In my humble opinion, the secondary cost of the operating system's security should be inversely proportional to the control granted by said operating system to the external network. What do I mean by this? The more networking gadgets one puts into their operating system, the more they are responsible for the access to said gadgets.
Security in DOS was practically non-existant, because frankly, you couldn't do much on it. The worst you could do was write data to COM1, and native DOS wouldn't do anything with it. Then came Win2 and they introduced the OLE concept, where a person could control application A through application B. Security req: still marginally zero, because of the single-user environment. Win311 brought us the Network Neighborhood, and now you could control application A over a network to control application B. Because of MS's DLL approach, the operating system now must track login names, and validate IDs, and coordinate data flows. Now we have XP, with automated updates, drivers for everything, protected modes, lots of complexity that MUST be secured by the operating system.
Brief Analogy: I build you a house, and I install a cardboard front door, then to protect this cardboard door I want to sell you the steel door as a security "upgrade". In a perfect world without crimes, we wouldn't need any doors, but that's not the way things work...
In short, Microsoft measured their rope, and now they're trying to avoid the gallows. They built an operating system that's practically transparent to the network, then they're horrified that someone other than MS might exploit this transparency. If they aren't willing to protect the public from their own products, then someone needs to inform the public that there are better products in existance...
Oh, so the public can be up in arms like we are about our current taxes? Oh, wait a minute...
If you can't afford to buy these electronics, then it doesn't really affect you, kind of like the luxury tax, or how income tax doesn't affect 30% of the US population, because they have nothing to pay.
Finally, when 49% of the Senate actually believes that LOWERING taxes HURTS the economy, and the public believes THEM, what makes you think people have the smarts to rebel against something like this?
I just ran accross this article on Yahoo about zirconium tungstate. Its a metal combination of zirconium, tungsten and oxygen, with the remarkable property that it shrinks when heated, almost proportional to temperature from near absolute zero to the high 700 degrees F.
Immediate proposed applications are dental fillings (heat stress is a leading cause of making fillings chip), microchips, and fiber optics.
And in the real world, if you don't like it, you have the freedom to move. Or better yet, get a bunch of like-minded people together in your neighborhood council, and change it to what you want it to be.
We have our opinion that we don't want larger powers looking over our shoulders, telling us what we can and cannot see or do. That's our community here on SlashDot. But on the flip-side, you have to honor those, like my parents, that just want to get on the internet to check their stocks & read the sports, without running into a dozen pop-under ads & crap in the email.
The world does not have to have a mutually exclusive, singular solution. It would be silly of us to give up all controls to the government without a fight; and if it comes to that, we vote the bums out. I'm putting my faith in the good ol' capitalist methods... Maybe ISP#1 only has sports, and ISP#2 only does electronics, but somewhere there will be an entrepreneur that will make a mix that we like. Like residents on a property, we can pick yourself up and go...
Here's another thank you to you, and all the other workers that toil behind the scenes to keep our country running.
... to the police, fire fighters, and EMTs that kept people calm and out of harms way. ... to the admins that kept the information flowing: photos, reports, message boards, etc. ... to the phone companies that kept the land-lines from collapsing, which let us contact the ones we love. ... to the electric grid dispatchers that served the nation's load, so that everyone else could continue doing their jobs.
Our jobs are not meant to be noticed, but we appreciate them being there all the same.
Of course that's the point of legislating "free speech", to define that one person's views/opinion are not more important than another person's, and should not be censored for the pure purpose of disagreement.
What's at issue is that "computer games as speech" SHOULD be protected, because it doesn't matter if the message is presented on a paper, or presented in a slide-show format ala Shockwave. Free Speech on paper is the same as Free Speech on computers.
What does bother me are people that think that just because something is presented on a computer, it's automatically "free speech". It's still illegal to use copies of commerical programs you haven't purchased.
Why did I choose fur? Because its as rediculious to me to throw paint on someone in real life as it would be to make a game about it. It is illegal to do the former (willful destruction of property), but it is legal to "speak" about it. In the virtual world of computers, it is again not illegal to write a program, because no individual rights are violated.
Printing Press
is to Newspaper as Flash SDK is to Flash Program
In my humble opinion, it's just another method of providing content to a viewer. Not everything printed in on paper is protected speach, just as not everything found on the internet is protected.
