Let's say I run an online job market site. IIS backed with SQL server. A blackhat hacker uses an unknown exploit to break in, unauthenticated, to IIS. He then leverages this account to steal SQL credentials (or he uses an unknown SQL vulnerability) and downloads every resume we have on the system.
You're telling me that I should be charged with a crime?
To further your car analogy, you're saying if, while driving, my factory-faulty bumper comes off and brains a passing pedestrian that I should be liable? OK, maybe not, because I didn't know about it. How bout this: Ford tells me that my bumper might fly off, and that I have to take it to a mechanic ASAP. I decide to do it after work, but on the way to work, *thump*, I kill a pedestrian with my faulty bumper.
America is like the most Type A personality infested place on earth, and our political system weeds out all but the strong willed in pursuit of elected office. On and on and on. Washington D.C. is like the most hostile place on earth to the stereotypical lazy philosopher king type and/or chin-in-hand-and-elbow-on-knee types.
I love having this argument with people, particularly in bars. How precisely is the United States' democracy and capitalist society any different than any other first world country? Cite specific examples.
Why on earth is this moderated as a troll? The guy isn't saying "FUTUR0M0R SUX" but instead says that it sucks and then presents extremely reasonable arguments as to why he doesn't like the show. I feel somewhat the same. They try for the same sort of irreverant humor as The Simpsons and with the same animation and some of the writers. Groening himself has often said that the point of Futurama was to be able to do wacky story lines and interesting sets but keep the style of The Simpsons. The fact is that The Simpsons got lucky with the actors. Picture The Godfather with B movie actors. It just wouldn't have the same impact. Clearly some of the characters and actors on that show aren't up to par with The Simpsons. Bender and Fry clearly carry the show, while Katey Segal's character and the voices of Zoidberg and the Professor are weak at best, and irritating more often than not. I think that the jokes are weak, but they could certianly be helped a great deal by a good voice behind them.
Think about it this way: how many times has a friend of yours ruined a really funny Chris Rock bit because he says the same words with a poor delivery?
I don't think the TAAS affected the students in any way, but it was the big thing to determine the schools' funding.
Wait a minute.. how does that make any sense? So if your school produces lousy students you get less funding to pay your teachers and supply teaching supplies? Now the teachers who're the best qualified are less likely to work for the crappy school. Granted some teachers will work for virtually nothing (actually most, since teachers are notoriously underpaid), but every teacher wants to give at least the STUDENTS the best chances for success, which is partially determined by the materials on-hand used to teach them. Clearly this test/funding system is redundant, and the schools who were traditionally well-funded (in more affluent districts) are going to recieve funds that reflect the benefits of being well-funded. The whole damn point of more funds is that funds == success!
I swear to christ, the next time some racist motherfucker tries to use an argument that "clearly minorities don't possess the brainpower to succeed, just look at their low test scores" is going to get an argument based on the ridiculous system you outlined. Minorities didn't even have HYPOTHETICAL access to the best schools just a few decades ago, and now we're trying to ensure that the schools in their neighborhoods never get the funds to improve. Sigh..
If you honestly think that America wants thousands of its own troops to die in a chemical attack in order to BOLSTER public opinion of our stance on the war you are seriously misguided. Remove the tinfoil hat please.
First of all, if you had listened to the news today (I know it's hard to see with your head up your ass, but there's always the radio turned up very loud) you would know that the reports of oil wells burning came hours before we had even crossed the De-Militarized Zone into Iraq or started flying bombers over the area. Second, how on earth would the Iranians know what we're doing? They have no satellites or troops in the area since the Iraqies and Iranians are mortal enemies. Your tinfoil hat is crooked.
We already do buy oil from Saddam. In fact, we now buy twice as much oil as we did before the Gulf war. Part of the reason for this is the Food For Oil program, which was intended to stop the sanctions from killing civilians and let it punish the leadership (because they can't get Gold Toilets and Scud Missiles). Unfortunatly the regime funneled the food and money into programs that only helped to enhance their lifestyles. Plus, no matter what friendly regime we put into power, democratic, dictator, hitler or whatever, the price of oil is set by Opec and Opec alone. And the amount of oil that Iraq accounts for (just 10% of the entire Gulf) isn't enough to raise or lower prices significantly based on how much they choose to pump.
