I love the image at the top of the article showing the "sample of the code for a more secure version of Microsoft Windows" -- just some random binary file open in a hex editor.
Ummmm... I believe that's a Palladium key, not machine code. Since the best encryption keys are those that are truly randomly generated, not the pseudo-random numbers most software uses at present, you see a good key (if it is indeed random).
Gotta love the NYT - their editors are on the ball!
It's a sad day when the FSF agrees with those who would plunder the free software world, but with an arugment like that, I can see why they'd feel that way.
Ummmm... last I checked, IBM is fully compliant with not only the rules of Free Software, but it's spirit as well. They are playing nice with FOSS, and actually seem to grok what it's all about. Sure they want to make lots of $ from FOSS, but they understand that the collaborative process is the heart of the system, and if they hurt the OSS dev community, they hurt themselves. As well, the legal powers of the GPL itself are based in IP and Copyright Law - they must be defended or the GPL can be destroyed. As for morality, IBM has shown itself to be a friend of Free Software, no matter it's motivation, and friends help friends in times of need.
The first thing that came to my head reading the parent was Dana Carvey's ChruchLady skit about Santa Claus - where she re-arranges the leters in Santa to spell *thunderous voice* SATAN!!!
(1) Don't preach to me about John McCain. If McCain had won the primary over GWB then the world would be a lot better place today and America's popularity wouldn't be at an all-time low worldwide. Furthermore I totally agree with him on campaign finance, as I have said in other posts in this thread. Unfortunately it will not happen while the Republicans are ruled by an evangelical/neocon cabal of realpolitik nazis (no trolling intended).
Join the Republican party, then keep yelling at the cabal and anyone else who might be interested with what's good about what Sen. McCain is talking about. Make a cool ad, make people laugh, and you could end up with quite a following. Remember Free Speech?
(2) "Isn't that giving up the most needed of democratic liberties?" How can you give up something you don't have? What good is a vote when Dubbya can raise $20 million at a fundraising dinner and use it to fund pictures of himself landing on aircraft carriers being shown during the capaign and thereby getting thousands of dimwits to vote for him?
Make the Congress give a damn. Use the funds you raise to take the message to the people, instead of fueling the same system more. Hell, you did a pretty damn good job of rebutting my post here, why not use that ability to get people to listen?
The whole point I was trying to make was: we are already totally marginalised. The congress doesn't give a damn about what the people want in a genuine sense; they only care in the sense that they must manipulate perceptions sufficiently to get reelected. Therefore it is only logical that if we want to exert influence over the political process we must use other avenues to do so.
See above for one possible way of getting your vote to actually count again without further damaging the system.
(3) I don't "suggest trading $ for votes" in the sense you suggest; I suggest trading $ for votes on capital hill, because right now you or I can't trade votes on election day for votes on capital hill with any degree of certainty.
You wish to tempt elected officials with "campaign contributions" in order to get them to listen to you more than anyone else. IMHO, that means you've bought votes, since the votes of others are what put the people in congress there in the first place, and those elected officials could possibly be going against the wishes of thier constituents. Fixing the system will provide "more certainty", not perpetuating the wrongness of "soft money".
(4) "Fighting fire with fire sometimes leaves nothing but scorched earth." You can use metaphors to demonstrate pretty much anything. "Sometimes the shortest path is through the mud."
Yup. "To make an Omlette.." et. al. Saves a lot of typing - I'm lazy too.;-)
(5) Thanks, I read my sig before I chose it.
I didn't think you chose it at random, friend. I was hoping, however, that you would be re-affirmed in it's spirit - namely Liberty is worth fighting for, and fighting for with honour and courage, not back room dealings.
WTF? "Insightful?" "Interesting?" Well, I think I'd mod this up too - to hold it up for ridicule.
Read your.sig - "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"
Your post suggests trading $ for votes. "My vote won't count, but my $ will!"? Isn't that essentially giving up the most needed of democratic liberties? OK, so corporate America seems to run the show and seems to be able to buy votes - following through with your suggestion would only show that they've won and Congress is a place to buy profits. Unless you have a lot more $ than the opposition, your vote still doesn't matter. Fighting fire with fire sometimes leaves nothing but scorched earth.
Listen to Sen. John McCain when he speaks of the need to rid elections of "soft money" - that is the crux of the problem. It will take a lot of time and energy to have the coprorate shills either turfed from office or earn thier election donations, but it can be done without stooping to the level of bribery. Use your rights fercryingoutloud - Freedom of Speech jumps into my head.