Suppose I make a game where the goal is to go around shooting politicians; its just as poor taste if I decided to print "paper dolls" of the pol's along with text encouraging you to cut them into pieces. What is the point that you are trying to make in either case?
But, suppose I wrote a game called "Fur Fighters" where the object is to throw cans of paint on people wearing furs? Thats much more aligned with a political message...
In short, its not the delivery medium that matters, it all comes down to the value of the content.
This is the most often forgotten rule in data mining: correllation is not causation!
Fact: Small amounts of pollution create small changes in water density. Conjecture: Large amounts of pollution MIGHT be affecting ocean currents, though we don't know how much pollution, what type it is, or the concentrations involved... Fact: Iron and other metals affect magnetic fields. Fact: Iron is largely distributed in the ocean in small concentrations Conjecture: Changes in water currents can affect global magnetic fields, because of the distributed metals. Conclusion: The gravity characteristics of the planet MUST be changing because of pollution!
Get real!
Same argument in global warming. Why is it that all of the temperature records for the northern hemisphere were set BEFORE the onset of the industrial revolution? Maybe because there are MANY more factors involved in temperature shifts than simply blaming "industrial pollution", and hamstringing the world's economy in the process...
What would be the ultimate prize in digital recording? Hint, its already being used in major league baseball, certain New Years broadcasts, and other televised events. Give up? I'm talking about Dynamic Advertising!
Let me put on my Content Distributor Cap... I can already charge advertising dollars for commercial space in the original broadcast... but what if I can REPLACE the advertising space on a recording with NEW advertising based on when the recording was watched?
I can charge prime-time advertising costs to those companies who want their adverts in the "live" version, then I can charge a second rate for the "replay" version... or even tailor the commercials to trigger on time of day. Watching that horror movie at 10PM? Why not throw in a few ice cream commercials...
There are possibilities for people to make a lot of money out there...
There was an old crack-pot scientist Tom Gold who had a theory that oil is being produced as a by-product of deep-underground microbes, and is a renewable resource.
In April, there was a study that revealed that a number of previously capped oil wells around the Gulf of Mexico are "mysteriously" refilling. As my sister (a chemical engineer) explained to me, underground oil is trapped at a very high pressure; this is why oil fields can get at the oil so easily, these are spots where the pressure is literally squeezing the oil out of the ground. After a while, the pressure equalizes with respect to the admosphere, and you actually have to work to get the oil out. After more time, it becomes too cost prohibitive to remove the oil, and the well is capped (even if there is still more oil to gather!).
Well, since you've been pumping all this liquid out of the ground, there is now low pressure in the well with respect to the oil that has been dissolved into the rocks around the reservoir, and oil will seep back into the well, so that the liquid pressures are equalized... and viola, the well refills!
Last time I checked, you and I live in a Capitalist society, not Socialist...
Businesses aren't supposed to cooperate, they are supposed to compete, and to the victor goes the spoils. You build a product, I build a product, and the consumer chooses which one they like, and the loser either comes up with a BETTER alternative or goes out of business.
The problem with modern society is that the losers are refusing to sit down and, well, lose. These cable providers are providing CRAPPY service at high rates, yet you all complain because the little fish might get gobbled by a big fish, a big company who DOES have the resources to provide a standard interface at low bulk prices.
Here at work, the DBAs are setting up strong-password checks on all of the Oracle databases. Passwords are restricted to more than seven characters, and must contain an upper-case alpha, lower-case alpha, a numeric, cannot be one of your last 10 passwords, and cannot have similar substring matches with your last password.
However, with Oracle versions 8.1+, there is a bug with the supplied verify function that rejects nearly ALL passwords supplied, even passwords that are completely random strings (such as g8kLK58sS). Anything used in the "ALTER USER [NAME] IDENTIFIED BY [PASS]" will fail, and we users are getting a bit angry that we've lost the ability to change our own passwords.
What this has resulted in is an abundance of ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed messages. This is the default error message when your password is not complex enough. Note that by default, Oracle passwords are NOT case sensitive.
Yeah, so what if it was illegal for the Florida Supreme Court to make the decision for a recount in the first place... why should we care about laws?
