The comment is funny, but the underlying reality is not. I already posted this today, but I think it has relevance here:
--- I've always wondered why Palestine/Iraq/Afghanistan doesn't simply train armies of script kiddies. They could cause as much mayhem as any suicide bomber in a Starbucks. Obviously I don't condone that kind of shit, but you have to wonder how far away we are from that reality. These suicide bombers aren't taking out tactical leaders, they're trying to incite fear and publicity.
Imagine an army of 1000 Iraqie script kiddies backed by 10 smart Iraqies who know how to audit C code and use disassemblers. I'm sorry to say that we'd be fucked. ---
How much coverage did the DoS'ing of eBay, Yahoo, Etc Co. get? WAY more than the bombing of some ship in Yemen.
All I can think of in these situations is a bug that a guy I know found in BIND. 90% of the root DNS servers in the world were vulnerable to it, just as they are to the recent ISS one. If someone in Afghanistan had found that instead of us, what would they do with it? They'd Hacked By Chinese every one of them. Imagine the implications of all the root NS's being hacked. Imagine the productivity loss in just a few hours. This is what we're up against. I'm afraid.
Christ.. it's the same for virtually every online game pay service. You sign up on the web or with their special GUI. Then you log on and have a modified binary so they ban you. How would NoMoreNicksLeft handle that situation in his hypothetical online gaming world of fantasy, elves and make-believe?
If you break the EULA you terminate any obligation MS might have for you. Is this so difficult to understand? You broke a contract. Repeat after me: YOU BROKE A CONTRACT. If you don't like it, don't fucking buy it.
So you're telling me that you only use Kazaa to download free music? Bullshit. You and 95% of Slashdot's population (including me) pirate music every day. If you want to listen to a piece of copywrited music you gotta pay for it, right? Or is that different somehow? Topics like this piss me off because it brings out every other fucking hypocrite on the internet.
You've obviously never submitted a bug to a large, closed-source bloated software company. If you're lucky enough to get a response, you then have to wrestle with them for a week over how to reproduce the damn thing. Even when you give them a working exploit, they'll still have trouble. I don't know how many times I had this conversation:
Me: I found a bug in your software. Them: We can't reproduce it. Me: I sent you an exploit. Them: It says to compile it with gcc. Me: I wrote the exploit to run under Linux. Them: Our software doesn't run on Linux. Me: I know that, but the exploit happens to run under Linux. Them: Most people don't use Linux, therefore there is no reproducable bug. Me: BUT I COULD'VE WRITTEN IT WITH MSVC++ OR VISUAL BASIC OR WHATEVER WINDOWS PROGRAM. Them: Let us know if you ever reproduce this bug in a Windows environment.
Perhaps it's a stall tactic, because this process of even getting them to acknowledge the bug is at least a week or 2. Then it goes to the bug queue. That's at least a month before it actually gets looked at by a developer. Then they have to regression test the fix (the fix is usually strcpy() to strncpy() or something just as trivial). Allow 6 to 8 weeks for this. Allow 2 weeks to type up the advisories and coordinate the release with a web page patch. Allow another month for unanswered emails.
Think I'm kidding? I found Oracle holes that took literally 9 months to get patched and posted. That's because if a vendor thinks that you won't release an exploit they'll take full advantage and put the security fix at the bottom of the stack.
Bug List ------- 1. Search feature not working properly...
99. Change desktop icon to Cornflower Blue
100. Fix critical security hole which allows anyone on the internet to gain superuser privs using only their web browser.
Seriously, sometimes the only way to get the attention of these people is to release an exploit. After that, they're much more responsive.
You remind me of one of a self-righteous animal-rights oriented vegetarian. She won't eat beef, but you better believe that Prada handbag is real leather. You can't possibly complain about disposable DVD's unless you never (drawing on recent personal memory) buy water in a plastic bottle, use plastic utensils, have a non-electric car or clothe a child in a disposable diaper. Any of these is as bad or worse than DVD's, so don't complain about a negligible plastic loss, complain about the real issues. Unless of course you're a caveman (that's not really a career).
