Comment Can't help plugging Atwood (Score 5, Interesting) 410
She denies it, but she's a Sci-Fi writer. I really liked the Oryx+Crake series -- it portrays a dystopian future that you can see developing before your eyes.
She denies it, but she's a Sci-Fi writer. I really liked the Oryx+Crake series -- it portrays a dystopian future that you can see developing before your eyes.
When I was first in school -- and by school I mean graduate school -- the school had a IBM running VM/CMS for general computing. Everyone had an account. In those days you could set up virtual disks to be shared and there was a mount command in exec 2 that let you mount a shared volume given the password. A lot of people would put the mount command and password in an executable script that would run at login. When a professor or admin gave you credentials to a volume, it might have a script in it with credentials for another volume.
I wrote an exec2 program to sift through the files in a volume looking for shared volume mount commands, then recursively mount and search any found volumes. It seemed to work pretty well.
At that point I showed the script to a random undergrad and forgot about it. He was later expelled and arrested.
The critical issue here is that we don't know exactly what "US Person" means. Canada is in the throes of the same issue, with the US demanding access to banking records for any US Persons, and the scope of this is troubling.
US Persons includes US citizens, of course. But it includes folks who might be entitled to citizenship through birth or parentage, whether or not they are actual citizens. It would include anyone who has ever resided in the US. And the definition can be manipulated to mean whatever the US decides it to mean, down the road. It could eventually mean anyone who has visited the US or anyone who has a dollar-denominated bank account or basically anyone who they are interested in.
There is no burden of proof on the IRS to show that they are entitled to specific records. They can ask for anyone's records and claim "US Person" interest. Do you suppose they will not simply vacuum up everything?
And if there is any avenue for information to come to the US government, you know that the NSA will have it. And the DEA and all the rest.
Not sure about all these crazy newfangled choices. I'm still running Yggdrasil on my 386SX.
"We introduced our second-generation Roundup Ready soybean technology in 2009"
So all the seeds in normal circulation now are "Genuity RoundUp Ready 2". Unless there are stocks of viable 2008 seeds around, there may not be so easy to get original patent-expired breeding stock. Whatever the new trait in "genuity" is, Monsanto just has to prove that it is in your glyphosate-resistant crop to come after you. And it most likely will be, because of cross-pollination contamination from fields with the new stuff in them.
The ruling is here:
http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/12pdf/11-796_c07d.pdf
It's not too long and is interesting. Read it before complaining too much.
I would like to see improved Java support. What we have now is all either hacks based on running the Linux JVM as a compatible ABI, or you have to build a JVM from source due to licensing. I would like to see a commercial JVM run natively. Ideally IBM's.
That's not something FreeBSD can do though, I don't expect.
Does it count if I send SMS status reports from systems that I set up and maintain? I mean, technically I think I'm texting myself. Sort of.
I repel most liquids too, although beer and coffee keep slipping though my formidable defences.
FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis