Can someone point me to a good description of how to set up sudo and the advantages to doing so? I may be misunderstanding it, but it seems to me that sudo is not so great from a security standpoint because it allows root access with the user's password. How is this so different from just giving every user root access?
Say I don't use sudo and I set up ssh to disallow root logins. That means that if someone hypothetically cracks my user password, they then have to crack the root password independently. That's two hurdles to jump over. If, however, I have sudo set up, the hacker only needs to have one password to do whatever they want to the system. Sure, the 5 minute limit protects (minimally) against someone walking up to the keyboard while I'm away, but it seems like a locking screensaver would have the same effect.
I guess I can see the advantage in a multiuser system where some users should have access to some root commands others shouldn't, but in a single user system, where the user is also the administrator, I see sudo as a security liability.
I've had occasion to want to edit pdfs. Most recently, it was PhD applications. Inevitably, they're distributed as pdfs. Unfortunately, I'm cursed with atroicious handwriting, and it would be nice to be able to return a typed version to the school, rather than one with my childlike handwriting all over it. Inevitably, I end up converting the pdf to a gif in gimp and then placing text on top of the image. It sucks, but it's better than the alternative. I'd love to be able to edit the pdf directly without the conversion step and the trouble of having to manually place the text so it looks like it's part of the original document.
As an aside, I wish people would use something like xml or html for documents. I never understood the rationale for turning something as compact and efficient as a text document into a giant image file. Acrobat is slow as hell for large documents, even with todays processors and download speeds. And the choice between unintelligibly small text and (given Acrobat's slow rendering time) seeing a partial page is a lousy one.
The point is that in both failures NASA knew there was a problem beforehand, and determined that the problem wasn't worth worrying about. Guess what? They were wrong and have now lost half of the fleet. Guess what happens to the U.S. manned space program if they lose another before the shuttle's replacement is ready? And here we are again - a problem is discovered, and NASA decides that yeah, it shouldn't be happening, we don't really know why it's happened, but don't worry about it: nothing to see here.
Whether the astronauts consider a 2% failure rate to be acceptable is immaterial. Nasa shouldn't have the attitude that they don't need to fix problems they don't understand, and Nasa needs to realize that by having that attitude they're endangering the viability of the manned space program over the next decade.
Yeah, apparently it was a misunderstanding of how the odometers on the machines work. They aren't reset between elections and therefore show the total number of ballots ever cast on them, not just the number in the current election. Some people saw the numbers on the odometers and thought ballots had already been cast.
I grew up in Connecticut where we too had the old mechanical machines with the levers and curtains. I was surprised when I moved to Arizona and saw the optical scan ballots. Filling in bubbles with a magic marker on a rickety table while your neighbor looks over your shoulder just feels cheap. Besides, the curtain and levers on the old machines, along with the fact that no one could come in (maybe a myth) gave the machines the feel of a really cool fort.
Presumably they have other features besides size that differentiate them from Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Pygmies are recognizibly H. sapiens. Note the article talks about the differences in the teeth, leg and skull shape from H. sapiens and Homo Erectus. If pygmies had the leg structure of apes and the skull features of H. erectus and Australopithecus, you can bet they'd be considered another species. They don't, so they aren't.
Maybe because some people have grandparents who were gassed to death in a slave labor camp. Maybe because some people have grandparents who were strung up by the neck from a tree, had their hands cut off and were then burned alive. Maybe because some people consider those events truly evil and not "evil". Is it so hard to understand that people would be sickened by the idea of their grandparent's gruesome death as entertainment?
Your inability to see a difference between Darth Vader and Hitler or a slave trader is particularly offensive, I might add.
That's too bad. The programming HBO puts out is of such high quality it would've been nice to think that their attitude towards their audience was similarly above the others in the industry. Apparently not.
"Because unfortunately there are those who are completely uncompromising, and in this case the fact that the telescope complex takes up a fairly large amount of space and would alter as-of-yet unaltered land was probably what set them off."
OK, I agree with you that the telescopes on Graham should be built, but your characterization of the opposition is wrong. There were two main reasons why the telescopes were opposed: 1) Mt. Graham is the home of the endangered red squirrel. 2) Mt. Graham is the sacred peak of the San Carlos Apache. The environmentalists were worried about the effects the increased activity would have on the squirrel (the University eventually made concessions on this issue), and the Apache opposed it because they have burial grounds on the mountain and consider it theirs.
"Short sightedness has led to massive wildfires that have burned more destructively than if the standard fire cycle were allowed to occur," Yeah, that's been going on in the West for the last 80 years. To pin it on the environmentalists is a bit unfair, as the policy of fire suppression predates the modern environmental movement by quite a bit. Most environmentalists I know support controlled burns as a solution; the (current) administration pushes clear cut logging as the solution. Result: impasse. Also, you can bet that Mt. Graham isn't going to see anything like the "standard fire cycle" now that there are millions of dollars invested in it.
