If you want to know what a general purpose PC which can only reliably run software blessed by a central authority looks like, go install Debian, then try and install a program that isn't included in the repositories. It'll probably make jailbreaking an iPhone look like a stroll through a grassy meadow.
Oh, you mean like I how I've built and run supertux, wesnoth, frozen-bubble and conky out of svn? Or like how I installed Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo with wine? Or how I install the wine packages from winehq instead of from Debian?
Or how I've installed vethd from a source tarball? Or how I've installed several emacs mode by downloading some random.el of the web? Or do you perhaps means the tons of scripts in my ~/bin that just keep on working and I only change because I learn something new about shell scripting?
Besides, that's missing the point a bit. The real point is that Apple is deliberately and actively making some pieces of software hard to install for the explicit purpose of preventing their users from running it. No such thing happens with Debian.
What [Trusted Computing] does do is let you run software on some arbitrary system and get that software into a provably secure state,
Say, like an OS that's locked down with DRM and refuses to run applications not signed by ${COMPANY} who sells signatures only to non-competing software? Oh right, but it doesn't allow third party control of what software you run. I see...
If I'm totally wrong, care to give a reference proving me wrong? I'd like to learn something new.
Comcast will enforce bandwidth caps. How's that better than throttling?
You're told up front what the limits are.
It's not discriminating against any application, not even the legal ones.
It's fairly generous: 250 gigs lets you download at 0.77878308 megabit/s 24/7 (thanks, GNU units), or 8 gig per day. Plenty enough for a few aptitude full-upgrades, some online gaming and downloading a new distro to try out, plus some video to watch.
Even if it turns out that 250 gig limits make for a shitty service, at least Comcast are honest about the limits they put on you, so you know what you're buying and you can take the limits placed on you into account when deciding what to download.
Most likely, because advertisers would NEVER use sex appeal / cool facor to sell a product or use an unappealing actor to represent the consumer of another product. Never.
So for instance - while you may not use recursion in C for general problem solving (due to the lack of tail-recursion optimizations which turn the thing into a loop)
If you read the gcc man page, you will learn that -foptimize-sibling-calls enables sibling and tail call optimization, and is enabled on -O2, -O3 and -Os:)
Umm, because as sovereign nations the people in each nation should be deciding their own laws, surely?
A nation state can have national sovereignty without being a democracy (sarcasm: just look at iraq). A sovereign state should be free to decide its laws without interference from other states, subject to the conditions that the sovereign state has put in place.
Whether the sovereign state has its laws made and enforced by a king who is king through the mercy of god (or through the magic power of cleanliness and the launching of blades by well-hydrated bitches) or by a trinity of mutually distrustful watchmen elected in whole or in part by the people makes no difference.
I would think the defense (not that I claim whether I agree or disagree with it) of extradition laws is that it's a quid pro quo: we can steal your criminals, you can steal ours. You get the benefit of people not breaking your laws.
Colbert explains how AT&T, BellSouth, Cingular, SBC, Ohio Bell, Indiana Bell, ${Other} Bell each bought one another and each others' subdivisions and rebranded the bought parts (with a hilariously confusing arrow diagram), then concludes that:
Due to American anti-trust regulations, we have gone from this [map of USA, parts of Canada and Mexico are showing; a caption says "1980:", there the AT&T logo and name, USA is blue to indicate that it's all pwned by AT&T]... to this... [the same map, with AT&T's now logo and their name in a new font]
He then refers to Terminator 2; no matter how many pieces you split AT&T into, it'll always come back together again.
A Social Security number is "meaningless". It's just an identifier. But it's a number that uniquely identifies you, and if other people get their hands on it, or are able to spoof it, then than meaningless number can have adverse effects on your life.
Suppose I generate an RSA key pair and give you my public key. Then that pair of numbers (N, e) uniquely identifies me. And if other people get their hands on it, or are able to spoof it, then those meaningless numbers can have...
Pause. The analogy breaks down right about here. Revealing my public key won't have adverse effects on my cryptographic security (clue is in the adjective).
An identifier is not an authenticator. An identifier is something that specifies who you are; an authenticator is something that proves you are who you claim to be.
