reading spoilers is no more cheating than looking at the source code.
Which, I imagine, a lot of the people with long beards and intravenous coffee would also consider cheating.
Reading spoilers or source is like doping: it gives you an advantage over those who don't do it, but the sport is still challenging. As long as you can distinguish those who do from those who don't, and take appropriate measures [whatever that is], I see no reason to be offended.
For those too young to remember games older than Halo
Halo? More like Bomberman or the Lotus and Turrican series (~1990). Nethack is from 1987, and is based on hack from 1985.
If you install `bsdgames' on debian/ubuntu, you can play hack, the precursor to nethack.
To get an idea of how the world looked when the internet was black-and-white, look at the end of the man page: BUGS
Probably infinite. Mail complaints to mcvax!aeb .
"Enhedslistens"* candidate for the parliament, Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen, thinks tha file sharing should be legal, and digital rights management, DRM, illegal
"I think it's an illusion to believe that it's possible to stop copying. I amounts to sticking one's head in the sand. The politicians have to realize the necessity of forming a committee that will address the question of how artists can be compensated for their work."
*"Enhedslisten" is the leftmost party in danish politics, left of The Socialist People's Party. I'd guess they compare with the greens; the environment is also one of their big issues, they're all for taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
I remember them branding themselves as the Robin Hood party one time, but I don't recall them using that term again. If they get into parliament, they often hold around four seats out of 179, which is the smallest possible amount (less than 2% of the votes and you don't get in).
Be aware that this statement was during election season.
How will they know that the downloader didn't have permission to download the copyrighted work? There are movies, music, and video games that are copyrighted but freely available.
One would hope the law says "unlicensed" rather than "not paid for". One would fear that the law is made by lawyers (just because we don't like lawyers). A fortunate side effect is that they probably know to distinguish the two.
If not, then because due to the fact that
There are [...] video games that are copyrighted but freely available
We would have that apt-get is a tool for software piracy: nexuiz, openarena, wesnoth; that's three strikes. Be sure to add the music to your playlist (dpkg -L $pkg; unzip the pk3s).
The french are trying to outlaw Linux? They're probably still angry at the Germans (who are adopting it, as we have all read);)
Or they're pissed at the freedom fries thing and want software frenchness rather than software freedom...;)
Kennedy issued his order in response to lawsuits by civil liberties groups in 2005 after news reports disclosed the wiretapping.
It has taken three to four years, roughly a whole term, to get a judge to dig up this bit of the current administration's {,mis,ab}use of power.
What will the consequences for the Bush et al. be, if their practices are found to be unconstitutional? Is there a real incentive to uphold the constitution if it takes so long to dig up the dirt?
"We all know"---I really ought to find an article that backs me up on this, but I've heard it enough times from random sources so it must be true---we all know that breast milk is very good for babies.
I'm wondering whether there's a large amount of calcium in breast milk, and whether that influences the babies' ability to form memories. The summary doesn't say whether the calcium acts as a "mere" catalyst or is used up in the process; but in any case, I'd guess that more is good.
[I also really should check whether calcium crosses the blood-brain barrier]
We can also contemplate applications. Is "forward amnesia"* caused by calcium not being where it needs to be in large enough amounts? Can we wrap calcium in a road map that guides it there and cures the amnesia?
* forward amnesia: the kind where you remember everything up to the point where you got it, but don't form new memories after that very well or at all. As opposed to retrograde amnesia, where you remember well after the point where you got it, but poorly or not at all what happened before it.
Google can probably give me answers, but I can't remember how to use it. I haven't had my milk today:)
Don't believe NASA. They're in the pocket of the vogons, who are targeting key computer installations at an undisclosed location.... just as we were about to enter the year of Linux on the desktop! That would have allowed us to form a global beowulf cluster which would finally be able to calculate the number 42, along with a proof that it indeed is the right answer.
Damn vogons and their toxic ammonia. You know what this means, right? Keep a towel handy, and don't keep your laptop in your lap. There's a giant task ahead of you and Trillian.
It'd be "rechner", not "komputor". The word "desktop" in the non-computer sense translates to "Schreibtisch" (lit. "writing table", same as in danish).
I don't know which words Germans use to distinguish between desktop/laptop/workstation systems and servers/clusters/phones/*, though.
"Jahr des Linux an die Schreibtisch Rechner" =~ Year of Linux on the desktop computer. Not sure.
the risk that a fuckwit with a short fuse and a.22 can kill with little more than pulling a trigger far outweighs the benefits of ' ohhh but i really want a gun'.
