I have debt. So I'm paying off my debt. You know, the mortgages and credit cards and car loans people have that they pay all these fees (like interest) on, but claim they're "saving money".
After that, a savings account will do better than a 401(k). I don't play funds because it's too much work to keep my money from shrinking--I've done it to the tune of 1% per day, and I was a fucking nervous wreck but I'd turned $800 into $3000 and I had 5 pages of taxes to file for 230 trades. Yeah, no, you know what? Honest living. It went from running an illegal gambling ring and tax fraud behind a front business (a "Computer Entertainment" business as a front to install gambling machines explicitly marked as not-gambling machines in various businesses) to stock market trading to pure, clean, honest living, and let me tell you, there is nothing quite like it. I'm even way past the statute of limitations after the illegal front business thing, although I can't get a security clearance due to running a miniature organized crime syndicate for a while.
This is also why I elect Traditional IRA (pre-tax) rather than Roth (Post-tax): I deduct taxes and pay that much less in taxes (for now), and when I cash out I'll pay taxes on it. Thing is I'm not investing, so I don't get to do massive capital gains and then dodge the income tax "because it was already taxed". Since I'll need much less in retirement than I need now, I'll be in the 0%-15% tax bracket, rather than the 33% bracket I'm slicing the money off--I'm getting an immediate, complete 18%-33% gain without putting any work in.
Where do you think JP Morgan and insurance companies get their money? Investments. They transfer money from idiot traders who don't know how to keep their hands on their cash into the hands of smart traders who work for their investment branch. Unless you are an elite trader, you should not be investing. The only time I invest is when I play with updown, and that's usually to reset my portfolio to a million dollars and see if I can have 2 million in a month (usually I come out with 1.2M to 1.5M) since I'm not willing to get sucked into the long-term trading trap again.
I have a mortgage, no longer have a car loan, I have some credit card debt that I've leveraged for home improvement because of $500/mo utility bills due to really bad insulation (7/8 of that is due to poor insulation in one room which needs new windows and work in the wall, ceiling, and floor). Rather than have all that mandatory spending and interest, I'm funneling my money into paying off my debt.
I paid off the car loan. $400/mo free to add to my mortgage, which will be paid off after a total of 3 years. Once the mortgage is paid off, I'll put the great mass into savings with my other savings, because I'll have under $500/mo of expenses.
The problem with 401(K) investment vehicles is the stock market is a big game to take money from idiots and give it to rich people with culturing and lots of study into how to rape the stock market for all it's worth. It's just a money transfer vehicle, like a game of poker, which as well is less about the cards and more about experienced players shaking up new fish and taking all their chips.
Or we'll get rid of QE and get 7% or 11% interest rates again, and your home value will stay the same plus inflation, but the sale price (your asset) will drop. Then people will again be able to buy a house and pay it off in 10 years or so instead of 30, since we'll be talking about putting a hundred or so dollars on top of their loan instead of paying 3.5x to pay it off in 10 years instead of 30.
What's sound money? Fiat money is okay, gold standard money has deflationary problems, fractional reserve systems appear to establish money by loaning it into existence. Our current fractional reserve system appears to preclude economic growth: any "growth" is a growth of debt, a growth in economic sickness.
The common argument is to use languages which are no longer dynamic and evolving with cultural growth. This limits choices to French, Latin, and Ancient Greek.
The language part is an issue with English being too fluid. To evaluate the Constitution, we have to frame English as what we think they thought English phrases meant 200 years ago. I'm just bolting on a lot of clarification and constraint to make that harder to fuck up.
Uh, if I encounter a gang rape, I'm going in. I don't care if I'm outnumbered; there will be pain and fists and blood and at least *some* of them are going to be broken before me.
I cannot fire bullets into that, it's too easy to hit the innocent I'm trying to protect. I can take a sword into that. I can take a cudgel into that, too. If they pull out guns, well.. one gun against six is about as good as one sword against six guns. I sort of accept that risk going in.
I live in a place where this is common, but not mexican-border common. The threats are similar, but they are different: a cartel party is a well-armed, fairly well-trained, battle-hardened and murder-ready group, whereas your garden variety rapist or mugger is not. Garden variety mugger is going to think twice about being involved in a lethal situation where he may get executed (partially not applicable here: many of our high-crime folks are drug dealers and other such who are at risk of death by criminal activity more than by state execution, so state execution is the most minor risk and thus not a deterrent; but they are also not the ones likely to mug random people), mexican cartel drug mob folks have murdered and will murder again. Garden variety mugger you beat back with force; mexican drug cartel you go in with the full assumption that these people *will* murder you if they're not dead.
Where I am, I don't need extraneous weapons. Fists work just fine, and any level of pressure really carries weight. I've been threatened by gangs, had multiple people crowding around me shouting and demanding money, and just brushed them off and walked; they are not prepared to follow through, and any amount of force is going to quickly drive these people away. When we get into hardened criminals, serial rapists, and organized crime, that ceases to work; I can inflict crippling injury faster with a cudgel, and I can inflict death faster with a blade or superior, and when they come in groups i will need to do one or the other with rapidity.
