I completely agree. It was not my intention in my post to imply that machines certainly don't experience things, but I felt that scattering qualifiers throughout it would make my explanation even more opaque.
The thought that computation can cause sensation is fascinating but puzzling to me. The whole difficulty here is that of trying to draw a coherent, causal line from atoms to sensations. If it's just a matter of computation then we're talking about a phenomenon that can arise regardless of how the underlying components are constructed. It's like finding a way to put two carbons and an iron together and coming up with a molecule that acted just like water.
I'm not saying that the computation theory is wrong. Hell, it's probably the best one we've got right now. It's just that it's so alien to the rest of reality.
It amuses me to think that computation can produce experience though. The idea of sensations flitting through my computer's "consciousness" is entertaining.
I'm not saying the experience of blueness is not directly, causally related to neural activity. I'm not saying that my past encounters with the color do not affect my reactions and responses to it. I'm also not saying that the experience is irrational or irreproducible.
What I'm trying to say is that when you experience things, something happens besides the resultant external behaviors and besides the internal chemical activity. Something occurs "in between" the input of, say, a nail through your foot and the output of your yelp. You feel pain. You are not merely an automaton programmed to yelp when certain sensors are activated in your foot. You experience certain sensations.
So yes, the newborn babe experiences blue. If my blue-loving mother died, the color could provoke a chemical reaction in my brain which we'd read on an MRI as meaning "He's sad." The point is that the infant's sight and my emotional reactions to blue both result in a mental component in addition to the fizzing chemicals. The child does not just process blue: it sees it. I don't just exhibit depressive behaviors: I feel sad. I'm not saying by any means that these two components are unrelated, but the latter does not (yet) explain origins of the former.
Yes and no. We cannot measure consciousness and sentience in others as anything other than physical effects, so establishing the consciousness of a machine would in fact be a metaphysical project. However, this is not to say that the question is meaningless, although it would likely be irrelevant if our goal is simply to create an artificial being which exhibits sentient-qualities.
[Warning: I've had difficulties explaining this concept to people offline, so I apologize if I am unclear below.]
The difference between your mind and a machine (possibly your brain) which produces responses that make us think it has a mind is that of sensation or experience. By this I do not mean that it can process visual data or that it can act based on past data, but rather that what's going on in your mind has a peculiarly mental aspect.
Consider what happens when you look at a blue wall and when a sophisticated, camera-equipped computer looks at a blue wall. Both (we will assume) can look at it and report that they are looking at a blue wall, but most of us would want to say there is something different going on in each case. The computer receives input through the camera which results in some transistors flipping between states and ultimately gives an output "The wall is blue."
Something similar happens with your brain. Light goes into your eyeball, some neurons fire, and you announce "The wall is blue." But something else also happens: you experience "blueness." You have a sensation, one which cannot be reduced to words (the problem of trying to explain color to a blind man).
It also cannot yet be easily reduced to physical processes. Particular neuron firings might always be connected with your experience, but we do not yet have a mechanism to explain it. We have no "sension particles" or whatever that explain how a bunch of atoms bouncing off each other somehow result in your seeing blue. This is not to say that they are not intimately related, but merely that it is an incomplete description of what is going on.
In summary, there's a difference between processing blue and seeing blue. It may be irrelevant to simulating people, but the fact that I see blue is pretty damn significant to me and serves as the identifying characteristics between me and what I perceive to be unsensing machines.
On the topic of finding the area of its surface, I would guess that it comes down to what you mean by "surface." Personally, I'd argue that surface is always two-dimensional. Perimeter would be the 1D equivalent, and volume the 3D equivalent. After that we get to make things up.
I think it comes out to 36L^2, where L is the length of any given edge of the hypercube. That's assuming I counted the number of sides correctly, of course. So I guess a hypercube has six times the area of a regular cube (as well as eight times the volume, I think).
We definitely need to work on that extradimensional housing (though the prototypes should probably not be built in California).
This may not have the wow-factor of some of the fancier systems, but in terms of UI creativity I think this scores major points. Simplicity and power: the hallmark of Linux in general.
802.11b and 802.11g. Refers to wireless networking standards. B is much more common, but only runs at 11Mb/s max. G is less common but much faster, at 54Mb/s.
I think the radiation definition was a bad choice on the part of Erich. Blue light may be radiation with a wavelength of approximately 475 nm, but that's not blue. After all, I have a bandanna here that I would call blue, but it doesn't have any wavelength worth speaking of.
