Most programming I see and do appears to be a form of compression- maximise compression of decisions[1] (minimal code) to provide a solution whilst trying to maintain flexibility to cope with _likely_ changes in the problem with minimal change in the code (minimal extra work - work/time compression).
Whilst the trig and sorting stuff seems quite well dealt with by the Math people, I'm not so aware of more formal ways to deal with the decision compression stuff- yeah there's Boolean logic and all that, but it's not helpful to type the entire uncompressed decision tree out, and then only let a computer compress it.
So sure, maybe programming is still maths, but I don't see that much help from the Maths people. They can talk about lisp and set theory till they turn blue, but we could do with a bit more help if possible...
I suppose maybe we're in the sine and cosine stage of Computer Science, and nobody has done the quadrant and spread thing yet? Or is it worse - we're in the roman numeral stage, and nobody has discovered the number zero and magnitude by numeric position?
[1] The most naive uncompressed program is probably a whole bunch of IF statements with all the possible input states followed by each of their corresponding THEN statements which produce the output states, (and GOTOS I guess:) ). While I've seen some programmers do stuff like this, that's not really programming eh?
It's just written for features not security. I'm surprised you haven't been modded troll yet - coz every time I point out that FF/Mozilla isn't that great even compare to IE, I get modded down.
Not sure why people just don't get it - if you find your browser crashes regularly or leaks merry it is a sign of shoddy coding and there are likely to be security problems, even if there aren't any publicly available in the wild. If a program crashes it usually means it is running something that isn't proper code - which often means it can be exploited (not always, but often enough).
And Mozilla/Firefox does crash. For some people it's not that rare. Often enough to be annoying especially since it takes everything down.
I've had Mozilla take up at least 600MB of memory, and I only had a few tabs and windows open.
With these you can stick a 3.5" ATA or SATA HDD into a caddy which goes into a rack that fits in a 5.25" bay. These allow you to add/remove/swap drives without having to open up your case.
Some allow hotswap. Some don't.
Some are a bit flaky (but others are pretty reliable) so be warned - test first before you buy a whole bunch of them.
Well I don't trust either browser that much. IE or Mozilla/Firefox. As far as I know, with respect to security bugs Firefox is about the same as Mozilla.
That's why I take precautions for _both_ IE and Mozilla. It's not because one design is that much more idiotic than the other. Mozilla does crash pretty more often than IE does nowadays, which is NOT a good sign of quality. And it's more annoying because you can't easily launch multiple independent instances of Mozilla - so that one crash doesn't take all browsers down.
I haven't got any malware either, whether using IE or Mozilla.
Yeah. There's been talk about this for years, but somehow it hasn't happened.
Nowadays with all that tech, preprinting books seems kind of stupid and wasteful. You should be able to get any book - almost everything is in stock - I'm sure you can fit a pretty sizeable colletion of books (covers photos etc ) within a few modern hard drives.
Might be cheaper to just buy slower printers for people who don't need the speed, and reserve the faster printers for jobs that do. That makes such mistakes much harder or even impossible.
Slower laser printers and their consumables are pretty cheap nowadays.
After all, not everyone needs 500bhp cars or can even handle them.
So what if the current job market for artists/designers requires you to know Photoshop version X, Macromedia, Pantone, etc. You should be able to learn that stuff in a timely manner. But if you can't draw and aren't creative in the first place, maybe you're in the wrong field - it might take a bit too long to teach you that eh?
What's worth it is learning stuff that would take you a lot longer (like maybe never) if you had to do it yourself, or interesting things that you would never have thought of learning - never knew was there to be learnt in the first place. So what if it seems "Theoretical" only.
If I were an employer, I'd ask you what projects you'd recently done for fun, not because you were told to or forced to do by your course or previous employer.
If you call yourself an artist and the last time you drew something was 3 months ago as part of your college course, well that just isn't very convincing. In contrast, you're a pretty good artist if you're absentmindedly doodling a decent caricature of me during the interview ("right brain" just has to do something whilst "left brain" is talking to me).
