I put up with the advert - actually I made some coffee while it was on.
The guy says that he's done this so that if his ISP ever accuses him of downloading illegal stuff, he can say "my connection was not secure; it could have been anybody". The fact is, he's posted an article on a publicly available site which tells everybody that he is doing this deliberately. "Well", says the ISP, "you are too stupid to have an internet connection". Snip go the scissors on his line. If this is not in their terms of service, I'm sure they can withdraw it with just a little financial compensation e.g. refund a couple of months of fees. But basically, they will not want anybody who exhibits such deliberate antisocial behaviour as a customer. (Antisocial because, for instance, a spammer could use his connection to send spam).
He's doing this so he can tell the ISP that it's not his fault if they detect somebody from his IP downloading illegal stuff. He has neglected the fact that if his connection was secure, nobody would be able to download illegal stuff from his IP...... except him.
Finally, who cares if the intended victim screwed the scammer? What's the shithead going to do, press charges? I'd like to hear that phone call to the police: "Hey, I was trying to defraud this guy out of his $2000+ PowerBook and he sniffed out the scam, turned it around, and made me pay $X in taxes on a 3-ring binder-- now will someone please prosecute him?"
Yes, but three ring binders are useless here in the UK. All the paper has either two holes or four holes in it.
You can't carbon date a fossil as all the original organic material has been displaced during the fossilisation process. It is dangerous to your own credibility to go around claiming that it is relevant - well it would be if you hadn't posted AC.
I distinguish between evolution and natural selection. Evolution is the observed fact (mainly from the fossil record) that species are "created" change and go extinct over time (there is actually quite a lot of fossil evidence for so called transitional forms). Natural selection is a theory proposed by Charles Darwin to explain how evolution might happen. Evolution is a fact. Natural selection is a good theory to explain it.
Are you a Young Earth Creationist? Because this "grossly inaccurate dating" argument is the kind of rubbish that they like to come up with. How grossly inaccurate? A factor of 10 wrong? 100? 1000? Current dating methods would have to be wrong by a factor of nearly a million in order for the Earth to only be 6000 years old.
Not all great circles are the same length due to the slightly non spherical nature of the Earth - hence the standardisation to a specific number of metres.
In fact, not all minutes of arc of latitude are all the same length for the same reason.
The ONLY people in the entire industry who considers MB/KB/et al to be in base-10 are the hard drive manufacturers, and that's just so they can claim their 230GB drives are 250GB!
Do they consider kilobytes to be 10^3 bytes? I only ask because in the old days of floppy disks you had 720K floppies. A "K" was a good old 1024 byte kilobyte. (In fact now I think about it, nobody ever used to say kbytes because of the possible confusion. A "K" was a specific unit of memory nothing to do with SI). Anyway, somebody thought of a way of doubling the amount of storage on a floppy to 1440K. These became known as 1.44 Megabyte disks. Think carefully in terms of actual bytes. The actual amount of storage is 1.44 x 1000 x 1024 bytes.
Ownership of ideas relating to software is immoral and must be stopped.
I think that depends on what you mean by "ideas". If you mean patenting translucent windows is immoral, then I agree with you. If you mean patenting this algorithm that took me two man years of effort and allows you to do translucent windows efficiently is immoral, then I disagree with you. Of course, I think it not unreasonable that any software patent shoud require the submission of the source code for publication in much the same way that if you patent a new fuel injection method, you'd be expected to submit engineering drawings (wouldn't you???)
The major barrier to entry in the field of software development is inherently intellectual, not financial. I don't need to spend money on scarce resources like raw materials and factories to produce software; I need time, a computer, and a brain. Therefore the natural initial outlay for software development is much lower than for the production of tangible goods.
Unfortunately, the said brains normally reside inside human bodies that require the usual food, drink, sex, computer games, pizza etc. These can usually only be obtained for money. To bring anything original to market in the software business today requires far more than one brain. Do not underestimate the cost of putting a packaged software product on the shelves.
