sdkmvx

Not that I would advocate confusing matters by changing the calendar again, but you just move the birthdays same as last time.

From Wikipedia: George Washington (February 22, 1732 [O.S. February 11, 1731] – December 14, 1799)

Notice the year is different. In the British Empire before 1752, March 25th was the first day of the year. March 24, 1751 was the day before March 25, 1752. Then September 2, 1752 was the day before September 14, 1752 The last day of 1752 was December 31, and the calendar has continued how we consider normal ever since.

The British custom of starting the tax year on April 6th survives as a relic of the old calendar (March 25th plus the missing 12 days in 1752).

> Can you imagine if, every time something new happened in Syria, Wikipedia published a new Syria page, and in order to understand the bigger picture, you had to manually sift through hundreds of pages with overlapping information?

That is exactly what Wikipedia does. It works well because most readers are not looking in an encyclopedia for information on yesterday's events.

Likewise inverted pyramid works well because it simultaneously satisfies the needs of new readers who need the most important details at the top and repeat readers who can quickly scan the short paragraphs for new information. I despise new-style live streaming because it is so awkward to read; I have to read backwards, bottom-to-top, and the most important details are often in the middle.

Algorithms matter. Do you know how Vim inserts text?

It's exponential. It's worse than a shell loop spawning a new echo process every iteration.

http://www.galexander.org/vim_sucks.html

The reality is always more mundane.

They showed supposed UI from Pathfinder displays image blocks of varying sizes in random locations then zooms them all to the right place. It makes a nice effect for the uninitiated, but I have trouble understanding why a computer would act like that.

You can see that the real NASA uses fvwm and xv to display images from Mars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Au-S-tjyiU&feature=youtu.be...

> it took minutes to establish SSH connections between machines on the same LAN

Most likely you were using a stupid DNS server that did not respond to reverse queries. See http://www.openbsd.org/faq/faq8.html#RevDNS

I run a similar system, but with OpenBSD. I don't have to fight systemd and DBus and PulseAudio there. I find OpenBSD to be a much better put together system in general, at the expense of some desktopy things I'd rather do without anyway.

What would you do if someone shows up on your mailing list and demands that you change your decade-old workflow that works fine? Weitse and others replies are not inappropriate.

Some projects do not want contributors. It belongs to the maintainer. Knowing what not to put in is sometimes the best way to keep good code.

For those who don't know (apparently including the authors), this is the standard 3270/IBM terminal font. It is available all over the web in various formats, notably in bitmap format with http://x3270.bgp.nu/, though it is in a different encoding (EBCDIC probably). I may look into converting it later.

There's also one a copy at https://github.com/rbanffy/3270font, and you may be able to find a better copy by doing more searching.

Show me where in the ANSI standard it says this is illegal. Implementation details do not matter. The Microsoft C compiler will compile a ANSI C89-conforming program into a runnable executable on Windows. The rest is undefined.

And while we're on implementation details, please note that most UNIX platforms do not start at main either. Most platforms include some soft of crt0 that must be linked which contains the real entry point. The dynamic linker will also run code prior to main.

But the C standard only defines what the environment looks like when execution begins and makes no statement on what might run before or how the program got into memory in the first place.

See http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=xconsole

But I have no idea whether this still exists and works on Linux. It is still started by XDM on OpenBSD though.

Many people are responding that you're making a mistake because cash is useful after having been stolen. Clearly this is true. But it is a mistake. Multiply the probability of being mugged in a year by the amount of money you carry. That's the expected loss over that year. Is your privacy worth that? If so, carry cash.

As for "chargeback insurance", I'd recommend taking responsibility for your own actions. If you buy crap from a merchant, that's between you and the merchant. Argue with him; don't buy more from him. The bank isn't a party to that argument. That should be enough to discourage such behavior. Additionally, they may have to pay the merchant and you. That's what the fees are for.

In Firefox they can be disabled via the gfx.downloadable_fonts.enabled about:config switch. Unfortunately that will really highlight the accessibility nightmare that icon fonts are, as they don't display and have no alt-text like images.

I've also noticed that disabling JavaScript has a huge effect on some websites' speed. But other sites don't even work without it nowadays.

