"But, this STILL doesn't seem to beat the real gorilla in the room - availability of bandwidth. So, you have your USB stick, and your busted ass old computer, but no connection. How useful is this?"
Do you REALLY not see any way a computer can be useful without an internet?
It's not *better* it's *additional* - additional chances for failure, that is. Any of the things that could cause a normal firearm to fail still apply, PLUS new ones.
"Most pro-gun types are vociferously against this sort of regulation."
Regulation? Why on earth you inserted that word I dont know, but we are most definitely not against this kind of education.
"This is really what most gun-safety advocates are looking for."
Well yeah, except that we teach our kids instead of going around calling ourselves 'gun-safety advocates.'
"Requiring guns to be in safes or locked cases."
Absolutely not. A gun you cant get to when you need it is *worse* than no gun at all.
"I agree, that if we had laws with real teeth we wouldn't need things like electronic trigger locks."
I dont know who you think you are agreeing with but it's not me. We have more laws than we need already, and by the way no one needs a trigger lock. If the weapon really needs to be decommissioned you pull the firing pin and pack it separately.
You know just a few decades ago we had firearm safety classes in schools? It's your so-called 'gun safety advocates' who shut that down. Oh, the horrors, exposing innocent children to firearms!
Many, many accidental deaths have resulted as generations have been raised since without formal firearm safety education available to them.
"And that just isn't going to happen (there's a reason why those two are such outliers)."
The reason is that people like you that ought to know better keep repeating such nonsense. Franken and Paul are only 'outliers' in the context of Washington DC and the deep state - in terms of the country they are essentially mainstream at this point. The media works tirelessly day and night to prevent us from figuring this out, however, and one of their most effective tools is silly little tropes such as the one I quoted above.
Well let's assume that, in a country of >300million people, a firearm is pulled in earnest about 300,000 times a year. Let's further assume that in 2 out of 3 cases, the situation de-escalates without further incident, so we have about 100,000 cases left where someone defends themselves with a firearm. This is probably a low estimate but it's fine, the number here isnt really what matters, it's the relationship between this number and some others that follows.
Let's say that as a result of this supposedly 'smart' technology, we add a 1:10,000 chance of a malfunction. That means that next year, 10 of us would be in mortal jeopardy as a result.
Any changes made to firearms must follow a modified form of the hypocratic oath. First do no harm - to the reliability of the weapon. None means none. Zero.
"Most gun lock advocates suggest using it to prevent a gun from being used by a child picking up a gun left around the house, a burglar taking it from your bedside table, or a mugger disarming you."
And most people that have any firearms experience will just look at you like a retard if you tell them that.
1.) "to prevent a gun from being used by a child picking up a gun left around the house"
The answer to this is firearms safety education. The adult version of this includes not leaving weapons 'laying around' and the child version includes do not touch without permission. Both versions include muzzle awareness. If they are selling an automatic system on the premise that it allows you to own a weapon safely without going all that boring safety training stuff, then they will be causing, not preventing, injuries to children and should be held accountable for that.
2.) "a burglar taking it from your bedside table"
And this is exactly the situation in which they have all the time in the world to figure out how to disable that safety, or more likely they will simply sell it to someone who does know how to run a soldering iron...
3.) "a mugger disarming you"
As already covered, in that case you just get beat to death instead of shot, that's no gain and arguably a loss.
So, yeah, a swing and a miss. Real sarcasm has to have some truth behind it, that's what makes it funny.
You're very naive. Someone that will charge a drawn weapon and disarm the holder of said weapon is unlikely to have any difficulty with pistolwhipping him to death afterwards.
Netflix was already paying for transit. Comcast was already being paid by their customers as well. Comcast said 'hey that's a lot of traffic on the interconnect.' Netflix offered to (as they have done with many other ISPs) install cache servers on Comcast's network, which would have improved the service for Comcast customers without requiring Comcast to upgrade their infrastructure (which Comcast really should have done years ago anyway but why would they spend money on it when they can apparently use it as an excuse to extort more payments instead?)
That's not asking for free bandwidth, that's making a very generous offer to help an ISP conserve bandwidth. Bandwidth, we should note, that the ISP already contracted with its customers to provide. Netflix is not a party to that and has no obligation to help at all, but obviously they do have an interest in making their own users happy, which is what they were after.
If as an ISP you do not like their offer then fine, dont take them up on it. You still need to provide the bandwidth you have already sold, just like if they had made no offer. But trying to spin that as a shakedown for free bandwidth? Are you freaking kidding me?
