It's nice to be able to edit the kernel source in dealing with the occasional quirk. For example, I'm NOT a kernel hacker (never, ever wrote a device driver, for instance), but it was still simple (if, perhaps, inelegant; there was probably a better way to do it, like a parameter) to edit a network device driver to force detection of the 10B2 interface of a combo card on one machine. It'd been stubbornly using the unconnected 10BT connector, instead; changing a line or two of code fixed it, and work could go on.
You also tend to end up mugged if you walk around very well-dressed, alone, and flashing lots of high-denomination bills around certain parts of various cities. That doesn't mean that the mugging is right, either; attack soldiers, and the soldiers have every right to fire back -- and the fight doesn't have to be "fair". Continue to attack, and it would seem proper for the military to even preemptively attack folks with a history of plotting, committing and inciting violence...
There may not be laws wherever you are regarding various nonlethal weaponry, but that doesn't mean that the authorities wouldn't add 'em if they felt like it. Try visibly carrying, say, a stun baton to City Council meetings; you'll probably got a response pretty quickly even if you keep it holstered.
In addition, calling somebody who's trying to smash up an OCCUPIED police vehicle -- so he can beat or kill the police inside -- a "protester" is, frankly, about as inane as the current media habit of calling members of the military wing of Hamas "activists", when the latter are more properly referred to as terrorists.
Protest involves sending a message -- through signs, through letters, phone calls, that sort of thing. It doesn't excuse violence, any more than violating an oath is protected by "free speech" laws; the latter is speech, but it's *also* perjury, just like attacking cops is, at a minimum, assault if not attempted murder -- and whether or not it's for a message is irrelevant.
"Thugs", "juvenile delinquents", "punks", "rioters", and so forth are more proper terms for those who employ random violence for a cause.
You're missing the point -- it's not designed to protect against "full-scale nuclear attacks".
Think a) accidental launches, which aren't terribly implausible from the ex-Sovs (they came darn close a few times), b) unauthorized launches (local commander has a personal vendetta -- the Jack Ripper scenario, only with missiles instead of bombers), and c) terrorists, who generally can't buy hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles, as they're not exactly sold in bulk.
Not only neutron detectors, but you can bet that the systems of informers and infiltrators still exist -- and you ain't going to be offering to buy a suitcase nuke, or the materials and engineering skills to build one -- without somebody hearing about it. Figure that they're under pretty centralized control.
A Mr. bin Laden, on the other hand, might have the resources to bribe a dissatisfied crew of a mobile launching platform, such as a submarine with SLBMs. And there's little doubt that he WOULD use it if he could, since it's not like either the US or Russia (I doubt he's *their* friend, either; a nuclear-armed, fundamentalist Islamic Afghanistan would not be in their interest) would forget about him even if he retired from financing and directing terrorism. Just the thing to start a holy war.
Hence, MAD is primarily useful for bipolar contests. The world isn't bipolar anymore, and there are entities with the financing and motivation to do some damage.
The Israelis, if memory serves, were sufficiently interested in Patriot to base their Arrow missile interceptor system off of it. And considering that the probability of somebody lobbing a missile at them is fairly high, given their neighbors, they likely don't consider it a lemon.
One trick that SirCam pulls is scanning not only the Outlook addressbook, but also the web pages cached of certain browsers (don't recall which ones). If a/. reader gets infected, well, it'll send mail to quite a few/.ers who don't munge their addresses. I'm pretty sure that accounts for a lot of the SirCam mail I've gotten, certainly from the stranger places such as the RAND think-tank and various places in Mexico.
As many of you know, each leap year the Internet must be shut down for
24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which
eliminates dead email and inactive ftp, www and gopher sites, allows
for a better-working and faster Internet.
This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on
Feb. 29 until 12:01 a.m. GMT on March 1. During that 24-hour period,
five powerful Internet-crawling robots situated around the world will
search the Internet and delete any data that they find.
In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do
the following:
1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their
Internet connections.
2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the
Internet.
3. Disconnect all disks and hardrives from any connections to the
Internet.
4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way.
We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet
users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconveniences
will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of
the Internet, once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and
jetsam.
We thank you for your cooperation.
Kim Dereksen
Interconnected Network Maintenance staff
Main branch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sysops and others: Since the last Internet cleaning, the number of
Internet users has grown dramatically. Please assist us in alerting
the public of the upcoming Internet cleaning by posting this message
where your users will be able to read it. Please pass this message on
to other sysops and Internet users as well. Thank you.
