A mechanic knows how to fix a car. Partially from books and "cookbook recipies", but more likely from tinkering with them and figuring them out. A good mechanic will not only know how to fix a broken engine, but what to replace, modify etc to make it run better.... just like a good sysadmin.
A good mechanic can probably, and might ocasionally, machine a custom part now and again.
Now an engineer tends to spend more time designing things and testing them than tinkering with existing things. They know how it works and why. However, ocasionally will build things and have to tinker with them to find out why it didn't translate as well from paper to reality and will adjust and fix it.
They are very much overlapping skillsets. Just like I find that a good admin can program, a good programmer knows enough about being an admin to work in the "real world" too.
Of course, I have also heard Admins refered to as "Janitors" which, while true...I much prefer "Computer Systems Sanitational Engineer" - course janitors just clean up messes, admins often make them too:)
Actually....I seem to remember seeing a figure that you could house the entire population of earth comfortably in an area the size of Texas.
This doesn't really surprize me, Cities areally arn't that big compared to the sparsly populated areas. However....I still don't accept it as an argument that "there arn't too many humans".
In any case, you must remember, the people who came up with this statistic know quite a bit about these stalites, including current velocity, position etc. They also know how they are being de-orbited, probably how much fuel is in whatever is being used to generate the proper force to take them out of orbit etc. (along with knowledge of what the most common failure modes for such things are).
Given all that data, they can probably rule out alot of areas as places where they will land. That would go a long way to changing the figures.
Then again...its always possible that the figures were cooked up for some other reason. There are, of course, "lies, damned lies, and statistics".
Ok....so its a completely useless watered down index. Oh fun.
You know, Slashdot started out as a non-company personal site. Alot of the best sites out there are personal sites. Alot of the worst are company backed sites.
Google is still where its at - it still sucks less than the rest.
However, I would argue that as a security bulliten, there is an implicit licence to distribute, which is obvious to anyone who is involved in the "security community" - the distribution of such things is a common and accepted practice.
Furthermore, that this information is needed, and was being distributed specifically to forward the end of stopping illegal activities and protecting the people. As such it was in the best interest of the public that the information be distributed.
And furthermore since Microsoft was not using them to generate profit, there is no damage done.
I can't help but note, that this comes like maybe a week after a note on BUGTRAQ by Aleph1 stating that he would no longer be aproving bullitins that contained JUST a URL and that all posts should include the information.
The idea being that its a security list and people subscribe to it to have the information delivered to them, not to have links so they can go find it.
Luckily this doesn't effect me, as where I work we don't run any NT systems (well some groups do, we are all Unix). However, I have to agree with Alpeph1 - I want to be able to determine whether services that I am running are vulnerable or patches are available right here and now...I don't want to have to go off somewhere else - it makes BUGTRAQ less useful.
I don't see the point of this. Isn't the whole idea of these bullitins to get the word out? This copyright bullshit is silly. These are security notices, not works of art. Why do they need this extra measure of "control" over them? So they can change them and pretend that any mistakes were never there? So they can make them dissapear later>
I really can't imagine any real reason for wanting this.
> Yes, the whole Big Brother stuff is pretty damn
> creepy...
Yes it is.
> On the other hand, we're talking about a mafia
> bookie... like I should feel sorry for 'em?
Well if hes just a bookie...hell my grandmother was a bookie for a while. Probably for the mafia I would assume (given her age, I would bet it was even quite a while before I was born).
All bookies do (afaik) is deal in gambling. If a person wants to gamble their money away on all manner of sporting events, I say let them.
If thats all he did, then I certainly feel sorry for him.
Actually the maffia is an interesting topic. Neither of my grandparents were (other than my grandmothers possible association as a bookie)...but once when they were mentioned my grandfathers response was "Oh those guys" in a tone that seems to say "Yea I knew some of those guys" or at least had met some on one occasion or another.
While that sounds nice, I somehow doubt the FBI is going to resort to a remote compromise to break into a system, just to place a wiretap program.
Chances are they will enter the premises when you
arn't looking and either add some sort of transmitting dongle, or put the program on that way.
