Sending our genome out in any form would be exceedingly stupid. Once the aliens have our source code, they'll just steal it and make their own humans. I suppose that will free us from otherwise inevitable slavery or fate as a feed source, but then SCO will have to sue the aliens and we'll never hear the end of those annoying Santa Cruz bastards!
Hold those law-weasels accountable for 20% of any damages IBM, Red Hat or others might be awarded in return salvos at SCO. That might teach lawyers to be a bit more selective about which idiotic cases they bring to the courts.
How about this... treat your room like your room, and lock it. I can't imagine being clueless enough to leave my door unlocked.
Other comments on the University/"College" experience: the severity of the transition or culture shift is overplayed. If you can think for yourself, be responsible, and already know how to make smart decisions then the next evolutionary step in your academic career shouldn't phase you. I started University when I was 17... piece of cake, it was nice to be in a real educational environment for a change rather than the joke commonly known as highschool;)
Excuse me a sec, my Troll Detect-o-matic just went haywire...
I think you have that backwards... the stuff I read suggests that ATI owners will be dancing in the streets (I get pretty decent framerates in CS:Source) while nvidia owners will be contemplating jumping from the nearest tall building. I also get pretty decent performance out of Doom 3.
Of course people are going to rush out and buy this game! Its going to be the best thing since... er... Half-life. It'll make people forget about Doom 3 and Far Cry;)
Preload availability != finished. Valve has clearly explained that preload content for HL2 is comprised of things that won't change between now and the final release.
You've missed the point and made assumptions. I don't use "good" or "bad" in a moral sense. It is entirely possible that a law is bad, in terms of quality. Bad law can lead to interpretations which violate more important principles such as constitutions or charters. Bad law is vaque and open to misinterpretation. It is entirely possible for language in any given piece of law to be objectively bad.
Of course, it is possible for good law, i.e., well-written law, to lead to the same violations of rights and freedoms. It is entirely possible to have a piece of law written in a way that is clear and excellent in quality.
My same usage of good and bad relate to quality, not morality with respect to the quality of judges. A judge that interprets law badly is a bad judge.
As far as agreement with any particular ruling from an ideological perspective, a judge that interprets law reasonably but only has a bad law to work with isn't a "bad judge" even if the decision is disagreed with. In that case, the law is the point of contention.
Forget the Greeks... Galileo Galilei. Thats a better, more modern, example.
As our understanding of the Universe increased, the worlds of the arts and sciences grew apart by necessity. The gap between the two and philosophy also increased. We now have the tools to increase scientific knowledge scientifically, not just by thinking, writing, and pondering.
I think the distinction is a useful and valid one, despite it not being such in the times of the heights of Greek civilization, Galileo's time, or other periods in the past. I'm sure that what we see as "science" or "art" today will be different in the future. Perspectives change, its the nature of the beast.
The problem is that judges are human, and humans are subject to stupendous lapses in judgement. Interpretation of law works great when Judge A is about to comprehend and interpret accurately. It would be a mistake to assume that they do in all cases, so I would argue that holding them accoutable for bad interpretation is necessary. A judge that takes a good law and interprets it badly is a lousy judge, just as one that takes a bad law and interprets it in a way that makes it not-so-bad is a good judge.
It is was possible to make objective decisions based on law that didn't have potential for failure, we could model the the whole damn law enforcement process with mathematics and script it;)
Yes. We are pleased to welcome you to the Illuminati... I'm serious... ok, ok, look... our initiation tests have been greatly simplified over the years. This sig a lone is responsible for almost tripling membership to 20...
There is more insight in the rest of Linus' comments. He likens his role to that of a "cat herder", far from the ominous meaning inherent to "dictator".
... RMS, I said "herd", not HURD, don't get all excited.
You would if you were German, and English is derived in part from German roots. Thats not important, I'm merely being pedantic.
What is important is understanding if [iI]nternet is a proper noun or not. If "The Internet" is the name given to one particularly large collection of interconnected networks, rather than that collection merely being "an internet".