So you can have your border state. I still think firearms are not a wholly appropriate self-defense weapon except in extreme cases (i.e. organized mob crime), and I think they carry a significant liability. I can see the comparative advantage when facing an intervention scenario with multiple adversaries, versus an ambush scenario where a firearm may quickly become a liability rather than an asset; depending on how you're going to handle an intervention scenario, either may be a valid choice to avoid bystander liability, but a cudgel quickly becomes less useful as you increase the need for quick lethality. Sword offers quick lethality in closed quarters, firearm offers quick lethality with range, cudgel is slow for cripple or kill.
I simply can't control a firearm like a blade. At the moment I carry none because nothing I can carry provides an advantage: I can handle any situation likely to arise here WITH MY FISTS. If I was out in gangland and dealing with organized murder gangs, I would go for no less than a sword; at that point I have to accept lethality in self defense, and I probably can't reasonably deal with those people with my fists--or even if I can, I'm going to have to kill them with my fists anyway, so screw it, you get to meet three feet of steel.
Grenades have a higher risk of collateral damage. So do firearms over swords. So do swords over staffs (even if you hit a bystander, it will probably hurt and that's it). Mind you if you are running from an attacker and you drop a grenade, and they don't recognize it, you have probably effectively ended the chase; this is a bad idea.
Which foil was it that was a full point weapon? My point was essentially that a point weapon is rather useless if you can't get the point into use, similar to a firearm requiring the barrel pointed at someone.
I don't trust pistols in most practical ambush scenarios. Most city muggings are not going to be an attacker from afar running up, waving, and screaming from down the road. You're going to find out you're under attack when you're suddenly being grabbed or beaten or clubbed in the head, or worse when you have a pistol in your face and can no longer reach for yours without getting shot in the face. In the best reasonably likely case, you'll be engaged in some form of physical combat, which means you have a wide berth for mistakes with a firearm, possible misses, and possible liability of a stray bullet. Blades don't miss in the same way: you only need to get this entire edge against *something*, and the edge doesn't go very far.
There is no safe place to stab someone, which is what a bullet does. You can get away with plenty of blunt attacks with fists and wooden sticks, however. Even if you break a shin, that can mend; if you damage a knee, that's worse; if you drive a sword or bullet into the leg, you're much more likely to catch an artery than a broken bone (although this can happen), and you wholly cannot catch an artery by flatting a staff across the front of the shin (there isn't one there) or bruising some ribs. You can even take someone in the head pretty hard without risking much damage. That won't happen with a firearm.
I feel that swords can be more effective than guns. Guns are less effective in close quarters, and are primarily effective when running is a worse option than standing and firing on an individual attacking you with a gun from a distance. Guns have the downside of sending a projectile flying quite far, so if you miss you may harm bystanders. Guns are LETHAL and there is no safe place to shoot a person with a firearm.
Swords are lethal for a few meters. If you get jumped, a knife or short sword is in the same class as a firearm--possibly even better, since a firearm requires the tip be pointed at the guy and you fire, while a knife has a long blade that only needs to find flesh. Compare a sword to an epe with a pointed tip and a harmless, round shaft and you will quickly understand. And as I said, there is little to no danger to anyone not within a few meters reach--however far your arm, the sword, and the distance of a lunge adds up to.
Staff weapons are less lethal and can be used by those whose immediate reaction to everything isn't to kill and maim. You can kill a man with a staff, but you can do a lot more. And again: limited range, and you're more likely to be jumped than fired upon from the trees 10 meters away.
These are all valid considerations. Some people just do not feel comfortable with a firearm as a self-defense weapon in public places. Grenades have the same concerns as a firearm but worse; swords have the same concerns as a firearm but lessened. It's not unreasonable to decide that the concern of "killing someone 200 feet away by mistake" is a good reason to select something other than a pistol for defense when you go out to the theater.
"Summon Tunado" doesn't seem like a practical weapon. Swords, flails, staffs, and fists are. Staffs and fists are the ultimate weapons: they can be lethal or non-lethal, they can be controlling, defensive, etc.
Staffs have replaced swords over time because police forces carrying swords had few options to deal with criminals: they developed a desire to subdue rowdy but minimally-threatening individuals without killing or severely maiming them, and so moved to staff weapons which could quickly kill a person or could protect against attacks and deliver blunt force for pain or submission. Similarly, firearms have been replaced largely with chemical sprays, batons, and tazers to allow for a discriminating approach to lower-threat adversarial situations rather than a blanket approach of shooting everyone in the face.
It seems to me that the choice of the citizenry to carry more or less lethal weapons is a more important one than the bare issue of gun control. With a firearm, you can send lethal projectiles off on an uncontrolled trajectory, possibly injuring bystanders; with a sword, your bystanders-at-risk must be within two or three meters. If you're worried about "getting jumped", hand-to-hand combat skill is much more valuable than a firearm; while a sword with a rapid-release scabbard (twist or slight pull to open the body so the sword can be swept out instead of drawn) may function as an effective lethal close-combat weapon, or even a short knife to avoid the risk of adversarial manipulation of the long blade. Firearms are for when you are assaulted by gun fire from a distance AND standing and shooting back is a better option than running--a constant in war, but an uncommon defensive position in city life.