Another reason to use linux really... it would require them to actually break in. They would have to break into root to actually hide anything. (of course if they bring it up off a floppy - how will you know that it wasn't a power failure or failing power supply that brought it down and ruined the uptime?)
Of course, noone bothers to look but - you would be able to see a dongle. (Unless it was internal - which might require shutting the machine down anyway (my case can't be opened without unplugging it - due to power cord/desk arrangement)
My problem wasn't the development of the Doctors character, since it wasn't all that developed in the book either (more than the movie, but he was never a central character except in the one act of betrayal - well - double betrayal)
My problem was what didn't get explained. Part of whats importent about the Dr is that he is Suk trained. It was only mentioned once in the movie but, supposedly a Suks training to be loyal can't be broken.
There were alot of little things like that. Stuff that is easy to explain in a book format, but not in a movie, since it has to be worked into the dialog somehow.
Another similar problem - the sheilds. The sheilds deflect a fast blow, but admit something moving slowly. This is a very important aspect of the fight.
Also... Guild navigators were never seen or even described in the physical sense until the second book. Also, I seem to remember Irulan being blond.
Also...I seem to remember more dialog with Piter and the Baron.... again another unexplained thing - whats a mentat? Or the fact that Idaho is a mentat.
The book was still better, but this blows the original movie out of the water. I can't wait for tonight.
This is one of the things that really gets me. Everyone talks about how great kennedy was...how he staved us from war.
What was the entire cold war? A big pissing match. Lots of good came of it (space programs, scientific reasearch) but when you boil it all down, it was a big pissing match.
In truth, the USSR didn't want a nuclear war any more than the US. Trying to put Nukes on Cuban soil was nothing more than a juvenile show of force. It was right on the level of mooning the rival team out the window of the bus.
The kennedy reaction? It was the same thing. "I can piss farther thna you can", lets see whose dick is bigger. Might as well have put kennedy and Kropuchev (sp?) in cars and had them play chicken.
All kenedy did was win a pissing match. The USSR swerved their car first, yeah! Big deal. Those missles were just going to be installed and rot on cuban soil until it was decided to dismantle them.
It just kind of pisses me off that the same juvenile high school locker room attitudes are a driving force behind international politics. I am half surprized that no US president ever offered to meet with the head of the USSR so they could compare penis sizes on national TV to see who the better man is.
It reminds me of sitting in the locker room getting ready for wrestling practice (first guy to go all 4 years at my HS) and seeing a couple of the guys whip em out to compare size. I thought it was one of the silliest things ive ever seen.
> If you read your CD it says that it is illegal,
> without prior consent, to copy it to another
> form.
And if you bought a new car, opened the hood, and saw a tiny little sticker saying "it is illegal to modify this car in any way, including but not limited to the addition of racing stries, repainting and tinting of glass without written permission from Honda" would that stop you?
Just because someone writes some words on a peice of paper (or plastic) doesn't make you legally bound by them. In truth, it has been ruled that its perfectly legal to make copies for personal use...in fact, the law explicitly states that you CAN.
Legally, the record companies can NOT stop you. they can not take that right away. However, they write their little fine print anyway because they know that they can fool some people, some of the time.
> How would you feel, for example, if a book you
> wrote, was disseminated on the internet, and as
> a result you didn't sell any books?
I would track down the person who distributed it and shake their hand. It feels great to creat something and have someone else like it enough to share it with others. It feels great to have your work accepted and praised in such a way.
In fact, I can think of no greater praise for my work than to have someone hand a copy to someone else and suggest that they take a look at it.
Its even easier. Just say...take the last 2 bytes of the mp3...and change them to random values. It wont really effect the sound of it much (2 bytes) but the md5 checksum will be totally different.
In reality...you can just change a single byte anywhere...but if its always the last two...then you wont get a kind of creeping change (if you picked random bytes differently and changed them every time...then through several itterations, it would start to effect the quality.
> If I see a control that was authored by
> Macromedia or Microsoft, I feel safe in running
> it, because I know that neither one of these
> companies is likely to insert malicious
> code into their systems.
So you never download shareware or code written by anyone but a huge company and run it?
Now... signing JUST means that the person who wrote it has access to a key that was given to them (or rather signed) by verisign.
