I still manage to be surprised that rational people can accept supernatural explanations for their own subjective experiences. Read the sci.skeptic FAQ? It's good stuff. I tend to pigeonhole theists alongside UFO freaks, crystal-waving new age bubbleheads and Carlos Castaneda fans. I really cannot understand how people who use computers daily can swallow such transparent myth.
On the other hand, I recently started reading about Buddhism here, and, modulo the culturally specific far-eastern context, found it very interesting and thought-provoking. Next thing in the reading pile happened to be The Elegant Universe, which discusses superstring theory and how it unifies quantum mechanics and relativity. (Links to Amazon, sorry B&N too slow... where else is there? anyone?) This last is utterly mind-bending. Now there are still some features of the universe and cosmology that are poorly understood; some things we may never be able to know, although we can invent untestable theories about what they might mean. I can see that there is space within this framework for something... hard to comprehend. We may call this 'the mind of god' if we like, but whatever it is, is sure as hell isn't an old guy with a big beard sitting on a cloud taking an interest in the events on planet Earth.
Christian Geeks? Do me a favour.
This comment posted with mozilla!
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
I'm really surprised that Slashdot hasn't picked up these comments about the evil of Open Source. Choice extract:
"Matthew Pavlovich [of LiViD] is a leader in the so-called 'open source' movement, which is dedicated to the proposition that material, copyrighted or not, should be made available over the Internet for free. Acting in concert
with like-minded individuals throughout the world, Pavlovich engaged in purposeful, unlawful conduct directed toward substantial business enterprises in the State of California by posting DeCSS. He did so knowing that his actions would
adversely affect these business enterprises..."
It's theoretically known that comets will tend to break apart due to the sudden heating from the sun as they approach the sun. However it hasn't been observed very often before. Shoemaker-Levy 9 (which crashed into Jupiter) did this, but a different cause - tidal stress from Jupiter. This seems to have been caused by the heat from the sun causing explosive sublimation of the ices that comprise much of the comet. Given that this particular LINEAR comet (it's named for the the LINEAR automated survey which has found tons of comets) doesn't appear to have approached the sun before,the ratio of ice to dirt is likely to be high. There's also speculation that the object itself broke off a larger parent body; not sure of the details on that one. NASA's Space Science site usually has good coverage of these things (here's their LINEAR story.) Sign up for the news alert mail, you get to hear about these things before Slashdot;)
Apologies for any accidental misinfo in this.
HTH
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Many networks already do filter RFC1918 packets on their border routers. An interestingly heated discussion on the pros and cons of this is to be found on the nanog list. first message of (LONG!) thread
Yeah, well done, we're all very proud of you. You seem rather tense and unhappy though; why do you think this could be? Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
It was rather sad how many of the responses on the original story were the same knee-jerk "aww c'mon, enough of this PC crap, no-one stopping women doing computers if they want to, therefore they don't want / are unable to perform in tech roles" type nonsense. To all the young males out there feeling irritated (threatened?) by the radical paradigm-breaking idea that maybe women DO suffer from discrimination from men -- and not just from classical "corr darlin'" sexist gits, but from apparently well-educated intelligent middle-class types who/just don't think/ about what they're saying and doing.
How depressing that this gets moderated up to 5, Insightful. Some people could use a course in basic rhetoric and logic, and perhaps some social science as well...
>it can't be social pressures [...] because social pressures >steer GUYS away from technology too!
Right. And viruses can't be spreading via email on Windows, because Linux has email too !
> It's no different for girls than it is for us guys.
Refraining from abuse by a heroic effort... let me just repeat this 'Insightful' phrase again. Take a deep breath, read it through... notice anything ?
> It's no different for girls than it is for us guys.
>sniff sniff Anyone here have any actual data or studies on women in technology, or are we just gonna cite anecdotal evidence as gospel, and repeat the "common sense" ideas that we haven't really reassessed since we were 11? Ask a silly question...
1: My aunt got her BSc degree in math and CompSci at Imperial College, London, in the late 60s - an incredible achievement. She then got into teaching, and for the last 20 years has been working in the west (== very rural) of Ireland, at a Tertiary level college, teaching IT and CS. I remember her saying that twenty years ago, the classes would be full of women. Now thanks to the internet "as soon as the 14 year old boys get near a computer they cluster around it and start pulling down porn."
2: I've known several women in tech careers professionally. All of them were as good as (or better than) their male peers, and all of them (as far as I could see) were consistently patronised, marginalised, shunted into "female orientated" roles (guess who gets to handle telecoms ?) and generally treated like shit.