Does it outweigh the benefits of a well-regulated militia which is necessary for the security of the free state?
I wouldn't know, I haven't read much of it. The parts I do know about, I think of as a work of fiction from which you can learn lessons about what it means to be a good person. That's good. But you don't need the bible to tell you what it means to respect your parents, be a loyal friend and be a good citizen, and why you should do it.
kinda tough to do without some VPN connecting to the other 30+ locations
Uhmm... you are aware that as part of the IRC spec, IRC daemons are to organize themselves in a spanning tree, right? [netsplits happen when an edge gets cut].
Run one IRC server at every office. They connect together tunneled with stunnel or ssh. Then you have intraoffice communication independent of any other office, and secure interoffice communication when the net is up.
Most clients support sending un/pw to the server, and most servers support throwing off clients with bad un/pw combos. Or do it the freenode way: tell the identification bot your password and it sets a flag on you visible to everyone else.
(make sure clients connect to the hosts in a secure way. Hey, stunnel again...).
Actually, depending on your requirements, you may not want clients to encrypt traffic, so that you can log and archive it.
Exactly my thoughts.
I'd recommend IRC. Set up one IRC server per location and tunnel inter-office connections over ssh or ssl [have a look at stunnel]. Whether to encrypt intraoffice communication depends on local requirements, but again there's stunnel.
If employees don't trust each other or the sysadmins, your organization probably either has serious problems, or it's the DOD.
For the crypto geeks, and those interested: look at the paper, section 2.5 "Optional arguments"
A Skein computation consists of processing these options in order, using UBI. Each input has a different "type" value for the tweak, ensuring that inputs are not interchangeable.
Q: Couldn't you get the same effect for any other hash function?
A: Yes, I think. If there's extra data you want to tie to the message, come up with a type-length-value encoding scheme;
To tie a randomized hash value to the public key used to verify the signature, simply do H("nonce:64:" || the_nonce || "pubkey:1024:" || the_pubkey || "message:$length:" || the_message).
Or use numbers instead of names to identify types, and use fixed-sized words for lengths (or do unary encoding of the length of the length, then the length in binary). Just keep the tie-in function injective.
Skein is defined for three different internal state sizesâ"256 bits, 512 bits, and 1024 bits [...]. A completely optional and extendable argument system makes Skein an efficient tool to use for a very large number of functions: [...] a stream cipher
So it does symmetric crypto with big keys [I assume the key size is either one internal state, or user-chosen].
Are there still crypto export laws in place? Would this impact Skein? Or will lawyers argue that encryption isn't it's primary purpose? Or...
Being faster means little if the average person can not install an application and have it work [without] going to the command line, editing some script, coping some file, or hunting for some needed RPM.
Absolutely true. If users can't use a given platform to their satisfaction, they will not use it.
I fail to see how it's relevant, unless you want to argue against a straw man. I could have a working box with a browser, pdf viewer, word processor, media player and whatever else I'm going to need without touching the command line.
I use the command line because I like it, not because I have to.
The time I spend on learning details about how the system works is an investment.
It means that when I unplug my ethernet wire, I switch to wifi without dropping connections*. It means that I can rename a million files with ten seconds of work and O(n) seconds of productivity doing something else. It means that my computer can serve as a time (sleep ${1}m; mplayer...) and an alarm clock (mpc volume 0; sleep $1; mpc volume 77; mpc play $2) [something I couldn't make windows do].
(* the trick: run wpa_supplicant with -b bond0, and write a script that sets the primary slave to bond0 when eth1 is not wpa_cli status | grep -q CONNECTED).
I run Ubuntu 8.10 and yet I am somehow able to assess the situation pragmatically.
Good! Making your decisions based on facts rather than preconceived notions is always a good idea.
As it sits, if I were to install Windows on my Ubuntu box, then I would probably make up the cost (aka "Micro$oft tax) with the annual power savings.
I'll trust you did the math, and did it well.
When Ubuntu can put up the functionality of Windows (including power management), then it becomes a proper comparison.
Ubuntu gives me so much more of what I want than windows that I'll probably find it worth the extra money if I did the math to see how much money we were talking about.