It is offensive to me that possession of a weapon is a crime, while possession of a firearm may or may not be or may require a permit which may or may not technically cover a different weapon. It also seems offensive to the rational senses to add criminal charges when a criminal is in possession of a weapon: if a man robbing a store has a firearm but is threatening WITH HIS FISTS, the firearm is immaterial as to the robbing of the store. We are innocent until proven guilty, and I don't like that we can call a man on charges for one crime and then say he was carrying a knife or nunchaku and call that a crime as well without proving that he had used them or had intended to use them to criminal intent; I don't even agree that it's criminal to defend yourself from bodily harm incurred as part of criminal activities, for example if you are a part of a drug deal and the other party attacks you then you are within your rights to defend yourself and should only be charged for illegal drug activities.
In this country we are essentially limited to carrying firearms for protection, which I think is sub-optimal. The breadth of the law and culture should specify that self defense weapons are appropriate for individual carry for self defense, and that self defense is not a crime.
I keep telling people it's alpha-quality garbage that needs a rewrite. The goal was good, but we messed up implementation. Pilot has taught us that people are fucking bastards and we need to try this again. The problem is the other side wants to gut it and rewrite it without our "freedoms" or whatever, and so nobody on this side wants to gut it and rewrite it to KEEP THE BALANCE OF POWER.
I *am* always armed. People around me are nuts, they have weapons they can't use, or can't use in closed quarters. Pepper spray? I've had girls tell me they carry pepper spray for defense, and it ended in me taking it from them by force. Do you pull out your gun and carry it ready to fire when you walk around outside? If you get jumped, your most likely outcome is the muggers take your gun.
Hand-to-hand combat. Fists. Arms. Legs. Bodies. It's not just clenching your fingers together to form a makeshift rock; every part of your body is vulnerable, so you need to turn every part into a weapon. I deflect kicks by taking them to parts of my leg that are better able to withstand kicks. I shift my body to catch punches in areas that won't hurt as much, and that give me retaliatory advantage. My whole body is a weapon, it is a shield.
If you can manage this for THREE SECONDS, you can get your pepper spray out and END IT. If you can't manage this at all, you're going to have your pepper spray or your fire arm taken away from you, and possibly used against you. You don't need to be a fucking ninja god of war; you need to not fail the minute somebody grabs you.
Everyone around me thinks they can slap some kind of knife or firearm or can of juice under their belt and they're now "safe". Like the assailant is going to announce himself so you can get your weapons ready. The police are going to have a problem if you point a large firearm at everybody that approaches you. You're going to have to get that stuff out *after* you get jumped, probably while partially restrained, possibly while on the ground getting beaten. Think about it for a minute.
This is why I want a new constitution dictating that all bills must have a mission defined in English, Latin, and Ancient Greek. The law must be consistent with the Mission; anything outside the Mission--anything not consistent in all three versions--is invalid. The Mission specifies goal (why the law exists) and scope (what the law will do to achieve the goal), while the text of the law specifies method (how the law will achieve the goal). If you start throwing in irrelevant earmarks, altering other criminal laws, or adding taxes where the Mission doesn't cover those activities, those parts of the law are legally invalid. If you arrest someone for violating the law and it can be shown in court that their actions are disconnected from the Mission, then the law was not made to police them in this scenario and they have committed no crime.
We can't even decide what the second amendment actually says. We need stronger definitions with multi-way consistency checking. Use two dead languages for parity.
Somebody has to write the back-end code; and you're arguing on one side that poor programmers will fuck up anyway, and on the other side that good programmers will fight the language paradigm (and make some jumble of weird shit like C++ std.cout operator overloading "to reduce complexity" so nobody can read and understand their code).
We can't decide if "People" means the Government or individual people, or if there should be a comma or a semicolon, or if it really matters, and so we can't decide if individuals have the constitutional right to own weapons. The National Guard is the State Militia, not the individual with a Ruger in his house. The argument rages.
If our lawmakers and lawyers and judges can't achieve literacy, we have a huge problem.
As I have specified that each provision and enforcement of the law must be logically consistent with the mission in all three languages, and two of these languages are dead and unchanging, I have provided a layer of clarification. It adds to time and cost, but it greatly adds to the time and cost of earmarking and adding backdoors to your laws. If you want to modify the mission to technically allow an unrelated provision, you have to do it in three languages, consistently, without breaking the rest of your bill. It's easier just to be honest and straightforward.
The particular mitigation in question is to not use brk() for the heap. pmalloc and kmalloc use brk() for the heap, except for individual allocations of a size larger than 128KB which are mmap().
Stock market is a big group psychology game. You wait for all the retirement fund people to think "oh this stock is hot" and you sell off to them. You wait for them to cry out and you buy it back. Smart, well-educated, savvy investors like JP Morgan's crew go in and rob the shit out of the little guy.
Alternately, you can start a fund "to make money" and encourage a buy-and-hold strategy. The fund is chartered on certain rules, which you follow strictly. It makes money, it loses money, it makes money again, it kind of follows inflation.. you don't care, because you siphon your 1% off the top.
