Why focus just on physics? What about some of the "science" we see in a lot of other films that people take seriously? Much of this seemed to start when you had the near simultaneous release of "China Syndrome" and the Three Mile Island incident. Although the actual incident was a far cry from what happened in the movie, it gave the perception that Hollywood was making movies based on real scientific information - i.e. these things could really happen.
We have ecological examples like "Waterworld," where the entire planet loses its land to melted polar ice caps, presumably the result of global warming; or "Jurassic Park" with bad biology bringing fossilized DNA to life. And speaking of biology, we all know SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!
This doesn't seem like a big threat. If they are referring to exploits using ports 135-139 and 445, those are already blocked by the high security internet setting on most commercial firewall programs and routers. If they know of some additional vulnerability, Homeland Security should provide more information than the alert says. Their recommendation is that you update with the latest security patches and block the above mentioned ports. If your IT people AREN't doing this already, I don't think this alert will help.
With all the back and forth about Linux on the desktop being either dead, alive, moribund, or as this study says, "much work remains to be done," folks are forgetting that once past the reliability issue, (which Linux has convincingly established) usability with existing data and the ability to interface with other users will drive users to one OS or another.
If the Linux desktop had these characteristics, every tiny nonprofit in the U.S. would be using this system - it is far less expensive and much more reliable. Yet I don't see hoards going to Wal-Mart and picking up the CPU Builder's model for $350. The reason (aside from the fear-of-a new-OS factor) users do not have the ability to share core word processing and speadsheet files back and forth as easily as they do with established (read Windows) software. If all your friends are on AOL, use Word, Excel or Works because it came bundled on their system, it's going to be extremely difficult to get them to be venturesome and try something else.
Smaller government agencies, non-profits and caritiable groups would seem like the best market for Linux to move into. But a charitable or non-profit business with very few IT dollars to spend, with overworked (and likely non-technical) volunteers or staffers, will have very few "technology pioneers" willing to take the risk of a Linux desktop. All their colleagues have Word files. Although Adobe is making great strides in making the PDF a more universal document, they do not support Linux, and I have not seen third party application that creates PDFs on Linux. If your file does not EXACTLY translate to Word, or your speadsheet has complicated links that won't transfer to Excel, you won't like the application.
What is needed is a different approach to the issue. Linux has to offer features and applications on the desktop that the other systems don't, AND be fully compatible with existing software.
Figure that one out, and maybe we can bury this one for good!!
Too many people don't pay attention to where their plug-ins and other downloads come from - that is where a big part of the problem starts. End users need to own up to that fact that when a warning comes up about an unsigned or questionable certificate, they need to ask some serious questions before installing.
Sure, Adobe still has a "vulnerability" in the strict sense of the word, and if they want to continue marketing a weak security product, that is their business. In my opinion, their inspired release of Acrobat Elements will make Adobe a bigger player and Acrobat a major product. Going in to this with a problem is just bad business and will not help them. And whacking the messenger with the DMCA is definitely not a solution!
I like the premise, but this is a very superficial first effort. The site is slow, and you can get just about all of the same information at www.firstgov.gov. Knowing several public officials, I tried to use the site to see just what dirt I could dig up. I have to say I was pretty disappointed. I couldn't even get an official bio on all but the most prominent elected officials.
If TIA does nothing more than this, then we have very little to worry about.
This beta goes a long way to explaining the WASTE posting/unposting that went on last week. Clearly AOL wants to encourage the message encryption through AIM and not another program, and certainly not one under the GPL. Note that AIM is MORE than willing to provide you with a public key (at a nominal fee of course).
So far, the spam kings have easily hidden their identities and outwitted most of the software and schemes people have used to try and secure their inboxes from junk mail. Many of the same practices could be (and probably will be) incorporated in file-sharing software.
In the meantime, we have learned the following from the Verizon case:
1) Don't share 600 files 2) Munge the names of files, and use different extensions from "mp3" or "wma" (Did I hear someone say "ogg vorbis?") 3) Don't stay online with your filesharing software all day
Between the porn sites, open relays and unresponsiveness re spam/TOS, I'm not surprised these folks are getting out of the business. Hopefully whoever buys the pieces knows what to do with them.
This is a good try for open source, but I worry this will just be its feel good legislation. The guts of the legislation is in 2054.114 (b), which states: For all new software acquisitions, a state agency shall:
(1) consider acquiring open source software products in addition to proprietary software products;
(2) except as provided by Subdivisions (4) and (5), acquire software products primarily on a value-for-money basis;
(3) provide justification whenever a proprietary software product is acquired instead of open source software;
(4) avoid the acquisition of products that do not comply with open standards for interoperability or data storage; and
(5) avoid the acquisition of products that are known to make unauthorized transfers of information to, or permit unauthorized control of or modification to the state government's computer systems by, parties outside the control of the state government.
