of human complexity, circulates on the founding metaphor of frictionless composability?
That any experienced software person bites on this for a millisecond seriously blows my mind.
Just a feeling, but I suspect HTML 2.0 would have lapped the field, and then gone out for an late-night pub crawl, returning home at the cock of dawn to romp nekid until the sun crosses over the yard arm with an insatiable beer-goggles Wonder Bra, and still find enough energy in the tank to chew off his arm a few hours later.
I don't whether AMP is responsible, but I visited a site about a week ago with progressive content and image load as I paged down. This is annoying, but nothing new.
Since I wanted to CTRL-F to search within the page, I spent 5 s manually pressing PG-DOWN to fully load the page.
Imagine my horror when I discovered that most of the top of the page—previously loaded already—had now disappeared from my document, and was doing progressive load on the way back up.
That wasn't just irritating. That was outright/etc/hosts-level hellban territory.
Please, for the love of God, look upon my 16 DIMM slots ye Mighty frugal HTTP server, and load the whole damn document all at once, SVP.
"Developers were not concentrating on fixing them", with regards to bugs.
You say tomahto, I say tomayto. You see inaccurate attribution, I see accurate observation.
Relationships where observations can't be stated before taking on the burden of sorting out attribution are all but guaranteed to make the kitchen fridge cringe.
If you can't separate the two, you can't agree to agree on the problem while agreeing to disagree on the solution, for the time being. Since "the" solution almost certainly involves personal change, there's simply no possibility you're obtained agreement on that front in a fifteen-minute raging kitchen bar fight.
You are so screwed... until the make-up sex doesn't work any more.
Some bad guy programs his car to give out false information causing lots of accidents. Would be a great way for a bank robber or other bad guy to slow pursuing authorities.
I have a new Turing test.
We'll know the long, slow caboose of our shiny new AI technology has fully arrived at the station when people no longer feel an irrepressible urge to posit that a lone bad actor can poison the entire system.
"N'uh — I don't think so," chime a thousand giant matrices in near-perfect unison.
If stupid decisions don't come around to bite people in the butt, they fail to learn the lesson and will continue making stupid decisions.
The everyday overreliance on this pathetic relish squee concerning the overriding eminence of naked incentive in dictating human behaviour patterns being one of those stupid, stupid, stupid things that just won't come out in the wash.
Welcome to Radiant City Third Rail, please watch your step.
This from the Mad Max prequel which explains, Enterprise-like, how Mad Max perfected his death-defying cliff grab before garbing himself in fifteen guns.
Now there's a man who truly knows his incentive systems.
But I've always felt that systemd was a solution in search of a problem, I don't care for Poettering's attitude (especially as regards the Unix philosophy), and I remain suspicious about how systemd got injected into all the major distros practically overnight.
Father knows best. Works for many. However, if I wanted that experience, I'd use Apple. Father knows best, the whole nine yards.
I'm over here precisely because I don't want that.
Thus, Poettering can take his father-knows-best peremptory monolith and shove it up his Aspen-cottage attic access hatch.
Apparently, TrueOS now supports both the old rcNG and the new OpenRC init systems, after a short flirtation with brain-eating tent caterpillars. OpenRC is already good for laptops, and that's what I will be choosing for my TrueOS laptop install.
For my TrueOS server, however, I'll stick with rcNG for a long time yet.
Man, I sure hope iXsystems' belated return to sanity can be classified as a permanent remission.
By way of comparison, those tiny little rubber boots I used to crack the pristine late-September ice on every gravel pothole from Alberta to Manitoba have morphed forty-something years later into giant rubber boots of almost identical design, with which I now mow the dog-strewn lawn (not my dog, but that's another story). My RubbersNG leak less. New challenge, desired performance. Progress enough.
On the plus side for TrueOS, ZFS boot environments really ought to have been nominated for technology of the year in some recent year—optimally during the forced-march-at-gunpoint mass Windows 10 migration.
Take any process A which catches a great many errors.
Follow it up by any B process, which finds a different set of errors, possible a very narrow set.
Sit back, eat popcorn, watch process B blow process A out of the water.
"No matter how hard we crank on process A, the supplementary process B always catches things that the A process missed. I kind of hate to admit this, but I'm dumb enough at this point to convince myself that process B is inherently superior to process A."
Well, I for one, don't welcome our new short-bus overlords.
The track record for human inspection goes up exponentially when the humans involved relentlessly pare away non-essential functionality. Non-essential function almost always has a political origin.