Well, I don't normally play that sort of game (heck, I've never even owned a console, the main market for fighting games AFAICT), but... actually, that ties into my point. I'd be a LOT more used to tossing around punches, palm strikes, and simple kicks (front, side, roundhouse, say -- nothing fancy like jumping up and kicking two people at once...) than I am familiar with button and joystick combinations. So some might get *better* results.
...but Napster *was* doing something illegal, according to the court. Hence, it seems appropriate that they pay a penalty and be required to operate under a strict consent decree, say, rather than simply letting them pretend it never happened. That's *if* they shouldn't be shut down for their previous violations.
And the "innocent until proven guilty" bit is only for criminal trials, not general conduct. Can you buy a car without registration and other paperwork? Does E-bay let you trade narcotics? Do bartenders have to wait until the police come and you're arrested before they card you? Sometimes you're expected to be able to show that you're not being a bozo and doing something you shouldn't be; and given Napster's history, this seems apropos.
One way that I could see it is opt-in: IOW, an artist produces an.MP3's, and sends it to Napster with documentation suggesting identity and authenticity. This, then, can be traded. Likewise, the RIAA could furnish official.MP3 versions which are explicitly licensed to Napster... then, only files whose time/frequency fingerprints and, say, CRCs matched known ones would be permitted.
Er, with some big-ticket items it's not unusual to negotiate -- cars, for instance, where at most places it is highly recommended that you do NOT pay the sticker price.
This is probably true of many commission-based markets, methinks. Unless a store has a strict no-haggling policy, it's in a salesperson's interest to, say, offer me a price cut or an atypical-but-quite-feasible configuration choice or other simple request if it makes the difference between a hefty sale (say, for a PC, in the $3-4k range versus the department-store varieties) and *no* sale.
College education is another -- there's quite a bit of grant/loan finaid and scholarship negotiation, because many universities compete for the best students. Hence, getting an award from one university can help with another.
Reviewing a Linux distribution and its included applications. Try a few "sane" configurations (stuff that a novie would probably try), and run it by several rootkits. If you find any problems, that's VERY important information. And if said distro people negligently *shipped* with packages with known, unfixed bugs, there may well be a compelling interest in publishing that information.
Likewise, say you've installed a new system, and you're thinking about hooking it up via broadband. Since you're going to be always-on, security becomes a *large* concern. Trying out the rootkit on your own system lets you find out if you *might* be hosed -- and better that you find out THAT way, then let it be done by somebody else who searches for private data and then dd's your disk devices with random garbage.
Third, security professionals can get paid to test their client's security. Penetration tests could clearly make use of these tools...
It seems unlikely that you even know what a semiautomatic *is*. One pull, one shot, next round chambered. That's all.
The British *do* shoot each other, incidentally. Or, rather, the criminals are the only ones shooting -- except for the armed police, which they NEED because, er, their gun-less bobbies just don't do the trick when they've got yet another half-naked maniac running around with a sword.
I'd think that'd be where the *real* research issues are -- with the added complexity of knowing when to check, call, raise or fold... Not just, say, figuring out which cards to replace...
Remember that oil *has* been used as a weapon -- both directly (primitive fire-based weapons), and, far more importantly nowadays, as an economic weapon. The Arab nations once attempted to blackmail the United States into dropping support for Israel via an oil embargo, if memory serves, and given how important oil is to our economy (not just transportation -- which affects a HUGE part of it, of course -- but also things like plastics).
Different connotation. Schadenfreude denotes the amusement when observing somebody's minor misfortune; it's a petty emotion, rather than mean-spirited spite or cruelty.
Add to that description the idea that they're often a) vaguely left-leaning "swing voters", and b) incredibly responsive to the mantra, "for the children".
Politicos like to shamelessly cater to them with "pro-children" legislation, regardless of minor details such as constitutionality or logic, because that's a good way of getting their votes -- and because otherwise, their votes aren't locked-in.
Slashdot Mirror
It's nice to be able to edit the kernel source in dealing with the occasional quirk. For example, I'm NOT a kernel hacker (never, ever wrote a device driver, for instance), but it was still simple (if, perhaps, inelegant; there was probably a better way to do it, like a parameter) to edit a network device driver to force detection of the 10B2 interface of a combo card on one machine. It'd been stubbornly using the unconnected 10BT connector, instead; changing a line or two of code fixed it, and work could go on.