Same goes for programmers. I'd expect your college to teach you the theory stuff that will remain true for decades at least - algorithms, information theory etc. But I'd expect you to mess around with current stuff too, on your own, just for fun/interest - it doesn't have to be very much, and nowadays most stuff is just a few google searches away.
Oh yeah, it's fine if you don't know the fancy tools/buzzwords in the industry. But if you can't do the programmer equivalent of using a "pencil" and sketch something passable, there are plenty of cheaper people in India who can and _will_.
Saying you know UML and all the buzzwords won't be as compelling to me as you actually having written something interesting which you can describe and explain to me in the interview what bits you think are nifty.
Anyone can say they know some buzzword and regurgitate the relevant keywords and phrases, and stick that in their CV. If people needed that, they should use google. If they only need just a bit more AI, maybe they should outsource;).
However, I'm not an employer at the moment, so maybe you should go with the flow, and listen to that buzzword guy;).
What I'd like to know is whether the bug appears when qmail is compiled on 64 bit powerpc or alpha code. If it does, then the bug is with qmail. Otherwise, it'll take a bit more to convince me it's a qmail bug.
I did a test, the ulimit thing won't shutdown the 2GB single line overflow thing. So it might be a way in. If it is genuinely exploitable DJB should pay up:). I run qmail on freebsd so I'm not sure how to exploit it.
BTW I have the freebsd server (my firewall etc) running on vmware so if anyone hacks into it, I can suspend the virtual machine, make a copy and maybe see what happened. Lot more options that way...
Yeah, I often get modded flamebait or troll when I point out that mozilla/firefox isn't really much more secure than IE.
Every few weeks there's evidence that I was correct:).
Anyway, I use both IE and Mozilla (which appears to crash more often than IE and worse of all you can't easily launch multiple independent Mozilla processes).
For security, my normal IE has active scripting off - which seems to prevent most security bugs from working. For sites which require javascript and IE, I use IE in a virtual machine.
At work, I use mozilla and set it up to run using a different user account from my normal user account, so it will be harder for exploits to affect my normal user files. I used to do that for IE in my prev office - I had XP there and it's easier to do that with XP. But the vmware thingy is good enough I guess;).
Once you do stuff like this, it's harder for browser exploits to do significant harm to your system. It can still do harm to other people's systems unless you have other firewall stuff or other countermeasures.
p.s. Same goes for Linux vs Windows security. The same Joe Average users are as likely to update Linux systems as they are to update windows systems (typically never).
More than half the bugs listed are for nonDJB code. qmailadmin and masqmail are not by DJB.
Much of the rest are for running in a 64 bit environment. If you want to port some 32 bit apps to a 64 bit environment, no surprise that you might have to change a few things first before things run properly.
The "rcpt to" overflow DoS thingy isn't a problem in practice, because your qmail processes should have sane ulimits on them. You might want ulimits even if you run postfix or some other mailserver.
The other one happens if you allow users to send 2GB messages. If you don't and you have a ulimit limiting the amount of memory qmail-smtpd uses to <2GB, I think the process would die first (not sure what happens if you try the exploit without ulimits on a box with < 2GB free RAM...).
The other thing of course is: qmail-smtpd runs as qmaild and not root. So even if you do allow > 2GB messages and there is an overflow, the attacker only gets qmaild permissions.
The attacker needs to work a lot more to get further.
AFAIK DJB doesn't claim there are no bugs. He just gives a security guarantee. And so far, I don't see how these bugs will allow an attacker remote root on a qmail system. Even without ulimit controls, you'd just get DoS or qmaild.
I don't believe openbsd is ahead of the curve though;). Ahead in some areas perhaps. But quite behind especially in performance.
It'll be fun to get another DJB vs Theo thing. When was the last one?;)
"Ironically, Microsoft is developing WinFS which is supposed to be able to automatically hardlink files transparently, thus the filesystem will automatically support Instance Store for every application. This is actually a pretty neat feature!"
Not if you really want a copy.