Bottom line: anything of political origin needs to be aggressively fuzz tested. Conclude about politics what you will.
Just like code smells, there are quack smells, and with chiropractors your quack smell needs to be on high alert.
I've had one who was outright incompetent, and another who was scamming for expensive x-rays to diagnose a neck shape 90% of the modern population has. The three hot chicks at reception was my first clue (they supervise a very nice neck-therapy gym). Singapore Airlines does not hire younger.
The gym was free for a while after your first visit. I noticed the Chiclets receiving "engagement" coaching from a high-energy, type A chiropractor on staff (and apparently a permanent gym rat). They seemed to think it was all a big game.
I've also had some pretty good chiropractors. One who was effective at short term relief (about six visits per year).
But then another who treated the same problem differently, and now I'm down to about two visits a year for that region.
I still have other problems, but I'm especially tall (long in the back to be precise) and I've also got some cervical degeneration.
Like anything else, if people blindly enrich the quacks, there will ever be more where that came from. (This ancient observation did us a whole lot of good curing the spam problem, didn't it?)
Chiropractic college (in Canada) is no cakewalk. There's a lot of good ones out there. But until they have an established clientele, the incentives are almost universally aligned to an initial sequence of six visits per new patient, just to get you normalized (and properly prepared to learn about your next problem).
I've often found two visits, about a week apart, to be more cost effective than one visit, if I need it badly enough. Beyond that, the extra sessions are primarily revenue visits. But that's just my own experience, relative to my own needs, and the practitioners I've dealt with.
Bottom line, you've got to deploy your own quack smell. Accept no substitute or new car smell.
This includes bacteria that it hasn't been exposed to yet.
And these would all be variations on bacteria that have been promiscuously circulating genes for billions of years, on a continuous basis, with perhaps a few truly novel mutations scattered here and there.
Just wait for the zero-day bacteria evolved in electrical quarantine on a giant, distributed Beowulf cluster of Volta GPUs, then released into wetware by some bio3d printer hacked by North Korea via some rogue Windows XP box long lost between the drywall of some otherwise District 9 secure facility.
This is the ultimate weakness of traditional bacteria.
Change boots. Show off. Change hat. Show off. Change belt. Show off. Change purse. Show off. Change bustier. Show off again and again.
But imagine a step change, like the "girl" next door, from a distant galaxy, far away, a real Xentai.
Slashdot Mirror
You must be new here. The Doctrine of the Useful Idiot is referenced these days almost hourly. Hence, you must be really new here.
In this case the "useful idiot" is the trusted repository administrator, who permits a package to be hosted from upstream because it doesn't look suspicious in any way (unless the obscure rule about user accounts with leading digits is top of mind—as if every project doesn't have at least one wonky anomaly, most of which, if pursued, turn out to accord with "who knew?"—and Poettering-appropriate paranoia level is set to deep fat fry).
The trusting user will run the package installer from the trusted repository using "sudo". There's your TRANSITORY, apparently harmless root. No weird system calls. No overt fingerprint of escalation. Mission accomplished. Tick, tick, tick ...
Under Poettering, the principle of least surprise is obeyed by allowing any departure from convention, no matter how thinly understood on the ground where it matters, to lead to an unchecked root escalation.
This was not your father's principle of least surprise.
The long cascade of trusted upstream is become our new Leviathan. Can one even finish a review of inbound patches any more before the next batch arrives?
Software security engineers, eat your heart out. The veritable mascots of unfinishable business sit there drinking tea, while we double down on making things worse.
For the record, Trump is also making a good case for himself as the President of Least Surprise.
This, too, was not your father's least surprise.
Colonel Klink couldn't have said it better, nor George Orwell. In the former case, Klink can't eff himself to find out. In the later case, it's guaranteed to be a movable feat.
Splitting the difference, they once made a feature length movie about this. It was called The Right Stuff, the whole movie about a bunch of guys (fewer than fifteen that I can now recall) who "simply" met some criteria. Not much other plot. Just that.
Your grandfather's Hewlett Packard made calculators that were the envy of engineers everywhere. The pilgrims of NASA jet-packed to the blast-proof Taj Mahal by the Boeing load.
Your father's HP made printer ink that was the envy of Rupert Murdoch. Bean counters sprouted sturdy beanstalks, and spouted unto the clouds in ecstasy. (This was before the one true cloud to rule them all.)
