who calls people 'Boobs' any more srsly? I guess, somebody who knows he's trolling and expects to be sued for libel calls people 'Boobs,' Boob. I really look forward to reading the article to see whether the judge's reasoning matches the defendant's argument. If it goes anything like "My client made such a Boob of himself, no reasonable person could take him srsly," that would be even funnier than the/.ers' witticisms. And anyway, now that this ruling is on record, can we expect the case to be cited as precedent in similar cases, and eventually, for the "Boobie Defense" to be as common in libel cases as the "Diminished Capacity" defense is in murder cases? Before long, complaints from people who claim they didn't expect their coffee to be hot won't be taken seriously either, I hope.
The stated purpose of the United States' patent system is to encourage innovation, for profit. Pursuing the best ideas and being first to market them is not the only means of profiting. Many successful companies have profited by developing the best refinements of the expression of the previous generation's best ideas. If property was defined only to include tangible assets, free market competition would increase many avenues of innovation, which are presently retarded by restrictions on access to patented ideas.
Nobody forced you to read it. Comments can be off-topic, but IMO your comment amounts to calling the article itself off-topic, and that is absurd; it's nerdy. I probably would have moderated that down as "Troll" if I had the chance, but I agree with the "-1" for that comment.
That's more like it! There are some good "surveillance society" conversations above, but this particular article doesn't show enough thinking to take seriously. It's a nice creme-puff issue to try to build name recognition for somebody like "Jim Dempsey, policy director at the Center for Democracy and Technology, a nonpartisan group that monitors privacy issues," but it's nothing like retroactive immunity for service providers who cooperate with surveillance requests they knew to be illegal all along.
One intelligence official, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said he had no evidence of activity by terrorist cells or widespread organized crime in virtual worlds. There have been numerous instances of fraud, harassment and other virtual crimes. Some computer users have used their avatars to destroy virtual buildings. My guess is that this research paper began with a responsible analyst saying something like "I wish terrorists were this easy to find," and an incompetent co-worker taking that casual remark to an illogical conclusion.
Some might say incompetent, but that tends to be taken as pejorative. I'm thinking more "developmentally disabled," because they may simply not be capable of researching good intelligence anymore. You misspelled "pejorative," an understandable mistake. If you had renewed the passport of a dead hijacker after his name had been published, I wouldn't hesitate to label you "incompetent."
That's damn straight. WTF is it with Government when they say shit like this? What, they think the rest of the World is too stupid to do this? That was just the left hand. At the same time, the right hand wanted access to the logs of the servers that host that information. We can just hope there is half as much inter-agency collaboration as the average/.-er can imagine in a 5 minute analysis.
The district's response was: "If you audit, we're moving to an entirely Linux desktop and curriculum, including educating our students on how to use Linux on the desktop, the home and the workplace."
And Microsoft cancelled the audit. The Microsoft response is a good indication of the real difficulty of switching to Linux. The idea that one expert sysadmin would have any more difficulty managing an all-Linux network than an all-Windows network is really kinda silly, now that I think about it. Ha! FUD just has more "traction" in the general public "mind share" than facts.
I think if you look at any of my slash dot posts about any topic in the past the theme is always... I'm really much more interested in the message than the messenger. Now, back to whodunnit:
"There are times when things can be accidentally coincidental. But when the probability mathematical odds get really high, then the question should always be: was it deliberate? No problems, yet.
If it was terrorists there is a high likely hood that there would be a: "look what we did" news cast. But if it were the covert actions of a semi legitimate government, then it would be made to look accidental." That's a specific claim, and with insufficient data to support it. That's all I have to say about this.
That's it, now you are doing your homework! Nice try. My homework was already done. Now, go and do yours. You claimed that when I called you on your specific claims without evidence, I was making an "assumption." In fact, I was stating the very opposite, refusal to accept any assumption, including yours, without proof, which you still have not provided. The link above only offers a plausible motive for sabotage, not positive evidence. And I never said sabotage wasn't plausible, so you haven't disproved or successfully rebutted anything that I have said, only what you've projected.
I'm sorry to hear about your financial loss. I hope your portfolio was diversified.
