(At grave risk to my karma, as I half-expect this post will earn a 0-troll,) once again we hear of a case where adequate driver training/testing could have saved a life. If you come to an intersection, and you're not sure what the hell color the traffic signal is... what are you supposed to do? It's in the driver's manual, by the way. You STOP. Treat no indication as to right of way as a yield or stop sign.
As I'm not one to bitch and offer no solution, here's one... suppose we start by placing conical lenses over these things. Snow may cover the top, but I doubt it would cover bottom and sides.
On the other hand, perhaps it is time to ditch the RED/YELLOW/GREEN system altogether, and come up with something more effective. So many drivers are talking/texting on cellphones while they're driving now, (even in many places where it is illegal to do so,) maybe the system should simply detect from the signals from the phones what their numbers are, and send them a message.
"... yeah, I'll come to Cindy's birthday pa... wait, I've got a message coming in... OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT - A RED LIGHT!"
Best wishes for your birthday, Linus! (I am confident he won't ever read this, but I wish it for him anyway.) My computer is one of those running the descendent of what he wrote on that computer. It's almost as if it was his birthday, and he ended up sharing his present with everyone on the planet... kids could stand to learn from this example of selflessness.
The story asked a rhetorical "how different would the world look today..." and the answer is: Gates and Balmer are working on a time-machine, and plan to take one of those hermetically-sealed Macintosh machines back with them, along with the tools required to open it, and give that to Linus for his birthday, and hope he ends up as a hardware hacker instead! ~Hal
I haven't bothered to see it, in as much as I've already seen Dances with Wolves, and have never been a one to go "oh golly gosh, wooja lookit that!" at special effects. I miss the days when movies had to have a decent plot, acting, etc., and couldn't simply borrow an already done story, jazz it up with nifty COMPUTER GENERATED graphics, and rake in more money than I could even imagine in a lifetime, let alone see in person.
now where is the rest of the movie? I made a whole bag of popcorn, and... WTF, just one scene?
Seriously though, this is just about the nerdiest/geekiest thing I've seen since the Matrix itself, and I mean that as high praise.
I was using "Linus" in a generic sense meaning "whomsoever is the appropriate authorities" in the Linux community for that particular issue. (I don't know who it is, and don't especially care... I am a Linux user who DOES NOT BELIEVE I should have to be an expert on how to use a computer, to be able to use a computer and reap the benefit of being able to enjoy not using garbage from Misro$oft, nor Straightjacketware from CrApple. I should no more be obliged to be an expert than a person should know how to field-strip an engine, and assemble an automatic transmission, to drive a car. Therefore, any time I hear of some asshole saying, "I know how to cripple Linux systems and I'm sick of all the smug bastards out there saying their systems are secure...", I get the same gut response I get whenever I hear some schmuck say "I know how to steal a car in 30 seconds..." That gut reaction is to break every one of his little goddamned fingers, and then ask if he can still steal a car in less than 30 seconds. I don't feel I should have to live in a fortress to enjoy the sense I don't live in a goddamned jungle, thank you very much, physically, nor electronically. Understand? Don't take me so literally. I know Linus Torvalds doesn't run every little aspect of the community that sprung up around his little creation, if he did, his name would be Steve, not Linus. ~Hal
SERIOUSLY!!! Putting it in the wild will HURT the Linux community, in many, many ways. Sending it to people who are close to the design of the OS, who may be able to do something about it will HELP the community. As for your ethics question, let me answer it with a question: When you leave your house for work, school, the grocer, etc., do you wear full body armor, and carry a gun? How would you feel if someone got tired of his country-men, (including you,) feeling so complacent and secure that you will walk blithely down the street without full body armor, a gas-mask, guns and ammo, that he decides to "show you all the error of your ways" by randomly sniping/gassing/tossing-grenades-at you, your family, and your friends? Wouldn't like it much, would you?
What you are contemplating doing is roughly, the digital-electronic equivalent of supplying criminals with maps of wealthy communities, marked with what areas are and are not guarded, where valuables are kept, etc. Don't think that simply because you didn't write a truly malicious payload, that by letting others use a tool you can and should reasonably know will be used for evil purposes you don't share in the culpability, ethically if not legally, even if you don't pull the trigger yourself. ~Hal
Every time I see or hear of a reference to "The Prince", or a leader is referred to as Machiavellian, I smile at the irony. Machiavelli was being SARCASTIC when he wrote that. He was kidding! Machiavelli was ahead of his time in holding the ideals of personal freedom and responsibility, equality, and all that jazz which are diametric opposites of the views espoused in "The Prince". He worked hard as a politician to build Florence into a shining beacon of how a society should be run, and a family called the de' Medici came along, seized power, (using techniques from the, at the time, as-yet-unwritten book, "The Prince") and turned the shining beacon into a cesspool of corruption, with rampant nepotism, greed, etc.