Just focus on (1) and (3) - this is legalese for writing two paragraphs to say why you are selecting the proprietary system you want to purchase.
The real issue for open source over proprietary is in the specifications for the bid, not in the selection process. Unless the open source product is responsive to what is in a bid, it doesn't need to be selected, no matter what this law says. In other words, if the bid solicitation is for a system that needs to meet the technical requirements of already existing products, it will be very difficult to meet those requirements for anything else.
Thus, if you have an IBM system, it will be diffcult to switch to Sun, or from Microsoft to something else. Most state IT departments are tied in to specific product lines, and it's like pulling teth to get them to change.
Bottom line, this will take years to have any significant impact. But as with any legislation, you need to start somewhere.
As usual with basically good ideas, there is a fly in the ointment.
In this case, it is who gets to certify, and which certifiers are going to be recognized by the community as valid and desireable.
The answer is the likely certifiers are going to be the ISPs. Let's face it - they have been winnowed down to a manageable number, they are the entry point for all e-mail users, and they will be recognized as an authority by the majority of users, who are mostly casual anyway.
Moreover, they are the only ones who can guarantee that they will get paid for their work.
I love the idea that Tripoli wants to empower the user, but I think their scheme will do just as much to empower ISPs.
Everyone thinks taxing is easy, but when it comes to sales or value added type of tax, any legislator or revenue official or accountant will tell you it is notoriously difficult.
First, when is the taxable event - when you send the e-mail or receive it? What about replies? What about size? Who is responsible for paying the tax - the sender, the receiver, the ISP? Who collects it? How do you enforce nonpayment? Who is going to take on the enforcement role? Where do the proceeds go?
Much as I don't like it, the solution really needs to revolve around a more direct approach, which is to say banning unconsented, unsolicited e-mail.
And the current SMTP setup definitely is a big part of the problem. Any solution has to impose an "honesty in e-mail" provision that makes untraceable e-mail subject to criminal sanction. Such a sanction would create a market for a better SMTP-type system that would allow e-mail to be traced.
This article is pie in the sky - taxing by itself causes more problems than it solves, but maybe the collective intelligence of Slashdot readers will provide some better, more promising ideas for solving this problem.
I don't know the numbers in other countries. After getting two letters in the mail and dutifully sending them to the FBI, I got three more solicitations via internet. I responded to these by sending internet fraud complaints (http://www.ifccfbi.gov).
Since then I've probably received five more of these "Nigerian" letters via e-mail.
This just underscores the need for the media companies to get off their collective asses and come up with a business plan that provides affordable, downloadable files of music or movies. The longer they continue to push this wet noodle up a hill, the more we will see ridiculous scenarios like this one. As one lawyer friend once old me, if you sue or get sued, you've already half lost the battle. At the end of this mess, EVERYONE loses big time.
Makes perfect sense to me. Just about everyone I know uses a Hotmail aaddress as a spam magnet. If there is a genuine effort to outlaw spam, especially at the federal level, Hotmail could lose a bunch of business.
And I agree with everyone else - Hotmail's spam filters really suck! I created a bunch of custom filters using the obvious words (penis, porn, sexy, tits, etc.) and lost about half the spam. Throw in other words like "free" and put them in a pre-sort file and you can lose another dozen.
I had exactly the same problem - newer distributions of Linux seem to expect more out of the hardware, so the installations work, but are extremely slow, or they don't work at all. Not to mention the winmodem problem - if you have an old computer, you probably need an older external modem as well.
Nobody should flame you because you are right on target. Global warming is based more on the politics of containing the United States than it is on science.
Your points about monitoring stations and the effect of various factors like cloud albedo and oceanic phytoplankton are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The reality is that those "scientists" are attempting to predict climatic behavior based on 150 years of information, for a planet that has 4 billion years of climatic history! That's like predicting the rest of your life on what occurred in the last five minutes.
This whole effort at thinking that global warming is a man-made phenomenon will undoubtedly go down in history as the most homocentric idea to have come along since man believed the planets rotated around the earth. It just goes to show that putting a bunch of numbers into a computer model and calling that science ignores one of the oldest chestnuts of computer science - "garbage in, garbage out."
Slashdot Mirror
Fine. Run the computer and quit drinking that god-awful tea!
Why focus just on physics? What about some of the "science" we see in a lot of other films that people take seriously? Much of this seemed to start when you had the near simultaneous release of "China Syndrome" and the Three Mile Island incident. Although the actual incident was a far cry from what happened in the movie, it gave the perception that Hollywood was making movies based on real scientific information - i.e. these things could really happen.
