The person you're replying to probably has a different hypothesis. Suppose the situation were thus: you're not a victim, and you have information that might help the police. The smart thing to do is not help (because talking to the police is risky even if you're innocent), but if everyone does the smart thing, we all lose.
I'm having a difficult time imagining a situation where I might have some helpful information, but revealing it might lead to me being charged with the crime.
I guess in such an oddball case, I'd consult an attorney before proceeding. But it's not as though you need to lawyer-up every time a cop says, "Hi, how are you?".
The fact of the matter is, our jails are not stuffed to the gills with people that helped the police. So something in the system must be working as designed.
Well, if the answer to the question, "Officer, am I free to go?" is something other than "yes", then you should seriously consider shutting the fuck up.
In your apartment building example, if it were me, I'd handle it thusly:
If I was not a victim, and I did not have any information that could help the police, I would just tell them who I was, where I live, and that I hadn't seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. If they still wanted to continue the conversation (doubtful they'd want to waste their time), I'd just say that "I have an appointment soon. Am I free to go?" If that doesn't end the conversation, then I invoke my right to counsel.
Once you know how to use portage it takes just a second to get v8.3.1 available for your system.
For generous enough definitions of the word "second".;)
I forget the name of it, but there is a plugin for APT that helps gentoo users convert to Debian. All it does is spew out a bunch of random compilation messages for a while before installing anything.
Once you're 13, unless you have some sort of physical or mental disability, you should be pretty self-sufficient. Being self-sufficient and thinking you're self-sufficient are two vastly different things.
A 13-year-old does need parental attention, even though she is hardwired to never admit to it.
I'm not sure that I agree that the perl thing is more serious. Well, I think that's just going to have to go down to the definition of "serious".
The perl hole was: 1. trivial to exploit 2. yielded a root shell 3. wouldn't be super hard to exploit remotely if you think of all the perl CGI that was written back in 1996. Getting write access to a cgi-bin directory was not considered too challenging. 4. perl was ubiquitous back then. Installed on most any *nix machine.
The ruby hole: 1. has not yet been shown to execute arbitrary code 2. is definitely remotely exploitable 3. can only execute code as the owner of the ruby interpreter (probably 'nobody') so hopefully that user can't to anything very interesting 4. ruby doesn't have much market share right now. How many boxes have a ruby interpreter? How many hosts have RoR? This isn't a sleight against RoR at all, but you have to admit that it represents a small percentage of websites.
Look at the exploit code in the linked article. I mean, ary[0x7fffffff] = "A" ? C'mon. Who takes an array index from user input? I can't imagine that's a common coding technique.
I dunno. I think they're both serious. But I think the perl hole was seriouser.;)
This reminds me of the notorious suidperl vulnerability from back in the day. In a nutshell, you could use the following code to achieve a root shell from an unprivileged account (apologies if I don't get it exactly right... I don't have an ancient system to verify on):
#!/usr/bin/suidperl -w
$< = 0; $> = 0;
`/bin/bash`;
That was available for how many years? Anyhow, that's much more serious than this Ruby DoS attack.;)
Now let me tell you something about how the business world works.;)
But seriously, just keep an open mind. You'll be shocked to find out what a little distance can solve. Physical distance as well as emotional distance. In other words, you know what topics you can't discuss with your parents, and a conversation is a two-way street. You can always change the subject or excuse yourself or whatever it takes. But it's a little hard when you live with them...
You turned out remarkably well for having such eccentric parents. Looks like you're going to have to be the adult here.
Yeah, I'm still living with my parents. Just bought a car and there was a huge battle, they didn't want me to get a manual transmission any more than they'd have wanted me to convert to Wiccan, so I'm spending $13000 of my own money on a car I don't want (I also believed a $2000 used car would be more fiscally responsible, since I had $500). Purchasing a reliable used car is definitely a better financial decision that purchasing a new car. Not that you need to hear this from me, since you've already crunched the numbers for yourself, but I just wanted to reaffirm that you figured correctly.
I'm at the point where I finally realized they've never been supportive of me making my own decisions... and now I'm tearing my life apart and putting it back together trying to get shit back on track. I'll probably sell the car and get the one I want as soon as I have money (bad financial decision, unless I get a used one.. probably won't, but I've projected the financial impact for 2 years and weighed it out) I would advise against making incorrect financial decisions just to spite your parents. For one thing, it screws up your finances, which you indicate are precarious. For another thing, would this really add to your independence? I would argue that it does not, since you are still making decisions based on your parents' (negative) influence instead of making decisions strictly for yourself.
