Absolutely; I was pretty astounded when I found out that Umberto Eco wrote his books in Italian. I can only assume that the original works are at least as good as the English translations, which are, in a word, awesome.
I think some creationists can't distinguish between the theory of man's evolution and the general theory of evolution. They think that our inability to trace exactly how mankind evolved is some kind of flaw in the theory of evolution. Of course it is nothing of the sort.
The process of evolution is a fact, backed up by mountains of evidence. We can even see it happen over short timescales of a few days or weeks.
The exact details of how mankind evolved are always being rethought and sometimes we discard an old theory when we find contrary evidence. Nothing in our lack of knowledge or the mistakes of the past invalidates anything related to the theory itself.
I think that creationists sometimes have an opposite problem as well. They may well be happy to accept the fact of animal evolution but be unable to apply it to mankind. Their church teaches that Man is "special", made in God's image and so on, and so therefore Man could not have evolved from Apes or lesser species.
It's probably a case of one's religious beliefs causing bias in the evaluation of the independent evidence supporting evolution.
www.philosophers.co.uk has
some great games related to religion and logic, and they explain the
results they get from large numbers of people playing their games.
Here's a relevant analysis from the site:
There are a number of important implications of the fact that we tend to be bad at the Wason selection task (and indeed, other similar tasks, e.g., the conjunction problem). One has to do with the notion of justified belief. If a belief is recognised to be based on defective reasoning, then to continue to believe it is not justified. But if we systematically, and unconsciously, reason badly, then the extent to which reason actually acts as a constraint on belief is a moot point.
And here's another relevant quote (this one from the 'Taboo' game)...
The other point to make is that it is possible that a judgement that harm occurs is an ex post facto rationalisation of a prior intuition that the acts depicted here are morally wrong. In other words, people don't like things like incest and sex with poultry, they are pretty good at inventing stories to explain why they don't like them, but, in fact, they don't like them regardless. We already know that people engage in this kind of retroactive reasoning when justifying their responses to taboo type stimuli (see Haidt, Koller and Dias). We also know that judgements of wrongdoing by people who take a moralising stance towards the kinds of acts depicted here are better predicted by asking them whether they would be bothered to see these acts than by asking them whether anyone is harmed. The suspicion, then, is that a judgement that harm occurs is simply a buttress of a prior baseline moral commitment.
The analogy is that refusal to accept the theory of evolution despite the many, many facts in its favour is a consequence of one's deeply held religious beliefs causing an inability to rationally evaluate new (and conflicting) evidence. To accept wholeheartedly the truth of the evolution theory may require abandonment of prior beliefs. The adherent has some investment in those beliefs, and to abandon them is just like selling shares when the market is low.
That sounded very reasonable, until I remembered the reports of small family businesses who had found that their accountant or CFO was stealing from them over a period of several years.
Small businesses can be ripped off by one partner.
I think it means that a certain level of auditing and separation of responsibilities is necessary for businesses of any size.
That's balony. I do not run a virus-scanner, and I still have no problems whatsoever.
That covers maybe 1% of windows users. The other 99% are composed of two groups: corporate desktops and others who run anti-virus software and botnets. Pretty much every corporate windows installation runs anti-virus code. Why? Because they believe the chance of infection is unacceptably high without it.
I'm sorry ? who's computer is it ?
You run windows, you already lost to Microsoft. Sorry.
And yes, that means that I want to be able to replace system-files at will, and not only when I get permission after filing my request in three-fold.
This attitude is dangerous to you. If you can do it, a piece of malware can do it. Are you likely to want to replace CMD.EXE? If not, why do you want to make it easy for malware to do it?
Anyway, you miss the point. The point is to get away from this endless arms race of having to get the latest anti-virus definitions. A simple verification process to ensure that system files are checked against what they should contain, rather than what they should not contain will go a long way toward that. A kernel-enforced process for
upgrading certain system files will help to avoid those files becoming infected in the first place.
If the user can write/change files, a program can write/change files.
You missed my point - in a scenario where the kernel prevents certain files from being changed (unless the replacement file is verified by some cryptographic mechanism), neither the user nor a program can
write or change certain files at will.
So no "admin password" will be necessary, and thus there's nothing for a trojan horse to scan.
The idea is that the windows kernel should limit modification of windows system files to only those files which are crypto-signed by MSFT (or another trusted key which you permit).
This is yet another reason to not run windows. If you run windows, the system's so insecure that you have to buy third party applications to check it constantly. These third party applications have the ability to run rampant through your files, destroying critical data without oversight.
Seriously, who thought this was a good idea, to configure these programs to automatically delete system files? There is always a chance of a false positive - identification of a file which does not contain malware. Are viruses so common in the windows world that it's not worth a human's time to confirm detection before files are altered?