For most normal users, disk space isn't a big problem. If it is, duplicate files aren't usually the cause of the problem.
When I make a copy of a file, I don't want the O/S to just add a link to the same file.
I want a frigging copy.
If there's a bad sector or something goes wrong the chances are higher that I can recover the data if I have a _real_ copy.
I use a file system for storing data. If disk storage was such a big problem, Google etc wouldn't be giving out GBs to users for _free_.
I/O is a bigger problem. Disks store a lot more nowadays, but are not that much faster.
Most guys aren't that interested in clothes or other stuff in department stores. Not enough to draw blood anyway...
Maybe if it were some other stuff say a BMW at 90% off, then you'd see some kicking and shoving. But clothing? Shirts or trousers? Nah...
Also most guys know that there's a significant chance that the other guy would kill or severely harm you if you really piss them off. "Damn the consequences" is a common guy thing - just look at the newspapers of people killing and being killed. Mostly guys involved.
So for guys, shoving around other guys is a bad idea.
Ladies/girls often get away with shoving/smacking guys. We tend to be more bemused or sometimes even amused when that happens.
Since you like the design, can you please explain why the Itaniums have 2x to 4x the number of transistors but are only in the same performance league as the P4s or Athlon64/Opterons? Is Intel burying the Itanium by making Itaniums with more transistors than they need? Or is the Itanium that inefficient?
And the Itanium physical specs. You can click on the side bar for other CPU physical specifications.
With 2x to 4x the transistors you could get a dual core or even two dual core x86 CPUs.
Don't forget each of the x86 cores taken alone will perform quite well, even in FPU tasks. The Itanium is 2x to 4x faster for some SPEC FPU subtasks, but is slower in others.
If it becomes easy for compilers to parallelize execution across many VLIW/EPIC units, then would it be so much harder for them to parellelize execution across multiple x86 cores?
Heh, or start running some of those FPU tasks on commodity GPUs;).
Compare the performance of the top Itaniums with the top P4s and Opterons.
Also compare[1]:
number of transistors
(don't forget to factor caches as well).
die area used.
power consumption.
price
Now can you really say there's nothing wrong with the Itanium?
The Itanium 2 needs about 210-410 million transistors to perform in the same ballpark as P4s or Opterons with about half to 1/4th the number of transistors.
A dual core Athlon64/Opteron with 1MB cache only needs 154 million transistors, 2MB cache versions need 233 million transistors.
Academicians and "True Believers" can talk about VLIW/EPIC and fancy compilers, but I argue if the application you run is so easy to parallelize so that it makes really good use of all the VLIW/EPIC units, then will it really be so hard to make it work in parallel and make good use of both the cores of a dual core opteron?
Maybe in theory there's nothing wrong with the Itanium. But in practice there's nothing that great about it, except for some FPU tasks (but if that's the case how about a bunch of DSPs?)...
Sure driving fast increases the risk of fatalities. But there's such a thing as too slow too.
Driving too slow costs lives too. I am assuming most people don't want to spend so much of their lives in traffic jams.
Someone driving too slow can slow thousands of others. You can do the math. e.g. 5000 people, X minutes more each day for Y years because of some person driving too slow. Not sure where you want to take the 10 minutes from - waking time, personal time, or work time. Some people don't have that much personal time after subtracting work etc, 10 minutes can be quite significant.
A driver who is driving too fast often pays a lot of his life. But a driver who is driving way too slow may not pay as much compared to how much he is costing everyone else.
My definition of being successful is at odds with "selfish, destructive, anti-social greed" - (the latter attributes seem very common amongst CxOs especially in Corporate USA).
It's a bit like playing one of those MMORPGs, sure you can be selfish, amoral, sociopathic and amass great wealth and power through dubious means, but lots of people could still consider you a loser.
I've no issues with rich people. If people do a great job, hey they should be rewarded.
But there are too many slash-and-burn CEOs - I don't think they should be rewarded for boosting a company's bottomline for just two or so quarters by doing stuff that is likely to damage the company in the long term.
