No, whether or not you can link binary drivers to your kernel has no impact at all on what software you can run in userspace.
OTOH, allowing binary kernel modules can be a "slippery slope" that leads to a situation where you are *expected* to load binary kernel drivers just to have a working linux system. (Think XGL and the like - in a few years it may actually be required to have working 3D hardware acceleration in order to use a modern Unix/Linux desktop.)
Because of the ability to use binary modules, a lot of commercial software are made available and that is A Good Thing (Tm)
Erm, no, the only commercial software made possible by this is hardware drivers - I wouldn't necessarily call that a "good thing". Yes, it means you can use your 3D-accelerated nvidia/ati-card right now, but it may also mean that there will never be a "proper" driver for those cards.
Larger commercial software products, like games, database systems, or what-have-you are not touched by this issue.
I don't think this holds true for database systems.
As far as I can see, the big databases like Oracle or Sybase are targeted at big corporations that don't have any second thoughts about hiring a full-time DBA - and as a consequence you will need one to use these products. Okay, maybe not a fulltime DBA, but at least a trained professional (trained for that particular application) to invest quite some time to even get stuff going.
For Postgres, OTOH, you'll just need someone smart with general knowledge of SQL and of the platform it's going to be running on - he needn't even have used Postgres before.
(as there isn't really a "Ride of the Nazgul" track on the soundtracks to any of the LotR soundtracks)
No, but there are several bands out there who have done some musical interpretations of Tolkien's novels (even long before the movies came out). There is at least one band who have produced a track with the name "Flight Of The Nazgul".
Excuse, but where did you read that FF has that exact same vulnerability?
Also, even though FF does have issues, I believe you'll be hard pressed to find a vulnerability in FF that has been known for years and still gone unfixed. (According to heise on http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/79745 this is actually an old bug that also affects IE 6)
Of course, the more tools you have available to you, the better, and while it's very unlikely that a rootkit from one install can infect another as long as you're careful, it's *extremely* unlikely that it'll be able to infect a Linux install. That may change with time, of course - as with so many things, it's an arms race, and this one is unlikely to do anything but get hotter.
Potential solution:
Install linux on a different physical harddisk and unplug it whenever you use Windows. Maybe put the least used one on an external hd.
Use a bootable linux-cd, like Knoppix for daily work.
A better analogy, IMHO, would be that you're paying someone a toll for the privilege of being allowed to use a high-speed road, where, as the company owning the road claims, you can go as fast as 85 mph. Now, obviously, sometimes the traffic even on a for-pay road might so thick that you can only go at 30 mph. But if that becomes the rule rather than the exception, then the owner of that road had better use all the toll-money he collects to increase the roads capacity or alternatively revise his claims about the speed you can get on his roads.
Okay, that analogy is still not very good, but I think it illustrates the point:
If a DSL provider sells DSL-lines with a certain speed to several thousand costumers, he also makes an implicit promise that he has the capacity to take the traffic of several thousand costumers. If there are "Internet-traffic-jams" on a regular basis with this provider, then its the providers responsibility to do something about it.
It's true. I just entered that URL into Konqueror, running on Linux - as expected, it complained that the hostname couldn't be resolved and nothing else happened. I than entered the same URL into Firefox, running on the same (Linux-) machine. I ended up at microsoft.com.
Should forum administrators block links to websites in the former Soviet Union?
Bah. I've seen plenty of bad sites from the US. Occasionally, I see a pretty interesting site from russia. (Famous example: http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/) I think blocking all russian sites would be shooting yourself in the foot.
It is part of my value system that people must not murder other people. Now, is it immoral to impose this value system, or this part of my value system, unto others?
No, a brain works fundamentally different from a computer. True, a very much evolved computer may show emergent characteristics that might be interpreted as consciousness and emotions, but those would likely bear little resemblances to our idea of emotions.
Anyway, everything we have right now in this department is just a cheap, superficial copy of the real thing.
No, a robot pet can never learn love, loyalty, hate or other emotions. It can at best closely mimic the behaviour caused by these emotions in real animals.
TNG had an episode to show how stupid judging people on their sexual preferences is but showing a race that is purely homosexual (a 1 gender species that still used two people to procreate is off course the ultimate same sex race) with the sexual weirdos being those who tended to have heterosexual feelings.
Which episode was that?
I think I have seen nearly every TNG episode, but I can't recall this one...