That's not just propaganda it's horrible propaganda, anyone that understands what you are talking about is going to laugh in your face.
Really, they were hacking on the aircraft carrier? Hacking what? Would be funny if a system failed so catastrophically they had to have sailors on board actually patch and recompile on the spot, and even if they were just innocently hacking away at a recalcitrant build-script for their photomanager or something it would still be cool, right?
At least that was what I thought when I read the headline. Imagine my surprise to find out this is actually a story about crime-on-the-internet and has othing to do with hacking whatsoever.
Yeah I was the one you first replied to and not the guy you replied to here
I did indeed miss the altitude. That makes the incident much more puzzling. Best I can tell there is no evidence it actually happened beyond the pilots report. It's possible he was mistaken about what he saw for a fraction of a second. At that altitude it becomes a puzzle than I was thinking though.
(Speaking of separating semantic data from presentation directives):
"why can't we have that idea for web stuff? and even modern apps?"
We kind of sort of do - it was baked into the idea of the web from the start - but advertising firms and 'designers' got involved pretty early too, and neither of them can stand it. They now collectively have firm control of the W3C and every major browser as well so it's a difficult fight at this point.
I have to admit I let myself be seduced by webmail many years ago and this might be the straw that drives me back to mutt. The idea of webmail is great - get your mail in a simple standard interface that's system agnostic, without having to carry your tool around with you from computer to computer, it's just a few k that can load over the net into your browser wherever and whenever you need it.
Only now, ever so many years later, it's become far from that. It's a massive web app that requires me to disable basic sanity and security checks in order to even load, and it exists in order to push advertising at me more effectively, NOT to let me access my email more effectively. Every change they make that clearer and clearer.
We've had RC model aircraft for a very long time now. 'Drones' are a new thing, and yeah, they are basically RC model airplanes at their core, but they have new features such as MUCH longer range remote control system and at minimum some remote sensors. The ones that tend to make the news the most are the ones that have full fledged military weapons systems on top of that, but even an unarmed recon drone is actually a quite different thing from a remote control F-4 model that has no sensors and a radio that will just last from one end of the park to the other.
Sounds to me like this guy was flying a standard old RC airplane and doing so too close to an airport, which is already illegal. Since there are no remote sensors, no long-range radios or autonomous control systems involved he had to have been extremely close to the airport at the time, keeping the model within his eyesight while holding a fairly conspicuous controller with antennas sticking out of it, and no extra laws are needed to catch and punish him, just a little police shoe-leather.
"It's not clear to me how a bootable thumb drive is going to resurrect a non-functional computer."
No? What causes a computer to be written off as 'non-functional?'
The first thing that comes to mind is a failed hard drive. Plug in a system on a stick and it's functional again.
Very often there is actually *nothing* physically wrong with the hard drive, it's just a corrupted/infected filesystem, but the typical computer user doesnt know the difference and junks it anyway. And system on a stick fixes that too.
"Neither is it clear what this will accomplish for all those people too poor to own one at all"
It will allow them either a) pick up a 'dead' computer either free or a a very low (scrap metal value) price and use it or b) borrow/rent computer time but still be able to boot their own system on the temporary hardware, maintaining some semblance at least of their privacy.
"From what I've read, Slackware is just holding out until the last minute. "
Pure FUD. Slackware does not ship PAM, it does not ship GNOME, it uses EUDEV, if anything it's even less likely than Gentoo to adopt systemd since it's already an option for the tuners that sit there with a stop watch rebooting and compiling all day.
But Slack Gentoo and OpenBSD, at the least, are going to continue doing what they have done so far. Implementing specific features that turn out to be useful enough to start being adopted by useful programs, but individually and without unnecessary breakage to the *nix design.
I think you two speak past each other several places.
It's not monolithic in the sense you are using it, it is modular in construction. But it's monolithic in the sense that the collection of modules work together more intimately than they should, and in fact *change* together in ways that quite explicitly discard compatibility. The entire design of not just the init system and PID1 but also of an expanding grab-bag of unrelated system components all get redesigned in ways that are not particularly sane.
It's not about parallel process startup - you can easily do that in the existing system, with OpenRC for instance among many options.
It's certainly not about boot times - I can make a system boot in milliseconds if I need to, that's *easy*.
It's about replacing a stable, mature, and robust standardised modular design with a new design that is vendor-specific and can make and break the rules whenever this is thought necessary to the benefit of corporate strategy.
Which, you know, if RedHat guys really think this is the way to make their stock options rise then more power to them. I think they are wrong, and I think Canonical are just as wrong cause their strategy is the same. I think this path will backfire on them and their forks will collapse in time. But they have every right to try it if they disagree.
