baghira

While I'm not a fan of this development either, the position w.r.t. darktable was frankly unreasonable: the library in question is not meant to be a system library. Indeed I believe also digikam had similar problems. Having a modicum of flexibility in this cases may be positive.

Right, but in that case you lose completely the crucial gatekeeping function. Already now arxiv.org is full of papers with glaring technical and conceptual mistakes. Imagine what would happen if submissions to arxiv.org where they way one decides who to promote.

At the cost of being a retrograde, I believe that this sort of things cannot be settled simply "the google way" i.e. 1. Count the citations. 2. Make a list. 3. Profit.

You need to "force" people to review their papers, correct mistakes, and in a sense establish what is worth other people time. Journal editors and reviwers screw up all the time, no doubt, but the burden of proof is on those arguing that "drop it on arxiv, let the review count do the scoring" is a better system.

Also, once you drag the taxpayer in, you have to figure out who polices the archive, least it becomes crackpot central: should they be elected? Should they be appointed? Who should pay them? What about conflicts of interest?

It puzzles me that the most significant problem with open access receives little mention, in discussions on HN: it changes the incentives structure of publication, from one where the publisher has to please the ones buying the journal to one where the it has to please the people paying to submit articles.

This is what makes the situation profoundly more complex compared to other application of copyright, say in the software industry, where clearly switching to an open source model doesn't change the incentives i.e. who assesses the quality of software.

The long term effects on academia of switching to a model where the taxpayer gives money to scientists to pay for open access submssion of their research are hard to evaluate, and do no get enough though (imho).

That clearly doesn't mean that there aren't bad journals that are not OA, nor that for the benefit of the public some sort of arrangement shouldn't be found for older research: I'm a big believer in "faster decaying" copyright in general, and mandating that all publications describing research that is publicly funded become OA after, say, 30 years, would help significantly.

By the same token it doesn't even have a window system, I don't think it is a good argument. Chrome/chromium should simply depend on libnotify, just like it depends on gtk2.

At this rate I also foresee a clash with Phonon and Plasma from the KDE project.

This doesn't sound as a good name given the existence of: https://vmware.github.io/photon/ Granted, in the context of atom and electron it makes sense, but still.

True, but if that is the case you won't be running dmd in the first place. And automated conversion/runtime translation will be a possibility even with different service managers, e.g. systemXVI.

I'm not really convinced by the second, in that I believe that nothing in the article proves that service management is something too complex to be done via configuration files.

1. The solution to this is to write a translator from systemd units (those of .service type) to the desired kind of unit. I haven't looked into dmd, but this should be possible at least for the majority of units.

2. This was going to be a problem in any case i.e. had most distros switched to openRC one would still have been faced with the task of producing a suitable collection of service configuration files for dmd and then adapting them to dmd's specfic featureset.

Selinux should block the VENOM vulnerability in Qemu: http://danwalsh.livejournal.com/71489.html See also http://www.selinuxproject.org/page/SVirt Keep in mind that Grsec (which is definitely underdeployed in the linux community) is compatible with LSM such as SElinx and AppArmor, so you do not have to choose (you'll take a performance hit, though).

You can definitely extend the definition of factorial to the complex numbers using Euler's Gamma function, but the notation is different (indeed ! is reserved for integers).

As far as the second question goes, that's taken to be the definition e^x := \sum_{n=0}^{\infty} (x^n)/(n!)

It's been pushed to Fedora 24. Still, supposedly with 23 everything should work the same (instead on 22 there were still features missing), allowing to iron out the bugs (well, some of them).

You are right, of course (although I'd argue that the term layman is poorly defined, on HN I'd expect a significant fraction of readers to know what a differential equation is).

Still, there is the kernel of the correct explanation which could probably be presented to the larger public, starting with the well known explanation for refraction in terms of minimal paths (the lifeguard trying to save a drowning man), passing to the fact that in special relativity the trajectory of the free particle maximizes the proper time, and ending up with the gravitational case.