To build on that, many of the worms that have cause significant impact spread after Microsoft had released patches. They, of course, assert that worms are the result of reverse engineering of patches. To whatever extent that is true, the fact remains that negligence on the part of the end-user is to blame for release patches not being applied in a timely manner. Slammer, for example, should have resulted in a hell of a lot of sysadmins getting fired.
Microsoft may have a track record of release swiss cheese products, but the end-user admins of those products are the ones responsible for deploying patches.
What we fail to pay attention to is that this is common practice EVERYWHERE, hence Slammer.
Companies have a difficult balance... testing patches and updates to software to ensure compatibility for their context, while getting patches in place to address vulnerabilities.
Anyways, I need to get back to trying to fix my Windows XP desktop at work. SP2 broke it severely, and I'm not doing a repair re-install of XP for the second time to try to get the damn thing operational again. Good thing I only run Windows in VMWare with Linux as my workstation's core OS;)
Ah, the viral RTFM signature has found another host. Excellent.
The phrase "life as we know it" highlights an important issue in our search for signs of other lifeforms: the definition of life. Can energy form complex enough structures with the emergent features we collectively call "life", or is such a system only achievable by matter? Of course, life (as we know it) does not exist without energy being a component of the functioning of the lifeform.
I'd think that complex dynamic systems exhibiting the behaviors we require to exist so that the definition of life is satisfied would require the interaction of energy and matter, which of course is based on complex physics at the subatomic level.
Our primitive efforts to detect other lifeforms really only try to detect systematic EM, which we hope to link to some sort of intelligent source.
There is a common misperception that Apple's various releases of MacOS are more security than alternatives A, B and C, and that "you can't hack a Mac". That, of course, is pure bullshit. The evidence often sited to support that outlandish claim is the lack of viruses or "hacking" incidents involving MacOS personal computers. One of the, if not the most important, factors in the "popularity" of a virus or worm is the popularity of the host it is designed to effect. MacOS may comprise a mere 5% (which is probably lower than the proportion of Linux desktop users) of desktops today, however Apple's products dominated back in the day. They have since lost that dominance to a little upstart based in Redmond, Washington;)
As you can see from the history, the bit of code considered to be the first virus. Elk Cloner spread from machine to machine on floppy disks. Of course, Apple was the shiznit at that time, and kids could get access to them in school.
Fast forward to 1986, and we see the first viruses hitting MS-DOS, which was starting to become popular at that time. The first self-replicating bit of malware (aka worm) was identified in 1987, affecting IBM mainframes.
It wasn't until 1988 that the first virus-related crisis broke out, but that often overshadows the fact that 1988 also marked two new viruses for the Apple Macintosh, including the first major outbreak. The Mac was still a very popular desktop at this time, both for business and in the educational sector.
Over the next few years, Apple's popularity decreased while Microsoft got a stranglehold on the desktop computer market. PCs running Windows started to become affordable, moreso than Apple's products, and personal computers spread rapidly into homes. With this increase in popularity came an even more rapid pace in malicious code being seen out in the wild.
It doesn't take much brain power to see that viruses, worms, trojans, and other malware are written for the big targets. Vulnerability in the target certainly plays a role, and both Apple and Microsoft have had their share of attention. Microsoft gets a far bigger share, of course. Given that they comprise roughly 90% of desktop PCs, it should be no surprise that the kiddies who write viruses are both using and targeting Windows products. It also doesn't help that Microsoft is only starting to really get a clue about security.
However, this shift has resulted in the misperception that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Is Apple a victim of the "you can't hack a Mac" delusion? There is some evidence that they are. A recent Security Focus article discusses a recent vulnerability in MacOS X - Apple patches critical Mac OS X hole:
The hole was discovered by a German techie called "Lixlpixel," who claims to have reported the bug to Apple on February 23rd. It wasn't until nearly three months passed without any response from the Cupertino, Calif. computer maker that Lixlpixel went public with the hole, when discussions about it began showing up in online forums, he says. Security services firm Secunia confirmed the vulnerability and released a formal advisory on Monday. Secunia rates the bug "extremely critical."
Apple's responses to the reports ranged from silence, initially, to smug assurances that customers are not at risk and that MacOS X's UNIX core is more secure than most. UNIX may have better inherent capabilities for security than Windows due to design, however a poor implementation of a UNIX-based system is equally (if not more) vulnerable than most systems ("most" being everything that isn't UNIX).