It gives me ease of software installation and updating. It gives me ease-to-use good functionality. It doesn't interrupt me while I'm using it. It gives me tremendous configurability*. It lets me automate tasks easily. By letting me slice open the guts and peek inside, it lets me learn more about computers, networks and operating systems than windows. It tries to do what I want rather than trying to do enough of what I want that it can also impose some of what the maker wants.
Windows... not so much. Every application has its own way of checking for updates. There's "helpful" balloon messages all the time. It asks you whether you are sure you want to do what you just asked the computer to do [you should only do this if there's no undo, and even so you should think about whether the user would want you to ask]. Windows is not easy to script. Remapping escape to caps lock is a PITA (you enter a hex scancode pair list in the registry). No workspaces. Not all windows can be made always-on-top. I could go on [I'm talking about XP as it was ~2005].
Having the system that works best for you is worth something. If everybody just bought for the cheapest, Apple wouldn't exist. For me, that system is Linux [ubuntu and debian]. If windows work best for you, fine. What does the saved money cost you? What do you gain by using windows? Which functionality does windows have that Ubuntu doesn't? [I'm out of touch with it, so I may have forgotten]
Translation of "configurability": it means that I can have the system work the way I want it to. Lack of configurability means that unless everybody agrees on how the unconfigurable parts of the system should work, someone is left with a system that doesn't do what they want.
Slashdot Mirror
I ascended with a wishless tourist once, and I consider that more of an accomplishment than my bachelor's degree.
Your CS dept.'s friday bar probably had more chicks, though ;)
</snark>
reading spoilers is no more cheating than looking at the source code.
Which, I imagine, a lot of the people with long beards and intravenous coffee would also consider cheating.
Reading spoilers or source is like doping: it gives you an advantage over those who don't do it, but the sport is still challenging. As long as you can distinguish those who do from those who don't, and take appropriate measures [whatever that is], I see no reason to be offended.
For those too young to remember games older than Halo
Halo? More like Bomberman or the Lotus and Turrican series (~1990). Nethack is from 1987, and is based on hack from 1985.
If you install `bsdgames' on debian/ubuntu, you can play hack, the precursor to nethack.
To get an idea of how the world looked when the internet was black-and-white, look at the end of the man page:
BUGS
Probably infinite. Mail complaints to mcvax!aeb .
Bang path ftw :) I'll get off your lawn now.
Let's compare this with a danish politician (I'm from Denmark).
http://www.computerworld.dk/art/42432?a=newsletter&i=1393 says (my translation from danish)
"Enhedslistens"* candidate for the parliament, Johanne Schmidt-Nielsen, thinks tha file sharing should be legal, and digital rights management, DRM, illegal
"I think it's an illusion to believe that it's possible to stop copying. I amounts to sticking one's head in the sand. The politicians have to realize the necessity of forming a committee that will address the question of how artists can be compensated for their work."
*"Enhedslisten" is the leftmost party in danish politics, left of The Socialist People's Party. I'd guess they compare with the greens; the environment is also one of their big issues, they're all for taking from the rich and giving to the poor.
I remember them branding themselves as the Robin Hood party one time, but I don't recall them using that term again. If they get into parliament, they often hold around four seats out of 179, which is the smallest possible amount (less than 2% of the votes and you don't get in).
Be aware that this statement was during election season.
I hope this gives you nutrition for cognition :)
How will they know that the downloader didn't have permission to download the copyrighted work? There are movies, music, and video games that are copyrighted but freely available.
One would hope the law says "unlicensed" rather than "not paid for". One would fear that the law is made by lawyers (just because we don't like lawyers). A fortunate side effect is that they probably know to distinguish the two.
If not, then because due to the fact that
There are [...] video games that are copyrighted but freely available
We would have that apt-get is a tool for software piracy: nexuiz, openarena, wesnoth; that's three strikes. Be sure to add the music to your playlist (dpkg -L $pkg; unzip the pk3s).
The french are trying to outlaw Linux? They're probably still angry at the Germans (who are adopting it, as we have all read) ;)
Or they're pissed at the freedom fries thing and want software frenchness rather than software freedom... ;)
Posted [...] on 2008-11-02
Kennedy issued his order in response to lawsuits by civil liberties groups in 2005 after news reports disclosed the wiretapping.
It has taken three to four years, roughly a whole term, to get a judge to dig up this bit of the current administration's {,mis,ab}use of power.
What will the consequences for the Bush et al. be, if their practices are found to be unconstitutional? Is there a real incentive to uphold the constitution if it takes so long to dig up the dirt?
