Sorry to hear that, Ray. You're one of the people demonstrating that lawyers can be awesome. IF you're not happy doing this, I hope you find something you do enjoy.
More importantly, they can ask you to take that unencrypted data and prove that it encrypts to the output in evidence. They probably have a way to Find Out if you are lying about it, unfortunately.
All the more reason for truecrypt within truecrypt.
The policeman perceives his job as to "make arrests", and the DA's job is to "make convictions". They (mostly) care only that tey have an ironclad case, and not whether or not you are innocent.
My right hand always gets those blisters from sitting on a mouse most of the day.
Have you considered holding your mouse with just your fingertips, rather than resting the palm on the mouse? I don't game quite this way, but at work at least it seems very confortable. A wrist rest lets my wrist stay cushioned, and then I can move my wrist using both wrist and finger movements (rather than only hand/arm movements).
Is it bad to ask how it got on Slashdot's front page, when it's basically a cut-and-paste advertisement, rather than descriptive and useful information?
Blood Frontier was mentioned a short while back on Slashdot (1 week? a month? I forget). But, I think the underlying question you are asking is, [b]"Why is this news for nerds?"[/b], and what differentiates it from the myriad piles of shovelware games that come out every month?
- It's open source. - It leverages OpenGL and is intended to be multiplatform. - It has an IRC client built-in? The only other game I've seen be that nerdy was Uplink. (I could have misread the summary on this fact.) - Did I mention it's open source? - The development team is small, and appears to be unfunded by a studio. We likes us some underdogs. - The developers are actively soliciting us for advice.
For years we've had people talking about how easy it "should be" to make multiplatform games. With the exception of Id and (to an extent) Blizzard, few developers DO, though. These guys actually have put effort into doing it as well, and I think that is most certainly nerd-news-worthy. Great job, guys. I hope your game turns out to be awesome. (And now I'll have to actually go download and try it out, hehe.)
You can bet that if they ever passed a law with an acronym like HAPPINESS, it would involve wording to the effect that police officers do not need a warrant to enter a civilian's home and shoot him as long as they have a good reason for it, such as self-defense, forcing compliance with the officers' orders, or target practice.
Did you mean the Home Access for Public Protection from INsurgents in Extended Safety Situations Act?;)
How much space does keeping DHCP assignment logs require, though?
My computer boots once a day, perhaps twice. My wife's boots a similar amount. My laptop, when actually being used (rare) probably connects a couple times in a day, perhaps more if wireless connections in my house are flakey. My server boots ~2x a year due to bumping-the-UPS-switch accidents. Non-nuclear family members occasionally bring laptops (~3x a year), and those are I think negligible. In theory, I deny wireless access to everyone else.
All told, that sounds like my network sees less than 2000 successful connections per year, right? If logging one connection uses one kilobyte of space (and for a line in a text file, that sounds like an overestimate), I'd still only use ~1.8 MB per year. Less than two megabytes per year. Why should I be worried about storage costs?
Also... if I change my router's firmware to OpenWRT, would I be able to gather such information? I imagine I would. It'd be an interesting data set to look at. (Well, a boring one, I hope.)
When your experience at a store, restaurant, or other service is bad enough to cause you to explicitly avoid them, telling the owner lets them know that there's a problem. They might have been unaware that their employees were rude, or that service was poor, or that the food is uncompelling or overpriced. This allows them to know WHY they're losing customers, rather than wondering why they continue to do poorly. This could conceivably lead to the restaurant's service/food/attitude improving, thereby improving the experience of all future customers (and potentially yourself, if you ever go back).
Sure, sometimes the owner is a jerk, and already endorses the establishment's bad behavior. You're then just informing him that you are no longer part of his customer demographic; the chance of restaurant improvement is much much smaller in this case, and I can understand the "why bother?" perspective in this case.
If you're EVER unhappy about an experience anywhere, it's often fruitful (or at least cathartic;)) to tell the owner that you had a poor experience. Even if it's something like, "We love your restaurant, but service was especially poor this past Friday night." Being polite is bound to be morefruitful than telling them off, as in almost all communications, of course.