The rubbersheet economy (as a dialogue):

1. Prices move according to the law of supply and demand.

2. Right: why do they move though?

1. Simple: every hour the central government determines the current supply and demand for all goods, and computes the right price.

It looks like a market economy, the prices move in the right direction (the balls are "attracted" to each other), but the explanation is a planned economy (the effect of Earth gravity).

A decent explanation is here: http://www.physicspages.com/2013/03/30/geodesics-paths-of-lo... (I haven't checked all the calculations though). A similar explanation is shown in Feynman's lectures:http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/II_42.html

I still disagree: the problem is not the number of dimensions, the problem is that the physics is wrong.

If one flips the rubbersheet, the geodesics are the same, but clearly now the model doesn't match our intuition. Indeed the objects are attracted by the mass because of the Earth's gravitational potential, not because of the rubbersheet curvature. The balls are following the variation in height of the sheet (in a sense a first order variation) not the curvature of it (the second order variation). The model is bending the wrong component (space, instead of time), and with the wrong sign (the geodesics are repelled by the mass).

As pointed out by Ron Maimon in this answer: http://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/1019/common-false...

a much better explanation can be offered introducing proper time and the effect of gravity on it.

I strongly disagree. There's a regime in which Newtonian gravity describes the world. There is no such regime for the rubbersheet model of GR, since the Earth's gravity is responsible, not the sheet's curvature. It's the illusion of explanation.

EDIT: I'd also remark that collapsing centuries of debate on what's a scientific theory into "everything is an analogy" is a disservice to the public: good luck distinguishing realism, structural realism, positivism, etc., if you put on the same level science popularizations and proper (albeit imperfect and incomplete) scientific theories.

Also, the science communication bit is a red herring. There are plenty of concepts that cannot be explained easily to the public. One might justify just as well going around popularizing Laffer's curve, since actual macroeconomics is impossible to explain on a napkin.

Yes, that part is definitely wrong. The free falling observer crosses the horizon in a finite time. It's the external obsever that see the infalling object redshifted to infinity. An the curvature scalar is finite everywhere except that at the singularity.

It's a great tool, but the problem with DRM to me is not the technical difficulty of removing it, it's the validation of a business model predicated on denying ownership of the books by the users.

It's like buying an iphone and then jailbreaking it: I'm all for it, but it does not change the reality that you have just financed apple practices to the tune of hundreds of dollars. For ebooks the sums are much smaller, and clearly compromising if there is no alternative more acceptable, but the problem remains.

Similarly Springer ebooks have your name as a watermark at the bottom of the page, but no "real" DRM.

It's a pretty reasonable compromise.

Right, I kept using "wheel" to mantain the terminology in the github page, but clearly this created confusion.

But my point was that, regardless of whether you use sudo or su, on GNU/Linux or on *BSD, if the account used to elevate priviledges is compromised, the next you elevate you priviledges you should expect the attacker to follow you.

This is what I meant by "the attacker is root as well": it's just a matter of waiting for the next time you use su or sudo.

Sure, although I never found that reason to hold much ground given that in reality most distros ship with accounts that can open a shell (instead of having a list of allowed commands) and have the timeout not set to zero, so any security benefit that would come from not using "sudo -s" is pretty much voided.

And I'm skeptical that having users type sudo a bunch of time when they add a PPA and install a program somehow results in greater awareness, but this is purely an opinion of mine.

The other big reason for using sudo is the ability to change policy wrt which users can be root without changing root password everytime, and that clearly is true.

You misread my post, what I meant was that your day-to-day account is vulnerable, since you run your applications with it. If that's the account belonging to wheel, once your user account is compromised the attacker is root as well. One should use a different account, hopefully harder to compromise since is used only for sudo.

That said, I like your use of yubikeys, even better than the phone that's the sort of stuff that should be triggered using a smartwatch.

