While I ostensibly agree that the average user doesn't have to worry about it, and that Microsoft has it covered, I cannot suborn the statement that
most can turn it off in Windows 7 without causing any trouble
Just because we don't need it now doesn't mean we won't need it in the future, and unless you're planning on replacing your system when we do hit network armageddon, DO NOT disable the forward compatibility! If people start disabling the preparations Microsoft has made for us, then we'll never be able to make the switch to IPv6. I'll bet those network admins would much rather have made the switch already than to have had to use the fancy engineering solutions.
It's a bit like switching from gas to electric vehicles. Sure, right now we have fancy hybrids, but they cost more than a gas-only or electric-only vehicle and are much more prone to failure. Would you suggest to the Prius owner that since we still have plenty of gas, there's nothing wrong with disabling the electric motor? (please don't get distracted by the analogy)
As stated above, the md5 doesn't actually hold the information. It's a "one-way" encryption. There's no way to "decrypt" the hash into the information that created it, because the information is lost. The only way to find what generated the hash is to guess and generate. In this case, the earlier AC just guessed it was the mission statement (based on the clue in TFA) and simcop tried it out.
Because it is "one-way" and an arbitrary amount of information can be lost, there is no limit to the size of the hash. It is very possible to take anything from a two-char string, to the entire Harry Potter series, to the entirety of all data produced by mankind, and produce a 128-bit MD5 sum.
Another way of thinking about it is this: Say that 2+2=4. Now, we know the answer is 4. That doesn't tell us that the equation is 2+2. It could have been 3+1, 4*1, sqrt(16), or anything, really. Similarly, just because we know the answer is 42, doesn't mean we know the equation. 42 is the MD5 sum of life, the universe, and everything, and just because it's meaningless now doesn't mean it was meaningless before it was hashed.
I blame news outlets like Fox News, not because of their political bias, but because they shit on everyone else, and in return, other outlets like MSNBC shit back on them. This may have helped their ratings in the short term, but in the long term shit storm that ensued, now nobody trusts any of them.
Furthermore, people are starting to realize that big newsrooms have certain ideas about what stories to show, and that these ideas might not correlate at all to what interests you personally. They're trying to run stories that get good ratings, they're trying to run stories that won't piss anybody off, and they're trying to avoid stories that could upset their sponsors. Online sources don't have any of these hindrances.
That's saying nothing about how wildly inaccurate things on the internet can be, but I think it explains why people would trust the internet more than the traditional outlets at this point.
I actually think this is more plausible than the premise about violent games, particularly shooters. If you just think about it, people are more likely to be driving a car than to be shooting at things. Nearly everyone in America drives. Despite how it seems to most gun owners, though, those that even know how to handle a firearm are in the minority. I find it entirely plausible that playing at reckless driving (say, Burnout) might have a subconscious affect on our habits in real life. Admittedly, I could also find it plausible that shooting at people and practicing head shots might also have a subconscious affect - but only if that person is already handling a gun. It's not going to make you want to pick up a real gun any more than playing Mario Kart will make you want to drive a real car (I picked Mario Kart because it is about as far from reality as most shooting games are from actual shooting for people that aren't soldiers).
I guess I won't be traveling through North Carolina then, because my wife is vegetarian and the smell of some meat is now disturbing to her. I'm told it's pretty universal for people who have not eaten meat in a long time to feel nauseous at the smell of strong meats like bacon or barbecue.
About the only funny thing about this is that he thought it was a good idea to make a video. That's actually funny in the wow-that's-weird sense. But for the exact reason you think everything else was funny, I'm just bored. It's unremarkable. We've all done something like that, and if not in public then in private when we thought it'd be fun to pretend to be the world's greatest swordsman or marksman or whatever. This kind of make-believe is expected of younger children, but somehow I suspect that if you saw a picture of a 7-year-old in a Spiderman costume pretending to throw webs, you'd laugh hysterically and pass it on.
Bottom line, I had never seen the video before, and now I think I at least would have chuckled a bit if I was rick-rolled instead.