A joke, but just so other people are clear other segments of memory are vulnerable to overflows as well:
-.bss section: for uninitialized data. In this exploit I smashed a buffer in.bss space that ended up overwriting a function pointer in the.dtors section (IIRC, this was many years ago). Upon exit this function was called and ran a shell.
-.data section: for initialized data. In this one I was able to overflow a set of character pointers in the xlock (screensaver) program. By overflowing them with the address of the/etc/shadow file stored in memory we were able to get xlock to dump the contents of the file.
- heap overflows have been widely exploited in numerous major programs, including the BIND TSig bug.
So don't think you're safe if you're using strcpy's on data not on the stack;)
Sitting in a class and being bored while listenening to your teacher drone on and on about MIPS assembly or turning in your homework on 45 kinds of sorting late has absolutely no bearing on whether you'll be a good programmer. It's a crapshoot, just like everything else. Some people with 4.0's will be crappy programmers in the real world, some people will fail out and break their ass at their job.
Personally I'd be more impressed with good humanities scores than good CS scores for a person I was interviewing.
This is patently untrue. The percentage of people getting CS degrees has stayed relatively static over the past ten years. Take a look here to see that the number of CS majors who enrolled in the height of the dotcom boom of 1999 was the same as the the number in 1992. There were maybe 20% more than normal during the boom, but even by the next year it was only 5% more, then back to normal, even after the bust.
Sorry, but there are just fewer jobs available, and just as many qualified applicants.
The price of Kuwaiti and Saudi and Iraqi oil is set by OPEC. Did you hear me? It's set by OPEC. We do not get cheaper oil from our friendly Arab nations. We will not get cheaper oil from Iraq after the war. Why is this so hard for people to understand? We currently only import about 2% of our total oil from Iraq, compared to about half that 20 years ago. Tell me, how is this about oil?
Most of the emails I recieved were confidential, but you can read my rant about SCO (the people who now own UNIX) here where I say:
I'm sure many of you are wondering what the response from the people from SCO has been regarding all of these UnixWare problems. Nil.... I've yet to recieve a word from SCO about my recent slew of exploits. My guess is that they were just happy to buy a few months of time before I started posting.
And about the FreeBSD guys, where you can read various threads on Google:
I've given the FreeBSD team about a month to get something official together. Maintainers were supposedly contacted, but no progress has been made. As promised, here are the goods:
Like I said, both can be bad, but generally OpenSource teams are quicker to turn around, like the FreeBSD guys did very shortly after this stuff was published.
I've dealt with Microsoft in a security related capacity before and I can give first hand testimonial that they were absolutely god-awful at responding with even so much as a "we have recieved your email." This experience pretty much mirrors ever single account I've heard from other folks that find holes. OTOH, OpenSource vendors seem to be, *in general*, much better than the closed source community. In particular, SuSE, RedHat and OpenBSD are standouts in that department, while Oracle, Microsoft and Sun are the absolute bottom of the barrel.
I read a study recently (I tried googling for it and couldn't find it) that basically tracked lottery winners over a five year period following their wins. It said that when they first recieved their money their overall happiness jumped a great deal, as described here. It then tracked their happiness for the remaining five years.
The interesting part is that almost uniformally every single winner's happiness receded back to what it was before they won. It seems that everyone has a "base happiness" that cannot be altered by material things in the long term. I believe that everyone needs enough money for sustenance and comfort, and after that it's all vanity.
Bank of America, the third largest bank in the US I believe, couldn't provide ATM service to their customers because of this worm. Given the hundreds of thousands of transactions that they lost, I'm suprised at the lowball $7M figure.