You also tend to end up mugged if you walk around very well-dressed, alone, and flashing lots of high-denomination bills around certain parts of various cities. That doesn't mean that the mugging is right, either; attack soldiers, and the soldiers have every right to fire back -- and the fight doesn't have to be "fair". Continue to attack, and it would seem proper for the military to even preemptively attack folks with a history of plotting, committing and inciting violence...
There may not be laws wherever you are regarding various nonlethal weaponry, but that doesn't mean that the authorities wouldn't add 'em if they felt like it. Try visibly carrying, say, a stun baton to City Council meetings; you'll probably got a response pretty quickly even if you keep it holstered.
In addition, calling somebody who's trying to smash up an OCCUPIED police vehicle -- so he can beat or kill the police inside -- a "protester" is, frankly, about as inane as the current media habit of calling members of the military wing of Hamas "activists", when the latter are more properly referred to as terrorists.
Protest involves sending a message -- through signs, through letters, phone calls, that sort of thing. It doesn't excuse violence, any more than violating an oath is protected by "free speech" laws; the latter is speech, but it's *also* perjury, just like attacking cops is, at a minimum, assault if not attempted murder -- and whether or not it's for a message is irrelevant.
"Thugs", "juvenile delinquents", "punks", "rioters", and so forth are more proper terms for those who employ random violence for a cause.
You're missing the point -- it's not designed to protect against "full-scale nuclear attacks".
Think a) accidental launches, which aren't terribly implausible from the ex-Sovs (they came darn close a few times), b) unauthorized launches (local commander has a personal vendetta -- the Jack Ripper scenario, only with missiles instead of bombers), and c) terrorists, who generally can't buy hundreds of nuclear-armed missiles, as they're not exactly sold in bulk.
Not only neutron detectors, but you can bet that the systems of informers and infiltrators still exist -- and you ain't going to be offering to buy a suitcase nuke, or the materials and engineering skills to build one -- without somebody hearing about it. Figure that they're under pretty centralized control.
A Mr. bin Laden, on the other hand, might have the resources to bribe a dissatisfied crew of a mobile launching platform, such as a submarine with SLBMs. And there's little doubt that he WOULD use it if he could, since it's not like either the US or Russia (I doubt he's *their* friend, either; a nuclear-armed, fundamentalist Islamic Afghanistan would not be in their interest) would forget about him even if he retired from financing and directing terrorism. Just the thing to start a holy war.
Hence, MAD is primarily useful for bipolar contests. The world isn't bipolar anymore, and there are entities with the financing and motivation to do some damage.
The Israelis, if memory serves, were sufficiently interested in Patriot to base their Arrow missile interceptor system off of it. And considering that the probability of somebody lobbing a missile at them is fairly high, given their neighbors, they likely don't consider it a lemon.
One trick that SirCam pulls is scanning not only the Outlook addressbook, but also the web pages cached of certain browsers (don't recall which ones). If a /. reader gets infected, well, it'll send mail to quite a few /.ers who don't munge their addresses. I'm pretty sure that accounts for a lot of the SirCam mail I've gotten, certainly from the stranger places such as the RAND think-tank and various places in Mexico.
An old April Fools joke come true?
*** Attention ***
It's that time again!
As many of you know, each leap year the Internet must be shut down for
24 hours in order to allow us to clean it. The cleaning process, which
eliminates dead email and inactive ftp, www and gopher sites, allows
for a better-working and faster Internet.
This year, the cleaning process will take place from 12:01 a.m. GMT on
Feb. 29 until 12:01 a.m. GMT on March 1. During that 24-hour period,
five powerful Internet-crawling robots situated around the world will
search the Internet and delete any data that they find.
In order to protect your valuable data from deletion we ask that you do
the following:
1. Disconnect all terminals and local area networks from their
Internet connections.
2. Shut down all Internet servers, or disconnect them from the
Internet.
3. Disconnect all disks and hardrives from any connections to the
Internet.
4. Refrain from connecting any computer to the Internet in any way.
We understand the inconvenience that this may cause some Internet
users, and we apologize. However, we are certain that any inconveniences
will be more than made up for by the increased speed and efficiency of
the Internet, once it has been cleared of electronic flotsam and
jetsam.
We thank you for your cooperation.
Kim Dereksen
Interconnected Network Maintenance staff
Main branch, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Sysops and others: Since the last Internet cleaning, the number of
Internet users has grown dramatically. Please assist us in alerting
the public of the upcoming Internet cleaning by posting this message
where your users will be able to read it. Please pass this message on
to other sysops and Internet users as well. Thank you.