Novell is making an enterprise play with this, friend, hence the bad marketing name Nterprise.
I would think that the idea of this product is to make NetWare and Linux "play nice together" - IOW enterprise level integration. IMHO, Novell's focus as of late hasn't been Netware but eDirectory and other NDS based services.
NDS can kick Active Directory's ass and take it's lunch money any day of the week, since it's a much more mature product. By integrating Linux and Netware, they can leverage the OSS community and drop the Netware OS if they so choose, or just gain a lot more marketshare by having Directory Services that mask the differences and complexity of either OS.
The whole point is that with NDS, Linux or Netware isn't a terribly large question at all - they're just resources on the NDS tree. This is one of the smartest plays I've seen from Novell in a long, long time.
Uhm..excuse me...but shouldn't the FBI be out chasing violent criminals and terrorists,
File sharing is terrorism, isn't it? I mean Sen. Hatch seems to think so.
rather than busting teenagers for downloading Britney Spears?
Well, let's not be too stringent on what people should be jailed for.;^)
Besides...it seems to me that all these wasted hours protecting the obsolete business models of private companies like the RIAA and MPAA
The RIAA and MPAA are trade groups (or lobby groups), not private corporations. That may sound pendantic, but your answer is in the difference.
might also be spent training agents more....as in making the 'intelligence' community a bit more intelligent.
You're assuming that there's intelligeence there to begin with. Seriously, IMHO the US congress and the RIAA are in a panic - they just don't know what to do to get back the control they "need".
Panic is the antithesis of logical thought.
IOW, the amount of intelligence they have doesn't matter - it won't be applied in the appropriate manner.
Successful by whose standards? I doubt a P2P sharing system would generate the huge amount of $ that controlling the whole distribution channel generates at present for RIAA members. As well, most P2P networks are circumventing the $ part that the RIAA covets so much quite effectively. (The morality of this is left as an excercise for the reader.)
This is what the whole issue is about - not just $, but cultural control. A P2P network is not nearly as easily tamed as distributing CDs, since the clients are not controlled directly by the companies. No control of distribution = no control at all = no more created cultural icons (like Brittney Spears) = no way to generate guranteed revenue = no value in the stock.
I'm going to try to say this as nicely as possible and without trolling:
Not trolling at all - you have a legitimate (though perhaps misguided) problem with this method.
You have just rendered Greylisting pretty useless by making it open source. Spammers are much smarter than you think and what you have basically done is shown them what they need to do in order to get around Greylisting. That's just my take on the issue, maybe I'm wrong but I doubt it.
So, the spammers themselves will be of significant help in debugging and helping to fix the code so they can't circumvent it, won't they? OSS means anyone who finds how the greylist script is beaten can figure out a fix and post it. Sounds like the best thing to do IMHO.
This is one time I want to see the oversized corporate menace kick the little guy's ass...
I think the ASR Quotes page has an appropriate quote:
Same to you, dipshit -- Coredump
Clue: You've got the appropriate amount of hostility for the Monastery, however you are metaphorically getting out of the safari jeep and kicking the lions. Guess what that means, mtepahorically?
conclusion: 2 points for gusto, minus several million for good sense
coonec
Being picked on for being small is one thing, but purposely picking a fight with King Kong is stupid. Maybe a Corporate Darwin Award is up next, eh?
ok, my "render math" isn't the greatest, but I can NOT imagine that the system he had before was THAT bad? What do you really gain by adding that much MORE horsepower? Is that the difference between a frame being rendered in 45sec vs 50sec? I understand that every little bit counts, but a LOT of these movies was done live action. Unless that little Gollum thing is in every scene, why does he need more? (ok, I know, I always want faster, better too....I'm just saying)
Well, when you're talking about a 2.5 minute CGI shot, you have 24 frames/second (minimum) X 60 seconds/minute X 2.5 minutes = 3600 frames to render. 3600 frames X 5 minutes/frame savings = 18000 minutes or 300 hours in total saved by reducing a frame render from 50 minutes to 45.
That's just in 2.5 minutes of on-screen CGI, too - when the lions share of the film requires complex digital effects, the rest is easy to justify to the bean counters. In fact, I'd be suprised if they don't end up with even more horsepower by the time ROTK is in theatres - saving that much time provides big returns on investment.
Soko
Re:domains I want are reserved or registered, alre
on
Los Angeles Gets Own TLD
·
· Score: 2, Funny
Given that the pr0n industry is pretty much centred in LA, how about oooh.la.la?