It would be nice if there was an easy federal health website that it was trivial to search for [restaurant inspection scores]
Quite true! Part of the problem is that the way places do this is not really standardized at all, from what I can tell, and often are in PDFs, and thus harder to extract text from.
I think a good idea would be to write to your people-that-provide-inspection-score-info and ask if they could also include an XML or other file for the information. Point out that the PDFs are likely automatically generated from a database, and that you would be happy to write code to pull the data from the same database in order to publish a text file in parallel with the PDF. Crap... I need to take that advice and do it myself: finding inspection scores in California was a royal pain.
As someone drooling over the insanely low prices of light weight netbooks with weak Atom processors, I was kind of lamenting that there wasn't something I could host on my beefy Linux desktop back home that acts as a code repository and compilation machine while all my development is done through a netbook.
I'm in a similar boat, and have been working to get Emacs and Slime playing together. Then, I can have a nice sexy REPL running on my server machine, and use a laptop while coding at the couch. (Emacs will run on the laptop, while the REPL is accessed over the network.)
I currently have a few small problems with the idea:
1) I don't really have anything useful to DO with lisp at the moment. I don't have a blog, as I can't really think of any interesting content I'd want to write for it. I need a "toy" project that's complex enough to be a challenge, but also interesting enough that I'd actually want to do it as more than an exercise. Finding this motivation is the hardest part, it seems. (This isn't a Lisp-specific problem, of course -- it applies equally to any other language I'm interested in.) {Suggestions are welcome. (:}
2) I'm absolutely addicted to large screens and dual monitors. I am not sure how well I will be able to code on a laptop.
3) I am reluctant to turn my gaming rig into a unix box to act as the back end for fun coding projects.
Hulu seem to be quite resistant to naming them, which is a shame. It's clear that they're walking a fine line between pleasing customers and pleasing providers, and you can see very clearly from the tone of their blog post that they're not happy about blocking Boxee - I'm surprised that they aren't pushing back a little by simply telling their customers who's pressed them into it.
Solution: List EVERY provider that you can think of which might object, and write to them.
It's likely the studios behind every single TV show and movie they list. Write to them, and tell them that you want to watch their stuff on Boxee, and only on Boxee, through Hulu. Some of them might not be the ones that pressured Hulu, but it might be enough to get them to say, "wait, you cut everyone off from watching *our* shows because our competitors wanted more exclusivity for their shows? Please enable Boxee users to stream OUR shows/movies."
I know, haha... as if that would happen. I could certianly imagine having Hulu specifically support Boxee for only certain content streams, though. While not ideal, it's better than nothing.
I was gonna say... if you're playing for money, then clearly the pole dancers are a detriment... but for entertainment, it certainly SOUNDS interesting.;)
For some others (myself included), the lure of games is already, or will soon be, insufficient to coax us into swallowing the DRM pill. The second point: there are alternatives available
Well said.
I currently play primarily on my PC: World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Portal are all very compelling games. However, if the OS were sufficiently unpalatable, I would not use it as a primary system. - I might dual-boot. I've done it before. - I can play WoW under Wine/Cedega, from what I've read. - As a worst case, I can hook up my Gamecube to my monitor and while away time with Twilight Princess, which I have yet to finish.
Gaming is the only thing "tying" me to Windows... and Wine's been getting better. It's close enough that I am seriously considering swapping OSes: the only thing holding me back is the pain in the ass of reinstalling and reconfiguring things.:)
Malicious code in an open source application is only as secure as it is obscure -- and obscurity is NOT security. Such things are not unable to be detected, merely unlikely. If anyone ever does a rigorous enough code audit, the "error" will come to light and can be fixed. With closed source, we never get the opportunity to do such an audit, and therefore it's much easier to hide it. The hiding can be permanent, whereas with open source, bad code remains only as long as no one has found it.
