That makes sense, unfortunately in some cases the alternative may be worse than signing. In my case I'm a member, and changing to another gym would be costly.
Other than that I certainly wish people would do like you do; and I usually try to follow the same principle.
I agree 110%. The thing I hate is that I'm now starting to see same of kind legasleaze in other places. Last one was the gym I go to. Their latest "waiver of rights" I had to sign basically said "you can leave your kid here at totlot [being a member and paying a fee] but if (s)he gets hurt, even if it's due to our gross incompetence or abuse, you can't sure us" (and although that's not word-by-word quote I'm not exaggerating here).
I hate the fact companies are making people sign all kinds of waivers -- enforceable or not -- just because "it doesn't cost any", and just might be useful in future. And then they even sometimes admit "yeah we know it's not valid so there's no harm signing" (when someone points out contract stinks). Disgusting.
Much of the world would like America's prosperity and much of the world envies it. Well, these are the sorts of things you have to do if you want that prosperity.
Yes, yes, no. These are not required, necessary or beneficial. The real american values that have helped prosperity are good work ethics, faith in everyone having a chance to succeed, and (relative) lack of people envying each other's wealth.
Your value of "let the [big] company coerce its employees to sign whoopass legal contracts because it has the power to do so" does not appear on list of favourable conditions for nations' prosperity.
As to "... allowing people to make agreements between themselves..." would be fine, if and only if:
Parties involved have equal rights and responsibilities. This doesn't seem to be the case in company vs. employees.
Neither of parties would be able to coerce the other party to legally binding one-side contracts. You can claim that "you don't have to work that company", but the reality is that there's virtual oligopoly of "make 'em donate their kidney" - minded employer that use draconian employment contracts.
And as much as many people hate the idea, governments / parliaments are about only external parties that could help balance this imbalance of power. Courts can help in some way by interpreting the laws, but they don't write the laws.
Yeah. You're right... what was I thinking. I must have drank too much of Bora Bora cider when I was younger (was popular back in my home country a decade ago or so).
Ah. Along the lines of old saying "since I already lost my hearing, I don't need sight".
Amazing as it may seem, but I haven't gotten the feeling that they really have been ruined by tourism. Sure there is some damage, but pyramids are huge objects, and relatively speaking damage is still not all that massive (depend on pyramid I guess; writings probably are the most easily damaged)
Umh, ever thought that there might be some difference between hard solid material like stone, metals, and liquids like water... that just might make this approach unusable?
If it was possible to use sonar like this, caverns of Bora Bora (in Afganistan, the supposed stronghold of mr. Laden et al) would have been piece of cake to take care of. Just map out the cave structure first, then use whatever firepower you need.
But I guess you must be right, all the archeologists, wasting decades, not having any scientific insight into how to study pyramids?:-o
No. I disagree; it's perfectly ok to look at GPL'd code, see how things are done, and implement it yourself, using ideas, but not copy it as is. There's no stealing involved that I can see, whatsoever. That's what source code is open for isn't it?
Furthermore, GPL doesn't prevent anyone from using GPL'd things, it just requires you to obey the restrictions if you distribute produce using the code. If you are not trying to sell (or otherwise distribute) the product there's no problem, even if copying things verbatim.
Still, the distinction between copying verbatim (which copyright protects against), and reimplementing same functionality, is somewhat blurry... and thus, to play it safe you probably shouldn't look at GPL'ed code that does things, then use the mechanisms. Not because that's certainly wrong, but because lawyers can certainly twist things enough that it could be argued either way.
Indeed. But keep in mind I didn't claim there's something unethical, just that the original poster said he did... and even he thought it's just this nagging feeling of something being wrong (instead of being something de jure wrong)
Ever heard the phrase "don't shoot the messenger"? I'm well aware of Mandrake having been branched a while ago, and personally don't have problem with their approach.
I was merely pointing out what the poster seemed to imply.
Perhaps there was no money to be made from e-learning related products/services? Or is there something fundamentally profitable in e-learning that I haven't heard of?
I think poster didn't mean ease-of-use being unethical, but more the idea of starting not from scratch but by using somebody else's distribution as the starting point (in this case, Red Hat)? That is, attitude along the lines "but isn't it just a RedHat rip-off with KDE"?
Not really, from my perspective, but YMMV.:-p
I was referring to killing as in "sentencing rapist to death", and comparing that to "that sick bastard raping the girl"... both that many people would consider wrong (although rape part would be almost universally considered wrong, whereas death penalty would probably get something like 50-50 split).
I couldn't disagree more. There ARE absolutes that govern our existence. There are laws that govern morality as there are laws of physics that govern our physical existence.
