Word order isn't really that big a deal - observe this sentence in SOV order: word order a big deal really isn't - this sentence in SOV order observe. See? That was more or less understandable.
The difficult thing when learning a language is vocabulary, and Chinese has almost no shared vocabulary with any European language. Even Japanese has more shared loanwords (pan, hankachi, koppu on one side, karaoke, otaku and tycoon on the other).
The thing with English is that you probably know some of the words already, regardless of what language you learned first. "Human" is related to "humaine", "umano", and "humano" - connecting it to four other languages rather simply. Add the synonym "man" and you can add "mens", "mensch", "manusia", "menneske", and "manut", for another five languages. It may be difficult to speak English properly, but it's not difficult to speak it poorly.
Chinese, in contrast, is unrelated to any European language, and there's been very limited exchange of vocabulary - there's very few Chinese words in English, and very few English words in Chinese. Learning the vocabulary, you essentially start from scratch.
As for the glyphs, English has the advantage of using the Latin alphabet, which is used in not only every west-European language, and is somewhat-related to the Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets, but is widely used in languages as unrelated as Japanese, Kurdish, Vietnamese and Navajo. So, even if you can't understand what the word means, you can make a reasonable (and, usually, comprehensible) attempt at pronouncing it.
I totally agree that English is probably a bad choice for a lingua franca, purely because of the idiosyncrasies. However, it's a better choice than Chinese. What is really needed is some sort of linguistic reform for English - standardizing pronunciation rules, reducing irregularities, and maybe normalizing spelling rules.
China has one simple problem: It's significantly different from most other languages. It's related to Japanese, Korean and a few other east-asian languages, but it's extremely difficult to learn unless you speak one of those. English is an Indo-European language - it's related to everything from German and French to Arabic and Hindi. Thus, there's more people, by far, who can easily (for varying values of easy) learn English than there are who can easily learn Chinese. Thus, English is much better suited to being a "lingua franca" than Chinese. Sure, French or Spanish or Esperanto could do that job just as easily (being related to just as many languages), but Chinese-language dominance of the Internet is about as likely as Swahili.
This isn't even getting into the problem of "Chinese pages rarely link to non-Chinese pages". You could make the argument that the Chinese 'net is separate from the international 'net, because there's so few links between them. Really, the only pages in Chinese are intended for Chinese people - you don't see the Associated Press publishing in Chinese, the way you see Xinhua publishing in English. I would be hard-pressed to find a site about, say, Russian literature, written in Chinese - but I could easily do so in English.
Yes, many groups outside the US send spam. However, stopping American-based spammers would be beneficial, even though it is not a complete stop to spam.
For the record, there actually is/was a lawsuit against bin Laden, filed by (IIRC) the pilot's and aircrew union. I have no idea what the status of it is.
This man is suing the people being advertised. He isn't suing the intermediaries - there's no effective way to figure out who they are without police resources. So he is, in fact, going after the funding companies.
Well, Mr. Balsam is making a living off of these lawsuits. So he's apparently living your "pipe dream".
Small Claims court is a much more painless and quicker process than a full court. Quite often, cases take only a few hours, although these might take an afternoon. And, since he's representing himself, he doesn't have any legal fees.
In other words, the only way we will ever stop spam is to address the economic issues behind spam.
That's what Mr. Balsam is doing - addressing the economic issues. The problem with spam is that, essentially, it has zero financial risk. You aren't guaranteed to make any money, but the cost is as close to zero as you can get, hence you have very little chance of losing money. Thus, as long as a single moron is stupid enough to buy your product, you end up with a profit.
By adding a financial burden, ie. litigation, to spam, it becomes possible to end up with a net loss by spamming. One man alone probably isn't enough of a disincentive, but if more people started doing this, it could become a sufficient deterrent to make spam vastly more uncommon.
Honestly, this is the best method I've seen for "adding a financial cost to spam". Earlier proposals, generally variants of a per-email fee, had two problems: they invariably charged innocent people, and they gave the money to corporations or the government, not the people. At least lawsuits like this give the money to the party that was actually damaged by the spam. It's not a perfect method, but it seems to be the best so far.
Let me make the argument another way. Say someone is going on Fox News, and is saying that "according to known internet celebrity mobby_6kl, Fox is the most reliable and fair news source.". Obviously, they are attempting to make money via the use of your image. However, you never said such things, and never endorsed them. You can't sue for libel or slander, as your image is not provably being damaged by their actions. Such a thing is obviously wrong and unethical. Thus, there is a law intended to prevent such things.