A better definition would be that the perception of blue is (or is caused by) a particular set of neurons firing in the visual cortex. This definition holds whether you're asleep or awake.
The difference is that if you have a Mac, you're probably using a Mac OS, hence the command key (which is what that actualy is) is the primary key for shortcuts. I don't alt-tab; I command-tab. I don't hit control-C to copy; I hit command-C.
Somehow it just seems far less offensive to have your hardware reflect the software when they're made by the same company. It's when your keyboard has keys on it designed for OSs you never want to deal with that people get ticked.
It's Walky - http://www.itswalky.com/ FOG Club Adventure - http://fogclub.keenspace.com/ Sinfest - http://www.sinfest.net/ Ozy and Millie - http://www.ozyandmillie.org/ Chopping Block - http://www.choppingblock.org/ Diesel Sweeties - http://www.dieselsweeties.com/ Help Desk - http://www.ubersoft.net/ Nukees - http://www.nukees.com/ Mac Hall - http://www.machall.com/
One thing to remember about webcomics however is that it's often helpful to read them from the beginning. Since they aren't constrained by the paper they can afford to not do one-shots every day. Luckily most of them haven't been around for more than a year or three.
No offense, but if you think PA is the best web comic out there you need to look around a bit. The art is good, but the jokes are usually pretty flat. Most of the humor comes from the rants.
"Real Life", "Mac Hall", "It's Walky". ..they all top PA in jokes, and "It's Walky" and "Mac Hall" -- especially "Mac Hall" -- surpass it in art. (Though "Mac Hall" only updates twice a week.)
...tip sets, like those found in William Gibson novels. As long as we're switching to a different way of talking to our boxes, why not make it something that's a lot more portable and flexible? Yeah, the new interface would be a bit of bitch to learn (now just what gesture do I do for 'q'?), but I think that you could do a lot with a system like this.
For example, the keyboard and the mouse could become the same unit. This would probably be the easiest part of the new interface to learn; after all, how hard is it to point? Even if it was more complicated than that I would be happy to figure it out if it would keep me from having to do that annoying keyboard-mouse-keyboard switch that some programs require.
As for the learning problem in general, we already have keyboarding classes. They'd just have to start teaching the new tech (tip sets) over the old (keyboards). The new generation would laugh at the old until we and our ridiculous habits died out and then keyboarding would join the ranks of punch cards and paper terminals.
Why do I think that tip-sets would be better than your trusty keyboard? Well, what I'm thinking of is gaming. You can go from one game to another and (usually) not have to think about what button does what. Somehow the concept of "My guy needs to jump now." goes straight from your mind to your hands, without passing through any state of "So what button is jump?". I would think that a well-engineered gesture-system would be the same thing. The letters that you wish to enter would go straight from mind to hands. Not that the keyboard doesn't do the same thing, but if your hands are shifted over a bit you'll get all screwed up, whereas the tip-sets are wherever your hands are. You could "type" with your hands lying by your sides or behind your head or whatever. You could also control the mouse pointer from this position, though who knows: maybe tip-sets would bring about an interface that didn't involve a pointer. (Nah.) Also, it would bring us one step closer to a VR environment, something that I believe has a certain amount of potential; especially given the graphics power of today's computers.
Okay, I'm beginning to ramble but the bottom line is that tip-sets are cool and probably more efficient and ergonomic than keyboards and mice.
---------- OpenNIC. Because it's just better, that's why.
Under the site's "Top 10 things to do with a 50lb butter PDA":
4. Healthy Midwestern snack that melts in your mouth not in your Palm
Putting aside the obvious issue of how 50lbs of butter can possibly be healthy, who on earth eats straight butter for a snack?
(Well, I suppose that somebody does, but they probably gave it up after their quadruple-bypass.)
----------
Digital pants...ACTIVATE!
Re:For every action, there is an equal and opposit
on
Quicktime In Linux
·
· Score: 1
I fully agree with you about installing apps. It's no problem for most/. readers to go through the process of "download tar.gz,./configure [options], fail, go get some libaries, repeat" or some other such system, but we're a relative minority. Unfortunately, we're the people in charge of making Linux easy to use; something that is never going to happen. I don't have any problem installing an rpm package so why should I spend my free time writing an easy-to-use installer for Linux?
