nnnnnnnn

I apologize. I thought I was quite clear here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4676144 and I was overly brusque in my latest response (due to the language above).

jlgreco was quite clear that this would be the authorities noticing, and under his theory this ought to be a prerequisite to an investigation.

Noting that the criminal or (now deceased) victim observed the crime is neither useful nor insightful.

On the contrary I understand your point well, and it appears to be nonsense.

You have, however, missed mine.

You are fabricating straw men. They do not need "an answer that can be implemented in an hour." They have been in business for 4 years, and this particular string of DDoS attacks has been going on for several days now. This is both a a planning failure and an incident response failure.

Your comment about iptables is odd. I don't know why iptables would be relevant here; I suspect we are talking about implementations several orders of magnitude different in size. Certainly one would drop traffic at the edges and not do filtering on end nodes.

The error in your reasoning is that all these things do have external effects, but the connection between an external effect and the source is not always apparent. To specifically use the example of fraud, a great number of business operations are under forced reporting requirements for specifically this reason. Your answer to this point is flatly incorrect, as fraud cannot and is not effectively detected in this manner today.

Regarding murder, you suggest "if someone is missing, start an investigation." Of course, the error in your logic is that we do have evidence of drug crime -- and plenty of it. There is no question that Alameda county is full of grow-ops, which produce drugs for the surrounding region. I know, because I live here. There are many, many busts every year. Mountains of evidence.

The reason to limit this sort of investigation is found in the 4th amendment, and it is more than adequate when applied here. Kyllo v. United States is very clear on this point.

Github can easily afford to use someone like Prolexic. And they should.

When you say things like "And it's all dependent on attackers not getting the IP of your actual servers" this makes me wonder how much you understand the subject matter. There are many, many options.

If a murder happens in my home and no one notices, is it not a crime?

If fraud occurs at my business and is undetected, is it not a crime?

Politically, I am against drug prohibition. Legalize it all, and demand warrants for non-visible spectrum imagery of homes. But the idea that a crime isn't a crime if no one notices just doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Your reply reminds me of the post-9/11 "get some priorities" troll: http://everything2.com/user/NotBridgetJones/writeups/slashdo...

It's a classic false dichotomy. Specifically, a person can care about both issues simultaniously.

The problem is that we're not producing the radiation in the air -- it's already there. Radiation shielding is heavy and infeasible for use in current airplane technology. It's a very, very hard problem.

BackScatter scanners, in contrast, are optional. They are completely and utterly unnecessary. It's very easy to get rid of them; indeed it would have been easiest and cheapest to never have forced them upon an an unwilling community of travelers.

"buy APPL and expect AAPL to double in 1 year."

Big error. You can predict a stock doubling in value a year in advance?

Your numbers are less shocking when you plug in more reasonable expectations, say 6% market index instead of 200% home run.

Funding the expensive regulatory process (which includes clinical trials and all the rest) is very easy to legislate. For example, grant a company some limited exclusive rights for commerce/sale of a drug they have funded through clinical trials.

A commercial restriction on the sale of a drug would be far less onerous and legally problematic than the current patent system.

Because human beings generally have selfish interests. If you tell a person they may own and control a thing for profit, many will choose to do so.

Unsurprisingly, this is a choice made by a large number of professors

It is not circular. Interest and authority are two very different things. For example, the Federal government has the authority to wage war -- this has no bearing on a discussion as to whether they are philosophically correct in doing so.

The suggestion that policy is justified merely because it subsists upon formal authority is nonsense.

Actually it is a reflection of the law. The US government had the authority to prohibit export of crypto (at the time), but did not have the authority to limit it domestically.

If they had been given that authority things may have been different.

I can't get it for you because I have a single laptop at my disposal. However, any meagerly funded criminal enterprise which can front a few tens of thousands of dollars could tell you the answer quite easily.

It is not reliable cryptography, and if you provide an incentive to reverse that hash (rather than merely challenging people who have better things to do) then it will be reversed. When it comes to the type of enterprise which cracks systems for profit, it is as good as plaintext.

masklinn was very clear about the difference between an ivory tower example (yours) and the reality of user passwords. It appears you have missed his point.

It's because I have nothing to say about the database stuff. Why are you so adversarial? I'm not here to cross swords with you; I don't have an opinion on the matter.