Econ 101: regulation is a barrier to new entrants to any market.
there has never been a single law passed by the government that makes life hard on you open source lemmings. name me just one. i know you won't take me up on this challenge because you can't. All big-business regulations favor the biggest businesses by making the cost of doing business prohibitively high to those who don't already have $ billions. You count them yourself.
the most you guys claim is that they buy their way into the government. And into professional organizations, which re-classify their proprietary garbage as "standards."
W3C HTML 5.0 draft, section 1.1.3, for example
i hate to break it to you but even in small governments there is corruption. In every society, and every profession, there is some corruption. Smaller government means the corrupt ones in government have less power to abuse. There, I fixed that.
The state cannot punish private citizens for enabling behavior while enabling the same behavior itself. Until the same regulations are applied to all government subsidies, they violate equal protection.
(Actually, just remembering: the other one I've been asked about is shared addressbooks; LDAP works, but is almost completely uneditable by the end user, who is usually the secretary given a pile of business cards to enter...) Then somebody in IT has already hypothetically failed to tell the secretary how to format her typing so the admin can do ldiff, or to make the needed changes to group membership for the secretary to do ldiff, also. I don't know LDAP well, but you can't lay the blame for that on the software, IMO. Probably applies to most criticisms of Linux as "too difficult." Oh well, the market that ignores anything more complicated than point-&-click "too difficult" deserves Mega-D.
One would argue that one of the many triumphs of modern democracy and western institutions is acknowledging the 'general will' of society. That is a valid point, but it cannot be understated. The freedom of individuals to decide for ourselves what is most helpful to us to learn in pursuit of our happiness is far more important than any derived benefit of the tendency of collectives to pursue the 'general will.' That is an artifact of collective, institutional recognition of individual rights, and requires no special accommodation to operate, just as the "Invisible Hand" of free economic competition does not require special statutory recognition of corporatist interests.
Sure, I heard of Global Crossing, they were really big news just a few years back. I can't seem to remember what it was, but wasn't there something odd about their demise?
One thing you missed, and office drones have regularly mentioned to me: calendaring, and specifically calendar sharing. I don't see anything missing from Evolution that Outlook was able to do, the last time I used that.
If there's one thing drones like, it's knowing when they can schedule meetings. There are some attempts at calendaring on Linux, but I haven't noticed a cleanly working solution yet, although some of the pieces appear to finally be in place... I admit, I'm not trying to be up-to-the minute on "calendaring," mostly because verbification of nouns gives me the shivers. What do office drones want that Evolution doesn't do?
I don't know about the "office drone."
I am purposely ignoring Linux niche markets such as servers et al, we are talking about the home user/gamer/office drone. For everybody who doesn't demand the highest video frame rates, and is even vaguely aware that any "functionality" lost to unsupported ActiveX controls is the necessary cost of a reasonable degree of security, I think Linux is the way to go. Or, maybe a BSD Unix-based OS. I'll agree, Linux support for games will be a weakness as long as video rendering is beholden to DirectX, but that doesn't matter to a lot of home users, and office drones just need a word processor and a spreadsheet, and maybe Base, unless they're drones in a video game developer's office, I guess. I see no shortcomings in Linux, except to video game-players. The office drones I know just want to browse the web and send e-mails & IMs, and have a working sound card without having to know that a "sound card" is a distinct, removable component. If an install disc comes with a straightforward recipe, that says "Do A, B & C to make sound come out of that green hole that you connect with a cable to your headphones or speakers," they're happy to spend the time to set it up -- once -- as long as it "just works" after that. As soon as that happens, it can be "The Year Of The Linux Desktop," for most users. I really think so, and everybody is sick of this shit:
My Hawker battery cost over $400 bux. This drives a UPS which puts out 120 volts AC which goes into a switching power supply which puts out 5 & 12 volts DC. I think there are some optimizations which can take place here. Hilarious!
That's it, now you are doing your homework! Thanks -- I think.
