Breeding is not equal to genetical engineering. There is no way to do transgenetic breeding, iow. to introduce genes from one species into another species by breeding. With GE, it's no problem at all; bioluminous tabacco plants (with firefly genes) anyone?
Consider this before you claim GE is harmless or nothing new.
The Europeans do not have a bill of rights. They do not have a constitution granting them freedoms like we have.
No, europeans are all slaves without any rights or liberties. Do you actually believe what you write, or is it just the kneejerk reaction thing?
Lets take the Netherlands for example. The division of powers and the rights of citizens are regulated and declared in the dutch "Grondwet" (fundamental law). It is very much like your Constitution, (except it isn't called that way for historical reasons, eg. occupation by France under Napoleon) and it explicitly declares rights and freedoms. There are differences of course: we don't have a right to bare arms like you, but we have freedom of education, which you don't have (in your Constitution at least).
The European Union is writing a European Constitution at the moment, but some states aren't happy with the drafts because they don't grant as many rights and liberties as current law does in those states.
The highschool killings is not unique to America. In fact if you want to get specific in details then it is Canada that exported that problem.
I didn't know that, I'll do some research on it.
Why do we constantly think it is an "American" problem? Hmmm, media maybe?
You are making my point; why exactly does the whole world know about every other guy gowing on a killing spree in the US?
And do you know who started it? Irish and Italian gangs. LO AND BEHOLD, these are Europeans that exported a problem from the "old country" to the new country.
Those immigrants came from rural communities mostly, but there wasn't much social integration in the cities so the new immigrants started off marking territories in the cities and treating them as separate 'villages'. The problem is they imported behaviour form rural communities into big cities where it isn't appropriate, but they wheren't stopped or helped much. There was never the kind of gangs that resulted from that in European cities until about 1980.
So again while America has issues and problems, the Europeans are not holier than thou. And I know I am a European who lives in Europe.
I'm a european also, I don't know how that supports your argument. Europe has its own specific problems like hooliganism, but statistically there is a whole lot more killing going on in the US. In general US media glorify violence, US entertainment does so in particular. I'm saying this does have its effect on kids who grow up on it, wether in the US or elsewhere.
America and American's have flaws. BUT and this what people have to realize. Many of those flaws are hyped media stuff. Just like maybe what is going on in Bhutan.
You are ignoring the fact that the US has a unique set of social problems, and it is exporting those problems to the rest of the world. Europe is a good example of this because western Europe is the main place the US has been exporting its culture to for several decades.
In Europe we now have: firstly the highschool killings, then there is the 'cripps vs. bloods' style gangsters and gangwars, and young kids arming themselves in general. Examples of sociocultural problems that have originated in the US, but spread to Europe under the influence of US media.
These problems are related to a cultural difference between the US and Europe. It comes down to how willing a society is to use violence and deadly force against its own members; or to be more exact, the social acceptance of violence as a way to solve (personal) problems.
Nobody can argue the fact that US media advertise this kind of violence and its underlying idiology, and the examples above should indicate the advertising actually works.
Apparently it's exceedingly easy to point out that the emperor has no clothes, at least when it comes to religion.
It all depends on the kind of religion. The 3 main religions we know today are theologic in the literal sense, subtily different logical structures built on the belief in the same personal god, but these religions have all 3 formalized away any personal involvement with, and experiencing of, this god.
Personal envolvement with and experience of gods, or better the reaching of godlike states of conciousness, is practiced in various forms of mysticism. As soon as mysticism is no longer the mainstream practice in a religion, that religion becomes 'academic'; the logical structures of dogma and doctrine become more important than personal enlightnment.
The believer that no longer practices mysticism has literally lost thouch with his god, he reduces his god from an experience to an idea. And as always, ideas are open to discussion, whereas experiences are not. To put it differently, these religions have lost their gnosis, their personal and intimate knowledge of god; they have in effect become agnostic religions.
These kind of religions leave the believer but two choices: either they become fundamentalists that follow the dogma and doctrine to the letter, or they are at heart only dabblers and pretenders. The only assurance of the existance of their god is the written word, or none at all.
Of course that makes these religions extremely suseptible to logic attack. Questioning the existance of their god or the corectness of their scriptures is a sure way to piss of the fundamentalists and spread doubt amongst the dabblers.
