Hurricane Katrina taught like five million people to be prepared.
And in case of Hurricane Katrina hitting New York (he said he's from New York. Out of hurricane territory, in most cases. So I said nuclear war. Excuuuuuse me.) you're *how* much better off with encrypted data than you are with unencrypted data?
We understand how 20 million transistors work together to form a computer but we do not have any idea what makes us love or hate each other.
Ja. Looks like we'll have to build an even *more* sophisticated computer to understand us. But to do that, we'll have to be even *smarter* than we are now. But if we get that smart, we'll be even *more* complicated. So we'll have to build an *even* *better* computer....
What kind of an inane question is this? You don't need any kind of encryption scheme at all. Take the social security card out of your wallet and look at it. It isn't encrypted, is it? Is your birth certificate encrypted? Stock certificates? Deed to your house? Mail from your Life Insurance Company? Driver's License? Sam's Club Card? Whining Yuppies' Guild Gold Membership Card?
As others have pointed, more politely than I think they needed to, "In case of a nuclear war, nobody's going to give a damn." You'll be struggling just to live. So will everybody around you. Nobody's going to give a damn about your stupid keychain drive with the password to all your porno-sites on it. And if you make it to a part of civilization where you actually get to *use* the damn thing for it's intended purpose, being to recover your life's data, you'll be lucky to find somebody's computer with a compatible document format to read it, let alone figure out how to recover the data from your ultra-secure storage method.
Why do you wish that they were going after television?
Because I like to worry you. "What can I do", I mused out loud to myself, startling the cat and spooking the mailman, "to make Secrity do a double-take thinking I'm out to get her/his favorite TV program, while seemingly posting an innocuous comment that would appear normal to everybody else?" This is the best I could come up with.
*Ahem* Beside that point, I was making a point about how we of the US live in a barbarian culture at perpetual war for the sake of world domination, obsessed with violent sports like football and NASCAR, awash in school shootings and employees going postal, adoring a religion whose central image is that of a man nailed to a couple of boards and left to die, singing a National Anthem that goes on at length about rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air, and flipping on the telly to escape it all with a few relaxing hours of car chases and shootings and stabbings and the team from CSI pulling OT to mop up the bodies in the wake; and then we ask "What's wrong? What needs fixing?" and the answer immediately comes: "Those little ActiveX console characters shooting rgb:#3E3E3E-colored bullets at each other, of course!" Oh, yes, that's what did it! The first time I saw Mario stomp on a shroom, it was that image alone that set my tender soul upon the brimstone path to Hell.
protect against and subsequently prosecute those found in violation of committing willful acts of "dissemination of certain ultra-violent explicit matter to minors"
Oh, but I wish that meant that they were going after television.
I notice that Linus softens his arguements considerably with "almost" "nearly", etc. He's not tarring every line of every spec ever committed to paper with the same brush.
The minds of the great and accomplished sometimes work in ways less fathomable to us mere mortals. But my take on this is "Be aware of the spec and if it matches reality, so much the better, but if it doesn't, it's time to throw away the spec." I'm considering it in the same spirit of "Just because you've seen a street map of New York, doesn't mean New York is divided into regular squares labeled 'E1', 'E2', etc. In other words, don't mistake the map for the territory." It's good advice for those wise enough to know how to take it, I think.
Get up to your elbows in code, and you'll notice the same relation between an object's spec and how it actually works that you see between a bill passed that creates a government department and what that department actually does ten years later. We *all* struggle to follow specs, standards, and protocols, but we keep running into special cases and exceptions that we have to work around.
Only an hour ago, I was grumbling over this very fact while pecking at my own box. I'm trying to write my own news-feed aggregator, and even though I'm sticking to feeds that specifically use RSS 2.0, I find the interpretation of RSS specs from one news-site to another into an actual feed are broadly applied at best and liberally amended to at worst. Once again, I have to ditch my initial "one-size-fits-all" idea (like I knew I would) and write the code to handle all the special cases and quirks (of course, this is a loose example: only three elements per list item are required, and some sixteen are "optional", with very fuzzy definitions. It's hardly expected to be carved in stone.). It's just how real life works.
Linus has always struck me as a severely practical, down-to-Earth person. His opinions can be considered as much an indictment of the spec-creation process as of specs themselves.
I would imagine that his workload has increased, and he's now facing one *heck* of a deadline. On the plus side, he's on a good footing to demand a raise.