And why, oh why, is it necessary to maintain huge lists of virus signatures? If windows kept a list of the correct md5sums of the system files it would become a trivial task to verify the integrity of those files. One would not need a daily update of virus signatures. Can I cynically suggest that the need for constant update gives the anti-virus companies a permanent revenue stream? And what does Microsoft get out of the flood of windows viruses?
Here's a way that Microsoft could design windows to be virus-resistant: designate certain files (system DLLs, EXEs etc) as change-limited. Provide an API into the kernel to permit those files to be changed by windows update software (only when the replacement file is signed by a trusted key). Maintain a file containing the md5sums of all change-limited files. This file would be modifiable only by the kernel.
In this scenario any virus wouldn't get a chance to corrupt system files because it wouldn't have a correctly signed replacement. And even if it did get to corrupt a system file, it would be trivially detected because the md5sum of the corrupted file wouldn't match the expected md5sum. In order for an infection to occur and be undetected the virus would need to work around the kernel file change API and alter both system file(s) and the md5sums file.
This scheme can be implemented for vendor software too. Windows needs some kind of database of installed software. Does it not have one already? (checks system clock: yep, it's 2006). Red Hat had RPM and the installed software database since 1995. That's 11 years ago, and Red Hat were probably not the first to hit upon the idea of a centralised list of all software installed on a computer.
That's the problem with "CASH IS KING". If you don't use credit from time to time you will have a zero credit rating.
That's why I always advise young folks to get a credit card, particularly the ones who tell me "I don't have a credit card because I don't want to spend money I don't have". Fundamentally a person needs the self control to be able to pay off the entire balance of the credit card every month. Once they've got that, they should use the card to earn themselves a good credit rating over time.
Choose your targets wisely. Buy things on credit - but choose the card which provides up to 55 days interest free, so you get the credit but it costs you nothing in interest, and only an annual fee to keep the card. Choose credit terms on purchases where you can pay off the principal without paying interest (and if they don't allow that, pay cash instead).
We've already lost the source code for some of the more popular TRS-80 software because the authors didn't think to preserve it when they had the chance.
Ira Goldklang has collected thousands of TRS-80 programs at trs-80.com but when the authors of some of these programs were tracked down, they admitted that their original source code had been lost - thrown away or media unreadable.
Debian already has encryption, and it's very convenient.
Install lvm2 (great for managing disk space), dmsetup, cryptsetup.
Read
this page and follow its instructions.
You can create a block device of any size you want using lvm (so long as there is sufficient disk space of course) and then map that to another block device using the device mapper and the crypt filter. The original block device looks like random bytes and if you get the passphrase wrong the mapped block device still looks like random bytes (i.e. there's no way to confirm a correct passphrase except that the result looks sensible).
Once you have set a passphrase, make a filesystem on the mapped block device. Go ahead and use it any way you like.
But I stand by my claim that they are obsolete. NASA is faced with a huge problem to recover the data off thousands of tapes written during the earliest space missions. After 40 years the oxide is flaking off the tapes and recovery is a delicate and dangerous process, often involving the destruction of the original tape.
It remains to be seen how long current technologies like CD and DVD will last before degradation causes data loss. Some say hundreds of years, some say only a few years, and others claim that the media is so unreliable that it can be unreadable immediately after being written.
This topic comes up every month or two on slashdot. The best answer I know of to the problem of data degredation and technology obsolescence is to continually reprocess archived data, upgrading it to new storage
media and new storage formats every few years.
For example, I was able to recover all my old TRS-80 code from the early 1980s from their original diskettes, with some effort. It doesn't make sense, however, to retain these programs in their original TRS-80 format (i.e. tokenised BASIC) because the meaning of the tokens can be lost very easily. So I converted them all to straight ASCII. Now anybody can read the code. And I CVSed them all too, so the history of the code can be examined (this was particularly useful when I had several similar copies of the same program). Now I don't need to worry about how to read 20-year-old 5.25" diskettes anymore; I just have to keep the processed files available.
Legally they're not allowed to convert the documents.
IMHO, storing them on 8-track tape is a massive blunder. 8-track is already obsolete. What they should be doing is either keeping them all on spinning storage (with massive amounts of redundancy) or burn multiple redundant copies to DVD.
Either way, they will have to deal with the problem of unreliable storage - it's easier to cope with if the problem can be automatically detected, and the data recovered from a backup and re-copied automatically. This should be possible with both DVDs and spinning storage. DVDs would need to be regularly loaded into the machine and read in their entirety. If a DVD shows errors, another copy of the DVD needs to be re-copied to replace the failing DVD.
I guess this is a good time to point out:
The difficulty to access these documents in 100 years is mostly a function of the tools used to create the documents in the first place, not of the archiving system itself.