Today's HP makes drivel that's the envy of one last, eccentric greybeard who lives in a ratty shack near the beach, with old newspapers piled so high, they are visibly blocking the sunlight from entering through any window.
He's never been quite the same since that fateful first day of summer vacation when the family station wagon backed out the driveway over top of his calculator, and he rushed in triumphantly to rescue it, to hold it high, and proclaim to his family and all the neighborhood "See!"—only it didn't work.
Ever again.
Turns out, there's a first time for everything, and this just wasn't his lucky day.
In a twist of linked fate, HP's corporate erosion would lead to a multitude of ratty beach-house might-have-beens, similarly bemoated by crowing yellow copy of yesteryear with curled, crumbling corners.
*cough* mmmmmRISSSSTOR *cough*
We think that was just a sneeze, but we're not sure.
Meanwhile, all that mite-infused pixie dust they exhale through pursed lips into their last remaining sunbeam—somehow fingering in through a kink in the panoply—surely can't be good for the lungs.
What you're referring to as a "coup" another person might refer to as a "wake-up call". While I'm sure the founding fathers did not foresee Twitter in its precise present form, it's far too soon to consign their prescient safeguards to the water under the bilge.
Second, our surveillance powers detected the threat before the election took place, and the Obama administration warned Russia in direct language to lay off on the worst of their meddling or face serious consequences from an American counter hack (picture the clone-army Mossad, with corresponding resources). Obama probably should have done more, but the optics were complicated (thanks for furnishing Exhibit A), so he dithered despicably.
Third, Trump would have earned 90% of the same votes with no Russian meddling at all.
So American now has a president that only 45% of the population would have voted for in a perfectly dry, vodka-free election, giving the Koch brothers their last, Act III simultaneous erection (hate to disappoint you, but don't count on erection 2021, boys, you've totally shot your loads).
Based on the caliber of your post, let's have a car metaphor.
The founding fathers were not building a democratic Ferrari. They were building a democratic Land Cruiser. The ugly kind that's surprisingly hard to kill.
Short of a roll-over at high speed somewhere along Armageddon ridge, it's probably going to outlive America's latest and greatest asshole taking his turn at the urn behind the wheel.
What "passed for the technology" in 1945 was nothing to sneeze at. On the other hand, both military and civilian safety remained on (cold) wartime footing for a long while thereafter.
Just think. Heisenberg and Einstein were old hat. Turing and von Neumann were new hat. While 1945 did lack for the transistor, the laser, the quark, and the structure of DNA, it didn't lack for the rocket, the atomic bomb, the jet engine, penicillin, general relatively, quantum mechanics, the Reynolds number, the intercontinental undersea telegraph cable, radar, a generalized theory of computation, or the Mk. XV Norden bombsight.
That would make for a very heavy "Ancient Technology 101 for non-implants" even by the highly accelerated standards of 23rd century Starfleet Academy.
Compare to what passes for clue in 2017.
One extra cancer at age 50 out of a hundred home-alone firebrand toddlers cosplaying Legoland Nero counts as an "ill effect" in my ledger.
A million college professors cried out in anguish and were left gnawing the knuckle of their remaining hand.
Way to forget the fundamental theorem of computation on the equivalence of data and program.
Program: A few grad students over a few months, on top of program libraries composed by a few hundred grad students over a few decades, on top of general-purpose computational abstractions as devised by a few thousand notable wonks over a century, on top of a hundred primary patron saints of abstraction inscribing circles in the sand over roughly three millennia.
Data: Millions of artist years, as winnowed down by billions of critic years, to thousands of artist years, on top of human visual perception over the whole 60 million years of human evolution, and this not from a standing start.
I'm not 100% certain I trust this long historical wall to be less than entirely porous, but if I did, I'd declare: advantage, data.
This whole business of glorifying the last touch is a weird human institution to begin with. That's how you know the real future has finally arrived: in the sudden discarding of the forever unjustifiable, if only you've got the wits to see it.
This credit-to-the-last-touch business has always been tainted by the aggregate shoulders of giants.
Now that we've reduced stirring the aggregate down to a semester project in graduate school, we need to park this ridiculous cultural legacy, pronto.
Remember "information wants to be free"?
By the late 1970s—if you had the wits to see it—certain premises of our long standing copyright system were coming into fatal contact with a new reality, a future long past the original paroxysm that continues to arrive in sluggish fits and start:
Wall Street Journal To Cut Back Print Outside the US
As they say in cryptography, attacks only ever improve. This, too, of our generative-art adversarial networks. Unlike human talent, this isn't a flash in the Picasso pan. This is remix culture on steroids passing through the inception stage of a one-way function, up escalator.