Most people just aren't as deligent as you about cleaning up corrupted stuff they download as you are. With harddrives in the tens of gigabytes these days, there's no pressing need for the average user to get rid of every single junk file. Most people are lazy, lazy, lazy. They download a whole chunk of mp3s at once and figure they'll sort through them later. Maybe that won't happen for a few days. In the meantime, others do the same thing and download it off him before he gets a chance to delete it.
Indeed. What more people need to do, and what P2P apps need to default to (or even mandate) is always having a seperate Shared and Downloaded directory. That way these things won't propogate because the user will have take the time to move his stuff into the Shared directory, which he probably won't do without listening/viewing first.
What employer, EVER, would say that experience IN YOUR HOME in any way equals that of a real-world environment? When is what you do in your own home, even with a traffic simulator, analagous to a real world environment in the eyes of HR (the people who give you a shot at getting an interview with the folks who will appreciate knowledge)? If it isn't in your Employment Experience: section no one gives a fuck. Just like you can build a spectacular open-source app in your spare time but when it comes time to interview all you can say is "i wrote an IMAP proggie in my spare timezor."
And Christ, I wish that wasn't true. The coding I've done in my spare time more than qualifies me for jobs ten feet further down the trough than what I'm capable of. And I live in NYC just like the original poster, so I know the job market he's talking about.
Trust me, experience, degrees or certifications are the only way that HR knows that you weren't just another.bomb dropout who tried to cash in on the boom but actually knows zip. Sad but true. The only way that this kind of experience will help you is if you lie about your experience and have the skills to back it up.
I fail to see the distinction in a practical sense. If we are able to manipulate something on one end and provoke ANY sort of reaction on the other end wouldn't that be good enough for a binary communication, like a hard drive reading either a 1 or a zero off a platter? Sure it wouldn't be like a marionette on the other side, but we're still conveying on/off information.
They will want to explore, conquer and the rest unless they outgrow the instinct they're evolved from. Humans explore, conquer, kill each other, etc. because we are driven by the instincts handed down from the apes. Alpha male, survival of the fittest, food, protection, sex, etc. I doubt that any ecosystem could evolve without this kind of instinct present somewhere, and I doubt that any life could become intelligent (in the sense of self-aware) unless they had the desire to explore and conquer.
Well I don't believe this, but it's possible that the aliens HAVE been here, and planted the seeds of terraforming so that they could come back later and populate with an appropriate atmosphere. Or whatever.. you can speculate a hundred ways about things like this.
Study Finds Infants Don't Encode Long-Term Memories Until Second Year
Chances are if you think your earliest memory dates from your first year or even early in your second year, it's not real -- or at least not one you formed from the actual experience. Researchers have learned that the area of the brain thought to play a key role in encoding long-term memory matures in spurts. And a study published this week in the journal Nature demonstrates that a major spurt happens after a person's first year and then takes a second year to fully mature.
"Components of early memories may be accurate," says Conor Liston, a graduate student who conducted the Nature study while at Harvard University. "But memories recalled from the first or second year of life are probably not that reliable."
Cleaning Up and Making a Rattle
To test young children's ability to remember, Liston taught three groups of children sequences that were prompted by specific toys and sounds. A call for "Clean Up Time," for example, was followed by wiping a table with a paper towel and then throwing the towel into a basket. "Make a Rattle" was followed by the motion of inserting a ring into a slot in a bottle and then shaking the bottle.
Liston taught 9-, 17- and 24-month-old babies three to five different sequences so that each child could do the actions after prompting. He then waited four months and tested each child's ability to re-enact each sequence following the same prompts.
The differences between the youngest group and the two older ones were striking. Both groups of older children were quickly able to repeat the sequences while the youngest group had a near-zero score.
"We know that neurons are beginning to grow at the frontal lobe around 8, 9 months," says Jerome Kagan, a Harvard University professor of psychology, Liston's adviser and co-author of the study. "This bolsters the work of others that has shown most memories from at least the first nine months become lost."
Kagan explains that one hint that a child is starting to develop memory begins at the age of 9 months when children become less willing to leave their parent. Missing one's mother, he says, is a sign that the child has a clear memory of his or her mother just being there and so the child notices when she leaves.