Well, I don't normally play that sort of game (heck, I've never even owned a console, the main market for fighting games AFAICT), but... actually, that ties into my point. I'd be a LOT more used to tossing around punches, palm strikes, and simple kicks (front, side, roundhouse, say -- nothing fancy like jumping up and kicking two people at once...) than I am familiar with button and joystick combinations. So some might get *better* results.
And kevlar doesn't protect cops against being shot in the face, or your front door deadbolt from acetylene torches. Your non-existent point?
Archie might have applied, once upon a time. Haven't checked how well it works lately.
...but Napster *was* doing something illegal, according to the court. Hence, it seems appropriate that they pay a penalty and be required to operate under a strict consent decree, say, rather than simply letting them pretend it never happened. That's *if* they shouldn't be shut down for their previous violations.
And the "innocent until proven guilty" bit is only for criminal trials, not general conduct. Can you buy a car without registration and other paperwork? Does E-bay let you trade narcotics? Do bartenders have to wait until the police come and you're arrested before they card you? Sometimes you're expected to be able to show that you're not being a bozo and doing something you shouldn't be; and given Napster's history, this seems apropos.
One way that I could see it is opt-in: IOW, an artist produces an .MP3's, and sends it to Napster with documentation suggesting identity and authenticity. This, then, can be traded. Likewise, the RIAA could furnish official .MP3 versions which are explicitly licensed to Napster... then, only files whose time/frequency fingerprints and, say, CRCs matched known ones would be permitted.
Er, with some big-ticket items it's not unusual to negotiate -- cars, for instance, where at most places it is highly recommended that you do NOT pay the sticker price.
This is probably true of many commission-based markets, methinks. Unless a store has a strict no-haggling policy, it's in a salesperson's interest to, say, offer me a price cut or an atypical-but-quite-feasible configuration choice or other simple request if it makes the difference between a hefty sale (say, for a PC, in the $3-4k range versus the department-store varieties) and *no* sale.
College education is another -- there's quite a bit of grant/loan finaid and scholarship negotiation, because many universities compete for the best students. Hence, getting an award from one university can help with another.
Three examples of legitimate use:
Reviewing a Linux distribution and its included applications. Try a few "sane" configurations (stuff that a novie would probably try), and run it by several rootkits. If you find any problems, that's VERY important information. And if said distro people negligently *shipped* with packages with known, unfixed bugs, there may well be a compelling interest in publishing that information.
Likewise, say you've installed a new system, and you're thinking about hooking it up via broadband. Since you're going to be always-on, security becomes a *large* concern. Trying out the rootkit on your own system lets you find out if you *might* be hosed -- and better that you find out THAT way, then let it be done by somebody else who searches for private data and then dd's your disk devices with random garbage.
Third, security professionals can get paid to test their client's security. Penetration tests could clearly make use of these tools...
And, statistically, allowing ubiquitious concealed carry reduces anti-person (versus anti-property) crime, not just injuries.
Plus, not everybody lives in urban areas... and you just *don't* negotiate with a big cat that sees you as its next dish of Meow Mix.
It seems unlikely that you even know what a semiautomatic *is*. One pull, one shot, next round chambered. That's all.
The British *do* shoot each other, incidentally. Or, rather, the criminals are the only ones shooting -- except for the armed police, which they NEED because, er, their gun-less bobbies just don't do the trick when they've got yet another half-naked maniac running around with a sword.
I'd think that'd be where the *real* research issues are -- with the added complexity of knowing when to check, call, raise or fold... Not just, say, figuring out which cards to replace...
Remember that oil *has* been used as a weapon -- both directly (primitive fire-based weapons), and, far more importantly nowadays, as an economic weapon. The Arab nations once attempted to blackmail the United States into dropping support for Israel via an oil embargo, if memory serves, and given how important oil is to our economy (not just transportation -- which affects a HUGE part of it, of course -- but also things like plastics).
Different connotation. Schadenfreude denotes the amusement when observing somebody's minor misfortune; it's a petty emotion, rather than mean-spirited spite or cruelty.
I think he's referring to the "Zero Wing" / AYB character.
Don't forget to doodle some "Peace, Love and Linux" graffiti.
I hate you
You hate me
We're a dysfunctional family
Then a shot rang out and B'harne hit the floor,
No more purple dinosaur.
Add to that description the idea that they're often a) vaguely left-leaning "swing voters", and b) incredibly responsive to the mantra, "for the children".
Politicos like to shamelessly cater to them with "pro-children" legislation, regardless of minor details such as constitutionality or logic, because that's a good way of getting their votes -- and because otherwise, their votes aren't locked-in.