The pharmaceutical industry might benifit from a lengthening of the patent period, but would the people?
Currently drugs that cost a few cents per dose to produce can cost 10 times that to purchase. Sure without the R&D investment by the pharm. companies the product would never have been produced, but how much do they spend on R&D? How much on marketing? And how much in political donations?
Its sad, but sometimes I find it ammusing when people jump up and down about issues like software patents and Intelectual Property. Sure these are important issues, but in the scheme of things, $US 0.75 cents to someone who lives in the first world doesn't really compare to people that are DEAD because they can't afford drugs that are only out of reach because the US won't let the country make them itself.
If you use google to search for something technical, quite often you'll get lots of results for a mailing list that is archived to a web site. Because each archived message usualy links to 5 or 6 others (next/prev in thread, by date, by author etc), each message must cound as being linked to lots of times. At least thats the only reason I can think of for a 3 line emails showing up in google searched so much.
I've seen unicies other then linux panic, including solaris. I've also had to re-build a solaris system with a failed software raid root partition, and that just ugly.
If it had been hardware raid, I would simply have had to boot of any bootable media, and restore the tape onto the raid disk. As it was, I had to jump though hoops to get the system working. Of course, getting wrong information for the SUN support technition didn't help the process.
The best reason to use a raid controller is the performance boost you get even if you don't use RAID . Its somethign about having all that juicy cache that most SCSI HBAs just don't have. Can you buy SCSI cards with similar caches to RAID controllers?
You have to look at the costs, and what sort of return you get for it. If I could afford it, and it was a critical server, I'd pay the extra for a cheap SmartArray controller. You only have to do mirroring, so you don't need a fast processor.
If you can loose a server without too much trouble, by all means use software RAID. I've seen many kernel panics, but never a RAID controller fail without help.
The other use for software RAID is to provide RAID controller redundancy. You configure two hardware raid5/stripe sets, on two different RAID controllers. Then you use software raid to mirror the two, that way you continue operating even if you lose a SCSI BUS (or the RAID NVRAM battery fails). Of course, if you use strip sets, and you lose 1 disk in each set, you are stuffed.
Disk redundancy wise its better to stripe mirror sets(think about it), but you can't have controller redundancy without a lot or controllers.
Going a bit far afeild, these days people look to SANs and multi-path FC HBAs to provide that level of protection.
Linux supports compaq proliant RAID quite well. I've had a few problems running SCO on them, but linux ran without problems. Of course, we had more servers running SCO then linux.
From memory redhat 7.X worked fine straight out of the box, with no extra drivers. Just use the SmartStart CD to configure the RAID, and then boot off the RedGat CD to finish the install.
I know people like software raid, but a hardware raid that I can trust to keep working even when the kernel panics is a real asset.
Legalities are nicities that we all talk about to deal with civilian misbehavior during peacetime. During wartime (I hope I'm not shattering your worldview) groups of people systematically plot to go find groups of other people and commit what would otherwise be called first degree murder - not only without "representation", without even a trial!.
In war zones, enemy combatantants are lucky to be merely detained. In the real (third) world, they are quite often quietly and unceremoniously killed. Only first-world armies such as the US actually follow the Geneva convention.
If a country (even a third world country) held US soldiers after the end of the colflict there would be hell to pay. Look at the US attitude to vietnam. Even though the rate or MIAs in vietnam was much less then in other conflicts (such as wwII) the US used it as an excuse for sanctions for something like 15 years.
The thing that really gets me is automatically assuming that the Taliban are terrorists. They were a government that the US was prepared to deal with, and supply money to (search one of the major news sites, it was early september 2001).
Now even if you think the afghans should have handed Bin-Laden over without the US presenting evidence (think if it had been the other way arround, see below), the US invaded.
I can't blame some one for defending their country. If some other country landed troops because GWB refused to hand over a war criminal, would you pick up a gun and defend your country?
Does that make you a war criminal to?