Surprisingly, your deduction of where the Navy expects the next war to be isn't too far from reality. As the Artic cap melts, significant oil reserves are being uncovered, and both the US and Russia are making claims to it. There's already been some minor show-of-force incidents, but a full naval war is not completely impossible.
Why do we even need nickels? The cheapest things you can find anymore are a quarter, and even a small can of soda is 75c. Ditch pennies, ditch nickels, maybe even ditch dimes, and we'd have a much better currency.
So far, everyone seems to be concluding that this woman is some sort of nut and/or lawsuit-happy money-grabber. Honestly, I agree with that given the evidence shown so far, but everyone deserves some level of defense.
This woman is making at least one claim that can be tested - that she lost her job due to this. It would be rather simple to find out if this was the case - ask her ex-boss if he fired her over them, find out if she was shunned by coworkers over the images, etc. Most cases of people suing over trivialities involve less testable claims. As such, either she's not good at trolling the legal system, or she's got more of a case than we've assumed. After all, Japan is a much different culture than America or Europe - something like this could actually be a big deal over there. I honestly don't know. So, I'm going to wait for more info before making any sort of final judgement.
Simple. "God works in subtle, mysterious ways. Who is to say that He did not create the universe in such a way that the precise results He wished to occur would occur, like an intricate, universe-wide set of dominoes? Could not evolution be the means by which He created man?"
If they continue to argue, hit them with a crowbar.
The dynamo has been running for about 3.5 billion years. Thus, from simple math and statistics (and the fact that we are not currently observing the beginning or end of the dynamo), I can state with 99.999% accuracy that the field will remain for at least thirty-five thousand years (and no more than 35 trillion years). Thus, we don't need to worry about that right now.
Don't view the plugin as an enhancement for Firefox. View it as an extension for Windows 7 - it's increasing compatibility with a certain feature. And then, it all makes sense - it's Microsoft's business to improve Windows, and now Firefox is getting a free boost on that platform.
Actually, people misusing exponential is one of my pet peeves. And yes, that was pretty much exactly what I meant - if there's only one program to exploit, the difficulty is k, if there's two it becomes k^2, and so on.
Yes. It's had quite a few exploits found and fixed. There's definitely more to be found. I would not trust it to contain a known-malicious program. However, it's an effective barrier when combined with a decently-secure browser like Firefox or Chrome - not only does the "hacker" have to find an exploit in the browser, but in the sandbox as well, making it exponentially more difficult.
After all, I already run Chrome itself in a sandbox. Firefox, too. Why?
Pretty much every exploit now begins by "the user visits a website". After that, pretty much any technology can be the hole it exploits - Java, Flash, PDF viewing, even JPEG rendering has been exploited. There's an abundance of targets. The modern browser is just too big a platform to secure completely. So, I don't trust any browser more modern than Lynx.
Except Al-Qaeda actually has a strong leadership structure. It has ranks, it has chain-of-command, it has membership lists. It may be structured in a way that one department can't identify another, but it's quite possible to identify someone as an al-Qaeda member. Actually, al-Qaeda means "the organization" in Arabic, or so I've been told.
MySQL is still just as good as it was under Sun. If you don't like whatever changes Oracle makes, fork it. Make your own. Call it LibreSQL if you wish. Until I hear of Oracle actually doing something bad to MySQL, I'm going to keep using it.
Seriously. What were they even testing? I was under the impression that social engineering was a security flaw in the user, not in the application. Reading the report, it sounds like they were just testing the browsers' databases of known malware/phishing sites. Which, really, has little to do with the security of the browser itself.
I used that OpenBSD box as a learning system - I think I fiddled with every config file in the system. Hell, I recompiled the kernel (advised against in the OpenBSD community), stripping out device drivers I'd never need, to shave the RAM usage down and shorten the boot time.
Yeah, I probably could do an upgrade, but it's never really been worth the effort. What, exactly, is there in 4.8 that there isn't in 3.6? Probably a decent amount of stuff, but nothing that made me say "I have to install that".
Well, at the very least, it means we have ready access to a machine to test the exploits on, if anyone figures out how it was supposed to work in the first place.