"If you're 5 months old, it's out of sight, out of mind. You're less likely to cry because you just forgot that your mother was ever there, so it's not as frightening," he says.
Tests of older children reveal they can form memories, but later they don't always realize they have them.
Sweaty Recognition
Nora Newcombe, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, recently tested the ability of 11-year-olds to recognize pictures of former classmates from their preschool years. She showed them a series of pictures of 3- and 4-year-old children, including some images of children they knew seven years earlier.
Most 11-year-olds claimed not to recognize any of their former classmates. But when Newcombe wired up their hands to measure sweating -- also called a galvanic skin response -- the children showed biological signs of remembering the faces of those with whom they'd attended preschool.
As they looked at pictures of children they had never known, the instrument measured no sweating responses.
"It was like an unconscious emotional memory existed even when there is no conscious memory," says Newcombe.
Newcombe and her colleagues are now working with 3- and 4-year-old children and testing their ability to remember scenes. She's finding that most children at this age are good at remembering central figures in picture scenes, like an elephant in a jungle, but they're not adept at remembering secondary details, such as the green jungle around the elephant.
"I think what happens after nine months is a growth in the ability to form explicit, conscious memories," she says. "It's clear that this is a step by step process that takes years to develop."
Early Trauma Erased?
Endel Tulving, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, believes that children develop different forms of memory at different phases. First, he says, they encode primitive memories, such as sights and sounds. Then comes semantic memory, the accumulation of general knowledge, such as concepts and language. The final kinds of absorbed memories are episodic, or autobiographical memories, which are recollections of personal experiences.
Understanding when and how memories form has implications beyond neuroscience. Kagan points out that knowing when children start to retain long-term memories could be useful in courtroom cases where a child's memories are used as evidence. Also, knowing that children younger than 9 months are poor at retaining memories could be a comfort to some adopting parents who might worry about early traumatic experiences in their adopted children's lives.
"Some people have argued that a child's first six to seven months can have a profound influence," he says. "But if experience recorded before the frontal lobe matures can't even be retrieved later, this is unlikely."
The recent studies fill in a long-standing gap in understanding of children's brain development since until recent years, most work had focused on adult brains and memory. Liston says after finishing these studies, he started to understand why.
"Babies' schedules aren't as reliable -- it's not like working with adults," he says. "So I couldn't count on them always showing up at the lab on time. They get sick sometimes and then there's always nap time."
And then there is the theory that we only use 10% of our brain.
This "theory" has been universally debunked. From snopes:
1) Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. Indeed, although certain minor functions may use only a small part of the brain at one time, any sufficiently complex set of activities or thought patterns will indeed use many parts of the brain. Just as people don't use all of their muscle groups at one time, they also don't use all of their brain at once. For any given activity, such as eating, watching television, making love, or reading, you may use a few specific parts of your brain. Over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
2) The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain. If the "used" or "necessary" parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary. But the myth implies that the "used" part of the brain is a discrete area, and the "unused" part is like an appendix or tonsil, taking up space but essentially unnecessary. But if all those parts of the brain are unused, removal or damage to the "unused" part of the brain should be minor or unnoticed. Yet people who have suffered head trauma, a stroke, or other brain injury are frequently severely impaired. Have you ever heard a doctor say, ". . . But luckily when that bullet entered his skull, it only damaged the 90 percent of his brain he didn't use"? Of course not.
Saddam admits that he gives $20,000 (or some such amount) to the families of Palestinean suicide bombers. He brutally tortures political rivals and dissenters. He violated the UN treaty. What more do you want? This is all UN information, and unless you're one of those Roswell people we have to trust the UN, if not our own government.
Slashdot Mirror
Uhm.
Let's say I run an online job market site. IIS backed with SQL server. A blackhat hacker uses an unknown exploit to break in, unauthenticated, to IIS. He then leverages this account to steal SQL credentials (or he uses an unknown SQL vulnerability) and downloads every resume we have on the system.
You're telling me that I should be charged with a crime?
