Thank you for spelling out the conclusions Apple likely made (internally) leading up to the decision not to support flash on it's initial release and brain storming some possible solutions
No, this isn't it. Their decision process goes more like this: "Flash allows people to run software on their phone that they didn't buy through the App Store. We have to reject it, but start thinking of reasons that don't sound so much like 'we are greedy bastards.'" Otherwise, where is Java? Hover is certainly not unique to Flash, and it's certainly not an unsolvable problem (trackpads solved it a long time ago), nor is it very frequently an essential interface element (usually it just gives access to some additional detail).
If the object under the start of the drag is draggable, then it's a drag. If it's not, then it's a hover. Just like trackpads, single finger interactions should not be a scroll action (I know they are, and that's the fundamental problem, not something endemic to Flash). You should use two fingers to scroll, one finger to drag/hover.
Trackpads have solved all of these problems a long time ago, they are not unique to "touch" interfaces, except that touch interfaces have undone many of the solutions already discovered.
Yes but then the school started using the laptops to monitor students behavior
So the suit alleges, and which the district denies. It seems way more likely that the student was stupid enough to use the camera himself, then forward the image to a friend.
His problem was due to a misunderstanding of the problem domain
Certainly. So are most (arguably all at some level) software bugs, either because of imperfect understanding or because the domain has since shifted. With perfect knowledge of the input domain (and unlimited development time), no actual validation is required, non-validating standard logic will handle it. Unfortunately we neither have perfect knowledge nor unlimited time.
I'm not saying he didn't make a mistake, I'm just saying it's impossible to never make a mistake.
That last part is bad design and bad practice, not an inherent flaw of software in general.
I agree, the flaw is not endemic to software, it's endemic to humans writing that software.
The problem is the same as that which makes antivirus software imperfect. What you're describing assumes perfect knowledge of the input domain, and that simply doesn't exist except in extremely simple cases (such as validating an integer). As systems grow past single-value systems, the number of possible permutations increases as a very high order exponential.
It's not possible to do the sort of work he was doing while validating against a list of known-good inputs. The known-good list would only be a set of messages he identified in advance as being valid, and that doesn't provide a very meaningful program (if it already has the set of good messages to validate against, it doesn't exactly need to go fetch them). So you try to write whitelist or blacklist rules which reasonably cover the possible domain, but by doing so it requires that you anticipate the sorts of situation which leads to valid and invalid inputs, and must accept that there'll be a certain false positive and false negative rate. It sounds like he anticipated a lot of potential problems (eg, the same image submitted in different posts), and corrected for them already. One he hadn't anticipated got past him (the same image twice in the same post).
Antivirus software's whole job is to provide input validation for the operating system. The entire industry exists exclusively to do this, and the collective human expertise in that industry has so far not yet been up to the task of accomplishing this task successfully (and if there was a magic bullet, it would only take a single person to discover it to revolutionize the industry). It's not like that whole industry is going to read your post, slap its forehead and declare, "If only we had thought to validate the input and only accept it if it's good!" The domain of possibilities is simply too large to meaningfully cover it, and the same is true of newsgroup parsing.
Female cats' need to mate can be satisfied, and so an infertile mate will remove the female from the breeding population for a time.
Until she mates or is spayed, these estrus cycles will repeat as often as every two or three weeks, causing distress to both the queen and her human companions. (1)
Male cats also have a barbed penis; upon withdrawal, the vagina is damaged and the female would be unwilling to mate for a while even if she remained in estrus (i.e. if ovulation failed to be stimulated).
30 seconds of research would tell you that Mennonites have no particular aversion to technology. They aren't the Amish. If you want to be a mennonite technophile, nobody would look at you cross-wise.
Traditional mennonites avoid technology because they value hard work and duty, and prefer not to introduce non-essential distractions into their lives. There's nothing "showy" about it at all. If asked, they'll tell you why they don't have technology, but if not asked, they probably won't unless it was relevant to the conversation (eg, "Did you see Lost?" "No, sorry, I don't have a TV."). They would neither make a point to tell you this, nor make a point to avoid talking about it. It just is.
So it's not some violation of their religious principles for them to go watch their son's race on a neighbor's TV - this neither distracts them from their duties, nor violates any principles. In fact, it lines up quite perfectly with their choice of lifestyle - when something is important, they can call in a favor and get the value of the technology, but when it's not important, it's probably better they didn't clutter up their lives with it.