Interesting links. If you want information, search for Union Carbide in you favorite news site
(although the criminals have no problem finding them),
Justify this statement. Put up or shut up.
I could say that the US media is one of the most censored media in the western world. Can I justify that? No I can't.
I can say that the US media is heavily censored, and one sided. Can I justify that, yes I can. (Read Naom Chomsky )
I'm not form Europe, or the US, and as an observer I'ld have to say I'l much rather live in Europe. Something about a country when LESS THEN HALF the population bothers to vote some years scares me, and I dare anyone to come up with a good reason to have a M16 in their home.
You have a defence against excesses in government, its called a vote. In my opinion, the idea that a small militia armed with handguns can defend their communities against a government in this age of jet fighters and saturation bombing is a joke. Notice that this is my opinion, so I'm not claiming it as a fact, and so I don't have to present evidence. I do think that there is room to argue this however.
I'm just feeding the trolls, and I should know better. My point still stands, If you want to make a claim, back it up.
If you have simply heard something, and can't site a source, say so.
Don't make statements that you have simply seen somewhere and present them as facts
Fact: I live in a country with more gun control then the US.
Fact: I have never seen a gun (outside a museum) that wasn't in the possession of a police officer or a security guard.
Is Tru64 really that unsecure compared with Solaris/HP-UX. I've administered Tru64 systems and they are just another unix. I've also looked on the security lists for Tru64 bugs and there are a lot less of them then for say solaris, but that is probably just because of its lower market share (less people using it).
Do you have anything else to base your opinion on? I'm not flaming, I'm actualy after a serious answer (Expecialy as this has been modded up so far).
This Follow Up story again on thaABC is about the ACCC (Australian Compitition and Consumer Commision0 looking at this ruling and Sony to see if region coding is illegal in Australia.
ACL's are dangerous if you don't know they are there. Imagine doing a ls -la over a directory and not seeing any files that were world writable, not knowing that there could be an ACL granting the nobody account Read, Write and Execute.
There are other uses for ACL other then disallowing access. They can allow overlapping access.
Think of a webserver, that is developed by multiple teams. You wan't to give you co-ordination people access to everything under the document root, so they can fix up other peoples mistakes, but you wan't to limit each of your web development teams to their own section of the tree.
Most importantly, you really don't want to have to add your webdevelopers to every development team.
Try doing that with user-group-other permissions
People have made a good point about ACL's biting people who don't know they are there, I think that the early Solaris versions would mark a file with an "a" instead of one of the permission bits if you did an "ls -l" so you could see instantly that there was an ACL you might have to check. Of course, that didn't work over NFS, and I don't know if they still do that. I know Tru64/Digital Unix/OSF doesn't.
Re:No... a 64bit chip doesn't have to be 'slower'
on
AMD's 64-Bit Chip
·
· Score: 1
I rememebr one of the authors of Plan9 saying that they wrote the compiler so it didn't use register windows. It simply used the registers that were currently visibly, and used the stack in the same way as a machine without a register window.
It was claimed that code compiled this way ran 15% faster then code compiled with gcc.
I still think the idea of a CPU with 512 registers is so cool. I don't know if any SPARC chip ever shiped with this many, but that was the max number allowed under the SPARC specifications.
He won't force anyone off the road, because they have to make the journey and there's no alternate route.
I'm not saying I like road tolls, but they are effective. I dislike having to reach into my pocket while I'm driving, but it does make me catch the train to work rather then drive.
Yes this is a tax, but I don't think the reason behind it is revenue raising. The bottom line is you have to limit the amout of cars people drive. If you don't, you end up with a workplace in which as much space is devoted to parking as to working.
Think how much space is taken up by roads and parking lots. Then think how much time you spend in a car, and compare the ratios. I don't drive to work (I drive to a train station) so I would spend 20mins a day in a car, and maybe a few hours of a weekend. Say 4 hours a week, out of a total on 168 hours a week, so less then 3%.
I'll tell you now that I devote more then 3% of my hour to car parking.