"Personally I'd like it if there were another decent sized community within four hours drive of Phoenix that wasn't also in the desert" How about Flagstaff, Sedona, Prescott, Jerome or Bisbee? Most of the state is within four hours of Phoenix.
Has he dropped his annoying French chef schtick? Or is it all "Good morning, monseiur! Zo, we are perhaps interested in sampling ze business desktop of linux, are we? We have several tasty items on ze menu today!"
As if it wasn't obvious what decision he was going to make...
You know, I support Kerry, but his argument that he only voted to give the President the right to go to war and not for war itself is, to my way of thinking, ridiculous. It was obvious to everyone that Bush wanted to go to war. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or a fool.
Moreover, even if we accept Kerry's argument that it came as a surprise to him that Bush would use any excuse to invade Iraq, it seems rather dishonest to vote to give the President blanket authority to declare war and then complain when that decision is made. A little late to have second thoughts, isn't it? If you don't want the president to have blanket authority, then don't give him blanket authority!
The truth is that Kerry, like virtually every other Democrat, was afraid of being labelled "unpatriotic" and "weak on defense" and so took the politically safe position. Why don't we debate that, instead? Why not talk about how we use patriotism as a political weapon? Why not talk about how that, more than anything Bush has done, needs to change if we're going to have a healthy democracy? The issue is not so much that Bush led us into a quagmire, it's that we and our elected representatives allowed him to lead us there.
I use crosscrypt with a couple of bat files to mount and unmount the filesystem. It seemed a bit more lightweight than truecrypt and truecrypt seemed to be pretty stagnant for awhile due to licensing issues.
I think George Will is insane. Intelligent, but insane. How anyone can look at the American political system and contend that it fosters compromise is beyond me. Look at a parliamentary system where one party rarely has an absolute majority. Those parties are forced to find common ground and compromise with others in order to form a majority government.
In contrast, our system encourages the majority party to ram everything they can think of through because in 4 years they could be the ones in the minority, powerless to stop the other party from doing whatever THEY want. Instead of trying to find common ground, we demonize. 51% of the electorate ignoring the wishes of the other 49% isn't compromise, it's what's tearing this country apart.
There are new reactor designs that...produce virtually 0% long half-life products.
Really? Do you have a link or citation for that? If true, I'd be 100% behind nuclear power, but I've never heard that there are fission reactors that don't product long half-life waste.
As for the nuclear waste generated aftewards there are a number of clever idea's about how to deal with it including one which disposes of it in the giant fusion reaction that is our Sun.
And we all know that rockets never blow up or otherwise fail on launch.
What's wrong with Dell's support? The couple of times I've had to call Dell support they've sent someone out to my house within 2 hours to fix it on the spot! In contrast, the local Apple store took 2 weeks (including shipping to Apple) to remove a scratched DVD from my girlfriend's powerbook. I think Dell has the best support in the business.
Perhaps I could've made it clearer that I was referencing two recent Groklaw postings. In the "Enderle Misunderstands Free Software and Swears a Lot" article she stated that she would not link to the keynote address and would "never suggest anyone read it." The fact that there are indirect links is, of course, beyond her control. I think her comments make it clear she would rather there were no links to it at all.
I still find groklaw to be a good site to get the latest news in the SCO soap opera, but I've long since learned to tune all the "analysis" out. What I find particularly offensive is that she won't link to documents or sites she disagrees with, but doesn't hesitate in the least to paraphrase and comment on them. In other words, don't bother to read it for yourself, I'll tell you what it means.
A good case in point was the Enderle speech. In my opinion, Enderle's a hack, but her description of the speech (sans link, of course) was not a fair characterization. "The language was so filthy, it is not fit for Groklaw?" Because he used the word BS? Was it professional? No, but to worry about what effect it will have on children (oh, the children!) And speculating that he was drunk? Come on.
My favorite part of today's entry was the implication that anyone who disagrees with her is working for SCO. It's ironic, isn't it? She rips into Enderle for talking about "Groklaw spies" but then warns everyone to be on the lookout for SCO moles. She ridicules Enderle for complaining about physical threats but keeps her own identity a secret.
In short, I don't think Pamela and Enderle are so different - she just happens to be on the right side.
Prepare the flamethowers:
My biggest problem with Tolkien's writing is the utter lack of any inner life or motivation for any of the characters. You have good guys and you have bad guys. The good guys do good things (all the time), the bad guys do bad things (all the time). Rather than being ahead of its time, as some of the posters here have suggested, I think LOTR is more accurately a throwback to a pre-Shakespearean style of writing.