Stripped of his position, and having been barred from holding any political office by the de' Medici, after a lifetime of public service, embittered, Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" basically saying: "if you want to grab, hold, and expand your political power," (adding under his breath, "like those de' Medici bastards,") he continued, "this is what you do..." (He could not insult them openly, he had already been imprisoned and tortured by them once, and I guess he wasn't "feeling strong" anymore.)
It was not meant literally! I guess the De Medici had the last laugh though, whether by their actions or not, Machiavelli's name is associated NOT with his own good and noble life's work, but with the behaviours and beliefs of those he most loathed and despised. For a better idea of what this great Renaissance figure really thought, try instead his "Discorsi sulla prima deca di Tito Livio", or "Discourses on the first ten books of Livy", (Titus Livius, Roman historian)
Could it be all this time we thought Micro$oft was incapable of shipping a bug-free, secure operating system, it wasn't ineptitude, or planned obsolescence as a tool to make folks upgrade like Skinner's pigeons every time a new version came out, but a device for fighting piracy?
.
Bill: We make it so complex and insecure that we'll constantly have to patch, leaving anyone who doesn't have a legitimate copy in the cold!
Steve: Great idea, boss!)
It would explain a lot which otherwise makes almost no sense. ~Hal
My father always said, (and long before this study too,) that it is either an absence of y-chromosomes, or an overabundance of x-chromosomes, or possibly a combination of the two.
...which will be used principly for... typing e-mails and surfing the internet, just like 90+% of other desktop computers... oh yeah, and downloading lots and lots of porn. Way to go, guys! Keep the hits coming!
And here I thought we would have to come up with a completely new, and totally different way to insist the world would end after it completely fails to do so by January 1st, 2013. I guess this means we will be able to keep right on pretending the Mayans knew something about the future, despite the shear silliness of such a notion. If they knew so much, how come they couldn't manage to prevent their own destruction? More importantly, even if this is true, has it occurred to anyone that the reason their calendar only runs until... whenever... is that they never thought the code would still be around so far on down the line? (Like our Y2K thing) Just some food for thought. ~Hal
...from the all-time kings of defective merchandise. Not surprising.
The cure? Refuse to use.
Don't make purchases of any type which feed the MPAA/RIAA vampires. At the same time, don't steal them either. There's lots of good free stuff to be downloaded and redistributed LEGALLY under Creative Commons. It won't matter what kind of copy-protection scheme they come up with next, if you don't buy their stuff, don't borrow it, don't listen to it, etc., and enough people do this, they will eventually shrivel up, and blow away.
Too many people are whining about abusive policies, and laws passed by politicians owned by BigMoney, while at the same time supporting and feeding BigMoney (in this case, MPAA/RIAA and their corporate friends) by paying for their products.
I am proud to say I have recently eliminated all proprietary BS from my life: I wiped out my old music and movie collection, and replaced them from, for instance, Jamendo.com in ogg format, and installed Fedora 11, overwriting Visuck from Micro$haft, (which came with my computer) and am happily free of proprietary interference in my e-life. IT CAN BE DONE!
Let's all do it together!
Slashdot Mirror
(By the way, the next line should read "You're more efficient honey, but people can't tell whose way has the right! Loooooxanne!")
As I'm not one to bitch and offer no solution, here's one... suppose we start by placing conical lenses over these things. Snow may cover the top, but I doubt it would cover bottom and sides.
On the other hand, perhaps it is time to ditch the RED/YELLOW/GREEN system altogether, and come up with something more effective. So many drivers are talking/texting on cellphones while they're driving now, (even in many places where it is illegal to do so,) maybe the system should simply detect from the signals from the phones what their numbers are, and send them a message.
"... yeah, I'll come to Cindy's birthday pa... wait, I've got a message coming in... OH SHIT OH SHIT OH SHIT - A RED LIGHT!"
The story asked a rhetorical "how different would the world look today..." and the answer is: Gates and Balmer are working on a time-machine, and plan to take one of those hermetically-sealed Macintosh machines back with them, along with the tools required to open it, and give that to Linus for his birthday, and hope he ends up as a hardware hacker instead! ~Hal
Yawn. That's right, I typed it, "Yawn."
~Hal
... I am going to grant your greatest wish. I'm going to show you a web without sin.
now where is the rest of the movie? I made a whole bag of popcorn, and... WTF, just one scene? Seriously though, this is just about the nerdiest/geekiest thing I've seen since the Matrix itself, and I mean that as high praise.
Original poster and taggers missed the obligatory Disaster Area reference.