In the United States, "that's it" can either mean "that's right/good job" or "that's the last straw!!" which is what our previous conversations predispose me to expect. But, then, "doing your homework" is pretty much always complimentary, so I lean towards interpreting "that's it" as a compliment. Also, I have an enormous ego, so I pretty much expect compliments, at any time.;-)
They take out your cables, they take out your satellites, jam your radio waves, and pretty soon you are blind and deaf. Then they attack. That region is so peaceful, this could never happen, right. I bet the Israelis see it that way too. A lot of things are just what they seem, but sometimes they are not. That's certainly one factor in making an educated guess. Another is that nobody likes being invaded, or even having a war in their neighborhood. Although in the long-term refugees are likely to become very appreciative, productive & vocally loyal additions to freer society than the one they left, few politicians' terms are that long, so politically, refugees are widely seen as a short-term nuisance, only. And, the regional tension that you correctly noted also has the well-known effect that all nations are about as well-armed as they're able to be, in order to deter their enemies from attack. Lastly, lacking the ability to pull up CNN.com, et al, will keep the civilians relatively less informed, but based on what I know, military operations use different, more robust methods of communication. Cutting civilian communications might be a very distant prelude to eventual attack, but to be honest, its likelihood of leading to riots and such makes it seem more like a terrorist tactic.
You cannot 'cheat' at war. Anything goes, that is the point. So, the only 'cheating' that could occur in a wargame, would be doing something unsafe. Say like using live ammunition rather than blanks.
The point of wargames is to prepare for possible situations, and train people how to react to them. If you fail to anticipate a situation, you have a weakness that can be exploited. I agree in general, but not with this particular cheat.
Michael Chertoff, in Wired:
"They point out where your expectations of your capabilities may be overstated," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the AP. "They may reveal to you things you haven't thought about. It's a good way of testing that you're going to do the job the way you think you were. It's the difference between doing drills and doing a scrimmage." I don't see the article saying that particular computer vulnerability was previously unknown. In fact, requesting that everybody not target the server suggests that the particular exploit is a known weakness, thus use of it is redundant to the organizers & lazy on the part of the cheaters, not insightful & informative & funny, & all-around, it's definitely not worthy of the prize. Of course, somebody among the organizers probably thought of that, and somebody else really should have listened more attentively. Wired:Perplexed organizers sent everyone an urgent e-mail marked "IMPORTANT!" instructing them not to probe or attack the game's control computers.
"Any time you get a group of (information technology) experts together, there's always a desire, 'Let's show them what we can do,'" said George Foresman, a former senior Homeland Security official. "Whether its intent was embarrassment or a prank, we had to temper the enthusiasm of the players."
The exercise was a big deal for all concerned.
The $3 million, invitation-only war game simulated what the U.S. describes as plausible attacks over five days in February 2006 against the technology industry, transportation lines and energy utilities by anti-globalization hackers. The government is organizing a multimillion-dollar "Cyber Storm 2," to take place in early March. They offered $3 million to the winner, left playing by the rules to "the honor system," and the organizers were "perplexed" that somebody cheated? That is stupid! They'll need to make it an "invitation, to use our-crippled-terminals-only war game" next time, and simulate the whole thing on an isolated LAN, if they want that kind of controlled simulation. Or, they can just repeat the same mistake, I guess, and hope it works better this time.
You make the assumption... That is your own assumption, and is not quite correct. You actually don't know that I've concluded one version or another. What I have said to you so far is only that your estimate of the improbability of the specific claims reported might not account for some relevant, statistically significant variables, such as strength of ocean currents and numbers of vessels anchored in the vicinities of important fiber optic cables. I don't know that to be the correct explanation. I do insist, based on what has been reported and on what remains totally unreported, on not discarding the benign explanation out of hand before I decide which version of events seems likeliest to me.
... that what is reported is always accurate, or even the intended truth. That might be a little bit naive. Oh no, those in control or who might lose face never manipulate the media, do they?
For systems with built-in redundancy, you might question the odds, of a complete failure. OK, let's get specific. "For systems with built-in redundancy" in general, I do indeed tend to more suspiciously "question the odds of a complete failure." It depends how redundant, and what type of system you're describing. So, back to my first comment to you in this thread, I don't have specific information that supports the conclusion that the reported interruptions are necessarily beyond the realm of possibility. Do you?