To be honest, it's more of because "there's really nothing on here besides some projects that I'm planning on open-sourcing eventually, a few games, and a mildly-disturbing amount of pornography". I really don't care if anybody hacks it.
Besides, have you TRIED to upgrade OpenBSD? Not easy.
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Word order isn't really that big a deal - observe this sentence in SOV order: word order a big deal really isn't - this sentence in SOV order observe. See? That was more or less understandable.
The difficult thing when learning a language is vocabulary, and Chinese has almost no shared vocabulary with any European language. Even Japanese has more shared loanwords (pan, hankachi, koppu on one side, karaoke, otaku and tycoon on the other).
The thing with English is that you probably know some of the words already, regardless of what language you learned first. "Human" is related to "humaine", "umano", and "humano" - connecting it to four other languages rather simply. Add the synonym "man" and you can add "mens", "mensch", "manusia", "menneske", and "manut", for another five languages. It may be difficult to speak English properly, but it's not difficult to speak it poorly.
Chinese, in contrast, is unrelated to any European language, and there's been very limited exchange of vocabulary - there's very few Chinese words in English, and very few English words in Chinese. Learning the vocabulary, you essentially start from scratch.
As for the glyphs, English has the advantage of using the Latin alphabet, which is used in not only every west-European language, and is somewhat-related to the Greek, Cyrillic and Arabic alphabets, but is widely used in languages as unrelated as Japanese, Kurdish, Vietnamese and Navajo. So, even if you can't understand what the word means, you can make a reasonable (and, usually, comprehensible) attempt at pronouncing it.
I totally agree that English is probably a bad choice for a lingua franca, purely because of the idiosyncrasies. However, it's a better choice than Chinese. What is really needed is some sort of linguistic reform for English - standardizing pronunciation rules, reducing irregularities, and maybe normalizing spelling rules.
China has one simple problem: It's significantly different from most other languages. It's related to Japanese, Korean and a few other east-asian languages, but it's extremely difficult to learn unless you speak one of those. English is an Indo-European language - it's related to everything from German and French to Arabic and Hindi. Thus, there's more people, by far, who can easily (for varying values of easy) learn English than there are who can easily learn Chinese. Thus, English is much better suited to being a "lingua franca" than Chinese. Sure, French or Spanish or Esperanto could do that job just as easily (being related to just as many languages), but Chinese-language dominance of the Internet is about as likely as Swahili.
This isn't even getting into the problem of "Chinese pages rarely link to non-Chinese pages". You could make the argument that the Chinese 'net is separate from the international 'net, because there's so few links between them. Really, the only pages in Chinese are intended for Chinese people - you don't see the Associated Press publishing in Chinese, the way you see Xinhua publishing in English. I would be hard-pressed to find a site about, say, Russian literature, written in Chinese - but I could easily do so in English.
In other words, the only way we will ever stop spam is to address the economic issues behind spam.
That's what Mr. Balsam is doing - addressing the economic issues. The problem with spam is that, essentially, it has zero financial risk. You aren't guaranteed to make any money, but the cost is as close to zero as you can get, hence you have very little chance of losing money. Thus, as long as a single moron is stupid enough to buy your product, you end up with a profit.
By adding a financial burden, ie. litigation, to spam, it becomes possible to end up with a net loss by spamming. One man alone probably isn't enough of a disincentive, but if more people started doing this, it could become a sufficient deterrent to make spam vastly more uncommon.
Honestly, this is the best method I've seen for "adding a financial cost to spam". Earlier proposals, generally variants of a per-email fee, had two problems: they invariably charged innocent people, and they gave the money to corporations or the government, not the people. At least lawsuits like this give the money to the party that was actually damaged by the spam. It's not a perfect method, but it seems to be the best so far.
Let me make the argument another way. Say someone is going on Fox News, and is saying that "according to known internet celebrity mobby_6kl, Fox is the most reliable and fair news source.". Obviously, they are attempting to make money via the use of your image. However, you never said such things, and never endorsed them. You can't sue for libel or slander, as your image is not provably being damaged by their actions. Such a thing is obviously wrong and unethical. Thus, there is a law intended to prevent such things.
Obviously, his sig was being played by William Shatner.
You didn't even read TFS (the summary), did you?
Surprisingly, your deduction of where the Navy expects the next war to be isn't too far from reality. As the Artic cap melts, significant oil reserves are being uncovered, and both the US and Russia are making claims to it. There's already been some minor show-of-force incidents, but a full naval war is not completely impossible.
