I had problems getting kixtart stuff to read UTF-8 stuff from the registry.
So I had to rewrite stuff in vbscript which does that a bit better (but not much better[1]), but sucks and is slower.
[1] IIRC there's a function to read UTF-8 values from registry keys, BUT it only supports limited types. There is a function that reads ASCII values from registry keys and it's not so fussy about type. Whoopee.
Assuming you've got it configured well. On at least one version of Ubuntu I tried, apparmor had rather loose permissions for firefox. I tightened it up, but how many in the world would do that?
As for reporting it to Ubuntu, I've more or less given up on "Desktop Linux". I'd report problems with server stuff, but in my experience the desktop developers aren't worth wasting time with.
And noscript is not used by the "patients" who need it most, and are the main targets of botnet operators.
Even if you pwn a noscript user, that user is far more likely to notice that he/she is infected, and eventually fix that. These users are the minority, so the botnet operators don't care.
FWIW, I've written a cross platform agent (unix/linux) that scans for hardware/software, connects to a remote server, and can download new instructions. This is legit, for work and is for admins to do software and hardware asset management. The same agent runs on OSX, AIX, Solaris and many Linux distros.
A botnet client wouldn't need root access, sending spam or helping to DDoS does not need root permissions. Most unix/linux machines allow normal users to set their own cron and at job, so that takes care of rerunning the bot after a reboot (there are other ways too).
So anyone who thinks a linux/unix botnet client would be difficult to create or "install" is ignorant or delusional.
The fanatics have got their heads firmly stuck in the sand.
The initial investment was not funded with the gas tax and has been mostly depreciating ever since then. It is about due to be replaced and that is going to cost a lot of money--where *should* it come from?
If you have "A" a culture that does 85% good, but does not reproduce itself, and "B" a culture that does 60% good and does reproduce itself. In the long run "B" will do more good than "A", since "A" would die out.
As for your other points: 1) there are very few rational beings. 2) From what I see most people want to belong to a group (which tends to be divisive) - whether that group is a football team, Greenpeace, Vegans, Apple, Linux, Democrats, Republicans. They're going to get religion whether the atheists like it or not. So it's more important that they get the less bad ones. If you don't think those adherents are religious maybe you should try to challenge their beliefs;). 3) practically everyone will have compartmentalization of beliefs. Just observe people. 4) Since we're on the subject of altruism, whether the supernatural nonsense is true is not actually that relevant. A rational atheist would objectively measure the actual good vs evil a particular belief system does over time, and rate them accordingly. Rather than go by faith and hearsay.
To the people who ask "what's good and what's evil?" maybe a good start would be the long term thriving (not just mere survival) of the species.
You're helping to create a friendly and safe environment/culture.
When people don't have to spend too much of their resources being paranoid and watching their backs they can generally get more productive stuff done.
That's why stuff like culture and religion are important.
The atheists might claim religion is net negative, but so far it looks like not all religions are the same, and the major religions are still competing very well against atheism (which does not seem to have a good reproduction/conversion[1] plan compared to the popular religions).
[1] If a particular culture is very good in theory, but is not good at spreading in practice, in the long run it's more likely to go extinct.
People write imperfect programs to imperfectly solve problems all the time, and often the customers are happy enough with the imperfect results to pay good enough money. And at least some of the time they aren't really being swindled;).
For example, the famous "halting problem" is actually an easier problem than detecting that a given program is malware (yes I know the halting problem is impossible to solve over turing machines, but bear with me).
The halting problem can be stated as "given a program and an input, figure out whether the program will eventually halt or will run forever."
Whereas an antimalware program just has a suspect program but not the full inputs, nor even the full program - it might connect to a server on the internet for legitimate reasons (updates) or not (malware payload/instructions). And sometimes the determination of malware might even be subjective.
So it is impossible for the antimalware program to work perfectly but that does not stop many people from using them, or even willingly paying for them.
BTW if one wanted better security the operating system would require the program to do the equivalent of requesting upfront what the program wants to be able to do. And then use that to help the user make a better decision on whether to actually run the program or not. And the operating system enforces the limits.
This is in effect sidestepping the halting problem by having the program say upfront how much time it wants, and if it tries to run beyond that time, the OS halts it;).
I believe some phone OSes do something like that already.
Sure it matters, but not directly. So it still does not answer the "why".
Research on nuclear fusion power plants might matter in the real world, but since the solution does not exist yet, most power plant designers or builders do not need to take up courses on it.
If a very smart person solves the P=NP problem and publishes the result, the programmers will soon be able to look up the resulting solutions on Google.