Don't try to tell me that there aren't, because asserting that morality is relative becomes a pretty ridiculous philosophy when a 15 year old girl is raped by a 40 year old man. Despite the fact that he asserts that it is within his "moral code" to do so doesn't mean that I wouldn't put my vote for the death penalty if I were sitting on the jury.
I find it ironic you strongly disagree with "no moral absolutes", and then give nice examples that pretty much underline what I said.
It's silly to compare man-made laws to laws of physics. Former are chosen usually to protect society, to discourage disruptive behaviour. Latter can be considered more or less absolute laws of nature.
In your rape case, it's not moral absolute you are talking about; in nature similar situation is nothing unheard of, nor necessarily wrong from predator's viewpoint. However, it is almost universally condemned by most all societies and religions. And reasons are much more practical; such behaviour is bad for society, individual being raped, and according to most religions, for the offender. But there's no universal "law of moral" that would apply. Even if 99.9999% of people agreed (hell, even if every human being agreed), that wouldn't make it any more absolute.
And notice that I (like most normal people) would a consider the act definitely wrong, according to my moral code. No problem there. Just like I might consider your death sentence verdict morally wrong. In latter case you would most likely have made a judgment between "raping is bad" versus "killing human is bad", and (for once) consider killing to be lesser evil. And notice that it's just your judgment, your moral values. Nothing absolute or universal.
Um, actually I think you are confusing "moral" with "ideals" here. According to your moral code (ethics), it is not only ok, but probably even the right thing to do, to kill someone instead of letting your kin to starve (from your last example). You wouldn't be losing your moral values. You would be doing moral judgment based on your moral code. Ideally, of course, you'd prefer not to kill anyone, but in this case you have to choose the lesser of evil, using whatever moral system you have.
Same applies to most other examples. Keep in mind that there's no single universal moral code, nor are moral codes absolute.
Of course there is the difference between survival (starving vs. working for evil masters), and simpler priorization between "right" and "convenient"... but I felt poster tried to make the point of at least considering why people do the things that are against their ideals, not to claim everyone always does what they thought is the right to do, no matter what.
Humans don't
play games by checking every possible move and picking the best one and never will.
The AI community really needs to stop looking for tricks that allow computers to solve
problems in ways that humans never could and instead...
Well... I understand the feeling ("just a huge brute force thing, nothing intelligent"), but consider your statement for a while. You are saying that researchers should NOT research methods humans do not use, but should try to simulate humans. While it is useful to try to understand the best information processor in existence that we know of (human brain), shouldn't it be even more interesting to find new ways of solving problems, methods this ultimate processing machine can not do? That is, to study these methods humans brains do NOT use? Otherwise, the best we could do would be just cloning existing system.
but regardless of where you work, your boss will always be a knucklehead and your co-workers will always play politics
That's a possibility, but my experience suggests that PHB ratio is higher, bigger the institution (company, governmental organization). Smaller companies have less managers all in all, as well as much less politics. And managers usually have actual experience from the field, they are not just hired guns from some completely different field (as is too often the case with bigger companies).
Part of the reason is that when all employees personally know each other, there's much less room politicking. On the other hand big corporations are bad in this respect, invariably. But they usually pay well, benefits are good... and for some reason they look good on your resume (I personally wouldn't have any more respect for big co's in resumes, but I'm probably in minority).
Downside with smaller companies is that often they are much more unstable economically. That depends on business area, of course; small places that don't have a problem being small are often much stabler than the ones aiming to grow big.
comparing the LiveJournal site engine to
the Everything2 engine.
This actually is one of my pet peeves. CMS is a larger term than just "web site management system". CMS need not have anything to do with web site management; it may act as backend system that may include authoring part, workflow management.
This is probably also why it seems all commercial CMSs have big problems (I work on a project that uses one and we have plenty of issues. That is, if they are "just" web site management systems, geared towards web design, they should be marketed as such. The company I work for bought a reasonably pricey CMS with some expectations, and then developers find out it's only glorified web management system. The irony is that not only are we rewriting much of existing functionality, we are not even using most of 'advanced' functionality that is mostly related to actual web publishing (in our case CMS is not the front-end system).
"Full" CMSes should probably concentrate on having complete robust platform for developing actual applications, which can then drive web sites or other publishing (often publishing to actual front-end systems, not being one). It would be good to have reasonable interfaces to actual publishing front-ends (web servers etc)... but it shouldn't be too tightly coupled.