Start using ODF format for word processor docs if you want to be able to read them in 100 years
Make them readily available to the public to ensure that the good stuff is copied over and over again.
Unfortunately this watch design is no smarter than the norm.
I was disappointed when I read:
The timekeeping rate is adjustable to permit regulation to within a few seconds a week.
I can't understand why in the year 2005 every digital watch does not include a tiny radio receiver to pick up the WWV or GPS radio time signals. Then every watch will be accurate to within a second or two, all the time (as long as the wearer goes outside every so often if it's a GPS watch), and there's no need to set it - unless you're telling it the local timezone offset from UTC.
Slashdot Mirror
Also Isaac Asimov, Cyril M Kornbluth, Fred Pohl, Frank Herbert and Algis Budrys.
I ran the CERN webserver. At random intervals it would suck up all the available CPU and memory. Was glad to change that for Apache!
Absolutely; I was pretty astounded when I found out that Umberto Eco wrote his books in Italian. I can only assume that the original works are at least as good as the English translations, which are, in a word, awesome.
The process of evolution is a fact, backed up by mountains of evidence. We can even see it happen over short timescales of a few days or weeks.
The exact details of how mankind evolved are always being rethought and sometimes we discard an old theory when we find contrary evidence. Nothing in our lack of knowledge or the mistakes of the past invalidates anything related to the theory itself.
I think that creationists sometimes have an opposite problem as well. They may well be happy to accept the fact of animal evolution but be unable to apply it to mankind. Their church teaches that Man is "special", made in God's image and so on, and so therefore Man could not have evolved from Apes or lesser species.
It's probably a case of one's religious beliefs causing bias in the evaluation of the independent evidence supporting evolution. www.philosophers.co.uk has some great games related to religion and logic, and they explain the results they get from large numbers of people playing their games.
Here's a relevant analysis from the site:
And here's another relevant quote (this one from the 'Taboo' game)...
The analogy is that refusal to accept the theory of evolution despite the many, many facts in its favour is a consequence of one's deeply held religious beliefs causing an inability to rationally evaluate new (and conflicting) evidence. To accept wholeheartedly the truth of the evolution theory may require abandonment of prior beliefs. The adherent has some investment in those beliefs, and to abandon them is just like selling shares when the market is low.
At least they got the 'SCAM' part right!
In order to embrace the environment, online newspapers should offer user commentary ala slashdot.
Small businesses can be ripped off by one partner.
I think it means that a certain level of auditing and separation of responsibilities is necessary for businesses of any size.
That covers maybe 1% of windows users. The other 99% are composed of two groups: corporate desktops and others who run anti-virus software and botnets. Pretty much every corporate windows installation runs anti-virus code. Why? Because they believe the chance of infection is unacceptably high without it.
I'm sorry ? who's computer is it ?
You run windows, you already lost to Microsoft. Sorry.
And yes, that means that I want to be able to replace system-files at will, and not only when I get permission after filing my request in three-fold.
This attitude is dangerous to you. If you can do it, a piece of malware can do it. Are you likely to want to replace CMD.EXE? If not, why do you want to make it easy for malware to do it?
Anyway, you miss the point. The point is to get away from this endless arms race of having to get the latest anti-virus definitions. A simple verification process to ensure that system files are checked against what they should contain, rather than what they should not contain will go a long way toward that. A kernel-enforced process for upgrading certain system files will help to avoid those files becoming infected in the first place.
You missed my point - in a scenario where the kernel prevents certain files from being changed (unless the replacement file is verified by some cryptographic mechanism), neither the user nor a program can write or change certain files at will.
So no "admin password" will be necessary, and thus there's nothing for a trojan horse to scan.
The idea is that the windows kernel should limit modification of windows system files to only those files which are crypto-signed by MSFT (or another trusted key which you permit).
Seriously, who thought this was a good idea, to configure these programs to automatically delete system files? There is always a chance of a false positive - identification of a file which does not contain malware. Are viruses so common in the windows world that it's not worth a human's time to confirm detection before files are altered?
And why, oh why, is it necessary to maintain huge lists of virus signatures? If windows kept a list of the correct md5sums of the system files it would become a trivial task to verify the integrity of those files. One would not need a daily update of virus signatures. Can I cynically suggest that the need for constant update gives the anti-virus companies a permanent revenue stream? And what does Microsoft get out of the flood of windows viruses?
Here's a way that Microsoft could design windows to be virus-resistant: designate certain files (system DLLs, EXEs etc) as change-limited. Provide an API into the kernel to permit those files to be changed by windows update software (only when the replacement file is signed by a trusted key). Maintain a file containing the md5sums of all change-limited files. This file would be modifiable only by the kernel.