Sure the system has weaknesses, but exploiting the flaws for personal benefit while causing great harm to others (job losses, destruction etc) is not something I would find commendable.
In many games/sports (e.g. golf) there are lots of rules in addition to the core rules, if you see some of the written rules you might wonder which asshole they had to write that particular rule for, so that the game remained fun for everyone else.
"Clearly the alcohol occurred quite reasonably, though, right?"
I meant something like crazy drunk young guys challenging each other to eat something that they'd normally not eat...
"some that I am not completely convinced are food, for that matter;)."
Have you seen waxed duck? Looks a bit like some roadkills. Heh.
The waxed duck thingy just doesn't seem that appetising to me. I've willingly eaten all sorts of animal innards (e.g. gizzards, intestines, stomach, kidney, liver, heart, lungs, fish eyeballs etc). Most are quite nice if prepared well. I do eat wax sausages so I'm probably weird...
And (*drumroll*) I've eaten at McDs more than a few times... Not in the past few months though - I prefer BK.
Slashdot Mirror
Most programming I see and do appears to be a form of compression- maximise compression of decisions[1] (minimal code) to provide a solution whilst trying to maintain flexibility to cope with _likely_ changes in the problem with minimal change in the code (minimal extra work - work/time compression).
:) ). While I've seen some programmers do stuff like this, that's not really programming eh?
Whilst the trig and sorting stuff seems quite well dealt with by the Math people, I'm not so aware of more formal ways to deal with the decision compression stuff- yeah there's Boolean logic and all that, but it's not helpful to type the entire uncompressed decision tree out, and then only let a computer compress it.
So sure, maybe programming is still maths, but I don't see that much help from the Maths people. They can talk about lisp and set theory till they turn blue, but we could do with a bit more help if possible...
I suppose maybe we're in the sine and cosine stage of Computer Science, and nobody has done the quadrant and spread thing yet? Or is it worse - we're in the roman numeral stage, and nobody has discovered the number zero and magnitude by numeric position?
[1] The most naive uncompressed program is probably a whole bunch of IF statements with all the possible input states followed by each of their corresponding THEN statements which produce the output states, (and GOTOS I guess
It's just written for features not security. I'm surprised you haven't been modded troll yet - coz every time I point out that FF/Mozilla isn't that great even compare to IE, I get modded down.
Not sure why people just don't get it - if you find your browser crashes regularly or leaks merry it is a sign of shoddy coding and there are likely to be security problems, even if there aren't any publicly available in the wild. If a program crashes it usually means it is running something that isn't proper code - which often means it can be exploited (not always, but often enough).
And Mozilla/Firefox does crash. For some people it's not that rare. Often enough to be annoying especially since it takes everything down.
I've had Mozilla take up at least 600MB of memory, and I only had a few tabs and windows open.
Only allow a white list of programs to run?
:p.
;)
Sounds a bit like DRM.
Be careful what you wish for.
Also be careful what others want you to wish for.
BTW who cares about really dumb ideas anyway, there are plenty around, too many to list.
Keeping to the spirit on things, maybe there should be a default deny on all ideas, and we should only get to see the good ones
That'll be double plus good wouldn't it?
With these you can stick a 3.5" ATA or SATA HDD into a caddy which goes into a rack that fits in a 5.25" bay. These allow you to add/remove/swap drives without having to open up your case.
Some allow hotswap. Some don't.
Some are a bit flaky (but others are pretty reliable) so be warned - test first before you buy a whole bunch of them.
Well I don't trust either browser that much. IE or Mozilla/Firefox. As far as I know, with respect to security bugs Firefox is about the same as Mozilla.
:).
That's why I take precautions for _both_ IE and Mozilla. It's not because one design is that much more idiotic than the other. Mozilla does crash pretty more often than IE does nowadays, which is NOT a good sign of quality. And it's more annoying because you can't easily launch multiple independent instances of Mozilla - so that one crash doesn't take all browsers down.
I haven't got any malware either, whether using IE or Mozilla.