Oh good scrod.. you probably burn that much gas (plastic is made from the same core materials) getting back to the video store. The environmental argument should have no place in this discussion.
Yeah but the same person who might opt out of the Penis Pump spam might click the Breast Enhancing Pills spam. These guys intentionally try to make it difficult to opt out by not having a central system.
Moreover, which cause is more worthy of my CPU's cycles? Finding out that there may be life in some star system millions of light-years away or possibly finding a cure for cancer or HIV. Perhaps we should concentrate on lifeforms on this planet before we try to find lifeforms on other ones.
The actual cost for sending 1lb of material into space is $10,000. Between food and water alone each person in the research station would be eating $30,000/day.
This means that a moderate research station of 20 people operating for one year would eat $219,000,000 worth of food. Still wondering why we don't have a research station?
Though I would normally abbreviate this kind of thing, Oh My Fucking God, What The Fuck are you talking about? Since when does the school you graduate from mean *ANYTHING* about how smart or capable you are? By the same token, since when does SAT scores or grades have anything to with how smart or capable you are? But just for the sake of argument, I would say that having good grades *probably* indicates smarts and capability. For this reason, check this link. I'll paste it too:
Bush
SAT Verbal Score Verbal 566 (of 800) Math 640 (of 800)
Undergraduate Transcript
73 (of 100) in PS14a 71 (of 100) in PS13b Pass in PS48
Look, I'll be the first to admit that I did *very* poorly in college, but I still got straight A's in Computer Science, because it was a class that I was interested in and was actually good at anyway.
I'll put it this way, do you really want your country run by a man who got a C- average in politics?
Some people watch a 3 hour baseball game every day on their special pay sports channel because they enjoy baseball. Some people play 3 hours of EQ every day with their $12/month account because they enjoy fantasy games and economies. These are both, in reality, totally worthless in real life. They both have little to no social contribution. But the people who play EQ instead of watching the fucking tube all day are the ones wasting their lives?
They're both illegal, the severity of the crime doesn't make it any more illegal, just more likely to be prosecuted. There's a reason the cops don't ticket everyone who jaywalks: they'd have to increase their police force by ten. Same thing for P2P. They can't realisticly arrest/sue and prosecute everyone who does it, but that doesn't make it legal, just easy to get away with.
P2P operates on the assumption that "It's only illegal if you get caught."
Seriously.. I may not have a popular opinion here, but 99% of the people, including myself, using Morpheus, Kazaa and the rest are criminals downloading pirated music, movies and software. Sorry if you don't like the laws, but they are what they are. You can't exactly go to the cops and say that you want your money back because the dealer gave you rock candy instead of crack. They're stealing, you're stealing.. what's the difference?
We did that because we were AT WAR with a government who were going to send millions of civilians to fight us on the beaches with spears. Christ, how hard is it to understand that if Iraq gets a nuke they're going to USE IT TO WIPE OUT ISRAEL OR THE US? We weren't blowing up people because we felt like it, we blew them up because they attacked us. He will use it to kill as many civilians as possible for ideological reasons.
The huge learning curve for computer usage didn't stop them from taking over the world. How clunky was DOS back in the day? A product has to be useful first, dumbed down second.
Actually there is a DIRECT and MEASURABLE comparison between brain activity on the road and cell phone usage. A study was done where people would wear a piece of headgear that would not only measure the placement of one's eyes but also brain activity while driving. Turns out that people talking on cellphones spend less time looking at the road and the parts of the brain which are active while concentrating only on the road are less active while the operator is talking on the phone. Similarly, while intoxicated, and they used this exact comparison, the brain is less concerned with the road and more concerned with other thoughts.
This doesn't even take into account the reality that most people still hold their cell phones with their hands, rather than using the headset.