People LIKE driving cars. You can try to make public transport more attractive, but it isn't going to be the same. So you make driving less attractive. You can try things like stop fixing roads, or dropping the speed limits to a walk, but then you hit commercial traffic as well as commuter traffic. Your economy suffers, and you don't want that
The other option is to TAX. Yes its a tax, but you make something less attractive by increasing the cost. This isn't something that is realy going to send comercial traffic to the wall, 5 pounds a day isn't much compared to what you are payign the driver fro the day, but people might thing twice about paying an extra 25 pounds a week to drive to work.
If the bulk of the traffic is commuter, then I think the better option would be to tax parking. Sure you can drive into the city if you are delivering goods or if you are passing through, but if you are just driving to work then you will still be hit for you 5 pounds a day, but only when you park. You get the benifit of making driving to work less attractive, and at the same time not hitting other people who happen to be using city roads.
No one likes paying tax, but there is a problem, too much traffic in London, and it is the role of government to fix it. This is one way. This is the role of government, and if you don't like it, vote some one else in. You may not always like what your government does, but its a lot beter to have a government then not to.
Apparently Gauntlet firewall is going to. Too bad for those of us who use this product and have paid for long-term support.
While not the most popular product out there, it is serviceable. In our instillation I think we are pushing it to the limit, but their Webshield e-pliance product was sold as an easy to configure/manage secure product, and was quite secure straight out of the box.
As for us, we have several issues we are trying to ram through NAI technical support. Will NAI continue to support a product they aren't going to continue to sell? Will our support contracts be transferred with the product when its sold, or will NAI try to honour the support contract even though they don't own the product anymore.
It's a worrying sight when Internet security suppliers go out of business. Unless there were serious problems with the product not in the public domain (and I know about their mail daemon) it was a good security product for small to mid-ish companies and they are saying it's unprofitable. Either firewall products are about to become more expensive, or the quality is about to go down. Neither is a good sign.
What war? You can't go to war on a group of people, even if that group has about 4,000 members.
Before you jump to "do something more to help the war effort" think about what that "war" means. In this case it will mean bombing the hell out of a country that is one of the poorest in the world, and has been a battle ground between the USSR and the US (US by proxy).
How are you going to get the "terrorists"? Bomb cities and towns that have terrorists? Do terrorists live in army camps, nice targets with no civilians, or do they live with their families, their wives and CHILDREN! Do they have day jobs? What about the people they work with?
How would you like it if Russia said the "terrorists" from Chechnya who bomb apartment buildings live in your town. If you don't hand him over then we'll bomb you. We won't make an extradition request, we won't give you evidence that this person is responsible, but give him up or else.
Never mind that up until the bombing the US was giving the Taliban millions of dollars in aid, and now they are a terrorist state who we are going to war with. There are a lot of things the Taliban do I don't agree with, but at least there honest and consistent.
The bottom line is what has the US ever done to help democracy and improve happiness outside the US? They've done lots of things to help the US but to aid some one who isn't a US citizen? Forget it!
I know this is a rant, but it makes me angry when people say things like "help the war effort" without any understanding of what they are saying. Why not say "I'd like to help some one drop bombs on a child care centre" or "I'll do networks for these people who stop medicines and food being delivered to a country who's people are starving".
Anyone who knows the facts that the US actions are hypocritical, but for a lot of people, its "my country, right or wrong".
If that's your attitude, then your just as bad as the people who carried out the airliner attacks.
A program which reads one line of code from the user, saves it to a fixed sized buffer, and then prints it out is vulnerable to a buffer overflow
I'm not sure from this statement if you are saying that any program that does at least that is vulnerable, or that a program as simple as that could be vulnerable.