I can't imagine why Views is not being integrated into Core. I mean, Core 6 had such necessary things as an OpenID authentication module. I would personally like to see certain things rewritten to use Views instead of the legacy methods already used, such as the front page or Drupal forums.
The key difference is that we're on Slashdot, and when I read this headline about "Online Gaming," I thought it said that Congress planned to regulate and tax buying currency for MMORPG's.
A good CS class nowadays doesn't ask you to program a simple linked list for an assignment. In my CS class last year, students were walked through programming singly-linked, doubly-linked, and circular lists in class, and were given an assignment to construct a doubly-linked list where.next goes three ahead, and.prev goes two back. It's fairly simple to write a.getNext() function as "return this.next.prev" but things can get hairy (and require more advanced and uncharted solutions) when you start implementing every function found in the Java List interface, which was part of the assignment.
Point is, asking a student to do something that's been done to death is not a good project. I could ask you to write a function which takes an input stream and splits it into an array on certain delimiters, and I can expect a unique solution from everyone. There's bound to be some small difference (maybe a line is out of order or the syntax is slightly different) if there isn't a large difference (using a while {} instead of a for {}, or even a do {} while), and if you were to take existing code and try to change it for those small differences you'd have to have some understanding of how it was put together in order not to break it.
Software requires explicit user consent to install.
Software requires explicit user consent to share files.
The first seems like common sense for all software, not just P2P (if it already existed, this provision would be redundant). If the law also clearly defined the difference between an "update" and "new software," it might prevent Microsoft from pushing out WGA as an automatic update. It could also provide legal provision against a specific hacker activity, installing malware, rather than the blanket DMCA provision against unauthorized computer access (which could be playful and/or harmless, whereas silently installing software almost never is).
As for the second one, I once installed Shareaza, and found eventually that it had downloaded a lot of high profile pirated software, presumably to share on the network and increase download speeds for other users. The program itself showed no indication of where these files came from, or how to remove them or stop sharing them. In the process, it implicated my as a copyright infringer without my intent, or even any benefit from the usage of the pirated software. Obviously there are more problems with technically illiterate people, but even a technical person could be bamboozled by the right program into sharing sensitive documents or participating in illegal activities. Again, these are actions most used by nefarious hackers.
So, it's a law that should, in effect, provide real, useful provisions against hackers. It is not banning P2P as a technology, nor is it even targeting the sharing of copyrighted materials AFAIK.
sort of like putting a recreation and reproduction facility right next to a waste water treatment facility?
It's not just next to, you're swimming in it. On occasion, the pumps in the water park turn off and start spewing sewage instead. Of course, there is supposed to be some warning beforehand, but that doesn't stop the swimmers (swimmer?) from getting uncomfortable with the idea of swimming there. But hey, certain other people have a roller coaster that sometimes doubles as a food synthesis plant. And don't even get me started on the "playground" built in a cave inside the landfill.
Gillette's advertising campaign will surely suffer if the image of the sexy woman caressing your face after a ridiculously smooth shave is no longer scientifically accurate. That women act that way is now disproven...by science!
Right, because those 8 year old bullies are keeping up on the latest scientific studies. Please.
Rather than that some kids are dicks, I would posit that dickery is the default state of humanity, and that it takes sympathy (someone else is getting hurt like you are) or empathy (someone else is getting hurt and you have nothing to do with it) to get past it.
Let's be clear though: an inability to pick up on certain social cues is not an inferiority. This paragraph from the article, to me, says that it could really happen to any child by circumstance alone:
When children have prolonged struggles with socializing, "a vicious cycle begins," Lavoie said. Shunned children have few opportunities to practice social skills, while popular kids are busy perfecting theirs. However, having just one or two friends can be enough to give a child the social practice he or she needs, he said.
Sound familiar?