As for the "su root" issue I think you could theoretically install any app to your home folder. It'd take a bit of modification of the config files (mostly adding paths that refer to your home folder and such), but once it was done you'd never have to think about it again. For the most part, though, root and its abilities are a necessary evil in a multi-user system. If you're going to have a lot of (potentially hostile) users on one system you have to have something to distinguish between people who should be able to do anything and people who shouldn't.
By the way, there was once an OS that was perfect for you. It was called BeOS and, if you had a supported video card, it would've kicked any other OS's ass in multimedia and had none of this silly "root" stuff to deal with. Program installation? Just drag it onto a special "Drag your app onto me!" icon and it would install. Don't remember whether it supported colorful pointers or not but it wouldn't surprise me.
(I'd like to make a few notes, though: I don't know what's wrong with your machine but I play Q3 quite comfortably under Linux and I know that at least Enlightenment supports colorful cursors quite well, it's just rarely used.)
No kidding. Yeah, every time I feel like doing something that could be potentially illegal I always use my own Hotmail account. And of course I've put my name, home address, and phone number into this account's information. Not to mention the fact that I'll do it from my home or office computer with a nice and easily traceable IP back to me.
Other tidbits I liked:
In order for intruders to access a Hotmail user's emails, they would need to know the victim's user name and then guess the number that identifies a specific email message.
Lessee now, who would most people be targeting: random users or specific family, friends, or enemies who they already have an address for? Not to mention the thousands, if not millions, of Hotmail addresses that could be reaped with a simple search.
"The average person in the street doesn't need to worry, as they would have to be specifically targeted," said Graham Cluley, an Internet security expert with antivirus firm Sophos.
Hey, Average Joe! Got any enemies who might be interested in reading your mail?
Root Core has posted on its website a scanning program that automatically guesses about one message number every second. But security experts said the program's impact is limited because, in order to work, an intruder would need to have a fast Internet connection and know how often the targeted victim checks their email account.
I wonder how many script kiddies are out there sitting next to their cable or DSL modems sniggering into their milk right now?
It is Eastern. From what I understand, Rob is the only one who hasn't moved yet, and he's up in Holland, MI. If you listen to Geeks in Space you'll hear them talk about where they are and where they went to college a few times. Also, they did a special about the filtering issue in the libraries of Holland.
(/me feels special, as he lives in the state that begot/.)
(/me also insists that he just has an excellent memory and that he is not stalking Rob Malda.)
You must be quite a bit better at the suspension-of-disbelief trick than I am. I saw FF this afternoon and while I enjoyed the plot, the technology (I want a car that runs on bio-ethereal energy and a computer with a holographic interface!), and the special effects the characters were all too stiff for me to connect with. I often found myself thinking "Huh, that guy just died and I really don't care." (And in this movie you're given a *lot* of opportunities to think that.)
Definitely a good movie, but the characters needed to be a bit more expressive. The only characters who seemed to have something resembling a soul were Dr. Sid and Aki.
MSDN® Subscriptions is pleased to announce that the MSDN Subscriber Download Web site at http://msdn.microsoft.com:666/subscriptions/resour ces/papers/help/assport/isnt/this/a/really/conveni ent/snappy/and/easy-to-memorize/url?subdwnld.asp will soon be downgrading its logon authentication technology to Microsoft® Assport.
Microsoft Assport provides personal authentication services that make it easier for us to track your every move, and makes it faster and more secure for you to sell your pathetic little soul into our custody.
Beginning in late June, the MSDN Subscriber Download Web site will prompt you to sign up for your personal Assport with a friendly little 110v electric shock through your keyboard and associate your current subscriber record, social security number, credit card number, favorite web sites, and embarassing personal habits to this Assport. After signing up, access to your personal information will be easier, faster, and more secure for our flying monkeys.
For complete details, and to sign up now for your free identification barcode/tattoo, please visit http://www.assport.com.
The way I read it, if the information you want isn't on the network a computer with more freedom will go and get it for you.
I'm curious as to how the communication works on a lower level. For example, if I'm behind a firewall that blocks almost all traffic that isn't going to a certain address (Bess), will this thing do me any good?
As another 15-year-old, high school sophomore, Slashdot-reading geek, I have to say that I'm not sure I like this idea. I've read in various places that geeks are just as diverse as any other category of people. You couldn't just pull one out at random, interview him or her, and say "Look! This is what a geek is!"
