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Comment Broken 8-bit Nintendo Boss Levels (Score 3, Insightful) 40

I'm not sure if AI will ever progress beyond the point where kids who grew up playing video games cannot find some strange method of getting it to spit out quarters or racking up free lives for everyone to play with. This is a clever demonstration of that. Without being provable in any strong manner, black box AIs used for anything close to security or adjudicating on resources of any kind may always have some corner cases where ingenious people profit from some strange LLM training quirk. I assume those in the AI industry who are looking forward will rely on punishment to discourage this sort of behaviour. However, at the moment, risk of punishment does not seem to be deterring criminals from profiting online. If AI isn't used as a high tide to raise all boats, those left beached will have strong incentives to abuse these sorts of loopholes.

Comment Local VPN with Firewall (Score 1) 183

A Local VPN server with a firewall on the VPN server would be effective. But, that firewall needs to maintain its rules with current vulnerabilities. One weakness here is the VPN clients on older machines will need to be upgraded as VPN servers drop backwards compatibility for older encryption. This might require custom Windows VPN clients, which is a lot of work. That also requires an serious level of security and programming knowledge to do with confidence. OpenVPN does a lot of work here, and it might be maintainable to keep an 32 bit OpenVPN windows client maintained if necessary. More effort would be required to keep the VPN firewall up-to-date with rules that are necessary for any local machines no longer supported by their vendors. Checking CVS security vulnerabilities, keeping track of exposed 0-days, and other forms or research would be necessary. That is complicated by the fact that not many people would be researching the impact of new vulnerabilities on older hardware and operating systems. A easier solution is an extreme set of firewall rules that would allow only the traffic that older machines need to use. Start with only .html .htm and find out what services are needed but cannot work. Add an exception as necessary until all the required sites/apps work as expected. That will still require regular review of the firewall rules, but it would reduce the amount of research and maintenance needed.

Comment They are doing this to all Federal Libraries (Score 5, Informative) 168

I worked for Natural Resources Canada's library system in 2011. My friend worked at Transportation Canada.

They closed Transportation Canada's library system. It no longer exists. Who knows what happened to the information there, if it even exists any more. My friend told me they housed some of the world's foremost research on transportation science, and were called upon by international colleagues to provide them with information.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...

They did a similar thing to the library at the Ministry of Fisheries and Oceans

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politic...

Environment Canada

http://o.canada.com/news/last-...

This government has a war on science and knowledge and actively prohibits scientists from speaking to the media without government approval.

http://scienceblogs.com/confes...

The Conservative government does not care about facts. They have policies they want to implement, and they will do WHATEVER it takes to ensure those policies are enacted. Even if it means destroying our scientific heritage.

Comment Check out the Evergreen ILS's Opensrf project (Score 2) 274

http://evergreen-ils.org/opensrf.php I do not know much about it. Here is Dan Scott's first paragraph form his 'Easing Gently into OpenSrf' article: OpenSRF is a message routing network that offers scalability and failover support for individual services and entire servers with minimal development and deployment overhead. You can use OpenSRF to build loosely-coupled applications that can be deployed on a single server or on clusters of geographically distributed servers using the same code and minimal configuration changes.

Comment Re:Licensed under the GPLv3 or later (Score 1) 269

I'm not sure how compiling my copyrighted work with a program would force me to change its copyright to GPL3. The GPL has to be applied to the source code, and this requires the creators of binary distributions of the source code to provide the source for the binaries. I do not think the GPL3 could make a binary created by GCC 4.8.0 count as covered under the GPL because the GPL isn't applied to binaries its is applied to source code. I am almost 100% certainly GCC 4.8.0 can't make my source code use the GPL. That is something I, as the copyright owner, have to do. Perhaps there is some weird language in the GPL3 that says by using GCC 4.8.0 I, by default, am assigning the GPL3 to my code, but that seems unlikely. I will take the time to read the GPL3 this weekend.

Comment Re:Licensed under the GPLv3 or later (Score 2) 269

I was going to say yes, and I'm fairly sure the answer is yes. But, I have not read the GPL3, so I do not really know the difference between it an GPL2. It seems unlikely that they would force people to release code under an open source license because you compiled it with GCC. In fact, that is probably not possible because you own the copyright on your code and any compiler should be able to make it work (depending on portability). So, I would say yes, you can compile non-OSS projects with GCC 4.8.0.

Comment Stay with OS X (Score 1) 965

I started using OSX in 2010, and like you I still use Linux. For the most part, I use Linux to develop software and for data munging. I'm still good with OS X. If they get rid of Terminal then I am done. Until then, I can do most anything I need on OS X that I can on my Linux box. The difference being, I don't have the same ease of use for all the Open Source projects on OS X that I do on Linux.

