Not that they don't invent anything themselves. Who else has a magneticly-attached power cord?
Anyone with an Asian-branded kitchen water heater from the last 20 years?
You won't see it on other computers however, since Apple patented the idea for electronic devices (with no reference to tons of prior art in electric devices). While copying an idea from one field to another is important, I don't know if it ought to qualify as a patentable invention. Anyone skilled in the art should be able to make the leap from the AC cord on their tea heater to a DC one on their laptop.
It's true that Apple is just using the patent system as others do, but I'm not going to call it a cool invention/innovation on their part.
This first time a water pipe breaks in your building and floods your server room[1], you'll wish you had your services running in well-managed datacenters rather than the 3rd floor of an 8+ floor building complex.
Good point; I should have added "If your employer has a halfway decent policy,...". In tech fields, most employers do have a reasonable policy; however in many service fields, the written or unwritten policies are not nearly as accommodating.
For any employers out there, make sure sick people can stay home, since it is better to lose their (partial) productivity for day, rather than to make the whole office sick.
The flu kills thousands of people every year. Why does this one have a special name?
So far it seems to have a 5% mortality rate, which is above normal. Usually mortality is 5% of those hospitalized, rather than 5% of all. Of course, the stats are from small numbers that are very new, so we'll have to wait for better information. It's certainly worth paying attention to though.
I can't decide how scared to be. As if there were anything I could do about it anyways.
If everyone would make an extra effort to wash their hands, cover their nose/mouth when coughing, and stay the f*** home from work/school when you are sick, that would help. If you can slow the spread, researchers can get a better understanding of the flu and how to treat it before everyone gets sick.
Avian flu still seems much worse though, since it has a much higher mortality rate, in particular among the young. It doesn't seem to be able to spread as fast though, thus the concern about this new flu.
From last year's TOS: Organizations based in Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar (Burma), and other persons and entities restricted by U.S. export controls and sanctions programs are not eligible to participate.
You can't really blame a company based in the US for following US laws. Sure, blocking people from the whole site is pretty ham-fisted, but a US company does *not* want to have even the appearance of getting on the wrong side of these laws. If you want to change things, get a job at the UN and take it up with the respective governments.
GSoC may make the world a (slightly) better place, but it will not bring about world peace and unencumbered trade.
Disclaimer: The above opinions are completely my own, and have nothing to do with any past, present, or future employer, nor with my country of citizenship or residence.
Fail2ban is actually configurable and temporary. Personally I've set it up to ban for an hour after 3 failed attempts. In the past this stopped most bots, who would go elsewhere if they were even temporarily banned. It looks like this new one is slow enough (<1 attempt/hr) that my current settings don't detect it. Of course, guessing username+password that way it'll take forever to get in, but it is kind of irksome.
Samy Kamkar entered a plea agreement, on January 31, 2007, to a felony charge. The action resulted in Kamkar being sentenced to three years probation, 90 days community service and an undisclosed amount of restitution.
It sounds like Mikeyy will get at least that much, and possibly much more; IIRC Samy had claimed that his virus was just supposed to be for his friends, while Mikeyy has already gone on record saying that he did it for commercial gain. That was a daft move, which he will realize as those words are trotted out over and over in his trial.
Won't people steal this? I would if I saw a cute little robot on the street!
Perhaps she put a color printout of the goatse image on the underside of the robot, along with the text "PUT ME DOWN"? That would probably work pretty well as an anti-theft device.
would you really trust a mechanical translation into another language?
Unless you're writing machine code directly, you are already trusting the mechanical translation done by your compiler. Often there's more than one, through several intermediate representations. Some high level languages can compile to C, in order to be portable to all the platforms with C compilers.
So yeah, I would trust a translator; I'd just test it a lot first. There should be large parts of the code where you know how it should behave, and can run regression tests. If you have something really hairy in some hard-to-test code, try to break out parts of it and make some tests for the translator, and go over its output with human reviewers too.
The thing that's nice about starting this way is that it gives you an incremental way to rewrite a system when you want to add new functionality. Of course, it can go to hell too, since I've heard of codebases that have been translated multiple times, with the original source code lost, and now it was completely unmaintainable. That doesn't mean translators don't have a place though, just that like everything else they aren't a silver bullet.
