All I want for Christmas

Best knock knock joke ever:
KNOCK KNOCK
    Who's there?
9/11
    9/11 who?
YOU SAID YOU'D NEVER FORGET!!

The primary function of society is the sharing or mediation of risk and reward. Thoughts?

Warning! Do not eat these. They are not candy. Although I suppose if you've been hankering for some gummi fish that taste like actual fish you may be in for a treat. My boss gave me some just now. "Want some gummi fish?" he asked, and me being a sucker for sweet-sour gummi things in general, I popped one in my mouth as he continued, "They're full of vitamins and Omega-3..." Right. Fish oil. These things taste like sugar and citrus coated rancid fish. Just nasty. I'm still trying to get the flavor out of my mouth.

Consider the simplified case of three property owners, A, B, and C. Here's what their property looks like:
AAA
ABC
CCC
Now, A and C make an agreement not to buy any of Bs goods or sell anything to B. B doesn't own enough land to support him and all his family living there. He doesn't have enough land for an airport, or a helicopter. A and C won't let him on their property, and they won't let anyone else deliver anything to him over their property either. B and his family starve to death, then A and C split his land between themselves.

Please, explain how this scenario or more complex variants of it would not be commonplace in a true libertarian system. "Force" is more complex than libertarian philosophy likes to admit.

From this post, just wanted to save it because I think it distills much of the objection I have towards libertarianism into a succinct argument, and if anyone can refute the premise, it would go a long way towards convincing me that libertarianism isn't morally bankrupt.

Also this, from the same thread:

The real ideological difference lies in what qualifies as "hitting first," and also what qualifies as "freedom." For instance, should people be free to own more real estate than they themselves can work, and charge rent for said real estate? If people have that freedom, is it "hitting first" for them to withhold food from workers who have no other means of support than working for them at whatever wage they offer?

In a system with total individual freedom and strong property rights, what is to keep the most ruthless from leveraging the power that accumulated wealth has to influence markets, and using that power to keep other people dependent on them? Is economic coercion "hitting first?"

If people do have the right to own more land than they themselves can work, then isn't it also a freedom for a group of people to, say, call themselves "The United States of America" and make up some rules regarding what others can do with "The United States of America's" land? After all, isn't that really nothing more than land owned by a group of individuals?

There is a lot of difference in ideology even amongst people who subscribe to the ideals of freedom and not hitting first. So much so that different camps within that group all seriously question the other sides' commitment to those ideals. You know, the whole rift between individualist anarchism and social anarchism.

Oh, and happy Troll Tuesday everybody!

Roses are red, too.
Two times six is twelve.
There are twelve inches in a ruler.
Queen Mary was a ruler.
Queen Mary was a ship.
Ships sail in the sea.
Fish swim in the sea.
Fish have fins.
The Finns fought the Russians.
Russians are Reds.
Fire engines are always rushin'

therefore, fire engines are red.

I suppose it's time. I seem to get them once a year. But I got ten this time, is that new?

I just got back from the Novell Brainshare conference in Salt Lake City. It was a fun week. I attended lots of sessions on Linux and other open source tools. There was free (well, someone payed for me to be there...) food, free massages, free lattes, & lots of swag. Novell had a tech lab giving lots of interesting demos, and there were several dozen vendors and ISVs present. On Wednesday, Frank Caliendo opened for Collective soul at a free concert put on by Novell and open to the general public.

Perhaps the most interesting was a tutorial on using AppArmor. It's a great system for protecting applications. Novell bought the company that produced it several years ago and open sourced it. Basically, you point AppArmor at an application and put it in learning mode. You put the app through its intended uses, and then answer a series of questions regarding what AppArmor saw it doing. For instance, the app accessed a file. You can allow, deny, or 'glob.' Meaning, put in an asterisk. So it could access any file in a particular directory. There are also a series of pre-built templates you can add which allow certain sets of operations. Then you put AppArmor in enforce mode, and it keeps the app from doing things it shouldn't. Even if its running as root.

I'm impressed with Novell's commitment to open source. They are moving everything to Linux. Netware is no more, Netware services live on in Open Enterprise Server built on Suse Linux. Novell gave a great presentation on using the GNU autotools for their partners who want to move their products to Linux. Who knew using autconf, automake, libtool, and the rest could be so easy? Not me.

I've been working on setting up a log server, analysis, reporting, and notification system recently. I'm using Linux HA to fail-over an IP address and restart syslog. The logs are stored on an OCFS2 filesystem shared by the two nodes in the cluster. I use octopussy to analyze, report, and notify, and monit as a client side add in for logging additional information.

You are probably out of compliance with your software licences.

Well, things are still going very well with Merrill and Jenny and I. When he and Jenny have problems, he works to resolve them. That's what really matters in a relationship. No one is going to be perfect, and no one can read someone else's mind. But as long as someone is willing to work with you, to communicate, negotiate, and compromise, then the relationship can work.