To further your car analogy, you're saying if, while driving, my factory-faulty bumper comes off and brains a passing pedestrian that I should be liable? OK, maybe not, because I didn't know about it. How bout this: Ford tells me that my bumper might fly off, and that I have to take it to a mechanic ASAP. I decide to do it after work, but on the way to work, *thump*, I kill a pedestrian with my faulty bumper.
See the problem? It's not black and white.
America is like the most Type A personality infested place on earth, and our political system weeds out all but the strong willed in pursuit of elected office. On and on and on. Washington D.C. is like the most hostile place on earth to the stereotypical lazy philosopher king type and/or chin-in-hand-and-elbow-on-knee types.
I love having this argument with people, particularly in bars. How precisely is the United States' democracy and capitalist society any different than any other first world country? Cite specific examples.
Why on earth is this moderated as a troll? The guy isn't saying "FUTUR0M0R SUX" but instead says that it sucks and then presents extremely reasonable arguments as to why he doesn't like the show. I feel somewhat the same. They try for the same sort of irreverant humor as The Simpsons and with the same animation and some of the writers. Groening himself has often said that the point of Futurama was to be able to do wacky story lines and interesting sets but keep the style of The Simpsons. The fact is that The Simpsons got lucky with the actors. Picture The Godfather with B movie actors. It just wouldn't have the same impact. Clearly some of the characters and actors on that show aren't up to par with The Simpsons. Bender and Fry clearly carry the show, while Katey Segal's character and the voices of Zoidberg and the Professor are weak at best, and irritating more often than not. I think that the jokes are weak, but they could certianly be helped a great deal by a good voice behind them.
Think about it this way: how many times has a friend of yours ruined a really funny Chris Rock bit because he says the same words with a poor delivery?
I don't think the TAAS affected the students in any way, but it was the big thing to determine the schools' funding.
Wait a minute.. how does that make any sense? So if your school produces lousy students you get less funding to pay your teachers and supply teaching supplies? Now the teachers who're the best qualified are less likely to work for the crappy school. Granted some teachers will work for virtually nothing (actually most, since teachers are notoriously underpaid), but every teacher wants to give at least the STUDENTS the best chances for success, which is partially determined by the materials on-hand used to teach them. Clearly this test/funding system is redundant, and the schools who were traditionally well-funded (in more affluent districts) are going to recieve funds that reflect the benefits of being well-funded. The whole damn point of more funds is that funds == success!
I swear to christ, the next time some racist motherfucker tries to use an argument that "clearly minorities don't possess the brainpower to succeed, just look at their low test scores" is going to get an argument based on the ridiculous system you outlined. Minorities didn't even have HYPOTHETICAL access to the best schools just a few decades ago, and now we're trying to ensure that the schools in their neighborhoods never get the funds to improve. Sigh..
If you honestly think that America wants thousands of its own troops to die in a chemical attack in order to BOLSTER public opinion of our stance on the war you are seriously misguided. Remove the tinfoil hat please.
First of all, if you had listened to the news today (I know it's hard to see with your head up your ass, but there's always the radio turned up very loud) you would know that the reports of oil wells burning came hours before we had even crossed the De-Militarized Zone into Iraq or started flying bombers over the area. Second, how on earth would the Iranians know what we're doing? They have no satellites or troops in the area since the Iraqies and Iranians are mortal enemies. Your tinfoil hat is crooked.
We already do buy oil from Saddam. In fact, we now buy twice as much oil as we did before the Gulf war. Part of the reason for this is the Food For Oil program, which was intended to stop the sanctions from killing civilians and let it punish the leadership (because they can't get Gold Toilets and Scud Missiles). Unfortunatly the regime funneled the food and money into programs that only helped to enhance their lifestyles. Plus, no matter what friendly regime we put into power, democratic, dictator, hitler or whatever, the price of oil is set by Opec and Opec alone. And the amount of oil that Iraq accounts for (just 10% of the entire Gulf) isn't enough to raise or lower prices significantly based on how much they choose to pump.