Some people either don't understand the distinction, don't think that public information fails to meet the criteria for a good authenticator, or don't think the system will be broken, or don't think the adverse effects of the system being broken are worth the cost of using a better system.
I've heard that identity theft is a major problem. That would suggest that some people are wrong.
In how many ways is this particular "meaningless" identifier any different? I'd say about none.
Still, private companies should not be in the business of enforcing laws or tracking citizens. Private companies do not answer to the public and are not regulated in the same way a police officer is.
You are most definitely right. Private companies are sometimes held accountable for their actions.
Check the referrer, then redirect to the main page when "needed"
Because wget would never lie, no it wouldn't. Nor would Live HTTP Headers for firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829). Nor would anyone ever copy a request from wireshark and paste it into netcat (or socat, or telnet).
It's ineffective at what it does and annoys people. Just like the myspace mp3-playing flash app that either lets the band disable downloading of a song (hello wireshark) or enable downloading of a song from logged-in users only (hello wiresh... oh wait, this time it was firefox's DownloadHelper add-on).
and if it's encrypted more than once, it's nearly impossible to decrypt.
Oh, you mean with ROT26?;)
Or perhaps RSA? Let's see...
Let n = pq, with e_1 * d_1 = e_2 * d_2 = 1 (mod phi(n)). Now let's encrypt m twice; we get (m^e_1)^e_2 = m^(e_1 * e_2); the decryption key is d = d_1 * d_2. This amounts to choosing d_1*d_2 randomly in a weird way, instead of just choosing d directly.
Even worse, if you only apply one pair of keys, you get (m^e)^e = m^(e^2); you're restricting your keyspace to the quadratic residues modulo phi(n), which lowers your security.
Depending on how you propose to encrypt everything twice, it may increase security, but I think the biggest increase will be from the fact that you are using an obscure, secret algorithm. I think your CPU time would be better spent on using a larger key; besides, who has the time to single out your anon-to-anon traffic and decrypt it (a highly non-trivial task), while there's tons of other encrypted traffic in the pipes?
So if you call eight PCs connected to a network a "supper computer"
I'd much rather call it a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser (as made by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation), since those doesn't eat spelling checkers for dinner;)
Or it could mean 2.71828183 channel surround sound.
(I feel like such a dork right now; imagine me talking like one, say with a slight lithp, while wearing my white AV-club member shirt and pocket protector--straight out of White and Nerdy)
Wow, it's like almost 3d sound. My stereo only supports something like 2.718281828459045 channels. Hey, why don't we throw the next party at your house, then I'll drop by a bit early to see what amazing difference the extra 0.000000017154 or so channels provides. You do use gold-ratio connectors and phiber cables, right?
It's like they're assuming you've played the other Guitar Hero games, were good at them, and only bought the new one because you wanted a bigger challenge.
I fail to recognize this. Let me first admit, though, that I have played other GH games very little. Three Aerosmith songs in my local EB, one or two songs from GH2 on easy, tier 1. My experience with GH3 is also incomplete: I've 5-starred easy (and, IIRC, medium), and completed ~10 songs on hard. A handful of FCs on easy too.
My experience is that the difficulty rises slowly within each difficulty level, with a few harder-than-normal boss fights in the mix, and then jerks upward when you go to the next difficulty level; the jerk is enough that you note it's significantly more difficult, but not enough to be impossible.
It'll be fun to see whether the difficulty increase between tiers is more pronounced on hard and expert.
making a good challenge that only hardcore fans will appreciate.
I would say that GH3 spans a large interval of difficulty level. Thus it should be relatively simple to reach a challenge level that matches your skill. Also, there are several goals you can set for yourself that you can work towards in a non-linear fashion (the bonus songs are great for this); for instance, n-starring all songs, FCing all the songs you had heard before playing the game, FCing all songs. Now vary the difficulty level and your settings for performance mode, precision mode and hyperspeed.
Sure, FCing TTFAF with precision mode and hypespeed five (or performance mode) is INfuckingSANE. And that's great--it means you won't run out of challenges soon. The greatness of this is of course depends on the fact that there are plenty of easier challenges with a wide selection of difficulty level you can work at, and lots of meaningful goals you can achieve during your play to keep the experience rewarding.