But why Debian is falling prey to it? That's the part that sucks.
"anything america is doing against russia right now is only to keep the american people happy, its not to actually get results"
Except that the polls have been saying for a couple years now that the majority of us actually want the government to settle down and be less interventionist overseas. See these recent results for instance. Commissar Nulands project has nothing to do with making Americans happy.
"I see nobody working on an alternative init system. "
There are better init systems in use and supported. Slack init has been it's own thing for a very long time, a bit of a cross between BSD and SysV that follows the slackware philosophy. Simple, robust, and easy to work with.
Gentoo still uses their own fork of init with OpenRC. OpenRC, in a nutshell, provides the features of Systemd or Upstart without breaking compatibility.
Systemd (and upstart, since you mentioned it) is not something primarily created to solve a technical problem. They exist primarily for political reasons. They are Red Hat and Canonical's attempts to rip out the guts of *nix and replace it with vendor-specific infrastructure that they can control and direct.
OpenRC isn't taken seriously because the gentoo folks propose it and now that both Debian and Red Hat, the two major players on the market, have both decided to play along with the systemd game (one of them was more or less forced into it, but no matter), systemd is omnipresent and impossible to stop.
"Because gentoo" makes no sense. Regardless, 'omnipresent and impossible to stop' is bullshit. What is unfortunately true is that Red Hat, Ubuntu, and now Debian will be outside the pale of *nix systems. One large *nix* ecosystem has been effectively forked into three systems. Red hat will own one, Canonical will own one, and the remaining *nix systems, including Linux, Gentoo, and *BSD will remain our own ecosystem that no one can own. It's sad that Debian is officially going the other way but hey, best of luck to them in their new role as Red Hat sattellites.
Slashdot Mirror
"IOS, HTML 5, CSS 3, jquery, and nosql"
None of which are programming languages.
"Comes to show you need to stay current in tech if you want the big bugs."
Not sure if you intended to say what you said, but it sure is true.
Those who do not remember Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.
"But, this STILL doesn't seem to beat the real gorilla in the room - availability of bandwidth. So, you have your USB stick, and your busted ass old computer, but no connection. How useful is this?"
Do you REALLY not see any way a computer can be useful without an internet?
Staggering.
It's not *better* it's *additional* - additional chances for failure, that is. Any of the things that could cause a normal firearm to fail still apply, PLUS new ones.
"Most pro-gun types are vociferously against this sort of regulation."
Regulation? Why on earth you inserted that word I dont know, but we are most definitely not against this kind of education.
"This is really what most gun-safety advocates are looking for."
Well yeah, except that we teach our kids instead of going around calling ourselves 'gun-safety advocates.'
"Requiring guns to be in safes or locked cases."
Absolutely not. A gun you cant get to when you need it is *worse* than no gun at all.
"I agree, that if we had laws with real teeth we wouldn't need things like electronic trigger locks."
I dont know who you think you are agreeing with but it's not me. We have more laws than we need already, and by the way no one needs a trigger lock. If the weapon really needs to be decommissioned you pull the firing pin and pack it separately.
You know just a few decades ago we had firearm safety classes in schools? It's your so-called 'gun safety advocates' who shut that down. Oh, the horrors, exposing innocent children to firearms!
Many, many accidental deaths have resulted as generations have been raised since without formal firearm safety education available to them.
"And that just isn't going to happen (there's a reason why those two are such outliers)."
The reason is that people like you that ought to know better keep repeating such nonsense. Franken and Paul are only 'outliers' in the context of Washington DC and the deep state - in terms of the country they are essentially mainstream at this point. The media works tirelessly day and night to prevent us from figuring this out, however, and one of their most effective tools is silly little tropes such as the one I quoted above.
Well let's assume that, in a country of >300million people, a firearm is pulled in earnest about 300,000 times a year. Let's further assume that in 2 out of 3 cases, the situation de-escalates without further incident, so we have about 100,000 cases left where someone defends themselves with a firearm. This is probably a low estimate but it's fine, the number here isnt really what matters, it's the relationship between this number and some others that follows.
Let's say that as a result of this supposedly 'smart' technology, we add a 1:10,000 chance of a malfunction. That means that next year, 10 of us would be in mortal jeopardy as a result.
Any changes made to firearms must follow a modified form of the hypocratic oath. First do no harm - to the reliability of the weapon. None means none. Zero.
