Please name some softwares that have been fixed, once and for all. I'm not aware of any. It seems that everything is evolving as threats evolve. You could start with the kernels. Microsoft seems to change theirs, Linux changes theirs, etc.
You might join the chorus, and complain that Oracle evolves to slowly, or that it is incapable of evolving fast enough to remain relevant, but there is no chance in hell that it can be fixed once and for all.
You claim to be sane? I don't see Cruise as funny. Is it possible that you are a product of conditioning by the mass media? When the canned laughter sounds, you laugh? Something to think about, huh?
"I don't see any way to interpret this but to conclude that psychiatry for depression is almost entirely a scam."
Bingo. They've been collecting their office fees, and subscribing drugs to enrich the pharmaceuticals for at least fifty years now. It's amazing how many psychiatric patients are "cured" when there is no more money to squeeze out of them. Hyperactivity is just as much a scam as depression.
So, in short, you approve of those advertising packages promoted by the entertainment industry, and you don't give a damn about the fools who live inside those packages?
I could make a list of individuals, if they were on fire, I wouldn't urinate on them. Heading the list would probably be that dead drug addict kiddie diddler, Michael Jackson. That boy was a freak, by almost any definition. The fact that he was filthy freaking RICH was good enough for most people to forgive him of all his sins, crimes, eccentricities, or whatever you might want to call it.
Tom Cruise would make the list, quite far down from Michael. But, he's definitely on the list.
Perhaps you're not following the conversation? I did mention "training". Of COURSE we don't want any lame halfwit being coerced into carrying a weapon at school, on the excuse that he/she might defend their students. We want them TRAINED. During the course of the training, we want them to at least be superficially evaluated psychologically. We want them to be competent with their weapons. We want them to be able to make judgement calls.
Training. Something that teachers are proficient at, right?
Oh, my! I don't know, do I? I'll just cower under my bed for the rest of my life then! Is that what you plan on doing, as well? Didn't think so.
"almost shot the guy who disarmed the killer"? Been there, done that. I "almost shot" my own squad leader. Big bastard disappeared in the middle of some excitement - just popped out of my line of sight. Didn't have time to actually LOOK FOR him, as I said, we were in the middle of a bit of excitement relating to a riot. Then the big bastard popped up BEHIND ME and to my right. I was swinging that way, ready to stab or shoot, when I realized who the big bastard was.
No, you can't know. You can't be prepared for EVERYTHING possible. But, you use judgement, and hope for the best.
I promise, being unarmed when the shooting starts is not hoping for the best.
There are a lot of "almost" happened things in life. Do you drive a car? How many times have you been "almost" killed? Have you quit driving?
If you are an American citizen, male, and between the ages of 18 and 40, you ARE the militia. Whether you have formalized that relationship between yourself and any militia by enlisting, you are still a member of the militia.
If you are not well regulated, that's your fault, not ours.
May I suggest that you listen carefully to what the lady says? She speaks from first hand knowledge. Listen very very carefully for about fifteen seconds starting at 2:16 for the answer to your specific question. No one in America understands the issue better than this lady.
That's your opinion. It stacks up well against the wishes of the founding fathers, NOT! And, BTW - if EVERYONE has a weapon, then NO ONE is willing to make an ass of himself, and become a target for all the other armed assholes surrounding him.
I've lived my life presuming that some of the people around me are armed. It makes things a lot simpler. The thought occurs, "I could steal a kiss from that pretty girl", and immediately, the thought follows, "And she'd pull a gun from her purse and blow my ass into eternity!"
Let's change my presumption to knowledge. Let's say you KNOW that the old lady with her social security check in her purse ALSO has a.380 tucked into her waistband? You might be desparate for money, and you might be the fastest sumbitch in town - but you can't outrun a.380. The old woman is untouchable.
You may rationalize the second amendment in any way you like - but Thomas Jefferson, among others, made it patently clear that it is the duty of American citizens to be armed, for the purpose of challenging government, and keeping government honest.
The government should fear the people - the people should not fear the government.