The movies are quite faithful to the books in this regard as well. One of the funniest things about the story is how the Riders of Rohan question the motives of the hobbits when all the "good characters" are universally attractive and well dressed, all the "evil" characters wear black or tattered clothing and are deformed in some way. OK, perhaps Saruman, but even he is openly building an army of orcs, digging a really nasty open pit mine complete with evil-looking tower, and not returning anyone's calls - hardly subtle. Grima Wormtongue? Let's see: he's pale with bad skin, has black, stingy, unwashed hair, wears black and his name is Grima Wormtongue. I can't imagine why anyone would suspect him of something nefarious.
Well, this was unintentional, but I had a 60 Mhz Pentium and after a couple of years decided to replace it. I bought some new components and opened up the case to pull the memory and found the heat sink lying at the bottom of the case. It had completely fallen off at some point in the past. Strangely, there were never any symptoms and it worked fine the whole time.
This is the part I don't understand. Actually, I can see telling Justin to cancel the check to try to divert suspicion, but why would Sal wait until Justin told him he canceled the check to try to cash it? Why no cash it right off? Wasn't Sal running the risk of having the whole scam fail? Any theories? What am I missing?
Sadly, this is the single most interesting thing in my life right now.
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Say I don't use sudo and I set up ssh to disallow root logins. That means that if someone hypothetically cracks my user password, they then have to crack the root password independently. That's two hurdles to jump over. If, however, I have sudo set up, the hacker only needs to have one password to do whatever they want to the system. Sure, the 5 minute limit protects (minimally) against someone walking up to the keyboard while I'm away, but it seems like a locking screensaver would have the same effect.
I guess I can see the advantage in a multiuser system where some users should have access to some root commands others shouldn't, but in a single user system, where the user is also the administrator, I see sudo as a security liability.
I've had occasion to want to edit pdfs. Most recently, it was PhD applications. Inevitably, they're distributed as pdfs. Unfortunately, I'm cursed with atroicious handwriting, and it would be nice to be able to return a typed version to the school, rather than one with my childlike handwriting all over it. Inevitably, I end up converting the pdf to a gif in gimp and then placing text on top of the image. It sucks, but it's better than the alternative. I'd love to be able to edit the pdf directly without the conversion step and the trouble of having to manually place the text so it looks like it's part of the original document.
As an aside, I wish people would use something like xml or html for documents. I never understood the rationale for turning something as compact and efficient as a text document into a giant image file. Acrobat is slow as hell for large documents, even with todays processors and download speeds. And the choice between unintelligibly small text and (given Acrobat's slow rendering time) seeing a partial page is a lousy one.
Whether the astronauts consider a 2% failure rate to be acceptable is immaterial. Nasa shouldn't have the attitude that they don't need to fix problems they don't understand, and Nasa needs to realize that by having that attitude they're endangering the viability of the manned space program over the next decade.
Yeah, apparently it was a misunderstanding of how the odometers on the machines work. They aren't reset between elections and therefore show the total number of ballots ever cast on them, not just the number in the current election. Some people saw the numbers on the odometers and thought ballots had already been cast.
I grew up in Connecticut where we too had the old mechanical machines with the levers and curtains. I was surprised when I moved to Arizona and saw the optical scan ballots. Filling in bubbles with a magic marker on a rickety table while your neighbor looks over your shoulder just feels cheap. Besides, the curtain and levers on the old machines, along with the fact that no one could come in (maybe a myth) gave the machines the feel of a really cool fort.
Never mind. I'll just RTFA...
I thought Sun had switched to Gnome. Is that wrong? The only Sun we have at work is an old Sparc 20 running Solaris 2.5.1 so I really don't know.
Presumably they have other features besides size that differentiate them from Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Pygmies are recognizibly H. sapiens. Note the article talks about the differences in the teeth, leg and skull shape from H. sapiens and Homo Erectus. If pygmies had the leg structure of apes and the skull features of H. erectus and Australopithecus, you can bet they'd be considered another species. They don't, so they aren't.
Your inability to see a difference between Darth Vader and Hitler or a slave trader is particularly offensive, I might add.
That's too bad. The programming HBO puts out is of such high quality it would've been nice to think that their attitude towards their audience was similarly above the others in the industry. Apparently not.
OK, I agree with you that the telescopes on Graham should be built, but your characterization of the opposition is wrong. There were two main reasons why the telescopes were opposed: 1) Mt. Graham is the home of the endangered red squirrel. 2) Mt. Graham is the sacred peak of the San Carlos Apache. The environmentalists were worried about the effects the increased activity would have on the squirrel (the University eventually made concessions on this issue), and the Apache opposed it because they have burial grounds on the mountain and consider it theirs.
"Short sightedness has led to massive wildfires that have burned more destructively than if the standard fire cycle were allowed to occur,"
Yeah, that's been going on in the West for the last 80 years. To pin it on the environmentalists is a bit unfair, as the policy of fire suppression predates the modern environmental movement by quite a bit. Most environmentalists I know support controlled burns as a solution; the (current) administration pushes clear cut logging as the solution. Result: impasse. Also, you can bet that Mt. Graham isn't going to see anything like the "standard fire cycle" now that there are millions of dollars invested in it.