Software patents as currently implemented are restrictive which is ironic because the original point of patents was to prevent people from secretly hoarding their ideas. I think the patent law could be tweaked to make patents beneficial to the industry as a whole simply by making people publish their source code on successful application and having a shorter time limit of, say, three years.
The irridium layer just proves that a meteorite hit the Earth at the end of the cretaceous. In fact, studies of the number of dinosaur species show that they were in trouble hundreds of thousands of years before the impact.
I don't think the case for the meteorite being the sole cause is considered all that strong amongst paleontologists.
Well the Earth is much older than a few thousand years. This is as much a fact as that it is round. That totally invalidates Genesis 1 and 2 by itself.
There is plenty of evidence of evolution - ever heard of fossils? Ever heard of strata. fossils of individual species tend to be found in certain definite strata which means that a) species have been dying out since the earliest times in which life has been around and b) new species have been "created" throughout history. Further, there are sets of fossils where you can trace changes over millions of years. Evolution is a fact. Natural selection (which is a theory of the mechanism of evolution) is not a fact, but it is the best theory we have for it at the moment (discredited accounts made up by semi literate tribesmen 3,000 years ago don't count).
Which all goes to show that your internal network should be equally well protected from the DMZ as from the real Internet and also outbound traffic should be controlled.
Reading the technical description, the worm selects a random computer on the net and conects on port 445 (why wasn't incoming traffic on port 445 blocked on your school's firewall?). Port 445 is used by Windows for SMB connections (i.e. file sharing). There is no excuse to have that port open to the Internet. It then creates a remote shell on port 9996 on the target (why is *that* port open on your firewall?). This shell then connects back to an FTP server on 5554 (started by the worm) on the already infected machine to get the worm's exe (why is port 5554 open on your school's firewall?).
Whoever is the sysadmin at your school really needs to learn about internet security.
You could run Darwin on it. Ok, that's still an Apple OS but it's free (as in beer) and it's Open Source. That'd give you all the right drivers since they're the same as in OS X.
Come to think of it, you can get the source code for Darwin so that means you theoretically don't need the specs for the hardware - you can look at how Apple did it.
The 9x based version of Windows did have proper virtual address spaces etc for user processes. There were issues, but these would have been caused by things like Win16 apps and calls to the GDI which was 95% the same as the win16 GDI (i.e. a 16 bit DLL).
Actually, it's a myth to say that the British constitution is not written down. Large parts of it are, but in lots of different places. It's just that there is no one document labelled "British Constitution".
Further: the EU constitution will do very little to curb the powers of the UK government. If the UK government decided to suspend general elections, the EU constitution would have nothing to say about it. However, they would never get the required law through parliament and our Head of State would refuse to sign the act.
Even further: the Government's powers are limited. There are lots of examples of things they have failed to do in spite of the huge majority they hold.
Because you like the hardware, but want to distance yourself from a user community seen by many as insular, conformant and intolerant?
Which user community is that? The Windows, Mac, Linux or BSD community? There are people in all of those that could be described as you have described them.
I'd never base my choice of hardware or software on what the other people who use it are like (if you can even make such a generalisation).
Don't use Cocoa/Java. It (Cocoa) wasn't designed for it. If you know C and you know objects you can learn Objective-C in - oh - about a day. The biggest hurdle for me (who's previous GUI experience was with M$ MFC and Win32) was coming to terms with the way objects interact with the user interface: things like first responders and file owners, targets, outlets and so on. Even so, after two or three days I felt fairly confident about creating simple apps in Cocoa.
I can't tell you about custom controls - haven't tried making any yet.
Cocoa does have a Unicode string class similar to java.lang.String. There is the concept of a generic object and you can discover what kind it is at run time (I guess this is a superset of varient). It does have an object array type (one imutable and one mutable actually).
Cocoa objects are reference counted, but the concept of pools is built into the language. Personnally, I like garbage collection because it allows me to be lazy, but reference counting gives you more control over what happens when you want things to go away. For instance if you have an object wrapping an external resource e.g. a socket, in Java you need to write a method to release the resource. The idea of just deleting the object and having the destructor tidy up seems cleaner to me.