The stock market is full of all kinds of hilariously stupid advice that is directly contradictory to the real world. For example: Diversification is a farce. If you bought a whole exchange tracker as your only fund, you would be ultimately diversified; you could buy SPY spyder's S&P500 index tracker, and be wholly diversified; yet this is not diversification BECAUSE YOU HOLD ONLY SPY, despite being able to argue that you hold some 500 different stocks by proxy. Ultimate diversification doesn't help because the whole market goes up and down; it reduces risk, some, but it eventually just reduces it to the whole market's risk. The trick to making money in the stock market is to specialize: to select one or a few stocks or funds or baskets that you think will make money, get some gain, and then bail out of them.
It comes down to news, market making, and technical analysis. Not diversification, not funds, not buy and hold and let it grow. You want to play in the market? Yeah, get ready for an 80 hour a week job, 'cause you'll be studying market movement all night and monitoring your holdings all day, or you'll be paying JP Morgan to take your money.
Buying stock in a company directly makes you a part of the "Board of Directors" or a minor shareholder. In either case, the stock comes with the stipulation of a share of actual ownership in the company. Common stock (NYSE) is cancelled when the company files bankruptcy; liquidations go to shareholders who have preferred stock.
There's a difference between holding a no-obligations pink slip and holding a contract of ownership. The stocks on the exchange? They're like a marriage with a prenup that says "YOU DON'T GET SHIT!" When the divorce comes, you get thrown out with the shirt on your back and a tiny tin cup that says "will suck dick for food". The stock you buy in a company when you directly invest gives you partial ownership, and when the company dissolves you get a court telling them that X% of their stuff belongs to you and they have to sell the house and give you half the money. You can also force them to buy you out (you cash out your share into the company, proportionally vesting everyone more strongly), and you are directly entitled to a proportion of the company's profits (a nice feature of some exchange stocks, but the preferred holders get bigger dividends).
Peons can't trade shares in this model; however the exchanges are just a mechanism to move money from dumb people to smart people, so it's really not a good place for the average joe to grow his nest egg. It's a great place for me to rob old ladies dumb enough to buy-and-hold the S&P.
I'd actually be very surprised if none of these companies use OpenBSD goodies - Either OpenBSD by itself, or middleware BSD products. And then you can add to this OpenSSH, OpenBGPD and a couple more interesting products. Microsoft used OpenBSD as a basis for the Microsoft Services for Unix. But again - is it relevant to the discussion? Not really.
Nope, it's not. what is relevant is that their front-facing OS is a non-openBSD OS running vulnerable libopenssl without the protections of the OpenBSD allocator because they're using glibc's pmalloc. That they have an OpenBSD appliance somewhere in the rack doesn't protect them. Remember: the point of my post was that all this warbling about OpenBSD's allocator doesn't have any real, practical bearing on the events that unfolded around the Heartbleed bug. If they had used the system allocator (everywhere), all other things equivalent, we'd still have heartbleed.
So, you're assuming there aren't compromised OpenBSD servers because of this. And that no one actually tried to exploit it in OpenBSD. The fact is that no one kows exactly the extent of the damage of this vulnerability, or if it could have been detected way earlier by using OpenBSD or Linux with grsecurity or whatnot.
I'm assuming that there are so few that the probability of OpenBSD servers being the first round of exploits--or really in any significant way exploited early enough that the bug is exposed and understood before the damage is probably done--is laughable at best. Remember: OpenBSD's technical security features WOULD NOT HAVE DETECTED HEARTBLEED until you actually exploited it. If OpenSSL was getting valid data, humming along fine, it would not have read past the end of the buffer. Only when given invalid data causing an out-of-bounds read did OpenSSL behave in ways indicative of program malfunction.
At that point the exploit is "in the wild", and people are probably exploiting banks and forums run on Linux and Solaris, and we must now assume... well, everything we assume in the current situation. So we're no better off.
grsecurity doesn't provide for a way to protect against this exploit, either. It's just another hardly-used security distribution with a strong niche following which I was using to compare volume--how much grsecurity versus how much OpenBSD, the answer being "not much of either", even though both have good technical security measures.
And it still remains a fact that it is a dumb idea to try to micro-manage memory on your library.
You mean like with object pooling, which is essentially what freelists are?
It's a common design pattern. Next you'll tell me Duff's Device is a dumb idea.
Actually, the whining I read was precisely that - why aren't OS developers doing the best they can to avoid and mitigate these kind of errors?
Everyone is blaming OpenSSL for having a freelist. Removing the freelist--or fixing the other broken memory allocations not relevant to Heartbleed--wouldn't help here. Implementing OpenBSD-style allocators may be useful--in fact, I had a memory allocator project 10 years ago that I abandoned which aimed for better memory density and high security by abandoning brk() and using mmap() and thread/class grouping (allocations from the same thread tend to allocate/free together; allocation fragmentation can be dealt with by grouping allocations of a given size together in a range of memory, rather than just buddy allocating in one big open field), and used all kinds of tests with canaries and dtags (deleted! double-free!) and other security bits.
I am not against a complete redesign of the allocator and I have no love for brk() segments. But this is not what people are crying about; they're crying about how Heartbleed mitigated OpenBSD's special allocator, which doesn't fucking matter for reasons already cited above.
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I have debt. So I'm paying off my debt. You know, the mortgages and credit cards and car loans people have that they pay all these fees (like interest) on, but claim they're "saving money".