`"Democratically elected", you said? I think what you mean to defend, is the "republic which give prior approval to certain people for candidacy, based on corporate whims and dictates".
It's amazing that so many people still believe the United States is a "democracy".
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
The problem is - anti-gun nuts won't HEAR the real statistics. They stick their fingers in their ears, and scream "NYAH NYAH NYAH!" so that they don't have to face reality.
I'd much rather be eating breakfast in Lubbock, Texas, where every adult seems to carry a weapon, than in Manhattan where only one homie from the 'hood has a gun.
The "armed guards" should be the teachers themselves. Offer teachers an incentive. The school system pays for their training. The school system then gives the teacher a fifty to one hundred dollar bonus each pay period in which they carry their weapon, acting as security. Nice, easy work, with a bit of fun training thrown in.
If I can't trust a teacher to handle a weapon properly, then I sure as HELL can't trust that teacher to handle my children properly.
It's pretty easy, actually. The bad guy is shooting indiscriminately, hitting old ladies, little kids, cops, preachers, pretty women - he just doesn't give a small damn who he takes out. The good guy is only shooting at the nutcase at the center of the spreading pool of carnage.
If you're to slow, to dull, or to dim to perceive where the threat is coming from, then you deserve the Darwin Award.
Hey - next time I'm trapped in a mass shooting incident, I'll be sure to wait til he stops shooting to make an attempt to save my sorry ass. That's a great idea you've got there!/sarcasm
Which part of "multiple weapons" does your idea apply to? And, which part of "multiple magazines" would it apply to? You DO realize that the mass murder nuts are NOT toting six-shooters? Almost exclusively, they carry semi-automatic weapons. Such weapons use quick changing magazines. Push the little slidey thing, the empty mag falls, and you slam the next mag into place, pull the trigger and "BOOM". This takes - ohhhhh - maybe three seconds if the shooter is slow. In a confined space, with a monster.45 hammering your skull with each report, you won't even perceive any time between the next-to-the-last shot from the previous mag, and the next shot after he changes mags. If he actually FIRES the last shot before swapping out, THEN you'll hear a lull in the big booms.
Oh - the multiple weapons. Guy comes in carrying three rifles, two pistols, and a shotgun? He's going to empty one and drop it, empty the next and drop it, etc. No "reloading time" at all. When he gets down to one or two weapons, THEN he'll start swapping magazines out.
As evidenced by several shooting now, a determined nutcase can mow dozens down before anyone can do anything, UNLESS THERE IS AN ARMED CITIZEN READY TO CONFRONT HIM!!!
That citizen can be a cop, a teacher, a veteran, a housewife, a passerby - anyone at all.
Be smart - get a gun, and learn how to use it. Learn WHEN to use it. And, use it effectively.
Dude - those Republicans and their "oaths" are to that Norquist dude, and has NOTHING to do with the Tea Party. The Tea Party and the Republicans have some things in common, and the deal with not raising taxes is one of those things. But, the Tea Party had nothing to do with extracting simplistic oaths from any Republicans.
Speaking of simplistic - you might want to examine the political parties, and try to understand what they are all about. I detest all of them. Libertarians have earned less of my contempt than the others, but at least I have a few clues on which to base my opinions.
Simplistic? Certainly it's a simplistic view. But, from an engineering point of view, simple is good! KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid!
Overly simplistic? Depends on who you're talking to. Here we delve into business and politics, mingled together. Add in a dash of everyday opinion, from whomever you might be talking to.
Let's start with Microsoft, who believes that they have some kind of inherent "right" to control who uses their operating system, and how. They want a degree of control over the operating system, for benevolent reasons, as well as for selfish reasons. (pushing critical updates, for instance) Many Windows users agree with allowing Microsoft some degree of control. That's alright - the owner of the machine has the right to decide to allow Microsoft that control, no matter how foolish I think it might be. The problem is, when politicians accept campaign donations, aka bribes, to represent the views of Microsoft and other businesses that think like Microsoft - RIAA, MPAA, and the list goes on.