When talking about foreign nations whose leaders have antagonistic personal or ideological relationships, I also tend to be less willing to assume the worst. More than enough of that goes on without my help, for my liking. I might turn out to be wrong, but if inaction is incorrectly taken until more solid information is available, no harm is done. Making the opposite mistake is a more serious matter.
Or why do cables come ashore, at ports or where ships normally anchor? Or do they? It was suggested above that because of lousy weather, many ports have had difficulty accommodating all the boats wanting to dock. As a result, there have recently been vessels anchored where they normally do not, close to shore but not in designated ports. Until I have more specific information about a particular act of sabotage, I'm not going to assume that I know something that I really know to be mere speculation, however plausible the explanation is for the limited set of facts you're considering. That kind of thing seems to me more suited to a James Bond movie than discussion of real-world events. Do you like James Bond? Bourne?
Some of these considerations might even be a bit of a credulity stretch don't you think. Not until I know that the waters in the locations in question were in fact calm at the time, and that whatever ship's anchors sliced each line had "no good reason" to be anchored in each of those places. So far, I don't know anything of the kind, partly because you have provided no specific information to lead me to that assumption. Of course, neither has anybody else, but most people have not made the claims that you have.
But when the probability mathematical odds get really high, then the question should always be: was it deliberate? If I had noticed your alias before replying to you above, I probably would have put that a little bit differently than challenging you to model the scenario in a computer simulation. I think you're missing an important aspect of the 'bigpicture;' specifically, the conclusion that the odds are 'really high' against everything other than your hypothesis ignores the scenario somebody else already proposed above, that boats were anchored in rough waters and their anchors were dragged through some fiber optic cable, which I think is very plausible. Have a nice day.
Slashdot Mirror
The stated purpose of the United States' patent system is to encourage innovation, for profit. Pursuing the best ideas and being first to market them is not the only means of profiting. Many successful companies have profited by developing the best refinements of the expression of the previous generation's best ideas. If property was defined only to include tangible assets, free market competition would increase many avenues of innovation, which are presently retarded by restrictions on access to patented ideas.
Nobody forced you to read it. Comments can be off-topic, but IMO your comment amounts to calling the article itself off-topic, and that is absurd; it's nerdy. I probably would have moderated that down as "Troll" if I had the chance, but I agree with the "-1" for that comment.
I wonder if they're just in lower orbits than the space station.
& I guess I missed it last month.
And Microsoft cancelled the audit. The Microsoft response is a good indication of the real difficulty of switching to Linux. The idea that one expert sysadmin would have any more difficulty managing an all-Linux network than an all-Windows network is really kinda silly, now that I think about it. Ha! FUD just has more "traction" in the general public "mind share" than facts.
Google hit #4 for "early quiet sun": http://www.esa.int/esaCP/Pr_7_1996_i_EN.html
I'm sorry to hear about your financial loss. I hope your portfolio was diversified.
W3C HTML 5.0 draft, section 1.1.3, for example i hate to break it to you but even in small governments there is corruption. In every society, and every profession, there is some corruption. Smaller government means the corrupt ones in government have less power to abuse. There, I fixed that.
The state cannot punish private citizens for enabling behavior while enabling the same behavior itself. Until the same regulations are applied to all government subsidies, they violate equal protection.
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/02/02/1645222
Sure, I heard of Global Crossing, they were really big news just a few years back. I can't seem to remember what it was, but wasn't there something odd about their demise?
Latest botnet
In the United States, "that's it" can either mean "that's right/good job" or "that's the last straw!!" which is what our previous conversations predispose me to expect. But, then, "doing your homework" is pretty much always complimentary, so I lean towards interpreting "that's it" as a compliment. Also, I have an enormous ego, so I pretty much expect compliments, at any time.