A Danish Climate Change Summit Prostitute? Hey everyone! We now have something better than "Free as in Beer!" MMmmmm... tastier, too!
I was using "Linus" in a generic sense meaning "whomsoever is the appropriate authorities" in the Linux community for that particular issue. (I don't know who it is, and don't especially care... I am a Linux user who DOES NOT BELIEVE I should have to be an expert on how to use a computer, to be able to use a computer and reap the benefit of being able to enjoy not using garbage from Misro$oft, nor Straightjacketware from CrApple. I should no more be obliged to be an expert than a person should know how to field-strip an engine, and assemble an automatic transmission, to drive a car. Therefore, any time I hear of some asshole saying, "I know how to cripple Linux systems and I'm sick of all the smug bastards out there saying their systems are secure...", I get the same gut response I get whenever I hear some schmuck say "I know how to steal a car in 30 seconds..." That gut reaction is to break every one of his little goddamned fingers, and then ask if he can still steal a car in less than 30 seconds. I don't feel I should have to live in a fortress to enjoy the sense I don't live in a goddamned jungle, thank you very much, physically, nor electronically. Understand? Don't take me so literally. I know Linus Torvalds doesn't run every little aspect of the community that sprung up around his little creation, if he did, his name would be Steve, not Linus. ~Hal
What you are contemplating doing is roughly, the digital-electronic equivalent of supplying criminals with maps of wealthy communities, marked with what areas are and are not guarded, where valuables are kept, etc. Don't think that simply because you didn't write a truly malicious payload, that by letting others use a tool you can and should reasonably know will be used for evil purposes you don't share in the culpability, ethically if not legally, even if you don't pull the trigger yourself. ~Hal
The cake is a lie! What better way to boost sales than by suggesting you shouldn't or oughtn't or flat-out can't have/read this book?
Stripped of his position, and having been barred from holding any political office by the de' Medici, after a lifetime of public service, embittered, Machiavelli wrote "The Prince" basically saying: "if you want to grab, hold, and expand your political power," (adding under his breath, "like those de' Medici bastards,") he continued, "this is what you do..." (He could not insult them openly, he had already been imprisoned and tortured by them once, and I guess he wasn't "feeling strong" anymore.)
It was not meant literally! I guess the De Medici had the last laugh though, whether by their actions or not, Machiavelli's name is associated NOT with his own good and noble life's work, but with the behaviours and beliefs of those he most loathed and despised. For a better idea of what this great Renaissance figure really thought, try instead his "Discorsi sulla prima deca di Tito Livio", or "Discourses on the first ten books of Livy", (Titus Livius, Roman historian)
~ Hallux
.
Bill: We make it so complex and insecure that we'll constantly have to patch, leaving anyone who doesn't have a legitimate copy in the cold!
Steve: Great idea, boss!)
It would explain a lot which otherwise makes almost no sense. ~Hal
My father always said, (and long before this study too,) that it is either an absence of y-chromosomes, or an overabundance of x-chromosomes, or possibly a combination of the two.
...which will be used principly for... typing e-mails and surfing the internet, just like 90+% of other desktop computers... oh yeah, and downloading lots and lots of porn. Way to go, guys! Keep the hits coming!
And here I thought we would have to come up with a completely new, and totally different way to insist the world would end after it completely fails to do so by January 1st, 2013. I guess this means we will be able to keep right on pretending the Mayans knew something about the future, despite the shear silliness of such a notion. If they knew so much, how come they couldn't manage to prevent their own destruction? More importantly, even if this is true, has it occurred to anyone that the reason their calendar only runs until... whenever... is that they never thought the code would still be around so far on down the line? (Like our Y2K thing) Just some food for thought. ~Hal
...from the all-time kings of defective merchandise. Not surprising. The cure? Refuse to use. Don't make purchases of any type which feed the MPAA/RIAA vampires. At the same time, don't steal them either. There's lots of good free stuff to be downloaded and redistributed LEGALLY under Creative Commons. It won't matter what kind of copy-protection scheme they come up with next, if you don't buy their stuff, don't borrow it, don't listen to it, etc., and enough people do this, they will eventually shrivel up, and blow away. Too many people are whining about abusive policies, and laws passed by politicians owned by BigMoney, while at the same time supporting and feeding BigMoney (in this case, MPAA/RIAA and their corporate friends) by paying for their products. I am proud to say I have recently eliminated all proprietary BS from my life: I wiped out my old music and movie collection, and replaced them from, for instance, Jamendo.com in ogg format, and installed Fedora 11, overwriting Visuck from Micro$haft, (which came with my computer) and am happily free of proprietary interference in my e-life. IT CAN BE DONE! Let's all do it together!