Getting behind the wheel while drunk shows a fundamental contempt for human life.
Now, I don't drive, so take what I say with the amount of salt you deem necessary. I do get on my bicycle after partying, though.
When I'm drunk, I'm not particularly thinking that my actions may kill someone. I also don't think I've ever harmed anyone (including myself) in traffic, and in all the dangerous situations I've been in, I think I acted prudently before ending up in that situation (I'm not saying "it's their fault!"---sometimes bad things just happen even though everybody is acting responsibly).
Now, suppose you drive, and your traffic danger history sounds similar to mine. Are you really going to entertain the likelihood of you harming or killing people?
If the though "I might harm someone" never enters your mind, are you really showing a contempt for human life?
It's a different thing to think "I might harm someone" and then not follow through on that thought (the next thought might be "how likely is that?"; not asking that question, or ignoring that answer, that might be contempt).
I know you love to think it's all fun and cooperation and puppy dogs in the EU, and the US government are 100% imperialist psychos
No, I don't like to think that. It's just that of all the countries in the western world, I think of the US as being the one most often engaged in warfare on foreign soil.
I'm no fanboi of the EU. The politicians are stealing my tax money by putting them in a travel expenses account, then pocketing the leftovers when the year ends. For that, and other transgression, they now govern me not with my consent but only because they have more, bigger and better weaponry than me.
I just haven't been aware of any imposition on third parties done by the EU. Your link, on the face of it, says it does happen. I might start revising my perception of the EU (specifically as compared to the US).
I'm not sure if you're playing word games or shifting the context here, or if you're just objecting to my point.
Let me answer the first: I think people have value beyond profitability---as friends, family, lovers, teachers, students, and many more relations.
But if a company could make more money by firing a particular employee, if we assume free market capitalism optimize social welfare*, why shouldn't the company fire that employee?
* Either that in itself is a big if, or it's questionable whether it's a model of the things that actually happen.
Now, granted, my equation doesn't take time into consideration. Maybe your employment is a negative profit right now (because you're a trainee) but you'll become profitable enough to make that lost profit back. Or you're having a tough time (temporarily) due to your personal life. Or... etc.. But I think profitability is a good enough measure.... it's just that you have to consider the full scenario. By making backups of important corporate data, you aren't directly making the company money. But it will still lose money the day it needs those backups and they aren't there. So you're still a net profit, even though it isn't immediately visible in your day-to-day duties.
If you download a file from a Canadian server then you acquired the material in Canada and imported into the U.S. That's on you, the importer.
Interesting! Very interesting. Sorry, I can't mod you up and also ask you some questions. Someone else please mod my parent up.
So, why is it you who's importing and not the Canadian server (which then proceeds to deliver the bits to your house like a postman)? Why isn't the Canadian server setting up an on-demand import-and-deliver service?
Is it because you sent the SYN and they sent the SYN/ACK? Is it because you sent the GET and they sent the 200 OK?
Suppose you downloaded the bits via SMTP, is it still the same answer? Now suppose you connect via SMTP and ask for some bits, then use the TURN command and let them ask your for some bits. If they do, are they now importing from your country (let's say the US) into Canada? Or are you importing into Canada and delivering to their door? If you know any other "mutual protocols", where no one party is well-defined as the initiator, or the initiator role is unimportant to what happens when speaking that protocol, please include answers for those too.
Also, while taking legal advice from strangers on the internet is Fun And Safe (tm), do you have anything to back up your assertion? Any prior cases or something of that sort (sorry I don't know the jargon terms for the things of that sort)?
Why is it sad? The code isn't closing, it's just now licensed under different (arguably freer) licenses. Unless you're RMS or one of his disciples who believes that all code must be GPL or it's not truly free
It's also an arguably less free license. And rational people who don't take everything RMS says as dogma without questioning it** might find GPL to be the "most free"* license.
* There is no "most free". The phrase "License X is the most free" means "License X provides and/or protects the freedoms I like". Personal preference.