So, in summary: the hardest parts of GH3 are hard enough that maybe, maybe, one person will complete them. But if you go there, you're asking for it. A sense of accomplishment is accessible to everyone, and there are challenges of sufficiently varying difficulty that your sense of accomplishment can match your level of skill.
The numbers didn't prove my point so they were left out. Do you expect a comment to be created as an attempt to trash something then to show the data is[^H^H^H] disproves the hypothesis. Whatever happened to good critique where you were allowed to be wrong and not ostracized from the slashdot community.
Changes in bold. In reply to your modified last sentence (the one I put in your moth): you're not being modded down because you are wrong. You're being modded down because you're being rude.
Did you note how the review said that the author is mostly descriptive? You ascribe him a motive (which goes against that), and then use that motive (which you don't know he has) to accuse him of poor scholarship (which we don't know he committed) without backing up any of your claims (which we know you didn't).
Suppose we do nothing, and we don't eliminate this $400 billion dependence we have on foreign oil. Some of that money goes to terrorist organizations and also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Then what kind of a world have we given our children?
Terrorists! Think of the Children! You don't... hate... children, do you?
Also, Al Gore's legislation encouraging the internet into existence happened around 1988, while TBL did his web-thing in 1991. The years are pulled out of http://www.firstmonday.org/ISSUES/issue5_10/wiggins/ which is not my ass.
Whatever they build upon i hold my thumbs its something new because if one thing is needed today its more OS out there.
I would like to emphasize that what the world needs is not more OSes (think about what the concept "distro chooser" implies); the world needs the "out there" part. In other words, we don't need more OSes in the ecosystem, we need more OSes in the marketplace.
And I would suggest that HP base their linux on Ubuntu. Debian is, at least to a larger part than ubuntu, made "by geeks, for geeks" and doesn't value ease of use as highly as Ubuntu. To make the hypothetical HP-LX usable enough to be competitive, were it based on debian, HP would have to duplicate a lot of the work of Ubuntu (wasting resources). Patches on the Ubuntu side would propagate to HP through Debian, introducing a delay.
Simply put: the goals of HP match those of Ubuntu more than they match those of Debian. By basing HP-LX on Ubuntu, HP will have to work less and can save some money, some of which will passed on to the consumer and help make HP more competitive.
Here's a translation of "nødværgeretten" (self-defense; danish criminal law, paragraph 13):
Actions done in self-defense are unpunished if they have been necessary to resist or deflect a commenced or impending unjustified attack, and doesn't apparently exceed what is reasonable, taking into account the dangerousness of the attack and the attacker's person.
Piece two:
If anyone exceeds the limits of legal self-defense, he is unpunished if the excess is reasonably justified by the fear or excitation caused by the attack.
Alright, that's the law (roughly translated). You claim laws to be objective. If that is true, then there are objective measures for the following:
- What's necessary to defend against attack - What causes attacks to be unjustified - What self-defense measures are reasonable, as a function of the attack - What excess is justified by fear and excitation
I don't believe that such objective measures exist, and so I can not agree that the law isn't subjective.
Some laws are pretty objective, though; for instance, giving a larger punishment to repeat offenders is fairly unambiguous: the record will show whether or not the person in question has been convicted before. But it is definitely not always the case. [Def-definitely not always the case. 18 minutes to Wapner.]
Consider the simplest law I have ever read; it states that a person called $NAME born in $COUNTRY has the "infødsret", meaning they should be treated as if born in Denmark with respect to some other laws, and that this has effect from $DATE. What happens if two people with that $NAME have been born in the same $COUNTRY prior to the law being passed?
Slashdot Mirror
If you want to know what a general purpose PC which can only reliably run software blessed by a central authority looks like, go install Debian, then try and install a program that isn't included in the repositories. It'll probably make jailbreaking an iPhone look like a stroll through a grassy meadow.
Oh, you mean like I how I've built and run supertux, wesnoth, frozen-bubble and conky out of svn? Or like how I installed Starcraft, Warcraft and Diablo with wine? Or how I install the wine packages from winehq instead of from Debian?
Or how I've installed vethd from a source tarball? Or how I've installed several emacs mode by downloading some random .el of the web? Or do you perhaps means the tons of scripts in my ~/bin that just keep on working and I only change because I learn something new about shell scripting?
