This is no year zero, nor is there a year 1, 2, 3, or any of the first few hundred.
At the risk of exposing myself as a pseudo-intellectual... if there is no year zero, then how should I refer to the year that was in progress 2010 years before today?
From a guy using an electricity powered computer to post an electronic message over an electricity powered Internet.
What's the issue here? Computers these days do use less power than they did in the past. Laptops, iPads, mac minis, netbooks, etc... they all use less than the ugly tower machines of past years. Ditto with LCD screens instead of CRTs, OS's with intelligent sleep modes, etc.
So likely the parent poster has already 'gone first'.
Or everybody should have shown up with a large knife. What's the TSA going to do, then?
Confiscate everybody's large knife, and possibly cancel flights or shut down the airport, if they think some sort of potential organized attack is in progress. What do you think they would do, let everyone on board because everyone brought a knife?
This would, it was hoped, spook AQ enough for them to postpone or cancel the attack.
On the other hand, this could backfire: if AQ start planning their attack, and the color-level didn't change, AQ would be assured that their plan was undetected, and would be encouraged to proceed.
But as the other poster noted, it's all academic anyway, since the level was never changed from orange.
Any lower level alert will never be used because by design the war on terror is a perpetual war . And ending the crisis would constitute the government surrendering power back to the people, which they don't want to do.
Well, that's the obligatory cynical take on it. The more obvious reason is: if and when the next terror attack occurs, whomever was responsible for lowering the alert status most recently would inevitably be sacked for "taking their eye off the ball". And nobody wants to be the one holding that hot potato.
Adobe couldn't fix all the security flaws in their program, so they wrote another program to put their program in. Fortunately the new porogram has no security flaws.
... or if it does, they can deal with them by running it in a sandbox...
Ever since von Neumann came up with this crazy idea of program and data being the same, guaranteeing that something that just manipulates data doesn't also execute code has been nontrivial.
Didn't Intel add an "execute bit" to its MMU at some point to deal with this problem? IIRC, the idea was that an attacker might be able to download executable code into a process's memory space, but the CPU would throw a hardware exception if it was directed to execute that code, because the code would be in a memory area marked as non-executable. The program's actual executable code, OTOH, would be in pages marked executable, but also read-only.
With that in place, the attacker would have to trick the program's original code into saving the downloaded code to disk, then running it as a separate application. Not necessarily impossible... but more difficult, no?
How hard can it be to fix all of those buffer overflows?
Fixing the known buffer overflows? Easy.
Verifying that no further security problems exist? Not so easy.
Guaranteeing that no additional security problems will be accidentally added in future versions? Difficult.
What's next? Sandboxing vi ? ls?/dev/null?
Well, why not? If you've got the resources to spare, why would you want to risk trusting code that might contain as-yet-undiscovered bugs or back doors?
Who am I kidding, your invisible friend is not real and religious folks really are just practicing magical thinking. In a sane society we would offer them mental help not let religious leaders steal their money and abuse their children.
Don't worry, I'll be praying for them to get better...
Here's the problem with taking suicidal people into space: When they finally commit suicide, either they'll take the rest of the crew with them (oops! Vented the atmosphere on my way out the air lock!), or they won't. The first case is results in failure of the mission, and in the second case, it negates the point of bringing them along in the first place. They used up food, fuel and oxygen, and the only benefit they provided was perhaps some additional fertilizer for the crops.
Of course, even many of the initially healthy people will probably become suicidal after a few weeks on Mars... once they realize how barren and awful life there is, and that there is no way they can ever go back to Earth.
In spirit, they are similar. The technical challenges to overcome are substantially greater. And once they are done with the technical problems, the financial costs are also relatively more significant.
You've covered the risk side of things... what about the rewards? When the Europeans colonized the Americas, they were rewarded with lots of fertile land, gold taken from the Incas and the Aztecs, natural resources, etc.
Assuming a Mars colony is successful, will it make anyone rich? Or is colonizing Mars like colonizing the Sahara desert, only more so?
And it has previously been noted that engineers are statistically over-represented amongst terrorists, so there may be a larger pool to recruit from as well, compared to deathrow.
