Config files can contain secrets such as mysql passwords, etc. And modifying them is definitely modification of source code. I wonder how they get across that one...
From India here... That was probably the case about 10 years ago. Things are very different now at least in urban India and improving for the better. Economic growth changes a lot. Most government offices are now computerized. Marriage certificate is typically issued within a day in most of India (though in Delhi it can take a couple of weeks).
"Patches can be slipstreamed anyway, and for the mother of all 'off-line patching systems' there's Windows Server Update Services." Does Windows Server Update Services help me download the updates at my college and apply them at home?
As for slipstreaming, the link you copy-pasted allows you to slipstream sp2 not patches after that. Autopatcher used to give you only the post-sp2 updates anyway. Wanna re-install? Pop in the sp2 slipstreamed cd, do an unattended install, throw in the latest autopatcher and thats it... you are through.
By the way, does anyone know a convenient way to slipstream anything more than sp2 *reliably* onto a bootable disc?
No, your e-mail account_s_ (plural) are not single points of attack, unless you use _all_ your e-mail accounts to sign up for everything you sign up for. If I use my primary email address for signing to 15 web services, compromising my email is enough to get access to those 15 services because of the way password recovery is implemented these days. It is thus a single point of attack. A single sign-on doesn't change that.
Your idea that your own server should be manager your keys is as close as you have come to a reasonable solution, but it is still subject to all sorts of man-in-the-middle. What has man in the middle got to do with this?
Don't understand how your final comment about controlling your password for single-sign-on at all. Does some would-be single-sign-on vendor want to take even the final password away? Or do you misunderstand the concept of keys instead of passwords? Or what? No. Suppose vendor A is managing my single sign on today. Tomorrow I stop liking vendor A for whatever reason. I should be able to switch to vendor B without losing anything worthwhile. OpenID delegation allows me to do just that.
There is nothing in a single sign on system to force you to use only one id. Using openid and the few sites that actually allow you to use it, I have already brought down my username password combos needed from about 10 to 2. So I can decrease the number of sign ons with systems like openid.
Secondly, as far as identity theft is concerned, my email accounts are already single points for attack. Once you have the email, the password recovery services will do your bidding. A single-identity-solution allows you to just shift this from email to some server which was created to keep and handle this data. Whats more you could be the one setting up that server... (not in the ms case but in the case of openid).
So, on the whole, single sign ons can work and openid hopefully will. I dont even want to rtfa. If I cant decide who keeps my username password for my single signon, I am just not interested.
And since Microsoft gets into funny contracts with its OEMs, most laptop makers can't even sell Linux laptops per contract. The contract is exclusive (apparently DELL made is somehow though).
However let's face it, most people would need Windows on those laptops. Most laptops come with specialized drivers that run specialized buttons and features on their laptop. If you simply wipe the Windows install and install, say, Ubuntu, you may lose some of the laptop functionality and reduce it to a generic PC part. Mot so amongst the people I know (mostly students). Majority of us like dual boots (legal or not). There are equally big camps of linux only, windows only and mac only amongst the people I know. It is just not right to not give install discs and product keys when you are charging for it.
Also, I don't buy that argument. If a low end laptop can be sold with a windows driver disc and freedos, so can a high end be. I don't see why I should be paying MS just because I want a fast portable machine running slack. I guess I won't be buying a laptop anytime soon.
And why can't we standardize stuff and have generic laptops be possible? It can't be that tough! And surely there is a market for those.
BusinessWeek has built good thesis on a bad assumption. Windows piracy is already rampant in China and India. It's harvesting time for Microsoft. Which is exactly what they are doing. I am in India. A shocking number of people I know have legal windows, because it "came with the laptop". They also don't have install discs of any kind or product keys. Some of them are not aware of what part of the system costs went to MS. And I am left as a helpless geek because there is no such thing as an assembled laptop that I can make and outdo these OEMs. Which, by the way, brings me to a question I have had for a very long time. Why don't we have an assembled laptops kind of concept? People could sell us the lcd/keyboard and cases as a single unit and w could buy and fit our own mobos/procys and stuff into them.