You have correctly stated what a buffer overflow is, but they are preventable. If the programmer checks the size of the line before writing it to a fixed size buffer, then they can prevent a buffer overflow. Its like trying to fit a #7 peg into a #2 hole. Buffer overflows are caused by shoddy programming. I would have thought that by now developers would be aware of the problems of not checking string lengths, but these problems still turn up
A much more relevant measure of rapid development is how quickly people can make the project work. If one person is working on a project, and can write perl code efficiently, that's great. Perl does not especially promote code readability. If a larger group of people is working on a project and they spend a large amount of time just figuring out how each other's code works, that's a problem. C does promote code readability which may be desired in such cases.
There are other scipting languages that are just as effective as perl (or similar, I dont' want to start a flame war with perl die-hards) but python produces some of the most readable code.
In fact, its had for novice programmers to produce unreadable python code (although they can do so). Its string manipulation is quite effective, and natural, and it is possible to implement complex structures just as quickly in python and in most other languages.
Let those people who cant name a candidate vote informal, but make them at least show up to a voting booth and put in a ballot, no matter what it says.
Wouldn't it solve all those problems with minorities not getting time off work to vote? Cirtainly make it easier to vote, provided it can be made secure, but don't make a mockery of universal sufferage.
Q: How can a country be a democracy when less then half the population vote?
The problem is people think civil courts are the way to punish people.
Civil courts should be a way for people to recover losses associated with anothers actions. If some one crashes into a parked car, I could sue them for the cost of repairing/replacing it.
Why should my payment be any more if the driver was drunk? If they were drunk they should go to jail/ be fined by the courts. I should still get the cost of my car, plus the other person should pay my laywer.
Punitive damages should not be awarded to the plaintiff, if they are in order, make them a court enforced fines to be paid by the person or organisation.
In the case of GM, if they produced a car that was more likeley to explode in the case of an accident, then they deserved to be punished. The victims should have received due compensation, and the company should have to pay the rest into the public purse. If that had hapened, whould anyone be ridiculing the couple ladies in California
There realy shouldn't be any replies to this. Everyone will have a different set of answers to this, so don't bother posting them.
Before you can consider the killing (and I use that word because because euphemisms will only hinder this debate) of other people, we should first form out own opinions on euthanasia and suicide.
Ask youself, if you were in a position that you would never enjoy life again, would you go on, or would you want to end it? Not just terminal cancer and the like, but if you were injured in the wilderness with no hope of rescue, what would you do?
What would you do if a close friend or relative was in a similar position? would you help them if they decided to kill them selves?
What is the difference between suicide and euthanasia? When is someout not justified in killing themselves?
these questions need to be asked before you can ask the questions posed in the article.
I think it is very important that you allow anonymous postings. For write or wrong, out of hatred of fear of reprisal (or a flame war), people will want to have their say without it being traced back to them.
I do not see any advantage in not making people accountable for their postings. Give registered used the option of posing anonymously, but the anonymous postings should count towards their karma.
Perhaps people should be able to chose how much an authors karma affects the score of a posting? People who don't care about reputations should ignore it, but other people might only want to hear from the big names, and not care about how that article has been moderated. Most likely some combination of the two.
One other thing. I don't thing that a person's karma should count towards their chance of moderating. It would be possible for a community of moderators (eg. us linux users) to moderate down another community, (ie. NT or BSD or BeOS or Mac or......).
Everyone is up in arms about a proposed tax, and one of the major themes is "Why should I pay the government money when I don't get anything in return?"
I am not a US citizen, I am all for freedom of speech, I use PGP, I think the US government is crazy, but why is everyone so against a tax on Internet traffic? The only answer I can think of is pure selfishness.
Governments provide many services, some you use, some you don't. You may not like everything they to, (and if I was a US citizen, I certainly wouldn't), but you have just as much say as anyone else. There are a lot of good arguments that the US government is undemocratic, but no one is citing any of them.
You rely on the police to keep the streets safe, you applaud the justice department for attacking Microsoft, the EPA tries to protect you from industries, big and small, who would make the planet a worse place to live. Yet you complain about a small tax on your Internet?