Besides, they didn't "decide the election themselves". The people voted for Bush, the original count showed Bush received more votes in Florida, and the after-the-fact review of votes by the media also showed Bush received more votes.
Do ANY of you people manage your own money? The budget is NOT CUT. What they've done is reduced the rate of increase. Yes, from the first paragraph, NASA is getting what it got last year, plus $500 million MORE.
What NASA, and the rest of our federal government, needs to do is eliminate the sheer waste of money that is going on... Focus on products that produce science, not kickbacks (*cough* ISS)
Sacrifice without War
on
The Drone War
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
I am reminded of a Star Trek (Original Series) episode about a completely computerized war.
Two planets had been warrior for centuries, perhaps millenia. Originally, they built great starfleets, rockets, atomic weapons, and launched them against their enemy planet. Thousands would die per attack.
Then they used their advanced computer networks to design new attack patterns, so they would build newer rockets, bombs, etc etc. On the other side, the computers would design new defenses, anti rocket, etc etc And vice versa.
So, with each new interation, the computers could calculate just how effective the new weapon would be, and calculate how many thousands of the enemy would die in the attack. And vice versa on the other side. For example, for every 100 missiles, 1 would get through, 20 square miles would get nuked, and 100,000 people would die.
Both sides could perfectly predict the results of their attacks before the attack even began, or even before the missiles were built to be used in the attack, they could tell by just the design. They could predict the enemy attacks also, perfectly, and could predict when and where their defenses would fail. The two enemies were locked at a stalemate.
So, the two planets made a decision... they would continue to fight the war, but instead of fighting with physical objects like missiles, the war would be fought entirely by computer. The computer would design new attacks and communicate the attacks to the enemy computer, where the enemy computer would make a defense calculation, predict the number of people dead, and the citizens would march themselves into suicide chambers to represent the losses without the mes of nuclear fallout and all that wasted manufacture.
And they did it, for additional millenia, until the survivors on both planets had forgotten what it was that they were fighting about in the first place.
Actually, from what I read, it's not a United States company because Cuba is still under embargo by our government. Thus it's illegal under US law for a US company to operate in those waters. Combine that with the fact that Cuba isn't technologically and fiscally advanced to send their own explorers, so that requires an international source; they were more than happy to offer Cuban divers to the teams funded by the other nations.
So, that leaves Mexico and Canada as the major nations who could legally investigate, and it so happens that a Canadian one spent the cash to go there.
Why is it that people in the Media are so surprised at what the 'Net has become?
The printing press: originally invented to standardize the font of books, because there were too many spelling errors in copying by hand.
In the late 1700's, everyone used Newspapers to spread information. New techniques of overlaying images with the text helped spawn the advertising age, then (1800s) the "catalog" was invented to bind a lot of advertisements into one book. Of course, people still wrote normal books, but wow, you can sell stuff remotely by displaying it! What do we get today: tabloids, leftist newspapers, conservative newspapers... a pretty good representation of freedom of the press.
Then you have the radio (late 1800's) where suddenly you can get your news by huddling around a wooden box at home, and soon "this program brought to you by..." took over, yes, advertising. People bought newspapers so they could see the event, and radios so they could hear it. What do we get today: Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, John Katz... all's fair in free speach. We don't have to agree with it all, but at least in America we CAN listen if we want.
Movies appeared in the 1900's, black and white, and from 1910 to 1950's, they were the main method of explaining world events to the masses. Again, advertisements in the form of "shorts" which appeared before movies. What do we get today: Sex & Violence. In the US, we're free to speak what we want, and Hollywood gives it to us (even if they do slant it left a bit more than the average American).
Then the television appeared, and became affordable, in the 1950s. It was supposed to be the END OF THE MOVIE THEATERS, we can stay home and get our evening news. What do we get today: Friends, MTV, crap. But they're free to show it to us, and we watch. We also have Discovery channel, and a lot of other "higher-quality content" channels.
Lastly, the internet. Again, we have 10,000 expectations, it'll IMPROVE OUR LIVES, except that right now, all we see is pr0n, banner ads, junk mail, private sites... and believe it or not, there's actually a lot of good information in there too.
When you offer free speach, don't be surprised at those that actually show up to use it.
Slashdot Mirror
Even Slashdot beat Slashdot to the story abou... wait a minute...