I'm fine with OS X moving towards an iOS interface. So far they are maintaining the ability to work around the interface. I have yet to encounter any limitations that cannot be bypassed. I also use OS X because it works without me having to maintain it. When I was in high school, I had days to spend screwing around with Slackware, and I learned a lot doing it. But, I no longer want to mess with setting things up just so I can get to the point where I start doing my actual activities. Which is one reason I moved away from Slackware to Ubuntu.

I've used Ubuntu on the desktop, and it is fairly good. But, there are still problems. A number of times I would have to kill the Synaptic Update system and do a manual apt-get update apt-get upgrade. Not sure why the GUI version wasn't working, and these days I no longer care. I don't have time to figure that out. As well, my network card would not alway be enabled when I booted my Lenovo R61 Thinkpad. This was in 2011. I bought the Thinkpad in 2007. Its hardware is old enough that it should just work at this point. To fix it, I would have to reload the card's module. There may be other issues I had. I can't remember any right now though.

My point is, I want my personal computer to turn on and work. I don't want to spend time configuring it. I realize I am betraying, in some sense, the Stallman Free Software ethic, that, in large part, is responsible for the programming skills I enjoy today. I have contributed to an Open Source project recently. And, I intend to do so in the future. But, I have become a pragmatist rather than an idealist in my thoughts on Free Software.

As for moving to Windows, I see no sense in that. Unless you want to use Cygwin or something like that, and those projects may be more mature now, but Windows is so far removed from the Unix philosophy that it is painful to use. At least in OS X, I can still pipe individual programs together to generate something useful.

Comment Re:A week? (Score 1) 1004

I do this as well. I am following so many shows from a year behind that it really isn't a big deal anymore. I have a lot of TV to watch on disc, so much that I have trouble watching it all before the next season is done. The only problem is avoiding spoilers, and since I've read A Song of Ice and FIre that really isn't a problem for me.

Comment Re:Who pays? (Score 1) 178

Libraries will eventually save money in this situation. Even if libraries paid the open access fee for all faculty, they would only be covering the costs necessary for their institution. Currently, libraries have to pay for bundled journal packages. So, if faculty need access to a particular journals, the library often has to pay a fee that is not justified for access to the required journals, and the providers justify this by bundling other journals with popular or renowned journals.

If academia moves to open-access journals, then everyone would be paying for their own contributions, and faculty would have access to everything they need. I suppose some libraries responsible for faculty who are active publishers may have their fees increase, but I'm not sure if that would be the case. I think the subscription prices set by providers are higher than the publishing costs of open-access journals. At least for the ones I've seen. I've seen open-access submission prices between $1,500 and $2,500. The faculty that teaches me is a small faculty with about 50 part-time and full-time faculty. If they each published 5 articles a year, that is $625,000 a year. I'm not sure what a reasonable amount of publishing is, but now that I look at it that is a lot of money. I don't know what it costs to get access to the various journal subscriptions used by my faculty, but I would be surprised if it was that much money. We have about 600 students in the various programs run by the faculty, which is about $1,800,000 worth of tuition per semester from the students contribution alone. Again, I don't know what amount the government provides after that. I doubt using 1/3rd of student tuition for publishing is feasible, but I'm not sure about that. Hmmm. Certainly, the library's budget will not be that large. I suppose, this system would favour institutions that do not publish as much. I feel that this benefits students in the end, but I guess I'm not sure any more if it would be cheaper. I am in a Master of Library and Information Science program. I'll ask around at school, and see if I can find out how much a typical journal bundle costs.

Comment Re:Check out Open Design (Score 1) 342

The $29.95 is for your commitment as a patron. That will get you a PDF. If you want a print version you will have to buy a copy via Lulu. At least that is how it was done. I think they may license the final copies to Paizo for retail sales. I haven't been in a project for a few months now and things have changed a fair bit recently.

Comment Check out Open Design (Score 5, Informative) 342

Open Design has been running patronage projects for role playing games for many years now. There system works very well. People can pay for various levels of commitment which gives them various levels of input into the design of the adventure or world being created. I'm a big fan of their work, and it has provided Open Design with a solid customer base. This is a list of recent stuff going on with them. And, here is a list of their current projects. If you are interested in chatting about this process, their forums are fairly active.

Comment Server Side Validation (Score 1) 150

I'm not sure if the form validation is such a great idea. Sure, it will save a lot of time and headache, but there is nothing stoping unscrupulous and technically knowledgeable people from sending whatever data they want to the web server. I guess 99% of the time if you use client side validation you'll be ok, but I would feel obliged to still check everything on the server side. I guess having the specific form elements to validate email addresses and constrict dates is very nice. I suppose it doesn't hurt anything to have those new elements, as long as sever side validation doesn't get forgotten about.

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