... please mod the parent post down. What I meant to say was:
The Pirate Bay is about theft, plain and simple. It may be true that the monetary losses are not nearly what the record companies claim, and it may be true that the media conglomerates are really out for money for themselves rather than to support the starving artists, but the propaganda is propaganda on both sides.
s/theft/copyright infringement/;
It seems pedantic, but it's true. Yes, media "pirates" want something-for-nothing, and yes they're cheating. But it's not theft. Many acquire or sample music which they would not normally pay money for -- and thus it's not even fair to claim it's a lost sale. I am not at all saying it's morally acceptible, just that it's not theft. If I download an album or a movie, that doesn't prevent anyone else from making a purchase.
The Pirate Bay is about theft, plain and simple. It may be true that the monetary losses are not nearly what the record companies claim, and it may be true that the media conglomerates are really out for money for themselves rather than to support the starving artists, but the propaganda is propaganda on both sides.
s/theft/copyright infringement/;
It seems pedantic, but it's true. Yes, media "pirates" want something-for-nothing, and yes they're cheating. But it's not theft. Many acquire or sample music which they would not normally pay money for -- and thus it's not even fair to claim it's a lost sale. I am not at all saying it's morally acceptible, just that it's not theft. If I download an album or a movie, that doesn't prevent anyone else from making a purchase.
"A head on collision was bound to happen even if they knew the other sub was there. The French drive on the right, the British on the left." What retard modded this Insightful? Funny, sure. Even Redundant. But FFS, Insightful?
I'd say interesting, though perhaps not insightful. Still, think about your initial "oh shit, get out of the way!" reaction. As a US driver, my initial instinct would be to veer towards the right, towards "my" side of the road. If the oncoming driver were from someplace where drivers drove on the left side of a road, their first reaction might be to veer to their left -- with a crash being an unsurprising result. Now, granted, this is about submarines and not cars. They surely have training which dictates how to avoid a collision. However, it is remotely possible that the first perception of a "safe" direction would be mirrored for the two captains.
I think that the likelihood of events is (in decreasing order):
- neither sub noticed the other - one sub saw the other, and didn't want to betray it's position, assuming that the other would turn away. - neither sub wanted to let the other know that they were detected, and thus neither turned - both subs turned, but happened to turn in the same direction.
It's possible, but... just seems damned unlikely, to me. (Then again, endangering your ship in order to prevent detection capabilities to be known sounds... foolish. Or ballsy. Then again, sub skippers have to be particularly daring, so it wouldn't surprise me much.)
A World without Anonymous Cowards? I thought I'd never see the day!
May I never live to see a day when anonymity is truly impossible.
(Granted, it's hard now, and being anonymous is not a goal I have... but for the most part, it's at least possible, with sufficient levels of paranoia. At least on-line. In meatspace, I'm not so sure.)
The right to state your views anonymously does not extend to being a shield against liability if your statements are found to be actionable.
If the site keeps no information from anonymous posters (and I think/. doesn't keep info on ACs, though I could be wrong), what can you do? Without timestamps and an IP address (or some other identifiers), I don't think you can do much more than drop the case (which sucks for those being libeled or otherwise trolled), or get mad at the site for allowing anonymous content. Hello, censorship; I'd prefer that not happen.
Now, if the forum host falsely claims to keep no information, and refuses to give it up... fry 'em. I would hope that anyone would willingly comply with an investigation for that. Ideally (for anonymous posters), that compliance would be of the nature of, "We don't have any records of WHO posted that, as our anonymization policy forbids it. Here's source code showing that we don't keep such records."
I think the original poster's intent was not that you HIDE the income from each other, but rather that you both agree that $X/month be allocated for each partner for discretionary income, in addition to the shared pool of money used for expenses and common needs/wants. You get to spend yours on computer purchases, video games, World of Warcraft, or beef jerky. She gets to spend hers on magazines, high quality dark chocolate, pedicures, or anything else that she wants but you see no "need" for. As long as you're both above-the-board about it, and have agreed to the concept ahead of time, I don't think that would cause much problems. When times get tougher and budgets tighten, you can both agree to limit your discretionary spending, as well.
If I had $50/month to spend on toys, I would set some aside for my WoW subscription, save for one of those ARM netbooks that I hope will be available this spring, and save for computer purchases. (I don't have such an arrangement, but neither do I have (or want) a "shadow" bank account.)
