Any host-based intrusion detection system will have a hash of the executable, and will report when it changes. This is not some new cutting-edge security precaution, it's routine for many, many installations.

Seriously, he's a lawyer, in what particular does he think the rejection is wrong?

  The nearest thing to a substantive accusation is that the examiner is simply rejecting the application because he's lazy and that's easy. But it's my understanding that, in fact, patent examiners face a lot of pressure to approve applications, which is faster and easier than rejection, because it takes less effort to justify approval, and because approvals don't generally get appealed by the applicant. So while I am sure laziness afflicts patent examiners from time to time, it's not obvious that this is an example.

As for "doing his job", his job is not to approve applications, it's to examine them and make a determination. Rejection is one possible outcome, and is not by itself proof that the job wasn't done.

So, yeah, faceless bureaucrats are lazy and stupid, ha ha. Tell me again what problem you solved by making this assertion?

I've been using it for a long time, too, it's a perfectly respectable choice, and if I had to use it for ten more years, that would be OK.

However, particularly for back-up systems, I am ready for snapshots and block-level deduplication. I tried to deploy something like this with XFS over LVM a few years ago, but discovered that the write performance of LVM snapshots degrades rapidly when there are a lot of them, and it helps a lot if you can guess the size in advance, which is hard. There's also a hard limit of 255 snapshots, but in our environment, performance became unacceptable before we got anywhere near that.

You're right that XFS "ain't broke", but I for one am ready for more features.

What you say is likely true for almost all users, but for server management, the network transparency features that come with server-client separation are a huge asset. My own "use-case" is that I frequently need to install commercial scientific software on remote headless systems, e.g. the head node of a computational cluster in the server room. These installers invariably have GUIs, which I use by SSH-ing into the box with a forwarded X connection and just running it.

There are other ways to do this, of course, you can use some kind of remote desktop scheme to accomplish the same goal, but you don't actually need the whole desktop, you really only need to operate the remote GUI on your existing local desktop. X can do this, Wayland (and Windows and Quartz) sacrifice this in order to have better local display performance.

I also worry that it's part of a general trend towards more monolithic software, and towards doing less in order to do it better. Unix (and Linux) were initially attractive to me because of their mind-set of having a good set of powerful, conceptually simple tools that I could chain together to accomplish my goals. Now, it seems like I'm seeing more and more conceptually complex, monolithic applications that are very, very good at solving the most frequent use case, but are somewhere between useless and harmful if you try something the developer didn't anticipate, because it's a niche requirement or a corner case. I'm starting to miss systems that worked in the corner cases.

FTFS: "Three serial interfaces are available via the expansion headers." So it's a connector and a few minutes of soldering.

Robert Zubrin, the "case for Mars" guy who seems to have thought a lot about months-long space journeys, believes that low-gravity bone loss can be mitigated by exercise. His data point is Shannon Lucid, who spent 179 days on the Mir space station, rigorously followed the prescribed exercise regime, and came back in significantly better physical condition than other members of her crew, who weren't as disciplined with their exercise regimes.

Even if he's wrong, this is a problem to be solved, rather than a reason not to try.

Seriously? Emergency medical technician, aka paramedic. The guy in the ambulance who does the cardio-pulmonary resuscitation.

Obligatory link.

It turns out this hypothetical scenario actually was too extreme, it was set much too far in the future...

Furrfu!

> Government builds capital on swamp ...

It's not, actually.

I suppose the confusion arises because of G. Washington's investments in trying to drain the Great Dismal Swamp, but this on the Virginia-NC border, not the site of Washington DC.

> No one fucking cares, I know this because ... its going away and no one is saying loudly 'we can import your google reader feeds, move to us!!!!!'.

Actually, that's exactly what feedly was saying on their home page last night. They seem to have a good feature set, and run on all the platforms I care about, but their servers buckled under the load yesterday, so maybe not.

So for those wondering how this came up all of a sudden, my guess is that it has to do with the background for this "Table Titans" page, which was (apparently) riffing on a twitter exchange between Rob Donoghue and Logan Bonner.

I don't do the twitter myself, and I'm not affiliated with Table Titans or PVP.

However, unlike you ignorant whippersnappers, I do keep up with the geekly webcomics. You may vacate my lawn at your convenience.

As far as I can tell from the article, the basis of the complaint is that vendors object to the fact that searching on their brand name or model name brings up stuff that's not theirs, and they believe that having these search results show up confuses consumers about who made the products in the search result.

So, if this is the case, then it's like, I go into a physical store, and say to the salesman, "I would like to buy an Apple laptop computer," and the salesman produces a computer, and says "Here is an Inspiron laptop computer, it has many wonderful features." The salesman neglects to mention that the Inspiron is an alternative to, rather than an example of, an Apple computer. The accusation is that the salesman is trading on Apple's good name to sell non-Apple merchandise.

It's similar to when people complain about sponsored search results not being easily distinguished from non-sponsored results.

There are several solutions to your problem.

One is to disallow password authentication via SSH. Then you can have weak passwords locally on the machine, and use public key authentication for remote access.

A second one is to only allow remote access to a special account with a long password, and then, when logging in remotely, su to the main account with the short password. This is a bit brittle, but would work.

A third is to re-examine how you're using your system -- you probably don't actually need to supply passwords all the time. There are other distros besides Ubuntu, and, contrary to what you might have heard, logging in as root to do system maintenance is both reasonable and allowed.

Having negative temperatures be "higher" than positive ones actually makes a lot of thermodynamic sense. For one thing, it lets you preserve the notion that heat naturally flows from hotter things to colder things.

Formally speaking, it's more natural to think in terms of the inverse of temperature, 1/T, sometimes called beta. In the limit of very large positive beta, that's nearly absolute zero, and is the low-energy end of the spectrum. A beta of zero is full disorder. Negative beta corresponds to high energy systems that nevertheless have some order, so that the concept of temperature can be (formally) defined.

It confounds your (well, my) intuition, because "ordinary" systems generally obey the rule that the more energy they have, the greater the number of states the system can be in, but that's not an actual law of physics, it's just the usual case.