There are probably tens thousands of businesses and persons who believe that they should be able to control the stuff that runs on computers around the world, whether that stuff be entertainment, highly technical software, the operating system itself, scientific programs, educational programs, antivirus and other security programs.
Permitting even a fraction of those entities to have even partial control over your machine is a disaster. But, laws are written to permit much of that control that is demanded by "rights holders".
And, that is a large part of the reason many people migrate to a Unix-like operating system. The OWNER ultimately has control. We can run the tripwire that Areyoukiddingme mentions above, easily and efficiently. But, for the most part, it isn't even necessary to run it, because we live in such a clean environment to start with.
We get our software from trusted sources, all bundled into the same installation disks for the most part. If/when a source of software squanders it's trusted status, they are simply dropped from the repositories.
I could go on - gotta head out to work though.
Simplistic? Simplistic is a good thing. Give me simple any day of the week. Give me a small pool of sources which can easily be checked for reliability by the community, regularly. What we have in the Windows world approaches insanity, if you ask me.
You've had some good answers posted already to the question, "How can I now trust symantic to find a zero day?"
Let me make this painfully clear for you. Antivirus is a reactive defense. Malware writers are an active offense. In any kind of gamesmanship, be it real life combat, business, online gaming, or whatever, the offense always has the advantage. Hence, the old adage, "The best defense is a good offense."
People who rely on antivirus programs to protect them are playing the game all wrong. It's a losing game, short term and long term.
Want a better method? How about we catalog and fingerprint all programs and processes on our machines. A new or changed process can be identified and sandboxed or killed. Screw the whole antivirus strategy - all that does is to ineffectively use system resources that might be better used in another manner.
Whether we fingerprint all processes or not, we can monitor communications. Each system establishes "trusted" protocols, ports, and addresses, everything else is blocked by default. That might throw a whammy into advertising networks, but so be it.
Heuristics are far better than any semi-static list of "bad things", even if that list is updated every day, or every week.
ALERT: An untrusted program is attempting to communicate with an unknown destination. Do you want to permit "PWNDMUTHAFUCKA.exe" to communicate with "bonedyomama.net" located at a proxy server in Singapore?
That may be a waste of time though. Most users will just click "yes", even if the details of their recent banking transactions are printed below the warning.
Talking heads, and the latest generations of "economists" would have you believe that the dollar is stable, while all other commodities fluctuate. The prices you see at the pump reflect, instead, the relative strength of the dollar.
Speculation does have a short transitory effect on the price of oil, or gold, or any other commodity. Thus, the spikes in the charts reflect speculation.
Depends on how you count weight. I spent most of my adult life between 150 and 160. Never had those picture perfect "six-pack abs", but I was rock solid, all over. Every commander who ever evaluated me gave me a rating of 4.0, impressive, for military appearance. No fat - in fact, some said that I was underweight.
Today, I bounce up and down between a low of 180 and a high of 195. At six feet tall, that's not "fat", but I'm certainly not the lean mean fighting machine who proudly wore his uniform around the world.
You make the call - overweight, or fat? I call it overweight.
There have been a few times where I had to give medical assistance to fat and obese people, as well as a couple of morbidly obese. When you have to handle a person, you can tell the difference real damned quick.
Maybe if we stopped subsidized farming, the price of food would go up, and we wouldn't have so many people gorging themselves?
Face it, as taxpayers, we are paying farmers to produce cheap foods so that more people can afford to be fat, so that we can pay MORE in taxes to take care of our diabetic, heart diseased, obese population.
To make things worse, in spite of all that cheap food, the food processors replace cheap food stuffs with even cheaper junk like sugar, salt, preservatives, etc, to aggravate our health problems.
Maybe we need to take a long hard look at the entire food economy.
Slashdot Mirror
"fix it once and for all."
Please name some softwares that have been fixed, once and for all. I'm not aware of any. It seems that everything is evolving as threats evolve. You could start with the kernels. Microsoft seems to change theirs, Linux changes theirs, etc.
You might join the chorus, and complain that Oracle evolves to slowly, or that it is incapable of evolving fast enough to remain relevant, but there is no chance in hell that it can be fixed once and for all.