I just want to add that this is obviously true because ACID can be implemented on the filesystem, which is not ACID. So to create a reliable transaction processing system on MongoDB (or any non-ACID system), you would need to build ACID on top of it. And if you're interested in Bitcoins and not database design, that's probably not the right way to go.

Imagine a pawn shop that loans money on cell phones. Now imagine someone comes in and pawns their phone. It still has service and all, but he thinks he will come back next week and redeem it. A few months pass and he never comes back. Now the phone is legally (the pawn contract says one must completely own the collateral, so carrier subsidies etc. shouldn't be a problem) the pawn shop's property. Mr. Defaulter calls the phone company and has the IMEI blocked. Now the pawn shop is out the money and owns a useless piece of metal and plastic.

I've seen this problem with phones, tablets, and even tasers. The company will not activate them if they've been reported lost or stolen. But "finders-keepers" is legal and people can lie about theft. Of course the company also has a second interest not to help create a used market. Just like encrypted firmware schemes, this erodes personal control over our property. The legal owner with physical control should be able to use the device. Period.

There are also concerns over government or corporate disablement. Aside from obvious government malice during e.g. protests, does anyone really think either the government or the phone company can run a blacklist without false positives? Obviously not. Nobody can when your population size is >300 million. And the customer service grunt is just following the rules when your device is disabled and he cannot re-enable it.

The argument for this law is that it will reduce thefts by making the phones worthless. I understand this. I just don't think that is worth losing control over our property and devices.

> It's not a case of legislators saying "it would be better to have less phone theft so let's try to reduce it this way" - instead it's more like, users want this, but don't have the bargaining power to compel the phone makers to build it in or the telcos to support it.

I am sick of reasoning like this. The purpose of government is to preserve your freedom to do something. If some users want something and cannot arrange it themselves, then they may just not be able to get it. It is not the government's place to mandate that everyone gets what some people want. That goes against personal freedom. It is certainly the government's place to punish thiefs---a person who deprives another of their freedom to control their property. The government should not mandate certain ways of arranging private (between a person and the phone company) affairs.

> Yes, it can screw up caches and return unexpected content.

Then the cache is broken. Obviously not getting a response is going to confuse things, but there is a way to send back REFUSED without giving a positive or negative answer.

Take HN's authoritative DNS server and ask it for information on yahoo.com.

    $ dig @sue.ns.cloudflare.com. yahoo.com.
    ...
    ;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: REFUSED, id: 28595
    ...

They are perfectly right to refuse service to non-customers, but I think it's bad network practice (legally right or not) to return incorrect information.

> At the least it’s leaking, in clear text on the wire, things that I expected to be sent to an encypted DDG search. If there was sensitive search terms or information in that query, it just dropped into Level3′s logfiles.

He must not realize that even if the DNS server was working correctly, the original request that should result in NXDOMAIN is also passed in clear text over the wire and naturally potentially logged by the DNS server. The lesson is not to rely on DNS security. Your ISP can see what servers (IPs) you communicate with anyway.

OpenBSD supports a number of odd and unusual platforms and does builds on them. See http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html. Older hardware can both use a significant amount of electricity and require much more hand-holding than is possible. Virtualization and emulation are not acceptable substitutes because they claim that doing builds on e.g. VAX is one of the best ways to ensure that the code works on VAX as opposed to simply booting on VAX. They also regularly find bugs affecting all platforms that are exacerbated by one particular architecture (think alignment or endianness issues).

Are you suggesting that mkdir should know .ssh is special? I'm not sure that's a good idea. And how will the kernel (yes, it has to be the kernel) ask for a password when you access these files? With a GUI? On the console?

So you don't want Firefox to be able to read SSH keys. Privilege separation and sandboxing is the correct solution to this problem. Full disk encryption will protect the data at rest.

> Why would anyone even have them be two separate machines with the same content?

They are in different locations. openbsd.org is updated first and in the same (physical) location as the CVS servers, build equipment, etc., and www.openbsd.org and the other mirrors are mirrors with much more bandwidth.

