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Comment Re:Just a note (Score 1) 164

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized" Frankly, warrantless wiretapping IS illegal, per the US Constitution.

The per the US Constitution part is debatable, nothing you quoted makes it so.

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

I agree with Justice Black, that the Fourth Amendment was not intended to protect your privacy. It was intended to prevent the government from physically intruding on your life. It would have been worded to include eavesdropping if it was meant to be. IMO, if you want privacy protections you need specific laws or new amendments.
If you read the Fourth as some kind of generic privacy protection then how can police interview your neighbors about what they saw or heard happen in your house? It does't make sense. Evidence exclusion rules make more sense for general privacy protection. Laws against gaining knowledge in itself are moronic, in my opinion.

I think most people here would agree the "reasonable expectation" test is fishy.
If you close a phone booth door WARRANT, but open NO WARRANT. Extrapolating from THAT logic lets us say... well you let Google not only index your email but thoroughly analyze them, AND you don't encrypt... soo.....

The Supreme Court did us a favor, but it wasn't the right thing to do. This isn't the privacy protection you want.

Comment Re:Why, New Zealand, WHY? (Score 1) 63

I've been to NZ.. it's a wonderful place. Beautiful, raw, remarkable in all of its unique features. It's also pretty fucking empty with more sheep than people. There isn't a threat within 5,000 miles unless Australia turns Taliban. The worst thing they need to look out for is Chinese fishing poachers emptying their seas.

In all seriousness, please, kiwis, tell me why you have a //spy agency//?! Enjoy the wonderful land you live in and leave the stupids to the rest of the world.

... because they're on an island and have to trade with other countries? Non-military intelligence isn't around just to foil movie-like terrrrist plots, but nobody makes movies about the boring stuff.

Comment Re:Too bad it sucked (Score 2) 52

Mod parent up. This is the reason I've stopped playing games almost entirely -- I am sick of being nickel-and-dimed to death.

This sounds like going to a cheap theater and complaining the experience sucks and concession stand prices are high.

One option is to go to a theater that does't suck, and pass on the concession stand.

Neither of these will be cheap AND good. Shocker.

Comment Re:Wish other OSs did this... (Score 1) 175

Anything's an improvement over:
"My computer froze."
"What happened?"
"It put some message on the screen."
"What did it say?"
"Something about an error."
"What error?"
"I dunno. It had some numbers and letters and stuff."

"Show me!"
"I already rebooted it."

Personally I would rather have a more sophisticated crash dump system, like other OSs, because whatever is going to fit in a QR code isn't going to help much unless you're looking up known issues in an enterprise Linux vendor's bug database. That's assuming they can cram a stack trace into QR codes, AAAAND you have a problem that leaves a predictable stack trace.

I don't remember the last time I had a Solaris system crash that didn't leave a dump (try not to giggle). It would have be be way back pre-ZFS, on a janky server without a dump partition. I'm also reading that Windows saves memory dumps to the page file going back to XP.

You go into the average Linux environment and even if it's not a "paid support is for wusses" camp, you are _EXTREMELY_ unlikely to have anything of value to send to support. Maybe your hawt X86 firmware will have logged an issue! ROFL.

Reboot and hope for the best :\

Comment Re:Like photo printers (Score 1) 400

Remember how photo printers put photo shops out of business?

Well, yes. I haven't seen any photo shops lately. "1 Hour Photo" is dead. Kinkos has photo printers, and so do the local CVS and Walgreens, but they're not used much. Nobody has an in-store film processor any more. Palo Alto still has Keeble and Shugat, a high end photo equipment store with pro darkroom services. Redwood City has some wedding-photographer types and some commercial printers. That's about it.

It wasn't the photo printers, it was the digital cameras, it was the keeping them on a computer instead, mailing a CD, emailing, and texting them that did these places in.

Lack of demand... same reason people aren't buying printers so much anymore.
Why own a printer and buy ink when you can just bring your sd card to a Walmart and have them print for you?

Even after people stop wanting nice shoes, Walmart is going to have a nicer, more efficient shoe printer than you will, unless you are a shoe retailer yourself.

Comment Re:Time for a code review? (Score 1) 44

In 2011, the NSA released 200,000 lines of code to the Apache Foundation.

it may be time for people to start looking for the backdoors that the NSA may have put into Apache.

When a /. post conflating Apache Foundation and Apache HTTP Server gets moderated up highly "Insightful", a hacker dies.

Nobody has ever thought of scouring httpd, the "The Number One HTTP Server On The Internet", the most common application you'll find exposed directly to the Internet, for back doors or security vulnerabilities. No, nobody never thought of that, thanks for your insightful comment.

Comment Re:On Debian that's allready done. (Score 1) 223

If you have daemons that keep falling over and needing restart, you're already at the hack stage.

What do you mean IF, it just happens from time to time for a variety of reasons. This is an incredibly basic problem in multiprocess systems.
It's like saying IF your computer crashes and needs to be restarted... in a datacenter, it's a matter of WHEN.

In both cases, absent an expected, non-rectified reason for them to crash, the immediate action for a human operator is... try restarting it.