From *my* incomplete understanding of the theorem, it seems to me that, since the laws governing the universe are both complete and consistent (at least that's what the truthiness in my gut tells me), those laws would have to be very simple, and the only question is do we have the intelligence or the energy levels required to figure them out.
And thus spake the wiki:
It is possible to have a complete and consistent list of axioms that cannot be produced by a computer program (that is, the list is not computably enumerable). For example, one might take all true statements about the natural numbers to be axioms (and no false statements). But then there is no mechanical way to decide, given a statement about the natural numbers, whether it is an axiom or not.
So, the consistency of the universe should have no effect.
All I wanted to claim is that it is likely that we will never have a finite or a recursively enumerable list of physical truths from which everything else can be derived as long as the model we are working with is complex enough to include the axioms that incompleteness requires. Where exactly am I making a mistake?
No, I'm really looking for a thing. If we ever manage to nail down the universe, account for all the forces and all the masses, and the only way it works is if you add a meaningless "magic" constant to it, then there is a god. But if it all adds up straight, then there's not.
From my (incomplete and thus maybe wrong) understanding of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, unless the universe happens to have a really simple explanation (in the sense that it doesn't require the full force of the ZF axiom set, which is unlikely because this explanation won't even have the power of natural numbers to use), we can almost surely, never have such an explanation.
To put it simply, there will always be gaps in any theory of the universe we put forward and that is (except for very very unlikely surprises), a mathematical certainty. Yes, as we progress, we can fill as many gaps as we want, but we will never fill them all up.
So, to get to the point, you can always ascribe a gap to a magical variable if you feel like it, wait for science to cover that and then move on to another gap, and rinse repeat.
Also, you use the term magical constants. You mean like the mass of an electron and stuff?
Anyway, however you might have meant that, they are indistinguishable from axioms and we will never ever get rid of them. This one is a mathematical certainty.
-- Sorry for a double post, but I wanted to check up on incompleteness before I wrote this. I might still be wrong about that though. I have not studied logic formally.
Now it should be obvious to anyone that there is no scientific proof for the existence of god, and while I know that there are many who think science is complete crap, I am not one of those people. As far as I am concerned, however, there is also no scientific proof against the existence of god. Before the "prove a negative" people jump out of the woodwork, I should say that I would consider a scientifically complete model of the universe that includes no "extra" variables to be a sufficient proof...It's a high standard, but a reasonable one for a scientific proof.
Aha! Extra variables! Brilliant except that who is to decide what is extra or not? This is not the 20th century when all the math we had access to was classical and simple models where extra variables even made sense. Say, if I gave you a variant of string theory that postulates that everything happens on a 11 dimensional complex manifold and gives a universal explanation of all the basic forces, what would the variables be and what would extra variables even mean? What if this theory used probability theory as a fundamental postulate? Would you cry that we have proven/disproven the existence of God?
No sir! What you are demanding is mathematical proof not scientific proof! Which we of course know cannot exist. What is a scientific truth? A scientific truth is a fact or theory supported by evidence. Everything else is by default scientifically untrue. It is scientifically untrue that there exists a negatively charged fundamental particle the size of earth and it is scientifically untrue that God exists. And both will remain scientifically untrue till evidence surfaces to suggest otherwise!
The BBC charges Indian cable operators for being able to broadcast some (all?) of the BBC channels in India. These operators will be pretty pissed without that DRM. Likely, the situation is the same over all the Commonwealth.
...three years ago. I decided to finish my education before getting involved in something real.
Everything modded highly above so far is good and there's no point repeating it, so I will just mention the Indian stuff.:P
Problems
Indian institutes pick up developments like C++/STL etc a bit too slowly so you will have to work that out for yourself unless you are from a lucky place.
We Indians typically don't learn any real world toolkit/framework/library. It is only very large projects like the kernel and subversion that don't rely on toolkits/frameworks etc. A smaller, entry level project, say like some small game or something will typically use a framework/toolkit of some sort. If you don't know even one of these then it is extremely difficult to get started. Though once you know one you can pick up on others over time.