Some people want the software they use to be free and don't care much about redistributing (changed versions of) that software with no strings attached. Other people care more about being free to redistribute (changed) software and not so much about the freedom(s) of their users.
Which license you find most free might tell you which one you care most about (or the other way around).
** I want to see Free Software and the GNU project succeed. But I think about RMS; for someone who spends a lot of time talking about how free software is a social good, he talks surprisingly little about how the licensing requirements influence how much (useful) software there is to use. [Economists probably like to say that the allocation mechanism (free markets vs. lotteries vs. first-come-first-serve) influence how much stuff there is to allocate. A similar thing goes on for software].
the only even-more-half-assed solution they can think of to make it hard to crack the DRM is security-through-obscurity.
But... but...
DRM is security by obscurity.
Here's how DRM works: I encrypt the movie, such that a given key k is required to decrypt it. To play the movie, you need to decrypt it first.
Then, I give you the key. I don't want you to decrypt-and-save, or decrypt-and-share-with-your-6-billion-best-friends, but I want you to decrypt-and-play.
This "works" by putting a "Play" button in the playback software which does the decrypt-and-play, and not putting in a "Save" button which does the decrypt-and-save.
But if you run the program step-by-step in a debugger (which is boring and laborious and takes some background knowledge, but is a skill every competent programmer should have), you can see exactly how the program does the "decrypt-and-" part. Then you can write your own tool which adds "save" to the "decrypt-and-" bit.
Your only defence against someone using a debugger is hiding the key, using the key, and manipulating the decrypted data in ways that are too complex and confusing for the people using the debugger to understand. The name for doing that is `obscurity'.
For example, XOR encryption is remarkably weak in most cases.
That really depends.
If you repeat a password cyclically ("hunter2hunter2hunter2...") and XOR it onto your plain text, you're doing a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. Those were broken around the first world war (IIRC); google for "Kasiski Test" and others.
If you use a random byte (independent of every other byte) at each position of the key stream ("%Nb2a#!\nF..."), XOR is the perfect cipher. By observing the cipher text, you have no better idea about what the plain text is compared to what idea you would have if all you knew was that the plain text was there*.
If you use a block cipher (DES, AES, etc.) to encrypt "n+0", "n+1", "n+2", etc., for some random initial offset n, and concatenate the byte blocks of encrypted numbers, you have in some sense a simulation of the perfect XOR encryption; if the block cipher is strong, this is strong as well (maybe if the block cipher can be broken in O(t), this can be broken in O(sqrt(t)), but if t is superpolynomial, so is sqrt(t)). [This is known as "Counter Mode", and you can use it to protect your ssh sessions. It has a bunch of nice properties compared to other Modes Of Operation, but that's beyond today's cryptography lecture.]
* Say we have a residents meeting at my dorm, and someone suggests we buy a Wii for our basement lounge. Later, I see an encrypted message between the dorm chairman and SomeWiiShop.dk. I know my dorm chairman is not a gamer, so my natural assumption is that she's acting on the request for a Wii. Since I also know about the applications of cryptography (for transactions in e-trade, but not the shopping pages), I assume she's bought a Wii (plus maybe some games and controllers). This is all without decryption. The "perfect security" of XOR is saying that I can't improve my guess by trying to decrypt---not that I can't have a good guess before trying to decrypt.
The value of a person just can't be represented in a couple of numbers.
profitability(company with employee) - profitability(company without employee)
It's just impossible to measure;-)
And all the numbers you can measure don't give you much useful information; especially if you only use said numbers and not (also) your intuitive gut judgement.
Out of curiosity, I asked a 20 year old full time student who the former vice president of America was for the past 8 years was.. I get a "?????".
Why would that person know? What difference would it make to their life?
I recall when I had my first opportunity to vote. At that point, I became interested in politics; at that point, I had an influence on it, so I had an interest in choosing the people who would have the best influence on me. Before then---why exactly would I care?
Also, I'm sad to say, often when I read the news, I hear about things that either don't influence me or that I can't influence. Why bother with that? The media is letting us down by not telling enough stories about how Joe Public called a member of parliament (or demonstrated, etc.) and had his representatives represent him better.