Whoopee, I got moderated troll again
In fact, if you don't burn the paper it takes carbon out of the atmosphere.
If only the commonly used paper making process was as environmentally friendly...
Yeah. There's been talk about this for years, but somehow it hasn't happened.
Nowadays with all that tech, preprinting books seems kind of stupid and wasteful. You should be able to get any book - almost everything is in stock - I'm sure you can fit a pretty sizeable colletion of books (covers photos etc ) within a few modern hard drives.
Might be cheaper to just buy slower printers for people who don't need the speed, and reserve the faster printers for jobs that do. That makes such mistakes much harder or even impossible.
Slower laser printers and their consumables are pretty cheap nowadays.
After all, not everyone needs 500bhp cars or can even handle them.
Death by papercuts...
Double plus ungood.
So what if the current job market for artists/designers requires you to know Photoshop version X, Macromedia, Pantone, etc. You should be able to learn that stuff in a timely manner. But if you can't draw and aren't creative in the first place, maybe you're in the wrong field - it might take a bit too long to teach you that eh?
;).
;).
What's worth it is learning stuff that would take you a lot longer (like maybe never) if you had to do it yourself, or interesting things that you would never have thought of learning - never knew was there to be learnt in the first place. So what if it seems "Theoretical" only.
If I were an employer, I'd ask you what projects you'd recently done for fun, not because you were told to or forced to do by your course or previous employer.
If you call yourself an artist and the last time you drew something was 3 months ago as part of your college course, well that just isn't very convincing. In contrast, you're a pretty good artist if you're absentmindedly doodling a decent caricature of me during the interview ("right brain" just has to do something whilst "left brain" is talking to me).
Same goes for programmers. I'd expect your college to teach you the theory stuff that will remain true for decades at least - algorithms, information theory etc. But I'd expect you to mess around with current stuff too, on your own, just for fun/interest - it doesn't have to be very much, and nowadays most stuff is just a few google searches away.
Oh yeah, it's fine if you don't know the fancy tools/buzzwords in the industry. But if you can't do the programmer equivalent of using a "pencil" and sketch something passable, there are plenty of cheaper people in India who can and _will_.
Saying you know UML and all the buzzwords won't be as compelling to me as you actually having written something interesting which you can describe and explain to me in the interview what bits you think are nifty.
Anyone can say they know some buzzword and regurgitate the relevant keywords and phrases, and stick that in their CV. If people needed that, they should use google. If they only need just a bit more AI, maybe they should outsource
However, I'm not an employer at the moment, so maybe you should go with the flow, and listen to that buzzword guy
Thing is, which one is the limited edition? The new one or the old one? :)
What I'd like to know is whether the bug appears when qmail is compiled on 64 bit powerpc or alpha code. If it does, then the bug is with qmail. Otherwise, it'll take a bit more to convince me it's a qmail bug.
:). I run qmail on freebsd so I'm not sure how to exploit it.
I did a test, the ulimit thing won't shutdown the 2GB single line overflow thing. So it might be a way in. If it is genuinely exploitable DJB should pay up
BTW I have the freebsd server (my firewall etc) running on vmware so if anyone hacks into it, I can suspend the virtual machine, make a copy and maybe see what happened. Lot more options that way...
Yeah, I often get modded flamebait or troll when I point out that mozilla/firefox isn't really much more secure than IE.
:).
;).
Every few weeks there's evidence that I was correct
Anyway, I use both IE and Mozilla (which appears to crash more often than IE and worse of all you can't easily launch multiple independent Mozilla processes).
For security, my normal IE has active scripting off - which seems to prevent most security bugs from working. For sites which require javascript and IE, I use IE in a virtual machine.
At work, I use mozilla and set it up to run using a different user account from my normal user account, so it will be harder for exploits to affect my normal user files. I used to do that for IE in my prev office - I had XP there and it's easier to do that with XP. But the vmware thingy is good enough I guess
Once you do stuff like this, it's harder for browser exploits to do significant harm to your system. It can still do harm to other people's systems unless you have other firewall stuff or other countermeasures.
p.s. Same goes for Linux vs Windows security. The same Joe Average users are as likely to update Linux systems as they are to update windows systems (typically never).
