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Comment Dryness (Score 1) 550

I investigated having this surgery a few years ago, in my late forties, with a thorough check at the Kellogg eye center at the University of Michigan. Their conclusion was that my eyes are too dry to be good candidates for this operation. It would cause irritation and even more dryness, and the side effects of halos would be worse with my eyes. Sadder and wiser, I skipped the procedure. I used to wear contact lenses but gave that up after a while for the same reasons. My latest glasses are very lightweight and not much of a bother to wear.

Comment great dogs (Score 2) 415

Impressive how these dogs can detect "storage with child porn", as opposed to storage with business data. It would be interesting to try some stenography tests, to see if the dogs can sniff through that as well. Maybe the stored data has some karmatic "bits of intent" floating around that the dogs can detect, just like they can implicitly growl at burglars but not ordinary visitors.

Comment Group Grope (Score 1) 306

Lot's of suggestions here for singleton work, but maybe you should get into something new by learning in a team. This could be "extreme programming" if you're already working in a paid corporate job, or by taking a real course someplace where you can interact with similar mindsets. (The course itself may be less useful than the peer interaction, so still worth the cost.) And sometimes software conferences have workshops or "interaction sessions". Community colleges are another possibility for special topics.

Comment Re:sudo is broken by design (Score 1) 83

Not buying these exaggerations. Most security vulnerabilities are in the applications themselves, eg buffer overflows, or on the client side. Let's see some evidence where weakness in concern-separation from VMware instances or sudo glitches is a major contributor to malware mishaps these days. I suppose the main vulnerability is a bit less control against insider malfeasance, and those are mostly due to configuration errors or corrupt admins.

There are architectural reasons to separate, and economic & practical reasons to consolidate - or not. I'd say you're off the curve of reasonable expectations if you're asking for mainframe-style "trusted" isolation on a setup of only a few (or just one) PC-grade servers in which you have all applications and services running together along with a variety of login access from different categories of users who may be potential attackers. Not that there's anything wrong with the BSD's etc, but in the scenarios you imply, you might be placing your support resources in areas of lower risk priority. Or maybe you yourself are the single supporter?

I say "PC-grade" because your scenario sounds economically uninteresting -- important enough to protect as you want (with excessive apps & users), but not important enough that there's budget to do hardware separation. Just because you're broke doesn't mean that Unix is broken. I agree that BSD Capsicums (etc) may be a good fit for these outlier use-cases, or special situations, but mostly if your establishment is willing to make a heavy technology investment in going that route.

Comment Re:sudo is broken by design (Score 1, Insightful) 83

I used to hear this a lot from VMS guys besmirching Unix, though such guys are harder to find these days.

There's more to life than an abstract security model. Virtual machines are cheap these days, don't let untrusted users (or processes) onto your important server in the first place. If you insist on OS timesharing and full security, well, you're fooling yourself IMHO. Of course VMS could do it, but try to find one now. Not cost effective for the real purpose of getting stuff done, ie, running applications.

Comment Re:Rich, white hypocrites? Say it aint so!!! (Score 1) 317

Offshore is people too. They also work hard to take care and make use of it, what's so bad about that? Or is it that only American people are entitled to such benefits?

Maybe the IRS should make it less onerous to re-pat the cash if they want it badly enough, instead of the hunting mentality as is perceived. Eg, anonymous fixed rate conversions independent of any other factors such as owner's income.

Comment Re: I always thought... (Score 1) 118

where the gravitational pull is so strong that nothing can escape.

I always wondered about this. Isn't it just a basic calculation showing the point where escape velocity exceeds the speed of light? Meaning that ballistically nothing can escape on it's own, but if you had a "space elevator" (with super-strong cables not defined here) you could raise and lower things into a black hole (or planet Earth) at whatever speed you wanted. So why not lower in a camera and take a look? And if the super-strong cable also does Ethernet, you wouldn't even have to raise it back, unless gravitational escape velocity also applies to electricity.

Physics being what it is, the rebuttal could something like proof that such a super-strong cable couldn't exist, even if the thought-experiment is valid. To keep it from getting infinitely crushed, maybe you have to build it out of some sort of antidote physical-contradiction like magnetic monopoles

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I've noticed several design suggestions in your code.

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