Meh. I'm wondering what all of the hoop.la is about...
In Canada, there isn't a monopoly on high speed access. We do have local monopolies for telephone (in my area, Southern Ontario, it's Bell Canada) and for cable (Cogeco for me - who happen to get my $45CDN/month for Intenet access), but they don't have anything to do with each other. This means that Bell Canada can't gouge thier customers too much or they'll jump to Cogeco, and vice-versa. hat's the real reason for the great prices we get - competition. (I'm lucky with Cogeco, BTW - very clueful and hacker friendly admins, as long as you don't do anything stupid - like get your home web-server published on/.)
As a matter of fact, the Cable companies are making noises about providing local and long distance telephone service via the cable infrastructure, and Bell is pushing satellite TV to compete with Cable TV. There isn't really a monopoly on the services, just the delivery mediums. A better idea for our Aussie friends would be to have a divorce betwixt Telstra and Optus, so they need to fight each other for your $AUS.
As long as you know login.scr is the real thing (as I do on my laptop, BTW) no problen, I agree.
A login.scr that sends "teh 1337 h4x0rz" your password keystrokes as you type them is another matter all together. OK, it's unlikely (with Windows File Protection and all), but not outside the realm of possibility - especially since the program is running with SYSTEM privs. If it was GUEST, I'd wager that the h4x0r in question might have a lot more trouble.
Soko
Re:windows vs *nix - un-informed is un-informed
on
Yet Another Windows Worm
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
that's not really true though, since there are holes in windows that have been there since windows version 1. Sure there are holes in any program, but at least most of the unix/linux/macos viruses don't cause the computer to crash. In almost every case, unix/linux/bsd viruses are really just exploiting a single program.
The point being...? Really, you have done nothing to assist our underinformed cyrax777. Let me help, please.
First, causing the box to crash or not is irrelevant, as is what program allowed the compromise - a compromised machine is no longer yours. Time to re-install the whole machine.
The reason *nix is much harder to infect in the first place is users run with user privileges, as do all the child processes that they create. Thus, the e-mail client cannot over-write any system files since it lacks the autority to do so. This is where "rooting" the box comes from - you need to elevate your normal privs to super user status in order to do any real damage. You can tell most *nixes that "This user account can never elevate it's priveleges", and it likely never will. System services, like say the Apache HTTP server, are usually set up to run as under-priveleged users as well, so compromising them leads to even more difficulty controlling the whole machine - there's very few opennings in the *nix security armour. In contrast, right now my XP laptop is running login.scr as SYSTEM. Yup, a screen saver with system level privs. IIS on NT/Win2K is the same way - out of the box it runs under the SYSTEM account. If one of these is compromised, it's not your machine anymore. Now you know where a lot of the issues with Windows security lie.
This reflects one of the design philosophies of *nix: only give users the privileges they need, and have a huge, well defined wall between them and the system. Windows seems to come from the other end - give it all, and try to take away what's dangerous. IMHO, that's where Windows fails - miserably.
Jeez, what are they paying these guys for? Pop culture derivative drivel about a movie whose sequel sucked?. This is like high school philosophy where you would sit around drinking beer in someones mom's basement saying "so, dude, how do we know if we are really here?"
And you asked that question because...it might have been fun? Aren't these people entitled to a little fun too?
Please. I'm all for arts and liberal education, but let's work at thinking about things that can make a difference.
IME, the human body works better longer if it's exercised regualrily, and with different regimens. Concentrating on a single regimen can lead to specialization of the body, which can be bad - I would guess Arnold Schwartzeneggar isn't a great gymnast, for instance. The human brain is no different - it requires different types of stimuli frequently to remain at it's peak.
As well, seeing college professors think - and using pop culture to give the thought processes a well known context - may stimulate a few young minds into becoming great minds by giving them cause to be exercised. I'd say thier doing thier jobs - getting people to think and hopefullly learn something.
This also may explain why time travel seems impossible: we dont meet visitors from the future since only the present is being simulated."
IOW, branch prediction in the Great Itanium in the sky isn't working too well, is it?
Here's anoher one for your Saturday Night "Isn't that fucked up?" discussions: I've always wondered if time actually is linear. We and our physics are stuck in the current space/time continuum, and therefore we would have no idea if time actually followed say, a sine wave, since we would have no other point of reference.
Slashdot Mirror
I love the image at the top of the article showing the "sample of the code for a more secure version of Microsoft Windows" -- just some random binary file open in a hex editor.