After that, a savings account will do better than a 401(k). I don't play funds because it's too much work to keep my money from shrinking--I've done it to the tune of 1% per day, and I was a fucking nervous wreck but I'd turned $800 into $3000 and I had 5 pages of taxes to file for 230 trades. Yeah, no, you know what? Honest living. It went from running an illegal gambling ring and tax fraud behind a front business (a "Computer Entertainment" business as a front to install gambling machines explicitly marked as not-gambling machines in various businesses) to stock market trading to pure, clean, honest living, and let me tell you, there is nothing quite like it. I'm even way past the statute of limitations after the illegal front business thing, although I can't get a security clearance due to running a miniature organized crime syndicate for a while.
This is also why I elect Traditional IRA (pre-tax) rather than Roth (Post-tax): I deduct taxes and pay that much less in taxes (for now), and when I cash out I'll pay taxes on it. Thing is I'm not investing, so I don't get to do massive capital gains and then dodge the income tax "because it was already taxed". Since I'll need much less in retirement than I need now, I'll be in the 0%-15% tax bracket, rather than the 33% bracket I'm slicing the money off--I'm getting an immediate, complete 18%-33% gain without putting any work in.
Where do you think JP Morgan and insurance companies get their money? Investments. They transfer money from idiot traders who don't know how to keep their hands on their cash into the hands of smart traders who work for their investment branch. Unless you are an elite trader, you should not be investing. The only time I invest is when I play with updown, and that's usually to reset my portfolio to a million dollars and see if I can have 2 million in a month (usually I come out with 1.2M to 1.5M) since I'm not willing to get sucked into the long-term trading trap again.
I'm investing in debt.
I have a mortgage, no longer have a car loan, I have some credit card debt that I've leveraged for home improvement because of $500/mo utility bills due to really bad insulation (7/8 of that is due to poor insulation in one room which needs new windows and work in the wall, ceiling, and floor). Rather than have all that mandatory spending and interest, I'm funneling my money into paying off my debt.
I paid off the car loan. $400/mo free to add to my mortgage, which will be paid off after a total of 3 years. Once the mortgage is paid off, I'll put the great mass into savings with my other savings, because I'll have under $500/mo of expenses.
The problem with 401(K) investment vehicles is the stock market is a big game to take money from idiots and give it to rich people with culturing and lots of study into how to rape the stock market for all it's worth. It's just a money transfer vehicle, like a game of poker, which as well is less about the cards and more about experienced players shaking up new fish and taking all their chips.
This is the worst advice ever.
Or we'll get rid of QE and get 7% or 11% interest rates again, and your home value will stay the same plus inflation, but the sale price (your asset) will drop. Then people will again be able to buy a house and pay it off in 10 years or so instead of 30, since we'll be talking about putting a hundred or so dollars on top of their loan instead of paying 3.5x to pay it off in 10 years instead of 30.
What's sound money? Fiat money is okay, gold standard money has deflationary problems, fractional reserve systems appear to establish money by loaning it into existence. Our current fractional reserve system appears to preclude economic growth: any "growth" is a growth of debt, a growth in economic sickness.
Why does everyone want a 401(k)? I had a 401(k) for a while. I stopped making that mistake, and I'm far better off.
The common argument is to use languages which are no longer dynamic and evolving with cultural growth. This limits choices to French, Latin, and Ancient Greek.
I was more concerned with the problems of handling a firearm in certain situations, versus handling other weapons.
The language part is an issue with English being too fluid. To evaluate the Constitution, we have to frame English as what we think they thought English phrases meant 200 years ago. I'm just bolting on a lot of clarification and constraint to make that harder to fuck up.
Uh, if I encounter a gang rape, I'm going in. I don't care if I'm outnumbered; there will be pain and fists and blood and at least *some* of them are going to be broken before me.
I cannot fire bullets into that, it's too easy to hit the innocent I'm trying to protect. I can take a sword into that. I can take a cudgel into that, too. If they pull out guns, well.. one gun against six is about as good as one sword against six guns. I sort of accept that risk going in.
I live in a place where this is common, but not mexican-border common. The threats are similar, but they are different: a cartel party is a well-armed, fairly well-trained, battle-hardened and murder-ready group, whereas your garden variety rapist or mugger is not. Garden variety mugger is going to think twice about being involved in a lethal situation where he may get executed (partially not applicable here: many of our high-crime folks are drug dealers and other such who are at risk of death by criminal activity more than by state execution, so state execution is the most minor risk and thus not a deterrent; but they are also not the ones likely to mug random people), mexican cartel drug mob folks have murdered and will murder again. Garden variety mugger you beat back with force; mexican drug cartel you go in with the full assumption that these people *will* murder you if they're not dead.
Where I am, I don't need extraneous weapons. Fists work just fine, and any level of pressure really carries weight. I've been threatened by gangs, had multiple people crowding around me shouting and demanding money, and just brushed them off and walked; they are not prepared to follow through, and any amount of force is going to quickly drive these people away. When we get into hardened criminals, serial rapists, and organized crime, that ceases to work; I can inflict crippling injury faster with a cudgel, and I can inflict death faster with a blade or superior, and when they come in groups i will need to do one or the other with rapidity.
