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Comment Re:Fedora fork too (Score 1) 555

If you want to query the service status, use ps aux | grep sendmail

And if sendmail dies, well, I would want it to stay dead so I would notice and look into why it died, but if you really wanted auto-restart, you have a number of options:

- Put "while true; do if ps aux | grep -v grep | grep -q sendmail; then /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail start; done" somewhere.
- (The right way): put the command to start sendmail (not the startup script, sendmail itself) in inittab with the :respawn: option. You'll have to make sure to use the "foreground" option if you choose this route.

Comment Re:Fedora fork too (Score 1) 555

As sibling said, this was Slackware's script, so you're actually criticizing its implementation of the BSD rc.d system.

And they are valid criticisms -- unrelated processes called sendmail would also get killed -- but my response would be, "yes, but, well, I've never run into that." If you stop sendmail, I think you should expect that some email might be dropped. You could easily create a sendmail.pid file in the script if you wanted, but I think keeping the script simple has greater value than catching those corner cases.

Comment Re:Fedora fork too (Score 4, Informative) 555

All that proves is that Fedora's init scripts suck. I'll believe that.

Here's Slackware's rc.sendmail script:

#!/bin/sh
# Start/stop/restart sendmail.

# Start sendmail:
sendmail_start() {
    if [ -x /usr/sbin/sendmail ]; then
        echo "Starting sendmail MTA daemon: /usr/sbin/sendmail -L sm-mta -bd -q25m" /usr/sbin/sendmail -L sm-mta -bd -q25m
        echo "Starting sendmail MSP queue runner: /usr/sbin/sendmail -L sm-msp-queue -Ac -q25m" /usr/sbin/sendmail -L sm-msp-queue -Ac -q25m
    fi
}

# Stop sendmail:
sendmail_stop() {
    killall sendmail
}

# Restart sendmail:
sendmail_restart() {
    sendmail_stop
    sleep 1
    sendmail_start
}

case "$1" in
'start')
    sendmail_start ;;
'stop')
    sendmail_stop ;;
'restart')
    sendmail_restart ;;
*)
    echo "usage $0 start|stop|restart"
esac

Comment Re:That's all we need ... (Score 1) 555

it's the future whether I like it or not. And I don't

SystemD clearly has enough adoption that it won't be going away any time soon. Some people, for whatever reason, want an init system that works like that. But other people clearly don't like it. Many of those people are programmers and now want to fork Debian. Even if that fizzles, there's still Slackware and at least Funtoo which are not using SystemD. Funtoo in its FAQ is committed not to using SystemD. Slackware isn't committed, but I think mainly because Volkerding knows to "never say never". But Slackware got rid of GNOME with its annoying PAM dependency long, long ago, so GNOME won't be forcing anything on Slackware, and Slackware uses BSD-style init rather than SystemV, so it was already an init outlier before all of this started. The point is, people who don't like SystemD will coalesce around the distributions not using it, or set up their own, and do the work necessary to keep them not using it.

Just like with the shutdown of FreeCrypt, there are enough people around who think this is important that they will be able to coalesce and do something about it.

Comment Re:Why is the school involved? (Score 1) 323

Damnit Slashdot!

Corrected post is here.

The US does libel and slander pretty well. For instance, if you're slandering/libeling a public figure, the burden of proof the public figure bears is higher than if you're talking about some random dude. The libeled individual has to prove the statement is false. There are cases of abuse, such as where someone gets sued by a rich person just to harass. It's not perfect. But I think anti-SLAPP laws are a better fix for that than saying, "it's perfectly okay to spread vicious lies about anyone you want."

It's true that popular speech doesn't need protection. But it's one thing to say, "I think <insert race or gender or hair color here> people are a bunch of savages, and they should all be locked up!" It's another thing to say, "This particular <insert race or gender or hair color here> person is a pedophile, raped my wife, and tortures animals for fun!" One of these things is stupid, but rightly protected speech. The other is harassment of a particular individual. There's a difference.

Comment Re:Why is the school involved? (Score 1) 323

The US does libel and slander pretty well. For instance, if you're slandering/libeling a public figure, the burden of proof the public figure bears is higher than if you're talking about some random dude. The libeled individual has to prove the statement is false. There are cases of abuse, such as where someone gets sued by a rich person just to harass. It's not perfect. But I think anti-SLAPP laws are a better fix for that than saying, "it's perfectly okay to spread vicious lies about anyone you want."

It's true that popular speech doesn't need protection. But it's one thing to say, "I think people are a bunch of savages, and they should all be locked up!" It's another thing to say, "This particular person is a pedophile, raped my wife, and tortures animals for fun!" One of these things is stupid, but rightly protected speech. The other is harassment of a particular individual. There's a difference.

Comment Re:Why not? When you have kids.. (Score 1) 323

So, your system would have people able to say anything, and then you read someone's mind to figure out he didn't hire you, or didn't invite you to his party, or stopped being your friend because he thought you're a pedo, and then you sue all those people. Meaning you're making EVERYTHING a protected class for the purposes of hiring and killing freedom of association while you're at it. That sounds like a much more restrictive world to me than the current one, which just has, "don't spread nasty lies about people" as the prohibition.