A joke, but just so other people are clear other segments of memory are vulnerable to overflows as well:
.bss section: for uninitialized data. In this exploit I smashed a buffer in .bss space that ended up overwriting a function pointer in the .dtors section (IIRC, this was many years ago). Upon exit this function was called and ran a shell.
.data section: for initialized data. In this one I was able to overflow a set of character pointers in the xlock (screensaver) program. By overflowing them with the address of the /etc/shadow file stored in memory we were able to get xlock to dump the contents of the file.
;)
-
-
- heap overflows have been widely exploited in numerous major programs, including the BIND TSig bug.
So don't think you're safe if you're using strcpy's on data not on the stack
Sitting in a class and being bored while listenening to your teacher drone on and on about MIPS assembly or turning in your homework on 45 kinds of sorting late has absolutely no bearing on whether you'll be a good programmer. It's a crapshoot, just like everything else. Some people with 4.0's will be crappy programmers in the real world, some people will fail out and break their ass at their job.
Personally I'd be more impressed with good humanities scores than good CS scores for a person I was interviewing.
This is patently untrue. The percentage of people getting CS degrees has stayed relatively static over the past ten years. Take a look here to see that the number of CS majors who enrolled in the height of the dotcom boom of 1999 was the same as the the number in 1992. There were maybe 20% more than normal during the boom, but even by the next year it was only 5% more, then back to normal, even after the bust.
Sorry, but there are just fewer jobs available, and just as many qualified applicants.
The price of Kuwaiti and Saudi and Iraqi oil is set by OPEC. Did you hear me? It's set by OPEC. We do not get cheaper oil from our friendly Arab nations. We will not get cheaper oil from Iraq after the war. Why is this so hard for people to understand? We currently only import about 2% of our total oil from Iraq, compared to about half that 20 years ago. Tell me, how is this about oil?
Most of the emails I recieved were confidential, but you can read my rant about SCO (the people who now own UNIX) here where I say:
...
I'm sure many of you are wondering what the response from the people from SCO has been regarding all of these UnixWare problems. Nil.
I've yet to recieve a word from SCO about my recent slew of exploits. My guess is that they were just happy to buy a few months of time before I started posting.
And about the FreeBSD guys, where you can read various threads on Google:
I've given the FreeBSD team about a month to get something official together. Maintainers were supposedly contacted, but no progress has been made. As promised, here are the goods:
Like I said, both can be bad, but generally OpenSource teams are quicker to turn around, like the FreeBSD guys did very shortly after this stuff was published.
I've dealt with Microsoft in a security related capacity before and I can give first hand testimonial that they were absolutely god-awful at responding with even so much as a "we have recieved your email." This experience pretty much mirrors ever single account I've heard from other folks that find holes. OTOH, OpenSource vendors seem to be, *in general*, much better than the closed source community. In particular, SuSE, RedHat and OpenBSD are standouts in that department, while Oracle, Microsoft and Sun are the absolute bottom of the barrel.
and: "Next Thursdays winning lotto numbers are:..."
I read a study recently (I tried googling for it and couldn't find it) that basically tracked lottery winners over a five year period following their wins. It said that when they first recieved their money their overall happiness jumped a great deal, as described here. It then tracked their happiness for the remaining five years.
The interesting part is that almost uniformally every single winner's happiness receded back to what it was before they won. It seems that everyone has a "base happiness" that cannot be altered by material things in the long term. I believe that everyone needs enough money for sustenance and comfort, and after that it's all vanity.
Pollution could be stopped today. The Segway obviously doesn't pollute.
Where do you think the electricity comes from to charge it? Lightning?
Bank of America, the third largest bank in the US I believe, couldn't provide ATM service to their customers because of this worm. Given the hundreds of thousands of transactions that they lost, I'm suprised at the lowball $7M figure.
Most people just aren't as deligent as you about cleaning up corrupted stuff they download as you are. With harddrives in the tens of gigabytes these days, there's no pressing need for the average user to get rid of every single junk file. Most people are lazy, lazy, lazy. They download a whole chunk of mp3s at once and figure they'll sort through them later. Maybe that won't happen for a few days. In the meantime, others do the same thing and download it off him before he gets a chance to delete it.