No need to: "read a textbook on computational complexity, or an algorithms text, or just take a course on theoretical computer science".
Saying that a programmer should do all that is like saying that a house designer/builder should take a course on theoretical material science.
Once a new construction material becomes actually available in practice then it makes sense to know about it. Otherwise it's not really useful.
Of course one can still learn about it out of curiosity.
IMO we should abolish the patent system. It mainly rewards those who come up with obvious ideas, and cannot reward those who are really pioneers (and if they are forced to spend time patenting the thousands of obvious steps to their great leaps it actually slows them down).
After all an idea is definitely innovative if by the time most people "get it" decades have passed so the patent has expired.
The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.
Yes some of the stuff he did was based off previous ideas. But he actually came up with a working implementation. More than 40 years ago.
To those who say such stuff shouldn't be rewarded because it didn't reach the general public, the NLS and other innovations led to similar and new stuff in Xerox PARC, which led to the Apple stuff (Lisa, Mac).
In contrast Amazon, Rambus et all get rewarded for obvious stuff like "1-click buying" or "breaking eggs to make an omelette". Yes I've looked at a few of Rambus's patents. So far I haven't seen innovation beyond "we need to make an omelette, here's a good way of breaking the eggs".
Since hindsight is better, perhaps we should have a prize based system where inventors are rewarded in hindsight.
You could have two classes of prizes (and many prizes for different fields). One class of prizes should be selected by the general public, the other class of prizes would be selected by experts in the respective fields.
There's opportunity cost too. Most people don't have enough money to buy their houses with cash.
So either they rent while saving up money for a house for years or even decades (which can actually mean they pay more in total or get "less house"), or they get a loan to buy a house to live in "now".
Some even buy more than one house and they rent them out to others. That's great when the cash-flow works out fine, but if everyone tries to do that and it all goes bad you end up with 2008.
And on the subject of 2008, when you can get immense enough amounts of credit, you're often not the one getting screwed;).
I don't have to be rich, all I need is for the Federal Reserve to give me a bail-out grade loan;).
p.s. if you buy stuff using your credit card AND pay up in full before the due date, you get to delay payment and the many benefits of using credit cards while not paying any interest.
There are other strange bits, but that part is strange enough.
If after zooming in you still think that scan or "scan" looks normal then there's probably no convincing you either. You can go ahead and see whatever you want to see.
As I've mentioned already, I don't really care whether it's fake or real. What I see is very sloppy work.
FWIW I was actually going to laugh at the conspiracy theorists, but when I downloaded the PDF from whitehouse.gov it's unbelievably crappy work.
It's about as crappy work as the Pentagon saying they're respecting Islamic traditions and then claiming they buried Osama's corpse at sea. Anyone bothering to do 2 minutes of searching would know that's not traditional at all. When someone told me it was a sea burial, it was so unbelievable that I thought he must have heard the news wrong.
Maybe the US Gov is trying to figure out how stupid the US people can be. Or are just taunting them. Perhaps they are actually putting "dumbing down" substances in the tap water;).
I don't see environment as being far more important than heritage. They are both limiting factors.
The best environment isn't going to make a chimp (or amoeba) a genius.
But if the environment is not good enough then the chimp is dead and dead chimps don't do well in IQ tests;).
Many like to say that there's only 2% difference between chimps and humans. If that's true then that 2% makes a big difference when it comes to intelligence. Therefore 0.1% is likely to also make a significant difference despite "politically correct" people insisting there's no difference.
Lastly, in many things the average is not as important as the extremes. People give out prizes and medals to the fastest runners and top geniuses, they don't give them out to populations that are on average a bit faster/smarter than other populations.
A scan of this quality should not be considered fit for release.
If the original document is actually damaged or torn into multiple pieces, arrange it, take a picture of it, and it would still be better than the crap they've released.
Zoom in closer to those numbers and you'll see what I mean about anti-aliasing. It's smoother. Compare with the other number "1"s which are jagged. The font might even be different.
FWIW, I don't actually care where he's born. It's just sloppy work.
He should have got his staff to do a better job. Whether scanning the originals or faking them;).
I was sceptical about initial reports but going to give them the benefit of doubt - since I figured more info about the death and corpse would surface. Then came the sea burial thing along with their bullshit about respecting Muslim traditions:
Senior US officials initially told news agencies that his body would be disposed of in accordance with Islamic tradition, which involves ritual washing, shrouding and burial within 24 hours.
Except for the important bit where if he died on land they should bury him on land.
The "avoiding a shrine" stuff is bullshit too. Bury him on land and set up cameras and microphones to record any "devotees" from afar.
Who in their right mind should believe the US Gov's story? Especially not with their track record of deception and outright lies.