Awesome idea! Send would-be suicide bombers to Mars to safeguard of America's multi-billion dollar investments in space! What could possibly go wrong there?;^)
Re:Think carefully. Do you want to be close to MS?
on
Which Language To Learn?
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Most of Microsoft's own software is NOT written in.NET. There is a reason for that.
Is it because most of Microsoft's own software was written before.NET was released?
invite Russian, Asian, and Middle eastern hackers to attempt to bring down the network and system then find all the points they attacked and fix em
Once you've fixed all of those points, you can start looking for the various hidden back doors the hackers installed while they were inside. Maybe you can hire some other hackers to help you find them?
You have to distrust every device on your network without exception-- even routers and switches can be broken into using fuzzing techniques.
I always thought that for the truly paranoid, the trick is to make sure that it is physically possible for information to flow into the "secured" system from the outside world. For example, make it so that the only connection between the secured system and the Internet-facing gateway is a serial cable, and the TX line on the serial cable has been physically severed. That way the secured system can send status data, alerts, etc, to the gateway computer, but no matter how p0wned the gateway computer is, and no matter how insecure the software running on the secured system is, nobody will be able to affect the secured system's behavior (unless they can physically access the serial cable and repair it, of course... but that's what the guards and Rottweilers are for...)
What is needed is reliable, reusable launchers which don't require months of maintenance by thousands of people between flights, and that's perfectly possibly with enough engineering effort... the idea that it will 'never' happen is just silly.
Balancing yourself on a giant tower of explosively combusting gas is never going to be particularly safe; hence the high maintenance costs to quadruple-ensure everything is "just right", before committing to what could very easily become a human fireworks display.
What's really needed is a reliable way to get high volumes of material into orbit -- one that doesn't require fuel to be present in the vehicle (other than possibly as payload). The problem with putting fuel in the vehicle is that it adds to the weight of the vehicle, which means you have to add more fuel to help lift the fuel you've already added, and so on, until the snowball effect limits the size and capacity of your vehicle to "not very much".
Once that's solved, and we can get significant amounts of material out of this nasty gravity well inexpensively, the rest is cake. Until then, it's doubtful that any rocket design, no matter how advanced, can do much -- it's like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
Yes,almost the entire 2GB of the windows kernel is a graphics driver.
That's correct -- Microsoft optimizes their video driver by pre-rendering every possible graphic in advance, and including all of them as resources in the driver binary. That way they can display anything via a single lookup into the displays-table.
So then you agree with me. Marijuana is not in the same category as Cocaine, Alcohol, and Heroin;-)
I think they are all in the category of "drugs", and that Heroin and Marijuana are in the category of "currently illegal drugs", and that society is in the process of deciding whether or not to remove Marijuana from the latter category.
My point is that pharmaceutical companies are referred to as drug companies because they manufacture drugs. Heroin and Cocaine are drugs, because they are manufactured.
Sure, but you're making a distinction without a difference. Marijuana is also "manufactured", in that it is chopped up, dried, and packaged for distribution. The only difference between manufacturing marijuana from a marijuana plant and manufacturing cocaine from a coca plant is that the latter takes a few more steps.
I'm as pro-marijuana-legalization as the next guy, but the "marijuana isn't a drug" argument is an irrelevancy and simply doesn't fly. People don't base their legal-categorization decisions on how a drug is made, they base them on its effects (to society, to the user, to the economy, etc).
Do you think language designers would really use both symbols and not make them interchangeable?
If languages only used the symbols as synonyms for each other, then supporting both of them wouldn't help anyone. It would only make it more difficult to do meaningful diffs on your source code.
Slashdot Mirror
This is no year zero, nor is there a year 1, 2, 3, or any of the first few hundred.
At the risk of exposing myself as a pseudo-intellectual... if there is no year zero, then how should I refer to the year that was in progress 2010 years before today?
From a guy using an electricity powered computer to post an electronic message over an electricity powered Internet.
What's the issue here? Computers these days do use less power than they did in the past. Laptops, iPads, mac minis, netbooks, etc... they all use less than the ugly tower machines of past years. Ditto with LCD screens instead of CRTs, OS's with intelligent sleep modes, etc.