Godel's theorem says that any formalised version of number theory is either incomplete or inconsistent. i.e. either there are true statements that cannot be proved within the system or there are statements where both they and there negations can be proved within the system.
You cannot prove that a statement is undecidable in any general sense only that it is undecidable within some system e.g. a Turing Machine or Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. A moment's thought is enough to confirm this: If I have proved that theorem T is undecidable, it follows that there must be no counter example to theorem T, because a counter example would constitute a proof of the negation of T which means that T is decidable. If there are no counter examples, T must be true, so T is decided.
You don't want transparent proxying for SMTP. The only way to detect which of the internal IP addresses was sending the spam was to look at the received headers. No SMTP server with visibility of the internal IPs = no received header with an internal IP.
This guy had caused the Internet Cafe to get put on a black list. The police were not willing to do anything without catching him in the act. How was the sysadmin supposed to do anything woithout monitoring his outbound traffic?
A friend who teaches in England has had exchange students from America ask about "African-American" history in England.
A large proportion of the black population here in the UK are imigrants from the West Indies (or descended from imigrants from the West Indies) which are part of the geographical entity known as America although not part of the political entity known as the United States of America. So it's not a stupid question to ask.
I can't tell you if any of the afore mentioned people would find the term "African-American" offensive, it'd be best to ask them before using it.
what about the owner of the original, and the original designer of the car? Would either of them care? It's something to ponder.
Yes, of course they would. A Ferrari duplicator would immediately make the real cars worthless. The manufacturer would then go out of business and have to lay off the designer. The owner would be left with something for which he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and no resale value.
Slashdot Mirror
I put up with the advert - actually I made some coffee while it was on.
... except him.
The guy says that he's done this so that if his ISP ever accuses him of downloading illegal stuff, he can say "my connection was not secure; it could have been anybody". The fact is, he's posted an article on a publicly available site which tells everybody that he is doing this deliberately. "Well", says the ISP, "you are too stupid to have an internet connection". Snip go the scissors on his line. If this is not in their terms of service, I'm sure they can withdraw it with just a little financial compensation e.g. refund a couple of months of fees. But basically, they will not want anybody who exhibits such deliberate antisocial behaviour as a customer. (Antisocial because, for instance, a spammer could use his connection to send spam).
He's doing this so he can tell the ISP that it's not his fault if they detect somebody from his IP downloading illegal stuff. He has neglected the fact that if his connection was secure, nobody would be able to download illegal stuff from his IP...
hmmmmmmm.....
Finally, who cares if the intended victim screwed the scammer? What's the shithead going to do, press charges? I'd like to hear that phone call to the police: "Hey, I was trying to defraud this guy out of his $2000+ PowerBook and he sniffed out the scam, turned it around, and made me pay $X in taxes on a 3-ring binder-- now will someone please prosecute him?"
Yes, but three ring binders are useless here in the UK. All the paper has either two holes or four holes in it.
You can't carbon date a fossil as all the original organic material has been displaced during the fossilisation process. It is dangerous to your own credibility to go around claiming that it is relevant - well it would be if you hadn't posted AC.
I distinguish between evolution and natural selection. Evolution is the observed fact (mainly from the fossil record) that species are "created" change and go extinct over time (there is actually quite a lot of fossil evidence for so called transitional forms). Natural selection is a theory proposed by Charles Darwin to explain how evolution might happen. Evolution is a fact. Natural selection is a good theory to explain it.
Are you a Young Earth Creationist? Because this "grossly inaccurate dating" argument is the kind of rubbish that they like to come up with. How grossly inaccurate? A factor of 10 wrong? 100? 1000? Current dating methods would have to be wrong by a factor of nearly a million in order for the Earth to only be 6000 years old.
Not all great circles are the same length due to the slightly non spherical nature of the Earth - hence the standardisation to a specific number of metres.
In fact, not all minutes of arc of latitude are all the same length for the same reason.
