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Comment It is going to happen so propose a useful solution (Score 1) 187

The laws in several countries are going to require it. My preferred way is for the OS to offer a flag of "This user is of legal age in this region based on information provided to the administrator of this computer." I'll leave it up to the people with compilers to comply or not with their local laws.

My proposal is stuff the flags in a sysctl user.$UID.age var. and then let the browser send info off to other sites just like it does with language selection. That way a pam module (or systemd) can set an over/under age of majority for the region and then let the browser send a "yes/no" flag. The pam module or sysd can calulate that based on a birthday or a +18 flag so you may have to log in to reset it but the birthdate is never sent to the browser let alone to the end web sites.

This gives schools a way to control content. It allows parents to control content. It allows home router vendors to claim to control content. It allows web sites to stop annoying users about being above 16,18 or 21 depending on what they are pushing. The politicians will look at it and say the industry is working with them while patting themselves on the back.

The other solution is let the politician's owners come up with a solution and that will be an expensive id solution that tracks everyone through the web with no way to opt out.

Comment Re: YUP! (Score 1) 118

I'm in favor of fixing this properly before the politicians mandate something stupid.
My proposal is a sysctl value set by a pam module (or systemd on systems infected with that). The browser then does something like language verification much like the HTTP Language headers. Those can be intercepted, checked or forced in environments that have to provide web access to kids like schools. A web site should be able to ask for something like Australia's under 16 and can return a AGE_AU_VIC_Under_16=True if and only if configured to do so. This allows things like online news papers to allow under 16 access to news but not the discussion forums. The proposal still needs work, but it allows for parents to set things as they wish and keep the politicians out of it while letting them claim they fixed it. In the past local ISPs were required to give out software to lock down kids computers and the take up was smaller than the number of people who supported the law.

Comment Re:Lest anyone think the problem is just AI slop (Score 3, Informative) 47

The business side of music has been trying to control how much new music is released ever since reproduction because easy in the early days of printed sheet music.

About 25 years ago a radio station in Melbourne had a contest where bands had to send in an album that was less than a year old and had at least 3 songs that weren't covers. Their listening area was about 3 million people and they got 3,000 entries. To me that implies that there is a band for every thousand people who is producing an album worth of music every year. That would imply there should be about 8 million new albums every year globally.

Comment Re:Vim Startup (Score 1) 116

In the vi vs emacs wars, there is only one real point to argue and that is the cat index. Get a cat on the keyboard and see how much damage it can do to the file.

Comment Re: No trust (Score 1) 124

If you notice there are some similarities of inittab and a makefile.

What?

Look at the names and descriptions in the fields and the pre-tab makefile format for far more similarity.

But both of those things are actually used. So are the IDs, they actually have meaning. And the runlevels are part of dependency. You pass through runlevels on your way to other runlevels.

The ID's aren't used for dependency. The id in sun sysv is a hack based on things like telnetd and rlogin. Part of the plan was to have the action field reference the ids and a state which was not done. The idea was to have a make like dependency check based on the current state of what was running.
Had inittab been expanded slightly, the need for scripts for most things would have disappeared completely. Everything else would have ended up being like the traditional rc3.d/[SK]* scripts.

Comment Re: No trust (Score 1) 124

Remind me again what was wrong with sysinit scripts?
The sysv init was never finished. If you notice there are some similarities of inittab and a makefile.
The idea was the runlevel and action fields could be used for dependency and concurrency. The run levels A,B & C are hints of that as is the current total lack of use of the id field. There are hints in the 5ess software as well. Init's early features were limited because it could never be paged out and multi-cpus weren't an option on the newer 3b line that sysV was written on until Sun added the sun-4m line.

Comment Training exercises often use oddball threats (Score 3, Interesting) 80

It is common to use strange threats for training exercises. It means the training controller can play games to put normal plans out of play. The CDC has been using zombie attacks for this reason for years plus it helps keep teams entertained while being able to evaluate the leadership parts of the teams. The CDC training requires a whole bunch of volunteers so zombies work for that. The military uses similar techniques for asymmetric warfare.

Comment Not just jamming (Score 1) 31

There are some systems that are sending valid looking signals with apparently valid ephemeris and almanac data. The signals should have been digitally signed decades ago. I had two different GPS receivers revert to valentine's day over the black sea. The one started seeing sats that were 10db stronger than the real ones and it got the time but never could get a position fix.

Comment Re:In ur radar, hacking ur storm cloudz (Score 2) 71

The old images were from radars that did 6 elevations with a sweep time of a minute per elevation. So rather than put the data in a continuous 6 minute buffer, they throw all the data away every 6 minutes and start over.

They could have bought a system from a number of groups for far less money. There are even TV stations that would have sold them a world class system for a few million dollars. That would be a turnkey system that can take feeds from all the existing radars plus any of the newer coastal radars that also collect weather data as well as the mobile research radars.

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