That's why some smart and amoral people go into stuff like investment banking instead: 1) The betting limits are much higher. 2) You generally don't have to deal with "Guido" and his very persuasive friends... 3) You are usually playing with other people's money. 4) When you win big, you win big. 5) When you lose big, you get a bail out, bonus for past performance. Then you go on a nice holiday and come back and do it all over again.
And when you bring the house down, you really bring it down:).
Slashdot Mirror
I had problems getting kixtart stuff to read UTF-8 stuff from the registry.
So I had to rewrite stuff in vbscript which does that a bit better (but not much better[1]), but sucks and is slower.
[1] IIRC there's a function to read UTF-8 values from registry keys, BUT it only supports limited types. There is a function that reads ASCII values from registry keys and it's not so fussy about type. Whoopee.
Assuming you've got it configured well. On at least one version of Ubuntu I tried, apparmor had rather loose permissions for firefox. I tightened it up, but how many in the world would do that?
As for reporting it to Ubuntu, I've more or less given up on "Desktop Linux". I'd report problems with server stuff, but in my experience the desktop developers aren't worth wasting time with.
And noscript is not used by the "patients" who need it most, and are the main targets of botnet operators.
Even if you pwn a noscript user, that user is far more likely to notice that he/she is infected, and eventually fix that. These users are the minority, so the botnet operators don't care.
FWIW, I've written a cross platform agent (unix/linux) that scans for hardware/software, connects to a remote server, and can download new instructions. This is legit, for work and is for admins to do software and hardware asset management. The same agent runs on OSX, AIX, Solaris and many Linux distros.
A botnet client wouldn't need root access, sending spam or helping to DDoS does not need root permissions. Most unix/linux machines allow normal users to set their own cron and at job, so that takes care of rerunning the bot after a reboot (there are other ways too).
So anyone who thinks a linux/unix botnet client would be difficult to create or "install" is ignorant or delusional.
The fanatics have got their heads firmly stuck in the sand.
The Linux "installer" is called Firefox.
;).
Google for firefox exploit linux. Or firefox vulnerability.
As long as attackers can run arbitrary code of their choice they can install botnet software.
Even if it means tricking the user to run it... Which is what botnet operators do all the time to Windows users.
The "linux" fanatics just like to believe Linux is more secure when there are so many exploited Linux servers[1] out there.
Go ahead and blame the administrators and users, but just imagine the sort of users you have "administering" a typical Windows machine.
They are the very users botnet operators target.
If OSX and "Desktop Linux" become very popular, you might get malware written in perl for more cross platform goodness.
[1] There may not be as many exploited Linux desktops, but I suspect there may be more Linux servers than desktops in the world
The initial investment was not funded with the gas tax and has been mostly depreciating ever since then. It is about due to be replaced and that is going to cost a lot of money--where *should* it come from?
Get it from the Federal Reserve?
http://www.google.com/search?&q=federal+reserve+trillions
(go look at some of the top links for the details)
As far as I know the total US interstate highway cost is "only" about US400-500 billion in comparison.
Someone might say creating the money would result in inflation but they've already created at least 9 trillion!
So what's another trillion or so?
We're on the subject of altruism.
If you have "A" a culture that does 85% good, but does not reproduce itself, and "B" a culture that does 60% good and does reproduce itself. In the long run "B" will do more good than "A", since "A" would die out.
As for your other points: ;).
1) there are very few rational beings.
2) From what I see most people want to belong to a group (which tends to be divisive) - whether that group is a football team, Greenpeace, Vegans, Apple, Linux, Democrats, Republicans. They're going to get religion whether the atheists like it or not. So it's more important that they get the less bad ones. If you don't think those adherents are religious maybe you should try to challenge their beliefs
3) practically everyone will have compartmentalization of beliefs. Just observe people.
4) Since we're on the subject of altruism, whether the supernatural nonsense is true is not actually that relevant. A rational atheist would objectively measure the actual good vs evil a particular belief system does over time, and rate them accordingly. Rather than go by faith and hearsay.
To the people who ask "what's good and what's evil?" maybe a good start would be the long term thriving (not just mere survival) of the species.
If you find alt-tabbing easier than moving your head maybe this might be useful: http://sourceforge.net/projects/linkkey/
Most people won't find it useful but a few do.
Basically with it you can quickly switch amongst 9 windows with their respective hotkeys. And set up the key-to-window mappings quickly.
You're helping to create a friendly and safe environment/culture.
When people don't have to spend too much of their resources being paranoid and watching their backs they can generally get more productive stuff done.
That's why stuff like culture and religion are important.