In my humble opinion, the secondary cost of the operating system's security should be inversely proportional to the control granted by said operating system to the external network. What do I mean by this? The more networking gadgets one puts into their operating system, the more they are responsible for the access to said gadgets.
Security in DOS was practically non-existant, because frankly, you couldn't do much on it. The worst you could do was write data to COM1, and native DOS wouldn't do anything with it. Then came Win2 and they introduced the OLE concept, where a person could control application A through application B. Security req: still marginally zero, because of the single-user environment. Win311 brought us the Network Neighborhood, and now you could control application A over a network to control application B. Because of MS's DLL approach, the operating system now must track login names, and validate IDs, and coordinate data flows. Now we have XP, with automated updates, drivers for everything, protected modes, lots of complexity that MUST be secured by the operating system.
Brief Analogy: I build you a house, and I install a cardboard front door, then to protect this cardboard door I want to sell you the steel door as a security "upgrade". In a perfect world without crimes, we wouldn't need any doors, but that's not the way things work...
In short, Microsoft measured their rope, and now they're trying to avoid the gallows. They built an operating system that's practically transparent to the network, then they're horrified that someone other than MS might exploit this transparency. If they aren't willing to protect the public from their own products, then someone needs to inform the public that there are better products in existance...
After reading that nonsense, can I please have that 8 minutes of my life back?
Oh, so the public can be up in arms like we are about our current taxes? Oh, wait a minute...
If you can't afford to buy these electronics, then it doesn't really affect you, kind of like the luxury tax, or how income tax doesn't affect 30% of the US population, because they have nothing to pay.
Finally, when 49% of the Senate actually believes that LOWERING taxes HURTS the economy, and the public believes THEM, what makes you think people have the smarts to rebel against something like this?
I just ran accross this article on Yahoo about zirconium tungstate. Its a metal combination of zirconium, tungsten and oxygen, with the remarkable property that it shrinks when heated, almost proportional to temperature from near absolute zero to the high 700 degrees F.
Immediate proposed applications are dental fillings (heat stress is a leading cause of making fillings chip), microchips, and fiber optics.
And in the real world, if you don't like it, you have the freedom to move. Or better yet, get a bunch of like-minded people together in your neighborhood council, and change it to what you want it to be.
We have our opinion that we don't want larger powers looking over our shoulders, telling us what we can and cannot see or do. That's our community here on SlashDot. But on the flip-side, you have to honor those, like my parents, that just want to get on the internet to check their stocks & read the sports, without running into a dozen pop-under ads & crap in the email.
The world does not have to have a mutually exclusive, singular solution. It would be silly of us to give up all controls to the government without a fight; and if it comes to that, we vote the bums out. I'm putting my faith in the good ol' capitalist methods... Maybe ISP#1 only has sports, and ISP#2 only does electronics, but somewhere there will be an entrepreneur that will make a mix that we like. Like residents on a property, we can pick yourself up and go...
Our jobs are not meant to be noticed, but we appreciate them being there all the same.
Its those darn conversions again, going from binary to decimal!
Of course that's the point of legislating "free speech", to define that one person's views/opinion are not more important than another person's, and should not be censored for the pure purpose of disagreement.
What's at issue is that "computer games as speech" SHOULD be protected, because it doesn't matter if the message is presented on a paper, or presented in a slide-show format ala Shockwave. Free Speech on paper is the same as Free Speech on computers.
What does bother me are people that think that just because something is presented on a computer, it's automatically "free speech". It's still illegal to use copies of commerical programs you haven't purchased.
Why did I choose fur? Because its as rediculious to me to throw paint on someone in real life as it would be to make a game about it. It is illegal to do the former (willful destruction of property), but it is legal to "speak" about it. In the virtual world of computers, it is again not illegal to write a program, because no individual rights are violated.
In my humble opinion, it's just another method of providing content to a viewer. Not everything printed in on paper is protected speach, just as not everything found on the internet is protected.
Suppose I make a game where the goal is to go around shooting politicians; its just as poor taste if I decided to print "paper dolls" of the pol's along with text encouraging you to cut them into pieces. What is the point that you are trying to make in either case?
But, suppose I wrote a game called "Fur Fighters" where the object is to throw cans of paint on people wearing furs? Thats much more aligned with a political message...