Ummmm... I believe that's a Palladium key, not machine code. Since the best encryption keys are those that are truly randomly generated, not the pseudo-random numbers most software uses at present, you see a good key (if it is indeed random).
Gotta love the NYT - their editors are on the ball!
Apparently. (Well, this time anyway.)
Soko
Remember this quote?
"How do you eat an elephant?
One bite at a time."
(Aside: If someone could please attibute this properly, I'd be grateful)
IOW, we have to start sometime even if it does take 20 years, and now is as good as any to get change underway.
Soko
Not suprising.
I'm a Canadian geek, and for me Tim Hortons coffee is rocket fuel - I just can't get off of the ground without it.
Soko
It's a sad day when the FSF agrees with those who would plunder the free software world, but with an arugment like that, I can see why they'd feel that way.
Ummmm... last I checked, IBM is fully compliant with not only the rules of Free Software, but it's spirit as well. They are playing nice with FOSS, and actually seem to grok what it's all about. Sure they want to make lots of $ from FOSS, but they understand that the collaborative process is the heart of the system, and if they hurt the OSS dev community, they hurt themselves. As well, the legal powers of the GPL itself are based in IP and Copyright Law - they must be defended or the GPL can be destroyed. As for morality, IBM has shown itself to be a friend of Free Software, no matter it's motivation, and friends help friends in times of need.
Soko
Heh - good one Mr. AC!
The first thing that came to my head reading the parent was Dana Carvey's ChruchLady skit about Santa Claus - where she re-arranges the leters in Santa to spell *thunderous voice* SATAN!!!
"Well, idn't that special!!!"
Soko
Clippy: It looks like you're trying to kill Saddam Hussien. Do you want an IP address assigned to each of your bullets so we can track the kill?
[yes] [no] [sod off before I shoot you, ya nosy paperclip!]
Soko
(1) Don't preach to me about John McCain. If McCain had won the primary over GWB then the world would be a lot better place today and America's popularity wouldn't be at an all-time low worldwide. Furthermore I totally agree with him on campaign finance, as I have said in other posts in this thread. Unfortunately it will not happen while the Republicans are ruled by an evangelical/neocon cabal of realpolitik nazis (no trolling intended).
;-)
Join the Republican party, then keep yelling at the cabal and anyone else who might be interested with what's good about what Sen. McCain is talking about. Make a cool ad, make people laugh, and you could end up with quite a following. Remember Free Speech?
(2) "Isn't that giving up the most needed of democratic liberties?" How can you give up something you don't have? What good is a vote when Dubbya can raise $20 million at a fundraising dinner and use it to fund pictures of himself landing on aircraft carriers being shown during the capaign and thereby getting thousands of dimwits to vote for him?
Make the Congress give a damn. Use the funds you raise to take the message to the people, instead of fueling the same system more. Hell, you did a pretty damn good job of rebutting my post here, why not use that ability to get people to listen?
The whole point I was trying to make was: we are already totally marginalised. The congress doesn't give a damn about what the people want in a genuine sense; they only care in the sense that they must manipulate perceptions sufficiently to get reelected. Therefore it is only logical that if we want to exert influence over the political process we must use other avenues to do so.
See above for one possible way of getting your vote to actually count again without further damaging the system.
(3) I don't "suggest trading $ for votes" in the sense you suggest; I suggest trading $ for votes on capital hill, because right now you or I can't trade votes on election day for votes on capital hill with any degree of certainty.
You wish to tempt elected officials with "campaign contributions" in order to get them to listen to you more than anyone else. IMHO, that means you've bought votes, since the votes of others are what put the people in congress there in the first place, and those elected officials could possibly be going against the wishes of thier constituents. Fixing the system will provide "more certainty", not perpetuating the wrongness of "soft money".
(4) "Fighting fire with fire sometimes leaves nothing but scorched earth." You can use metaphors to demonstrate pretty much anything. "Sometimes the shortest path is through the mud."
Yup. "To make an Omlette.." et. al. Saves a lot of typing - I'm lazy too.
(5) Thanks, I read my sig before I chose it.
I didn't think you chose it at random, friend. I was hoping, however, that you would be re-affirmed in it's spirit - namely Liberty is worth fighting for, and fighting for with honour and courage, not back room dealings.
Soko
WTF? "Insightful?" "Interesting?" Well, I think I'd mod this up too - to hold it up for ridicule.
