Then try to find ancestral wheat or corn. The problem won't happen in a year or in a decade, amd probably not within a century or two, but this is a very bad idea.
Have you been following the fate of the banana recently? Variety after variety has been succumbing to fungal infections that can't be dealt with, even by using massively increased doses of fungicides.
We're down to only a few varieties left. Many have totally died out. Supposedly the, was it the Cavendish?, most popular banana from the 1930's and 40's is totally gone with not one surviving cell line. Because bananas reproduce asexually, so there's not genetic variation within a variety. (They all trace back to a mutation that happened fairly recently, which resulted in the seeds (that dark line in the center of the banana) not maturing. At that point the banana was fairly diverse, but the diversity was reduced with each reproductive cycle until each individual was homozygous essentially everywhere in the genome. (I don't really understand how this works, so don't ask for details.)
This has resulted in a large number of separate varieties all descendant from that one mutated individual...but these varieties are all identical twins....and they're all susceptible to the same diseases.
It's not acceptable to me, but I'm not a target customer.
Since the target customers probably already run MSWind, this is likely not to be any increase in their degree of compromise. (But what does it do about firewalls? Nat translators? Etc.? These can all be handled, but each one that you handle increases the size of the code.)
As a statistician (out of practice) there are THREE common averages: The mean, the median, and the mode. In a normally distributed sample these values coincide.
He's not wrong, merely imprecise. You might be considered either wrong, or ill informed. Your choice. I can't just pick overly critical, as that doesn't fit. (Well, it's true, but it's not the point I'm addressing.)
It would have been more correct to point out that dumb means unable to speak rather than unintelligent. This is at least formally true.
That's not the hardware. That's residual closed-source software.
Maybe I WILL go with Intel the next system I buy. They seem to be the only Open-Source option. (Matrox seems to only sell multi-headed systems.)
Hey, AMD! Are you listening to me? I've spec'd you for my last several systems, but this is a big enough deal to make me change my mind. It's not the performance, I have Intel down as being charged a 20% penalty for bad corporate behavior. It's having Open-Source code. That's worth around 25% just by itself.
I don't do fancy graphics manipulation. I just want a high reslolution screen...with open source drivers. Unfortunately, the nv drivers won't go very high, and the reason for this is fairly clearly laid at NVidia's feet. ATI is reported not to be any better. This isn't my area of specialty...I just know how I want my screen to look. 1280x1024 is fine. 1024xWhatever isn't. (Were I to get a larger screen, I might want a higher resolution.)
It's not really accurate, as it's quite possible to have an uninfected NSWind machine. I've got an uninfected MSWind95 box. It never connects to the internet. This SHOULD be the answer for most hospital computers, though I would bet that it isn't, as it would require a separated LAN, and that no box that ever connected to the net was later connected to the LAN. Difficult to enforce.
At any particular time there is, or may be, a secure way to connect a particular version of MSWind to the net. Unfortunately, there are so many exploits, that it's essentially impossible to follow them all, and the virus protection companies have PROVEN themselves more interested in collecting money than in protecting their customers. (Consider the recent Sony rootkit...known by all the virus protection companies, and detected by NONE of them.)
So. The simple way of saying this is "If you've got MSWind installed, presume that you are infected." This isn't guaranteed to be correct, but it's the safest presumption and it has a quite high likelihood. Indirect connections (firewalls, etc.) can be tunneled through. They increase the feeling of security to a much greater extent than they truly justify.
That's why the jokes. It's a kind of bitterness at the situation that people are forced to live with and deal with...and which the end-users insist upon, largely because of ignorance. They don't, and WON'T, consider the risks that they are taking. They are a mix of ignorant and willfully ignorant. (You think they're alone? Consider programmers and legal matters. Or social.)
We live in a society that's too complex for anyone to understand. So different people understand different parts of it. This tends to lead to frictions between parts that NEED to work together.
I don't think 1040 is the schedule used by a company for it's taxes. If you file taxes as a company, I believe that you enter an entirely new level of the game...of course, this doesn't let you out of playing the old level at the same time:)
The main societal controls against revolution due to revulsion against the government cannot be addressed with guns. Certainly not with pistons. (Sharpshooter rifles with telescopic sights...maybe.)