(but seriously, that idea is old, almost as old as map-reduce, which means patentable in the US)
From the MapReduce paper: Our abstraction is inspired by the map and reduce primitives present in Lisp and many other functional languages
The contributions are listed as: The major contributions of this work are a simple and powerful interface that enables automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale computations, combined with an implementation of this interface that achieves high performance on large clusters of commodity PCs.
The MapReduce authors never claimed the model was new, so don't blame them for other people making incorrect attributions. What they did claim as new is using this as an API for automatic parallelization across thousands of commodity machines; if you know of people who were doing that before 2004, and published it, please provide a citation.
The hardware stuff here is a pretty similar situation. Google hardware designers are showing everyone what they did, and some specific implementations of it are patented. People here then claim foul, pointing to very general techniques, while nowhere in the article is the claim made that this is the first time a battery has been stuck on a computer.
Good ideas deserve some buzz, even if they are variants on an old idea. Of course some people who are uninformed of those old ideas will overhype things, but you can just ignore them. Don't blame the person with the good idea however.
Disclaimer: I work at Google, and I've been known to write the occasional MapReduce that runs on Google servers.
I have always hated Searle's Chinese room "paradox", since it is just playing a semantic game with the definition of the system. The claim that the person in the room doesn't understand things is no different from saying that a neuron doesn't understand things, or that 1/4 of my brain alone doesn't understand things. The "rules" in the box are part of the system, and I would claim that if it passes the test, the person+rules do demonstrate understanding. We have no evidence that human thought somehow transcends the model of executed rules anyway; at some level it is all chemistry and physics.
A modern example would be that my CPU (::person in box) doesn't know how to behave as a web browser. While true, my computer does know how to be a web browser when you add the software (::rules), and an input and output system (::box interface). The Chinese room paradox is just yanking out the CPU and saying that it doesn't know how to be a web browser. Nice trick.
The other thing the "paradox" does it to try to evoke imagery of a very simple ruleset because it is a person executing rules on paper, which would be very slow. The person executing paper rules is slow enough to have the computational power of a few neurons at best, while the brain has ~100 billion. So the equivalent rules in the paradox's imagined transformation would never fit in a room and could not be executed to completion by a person before their death. While it is supposed to be a thought experiment, the relative scale is so incredibly different that it makes imagining it difficult, and I wonder if it was chosen for that purpose. I will cut Searle some slack though, since Turing's guess about how much computing power needed to pass the Turing test was ridiculously low (~50 MB of storage), when compared to what we now know of human brain capabilities.
I think the appeal of the paradox is that deep down many people want to believe that we are qualitatively different from computers, rather than quantitatively so. As for me, I'm happy enough knowing that atop my shoulders sits a computer with more raw processing power than the largest supercomputer, with rules/programming far beyond anything we can create now, or perhaps for hundreds of years.
You can get the exact date from the shadows - every day the sun passes through a slightly different arc, and the shadows are slightly different than they were the day before or will be the day after. As I said, it provides validation of other intel sources, to the day and time.
Only if you know the exact height of the building casting the shadow:
Observable variables: length and angle of shadow
Unknown variables: height of object, time of day, time of year Even if you hire an analyst to figure it out from looking at enough objects of known geometry, you still won't know which year it came from, unless you get some people on the ground to look at other objects nearby. In that case, they could go take pictures of the subs. Also, a reconnaissance analyst costs more than someone with a plane ticket and a cell phone camera, and gives you poorer information in this case.
... it's not grasping at straws when it's what the UK did - launched cruise missiles from nuclear subs into targets in Afghanistan. Can't ignore the facts...
I'm not ignoring them, I was just pointing out that they are not relevant here. Right now, over Afghanistan, there are airplanes on patrol with bombs and missiles. There's no need for a sub to fire a much more expensive cruise missile when you could just drop a regular GPS bomb on something. Also to reach Afghanistan from the ocean, you'd need to fire a missile over Pakistan or Iran anyway; Why tick off an already hostile nation when there's no need?
... except that surface ships can be visually ID'd - no false flag opportunity...
