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Comment This isn't a victory for Behring-Breivik. (Score 3, Insightful) 491

Someone once pointed out that hoping a rapist gets raped in prison isn't a victory for his victim(s), because it somehow gives him what he had coming to him, but it's actually a victory for rape and violence. I wish I could remember who said that, because they are right. The score doesn't go Rapist: 1 World: 1. It goes Rape: 2.

What this man did is unspeakable, and he absolutely deserves to spend the rest of his life in prison. If he needs to be kept away from other prisoners as a safety issue, there are ways to do that without keeping him in solitary confinement, which has been shown conclusively to be profoundly cruel and harmful.

Putting him in solitary confinement, as a punitive measure, is not a victory for the good people in the world. It's a victory for inhumane treatment of human beings. This ruling is, in my opinion, very good and very strong for human rights, *precisely* because it was brought by such a despicable and horrible person. It affirms that all of us have basic human rights, even the absolute worst of us on this planet.

Comment Re:Welcome to the Group! (Score 1) 198

I'll pile on here. Your job is no longer to be the sysadmin, or even the BOFH - your job is to develop the projects, policies, etc. that the IT staff will implement, oversee the implementations, and ensure they transition to operations successfully - all the while planning the next move. You shouldn't need admin rights in an organization that size.

You SHOULD, however, have authority over the people doing the implementation and administration. If they work for you, or you have significant enough levers on them, you can exercise oversight. As another respondent mentioned, getting read access is simple, and I agree with that completely. Setting up a lab where you get deity rights is simple enough, and you should do that in your first year, but for the operational environment, you shouldn't ever have to sudo. You now have people to do that.

Comment Absofrickin' Useless (Score 1) 168

Like the NoDeerZone.com guy said... what a useless app. There's no enforcement capability here, no laws behind it, and no way to let a drone pilot know that the airspace they're flying through is "banned", with no penalties.

This is worse than one of those 2000s dot-coms with no product - this is something that will give people false hope. I call that fraud - maybe their local prosecutors will too.

Comment 4: Multiple Choice Crashers (Score 1) 310

The oddest thing I've written - code that crashed, deliberately, in different ways based on use selection.

I was working a project where we built atop an "abstraction layer" designed to insulate us from OS changes (this was the 90s, such things were in vogue). The team doing the abstraction layer, at another site, rolled out a new version. The best I can say of it is, it compiled.

Different parts of my code started exploding. Almost literally - I had one test case cause a kernel panic in AIX, which was no small challenge. Of course, it was all blamed on my "bad code practices" and couldn't POSSIBLY be flaws in their update.

Over the course of two weeks of core dump analysis, discussion with the AIX team at IBM, and heated exchanges going up the chain of command, I crafted a 200-line program which three different options to crash the system. Pick your choice, guaranteed crash, including the kernel panic. Once I delivered THAT through channels, they got silent quick. It took them another month to fix their internal bugs and re-deliver. The memory leak I found in that version required another "prove it!" program, but my management had my back by then.

Comment Re:Uhm... not really impressive (Score 1) 207

I recall a rash of home burglaries when a certain company in Florida was using cheap materials under the siding, before the inner walls were finished, where burglars were removing the siding, punching through the outer walls, opening doors from the inside and making off with copper piping, wiring, and appliances. They were keeping track of the progress of the new homes and would wait until the appliances were installed before going in at night and removing them. They were even replacing the siding to make it harder for security to notice the holes until the work crews showed up to finish the drywall and install carpet.

Piracy

Submission + - Google looks to cut funds to illegal sites (telegraph.co.uk)

rbrandis writes: Google is in discussions with payment companies including Visa, Mastercard and PayPal to put illegal download websites out of existence by cutting off their funding. If Google goes ahead with the radical move, it would not mark the first time that illegal websites have been diminished or driven out of business by having a block put on their source of cash.

Submission + - Why hasn't 3D taken off for the web?

clockwise_music writes: "With HTML5 we're closer to the point where a browser can do almost everything that a native app can do. The final frontier is 3D, but WebGL isn't even part of the HTML5 standard, Microsoft refuse to support it, Apple want to push their native apps and it's not supported in the Android mobile browser. Flash used to be an option but Adobe have dropped mobile support. To reach most people you'd have to learn Javascript, WebGL and Three.js/Scene.js for Chrome/Firefox, then you'd have to learn actionscript + flash for the microsofties, then learn objective c for the apple fanboyz, then learn Java to write a native app for Android. Phew!

When will 3D finally become available for all? Do you think it's inevitable or will it never see the light of day?"

Comment Simple Physics and Wind Tunnel (Score 1) 64

An iOS, and Android app for tablets and phones, Simple Physics works very well to educate kids on forces, leverage, relative strength, etc. Build a bridge and drop rocks on it to see how many it can hold. Build a dam to withstand a flooding river. Build a shelter to withstand a bomb blast, all from the same simple "wooden" materials. My kids play this for hours when I let them.

There's also an excellent Wind Tunnel app for iOS that acts as a simple 2-D wind tunnel, with particle streams, smoke, pressure differentiation, etc.

Fun toys, and the kids learn while they play 'em.

User Journal

Journal Journal: Get off my Lawn! 6

I feel old, guys. I feel like the old man sysadmin with the Unix Beard and suspenders (which I continually think of as a halloween costume, less and less ironically). My coworkers are all... what would have been slashdotters had they not found digg or reddit, or whatever it was.

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How many hardware guys does it take to change a light bulb? "Well the diagnostics say it's fine buddy, so it's a software problem."

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