PS Thanks to the complete Circus Clown's Fire Drill that has been the attempt to re-re-re-define the word "hacker" from the last quarter of the 20th century into this one, there is officially no such thing as hacking. The number of mis-percieved mis-definitions of the word surpassed the total human population about 1996 (yes, I wrote it down) and thus freed of the confines of mere space-time continuum, has increased exponentially ever since, which explains why each person can define the word five different ways and have *none* of them agree with anybody else's five different definitions.
This is where black holes come from. I nominate that, along with words like "Tao" and "mu", we puny mortals simply abandon the word back to the Ancient Ones from whence it came, admit that our shriveled husks of cortexes are incapable of fathoming such a deep concept, and hereafter relegate the word to the ranks of words which, if named, are not their true selves.
Which will spare us the upcoming inconclusive debate, now looming over this thread, over what hacking is for the 998.8E+999 time. Because I can't sit through another one. And to ensure I don't, I'm...I'm...I'm HOLDING THE EASTER BUNNY HOSTAGE! Yes! Drop the flamegun, or the lepus gets it right between the oculi!!! And there'll be no more Cadbury chocolate eggs for any of you!
*Everything* has to be discussed in terms of whether it will, or won't, kill, maim, cripple, weaken, tumble, block, spoil, ravage, or skin the knee of Microsoft? Can't we just once discuss a software title all by itself? Does the entire universe revolve around Redmond?
Here, like this: "I've used OpenOffice applications infrequently, and while I wouldn't describe them as perfect, they show some promise of being a solid software title in the near future.", or "I love my OpenOffice suite! The features are just right for what I need!", or "I'm not much of an OpenOffice fan. Their performance leaves much to be desired."
Not like this: "It's better than Microsoft!" "No, it isn't!" "Yes it is!!" "No, it isn't!!!" etc...
FTP, no, not for years. I don't really see a reason not to download a file directly from a webpage. Chat clients: *bing* yes, I stick my nose in one about once a year. Console-mode IRC is the internet without the web, granted; I forgot about that. And telnet and Usenet still around, of course. These days, you can even get Usenet archives in a nicely-formatted webpage. *sigh* OK, continue jumping on who you will, but I prefer just to assume what the speaker meant from context. By the way, I don't beat people up over saying "hacker" when they mean "cracker" or "desktop" when they mean "window manager" or "Linux" when they mean "GNU/Linux". I'm scandalous, I know!
Generally, "suit" is what geeks call people who have to wear one as part of their job. Most suits are not geeks. Most geeks are not suits. Therefore, geeks and suits rarely see eye-to-eye. Nevertheless, they frequently are forced by circumstances beyond their control to co-operate in order to achieve some otherwise-unobtainable goal, like keeping a company in business.
Nevertheless, it's not an automatic putdown. In this context, we may speak of "suitware" for "suits" to delimit the applications as being for office use, as opposed to something that's good for writing program code in. Some undercurrent of dislike may also be prevalent when you hear of a geek speak of "suitware" because...well...they're incredibly boring applications to design. Databases especially.
Congratulation, you don't seem to see the difference between "the web" and "the internet"
Pardon me. I'm not arguing with you. I'm not saying you're wrong. But I fail to see the point of jumping all over people about this. It has been about 20 years (give/take fudge factor) since I used the internet without using the web, I know of no way to use the web without using the internet, and do you know of any?
You're not better than a younger generation because you understand different things than they do. When you start to understand them, you're better than you were.
*standing ovation* Absolutely! As I mature, I find that there's never a time to stop learning. The tech I learned as a kid is vaporized. The tech I loved ten years ago is long gone. And the tech that I specialize in now will probably be out the door in ten *more* years; when it does, I want to be using the new thing. Nothing teaches you this concept better than programming languages, where you *must* learn at least one new language a year or get sucked into the tar pit.
Re: "Microsoft-haters"
Listen, if I loved Microsoft to little bitty pieces and hated every other system, I think I'd still use Firefox. It's the only user-friendly web-browser I've ever encountered. It has skinnable themes. It has plug-ins. It has extensions from the useful to the frivilously fun. And so simple to download/install all of the above, Aunt Tillie and Joe Sixpack can handle it. It adds a whole new dimension to the entire web experience, which is something that never even occured to me to say about a web browser before - before the web browser was just a random window to interact with the internet through.
Extra gee-whiz naive enthusiasm provided for your entertainment.
Usable, but clumsy. Now, a PHP app that auto-generates a Slashdot reply to cut-n-paste would go well here. The unselected options in this form would clutter up the post.
How? Vote for Clown A or Clown B in the next election? Print up flyers? Preach on soapboxes? Write our Congressmen? Telephone our Representative? Show up on the steps of the White House and protest?
