Also, isn't the company and situation the conversation is taking place the CONTEXT
I would hardly refer to a mass of hundreds of thousands of different individuals as a "context." If we all thought identically, there would be no point in having discussions here.
I know I would sue if someone steered the next Katrina into my house.
And you would most likely lose, because there is no way to prove that the path of the hurricane was altered by human actions. Do you have an identical hurricane sitting around somewhere that you can test your hypothesis on?
Suppose I snap my fingers and scratch my butt and wish for a hurricane to slam your house. And it happens. Are you gonna sue me?
Sooner or later, world scale experimentation is going to be necessary. I'm not talking about Global warming or anything like that, just that one day our environment will have naturally changed in some way that won't support us as we currently are. Yeah, its dangerous, but so is leaving things to chance and trying to predict our way around them.
It's not about not knowing what the potential consequences are. It's that such experiments are FUNDAMENTALLY UNVERIFIABLE. You have no way of knowing if what you did had an effect, because you have no "control earth" to compare with. The earth could have changed anyway. It's not about danger, it's just NON-SCIENCE.
Really. It sounds dangerous. It's not best to mess with Mother Nature. Especially when it comes to climate and weather. IMHO, weather control such as steering hurricanes will create more problems than it solves. Do you know what the results would be? Do you know what the long-term effects of hurricane steering would be? No, no one does because it hasn't been done.
It's not a matter of whether it's been tried. It simply can't be verified, period. So, you do X and the hurricane changes course. But how do you know it wasn't going to change course anyway? In other fields of science, you test this by using controls. But there is no such thing as a "control hurricane." Basically, you have no idea if your manipulations have had any effect. Even a freshman science student can tell you that such "experiments" are pointless at best, deadly at worst.
On the other hand, I really hate Comcast even more now. They're allowed to charge for this? What the hell *is* that?
Why? I think this is great. It's a lot harder to institute hundreds of random wiretaps on probably harmless individuals, if you have to pay good money for each one of them. I say, make it law. A wiretap of any kind costs the DA's office $1000 per month.
So I take it you call your monitor your "computer", your tower your "CPU", and the whole thing your "hard drive"? That's what the general population does, so you should too.
Silly generalizations on hundreds of millions of people do not make an argument.
Much like using "weight" at a physicists convention means something different (and more accurate) than in the locker room at your gym.
Physicists are just as sloppy, terminologically, as anyone else. I've heard mass referred to as "weight" in plenty of informal discussions. It is not a problem because the context is always clear. Hell, we still have the term "atomic weight" which has been wrong for over 100 years, and yet continues to be used.
In a publication, the correct terms are always used. And of course, there are scientists who are anal about terminology even in informal settings. But I would hope that the human race has enough intelligence to account for CONTEXT in discussions in order to disambiguate terms.
The old hacker/cracker debate is tiresome, pointless, and indicates that the poster has nothing USEFUL to say.
I'm sorry, but anyone one Slashdot blaming SWAT, the Police, 911 Dispatch, or anyone other then the hacker is a fucking moron.
I don't blame them for acting on the information they were given. They did exactly what they were supposed to do. I DO blame the decision to rely on software which can so easily be compromised. That decision was out of the hands of SWAT, 911 dispatch, perhaps the entire police department. But SOMEBODY chose to use a system that was flawed, and whoever that person/organization is, they bear blame.
You said he wasn't responsible. You implied that you believed his motivations were honorable. THAT is being fucking stupid.
There are degrees of responsibility. In this case it is split between him and the implementors of the system. I did not IMPLY anything -- you INFERRED.
Is the guy a douche? Unquestionably. But it shouldn't be the focus of your ire.
This comment just makes me barf: 'if you're a web designer and not using Vista then this download is mandatory since it will let you see your page as your Vista users see it.'
Well, it was a good run while it lasted. HTML, your role as a presentation-agnostic information medium has come to an end. We've got morons all over the world writing HTML to make precise renditions on specific browsers with specific fucking fonts. May you rest in piece (or little itty bitty pieces).
This young hero has shown great courage today. I think we should all commend his patriotic efforts to improve our police services and protect the public good.