Let those who have never bullied be the first to throw stones. I guarantee you that at some point in your childhood, you acted as a bully to someone else whether you meant it (or realized it) or not. The end of the article suggests that all children need to learn how to interpret social cues and other people's feelings (imagine that!) and that "bullying" might be more about perception than about another child intentionally dicking you around.
And as always, the summary (especially because it was pulled straight from the beginning of the article) is more controversial and biased than the research itself. From what I can tell, the research in no way says that only children with learning disabilities get bullied.
Well, just based on the line you quoted, I would say that the software is so that the two hard drives only show up as one hard drive. It says nothing about file systems, or caching, or file/block level, it just says that they made this neat piece of software that will eliminate your confusion as to which of the two drive letters you should use.
I'm guessing that they didn't make such a neat little piece of software for other OSes, in which case, if I'm reading it right, it should still work but show two disks.
Mod parent down, please. I'd rather not listen to Maddox (the jock asshole persona) telling me how the Internet is great because it's just like High School Musical (stop caring about cliques and what other people think, and they will magically think better of you and we can all be in this together)
Looks to me like the software to accomplish this is one of those programs the manufacturer bundles on your computer, not an architectural change. If I have to tolerate a 6 month trial of MS Office, Norton Antivirus, several dozen casual games distributed as adware, and whatever other "productivity" software they decide I want, then no thanks. Bundled software should be possible to separate from each other.
Didn't this just happen last month? And the month before that?
When I first heard about a Javascript vulnerability in Acrobat, I tried to turn it off. It must have worked, because Acrobat complained EVERY F***ING TIME I opened it. Really annoying. I don't know if they've fixed that, but it almost seems to me like Adobe is trying to perpetuate the Javascript bugs not just by having it on by default, but by punishing you for turning it off.
What would you rather they use? Flash? That doesn't work well in Linux either. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. That's why rather than using Flash and trying to support any device with a web browser (mobile browsers and game consoles don't usually support Flash very well either) they make special applications on platforms where it's worth their while, and use Silverlight elsewhere. Silverlight works on PC and Mac, so they've covered 99% of the market already, with a solution that I find preferable to Flash (possibly only because I like the underdog software, and ironically Microsoft is the underdog compared to Adobe with Flash).
Maybe HTML 5 will solve all our problems. But then, maybe we'll never actually get to see full HTML 5 implementation (hell, IE only got to CSS 2.0 with the most recent version, 8, and there's no chance of seeing CSS 3.0 features commonly accessible from multiple browsers).
To me, this is reminiscent of our arms race with the Soviet Union. Military officials were convinced that the Soviets were always one step ahead of them the entire time, even though the only time they got to a technology before us was the launch of Sputnik, which wasn't really a military achievement anyway (we were all decades behind spy satellites or something like SDI). If they didn't think the Soviets were building something better than what we had (which would have been supported by their intelligence gathering) they never stopped using that argument to support large standing armies and rapid technological arms buildup.
And when the USSR collapsed, we learned that the entire time they had been at least two steps behind us.
My opinion is that our infrastructure is in such disrepair that if hostile powers had the capability of cyperterrorism, they would have to practice extreme restraint not to use it to put the entire nation in a blackout for a month. If that means they're waiting for a combined-arms assault, then offense is not going to help us when our "military botnet" doesn't have any electricity to run on.
My response to what people have said here so far (and I haven't read any of the article yet) is that this is not social theory, it's business theory. It's not supposed to define how you relate to people or how you perceive them. It's intended as an analysis of business dynamics, which is to say it's about how workers in different positions respond to their position and the position of those around them. From what I remember about the earlier article, I would say that even just among the "Losers," their goal is to focus energy into other parts of their lives, parts that have nothing to do with business or their job. When the characters leave the office, this entire analysis falls apart, and this does not invalidate the analysis because it's not intended to reflect each person's entire life.
Slashdot Mirror
While I ostensibly agree that the average user doesn't have to worry about it, and that Microsoft has it covered, I cannot suborn the statement that
Just because we don't need it now doesn't mean we won't need it in the future, and unless you're planning on replacing your system when we do hit network armageddon, DO NOT disable the forward compatibility! If people start disabling the preparations Microsoft has made for us, then we'll never be able to make the switch to IPv6. I'll bet those network admins would much rather have made the switch already than to have had to use the fancy engineering solutions.