If you have it check for signatures...does it stop before EVERY peice of code and tell you who signed it and ask "do you trust them?"
My understanding was that if code is signed, it is executed with no question, regardless of who signed it (as long as the key has a valid verigign signature)
So anyone who is capable of getting a key with a valid verisign signature can have code executed.
That makes it kind of pointless I think. Unless of course it is really hard and only biog companies can get them...in that case maybe it has a point.
Of course...since I don't usually run much software thats written by big companies...I don't know.
Well we are talking about a "cryptographically secure" system as implimented by microsoft.
As a person who once had to recover a lost administrator password from an NT box - and was able to have it brute forced with l0phtcrack in under an hour on a P90... I have very little faith in their abilities.
Then again...I havn't used a single bit of microsoft software in quite a while now.... maybe they have gotten better? Perhaps this will take 2 hours to brute force.
The decision to include a package is made by a maintainer, not by "Democratic process". Any maintainer can say "I am making a package for this" and upload it into the distribution (there are some social rules for this, kind of an ettiquet - but no vote)
Forking? Nah, I don't think anyone would get kicked out for frivilous forking... flamed almost definitly. Asked to not fork frivilously? probably. Upload access revoked? nah. (yes upload, not CVS)
The democratic process is really only used for things like electing leaders, and making "political" decisions. Even "do we include xfstt in the distribution" is a lower level than it gets used on (unless the package had a licence that was causing controversy and the question had to be solved that way - even then that would be rare)
I think democracy works best when it is used either a) for very general "directional" and policy stuff or B) as a last resort for problem resolution
As a person who has seen Debian work from the inside (I am a debian developer), I would like to disagree with your assessment of why it works or doesn't.
The reason it works, imho is that democracy is used where it is needed, and not used where it isn't. It is used to make changes to policy, and settle important disputes that effect all of debian. It is used for "big picture stuff".
At the same time, each developer is like a "king" when it comes to the packages that he owns. As the xfstt maintainer, I can completely fork xfstt for debian (not that I would, I am the upstream maintainer now too; something I should devote some time too very soon now that my life is settling down).
Its the balance of using democracy for big picture stuff and allowing discourse between the developers to solve the technical issues. (actually in the past it wasn't a democracy for big picture stuff).
I have checked DanceSafe...thats why I said like 90% (or did I say 95%?) Because they said it was a very high percentage AND thats probably skewed since people only send in the suspect pills.
> I took a pill about a month ago that was mostly
> mescaline.
And how can you possibly know that? Have you had real mescaline before? Even the stuff sold on the street as "Mescaline" is usually LSD (just about always; not only a different drug - but a different class of drug). Not to mention that one could probably sell real mescaline for more than MDMA sells for (given its rarity) and any chemist who could make mescaline could certainly make MDMA - and cheaper too.
Hmmm a funny observation about an acronym used in a TLD creation turns into a discussion of black market product quality.
Actually....you could make an argument either way. Look at it this way. "Ecstacy" (X, E, or whatever you want to call it) is a street drug. It is USUALLY (probably about 95% of the time or so) just MDMA and nothing else....
However, it is sometimes mixed with Meth, or is just MDA with no MDMA, Hell I have even heard of DOB being sold under that name (man, talk about a problem waiting to happen!)
So one could argue that MDMA is a street name for several several different possible drug combonations - usually mostly MDMA, but not always.
In any case...it has nothing to do with new TLDs but...I did think it was cool - it was the first thing _I_ thought of when I saw "MDMA" in the article:)
I just a coupl eof months ago read Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. I read every single one of those text bits on every chapter. I thought they added alot to the story actually.
I saw the movie first. I LIKED the movie alot. It was good and I didn't have much trouble following it. However...it left out ALOT.
What got me though was just that. Those voice weapons. it wasn't a terrible idea...it was just wrong. I kept expecting it in the book...it never showed up...frankly, I was glad. The book worked much better.
Another thing...the whole famous thing "It is by will alone that I set my mind in motion"...did I miss that or was it JUST in the movie?
I am glad I saw the movie first...because it was good. I think I would have hated the movie if I read the book first because it would have annoyed the hell out of me.
I disagree....I don't think anyone would be out to abuse them per se. I think the problem is exactly what ICANN said... there are just too many cultural rifts in thinking.