But that's what you're doing right here! You're saying "Look! This is what the average teenage geek of today is!" Clinton will answer the questions, and you'll all settle back, content in knowing what we high school geeks are like. But chances are it'll be a flawed picture. Of course some things will be correct, but not all. He'll look at things differently, do things differently, have a different situation that any other younger geek out there.
Now I would like to say that I don't blame Clinton for going ahead with the interview and not thinking about this. I sure wouldn't have thought about it. "Me?!? Interviewed on Slashdot!?!" I'd feel honored.
The point, however, is that you can't get an image of any group of people by interviewing just one of them, especially if that group is a sub-group of the wild and wooly world of Slashdot readers. I ask that as you read Clinton's responses, just take them as an interview with yet another unique member of are community, but NOT as a barometer of the lives of teenage geeks.
----------
Ray's Rule of Precision:
Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe.
Seems to me that we probably won't end up with any OS that currently exists. Linux is great for servers, since it provides great power to people who know what they are doing. Mac OS is nice, but it's old and kind of out of shape. While it may just be me, it's always seemed a little clunky but smooth. Sort of like a luxury car that only goes where it wants to go.
BeOS is killing itself off. Be's moves towards being an "appliance OS" will either give it an incredible nitch advantage or be the end of it's life. Who knows, maybe someday my toaster will be running BeOS 7.
I'm betting that the my mom's home computer will be running something completely different five or ten years from now. All the current OSs came out of nowhere. A scrappy geek from Washington, a lunatic mastermind from California, a Finnish genius at Helsinki. (Dare I pray an ultra-intelligent master programmer from Michigan?:-)
My point is simple: The next great OS will probably come from yet another unknown who knows what the people want. It will probably be a blend of the best properties of all the current systems: a stable, easy-to-use, self-configuring, and widely supported operating system.
And may the Justice Department have mercy on its soul.
Moon - Last night at 12:01 EST, the United States military added a new zit to the crater pocked face of the moon. When questioned about the unexpected strength of the explosion, they could only say "Behold the power of cheese!"
Military tests of weapons grade Cheeze Whiz are rumored to be in progress.
It's people who have more time on their hands then the actual creators do who make literature great.
Here we have dozens of people claiming to have the answer, and yet buried among these is an actual quote from DNA stating that he just decided on 42 for no reason. None of the reasons that our fellow colleagues are presenting have any relation to the real reason, but they refuse to accept that maybe they are thinking about it more then the original thinker thought.
Thanks people. Without people like you, Star Wars would have about 1/42 of the plot depth that it had when George Lucas originally wrote it.
Slashdot Mirror
I completely agree. It was not my intention in my post to imply that machines certainly don't experience things, but I felt that scattering qualifiers throughout it would make my explanation even more opaque.
The thought that computation can cause sensation is fascinating but puzzling to me. The whole difficulty here is that of trying to draw a coherent, causal line from atoms to sensations. If it's just a matter of computation then we're talking about a phenomenon that can arise regardless of how the underlying components are constructed. It's like finding a way to put two carbons and an iron together and coming up with a molecule that acted just like water.
I'm not saying that the computation theory is wrong. Hell, it's probably the best one we've got right now. It's just that it's so alien to the rest of reality.
It amuses me to think that computation can produce experience though. The idea of sensations flitting through my computer's "consciousness" is entertaining.
I'm not saying the experience of blueness is not directly, causally related to neural activity. I'm not saying that my past encounters with the color do not affect my reactions and responses to it. I'm also not saying that the experience is irrational or irreproducible.
What I'm trying to say is that when you experience things, something happens besides the resultant external behaviors and besides the internal chemical activity. Something occurs "in between" the input of, say, a nail through your foot and the output of your yelp. You feel pain. You are not merely an automaton programmed to yelp when certain sensors are activated in your foot. You experience certain sensations.
So yes, the newborn babe experiences blue. If my blue-loving mother died, the color could provoke a chemical reaction in my brain which we'd read on an MRI as meaning "He's sad." The point is that the infant's sight and my emotional reactions to blue both result in a mental component in addition to the fizzing chemicals. The child does not just process blue: it sees it. I don't just exhibit depressive behaviors: I feel sad. I'm not saying by any means that these two components are unrelated, but the latter does not (yet) explain origins of the former.
Yes and no. We cannot measure consciousness and sentience in others as anything other than physical effects, so establishing the consciousness of a machine would in fact be a metaphysical project. However, this is not to say that the question is meaningless, although it would likely be irrelevant if our goal is simply to create an artificial being which exhibits sentient-qualities.