In this scenario any virus wouldn't get a chance to corrupt system files because it wouldn't have a correctly signed replacement. And even if it did get to corrupt a system file, it would be trivially detected because the md5sum of the corrupted file wouldn't match the expected md5sum. In order for an infection to occur and be undetected the virus would need to work around the kernel file change API and alter both system file(s) and the md5sums file.
This scheme can be implemented for vendor software too. Windows needs some kind of database of installed software. Does it not have one already? (checks system clock: yep, it's 2006). Red Hat had RPM and the installed software database since 1995. That's 11 years ago, and Red Hat were probably not the first to hit upon the idea of a centralised list of all software installed on a computer.
I was waiting for a slashvertisement so I could tag it correctly. It was a good thing I didn't have to wait long!
That's why I always advise young folks to get a credit card, particularly the ones who tell me "I don't have a credit card because I don't want to spend money I don't have". Fundamentally a person needs the self control to be able to pay off the entire balance of the credit card every month. Once they've got that, they should use the card to earn themselves a good credit rating over time.
Choose your targets wisely. Buy things on credit - but choose the card which provides up to 55 days interest free, so you get the credit but it costs you nothing in interest, and only an annual fee to keep the card. Choose credit terms on purchases where you can pay off the principal without paying interest (and if they don't allow that, pay cash instead).
Ira Goldklang has collected thousands of TRS-80 programs at trs-80.com but when the authors of some of these programs were tracked down, they admitted that their original source code had been lost - thrown away or media unreadable.
Sooo ... how many hours of free access will the GOP CD give me?
Install lvm2 (great for managing disk space), dmsetup, cryptsetup. Read this page and follow its instructions.
You can create a block device of any size you want using lvm (so long as there is sufficient disk space of course) and then map that to another block device using the device mapper and the crypt filter. The original block device looks like random bytes and if you get the passphrase wrong the mapped block device still looks like random bytes (i.e. there's no way to confirm a correct passphrase except that the result looks sensible).
Once you have set a passphrase, make a filesystem on the mapped block device. Go ahead and use it any way you like.
The only watch I'm interested in is the one which sets the time by itself by listening to GPS or Galileo signals.
http://www.monzy.org/audience/
p df
http://www.monzy.org/audience/ICMI-2002-finalpub.
http://movis.net/research/audience/techniques.pdf
http://www.cuug.ab.ca/CUUGer/9705/confernc.html
Hmm, this might be useful with Juries ...
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0050083
... only if it comes with an inbuilt censorship regime.
But I stand by my claim that they are obsolete. NASA is faced with a huge problem to recover the data off thousands of tapes written during the earliest space missions. After 40 years the oxide is flaking off the tapes and recovery is a delicate and dangerous process, often involving the destruction of the original tape.
It remains to be seen how long current technologies like CD and DVD will last before degradation causes data loss. Some say hundreds of years, some say only a few years, and others claim that the media is so unreliable that it can be unreadable immediately after being written.
This topic comes up every month or two on slashdot. The best answer I know of to the problem of data degredation and technology obsolescence is to continually reprocess archived data, upgrading it to new storage media and new storage formats every few years.
For example, I was able to recover all my old TRS-80 code from the early 1980s from their original diskettes, with some effort. It doesn't make sense, however, to retain these programs in their original TRS-80 format (i.e. tokenised BASIC) because the meaning of the tokens can be lost very easily. So I converted them all to straight ASCII. Now anybody can read the code. And I CVSed them all too, so the history of the code can be examined (this was particularly useful when I had several similar copies of the same program). Now I don't need to worry about how to read 20-year-old 5.25" diskettes anymore; I just have to keep the processed files available.
IMHO, storing them on 8-track tape is a massive blunder. 8-track is already obsolete. What they should be doing is either keeping them all on spinning storage (with massive amounts of redundancy) or burn multiple redundant copies to DVD.
Either way, they will have to deal with the problem of unreliable storage - it's easier to cope with if the problem can be automatically detected, and the data recovered from a backup and re-copied automatically. This should be possible with both DVDs and spinning storage. DVDs would need to be regularly loaded into the machine and read in their entirety. If a DVD shows errors, another copy of the DVD needs to be re-copied to replace the failing DVD.
I guess this is a good time to point out:
I was disappointed when I read:
I can't understand why in the year 2005 every digital watch does not include a tiny radio receiver to pick up the WWV or GPS radio time signals. Then every watch will be accurate to within a second or two, all the time (as long as the wearer goes outside every so often if it's a GPS watch), and there's no need to set it - unless you're telling it the local timezone offset from UTC.
So does this mean the directors will now be instructed to zoom in more on the product (coke can, etc) since the screen is so tiny?
I'm used to product placement. I read Slashdot.
All I'm saying is that the article summary is drawing a different and unjustified conclusion to that of the original article.