What-ever your position on social-security, health and education, YOU get some benefit from the government. There are a number of arguments against a tax per-email, but a small charge, about 1c/MB on bandwidth (which was in the earlier U.N. proposal / hoax) would not be noticed by most people. I admit that for many people charging per MB is unusual, but it is really a very sensible way of doing it, once you are used to it.
I would welcome a small tax on Internet traffic that would be used to help the under privileged take advantage of the "Information revolution", but I think they need food to eat, or a roof over their heads more.
But remember that Gibson also worked on the screen play for Johny Mnemonic.
I saw an interview with him in which he was saying how wonderful everything was with that movie. No offence to the guy, but he does have an interest in getting people to see it. He's hardly going to get another movie deal if he starts complaining about creative control.
Slashdot Mirror
Currently drugs that cost a few cents per dose to produce can cost 10 times that to purchase. Sure without the R&D investment by the pharm. companies the product would never have been produced, but how much do they spend on R&D? How much on marketing? And how much in political donations?
The Industry view point
A 6 page PDF for a conference on pharm. patent lifecycle
Ten Misconceptions About Pharmaceutical Patent Litigation
check out point 2,
From some one I would trust a bit more
Noam Chomsky on India, GATT and Pharmaceutal Patents, and 3rd World
He hits out hard on the topic of "multi-national corperations", and this is an interview, so he doesn't cite sources. This guy does back up his facts, I've read people critical of his work and the worst that I've heard said about his sources is that he cites "left wing policital groups" such as Amnesty International.
the site that hosts the above article. Lots of links
Its sad, but sometimes I find it ammusing when people jump up and down about issues like software patents and Intelectual Property. Sure these are important issues, but in the scheme of things, $US 0.75 cents to someone who lives in the first world doesn't really compare to people that are DEAD because they can't afford drugs that are only out of reach because the US won't let the country make them itself.
If you use google to search for something technical, quite often you'll get lots of results for a mailing list that is archived to a web site. Because each archived message usualy links to 5 or 6 others (next/prev in thread, by date, by author etc), each message must cound as being linked to lots of times. At least thats the only reason I can think of for a 3 line emails showing up in google searched so much.
If it had been hardware raid, I would simply have had to boot of any bootable media, and restore the tape onto the raid disk. As it was, I had to jump though hoops to get the system working. Of course, getting wrong information for the SUN support technition didn't help the process.
The best reason to use a raid controller is the performance boost you get even if you don't use RAID . Its somethign about having all that juicy cache that most SCSI HBAs just don't have. Can you buy SCSI cards with similar caches to RAID controllers?
If you can loose a server without too much trouble, by all means use software RAID. I've seen many kernel panics, but never a RAID controller fail without help.
The other use for software RAID is to provide RAID controller redundancy. You configure two hardware raid5/stripe sets, on two different RAID controllers. Then you use software raid to mirror the two, that way you continue operating even if you lose a SCSI BUS (or the RAID NVRAM battery fails). Of course, if you use strip sets, and you lose 1 disk in each set, you are stuffed.
Disk redundancy wise its better to stripe mirror sets(think about it), but you can't have controller redundancy without a lot or controllers.
Going a bit far afeild, these days people look to SANs and multi-path FC HBAs to provide that level of protection.
Linux supports compaq proliant RAID
quite well. I've had a few problems running SCO on them, but linux ran without problems. Of course, we had more servers running SCO then linux.
From memory redhat 7.X worked fine straight out of the box, with no extra drivers. Just use the SmartStart CD to configure the RAID, and then boot off the RedGat CD to finish the install.
I know people like software raid, but a hardware raid that I can trust to keep working even when the kernel panics is a real asset.
Are peole moderating this because they think they don't agree with the viewpoint or because they don't think it contributed to the discussion.
Oh, this is probably Offtopic=1
The thing that really gets me is automatically assuming that the Taliban are terrorists. They were a government that the US was prepared to deal with, and supply money to (search one of the major news sites, it was early september 2001).
Now even if you think the afghans should have handed Bin-Laden over without the US presenting evidence (think if it had been the other way arround, see below), the US invaded.