Sure, it always bothered me that guides show whole lists of commands prefixed by sudo, instead of teaching people to disable the timeout and use "sudo -i" or "sudo -s" to get their stuff done. See also the fact that OSX ships with tty_tickets disabled.

Still, unless one is sure that the sudo being invoked really is sudo, disabling the timeout won't be enough.

What I found problematic (unless I'm missing something) was the suggestion that your day-to-day user should be in the wheel group: if that's the case, once your user is compromised the attacker can edit .bashrc to change $PATH and use a patched sudo to take over the machine.

IMHO "sudo" (or "doas") should be used from a different user, by switching to a different VT. Or at least only allowing certain commands for you day to day user.

It does work in urxvt and konsole (and there's an option to turn it off). And as tempodox said, this is just VT100 stuff.

It's not that simple. Changes in the syntax for strings and environmental variables are going to bite precisely newcomers who would benefit the most from fish. And sourcing happens.

I do know that all these problems result from fish having a saner syntax compared to bash (hell, FWIW I'm still mad that globs are not regular expressions and have a different syntax) but everytime someone points out these problems the reaction is "#!/bin/bash", which kinda misses the point.

For Atom/RSS canto should cover your needs, provided you are looking for a terminal based reader. It runs as a daemon with a ncurses interface. http://codezen.org/canto-ng/ Newsbeuter should be interesting, but I've never used it.

Both krill and baleen whales are filter feeders (i.e. eat what they find filtering water). Baleen sounds like a good name for PyQt GUI to krill.

1. Yes, you have higlighted a source of frustration: currently to limit certain features one must either install half a dozen extensions on chromium or firefox, or stick to ESR versions of firefox, or gtkwebkit browsers (which I'm afraid do lag behind the apple upstream when it comes to security fixes). Hopefully with CEF and servo swapping out an engine for another will be easier, so the situation may improve a bit.

In an ideal world, this would be the purpose standards are: all the browsers agree on a set of minimum features, and security conscious users or administrators can decide to stick to that (I have no clue on whether other browser vendors would be interested). This would break websites in a predictable manner. After all sooner or later browser vendors will probably decide to break all tls-less websites. Some websites would be broken, but for people using a screen reader the web is already broken, and at least the would have a clear metric to point at when dealing with banks/news sites/institutions: if it breaks firefox/chrome/safari/edge safe mode, the webdesigner is doing something wrong. Similarly the limit imposed by organizations would help: if you are an entrerprise website you must render correcly in this mode. I'm convinced that administrators enforcing a "no IE policy" on the workplace did help move us away from a world in which frontpage's HTML was acceptable. My parents and users of entreprise workstation don't have browser choice anyway: they cannot install software.

2. Sure, the problem with modes is the problem with the UAC: you end up asking permission so often that you devalue the role of permssions, or you require the user to constantly check the current status of the application (e.g. the lock icon for SSL), which most users won't do. Polaris probably suffers from similar problems, as all "restrictive" extensions do. I'll admit that my solution is squarely aimed at users that cannot switch browser (or cannot switch browser mode), similarly to the gatekeeper role of apple on iphone, only giving the power to switch to administators/technically advanced users, which apple does not.

Ok, I guess that I misread the tone of your post (i.e. we largely agree).

I don't however think that the web it that broken without those features (javascript being the harder one to police). Judging from the browsing habits of my family members, they don't spend nearly as much time inside web applications as the HN news cycle would lead me to believe: some news sites, some webmail (and even there, when presented with a decent looking mail application they happily switched), the most basic functions of facebook, and "utilities" i.e. web banking, traveling, university websites.

None of these uses requires the ability to play quake3 inside firefox, or are really applications inside a webpage. Same probably goes for all the browsers in the workplace, for instance.

I'll agree with you that few sites will do progressive-enhancement (and decent accessibiliy), I'm just disappointed in the defeatist attitude of browser vendors and expert users: the idea of having a browser safe mode that you can lock down doesn't strike me as such an impossiblity and it would give some incentive to developers to put their act together.