Indeed. What more people need to do, and what P2P apps need to default to (or even mandate) is always having a seperate Shared and Downloaded directory. That way these things won't propogate because the user will have take the time to move his stuff into the Shared directory, which he probably won't do without listening/viewing first.
Not flamebait:
.bomb dropout who tried to cash in on the boom but actually knows zip. Sad but true. The only way that this kind of experience will help you is if you lie about your experience and have the skills to back it up.
What employer, EVER, would say that experience IN YOUR HOME in any way equals that of a real-world environment? When is what you do in your own home, even with a traffic simulator, analagous to a real world environment in the eyes of HR (the people who give you a shot at getting an interview with the folks who will appreciate knowledge)? If it isn't in your Employment Experience: section no one gives a fuck. Just like you can build a spectacular open-source app in your spare time but when it comes time to interview all you can say is "i wrote an IMAP proggie in my spare timezor."
And Christ, I wish that wasn't true. The coding I've done in my spare time more than qualifies me for jobs ten feet further down the trough than what I'm capable of. And I live in NYC just like the original poster, so I know the job market he's talking about.
Trust me, experience, degrees or certifications are the only way that HR knows that you weren't just another
I fail to see the distinction in a practical sense. If we are able to manipulate something on one end and provoke ANY sort of reaction on the other end wouldn't that be good enough for a binary communication, like a hard drive reading either a 1 or a zero off a platter? Sure it wouldn't be like a marionette on the other side, but we're still conveying on/off information.
They will want to explore, conquer and the rest unless they outgrow the instinct they're evolved from. Humans explore, conquer, kill each other, etc. because we are driven by the instincts handed down from the apes. Alpha male, survival of the fittest, food, protection, sex, etc. I doubt that any ecosystem could evolve without this kind of instinct present somewhere, and I doubt that any life could become intelligent (in the sense of self-aware) unless they had the desire to explore and conquer.
Well I don't believe this, but it's possible that the aliens HAVE been here, and planted the seeds of terraforming so that they could come back later and populate with an appropriate atmosphere. Or whatever.. you can speculate a hundred ways about things like this.
from abcnews:
-----
Thinking Back
Study Finds Infants Don't Encode Long-Term Memories Until Second Year
Chances are if you think your earliest memory dates from your first year or even early in your second year, it's not real -- or at least not one you formed from the actual experience.
Researchers have learned that the area of the brain thought to play a key role in encoding long-term memory matures in spurts. And a study published this week in the journal Nature demonstrates that a major spurt happens after a person's first year and then takes a second year to fully mature.
"Components of early memories may be accurate," says Conor Liston, a graduate student who conducted the Nature study while at Harvard University. "But memories recalled from the first or second year of life are probably not that reliable."
Cleaning Up and Making a Rattle
To test young children's ability to remember, Liston taught three groups of children sequences that were prompted by specific toys and sounds. A call for "Clean Up Time," for example, was followed by wiping a table with a paper towel and then throwing the towel into a basket. "Make a Rattle" was followed by the motion of inserting a ring into a slot in a bottle and then shaking the bottle.
Liston taught 9-, 17- and 24-month-old babies three to five different sequences so that each child could do the actions after prompting. He then waited four months and tested each child's ability to re-enact each sequence following the same prompts.
The differences between the youngest group and the two older ones were striking. Both groups of older children were quickly able to repeat the sequences while the youngest group had a near-zero score.
"We know that neurons are beginning to grow at the frontal lobe around 8, 9 months," says Jerome Kagan, a Harvard University professor of psychology, Liston's adviser and co-author of the study. "This bolsters the work of others that has shown most memories from at least the first nine months become lost."
Kagan explains that one hint that a child is starting to develop memory begins at the age of 9 months when children become less willing to leave their parent. Missing one's mother, he says, is a sign that the child has a clear memory of his or her mother just being there and so the child notices when she leaves.
"If you're 5 months old, it's out of sight, out of mind. You're less likely to cry because you just forgot that your mother was ever there, so it's not as frightening," he says.