We have ecological examples like "Waterworld," where the entire planet loses its land to melted polar ice caps, presumably the result of global warming; or "Jurassic Park" with bad biology bringing fossilized DNA to life. And speaking of biology, we all know SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE!
There is a whole discussion about this here
This doesn't seem like a big threat. If they are referring to exploits using ports 135-139 and 445, those are already blocked by the high security internet setting on most commercial firewall programs and routers. If they know of some additional vulnerability, Homeland Security should provide more information than the alert says. Their recommendation is that you update with the latest security patches and block the above mentioned ports. If your IT people AREN't doing this already, I don't think this alert will help.
File this in the "flogged dead horse" department.
With all the back and forth about Linux on the desktop being either dead, alive, moribund, or as this study says, "much work remains to be done," folks are forgetting that once past the reliability issue, (which Linux has convincingly established) usability with existing data and the ability to interface with other users will drive users to one OS or another.
If the Linux desktop had these characteristics, every tiny nonprofit in the U.S. would be using this system - it is far less expensive and much more reliable. Yet I don't see hoards going to Wal-Mart and picking up the CPU Builder's model for $350. The reason (aside from the fear-of-a new-OS factor) users do not have the ability to share core word processing and speadsheet files back and forth as easily as they do with established (read Windows) software. If all your friends are on AOL, use Word, Excel or Works because it came bundled on their system, it's going to be extremely difficult to get them to be venturesome and try something else.
Smaller government agencies, non-profits and caritiable groups would seem like the best market for Linux to move into. But a charitable or non-profit business with very few IT dollars to spend, with overworked (and likely non-technical) volunteers or staffers, will have very few "technology pioneers" willing to take the risk of a Linux desktop. All their colleagues have Word files. Although Adobe is making great strides in making the PDF a more universal document, they do not support Linux, and I have not seen third party application that creates PDFs on Linux. If your file does not EXACTLY translate to Word, or your speadsheet has complicated links that won't transfer to Excel, you won't like the application.
What is needed is a different approach to the issue. Linux has to offer features and applications on the desktop that the other systems don't, AND be fully compatible with existing software.
Figure that one out, and maybe we can bury this one for good!!
Too many people don't pay attention to where their plug-ins and other downloads come from - that is where a big part of the problem starts. End users need to own up to that fact that when a warning comes up about an unsigned or questionable certificate, they need to ask some serious questions before installing.
Sure, Adobe still has a "vulnerability" in the strict sense of the word, and if they want to continue marketing a weak security product, that is their business. In my opinion, their inspired release of Acrobat Elements will make Adobe a bigger player and Acrobat a major product. Going in to this with a problem is just bad business and will not help them. And whacking the messenger with the DMCA is definitely not a solution!
I like the premise, but this is a very superficial first effort. The site is slow, and you can get just about all of the same information at www.firstgov.gov. Knowing several public officials, I tried to use the site to see just what dirt I could dig up. I have to say I was pretty disappointed. I couldn't even get an official bio on all but the most prominent elected officials.
If TIA does nothing more than this, then we have very little to worry about.
This beta goes a long way to explaining the WASTE posting/unposting that went on last week. Clearly AOL wants to encourage the message encryption through AIM and not another program, and certainly not one under the GPL. Note that AIM is MORE than willing to provide you with a public key (at a nominal fee of course).
So far, the spam kings have easily hidden their identities and outwitted most of the software and schemes people have used to try and secure their inboxes from junk mail. Many of the same practices could be (and probably will be) incorporated in file-sharing software.
In the meantime, we have learned the following from the Verizon case:
1) Don't share 600 files
2) Munge the names of files, and use different extensions from "mp3" or "wma" (Did I hear someone say "ogg vorbis?")
3) Don't stay online with your filesharing software all day
Between the porn sites, open relays and unresponsiveness re spam/TOS, I'm not surprised these folks are getting out of the business. Hopefully whoever buys the pieces knows what to do with them.
BSA? Isn't that Boy Scouts of America?
Sure. We're all going to roast from global warming first!
What are these guys upset about?
That we find out the dirty secret we have been suspecting all these years - half of these songs don't even HAVE real lyrics!!!!!
A link to the substitute would be helpful - I didn't see one on the legislative website (http://www.capitol.state.tx).