Don't be fucking stupid. Nobody is calling this guy a hero, including me. His motivations are irrelevant. Lock him up if you want -- it doesn't solve the problem. FIXING THE SYSTEM will solve the problem. Had he not identified the flaw, someone else would have, with potentially even more serious consequences. This is not an ethical question, it is a practical one.
This is not the only way to point out the flaw to the police. If he was afraid of being prosecuted for finding the breach, he could have just as easily used anonymous proxies to send the information to police, government officials and the press.
People ignore such reports, as has been proven time and time again.
He did it for kicks and put peoples lives in danger.
He didn't put anyone's lives in danger. The 911 center did, by using systems which can be spoofed by any fucktard with a cell phone.
Defacing a webpage is funny. Risking some unknown family's lives over a prank is just idiotic.
No. Using a 911 dispatch system that can so easily be manipulated by outsiders is what is idiotic.
If there was a web site somewhere that allowed you to launch nuclear missiles from the Unites States arsenal, and somebody did it, who would you blame?
What if the guy whose house this is happened to be at home cleaning his gun in his basement or in some way looked threatening to someone who was looking to assault his house?
That would have been Very Bad. This guy and his whole family could have died because a fucked-up 911 dispatch system can be hacked into by any random idiot. Placing blame on the specific individual who broke into the system misses the point completely.
I'd agree with you if the hackers had told the cops about the flaw and they didn't fix it - but in this case, they just exploited the flaw for their own amusement.
Tell the cops about it? Are you fucking insane? He would have been arrested and charged with some kind of terrorism. If he knows of a security issue, that means he was testing security -- a.k.a. "hacking." Sadly, this was probably the only way to point out the flaws in the system without ending up in prison. Unfortunately he didn't cover his tracks well enough.
Pointless? Avoiding 5 minutes of wasted time isn't pointless to me.
Yes, pointless. Knowing that enough space is available at the time of the check tells you NOTHING. In fact, it gives you a false sense of security, thinking that the operation WILL complete successfully. If some other application suddenly allocates a 2 gigabyte file, you're screwed.
On the other hand, at least getting a WARNING when there is NOT enough space available would be nice. I'm not defending Windows -- far from it. I am simply pointing out that checking for sufficient disk space is absolutely NO GUARANTEE that the copy will complete.
Is this somehow related to the stupid inability of pretty much every Windows version ever to NOT start copying files until it can assure there is enough room on the target disk? I've lost track of how many times something has started copying, gone for a few minutes, then just stopped because 75% of the way in Windows realized there wasn't enough disk space to finish.
Such checks are pointless at best. Just because there was enough space when the operation STARTED doesn't mean there will be enough space when it ENDS. You know, other programs might use up disk space in the meantime. And vice-versa -- just because there ISN'T enough space at the beginning doesn't mean that disk space will not become available during the operation.
It's like approaching a traffic light, seeing that it's green, and proceeding to drive through the intersection with your eyes closed. The light couldn't possibly turn red in the meantime, right?
The shell should probably WARN the user that not enough space is CURRENTLY available, but there's absolutely no reason to DISALLOW the operation.
Everyone writes bugs. But it takes a certain kind of moron to fuck up a file-copying routine. It takes another kind of idiot to fuck up the QA so the original stupidity is not caught. Seriously, we should all expect and demand better.
2^14 is 16384, so Vista uses 14 bits in its for loop for copy. The question is why? even signed integers are 15 bits in old systems so are they using 1 bit for other purpose?
I don't think that's likely. More likely, there is a table somewhere that can hold 16384 entries (what they are, I have no idea). Programmers like powers of 2, so a table of fixed size 16384 isn't unusual. For some reason, when this table becomes full, things explode. Just a guess.
So, if my mom gets in a car wreck and has 24 hours to live, and I'm on the other side of the country, I'm just fucked if I want to go see her one last time, huh?
Slashdot Mirror
Also, isn't the company and situation the conversation is taking place the CONTEXT
I would hardly refer to a mass of hundreds of thousands of different individuals as a "context." If we all thought identically, there would be no point in having discussions here.
Will a hard drive run Linux... I quote Babbage: I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.