Your racecar analogy is bogus for reasons that any reasonably intelligent person can see. However, since we're posting on Slashnerd I'll elaborate. A racecar driver has certain commands and phrases that he says to his pit crew that he has said hundreds of times before. There is no conversation and there is no intensive cognitive thought involved. Therefore the portions of the brain which are focused on the road remain focused on the road when these pre-programmed phrases are uttered. Clearly arguing with your girlfriend is more demanding on the brain than "I need gas."
Re:copy a string from buffer
on
Hacker Survey
·
· Score: 2
Yeah, except that you're wrong. There is no "feeling" it conveys to the user that can't be expressed in terms of numbers and appointed tasks. It's either this fast or this fast, it's either this modular or this modular. Let me put it this way: has a programmer ever been able to solicit the range of emotion that musicians can? You can make the user happy/programmer happy that it does work, you can make them unhappy if it doesn't. This is a 1 or a 0.
I'm not saying that a programmer can't be creative. That is, that they can't do things that no one else has done. I'm saying that the end result can never be remotely classified as being akin to music or poetry. I mean, if you go by your rationale EVERY profession is like being an artist. Building a house, laying the plumbing, psychology, advertising.. EVERYTHING can be done in a different way that, by your definition, would make it art.
Re:it was a very abstract comment
on
Hacker Survey
·
· Score: 2
Bah@you the difference is that the end result of music is subjective and the end result of programming is not. The program either works or does not. The music can be good, bad or anywhere in between. Don't give me any of this "Yeah, but like Mozilla is OK, IE suxors and Opera is the money.. AND THEY'RE ALL WEB BROWSERS" nonsense. They r0x or sux0r because of bugs or the lack thereof. The only thing even remotely subjective is the UI, not the underlying code.
If you're writing a program that's supposed to copy a string from buffer A to buffer B the program either does this or doesn't. There are ways to make it do it more efficiently, but in the end they all perform the same task.
Slashdot Mirror
The comment is funny, but the underlying reality is not. I already posted this today, but I think it has relevance here:
---
I've always wondered why Palestine/Iraq/Afghanistan doesn't simply train armies of script kiddies. They could cause as much mayhem as any suicide bomber in a Starbucks. Obviously I don't condone that kind of shit, but you have to wonder how far away we are from that reality. These suicide bombers aren't taking out tactical leaders, they're trying to incite fear and publicity.
Imagine an army of 1000 Iraqie script kiddies backed by 10 smart Iraqies who know how to audit C code and use disassemblers. I'm sorry to say that we'd be fucked.
---
How much coverage did the DoS'ing of eBay, Yahoo, Etc Co. get? WAY more than the bombing of some ship in Yemen.
All I can think of in these situations is a bug that a guy I know found in BIND. 90% of the root DNS servers in the world were vulnerable to it, just as they are to the recent ISS one. If someone in Afghanistan had found that instead of us, what would they do with it? They'd Hacked By Chinese every one of them. Imagine the implications of all the root NS's being hacked. Imagine the productivity loss in just a few hours. This is what we're up against. I'm afraid.
Christ.. it's the same for virtually every online game pay service. You sign up on the web or with their special GUI. Then you log on and have a modified binary so they ban you. How would NoMoreNicksLeft handle that situation in his hypothetical online gaming world of fantasy, elves and make-believe?
If you break the EULA you terminate any obligation MS might have for you. Is this so difficult to understand? You broke a contract. Repeat after me: YOU BROKE A CONTRACT. If you don't like it, don't fucking buy it.
So you're telling me that you only use Kazaa to download free music? Bullshit. You and 95% of Slashdot's population (including me) pirate music every day. If you want to listen to a piece of copywrited music you gotta pay for it, right? Or is that different somehow? Topics like this piss me off because it brings out every other fucking hypocrite on the internet.
You've obviously never submitted a bug to a large, closed-source bloated software company. If you're lucky enough to get a response, you then have to wrestle with them for a week over how to reproduce the damn thing. Even when you give them a working exploit, they'll still have trouble. I don't know how many times I had this conversation:
...
Me: I found a bug in your software.
Them: We can't reproduce it.