Maybe you can blame the parents for not making politics a dinner table discussion. But the youngsters who have never voted nor have had politics be a two-way street? Seriously? You're going to blame them?
Sony have profited to the tune of 500,000 digital downloads on the RATM track [...] I think it only fair that they make a gesture in kind and make a sizable donation to Shelter as well.
I presented your idea to Sony's CEO, and here's what he told me:
It is very unlikely that one will hit us in next 100 years, and after that, we'll probably have completely different means available for trying to avert incoming asteroids.
I might be going completely off-topic here (burn, karma, burn...), but think about what saibot is saying.
When, in the history of mankind, would anyone say that in 100 years we will have completely different ways of handling asteroids? When would it ever be believed? When would it ever be true?
That statement is a testament to the fact that science and technology are progressing faster than ever. Let us hope we can put the knowledge and capability we will gain to some good uses.
[...] struck by how crappy our fave OS is once it gets dumbed down with automatic everything. Perhaps it's unavoidable.
I think it's perfectly avoidable, except in practice;)
Why does it happen? Priorities.
Ubuntu* wants to be "Just Works" for the most common usage scenarios. Debian** wants to be "Works well" for almost anything.
An emphasis on "Just Works" gives us Network Manager. It's easy to use; you just click on the essid label to connect to a wireless network, and it automatically does dhcp for you and all that nice stuff.
What it doesn't give you is the ability to say "connect to 'home-router' whenever you see it." You also can't say "Whenever you connect to 'work-wifi-net', run VPN client". This you can have from wpa_supplicant's roaming mode, but it means you have to hack/etc/network/interfaces and wpa_supplicant.conf.
But why? Because if "Just Works, easily" is your priority, you tend to not devote resources to making it work automatically with some extra fiddling in the corner cases, and instead devoting those resources towards making something else also "Just Work, easily" in the most common cases.
That's really the crucial issue, I think: priorities of goals determining the allocation of resources (mostly man hours), in Ubuntu's case away from making it "hacker"-friendly.
(*) and (**): It goes for other things than Ubuntu and Debian, I just use those as examples.
Look at gedit versus emacs; one is easy to learn to use, but limited in what it does. The other one does everything (and does it quite well IMNSHO), but takes a while to learn. One is focused on being easy to learn to use, the other on being easy to use effectively(!).
(Aside: I'm dead serious when I claim that having go-one-line-{up,down} bound to only the arrow keys makes you edit text slower, because you have to move your hands away from the letter keys to navigate. Emacs and vim both do the effective thing, at least if you put escape on caps lock, but it takes effort to discover.)
Also, technical people tend to want their computers to work exactly the right way. Most people will settle for "gets the job done" if it means they don't have to spend time learning how the "magic box" works. (not meant in a condescending way. A good friend of mine, avid gamer, calls technology he doesn't understand "magic" in a ha-ha-only-serious way.)
Slashdot Mirror
Naked girls, software, terrorists, fraud^W^W^W - enough to make a nerd reach new emotional heights.
FTFY.
Getting behind the wheel while drunk shows a fundamental contempt for human life.
Now, I don't drive, so take what I say with the amount of salt you deem necessary. I do get on my bicycle after partying, though.
When I'm drunk, I'm not particularly thinking that my actions may kill someone. I also don't think I've ever harmed anyone (including myself) in traffic, and in all the dangerous situations I've been in, I think I acted prudently before ending up in that situation (I'm not saying "it's their fault!"---sometimes bad things just happen even though everybody is acting responsibly).
Now, suppose you drive, and your traffic danger history sounds similar to mine. Are you really going to entertain the likelihood of you harming or killing people?
If the though "I might harm someone" never enters your mind, are you really showing a contempt for human life?
It's a different thing to think "I might harm someone" and then not follow through on that thought (the next thought might be "how likely is that?"; not asking that question, or ignoring that answer, that might be contempt).
I know you love to think it's all fun and cooperation and puppy dogs in the EU, and the US government are 100% imperialist psychos
No, I don't like to think that. It's just that of all the countries in the western world, I think of the US as being the one most often engaged in warfare on foreign soil.