I can't blame some one for defending their country. If some other country landed troops because GWB refused to hand over a war criminal, would you pick up a gun and defend your country?
Does that make you a war criminal to?
Interesting links. If you want information, search for Union Carbide in you favorite news site
summary of India-US extradition treaty
An article on court procedings. How can some one refuse to be extradited?
Articly critical of the indian governments handeling
Justify this statement. Put up or shut up.
I could say that the US media is one of the most censored media in the western world. Can I justify that? No I can't.
I can say that the US media is heavily censored, and one sided. Can I justify that, yes I can. (Read Naom Chomsky )
I'm not form Europe, or the US, and as an observer I'ld have to say I'l much rather live in Europe.
Something about a country when LESS THEN HALF the population bothers to vote some years scares me, and I dare anyone to come up with a good reason to have a M16 in their home.
You have a defence against excesses in government, its called a vote.
In my opinion, the idea that a small militia armed with handguns can defend their communities against a government in this age of jet fighters and saturation bombing is a joke. Notice that this is my opinion, so I'm not claiming it as a fact, and so I don't have to present evidence. I do think that there is room to argue this however.
I'm just feeding the trolls, and I should know better. My point still stands, If you want to make a claim, back it up.
If you have simply heard something, and can't site a source, say so.
Don't make statements that you have simply seen somewhere and present them as facts
Fact: I live in a country with more gun control then the US.
Fact: I have never seen a gun (outside a museum) that wasn't in the possession of a police officer or a security guard.
Fact: I'm 24 years old.
Anecdotal, but compelling.
Do you have anything else to base your opinion on? I'm not flaming, I'm actualy after a serious answer (Expecialy as this has been modded up so far).
This
Follow Up story again on thaABC is about the ACCC (Australian Compitition and Consumer Commision0 looking at this ruling and Sony to see if region coding is illegal in Australia.
ACL's are dangerous if you don't know they are there. Imagine doing a ls -la over a directory and not seeing any files that were world writable, not knowing that there could be an ACL granting the nobody account Read, Write and Execute.
Think of a webserver, that is developed by multiple teams. You wan't to give you co-ordination people access to everything under the document root, so they can fix up other peoples mistakes, but you wan't to limit each of your web development teams to their own section of the tree.
Most importantly, you really don't want to have to add your webdevelopers to every development team.
Try doing that with user-group-other permissions
People have made a good point about ACL's biting people who don't know they are there, I think that the early Solaris versions would mark a file with an "a" instead of one of the permission bits if you did an "ls -l" so you could see instantly that there was an ACL you might have to check. Of course, that didn't work over NFS, and I don't know if they still do that. I know Tru64/Digital Unix/OSF doesn't.
It was claimed that code compiled this way ran 15% faster then code compiled with gcc.
I still think the idea of a CPU with 512 registers is so cool. I don't know if any SPARC chip ever shiped with this many, but that was the max number allowed under the SPARC specifications.
I'm not saying I like road tolls, but they are effective. I dislike having to reach into my pocket while I'm driving, but it does make me catch the train to work rather then drive.
Yes this is a tax, but I don't think the reason behind it is revenue raising. The bottom line is you have to limit the amout of cars people drive. If you don't, you end up with a workplace in which as much space is devoted to parking as to working.
Think how much space is taken up by roads and parking lots. Then think how much time you spend in a car, and compare the ratios. I don't drive to work (I drive to a train station) so I would spend 20mins a day in a car, and maybe a few hours of a weekend. Say 4 hours a week, out of a total on 168 hours a week, so less then 3%.
I'll tell you now that I devote more then 3% of my hour to car parking.
People LIKE driving cars. You can try to make public transport more attractive, but it isn't going to be the same. So you make driving less attractive. You can try things like stop fixing roads, or dropping the speed limits to a walk, but then you hit commercial traffic as well as commuter traffic. Your economy suffers, and you don't want that
The other option is to TAX. Yes its a tax, but you make something less attractive by increasing the cost. This isn't something that is realy going to send comercial traffic to the wall, 5 pounds a day isn't much compared to what you are payign the driver fro the day, but people might thing twice about paying an extra 25 pounds a week to drive to work.