Most of the true villains do not have faces known to the public. You would need to be so convinced in your cause, and there would need to be so many of you, that you could kill the government by killing all the tax collectors. Be aware that this would destroy the value of the paper money, as it's value is totally maintained by the government's demand that you pay it for taxes or they will confiscate your property. This will mean that many or most of the citizens starve, possibly to death.
Is anyone sane that determined? Yes, the government is evil, but it's not THAT evil. This would only ensure replacing an oligarch by a military dictator, without the false-front of a "popular election".
Re:It's not that your crazy not to go with Google
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 1
OK. And I've heard of others who were satisfied. But I've heard of enough who weren't that I'd never consider working there.
OTOH, you might notice I'm saying "I've heard of". I don't have direct personal experience, and I don't know anyone with direct personal experience. (I should have made that clearer. sorry.)
Also, the person who identified the case I was talking about was correct. I wasn't explicit because I couldn't remember enough details. Again, sorry.
Re:It's not that your crazy not to go with Google
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 1
You can call them contractors. The court decided that they were employees.
You have more faith in the US court system than I do. Whether he is found guilty or innocent, I will consider the matter "undecided" until I have some personal need to decide. Then I will decide based on what I know...and a decision of the court would be only one factor to be considered. An important one, perhaps, but not in and of itself decisive. Presumably evidence will be brought forwards during the trial that won't be sealed. That should be the main factor.
I would consider that "People are usually killed by close friends or lovers" together with the arrest would be good evidence if those were independent facts. They aren't. It may well be that the MAJOR reason the police have for suspecting him is that he is an estranged husband. That together with her disappearance is sufficient for suspecting him. They have some other evidence, characterized as "circumstantial", whatever that means. Some "biological materials". What this will actually show is uncertain.
Given what I know I see three main possibilities: 1) Hans did it 2) The other guy did it 3) She went into hiding for some reason (which may be totally independent of this case)
In general terms, and based only on publicly available information that I happened to notice, I listed them in order of my estimate of decreasing probability. Please note that the I would consider the residual probabilities to be 40% or higher, and they include several corner cases together with "exogenous factors" ranging all the way down to n) a MS hitman "removed" her to disrupt linux development (at considerably less that 0.01% chance). At 4) Something I haven't thought of (around 20%) I realized that this wasn't something I could reasonable come to even a tentative conclusion on. If I guessed now it would be because circumstances forced me to.
It's not that your crazy not to go with Google
on
Microsoft or Google?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I don't know you. I don't know working at Google. (The rumors sound good, but I haven't checked them out.)
It's not that your crazy not to go with Google. You might not be a good fit.
It's that you ARE crazy to go with Microsoft.
I'm sorry, but I can't count of MS as either a good place to work OR a secure job. It's one of the few companies that has been busted by the feds for abusing their computer personnel. Now partially this is because they're the biggest, and partially it's because they used stocks to pay them. But mainly it's that they wanted to avoid paying benefits. They wanted to refuse to honor an agreement that they were still using to pull people in to work at MS. You might think a bit about what that implies about both the corporate culture and how you'll actually be treated if you accept that job. (I.e., not only can you not trust the salesman's promises, you can't even trust what was agreed to and signed for. They'll hold *you* to every implied letter on the agreement, and a few more, but don't expect them to honor the deal without a legal fight that you won't be able to afford.)
Personally, I found the year 2000 EULA to be sufficiently bad that I no longer run MSWind. Eventually they'll convince more people.
P.S.: I don't care whether the terms are new or not. I'd never noticed them before. If I remember them, I'll include them among the reasons that a person should not use MS software. (Generally, however, I don't get this far down the list before they are already convinced one way or the other.)
I'm not sure whether I think of this as good or bad, but corporations are spreading ALL of their pieces around the world. They don't want to be dependent on any country in particular. (It's hard to blame them for THAT attitude!) This will, inevitably, mean that their costs and benefits are also distributed. One of the benefits is jobs.
This is a clear argument that corporations should not be given legal advantages in excess of the net benefits they provide, but that was reasonably clear already. (I count corruption as a part of the net costs of having large corporations present, but I'm not sure those they pay to write the laws count things the same way.)