He's much more comfortable being affectionate, and telling her he loves her. We're starting to think about the future in terms of all of us. He and I still get along great. Quite frankly, we both like a certain amount of alone time, and as much as we love Jenny, it's nice to have days when we can just do whatever we like without a woman hovering over us ;).

Jenny found an article about polyamory in our local weekly, evidently there is a new discussion group here in Albuquerque that meets bi-weekly. We're planning on going. I've found these kinds of groups to be very helpful in the past, as it's comforting to know that we're not total freaks, there are others like us out there. And it helps to talk about issues that happen in polyamory.

This isn't tech-related in the least, but my family just got back from staying at the Ramada Inn in Kearney, Nebraska. It wasn't pretty.

Not that Kearney is a likely destination for Slashdotters, but for those who might find yourselves there: you've been warned.

Here's a snippet from an email from a so-called 'Linux guy' at Novell support. Trust me, I am not taking this out of context.

So, how many errors can you spot in these two sentences? I count three. You don't want to stay away from compiling kernel modules on your own. In fact, any time you compile the stock kernel supplied with SUSE, you compile the modules too. Only non-GPL modules will taint the kernel. Self compiled GPL modules will not, vendor supplied binaries not under the GPL will. And non-GPL modules can be MORE stable than some GPL modules.

This is what we're paying for?

EDIT: More info, they don't support compiling your own kernel. Or more specifically, you can, as long as you leave every single option the same as in their stock kernel. I'm speechless.

Refactoring relationships

Right now, relationships are embedded into the comments section of story pages with tags like:

<span class="zooicon"><a href="//science.slashdot.org/zoo.pl?op=check&amp;uid=198669"><img src="//images.slashdot.org/fof.gif" alt="Friend of a Friend" title="Friend of a Friend"></a></span>

This is ugly for a few reasons. First, it's a mess. Second, it means that every visitor has to have their own custom-rendered comments sections so you can't apply aggressive caching to the page-generation code. I would replace this with per-user CSS.

First, create a CSS file for each user like this:

/* Default class */
a.relationship {
background: url(neutral.gif);
width: 12px;
height: 12px;
display: inline-block;
text-decoration: none;
}

/* User-specific values start here: */

/* Friends */
a.user3352,a.user42 { background: url(friend.gif); }

/* Foes */
a.user666 { background: url(foe.gif); }

Next, replace the HTML in the comments section with generic relationship information such as:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="relationships.css">
[...]
<p>by neutral (1234) <a href="bar" class="user1234 relationship">&nbsp;</a> on 2008-01-20</p>
<p>by Just Some Guy (3352) <a href="bar" class="user3352 relationship">&nbsp;</a> on 2008-01-20</p>
<p>by foe (666) <a href="bar" class="user666 relationship">&nbsp;</a> on 2008-01-20</p>

All "a" tags with the "relationship" class get the default CSS values. If there is also a corresponding "user*" selector in the visitor's stylesheet, then the values in that selector override the defaults. For a sad user with no friends, this means that everyone gets the neutral.gif icon. As that user accumulates more specific relationships, those CSS definitions are applied instead.

This benefits Slashdot because suddenly they don't have to generate a brand new comments section for every visitor. The per-user CSS would also be extremely simple to generate. In any case, it would be no more difficult than the current method of embedding all that information directly into the comments section.

Finally, those CSS files could also be cached very easily. Since they would only change whenever a user's relationships are modified, Slashdot would no longer have to query that information every single time it creates a page.

There are two drawbacks to this idea. First, there are no more alt attributes on images, so users don't see a "Friend" popup if they hover over the relationship button. If that's a problem, replace the icons with little smiley or frowny faces as appropriate. Second, it would take slightly more work to support putting users in multiple categories at the same time ("Friend" + "Freak"). The fix is to create a whole set of graphics like "friend_freak.gif" and "foe_friendoffriend.gif" and corresponding CSS classes. There aren't that many categories, though, so it would require only minimal extra work to cover every possible combination.

How 'bout it, Taco - could you use something like that? Less code, less bandwidth, and less processing should be pretty easily reachable goals.

UbuntuDupe screwed up an Ubuntu installation almost two years ago. He still hasn't gotten over it.

UD, let me give you some free advice: move on. Really. You don't even have to admit that you were wrong. Just stop yapping about it and move on.

Do you notice that every time you bring this up, everyone opposes you? It's not because we don't like you, but because even if you were in the right (which you weren't), after two years we simply don't want to hear it anymore. Stop embarrassing yourself and let it die already, OK?

Fark: Is read by your boss.
Slashdot: Is read by the weird guy in the server room.

Fark: Tries to be corporate friendly.
Slashdot: Links to Tubgirl.

Fark: Garfield.
Slashdot: Doonesbury.

Quit whining about "oh noes this is not teh NSFW!" If you want Fark, read Fark. This is Slashdot.