What is apropriate for kids? What is not? Your not going to get any one answer.
Some friends of mine have a little kid, it amazes me whats "Ok" and whats "not ok" with them. We were watching pulp fiction, remember the scene where butch returns to the hotel after his fight?
They were freaking out and turned the movie off because of the sexual suggestiveness of the scene (watch the expressions on the girls face in the closups - her manners are very suggestive of sex). The kid wasn't even watching it - he was playing with some toys and thought the movie was boreing as hell.
However... the Matrix with people being gunned down with machine guns - thats perfectly OK.
Go other places in the world, and expect a complete reversal. Countries like France show pornography on TV at night. You will also notice that their movies tend to have alot less violence than standard americain fair.
The bottom line is that while some people in one communitty may think "sex is ok, violence isn't" others will say the opposite. Its all really just that parents are paranoid and will fight against any imagined danger to their kids.
I don't think that standards committees need to bend to parinoid delusions of "danger".
I like this idea alot - even more so than "None of the above is acceptable".
What would even be better.... numbered votes.
Lets say I list
1. Harry Brown
2. Ralph Nader
3. Al Gore
Then if brown can't win...my vote dgoes to nader - if that doesn't push nader over the top - then gore.
of course it would need to be a little more complex than that I mean...if Someone else votes for Nader then Brown... you need to handle both
cases. Maybe start with whoever has less 1s and move up...
One of the truely great ideas that I have seen from the libertarian party....
Every election for a candidate should have a "None of the above is acceptable" option. Something which does NOT cast a vote for any of them - something that says "I would rather have the office vacant than filled with one of these men"
I think part of the real problem is the way the system works. The democrats and repubs automatically get someone on the ballot. They have enough money that they can buy enough advertising to make other parties pointless.
Nothing has struck me quite like Jesse Ventura's story of his mayoral election. Both Democrats and Repubs joined forces to attack him. They drug hius name through the mud and said he would be the worst thing for the city that was possible. Being city level - he was still able to win (its much easier to fight such things when your scope is limited to the area of a city)
What did they do when he won? They aproached him sepratly and asked him to join their party. No morals, just do whatever it takes to win and have the most winners on your side.
> Surely the main point is 'the letter of the Law'
> versus 'the Spirit of the Law'?
I find this to be an interesting concept - and one which I have given much thought to lately. Its seems though that the "Spirit" always loses to the "letter".
Take driving. The whole point of the stop sign is to prevent accidents. To make people stop and look. Makes alot of sense in heavy traffic to have a definite stop.
However...there are many times when I can see that there is no traffic comming and that it is perfectly safe to go without comming to a FULL stop.
How about the red light I was at last night. My motorcycle only weighs about700 lbs with me on it...not enough to trip the sensor...I had to wait for a car to dive up behind me (2 light cycles later) before I got a green light.
I could see that there was no traffic comming in either direction. Sure - its a dangerous intersection during the day - but not at night.
However - should a cop see me roll through a stop sign or go through the red light, I would get ticketed. Why? because the letter of the law, a law whose spirit is to encourage "safe" driving, states that I must wait for green or stop fully at stop signs.
A court would have upheld those tickets on apeal, no matter how well I can argue that what I did was safe, and thus within the spirit of the law. (or at least I believe they would have)
Just about every book ever written - or at least every book that some librarians can get their hands on - is archived somewhere.
With the exception of things only available in a few copies - nothign will make a book completely dissapear from the world. At any point in the future - we will be able to find them and have new copies made or just read them.
There is nothing to protect software in such a way. I think its sad to know that so much is being produced, and continues to be produced - which will someday be gone forever.
Whenever something is released to the public - it becomes part of our culture. To loose such a thing forever is to lose forever part of our cultural memory.
Slashdot Mirror
Hmmm an interesting ananlogy.
:)
A mechanic knows how to fix a car. Partially from books and "cookbook recipies", but more likely from tinkering with them and figuring them out. A good mechanic will not only know how to fix a broken engine, but what to replace, modify etc to make it run better.... just like a good sysadmin.
A good mechanic can probably, and might ocasionally, machine a custom part now and again.