So likely the parent poster has already 'gone first'.
Or everybody should have shown up with a large knife. What's the TSA going to do, then?
Confiscate everybody's large knife, and possibly cancel flights or shut down the airport, if they think some sort of potential organized attack is in progress. What do you think they would do, let everyone on board because everyone brought a knife?
This would, it was hoped, spook AQ enough for them to postpone or cancel the attack.
On the other hand, this could backfire: if AQ start planning their attack, and the color-level didn't change, AQ would be assured that their plan was undetected, and would be encouraged to proceed.
But as the other poster noted, it's all academic anyway, since the level was never changed from orange.
Why not use probability average American will get killed in a car accident divided by probability they will be killed by a terrorist.
Because then the Palin administration will successfully reduce the threat of terrorism by banning seat belts.
Any lower level alert will never be used because by design the war on terror is a perpetual war . And ending the crisis would constitute the government surrendering power back to the people, which they don't want to do.
Well, that's the obligatory cynical take on it. The more obvious reason is: if and when the next terror attack occurs, whomever was responsible for lowering the alert status most recently would inevitably be sacked for "taking their eye off the ball". And nobody wants to be the one holding that hot potato.
So these increasingly intrusive TSA make-work tactics would have had zero effect on the worst terrorist attack in US history.
Is that relevant? The TSA's goal is to stop future attacks, however they might occur... not to stop only attacks that repeat the tactics of 9/11.
Adobe couldn't fix all the security flaws in their program, so they wrote another program to put their program in. Fortunately the new porogram has no security flaws.
Ever since von Neumann came up with this crazy idea of program and data being the same, guaranteeing that something that just manipulates data doesn't also execute code has been nontrivial.
Didn't Intel add an "execute bit" to its MMU at some point to deal with this problem? IIRC, the idea was that an attacker might be able to download executable code into a process's memory space, but the CPU would throw a hardware exception if it was directed to execute that code, because the code would be in a memory area marked as non-executable. The program's actual executable code, OTOH, would be in pages marked executable, but also read-only.
With that in place, the attacker would have to trick the program's original code into saving the downloaded code to disk, then running it as a separate application. Not necessarily impossible... but more difficult, no?
How hard can it be to fix all of those buffer overflows?
Fixing the known buffer overflows? Easy.
Verifying that no further security problems exist? Not so easy.
Guaranteeing that no additional security problems will be accidentally added in future versions? Difficult.
What's next? Sandboxing vi ? ls? /dev/null?
Well, why not? If you've got the resources to spare, why would you want to risk trusting code that might contain as-yet-undiscovered bugs or back doors?
Who am I kidding, your invisible friend is not real and religious folks really are just practicing magical thinking. In a sane society we would offer them mental help not let religious leaders steal their money and abuse their children.
Don't worry, I'll be praying for them to get better...
Just find some depressed, suicidal smart people.
Here's the problem with taking suicidal people into space: When they finally commit suicide, either they'll take the rest of the crew with them (oops! Vented the atmosphere on my way out the air lock!), or they won't. The first case is results in failure of the mission, and in the second case, it negates the point of bringing them along in the first place. They used up food, fuel and oxygen, and the only benefit they provided was perhaps some additional fertilizer for the crops.
Of course, even many of the initially healthy people will probably become suicidal after a few weeks on Mars... once they realize how barren and awful life there is, and that there is no way they can ever go back to Earth.
In spirit, they are similar. The technical challenges to overcome are substantially greater. And once they are done with the technical problems, the financial costs are also relatively more significant.
You've covered the risk side of things... what about the rewards? When the Europeans colonized the Americas, they were rewarded with lots of fertile land, gold taken from the Incas and the Aztecs, natural resources, etc.
Assuming a Mars colony is successful, will it make anyone rich? Or is colonizing Mars like colonizing the Sahara desert, only more so?
And it has previously been noted that engineers are statistically over-represented amongst terrorists, so there may be a larger pool to recruit from as well, compared to deathrow.