"Personally I'd like it if there were another decent sized community within four hours drive of Phoenix that wasn't also in the desert"
How about Flagstaff, Sedona, Prescott, Jerome or Bisbee? Most of the state is within four hours of Phoenix.
Has he dropped his annoying French chef schtick? Or is it all "Good morning, monseiur! Zo, we are perhaps interested in sampling ze business desktop of linux, are we? We have several tasty items on ze menu today!"
The "Glick thing" was shameful. In that case, it does an asshole make.
You know, I support Kerry, but his argument that he only voted to give the President the right to go to war and not for war itself is, to my way of thinking, ridiculous. It was obvious to everyone that Bush wanted to go to war. Anyone who says otherwise is a liar or a fool.
Moreover, even if we accept Kerry's argument that it came as a surprise to him that Bush would use any excuse to invade Iraq, it seems rather dishonest to vote to give the President blanket authority to declare war and then complain when that decision is made. A little late to have second thoughts, isn't it? If you don't want the president to have blanket authority, then don't give him blanket authority!
The truth is that Kerry, like virtually every other Democrat, was afraid of being labelled "unpatriotic" and "weak on defense" and so took the politically safe position. Why don't we debate that, instead? Why not talk about how we use patriotism as a political weapon? Why not talk about how that, more than anything Bush has done, needs to change if we're going to have a healthy democracy? The issue is not so much that Bush led us into a quagmire, it's that we and our elected representatives allowed him to lead us there.
Yep, you're next buddy.
YMMV
In contrast, our system encourages the majority party to ram everything they can think of through because in 4 years they could be the ones in the minority, powerless to stop the other party from doing whatever THEY want. Instead of trying to find common ground, we demonize. 51% of the electorate ignoring the wishes of the other 49% isn't compromise, it's what's tearing this country apart.
Really? Do you have a link or citation for that? If true, I'd be 100% behind nuclear power, but I've never heard that there are fission reactors that don't product long half-life waste.
And we all know that rockets never blow up or otherwise fail on launch.
What's wrong with Dell's support? The couple of times I've had to call Dell support they've sent someone out to my house within 2 hours to fix it on the spot! In contrast, the local Apple store took 2 weeks (including shipping to Apple) to remove a scratched DVD from my girlfriend's powerbook. I think Dell has the best support in the business.
I'd say your last comment supports my point.
A good case in point was the Enderle speech. In my opinion, Enderle's a hack, but her description of the speech (sans link, of course) was not a fair characterization. "The language was so filthy, it is not fit for Groklaw?" Because he used the word BS? Was it professional? No, but to worry about what effect it will have on children (oh, the children!) And speculating that he was drunk? Come on.
My favorite part of today's entry was the implication that anyone who disagrees with her is working for SCO. It's ironic, isn't it? She rips into Enderle for talking about "Groklaw spies" but then warns everyone to be on the lookout for SCO moles. She ridicules Enderle for complaining about physical threats but keeps her own identity a secret.
In short, I don't think Pamela and Enderle are so different - she just happens to be on the right side.
Prepare the flamethowers:
My biggest problem with Tolkien's writing is the utter lack of any inner life or motivation for any of the characters. You have good guys and you have bad guys. The good guys do good things (all the time), the bad guys do bad things (all the time). Rather than being ahead of its time, as some of the posters here have suggested, I think LOTR is more accurately a throwback to a pre-Shakespearean style of writing.
The movies are quite faithful to the books in this regard as well. One of the funniest things about the story is how the Riders of Rohan question the motives of the hobbits when all the "good characters" are universally attractive and well dressed, all the "evil" characters wear black or tattered clothing and are deformed in some way. OK, perhaps Saruman, but even he is openly building an army of orcs, digging a really nasty open pit mine complete with evil-looking tower, and not returning anyone's calls - hardly subtle. Grima Wormtongue? Let's see: he's pale with bad skin, has black, stingy, unwashed hair, wears black and his name is Grima Wormtongue. I can't imagine why anyone would suspect him of something nefarious.
Well, this was unintentional, but I had a 60 Mhz Pentium and after a couple of years decided to replace it. I bought some new components and opened up the case to pull the memory and found the heat sink lying at the bottom of the case. It had completely fallen off at some point in the past. Strangely, there were never any symptoms and it worked fine the whole time.
This is the part I don't understand. Actually, I can see telling Justin to cancel the check to try to divert suspicion, but why would Sal wait until Justin told him he canceled the check to try to cash it? Why no cash it right off? Wasn't Sal running the risk of having the whole scam fail? Any theories? What am I missing? Sadly, this is the single most interesting thing in my life right now.