"I'd have more respect for them if they simply didn't own a television by choice and watched it at their neighbor's place..." that's exactly what it is not this: "rather than out of some showy religious gesture."
A major motivation for the right to bear arms was that it required the government to exist in fear of its citizens (i.e. if the government sufficiently violates the will of the people, the people have the capacity to rise up against the government).
So I think that yes, the founding fathers probably would expect that the citizens be permitted access to such weapons as would be required for a successful revolt. I don't know that biological weapons would qualify, nor weapons of mass destruction, but almost certainly more than is typically legal for most citizens to own now.
I missed it (I'm in this area), but I do know that Comcast and NBC have been trying to merge. They were in front of Congress recently arguing why they should be allowed to (it's very unlikely that this will spell good things for consumers, particularly with NBC's interest in Hulu which is open to everyone and Comcast's interest in fancast, which is open only to Comcast subscribers).
And where does it store this ID so that it knows for sure it's the same volume in the future? That's right, on the disk. Clone the disk, and the ID gets cloned too. Now the OS is confused because two disks have the same ID, and it's not sure which one is which (sure it can address them differently still, but which one should it boot from, etc?)
Re:Uh... everyone seems focused on amazon but...
on
Authors' Amazon Awareness
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· Score: 2, Insightful
And besides, devices like the kindle do not lend themselves to very specific layouts by the publisher; they allow you to change font sizes, and the text reflows automatically. Like HTML the publisher doesn't spend lots of time pouring over kerning and leading, making sure that white space rivers don't appear and that text flows meaningfully around any illustrations. You just don't have that much control in an e-book.
There is no way production costs on an e-book are higher than any printed form. Printed forms have the same (or more demanding) layout requirements, more proofreading (making sure the are not words which fell off the page when making plates, for example), plus physical material costs, man hours to run and clean the presses, run the paper shears, collate the pages, fold them, bind them, box them, then there's the physical shipping involved. I worked in a press room for a couple of years in college. Until you get into the very, very large publishers, there's a whole lot of manual labor involved, and even when you're one of the very large publishers, there's still a lot of very expensive equipment involved (whose price needs to be part of the cost of the books printed on them).
The e-book has none of that overhead, someone performs the same level of quality control as the print plates (less really, there aren't blue lines and gels to produce for proofing, etc), then someone runs a software tool to produce the e-book format (which most likely takes less than a minute), and the process is complete. It's ludicrous to suggest that the production costs of an e-book are anywhere near similar to a paperback. Sure there are shared fixed costs which need to be recouped (writing and editing mostly), but an e-book should be half the price of a paperback - or less.
My mother in law's phone has no dial tone. She can place and receive calls on it just fine. But she has been unable to convince the phone company to fix it because they insist that if she can place calls on that line (which she can), then it has a dial tone (which it doesn't).
It turns out to not be that big of a deal. The biggest inconvenience was having to tell the TiVO to not wait for a dial tone before it dials out to get program listings (earlier model before they could use the Internet for this). And once in a while we get a call from her to make sure her phone works (eg, after a storm) since there's no way for her to know other than to call someone.
Some people claim that glass is actually a supercooled liquid because there is no first order phase transition as it cools. In fact, there is a second order transition between the supercooled liquid state and the glass state, so a distinction can still be drawn.
and
The use of the term "supercooled liquid" to describe glass still persists, but is considered by many to be an unfortunate misnomer that should be avoided.
Flash and Silverlight may be proprietary (for some narrow definition of proprietary: they both have public specifications and even fairly featureful open source implementations of both), but don't kid yourself into thinking this has anything to do with why they won't be permitted on that platform.
Apple rejects them for one reason only: they grant the user control over their own device, and Apple wants anything but that. You can run software with these (and the Java runtime which also won't be permitted past the Apple gatekeepers), which you didn't downloaded through Apple's exclusive and tightly controlled distribution channel and which isn't just an elaborate webpage.
Apple won't let any virtual machine or runtime compiler on their hardware no matter how standards compliant it might be. They even blocked the Commodore 64 emulator for a while because being able to run software from almost 30 years ago that hadn't previously been approved by Apple was giving the user too much control over the hardware they own.
