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Comment Re:Maybe because the movies were not that good? (Score 2) 360

With the Prequels, Lucas did everything

This cannot be overstated enough. Go watch the 'making of' featurettes for Phantom Menace. You'll see Lucas saying things like "I liked Liam's forth take, but I liked Ewan's thirteenth take." Seeing as how they're greenscreened, he'd simply take the left half of take four, the right half of take thirteen, paste them together, and put in the background.

Which means you have both actors looking at, responding to, and acting against a person who wasn't there.

And that's when there's actually two humans interacting! Now have them acting against a character who is represented by a stick with masking tape at that character's eye level.

Comment Re:"principles our nation was founded on" (Score 1) 1168

You won't find those exact words; however, you will find this:

but no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.

If there was a state religion, or if religion were not required to be separate from the state, there would, indeed, be religious tests applicable.

Of course, the Constitution also still contains provisions on how to count slaves for purposes of allocating Congress.

Comment Tom Clancy strikes again (Score 1) 341

Tom Clancy published 'The Sum of All Fears' in 1991. In the afterword, he mentions how it was frighteningly easy to piece together, from public domain data, how to build a multistage thermonuclear bomb. How he was couriered design specs for fabrication devices for the asking. How he felt the need to obfuscate some details, even though he knew there was no point, just to assuage his conscience.

As he points out, it's physics, and it's engineering.

Comment Re:You want security? Start with the OS. (Score 1) 237

Today, the computer utility concept has returned [13], but todayâ(TM)s operating systems are not even up to the level of security that Multics offered in the early 1970s, let alone the level needed for a modern computer utility. There has been work on security for Computational Grids

Because the Multics security enhancements, including mandatory access controls, were shipped to ALL customers, this meant that the designers of applications had to make sure that their applications worked properly with those controls. By contrast, many application developers for other systems with optional security enhancements donâ(TM)t even know that the security enhancement options exist,

Of course vulnerabilities remain. But when you're deliberately aiming for a secure *system*, they're a lot less impactful. Kinda like how turning ASLR on simply nullifies entire classes of vulnerabilities. MULTICS, according to your paper, didn't have problems with buffer overflows. Thirty years ago, this was a solved problem. Why is it an ongoing problem now?

One of the most common types of security penetrations today is the buffer overflow [6]. However, when you look at the published history of Multics security problems [20, 28-30], you find essentially no buffer overflows. Multics generally did not suffer from buffer overflows, both because of the choice of implementation language and because of the use of several hardware features. These hardware and software features did not make buffer overflows impossible,

And so on and so forth.

Comment Re:You want security? Start with the OS. (Score 1) 237

Why is it so hard to write secure software?

Really, it isn't. The problem is that 'secure software' is exactly one piece of the puzzle that is 'a secure system.'

Securing your software, but not your OS, your hardware, your physicals, and your users, is kinda like having a highquality steel security door, unpickable deadlock, and so on, on your house, right beside a bog-standard window.

Remember, UNIX started out as 'MULTICS with all of the annoying security stuff stripped out.' Literally a castrated version of MULTICS.

Comment Re:this is why i read slashdot (Score 1) 253

Once in a while they throw in an argument about programming languages, chumming the waters.

That would be the bit about Windows. Completely irrelevant to the task at hand.

That all said, it's really fucking easy to put a server outside; people do it all the time. Just get an outdoor enclosure with a heater, a fan, and a thermostat. You can even get them rackmount. It's going outside, so solar load won't be an issue, so it's a stupidly easy thing to do. If this thing is going to do nothing but fileserve, it doesn't even have to be much of a computer.

Yes, he'd be better served by getting a Synology diskstation or something similar, installing the Plex package, and being done with it, but whatevs.

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FORTRAN is not a flower but a weed -- it is hardy, occasionally blooms, and grows in every computer. -- A.J. Perlis

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