I think I've posted this link before. It was one of my favourites, and good background for the present discussion:
Talking Machines interviews Doug Eck on Generative Art and Hamiltonian Monte Carlo — August 2016
With apologies to Blaise PAscal.
Sometimes I notice a typo and I think about fixing it, and then I just go "nah, it fits well enough".
If you don't let your accidents pitch in, then you have to make everything up yourself.
Besides, I was busy. I couldn't off the top of my head recall Rimmer's given name. Pressing matters.
A temperature of 129 C is reported on the earth's surface, and you're content to assume 101.3 kPA as opposed to, say, 101.3 MPA?
For 129 C at 1 kbar, water is liquid at any infernal temperature up to the critical point, though ammonia appears to remain liquid the smallest C-hair, having a critical point of 132.4 C at 112.8 MPA (by way of comparison, the MPAA rating system reeks of adult depends at every known temperature and pressure).
I wouldn't rule this possibility out, either. Planet earth was obviously struck by some very large object, a Vogon bagpipe sonata, or a Lister trick shot.
____
Rimmer: Eeeeeew, who just shat their pants?
Holly: Ahhhhh, how I love the smell of vindaloo in the morning.
Cat subtly glides away from Lister.
Lister: I was concentrating ... there was a lot at stake ... the pressure was immense ...
Cat [turning to Holly]: Hey, you can smell that?
Holly: Not exactly. It's as if a billion photons cried out in terror and suddenly scattered.
Lister: Only a billion?
Holly: Units, smunits.
Lister: Whew, that's a relief. I was beginning to think last night's curry was sub-standard.
Rimmer [Sinking to his knees, grasping at his neck as if being choked by an invisible hand]: Holly ... release ... the ... airlock ... NOW!
Holly: I'm sorry, Arnold, I'm afraid I can't do that.
Lister: Next time, I'll ask.
Holly: I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I still wouldn't be able to do that.
Lister: Mission accomplished.
In Firefox, this reduced the clutter to manageable levels:
.X20oP, .fkWPz, .FOvasf, .cZgiac, .JHzJp {
@namespace url(http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml);
@-moz-document domain("news.google.com") {
img,
display : none !important;
}
}
Google probably scrambles those class selectors, so we'll see what happens tomorrow.
It appears that many "related" items are repetitions (boo hiss) and where there isn't a related item, I was getting links to some horrible detox service.
I've previously searched on both pseudoxanthoma elasticum and adrenoleukodystrophy. Fortunately, I don't have both. That would make it very hard to hack user script to repair the effects of usranathema adrenocarddystrophy.
That was more than you needed to write.
There should have been (and should now be) two separate icons: a cone of silence icon that indicates session encryption, and a second Alex Trebek icon that indicates that the server you are presently visiting is a validated celebrity, standing up.
To Tell the Truth
Presented with the correct conceptual icon map, the problem with the falsehoods users assume might magically become vaguely tractable.
I kind of wish that the OS would notice the web browser displaying the padlock icon, and then put up an intrusive dialogue box "the padlock icon is known to cause widespread damage to the end-user's conceptual map" and only allow the user to proceed to use the web browser after registering a stupid-by-design exception.
Some bad actors rip you off. Other bad actors merely promulgate bad conceptual models. I'm pissed at both.
Your entire post is a paean for a two-track solution: a sane, modular solution for servers (already extant), and a convenience solution for mobile devices (if under "convenience" one accepts that some, or many, or most reboots might not be optional).
Slashdot is precisely that forum which caters first of all to the former group.
Yeah? Slashdot was founded in 1997. All the better to shit on 1998, and much else from the same "a quick reboot will fix it (for a while)" family tree.
It'll never be settled. Basically as soon as minimum wage is implemented, both sides mark a future date in their respective calendars to write up a victory lap (victory condition for the negative side is an employment mushroom cloud).
All this supported by impeccable data, on both sides.
I personally think that a UBI regime is far better than a livable minimum wage, but UBI hasn't got the miles on it yet to "definitively" conclude one way or the other.
Plus the interaction of the two where minimum wage remains in effect make pilot studies of UBI almost worthless.