They take out your cables, they take out your satellites, jam your radio waves, and pretty soon you are blind and deaf. Then they attack. That region is so peaceful, this could never happen, right. I bet the Israelis see it that way too. A lot of things are just what they seem, but sometimes they are not. That's certainly one factor in making an educated guess. Another is that nobody likes being invaded, or even having a war in their neighborhood. Although in the long-term refugees are likely to become very appreciative, productive & vocally loyal additions to freer society than the one they left, few politicians' terms are that long, so politically, refugees are widely seen as a short-term nuisance, only. And, the regional tension that you correctly noted also has the well-known effect that all nations are about as well-armed as they're able to be, in order to deter their enemies from attack. Lastly, lacking the ability to pull up CNN.com, et al, will keep the civilians relatively less informed, but based on what I know, military operations use different, more robust methods of communication. Cutting civilian communications might be a very distant prelude to eventual attack, but to be honest, its likelihood of leading to riots and such makes it seem more like a terrorist tactic.
The point of wargames is to prepare for possible situations, and train people how to react to them. If you fail to anticipate a situation, you have a weakness that can be exploited. I agree in general, but not with this particular cheat.
Michael Chertoff, in Wired: "They point out where your expectations of your capabilities may be overstated," Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the AP. "They may reveal to you things you haven't thought about. It's a good way of testing that you're going to do the job the way you think you were. It's the difference between doing drills and doing a scrimmage." I don't see the article saying that particular computer vulnerability was previously unknown. In fact, requesting that everybody not target the server suggests that the particular exploit is a known weakness, thus use of it is redundant to the organizers & lazy on the part of the cheaters, not insightful & informative & funny, & all-around, it's definitely not worthy of the prize. Of course, somebody among the organizers probably thought of that, and somebody else really should have listened more attentively.
Wired: Perplexed organizers sent everyone an urgent e-mail marked "IMPORTANT!" instructing them not to probe or attack the game's control computers.
"Any time you get a group of (information technology) experts together, there's always a desire, 'Let's show them what we can do,'" said George Foresman, a former senior Homeland Security official. "Whether its intent was embarrassment or a prank, we had to temper the enthusiasm of the players."
The exercise was a big deal for all concerned.
The $3 million, invitation-only war game simulated what the U.S. describes as plausible attacks over five days in February 2006 against the technology industry, transportation lines and energy utilities by anti-globalization hackers. The government is organizing a multimillion-dollar "Cyber Storm 2," to take place in early March. They offered $3 million to the winner, left playing by the rules to "the honor system," and the organizers were "perplexed" that somebody cheated? That is stupid! They'll need to make it an "invitation, to use our-crippled-terminals-only war game" next time, and simulate the whole thing on an isolated LAN, if they want that kind of controlled simulation. Or, they can just repeat the same mistake, I guess, and hope it works better this time.
... that what is reported is always accurate, or even the intended truth. That might be a little bit naive. Oh no, those in control or who might lose face never manipulate the media, do they?For systems with built-in redundancy, you might question the odds, of a complete failure. OK, let's get specific. "For systems with built-in redundancy" in general, I do indeed tend to more suspiciously "question the odds of a complete failure." It depends how redundant, and what type of system you're describing. So, back to my first comment to you in this thread, I don't have specific information that supports the conclusion that the reported interruptions are necessarily beyond the realm of possibility. Do you?
When talking about foreign nations whose leaders have antagonistic personal or ideological relationships, I also tend to be less willing to assume the worst. More than enough of that goes on without my help, for my liking. I might turn out to be wrong, but if inaction is incorrectly taken until more solid information is available, no harm is done. Making the opposite mistake is a more serious matter. Or why do cables come ashore, at ports or where ships normally anchor? Or do they? It was suggested above that because of lousy weather, many ports have had difficulty accommodating all the boats wanting to dock. As a result, there have recently been vessels anchored where they normally do not, close to shore but not in designated ports. Until I have more specific information about a particular act of sabotage, I'm not going to assume that I know something that I really know to be mere speculation, however plausible the explanation is for the limited set of facts you're considering. That kind of thing seems to me more suited to a James Bond movie than discussion of real-world events. Do you like James Bond? Bourne? Some of these considerations might even be a bit of a credulity stretch don't you think. Not until I know that the waters in the locations in question were in fact calm at the time, and that whatever ship's anchors sliced each line had "no good reason" to be anchored in each of those places. So far, I don't know anything of the kind, partly because you have provided no specific information to lead me to that assumption. Of course, neither has anybody else, but most people have not made the claims that you have.
Have a great day!