Crunch the numbers and do what makes the most sense for you. Not what irritates your parents the most.;)
I think in January I should be ready to actually move out, might delay as long as March to finish a safety net and do a proper examination of options. I agree with you that moving out would be a wise course of action. You'll never be your own person until you get out of the nest.
I won't be involving my parents, of course. I've never in my life understood the strange material bond people share with their parents; they always seemed like a threat to me, or a tool (I need a place to live), depending on context. Thousands of people have slipped in and out of my life, they'll slip out just as easily and I'm done with them and can finally deal with the world on my own. I'm going to give you a little advice here to tuck away for the future. Definitely get out from underneath your parents. Get out on your own. Breathe the fresh air. If you have to, take a break from your parents for a bit.
But this talk about people slipping into and out of your life--be careful with that. Many times people with overbearing parents are able to reforge that relationship in a healthy fashion after achieving independence. You may find that your parents respect your individuality, intelligence, and decision-making competence once they see you thriving on your own. It is true that some people you can never satisfy, but I think you'll find it to be worthwhile to give your parents another chance once you are on different terms.
Parent/child estrangement is tragic, and you should not take this decision so lightly as you have indicated. It should be only a last resort.
(Indication you didn't raise your kids right: They decide they need to fix their broken life, you're not helping, and they want to get as far away from you as possible to prevent further damage) "Raising kids right" is something that sounds a lot easier than it is. "Broken lives." "Damage." I bet if you to take a step back and look past their smothering, you'll see they are doing this out of a misguided notion of love and protection. Do you truly believe that you are broken? Try not to forget about the truly deplorable conditions that some kids grow up in (alcoholic, abusive, malnourishing, imprisoned, impoverished, foster, etc. parents).
Summary: Get out on your own, and reforge that relationship sometime in the future.
Make _intentionally_ having it a crime. I'm having a hard time envisioning how we can know a person's intentions and prove them beyond reasonable doubt.
How cool would it be if we could know people's intentions? It would certainly do away with all this security theater at the airports.
When your kid's a programmer at 6, and using alternate OSes at like 15, it's out of your hands. You're forgetting that I was also a programmer at 6, and I didn't have my first child until age 29. That means I'm always going to have 25 years, give or take, more computer experience than my first child. That's an awfully large gap in knowledge to bridge.
On the flip side, and you'll understand this when you have kids, is that letting them think they have gotten away with something from time to time is good for their development. Parents who don't recognize the need to foster the development of their kids' sense of independence are the same parents who you hear complaining about their 28-year-old "boomerang children" they've got living rent-free in their basements.
But that might hit a little close to home for some slashdot readers...
With this new perspective, it's amazing to me how many people, well into adulthood, still believe they "got away with" so much as kids. I know that I am guilty of this personally. In middle school, I couldn't believe how naive my father had been to hide a stack of Playboy and Penthouse magazines in a box in the basement that had no other contents. It took me until I had children of my own to realize that had my father truly intended to "protect" me from this pornography, he could have found a much better hiding place, such as the county landfill.
Take a look back at all of the devious things you did as a child that you believe you got away with. But this time try to look with an objective eye. It's funny, I never realized just how clever my parents were until I had kids of my own.
Dell laptops (Vostro, in particular) are well-known to use hardware that makes installing the OS yourself difficult or even impossible. I remember reading a long thread about trying to get retail XP to install on the Vostro 1400 ending in failure. This was with large numbers of experienced Windows admins trying to convince XP to install.
What you get for your "downgrade" fee is more than just an XP license--you're getting Dell to certify the software and hardware and make 'em work.
Incidentally, have you ever attempted to install a retail Windows OS on a whitebox machine? I've only built one machine that I had intended to put Windows on (dual-boot), and try as I might, I just could not get the damn thing to install. Debian installed cleanly with zero hiccups and that machine has been running Deb ever since.
My point being: if you think you're going to get around this "downgrade" fee by purchasing a Windows license on your own, you are on some seriously shaky ground.
It's not legal semantics. It's the law, period. Umm, if you would read more carefully, you would see that Izabael_DaJinn's argument is that the law is stupid. Whether or not statutory rape laws exist was never called into question.
Why do you have mixed feelings? There isn't even a "think of the children" argument to pull at your heart strings.