.sig - "They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety"
Read your
Your post suggests trading $ for votes. "My vote won't count, but my $ will!"? Isn't that essentially giving up the most needed of democratic liberties? OK, so corporate America seems to run the show and seems to be able to buy votes - following through with your suggestion would only show that they've won and Congress is a place to buy profits. Unless you have a lot more $ than the opposition, your vote still doesn't matter. Fighting fire with fire sometimes leaves nothing but scorched earth.
Listen to Sen. John McCain when he speaks of the need to rid elections of "soft money" - that is the crux of the problem. It will take a lot of time and energy to have the coprorate shills either turfed from office or earn thier election donations, but it can be done without stooping to the level of bribery. Use your rights fercryingoutloud - Freedom of Speech jumps into my head.
Sheesh.
Soko
Novell is making an enterprise play with this, friend, hence the bad marketing name Nterprise.
I would think that the idea of this product is to make NetWare and Linux "play nice together" - IOW enterprise level integration. IMHO, Novell's focus as of late hasn't been Netware but eDirectory and other NDS based services.
NDS can kick Active Directory's ass and take it's lunch money any day of the week, since it's a much more mature product. By integrating Linux and Netware, they can leverage the OSS community and drop the Netware OS if they so choose, or just gain a lot more marketshare by having Directory Services that mask the differences and complexity of either OS.
The whole point is that with NDS, Linux or Netware isn't a terribly large question at all - they're just resources on the NDS tree. This is one of the smartest plays I've seen from Novell in a long, long time.
Soko
looking forward to the day when the drivers are happy and seattle is just one wide freeway.
Make it Redmond instead and you've got yourself a deal!
Soko
Uhm..excuse me...but shouldn't the FBI be out chasing violent criminals and terrorists,
;^)
File sharing is terrorism, isn't it? I mean Sen. Hatch seems to think so.
rather than busting teenagers for downloading Britney Spears?
Well, let's not be too stringent on what people should be jailed for.
Besides...it seems to me that all these wasted hours protecting the obsolete business models of private companies like the RIAA and MPAA
The RIAA and MPAA are trade groups (or lobby groups), not private corporations. That may sound pendantic, but your answer is in the difference.
might also be spent training agents more....as in making the 'intelligence' community a bit more intelligent.
You're assuming that there's intelligeence there to begin with. Seriously, IMHO the US congress and the RIAA are in a panic - they just don't know what to do to get back the control they "need".
Panic is the antithesis of logical thought.
IOW, the amount of intelligence they have doesn't matter - it won't be applied in the appropriate manner.
Soko
Successful by whose standards? I doubt a P2P sharing system would generate the huge amount of $ that controlling the whole distribution channel generates at present for RIAA members. As well, most P2P networks are circumventing the $ part that the RIAA covets so much quite effectively. (The morality of this is left as an excercise for the reader.)
This is what the whole issue is about - not just $, but cultural control. A P2P network is not nearly as easily tamed as distributing CDs, since the clients are not controlled directly by the companies. No control of distribution = no control at all = no more created cultural icons (like Brittney Spears) = no way to generate guranteed revenue = no value in the stock.
In summary: In your dreams, bud.
Soko
I'm going to try to say this as nicely as possible and without trolling:
Not trolling at all - you have a legitimate (though perhaps misguided) problem with this method.
You have just rendered Greylisting pretty useless by making it open source. Spammers are much smarter than you think and what you have basically done is shown them what they need to do in order to get around Greylisting. That's just my take on the issue, maybe I'm wrong but I doubt it.
So, the spammers themselves will be of significant help in debugging and helping to fix the code so they can't circumvent it, won't they? OSS means anyone who finds how the greylist script is beaten can figure out a fix and post it. Sounds like the best thing to do IMHO.
Soko
.and to e-mail, throw it out the window. Sendmail'll pick it up somehow.
Soko
I think the ASR Quotes page has an appropriate quote:Being picked on for being small is one thing, but purposely picking a fight with King Kong is stupid. Maybe a Corporate Darwin Award is up next, eh?
Soko
Funny thing is, is that the objects of pamela_boobs.jpg are just as bought and paid for as Netscape.
Yup, it's all realted to getting more $, via silicone or silicon. Go figure. (pun intended)
Soko
ok, my "render math" isn't the greatest, but I can NOT imagine that the system he had before was THAT bad? What do you really gain by adding that much MORE horsepower? Is that the difference between a frame being rendered in 45sec vs 50sec? I understand that every little bit counts, but a LOT of these movies was done live action. Unless that little Gollum thing is in every scene, why does he need more? (ok, I know, I always want faster, better too....I'm just saying)
Well, when you're talking about a 2.5 minute CGI shot, you have 24 frames/second (minimum) X 60 seconds/minute X 2.5 minutes = 3600 frames to render. 3600 frames X 5 minutes/frame savings = 18000 minutes or 300 hours in total saved by reducing a frame render from 50 minutes to 45.