The big question is whether or not Apple has a good and secure implementation of UNIX at the heart of their product? Short answer: hell no. One of the pred
What does Media Access Control or Mandatory Access Control have anything do with this?
BTW, if you are going to give money to a cancer survivor non-profit in anybody's name, how about you do it in the name of a non-megalomaniac who can't afford to buy his way out of relatively trivial cancerous tumors?
Perhaps those in one of the tiny Maritime provinces or those of (Scott/Ir/Engl)ish descent. Canadians without accents influenced by the UK don't say "aboot".
Slashdot Mirror
Sending our genome out in any form would be exceedingly stupid. Once the aliens have our source code, they'll just steal it and make their own humans. I suppose that will free us from otherwise inevitable slavery or fate as a feed source, but then SCO will have to sue the aliens and we'll never hear the end of those annoying Santa Cruz bastards!
Hold those law-weasels accountable for 20% of any damages IBM, Red Hat or others might be awarded in return salvos at SCO. That might teach lawyers to be a bit more selective about which idiotic cases they bring to the courts.
Other comments on the University/"College" experience: the severity of the transition or culture shift is overplayed. If you can think for yourself, be responsible, and already know how to make smart decisions then the next evolutionary step in your academic career shouldn't phase you. I started University when I was 17... piece of cake, it was nice to be in a real educational environment for a change rather than the joke commonly known as highschool ;)
I think you have that backwards... the stuff I read suggests that ATI owners will be dancing in the streets (I get pretty decent framerates in CS:Source) while nvidia owners will be contemplating jumping from the nearest tall building. I also get pretty decent performance out of Doom 3.
Of course people are going to rush out and buy this game! Its going to be the best thing since... er... Half-life. It'll make people forget about Doom 3 and Far Cry ;)
Hey! Thats GNU/Childhood, thank you very much!
Preload availability != finished. Valve has clearly explained that preload content for HL2 is comprised of things that won't change between now and the final release.
Of course, it is possible for good law, i.e., well-written law, to lead to the same violations of rights and freedoms. It is entirely possible to have a piece of law written in a way that is clear and excellent in quality.
My same usage of good and bad relate to quality, not morality with respect to the quality of judges. A judge that interprets law badly is a bad judge.
As far as agreement with any particular ruling from an ideological perspective, a judge that interprets law reasonably but only has a bad law to work with isn't a "bad judge" even if the decision is disagreed with. In that case, the law is the point of contention.
As our understanding of the Universe increased, the worlds of the arts and sciences grew apart by necessity. The gap between the two and philosophy also increased. We now have the tools to increase scientific knowledge scientifically, not just by thinking, writing, and pondering.
I think the distinction is a useful and valid one, despite it not being such in the times of the heights of Greek civilization, Galileo's time, or other periods in the past. I'm sure that what we see as "science" or "art" today will be different in the future. Perspectives change, its the nature of the beast.
It is was possible to make objective decisions based on law that didn't have potential for failure, we could model the the whole damn law enforcement process with mathematics and script it ;)
SCO is getting boring, I wish this thing could just get wrapped up. Anyone want to predict how long until Darl and SCO "mutually" part company?
Yes. We are pleased to welcome you to the Illuminati... I'm serious... ok, ok, look... our initiation tests have been greatly simplified over the years. This sig a lone is responsible for almost tripling membership to 20...
Anyways, where do I go to place my bets on how long it will take for Sunbird to get renamed to Sunfox, Firesun, Sunfire, or Firefire?
What is important is understanding if [iI]nternet is a proper noun or not. If "The Internet" is the name given to one particularly large collection of interconnected networks, rather than that collection merely being "an internet".
He's more of a Darph Bobo, IMO.
Microsoft may have a track record of release swiss cheese products, but the end-user admins of those products are the ones responsible for deploying patches.
Companies have a difficult balance... testing patches and updates to software to ensure compatibility for their context, while getting patches in place to address vulnerabilities.