The Matrix Reloaded is loaded (pun intended) with religious and philosophical allegories, but more importantly it is extremely gnostic, which is a direct threat to any dogma and doctrine of an institutionalized religion. For instance: in good gnostic tradition the Demiurge, Creator or Architect (freemasons call him that way also) is a bad guy that creates evil and flawed worlds. This is a heracy, and I expect it will be seen for what it is in islamic societies. So its not only the referencens to Zion, passover etc. that make the Matrix dangerous to islamic societies.
Ah, no problem,/. has always had its difficulty with the "haha, only serious" attitude of discordianists (like me). I try to put a side-joke in my posts, that are otherwise meant serious.
In this case the 100% decrease would mean there would be no more illegal copies at all, so whatever the price, it would be multiplied by zero when calculating losses. That was meant as a joke of course, but put in any percentage less than 100 and we're talking business.
What happens is that some mods only see the serious side of this kind of posts (or don't get the joke) and moderate it "Insightful" instead of "Interesting". Then other mods see the joke and moderate the posts down as "Troll" instead of "Overrated". Moderator war ensues.
Though piracy rates have decreased, the amount of money lost has risen partly because software prices have gone up, according to the study.
Since the members of the BSA fix the prices for their own products, they can keep up these kind of nonsensical claims indefinitely. Like "The number of pirated copies has decreased 100%, but prices have gone up 200%, so piracy is actually getting worse, therefore we need trusted computing enforced". They can manipulate this any way they want to fit their agenda.
It would have lots of advantages: use the drivers, packages for Linux, the best GUI for users and programs, no X.
Disadvantages: not open source, doesn't really belong in either world.
Main disadvantage: lose X and you lose all X apps. This is the he main reason for GUI developers to stay on X, not because they like it so much. Be showed before that a great GUI isn't enough, you need those apps.
The authors 'final thoughts' suck, and the article as a whole doesn't impress me. The rant is almost trolling:
The author uses anecdotal evidence only in his claims about WinXP stability, which is of course not done in objective journalism. To make things worse, he calls people who don't support his anecdotes liars, because 'he knows better'.
Also, yammering about the names of applications? Give me a break.
Oops, thought you where implying gnosticism is unchristian.
I don't entirely agree with the displacement yet. Gnosticism is in essence a mystical worldview of greek origin (orpheanism) with various sets of beliefs, there is no real dogma in gnosticism and but very little doctrine.
Gnostics have always exchanged ideas and experiences beyond the boundaries of their creed, the worldview was (and is) more important than its interpretation in various deities, archons, angels, etc. If the archons became agents (machines) and the demiurge became the architect in a particular view, this wouldn't set off a dogmatic fight with gnostic christians.
Whether there is a real redeemer in the matrix remains to be seen. Lack of a redeemer would prove a bit of a problem, I suppose:)
I do notice that the apologists for the first film who claimed it was Christian allegory have fallen silent, as the Dickian gnosticism and ironic paranoia of the second film have undone the Christian reading entirely.
The matrix' is perhaps Dickian, but Dick isn't a 'straight' gnostic himself. They both propagate more like a mix of gnostism and hermetism. Using science to 'crack open the world' is much more a hermetic practice than it is typical for gnostics. The matrix has even more obvious hereticism in it than most of Dicks novels ('as above, so below' for instance: die in the matrix and you die in the real world).
Then there is the fact that gnosticism isn't unchristian in itself; there have been gnostic christians throughout the history of the religion, lots of them in the early period (before orthodox christians wiped them out) some of them in the medieval period (like the french cathars, also wiped out by fellow christians), some in the enlightment (like William Blake) and there is a growing number of gnostic christians today. Of course most of those christian gnostics form the past where burned at the stake for heracy, but so where lots of protestants.
The 50 grams rule is easy to avoid, there is no rule against somebody delivering you 50 grams several times a day.
All in all the rules are (deliberately) so unclear that its impossible to run a business if you follow them all. An example: a coffeeshop owner is allowed to sell softdrugs in small quantities but he isn't allowed to buy his stock, he could be arrested for buying those 50 grams every time.
The rules where set up this way to make it easy for law enforcement to close down a coffeeshop if things get out of hand. Selling large quantities (like the 200 grams in another post) or harddrugs, selling to minors, etc. is a sure way to get your coffeeshop closed and yourself in court sooner or later. Selling to foreigners is tolerated because there is no law that mandates dutch citizens to carry id yet, so a dutch citizen can never prove he isn't a foreigner (this is going to change due to the global terrorism paranoia).