Without being as bitter about it as you seem to be, I'll agree. Many of the PhD students / holders I have known are actually mostly just people who weren't really sure what the next step was going to be for themselves when they got to the end of their undergrad career. Remaining in academia was easier for them than trying to enter the next phase of their life. Some of them then remain in academia as professors, so they never really experience what the rest of us consider normal life (not that there's anything wrong with that - I wish I possessed exactly the right mix of motivation and apathy which seems to have gotten most professors where they are).
That's not to say this is true of every PhD student. It's just that you need to be of reasonable intelligence, and willing to dedicate a lot of time to it. Those are really the only requirements - it really doesn't require exceptional intelligence like it once did, just time.
My work experience with PhDs has lead me to the conclusion that most of them are good at philosophizing about their field of study, but few really possess any real capacity to accomplish much outside of theory. If what you need in a new hire is a theory person, then this is probably right for you. If you need a pragmatist or real producer of tangible work product, then seeing a PhD on the resume should make you hesitate.
To go anecdotal, just today a friend was lamenting to me how difficult he finds it working with the PhDs at his company. They rejected the approach his team was taking toward a super high volume proxy for a particular kind of data as being ideologically incorrect, and built their own competing product. The undergrad team produced software capable of handling 50,000 connections per second, while the PhDs could handle at most 1 or 2 thousand on the same hardware. The same team had previously experienced problems where software written by the PhDs was broadcasting data in a deprecated format. The PhDs refused to believe that their software was wrong, and insisted that my friend's team was the source of the disconnect. It took several months of his team translating the deprecated data format to the new data format before the PhD team quietly announced (not to his group) that their software had not been updating correctly for the past few months.
I know, anecdotes do not a rule make, but it's pretty consistent with my own experience as well. There are some firecracker PhDs out there, you can often easily distinguish them from the lamers because of the prominence of their insistence on recognition of their education. The good PhDs don't jam it down everyone's throat, while the bad ones use it as a form of appeal to authority (i.e. don't question me, I'm a PhD, you've only got a bachelors, etc).
I tend to double-click the word or sentence I'm on to select it just before I scroll. Helps me keep my reading pace up since I don't lose track of my position.
I didn't say the artwork doesn't matter; without artwork the tone and tenor of the humor changes. It becomes not a comic but just dialog heavy prose. Obviously the effect is different.
The point I was making, in case your question wasn't purely rhetorical, is that some comics use their artwork to make the joke; some just use it as part of the story telling. Neither class of humor is innately better or worse than the other; but the latter category depends more on wit than the former, and that appeals to me.
-----
T-rex says, "Utahraptor and I enter a bar, him dressed mostly in black and me dressed mostly in white. We sit at opposite ends of the bar.
"I order a drink for the angriest-looking lady in the room!
"Utahraptor orders one for her too, only his drink is slightly fancier than mine. And we go back and forth, upping the ante, sending over fancier and fancier drinks, until we're sending over full bottles of champagne!"
"And then?" wonders Dromicemomius.
"And then we send over food! Nachos! Fries! CHICKEN WINGS."
"So now this angry woman is surrounded on all sides by chicken wings," observes Utahraptor.
T-Rex confirms, "And booze, yeah!
"And she'll be so happy! It's IMPOSSIBLE to be angry when surrounded by chicken wings!! It's impossible, Utahraptor. I tried it."
"So we're cheering up a random woman at some expense," continues Utahraptor, "but at the end, we probably all get to eat wings together. Alright, I'm in! Let's do it!"
Later, T-Rex is dejected. "What was an angry prohibitionist chicken-rights activist doing in a bar anyway?!"
The value in some comics is their artwork. The value in some comics is their humor or topics. I tend to prefer the latter. Dinosaur comics makes me laugh more consistently than almost any other comic out there.
I love the fact that his humor does not need to be propped up with artwork; it stands on its own.
Yes it is; my ICQ number (8 digits) was one that I memorized the very first time I saw it for whatever reason (there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason that it would stick out in my head so strongly, not like there was a pattern I could ever discern). Insanely enough I was given a workstation at a company that names their workstations {sitecode}{locationcode}{assetID}. The assetID portion of my workstation was my exact 8-digit ICQ number. And once again I had no problem memorizing my worstation name, though it actually took me 2 or 3 years before I realized that this was my ICQ number (which was a huge mind eff when that realization struck).