I know I would sue if someone steered the next Katrina into my house.
And you would most likely lose, because there is no way to prove that the path of the hurricane was altered by human actions. Do you have an identical hurricane sitting around somewhere that you can test your hypothesis on?
Suppose I snap my fingers and scratch my butt and wish for a hurricane to slam your house. And it happens. Are you gonna sue me?
Sooner or later, world scale experimentation is going to be necessary. I'm not talking about Global warming or anything like that, just that one day our environment will have naturally changed in some way that won't support us as we currently are. Yeah, its dangerous, but so is leaving things to chance and trying to predict our way around them.
It's not about not knowing what the potential consequences are. It's that such experiments are FUNDAMENTALLY UNVERIFIABLE. You have no way of knowing if what you did had an effect, because you have no "control earth" to compare with. The earth could have changed anyway. It's not about danger, it's just NON-SCIENCE.
Really. It sounds dangerous. It's not best to mess with Mother Nature. Especially when it comes to climate and weather. IMHO, weather control such as steering hurricanes will create more problems than it solves. Do you know what the results would be? Do you know what the long-term effects of hurricane steering would be? No, no one does because it hasn't been done.
It's not a matter of whether it's been tried. It simply can't be verified, period. So, you do X and the hurricane changes course. But how do you know it wasn't going to change course anyway? In other fields of science, you test this by using controls. But there is no such thing as a "control hurricane." Basically, you have no idea if your manipulations have had any effect. Even a freshman science student can tell you that such "experiments" are pointless at best, deadly at worst.
Steer it WHERE? Toward some other major population center you don't care quite so much about?
I'd have to hope that the costs of losing customers would cause a greater net loss to the companies than they could obtain in profits.
The fact that Comcast makes it more difficult for the government to tap your internet connection pisses you off? What bizarro world are you in?
On the other hand, I really hate Comcast even more now. They're allowed to charge for this? What the hell *is* that?
Why? I think this is great. It's a lot harder to institute hundreds of random wiretaps on probably harmless individuals, if you have to pay good money for each one of them. I say, make it law. A wiretap of any kind costs the DA's office $1000 per month.
So I take it you call your monitor your "computer", your tower your "CPU", and the whole thing your "hard drive"? That's what the general population does, so you should too.
Silly generalizations on hundreds of millions of people do not make an argument.
Much like using "weight" at a physicists convention means something different (and more accurate) than in the locker room at your gym.
Physicists are just as sloppy, terminologically, as anyone else. I've heard mass referred to as "weight" in plenty of informal discussions. It is not a problem because the context is always clear. Hell, we still have the term "atomic weight" which has been wrong for over 100 years, and yet continues to be used.
In a publication, the correct terms are always used. And of course, there are scientists who are anal about terminology even in informal settings. But I would hope that the human race has enough intelligence to account for CONTEXT in discussions in order to disambiguate terms.
The old hacker/cracker debate is tiresome, pointless, and indicates that the poster has nothing USEFUL to say.
I'm sorry, but anyone one Slashdot blaming SWAT, the Police, 911 Dispatch, or anyone other then the hacker is a fucking moron.
I don't blame them for acting on the information they were given. They did exactly what they were supposed to do. I DO blame the decision to rely on software which can so easily be compromised. That decision was out of the hands of SWAT, 911 dispatch, perhaps the entire police department. But SOMEBODY chose to use a system that was flawed, and whoever that person/organization is, they bear blame.
You said he wasn't responsible. You implied that you believed his motivations were honorable. THAT is being fucking stupid.
There are degrees of responsibility. In this case it is split between him and the implementors of the system. I did not IMPLY anything -- you INFERRED.
Is the guy a douche? Unquestionably. But it shouldn't be the focus of your ire.
Heh. I Freudian-slipped there with "piece" vs. "peace." May you rest in pieces!
This comment just makes me barf: 'if you're a web designer and not using Vista then this download is mandatory since it will let you see your page as your Vista users see it.'