Like minimum wage, there's a huge problem with UBI where the gets and get-nots find themselves living on opposite sides of some arbitrary political demarcation line. Probably worse than interstate sales tax.
(In Canada, Alberta was long a tax-dodge for neighbouring communities. Regulated marketing in Canada is good for animal welfare and pandemic aftermath compliance, but the higher prices involved lead to an epidemic of cross-border shopping. We don't drive to the corner store. We drive from Windsor to Detroit.)
There can hardly be a news story with less reliable "news" content than research group A (or B) publishes report finding that minimum wage does (does not) benefit society.
Did you first check whether it's a historical truth that much of human enlightenment has depended upon this exact thing? Because if you didn't, you might be throwing the only successful system we've ever had out the window with the bath water.
Show me the political system that hasn't depended upon this, and presently works better than the current environment of anti-bipartisan American politics.
David Zetland on Water
Glorious visions of human affairs lacking intellectual rigour are also hard to rely on.
My own standard of rigour includes honesty. Superficially ridiculous is not enough. One also has to prove there's actually something with less blemished skin that has ever worked. (Diogenes was a wimp. He should have spent his pointless existence searching for an honest libertarian.)
Libertarians basically believe that linear superposition applies to giant systems. If for any x, with enough cleverness, one can make a market to good social and economic effect, then for any 7000 different {x}s, you can instigate all these independent markets to good social and economic effect at the same time with correspondingly large benefits.
Perhaps, but I wouldn't want to rely on it.
This is funny, because in software, we can barely manage to compose three desiderata (quality/scope/budget), on a good day.
Markets sure look good set against the backdrop of social equity accumulated by other means over hundreds of years (the British enlightenment took place on the backs of exceptional individuals whose existence one wouldn't wish to have to rely upon).
What other idea, postulated for the highest reach of human complexity, circulates on the founding metaphor of frictionless composability?
That any experienced software person bites on this for a millisecond seriously blows my mind.
Canice Prendergast on How Prices Can Improve a Food Fight (and Help the Poor)
Here's a guy who designed a market clean sheet and actually got it right. Glorious when it happens, I'm totally with you on that point.
Just a feeling, but I suspect HTML 2.0 would have lapped the field, and then gone out for an late-night pub crawl, returning home at the cock of dawn to romp nekid until the sun crosses over the yard arm with an insatiable beer-goggles Wonder Bra, and still find enough energy in the tank to chew off his arm a few hours later.
I don't whether AMP is responsible, but I visited a site about a week ago with progressive content and image load as I paged down. This is annoying, but nothing new.
Since I wanted to CTRL-F to search within the page, I spent 5 s manually pressing PG-DOWN to fully load the page.
Imagine my horror when I discovered that most of the top of the page—previously loaded already—had now disappeared from my document, and was doing progressive load on the way back up.
That wasn't just irritating. That was outright /etc/hosts-level hellban territory.
Please, for the love of God, look upon my 16 DIMM slots ye Mighty frugal HTTP server, and load the whole damn document all at once, SVP.
You say tomahto, I say tomayto. You see inaccurate attribution, I see accurate observation.
Relationships where observations can't be stated before taking on the burden of sorting out attribution are all but guaranteed to make the kitchen fridge cringe.
If you can't separate the two, you can't agree to agree on the problem while agreeing to disagree on the solution, for the time being. Since "the" solution almost certainly involves personal change, there's simply no possibility you're obtained agreement on that front in a fifteen-minute raging kitchen bar fight.
You are so screwed ... until the make-up sex doesn't work any more.
I have a new Turing test.
We'll know the long, slow caboose of our shiny new AI technology has fully arrived at the station when people no longer feel an irrepressible urge to posit that a lone bad actor can poison the entire system.
"N'uh — I don't think so," chime a thousand giant matrices in near-perfect unison.
The everyday overreliance on this pathetic relish squee concerning the overriding eminence of naked incentive in dictating human behaviour patterns being one of those stupid, stupid, stupid things that just won't come out in the wash.
Welcome to Radiant City Third Rail, please watch your step.
This from the Mad Max prequel which explains, Enterprise-like, how Mad Max perfected his death-defying cliff grab before garbing himself in fifteen guns.
Now there's a man who truly knows his incentive systems.
If at first you don't succeed, dire again.
Father knows best. Works for many. However, if I wanted that experience, I'd use Apple. Father knows best, the whole nine yards.
I'm over here precisely because I don't want that.
Thus, Poettering can take his father-knows-best peremptory monolith and shove it up his Aspen-cottage attic access hatch.