If the bulk of the traffic is commuter, then I think the better option would be to tax parking. Sure you can drive into the city if you are delivering goods or if you are passing through, but if you are just driving to work then you will still be hit for you 5 pounds a day, but only when you park. You get the benifit of making driving to work less attractive, and at the same time not hitting other people who happen to be using city roads.
No one likes paying tax, but there is a problem, too much traffic in London, and it is the role of government to fix it. This is one way. This is the role of government, and if you don't like it, vote some one else in. You may not always like what your government does, but its a lot beter to have a government then not to.
Apparently Gauntlet firewall is going to. Too bad for those of us who use this product and have paid for long-term support.
While not the most popular product out there, it is serviceable. In our instillation I think we are pushing it to the limit, but their Webshield e-pliance product was sold as an easy to configure/manage secure product, and was quite secure straight out of the box.
As for us, we have several issues we are trying to ram through NAI technical support. Will NAI continue to support a product they aren't going to continue to sell? Will our support contracts be transferred with the product when its sold, or will NAI try to honour the support contract even though they don't own the product anymore.
It's a worrying sight when Internet security suppliers go out of business. Unless there were serious problems with the product not in the public domain (and I know about their mail daemon) it was a good security product for small to mid-ish companies and they are saying it's unprofitable. Either firewall products are about to become more expensive, or the quality is about to go down. Neither is a good sign.
Help the war effort?
What war? You can't go to war on a group of people, even if that group has about 4,000 members.
Before you jump to "do something more to help the war effort" think about what that "war" means. In this case it will mean bombing the hell out of a country that is one of the poorest in the world, and has been a battle ground between the USSR and the US (US by proxy).
How are you going to get the "terrorists"? Bomb cities and towns that have terrorists? Do terrorists live in army camps, nice targets with no civilians, or do they live with their families, their wives and CHILDREN! Do they have day jobs? What about the people they work with?
How would you like it if Russia said the "terrorists" from Chechnya who bomb apartment buildings live in your town. If you don't hand him over then we'll bomb you. We won't make an extradition request, we won't give you evidence that this person is responsible, but give him up or else.
Never mind that up until the bombing the US was giving the Taliban millions of dollars in aid, and now they are a terrorist state who we are going to war with. There are a lot of things the Taliban do I don't agree with, but at least there honest and consistent.
The bottom line is what has the US ever done to help democracy and improve happiness outside the US? They've done lots of things to help the US but to aid some one who isn't a US citizen? Forget it!
I know this is a rant, but it makes me angry when people say things like "help the war effort" without any understanding of what they are saying. Why not say "I'd like to help some one drop bombs on a child care centre" or "I'll do networks for these people who stop medicines and food being delivered to a country who's people are starving".
Anyone who knows the facts that the US actions are hypocritical, but for a lot of people, its "my country, right or wrong".
If that's your attitude, then your just as bad as the people who carried out the airliner attacks.
I'm not sure from this statement if you are saying that any program that does at least that is vulnerable, or that a program as simple as that could be vulnerable.
You have correctly stated what a buffer overflow is, but they are preventable. If the programmer checks the size of the line before writing it to a fixed size buffer, then they can prevent a buffer overflow. Its like trying to fit a #7 peg into a #2 hole. Buffer overflows are caused by shoddy programming. I would have thought that by now developers would be aware of the problems of not checking string lengths, but these problems still turn up
There are other scipting languages that are just as effective as perl (or similar, I dont' want to start a flame war with perl die-hards) but python produces some of the most readable code.
In fact, its had for novice programmers to produce unreadable python code (although they can do so). Its string manipulation is quite effective, and natural, and it is possible to implement complex structures just as quickly in python and in most other languages.
This had better be a flame.
I've said it before, and I'll say it again....