Come back when each release of Linux [...]
You come back when WGA includes source code and a patch. Until then, I'll be sending my money in the direction of http://www.linuxgenuineadvantage.org/source/ and http://www.alienos.com/wp-content/uploads/linux_gen_adv_crack.patch
On a more serious note...
"We all know"---I really ought to find an article that backs me up on this, but I've heard it enough times from random sources so it must be true---we all know that breast milk is very good for babies.
I'm wondering whether there's a large amount of calcium in breast milk, and whether that influences the babies' ability to form memories. The summary doesn't say whether the calcium acts as a "mere" catalyst or is used up in the process; but in any case, I'd guess that more is good.
[I also really should check whether calcium crosses the blood-brain barrier]
We can also contemplate applications. Is "forward amnesia"* caused by calcium not being where it needs to be in large enough amounts? Can we wrap calcium in a road map that guides it there and cures the amnesia?
* forward amnesia: the kind where you remember everything up to the point where you got it, but don't form new memories after that very well or at all. As opposed to retrograde amnesia, where you remember well after the point where you got it, but poorly or not at all what happened before it.
Google can probably give me answers, but I can't remember how to use it. I haven't had my milk today :)
myosin Vb molecule in hippocampal neurons responded to a flow of calcium ions
"So remember to drink your milk, boys and girls, or you will forget how to."
Don't believe NASA. They're in the pocket of the vogons, who are targeting key computer installations at an undisclosed location. ... just as we were about to enter the year of Linux on the desktop! That would have allowed us to form a global beowulf cluster which would finally be able to calculate the number 42, along with a proof that it indeed is the right answer.
Damn vogons and their toxic ammonia. You know what this means, right? Keep a towel handy, and don't keep your laptop in your lap. There's a giant task ahead of you and Trillian.
It'd be "rechner", not "komputor". The word "desktop" in the non-computer sense translates to "Schreibtisch" (lit. "writing table", same as in danish).
I don't know which words Germans use to distinguish between desktop/laptop/workstation systems and servers/clusters/phones/*, though.
"Jahr des Linux an die Schreibtisch Rechner" =~ Year of Linux on the desktop computer. Not sure.
the risk that a fuckwit with a short fuse and a .22 can kill with little more than pulling a trigger far outweighs the benefits of ' ohhh but i really want a gun'.
Does it outweigh the benefits of a well-regulated militia which is necessary for the security of the free state?
the aug steyr, it's a semi/fully automatic assault rifle,
You don't need to explain to us what the aug steyr is. It was in counterstrike.
Use Crelm toothpaste, with the secret ingredient Fraudulin. It's the he most effective way to fight
Fascism has a domino effect: once we restore liberty and democracy to the US, the rest will fall like dominoes.
Use Crelm toothpaste, or a well-regulated American militia (being necessary to the security of the free state), to fight fascism.
(apt-get install miscfiles to get /usr/share/state/us-constitution.gz)
much of the stuff in the Bible are good things.
I wouldn't know, I haven't read much of it. The parts I do know about, I think of as a work of fiction from which you can learn lessons about what it means to be a good person. That's good. But you don't need the bible to tell you what it means to respect your parents, be a loyal friend and be a good citizen, and why you should do it.
No garlic? Count me out!
Wait, are you saying that's why I'm such a "hit" at parties?
kinda tough to do without some VPN connecting to the other 30+ locations
Uhmm... you are aware that as part of the IRC spec, IRC daemons are to organize themselves in a spanning tree, right? [netsplits happen when an edge gets cut].
Run one IRC server at every office. They connect together tunneled with stunnel or ssh. Then you have intraoffice communication independent of any other office, and secure interoffice communication when the net is up.
Most clients support sending un/pw to the server, and most servers support throwing off clients with bad un/pw combos. Or do it the freenode way: tell the identification bot your password and it sets a flag on you visible to everyone else.
(make sure clients connect to the hosts in a secure way. Hey, stunnel again...).
Actually, depending on your requirements, you may not want clients to encrypt traffic, so that you can log and archive it.
Exactly my thoughts.
I'd recommend IRC. Set up one IRC server per location and tunnel inter-office connections over ssh or ssl [have a look at stunnel]. Whether to encrypt intraoffice communication depends on local requirements, but again there's stunnel.
If employees don't trust each other or the sysadmins, your organization probably either has serious problems, or it's the DOD.
