I bet most projects would be happy to accept patches to their man pages, and files they store in /usr/doc/ if they improve quality or accuracy.

This is one of the few areas where just about anyone can contribute even if you don't code. Chances are you can still read it enough glean what the expected options are etc.

Google should start trolling their competitors. All they have to do is park a boat someplace and they can spur everyone into a flurry of pointless activity and worry.

No it does not and Israel isn't "carpet bombing" In fact they are going out their way to the point where it undermines their mission to avoid civilian casualties. Do think Hamas does not attempt to move rockets, launchers, and fighters when Israel names targets?

What Israel is doing and has always does is conduct one of the most carefully targeted offensives in history.

The fact is Hamas intentionally places legitimate targets in and around civilian populations and non-targets schools, hospitals, etc. The Israelis do their best; but at the end of they day a military kills people and destroy property; that is what they are for and that is always the outcome. You can try and target carefully but their will always be collateral damage in a conflict of any size or duration. The damage will be higher when one side (Hamas) refuses to adopt conventions that would help restrict the direct harm to those that who are direct actors themselves.

In the grand scheme of cosmic justice should more Israeli soldiers die because Hamas decided not to take steps to protect their own civilian population? Because the only real alternative would be for Israel to have infantry work their way thru Gaza building to building street to street with small arms; and I can assure you the casualties would be higher, although the mixture would change.

If one who abstaining should be considered every bit as responsible for the outcome as those who voted in favor of whatever proposition wins and is executed upon. Abdicating your responsibly to contribute and informed decision to a democratic process does not earn your pass.

Those who voted against Hamas leadership and those who were prevented from voting or were coerced might be innocent but that does not describe the majority of the electorate. Israel has to deal with the group as a whole, they don't get a choice in that. Maybe it "isn't fair" to some but its the reality we all have to live with.

I am not a fan of Israel but I sure wish people would stop apologizing for Palestine. You would have to be certifiably crazy to allow a group who has an organizing document that calls for your extermination and a history of taking violent action against you to establish permeate state on your border with a few flow of goods (weapons and the making of) allowed to flow in.

The Palestinian people DID ELECT these people their leaders so THEY ARE responsible for their actions. When the Palestinian people disown the PLO and Hamas, then and only then could you make an argument for treating differently.

Sure Israels positions might be considered hardline, and they might not be in rush to hand over the desirable real-estate to Palestinian groups but their are Arab-isrealies, who are not themselves Jews but enjoy "full citizenship" and no mainstream Jewish groups are out calling for the extermination of all Arabs, Muslims, etc. There is simply no intellectually honest argument to be made in favor of the current Palestinian leadership over Israel if you must take sides.

The truth is though the 'west' needs to get out of this shit, we need to stop being evolved if we ever want this to end and that includes providing aide to Palestine and money and military toys to Israel.

Actually it just proves how valuable people think he is. Look at the rest of our society. We allow all kinds of people who are of some particular talent: athletics, musicians, actors, politicians, certain academics, and others get away with things the rest of us would surely be fired over and quite possibly prosecuted and imprisoned.

I am not say its a good thing, but our society in general allows individuals who attain a certain celebrity status a degree of entitled behavior and allowances are made when they break the 'rules' the rest of us live by. The more actual talent and the less 'replaceable' they are the more outrageous we let them behave. Some of them over step and hilarity ensues and others remain decent people and don't take advantage of their position at all.

Linus however is no different in this regard. He does it because he CAN get away with it. The rest of us ARE WILLING to put up with it; that has been proven over and over again. He knows how far he can go and does not go farther.

I agree the major distributions have botched almost all of those. Can you site any MAJOR bugs in release ( ie even numbered minor version kernels without -rc etc on the end of them) that issues?

I can't recall any. Like any large complex software project Linux has had its share of bugs but I have been using it in various capacities for 15 years and I can't recall anything in a non-development release that made me go "Good God how did that get past QA".

Right the entire conflict is evil and it needs to end, but for it to end the West needs to quit meddling and and the various Palestinian groups need to accept reality.

Its not the Wests fault for creating Israel. Sure we did but all throughout history wars have been fought and lines on maps have been redrawing various peoples have been pushed out of one spot or another by other groups. There has to be some statue of limitations on these things. 70 years on I think we need to acknowledge we are no-long responsible for the security of Israel ( that needs to on them now ) and we don't owe the children of the displaced Palestinian peoples anything either. Which leaves the situation like this:

Israel faces and existential problem. They can't appease the Palestinians without abandonment of the fundamental character of their nation. Nobody can reasonably expect a people to do that.

Hamas has and does advocate and conduct violence against Israel, the can and do hide weapons among their civilian population they have and will use their tunnels or any relaxed restrictions on the embargo to transport weapons or materials from which weapons can be made into Gaza.

The Palestinians face an existential problem, They can't make peace with Israel without surrendering what they believe to be their homeland; nor can they accept the status quo as a settlement neither of the current Palestinian territories is economically viable on its own. They cannot feed the people they have with their own production they cannot produce enough of anything else of value to purchase food, their existence is dependent on charity. They could not do this with open boarders either.

Nobody can expect the Palestinians to lie down and accept that.

Because the threats they face on their boarders Israel can't accept much movement where lines on the map are concerned and remain defense able. Its a fundamental impasse.