You claim to be sane? I don't see Cruise as funny. Is it possible that you are a product of conditioning by the mass media? When the canned laughter sounds, you laugh? Something to think about, huh?
"I don't see any way to interpret this but to conclude that psychiatry for depression is almost entirely a scam."
Bingo. They've been collecting their office fees, and subscribing drugs to enrich the pharmaceuticals for at least fifty years now. It's amazing how many psychiatric patients are "cured" when there is no more money to squeeze out of them. Hyperactivity is just as much a scam as depression.
So, in short, you approve of those advertising packages promoted by the entertainment industry, and you don't give a damn about the fools who live inside those packages?
I could make a list of individuals, if they were on fire, I wouldn't urinate on them. Heading the list would probably be that dead drug addict kiddie diddler, Michael Jackson. That boy was a freak, by almost any definition. The fact that he was filthy freaking RICH was good enough for most people to forgive him of all his sins, crimes, eccentricities, or whatever you might want to call it.
Tom Cruise would make the list, quite far down from Michael. But, he's definitely on the list.
Some of us have standards.
Price be damned. Pass the taxes, if that's what it takes. Stop chasing kids down alleys to arrest and/or kill them when they resist arrest.
Perhaps you're not following the conversation? I did mention "training". Of COURSE we don't want any lame halfwit being coerced into carrying a weapon at school, on the excuse that he/she might defend their students. We want them TRAINED. During the course of the training, we want them to at least be superficially evaluated psychologically. We want them to be competent with their weapons. We want them to be able to make judgement calls.
Training. Something that teachers are proficient at, right?
Oh, my! I don't know, do I? I'll just cower under my bed for the rest of my life then! Is that what you plan on doing, as well? Didn't think so.
"almost shot the guy who disarmed the killer"? Been there, done that. I "almost shot" my own squad leader. Big bastard disappeared in the middle of some excitement - just popped out of my line of sight. Didn't have time to actually LOOK FOR him, as I said, we were in the middle of a bit of excitement relating to a riot. Then the big bastard popped up BEHIND ME and to my right. I was swinging that way, ready to stab or shoot, when I realized who the big bastard was.
No, you can't know. You can't be prepared for EVERYTHING possible. But, you use judgement, and hope for the best.
I promise, being unarmed when the shooting starts is not hoping for the best.
There are a lot of "almost" happened things in life. Do you drive a car? How many times have you been "almost" killed? Have you quit driving?
If you are an American citizen, male, and between the ages of 18 and 40, you ARE the militia. Whether you have formalized that relationship between yourself and any militia by enlisting, you are still a member of the militia.
If you are not well regulated, that's your fault, not ours.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M1u0Byq5Qis
May I suggest that you listen carefully to what the lady says? She speaks from first hand knowledge. Listen very very carefully for about fifteen seconds starting at 2:16 for the answer to your specific question. No one in America understands the issue better than this lady.
"What on earth do those two skills have to do with each other?"
Responsibility.
That's your opinion. It stacks up well against the wishes of the founding fathers, NOT! And, BTW - if EVERYONE has a weapon, then NO ONE is willing to make an ass of himself, and become a target for all the other armed assholes surrounding him.
I've lived my life presuming that some of the people around me are armed. It makes things a lot simpler. The thought occurs, "I could steal a kiss from that pretty girl", and immediately, the thought follows, "And she'd pull a gun from her purse and blow my ass into eternity!"
Let's change my presumption to knowledge. Let's say you KNOW that the old lady with her social security check in her purse ALSO has a .380 tucked into her waistband? You might be desparate for money, and you might be the fastest sumbitch in town - but you can't outrun a .380. The old woman is untouchable.
You may rationalize the second amendment in any way you like - but Thomas Jefferson, among others, made it patently clear that it is the duty of American citizens to be armed, for the purpose of challenging government, and keeping government honest.
The government should fear the people - the people should not fear the government.
"War on Drugs"
`"Democratically elected", you said? I think what you mean to defend, is the "republic which give prior approval to certain people for candidacy, based on corporate whims and dictates".