Now an engineer tends to spend more time designing things and testing them than tinkering with existing things. They know how it works and why. However, ocasionally will build things and have to tinker with them to find out why it didn't translate as well from paper to reality and will adjust and fix it.
They are very much overlapping skillsets. Just like I find that a good admin can program, a good programmer knows enough about being an admin to work in the "real world" too.
Of course, I have also heard Admins refered to as "Janitors" which, while true...I much prefer "Computer Systems Sanitational Engineer" - course janitors just clean up messes, admins often make them too
-Steve
Actually....I seem to remember seeing a figure that you could house the entire population of earth comfortably in an area the size of Texas.
This doesn't really surprize me, Cities areally arn't that big compared to the sparsly populated areas. However....I still don't accept it as an argument that "there arn't too many humans".
In any case, you must remember, the people who came up with this statistic know quite a bit about these stalites, including current velocity, position etc. They also know how they are being de-orbited, probably how much fuel is in whatever is being used to generate the proper force to take them out of orbit etc. (along with knowledge of what the most common failure modes for such things are).
Given all that data, they can probably rule out alot of areas as places where they will land. That would go a long way to changing the figures.
Then again...its always possible that the figures were cooked up for some other reason. There are, of course, "lies, damned lies, and statistics".
-Steve
Ok....so its a completely useless watered down index. Oh fun.
You know, Slashdot started out as a non-company personal site. Alot of the best sites out there are personal sites. Alot of the worst are company backed sites.
Google is still where its at - it still sucks less than the rest.
-Steve
However, I would argue that as a security bulliten, there is an implicit licence to distribute, which is obvious to anyone who is involved in the "security community" - the distribution of such things is a common and accepted practice.
Furthermore, that this information is needed, and was being distributed specifically to forward the end of stopping illegal activities and protecting the people. As such it was in the best interest of the public that the information be distributed.
And furthermore since Microsoft was not using them to generate profit, there is no damage done.
-Steve
I can't help but note, that this comes like maybe a week after a note on BUGTRAQ by Aleph1 stating that he would no longer be aproving bullitins that contained JUST a URL and that all posts should include the information.
The idea being that its a security list and people subscribe to it to have the information delivered to them, not to have links so they can go find it.
Luckily this doesn't effect me, as where I work we don't run any NT systems (well some groups do, we are all Unix). However, I have to agree with Alpeph1 - I want to be able to determine whether services that I am running are vulnerable or patches are available right here and now...I don't want to have to go off somewhere else - it makes BUGTRAQ less useful.
I don't see the point of this. Isn't the whole idea of these bullitins to get the word out? This copyright bullshit is silly. These are security notices, not works of art. Why do they need this extra measure of "control" over them? So they can change them and pretend that any mistakes were never there? So they can make them dissapear later>
I really can't imagine any real reason for wanting this.
-Steve
> Yes, the whole Big Brother stuff is pretty damn
> creepy...
Yes it is.
> On the other hand, we're talking about a mafia
> bookie... like I should feel sorry for 'em?
Well if hes just a bookie...hell my grandmother was a bookie for a while. Probably for the mafia I would assume (given her age, I would bet it was even quite a while before I was born).
All bookies do (afaik) is deal in gambling. If a person wants to gamble their money away on all manner of sporting events, I say let them.
If thats all he did, then I certainly feel sorry for him.
Actually the maffia is an interesting topic. Neither of my grandparents were (other than my grandmothers possible association as a bookie)...but once when they were mentioned my grandfathers response was "Oh those guys" in a tone that seems to say "Yea I knew some of those guys" or at least had met some on one occasion or another.
-Steve
While that sounds nice, I somehow doubt the FBI is going to resort to a remote compromise to break into a system, just to place a wiretap program.
Chances are they will enter the premises when you
arn't looking and either add some sort of transmitting dongle, or put the program on that way.
Another reason to use linux really... it would require them to actually break in. They would have to break into root to actually hide anything. (of course if they bring it up off a floppy - how will you know that it wasn't a power failure or failing power supply that brought it down and ruined the uptime?)