Me: I sent you an exploit.
Them: It says to compile it with gcc.
Me: I wrote the exploit to run under Linux.
Them: Our software doesn't run on Linux.
Me: I know that, but the exploit happens to run under Linux.
Them: Most people don't use Linux, therefore there is no reproducable bug.
Me: BUT I COULD'VE WRITTEN IT WITH MSVC++ OR VISUAL BASIC OR WHATEVER WINDOWS PROGRAM.
Them: Let us know if you ever reproduce this bug in a Windows environment.
Perhaps it's a stall tactic, because this process of even getting them to acknowledge the bug is at least a week or 2. Then it goes to the bug queue. That's at least a month before it actually gets looked at by a developer. Then they have to regression test the fix (the fix is usually strcpy() to strncpy() or something just as trivial). Allow 6 to 8 weeks for this. Allow 2 weeks to type up the advisories and coordinate the release with a web page patch. Allow another month for unanswered emails.
Think I'm kidding? I found Oracle holes that took literally 9 months to get patched and posted. That's because if a vendor thinks that you won't release an exploit they'll take full advantage and put the security fix at the bottom of the stack.
Bug List
-------
1. Search feature not working properly
99. Change desktop icon to Cornflower Blue
100. Fix critical security hole which allows anyone on the internet to gain superuser privs using only their web browser.
Seriously, sometimes the only way to get the attention of these people is to release an exploit. After that, they're much more responsive.
You remind me of one of a self-righteous animal-rights oriented vegetarian. She won't eat beef, but you better believe that Prada handbag is real leather. You can't possibly complain about disposable DVD's unless you never (drawing on recent personal memory) buy water in a plastic bottle, use plastic utensils, have a non-electric car or clothe a child in a disposable diaper. Any of these is as bad or worse than DVD's, so don't complain about a negligible plastic loss, complain about the real issues. Unless of course you're a caveman (that's not really a career).
Oh good scrod.. you probably burn that much gas (plastic is made from the same core materials) getting back to the video store. The environmental argument should have no place in this discussion.
Fox seems to be fairly cool with that stuff. Until a German (?) brewery started putting out Duff Beer and got hit with a C&D.
how much do you want to bet that info@dataresourceconsulting.com has a spam filter on it?
Yeah but the same person who might opt out of the Penis Pump spam might click the Breast Enhancing Pills spam. These guys intentionally try to make it difficult to opt out by not having a central system.
Moreover, which cause is more worthy of my CPU's cycles? Finding out that there may be life in some star system millions of light-years away or possibly finding a cure for cancer or HIV. Perhaps we should concentrate on lifeforms on this planet before we try to find lifeforms on other ones.
Well then you must know something the stockholders don't.
The actual cost for sending 1lb of material into space is $10,000. Between food and water alone each person in the research station would be eating $30,000/day.
This means that a moderate research station of 20 people operating for one year would eat $219,000,000 worth of food. Still wondering why we don't have a research station?
You're supposed to unwrap the plastic before smoking the cigar.
Man Mugs Mime With Meat, Millions Make Merry!
Though I would normally abbreviate this kind of thing, Oh My Fucking God, What The Fuck are you talking about? Since when does the school you graduate from mean *ANYTHING* about how smart or capable you are? By the same token, since when does SAT scores or grades have anything to with how smart or capable you are? But just for the sake of argument, I would say that having good grades *probably* indicates smarts and capability. For this reason, check this link. I'll paste it too:
Bush
SAT Verbal Score
Verbal 566 (of 800)
Math 640 (of 800)
Undergraduate Transcript
73 (of 100) in PS14a
71 (of 100) in PS13b
Pass in PS48
Look, I'll be the first to admit that I did *very* poorly in college, but I still got straight A's in Computer Science, because it was a class that I was interested in and was actually good at anyway.
I'll put it this way, do you really want your country run by a man who got a C- average in politics?