Zero was (is) special. It dials the operator. This was much more common back then than it is today, so it is fitting that it got a special position. I can't speak for keyboards, but I do recall once reading a Knuth paper on METAFONT where he noted the difference between the order that mathematicians write numbers (0123456789) and the order that typographers write numbers (1234567890).

If you like the X11 Fixed fonts, check out http://monkey.org/~marius/beautiful-fixed-width-fonts-for-os..., which provides 6x13, 7x14, 9x15 and 10x20 in OS X dfont format.

Your terminal is probably not correctly configured. Remember that real terminals did not originally have arrow keys or home end keys or really anything that's not in ASCII. If you're actually using a termcap old enough that it doesn't know about those escape sequences (maybe Solaris and other commercial UNIX offerings), or you're using a more recent termcap but your $TERM is set to something ancient, then the escape sequences are not interpreted.

Of course UNIX terminal handling is not standardized at all, so you may find that some programs ignore $TERM and do their own thing.

What does this even mean? Google provides the leased line to the store? The store obtains an Internet connection the normal way, but then tunnels to Google? Or is Google's level of involvement that they have paid for an ad in the SSID?

Google Fiber is a nice business opportunity for them, but that requires infrastructure. This comes with none of that. It's not even a precursor to Google Fiber rollout. Either they are getting a similar-quality leased line to _one_ place, or it's just an ad. And even if the Starbucks uplink is "Google Fiber", the wireless connection itself will be a huge bottleneck, as it always is when you have more than around five devices communicating at once.

Before widespread communications networks, credit card imprints were taken with machines that look like [1]. They are still sometimes used when networks are down or when there is no phone/Internet network (think temporary locations like fairs and carnivals). The security is that the credit card company will (hopefully) void invalid transactions...

[1] http://img.ehowcdn.com/article-new/ehow/images/a04/b9/g6/cre...

> How many liberal democracies can you point to that have gone the way of totalitarianism, mass imprisonment, and genocide?

How many 200 year old liberal democracies can you point to? There's no historical data to look at. This history of the United States itself is an indicator that democracy is self-defeating. Compare the amount of classical liberalism in 1800 and 2000. Whether that can continue past the middle and into full-blown totalitarianism is untested.

> It's not rational to be so worried about government surveillance while giving a free pass to the companies creating a surveillance apparatus that can be abused by corporations.

It's also not rational to give the government a free pass. Don't think that companies can collude with each other. The government can also collude with companies, as PRISM indicates that they have been doing.

> > Note: In order for opt-out to work properly, you need to accept a "cookie" indicating that you have opted out of this service. If you use a program that removes cookies, you will have to repeat this opt-out process when the cookie is deleted. The cookie placed on your computer will contain the site name: "http://tmob.search-help.net.

Do you have more information about how this works? I cannot imagine how a cookie would affect whether the DNS server returns NXDOMAIN. The site could possibly do it by IP but then the cookie wouldn't need to exist. If opting out just changes the ads to a 404 that is still DNS hijacking.

The DNS server needs to return NXDOMAIN if a domain does not exist. Nothing else.

I run a mail server with OpenBSD's spamd[1] with greylisting and it works well enough. Most spam is not sent by SMTP compliant hosts. Blacklisting makes it particularly hard to recover IPs that have ever been compromised and unfairly hurts good hosts on otherwise untrustworthy (like some home ISPs) networks.

[1] http://www.openbsd.org/spamd/

Is it actually dangerous to use read for user input?

    (defun read-data ()
      (let ((data (let ((*read-eval* 'nil)) (read))))
        (mapcar
         (lambda (x) (format 't "~a: ~a~%" (car x) (cdr x)))
         data)))

Then I can

    (read-data)
    (("a" . 1) ("b" . 2) ("c" . (funcall (lambda () (princ "I ran code!")))))

And the following will print.

    a: 1
    b: 2
    c: (FUNCALL (LAMBDA () (PRINC I ran code!)))

But of course unless I eval the code, arbitrary code will not run (assuming I haven't forgotten some aspect of the reader).

AirPlay works with any video from the iPod/Music/Videos apps. One can import any video (including tormented TV shows) into iTunes and thus into these apps. It most certainly is AirPlay, although Apple would prefer people to just buy from their store.