Anyways, I need to get back to trying to fix my Windows XP desktop at work. SP2 broke it severely, and I'm not doing a repair re-install of XP for the second time to try to get the damn thing operational again. Good thing I only run Windows in VMWare with Linux as my workstation's core OS ;)
The phrase "life as we know it" highlights an important issue in our search for signs of other lifeforms: the definition of life. Can energy form complex enough structures with the emergent features we collectively call "life", or is such a system only achievable by matter? Of course, life (as we know it) does not exist without energy being a component of the functioning of the lifeform.
I'd think that complex dynamic systems exhibiting the behaviors we require to exist so that the definition of life is satisfied would require the interaction of energy and matter, which of course is based on complex physics at the subatomic level.
Our primitive efforts to detect other lifeforms really only try to detect systematic EM, which we hope to link to some sort of intelligent source.
There is a common misperception that Apple's various releases of MacOS are more security than alternatives A, B and C, and that "you can't hack a Mac". That, of course, is pure bullshit. The evidence often sited to support that outlandish claim is the lack of viruses or "hacking" incidents involving MacOS personal computers. One of the, if not the most important, factors in the "popularity" of a virus or worm is the popularity of the host it is designed to effect. MacOS may comprise a mere 5% (which is probably lower than the proportion of Linux desktop users) of desktops today, however Apple's products dominated back in the day. They have since lost that dominance to a little upstart based in Redmond, Washington ;)
Anyways, I think a review of some malicious code history is in order.
As you can see from the history, the bit of code considered to be the first virus. Elk Cloner spread from machine to machine on floppy disks. Of course, Apple was the shiznit at that time, and kids could get access to them in school.
Fast forward to 1986, and we see the first viruses hitting MS-DOS, which was starting to become popular at that time. The first self-replicating bit of malware (aka worm) was identified in 1987, affecting IBM mainframes.
It wasn't until 1988 that the first virus-related crisis broke out, but that often overshadows the fact that 1988 also marked two new viruses for the Apple Macintosh, including the first major outbreak. The Mac was still a very popular desktop at this time, both for business and in the educational sector.
Over the next few years, Apple's popularity decreased while Microsoft got a stranglehold on the desktop computer market. PCs running Windows started to become affordable, moreso than Apple's products, and personal computers spread rapidly into homes. With this increase in popularity came an even more rapid pace in malicious code being seen out in the wild.
It doesn't take much brain power to see that viruses, worms, trojans, and other malware are written for the big targets. Vulnerability in the target certainly plays a role, and both Apple and Microsoft have had their share of attention. Microsoft gets a far bigger share, of course. Given that they comprise roughly 90% of desktop PCs, it should be no surprise that the kiddies who write viruses are both using and targeting Windows products. It also doesn't help that Microsoft is only starting to really get a clue about security.
However, this shift has resulted in the misperception that I mentioned at the beginning of this post. Is Apple a victim of the "you can't hack a Mac" delusion? There is some evidence that they are. A recent Security Focus article discusses a recent vulnerability in MacOS X - Apple patches critical Mac OS X hole:
Apple's responses to the reports ranged from silence, initially, to smug assurances that customers are not at risk and that MacOS X's UNIX core is more secure than most. UNIX may have better inherent capabilities for security than Windows due to design, however a poor implementation of a UNIX-based system is equally (if not more) vulnerable than most systems ("most" being everything that isn't UNIX).
The big question is whether or not Apple has a good and secure implementation of UNIX at the heart of their product? Short answer: hell no. One of the pred
Who needs iTunes with bittorrent and XMMS?
Good ol' friendly with resources Perl... mmmmmm.
BTW, I had to fight through 4 rounds of 503 to read this story and post this comment... using Firefox on my Linux workstation at work.
BTW, if you are going to give money to a cancer survivor non-profit in anybody's name, how about you do it in the name of a non-megalomaniac who can't afford to buy his way out of relatively trivial cancerous tumors?
Perhaps those in one of the tiny Maritime provinces or those of (Scott/Ir/Engl)ish descent. Canadians without accents influenced by the UK don't say "aboot".
I can't wait to see if he's going to sink lower than my already low expectations for the third movie.
There won't be any "real fans" until U2 has a chance to overhype and overplay their songs in conjunction with movie soundtracks.