Nobody wants to see kids getting sexually abused. This we can all agree on. But unless someone can explain to me how three large ISPs dropping their Usenet feeds is going to protect even one child from sexual abuse, this is nothing more than a publicity stunt.
There is no reason for you to have mixed feelings about this.
Man... where do this people come from? Linux is already out there! Go buy a box with it on it and youll never, ever, look back. OK, I'll do that if you can tell me how to run Quickbooks on this shiny, new Linux box.
P.S. If your answer passes the following test: m/gnucash/i then you fail it.
From the ARAG list of exclusions:
Legal services arising out of your profession, business interests, investment interests, occupation, employment, workers or unemployment compensation, relocation required by an employer, patents or copyrights. Hope you weren't sleeping well at night with that BitComet window open.
personally, I think SMART was developed by the drive companies to sell more drives. Frequently, admins (myself included) will replace a drive that they have a bad feeling about. What's the use in replacing a drive before it fails?
When SMART starts whining about a drive, I order a replacement. But I don't replace until the drive fails.
Seriously, +4 Informative? _INFORMATIVE_??? I could see +4 funny perhaps, but no way is that informative. Wait until you're married with kids for a while. Then, you'll understand why that was informative.
They are a pain in the rear to install, but once installed properly, your kid is not going to get that cabinet or drawer open before you figure out what's going on.
That's the whole idea, really--to slow them down. Just make sure you put the key someplace that the kid can't get to without constructing some serious access ramp.
You want the parental, "Just what do you think your doing?" to refer to constructing a ramp rather than you kid spraying her little brother with Raid because "he was bugging her".
You can't get a boarding pass without showing your physical photo ID (at least in the US, where TSA has jurisdiction). This is simply false. In the US, you can print out your boarding pass up to 24 hours before your flight, all from the comfort of your parents' basement.
Hope the rest of your comment was better than the first sentence, because I stopped reading once you proved yourself to be full of shit.
It doesn't solve any problem at all even a little bit, except for people expressing opinions the TSA doesn't like. It's not about expressing opinions the TSA doesn't like, it's about trying to demonstrate to the public that the TSA is in control.
Picture how this would play out in a security line: TSA: ID, please. Traveler: No. TSA: What do you mean, no? It's required. Traveler: Well, I refuse to show my ID. [Soccer mom behind traveler starts to get nervous] TSA: ?? Well... uhh... I'm going to have to consult a supervisor... I don't think this was in my 90 minute training video... [Soccer mom behind traveler starts writing her Congressman on her Blackberry. Clearly this is scary and clearly needs to be illegal.]
It following dialogue would reassure many more passengers: TSA: ID, please. Traveler: No. TSA: What do you mean, no? It's required. Traveler: Well, I refuse to show my ID. TSA: Sir, you have a choice. Either produce some government-approved identification, or step out of line. And don't get back into the line until you've changed your mind. NEXT!
She got some nasty messages, tried to talk to her mom about it, her mom blew her off because she didn't like the language Meghan had used in her chatting, she cried out to her mom that she was supposed to be on her side, THEN went up to her room and immediately killed herself. I have always been reluctant to criticize other people's parenting, and I think you should be too. You weren't in that household, and you don't know the dynamic.
Parents generally try to do the right thing for their kids. Sometimes the best medicine is for the kid to be alone and cry for a bit. Could the mother have really known that this time it was different?
Surely, she'll beat herself up over her decision until the day she dies. But I think it's unfair, as an outside observer, to criticize the mother for allowing her daughter a little catharsis.
That is, the majority of people teaching mathematics have degrees (if any) in unrelated subjects. The problem with your reasoning is that people who are inclined to obtain a degree in mathematics seem to think differently from those who are not inclined to obtain such a degree. When such people teach mathematics, they teach it the way they think. People who are wired to study mathematics learn well from them, while the rest of the world doesn't understand a goddamn thing they're saying.
I learned more calculus in my economics classes than I did in my calculus classes. Why? Well, because my calc classes were taught by eccentric mathematics PhD holders who stood up in front of the class writing Greek nonsense with their right hand and erasing it with their left hand (not an eraser, mind you). The only thing accomplished in those classes was the prof getting covered in chalk dust, and no student learning anything about calculus except for the 2 students who were math majors.
My economics classes were taught by ordinary human beings who are wired correctly, so through them, I was finally able to understand calculus. Anyone with a degree in mathematics has no business teaching basic math.