Besides, that's missing the point a bit. The real point is that Apple is deliberately and actively making some pieces of software hard to install for the explicit purpose of preventing their users from running it. No such thing happens with Debian.
What [Trusted Computing] does do is let you run software on some arbitrary system and get that software into a provably secure state,
Say, like an OS that's locked down with DRM and refuses to run applications not signed by ${COMPANY} who sells signatures only to non-competing software? Oh right, but it doesn't allow third party control of what software you run. I see...
If I'm totally wrong, care to give a reference proving me wrong? I'd like to learn something new.
Comcast will enforce bandwidth caps. How's that better than throttling?
Even if it turns out that 250 gig limits make for a shitty service, at least Comcast are honest about the limits they put on you, so you know what you're buying and you can take the limits placed on you into account when deciding what to download.
Most likely, because advertisers would NEVER use sex appeal / cool facor to sell a product or use an unappealing actor to represent the consumer of another product. Never.
Of course not. Just like they didn't do on http://www.break.com/index/ps3_vs_nintendos_wii.html (warning: flash video, and the fat bitch is ugly).
So for instance - while you may not use recursion in C for general problem solving (due to the lack of tail-recursion optimizations which turn the thing into a loop)
If you read the gcc man page, you will learn that -foptimize-sibling-calls enables sibling and tail call optimization, and is enabled on -O2, -O3 and -Os :)
-- Jonas K
Umm, because as sovereign nations the people in each nation should be deciding their own laws, surely?
A nation state can have national sovereignty without being a democracy (sarcasm: just look at iraq). A sovereign state should be free to decide its laws without interference from other states, subject to the conditions that the sovereign state has put in place.
Whether the sovereign state has its laws made and enforced by a king who is king through the mercy of god (or through the magic power of cleanliness and the launching of blades by well-hydrated bitches) or by a trinity of mutually distrustful watchmen elected in whole or in part by the people makes no difference.
I would think the defense (not that I claim whether I agree or disagree with it) of extradition laws is that it's a quid pro quo: we can steal your criminals, you can steal ours. You get the benefit of people not breaking your laws.
</fart origin="cortical">
Colbert explains how AT&T, BellSouth, Cingular, SBC, Ohio Bell, Indiana Bell, ${Other} Bell each bought one another and each others' subdivisions and rebranded the bought parts (with a hilariously confusing arrow diagram), then concludes that:
Due to American anti-trust regulations, we have gone from this ... to this ...
[map of USA, parts of Canada and Mexico are showing; a caption says "1980:", there the AT&T logo and name, USA is blue to indicate that it's all pwned by AT&T]
[the same map, with AT&T's now logo and their name in a new font]
He then refers to Terminator 2; no matter how many pieces you split AT&T into, it'll always come back together again.
A Social Security number is "meaningless". It's just an identifier. But it's a number that uniquely identifies you, and if other people get their hands on it, or are able to spoof it, then than meaningless number can have adverse effects on your life.
Suppose I generate an RSA key pair and give you my public key. Then that pair of numbers (N, e) uniquely identifies me. And if other people get their hands on it, or are able to spoof it, then those meaningless numbers can have...
Pause. The analogy breaks down right about here. Revealing my public key won't have adverse effects on my cryptographic security (clue is in the adjective).
An identifier is not an authenticator. An identifier is something that specifies who you are; an authenticator is something that proves you are who you claim to be.
Some people either don't understand the distinction, don't think that public information fails to meet the criteria for a good authenticator, or don't think the system will be broken, or don't think the adverse effects of the system being broken are worth the cost of using a better system.
I've heard that identity theft is a major problem. That would suggest that some people are wrong.
In how many ways is this particular "meaningless" identifier any different? I'd say about none.
Still, private companies should not be in the business of enforcing laws or tracking citizens. Private companies do not answer to the public and are not regulated in the same way a police officer is.
You are most definitely right. Private companies are sometimes held accountable for their actions.
Check the referrer, then redirect to the main page when "needed"
Because wget would never lie, no it wouldn't. Nor would Live HTTP Headers for firefox (https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/3829). Nor would anyone ever copy a request from wireshark and paste it into netcat (or socat, or telnet).