"Most gun lock advocates suggest using it to prevent a gun from being used by a child picking up a gun left around the house, a burglar taking it from your bedside table, or a mugger disarming you."
And most people that have any firearms experience will just look at you like a retard if you tell them that.
1.) "to prevent a gun from being used by a child picking up a gun left around the house"
The answer to this is firearms safety education. The adult version of this includes not leaving weapons 'laying around' and the child version includes do not touch without permission. Both versions include muzzle awareness. If they are selling an automatic system on the premise that it allows you to own a weapon safely without going all that boring safety training stuff, then they will be causing, not preventing, injuries to children and should be held accountable for that.
2.) "a burglar taking it from your bedside table"
And this is exactly the situation in which they have all the time in the world to figure out how to disable that safety, or more likely they will simply sell it to someone who does know how to run a soldering iron...
3.) "a mugger disarming you"
As already covered, in that case you just get beat to death instead of shot, that's no gain and arguably a loss.
So, yeah, a swing and a miss. Real sarcasm has to have some truth behind it, that's what makes it funny.
"The moderators understand sarcasm."
But apparently they do not understand the difference between sarcasm that hits the target, and an attempt that comes nowhere near the target.
Keyword: "European"
The law is a bit different in most European countries.
You're very naive. Someone that will charge a drawn weapon and disarm the holder of said weapon is unlikely to have any difficulty with pistolwhipping him to death afterwards.
"(Yes, I know that seems like an outrageous number, but there are solid statistical reasons for it.) "
It does seem outrageous - outrageously low.
How the heck is that insightful?
That's just stupid. I mean, criminals are stupid, but they arent that stupid.
He wont pull out a soldering iron. He'll pistolwhip you. Doh.
"that if I am willing and able to pay for higher priority I cannot be given it?"
If you are paying for a private point to point link, sure.
If you are paying for a 'fast lane' on the public network, no, you cannot. That would defeat the entire point of the internet.
"This is the result of capitalism."
You could not have gotten that more backwards.
No.
Netflix was already paying for transit. Comcast was already being paid by their customers as well. Comcast said 'hey that's a lot of traffic on the interconnect.' Netflix offered to (as they have done with many other ISPs) install cache servers on Comcast's network, which would have improved the service for Comcast customers without requiring Comcast to upgrade their infrastructure (which Comcast really should have done years ago anyway but why would they spend money on it when they can apparently use it as an excuse to extort more payments instead?)
That's not asking for free bandwidth, that's making a very generous offer to help an ISP conserve bandwidth. Bandwidth, we should note, that the ISP already contracted with its customers to provide. Netflix is not a party to that and has no obligation to help at all, but obviously they do have an interest in making their own users happy, which is what they were after.
If as an ISP you do not like their offer then fine, dont take them up on it. You still need to provide the bandwidth you have already sold, just like if they had made no offer. But trying to spin that as a shakedown for free bandwidth? Are you freaking kidding me?
That's not just propaganda it's horrible propaganda, anyone that understands what you are talking about is going to laugh in your face.
Really, they were hacking on the aircraft carrier? Hacking what? Would be funny if a system failed so catastrophically they had to have sailors on board actually patch and recompile on the spot, and even if they were just innocently hacking away at a recalcitrant build-script for their photomanager or something it would still be cool, right?
At least that was what I thought when I read the headline. Imagine my surprise to find out this is actually a story about crime-on-the-internet and has othing to do with hacking whatsoever.
0o
Yeah I was the one you first replied to and not the guy you replied to here
I did indeed miss the altitude. That makes the incident much more puzzling. Best I can tell there is no evidence it actually happened beyond the pilots report. It's possible he was mistaken about what he saw for a fraction of a second. At that altitude it becomes a puzzle than I was thinking though.
(Speaking of separating semantic data from presentation directives):
"why can't we have that idea for web stuff? and even modern apps?"
We kind of sort of do - it was baked into the idea of the web from the start - but advertising firms and 'designers' got involved pretty early too, and neither of them can stand it. They now collectively have firm control of the W3C and every major browser as well so it's a difficult fight at this point.
I have to admit I let myself be seduced by webmail many years ago and this might be the straw that drives me back to mutt. The idea of webmail is great - get your mail in a simple standard interface that's system agnostic, without having to carry your tool around with you from computer to computer, it's just a few k that can load over the net into your browser wherever and whenever you need it.
Only now, ever so many years later, it's become far from that. It's a massive web app that requires me to disable basic sanity and security checks in order to even load, and it exists in order to push advertising at me more effectively, NOT to let me access my email more effectively. Every change they make that clearer and clearer.