I'm no fanboi of the EU. The politicians are stealing my tax money by putting them in a travel expenses account, then pocketing the leftovers when the year ends. For that, and other transgression, they now govern me not with my consent but only because they have more, bigger and better weaponry than me.
I just haven't been aware of any imposition on third parties done by the EU. Your link, on the face of it, says it does happen. I might start revising my perception of the EU (specifically as compared to the US).
the entire value of the employee as a person.
I'm not sure if you're playing word games or shifting the context here, or if you're just objecting to my point.
Let me answer the first: I think people have value beyond profitability---as friends, family, lovers, teachers, students, and many more relations.
But if a company could make more money by firing a particular employee, if we assume free market capitalism optimize social welfare*, why shouldn't the company fire that employee?
* Either that in itself is a big if, or it's questionable whether it's a model of the things that actually happen.
Now, granted, my equation doesn't take time into consideration. Maybe your employment is a negative profit right now (because you're a trainee) but you'll become profitable enough to make that lost profit back. Or you're having a tough time (temporarily) due to your personal life. Or... etc.. But I think profitability is a good enough measure. ... it's just that you have to consider the full scenario. By making backups of important corporate data, you aren't directly making the company money. But it will still lose money the day it needs those backups and they aren't there. So you're still a net profit, even though it isn't immediately visible in your day-to-day duties.
Between the EU and the MPAA there's always someone trying to concentrate their own power by making their favorite local laws the international rule.
Sorry if I'm trolling (me no mean to), but exactly who is trying to impose their form of governance on the people of Iraq?
Now, granted, even though it sucks it does suck less than everything else (thank you, Churchill); so maybe something good will come of that endeavour.
But still... the EU is imposing their will on others? Are you aware how America (well, the USA) is viewed outside of the US?
If you download a file from a Canadian server then you acquired the material in Canada and imported into the U.S. That's on you, the importer.
Interesting! Very interesting. Sorry, I can't mod you up and also ask you some questions. Someone else please mod my parent up.
So, why is it you who's importing and not the Canadian server (which then proceeds to deliver the bits to your house like a postman)? Why isn't the Canadian server setting up an on-demand import-and-deliver service?
Is it because you sent the SYN and they sent the SYN/ACK? Is it because you sent the GET and they sent the 200 OK?
Suppose you downloaded the bits via SMTP, is it still the same answer? Now suppose you connect via SMTP and ask for some bits, then use the TURN command and let them ask your for some bits. If they do, are they now importing from your country (let's say the US) into Canada? Or are you importing into Canada and delivering to their door? If you know any other "mutual protocols", where no one party is well-defined as the initiator, or the initiator role is unimportant to what happens when speaking that protocol, please include answers for those too.
Also, while taking legal advice from strangers on the internet is Fun And Safe (tm), do you have anything to back up your assertion? Any prior cases or something of that sort (sorry I don't know the jargon terms for the things of that sort)?
Why is it sad? The code isn't closing, it's just now licensed under different (arguably freer) licenses. Unless you're RMS or one of his disciples who believes that all code must be GPL or it's not truly free
It's also an arguably less free license. And rational people who don't take everything RMS says as dogma without questioning it** might find GPL to be the "most free"* license.
* There is no "most free". The phrase "License X is the most free" means "License X provides and/or protects the freedoms I like". Personal preference.
Some people want the software they use to be free and don't care much about redistributing (changed versions of) that software with no strings attached. Other people care more about being free to redistribute (changed) software and not so much about the freedom(s) of their users.
Which license you find most free might tell you which one you care most about (or the other way around).
** I want to see Free Software and the GNU project succeed. But I think about RMS; for someone who spends a lot of time talking about how free software is a social good, he talks surprisingly little about how the licensing requirements influence how much (useful) software there is to use. [Economists probably like to say that the allocation mechanism (free markets vs. lotteries vs. first-come-first-serve) influence how much stuff there is to allocate. A similar thing goes on for software].
For your next trick, I'll bet you'll tell us that emacs > vi
Fuck 'em both; ed is The One True Editor.
the only even-more-half-assed solution they can think of to make it hard to crack the DRM is security-through-obscurity.
But... but...
DRM is security by obscurity.
Here's how DRM works: I encrypt the movie, such that a given key k is required to decrypt it. To play the movie, you need to decrypt it first.
Then, I give you the key. I don't want you to decrypt-and-save, or decrypt-and-share-with-your-6-billion-best-friends, but I want you to decrypt-and-play.
This "works" by putting a "Play" button in the playback software which does the decrypt-and-play, and not putting in a "Save" button which does the decrypt-and-save.
But if you run the program step-by-step in a debugger (which is boring and laborious and takes some background knowledge, but is a skill every competent programmer should have), you can see exactly how the program does the "decrypt-and-" part. Then you can write your own tool which adds "save" to the "decrypt-and-" bit.
Your only defence against someone using a debugger is hiding the key, using the key, and manipulating the decrypted data in ways that are too complex and confusing for the people using the debugger to understand. The name for doing that is `obscurity'.
For example, XOR encryption is remarkably weak in most cases.
That really depends.
If you repeat a password cyclically ("hunter2hunter2hunter2...") and XOR it onto your plain text, you're doing a polyalphabetic substitution cipher. Those were broken around the first world war (IIRC); google for "Kasiski Test" and others.
If you use a random byte (independent of every other byte) at each position of the key stream ("%Nb2a#!\nF..."), XOR is the perfect cipher. By observing the cipher text, you have no better idea about what the plain text is compared to what idea you would have if all you knew was that the plain text was there*.
If you use a block cipher (DES, AES, etc.) to encrypt "n+0", "n+1", "n+2", etc., for some random initial offset n, and concatenate the byte blocks of encrypted numbers, you have in some sense a simulation of the perfect XOR encryption; if the block cipher is strong, this is strong as well (maybe if the block cipher can be broken in O(t), this can be broken in O(sqrt(t)), but if t is superpolynomial, so is sqrt(t)). [This is known as "Counter Mode", and you can use it to protect your ssh sessions. It has a bunch of nice properties compared to other Modes Of Operation, but that's beyond today's cryptography lecture.]
* Say we have a residents meeting at my dorm, and someone suggests we buy a Wii for our basement lounge. Later, I see an encrypted message between the dorm chairman and SomeWiiShop.dk. I know my dorm chairman is not a gamer, so my natural assumption is that she's acting on the request for a Wii. Since I also know about the applications of cryptography (for transactions in e-trade, but not the shopping pages), I assume she's bought a Wii (plus maybe some games and controllers). This is all without decryption. The "perfect security" of XOR is saying that I can't improve my guess by trying to decrypt---not that I can't have a good guess before trying to decrypt.
so many people authoring bad words and having a negative affect on english
Aww, that made me feel bad :(
The value of a person just can't be represented in a couple of numbers.
profitability(company with employee) - profitability(company without employee)
It's just impossible to measure ;-)
And all the numbers you can measure don't give you much useful information; especially if you only use said numbers and not (also) your intuitive gut judgement.
I'd feel sorta bad modifying it.
Call the modified text Service Pack 1, then it doesn't look like a modification but an update ;-)
Out of curiosity, I asked a 20 year old full time student who the former vice president of America was for the past 8 years was.. I get a "?????".
Why would that person know? What difference would it make to their life?
I recall when I had my first opportunity to vote. At that point, I became interested in politics; at that point, I had an influence on it, so I had an interest in choosing the people who would have the best influence on me. Before then---why exactly would I care?
Also, I'm sad to say, often when I read the news, I hear about things that either don't influence me or that I can't influence. Why bother with that? The media is letting us down by not telling enough stories about how Joe Public called a member of parliament (or demonstrated, etc.) and had his representatives represent him better.
Maybe you can blame the parents for not making politics a dinner table discussion. But the youngsters who have never voted nor have had politics be a two-way street? Seriously? You're going to blame them?