I think there's another, quite simple rule to classify something as either fruit or vegetable, at least here in Germany:
If it comes from a one-yeared plant, it is a vegetable, otherwise it's a fruit.
Works quite well: Tomate -> One yeared plant -> vegetable
Potatoe -> one-yeared -> vegetable
Apple -> comes from trees -> fruit
Strawberry -> strawberry plants can live a long time -> fruit
It's Kilowatt times hours (kWh), not Kilowatt per hour (kW/h). There is such a thing as kWh per hour (== kW), but no such thing as kW per hour.</nitpickmode>
(KW is power, kWh is energy. Power doesn't "accumulate", energy does. Or was it that power does accumulate, but then it's referred to as energy? A second ago I thought I had a good grip on those concepts...)
Does it support JEP 0027 encryption or are there any plans to do so in the future?
JEP 0027 is a very straight-forward way to use OpenPGP based end-to-end encryption via Jabber. Everyone who has used PGP or GnuPG for their email will soon feel familiar with this scheme.
Right now, the only Jabberclient I know which supports this would be Psi, which is kind of sad.
If no, does anyone know of a Open Source, cross-platform IM-client (supporting at least Windows and Linux) with support for at least ICQ and Jabber and with JEP 0027 support?
Well, I'm glad I have a Lexmark laser printer, then. It has got what way too many modern appliances miss: a simple, old-fashioned, mechanical power switch. Instant off, guaranteed to draw no power at all.
Saying "I can provide real and reliable sources" without actually doing so is just as dodgy, maybe even more so, than not talking about reliable sources at all.
Depends on where you live. In certain jurisdictions, if there is a pressing need for the general public to make use of that land, the owner can be forced to.
In Germany, for example, if there were a pressing shortage of apartments/houses in a certain city because of which a lot of people ended up homeless, someone owning a big, empty apartment building could, theoretically, be forced to rent some of the apartments. (Or so i've been told. IANAL.)
Well, I am a German, and one of the sort who likes to correct what other people say...
The word "boxen" as a verb means exactly what was said, "boxing".
As a noun, "Boxen" means loudspeakers (plural). I guess this was originally taken from the english language.
Slashdot Mirror
No, whether or not you can link binary drivers to your kernel has no impact at all on what software you can run in userspace.
OTOH, allowing binary kernel modules can be a "slippery slope" that leads to a situation where you are *expected* to load binary kernel drivers just to have a working linux system. (Think XGL and the like - in a few years it may actually be required to have working 3D hardware acceleration in order to use a modern Unix/Linux desktop.)
Erm, no, the only commercial software made possible by this is hardware drivers - I wouldn't necessarily call that a "good thing". Yes, it means you can use your 3D-accelerated nvidia/ati-card right now, but it may also mean that there will never be a "proper" driver for those cards.
Larger commercial software products, like games, database systems, or what-have-you are not touched by this issue.
I don't think this holds true for database systems.
As far as I can see, the big databases like Oracle or Sybase are targeted at big corporations that don't have any second thoughts about hiring a full-time DBA - and as a consequence you will need one to use these products. Okay, maybe not a fulltime DBA, but at least a trained professional (trained for that particular application) to invest quite some time to even get stuff going.
For Postgres, OTOH, you'll just need someone smart with general knowledge of SQL and of the platform it's going to be running on - he needn't even have used Postgres before.
Excuse, but where did you read that FF has that exact same vulnerability?
Also, even though FF does have issues, I believe you'll be hard pressed to find a vulnerability in FF that has been known for years and still gone unfixed. (According to heise on http://www.heise-security.co.uk/news/79745 this is actually an old bug that also affects IE 6)
Er, sorry, the period at the end of the sentence was obviously not supposed to be part of the URL. Corrected version:
http://thedailywtf.com/
A reference to "The brillant Paula Bean". See http://thedailywtf.com./
>Sorry, I'm too lazy to search for the actual article in which she was featured right now.
Potential solution:
Okay, both of these are very unpractical...
Well, that's because the analogy is flawed.
A better analogy, IMHO, would be that you're paying someone a toll for the privilege of being allowed to use a high-speed road, where, as the company owning the road claims, you can go as fast as 85 mph. Now, obviously, sometimes the traffic even on a for-pay road might so thick that you can only go at 30 mph. But if that becomes the rule rather than the exception, then the owner of that road had better use all the toll-money he collects to increase the roads capacity or alternatively revise his claims about the speed you can get on his roads.