Awesome idea! Send would-be suicide bombers to Mars to safeguard of America's multi-billion dollar investments in space! What could possibly go wrong there? ;^)
Most of Microsoft's own software is NOT written in .NET. There is a reason for that.
Is it because most of Microsoft's own software was written before .NET was released?
I'm not sure if you realise this or not, but the pilot doesn't need any weapon to hijack the plane.
Wouldn't depend on whether the co-pilot is feeling co-operative, or not?
. Until then, what am I supposed to believe? My gut instinct or my lying eyes?
Which pair of eyes are you planning to read the mathematics with?
invite Russian, Asian, and Middle eastern hackers to attempt to bring down the network and system then find all the points they attacked and fix em
Once you've fixed all of those points, you can start looking for the various hidden back doors the hackers installed while they were inside. Maybe you can hire some other hackers to help you find them?
You have to distrust every device on your network without exception-- even routers and switches can be broken into using fuzzing techniques.
I always thought that for the truly paranoid, the trick is to make sure that it is physically possible for information to flow into the "secured" system from the outside world. For example, make it so that the only connection between the secured system and the Internet-facing gateway is a serial cable, and the TX line on the serial cable has been physically severed. That way the secured system can send status data, alerts, etc, to the gateway computer, but no matter how p0wned the gateway computer is, and no matter how insecure the software running on the secured system is, nobody will be able to affect the secured system's behavior (unless they can physically access the serial cable and repair it, of course... but that's what the guards and Rottweilers are for...)
What is needed is reliable, reusable launchers which don't require months of maintenance by thousands of people between flights, and that's perfectly possibly with enough engineering effort... the idea that it will 'never' happen is just silly.
Balancing yourself on a giant tower of explosively combusting gas is never going to be particularly safe; hence the high maintenance costs to quadruple-ensure everything is "just right", before committing to what could very easily become a human fireworks display.
What's really needed is a reliable way to get high volumes of material into orbit -- one that doesn't require fuel to be present in the vehicle (other than possibly as payload). The problem with putting fuel in the vehicle is that it adds to the weight of the vehicle, which means you have to add more fuel to help lift the fuel you've already added, and so on, until the snowball effect limits the size and capacity of your vehicle to "not very much".
Once that's solved, and we can get significant amounts of material out of this nasty gravity well inexpensively, the rest is cake. Until then, it's doubtful that any rocket design, no matter how advanced, can do much -- it's like trying to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
So, how much is this costing us to duct tape this 1970's clunker back together for 1 last hoo-ra and for what scientific gain?
Average cost of a Shuttle Launch: $450,000,000.
Population of the United States: 307,006,550
Therefore, it's costing us an average of $1.47 per person.
Yes,almost the entire 2GB of the windows kernel is a graphics driver.
That's correct -- Microsoft optimizes their video driver by pre-rendering every possible graphic in advance, and including all of them as resources in the driver binary. That way they can display anything via a single lookup into the displays-table.
So then you agree with me. Marijuana is not in the same category as Cocaine, Alcohol, and Heroin ;-)
I think they are all in the category of "drugs", and that Heroin and Marijuana are in the category of "currently illegal drugs", and that society is in the process of deciding whether or not to remove Marijuana from the latter category.
My point is that pharmaceutical companies are referred to as drug companies because they manufacture drugs. Heroin and Cocaine are drugs, because they are manufactured.
Sure, but you're making a distinction without a difference. Marijuana is also "manufactured", in that it is chopped up, dried, and packaged for distribution. The only difference between manufacturing marijuana from a marijuana plant and manufacturing cocaine from a coca plant is that the latter takes a few more steps.
I'm as pro-marijuana-legalization as the next guy, but the "marijuana isn't a drug" argument is an irrelevancy and simply doesn't fly. People don't base their legal-categorization decisions on how a drug is made, they base them on its effects (to society, to the user, to the economy, etc).
Do you think language designers would really use both symbols and not make them interchangeable?
If languages only used the symbols as synonyms for each other, then supporting both of them wouldn't help anyone. It would only make it more difficult to do meaningful diffs on your source code.