Slashdot Mirror
The person you're replying to probably has a different hypothesis. Suppose the situation were thus: you're not a victim, and you have information that might help the police. The smart thing to do is not help (because talking to the police is risky even if you're innocent), but if everyone does the smart thing, we all lose.
I'm having a difficult time imagining a situation where I might have some helpful information, but revealing it might lead to me being charged with the crime.
I guess in such an oddball case, I'd consult an attorney before proceeding. But it's not as though you need to lawyer-up every time a cop says, "Hi, how are you?".
The fact of the matter is, our jails are not stuffed to the gills with people that helped the police. So something in the system must be working as designed.
How do you know when you're a suspect?
Well, if the answer to the question, "Officer, am I free to go?" is something other than "yes", then you should seriously consider shutting the fuck up.
In your apartment building example, if it were me, I'd handle it thusly:
If I was not a victim, and I did not have any information that could help the police, I would just tell them who I was, where I live, and that I hadn't seen or heard anything out of the ordinary. If they still wanted to continue the conversation (doubtful they'd want to waste their time), I'd just say that "I have an appointment soon. Am I free to go?" If that doesn't end the conversation, then I invoke my right to counsel.
Once you know how to use portage it takes just a second to get v8.3.1 available for your system.
For generous enough definitions of the word "second". ;)
I forget the name of it, but there is a plugin for APT that helps gentoo users convert to Debian. All it does is spew out a bunch of random compilation messages for a while before installing anything.
A 13-year-old does need parental attention, even though she is hardwired to never admit to it.
The perl hole was:
1. trivial to exploit
2. yielded a root shell
3. wouldn't be super hard to exploit remotely if you think of all the perl CGI that was written back in 1996. Getting write access to a cgi-bin directory was not considered too challenging.
4. perl was ubiquitous back then. Installed on most any *nix machine.
The ruby hole:
1. has not yet been shown to execute arbitrary code
2. is definitely remotely exploitable
3. can only execute code as the owner of the ruby interpreter (probably 'nobody') so hopefully that user can't to anything very interesting
4. ruby doesn't have much market share right now. How many boxes have a ruby interpreter? How many hosts have RoR? This isn't a sleight against RoR at all, but you have to admit that it represents a small percentage of websites.
Look at the exploit code in the linked article. I mean, ary[0x7fffffff] = "A" ? C'mon. Who takes an array index from user input? I can't imagine that's a common coding technique.
I dunno. I think they're both serious. But I think the perl hole was seriouser. ;)
This reminds me of the notorious suidperl vulnerability from back in the day. In a nutshell, you could use the following code to achieve a root shell from an unprivileged account (apologies if I don't get it exactly right... I don't have an ancient system to verify on):
That was available for how many years? Anyhow, that's much more serious than this Ruby DoS attack.Now let me tell you something about how the business world works. ;)
But seriously, just keep an open mind. You'll be shocked to find out what a little distance can solve. Physical distance as well as emotional distance. In other words, you know what topics you can't discuss with your parents, and a conversation is a two-way street. You can always change the subject or excuse yourself or whatever it takes. But it's a little hard when you live with them...
You turned out remarkably well for having such eccentric parents. Looks like you're going to have to be the adult here.
Good luck!
Crunch the numbers and do what makes the most sense for you. Not what irritates your parents the most.
But this talk about people slipping into and out of your life--be careful with that. Many times people with overbearing parents are able to reforge that relationship in a healthy fashion after achieving independence. You may find that your parents respect your individuality, intelligence, and decision-making competence once they see you thriving on your own. It is true that some people you can never satisfy, but I think you'll find it to be worthwhile to give your parents another chance once you are on different terms.
Parent/child estrangement is tragic, and you should not take this decision so lightly as you have indicated. It should be only a last resort. (Indication you didn't raise your kids right: They decide they need to fix their broken life, you're not helping, and they want to get as far away from you as possible to prevent further damage) "Raising kids right" is something that sounds a lot easier than it is. "Broken lives." "Damage." I bet if you to take a step back and look past their smothering, you'll see they are doing this out of a misguided notion of love and protection. Do you truly believe that you are broken? Try not to forget about the truly deplorable conditions that some kids grow up in (alcoholic, abusive, malnourishing, imprisoned, impoverished, foster, etc. parents).
Summary: Get out on your own, and reforge that relationship sometime in the future.
Good luck!
How cool would it be if we could know people's intentions? It would certainly do away with all this security theater at the airports.