Comment Re:Parallels exist in animals (Score 1) 87

Human nature is the same as all other nature.

I'll be more serious now: no, it's not. We fit the definition of animals, yes, but we're freaks of nature. We're smarter than all other animals we know of; our brains have more synapses than any other animal we know of; we have more complex societies than any other animal we know of; and, we've been able to harness more energy in directed ways than any other animals we know of (exhibited by electrical grids, cars, planes, and rockets that leave the fucking atmosphere and send objects into space). You wouldn't necessarily expect, say, a mouse or fish to have the same problems with emotional neglect that human children have if they aren't "shown love" but still have all their basic nutritional needs met. That's something that's going to fuck up humans much, much more than most other animals. It'll fuck up monkeys (someone did a morally reprehensible experiment, referred to elsewhere in this thread, that proved that). According to the GP, it'll fuck up dogs, too, which you might expect since they're relatively smart. But you can't go the other way. You can't say, "this level of social interaction is fine for my dog, so my kid'll be fine if I treat him like that, too". Because we're not like dogs. We're an extreme of nature. We're freaks.

Comment Re:Are you patenting software? (Score 4, Informative) 224

I'm not sure how one might think patents on methods of optimizing database queries would not qualify as software patents. As someone else said below, it's applied mathematics. Heck, the "relational" part of "relational database" comes from the theory of set relations. And if databases are your field, you know that. And if you'd donated the patents to the EFF, then you wouldn't be asking this question.

Trying to play devil's advocate the only counterargument I can come up with is, "the optimizations are useful because of the way this particular computer is architected." But that's silly; much of number theory is useful and studied because it's applicable to cryptography. Being useful in an engineering situation doesn't turn mathematics into engineering.

I don't believe in telling people to fuck off for asking an honest question. At the same time, I'm not personally inclined to help you with your problem, because you're asking with help engaging in an antisocial activity. The weird thing is, from your comment, it seems we're in agreement on that, but you don't see that what you're doing is what we both believe is wrong. Dude, those kinds of patents are the types of things most software developers talk about when they mean software patents. Amazon one-click and Microsoft's FAT patent are just talked about more because *EVERYONE* runs into those, whereas only compiler developers run into the asinine register allocation patents, and only database developers run into yours. But they're still bad, just bad in a narrower field. Look up the history of register allocation in GCC and LLVM if you want to see what patents can do to OSS. LLVM uses linear scan register allocation, which is faster than the standard graph coloring algorithm, but worse-performing. Guess which consideration is most important in 2014 when you can compile on 16 CPUs at once? GCC, as usual, does something totally fucked up because it's been around so long accumulating cruft, but its algorithm was originally designed around exactly the same patents LLVM had to design around.

Again: software patents have crippled open source compilers' register allocation algorithms from the dawn of GCC to the rise of LLVM. How disgusting is that? And the register allocation patents are what happens when we're aware of the patents and they're held by an OSS-friendly company (IBM).

If you're not going to stop patenting software, but you care about the ethical implications of your work, my minimal request to you would be to donate the patents somewhere like the EFF or FSF in your will. If you don't, your heirs might decide to sell your work to SCOracle and you'll fuck up every OSS database for a LONG. TIME. I'm sure you don't want that to be your legacy.

And btw, if you haven't, you should have your estate planning done anyway. Everyone with even a small amount of assets should. Shit happens, it's not as expensive as you might think, and a competent attorney will also prepare "collaterals" where you say, among other things, what you want to happen if you end up like Terri Schiavo. And if you're not aware of why you really need to make that absolutely clear in a totally legally binding way ... just look at the Wikipedia article for "Terri Schiavo".

Comment The guy's a hack (Score 1) 304

There are already decryption utilities that we use to decrypt all of Microsoft products, this will be one more. However, there are technologies that are already out that can make our job harder. These are file-shredding utilities, which overwrite data numerous times making it impossible to recover the data. However, we often get some of the data back because users get lazy in using the shredding utility and some shredding utilities are not the best quality and do a horrible job.

Disk encryption > file shredding, 100 times over. Yes, BitLocker shouldn't be trusted because of the NSA, but, even if the NSA did backdoor it, it would still be impenetrable to standard law enforcement. Handwaving this problem away is either bluster or ignorance. Either way, he's a hack.

Comment Re:Just tell me (Score 2) 463

This isn't the first ebola outbreak West Africa has had. It's not an especially "fast moving" disease, either. And "soldier on to what may be a post apocalyptic world" is a great way not to spread panic</sarcasm>. In the developed world, we can contain ebola. If it spreads past the infected Texas healthcare workers, that wouldn't be good, but the world's not ending.

Reading your post, I'm reminded of a Slashdot poster during the housing crisis who said he was betting with his investments on sustained, deep economic decline. I wonder how that worked out for him.

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