Now, one more thing to consider; I am a somewhat content Qwest DSL (but no ISP) customer (about only thing they do quite ok is physical DSL line... that is, once you manage to get it, it works well); I use a local kick-ass medium sized ISP so I have no big complaints. However, Qwest is heading for bankrupcy (50-50 chance I think), and right now they are not expanding their network at all. Thus, if you are in an area they offer DSL in, it's ok choice, and even through bankcrupcy proceedings things might work ok... but if not, you are SOL.
For that reason perhaps Ricochet's strategy is not stupid at all. In metro-Denver (~2 million people) they may have good chance, since the biggest competitor is in big trouble, and even in the best possible case (for Qwest), competitor is not expanding their coverage. ATnT may be some competition... hard to say. But they don't allow using other ISP, and their choice of ISP used to pretty much suck (according to co-workers who had their cable modem).
Plus gnu utils are freely available from most places... I thought Solaris 8/9 even shipped with one extra CD that contains optional stuff including lots of gnu goodies?
And then both KDE and Gnome work on Solaris platform; Gnome is easier to install since Sun is committed to making it that way.
So, although Solaris is hardly the best platform for Gnu tools, it's not all that bad either.
Fair enough... the original article apparently got that wrong, then (and I trusted writer to have checked that). I guess that's good news, but I wish authors did check basic facts, as this was pretty fundamental chain in his reasoning.
Hmmh. It seemed to me, reading the article, that some messages can not be handled by app even if it wanted to (the timer message mentioned). If you are right in that app can potentially get all messages and do proper handling, then article was indeed misleading.
Apps mishandling messages it gets (like just blindly executing them) is stupid, and none of MS fault. Article didn't make it look like that is the case though.
Yes, and you are just reiterating what I wrote.
Even though window has higher execution rights doesn't mean it has to let anyone use it as straight launcher tool for executables. That is the problem.
There are n+1 things that are not potentially good things to do, but that shouldn't be as fatal as this one may be. Is it really unreasonable to expect that there are no glaring security holes in your platform's GUI components.
Read the article and check comparison to X-Windows to see a sane approach to handling message queue.
Saddam was rumored to buy some to control missles or something?
Well. Considering that 8-bit computers were enough to send Voyager and Pioneer through millions of kms of space, precisely enough to still do close encounters with planets, and considering V-2 (II world war) were able to hit targets hundreds of KMs away with no computers (but brilliant engineering resulting in sophisticated non-electronic controlling system),
one does NOT really need anything resembling super computer for controlling missiles.
Others have pointed out that the Saddam-and-superchips was mostly marketing hype, which is true enough... but there's really no need for super computers or chips for calculating missiles' flight paths. There are needs in nuclear simulations, but once again, first nuclear weapons were developed with reasonably modest computational resources.
Re:Yes, but who's fault is it? Not MS'!
on
Shattering Windows
·
· Score: 4, Informative
that service
listens to a port and executes all the crap that is posted to that port, is it
MS' fault?
One more commenter who didn't even read the article aren't you? The exploit doesn't require app to blindly trust the user. App unfortunately does trust Windows API not to do stupid stunts like allowing certain messages (that may or may not originate from another app -- there's no way to tell either way!) to get to execute stuff without app having a clue as to what hit it.
It's like opening a socket for doing basic network communication and Windows API allowing certain pre-determined 'helper' messages to be handled by OS before your app has any say to handling.
You are of course right about UI separation part -- as long as Microsoft really has made it totally clear that's what has to be done, for the security reasons article explains.
And as to needing a local user... yes. It's not a perfect remote hack. But that hardly invalidates the claim this is a serious issue, esp. for certain applications.
Slashdot Mirror
Other than that I certainly wish people would do like you do; and I usually try to follow the same principle.
I hate the fact companies are making people sign all kinds of waivers -- enforceable or not -- just because "it doesn't cost any", and just might be useful in future. And then they even sometimes admit "yeah we know it's not valid so there's no harm signing" (when someone points out contract stinks). Disgusting.
Yes, yes, no. These are not required, necessary or beneficial. The real american values that have helped prosperity are good work ethics, faith in everyone having a chance to succeed, and (relative) lack of people envying each other's wealth.
Your value of "let the [big] company coerce its employees to sign whoopass legal contracts because it has the power to do so" does not appear on list of favourable conditions for nations' prosperity.
As to "... allowing people to make agreements between themselves..." would be fine, if and only if:
Parties involved have equal rights and responsibilities. This doesn't seem to be the case in company vs. employees.
Neither of parties would be able to coerce the other party to legally binding one-side contracts. You can claim that "you don't have to work that company", but the reality is that there's virtual oligopoly of "make 'em donate their kidney" - minded employer that use draconian employment contracts.