Tests of older children reveal they can form memories, but later they don't always realize they have them.
Sweaty Recognition
Nora Newcombe, a psychologist at Temple University in Philadelphia, recently tested the ability of 11-year-olds to recognize pictures of former classmates from their preschool years. She showed them a series of pictures of 3- and 4-year-old children, including some images of children they knew seven years earlier.
Most 11-year-olds claimed not to recognize any of their former classmates. But when Newcombe wired up their hands to measure sweating -- also called a galvanic skin response -- the children showed biological signs of remembering the faces of those with whom they'd attended preschool.
As they looked at pictures of children they had never known, the instrument measured no sweating responses.
"It was like an unconscious emotional memory existed even when there is no conscious memory," says Newcombe.
Newcombe and her colleagues are now working with 3- and 4-year-old children and testing their ability to remember scenes. She's finding that most children at this age are good at remembering central figures in picture scenes, like an elephant in a jungle, but they're not adept at remembering secondary details, such as the green jungle around the elephant.
"I think what happens after nine months is a growth in the ability to form explicit, conscious memories," she says. "It's clear that this is a step by step process that takes years to develop."
Early Trauma Erased?
Endel Tulving, a psychologist at the University of Toronto, believes that children develop different forms of memory at different phases. First, he says, they encode primitive memories, such as sights and sounds. Then comes semantic memory, the accumulation of general knowledge, such as concepts and language. The final kinds of absorbed memories are episodic, or autobiographical memories, which are recollections of personal experiences.
Understanding when and how memories form has implications beyond neuroscience. Kagan points out that knowing when children start to retain long-term memories could be useful in courtroom cases where a child's memories are used as evidence. Also, knowing that children younger than 9 months are poor at retaining memories could be a comfort to some adopting parents who might worry about early traumatic experiences in their adopted children's lives.
"Some people have argued that a child's first six to seven months can have a profound influence," he says. "But if experience recorded before the frontal lobe matures can't even be retrieved later, this is unlikely."
The recent studies fill in a long-standing gap in understanding of children's brain development since until recent years, most work had focused on adult brains and memory. Liston says after finishing these studies, he started to understand why.
"Babies' schedules aren't as reliable -- it's not like working with adults," he says. "So I couldn't count on them always showing up at the lab on time. They get sick sometimes and then there's always nap time."
No, the first question, as with all innovation, will be: Do they possess any technology that will enable us to jack off more efficiently?
And then there is the theory that we only use 10% of our brain.
This "theory" has been universally debunked. From snopes:
1) Brain imaging research techniques such as PET scans (positron emission tomography) and fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging) clearly show that the vast majority of the brain does not lie fallow. Indeed, although certain minor functions may use only a small part of the brain at one time, any sufficiently complex set of activities or thought patterns will indeed use many parts of the brain. Just as people don't use all of their muscle groups at one time, they also don't use all of their brain at once. For any given activity, such as eating, watching television, making love, or reading, you may use a few specific parts of your brain. Over the course of a whole day, however, just about all of the brain is used at one time or another.
2) The myth presupposes an extreme localization of functions in the brain. If the "used" or "necessary" parts of the brain were scattered all around the organ, that would imply that much of the brain is in fact necessary. But the myth implies that the "used" part of the brain is a discrete area, and the "unused" part is like an appendix or tonsil, taking up space but essentially unnecessary. But if all those parts of the brain are unused, removal or damage to the "unused" part of the brain should be minor or unnoticed. Yet people who have suffered head trauma, a stroke, or other brain injury are frequently severely impaired. Have you ever heard a doctor say, ". . . But luckily when that bullet entered his skull, it only damaged the 90 percent of his brain he didn't use"? Of course not.
Saddam admits that he gives $20,000 (or some such amount) to the families of Palestinean suicide bombers. He brutally tortures political rivals and dissenters. He violated the UN treaty. What more do you want? This is all UN information, and unless you're one of those Roswell people we have to trust the UN, if not our own government.