Why do we even need nickels? The cheapest things you can find anymore are a quarter, and even a small can of soda is 75c. Ditch pennies, ditch nickels, maybe even ditch dimes, and we'd have a much better currency.
So far, everyone seems to be concluding that this woman is some sort of nut and/or lawsuit-happy money-grabber. Honestly, I agree with that given the evidence shown so far, but everyone deserves some level of defense.
This woman is making at least one claim that can be tested - that she lost her job due to this. It would be rather simple to find out if this was the case - ask her ex-boss if he fired her over them, find out if she was shunned by coworkers over the images, etc. Most cases of people suing over trivialities involve less testable claims. As such, either she's not good at trolling the legal system, or she's got more of a case than we've assumed. After all, Japan is a much different culture than America or Europe - something like this could actually be a big deal over there. I honestly don't know. So, I'm going to wait for more info before making any sort of final judgement.
Simple. "God works in subtle, mysterious ways. Who is to say that He did not create the universe in such a way that the precise results He wished to occur would occur, like an intricate, universe-wide set of dominoes? Could not evolution be the means by which He created man?"
If they continue to argue, hit them with a crowbar.
Because it's an interesting proof-of-concept that DDoS is no longer bound to botnets, as well as proof-of-concept of DDoSing in Javascript.
The dynamo has been running for about 3.5 billion years. Thus, from simple math and statistics (and the fact that we are not currently observing the beginning or end of the dynamo), I can state with 99.999% accuracy that the field will remain for at least thirty-five thousand years (and no more than 35 trillion years). Thus, we don't need to worry about that right now.
It's fine.
Don't view the plugin as an enhancement for Firefox. View it as an extension for Windows 7 - it's increasing compatibility with a certain feature. And then, it all makes sense - it's Microsoft's business to improve Windows, and now Firefox is getting a free boost on that platform.
Actually, people misusing exponential is one of my pet peeves. And yes, that was pretty much exactly what I meant - if there's only one program to exploit, the difficulty is k, if there's two it becomes k^2, and so on.
Yes. It's had quite a few exploits found and fixed. There's definitely more to be found. I would not trust it to contain a known-malicious program. However, it's an effective barrier when combined with a decently-secure browser like Firefox or Chrome - not only does the "hacker" have to find an exploit in the browser, but in the sandbox as well, making it exponentially more difficult.
After all, I already run Chrome itself in a sandbox. Firefox, too. Why?
Pretty much every exploit now begins by "the user visits a website". After that, pretty much any technology can be the hole it exploits - Java, Flash, PDF viewing, even JPEG rendering has been exploited. There's an abundance of targets. The modern browser is just too big a platform to secure completely. So, I don't trust any browser more modern than Lynx.
Except Al-Qaeda actually has a strong leadership structure. It has ranks, it has chain-of-command, it has membership lists. It may be structured in a way that one department can't identify another, but it's quite possible to identify someone as an al-Qaeda member. Actually, al-Qaeda means "the organization" in Arabic, or so I've been told.
MySQL is still just as good as it was under Sun. If you don't like whatever changes Oracle makes, fork it. Make your own. Call it LibreSQL if you wish. Until I hear of Oracle actually doing something bad to MySQL, I'm going to keep using it.
Seriously. What were they even testing? I was under the impression that social engineering was a security flaw in the user, not in the application. Reading the report, it sounds like they were just testing the browsers' databases of known malware/phishing sites. Which, really, has little to do with the security of the browser itself.
I used that OpenBSD box as a learning system - I think I fiddled with every config file in the system. Hell, I recompiled the kernel (advised against in the OpenBSD community), stripping out device drivers I'd never need, to shave the RAM usage down and shorten the boot time.
Yeah, I probably could do an upgrade, but it's never really been worth the effort. What, exactly, is there in 4.8 that there isn't in 3.6? Probably a decent amount of stuff, but nothing that made me say "I have to install that".
Well, at the very least, it means we have ready access to a machine to test the exploits on, if anyone figures out how it was supposed to work in the first place.
To be honest, it's more of because "there's really nothing on here besides some projects that I'm planning on open-sourcing eventually, a few games, and a mildly-disturbing amount of pornography". I really don't care if anybody hacks it.
Besides, have you TRIED to upgrade OpenBSD? Not easy.