It's what the obscurity is of that matters. Depending on obscurity in an algorithm means that all uses of that algorithm can be broken with a single loss of obscurity. Depending on obscurity of the key means that when there is an obscurity breach, only that one individual who lost their key is prone to suffer data loss, while it represents no threat to everyone else.
That's the point, access was only authorized for a specific purpose (authorized and granted accesses do not need to necessarily agree). Installing the rootkit (or maliciously altering the configuration to provide some alternate back door) is beyond that purpose and therefore is illegal.
For a real world analogy, if you have a plumber into your house to work on a clogged sink, and while he's there, he unlocks a window to facilitate access at a later date, that is illegal. Allowing someone into your house for one purpose does not give the carte blanche to do whatever they like while they're in there, and does not confer any future access rights.
...something we can actually verify: has somebody every been prosecuted...
Oh brother, successful prosecution is not required for something to have been illegal. Otherwise it'd be impossible to pass any new laws. It's also not impossible to know law without being a lawyer (in fact, citizens are expected to, however infeasible that may be in real practice).
If you'd like something you can actually verify, here are the specific articles which refer to relevant computer crimes in each of the states in the US (still don't know where you're located, maybe these aren't your jurisdiction, but I'm in the US, and these are ours). This is according to the National Conference of State Legislatures; there are other federal statues as well, but I figured this is a better example by way of demonstrating that these subjects are things which have received substantial consideration and which have extremely wide precedent.
Notably, you'll see the following text on this page (emphasis mine):
"Unauthorized access" entails approaching, trespassing within, communicating with, storing data in, retrieving data from, or otherwise intercepting and changing computer resources without consent. These laws relate to either or both, or any other actions that interfere with computers, systems, programs or networks.
It would certainly depend on your specific agreement with your host, but unless they have a clause in there which permits them to root your server without your permission (and I don't doubt that there are some providers which do), it would definitely be illegal (at least in most of the world - I don't know where you live). A legitimate provider which has as part of their terms of service a requirement that they retain root access will not need to do so with covert methods though.
There's some sort of genetic predisposition to various types of hangover. My wife drinks a small glass of water and has no problems no matter how much she had the night before (her brother is the same way).
Headaches are typically dehydration headaches, and what you suggest works well for me for that. But alcohol can irritate the GI tract in some people (such as me), and this can lead to nausea and vomiting, and these things can themselves produce a second kind of headache not cured by hydration. The only way I've found around this second set of symptoms is moderation.
Slashdot Mirror
No, this isn't it. Their decision process goes more like this: "Flash allows people to run software on their phone that they didn't buy through the App Store. We have to reject it, but start thinking of reasons that don't sound so much like 'we are greedy bastards.'" Otherwise, where is Java? Hover is certainly not unique to Flash, and it's certainly not an unsolvable problem (trackpads solved it a long time ago), nor is it very frequently an essential interface element (usually it just gives access to some additional detail).
If the object under the start of the drag is draggable, then it's a drag. If it's not, then it's a hover. Just like trackpads, single finger interactions should not be a scroll action (I know they are, and that's the fundamental problem, not something endemic to Flash). You should use two fingers to scroll, one finger to drag/hover.
Trackpads have solved all of these problems a long time ago, they are not unique to "touch" interfaces, except that touch interfaces have undone many of the solutions already discovered.
So the suit alleges, and which the district denies. It seems way more likely that the student was stupid enough to use the camera himself, then forward the image to a friend.
Certainly. So are most (arguably all at some level) software bugs, either because of imperfect understanding or because the domain has since shifted. With perfect knowledge of the input domain (and unlimited development time), no actual validation is required, non-validating standard logic will handle it. Unfortunately we neither have perfect knowledge nor unlimited time.
I'm not saying he didn't make a mistake, I'm just saying it's impossible to never make a mistake.
I agree, the flaw is not endemic to software, it's endemic to humans writing that software.
The problem is the same as that which makes antivirus software imperfect. What you're describing assumes perfect knowledge of the input domain, and that simply doesn't exist except in extremely simple cases (such as validating an integer). As systems grow past single-value systems, the number of possible permutations increases as a very high order exponential.