[Warning: I've had difficulties explaining this concept to people offline, so I apologize if I am unclear below.]
The difference between your mind and a machine (possibly your brain) which produces responses that make us think it has a mind is that of sensation or experience. By this I do not mean that it can process visual data or that it can act based on past data, but rather that what's going on in your mind has a peculiarly mental aspect.
Consider what happens when you look at a blue wall and when a sophisticated, camera-equipped computer looks at a blue wall. Both (we will assume) can look at it and report that they are looking at a blue wall, but most of us would want to say there is something different going on in each case. The computer receives input through the camera which results in some transistors flipping between states and ultimately gives an output "The wall is blue."
Something similar happens with your brain. Light goes into your eyeball, some neurons fire, and you announce "The wall is blue." But something else also happens: you experience "blueness." You have a sensation, one which cannot be reduced to words (the problem of trying to explain color to a blind man).
It also cannot yet be easily reduced to physical processes. Particular neuron firings might always be connected with your experience, but we do not yet have a mechanism to explain it. We have no "sension particles" or whatever that explain how a bunch of atoms bouncing off each other somehow result in your seeing blue. This is not to say that they are not intimately related, but merely that it is an incomplete description of what is going on.
In summary, there's a difference between processing blue and seeing blue. It may be irrelevant to simulating people, but the fact that I see blue is pretty damn significant to me and serves as the identifying characteristics between me and what I perceive to be unsensing machines.
On the topic of finding the area of its surface, I would guess that it comes down to what you mean by "surface." Personally, I'd argue that surface is always two-dimensional. Perimeter would be the 1D equivalent, and volume the 3D equivalent. After that we get to make things up.
I think it comes out to 36L^2, where L is the length of any given edge of the hypercube. That's assuming I counted the number of sides correctly, of course. So I guess a hypercube has six times the area of a regular cube (as well as eight times the volume, I think).
We definitely need to work on that extradimensional housing (though the prototypes should probably not be built in California).
For those who don't know, the above excerpt comes from the comedy genius of Three Dead Trolls in a Baggie, specifically the track "Every OS Sucks".
This may not have the wow-factor of some of the fancier systems, but in terms of UI creativity I think this scores major points. Simplicity and power: the hallmark of Linux in general.
The original design
My take on it
802.11b and 802.11g. Refers to wireless networking standards. B is much more common, but only runs at 11Mb/s max. G is less common but much faster, at 54Mb/s.
I think the radiation definition was a bad choice on the part of Erich. Blue light may be radiation with a wavelength of approximately 475 nm, but that's not blue. After all, I have a bandanna here that I would call blue, but it doesn't have any wavelength worth speaking of.
A better definition would be that the perception of blue is (or is caused by) a particular set of neurons firing in the visual cortex. This definition holds whether you're asleep or awake.
I thought everyone knew that?
The difference is that if you have a Mac, you're probably using a Mac OS, hence the command key (which is what that actualy is) is the primary key for shortcuts. I don't alt-tab; I command-tab. I don't hit control-C to copy; I hit command-C.
Somehow it just seems far less offensive to have your hardware reflect the software when they're made by the same company. It's when your keyboard has keys on it designed for OSs you never want to deal with that people get ticked.
It's Walky - http://www.itswalky.com/
FOG Club Adventure - http://fogclub.keenspace.com/
Sinfest - http://www.sinfest.net/
Ozy and Millie - http://www.ozyandmillie.org/
Chopping Block - http://www.choppingblock.org/
Diesel Sweeties - http://www.dieselsweeties.com/
Help Desk - http://www.ubersoft.net/
Nukees - http://www.nukees.com/
Mac Hall - http://www.machall.com/
One thing to remember about webcomics however is that it's often helpful to read them from the beginning. Since they aren't constrained by the paper they can afford to not do one-shots every day. Luckily most of them haven't been around for more than a year or three.
No offense, but if you think PA is the best web comic out there you need to look around a bit. The art is good, but the jokes are usually pretty flat. Most of the humor comes from the rants. "Real Life", "Mac Hall", "It's Walky". . .they all top PA in jokes, and "It's Walky" and "Mac Hall" -- especially "Mac Hall" -- surpass it in art. (Though "Mac Hall" only updates twice a week.)