It's amazing that so many people still believe the United States is a "democracy".
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.
Do you see the word "democracy" in that pledge?
The problem is - anti-gun nuts won't HEAR the real statistics. They stick their fingers in their ears, and scream "NYAH NYAH NYAH!" so that they don't have to face reality.
I'd much rather be eating breakfast in Lubbock, Texas, where every adult seems to carry a weapon, than in Manhattan where only one homie from the 'hood has a gun.
The "armed guards" should be the teachers themselves. Offer teachers an incentive. The school system pays for their training. The school system then gives the teacher a fifty to one hundred dollar bonus each pay period in which they carry their weapon, acting as security. Nice, easy work, with a bit of fun training thrown in.
If I can't trust a teacher to handle a weapon properly, then I sure as HELL can't trust that teacher to handle my children properly.
"armed guards will likely lead to statistically more gun related fatalities."
You have statistics to back up the "will likely lead to" nonsense? I thought not.
It's pretty easy, actually. The bad guy is shooting indiscriminately, hitting old ladies, little kids, cops, preachers, pretty women - he just doesn't give a small damn who he takes out. The good guy is only shooting at the nutcase at the center of the spreading pool of carnage.
If you're to slow, to dull, or to dim to perceive where the threat is coming from, then you deserve the Darwin Award.
Hey - next time I'm trapped in a mass shooting incident, I'll be sure to wait til he stops shooting to make an attempt to save my sorry ass. That's a great idea you've got there! /sarcasm
Which part of "multiple weapons" does your idea apply to? And, which part of "multiple magazines" would it apply to? You DO realize that the mass murder nuts are NOT toting six-shooters? Almost exclusively, they carry semi-automatic weapons. Such weapons use quick changing magazines. Push the little slidey thing, the empty mag falls, and you slam the next mag into place, pull the trigger and "BOOM". This takes - ohhhhh - maybe three seconds if the shooter is slow. In a confined space, with a monster .45 hammering your skull with each report, you won't even perceive any time between the next-to-the-last shot from the previous mag, and the next shot after he changes mags. If he actually FIRES the last shot before swapping out, THEN you'll hear a lull in the big booms.
Oh - the multiple weapons. Guy comes in carrying three rifles, two pistols, and a shotgun? He's going to empty one and drop it, empty the next and drop it, etc. No "reloading time" at all. When he gets down to one or two weapons, THEN he'll start swapping magazines out.
As evidenced by several shooting now, a determined nutcase can mow dozens down before anyone can do anything, UNLESS THERE IS AN ARMED CITIZEN READY TO CONFRONT HIM!!!
That citizen can be a cop, a teacher, a veteran, a housewife, a passerby - anyone at all.
Be smart - get a gun, and learn how to use it. Learn WHEN to use it. And, use it effectively.
Dude - those Republicans and their "oaths" are to that Norquist dude, and has NOTHING to do with the Tea Party. The Tea Party and the Republicans have some things in common, and the deal with not raising taxes is one of those things. But, the Tea Party had nothing to do with extracting simplistic oaths from any Republicans.
Speaking of simplistic - you might want to examine the political parties, and try to understand what they are all about. I detest all of them. Libertarians have earned less of my contempt than the others, but at least I have a few clues on which to base my opinions.
Simplistic? Certainly it's a simplistic view. But, from an engineering point of view, simple is good! KISS: Keep It Simple Stupid!
Overly simplistic? Depends on who you're talking to. Here we delve into business and politics, mingled together. Add in a dash of everyday opinion, from whomever you might be talking to.
Let's start with Microsoft, who believes that they have some kind of inherent "right" to control who uses their operating system, and how. They want a degree of control over the operating system, for benevolent reasons, as well as for selfish reasons. (pushing critical updates, for instance) Many Windows users agree with allowing Microsoft some degree of control. That's alright - the owner of the machine has the right to decide to allow Microsoft that control, no matter how foolish I think it might be. The problem is, when politicians accept campaign donations, aka bribes, to represent the views of Microsoft and other businesses that think like Microsoft - RIAA, MPAA, and the list goes on.
