Oops I missed part of the quote.

At the heart of this struggle is the political failure of the various Arab regimes that emerged after the defeat of the Ottoman Empire and the end of European colonialism. Those regimesâ"whether kingdoms, parliamentary democracies, or single-party socialist statesâ"were all roughly designed after western models, with elements of western law. But all quickly devolved into despotic states, corrupt and generally incompetent in meeting the basic needs of their citizens. Not coincidentally, leaders of some of those statesâ"notably, Egypt, Syria, and Iraqâ"for a time paid lip service, and perhaps something more, to a largely secular vision of pan-Arab political unity. A humiliating defeat at the hands of the Israelis in 1967 largely dashed that dream.

Thanks for the link, by the way. It's a very good article. Worth bookmarking and passing around.

Did you even bother to read the link you posted? Here's a good quote from it:

Bewildering as all this has been, Americans might have found it easier to negotiate if they had paid as much attention to the Arab side of the terrorists' identity as they did to the Muslim side. The friction between Lewis and Said loses some of its heat, for example, when 9/11, bin Laden, and al Qaeda are seen as key elements of a struggle that is taking place primarily within the Arab core of the Middle East.

The ignorance of we in the west does us few favors. We often confuse culture and religion in the Muslim world. And many of us are unaware that Arab is not equivalent to Muslim. The vast majority of the world's Muslims are not Arab, and in fact not even middle-eastern--they are Asian! The Arab and nearby world represents a disproportionate amount of Islamist terrorism. In effect, we are seeing the results of a thousand years of culture clashing with western meddling to create some truly desperate folk. It surely wouldn't hurt to at least understand the dynamics of the situation before blindly stabbing. Odds are the criminals who murdered these people in France are probably immigrants from north African, countries (Arab mainly), who are not only escaping brutal, corrupt regimes (we fixed things so well in Libya), but are also un-integrated, disenfranchised in modern European society which has little understanding of their values. So they are exceedingly vulnerable to ideologies that purport to empower them, even if they are wrong and criminal.

Islamist terrorists succeed in getting their recruits to dehumanize the west. Let's not do the same in our own ideology towards the Muslim world.

Yes really. What makes you think these people celebrating are the majority? Do you know how many muslims there are and how many of them are ordinary, peaceful folk? We're talking 1.6 Billion people that identify as Muslim. If 1.6 Billion muslims hated Americans as you seem to think, I think we probably would have long ago fought World War III.

And how is claiming all Muslims are terrorists any better than the many people that dislike America (we have great cause to be disliked, let's be honest) celebrating 9/11? If the world succeeded in destroying all 1.6 billion Muslim terrorists, then which group will become the new terrorists?

Certainly all acts of violence are to be condemned, whether it is by an Islamist terrorist, a Christian terrorist, an atheist terrorist, or war and conflict in general.

And in fact the criminals who murdered these 12 people are not followers of Islam though they claim to do it in the name of Islam. And the vast majority of those who are Muslim in the world do not condone nor celebrate these kind of murders done in the name of Islam, and really do want, as most of us do, peace. To paint them all with the same brush is to be as bigoted as those who committed this heinous act in the first place, especially when I read of westerners who call for the annihilation of Muslims, as I've read in other places. Surely that is no better than religious extremism.

I have spent some significant time in the middle east, and I can assure you that in general the peoples of that area (of all cultural identities, Turkish, Arab, Persian, and others) are good folks who are welcoming and hospitable, just as I'm sure the majority of westerners are. We have our own extremist and criminals in the west as well, of different kinds, be they non-religious or religious.

In actual fact, the root causes of many forms of terrorism are not very different from common gang problems in the United States. Disenfranchisement, poverty, political corruption, military occupation all contribute to the problem, though that cannot excuse personal responsibility.

This tragic event seems to fit the definition of "terrorism" but I fear the word has still lost all meaning. A man who shot and killed 8 people in Calgary recently is called a "mass murderer." Perhaps this is not terrorism because his goal was to terrorize and kill a single family, not a city or nation? If a killing can be linked to some religious idea is it terrorism? The "troubles" in northern Ireland in the 80s and 90s, was that terrorism? What about the PKK fight against Turkey, or the intifada in Palestine (which is clearly not religious in nature)? What about the massacre in Norway in 2011? Certainly that was terrorism, but definitely not religious at all?

I sincerely hope that these criminals are captured quickly and brought to justice. I also hope that innocent folks who do follow Isam, and are in fact peaceful, will not face reprisals or violence against them. And my heart goes out to the families who lost their loved ones in today's senseless attack.