In recent history, the US and UK are pretty much the only nations to attack other nations that are not one of their immediate neighbors. So, the UK would not stand much to gain from this, unless it was trying to get the US involved in a war (recently it's been the other way around). The Russians or Chinese might gain something from a false flag attack, but the risk and cost of getting caught is too much for a large nation. Terrorist organizations could gain a lot from a false flag attack, since they wouldn't be expected, and have no nation to strike back at. However, terrorists don't have submarines with cruise missiles.
If they didn't care about them being visible in satellite images, why are they so concerned about wanting them to be blurred?
Clearly they aren't that concerned, otherwise they would have demanded and gotten action from google; The images are still visible on google maps. It's easy for a lazy bureaucrat to "demand" the images be blurred; that just means he is "doing his job", overreacting when the overall privacy is swiss cheese anyway. If they really cared, then it wouldn't be visible to well-funded adversaries, but the bureaucrat will still do his job anyway, as though it's the most important thing in the world.
And this all still ignores the bullshit claim earlier in this thread (which I shot down earlier) about how every country that the UK has to worry about already has satellite intel. So, since you don't like any of MY explanations, what explanation do YOU propose to why the UK wants these pictures blurred?
The best reason I could come up with is worries about terrorists using the imagery to plan some sort of attack on the base. Obviously attacking a military base is a suicide mission, but some nations can get people willing to do it anyway. Such a scenario is quite far-fetched (yes I know of the attacks in Mumbai, but those were soft targets). This then comes back to my point before; It's someone's job to "hide" this info, and they'll still do it even if it is kind of pointless, because it is their job. That doesn't mean the rest of the UK government cares that much, because the information protected seems to be worth less than adding some large roofs and walls.
So, someone in the government is annoyed, but not enough to get the imagery blurred on a weekend, and the Sun is drumming up extra controversy for all it is worth. Same as always.
It doesn't matter if the data is months behind - its usefulness in this case is to confirm what ground-based assets have already told you. If they told you that, at that date,
Except that you often don't know the date, since the maps are a patchwork of satellite imagery. If you check the maps (or other people's comments), you'll see that these subs are visible from public roads. If you can get pictures of something on the ground, old satellite imagery doesn't really add much information.
And as I pointed out (with links elsewhere in this thread), the UK has already used their nuclear subs to launch cruise missle attacks against targets in Afghanistan. Please don't confuse "primary purpose" with "only purpose."... Subs make a better launch platform than surface ships - you can move them into the area without alerting your target,
This is really grasping for straws. Afghanistan is 400 miles from the nearest ocean, and US planes can already fly around that country, so you could just drop a bomb on something. Cruise missiles also aren't that helpful against recent Taliban/etc activity; They now know they need to be completely hidden or always moving. Static bases outside of cities went away in 2001.
You could even do false flag attacks, allowing some "duds" to fall into their hands implicating a 3rd party, since they have no surface sightings to put the lie to it
Wasn't that a James Bond movie plot? NATO cruise missiles are pretty distinctive, and the launch systems are very incompatible. If you were going to modify something to shoot Chinese or Russian missiles, it'd be a hell of a lot easier to do it with a surface ship, where much of the stuff is bolted on in a modular style. Subs by necessity are highly compact, integrated, and relatively inflexible as a result.
Now, before you come up with a new claim, please answer this: If the UK government cared about hostile people seeing these subs, why didn't they build a roof over the dock, or put up walls blocking the view from publicly accessible roads? If you aren't afraid of nations that can afford satellites, buy imagery, or from nations that can get a spy to drive down a public road, then clearly you don't value protecting something all that much.
RTFJ, these documents were not shared with the entire world, just people that other selected documents had already been shared with. So, if you selected N documents, and added one user "bob", instead of adding only "bob" to all the docs, it would instead share all N docs with the union of all people the N docs were shared with + "bob".
Yes it's a bug, but it's the kind of bug that could happen in any sharing system (unexpected UI behavior leading to wider sharing than intended / not some exploitable security backdoor).
For example, if you never shared documents beyond your company, this bug would not share documents beyond your company. However, this is exactly the sort of bug that would do embarrassing things like share the performance reports of every employee with everyone rather than just HR + the individual employee for each doc. It could also expose docs you share with a customer with other customers.
I think so - some mod's been digging through my history and modding every post I've made recently "troll", except for the +5 posts. Somebody's out to get me, because apparently I've pissed off the karma gods somehow...
It's the Legion of Extraordinary Low User Ids.
I crossed them once... it took 5 years for my karma to recover. Make sure you always wear your tinfoil hat tilted back a bit, since the people out to get you might be sneaking up from behind.
--nuke_from_orbit was meant as a joke, but it is the only way to be sure.
Some people hate *DM for several reasons. The biggest issue for me is stability; If my laptop has some weird X driver bug that crashes on startup, with *DM the machine is almost useless, whereas if it sticks with text only for login I have a least a chance to fix it. Second, KDM and GDM assume everyone who uses that machine uses KDE or Gnome, respectively. So, for any sort of shared machine, it is pretty horrid to have KDM start up a bunch of stuff it doesn't need, tear it all down and have Gnome start up in it's place. We might have well stuck with plain XDM, or even better, nothing. In fact, if you aren't running a "desktop environment" at all, but instead some old school window manager (which is what I do), KDM and GDM can even screw things up enough your window manager won't start properly.
It left a bitter taste when I was forced to use it on some shared machines, thus interfering with my choice for the desktop environment I wanted. Some of us also have to use auto-updated machines at work, that repeatedly install the display managers, since they are "required" by the desktop environment install.
So, for all those reasons, I don't want it. I feel users are capable of learning how to enter a username and password at a text screen, and can be taught to type "startx" if they want X (or can have someone add it to their.login). Thus, a minor convenience and eye candy aren't worth the problems it causes. Whenever I have a choice, it's apt-get remove.
Slashdot Mirror
Not that they don't invent anything themselves. Who else has a magneticly-attached power cord?
Anyone with an Asian-branded kitchen water heater from the last 20 years?
You won't see it on other computers however, since Apple patented the idea for electronic devices (with no reference to tons of prior art in electric devices). While copying an idea from one field to another is important, I don't know if it ought to qualify as a patentable invention. Anyone skilled in the art should be able to make the leap from the AC cord on their tea heater to a DC one on their laptop.
It's true that Apple is just using the patent system as others do, but I'm not going to call it a cool invention/innovation on their part.
The "no context" is not an inescapable consequence of the infamous 140-character medium -- the web has a useful, low-character, way to sprea
Sorry, I had to stop reading after 140 characters, so I will assume the web is spreading this disease with a low-character method: Twitter!
This first time a water pipe breaks in your building and floods your server room[1], you'll wish you had your services running in well-managed datacenters rather than the 3rd floor of an 8+ floor building complex.
[1] Yes, this really happened at my university.
Until I found about:config, browser.blink_allowed.
Thank you.
Good point; I should have added "If your employer has a halfway decent policy, ...". In tech fields, most employers do have a reasonable policy; however in many service fields, the written or unwritten policies are not nearly as accommodating.
For any employers out there, make sure sick people can stay home, since it is better to lose their (partial) productivity for day, rather than to make the whole office sick.
The flu kills thousands of people every year. Why does this one have a special name?
So far it seems to have a 5% mortality rate, which is above normal. Usually mortality is 5% of those hospitalized, rather than 5% of all. Of course, the stats are from small numbers that are very new, so we'll have to wait for better information. It's certainly worth paying attention to though.
I can't decide how scared to be. As if there were anything I could do about it anyways.
If everyone would make an extra effort to wash their hands, cover their nose/mouth when coughing, and stay the f*** home from work/school when you are sick, that would help. If you can slow the spread, researchers can get a better understanding of the flu and how to treat it before everyone gets sick.
Avian flu still seems much worse though, since it has a much higher mortality rate, in particular among the young. It doesn't seem to be able to spread as fast though, thus the concern about this new flu.
From last year's TOS: Organizations based in Iran, Syria, Cuba, Sudan, North Korea and Myanmar (Burma), and other persons and entities restricted by U.S. export controls and sanctions programs are not eligible to participate.
You can't really blame a company based in the US for following US laws. Sure, blocking people from the whole site is pretty ham-fisted, but a US company does *not* want to have even the appearance of getting on the wrong side of these laws. If you want to change things, get a job at the UN and take it up with the respective governments.