So you can have your border state. I still think firearms are not a wholly appropriate self-defense weapon except in extreme cases (i.e. organized mob crime), and I think they carry a significant liability. I can see the comparative advantage when facing an intervention scenario with multiple adversaries, versus an ambush scenario where a firearm may quickly become a liability rather than an asset; depending on how you're going to handle an intervention scenario, either may be a valid choice to avoid bystander liability, but a cudgel quickly becomes less useful as you increase the need for quick lethality. Sword offers quick lethality in closed quarters, firearm offers quick lethality with range, cudgel is slow for cripple or kill.
I simply can't control a firearm like a blade. At the moment I carry none because nothing I can carry provides an advantage: I can handle any situation likely to arise here WITH MY FISTS. If I was out in gangland and dealing with organized murder gangs, I would go for no less than a sword; at that point I have to accept lethality in self defense, and I probably can't reasonably deal with those people with my fists--or even if I can, I'm going to have to kill them with my fists anyway, so screw it, you get to meet three feet of steel.
Grenades have a higher risk of collateral damage. So do firearms over swords. So do swords over staffs (even if you hit a bystander, it will probably hurt and that's it). Mind you if you are running from an attacker and you drop a grenade, and they don't recognize it, you have probably effectively ended the chase; this is a bad idea.
Which foil was it that was a full point weapon? My point was essentially that a point weapon is rather useless if you can't get the point into use, similar to a firearm requiring the barrel pointed at someone.
I don't trust pistols in most practical ambush scenarios. Most city muggings are not going to be an attacker from afar running up, waving, and screaming from down the road. You're going to find out you're under attack when you're suddenly being grabbed or beaten or clubbed in the head, or worse when you have a pistol in your face and can no longer reach for yours without getting shot in the face. In the best reasonably likely case, you'll be engaged in some form of physical combat, which means you have a wide berth for mistakes with a firearm, possible misses, and possible liability of a stray bullet. Blades don't miss in the same way: you only need to get this entire edge against *something*, and the edge doesn't go very far.
There is no safe place to stab someone, which is what a bullet does. You can get away with plenty of blunt attacks with fists and wooden sticks, however. Even if you break a shin, that can mend; if you damage a knee, that's worse; if you drive a sword or bullet into the leg, you're much more likely to catch an artery than a broken bone (although this can happen), and you wholly cannot catch an artery by flatting a staff across the front of the shin (there isn't one there) or bruising some ribs. You can even take someone in the head pretty hard without risking much damage. That won't happen with a firearm.
I feel that swords can be more effective than guns. Guns are less effective in close quarters, and are primarily effective when running is a worse option than standing and firing on an individual attacking you with a gun from a distance. Guns have the downside of sending a projectile flying quite far, so if you miss you may harm bystanders. Guns are LETHAL and there is no safe place to shoot a person with a firearm.
Swords are lethal for a few meters. If you get jumped, a knife or short sword is in the same class as a firearm--possibly even better, since a firearm requires the tip be pointed at the guy and you fire, while a knife has a long blade that only needs to find flesh. Compare a sword to an epe with a pointed tip and a harmless, round shaft and you will quickly understand. And as I said, there is little to no danger to anyone not within a few meters reach--however far your arm, the sword, and the distance of a lunge adds up to.
Staff weapons are less lethal and can be used by those whose immediate reaction to everything isn't to kill and maim. You can kill a man with a staff, but you can do a lot more. And again: limited range, and you're more likely to be jumped than fired upon from the trees 10 meters away.
These are all valid considerations. Some people just do not feel comfortable with a firearm as a self-defense weapon in public places. Grenades have the same concerns as a firearm but worse; swords have the same concerns as a firearm but lessened. It's not unreasonable to decide that the concern of "killing someone 200 feet away by mistake" is a good reason to select something other than a pistol for defense when you go out to the theater.
"Summon Tunado" doesn't seem like a practical weapon. Swords, flails, staffs, and fists are. Staffs and fists are the ultimate weapons: they can be lethal or non-lethal, they can be controlling, defensive, etc.
Staffs have replaced swords over time because police forces carrying swords had few options to deal with criminals: they developed a desire to subdue rowdy but minimally-threatening individuals without killing or severely maiming them, and so moved to staff weapons which could quickly kill a person or could protect against attacks and deliver blunt force for pain or submission. Similarly, firearms have been replaced largely with chemical sprays, batons, and tazers to allow for a discriminating approach to lower-threat adversarial situations rather than a blanket approach of shooting everyone in the face.
It seems to me that the choice of the citizenry to carry more or less lethal weapons is a more important one than the bare issue of gun control. With a firearm, you can send lethal projectiles off on an uncontrolled trajectory, possibly injuring bystanders; with a sword, your bystanders-at-risk must be within two or three meters. If you're worried about "getting jumped", hand-to-hand combat skill is much more valuable than a firearm; while a sword with a rapid-release scabbard (twist or slight pull to open the body so the sword can be swept out instead of drawn) may function as an effective lethal close-combat weapon, or even a short knife to avoid the risk of adversarial manipulation of the long blade. Firearms are for when you are assaulted by gun fire from a distance AND standing and shooting back is a better option than running--a constant in war, but an uncommon defensive position in city life.