There are probably tens thousands of businesses and persons who believe that they should be able to control the stuff that runs on computers around the world, whether that stuff be entertainment, highly technical software, the operating system itself, scientific programs, educational programs, antivirus and other security programs.
Permitting even a fraction of those entities to have even partial control over your machine is a disaster. But, laws are written to permit much of that control that is demanded by "rights holders".
And, that is a large part of the reason many people migrate to a Unix-like operating system. The OWNER ultimately has control. We can run the tripwire that Areyoukiddingme mentions above, easily and efficiently. But, for the most part, it isn't even necessary to run it, because we live in such a clean environment to start with.
We get our software from trusted sources, all bundled into the same installation disks for the most part. If/when a source of software squanders it's trusted status, they are simply dropped from the repositories.
I could go on - gotta head out to work though.
Simplistic? Simplistic is a good thing. Give me simple any day of the week. Give me a small pool of sources which can easily be checked for reliability by the community, regularly. What we have in the Windows world approaches insanity, if you ask me.
You've had some good answers posted already to the question, "How can I now trust symantic to find a zero day?"
Let me make this painfully clear for you. Antivirus is a reactive defense. Malware writers are an active offense. In any kind of gamesmanship, be it real life combat, business, online gaming, or whatever, the offense always has the advantage. Hence, the old adage, "The best defense is a good offense."
People who rely on antivirus programs to protect them are playing the game all wrong. It's a losing game, short term and long term.
Want a better method? How about we catalog and fingerprint all programs and processes on our machines. A new or changed process can be identified and sandboxed or killed. Screw the whole antivirus strategy - all that does is to ineffectively use system resources that might be better used in another manner.
Whether we fingerprint all processes or not, we can monitor communications. Each system establishes "trusted" protocols, ports, and addresses, everything else is blocked by default. That might throw a whammy into advertising networks, but so be it.
Heuristics are far better than any semi-static list of "bad things", even if that list is updated every day, or every week.
ALERT: An untrusted program is attempting to communicate with an unknown destination. Do you want to permit "PWNDMUTHAFUCKA.exe" to communicate with "bonedyomama.net" located at a proxy server in Singapore?
That may be a waste of time though. Most users will just click "yes", even if the details of their recent banking transactions are printed below the warning.
I'll repeat: the value of oil, based on the value of gold, has remained very stable since 1950.
http://communities.washingtontimes.com/neighborhood/energy-harnassed/2012/jul/17/does-gold-set-price-oil/
http://pricedingold.com/crude-oil/
Talking heads, and the latest generations of "economists" would have you believe that the dollar is stable, while all other commodities fluctuate. The prices you see at the pump reflect, instead, the relative strength of the dollar.
Speculation does have a short transitory effect on the price of oil, or gold, or any other commodity. Thus, the spikes in the charts reflect speculation.
Depends on how you count weight. I spent most of my adult life between 150 and 160. Never had those picture perfect "six-pack abs", but I was rock solid, all over. Every commander who ever evaluated me gave me a rating of 4.0, impressive, for military appearance. No fat - in fact, some said that I was underweight.
Today, I bounce up and down between a low of 180 and a high of 195. At six feet tall, that's not "fat", but I'm certainly not the lean mean fighting machine who proudly wore his uniform around the world.
You make the call - overweight, or fat? I call it overweight.
There have been a few times where I had to give medical assistance to fat and obese people, as well as a couple of morbidly obese. When you have to handle a person, you can tell the difference real damned quick.
Maybe if we stopped subsidized farming, the price of food would go up, and we wouldn't have so many people gorging themselves?
Face it, as taxpayers, we are paying farmers to produce cheap foods so that more people can afford to be fat, so that we can pay MORE in taxes to take care of our diabetic, heart diseased, obese population.
To make things worse, in spite of all that cheap food, the food processors replace cheap food stuffs with even cheaper junk like sugar, salt, preservatives, etc, to aggravate our health problems.
Maybe we need to take a long hard look at the entire food economy.