I think we need more meta-moderation, and people that get unmodded ought to get fewer mod privileges (if that's not already how it works). Unbelievable.
You're right... and when you are eligible, the front page even asks you to do so. However, when meta-modding, you really only see a few posts, and a single moderation for them. In contrast, the moderation system itself is mostly self-correcting: Many people (I suspect MORE people) see the post in-context, and will moderate up or down as appropriate. The trouble is, many people while moderating (including me) do not often want to sift the -1's, and so end up modding things that are ALREADY above a threshold. If more of us moderated "properly" (looking at -1's, and such), we would get more corrections of mistaken-downmods.
Slashdot Mirror
But what about their chefs? Surely those are American, right?
I'm not sure that's the wisest thing to wish for. :D
Sorry to hear that, Ray. You're one of the people demonstrating that lawyers can be awesome. IF you're not happy doing this, I hope you find something you do enjoy.
More importantly, they can ask you to take that unencrypted data and prove that it encrypts to the output in evidence. They probably have a way to Find Out if you are lying about it, unfortunately.
All the more reason for truecrypt within truecrypt.
As a reminder, never ever EVER volunteer information to the police. Get a lawyer, ALWAYS.
This was linked on Slashdot once before:
"Don't Talk to the Police" by Professor James Duane
The policeman perceives his job as to "make arrests", and the DA's job is to "make convictions". They (mostly) care only that tey have an ironclad case, and not whether or not you are innocent.
Have you considered holding your mouse with just your fingertips, rather than resting the palm on the mouse? I don't game quite this way, but at work at least it seems very confortable. A wrist rest lets my wrist stay cushioned, and then I can move my wrist using both wrist and finger movements (rather than only hand/arm movements).
Blood Frontier was mentioned a short while back on Slashdot (1 week? a month? I forget). But, I think the underlying question you are asking is, [b]"Why is this news for nerds?"[/b], and what differentiates it from the myriad piles of shovelware games that come out every month?
- It's open source.
- It leverages OpenGL and is intended to be multiplatform.
- It has an IRC client built-in? The only other game I've seen be that nerdy was Uplink. (I could have misread the summary on this fact.)
- Did I mention it's open source?
- The development team is small, and appears to be unfunded by a studio. We likes us some underdogs.
- The developers are actively soliciting us for advice.
For years we've had people talking about how easy it "should be" to make multiplatform games. With the exception of Id and (to an extent) Blizzard, few developers DO, though. These guys actually have put effort into doing it as well, and I think that is most certainly nerd-news-worthy. Great job, guys. I hope your game turns out to be awesome. (And now I'll have to actually go download and try it out, hehe.)
Did you mean the Home Access for Public Protection from INsurgents in Extended Safety Situations Act? ;)
How much space does keeping DHCP assignment logs require, though?
My computer boots once a day, perhaps twice.
My wife's boots a similar amount.
My laptop, when actually being used (rare) probably connects a couple times in a day, perhaps more if wireless connections in my house are flakey.
My server boots ~2x a year due to bumping-the-UPS-switch accidents.
Non-nuclear family members occasionally bring laptops (~3x a year), and those are I think negligible.
In theory, I deny wireless access to everyone else.
All told, that sounds like my network sees less than 2000 successful connections per year, right? If logging one connection uses one kilobyte of space (and for a line in a text file, that sounds like an overestimate), I'd still only use ~1.8 MB per year. Less than two megabytes per year. Why should I be worried about storage costs?
Also ... if I change my router's firmware to OpenWRT, would I be able to gather such information? I imagine I would. It'd be an interesting data set to look at. (Well, a boring one, I hope.)
When your experience at a store, restaurant, or other service is bad enough to cause you to explicitly avoid them, telling the owner lets them know that there's a problem. They might have been unaware that their employees were rude, or that service was poor, or that the food is uncompelling or overpriced. This allows them to know WHY they're losing customers, rather than wondering why they continue to do poorly. This could conceivably lead to the restaurant's service/food/attitude improving, thereby improving the experience of all future customers (and potentially yourself, if you ever go back).