We've all been doing that for decades. Here's a sad truth: We do not have the Government for our adversary. We have for our adversary the 51% who cruise along in their cushy lives in blissful ignorance of anything wrong.
Slashdot Mirror
And in case of Hurricane Katrina hitting New York (he said he's from New York. Out of hurricane territory, in most cases. So I said nuclear war. Excuuuuuse me.) you're *how* much better off with encrypted data than you are with unencrypted data?
For me, happiness doesn't come from what I can get, only from what I can do.
Ja. Looks like we'll have to build an even *more* sophisticated computer to understand us. But to do that, we'll have to be even *smarter* than we are now. But if we get that smart, we'll be even *more* complicated. So we'll have to build an *even* *better* computer....
By *your* reasoning, you should cut your credit card up into tiny splinters. I'm waiting...
Well, duh, keep the USB drive in a safe place, too! How is that less safe than your personal paper documents?
As others have pointed, more politely than I think they needed to, "In case of a nuclear war, nobody's going to give a damn." You'll be struggling just to live. So will everybody around you. Nobody's going to give a damn about your stupid keychain drive with the password to all your porno-sites on it. And if you make it to a part of civilization where you actually get to *use* the damn thing for it's intended purpose, being to recover your life's data, you'll be lucky to find somebody's computer with a compatible document format to read it, let alone figure out how to recover the data from your ultra-secure storage method.
Get a LIFE!
Because I like to worry you. "What can I do", I mused out loud to myself, startling the cat and spooking the mailman, "to make Secrity do a double-take thinking I'm out to get her/his favorite TV program, while seemingly posting an innocuous comment that would appear normal to everybody else?" This is the best I could come up with.
*Ahem* Beside that point, I was making a point about how we of the US live in a barbarian culture at perpetual war for the sake of world domination, obsessed with violent sports like football and NASCAR, awash in school shootings and employees going postal, adoring a religion whose central image is that of a man nailed to a couple of boards and left to die, singing a National Anthem that goes on at length about rockets red glare and bombs bursting in air, and flipping on the telly to escape it all with a few relaxing hours of car chases and shootings and stabbings and the team from CSI pulling OT to mop up the bodies in the wake; and then we ask "What's wrong? What needs fixing?" and the answer immediately comes: "Those little ActiveX console characters shooting rgb:#3E3E3E-colored bullets at each other, of course!" Oh, yes, that's what did it! The first time I saw Mario stomp on a shroom, it was that image alone that set my tender soul upon the brimstone path to Hell.
...meanwhile we all go from being dumb users to hackers to dumb users again. Ah, synergy.
You can have all that. I want a wireless jack to Google in my brain so I can go on Jeopardy and beat Ken Jennings' record.
Yuk! Yuk! No, wait, I got one! An extension to gmail that let's you find the best pr0n quickly: g-string!
Oh, but I wish that meant that they were going after television.
The minds of the great and accomplished sometimes work in ways less fathomable to us mere mortals. But my take on this is "Be aware of the spec and if it matches reality, so much the better, but if it doesn't, it's time to throw away the spec." I'm considering it in the same spirit of "Just because you've seen a street map of New York, doesn't mean New York is divided into regular squares labeled 'E1', 'E2', etc. In other words, don't mistake the map for the territory." It's good advice for those wise enough to know how to take it, I think.
Get up to your elbows in code, and you'll notice the same relation between an object's spec and how it actually works that you see between a bill passed that creates a government department and what that department actually does ten years later. We *all* struggle to follow specs, standards, and protocols, but we keep running into special cases and exceptions that we have to work around.
Only an hour ago, I was grumbling over this very fact while pecking at my own box. I'm trying to write my own news-feed aggregator, and even though I'm sticking to feeds that specifically use RSS 2.0, I find the interpretation of RSS specs from one news-site to another into an actual feed are broadly applied at best and liberally amended to at worst. Once again, I have to ditch my initial "one-size-fits-all" idea (like I knew I would) and write the code to handle all the special cases and quirks (of course, this is a loose example: only three elements per list item are required, and some sixteen are "optional", with very fuzzy definitions. It's hardly expected to be carved in stone.). It's just how real life works.
Linus has always struck me as a severely practical, down-to-Earth person. His opinions can be considered as much an indictment of the spec-creation process as of specs themselves.
How'd that moderation get past the Ubuntu Mafia?
I would imagine that his workload has increased, and he's now facing one *heck* of a deadline. On the plus side, he's on a good footing to demand a raise.
"Yeah, but does it run Linux?"