And as much as many people hate the idea, governments / parliaments are about only external parties that could help balance this imbalance of power. Courts can help in some way by interpreting the laws, but they don't write the laws.
Yeah. You're right... what was I thinking. I must have drank too much of Bora Bora cider when I was younger (was popular back in my home country a decade ago or so).
Amazing as it may seem, but I haven't gotten the feeling that they really have been ruined by tourism. Sure there is some damage, but pyramids are huge objects, and relatively speaking damage is still not all that massive (depend on pyramid I guess; writings probably are the most easily damaged)
If it was possible to use sonar like this, caverns of Bora Bora (in Afganistan, the supposed stronghold of mr. Laden et al) would have been piece of cake to take care of. Just map out the cave structure first, then use whatever firepower you need.
But I guess you must be right, all the archeologists, wasting decades, not having any scientific insight into how to study pyramids? :-o
Furthermore, GPL doesn't prevent anyone from using GPL'd things, it just requires you to obey the restrictions if you distribute produce using the code. If you are not trying to sell (or otherwise distribute) the product there's no problem, even if copying things verbatim.
Still, the distinction between copying verbatim (which copyright protects against), and reimplementing same functionality, is somewhat blurry... and thus, to play it safe you probably shouldn't look at GPL'ed code that does things, then use the mechanisms. Not because that's certainly wrong, but because lawyers can certainly twist things enough that it could be argued either way.
Indeed. But keep in mind I didn't claim there's something unethical, just that the original poster said he did... and even he thought it's just this nagging feeling of something being wrong (instead of being something de jure wrong)
Ever heard the phrase "don't shoot the messenger"? I'm well aware of Mandrake having been branched a while ago, and personally don't have problem with their approach. I was merely pointing out what the poster seemed to imply.
Perhaps there was no money to be made from e-learning related products/services? Or is there something fundamentally profitable in e-learning that I haven't heard of?
I think poster didn't mean ease-of-use being unethical, but more the idea of starting not from scratch but by using somebody else's distribution as the starting point (in this case, Red Hat)? That is, attitude along the lines "but isn't it just a RedHat rip-off with KDE"?
Not really, from my perspective, but YMMV. :-p
I was referring to killing as in "sentencing rapist to death", and comparing that to "that sick bastard raping the girl"... both that many people would consider wrong (although rape part would be almost universally considered wrong, whereas death penalty would probably get something like 50-50 split).
Don't try to tell me that there aren't, because asserting that morality is relative becomes a pretty ridiculous philosophy when a 15 year old girl is raped by a 40 year old man. Despite the fact that he asserts that it is within his "moral code" to do so doesn't mean that I wouldn't put my vote for the death penalty if I were sitting on the jury.
I find it ironic you strongly disagree with "no moral absolutes", and then give nice examples that pretty much underline what I said.
It's silly to compare man-made laws to laws of physics. Former are chosen usually to protect society, to discourage disruptive behaviour. Latter can be considered more or less absolute laws of nature.
In your rape case, it's not moral absolute you are talking about; in nature similar situation is nothing unheard of, nor necessarily wrong from predator's viewpoint. However, it is almost universally condemned by most all societies and religions. And reasons are much more practical; such behaviour is bad for society, individual being raped, and according to most religions, for the offender. But there's no universal "law of moral" that would apply. Even if 99.9999% of people agreed (hell, even if every human being agreed), that wouldn't make it any more absolute.
And notice that I (like most normal people) would a consider the act definitely wrong, according to my moral code. No problem there. Just like I might consider your death sentence verdict morally wrong. In latter case you would most likely have made a judgment between "raping is bad" versus "killing human is bad", and (for once) consider killing to be lesser evil. And notice that it's just your judgment, your moral values. Nothing absolute or universal.
That's assuming those hackers don't have actual jobs... which is not all that likely, even in this economy?
Same applies to most other examples. Keep in mind that there's no single universal moral code, nor are moral codes absolute.
Of course there is the difference between survival (starving vs. working for evil masters), and simpler priorization between "right" and "convenient"... but I felt poster tried to make the point of at least considering why people do the things that are against their ideals, not to claim everyone always does what they thought is the right to do, no matter what.
The AI community really needs to stop looking for tricks that allow computers to solve problems in ways that humans never could and instead ...
Well... I understand the feeling ("just a huge brute force thing, nothing intelligent"), but consider your statement for a while. You are saying that researchers should NOT research methods humans do not use, but should try to simulate humans. While it is useful to try to understand the best information processor in existence that we know of (human brain), shouldn't it be even more interesting to find new ways of solving problems, methods this ultimate processing machine can not do? That is, to study these methods humans brains do NOT use? Otherwise, the best we could do would be just cloning existing system.