3: Someone recently posted a brief announcement on the NANOG list about a "women in technology" mailing list starting up. The general tone of the responses seemed to be to be amused superiority; a couple of people got/really worked up/ and came out with some embarrassingly reactionary, MCP-type sexist garbage - confirming the stereotype of male tech workers as poorly socialised, arrogant, and ignorant outside their narrow field of expertise (in which they become obsessively knowledgable.)
4: Only last week a similar discussion happened where I work; apparently intelligent, sensible programmers were seriously advancing the notion that women are genetically unable to code owing to some chromosomal imbalance.
As one of my esteemed colleagues pointed out this morning, this is mostly just the BBC hyping a (domestic) show that's going out tonight ('Panorama') with a pseudo-'news' spinoff. Read the NASA quotes carefully and it's obvious the cracker / DoSer never got near actual live production systems.
Panorama used to be good - or at least, I remember it being good, perhaps I just didn't have the web to compare it against in those days. Nowadays it's been largely dumbed down and become increasingly sensationalist, along with the rest of their (domestic terrestrial) output.
BBC News 24 (reputedly) and the World Service (from personal experience) are still good, though.
This is the funniest thing I've seen all week. Is he planning to do any testing? Yes it seems so, although he'll be sitting on top whilst it's being tested... look, mate, if you do this, you're gonna DIE. Painfully, but spectacularly. It'd be a miracle if there's enough left of him to fit in a matchbox, let alone bury.
Should be a pretty spectacular show. Here's hoping for a webcast!
The picture used to illustrate this is unlikely to be what this rumour is about. It's a southern hemisphere crater; the BBC story is talking about the bottom of Valles Marineris.
As the Mars Global Surveyor's raw dataset is up on the web the assembled/. hordes should be able to identify something, perhaps. http://barsoom.msss.com/moc_gallery/watables/mc18- M04-wa.html is a list of images from the general region.
I just got hit by an enormous electricity bill -- 650 UKP, or about (uh) $1000 -- for/three months/. This is for a small 4 bedroom house with gas-powered heating, and past bills are a sixth of this. All that's changed is that I've been running two desktops and a laptop 24/7 for the past few months (in addition to another box which has been there for three years.) I've been physically switching off monitors when not in use (for reasons of pollution as well as the bill.) I thought that apart from the monitor, the main circuitry, HD, CPU etc used a tiny amount -- 10 watts or so (a tenth of a lightbulb.) At the moment I'm disputing the bill with the power co, but could they be right ? Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Stuff radiation hardening, what about the temperature cycle ? Unless it's in an airtight container obviously fans and convection cooling aren't going to work... Plus, there's a c200 degree gradient from one side of a satellite to another, isn't there? Isn't that likely to exceed the manufacturer's approved temperature range?
This/has/ to be a hoax.
More realistically -- I've always wondered if any GPL'd code ever made it off the planet. Sure, NASA & contractors write their own code; but surely gcc or something has been folded into onboard code at some point, on something ? Anyone? Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
> In fact, the UK publishing companies have set up > a price-fixing cartel which should be > investigated sometime soon, but the price isn't > fixed _too_ high, so there's not too many > complaints.
Actually, the Net Book Agreement collapsed a couple of years ago. Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
A buffer overflow vulnerability in Mutt's handlers for the text/enriched MIME type allows malicious email messages to execute commands as the user running Mutt.
bugtraq id 664 object mutt (exec) class Boundary Condition Error cve GENERIC-MAP-NOMATCH remote Yes local Yes published September 27, 1999 updated April 11, 2000 vulnerable Mutt Mutt 0.95.6 not vulnerable Mutt Mutt 1.0pre3
Nothing comparable with Outlook's abominable security model, and of course it could only trash your own files... but just cos you're on Linux doesn't mean you're 100% safe. Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
By this standard the ILOVEYOU author must also have been a white-hat -- well, grey-hat anyway -- consider, (a) 'ILOVEYOU' subjectline, without spaces, thus v easy to filter; (b) the fact that it could clearly have been/way/ more destructive.
[off-topic] Still it doesn't seem to have had much effect on luser's behaviour. I guess we'll just have to wait for the Big One before people start to realise that an office with Microsoft/anywhere/ is a disaster waiting to happen. Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Something I always wanted to do back when I worked in a Windows shop -- back up the standard IT dept warnings about not opening attachments by writing a simple program to mail us back saying "User x just opened an attachment." After a round of public humiliations everyone would be told that this would be a continuous policy, and would henceforth be a disciplinary offence.