It's not possible to do the sort of work he was doing while validating against a list of known-good inputs. The known-good list would only be a set of messages he identified in advance as being valid, and that doesn't provide a very meaningful program (if it already has the set of good messages to validate against, it doesn't exactly need to go fetch them). So you try to write whitelist or blacklist rules which reasonably cover the possible domain, but by doing so it requires that you anticipate the sorts of situation which leads to valid and invalid inputs, and must accept that there'll be a certain false positive and false negative rate. It sounds like he anticipated a lot of potential problems (eg, the same image submitted in different posts), and corrected for them already. One he hadn't anticipated got past him (the same image twice in the same post).
Antivirus software's whole job is to provide input validation for the operating system. The entire industry exists exclusively to do this, and the collective human expertise in that industry has so far not yet been up to the task of accomplishing this task successfully (and if there was a magic bullet, it would only take a single person to discover it to revolutionize the industry). It's not like that whole industry is going to read your post, slap its forehead and declare, "If only we had thought to validate the input and only accept it if it's good!" The domain of possibilities is simply too large to meaningfully cover it, and the same is true of newsgroup parsing.
Female cats' need to mate can be satisfied, and so an infertile mate will remove the female from the breeding population for a time.
Male cats also have a barbed penis; upon withdrawal, the vagina is damaged and the female would be unwilling to mate for a while even if she remained in estrus (i.e. if ovulation failed to be stimulated).
30 seconds of research would tell you that Mennonites have no particular aversion to technology. They aren't the Amish. If you want to be a mennonite technophile, nobody would look at you cross-wise.
Traditional mennonites avoid technology because they value hard work and duty, and prefer not to introduce non-essential distractions into their lives. There's nothing "showy" about it at all. If asked, they'll tell you why they don't have technology, but if not asked, they probably won't unless it was relevant to the conversation (eg, "Did you see Lost?" "No, sorry, I don't have a TV."). They would neither make a point to tell you this, nor make a point to avoid talking about it. It just is.
So it's not some violation of their religious principles for them to go watch their son's race on a neighbor's TV - this neither distracts them from their duties, nor violates any principles. In fact, it lines up quite perfectly with their choice of lifestyle - when something is important, they can call in a favor and get the value of the technology, but when it's not important, it's probably better they didn't clutter up their lives with it.
"I'd have more respect for them if they simply didn't own a television by choice and watched it at their neighbor's place..." that's exactly what it is not this: "rather than out of some showy religious gesture."
Isn't that the point of a Godzilla movie?
A major motivation for the right to bear arms was that it required the government to exist in fear of its citizens (i.e. if the government sufficiently violates the will of the people, the people have the capacity to rise up against the government).
So I think that yes, the founding fathers probably would expect that the citizens be permitted access to such weapons as would be required for a successful revolt. I don't know that biological weapons would qualify, nor weapons of mass destruction, but almost certainly more than is typically legal for most citizens to own now.
I missed it (I'm in this area), but I do know that Comcast and NBC have been trying to merge. They were in front of Congress recently arguing why they should be allowed to (it's very unlikely that this will spell good things for consumers, particularly with NBC's interest in Hulu which is open to everyone and Comcast's interest in fancast, which is open only to Comcast subscribers).
And where does it store this ID so that it knows for sure it's the same volume in the future? That's right, on the disk. Clone the disk, and the ID gets cloned too. Now the OS is confused because two disks have the same ID, and it's not sure which one is which (sure it can address them differently still, but which one should it boot from, etc?)
And besides, devices like the kindle do not lend themselves to very specific layouts by the publisher; they allow you to change font sizes, and the text reflows automatically. Like HTML the publisher doesn't spend lots of time pouring over kerning and leading, making sure that white space rivers don't appear and that text flows meaningfully around any illustrations. You just don't have that much control in an e-book.
There is no way production costs on an e-book are higher than any printed form. Printed forms have the same (or more demanding) layout requirements, more proofreading (making sure the are not words which fell off the page when making plates, for example), plus physical material costs, man hours to run and clean the presses, run the paper shears, collate the pages, fold them, bind them, box them, then there's the physical shipping involved. I worked in a press room for a couple of years in college. Until you get into the very, very large publishers, there's a whole lot of manual labor involved, and even when you're one of the very large publishers, there's still a lot of very expensive equipment involved (whose price needs to be part of the cost of the books printed on them).