It's a bit like switching from gas to electric vehicles. Sure, right now we have fancy hybrids, but they cost more than a gas-only or electric-only vehicle and are much more prone to failure. Would you suggest to the Prius owner that since we still have plenty of gas, there's nothing wrong with disabling the electric motor? (please don't get distracted by the analogy)
As stated above, the md5 doesn't actually hold the information. It's a "one-way" encryption. There's no way to "decrypt" the hash into the information that created it, because the information is lost. The only way to find what generated the hash is to guess and generate. In this case, the earlier AC just guessed it was the mission statement (based on the clue in TFA) and simcop tried it out.
Because it is "one-way" and an arbitrary amount of information can be lost, there is no limit to the size of the hash. It is very possible to take anything from a two-char string, to the entire Harry Potter series, to the entirety of all data produced by mankind, and produce a 128-bit MD5 sum.
Another way of thinking about it is this: Say that 2+2=4. Now, we know the answer is 4. That doesn't tell us that the equation is 2+2. It could have been 3+1, 4*1, sqrt(16), or anything, really. Similarly, just because we know the answer is 42, doesn't mean we know the equation. 42 is the MD5 sum of life, the universe, and everything, and just because it's meaningless now doesn't mean it was meaningless before it was hashed.
I blame news outlets like Fox News, not because of their political bias, but because they shit on everyone else, and in return, other outlets like MSNBC shit back on them. This may have helped their ratings in the short term, but in the long term shit storm that ensued, now nobody trusts any of them.
Furthermore, people are starting to realize that big newsrooms have certain ideas about what stories to show, and that these ideas might not correlate at all to what interests you personally. They're trying to run stories that get good ratings, they're trying to run stories that won't piss anybody off, and they're trying to avoid stories that could upset their sponsors. Online sources don't have any of these hindrances.
That's saying nothing about how wildly inaccurate things on the internet can be, but I think it explains why people would trust the internet more than the traditional outlets at this point.
I actually think this is more plausible than the premise about violent games, particularly shooters. If you just think about it, people are more likely to be driving a car than to be shooting at things. Nearly everyone in America drives. Despite how it seems to most gun owners, though, those that even know how to handle a firearm are in the minority. I find it entirely plausible that playing at reckless driving (say, Burnout) might have a subconscious affect on our habits in real life. Admittedly, I could also find it plausible that shooting at people and practicing head shots might also have a subconscious affect - but only if that person is already handling a gun. It's not going to make you want to pick up a real gun any more than playing Mario Kart will make you want to drive a real car (I picked Mario Kart because it is about as far from reality as most shooting games are from actual shooting for people that aren't soldiers).
I guess I won't be traveling through North Carolina then, because my wife is vegetarian and the smell of some meat is now disturbing to her. I'm told it's pretty universal for people who have not eaten meat in a long time to feel nauseous at the smell of strong meats like bacon or barbecue.
About the only funny thing about this is that he thought it was a good idea to make a video. That's actually funny in the wow-that's-weird sense. But for the exact reason you think everything else was funny, I'm just bored. It's unremarkable. We've all done something like that, and if not in public then in private when we thought it'd be fun to pretend to be the world's greatest swordsman or marksman or whatever. This kind of make-believe is expected of younger children, but somehow I suspect that if you saw a picture of a 7-year-old in a Spiderman costume pretending to throw webs, you'd laugh hysterically and pass it on.
Bottom line, I had never seen the video before, and now I think I at least would have chuckled a bit if I was rick-rolled instead.
http://xkcd.com/285/
I can't imagine why Views is not being integrated into Core. I mean, Core 6 had such necessary things as an OpenID authentication module. I would personally like to see certain things rewritten to use Views instead of the legacy methods already used, such as the front page or Drupal forums.