OK, Reisser4. In that case I've definitely never used it and it's not currently a part of the kernel. That removes a couple of places where I was vague. The rest stands.
Well, circumstantial evidence can be probable cause...but one generally needs more to win a conviction. OTOH, one could plausibly argue that ALL evidence is circumstantial, with greater or lesser degrees of convincing-ness. Fingerprints at a crime scene could have been planted there, photographs could have been faked, etc. Eye witness testimony has definitely been proven unreliable in multiple cases and experiments. (I like the one where the guy stabs to woman with a banana in front of witnesses. They almost always report a knife.)
The police have what they believe is sufficient evidence to begin the process, and the prosecutor believes that they will be able to develop sufficient evidence to convict. They may or may not be correct. Also he may or may not have done the deed he is accused of. (These last two are independent statements with correlated but not identical truth values.)
FWIW, I've been expecting this, or some similar action, since the story a week or so ago about the police searching his house.
IF it gets accepted into the kernel. Will it though?
There may be a better chance now than before. (I don't follow it, so this is wild speculation.) Sometimes the original developer is so possessive and difficult to work with that once his project reaches a certain stage it is more likely to be accepted if he ceases his involvement with it.
OTOH, I haven't used the Reisser file system since ext3 was released, so I don't follow it. I might have already been accepted and I wouldn't know. (OTOH, I remember SOME project recently where the people who needed to accept the code into the kernel? just refused to work with the developer. For some reason I associate this with Reisser.)
Note that FOSS code doesn't require any particular group to support it. If enough people like the Reisser file system, they can maintain it/have it maintained even without support from the kernel maintainers. Whether this happens may be as much a function of social networking as technical competence, however.
Yes, an clearly moderation *isn't* good enough for slashdot. This doesn't mean that it's not required, but it's not good enough.
Wikipedia is another effort with good, but not good enough mechanisms.
One doesn't know what the limitations of this kind of approach are. Merely that the current mechanisms aren't "good enough".
For that matter, consider scientific publications. That is an approach with a LOT going for it, but it's not perfect. Some people get too attached to their own name being successful. (A certain researcher in Korea recently comes to mind here.) Perhaps no system could be better...or perhaps the only improvement could be in speed. OTOH, perhaps things could be a lot better. We don't know. We don't even have a clear theory as to how to derive this. Therefore...
"When in doubt, cut and find out!" (A motto sarcastically attributed to surgeons in the 1800's.)
One limit to the price level is the price at which it becomes economic to extract oil from oil shales. I believe that we're currently just below that level, and that may be WHY we're just below that level.
Of course, the countries that have lots of oil shale (US, Canada, etc.) aren't going to invest in developing refineries as long as their prices can be undercut at any point...so prices can raise above that "insurance level" for brief periods...say six months or a year. Possibly even two years as long as the prices keep fluctuating.
Naturally this is all distorted by politics. (Surprise!)
OTOH, the CO2 level keeps rising...and using oil shales will just make things worse, because a lot of energy is used in extracting and cracking them.
It is seriously possible that fast breeder reactors are necessary. I don't know. If anyone does know, I'm sure their knowledge is classified.
OTTH, the tax subsidy of fuel inefficient vehicles should be stopped immediately, and be replaced by a "excessive use of carbon" tax. I'm thinking SUVs here. Don't say you need one, I'm not saying outlaw them. I'm saying, "If you need this destructive vehicle, be prepared to pay extra for it." What should be subsidized is cars that get over 40 MPG. Tthis should increase with time...but slowly. We don't yet know the total environmental cost of a hybrid. How long *will* the batteries last? What is it's REAL gas mileage as it ages? etc. And each vehicle design is slightly different, so global rules will tend to be incorrect.
Perhaps the sane thing to do would be to repeal all other taxes and replace them by increased taxes on gas/diesel/etc. (Which would NOT be strictly for vehicles. Cooking and electric generation would need to be included.)
Slashdot Mirror
Then try to find ancestral wheat or corn. The problem won't happen in a year or in a decade, amd probably not within a century or two, but this is a very bad idea.
Have you been following the fate of the banana recently? Variety after variety has been succumbing to fungal infections that can't be dealt with, even by using massively increased doses of fungicides.