Mushrooms are a difficult issue in dutch law, it depends on the way the mushrooms are processed wether they are considered hard- or softdrugs. Most unprocessed (fresh) mushrooms are not on the list, but all processed (dried or otherwise) mushrooms are taboo.
Selling softdrugs (eg. cannabis products like marihuana and hash) is not legal in the Netherlands, its 'legally tolerated' if you follow lots of rules. You must apply for a permit to run a 'coffeeshop' and you can only sell softdrugs in such an official coffeshop. In there, you can't sell to minors, you can only sell up to 5 grams to dutch citizens of legal age, you can't sell alcoholic beverages, and you may only hold a surplus of 50 grams of drugs on site.
On the other hand, prostitution is legal in the Netherlands...
The reasoning behind this is that a state should take control over what it can't root out.
Same thoughts over here. The photochemical reaction doesn't even have to be triggered by some external lightsource, it could be triggered by the DVD laser itself. The discs would be in a readable state when you buy them (in a lightsealed package) and by first playing them you would start the selfdestruct process. Exposing them to bright light would also start or speed up this process.
This is technically an eclipse, but Mercury is so much smaller than the sun (and so close to it) that it only makes for a tiny black spot on surface of the sun. The spot Mercury projects is even smaller than an average sunspot, so the reduction of energy hitting your eye is negliable.
Seems to me like the people at securityfocus missed something: what would happen if someone where to put up a page that changes IEs default startup url to about:<input type about> or something like that?
I know mr. Gerrie Mansur from irc and weblogs (and dutch tv). I can't think of a decent description of mr. Mansur without resorting to flame.
Before he started his HIT2000 company, mr. Mansur AKA "Gerrie" AKA "Dokter" used to be on irc even more then he is now, and was not shy of using the good old packets. Whenever Gerrie was on irc, he was asking people "in the know" for the latest exploits and flooding tools. As Gerrie's "skills" increased, he got more and more arrogant.
Mr. Mansur wanted to make his hobby his work, so for years he was talking on irc about how he was going to start this security company, and so he did. In the beginning his company doesn't get noticed much organising the hacker meeting HIT2000, so mr. Mansur starts pulling stunts to get his well deserved attention. He claims to know who did the hack on the dutch ISP Sonera back in april (warning: dutch), in which more then 100.000 passwords were stolen; but not how it was done. Then he goes on claiming he is on such good terms with the hacker that his company (yes, HIT2000) could employ the hacker, as to restore the damages done to Sonera...
Mr. Mansur has often been dared by the dutch hacker community to show the source of even a tiny exploit he himself produced. Mr. Mansur is the laughing stock of the dutch hacker/security community. In his last tv appearance (in an amusement show), he pulls out his laptop (running windows), does some obscure things and says "look, I could now hack Nasdaq" (amongst other websites). Then he goes off to his irc session, while still being interviewed. Here is al link to a dutch secrity website with an article called "Gerrie's Goochelshow" (warning: dutch), which roughly translates to "Gerrie's Magic Show". In there, mr. Mansur gets flamed to the bone, and his thoughful responces make things worse.
(On a sidenote: most of the people who work at HIT2000 actually know what they are talking about.) -><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
Hehe, I was expecting that answer. Of course you are right that looking at just one member state isn't like looking at the whole community. But the EC as a whole is not a stabile entity in economical terms, it is still expanding. Many former eastblock states are going to join it in the coming years. This makes doing correct economical measurements on the EC as a whole very difficult, not at all like the US (not suggesting it is easy to do on the US).
The point in my previous post is that there are other successful economical models in this world besides the US one. Which model is chosen depends on the consensus of the people who are going to live in (under?) this model, not on the holy laws of money. People quickly tend to precieve their view of the world as the only correct one, labeling all other views inferior. The real world however, doesn't seem to care about how it is precieved, and leaves room for various interpretations of its fenomena.
Oh, before I forget, thank you for having this nice discussion. I expected to get severely flamed for having different opinion here on/. Maybe posting late to a discussion helps?:-) -><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
It still lacks some functionality though, like being able to unpackage from other places than the CD-rom, but it's improving.
If you doubleclick an.rpm in mc (gnome midnight commander, the file browser), gnorpm will prompt you for the root passwd and install/upgrade the.rpm from any location (if you have read access). -><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
It would be really hard to code such a virus/worm. You would need some kind of virtual machine (within the v/w itself) to run the "genome" on. Then you'ld probably have to emulate that VM within the "genome" code, or build a more expressive VM in "genome" code. (Building a 2nd VM that is able to evolve might very clever or eternaly stupid, I'm not sure). Next you'ld "genome" code the v/w itself to run on that 2nd VM.