Drupal? Intuitive? What universe are you living in?
The key difference is that we're on Slashdot, and when I read this headline about "Online Gaming," I thought it said that Congress planned to regulate and tax buying currency for MMORPG's.
Regarding Mussolini...
A good CS class nowadays doesn't ask you to program a simple linked list for an assignment. In my CS class last year, students were walked through programming singly-linked, doubly-linked, and circular lists in class, and were given an assignment to construct a doubly-linked list where .next goes three ahead, and .prev goes two back. It's fairly simple to write a .getNext() function as "return this.next.prev" but things can get hairy (and require more advanced and uncharted solutions) when you start implementing every function found in the Java List interface, which was part of the assignment.
Point is, asking a student to do something that's been done to death is not a good project. I could ask you to write a function which takes an input stream and splits it into an array on certain delimiters, and I can expect a unique solution from everyone. There's bound to be some small difference (maybe a line is out of order or the syntax is slightly different) if there isn't a large difference (using a while {} instead of a for {}, or even a do {} while), and if you were to take existing code and try to change it for those small differences you'd have to have some understanding of how it was put together in order not to break it.
Seems to me like this just does two things:
The first seems like common sense for all software, not just P2P (if it already existed, this provision would be redundant). If the law also clearly defined the difference between an "update" and "new software," it might prevent Microsoft from pushing out WGA as an automatic update. It could also provide legal provision against a specific hacker activity, installing malware, rather than the blanket DMCA provision against unauthorized computer access (which could be playful and/or harmless, whereas silently installing software almost never is).
As for the second one, I once installed Shareaza, and found eventually that it had downloaded a lot of high profile pirated software, presumably to share on the network and increase download speeds for other users. The program itself showed no indication of where these files came from, or how to remove them or stop sharing them. In the process, it implicated my as a copyright infringer without my intent, or even any benefit from the usage of the pirated software. Obviously there are more problems with technically illiterate people, but even a technical person could be bamboozled by the right program into sharing sensitive documents or participating in illegal activities. Again, these are actions most used by nefarious hackers.
So, it's a law that should, in effect, provide real, useful provisions against hackers. It is not banning P2P as a technology, nor is it even targeting the sharing of copyrighted materials AFAIK.
So, if we were to translate what you're saying out of the 90's, you want a pico projector in your iPhone/Droid/Nexus One/Palm Pre?
a product of intelligent design?
sort of like putting a recreation and reproduction facility right next to a waste water treatment facility?
It's not just next to, you're swimming in it. On occasion, the pumps in the water park turn off and start spewing sewage instead. Of course, there is supposed to be some warning beforehand, but that doesn't stop the swimmers (swimmer?) from getting uncomfortable with the idea of swimming there. But hey, certain other people have a roller coaster that sometimes doubles as a food synthesis plant. And don't even get me started on the "playground" built in a cave inside the landfill.
Gillette's advertising campaign will surely suffer if the image of the sexy woman caressing your face after a ridiculously smooth shave is no longer scientifically accurate. That women act that way is now disproven...by science!
Right, because those 8 year old bullies are keeping up on the latest scientific studies. Please.
Rather than that some kids are dicks, I would posit that dickery is the default state of humanity, and that it takes sympathy (someone else is getting hurt like you are) or empathy (someone else is getting hurt and you have nothing to do with it) to get past it.
Let's be clear though: an inability to pick up on certain social cues is not an inferiority. This paragraph from the article, to me, says that it could really happen to any child by circumstance alone:
When children have prolonged struggles with socializing, "a vicious cycle begins," Lavoie said. Shunned children have few opportunities to practice social skills, while popular kids are busy perfecting theirs. However, having just one or two friends can be enough to give a child the social practice he or she needs, he said.
Sound familiar?
Let those who have never bullied be the first to throw stones. I guarantee you that at some point in your childhood, you acted as a bully to someone else whether you meant it (or realized it) or not. The end of the article suggests that all children need to learn how to interpret social cues and other people's feelings (imagine that!) and that "bullying" might be more about perception than about another child intentionally dicking you around.
And as always, the summary (especially because it was pulled straight from the beginning of the article) is more controversial and biased than the research itself. From what I can tell, the research in no way says that only children with learning disabilities get bullied.
Well, just based on the line you quoted, I would say that the software is so that the two hard drives only show up as one hard drive. It says nothing about file systems, or caching, or file/block level, it just says that they made this neat piece of software that will eliminate your confusion as to which of the two drive letters you should use. I'm guessing that they didn't make such a neat little piece of software for other OSes, in which case, if I'm reading it right, it should still work but show two disks.
Mod parent down, please. I'd rather not listen to Maddox (the jock asshole persona) telling me how the Internet is great because it's just like High School Musical (stop caring about cliques and what other people think, and they will magically think better of you and we can all be in this together)
Looks to me like the software to accomplish this is one of those programs the manufacturer bundles on your computer, not an architectural change. If I have to tolerate a 6 month trial of MS Office, Norton Antivirus, several dozen casual games distributed as adware, and whatever other "productivity" software they decide I want, then no thanks. Bundled software should be possible to separate from each other.
Another important question: will it run Linux?
Didn't this just happen last month? And the month before that?
When I first heard about a Javascript vulnerability in Acrobat, I tried to turn it off. It must have worked, because Acrobat complained EVERY F***ING TIME I opened it. Really annoying. I don't know if they've fixed that, but it almost seems to me like Adobe is trying to perpetuate the Javascript bugs not just by having it on by default, but by punishing you for turning it off.
What would you rather they use? Flash? That doesn't work well in Linux either. There is no one-size-fits-all solution. That's why rather than using Flash and trying to support any device with a web browser (mobile browsers and game consoles don't usually support Flash very well either) they make special applications on platforms where it's worth their while, and use Silverlight elsewhere. Silverlight works on PC and Mac, so they've covered 99% of the market already, with a solution that I find preferable to Flash (possibly only because I like the underdog software, and ironically Microsoft is the underdog compared to Adobe with Flash). Maybe HTML 5 will solve all our problems. But then, maybe we'll never actually get to see full HTML 5 implementation (hell, IE only got to CSS 2.0 with the most recent version, 8, and there's no chance of seeing CSS 3.0 features commonly accessible from multiple browsers).
Mod parent up, this looks like a good idea.
To me, this is reminiscent of our arms race with the Soviet Union. Military officials were convinced that the Soviets were always one step ahead of them the entire time, even though the only time they got to a technology before us was the launch of Sputnik, which wasn't really a military achievement anyway (we were all decades behind spy satellites or something like SDI). If they didn't think the Soviets were building something better than what we had (which would have been supported by their intelligence gathering) they never stopped using that argument to support large standing armies and rapid technological arms buildup.
And when the USSR collapsed, we learned that the entire time they had been at least two steps behind us.
My opinion is that our infrastructure is in such disrepair that if hostile powers had the capability of cyperterrorism, they would have to practice extreme restraint not to use it to put the entire nation in a blackout for a month. If that means they're waiting for a combined-arms assault, then offense is not going to help us when our "military botnet" doesn't have any electricity to run on.
The recent scare about cyberterrorism causing blackouts in Brazil, only to find that those blackouts were more likely due to natural causes in a poorly maintained electrical grid, supports my point.
The article seems to be inaccessible, so here's a link to the Google Cache (text-only version)
My response to what people have said here so far (and I haven't read any of the article yet) is that this is not social theory, it's business theory. It's not supposed to define how you relate to people or how you perceive them. It's intended as an analysis of business dynamics, which is to say it's about how workers in different positions respond to their position and the position of those around them. From what I remember about the earlier article, I would say that even just among the "Losers," their goal is to focus energy into other parts of their lives, parts that have nothing to do with business or their job. When the characters leave the office, this entire analysis falls apart, and this does not invalidate the analysis because it's not intended to reflect each person's entire life.