If the dependancies are programmatically declared (a Good Thing in itself), we can automate this. It's not a hack, because machines are NEVER perfect. The "recoverable" error rate adds up when you tie bunches of them together. So does the "non-recoverable" rate... so why not do what we can to address it? This is why we put things like Xeons and ECC memory in data centers, it's the only way to scale out the number of machines, and ultimately processes.

Comment Re:Already Possible (Score 1) 195

Newer versions of Linux can already do this. Using the integrity measurement architecture, module signing, and Secure Boot it's possible to have a system where almost any change is detected. I'm currently trying to get it all working on my machine right now, but it's slow going. Here's hoping that distros start shipping with this set up by default. http://lwn.net/Articles/488906...

A shorter term security measure that more users/Distributions should take is making the root partition read only. I know Android already does this, but it really does help. Something that I would really like to see is an easy to use per application firewall. Cgroups mean that I don't even have to worry about it just spawning a child process. Yes, I want to play this game in wine. No, I don't want it to access the internet. No, wine refuses to run it as a different user, much less one with lower privileges.

Take it from a former Solaris admin, difficult to maintain over-engineering is not the answer. It will fail, and users will hate you.

Question of the day: Why are single user smartphone OSs better at segregating processes than server OSs in the first place? Even while using basic UNIX features to do it?

These classic UNIX systems kind of need to roll over and fall into their graves already. I mean look at what you get with VMWare ESX, then look at iOS/Android, then look at say.. a RHEL-type classic UNIX server.

Where is a modern datacenter OS with the flexibility, availability, resource accounting, process separation of ESX, and the developer friendly frameworks and "It's The Apps Stupid" focus like iOS or Android?

Well, it's not with Linux...

Comment Re:Stunning. (Score 2) 227

There's zero reason to believe the NSA's version of this and every reason to believe Snowden's

Why?

Because, so far, every single thing that Snowden has said has turned out to be true when cross-checked. And, so far, every NSA official spokesperson has been caught repeatedly lying.

Once you start using absolutes, we're past the point where every single thing you want to believe is true, and every single thing you don't is a lie.

Consider that.

Comment Re:Wow... (Score 0) 227

Knock me over with a feather, spooks. You fucking hired people to build what is probably the largest collection of signals intelligence scraping systems on the planet, targeted at a wide variety of differently structured systems. Why would you even consider, except as a last resort, the notion that you are dealing with a bunch of noobs?

Someone made a comment that the collection was automated and you read all THIS from it? To the people in the position to know the volume of data taken, the fact it was automated is obvious.

Do you think it isn't?

Do you feel good attacking that straw man?

Comment The title is wrong (Score 1, Informative) 474

The quote is

"Every company that made computers when we started the Mac, they're all gone, we're the only one left. We're still doing it, and growing faster than the rest of the PC industry because of that willingness to reinvent ourselves over and over." said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of worldwide marketing

As far as making personal computers before Apple and still doing it, I think it's a stretch to count HP because of a calculator, and I'm not even counting HP's attempt to get out of the PC market recently. The HP-150 that came out after they started working on the Mac... is that even in the same ballgame as the 1984 Mac, I don't think so.

Apple started on the Mac in 1980 from what I can tell.

The nitpicking is really skewing his point - HP is ALSO still around because they've had to reinvent themselves over and over.

Comment Re:Why is this a surprise? (Score 1) 804

The Mac tax has always been about the actual parts they use and that there are cheaper alternatives. For this comparison, they try to match the parts exactly. That of course is going to cost more because you are paying 3rd party markup prices while Apple is being direct from the manufacturer. The article even admits that you can buy things like a different video card that is equivalent for half the price. The question isn't if you can make the exact same system (or as close as possible) for cheaper but whether you can make an equivalent system for cheaper, and the answer to that is almost always yes.

So, you could build a battle tank or an F1 car with cheaper alternative parts, like.. the engine and wheels off my old Mustang. No matter how much hand waving you do, the scrap metal I bolt on the side is not the same as reactive armor.

If you need the uptime assurance that Xeon, ECC, FireGL whatever provide, then using desktop grade components is not the same thing, and you aren't fooling anybody actually in the market for those things.

Comment Re:Hard to believe (Score 1) 804

Yeah, quite. The base Mac Pro actually turns out to be fairly reasonably priced for the combination of components inside, but - and this is important - there is essentially no reason to get that combination of components unless you have no other choice because you're buying a Mac. For instance, they're paying out quite a bit of extra money in order to fit everything into a smaller case, even though that'd actually be a downside for many customers. Also, most of the professional applications out there that use GPU acceleration can only make use of a single GPU, so the second $3400 GPU will be sitting completely idle for most Mac Pro buyers. What's more, as the article mentions many apps run better on NVidia GPUs anyway. Also, how many of the GPU-accelerated apps can also make full use of a 12-core CPU?

Whoa, I thought you were going to say something about the Xeon and ECC memory. What exactly is highly unusual about the video card and number of cores?

This thing is built with server grade equipment, so my wild guess is that means they intended it to have very long uptime, and again, what's highly unusual about that in a high end workstation?

Look, we don't all need to drive tanks to work, but some do. The rest of us don't need to play the "I could build a tank for less, but without the turbine engine, armor, or tracks" game. Well, you can do that, but they are just going to be laughed at by the people that drive tanks, and what else matters...

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