Schmidt Predicts Digital Sky Is Falling
Danse writes "Former Microsoft security chief Howard Schmidt now works for the government as the vice chairman of the Critical Infrastructure Protection Board. According to this article on Security Focus, he has been touring the country, proclaiming the dangers of "zero-day viruses" and "affinity worms" that will create the kind of havoc that nothing else short of a nuclear exchange could cause. "Traffic lights, pacemakers, appliances -- all subject to outages and interruptions because in the future they're controlled via Internet, declares Schmidt. The power grid could fail catastrophically by 2005!" How do you argue with this kind of rhetoric, especially when it's being spread directly by government officials to corporate leaders?"
Can someone spell "Prophte de malheur"?
All your heart are belong to us!
I hate filters
you hate filters
We all hate filters
from the dict-cullion dept.
I'm guessing Michael actually read this article.
This guy George, he's just a fucking moron. Move on, nothing to see here.
Happy Troll Tuesday!
OPEN SOURCE MISCONCEPTIONS
By Serial Troller
Myth: Open Source is written by heterosexuals.
Fact: All Open Source development is done by raging homosexuals. The more flaming examples include Anal Cox, Linus Turdballs, Eric Ass-Reaming Raymond, and the entire Slashdot crew. The ringleader of the slashdotters, a man named CmdrTaco, engages in a practice known as Taco-snotting, along with his faggot-buddies Jeff Homos Bates and CowBoiKneel.
Myth: Open Source is written for heterosexuals.
Fact: Using Open Source software can cause suppressed homosexual fantasies to surface, leading to all out flaming faggotry within 6-8 weeks. Anecdotes of otherwise hetero men turning queer are far too numerous to count, but a few examples stand out. In one case, a man was arrested loitering outside an elementary school and making sexual overtures to several children: he quickly confessed that shortly after installing the Mozilla browser on his computer, he began to have uncontrollable urges to, to put it simply, have his cock sucked off by little boys. He soon met several other like-minded men through discussions on the Bugger Zilla mailing list (all already homosexuals), who together kidnapped a total of seven children whom they brought back to their apartment and sodomized. The other two men are still at large and believed to still be using Mozilla.
Myth: Open Source is multicultural.
Fact: Open Source is openly racist.
Myth: Open Source is democratic.
Fact: Open Source is controlled by a few narrow-minded zealots (mentioned throughout this post), most of whom are either Communists, Stalinists, Nazis, or Fascists. Additionally, Open Source supports terrorism.
Myth: Open Source is tolerant of religious preferences.
Fact: Open Source developers regularly engage in holy wars over the superiority of various Open Source projects, such as the Emacs program (preferred by Christians) versus vi (used mostly by neo-pagans and Satanists); or the KDE desktop (a favorite among Muslims) versus the GNOME project (particularly favored by Jews). Posts initiating crusades or jihads against other developers can be found regularly throughout the newsgroups and mailing lists.
Myth: Open Source is tolerant of sexual preference.
Fact: See above. Either you are a homo, you become a homo, or you never visit Richard Stallman alone in his office and hope to God you never meet him on the street at night.
Myth: Open Source is tolerant of political differences.
Fact: Open Source is an anarcho-communist philosophy bent on the destruction of capitalism. The very same Richard Stallman, a man whose name is disturbingly reminiscent of Stalin, has stated several times in public that his vision includes the subjugation of all who own intellectual properties under the jackboot of the GPL. The GPL is a pernicious piece of literature lifted straight from Karl Marxs Communist Manifesto, and is fortunately banned in many democratic nations.
* * * * * UPDATE * * * * *
Myth: Open Source programming is a harlmess, healthy activity.
Fact: Open Source programming has been known to lead to massive obesity, violent tendencies with an obsession with handguns, paranoid-delusional ranting, and in severe cases, complete insanity. If anyone you know is thinking about going Open Source, stop them before its too late!
* * * * * UPDATE * * * * *
____________________
2002 Serial Troller. Permission to reproduce this document is granted provided that you send all the bukkake porn you can find to serialtroller@hotmail.com.
- posted by poopbot: because we're all crapflooders at heart
BVlDAdnSZB Post #475
Unless you really love shopping like my girlfriend, wouldn't you rather spend your time and energy doing something else?
When I think about things like this, I think about how nice it would be to have a servant that knew exactly what I like, shopped around for the best price, stocked my frig, and even prepaired my food for me.
I cannot afford a servant, but you have to wonder how well technology will some day be able to provide these kind of services at a reasonible price.
You could imagine a service which analyzes you and your needs, analyzes the contents of your frig, and analyzes the current or forcasted prices of the items it predicts you will need. Such a service could potentially make purchasing decisions better than you can, and all automatically without you ever thinking about it. And you could imagine that these items are then delivered right to your frig all at a low price: much lower than the cost of a servant, and perhaps even lower than if you had shopped for them yourself.
You could imagine that the service is highly customizable and learns more about you the more you use it. For example, maybe you don't care about different kinds of pasta so much, so it gets a cheaper kind. But it learns that you really care about beer, so it only gets certain kinds. You could even imagine that it uses the information that it knows about you and networks with other services and discovers products that you have a high probability of really liking.
You could imagine this service using your schedule data to help make decisions. "Hello, I see you are watching the football game this weekend. Will the guys be coming over as well? I have permissions to read their personal food preferences. Would you like me to prepair for a party?"
I recognize that many people may react to this scenario with dislike, and that such a service would never do as good a job as they could do themselves.
But don't forget that assembly coders had this same exact attitude about Fortran compilers. Today, I really doubt that many developers could write assembly as well as a good compiler. And even if they could, for most projects, it's a major waste of time and energy.
Just a thought.
"The only rights you have are the rights you are willing to fight for."
Actually, I can easily imagine the desire to design a larger-scale system for a city's traffic lights. I agree that such an algorithm is not simple to design, but that doesn't mean that it's beyond our collective capabilities.
And my guess is that it would be in most cases several orders of magnitude less expensive for a city to optimize their traffic lights to yeild the optimal flow than simply build more streets or widen existing ones.
As a simple example: consider one smart light that can sense when a greater flow of traffic is crossing east/west than north/south. To compensate, it extends the east/west green time. But now, the traffic lights in the surrounding intersections are not going to be green at the "right" time. For traffic flow purposes, it is advantageous to keep cars from stopping. Thus, the surrounding lights should know about a light's timing to help keep the flow of traffic moving as much as possible.
An interesting question might be, how well can you do if only the surrounding lights know about eachother's timing? This is starting to sound like the standard network flow algorithms.
"The only rights you have are the rights you are willing to fight for."