Just a note that many games on archive.org cannot be downloaded. They can be played online only, through the uncredited javascript dosbox implementation. Not sure how that affects the legal status of these games.

ASN.1 is certainly not a "programming" language. It is a type of domain-specific language, I suppose, similar to how a web programmer has to know HTML and CSS, while writing programs in some other language. I guess in our modern world where XML is used to bludgeon every problem to death, I can see why some people might call ASN.1 with a programming language, though like XML, ASN.1 is not turing complete. ASN.1 is pretty cool, though. It is a binary, self-describing data encoding scheme, and forms the basis of a number of core protocols we use all the time, including LDAP (which uses a form of ASN.1 called BER). ASN.1 has been around for far longer than XML, and if you're working with network protocols at the software level, is worth knowing.

I once wrote an LDAP proxy server that spoke LDAP wire protocol natively, and I had to implement ASN.1 encoding and decoding. My code at the time was written in C using the wonderful glib library (which minus gobject should be made part of the standard c library someday). It has since been rewritten in Python using Twisted which nicely abstractly all the ASN.1 stuff away in the nice Twisted LDAP adapter classes.

This is why I like Python. Python allows object-oriented programming styles or procedural, or a mix. Python has a lot of warts, but it's really refreshing to me to use. Every time I look at Java, I'm turned off by the forcing of class-based object-oriented programming for everything, even when the program is really just procedural with a static main. Perhaps this tends to make programmers try to shoehorn OOP when it's not the best fit.

If anyone else hadn't heard about using a CA with ssh, as I hadn't, they might find this short tutorial interesting:

https://www.digitalocean.com/c...

Wish this was available back in my uni days when I managed many dozens of Linux workstations. Managing keys was always a pain.

This is the first I've heard of using a Certificate Authority in an SSH context. So I had to look this up. Appears that recent versions of OpenSSH (5.4) have added support for signing ssh keys. Interesting. I doubt many enterprises have deployed OpenSSH new enough to support this sort of thing. RHEL 6 certainly doesn't. RHEL7 should. Seems like a nice security addition. Instead of checking fingerprints (which no one ever does), we can check the signing of the cert to make sure we recognize that. I can see how this could dramatically simplify things and make it easier to detect man in the middle.

I don't blame the copyright holder; I think it's too bad even for MS3K. That said, you can buy it on DVD. Though I think your money is better spent on Plan 9 from Outer Space.

It's not just the elected politicians, though. There's an entire bureaucratic machine that is completely unelected and barely accountable that also is contributing to this mess. Heads of departments can influence the direction a department takes but often departments pull the newly appointed head in certain directions, often backed up with top-secret evidence to sway them. With no outside checks and balances, things get out of order very quickly. Also there also are attitudes in the civil service that must change. Many of the individuals that work for bureaucracy, and also many Americans in general (or citizens of whatever country you are in) have a skewed idea of what patriotism means that blinds them to the consequences of their actions.

No there's a third remedy. Negotiate with the copyright holder for more suitable terms of license. So to summarize, there are three remedies available:
1. Cease distributing the offending code (replace it, or withdraw the software from distribution entirely)
2. Re-license the derivative work under compatible terms (essentially release the entire work as GPLv2)
3. Buy a suitable license for the copyrighted code under terms compatible with the needs of the derivative work.

Note that #3 is impossible for some projects, as all copyright holders must agree. For some large projects this is very difficult, especially when some contributors can no longer be found. The Linux Kernel is one example.

For one-man shows, this is why I always recommend the GPL for released code. This allows you the option to sell commercial licenses should your code prove popular. And you still have the option to add additional open source licenses as others request. Releasing code under a permissive license, such as the BSD or even MIT, shuts the door on some of these options. You can always relicense your own code, but you can't recall code you've previously released under another license.

Please provide a citation to support your somewhat extraordinary claim. Which CDC study was this and where were the results published? Who silenced whom?

As far as your desire for rational debate, how is this helped by referring to conspiracy and innuendo?

Gee, if you need to see porn that badly, the full Lena image is doubtless a click away.

As for why the iconic image is the way it is, it has nothing to do with indecency. They could only wrap the top third of the image around their imaging drum to end up with a 512x512 image, and that's the way it's stayed ever since.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Noticed on the hovercraft picture that the webp version had a slightly different hue to the water than the original image had. bpg seemed to have the correct, original hue. Except this color issue (not sure where the color problem comes from), WebP seems to be about the same as bpg.