Why bother voting when the result is the same?
Because a Giant Douche is a way better school mascot than a Turd Sandwich? ...
something which I highly doubt Joe McElderberry, X-Factor winner, will do.
Are you saying he has a smelly family member?
Sony have profited to the tune of 500,000 digital downloads on the RATM track [...] I think it only fair that they make a gesture in kind and make a sizable donation to Shelter as well.
I presented your idea to Sony's CEO, and here's what he told me:
"Fuck you I won't do as you tell me!"
(He repeated that until fading out)
The internet is overwhelmingly against the DMCA, why keep it?
The internet doesn't purchase* as many politicians as the MPAA and RIAA members.
* I mean bribe**
** I mean 'offer campaign contributions'
MBS/ABS/CMBS/CDO/CLO
How many times do we have to go over this? It's GNU/MBS/ABS/CMBS/CDO/CLO...
Wait, what were you talking about?
but why are cell phones so strongly coupled to the service providers and, well, not open?
Because the service providers make more money that way, and they can afford the politicians it takes to not change the situation.
Will apple try the same carp on iphone unlocks soon?
I'm Ulrich Drepper, and I approve of this message.
http://sourceware.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=5070#c1
It is very unlikely that one will hit us in next 100 years, and after that, we'll probably have completely different means available for trying to avert incoming asteroids.
I might be going completely off-topic here (burn, karma, burn...), but think about what saibot is saying.
When, in the history of mankind, would anyone say that in 100 years we will have completely different ways of handling asteroids? When would it ever be believed? When would it ever be true?
That statement is a testament to the fact that science and technology are progressing faster than ever. Let us hope we can put the knowledge and capability we will gain to some good uses.
(You may go about your business. Move along.)
but the adittion of that PulseAudio and the almost impossible task of remove it
apt-get remove --purge pulseaudio
Works perfectly on my box. YMMV.
[...] struck by how crappy our fave OS is once it gets dumbed down with automatic everything. Perhaps it's unavoidable.
I think it's perfectly avoidable, except in practice ;)
Why does it happen? Priorities.
Ubuntu* wants to be "Just Works" for the most common usage scenarios. Debian** wants to be "Works well" for almost anything.
An emphasis on "Just Works" gives us Network Manager. It's easy to use; you just click on the essid label to connect to a wireless network, and it automatically does dhcp for you and all that nice stuff.
What it doesn't give you is the ability to say "connect to 'home-router' whenever you see it." You also can't say "Whenever you connect to 'work-wifi-net', run VPN client". This you can have from wpa_supplicant's roaming mode, but it means you have to hack /etc/network/interfaces and wpa_supplicant.conf.
But why? Because if "Just Works, easily" is your priority, you tend to not devote resources to making it work automatically with some extra fiddling in the corner cases, and instead devoting those resources towards making something else also "Just Work, easily" in the most common cases.
That's really the crucial issue, I think: priorities of goals determining the allocation of resources (mostly man hours), in Ubuntu's case away from making it "hacker"-friendly.
(*) and (**): It goes for other things than Ubuntu and Debian, I just use those as examples.
Look at gedit versus emacs; one is easy to learn to use, but limited in what it does. The other one does everything (and does it quite well IMNSHO), but takes a while to learn. One is focused on being easy to learn to use, the other on being easy to use effectively(!).
(Aside: I'm dead serious when I claim that having go-one-line-{up,down} bound to only the arrow keys makes you edit text slower, because you have to move your hands away from the letter keys to navigate. Emacs and vim both do the effective thing, at least if you put escape on caps lock, but it takes effort to discover.)
Also, technical people tend to want their computers to work exactly the right way. Most people will settle for "gets the job done" if it means they don't have to spend time learning how the "magic box" works. (not meant in a condescending way. A good friend of mine, avid gamer, calls technology he doesn't understand "magic" in a ha-ha-only-serious way.)
In the United States, patents protect not just the device or technique, but also the product of it.
Wait, so if I patent topological sorting, I also have a monopoly on the use of sorted lists?