We're down to only a few varieties left. Many have totally died out. Supposedly the, was it the Cavendish?, most popular banana from the 1930's and 40's is totally gone with not one surviving cell line. Because bananas reproduce asexually, so there's not genetic variation within a variety. (They all trace back to a mutation that happened fairly recently, which resulted in the seeds (that dark line in the center of the banana) not maturing. At that point the banana was fairly diverse, but the diversity was reduced with each reproductive cycle until each individual was homozygous essentially everywhere in the genome. (I don't really understand how this works, so don't ask for details.)
This has resulted in a large number of separate varieties all descendant from that one mutated individual...but these varieties are all identical twins....and they're all susceptible to the same diseases.
What do you expect of cloned mammals?
It's not acceptable to me, but I'm not a target customer.
Since the target customers probably already run MSWind, this is likely not to be any increase in their degree of compromise. (But what does it do about firewalls? Nat translators? Etc.? These can all be handled, but each one that you handle increases the size of the code.)
As a statistician (out of practice) there are THREE common averages: The mean, the median, and the mode. In a normally distributed sample these values coincide.
He's not wrong, merely imprecise. You might be considered either wrong, or ill informed. Your choice. I can't just pick overly critical, as that doesn't fit. (Well, it's true, but it's not the point I'm addressing.)
It would have been more correct to point out that dumb means unable to speak rather than unintelligent. This is at least formally true.
You're also presuming that the price of the electricity doesn't increase. That strikes me as a bad bet.
How could we tell you from the other bad guys?
I mean, YOU may know that your heart is pure, but how could we know that?
That's not the hardware. That's residual closed-source software.
Maybe I WILL go with Intel the next system I buy. They seem to be the only Open-Source option. (Matrox seems to only sell multi-headed systems.)
Hey, AMD! Are you listening to me? I've spec'd you for my last several systems, but this is a big enough deal to make me change my mind. It's not the performance, I have Intel down as being charged a 20% penalty for bad corporate behavior. It's having Open-Source code. That's worth around 25% just by itself.
I don't do fancy graphics manipulation. I just want a high reslolution screen...with open source drivers. Unfortunately, the nv drivers won't go very high, and the reason for this is fairly clearly laid at NVidia's feet. ATI is reported not to be any better. This isn't my area of specialty...I just know how I want my screen to look. 1280x1024 is fine. 1024xWhatever isn't. (Were I to get a larger screen, I might want a higher resolution.)
The problem is, it's accurate...well, sort of.
It's not really accurate, as it's quite possible to have an uninfected NSWind machine. I've got an uninfected MSWind95 box. It never connects to the internet. This SHOULD be the answer for most hospital computers, though I would bet that it isn't, as it would require a separated LAN, and that no box that ever connected to the net was later connected to the LAN. Difficult to enforce.
At any particular time there is, or may be, a secure way to connect a particular version of MSWind to the net. Unfortunately, there are so many exploits, that it's essentially impossible to follow them all, and the virus protection companies have PROVEN themselves more interested in collecting money than in protecting their customers. (Consider the recent Sony rootkit...known by all the virus protection companies, and detected by NONE of them.)
So. The simple way of saying this is "If you've got MSWind installed, presume that you are infected." This isn't guaranteed to be correct, but it's the safest presumption and it has a quite high likelihood. Indirect connections (firewalls, etc.) can be tunneled through. They increase the feeling of security to a much greater extent than they truly justify.
That's why the jokes. It's a kind of bitterness at the situation that people are forced to live with and deal with...and which the end-users insist upon, largely because of ignorance. They don't, and WON'T, consider the risks that they are taking. They are a mix of ignorant and willfully ignorant. (You think they're alone? Consider programmers and legal matters. Or social.)
We live in a society that's too complex for anyone to understand. So different people understand different parts of it. This tends to lead to frictions between parts that NEED to work together.
I don't think 1040 is the schedule used by a company for it's taxes. :)
If you file taxes as a company, I believe that you enter an entirely new level of the game...of course, this doesn't let you out of playing the old level at the same time
The main societal controls against revolution due to revulsion against the government cannot be addressed with guns. Certainly not with pistons. (Sharpshooter rifles with telescopic sights...maybe.)