But I did notice your rudeness, and you're now being rude to me. Totally uncalled for.

"On your home page you imply that you can automatically OCR arbitrary handwritten receipts into an analyzable format. No one can do that. That is your problem"

Jeez, lay off the confrontational tone. He doesn't say anything about OCR. Maybe he's using humans to do data entry? In any event, it's completely irrelevant to the topic of databases.

Frankly, your lack of belief is likely due to a lack of experience with user submitted forms with email addresses. It's VERY common for users to simply type the wrong data into a particular textarea. If you do no validation you will get things like the person's name, street address, or other confused mixups.

Anyone who deals with forms of this nature will have seen this firsthand, and with enough frequency to cause trouble with mail relay as the person above has described. It's a real problem.

Which MTAs do you suspect wouldn't deliver it? I've used internal zones of that form extensively without issue on all the common OSS MTAs (postfix, sendmail, exim).

I'm unaware of any common MTA software which wouldn't handle it.

The issue you refer to is in a poorly formed, ad-hoc serialization format. It has nothing to do with representation of variables at runtime. It has nothing to do with the language.

It is a programming error, not an inherent flaw in the language.

In any event it does not support your assertion that other languages suffer similar problems.

Because, as the author points out, different users may want different globbing behavior. Globbing is not performed identically between shells.

If the author so wished, he might trivially create his own shell and allow * to match dotfiles, with absolutely no disruption to the rest of his system. Or one could write a shell which uses a regex instead of a glob. Or the SQL LIKE query syntax. The possibilities are endless. Anyone is free to do this.

The fact is, the current globbing behavior in unix shells strikes a good balance between pedantic correctness and "what I really want." The author's frustration is due to his attempting to use a command line interface as a structured programming language.

No, that is not at all accurate.

Your link above shows an author who claims JSON output, yet the output is clearly non-validating JSON (toplevel is not a [] or {}, improper quoting, etc). It appears that instead of using JSON serialization, the author merely printed key/value pairs separated by the string ": ". The problems with this approach are obvious.

This is why using a proper serialization format is important.

If the author had done this correctly and used a proper JSON library to produce this output, the following, completely safe result would have occurred:

{ "cluster_size":65536, "disk size":"136K", "file format":"qcow2", "image":"/tmp/foo\ncluster_size: bar", "virtual size":"10M (10485760 bytes)" }

The author probably would have been best served by YAML, which is more easily readable -- and which, like json, provides mechanisms to properly represent arbitrary data.

In any event, the discussion is severely confused. Ad-hoc buggy formats cannot be compared with well-formed JSON or YAML. This has nothing at all to do with the language.

An interesting observation is that tablets are becoming the new desktop and in that space linux, through android, is becoming a dominant player. In a way, the linux desktop is finally here and it's winning against both Microsoft and Apple put together.

All of the article's criticism of mainstream workstation distributions is accurate, of course. But it's important to note that those represent nowhere near the sum total of the linux user experience these days.

I put good odds on a jury drawing the line by putting the shopowner in considerable debt if not in jail.

" you should not be able to just close your credit card account and be able to walk away from a contractual recurring payment agreement into which you entered."

Of course you should. What if the other party fails to uphold their side of the contract, rendering it invalid? You are suggesting that the cardholder must pay regardless of the contract terms. In reality, either party may violate the terms of their contract in incalculable ways. Singling out consumer payments is extremely myopic.

I understand you're playing devil's advocate here, but this position is extremely flawed.

That's not something noticeable during basic desktop use. I've used VMWare Fusion a fair amount and I was very impressed. I imagine someone non-technical would not be able to tell the difference.

I think a reasonable view is:

A] Unauthorized copying is rampant. B] This is not a problem; profitable business exists regardless.

The most interesting part of the above statistic in my mind is how it shows heavyhanded copy controls have absolutely no effect. So you may as well not bother.

The software industry is not and has never been under an existential threat from unauthorized copying. These numbers are solid evidence that it is possible to have a booming, profitable software industry despite a 95% unauthorized copying rate.

No, it isn't limited that way. It's 0% under 250k, and reverts to the regular 2.75% if you process above those limits.

Not "less than 21k." There is no upper bound on the value. You always save money, provided you process upwards of $10k/mo.

A merchant processing 50k/month on square paying 2.75% would save money by switching to the new plan. At least, if I'm reading this correctly.