Too few mentors.
Solutions
Read wikipedia and its discussion pages on the language of your choice. You will know what you are missing. Learn that up. And if you were not taught STL, please pick it up if you want to proceed with C++. Ask your doubts on irc. IRc works once you figure out stuff like "Don't ask if I can ask", etc!
Try one of these -
Pick up some toolkit of your choice for example, in C++, you could choose something from QT, GTK, ncurses, SDL, etc. Now find a project that uses these and is both small and interesting and follow the slashdot advice.
Find the project first and then learn the corresponding toolkit. This is slightly more difficult for things like C++ etc.
There is a firefox plugin that makes this operation even more easy.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/239 0 As a past user of this addon, I would like to warn you that it routes your requests via a third party website, which of course should and can be be avoided.
I think this is the survey (pdf) the parent was talking about. The second table on Page 5 is relevant here.
Basically, what it says is that 26% of Muslims aged 18 to 29 in the United States said that suicide bombing of civilian targets could be rarely (11%) or often/sometimes (15%) justified.
Frankly, I don't see whats wrong with that. I would like to see a similar study on other groups. I think it is reasonable to assume that a similar percentage of all youth in the 18 to 29 age group would have a similar response.
Slashdot Mirror
You can, but you will need a great person for that... Maybe a great merchant or a great scientist...
Config files can contain secrets such as mysql passwords, etc. And modifying them is definitely modification of source code. I wonder how they get across that one...
From India here... That was probably the case about 10 years ago. Things are very different now at least in urban India and improving for the better. Economic growth changes a lot. Most government offices are now computerized. Marriage certificate is typically issued within a day in most of India (though in Delhi it can take a couple of weeks).
Hmmm... this puts their autopatcher move into perspective. Autopatcher could potentially have competed with an official service pack.
"Patches can be slipstreamed anyway, and for the mother of all 'off-line patching systems' there's Windows Server Update Services." Does Windows Server Update Services help me download the updates at my college and apply them at home?
As for slipstreaming, the link you copy-pasted allows you to slipstream sp2 not patches after that. Autopatcher used to give you only the post-sp2 updates anyway. Wanna re-install? Pop in the sp2 slipstreamed cd, do an unattended install, throw in the latest autopatcher and thats it... you are through.
By the way, does anyone know a convenient way to slipstream anything more than sp2 *reliably* onto a bootable disc?
There is nothing in a single sign on system to force you to use only one id. Using openid and the few sites that actually allow you to use it, I have already brought down my username password combos needed from about 10 to 2. So I can decrease the number of sign ons with systems like openid.
Secondly, as far as identity theft is concerned, my email accounts are already single points for attack. Once you have the email, the password recovery services will do your bidding. A single-identity-solution allows you to just shift this from email to some server which was created to keep and handle this data. Whats more you could be the one setting up that server... (not in the ms case but in the case of openid).
So, on the whole, single sign ons can work and openid hopefully will. I dont even want to rtfa. If I cant decide who keeps my username password for my single signon, I am just not interested.
http://google.com/trends?q=God%2C+Ubuntu&ctab=0&ge o=all&date=all&sort=0
google confirms it!
However let's face it, most people would need Windows on those laptops. Most laptops come with specialized drivers that run specialized buttons and features on their laptop. If you simply wipe the Windows install and install, say, Ubuntu, you may lose some of the laptop functionality and reduce it to a generic PC part. Mot so amongst the people I know (mostly students). Majority of us like dual boots (legal or not). There are equally big camps of linux only, windows only and mac only amongst the people I know. It is just not right to not give install discs and product keys when you are charging for it.
Also, I don't buy that argument. If a low end laptop can be sold with a windows driver disc and freedos, so can a high end be. I don't see why I should be paying MS just because I want a fast portable machine running slack. I guess I won't be buying a laptop anytime soon.
And why can't we standardize stuff and have generic laptops be possible? It can't be that tough! And surely there is a market for those.
There's gotta be a worst fanfic ever award out there somewhere.... May I suggest that you give it a try.