In short, its not the delivery medium that matters, it all comes down to the value of the content.
So, maybe he doesn't get his exposé on NBC about cracking NBC's networks...
But I'll bet that ABC would be happy do do a report on cracking NBC's networks...
Where are you, Mr. Jennings...
It's a good thing this sort of illicit loaning only goes on in the corporate world... Wait a sec, you mean it happens in government too?
This is the most often forgotten rule in data mining: correllation is not causation!
Fact: Small amounts of pollution create small changes in water density.
Conjecture: Large amounts of pollution MIGHT be affecting ocean currents, though we don't know how much pollution, what type it is, or the concentrations involved...
Fact: Iron and other metals affect magnetic fields.
Fact: Iron is largely distributed in the ocean in small concentrations
Conjecture: Changes in water currents can affect global magnetic fields, because of the distributed metals.
Conclusion: The gravity characteristics of the planet MUST be changing because of pollution!
Get real!
Same argument in global warming. Why is it that all of the temperature records for the northern hemisphere were set BEFORE the onset of the industrial revolution? Maybe because there are MANY more factors involved in temperature shifts than simply blaming "industrial pollution", and hamstringing the world's economy in the process...
Paint me a cynic, but....
What would be the ultimate prize in digital recording? Hint, its already being used in major league baseball, certain New Years broadcasts, and other televised events. Give up? I'm talking about Dynamic Advertising!
Let me put on my Content Distributor Cap... I can already charge advertising dollars for commercial space in the original broadcast... but what if I can REPLACE the advertising space on a recording with NEW advertising based on when the recording was watched?
I can charge prime-time advertising costs to those companies who want their adverts in the "live" version, then I can charge a second rate for the "replay" version... or even tailor the commercials to trigger on time of day. Watching that horror movie at 10PM? Why not throw in a few ice cream commercials...
There are possibilities for people to make a lot of money out there...
There was an old crack-pot scientist Tom Gold who had a theory that oil is being produced as a by-product of deep-underground microbes, and is a renewable resource.
In April, there was a study that revealed that a number of previously capped oil wells around the Gulf of Mexico are "mysteriously" refilling. As my sister (a chemical engineer) explained to me, underground oil is trapped at a very high pressure; this is why oil fields can get at the oil so easily, these are spots where the pressure is literally squeezing the oil out of the ground. After a while, the pressure equalizes with respect to the admosphere, and you actually have to work to get the oil out. After more time, it becomes too cost prohibitive to remove the oil, and the well is capped (even if there is still more oil to gather!).
Well, since you've been pumping all this liquid out of the ground, there is now low pressure in the well with respect to the oil that has been dissolved into the rocks around the reservoir, and oil will seep back into the well, so that the liquid pressures are equalized... and viola, the well refills!
Last time I checked, you and I live in a Capitalist society, not Socialist...
Businesses aren't supposed to cooperate, they are supposed to compete, and to the victor goes the spoils. You build a product, I build a product, and the consumer chooses which one they like, and the loser either comes up with a BETTER alternative or goes out of business.
The problem with modern society is that the losers are refusing to sit down and, well, lose. These cable providers are providing CRAPPY service at high rates, yet you all complain because the little fish might get gobbled by a big fish, a big company who DOES have the resources to provide a standard interface at low bulk prices.
Here at work, the DBAs are setting up strong-password checks on all of the Oracle databases. Passwords are restricted to more than seven characters, and must contain an upper-case alpha, lower-case alpha, a numeric, cannot be one of your last 10 passwords, and cannot have similar substring matches with your last password.
However, with Oracle versions 8.1+, there is a bug with the supplied verify function that rejects nearly ALL passwords supplied, even passwords that are completely random strings (such as g8kLK58sS). Anything used in the "ALTER USER [NAME] IDENTIFIED BY [PASS]" will fail, and we users are getting a bit angry that we've lost the ability to change our own passwords.
What this has resulted in is an abundance of ORA-28003: password verification for the specified password failed messages. This is the default error message when your password is not complex enough. Note that by default, Oracle passwords are NOT case sensitive.
Yeah, so what if it was illegal for the Florida Supreme Court to make the decision for a recount in the first place... why should we care about laws?