It may sound simple, but designing this would be very difficult. The main problem I see is what functionality to put in the VMs and what in the v/w code. Put to much in the VMs and it won't evolve much, or in repeating patterns. Put to much in the v/w code and it will produce mainly freaks.
All in all a gigantic effort, I don't think we will see anything like this soon. -><- Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
What is there to keep the virus/worm from evolving in such a way that it would no longer lay low (read: become more damaging)? Even a "harmless" virus/worm causes damage by using up recources like diskspace, memory, cpu time and bandwidth.
If it started out as a stealth-type, using minimal resources, chances are it would get nasty rather late in its evolution. It would evolve rather slow until there where enough infected "victims" to speed up the breeding/mating process. Once this happened, our little critters would evolve to take advantage of their "power in numbers" in no time. -><- Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
Slashdot Mirror
Breeding is not equal to genetical engineering. There is no way to do transgenetic breeding, iow. to introduce genes from one species into another species by breeding. With GE, it's no problem at all; bioluminous tabacco plants (with firefly genes) anyone?
Consider this before you claim GE is harmless or nothing new.
No, europeans are all slaves without any rights or liberties. Do you actually believe what you write, or is it just the kneejerk reaction thing?
Lets take the Netherlands for example. The division of powers and the rights of citizens are regulated and declared in the dutch "Grondwet" (fundamental law). It is very much like your Constitution, (except it isn't called that way for historical reasons, eg. occupation by France under Napoleon) and it explicitly declares rights and freedoms. There are differences of course: we don't have a right to bare arms like you, but we have freedom of education, which you don't have (in your Constitution at least).
The European Union is writing a European Constitution at the moment, but some states aren't happy with the drafts because they don't grant as many rights and liberties as current law does in those states.
I didn't know that, I'll do some research on it.
Why do we constantly think it is an "American" problem? Hmmm, media maybe?
You are making my point; why exactly does the whole world know about every other guy gowing on a killing spree in the US?
And do you know who started it? Irish and Italian gangs. LO AND BEHOLD, these are Europeans that exported a problem from the "old country" to the new country.
Those immigrants came from rural communities mostly, but there wasn't much social integration in the cities so the new immigrants started off marking territories in the cities and treating them as separate 'villages'. The problem is they imported behaviour form rural communities into big cities where it isn't appropriate, but they wheren't stopped or helped much. There was never the kind of gangs that resulted from that in European cities until about 1980.
So again while America has issues and problems, the Europeans are not holier than thou. And I know I am a European who lives in Europe.
I'm a european also, I don't know how that supports your argument. Europe has its own specific problems like hooliganism, but statistically there is a whole lot more killing going on in the US. In general US media glorify violence, US entertainment does so in particular. I'm saying this does have its effect on kids who grow up on it, wether in the US or elsewhere.
You are ignoring the fact that the US has a unique set of social problems, and it is exporting those problems to the rest of the world. Europe is a good example of this because western Europe is the main place the US has been exporting its culture to for several decades.
In Europe we now have: firstly the highschool killings, then there is the 'cripps vs. bloods' style gangsters and gangwars, and young kids arming themselves in general. Examples of sociocultural problems that have originated in the US, but spread to Europe under the influence of US media.
These problems are related to a cultural difference between the US and Europe. It comes down to how willing a society is to use violence and deadly force against its own members; or to be more exact, the social acceptance of violence as a way to solve (personal) problems.
Nobody can argue the fact that US media advertise this kind of violence and its underlying idiology, and the examples above should indicate the advertising actually works.
It all depends on the kind of religion. The 3 main religions we know today are theologic in the literal sense, subtily different logical structures built on the belief in the same personal god, but these religions have all 3 formalized away any personal involvement with, and experiencing of, this god.
Personal envolvement with and experience of gods, or better the reaching of godlike states of conciousness, is practiced in various forms of mysticism. As soon as mysticism is no longer the mainstream practice in a religion, that religion becomes 'academic'; the logical structures of dogma and doctrine become more important than personal enlightnment.
The believer that no longer practices mysticism has literally lost thouch with his god, he reduces his god from an experience to an idea. And as always, ideas are open to discussion, whereas experiences are not. To put it differently, these religions have lost their gnosis, their personal and intimate knowledge of god; they have in effect become agnostic religions.