Naturally the idea was a complete non-starter. The whole reason they used Outlook in the first place was so they could send each other pretty HTMLified mail with, like, colours ! and fonts ! and stiuff; plus they were always mailing 100Mb Excel and Access docs around to each other. Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Re:More info -- from one of the deposed
on
DeCSS Update
·
· Score: 2
Hmmm. Ob_IANAL... but what if you routinely wipe free space using GPG (can GPG do that? I know PGP can), delete all email once you've read it, and don't keep archives of (eg) mailing lists ?
If you haven't got a copy of the file, they can't ask you for it -- they don't know you ever had it. Is simple prudence and best practice for data security now against the law ? Presumably not, until you are notified to retain everything related to the case. At which point one unsubscribes from lists, alerts everyone you have email contact with, and so on ?
... you faked the flu to get day off school to watch the first Shuttle launch back in '81. STS looked much cooler before they stopped painting the external tank white... Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Of course it's a log scale. Oh look there's just been a big correction and the market now appears to be back on the long term trend line.
I was going to indulge in a long Katz rant but then I thoughtr, what's the point ?
The idea that tech stocks are wildly over-valued isn't exactly a big secret. The phrase "irrational exurberance" itself was comes from Alan Greenspan[1], who's been trying to talk it down for at least 3 years AFAIK.
( [1] Chairman of the Federal Reserve for the benefit of the ignorant.) Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Slashdot Mirror
I still manage to be surprised that rational people can accept supernatural explanations for their own subjective experiences. Read the sci.skeptic FAQ? It's good stuff. I tend to pigeonhole theists alongside UFO freaks, crystal-waving new age bubbleheads and Carlos Castaneda fans. I really cannot understand how people who use computers daily can swallow such transparent myth.
On the other hand, I recently started reading about Buddhism here, and, modulo the culturally specific far-eastern context, found it very interesting and thought-provoking. Next thing in the reading pile happened to be The Elegant Universe, which discusses superstring theory and how it unifies quantum mechanics and relativity. (Links to Amazon, sorry B&N too slow... where else is there? anyone?) This last is utterly mind-bending. Now there are still some features of the universe and cosmology that are poorly understood; some things we may never be able to know, although we can invent untestable theories about what they might mean. I can see that there is space within this framework for something... hard to comprehend. We may call this 'the mind of god' if we like, but whatever it is, is sure as hell isn't an old guy with a big beard sitting on a cloud taking an interest in the events on planet Earth.
Christian Geeks? Do me a favour.
This comment posted with mozilla!
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Apologies for any accidental misinfo in this.
HTH
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Many networks already do filter RFC1918 packets on their border routers. An interestingly heated discussion on the pros and cons of this is to be found on the nanog list. first message of (LONG!) thread
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Told you so.
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Yeah, well done, we're all very proud of you. You seem rather tense and unhappy though; why do you think this could be?
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
It was rather sad how many of the responses on the original story were the same knee-jerk "aww c'mon, enough of this PC crap, no-one stopping women doing computers if they want to, therefore they don't want / are unable to perform in tech roles" type nonsense. To all the young males out there feeling irritated (threatened?) by the radical paradigm-breaking idea that maybe women DO suffer from discrimination from men -- and not just from classical "corr darlin'" sexist gits, but from apparently well-educated intelligent middle-class types who /just don't think/ about what they're saying and doing.
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
>it can't be social pressures [...] because social pressures
>steer GUYS away from technology too!
Right. And viruses can't be spreading via email on Windows, because Linux has email too !
> It's no different for girls than it is for us guys.
Refraining from abuse by a heroic effort... let me just repeat this 'Insightful' phrase again. Take a deep breath, read it through... notice anything ?
> It's no different for girls than it is for us guys.
>sniff sniff Anyone here have any actual data or studies on women in technology, or are we just gonna cite anecdotal evidence as gospel, and repeat the "common sense" ideas that we haven't really reassessed since we were 11? Ask a silly question...
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
1: My aunt got her BSc degree in math and CompSci at Imperial College, London, in the late 60s - an incredible achievement. She then got into teaching, and for the last 20 years has been working in the west (== very rural) of Ireland, at a Tertiary level college, teaching IT and CS. I remember her saying that twenty years ago, the classes would be full of women. Now thanks to the internet "as soon as the 14 year old boys get near a computer they cluster around it and start pulling down porn."
2: I've known several women in tech careers professionally. All of them were as good as (or better than) their male peers, and all of them (as far as I could see) were consistently patronised, marginalised, shunted into "female orientated" roles (guess who gets to handle telecoms ?) and generally treated like shit.