The e-book has none of that overhead, someone performs the same level of quality control as the print plates (less really, there aren't blue lines and gels to produce for proofing, etc), then someone runs a software tool to produce the e-book format (which most likely takes less than a minute), and the process is complete. It's ludicrous to suggest that the production costs of an e-book are anywhere near similar to a paperback. Sure there are shared fixed costs which need to be recouped (writing and editing mostly), but an e-book should be half the price of a paperback - or less.
My mother in law's phone has no dial tone. She can place and receive calls on it just fine. But she has been unable to convince the phone company to fix it because they insist that if she can place calls on that line (which she can), then it has a dial tone (which it doesn't).
It turns out to not be that big of a deal. The biggest inconvenience was having to tell the TiVO to not wait for a dial tone before it dials out to get program listings (earlier model before they could use the Internet for this). And once in a while we get a call from her to make sure her phone works (eg, after a storm) since there's no way for her to know other than to call someone.
From your own citation:
and
Flash and Silverlight may be proprietary (for some narrow definition of proprietary: they both have public specifications and even fairly featureful open source implementations of both), but don't kid yourself into thinking this has anything to do with why they won't be permitted on that platform.
Apple rejects them for one reason only: they grant the user control over their own device, and Apple wants anything but that. You can run software with these (and the Java runtime which also won't be permitted past the Apple gatekeepers), which you didn't downloaded through Apple's exclusive and tightly controlled distribution channel and which isn't just an elaborate webpage.
Apple won't let any virtual machine or runtime compiler on their hardware no matter how standards compliant it might be. They even blocked the Commodore 64 emulator for a while because being able to run software from almost 30 years ago that hadn't previously been approved by Apple was giving the user too much control over the hardware they own.
Without being as bitter about it as you seem to be, I'll agree. Many of the PhD students / holders I have known are actually mostly just people who weren't really sure what the next step was going to be for themselves when they got to the end of their undergrad career. Remaining in academia was easier for them than trying to enter the next phase of their life. Some of them then remain in academia as professors, so they never really experience what the rest of us consider normal life (not that there's anything wrong with that - I wish I possessed exactly the right mix of motivation and apathy which seems to have gotten most professors where they are).
That's not to say this is true of every PhD student. It's just that you need to be of reasonable intelligence, and willing to dedicate a lot of time to it. Those are really the only requirements - it really doesn't require exceptional intelligence like it once did, just time.
My work experience with PhDs has lead me to the conclusion that most of them are good at philosophizing about their field of study, but few really possess any real capacity to accomplish much outside of theory. If what you need in a new hire is a theory person, then this is probably right for you. If you need a pragmatist or real producer of tangible work product, then seeing a PhD on the resume should make you hesitate.
To go anecdotal, just today a friend was lamenting to me how difficult he finds it working with the PhDs at his company. They rejected the approach his team was taking toward a super high volume proxy for a particular kind of data as being ideologically incorrect, and built their own competing product. The undergrad team produced software capable of handling 50,000 connections per second, while the PhDs could handle at most 1 or 2 thousand on the same hardware. The same team had previously experienced problems where software written by the PhDs was broadcasting data in a deprecated format. The PhDs refused to believe that their software was wrong, and insisted that my friend's team was the source of the disconnect. It took several months of his team translating the deprecated data format to the new data format before the PhD team quietly announced (not to his group) that their software had not been updating correctly for the past few months.
I know, anecdotes do not a rule make, but it's pretty consistent with my own experience as well. There are some firecracker PhDs out there, you can often easily distinguish them from the lamers because of the prominence of their insistence on recognition of their education. The good PhDs don't jam it down everyone's throat, while the bad ones use it as a form of appeal to authority (i.e. don't question me, I'm a PhD, you've only got a bachelors, etc).
I tend to double-click the word or sentence I'm on to select it just before I scroll. Helps me keep my reading pace up since I don't lose track of my position.
I didn't say the artwork doesn't matter; without artwork the tone and tenor of the humor changes. It becomes not a comic but just dialog heavy prose. Obviously the effect is different.