It's ineffective at what it does and annoys people. Just like the myspace mp3-playing flash app that either lets the band disable downloading of a song (hello wireshark) or enable downloading of a song from logged-in users only (hello wiresh... oh wait, this time it was firefox's DownloadHelper add-on).
</rant>
Colbert explains it best. You can watch him on youtube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I6nuwQmhrZ8.
and if it's encrypted more than once, it's nearly impossible to decrypt.
Oh, you mean with ROT26? ;)
Or perhaps RSA? Let's see...
Let n = pq, with e_1 * d_1 = e_2 * d_2 = 1 (mod phi(n)). Now let's encrypt m twice; we get (m^e_1)^e_2 = m^(e_1 * e_2); the decryption key is d = d_1 * d_2. This amounts to choosing d_1*d_2 randomly in a weird way, instead of just choosing d directly.
Even worse, if you only apply one pair of keys, you get (m^e)^e = m^(e^2); you're restricting your keyspace to the quadratic residues modulo phi(n), which lowers your security.
Depending on how you propose to encrypt everything twice, it may increase security, but I think the biggest increase will be from the fact that you are using an obscure, secret algorithm. I think your CPU time would be better spent on using a larger key; besides, who has the time to single out your anon-to-anon traffic and decrypt it (a highly non-trivial task), while there's tons of other encrypted traffic in the pipes?
So if you call eight PCs connected to a network a "supper computer"
I'd much rather call it a Nutrimatic Drinks Dispenser (as made by the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation), since those doesn't eat spelling checkers for dinner ;)
Oak Ridge has a >30,000 core Cray XT4,
Yeah, but does it run gentoo?
25% of the [Intellectual Property Subcommittee] is from California.
For the few who may be unaware:
Hollywood is a district in the city of Los Angeles, California
(so sayeth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hollywood)
That's of course why it's interesting to note the numerousity of Californians in that particular committee.
Or it could mean 2.71828183 channel surround sound.
(I feel like such a dork right now; imagine me talking like one, say with a slight lithp, while wearing my white AV-club member shirt and pocket protector--straight out of White and Nerdy)
Wow, it's like almost 3d sound. My stereo only supports something like 2.718281828459045 channels. Hey, why don't we throw the next party at your house, then I'll drop by a bit early to see what amazing difference the extra 0.000000017154 or so channels provides. You do use gold-ratio connectors and phiber cables, right?
(captcha: arousing... make of it what you will)
It's like they're assuming you've played the other Guitar Hero games, were good at them, and only bought the new one because you wanted a bigger challenge.
I fail to recognize this. Let me first admit, though, that I have played other GH games very little. Three Aerosmith songs in my local EB, one or two songs from GH2 on easy, tier 1. My experience with GH3 is also incomplete: I've 5-starred easy (and, IIRC, medium), and completed ~10 songs on hard. A handful of FCs on easy too.
My experience is that the difficulty rises slowly within each difficulty level, with a few harder-than-normal boss fights in the mix, and then jerks upward when you go to the next difficulty level; the jerk is enough that you note it's significantly more difficult, but not enough to be impossible.
It'll be fun to see whether the difficulty increase between tiers is more pronounced on hard and expert.
making a good challenge that only hardcore fans will appreciate.
I would say that GH3 spans a large interval of difficulty level. Thus it should be relatively simple to reach a challenge level that matches your skill. Also, there are several goals you can set for yourself that you can work towards in a non-linear fashion (the bonus songs are great for this); for instance, n-starring all songs, FCing all the songs you had heard before playing the game, FCing all songs. Now vary the difficulty level and your settings for performance mode, precision mode and hyperspeed.
Sure, FCing TTFAF with precision mode and hypespeed five (or performance mode) is INfuckingSANE. And that's great--it means you won't run out of challenges soon. The greatness of this is of course depends on the fact that there are plenty of easier challenges with a wide selection of difficulty level you can work at, and lots of meaningful goals you can achieve during your play to keep the experience rewarding.
So, in summary: the hardest parts of GH3 are hard enough that maybe, maybe, one person will complete them. But if you go there, you're asking for it. A sense of accomplishment is accessible to everyone, and there are challenges of sufficiently varying difficulty that your sense of accomplishment can match your level of skill.