Of course, noone bothers to look but - you would be able to see a dongle. (Unless it was internal - which might require shutting the machine down anyway (my case can't be opened without unplugging it - due to power cord/desk arrangement)
-Steve
Okl I remember now...
;) )
However, I seem to remember the Atreidies having a mentat around? (other than the one in training that is
I thought that he was a mentat before becoming a Ghola and was trained as a Zensunni by the Bene Tleilax.
Who was the Atreides Mentat then?
-Steve
My problem wasn't the development of the Doctors character, since it wasn't all that developed in the book either (more than the movie, but he was never a central character except in the one act of betrayal - well - double betrayal)
My problem was what didn't get explained. Part of whats importent about the Dr is that he is Suk trained. It was only mentioned once in the movie but, supposedly a Suks training to be loyal can't be broken.
There were alot of little things like that. Stuff that is easy to explain in a book format, but not in a movie, since it has to be worked into the dialog somehow.
Another similar problem - the sheilds. The sheilds deflect a fast blow, but admit something moving slowly. This is a very important aspect of the fight.
Also... Guild navigators were never seen or even described in the physical sense until the second book. Also, I seem to remember Irulan being blond.
Also...I seem to remember more dialog with Piter and the Baron.... again another unexplained thing - whats a mentat? Or the fact that Idaho is a mentat.
The book was still better, but this blows the original movie out of the water. I can't wait for tonight.
-Steve
This is one of the things that really gets me. Everyone talks about how great kennedy was...how he staved us from war.
What was the entire cold war? A big pissing match. Lots of good came of it (space programs, scientific reasearch) but when you boil it all down, it was a big pissing match.
In truth, the USSR didn't want a nuclear war any more than the US. Trying to put Nukes on Cuban soil was nothing more than a juvenile show of force. It was right on the level of mooning the rival team out the window of the bus.
The kennedy reaction? It was the same thing. "I can piss farther thna you can", lets see whose dick is bigger. Might as well have put kennedy and Kropuchev (sp?) in cars and had them play chicken.
All kenedy did was win a pissing match. The USSR swerved their car first, yeah! Big deal. Those missles were just going to be installed and rot on cuban soil until it was decided to dismantle them.
It just kind of pisses me off that the same juvenile high school locker room attitudes are a driving force behind international politics. I am half surprized that no US president ever offered to meet with the head of the USSR so they could compare penis sizes on national TV to see who the better man is.
It reminds me of sitting in the locker room getting ready for wrestling practice (first guy to go all 4 years at my HS) and seeing a couple of the guys whip em out to compare size. I thought it was one of the silliest things ive ever seen.
-Steve
> If you read your CD it says that it is illegal,
> without prior consent, to copy it to another
> form.
And if you bought a new car, opened the hood, and saw a tiny little sticker saying "it is illegal to modify this car in any way, including but not limited to the addition of racing stries, repainting and tinting of glass without written permission from Honda" would that stop you?
Just because someone writes some words on a peice of paper (or plastic) doesn't make you legally bound by them. In truth, it has been ruled that its perfectly legal to make copies for personal use...in fact, the law explicitly states that you CAN.
Legally, the record companies can NOT stop you. they can not take that right away. However, they write their little fine print anyway because they know that they can fool some people, some of the time.
> How would you feel, for example, if a book you
> wrote, was disseminated on the internet, and as
> a result you didn't sell any books?
I would track down the person who distributed it and shake their hand. It feels great to creat something and have someone else like it enough to share it with others. It feels great to have your work accepted and praised in such a way.
In fact, I can think of no greater praise for my work than to have someone hand a copy to someone else and suggest that they take a look at it.
-Steve
Its even easier. Just say...take the last 2 bytes of the mp3...and change them to random values. It wont really effect the sound of it much (2 bytes) but the md5 checksum will be totally different.
In reality...you can just change a single byte anywhere...but if its always the last two...then you wont get a kind of creeping change (if you picked random bytes differently and changed them every time...then through several itterations, it would start to effect the quality.
-Steve
> If I see a control that was authored by
> Macromedia or Microsoft, I feel safe in running
> it, because I know that neither one of these
> companies is likely to insert malicious
> code into their systems.
So you never download shareware or code written by anyone but a huge company and run it?