3: Someone recently posted a brief announcement on the NANOG list about a "women in technology" mailing list starting up. The general tone of the responses seemed to be to be amused superiority; a couple of people got /really worked up/ and came out with some embarrassingly reactionary, MCP-type sexist garbage - confirming the stereotype of male tech workers as poorly socialised, arrogant, and ignorant outside their narrow field of expertise (in which they become obsessively knowledgable.)
4: Only last week a similar discussion happened where I work; apparently intelligent, sensible programmers were seriously advancing the notion that women are genetically unable to code owing to some chromosomal imbalance.
;)
Draw your own conclusions. Oh, you already have
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Panorama used to be good - or at least, I remember it being good, perhaps I just didn't have the web to compare it against in those days. Nowadays it's been largely dumbed down and become increasingly sensationalist, along with the rest of their (domestic terrestrial) output.
BBC News 24 (reputedly) and the World Service (from personal experience) are still good, though.
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Should be a pretty spectacular show. Here's hoping for a webcast!
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
context map of what /might/ be the general area.
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
As the Mars Global Surveyor's raw dataset is up on the web the assembled /. hordes should be able to identify something, perhaps. http://barsoom.msss.com/moc_gallery/watables/mc18- M04-wa.html is a list of images from the general region.
Enjoy !
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
many thanks for the info -- just what I needed to know.
\a
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
I just got hit by an enormous electricity bill -- 650 UKP, or about (uh) $1000 -- for /three months/. This is for a small 4 bedroom house with gas-powered heating, and past bills are a sixth of this. All that's changed is that I've been running two desktops and a laptop 24/7 for the past few months (in addition to another box which has been there for three years.) I've been physically switching off monitors when not in use (for reasons of pollution as well as the bill.) I thought that apart from the monitor, the main circuitry, HD, CPU etc used a tiny amount -- 10 watts or so (a tenth of a lightbulb.) At the moment I'm disputing the bill with the power co, but could they be right ?
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
This /has/ to be a hoax.
More realistically -- I've always wondered if any GPL'd code ever made it off the planet. Sure, NASA & contractors write their own code; but surely gcc or something has been folded into onboard code at some point, on something ? Anyone?
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
> In fact, the UK publishing companies have set up
> a price-fixing cartel which should be
> investigated sometime soon, but the price isn't
> fixed _too_ high, so there's not too many
> complaints.
Actually, the Net Book Agreement collapsed a couple of years ago.
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Don't be so proud of this technological terror you've created ....
d =664:
... but just cos you're on Linux doesn't mean you're 100% safe.
http://www.securityfocus.com/vdb/bottom.html?vi
Mutt Text/Enriched Handler Buffer Overflow Vulnerability
A buffer overflow vulnerability in Mutt's handlers for the text/enriched MIME type allows malicious
email messages to execute commands as the user running Mutt.
bugtraq id
664
object
mutt (exec)
class
Boundary Condition Error
cve
GENERIC-MAP-NOMATCH
remote
Yes
local
Yes
published
September 27, 1999
updated
April 11, 2000
vulnerable
Mutt Mutt 0.95.6
not vulnerable
Mutt Mutt 1.0pre3
Nothing comparable with Outlook's abominable security model, and of course it could only trash your own files
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
[off-topic] Still it doesn't seem to have had much effect on luser's behaviour. I guess we'll just have to wait for the Big One before people start to realise that an office with Microsoft /anywhere/ is a disaster waiting to happen.
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Naturally the idea was a complete non-starter. The whole reason they used Outlook in the first place was so they could send each other pretty HTMLified mail with, like, colours ! and fonts ! and stiuff; plus they were always mailing 100Mb Excel and Access docs around to each other.
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
If you haven't got a copy of the file, they can't ask you for it -- they don't know you ever had it. Is simple prudence and best practice for data security now against the law ? Presumably not, until you are notified to retain everything related to the case. At which point one unsubscribes from lists, alerts everyone you have email contact with, and so on ?
Clue me in, someone ?
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
... you faked the flu to get day off school to watch the first Shuttle launch back in '81. STS looked much cooler before they stopped painting the external tank white ...
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Irony: it's sorta like coppery, but a bit darker ?
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my
Of course it's a log scale. Oh look there's just been a big correction and the market now appears to be back on the long term trend line.
I was going to indulge in a long Katz rant but then I thoughtr, what's the point ?
The idea that tech stocks are wildly over-valued isn't exactly a big secret. The phrase "irrational exurberance" itself was comes from Alan Greenspan[1], who's been trying to talk it down for at least 3 years AFAIK.
( [1] Chairman of the Federal Reserve for the benefit of the ignorant.)
Camaron de la Isla 'When I sing with pleasure, my