Most of the true villains do not have faces known to the public. You would need to be so convinced in your cause, and there would need to be so many of you, that you could kill the government by killing all the tax collectors. Be aware that this would destroy the value of the paper money, as it's value is totally maintained by the government's demand that you pay it for taxes or they will confiscate your property. This will mean that many or most of the citizens starve, possibly to death.
Is anyone sane that determined? Yes, the government is evil, but it's not THAT evil. This would only ensure replacing an oligarch by a military dictator, without the false-front of a "popular election".
OK. And I've heard of others who were satisfied. But I've heard of enough who weren't that I'd never consider working there.
OTOH, you might notice I'm saying "I've heard of". I don't have direct personal experience, and I don't know anyone with direct personal experience. (I should have made that clearer. sorry.)
Also, the person who identified the case I was talking about was correct. I wasn't explicit because I couldn't remember enough details. Again, sorry.
You can call them contractors. The court decided that they were employees.
But that's the case I'm talking about.
You have more faith in the US court system than I do. Whether he is found guilty or innocent, I will consider the matter "undecided" until I have some personal need to decide. Then I will decide based on what I know...and a decision of the court would be only one factor to be considered. An important one, perhaps, but not in and of itself decisive. Presumably evidence will be brought forwards during the trial that won't be sealed. That should be the main factor.
I would consider that "People are usually killed by close friends or lovers" together with the arrest would be good evidence if those were independent facts. They aren't. It may well be that the MAJOR reason the police have for suspecting him is that he is an estranged husband. That together with her disappearance is sufficient for suspecting him. They have some other evidence, characterized as "circumstantial", whatever that means. Some "biological materials". What this will actually show is uncertain.
Given what I know I see three main possibilities:
1) Hans did it
2) The other guy did it
3) She went into hiding for some reason (which may be totally independent of this case)
In general terms, and based only on publicly available information that I happened to notice, I listed them in order of my estimate of decreasing probability. Please note that the I would consider the residual probabilities to be 40% or higher, and they include several corner cases together with "exogenous factors" ranging all the way down to
n) a MS hitman "removed" her to disrupt linux development (at considerably less that 0.01% chance).
At
4) Something I haven't thought of (around 20%)
I realized that this wasn't something I could reasonable come to even a tentative conclusion on. If I guessed now it would be because circumstances forced me to.
I don't know you. I don't know working at Google. (The rumors sound good, but I haven't checked them out.)
It's not that your crazy not to go with Google. You might not be a good fit.
It's that you ARE crazy to go with Microsoft.
I'm sorry, but I can't count of MS as either a good place to work OR a secure job. It's one of the few companies that has been busted by the feds for abusing their computer personnel. Now partially this is because they're the biggest, and partially it's because they used stocks to pay them. But mainly it's that they wanted to avoid paying benefits. They wanted to refuse to honor an agreement that they were still using to pull people in to work at MS. You might think a bit about what that implies about both the corporate culture and how you'll actually be treated if you accept that job. (I.e., not only can you not trust the salesman's promises, you can't even trust what was agreed to and signed for. They'll hold *you* to every implied letter on the agreement, and a few more, but don't expect them to honor the deal without a legal fight that you won't be able to afford.)
Personally, I found the year 2000 EULA to be sufficiently bad that I no longer run MSWind. Eventually they'll convince more people.
P.S.: I don't care whether the terms are new or not. I'd never noticed them before. If I remember them, I'll include them among the reasons that a person should not use MS software. (Generally, however, I don't get this far down the list before they are already convinced one way or the other.)
What *I* wonder is "How long 'til they 'inadvertently' disable some company's cert for a product that just happens to compete with one of theirs?"
I'm not sure whether I think of this as good or bad, but corporations are spreading ALL of their pieces around the world. They don't want to be dependent on any country in particular. (It's hard to blame them for THAT attitude!) This will, inevitably, mean that their costs and benefits are also distributed. One of the benefits is jobs.
This is a clear argument that corporations should not be given legal advantages in excess of the net benefits they provide, but that was reasonably clear already. (I count corruption as a part of the net costs of having large corporations present, but I'm not sure those they pay to write the laws count things the same way.)
OK, Reisser4. In that case I've definitely never used it and it's not currently a part of the kernel. That removes a couple of places where I was vague. The rest stands.