Apparently, TrueOS now supports both the old rcNG and the new OpenRC init systems, after a short flirtation with brain-eating tent caterpillars. OpenRC is already good for laptops, and that's what I will be choosing for my TrueOS laptop install.
For my TrueOS server, however, I'll stick with rcNG for a long time yet.
Man, I sure hope iXsystems' belated return to sanity can be classified as a permanent remission.
By way of comparison, those tiny little rubber boots I used to crack the pristine late-September ice on every gravel pothole from Alberta to Manitoba have morphed forty-something years later into giant rubber boots of almost identical design, with which I now mow the dog-strewn lawn (not my dog, but that's another story). My RubbersNG leak less. New challenge, desired performance. Progress enough.
On the plus side for TrueOS, ZFS boot environments really ought to have been nominated for technology of the year in some recent year—optimally during the forced-march-at-gunpoint mass Windows 10 migration.
Suck it, Microsoft. My BE remembers 8.
Me, too. There was some kind of willful fuzziness going on with Katz that was simply incomprehensible.
I saw once piece at large by Katz in subsequent years that wasn't half bad, from his early days of animal farm, IIRC.
A tiny piece of the same mind fungus can be sometimes found in the writings of Clifford Stoll.
Theodore Dalrymple would figure prominently on any list of the same mind fungus manifesting sporadically on the other side of the brain.
Unclassified bio-hazard level 3: What scares the new atheists by John Grey.
Another guy capable of level-10 wool porn is Alain de Botton.
The stupidity of this claim is mind-blowing.
Take any process A which catches a great many errors.
Follow it up by any B process, which finds a different set of errors, possible a very narrow set.
Sit back, eat popcorn, watch process B blow process A out of the water.
"No matter how hard we crank on process A, the supplementary process B always catches things that the A process missed. I kind of hate to admit this, but I'm dumb enough at this point to convince myself that process B is inherently superior to process A."
Well, I for one, don't welcome our new short-bus overlords.
The track record for human inspection goes up exponentially when the humans involved relentlessly pare away non-essential functionality. Non-essential function almost always has a political origin.
Bottom line: anything of political origin needs to be aggressively fuzz tested. Conclude about politics what you will.
Just like code smells, there are quack smells, and with chiropractors your quack smell needs to be on high alert.
I've had one who was outright incompetent, and another who was scamming for expensive x-rays to diagnose a neck shape 90% of the modern population has. The three hot chicks at reception was my first clue (they supervise a very nice neck-therapy gym). Singapore Airlines does not hire younger.
The gym was free for a while after your first visit. I noticed the Chiclets receiving "engagement" coaching from a high-energy, type A chiropractor on staff (and apparently a permanent gym rat). They seemed to think it was all a big game.
I've also had some pretty good chiropractors. One who was effective at short term relief (about six visits per year).
But then another who treated the same problem differently, and now I'm down to about two visits a year for that region.
I still have other problems, but I'm especially tall (long in the back to be precise) and I've also got some cervical degeneration.
Like anything else, if people blindly enrich the quacks, there will ever be more where that came from. (This ancient observation did us a whole lot of good curing the spam problem, didn't it?)
Chiropractic college (in Canada) is no cakewalk. There's a lot of good ones out there. But until they have an established clientele, the incentives are almost universally aligned to an initial sequence of six visits per new patient, just to get you normalized (and properly prepared to learn about your next problem).
I've often found two visits, about a week apart, to be more cost effective than one visit, if I need it badly enough. Beyond that, the extra sessions are primarily revenue visits. But that's just my own experience, relative to my own needs, and the practitioners I've dealt with.
Bottom line, you've got to deploy your own quack smell. Accept no substitute or new car smell.
And these would all be variations on bacteria that have been promiscuously circulating genes for billions of years, on a continuous basis, with perhaps a few truly novel mutations scattered here and there.
Just wait for the zero-day bacteria evolved in electrical quarantine on a giant, distributed Beowulf cluster of Volta GPUs, then released into wetware by some bio3d printer hacked by North Korea via some rogue Windows XP box long lost between the drywall of some otherwise District 9 secure facility.
This is the ultimate weakness of traditional bacteria.
Change boots. Show off. Change hat. Show off. Change belt. Show off. Change purse. Show off. Change bustier. Show off again and again.
But imagine a step change, like the "girl" next door, from a distant galaxy, far away, a real Xentai.