This is a good try for open source, but I worry this will just be its feel good legislation. The guts of the legislation is in 2054.114 (b), which states: For all new software acquisitions, a state agency shall:
(1) consider acquiring open source software products in addition to proprietary software products;
(2) except as provided by Subdivisions (4) and (5),
acquire software products primarily on a value-for-money basis;
(3) provide justification whenever a proprietary
software product is acquired instead of open source software;
(4) avoid the acquisition of products that do not
comply with open standards for interoperability or data storage;
and
(5) avoid the acquisition of products that are known to make unauthorized transfers of information to, or permit
unauthorized control of or modification to the state government's
computer systems by, parties outside the control of the state
government.
Just focus on (1) and (3) - this is legalese for writing two paragraphs to say why you are selecting the proprietary system you want to purchase.
The real issue for open source over proprietary is in the specifications for the bid, not in the selection process. Unless the open source product is responsive to what is in a bid, it doesn't need to be selected, no matter what this law says. In other words, if the bid solicitation is for a system that needs to meet the technical requirements of already existing products, it will be very difficult to meet those requirements for anything else.
Thus, if you have an IBM system, it will be diffcult to switch to Sun, or from Microsoft to something else. Most state IT departments are tied in to specific product lines, and it's like pulling teth to get them to change.
Bottom line, this will take years to have any significant impact. But as with any legislation, you need to start somewhere.
As usual with basically good ideas, there is a fly in the ointment.
In this case, it is who gets to certify, and which certifiers are going to be recognized by the community as valid and desireable.
The answer is the likely certifiers are going to be the ISPs. Let's face it - they have been winnowed down to a manageable number, they are the entry point for all e-mail users, and they will be recognized as an authority by the majority of users, who are mostly casual anyway.
Moreover, they are the only ones who can guarantee that they will get paid for their work.
I love the idea that Tripoli wants to empower the user, but I think their scheme will do just as much to empower ISPs.
Everyone thinks taxing is easy, but when it comes to sales or value added type of tax, any legislator or revenue official or accountant will tell you it is notoriously difficult.
First, when is the taxable event - when you send the e-mail or receive it? What about replies? What about size? Who is responsible for paying the tax - the sender, the receiver, the ISP? Who collects it? How do you enforce nonpayment? Who is going to take on the enforcement role? Where do the proceeds go?
Much as I don't like it, the solution really needs to revolve around a more direct approach, which is to say banning unconsented, unsolicited e-mail.
And the current SMTP setup definitely is a big part of the problem. Any solution has to impose an "honesty in e-mail" provision that makes untraceable e-mail subject to criminal sanction. Such a sanction would create a market for a better SMTP-type system that would allow e-mail to be traced.
This article is pie in the sky - taxing by itself causes more problems than it solves, but maybe the collective intelligence of Slashdot readers will provide some better, more promising ideas for solving this problem.
I don't know the numbers in other countries. After getting two letters in the mail and dutifully sending them to the FBI, I got three more solicitations via internet. I responded to these by sending internet fraud complaints (http://www.ifccfbi.gov).
Since then I've probably received five more of these "Nigerian" letters via e-mail.
Hey, you don't suppose.............
This just underscores the need for the media companies to get off their collective asses and come up with a business plan that provides affordable, downloadable files of music or movies. The longer they continue to push this wet noodle up a hill, the more we will see ridiculous scenarios like this one. As one lawyer friend once old me, if you sue or get sued, you've already half lost the battle. At the end of this mess, EVERYONE loses big time.
So let me get this right, if I'm googling, I'm bogarting a verb, and the lawyers will ralph-bunche me to death???
Makes perfect sense to me. Just about everyone I know uses a Hotmail aaddress as a spam magnet. If there is a genuine effort to outlaw spam, especially at the federal level, Hotmail could lose a bunch of business.
And I agree with everyone else - Hotmail's spam filters really suck! I created a bunch of custom filters using the obvious words (penis, porn, sexy, tits, etc.) and lost about half the spam. Throw in other words like "free" and put them in a pre-sort file and you can lose another dozen.
I had exactly the same problem - newer distributions of Linux seem to expect more out of the hardware, so the installations work, but are extremely slow, or they don't work at all. Not to mention the winmodem problem - if you have an old computer, you probably need an older external modem as well.
Nobody should flame you because you are right on target. Global warming is based more on the politics of containing the United States than it is on science. Your points about monitoring stations and the effect of various factors like cloud albedo and oceanic phytoplankton are only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. The reality is that those "scientists" are attempting to predict climatic behavior based on 150 years of information, for a planet that has 4 billion years of climatic history! That's like predicting the rest of your life on what occurred in the last five minutes. This whole effort at thinking that global warming is a man-made phenomenon will undoubtedly go down in history as the most homocentric idea to have come along since man believed the planets rotated around the earth. It just goes to show that putting a bunch of numbers into a computer model and calling that science ignores one of the oldest chestnuts of computer science - "garbage in, garbage out."