...tip sets, like those found in William Gibson novels. As long as we're switching to a different way of talking to our boxes, why not make it something that's a lot more portable and flexible? Yeah, the new interface would be a bit of bitch to learn (now just what gesture do I do for 'q'?), but I think that you could do a lot with a system like this.
For example, the keyboard and the mouse could become the same unit. This would probably be the easiest part of the new interface to learn; after all, how hard is it to point? Even if it was more complicated than that I would be happy to figure it out if it would keep me from having to do that annoying keyboard-mouse-keyboard switch that some programs require.
As for the learning problem in general, we already have keyboarding classes. They'd just have to start teaching the new tech (tip sets) over the old (keyboards). The new generation would laugh at the old until we and our ridiculous habits died out and then keyboarding would join the ranks of punch cards and paper terminals.
Why do I think that tip-sets would be better than your trusty keyboard? Well, what I'm thinking of is gaming. You can go from one game to another and (usually) not have to think about what button does what. Somehow the concept of "My guy needs to jump now." goes straight from your mind to your hands, without passing through any state of "So what button is jump?". I would think that a well-engineered gesture-system would be the same thing. The letters that you wish to enter would go straight from mind to hands. Not that the keyboard doesn't do the same thing, but if your hands are shifted over a bit you'll get all screwed up, whereas the tip-sets are wherever your hands are. You could "type" with your hands lying by your sides or behind your head or whatever. You could also control the mouse pointer from this position, though who knows: maybe tip-sets would bring about an interface that didn't involve a pointer. (Nah.) Also, it would bring us one step closer to a VR environment, something that I believe has a certain amount of potential; especially given the graphics power of today's computers.
Okay, I'm beginning to ramble but the bottom line is that tip-sets are cool and probably more efficient and ergonomic than keyboards and mice.
----------
OpenNIC. Because it's just better, that's why.
Under the site's "Top 10 things to do with a 50lb butter PDA":
4. Healthy Midwestern snack that melts in your mouth not in your Palm
Putting aside the obvious issue of how 50lbs of butter can possibly be healthy, who on earth eats straight butter for a snack?
(Well, I suppose that somebody does, but they probably gave it up after their quadruple-bypass.)
----------
Digital pants...ACTIVATE!
I fully agree with you about installing apps. It's no problem for most /. readers to go through the process of "download tar.gz, ./configure [options], fail, go get some libaries, repeat" or some other such system, but we're a relative minority. Unfortunately, we're the people in charge of making Linux easy to use; something that is never going to happen. I don't have any problem installing an rpm package so why should I spend my free time writing an easy-to-use installer for Linux?
As for the "su root" issue I think you could theoretically install any app to your home folder. It'd take a bit of modification of the config files (mostly adding paths that refer to your home folder and such), but once it was done you'd never have to think about it again. For the most part, though, root and its abilities are a necessary evil in a multi-user system. If you're going to have a lot of (potentially hostile) users on one system you have to have something to distinguish between people who should be able to do anything and people who shouldn't.
By the way, there was once an OS that was perfect for you. It was called BeOS and, if you had a supported video card, it would've kicked any other OS's ass in multimedia and had none of this silly "root" stuff to deal with. Program installation? Just drag it onto a special "Drag your app onto me!" icon and it would install. Don't remember whether it supported colorful pointers or not but it wouldn't surprise me.
(I'd like to make a few notes, though: I don't know what's wrong with your machine but I play Q3 quite comfortably under Linux and I know that at least Enlightenment supports colorful cursors quite well, it's just rarely used.)
No kidding. Yeah, every time I feel like doing something that could be potentially illegal I always use my own Hotmail account. And of course I've put my name, home address, and phone number into this account's information. Not to mention the fact that I'll do it from my home or office computer with a nice and easily traceable IP back to me.
Other tidbits I liked:
In order for intruders to access a Hotmail user's emails, they would need to know the victim's user name and then guess the number that identifies a specific email message.
Lessee now, who would most people be targeting: random users or specific family, friends, or enemies who they already have an address for? Not to mention the thousands, if not millions, of Hotmail addresses that could be reaped with a simple search.
"The average person in the street doesn't need to worry, as they would have to be specifically targeted," said Graham Cluley, an Internet security expert with antivirus firm Sophos.
Hey, Average Joe! Got any enemies who might be interested in reading your mail?
Root Core has posted on its website a scanning program that automatically guesses about one message number every second. But security experts said the program's impact is limited because, in order to work, an intruder would need to have a fast Internet connection and know how often the targeted victim checks their email account.