These kind of religions leave the believer but two choices: either they become fundamentalists that follow the dogma and doctrine to the letter, or they are at heart only dabblers and pretenders. The only assurance of the existance of their god is the written word, or none at all.
Of course that makes these religions extremely suseptible to logic attack. Questioning the existance of their god or the corectness of their scriptures is a sure way to piss of the fundamentalists and spread doubt amongst the dabblers.
The Matrix Reloaded is loaded (pun intended) with religious and philosophical allegories, but more importantly it is extremely gnostic, which is a direct threat to any dogma and doctrine of an institutionalized religion. For instance: in good gnostic tradition the Demiurge, Creator or Architect (freemasons call him that way also) is a bad guy that creates evil and flawed worlds. This is a heracy, and I expect it will be seen for what it is in islamic societies. So its not only the referencens to Zion, passover etc. that make the Matrix dangerous to islamic societies.
In this case the 100% decrease would mean there would be no more illegal copies at all, so whatever the price, it would be multiplied by zero when calculating losses. That was meant as a joke of course, but put in any percentage less than 100 and we're talking business.
What happens is that some mods only see the serious side of this kind of posts (or don't get the joke) and moderate it "Insightful" instead of "Interesting". Then other mods see the joke and moderate the posts down as "Troll" instead of "Overrated". Moderator war ensues.
Since the members of the BSA fix the prices for their own products, they can keep up these kind of nonsensical claims indefinitely. Like "The number of pirated copies has decreased 100%, but prices have gone up 200%, so piracy is actually getting worse, therefore we need trusted computing enforced". They can manipulate this any way they want to fit their agenda.
Main disadvantage: lose X and you lose all X apps. This is the he main reason for GUI developers to stay on X, not because they like it so much. Be showed before that a great GUI isn't enough, you need those apps.
The author uses anecdotal evidence only in his claims about WinXP stability, which is of course not done in objective journalism. To make things worse, he calls people who don't support his anecdotes liars, because 'he knows better'.
Also, yammering about the names of applications? Give me a break.
Knowing the french they would never, never take a german car for a standard! It would definitely have to be a Citroën 2CV!
I don't entirely agree with the displacement yet. Gnosticism is in essence a mystical worldview of greek origin (orpheanism) with various sets of beliefs, there is no real dogma in gnosticism and but very little doctrine.
Gnostics have always exchanged ideas and experiences beyond the boundaries of their creed, the worldview was (and is) more important than its interpretation in various deities, archons, angels, etc. If the archons became agents (machines) and the demiurge became the architect in a particular view, this wouldn't set off a dogmatic fight with gnostic christians.
Whether there is a real redeemer in the matrix remains to be seen. Lack of a redeemer would prove a bit of a problem, I suppose :)
*sigh* misspelled hermeticism twice.
The matrix' is perhaps Dickian, but Dick isn't a 'straight' gnostic himself. They both propagate more like a mix of gnostism and hermetism. Using science to 'crack open the world' is much more a hermetic practice than it is typical for gnostics. The matrix has even more obvious hereticism in it than most of Dicks novels ('as above, so below' for instance: die in the matrix and you die in the real world).
Then there is the fact that gnosticism isn't unchristian in itself; there have been gnostic christians throughout the history of the religion, lots of them in the early period (before orthodox christians wiped them out) some of them in the medieval period (like the french cathars, also wiped out by fellow christians), some in the enlightment (like William Blake) and there is a growing number of gnostic christians today. Of course most of those christian gnostics form the past where burned at the stake for heracy, but so where lots of protestants.
All in all the rules are (deliberately) so unclear that its impossible to run a business if you follow them all. An example: a coffeeshop owner is allowed to sell softdrugs in small quantities but he isn't allowed to buy his stock, he could be arrested for buying those 50 grams every time.
The rules where set up this way to make it easy for law enforcement to close down a coffeeshop if things get out of hand. Selling large quantities (like the 200 grams in another post) or harddrugs, selling to minors, etc. is a sure way to get your coffeeshop closed and yourself in court sooner or later. Selling to foreigners is tolerated because there is no law that mandates dutch citizens to carry id yet, so a dutch citizen can never prove he isn't a foreigner (this is going to change due to the global terrorism paranoia).