More than half the bugs listed are for nonDJB code. qmailadmin and masqmail are not by DJB.
;). Ahead in some areas perhaps. But quite behind especially in performance.
;)
Much of the rest are for running in a 64 bit environment. If you want to port some 32 bit apps to a 64 bit environment, no surprise that you might have to change a few things first before things run properly.
The "rcpt to" overflow DoS thingy isn't a problem in practice, because your qmail processes should have sane ulimits on them. You might want ulimits even if you run postfix or some other mailserver.
The other one happens if you allow users to send 2GB messages. If you don't and you have a ulimit limiting the amount of memory qmail-smtpd uses to <2GB, I think the process would die first (not sure what happens if you try the exploit without ulimits on a box with < 2GB free RAM...).
The other thing of course is: qmail-smtpd runs as qmaild and not root. So even if you do allow > 2GB messages and there is an overflow, the attacker only gets qmaild permissions.
The attacker needs to work a lot more to get further.
AFAIK DJB doesn't claim there are no bugs. He just gives a security guarantee. And so far, I don't see how these bugs will allow an attacker remote root on a qmail system. Even without ulimit controls, you'd just get DoS or qmaild.
I don't believe openbsd is ahead of the curve though
It'll be fun to get another DJB vs Theo thing. When was the last one?
Uh you should worry if someone unauthorized can set an arbitrary RELAYCLIENT on your system.
Only an admin user should be able to do that.
So the bug isn't a problem in practice (like most other bugs with qmail or other software DJB guarantees).
"Ironically, Microsoft is developing WinFS which is supposed to be able to automatically hardlink files transparently, thus the filesystem will automatically support Instance Store for every application. This is actually a pretty neat feature!"
Not if you really want a copy.
For most normal users, disk space isn't a big problem. If it is, duplicate files aren't usually the cause of the problem.
When I make a copy of a file, I don't want the O/S to just add a link to the same file.
I want a frigging copy.
If there's a bad sector or something goes wrong the chances are higher that I can recover the data if I have a _real_ copy.
I use a file system for storing data. If disk storage was such a big problem, Google etc wouldn't be giving out GBs to users for _free_.
I/O is a bigger problem. Disks store a lot more nowadays, but are not that much faster.
I dunno about poised and stately.
Most guys aren't that interested in clothes or other stuff in department stores. Not enough to draw blood anyway...
Maybe if it were some other stuff say a BMW at 90% off, then you'd see some kicking and shoving. But clothing? Shirts or trousers? Nah...
Also most guys know that there's a significant chance that the other guy would kill or severely harm you if you really piss them off. "Damn the consequences" is a common guy thing - just look at the newspapers of people killing and being killed. Mostly guys involved.
So for guys, shoving around other guys is a bad idea.
Ladies/girls often get away with shoving/smacking guys. We tend to be more bemused or sometimes even amused when that happens.
Uh. They might start spreading emails about you, your behaviour, etc to the whole world...
Since you like the design, can you please explain why the Itaniums have 2x to 4x the number of transistors but are only in the same performance league as the P4s or Athlon64/Opterons? Is Intel burying the Itanium by making Itaniums with more transistors than they need? Or is the Itanium that inefficient?
;).
See the SPEC CPU2000 results.
And the Itanium physical specs. You can click on the side bar for other CPU physical specifications.
With 2x to 4x the transistors you could get a dual core or even two dual core x86 CPUs.
Don't forget each of the x86 cores taken alone will perform quite well, even in FPU tasks. The Itanium is 2x to 4x faster for some SPEC FPU subtasks, but is slower in others.
If it becomes easy for compilers to parallelize execution across many VLIW/EPIC units, then would it be so much harder for them to parellelize execution across multiple x86 cores?
Heh, or start running some of those FPU tasks on commodity GPUs
Nothing wrong with Itanium?