I wonder how many script kiddies are out there sitting next to their cable or DSL modems sniggering into their milk right now?
----------
Digital Pants...ACTIVATE!
It is Eastern. From what I understand, Rob is the only one who hasn't moved yet, and he's up in Holland, MI. If you listen to Geeks in Space you'll hear them talk about where they are and where they went to college a few times. Also, they did a special about the filtering issue in the libraries of Holland.
(/me feels special, as he lives in the state that begot /.)
(/me also insists that he just has an excellent memory and that he is not stalking Rob Malda.)
You must be quite a bit better at the suspension-of-disbelief trick than I am. I saw FF this afternoon and while I enjoyed the plot, the technology (I want a car that runs on bio-ethereal energy and a computer with a holographic interface!), and the special effects the characters were all too stiff for me to connect with. I often found myself thinking "Huh, that guy just died and I really don't care." (And in this movie you're given a *lot* of opportunities to think that.)
Definitely a good movie, but the characters needed to be a bit more expressive. The only characters who seemed to have something resembling a soul were Dr. Sid and Aki.
Dear future mindslave,
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The way I read it, if the information you want isn't on the network a computer with more freedom will go and get it for you.
I'm curious as to how the communication works on a lower level. For example, if I'm behind a firewall that blocks almost all traffic that isn't going to a certain address (Bess), will this thing do me any good?
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"Great minds run in great circles." -fortune
As another 15-year-old, high school sophomore, Slashdot-reading geek, I have to say that I'm not sure I like this idea. I've read in various places that geeks are just as diverse as any other category of people. You couldn't just pull one out at random, interview him or her, and say "Look! This is what a geek is!"
But that's what you're doing right here! You're saying "Look! This is what the average teenage geek of today is!" Clinton will answer the questions, and you'll all settle back, content in knowing what we high school geeks are like. But chances are it'll be a flawed picture. Of course some things will be correct, but not all. He'll look at things differently, do things differently, have a different situation that any other younger geek out there.
Now I would like to say that I don't blame Clinton for going ahead with the interview and not thinking about this. I sure wouldn't have thought about it. "Me?!? Interviewed on Slashdot!?!" I'd feel honored.
The point, however, is that you can't get an image of any group of people by interviewing just one of them, especially if that group is a sub-group of the wild and wooly world of Slashdot readers. I ask that as you read Clinton's responses, just take them as an interview with yet another unique member of are community, but NOT as a barometer of the lives of teenage geeks.
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Ray's Rule of Precision:
Measure with a micrometer. Mark with chalk. Cut with an axe.
Seems to me that we probably won't end up with any OS that currently exists. Linux is great for servers, since it provides great power to people who know what they are doing. Mac OS is nice, but it's old and kind of out of shape. While it may just be me, it's always seemed a little clunky but smooth. Sort of like a luxury car that only goes where it wants to go.
BeOS is killing itself off. Be's moves towards being an "appliance OS" will either give it an incredible nitch advantage or be the end of it's life. Who knows, maybe someday my toaster will be running BeOS 7.
I'm betting that the my mom's home computer will be running something completely different five or ten years from now. All the current OSs came out of nowhere. A scrappy geek from Washington, a lunatic mastermind from California, a Finnish genius at Helsinki. (Dare I pray an ultra-intelligent master programmer from Michigan? :-)
My point is simple: The next great OS will probably come from yet another unknown who knows what the people want. It will probably be a blend of the best properties of all the current systems: a stable, easy-to-use, self-configuring, and widely supported operating system.
And may the Justice Department have mercy on its soul.
Now wouldn't that have made a great headline!
U.S. Peforms Lunar Nuke Test!
Moon - Last night at 12:01 EST, the United States military added a new zit to the crater pocked face of the moon. When questioned about the unexpected strength of the explosion, they could only say "Behold the power of cheese!"
Military tests of weapons grade Cheeze Whiz are rumored to be in progress.
It's people who have more time on their hands then the actual creators do who make literature great.
Here we have dozens of people claiming to have the answer, and yet buried among these is an actual quote from DNA stating that he just decided on 42 for no reason. None of the reasons that our fellow colleagues are presenting have any relation to the real reason, but they refuse to accept that maybe they are thinking about it more then the original thinker thought.
Thanks people. Without people like you, Star Wars would have about 1/42 of the plot depth that it had when George Lucas originally wrote it.