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So every couple years we have these little dust-ups and thousands die and more end up suffering. Then some arrogant fools arrange another ceasefire thinking its humanitarian. Next various groups again in the name of humanitarianism provide food and energy to Palestine, which leads to another generation born into a community which cannot support them and life of no real opportunities or hope. Finally we repeat the bloodshed. Its stupid more people have died badly than if we just backed off and let Israel, the Palestinian groups, and the other local nations states just slug it out and finish things once and for all.

Frankly we should have recognized the coup that took place in Egypt and cut off the foreign aid and imposed an travel ban. If we had let Egypt collapse into a failed state (and it would without tourism and aide monies) it would give the Palestinian refuges some place to go or force Israel to fight a war that actually resolves the matter once and for necessitated by no longer having Egypt's assistance to keep arms out of Palestine. Maybe over a few decades a new stable system could emerge;

Rght now its just an endless cycle of violence and we are its enablers. I really believe the most humanitarian thing we could do is just resolve the get out of the conflict and stay out of the conflict no matter what.

Even with a tunneled VPN there is a lot of traffic shaping they could do that probably would not interfere with most online commerce and business users activities.

Web browsing is very busty. You simply allow full bandwidth when connections start. Then you count packets per second and packet sizes, which you can do encrypted or not. Unless deliberate steps to introduce noise are taken media streams are going to be characterized by relatively fixed size packets are fixed rates. Connections for things webpage loads or form posts and Outlook syncs probably will be in most cases to short lived for your analysis phase to complete and won't be affected at all.

Bigger file transfers (assuming you don't want to throttle them too) will in most cases show more variation in packets per second as network conditions change, because in most cases they running as fast as things will allow, wherever the bottle neck might be, unlike streams which are hopefully running at a negotiated rate that is fully sustainable.

Right because there is no way a little traffic analysis can't tell the difference between some typical GET and POST request sent on an SSL channel and video stream. /sarcasm off

It might be slightly harder to tell the difference between a video stream and a large file download but by no means impossible. You can do this much with (relatively) inexpensive COTS routing and fire-walling equipment now.

Nope just SSL or just tunneled ipsec for that matter won't cut it; you going to have to put some traffic analysis thwarting measures in there too, which means even more waste than the tunnel overhead. So ultimately VZ is making things worse for themselves in terms of network traffic, unless they are only going to allow busty stuff like webpage downloads.

Still even the typical slashdot'ers home setup is very much on the losing end of the arms race as things stand today. The only reason VPN success is VZ isn't really trying that hard.

Gotta join in on this here.

On the one hand it all evokes fond memories of CDE on the other hand CDE is open source now if what I wanted was CDE I could have it. I expect something better than this.

Don't forget about all those maned mars missions.

yes but they would get a warrant to search the filing cabinet for the named documents. They *might* discover other interesting documents incidental to the search in the cabinet and they would be allowed access to those. They would not be allowed to remove or copy the other documents. They also would not be allowed to drive to your parents place 5 hours away and search thur boxes of old files there from 10 years ago, unless they specified doing so on the warrant and it would only be allowed if there was reason to think related documents could be there.

E-mailboxes are not perfectly analogous to physical filing containers. People tend to have all of there electronic documents in once place. I think the basic principle of limited searches though means if you can't restrict where, because there isn't an atomic concept of place, than you must restrict what. So I still say minimally having to name a reasonable date range is not asking to much of LEOs.
 

Not all that hard really. I agree with you in that you probably can't go specifying search terms because all it would take is a few code words having been used and you really might miss what you are looking for. That said a lot of people now have a decade of correspondence in Gmail. I think "the entire mailbox of" is a little to broad for a warrant. Its not fair to just open up all of someones papers for their entire life for investigation.

I would expect in almost every situation there would be *some* criteria short of *all messages* that could be used. Like say all message between "X date and Z dates", when the crime took place on Y date. Bracket it by a year or so, or maybe longer if it was some sort of conspiracy or something at that point the prosecutors have to have some definable reasons and a magistrate has to agree the make sense. Maybe its all messages with an 822 from ${address}; or even mail server IP in ${geographic region}.

Prosecutors should have to demonstrate some knowledge of what they are looking for, just like with a physical search where they have to say: we are looking for a knife between 3" and 7" long, or financial documents related to account XXXX--XXXX-XXX.

And while we are on the subject:

Its true that some protests and the beginnings of the Arab spring stuff apparently began on Twatter and Facespace; I wonder how much of that was going to happen anyway, especially given that in at least 3 of the four major uprisings the secular movements that seemed so popular online certainly have not proven to be what the people ultimately choose to support:

Egypt - went theocracy and is now back to essentially an autocracy that more or less resembles the one they started out with.

Libya - If you're not an Obama apologist is a failed sate, run by gangs or would be tyrants.

Syria - Ramains to be seen if the rebels will even succeed by if they do will probably be Islamist

Tunisia - Well that one might have kinda worked.

  One is left to wonder if much like Slashdot here in the states, were lots of radical (not to be necessarily read with a negative connotation), ideas get expressed on line, but it seems to amount to a lot of political masturbation because it does not get translated into actions that generate any sort of results at the ballot box. In some respects taking a longer view of the pamphleteers of the late 17th and 18th centuries, and the marchers and organizers of the mid 20th century seem to have had much more influence that the 21st century Internet critics. Oh sure the can manage to get a SOPA or PIPPA shot down once in awhile, but can't get it turned into the sort of third rail the politicians will shy away from touching again for even a year.

So is it possible the Internet is actually harmful to these movements, is it keeping people sitting at home posting on Facespace behind their proxies instead of actually out in the street doing something disruptive? Sure the organizing power of these things is clear but real widely supported political movements always have managed to organize before.