Now... signing JUST means that the person who wrote it has access to a key that was given to them (or rather signed) by verisign.
If you have it check for signatures...does it stop before EVERY peice of code and tell you who signed it and ask "do you trust them?"
My understanding was that if code is signed, it is executed with no question, regardless of who signed it (as long as the key has a valid verigign signature)
So anyone who is capable of getting a key with a valid verisign signature can have code executed.
That makes it kind of pointless I think. Unless of course it is really hard and only biog companies can get them...in that case maybe it has a point.
Of course...since I don't usually run much software thats written by big companies...I don't know.
-Steve
-Steve
Well we are talking about a "cryptographically secure" system as implimented by microsoft.
... I have very little faith in their abilities.
As a person who once had to recover a lost administrator password from an NT box - and was able to have it brute forced with l0phtcrack in under an hour on a P90
Then again...I havn't used a single bit of microsoft software in quite a while now.... maybe they have gotten better? Perhaps this will take 2 hours to brute force.
-Steve
No.
The decision to include a package is made by a maintainer, not by "Democratic process". Any maintainer can say "I am making a package for this" and upload it into the distribution (there are some social rules for this, kind of an ettiquet - but no vote)
Forking? Nah, I don't think anyone would get kicked out for frivilous forking... flamed almost definitly. Asked to not fork frivilously? probably. Upload access revoked? nah. (yes upload, not CVS)
The democratic process is really only used for things like electing leaders, and making "political" decisions. Even "do we include xfstt in the distribution" is a lower level than it gets used on (unless the package had a licence that was causing controversy and the question had to be solved that way - even then that would be rare)
I think democracy works best when it is used either a) for very general "directional" and policy stuff or B) as a last resort for problem resolution
-Steve
As a person who has seen Debian work from the inside (I am a debian developer), I would like to disagree with your assessment of why it works or doesn't.
The reason it works, imho is that democracy is used where it is needed, and not used where it isn't. It is used to make changes to policy, and settle important disputes that effect all of debian. It is used for "big picture stuff".
At the same time, each developer is like a "king" when it comes to the packages that he owns. As the xfstt maintainer, I can completely fork xfstt for debian (not that I would, I am the upstream maintainer now too; something I should devote some time too very soon now that my life is settling down).
Its the balance of using democracy for big picture stuff and allowing discourse between the developers to solve the technical issues. (actually in the past it wasn't a democracy for big picture stuff).
-Steve
I have checked DanceSafe...thats why I said like 90% (or did I say 95%?) Because they said it was a very high percentage AND thats probably skewed since people only send in the suspect pills.
> I took a pill about a month ago that was mostly
> mescaline.
And how can you possibly know that? Have you had real mescaline before? Even the stuff sold on the street as "Mescaline" is usually LSD (just about always; not only a different drug - but a different class of drug). Not to mention that one could probably sell real mescaline for more than MDMA sells for (given its rarity) and any chemist who could make mescaline could certainly make MDMA - and cheaper too.
Hmmm a funny observation about an acronym used in a TLD creation turns into a discussion of black market product quality.
-Steve
Actually....you could make an argument either way. Look at it this way. "Ecstacy" (X, E, or whatever you want to call it) is a street drug. It is USUALLY (probably about 95% of the time or so) just MDMA and nothing else....
:)
However, it is sometimes mixed with Meth, or is just MDA with no MDMA, Hell I have even heard of DOB being sold under that name (man, talk about a problem waiting to happen!)
So one could argue that MDMA is a street name for several several different possible drug combonations - usually mostly MDMA, but not always.
In any case...it has nothing to do with new TLDs but...I did think it was cool - it was the first thing _I_ thought of when I saw "MDMA" in the article
-Steve
I just a coupl eof months ago read Dune, Dune Messiah and Children of Dune. I read every single one of those text bits on every chapter. I thought they added alot to the story actually.
-Steve
I have to agree.
I saw the movie first. I LIKED the movie alot. It was good and I didn't have much trouble following it. However...it left out ALOT.
What got me though was just that. Those voice weapons. it wasn't a terrible idea...it was just wrong. I kept expecting it in the book...it never showed up...frankly, I was glad. The book worked much better.