PS Thanks to the complete Circus Clown's Fire Drill that has been the attempt to re-re-re-define the word "hacker" from the last quarter of the 20th century into this one, there is officially no such thing as hacking. The number of mis-percieved mis-definitions of the word surpassed the total human population about 1996 (yes, I wrote it down) and thus freed of the confines of mere space-time continuum, has increased exponentially ever since, which explains why each person can define the word five different ways and have *none* of them agree with anybody else's five different definitions.
This is where black holes come from. I nominate that, along with words like "Tao" and "mu", we puny mortals simply abandon the word back to the Ancient Ones from whence it came, admit that our shriveled husks of cortexes are incapable of fathoming such a deep concept, and hereafter relegate the word to the ranks of words which, if named, are not their true selves.
Which will spare us the upcoming inconclusive debate, now looming over this thread, over what hacking is for the 998.8E+999 time. Because I can't sit through another one. And to ensure I don't, I'm...I'm...I'm HOLDING THE EASTER BUNNY HOSTAGE! Yes! Drop the flamegun, or the lepus gets it right between the oculi!!! And there'll be no more Cadbury chocolate eggs for any of you!
Here, like this: "I've used OpenOffice applications infrequently, and while I wouldn't describe them as perfect, they show some promise of being a solid software title in the near future.", or "I love my OpenOffice suite! The features are just right for what I need!", or "I'm not much of an OpenOffice fan. Their performance leaves much to be desired."
Not like this: "It's better than Microsoft!" "No, it isn't!" "Yes it is!!" "No, it isn't!!!" etc...
FTP, no, not for years. I don't really see a reason not to download a file directly from a webpage. Chat clients: *bing* yes, I stick my nose in one about once a year. Console-mode IRC is the internet without the web, granted; I forgot about that. And telnet and Usenet still around, of course. These days, you can even get Usenet archives in a nicely-formatted webpage. *sigh* OK, continue jumping on who you will, but I prefer just to assume what the speaker meant from context. By the way, I don't beat people up over saying "hacker" when they mean "cracker" or "desktop" when they mean "window manager" or "Linux" when they mean "GNU/Linux". I'm scandalous, I know!
http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/S/suit.html
Generally, "suit" is what geeks call people who have to wear one as part of their job. Most suits are not geeks. Most geeks are not suits. Therefore, geeks and suits rarely see eye-to-eye. Nevertheless, they frequently are forced by circumstances beyond their control to co-operate in order to achieve some otherwise-unobtainable goal, like keeping a company in business.
Nevertheless, it's not an automatic putdown. In this context, we may speak of "suitware" for "suits" to delimit the applications as being for office use, as opposed to something that's good for writing program code in. Some undercurrent of dislike may also be prevalent when you hear of a geek speak of "suitware" because...well...they're incredibly boring applications to design. Databases especially.
Pardon me. I'm not arguing with you. I'm not saying you're wrong. But I fail to see the point of jumping all over people about this. It has been about 20 years (give/take fudge factor) since I used the internet without using the web, I know of no way to use the web without using the internet, and do you know of any?
*standing ovation* Absolutely! As I mature, I find that there's never a time to stop learning. The tech I learned as a kid is vaporized. The tech I loved ten years ago is long gone. And the tech that I specialize in now will probably be out the door in ten *more* years; when it does, I want to be using the new thing. Nothing teaches you this concept better than programming languages, where you *must* learn at least one new language a year or get sucked into the tar pit.
Listen, if I loved Microsoft to little bitty pieces and hated every other system, I think I'd still use Firefox. It's the only user-friendly web-browser I've ever encountered. It has skinnable themes. It has plug-ins. It has extensions from the useful to the frivilously fun. And so simple to download/install all of the above, Aunt Tillie and Joe Sixpack can handle it. It adds a whole new dimension to the entire web experience, which is something that never even occured to me to say about a web browser before - before the web browser was just a random window to interact with the internet through.
Extra gee-whiz naive enthusiasm provided for your entertainment.
___-excerpt from the forthcoming book: "Everything I need to know in life, I learned from playing Rampage".
Usable, but clumsy. Now, a PHP app that auto-generates a Slashdot reply to cut-n-paste would go well here. The unselected options in this form would clutter up the post.
How? Vote for Clown A or Clown B in the next election? Print up flyers? Preach on soapboxes? Write our Congressmen? Telephone our Representative? Show up on the steps of the White House and protest?
We've all been doing that for decades. Here's a sad truth: We do not have the Government for our adversary. We have for our adversary the 51% who cruise along in their cushy lives in blissful ignorance of anything wrong.