The point I was making, in case your question wasn't purely rhetorical, is that some comics use their artwork to make the joke; some just use it as part of the story telling. Neither class of humor is innately better or worse than the other; but the latter category depends more on wit than the former, and that appeals to me.
-----
T-rex says, "Utahraptor and I enter a bar, him dressed mostly in black and me dressed mostly in white. We sit at opposite ends of the bar.
"I order a drink for the angriest-looking lady in the room!
"Utahraptor orders one for her too, only his drink is slightly fancier than mine. And we go back and forth, upping the ante, sending over fancier and fancier drinks, until we're sending over full bottles of champagne!"
"And then?" wonders Dromicemomius.
"And then we send over food! Nachos! Fries! CHICKEN WINGS."
"So now this angry woman is surrounded on all sides by chicken wings," observes Utahraptor.
T-Rex confirms, "And booze, yeah!
"And she'll be so happy! It's IMPOSSIBLE to be angry when surrounded by chicken wings!! It's impossible, Utahraptor. I tried it."
"So we're cheering up a random woman at some expense," continues Utahraptor, "but at the end, we probably all get to eat wings together. Alright, I'm in! Let's do it!"
Later, T-Rex is dejected. "What was an angry prohibitionist chicken-rights activist doing in a bar anyway?!"
"Maaaaaaaan."
The value in some comics is their artwork. The value in some comics is their humor or topics. I tend to prefer the latter. Dinosaur comics makes me laugh more consistently than almost any other comic out there.
I love the fact that his humor does not need to be propped up with artwork; it stands on its own.
Yes it is; my ICQ number (8 digits) was one that I memorized the very first time I saw it for whatever reason (there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason that it would stick out in my head so strongly, not like there was a pattern I could ever discern). Insanely enough I was given a workstation at a company that names their workstations {sitecode}{locationcode}{assetID}. The assetID portion of my workstation was my exact 8-digit ICQ number. And once again I had no problem memorizing my worstation name, though it actually took me 2 or 3 years before I realized that this was my ICQ number (which was a huge mind eff when that realization struck).
It probably also has something to do with the United States having about one tenth the population density of Japan.
It's what the obscurity is of that matters. Depending on obscurity in an algorithm means that all uses of that algorithm can be broken with a single loss of obscurity. Depending on obscurity of the key means that when there is an obscurity breach, only that one individual who lost their key is prone to suffer data loss, while it represents no threat to everyone else.
That's the point, access was only authorized for a specific purpose (authorized and granted accesses do not need to necessarily agree). Installing the rootkit (or maliciously altering the configuration to provide some alternate back door) is beyond that purpose and therefore is illegal.
For a real world analogy, if you have a plumber into your house to work on a clogged sink, and while he's there, he unlocks a window to facilitate access at a later date, that is illegal. Allowing someone into your house for one purpose does not give the carte blanche to do whatever they like while they're in there, and does not confer any future access rights.
Oh brother, successful prosecution is not required for something to have been illegal. Otherwise it'd be impossible to pass any new laws. It's also not impossible to know law without being a lawyer (in fact, citizens are expected to, however infeasible that may be in real practice).
If you'd like something you can actually verify, here are the specific articles which refer to relevant computer crimes in each of the states in the US (still don't know where you're located, maybe these aren't your jurisdiction, but I'm in the US, and these are ours). This is according to the National Conference of State Legislatures; there are other federal statues as well, but I figured this is a better example by way of demonstrating that these subjects are things which have received substantial consideration and which have extremely wide precedent.
Notably, you'll see the following text on this page (emphasis mine):
It would certainly depend on your specific agreement with your host, but unless they have a clause in there which permits them to root your server without your permission (and I don't doubt that there are some providers which do), it would definitely be illegal (at least in most of the world - I don't know where you live). A legitimate provider which has as part of their terms of service a requirement that they retain root access will not need to do so with covert methods though.
There's some sort of genetic predisposition to various types of hangover. My wife drinks a small glass of water and has no problems no matter how much she had the night before (her brother is the same way).
Headaches are typically dehydration headaches, and what you suggest works well for me for that. But alcohol can irritate the GI tract in some people (such as me), and this can lead to nausea and vomiting, and these things can themselves produce a second kind of headache not cured by hydration. The only way I've found around this second set of symptoms is moderation.