Okay, that analogy is still not very good, but I think it illustrates the point:
If a DSL provider sells DSL-lines with a certain speed to several thousand costumers, he also makes an implicit promise that he has the capacity to take the traffic of several thousand costumers. If there are "Internet-traffic-jams" on a regular basis with this provider, then its the providers responsibility to do something about it.
Maybe something's wrong with my local DNS setup, but so far, the only actually working example for a .eu domain name I've seen was "eurid.eu"....
it's FIREFOX doing it.
It's true. I just entered that URL into Konqueror, running on Linux - as expected, it complained that the hostname couldn't be resolved and nothing else happened.
I than entered the same URL into Firefox, running on the same (Linux-) machine. I ended up at microsoft.com.
WTF?
Should forum administrators block links to websites in the former Soviet Union?
Bah. I've seen plenty of bad sites from the US. Occasionally, I see a pretty interesting site from russia. (Famous example: http://www.artlebedev.com/portfolio/optimus/) I think blocking all russian sites would be shooting yourself in the foot.
It is part of my value system that people must not murder other people.
Now, is it immoral to impose this value system, or this part of my value system, unto others?
Face it buddy: you know as much about the complexity of brain as a Neanderthal would know about Halliburton-Cheney nexus.
I didn't say I knew exactly how a brain works. But even so I can be quite certain that it's very very different from how a computer works.
No, a brain works fundamentally different from a computer. True, a very much evolved computer may show emergent characteristics that might be interpreted as consciousness and emotions, but those would likely bear little resemblances to our idea of emotions.
Anyway, everything we have right now in this department is just a cheap, superficial copy of the real thing.
No, a robot pet can never learn love, loyalty, hate or other emotions. It can at best closely mimic the behaviour caused by these emotions in real animals.
TNG had an episode to show how stupid judging people on their sexual preferences is but showing a race that is purely homosexual (a 1 gender species that still used two people to procreate is off course the ultimate same sex race) with the sexual weirdos being those who tended to have heterosexual feelings.
Which episode was that?
I think I have seen nearly every TNG episode, but I can't recall this one...
I think there's another, quite simple rule to classify something as either fruit or vegetable, at least here in Germany:
If it comes from a one-yeared plant, it is a vegetable, otherwise it's a fruit.
Works quite well:
Tomate -> One yeared plant -> vegetable
Potatoe -> one-yeared -> vegetable
Apple -> comes from trees -> fruit
Strawberry -> strawberry plants can live a long time -> fruit
It's Kilowatt times hours (kWh), not Kilowatt per hour (kW/h). There is such a thing as kWh per hour (== kW), but no such thing as kW per hour.</nitpickmode>
(KW is power, kWh is energy. Power doesn't "accumulate", energy does. Or was it that power does accumulate, but then it's referred to as energy? A second ago I thought I had a good grip on those concepts...)
Does it support JEP 0027 encryption or are there any plans to do so in the future?
JEP 0027 is a very straight-forward way to use OpenPGP based end-to-end encryption via Jabber. Everyone who has used PGP or GnuPG for their email will soon feel familiar with this scheme.
Right now, the only Jabberclient I know which supports this would be Psi, which is kind of sad.
If no, does anyone know of a Open Source, cross-platform IM-client (supporting at least Windows and Linux) with support for at least ICQ and Jabber and with JEP 0027 support?
Yes, shooting presidents (or anybody else, in most cases) is certainly illegal.
Well, I'm glad I have a Lexmark laser printer, then. It has got what way too many modern appliances miss: a simple, old-fashioned, mechanical power switch. Instant off, guaranteed to draw no power at all.
Saying "I can provide real and reliable sources" without actually doing so is just as dodgy, maybe even more so, than not talking about reliable sources at all.
Depends on where you live. In certain jurisdictions, if there is a pressing need for the general public to make use of that land, the owner can be forced to.
In Germany, for example, if there were a pressing shortage of apartments/houses in a certain city because of which a lot of people ended up homeless, someone owning a big, empty apartment building could, theoretically, be forced to rent some of the apartments. (Or so i've been told. IANAL.)
Well, I am a German, and one of the sort who likes to correct what other people say...
The word "boxen" as a verb means exactly what was said, "boxing".
As a noun, "Boxen" means loudspeakers (plural). I guess this was originally taken from the english language.