The atheists might claim religion is net negative, but so far it looks like not all religions are the same, and the major religions are still competing very well against atheism (which does not seem to have a good reproduction/conversion[1] plan compared to the popular religions).
[1] If a particular culture is very good in theory, but is not good at spreading in practice, in the long run it's more likely to go extinct.
All that is still mostly irrelevant.
;).
;).
People write imperfect programs to imperfectly solve problems all the time, and often the customers are happy enough with the imperfect results to pay good enough money. And at least some of the time they aren't really being swindled
For example, the famous "halting problem" is actually an easier problem than detecting that a given program is malware (yes I know the halting problem is impossible to solve over turing machines, but bear with me).
The halting problem can be stated as "given a program and an input, figure out whether the program will eventually halt or will run forever."
Whereas an antimalware program just has a suspect program but not the full inputs, nor even the full program - it might connect to a server on the internet for legitimate reasons (updates) or not (malware payload/instructions). And sometimes the determination of malware might even be subjective.
So it is impossible for the antimalware program to work perfectly but that does not stop many people from using them, or even willingly paying for them.
BTW if one wanted better security the operating system would require the program to do the equivalent of requesting upfront what the program wants to be able to do. And then use that to help the user make a better decision on whether to actually run the program or not. And the operating system enforces the limits.
This is in effect sidestepping the halting problem by having the program say upfront how much time it wants, and if it tries to run beyond that time, the OS halts it
I believe some phone OSes do something like that already.
Sure it matters, but not directly. So it still does not answer the "why".
Research on nuclear fusion power plants might matter in the real world, but since the solution does not exist yet, most power plant designers or builders do not need to take up courses on it.
If a very smart person solves the P=NP problem and publishes the result, the programmers will soon be able to look up the resulting solutions on Google.
No need to: "read a textbook on computational complexity, or an algorithms text, or just take a course on theoretical computer science".
Saying that a programmer should do all that is like saying that a house designer/builder should take a course on theoretical material science.
Once a new construction material becomes actually available in practice then it makes sense to know about it. Otherwise it's not really useful.
Of course one can still learn about it out of curiosity.
IMO we should abolish the patent system. It mainly rewards those who come up with obvious ideas, and cannot reward those who are really pioneers (and if they are forced to spend time patenting the thousands of obvious steps to their great leaps it actually slows them down).
After all an idea is definitely innovative if by the time most people "get it" decades have passed so the patent has expired.
For an example see the "Mother of all demos" stuff by Douglas Engelbart: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JfIgzSoTMOs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NLS_(computer_system)
The Mother of All Demos is a name given retrospectively to Douglas Engelbart's December 9, 1968, demonstration of experimental computer technologies that are now commonplace. The live demonstration featured the introduction of the computer mouse, video conferencing, teleconferencing, email, hypertext, word processing, hypermedia, object addressing and dynamic file linking, bootstrapping, and a collaborative real-time editor.
Yes some of the stuff he did was based off previous ideas. But he actually came up with a working implementation. More than 40 years ago.
To those who say such stuff shouldn't be rewarded because it didn't reach the general public, the NLS and other innovations led to similar and new stuff in Xerox PARC, which led to the Apple stuff (Lisa, Mac).
In contrast Amazon, Rambus et all get rewarded for obvious stuff like "1-click buying" or "breaking eggs to make an omelette". Yes I've looked at a few of Rambus's patents. So far I haven't seen innovation beyond "we need to make an omelette, here's a good way of breaking the eggs".
Since hindsight is better, perhaps we should have a prize based system where inventors are rewarded in hindsight.
You could have two classes of prizes (and many prizes for different fields). One class of prizes should be selected by the general public, the other class of prizes would be selected by experts in the respective fields.
There's opportunity cost too. Most people don't have enough money to buy their houses with cash.
;).
;).
So either they rent while saving up money for a house for years or even decades (which can actually mean they pay more in total or get "less house"), or they get a loan to buy a house to live in "now".
Some even buy more than one house and they rent them out to others. That's great when the cash-flow works out fine, but if everyone tries to do that and it all goes bad you end up with 2008.
And on the subject of 2008, when you can get immense enough amounts of credit, you're often not the one getting screwed
I don't have to be rich, all I need is for the Federal Reserve to give me a bail-out grade loan
p.s. if you buy stuff using your credit card AND pay up in full before the due date, you get to delay payment and the many benefits of using credit cards while not paying any interest.
Most people will also rely on the preinstalled software and hardware in the car they bought/rented/leased from the car dealer.
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2121372&cid=36012814
Sometimes it seems to me that these bunch are actually sabotaging "Desktop Linux".