Sure, sometimes the owner is a jerk, and already endorses the establishment's bad behavior. You're then just informing him that you are no longer part of his customer demographic; the chance of restaurant improvement is much much smaller in this case, and I can understand the "why bother?" perspective in this case.
If you're EVER unhappy about an experience anywhere, it's often fruitful (or at least cathartic ;)) to tell the owner that you had a poor experience. Even if it's something like, "We love your restaurant, but service was especially poor this past Friday night." Being polite is bound to be morefruitful than telling them off, as in almost all communications, of course.
Quite true! Part of the problem is that the way places do this is not really standardized at all, from what I can tell, and often are in PDFs, and thus harder to extract text from.
I think a good idea would be to write to your people-that-provide-inspection-score-info and ask if they could also include an XML or other file for the information. Point out that the PDFs are likely automatically generated from a database, and that you would be happy to write code to pull the data from the same database in order to publish a text file in parallel with the PDF. Crap ... I need to take that advice and do it myself: finding inspection scores in California was a royal pain.
I'm in a similar boat, and have been working to get Emacs and Slime playing together. Then, I can have a nice sexy REPL running on my server machine, and use a laptop while coding at the couch. (Emacs will run on the laptop, while the REPL is accessed over the network.)
I currently have a few small problems with the idea:
1) I don't really have anything useful to DO with lisp at the moment. I don't have a blog, as I can't really think of any interesting content I'd want to write for it. I need a "toy" project that's complex enough to be a challenge, but also interesting enough that I'd actually want to do it as more than an exercise. Finding this motivation is the hardest part, it seems. (This isn't a Lisp-specific problem, of course -- it applies equally to any other language I'm interested in.) {Suggestions are welcome. (:}
2) I'm absolutely addicted to large screens and dual monitors. I am not sure how well I will be able to code on a laptop.
3) I am reluctant to turn my gaming rig into a unix box to act as the back end for fun coding projects.
Solution: List EVERY provider that you can think of which might object, and write to them.
It's likely the studios behind every single TV show and movie they list. Write to them, and tell them that you want to watch their stuff on Boxee, and only on Boxee, through Hulu. Some of them might not be the ones that pressured Hulu, but it might be enough to get them to say, "wait, you cut everyone off from watching *our* shows because our competitors wanted more exclusivity for their shows? Please enable Boxee users to stream OUR shows/movies."
I know, haha... as if that would happen. I could certianly imagine having Hulu specifically support Boxee for only certain content streams, though. While not ideal, it's better than nothing.
I realize that the core issue is refusal to stop being disruptive, but why not prevent this particular type of disruptive behavior?
If teachers could have rooms which were basically Faraday cages, wouldn't that make texting impossible?
I was gonna say ... if you're playing for money, then clearly the pole dancers are a detriment ... but for entertainment, it certainly SOUNDS interesting. ;)
Well said.
I currently play primarily on my PC: World of Warcraft, Call of Duty, Portal are all very compelling games. However, if the OS were sufficiently unpalatable, I would not use it as a primary system.
- I might dual-boot. I've done it before.
- I can play WoW under Wine/Cedega, from what I've read.
- As a worst case, I can hook up my Gamecube to my monitor and while away time with Twilight Princess, which I have yet to finish.
Gaming is the only thing "tying" me to Windows ... and Wine's been getting better. It's close enough that I am seriously considering swapping OSes: the only thing holding me back is the pain in the ass of reinstalling and reconfiguring things. :)
We only know that pure Open Source will never be able to hide those things.
See also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Underhanded_C_Contest
Malicious code in an open source application is only as secure as it is obscure -- and obscurity is NOT security. Such things are not unable to be detected, merely unlikely. If anyone ever does a rigorous enough code audit, the "error" will come to light and can be fixed. With closed source, we never get the opportunity to do such an audit, and therefore it's much easier to hide it. The hiding can be permanent, whereas with open source, bad code remains only as long as no one has found it.