Mushrooms are a difficult issue in dutch law, it depends on the way the mushrooms are processed wether they are considered hard- or softdrugs. Most unprocessed (fresh) mushrooms are not on the list, but all processed (dried or otherwise) mushrooms are taboo.
Selling softdrugs (eg. cannabis products like marihuana and hash) is not legal in the Netherlands, its 'legally tolerated' if you follow lots of rules. You must apply for a permit to run a 'coffeeshop' and you can only sell softdrugs in such an official coffeshop. In there, you can't sell to minors, you can only sell up to 5 grams to dutch citizens of legal age, you can't sell alcoholic beverages, and you may only hold a surplus of 50 grams of drugs on site.
On the other hand, prostitution is legal in the Netherlands...
The reasoning behind this is that a state should take control over what it can't root out.
Same thoughts over here. The photochemical reaction doesn't even have to be triggered by some external lightsource, it could be triggered by the DVD laser itself. The discs would be in a readable state when you buy them (in a lightsealed package) and by first playing them you would start the selfdestruct process. Exposing them to bright light would also start or speed up this process.
Because the infector would still be in the Kazaa share folders, causing other lusers to download it and infect themselves.
This is technically an eclipse, but Mercury is so much smaller than the sun (and so close to it) that it only makes for a tiny black spot on surface of the sun. The spot Mercury projects is even smaller than an average sunspot, so the reduction of energy hitting your eye is negliable.
Seems to me like the people at securityfocus missed something: what would happen if someone where to put up a page that changes IEs default startup url to about:<input type about> or something like that?
Before he started his HIT2000 company, mr. Mansur AKA "Gerrie" AKA "Dokter" used to be on irc even more then he is now, and was not shy of using the good old packets. Whenever Gerrie was on irc, he was asking people "in the know" for the latest exploits and flooding tools. As Gerrie's "skills" increased, he got more and more arrogant.
Mr. Mansur wanted to make his hobby his work, so for years he was talking on irc about how he was going to start this security company, and so he did. In the beginning his company doesn't get noticed much organising the hacker meeting HIT2000, so mr. Mansur starts pulling stunts to get his well deserved attention. He claims to know who did the hack on the dutch ISP Sonera back in april (warning: dutch), in which more then 100.000 passwords were stolen; but not how it was done. Then he goes on claiming he is on such good terms with the hacker that his company (yes, HIT2000) could employ the hacker, as to restore the damages done to Sonera...
Mr. Mansur has often been dared by the dutch hacker community to show the source of even a tiny exploit he himself produced. Mr. Mansur is the laughing stock of the dutch hacker/security community. In his last tv appearance (in an amusement show), he pulls out his laptop (running windows), does some obscure things and says "look, I could now hack Nasdaq" (amongst other websites). Then he goes off to his irc session, while still being interviewed. Here is al link to a dutch secrity website with an article called "Gerrie's Goochelshow" (warning: dutch), which roughly translates to "Gerrie's Magic Show". In there, mr. Mansur gets flamed to the bone, and his thoughful responces make things worse.
(On a sidenote: most of the people who work at HIT2000 actually know what they are talking about.)
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
The point in my previous post is that there are other successful economical models in this world besides the US one. Which model is chosen depends on the consensus of the people who are going to live in (under?) this model, not on the holy laws of money. People quickly tend to precieve their view of the world as the only correct one, labeling all other views inferior. The real world however, doesn't seem to care about how it is precieved, and leaves room for various interpretations of its fenomena.
Oh, before I forget, thank you for having this nice discussion. I expected to get severely flamed for having different opinion here on /. Maybe posting late to a discussion helps? :-)
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
It may sound simple, but designing this would be very difficult. The main problem I see is what functionality to put in the VMs and what in the v/w code. Put to much in the VMs and it won't evolve much, or in repeating patterns. Put to much in the v/w code and it will produce mainly freaks.
All in all a gigantic effort, I don't think we will see anything like this soon.
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC
What is there to keep the virus/worm from evolving in such a way that it would no longer lay low (read: become more damaging)? Even a "harmless" virus/worm causes damage by using up recources like diskspace, memory, cpu time and bandwidth.
If it started out as a stealth-type, using minimal resources, chances are it would get nasty rather late in its evolution. It would evolve rather slow until there where enough infected "victims" to speed up the breeding/mating process. Once this happened, our little critters would evolve to take advantage of their "power in numbers" in no time.
-><-
Grand Reverence Zan Zu, AB, DD, KSC