It is offensive to me that possession of a weapon is a crime, while possession of a firearm may or may not be or may require a permit which may or may not technically cover a different weapon. It also seems offensive to the rational senses to add criminal charges when a criminal is in possession of a weapon: if a man robbing a store has a firearm but is threatening WITH HIS FISTS, the firearm is immaterial as to the robbing of the store. We are innocent until proven guilty, and I don't like that we can call a man on charges for one crime and then say he was carrying a knife or nunchaku and call that a crime as well without proving that he had used them or had intended to use them to criminal intent; I don't even agree that it's criminal to defend yourself from bodily harm incurred as part of criminal activities, for example if you are a part of a drug deal and the other party attacks you then you are within your rights to defend yourself and should only be charged for illegal drug activities.
In this country we are essentially limited to carrying firearms for protection, which I think is sub-optimal. The breadth of the law and culture should specify that self defense weapons are appropriate for individual carry for self defense, and that self defense is not a crime.
I keep telling people it's alpha-quality garbage that needs a rewrite. The goal was good, but we messed up implementation. Pilot has taught us that people are fucking bastards and we need to try this again. The problem is the other side wants to gut it and rewrite it without our "freedoms" or whatever, and so nobody on this side wants to gut it and rewrite it to KEEP THE BALANCE OF POWER.
I *am* always armed. People around me are nuts, they have weapons they can't use, or can't use in closed quarters. Pepper spray? I've had girls tell me they carry pepper spray for defense, and it ended in me taking it from them by force. Do you pull out your gun and carry it ready to fire when you walk around outside? If you get jumped, your most likely outcome is the muggers take your gun.
Hand-to-hand combat. Fists. Arms. Legs. Bodies. It's not just clenching your fingers together to form a makeshift rock; every part of your body is vulnerable, so you need to turn every part into a weapon. I deflect kicks by taking them to parts of my leg that are better able to withstand kicks. I shift my body to catch punches in areas that won't hurt as much, and that give me retaliatory advantage. My whole body is a weapon, it is a shield.
If you can manage this for THREE SECONDS, you can get your pepper spray out and END IT. If you can't manage this at all, you're going to have your pepper spray or your fire arm taken away from you, and possibly used against you. You don't need to be a fucking ninja god of war; you need to not fail the minute somebody grabs you.
Everyone around me thinks they can slap some kind of knife or firearm or can of juice under their belt and they're now "safe". Like the assailant is going to announce himself so you can get your weapons ready. The police are going to have a problem if you point a large firearm at everybody that approaches you. You're going to have to get that stuff out *after* you get jumped, probably while partially restrained, possibly while on the ground getting beaten. Think about it for a minute.
By this argument, we need to strengthen our right to openly carry swords and nunchaku.
This is why I want a new constitution dictating that all bills must have a mission defined in English, Latin, and Ancient Greek. The law must be consistent with the Mission; anything outside the Mission--anything not consistent in all three versions--is invalid. The Mission specifies goal (why the law exists) and scope (what the law will do to achieve the goal), while the text of the law specifies method (how the law will achieve the goal). If you start throwing in irrelevant earmarks, altering other criminal laws, or adding taxes where the Mission doesn't cover those activities, those parts of the law are legally invalid. If you arrest someone for violating the law and it can be shown in court that their actions are disconnected from the Mission, then the law was not made to police them in this scenario and they have committed no crime.
We can't even decide what the second amendment actually says. We need stronger definitions with multi-way consistency checking. Use two dead languages for parity.
That's what you get for using technology. Next time, use your fists.
Somebody has to write the back-end code; and you're arguing on one side that poor programmers will fuck up anyway, and on the other side that good programmers will fight the language paradigm (and make some jumble of weird shit like C++ std.cout operator overloading "to reduce complexity" so nobody can read and understand their code).
We can't decide if "People" means the Government or individual people, or if there should be a comma or a semicolon, or if it really matters, and so we can't decide if individuals have the constitutional right to own weapons. The National Guard is the State Militia, not the individual with a Ruger in his house. The argument rages.
If our lawmakers and lawyers and judges can't achieve literacy, we have a huge problem.
As I have specified that each provision and enforcement of the law must be logically consistent with the mission in all three languages, and two of these languages are dead and unchanging, I have provided a layer of clarification. It adds to time and cost, but it greatly adds to the time and cost of earmarking and adding backdoors to your laws. If you want to modify the mission to technically allow an unrelated provision, you have to do it in three languages, consistently, without breaking the rest of your bill. It's easier just to be honest and straightforward.
The particular mitigation in question is to not use brk() for the heap. pmalloc and kmalloc use brk() for the heap, except for individual allocations of a size larger than 128KB which are mmap().
Screw the little guy, don't tax the big guy?
Stock market is a big group psychology game. You wait for all the retirement fund people to think "oh this stock is hot" and you sell off to them. You wait for them to cry out and you buy it back. Smart, well-educated, savvy investors like JP Morgan's crew go in and rob the shit out of the little guy.
Alternately, you can start a fund "to make money" and encourage a buy-and-hold strategy. The fund is chartered on certain rules, which you follow strictly. It makes money, it loses money, it makes money again, it kind of follows inflation.. you don't care, because you siphon your 1% off the top.