The numbers didn't prove my point so they were left out. Do you expect a comment to be created as an attempt to trash something then to show the data is[^H^H^H] disproves the hypothesis. Whatever happened to good critique where you were allowed to be wrong and not ostracized from the slashdot community.
Changes in bold. In reply to your modified last sentence (the one I put in your moth): you're not being modded down because you are wrong. You're being modded down because you're being rude.
Did you note how the review said that the author is mostly descriptive? You ascribe him a motive (which goes against that), and then use that motive (which you don't know he has) to accuse him of poor scholarship (which we don't know he committed) without backing up any of your claims (which we know you didn't).
As said by McCain:
Suppose we do nothing, and we don't eliminate this $400 billion dependence we have on foreign oil. Some of that money goes to terrorist organizations and also contributes to greenhouse gas emissions. Then what kind of a world have we given our children?
Terrorists! Think of the Children! You don't... hate... children, do you?
The news is that this dude says he did the www, not Al Gore.
If by "This Dude" you mean Tim Berners-Lee, then it's not at all news.
Al Gore built the internet (in that he's responsible for legislation encouraging it being built), while Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web.
Should anyone be unfamiliar with that distinction, it is discussed to some satisfaction at http://webopedia.internet.com/DidYouKnow/Internet/2002/Web_vs_Internet.asp and a quick google search for, say, "internet vs. www" should give you more information.
Also, Al Gore's legislation encouraging the internet into existence happened around 1988, while TBL did his web-thing in 1991. The years are pulled out of http://www.firstmonday.org/ISSUES/issue5_10/wiggins/ which is not my ass.
They PAY for the RDM, and for [...]
Restrictions Digital Management; riight... Use grammar French much?
Of course, packetloss due to geese...
The should offer the geese to keep their lives in return for some rfc1149-based network acceleration service. No strings attached, of course :)
Whatever they build upon i hold my thumbs its something new because if one thing is needed today its more OS out there.
I would like to emphasize that what the world needs is not more OSes (think about what the concept "distro chooser" implies); the world needs the "out there" part. In other words, we don't need more OSes in the ecosystem, we need more OSes in the marketplace.
And I would suggest that HP base their linux on Ubuntu. Debian is, at least to a larger part than ubuntu, made "by geeks, for geeks" and doesn't value ease of use as highly as Ubuntu. To make the hypothetical HP-LX usable enough to be competitive, were it based on debian, HP would have to duplicate a lot of the work of Ubuntu (wasting resources). Patches on the Ubuntu side would propagate to HP through Debian, introducing a delay.
Simply put: the goals of HP match those of Ubuntu more than they match those of Debian. By basing HP-LX on Ubuntu, HP will have to work less and can save some money, some of which will passed on to the consumer and help make HP more competitive.
Techinca
Oh, the irony...
Arsicles
From Art Techinca, were they?
#1 is subjective, #2 is not.
(IANAL, TINLA)
Here's a translation of "nødværgeretten" (self-defense; danish criminal law, paragraph 13):
Actions done in self-defense are unpunished if they have been necessary to resist or deflect a commenced or impending unjustified attack, and doesn't apparently exceed what is reasonable, taking into account the dangerousness of the attack and the attacker's person.
Piece two:
If anyone exceeds the limits of legal self-defense, he is unpunished if the excess is reasonably justified by the fear or excitation caused by the attack.
Alright, that's the law (roughly translated). You claim laws to be objective. If that is true, then there are objective measures for the following:
- What's necessary to defend against attack
- What causes attacks to be unjustified
- What self-defense measures are reasonable, as a function of the attack
- What excess is justified by fear and excitation
I don't believe that such objective measures exist, and so I can not agree that the law isn't subjective.
Some laws are pretty objective, though; for instance, giving a larger punishment to repeat offenders is fairly unambiguous: the record will show whether or not the person in question has been convicted before. But it is definitely not always the case. [Def-definitely not always the case. 18 minutes to Wapner.]
Consider the simplest law I have ever read; it states that a person called $NAME born in $COUNTRY has the "infødsret", meaning they should be treated as if born in Denmark with respect to some other laws, and that this has effect from $DATE. What happens if two people with that $NAME have been born in the same $COUNTRY prior to the law being passed?