Besides, they didn't "decide the election themselves". The people voted for Bush, the original count showed Bush received more votes in Florida, and the after-the-fact review of votes by the media also showed Bush received more votes.
Do ANY of you people manage your own money? The budget is NOT CUT. What they've done is reduced the rate of increase. Yes, from the first paragraph, NASA is getting what it got last year, plus $500 million MORE.
What NASA, and the rest of our federal government, needs to do is eliminate the sheer waste of money that is going on... Focus on products that produce science, not kickbacks (*cough* ISS)
I am reminded of a Star Trek (Original Series) episode about a completely computerized war.
Two planets had been warrior for centuries, perhaps millenia. Originally, they built great starfleets, rockets, atomic weapons, and launched them against their enemy planet. Thousands would die per attack.
Then they used their advanced computer networks to design new attack patterns, so they would build newer rockets, bombs, etc etc. On the other side, the computers would design new defenses, anti rocket, etc etc And vice versa.
So, with each new interation, the computers could calculate just how effective the new weapon would be, and calculate how many thousands of the enemy would die in the attack. And vice versa on the other side. For example, for every 100 missiles, 1 would get through, 20 square miles would get nuked, and 100,000 people would die.
Both sides could perfectly predict the results of their attacks before the attack even began, or even before the missiles were built to be used in the attack, they could tell by just the design. They could predict the enemy attacks also, perfectly, and could predict when and where their defenses would fail. The two enemies were locked at a stalemate.
So, the two planets made a decision... they would continue to fight the war, but instead of fighting with physical objects like missiles, the war would be fought entirely by computer. The computer would design new attacks and communicate the attacks to the enemy computer, where the enemy computer would make a defense calculation, predict the number of people dead, and the citizens would march themselves into suicide chambers to represent the losses without the mes of nuclear fallout and all that wasted manufacture.
And they did it, for additional millenia, until the survivors on both planets had forgotten what it was that they were fighting about in the first place.
I read about this yesterday on Yahoo's copy of a Reuter's story
Actually, from what I read, it's not a United States company because Cuba is still under embargo by our government. Thus it's illegal under US law for a US company to operate in those waters. Combine that with the fact that Cuba isn't technologically and fiscally advanced to send their own explorers, so that requires an international source; they were more than happy to offer Cuban divers to the teams funded by the other nations.
So, that leaves Mexico and Canada as the major nations who could legally investigate, and it so happens that a Canadian one spent the cash to go there.
Why is it that people in the Media are so surprised at what the 'Net has become?
The printing press: originally invented to standardize the font of books, because there were too many spelling errors in copying by hand.
In the late 1700's, everyone used Newspapers to spread information. New techniques of overlaying images with the text helped spawn the advertising age, then (1800s) the "catalog" was invented to bind a lot of advertisements into one book. Of course, people still wrote normal books, but wow, you can sell stuff remotely by displaying it! What do we get today: tabloids, leftist newspapers, conservative newspapers... a pretty good representation of freedom of the press.
Then you have the radio (late 1800's) where suddenly you can get your news by huddling around a wooden box at home, and soon "this program brought to you by..." took over, yes, advertising. People bought newspapers so they could see the event, and radios so they could hear it. What do we get today: Howard Stern, Rush Limbaugh, John Katz... all's fair in free speach. We don't have to agree with it all, but at least in America we CAN listen if we want.
Movies appeared in the 1900's, black and white, and from 1910 to 1950's, they were the main method of explaining world events to the masses. Again, advertisements in the form of "shorts" which appeared before movies. What do we get today: Sex & Violence. In the US, we're free to speak what we want, and Hollywood gives it to us (even if they do slant it left a bit more than the average American).
Then the television appeared, and became affordable, in the 1950s. It was supposed to be the END OF THE MOVIE THEATERS, we can stay home and get our evening news. What do we get today: Friends, MTV, crap. But they're free to show it to us, and we watch. We also have Discovery channel, and a lot of other "higher-quality content" channels.
Lastly, the internet. Again, we have 10,000 expectations, it'll IMPROVE OUR LIVES, except that right now, all we see is pr0n, banner ads, junk mail, private sites... and believe it or not, there's actually a lot of good information in there too.
When you offer free speach, don't be surprised at those that actually show up to use it.
... So when they there are bugs in NASA's program, they aren't kidding!