I don't really like Windows 7, but I dislike GNOME more.
Download the PDF and zoom in (1600%) to the 10641 number of the PDF and you'll see stuff like:
http://images.sodahead.com/profiles/0/0/2/1/8/4/7/2/9/one-44065555029.jpeg
http://i54.tinypic.com/1fheex.jpg
There are other strange bits, but that part is strange enough.
If after zooming in you still think that scan or "scan" looks normal then there's probably no convincing you either. You can go ahead and see whatever you want to see.
As I've mentioned already, I don't really care whether it's fake or real. What I see is very sloppy work.
FWIW I was actually going to laugh at the conspiracy theorists, but when I downloaded the PDF from whitehouse.gov it's unbelievably crappy work.
It's about as crappy work as the Pentagon saying they're respecting Islamic traditions and then claiming they buried Osama's corpse at sea. Anyone bothering to do 2 minutes of searching would know that's not traditional at all. When someone told me it was a sea burial, it was so unbelievable that I thought he must have heard the news wrong.
Maybe the US Gov is trying to figure out how stupid the US people can be. Or are just taunting them. Perhaps they are actually putting "dumbing down" substances in the tap water ;).
I don't see environment as being far more important than heritage. They are both limiting factors.
;).
The best environment isn't going to make a chimp (or amoeba) a genius.
But if the environment is not good enough then the chimp is dead and dead chimps don't do well in IQ tests
Many like to say that there's only 2% difference between chimps and humans. If that's true then that 2% makes a big difference when it comes to intelligence. Therefore 0.1% is likely to also make a significant difference despite "politically correct" people insisting there's no difference.
Lastly, in many things the average is not as important as the extremes. People give out prizes and medals to the fastest runners and top geniuses, they don't give them out to populations that are on average a bit faster/smarter than other populations.
Top right: 10641
Real or fake it's still sloppy work.
A scan of this quality should not be considered fit for release.
If the original document is actually damaged or torn into multiple pieces, arrange it, take a picture of it, and it would still be better than the crap they've released.
Zoom in closer to those numbers and you'll see what I mean about anti-aliasing. It's smoother. Compare with the other number "1"s which are jagged. The font might even be different.
;).
FWIW, I don't actually care where he's born. It's just sloppy work.
He should have got his staff to do a better job. Whether scanning the originals or faking them
http://whitehouse.gov/sites/default/files/rss_viewer/birth-certificate-long-form.pdf
If it's fake it's a very bad fake. For example there's stuff like one number being antialiased but the rest aren't.
My company's receptionist does a better job at scanning stuff to PDF.
So what's their excuse?
This level of incompetence is hard to distinguish from malice.
I was sceptical about initial reports but going to give them the benefit of doubt - since I figured more info about the death and corpse would surface. Then came the sea burial thing along with their bullshit about respecting Muslim traditions:
Senior US officials initially told news agencies that his body would be disposed of in accordance with Islamic tradition, which involves ritual washing, shrouding and burial within 24 hours.
Except for the important bit where if he died on land they should bury him on land.
The "avoiding a shrine" stuff is bullshit too. Bury him on land and set up cameras and microphones to record any "devotees" from afar.
Who in their right mind should believe the US Gov's story? Especially not with their track record of deception and outright lies.
Can't the perl bunch do something similar directly? They had years to get perl faster. Same goes for python.
Google and Mozilla seemed to have got a much faster javascript in a much shorter time.
That's why some smart and amoral people go into stuff like investment banking instead:
:).
1) The betting limits are much higher.
2) You generally don't have to deal with "Guido" and his very persuasive friends...
3) You are usually playing with other people's money.
4) When you win big, you win big.
5) When you lose big, you get a bail out, bonus for past performance. Then you go on a nice holiday and come back and do it all over again.
And when you bring the house down, you really bring it down
It's actually starting to make more sense.
Previously it had to be subsidized and was more of a way for offsetting your costs to taxpayers, than to the Sun ;).
But from what I see the prices are dropping: http://sunelec.com/index.php?main_page=index&cPath=5
Currently average retail electricity costs are about USD0.09 per kWh (grabbed from DOE). So: ( 1.60 per watt ) / ( 0.09 per kWh) = 2 years.
The sun doesn't shine brightly all the time and there are installation costs etc, so the payback time is about a multiple of that say 8-10 years?
What someone could add in future is "augmented reality". e.g. use phone, take a picture/live video of a bunch of numbers, and it adds the numbers up.
;).
Or write on a napkin: 4 x 2 + 5 = ?
and the phone figures out what ? is.
For bonus points it solves equations