I suppose it would be a bit scary, too.
On the flip side, and you'll understand this when you have kids, is that letting them think they have gotten away with something from time to time is good for their development. Parents who don't recognize the need to foster the development of their kids' sense of independence are the same parents who you hear complaining about their 28-year-old "boomerang children" they've got living rent-free in their basements.
But that might hit a little close to home for some slashdot readers...
With this new perspective, it's amazing to me how many people, well into adulthood, still believe they "got away with" so much as kids. I know that I am guilty of this personally. In middle school, I couldn't believe how naive my father had been to hide a stack of Playboy and Penthouse magazines in a box in the basement that had no other contents. It took me until I had children of my own to realize that had my father truly intended to "protect" me from this pornography, he could have found a much better hiding place, such as the county landfill.
Take a look back at all of the devious things you did as a child that you believe you got away with. But this time try to look with an objective eye. It's funny, I never realized just how clever my parents were until I had kids of my own.
Dell laptops (Vostro, in particular) are well-known to use hardware that makes installing the OS yourself difficult or even impossible. I remember reading a long thread about trying to get retail XP to install on the Vostro 1400 ending in failure. This was with large numbers of experienced Windows admins trying to convince XP to install.
What you get for your "downgrade" fee is more than just an XP license--you're getting Dell to certify the software and hardware and make 'em work.
Incidentally, have you ever attempted to install a retail Windows OS on a whitebox machine? I've only built one machine that I had intended to put Windows on (dual-boot), and try as I might, I just could not get the damn thing to install. Debian installed cleanly with zero hiccups and that machine has been running Deb ever since.
My point being: if you think you're going to get around this "downgrade" fee by purchasing a Windows license on your own, you are on some seriously shaky ground.
Other than being totally irrelevant, great post.
Why do you have mixed feelings? There isn't even a "think of the children" argument to pull at your heart strings.
Nobody wants to see kids getting sexually abused. This we can all agree on. But unless someone can explain to me how three large ISPs dropping their Usenet feeds is going to protect even one child from sexual abuse, this is nothing more than a publicity stunt.
There is no reason for you to have mixed feelings about this.
P.S. If your answer passes the following test: m/gnucash/i then you fail it.
When SMART starts whining about a drive, I order a replacement. But I don't replace until the drive fails.
My kids were never able to defeat Tot Lok.
They are a pain in the rear to install, but once installed properly, your kid is not going to get that cabinet or drawer open before you figure out what's going on.
That's the whole idea, really--to slow them down. Just make sure you put the key someplace that the kid can't get to without constructing some serious access ramp.
You want the parental, "Just what do you think your doing?" to refer to constructing a ramp rather than you kid spraying her little brother with Raid because "he was bugging her".
Hope the rest of your comment was better than the first sentence, because I stopped reading once you proved yourself to be full of shit.
Picture how this would play out in a security line:
TSA: ID, please.
Traveler: No.
TSA: What do you mean, no? It's required.
Traveler: Well, I refuse to show my ID.
[Soccer mom behind traveler starts to get nervous]
TSA: ?? Well... uhh... I'm going to have to consult a supervisor... I don't think this was in my 90 minute training video...
[Soccer mom behind traveler starts writing her Congressman on her Blackberry. Clearly this is scary and clearly needs to be illegal.]
It following dialogue would reassure many more passengers:
TSA: ID, please.
Traveler: No.
TSA: What do you mean, no? It's required.
Traveler: Well, I refuse to show my ID.
TSA: Sir, you have a choice. Either produce some government-approved identification, or step out of line. And don't get back into the line until you've changed your mind. NEXT!
Parents generally try to do the right thing for their kids. Sometimes the best medicine is for the kid to be alone and cry for a bit. Could the mother have really known that this time it was different?
Surely, she'll beat herself up over her decision until the day she dies. But I think it's unfair, as an outside observer, to criticize the mother for allowing her daughter a little catharsis.
I learned more calculus in my economics classes than I did in my calculus classes. Why? Well, because my calc classes were taught by eccentric mathematics PhD holders who stood up in front of the class writing Greek nonsense with their right hand and erasing it with their left hand (not an eraser, mind you). The only thing accomplished in those classes was the prof getting covered in chalk dust, and no student learning anything about calculus except for the 2 students who were math majors.
My economics classes were taught by ordinary human beings who are wired correctly, so through them, I was finally able to understand calculus. Anyone with a degree in mathematics has no business teaching basic math.