That's a possibility, but my experience suggests that PHB ratio is higher, bigger the institution (company, governmental organization). Smaller companies have less managers all in all, as well as much less politics. And managers usually have actual experience from the field, they are not just hired guns from some completely different field (as is too often the case with bigger companies). Part of the reason is that when all employees personally know each other, there's much less room politicking. On the other hand big corporations are bad in this respect, invariably. But they usually pay well, benefits are good... and for some reason they look good on your resume (I personally wouldn't have any more respect for big co's in resumes, but I'm probably in minority).
Downside with smaller companies is that often they are much more unstable economically. That depends on business area, of course; small places that don't have a problem being small are often much stabler than the ones aiming to grow big.
comparing the LiveJournal site engine to the Everything2 engine.
This actually is one of my pet peeves. CMS is a larger term than just "web site management system". CMS need not have anything to do with web site management; it may act as backend system that may include authoring part, workflow management.
This is probably also why it seems all commercial CMSs have big problems (I work on a project that uses one and we have plenty of issues. That is, if they are "just" web site management systems, geared towards web design, they should be marketed as such. The company I work for bought a reasonably pricey CMS with some expectations, and then developers find out it's only glorified web management system. The irony is that not only are we rewriting much of existing functionality, we are not even using most of 'advanced' functionality that is mostly related to actual web publishing (in our case CMS is not the front-end system).
"Full" CMSes should probably concentrate on having complete robust platform for developing actual applications, which can then drive web sites or other publishing (often publishing to actual front-end systems, not being one). It would be good to have reasonable interfaces to actual publishing front-ends (web servers etc)... but it shouldn't be too tightly coupled.
Now, one more thing to consider; I am a somewhat content Qwest DSL (but no ISP) customer (about only thing they do quite ok is physical DSL line... that is, once you manage to get it, it works well); I use a local kick-ass medium sized ISP so I have no big complaints. However, Qwest is heading for bankrupcy (50-50 chance I think), and right now they are not expanding their network at all. Thus, if you are in an area they offer DSL in, it's ok choice, and even through bankcrupcy proceedings things might work ok... but if not, you are SOL.
For that reason perhaps Ricochet's strategy is not stupid at all. In metro-Denver (~2 million people) they may have good chance, since the biggest competitor is in big trouble, and even in the best possible case (for Qwest), competitor is not expanding their coverage. ATnT may be some competition... hard to say. But they don't allow using other ISP, and their choice of ISP used to pretty much suck (according to co-workers who had their cable modem).
And then both KDE and Gnome work on Solaris platform; Gnome is easier to install since Sun is committed to making it that way.
So, although Solaris is hardly the best platform for Gnu tools, it's not all that bad either.
Fair enough... the original article apparently got that wrong, then (and I trusted writer to have checked that). I guess that's good news, but I wish authors did check basic facts, as this was pretty fundamental chain in his reasoning.
Apps mishandling messages it gets (like just blindly executing them) is stupid, and none of MS fault. Article didn't make it look like that is the case though.
There are n+1 things that are not potentially good things to do, but that shouldn't be as fatal as this one may be. Is it really unreasonable to expect that there are no glaring security holes in your platform's GUI components.
Read the article and check comparison to X-Windows to see a sane approach to handling message queue.
Well. Considering that 8-bit computers were enough to send Voyager and Pioneer through millions of kms of space, precisely enough to still do close encounters with planets, and considering V-2 (II world war) were able to hit targets hundreds of KMs away with no computers (but brilliant engineering resulting in sophisticated non-electronic controlling system), one does NOT really need anything resembling super computer for controlling missiles.
Others have pointed out that the Saddam-and-superchips was mostly marketing hype, which is true enough... but there's really no need for super computers or chips for calculating missiles' flight paths. There are needs in nuclear simulations, but once again, first nuclear weapons were developed with reasonably modest computational resources.
One more commenter who didn't even read the article aren't you? The exploit doesn't require app to blindly trust the user. App unfortunately does trust Windows API not to do stupid stunts like allowing certain messages (that may or may not originate from another app -- there's no way to tell either way!) to get to execute stuff without app having a clue as to what hit it. It's like opening a socket for doing basic network communication and Windows API allowing certain pre-determined 'helper' messages to be handled by OS before your app has any say to handling.
You are of course right about UI separation part -- as long as Microsoft really has made it totally clear that's what has to be done, for the security reasons article explains.
And as to needing a local user... yes. It's not a perfect remote hack. But that hardly invalidates the claim this is a serious issue, esp. for certain applications.