Well, circumstantial evidence can be probable cause...but one generally needs more to win a conviction. OTOH, one could plausibly argue that ALL evidence is circumstantial, with greater or lesser degrees of convincing-ness. Fingerprints at a crime scene could have been planted there, photographs could have been faked, etc. Eye witness testimony has definitely been proven unreliable in multiple cases and experiments. (I like the one where the guy stabs to woman with a banana in front of witnesses. They almost always report a knife.)
The police have what they believe is sufficient evidence to begin the process, and the prosecutor believes that they will be able to develop sufficient evidence to convict. They may or may not be correct. Also he may or may not have done the deed he is accused of. (These last two are independent statements with correlated but not identical truth values.)
FWIW, I've been expecting this, or some similar action, since the story a week or so ago about the police searching his house.
IF it gets accepted into the kernel. Will it though?
There may be a better chance now than before. (I don't follow it, so this is wild speculation.) Sometimes the original developer is so possessive and difficult to work with that once his project reaches a certain stage it is more likely to be accepted if he ceases his involvement with it.
OTOH, I haven't used the Reisser file system since ext3 was released, so I don't follow it. I might have already been accepted and I wouldn't know. (OTOH, I remember SOME project recently where the people who needed to accept the code into the kernel? just refused to work with the developer. For some reason I associate this with Reisser.)
Note that FOSS code doesn't require any particular group to support it. If enough people like the Reisser file system, they can maintain it/have it maintained even without support from the kernel maintainers. Whether this happens may be as much a function of social networking as technical competence, however.
Yes, an clearly moderation *isn't* good enough for slashdot. This doesn't mean that it's not required, but it's not good enough.
Wikipedia is another effort with good, but not good enough mechanisms.
One doesn't know what the limitations of this kind of approach are. Merely that the current mechanisms aren't "good enough".
For that matter, consider scientific publications. That is an approach with a LOT going for it, but it's not perfect. Some people get too attached to their own name being successful. (A certain researcher in Korea recently comes to mind here.) Perhaps no system could be better...or perhaps the only improvement could be in speed. OTOH, perhaps things could be a lot better. We don't know. We don't even have a clear theory as to how to derive this. Therefore...
"When in doubt, cut and find out!" (A motto sarcastically attributed to surgeons in the 1800's.)
That doesn't sound as good as IceWeasel.
Mind you, the image is better, but IceWeasel has a certain sound. (Yes, I know what alliteration is, and assonance, too.)
Gnuzilla, though, is just *strange*.
One limit to the price level is the price at which it becomes economic to extract oil from oil shales. I believe that we're currently just below that level, and that may be WHY we're just below that level.
Of course, the countries that have lots of oil shale (US, Canada, etc.) aren't going to invest in developing refineries as long as their prices can be undercut at any point...so prices can raise above that "insurance level" for brief periods...say six months or a year. Possibly even two years as long as the prices keep fluctuating.
Naturally this is all distorted by politics. (Surprise!)
OTOH, the CO2 level keeps rising...and using oil shales will just make things worse, because a lot of energy is used in extracting and cracking them.
It is seriously possible that fast breeder reactors are necessary. I don't know. If anyone does know, I'm sure their knowledge is classified.
OTTH, the tax subsidy of fuel inefficient vehicles should be stopped immediately, and be replaced by a "excessive use of carbon" tax. I'm thinking SUVs here. Don't say you need one, I'm not saying outlaw them. I'm saying, "If you need this destructive vehicle, be prepared to pay extra for it." What should be subsidized is cars that get over 40 MPG. Tthis should increase with time...but slowly. We don't yet know the total environmental cost of a hybrid. How long *will* the batteries last? What is it's REAL gas mileage as it ages? etc. And each vehicle design is slightly different, so global rules will tend to be incorrect.
Perhaps the sane thing to do would be to repeal all other taxes and replace them by increased taxes on gas/diesel/etc. (Which would NOT be strictly for vehicles. Cooking and electric generation would need to be included.)
My favorites are:
Alpha Centauri
Majesty
Eight-Off (AileRiot version)
Free-Cell
And, if I'm on a Mac
Civilization IV
Some of the defenses that IBM has alleged depend upon the GPL.
The GPL is not a main element in this case, but it is present and is used.