We've had RC model aircraft for a very long time now. 'Drones' are a new thing, and yeah, they are basically RC model airplanes at their core, but they have new features such as MUCH longer range remote control system and at minimum some remote sensors. The ones that tend to make the news the most are the ones that have full fledged military weapons systems on top of that, but even an unarmed recon drone is actually a quite different thing from a remote control F-4 model that has no sensors and a radio that will just last from one end of the park to the other.
Sounds to me like this guy was flying a standard old RC airplane and doing so too close to an airport, which is already illegal. Since there are no remote sensors, no long-range radios or autonomous control systems involved he had to have been extremely close to the airport at the time, keeping the model within his eyesight while holding a fairly conspicuous controller with antennas sticking out of it, and no extra laws are needed to catch and punish him, just a little police shoe-leather.
"It's not clear to me how a bootable thumb drive is going to resurrect a non-functional computer."
No? What causes a computer to be written off as 'non-functional?'
The first thing that comes to mind is a failed hard drive. Plug in a system on a stick and it's functional again.
Very often there is actually *nothing* physically wrong with the hard drive, it's just a corrupted/infected filesystem, but the typical computer user doesnt know the difference and junks it anyway. And system on a stick fixes that too.
"Neither is it clear what this will accomplish for all those people too poor to own one at all"
It will allow them either a) pick up a 'dead' computer either free or a a very low (scrap metal value) price and use it or b) borrow/rent computer time but still be able to boot their own system on the temporary hardware, maintaining some semblance at least of their privacy.
"From what I've read, Slackware is just holding out until the last minute. "
Pure FUD. Slackware does not ship PAM, it does not ship GNOME, it uses EUDEV, if anything it's even less likely than Gentoo to adopt systemd since it's already an option for the tuners that sit there with a stop watch rebooting and compiling all day.
But Slack Gentoo and OpenBSD, at the least, are going to continue doing what they have done so far. Implementing specific features that turn out to be useful enough to start being adopted by useful programs, but individually and without unnecessary breakage to the *nix design.
I think you two speak past each other several places.
It's not monolithic in the sense you are using it, it is modular in construction. But it's monolithic in the sense that the collection of modules work together more intimately than they should, and in fact *change* together in ways that quite explicitly discard compatibility. The entire design of not just the init system and PID1 but also of an expanding grab-bag of unrelated system components all get redesigned in ways that are not particularly sane.
It's not about parallel process startup - you can easily do that in the existing system, with OpenRC for instance among many options.
It's certainly not about boot times - I can make a system boot in milliseconds if I need to, that's *easy*.
It's about replacing a stable, mature, and robust standardised modular design with a new design that is vendor-specific and can make and break the rules whenever this is thought necessary to the benefit of corporate strategy.
Which, you know, if RedHat guys really think this is the way to make their stock options rise then more power to them. I think they are wrong, and I think Canonical are just as wrong cause their strategy is the same. I think this path will backfire on them and their forks will collapse in time. But they have every right to try it if they disagree.
But why Debian is falling prey to it? That's the part that sucks.
"anything america is doing against russia right now is only to keep the american people happy, its not to actually get results"
Except that the polls have been saying for a couple years now that the majority of us actually want the government to settle down and be less interventionist overseas. See these recent results for instance. Commissar Nulands project has nothing to do with making Americans happy.
"We're here to discuss, not win or lose."
I wasnt using lose in that sense. I mean he lost the thread, as in he lost track of who he was talking to.
There are better init systems in use and supported. Slack init has been it's own thing for a very long time, a bit of a cross between BSD and SysV that follows the slackware philosophy. Simple, robust, and easy to work with.
Gentoo still uses their own fork of init with OpenRC. OpenRC, in a nutshell, provides the features of Systemd or Upstart without breaking compatibility.
Systemd (and upstart, since you mentioned it) is not something primarily created to solve a technical problem. They exist primarily for political reasons. They are Red Hat and Canonical's attempts to rip out the guts of *nix and replace it with vendor-specific infrastructure that they can control and direct.
"Because gentoo" makes no sense. Regardless, 'omnipresent and impossible to stop' is bullshit. What is unfortunately true is that Red Hat, Ubuntu, and now Debian will be outside the pale of *nix systems. One large *nix* ecosystem has been effectively forked into three systems. Red hat will own one, Canonical will own one, and the remaining *nix systems, including Linux, Gentoo, and *BSD will remain our own ecosystem that no one can own. It's sad that Debian is officially going the other way but hey, best of luck to them in their new role as Red Hat sattellites.