GSoC may make the world a (slightly) better place, but it will not bring about world peace and unencumbered trade.
Disclaimer: The above opinions are completely my own, and have nothing to do with any past, present, or future employer, nor with my country of citizenship or residence.
Fail2ban is actually configurable and temporary. Personally I've set it up to ban for an hour after 3 failed attempts. In the past this stopped most bots, who would go elsewhere if they were even temporarily banned. It looks like this new one is slow enough (<1 attempt/hr) that my current settings don't detect it. Of course, guessing username+password that way it'll take forever to get in, but it is kind of irksome.
From Wikipedia:
Samy Kamkar entered a plea agreement, on January 31, 2007, to a felony charge. The action resulted in Kamkar being sentenced to three years probation, 90 days community service and an undisclosed amount of restitution.
It sounds like Mikeyy will get at least that much, and possibly much more; IIRC Samy had claimed that his virus was just supposed to be for his friends, while Mikeyy has already gone on record saying that he did it for commercial gain. That was a daft move, which he will realize as those words are trotted out over and over in his trial.
Won't people steal this? I would if I saw a cute little robot on the street!
Perhaps she put a color printout of the goatse image on the underside of the robot, along with the text "PUT ME DOWN"? That would probably work pretty well as an anti-theft device.
While I do find Twitter moderately interesting as a service, pretty much everything you mentioned equally applies to IRC.
would you really trust a mechanical translation into another language?
Unless you're writing machine code directly, you are already trusting the mechanical translation done by your compiler. Often there's more than one, through several intermediate representations. Some high level languages can compile to C, in order to be portable to all the platforms with C compilers.
So yeah, I would trust a translator; I'd just test it a lot first. There should be large parts of the code where you know how it should behave, and can run regression tests. If you have something really hairy in some hard-to-test code, try to break out parts of it and make some tests for the translator, and go over its output with human reviewers too.
The thing that's nice about starting this way is that it gives you an incremental way to rewrite a system when you want to add new functionality. Of course, it can go to hell too, since I've heard of codebases that have been translated multiple times, with the original source code lost, and now it was completely unmaintainable. That doesn't mean translators don't have a place though, just that like everything else they aren't a silver bullet.
So you have a prejudice against declarative programming languages?
yes;
(but seriously, that idea is old, almost as old as map-reduce, which means patentable in the US)
From the MapReduce paper:
Our abstraction is inspired by the map and reduce primitives present in Lisp and many other functional languages
The contributions are listed as:
The major contributions of this work are a simple and powerful interface that enables automatic parallelization and distribution of large-scale computations, combined with an implementation of this interface that achieves high performance on large clusters of commodity PCs.
The MapReduce authors never claimed the model was new, so don't blame them for other people making incorrect attributions. What they did claim as new is using this as an API for automatic parallelization across thousands of commodity machines; if you know of people who were doing that before 2004, and published it, please provide a citation.
The hardware stuff here is a pretty similar situation. Google hardware designers are showing everyone what they did, and some specific implementations of it are patented. People here then claim foul, pointing to very general techniques, while nowhere in the article is the claim made that this is the first time a battery has been stuck on a computer.
Good ideas deserve some buzz, even if they are variants on an old idea. Of course some people who are uninformed of those old ideas will overhype things, but you can just ignore them. Don't blame the person with the good idea however.
Disclaimer: I work at Google, and I've been known to write the occasional MapReduce that runs on Google servers.
I could cease to care less.
I have always hated Searle's Chinese room "paradox", since it is just playing a semantic game with the definition of the system. The claim that the person in the room doesn't understand things is no different from saying that a neuron doesn't understand things, or that 1/4 of my brain alone doesn't understand things. The "rules" in the box are part of the system, and I would claim that if it passes the test, the person+rules do demonstrate understanding. We have no evidence that human thought somehow transcends the model of executed rules anyway; at some level it is all chemistry and physics.
A modern example would be that my CPU (::person in box) doesn't know how to behave as a web browser. While true, my computer does know how to be a web browser when you add the software (::rules), and an input and output system (::box interface). The Chinese room paradox is just yanking out the CPU and saying that it doesn't know how to be a web browser. Nice trick.