The ONLY people in the entire industry who considers MB/KB/et al to be in base-10 are the hard drive manufacturers, and that's just so they can claim their 230GB drives are 250GB!
Do they consider kilobytes to be 10^3 bytes? I only ask because in the old days of floppy disks you had 720K floppies. A "K" was a good old 1024 byte kilobyte. (In fact now I think about it, nobody ever used to say kbytes because of the possible confusion. A "K" was a specific unit of memory nothing to do with SI). Anyway, somebody thought of a way of doubling the amount of storage on a floppy to 1440K. These became known as 1.44 Megabyte disks. Think carefully in terms of actual bytes. The actual amount of storage is 1.44 x 1000 x 1024 bytes.
Ownership of ideas relating to software is immoral and must be stopped.
I think that depends on what you mean by "ideas". If you mean patenting translucent windows is immoral, then I agree with you. If you mean patenting this algorithm that took me two man years of effort and allows you to do translucent windows efficiently is immoral, then I disagree with you. Of course, I think it not unreasonable that any software patent shoud require the submission of the source code for publication in much the same way that if you patent a new fuel injection method, you'd be expected to submit engineering drawings (wouldn't you???)
The major barrier to entry in the field of software development is inherently intellectual, not financial. I don't need to spend money on scarce resources like raw materials and factories to produce software; I need time, a computer, and a brain. Therefore the natural initial outlay for software development is much lower than for the production of tangible goods.
Unfortunately, the said brains normally reside inside human bodies that require the usual food, drink, sex, computer games, pizza etc. These can usually only be obtained for money. To bring anything original to market in the software business today requires far more than one brain. Do not underestimate the cost of putting a packaged software product on the shelves.
Software patents as currently implemented are restrictive which is ironic because the original point of patents was to prevent people from secretly hoarding their ideas. I think the patent law could be tweaked to make patents beneficial to the industry as a whole simply by making people publish their source code on successful application and having a shorter time limit of, say, three years.
The irridium layer just proves that a meteorite hit the Earth at the end of the cretaceous. In fact, studies of the number of dinosaur species show that they were in trouble hundreds of thousands of years before the impact.
I don't think the case for the meteorite being the sole cause is considered all that strong amongst paleontologists.
Well the Earth is much older than a few thousand years. This is as much a fact as that it is round. That totally invalidates Genesis 1 and 2 by itself.
There is plenty of evidence of evolution - ever heard of fossils? Ever heard of strata. fossils of individual species tend to be found in certain definite strata which means that a) species have been dying out since the earliest times in which life has been around and b) new species have been "created" throughout history. Further, there are sets of fossils where you can trace changes over millions of years. Evolution is a fact. Natural selection (which is a theory of the mechanism of evolution) is not a fact, but it is the best theory we have for it at the moment (discredited accounts made up by semi literate tribesmen 3,000 years ago don't count).
So that's two places where I've seen it used.
But also do remember that it'll give off fumes that are carcinogenic.
if (b > a) { t = b ; b = a ; a = t }
(t is a temporary variable of the same type as b and a).
Which all goes to show that your internal network should be equally well protected from the DMZ as from the real Internet and also outbound traffic should be controlled.
Reading the technical description, the worm selects a random computer on the net and conects on port 445 (why wasn't incoming traffic on port 445 blocked on your school's firewall?). Port 445 is used by Windows for SMB connections (i.e. file sharing). There is no excuse to have that port open to the Internet. It then creates a remote shell on port 9996 on the target (why is *that* port open on your firewall?). This shell then connects back to an FTP server on 5554 (started by the worm) on the already infected machine to get the worm's exe (why is port 5554 open on your school's firewall?).
Whoever is the sysadmin at your school really needs to learn about internet security.
You could run Darwin on it. Ok, that's still an Apple OS but it's free (as in beer) and it's Open Source. That'd give you all the right drivers since they're the same as in OS X.
Come to think of it, you can get the source code for Darwin so that means you theoretically don't need the specs for the hardware - you can look at how Apple did it.