PEOPLE SHOULD BE COMPELED TO VOTE BY LAW.
Let those people who cant name a candidate vote informal, but make them at least show up to a voting booth and put in a ballot, no matter what it says.
Wouldn't it solve all those problems with minorities not getting time off work to vote? Cirtainly make it easier to vote, provided it can be made secure, but don't make a mockery of universal sufferage.
Q: How can a country be a democracy when less then half the population vote?
The problem is people think civil courts are the way to punish people.
Civil courts should be a way for people to recover losses associated with anothers actions. If some one crashes into a parked car, I could sue them for the cost of repairing/replacing it.
Why should my payment be any more if the driver was drunk? If they were drunk they should go to jail/ be fined by the courts. I should still get the cost of my car, plus the other person should pay my laywer.
Punitive damages should not be awarded to the plaintiff, if they are in order, make them a court enforced fines to be paid by the person or organisation.
In the case of GM, if they produced a car that was more likeley to explode in the case of an accident, then they deserved to be punished. The victims should have received due compensation, and the company should have to pay the rest into the public purse. If that had hapened, whould anyone be ridiculing the couple ladies in California
There realy shouldn't be any replies to this. Everyone will have a different set of answers to this, so don't bother posting them.
Before you can consider the killing (and I use that word because because euphemisms will only hinder this debate) of other people, we should first form out own opinions on euthanasia and suicide.
Ask youself, if you were in a position that you would never enjoy life again, would you go on, or would you want to end it? Not just terminal cancer and the like, but if you were injured in the wilderness with no hope of rescue, what would you do?
What would you do if a close friend or relative was in a similar position? would you help them if they decided to kill them selves?
What is the difference between suicide and euthanasia? When is someout not justified in killing themselves?
these questions need to be asked before you can ask the questions posed in the article.
I think it is very important that you allow anonymous postings. For write or wrong, out of hatred of fear of reprisal (or a flame war), people will want to have their say without it being traced back to them.
......).
I do not see any advantage in not making people accountable for their postings. Give registered used the option of posing anonymously, but the anonymous postings should count towards their karma.
Perhaps people should be able to chose how much an authors karma affects the score of a posting? People who don't care about reputations should ignore it, but other people might only want to hear from the big names, and not care about how that article has been moderated. Most likely some combination of the two.
One other thing. I don't thing that a person's karma should count towards their chance of moderating. It would be possible for a community of moderators (eg. us linux users) to moderate down another community, (ie. NT or BSD or BeOS or Mac or
Everyone is up in arms about a proposed tax, and one of the major themes is "Why should I pay the government money when I don't get anything in return?"
I am not a US citizen, I am all for freedom of speech, I use PGP, I think the US government is crazy, but why is everyone so against a tax on Internet traffic? The only answer I can think of is pure selfishness.
Governments provide many services, some you use, some you don't. You may not like everything they to, (and if I was a US citizen, I certainly wouldn't), but you have just as much say as anyone else. There are a lot of good arguments that the US government is undemocratic, but no one is citing any of them.
You rely on the police to keep the streets safe, you applaud the justice department for attacking Microsoft, the EPA tries to protect you from industries, big and small, who would make the planet a worse place to live. Yet you complain about a small tax on your Internet?
What-ever your position on social-security, health and education, YOU get some benefit from the government. There are a number of arguments against a tax per-email, but a small charge, about 1c/MB on bandwidth (which was in the earlier U.N. proposal / hoax) would not be noticed by most people. I admit that for many people charging per MB is unusual, but it is really a very sensible way of doing it, once you are used to it.
I would welcome a small tax on Internet traffic that would be used to help the under privileged take advantage of the "Information revolution", but I think they need food to eat, or a roof over their heads more.
But remember that Gibson also worked on the screen play for Johny Mnemonic.
I saw an interview with him in which he was saying how wonderful everything was with that movie. No offence to the guy, but he does have an interest in getting people to see it. He's hardly going to get another movie deal if he starts complaining about creative control.