The other thing the "paradox" does it to try to evoke imagery of a very simple ruleset because it is a person executing rules on paper, which would be very slow. The person executing paper rules is slow enough to have the computational power of a few neurons at best, while the brain has ~100 billion. So the equivalent rules in the paradox's imagined transformation would never fit in a room and could not be executed to completion by a person before their death. While it is supposed to be a thought experiment, the relative scale is so incredibly different that it makes imagining it difficult, and I wonder if it was chosen for that purpose. I will cut Searle some slack though, since Turing's guess about how much computing power needed to pass the Turing test was ridiculously low (~50 MB of storage), when compared to what we now know of human brain capabilities.
I think the appeal of the paradox is that deep down many people want to believe that we are qualitatively different from computers, rather than quantitatively so. As for me, I'm happy enough knowing that atop my shoulders sits a computer with more raw processing power than the largest supercomputer, with rules/programming far beyond anything we can create now, or perhaps for hundreds of years.
You can get the exact date from the shadows - every day the sun passes through a slightly different arc, and the shadows are slightly different than they were the day before or will be the day after. As I said, it provides validation of other intel sources, to the day and time.
Only if you know the exact height of the building casting the shadow:
Observable variables: length and angle of shadow
Unknown variables: height of object, time of day, time of year
Even if you hire an analyst to figure it out from looking at enough objects of known geometry, you still won't know which year it came from, unless you get some people on the ground to look at other objects nearby. In that case, they could go take pictures of the subs. Also, a reconnaissance analyst costs more than someone with a plane ticket and a cell phone camera, and gives you poorer information in this case.
... it's not grasping at straws when it's what the UK did - launched cruise missiles from nuclear subs into targets in Afghanistan. Can't ignore the facts ...
I'm not ignoring them, I was just pointing out that they are not relevant here. Right now, over Afghanistan, there are airplanes on patrol with bombs and missiles. There's no need for a sub to fire a much more expensive cruise missile when you could just drop a regular GPS bomb on something. Also to reach Afghanistan from the ocean, you'd need to fire a missile over Pakistan or Iran anyway; Why tick off an already hostile nation when there's no need?
... except that surface ships can be visually ID'd - no false flag opportunity ...
In recent history, the US and UK are pretty much the only nations to attack other nations that are not one of their immediate neighbors. So, the UK would not stand much to gain from this, unless it was trying to get the US involved in a war (recently it's been the other way around). The Russians or Chinese might gain something from a false flag attack, but the risk and cost of getting caught is too much for a large nation. Terrorist organizations could gain a lot from a false flag attack, since they wouldn't be expected, and have no nation to strike back at. However, terrorists don't have submarines with cruise missiles.
If they didn't care about them being visible in satellite images, why are they so concerned about wanting them to be blurred?
Clearly they aren't that concerned, otherwise they would have demanded and gotten action from google; The images are still visible on google maps. It's easy for a lazy bureaucrat to "demand" the images be blurred; that just means he is "doing his job", overreacting when the overall privacy is swiss cheese anyway. If they really cared, then it wouldn't be visible to well-funded adversaries, but the bureaucrat will still do his job anyway, as though it's the most important thing in the world.
And this all still ignores the bullshit claim earlier in this thread (which I shot down earlier) about how every country that the UK has to worry about already has satellite intel. So, since you don't like any of MY explanations, what explanation do YOU propose to why the UK wants these pictures blurred?
The best reason I could come up with is worries about terrorists using the imagery to plan some sort of attack on the base. Obviously attacking a military base is a suicide mission, but some nations can get people willing to do it anyway. Such a scenario is quite far-fetched (yes I know of the attacks in Mumbai, but those were soft targets). This then comes back to my point before; It's someone's job to "hide" this info, and they'll still do it even if it is kind of pointless, because it is their job. That doesn't mean the rest of the UK government cares that much, because the information protected seems to be worth less than adding some large roofs and walls.
So, someone in the government is annoyed, but not enough to get the imagery blurred on a weekend, and the Sun is drumming up extra controversy for all it is worth. Same as always.