Ok, a nautical mile is defined to be 6000 feet.
No, it was defined as a minute of arc of latitude. It's been standardised to 1,852 metres or 6,076.1 feet.
The 9x based version of Windows did have proper virtual address spaces etc for user processes. There were issues, but these would have been caused by things like Win16 apps and calls to the GDI which was 95% the same as the win16 GDI (i.e. a 16 bit DLL).
Actually, it's a myth to say that the British constitution is not written down. Large parts of it are, but in lots of different places. It's just that there is no one document labelled "British Constitution".
Further: the EU constitution will do very little to curb the powers of the UK government. If the UK government decided to suspend general elections, the EU constitution would have nothing to say about it. However, they would never get the required law through parliament and our Head of State would refuse to sign the act.
Even further: the Government's powers are limited. There are lots of examples of things they have failed to do in spite of the huge majority they hold.
More to the point, he's literally the only person in the UK who thinks ID cards are a good thing and yet still they're being pushed through.
This survey shows that your assertion is wrong.
Because you like the hardware, but want to distance yourself from a user community seen by many as insular, conformant and intolerant?
Which user community is that? The Windows, Mac, Linux or BSD community? There are people in all of those that could be described as you have described them.
I'd never base my choice of hardware or software on what the other people who use it are like (if you can even make such a generalisation).
Don't use Cocoa/Java. It (Cocoa) wasn't designed for it. If you know C and you know objects you can learn Objective-C in - oh - about a day. The biggest hurdle for me (who's previous GUI experience was with M$ MFC and Win32) was coming to terms with the way objects interact with the user interface: things like first responders and file owners, targets, outlets and so on. Even so, after two or three days I felt fairly confident about creating simple apps in Cocoa.
I can't tell you about custom controls - haven't tried making any yet.
Cocoa does have a Unicode string class similar to java.lang.String. There is the concept of a generic object and you can discover what kind it is at run time (I guess this is a superset of varient). It does have an object array type (one imutable and one mutable actually).
Cocoa objects are reference counted, but the concept of pools is built into the language. Personnally, I like garbage collection because it allows me to be lazy, but reference counting gives you more control over what happens when you want things to go away. For instance if you have an object wrapping an external resource e.g. a socket, in Java you need to write a method to release the resource. The idea of just deleting the object and having the destructor tidy up seems cleaner to me.
Godel's theorem says that any formalised version of number theory is either incomplete or inconsistent. i.e. either there are true statements that cannot be proved within the system or there are statements where both they and there negations can be proved within the system.
You cannot prove that a statement is undecidable in any general sense only that it is undecidable within some system e.g. a Turing Machine or Russell and Whitehead's Principia Mathematica. A moment's thought is enough to confirm this: If I have proved that theorem T is undecidable, it follows that there must be no counter example to theorem T, because a counter example would constitute a proof of the negation of T which means that T is decidable. If there are no counter examples, T must be true, so T is decided.
You don't want transparent proxying for SMTP. The only way to detect which of the internal IP addresses was sending the spam was to look at the received headers. No SMTP server with visibility of the internal IPs = no received header with an internal IP.
This guy had caused the Internet Cafe to get put on a black list. The police were not willing to do anything without catching him in the act. How was the sysadmin supposed to do anything woithout monitoring his outbound traffic?
A friend who teaches in England has had exchange students from America ask about "African-American" history in England.
A large proportion of the black population here in the UK are imigrants from the West Indies (or descended from imigrants from the West Indies) which are part of the geographical entity known as America although not part of the political entity known as the United States of America. So it's not a stupid question to ask.
I can't tell you if any of the afore mentioned people would find the term "African-American" offensive, it'd be best to ask them before using it.
And music doesn't require money to produce?
what about the owner of the original, and the original designer of the car? Would either of them care? It's something to ponder.
Yes, of course they would. A Ferrari duplicator would immediately make the real cars worthless. The manufacturer would then go out of business and have to lay off the designer. The owner would be left with something for which he paid hundreds of thousands of dollars and no resale value.