For the crypto geeks, and those interested: look at the paper, section 2.5 "Optional arguments"
A Skein computation consists of processing these options in order, using UBI. Each input has a
different "type" value for the tweak, ensuring that inputs are not interchangeable.
Q: Couldn't you get the same effect for any other hash function?
A: Yes, I think. If there's extra data you want to tie to the message, come up with a type-length-value encoding scheme;
To tie a randomized hash value to the public key used to verify the signature, simply do H("nonce:64:" || the_nonce || "pubkey:1024:" || the_pubkey || "message:$length:" || the_message).
Or use numbers instead of names to identify types, and use fixed-sized words for lengths (or do unary encoding of the length of the length, then the length in binary). Just keep the tie-in function injective.
Can anyone see a fault in this?
From Schneier:
Skein is defined for three different internal state sizesâ"256 bits, 512 bits, and 1024 bits [...]. A completely optional and extendable argument system makes Skein an efficient tool to use for a very large number of functions: [...] a stream cipher
So it does symmetric crypto with big keys [I assume the key size is either one internal state, or user-chosen].
Are there still crypto export laws in place? Would this impact Skein? Or will lawyers argue that encryption isn't it's primary purpose? Or...
Did you know your uid is a prime number when interpreted in base 7 or 11? How do you sleep at night?
If he tells anyone about it, chances are the answer is "lonely".
Re-read the definition of impossible that was given. It wasn't a one-shot definition.
Being faster means little if the average person can not install an application and have it work [without] going to the command line, editing some script, coping some file, or hunting for some needed RPM.
Absolutely true. If users can't use a given platform to their satisfaction, they will not use it.
I fail to see how it's relevant, unless you want to argue against a straw man. I could have a working box with a browser, pdf viewer, word processor, media player and whatever else I'm going to need without touching the command line.
I use the command line because I like it, not because I have to.
The time I spend on learning details about how the system works is an investment.
It means that when I unplug my ethernet wire, I switch to wifi without dropping connections*. It means that I can rename a million files with ten seconds of work and O(n) seconds of productivity doing something else. It means that my computer can serve as a time (sleep ${1}m; mplayer ...) and an alarm clock (mpc volume 0; sleep $1; mpc volume 77; mpc play $2) [something I couldn't make windows do].
(* the trick: run wpa_supplicant with -b bond0, and write a script that sets the primary slave to bond0 when eth1 is not wpa_cli status | grep -q CONNECTED).
I run Ubuntu 8.10 and yet I am somehow able to assess the situation pragmatically.
Good! Making your decisions based on facts rather than preconceived notions is always a good idea.
As it sits, if I were to install Windows on my Ubuntu box, then I would probably make up
the cost (aka "Micro$oft tax) with the annual power savings.
I'll trust you did the math, and did it well.
When Ubuntu can put up the functionality of Windows (including power management), then it becomes a proper comparison.
Ubuntu gives me so much more of what I want than windows that I'll probably find it worth the extra money if I did the math to see how much money we were talking about.
It gives me ease of software installation and updating. It gives me ease-to-use good functionality. It doesn't interrupt me while I'm using it. It gives me tremendous configurability*. It lets me automate tasks easily. By letting me slice open the guts and peek inside, it lets me learn more about computers, networks and operating systems than windows. It tries to do what I want rather than trying to do enough of what I want that it can also impose some of what the maker wants.
Windows... not so much. Every application has its own way of checking for updates. There's "helpful" balloon messages all the time. It asks you whether you are sure you want to do what you just asked the computer to do [you should only do this if there's no undo, and even so you should think about whether the user would want you to ask]. Windows is not easy to script. Remapping escape to caps lock is a PITA (you enter a hex scancode pair list in the registry). No workspaces. Not all windows can be made always-on-top. I could go on [I'm talking about XP as it was ~2005].
Having the system that works best for you is worth something. If everybody just bought for the cheapest, Apple wouldn't exist. For me, that system is Linux [ubuntu and debian]. If windows work best for you, fine. What does the saved money cost you? What do you gain by using windows? Which functionality does windows have that Ubuntu doesn't? [I'm out of touch with it, so I may have forgotten]
Translation of "configurability": it means that I can have the system work the way I want it to. Lack of configurability means that unless everybody agrees on how the unconfigurable parts of the system should work, someone is left with a system that doesn't do what they want.
Firefox, and thankfully that is getting a QT4 port from Nokia.
Will it be rebranded as firefoks? ;)