Could this be a response to these Gujarati dealers from India?
And thus spake the wiki:
It is possible to have a complete and consistent list of axioms that cannot be produced by a computer program (that is, the list is not computably enumerable). For example, one might take all true statements about the natural numbers to be axioms (and no false statements). But then there is no mechanical way to decide, given a statement about the natural numbers, whether it is an axiom or not.
So, the consistency of the universe should have no effect.
All I wanted to claim is that it is likely that we will never have a finite or a recursively enumerable list of physical truths from which everything else can be derived as long as the model we are working with is complex enough to include the axioms that incompleteness requires. Where exactly am I making a mistake?
From my (incomplete and thus maybe wrong) understanding of Gödel's incompleteness theorems, unless the universe happens to have a really simple explanation (in the sense that it doesn't require the full force of the ZF axiom set, which is unlikely because this explanation won't even have the power of natural numbers to use), we can almost surely, never have such an explanation.
To put it simply, there will always be gaps in any theory of the universe we put forward and that is (except for very very unlikely surprises), a mathematical certainty. Yes, as we progress, we can fill as many gaps as we want, but we will never fill them all up.
So, to get to the point, you can always ascribe a gap to a magical variable if you feel like it, wait for science to cover that and then move on to another gap, and rinse repeat.
Also, you use the term magical constants. You mean like the mass of an electron and stuff? Anyway, however you might have meant that, they are indistinguishable from axioms and we will never ever get rid of them. This one is a mathematical certainty.
--Sorry for a double post, but I wanted to check up on incompleteness before I wrote this. I might still be wrong about that though. I have not studied logic formally.
You keep using that word, but I don't think it means what you think it means.
Now it should be obvious to anyone that there is no scientific proof for the existence of god, and while I know that there are many who think science is complete crap, I am not one of those people. As far as I am concerned, however, there is also no scientific proof against the existence of god. Before the "prove a negative" people jump out of the woodwork, I should say that I would consider a scientifically complete model of the universe that includes no "extra" variables to be a sufficient proof...It's a high standard, but a reasonable one for a scientific proof.
Aha! Extra variables! Brilliant except that who is to decide what is extra or not? This is not the 20th century when all the math we had access to was classical and simple models where extra variables even made sense. Say, if I gave you a variant of string theory that postulates that everything happens on a 11 dimensional complex manifold and gives a universal explanation of all the basic forces, what would the variables be and what would extra variables even mean? What if this theory used probability theory as a fundamental postulate? Would you cry that we have proven/disproven the existence of God?
No sir! What you are demanding is mathematical proof not scientific proof! Which we of course know cannot exist. What is a scientific truth? A scientific truth is a fact or theory supported by evidence. Everything else is by default scientifically untrue. It is scientifically untrue that there exists a negatively charged fundamental particle the size of earth and it is scientifically untrue that God exists. And both will remain scientifically untrue till evidence surfaces to suggest otherwise!
Come on! Why not link to the xkcd page itself? There is an alt text to those comics which will be missed if you directly link to the png.
The BBC charges Indian cable operators for being able to broadcast some (all?) of the BBC channels in India. These operators will be pretty pissed without that DRM. Likely, the situation is the same over all the Commonwealth.
...three years ago. I decided to finish my education before getting involved in something real.
Everything modded highly above so far is good and there's no point repeating it, so I will just mention the Indian stuff. :P
Problems
Solutions
Perhaps I should add a proper detailed howto for Indians on my home page sometime. Anyway, good luck!
Oh and also check out Sarovar along with sourceforge. (I am not affiliated with Sarovar or anything, btw.)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/23
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/30
I think this is the survey (pdf) the parent was talking about. The second table on Page 5 is relevant here.
Basically, what it says is that 26% of Muslims aged 18 to 29 in the United States said that suicide bombing of civilian targets could be rarely (11%) or often/sometimes (15%) justified.
Frankly, I don't see whats wrong with that. I would like to see a similar study on other groups. I think it is reasonable to assume that a similar percentage of all youth in the 18 to 29 age group would have a similar response.