Another thing...the whole famous thing "It is by will alone that I set my mind in motion"...did I miss that or was it JUST in the movie?
I am glad I saw the movie first...because it was good. I think I would have hated the movie if I read the book first because it would have annoyed the hell out of me.
-Steve
I disagree....I don't think anyone would be out to abuse them per se. I think the problem is exactly what ICANN said... there are just too many cultural rifts in thinking.
What is apropriate for kids? What is not? Your not going to get any one answer.
Some friends of mine have a little kid, it amazes me whats "Ok" and whats "not ok" with them. We were watching pulp fiction, remember the scene where butch returns to the hotel after his fight?
They were freaking out and turned the movie off because of the sexual suggestiveness of the scene (watch the expressions on the girls face in the closups - her manners are very suggestive of sex). The kid wasn't even watching it - he was playing with some toys and thought the movie was boreing as hell.
However... the Matrix with people being gunned down with machine guns - thats perfectly OK.
Go other places in the world, and expect a complete reversal. Countries like France show pornography on TV at night. You will also notice that their movies tend to have alot less violence than standard americain fair.
The bottom line is that while some people in one communitty may think "sex is ok, violence isn't" others will say the opposite. Its all really just that parents are paranoid and will fight against any imagined danger to their kids.
I don't think that standards committees need to bend to parinoid delusions of "danger".
-Steve
I like this idea alot - even more so than "None of the above is acceptable".
What would even be better.... numbered votes.
Lets say I list
1. Harry Brown
2. Ralph Nader
3. Al Gore
Then if brown can't win...my vote dgoes to nader - if that doesn't push nader over the top - then gore.
of course it would need to be a little more complex than that I mean...if Someone else votes for Nader then Brown... you need to handle both
cases. Maybe start with whoever has less 1s and move up...
-Steve
One of the truely great ideas that I have seen from the libertarian party....
Every election for a candidate should have a "None of the above is acceptable" option. Something which does NOT cast a vote for any of them - something that says "I would rather have the office vacant than filled with one of these men"
I think part of the real problem is the way the system works. The democrats and repubs automatically get someone on the ballot. They have enough money that they can buy enough advertising to make other parties pointless.
Nothing has struck me quite like Jesse Ventura's story of his mayoral election. Both Democrats and Repubs joined forces to attack him. They drug hius name through the mud and said he would be the worst thing for the city that was possible. Being city level - he was still able to win (its much easier to fight such things when your scope is limited to the area of a city)
What did they do when he won? They aproached him sepratly and asked him to join their party. No morals, just do whatever it takes to win and have the most winners on your side.
> Surely the main point is 'the letter of the Law'
> versus 'the Spirit of the Law'?
I find this to be an interesting concept - and one which I have given much thought to lately. Its seems though that the "Spirit" always loses to the "letter".
Take driving. The whole point of the stop sign is to prevent accidents. To make people stop and look. Makes alot of sense in heavy traffic to have a definite stop.
However...there are many times when I can see that there is no traffic comming and that it is perfectly safe to go without comming to a FULL stop.
How about the red light I was at last night. My motorcycle only weighs about700 lbs with me on it...not enough to trip the sensor...I had to wait for a car to dive up behind me (2 light cycles later) before I got a green light.
I could see that there was no traffic comming in either direction. Sure - its a dangerous intersection during the day - but not at night.
However - should a cop see me roll through a stop sign or go through the red light, I would get ticketed. Why? because the letter of the law, a law whose spirit is to encourage "safe" driving, states that I must wait for green or stop fully at stop signs.
A court would have upheld those tickets on apeal, no matter how well I can argue that what I did was safe, and thus within the spirit of the law. (or at least I believe they would have)
-Steve
I have to agree here....
Just about every book ever written - or at least every book that some librarians can get their hands on - is archived somewhere.
With the exception of things only available in a few copies - nothign will make a book completely dissapear from the world. At any point in the future - we will be able to find them and have new copies made or just read them.
There is nothing to protect software in such a way. I think its sad to know that so much is being produced, and continues to be produced - which will someday be gone forever.
Whenever something is released to the public - it becomes part of our culture. To loose such a thing forever is to lose forever part of our cultural memory.
I think thats truely sad.
-Steve