It doesn't matter if the data is months behind - its usefulness in this case is to confirm what ground-based assets have already told you. If they told you that, at that date,
Except that you often don't know the date, since the maps are a patchwork of satellite imagery. If you check the maps (or other people's comments), you'll see that these subs are visible from public roads. If you can get pictures of something on the ground, old satellite imagery doesn't really add much information.
And as I pointed out (with links elsewhere in this thread), the UK has already used their nuclear subs to launch cruise missle attacks against targets in Afghanistan. Please don't confuse "primary purpose" with "only purpose." ... Subs make a better launch platform than surface ships - you can move them into the area without alerting your target,
This is really grasping for straws. Afghanistan is 400 miles from the nearest ocean, and US planes can already fly around that country, so you could just drop a bomb on something. Cruise missiles also aren't that helpful against recent Taliban/etc activity; They now know they need to be completely hidden or always moving. Static bases outside of cities went away in 2001.
You could even do false flag attacks, allowing some "duds" to fall into their hands implicating a 3rd party, since they have no surface sightings to put the lie to it
Wasn't that a James Bond movie plot? NATO cruise missiles are pretty distinctive, and the launch systems are very incompatible. If you were going to modify something to shoot Chinese or Russian missiles, it'd be a hell of a lot easier to do it with a surface ship, where much of the stuff is bolted on in a modular style. Subs by necessity are highly compact, integrated, and relatively inflexible as a result.
Now, before you come up with a new claim, please answer this: If the UK government cared about hostile people seeing these subs, why didn't they build a roof over the dock, or put up walls blocking the view from publicly accessible roads? If you aren't afraid of nations that can afford satellites, buy imagery, or from nations that can get a spy to drive down a public road, then clearly you don't value protecting something all that much.
RTFJ, these documents were not shared with the entire world, just people that other selected documents had already been shared with. So, if you selected N documents, and added one user "bob", instead of adding only "bob" to all the docs, it would instead share all N docs with the union of all people the N docs were shared with + "bob".
Yes it's a bug, but it's the kind of bug that could happen in any sharing system (unexpected UI behavior leading to wider sharing than intended / not some exploitable security backdoor).
For example, if you never shared documents beyond your company, this bug would not share documents beyond your company. However, this is exactly the sort of bug that would do embarrassing things like share the performance reports of every employee with everyone rather than just HR + the individual employee for each doc. It could also expose docs you share with a customer with other customers.
It's easy to get a reaction from a chemical nazi.
I think so - some mod's been digging through my history and modding every post I've made recently "troll", except for the +5 posts. Somebody's out to get me, because apparently I've pissed off the karma gods somehow...
It's the Legion of Extraordinary Low User Ids.
I crossed them once... it took 5 years for my karma to recover. Make sure you always wear your tinfoil hat tilted back a bit, since the people out to get you might be sneaking up from behind.
--nuke_from_orbit was meant as a joke, but it is the only way to be sure.
Some people hate *DM for several reasons. The biggest issue for me is stability; If my laptop has some weird X driver bug that crashes on startup, with *DM the machine is almost useless, whereas if it sticks with text only for login I have a least a chance to fix it. Second, KDM and GDM assume everyone who uses that machine uses KDE or Gnome, respectively. So, for any sort of shared machine, it is pretty horrid to have KDM start up a bunch of stuff it doesn't need, tear it all down and have Gnome start up in it's place. We might have well stuck with plain XDM, or even better, nothing. In fact, if you aren't running a "desktop environment" at all, but instead some old school window manager (which is what I do), KDM and GDM can even screw things up enough your window manager won't start properly.
It left a bitter taste when I was forced to use it on some shared machines, thus interfering with my choice for the desktop environment I wanted. Some of us also have to use auto-updated machines at work, that repeatedly install the display managers, since they are "required" by the desktop environment install.
So, for all those reasons, I don't want it. I feel users are capable of learning how to enter a username and password at a text screen, and can be taught to type "startx" if they want X (or can have someone add it to their .login). Thus, a minor convenience and eye candy aren't worth the problems it causes. Whenever I have a choice, it's apt-get remove.
All they forgot was the trailing "."
-- being harmed by slashdot since 1999.
sudo apt-get remove --purge --nuke_from_orbit xdm kdm gdm
It's the first thing I run on any machine I install or are given.