The stock market is full of all kinds of hilariously stupid advice that is directly contradictory to the real world. For example: Diversification is a farce. If you bought a whole exchange tracker as your only fund, you would be ultimately diversified; you could buy SPY spyder's S&P500 index tracker, and be wholly diversified; yet this is not diversification BECAUSE YOU HOLD ONLY SPY, despite being able to argue that you hold some 500 different stocks by proxy. Ultimate diversification doesn't help because the whole market goes up and down; it reduces risk, some, but it eventually just reduces it to the whole market's risk. The trick to making money in the stock market is to specialize: to select one or a few stocks or funds or baskets that you think will make money, get some gain, and then bail out of them.
It comes down to news, market making, and technical analysis. Not diversification, not funds, not buy and hold and let it grow. You want to play in the market? Yeah, get ready for an 80 hour a week job, 'cause you'll be studying market movement all night and monitoring your holdings all day, or you'll be paying JP Morgan to take your money.
Frama-C found it.
The caching allocator was irrelevant to the heartbleed bug.
Buying stock in a company directly makes you a part of the "Board of Directors" or a minor shareholder. In either case, the stock comes with the stipulation of a share of actual ownership in the company. Common stock (NYSE) is cancelled when the company files bankruptcy; liquidations go to shareholders who have preferred stock.
There's a difference between holding a no-obligations pink slip and holding a contract of ownership. The stocks on the exchange? They're like a marriage with a prenup that says "YOU DON'T GET SHIT!" When the divorce comes, you get thrown out with the shirt on your back and a tiny tin cup that says "will suck dick for food". The stock you buy in a company when you directly invest gives you partial ownership, and when the company dissolves you get a court telling them that X% of their stuff belongs to you and they have to sell the house and give you half the money. You can also force them to buy you out (you cash out your share into the company, proportionally vesting everyone more strongly), and you are directly entitled to a proportion of the company's profits (a nice feature of some exchange stocks, but the preferred holders get bigger dividends).
Peons can't trade shares in this model; however the exchanges are just a mechanism to move money from dumb people to smart people, so it's really not a good place for the average joe to grow his nest egg. It's a great place for me to rob old ladies dumb enough to buy-and-hold the S&P.
I'd actually be very surprised if none of these companies use OpenBSD goodies - Either OpenBSD by itself, or middleware BSD products. And then you can add to this OpenSSH, OpenBGPD and a couple more interesting products. Microsoft used OpenBSD as a basis for the Microsoft Services for Unix. But again - is it relevant to the discussion? Not really.
Nope, it's not. what is relevant is that their front-facing OS is a non-openBSD OS running vulnerable libopenssl without the protections of the OpenBSD allocator because they're using glibc's pmalloc. That they have an OpenBSD appliance somewhere in the rack doesn't protect them. Remember: the point of my post was that all this warbling about OpenBSD's allocator doesn't have any real, practical bearing on the events that unfolded around the Heartbleed bug. If they had used the system allocator (everywhere), all other things equivalent, we'd still have heartbleed.
So, you're assuming there aren't compromised OpenBSD servers because of this. And that no one actually tried to exploit it in OpenBSD. The fact is that no one kows exactly the extent of the damage of this vulnerability, or if it could have been detected way earlier by using OpenBSD or Linux with grsecurity or whatnot.
I'm assuming that there are so few that the probability of OpenBSD servers being the first round of exploits--or really in any significant way exploited early enough that the bug is exposed and understood before the damage is probably done--is laughable at best. Remember: OpenBSD's technical security features WOULD NOT HAVE DETECTED HEARTBLEED until you actually exploited it. If OpenSSL was getting valid data, humming along fine, it would not have read past the end of the buffer. Only when given invalid data causing an out-of-bounds read did OpenSSL behave in ways indicative of program malfunction.
At that point the exploit is "in the wild", and people are probably exploiting banks and forums run on Linux and Solaris, and we must now assume... well, everything we assume in the current situation. So we're no better off.
grsecurity doesn't provide for a way to protect against this exploit, either. It's just another hardly-used security distribution with a strong niche following which I was using to compare volume--how much grsecurity versus how much OpenBSD, the answer being "not much of either", even though both have good technical security measures.
And it still remains a fact that it is a dumb idea to try to micro-manage memory on your library.
You mean like with object pooling, which is essentially what freelists are?
It's a common design pattern. Next you'll tell me Duff's Device is a dumb idea.
Actually, the whining I read was precisely that - why aren't OS developers doing the best they can to avoid and mitigate these kind of errors?
Everyone is blaming OpenSSL for having a freelist. Removing the freelist--or fixing the other broken memory allocations not relevant to Heartbleed--wouldn't help here. Implementing OpenBSD-style allocators may be useful--in fact, I had a memory allocator project 10 years ago that I abandoned which aimed for better memory density and high security by abandoning brk() and using mmap() and thread/class grouping (allocations from the same thread tend to allocate/free together; allocation fragmentation can be dealt with by grouping allocations of a given size together in a range of memory, rather than just buddy allocating in one big open field), and used all kinds of tests with canaries and dtags (deleted! double-free!) and other security bits.
I am not against a complete redesign of the allocator and I have no love for brk() segments. But this is not what people are crying about; they're crying about how Heartbleed mitigated OpenBSD's special allocator, which doesn't fucking matter for reasons already cited above.
That only demonstrates