... please mod the parent post down. What I meant to say was:
s/theft/copyright infringement/;
It seems pedantic, but it's true. Yes, media "pirates" want something-for-nothing, and yes they're cheating. But it's not theft. Many acquire or sample music which they would not normally pay money for -- and thus it's not even fair to claim it's a lost sale. I am not at all saying it's morally acceptible, just that it's not theft. If I download an album or a movie, that doesn't prevent anyone else from making a purchase.
s/theft/copyright infringement/;
It seems pedantic, but it's true. Yes, media "pirates" want something-for-nothing, and yes they're cheating. But it's not theft. Many acquire or sample music which they would not normally pay money for -- and thus it's not even fair to claim it's a lost sale. I am not at all saying it's morally acceptible, just that it's not theft. If I download an album or a movie, that doesn't prevent anyone else from making a purchase.
I'd say interesting, though perhaps not insightful. Still, think about your initial "oh shit, get out of the way!" reaction. As a US driver, my initial instinct would be to veer towards the right, towards "my" side of the road. If the oncoming driver were from someplace where drivers drove on the left side of a road, their first reaction might be to veer to their left -- with a crash being an unsurprising result. Now, granted, this is about submarines and not cars. They surely have training which dictates how to avoid a collision. However, it is remotely possible that the first perception of a "safe" direction would be mirrored for the two captains.
I think that the likelihood of events is (in decreasing order):
- neither sub noticed the other
- one sub saw the other, and didn't want to betray it's position, assuming that the other would turn away.
- neither sub wanted to let the other know that they were detected, and thus neither turned
- both subs turned, but happened to turn in the same direction.
It's possible, but ... just seems damned unlikely, to me. (Then again, endangering your ship in order to prevent detection capabilities to be known sounds ... foolish. Or ballsy. Then again, sub skippers have to be particularly daring, so it wouldn't surprise me much.)
May I never live to see a day when anonymity is truly impossible.
(Granted, it's hard now, and being anonymous is not a goal I have... but for the most part, it's at least possible, with sufficient levels of paranoia. At least on-line. In meatspace, I'm not so sure.)
If the site keeps no information from anonymous posters (and I think /. doesn't keep info on ACs, though I could be wrong), what can you do? Without timestamps and an IP address (or some other identifiers), I don't think you can do much more than drop the case (which sucks for those being libeled or otherwise trolled), or get mad at the site for allowing anonymous content. Hello, censorship; I'd prefer that not happen.
Now, if the forum host falsely claims to keep no information, and refuses to give it up ... fry 'em. I would hope that anyone would willingly comply with an investigation for that. Ideally (for anonymous posters), that compliance would be of the nature of, "We don't have any records of WHO posted that, as our anonymization policy forbids it. Here's source code showing that we don't keep such records."
I think the original poster's intent was not that you HIDE the income from each other, but rather that you both agree that $X/month be allocated for each partner for discretionary income, in addition to the shared pool of money used for expenses and common needs/wants. You get to spend yours on computer purchases, video games, World of Warcraft, or beef jerky. She gets to spend hers on magazines, high quality dark chocolate, pedicures, or anything else that she wants but you see no "need" for. As long as you're both above-the-board about it, and have agreed to the concept ahead of time, I don't think that would cause much problems. When times get tougher and budgets tighten, you can both agree to limit your discretionary spending, as well.
If I had $50/month to spend on toys, I would set some aside for my WoW subscription, save for one of those ARM netbooks that I hope will be available this spring, and save for computer purchases. (I don't have such an arrangement, but neither do I have (or want) a "shadow" bank account.)
After deleting the Launchd entries, would you be able to simply chmod the folder so that only owner can read/write it, and then chown it to root?
You're right ... and when you are eligible, the front page even asks you to do so. However, when meta-modding, you really only see a few posts, and a single moderation for them. In contrast, the moderation system itself is mostly self-correcting: Many people (I suspect MORE people) see the post in-context, and will moderate up or down as appropriate. The trouble is, many people while moderating (including me) do not often want to sift the -1's, and so end up modding things that are ALREADY above a threshold. If more of us moderated "properly" (looking at -1's, and such), we would get more corrections of mistaken-downmods.
(This is off-topic, I expect; sorry about that.)