Some people watch a 3 hour baseball game every day on their special pay sports channel because they enjoy baseball. Some people play 3 hours of EQ every day with their $12/month account because they enjoy fantasy games and economies. These are both, in reality, totally worthless in real life. They both have little to no social contribution. But the people who play EQ instead of watching the fucking tube all day are the ones wasting their lives?
Sorry buddy, having fun is not wasting your life.
They're both illegal, the severity of the crime doesn't make it any more illegal, just more likely to be prosecuted. There's a reason the cops don't ticket everyone who jaywalks: they'd have to increase their police force by ten. Same thing for P2P. They can't realisticly arrest/sue and prosecute everyone who does it, but that doesn't make it legal, just easy to get away with.
P2P operates on the assumption that "It's only illegal if you get caught."
Seriously.. I may not have a popular opinion here, but 99% of the people, including myself, using Morpheus, Kazaa and the rest are criminals downloading pirated music, movies and software. Sorry if you don't like the laws, but they are what they are. You can't exactly go to the cops and say that you want your money back because the dealer gave you rock candy instead of crack. They're stealing, you're stealing.. what's the difference?
We did that because we were AT WAR with a government who were going to send millions of civilians to fight us on the beaches with spears. Christ, how hard is it to understand that if Iraq gets a nuke they're going to USE IT TO WIPE OUT ISRAEL OR THE US? We weren't blowing up people because we felt like it, we blew them up because they attacked us. He will use it to kill as many civilians as possible for ideological reasons.
Well, it would effectively make the opponent blind, which I think would translate into a +3 bonus unless they had blind fighting.
The huge learning curve for computer usage didn't stop them from taking over the world. How clunky was DOS back in the day? A product has to be useful first, dumbed down second.
Actually there is a DIRECT and MEASURABLE comparison between brain activity on the road and cell phone usage. A study was done where people would wear a piece of headgear that would not only measure the placement of one's eyes but also brain activity while driving. Turns out that people talking on cellphones spend less time looking at the road and the parts of the brain which are active while concentrating only on the road are less active while the operator is talking on the phone. Similarly, while intoxicated, and they used this exact comparison, the brain is less concerned with the road and more concerned with other thoughts.
This doesn't even take into account the reality that most people still hold their cell phones with their hands, rather than using the headset.
Your racecar analogy is bogus for reasons that any reasonably intelligent person can see. However, since we're posting on Slashnerd I'll elaborate. A racecar driver has certain commands and phrases that he says to his pit crew that he has said hundreds of times before. There is no conversation and there is no intensive cognitive thought involved. Therefore the portions of the brain which are focused on the road remain focused on the road when these pre-programmed phrases are uttered. Clearly arguing with your girlfriend is more demanding on the brain than "I need gas."
Yeah, except that you're wrong. There is no "feeling" it conveys to the user that can't be expressed in terms of numbers and appointed tasks. It's either this fast or this fast, it's either this modular or this modular. Let me put it this way: has a programmer ever been able to solicit the range of emotion that musicians can? You can make the user happy/programmer happy that it does work, you can make them unhappy if it doesn't. This is a 1 or a 0.
I'm not saying that a programmer can't be creative. That is, that they can't do things that no one else has done. I'm saying that the end result can never be remotely classified as being akin to music or poetry. I mean, if you go by your rationale EVERY profession is like being an artist. Building a house, laying the plumbing, psychology, advertising.. EVERYTHING can be done in a different way that, by your definition, would make it art.
Bah@you the difference is that the end result of music is subjective and the end result of programming is not. The program either works or does not. The music can be good, bad or anywhere in between. Don't give me any of this "Yeah, but like Mozilla is OK, IE suxors and Opera is the money.. AND THEY'RE ALL WEB BROWSERS" nonsense. They r0x or sux0r because of bugs or the lack thereof. The only thing even remotely subjective is the UI, not the underlying code.
If you're writing a program that's supposed to copy a string from buffer A to buffer B the program either does this or doesn't. There are ways to make it do it more efficiently, but in the end they all perform the same task.
In the end, programs are either 1 or 0.