Well, it was a good run while it lasted. HTML, your role as a presentation-agnostic information medium has come to an end. We've got morons all over the world writing HTML to make precise renditions on specific browsers with specific fucking fonts. May you rest in piece (or little itty bitty pieces).
you->get_out_of(mom::basement);
This young hero has shown great courage today. I think we should all commend his patriotic efforts to improve our police services and protect the public good.
Don't be fucking stupid. Nobody is calling this guy a hero, including me. His motivations are irrelevant. Lock him up if you want -- it doesn't solve the problem. FIXING THE SYSTEM will solve the problem. Had he not identified the flaw, someone else would have, with potentially even more serious consequences. This is not an ethical question, it is a practical one.
This is not the only way to point out the flaw to the police. If he was afraid of being prosecuted for finding the breach, he could have just as easily used anonymous proxies to send the information to police, government officials and the press.
People ignore such reports, as has been proven time and time again.
He did it for kicks and put peoples lives in danger.
He didn't put anyone's lives in danger. The 911 center did, by using systems which can be spoofed by any fucktard with a cell phone.
Defacing a webpage is funny. Risking some unknown family's lives over a prank is just idiotic.
No. Using a 911 dispatch system that can so easily be manipulated by outsiders is what is idiotic.
If there was a web site somewhere that allowed you to launch nuclear missiles from the Unites States arsenal, and somebody did it, who would you blame?
What if the guy whose house this is happened to be at home cleaning his gun in his basement or in some way looked threatening to someone who was looking to assault his house?
That would have been Very Bad. This guy and his whole family could have died because a fucked-up 911 dispatch system can be hacked into by any random idiot. Placing blame on the specific individual who broke into the system misses the point completely.
I'd agree with you if the hackers had told the cops about the flaw and they didn't fix it - but in this case, they just exploited the flaw for their own amusement.
Tell the cops about it? Are you fucking insane? He would have been arrested and charged with some kind of terrorism. If he knows of a security issue, that means he was testing security -- a.k.a. "hacking." Sadly, this was probably the only way to point out the flaws in the system without ending up in prison. Unfortunately he didn't cover his tracks well enough.
Pointless? Avoiding 5 minutes of wasted time isn't pointless to me.
Yes, pointless. Knowing that enough space is available at the time of the check tells you NOTHING. In fact, it gives you a false sense of security, thinking that the operation WILL complete successfully. If some other application suddenly allocates a 2 gigabyte file, you're screwed.
On the other hand, at least getting a WARNING when there is NOT enough space available would be nice. I'm not defending Windows -- far from it. I am simply pointing out that checking for sufficient disk space is absolutely NO GUARANTEE that the copy will complete.
Is this somehow related to the stupid inability of pretty much every Windows version ever to NOT start copying files until it can assure there is enough room on the target disk? I've lost track of how many times something has started copying, gone for a few minutes, then just stopped because 75% of the way in Windows realized there wasn't enough disk space to finish.
Such checks are pointless at best. Just because there was enough space when the operation STARTED doesn't mean there will be enough space when it ENDS. You know, other programs might use up disk space in the meantime. And vice-versa -- just because there ISN'T enough space at the beginning doesn't mean that disk space will not become available during the operation.
It's like approaching a traffic light, seeing that it's green, and proceeding to drive through the intersection with your eyes closed. The light couldn't possibly turn red in the meantime, right?
The shell should probably WARN the user that not enough space is CURRENTLY available, but there's absolutely no reason to DISALLOW the operation.
Why is this newsworthy?
Everyone writes bugs. But it takes a certain kind of moron to fuck up a file-copying routine. It takes another kind of idiot to fuck up the QA so the original stupidity is not caught. Seriously, we should all expect and demand better.
2^14 is 16384, so Vista uses 14 bits in its for loop for copy. The question is why? even signed integers are 15 bits in old systems so are they using 1 bit for other purpose?
I don't think that's likely. More likely, there is a table somewhere that can hold 16384 entries (what they are, I have no idea). Programmers like powers of 2, so a table of fixed size 16384 isn't unusual. For some reason, when this table becomes full, things explode. Just a guess.
So, if my mom gets in a car wreck and has 24 hours to live, and I'm on the other side of the country, I'm just fucked if I want to go see her one last time, huh?