Look the SPEC CPU2000 benchmark results.
Compare the performance of the top Itaniums with the top P4s and Opterons.
Also compare[1]:
number of transistors
(don't forget to factor caches as well).
die area used.
power consumption.
price
Now can you really say there's nothing wrong with the Itanium?
The Itanium 2 needs about 210-410 million transistors to perform in the same ballpark as P4s or Opterons with about half to 1/4th the number of transistors.
A dual core Athlon64/Opteron with 1MB cache only needs 154 million transistors, 2MB cache versions need 233 million transistors.
Academicians and "True Believers" can talk about VLIW/EPIC and fancy compilers, but I argue if the application you run is so easy to parallelize so that it makes really good use of all the VLIW/EPIC units, then will it really be so hard to make it work in parallel and make good use of both the cores of a dual core opteron?
Maybe in theory there's nothing wrong with the Itanium. But in practice there's nothing that great about it, except for some FPU tasks (but if that's the case how about a bunch of DSPs?)...
[1]
Itanium
P4
PM
Opteron/Athlon64
Dual core Athlon64/Opterons
Let me know if the above site has the numbers wrong.
I heard Wal-Mart managed to send 13 trailers of supplies to New Orleans.
I can't believe the US Gov hasn't done much better.
I think it worked out ok for Gandhi because the British (at least then) weren't that evil or ruthless.
;)...
He might be in some unmarked grave if it were some other country colonizing India[1].
If the British were that bad, if they tried holding their "Commonwealth Games" not so many of their ex-colonies would attend
Many of their ex-colonies are doing pretty well compared to ex-colonies of other nations or even noncolonized countries.
I daresay they were better than a fair number of indigenous leaders in their colonies. Look at the various maharajahs, sultans, kings etc.
[1] Wonder how well Gandhi would have done against say the Japanese in WWII.
Sure driving fast increases the risk of fatalities. But there's such a thing as too slow too.
Driving too slow costs lives too. I am assuming most people don't want to spend so much of their lives in traffic jams.
Someone driving too slow can slow thousands of others. You can do the math. e.g. 5000 people, X minutes more each day for Y years because of some person driving too slow. Not sure where you want to take the 10 minutes from - waking time, personal time, or work time. Some people don't have that much personal time after subtracting work etc, 10 minutes can be quite significant.
A driver who is driving too fast often pays a lot of his life. But a driver who is driving way too slow may not pay as much compared to how much he is costing everyone else.
My definition of being successful is at odds with "selfish, destructive, anti-social greed" - (the latter attributes seem very common amongst CxOs especially in Corporate USA).
It's a bit like playing one of those MMORPGs, sure you can be selfish, amoral, sociopathic and amass great wealth and power through dubious means, but lots of people could still consider you a loser.
I've no issues with rich people. If people do a great job, hey they should be rewarded.
But there are too many slash-and-burn CEOs - I don't think they should be rewarded for boosting a company's bottomline for just two or so quarters by doing stuff that is likely to damage the company in the long term.
Sure the system has weaknesses, but exploiting the flaws for personal benefit while causing great harm to others (job losses, destruction etc) is not something I would find commendable.
In many games/sports (e.g. golf) there are lots of rules in addition to the core rules, if you see some of the written rules you might wonder which asshole they had to write that particular rule for, so that the game remained fun for everyone else.
"Clearly the alcohol occurred quite reasonably, though, right?"
;)."
I meant something like crazy drunk young guys challenging each other to eat something that they'd normally not eat...
"some that I am not completely convinced are food, for that matter
Have you seen waxed duck? Looks a bit like some roadkills. Heh.
The waxed duck thingy just doesn't seem that appetising to me. I've willingly eaten all sorts of animal innards (e.g. gizzards, intestines, stomach, kidney, liver, heart, lungs, fish eyeballs etc). Most are quite nice if prepared well. I do eat wax sausages so I'm probably weird...
And (*drumroll*) I've eaten at McDs more than a few times... Not in the past few months though - I prefer BK.