That's just in 2.5 minutes of on-screen CGI, too - when the lions share of the film requires complex digital effects, the rest is easy to justify to the bean counters. In fact, I'd be suprised if they don't end up with even more horsepower by the time ROTK is in theatres - saving that much time provides big returns on investment.
Soko
Given that the pr0n industry is pretty much centred in LA, how about oooh.la.la?
Meh. I'm wondering what all of the hoop.la is about...
Soko
In Canada, there isn't a monopoly on high speed access. We do have local monopolies for telephone (in my area, Southern Ontario, it's Bell Canada) and for cable (Cogeco for me - who happen to get my $45CDN/month for Intenet access), but they don't have anything to do with each other. This means that Bell Canada can't gouge thier customers too much or they'll jump to Cogeco, and vice-versa. hat's the real reason for the great prices we get - competition. (I'm lucky with Cogeco, BTW - very clueful and hacker friendly admins, as long as you don't do anything stupid - like get your home web-server published on /.)
As a matter of fact, the Cable companies are making noises about providing local and long distance telephone service via the cable infrastructure, and Bell is pushing satellite TV to compete with Cable TV. There isn't really a monopoly on the services, just the delivery mediums. A better idea for our Aussie friends would be to have a divorce betwixt Telstra and Optus, so they need to fight each other for your $AUS.
Soko
I can smell the smolding plastic and paperclips etc... :)
Yeah. They've been Fremch Fried by "L' Effect de Slashdot".
Soko
As long as you know login.scr is the real thing (as I do on my laptop, BTW) no problen, I agree.
A login.scr that sends "teh 1337 h4x0rz" your password keystrokes as you type them is another matter all together. OK, it's unlikely (with Windows File Protection and all), but not outside the realm of possibility - especially since the program is running with SYSTEM privs. If it was GUEST, I'd wager that the h4x0r in question might have a lot more trouble.
Soko
that's not really true though, since there are holes in windows that have been there since windows version 1. Sure there are holes in any program, but at least most of the unix/linux/macos viruses don't cause the computer to crash. In almost every case, unix/linux/bsd viruses are really just exploiting a single program.
The point being...? Really, you have done nothing to assist our underinformed cyrax777. Let me help, please.
First, causing the box to crash or not is irrelevant, as is what program allowed the compromise - a compromised machine is no longer yours. Time to re-install the whole machine.
The reason *nix is much harder to infect in the first place is users run with user privileges, as do all the child processes that they create. Thus, the e-mail client cannot over-write any system files since it lacks the autority to do so. This is where "rooting" the box comes from - you need to elevate your normal privs to super user status in order to do any real damage. You can tell most *nixes that "This user account can never elevate it's priveleges", and it likely never will. System services, like say the Apache HTTP server, are usually set up to run as under-priveleged users as well, so compromising them leads to even more difficulty controlling the whole machine - there's very few opennings in the *nix security armour. In contrast, right now my XP laptop is running login.scr as SYSTEM. Yup, a screen saver with system level privs. IIS on NT/Win2K is the same way - out of the box it runs under the SYSTEM account. If one of these is compromised, it's not your machine anymore. Now you know where a lot of the issues with Windows security lie.
This reflects one of the design philosophies of *nix: only give users the privileges they need, and have a huge, well defined wall between them and the system. Windows seems to come from the other end - give it all, and try to take away what's dangerous. IMHO, that's where Windows fails - miserably.
Soko
Soko
Jeez, what are they paying these guys for? Pop culture derivative drivel about a movie whose sequel sucked?. This is like high school philosophy where you would sit around drinking beer in someones mom's basement saying "so, dude, how do we know if we are really here?"
And you asked that question because...it might have been fun? Aren't these people entitled to a little fun too?
Please. I'm all for arts and liberal education, but let's work at thinking about things that can make a difference.
IME, the human body works better longer if it's exercised regualrily, and with different regimens. Concentrating on a single regimen can lead to specialization of the body, which can be bad - I would guess Arnold Schwartzeneggar isn't a great gymnast, for instance. The human brain is no different - it requires different types of stimuli frequently to remain at it's peak.
As well, seeing college professors think - and using pop culture to give the thought processes a well known context - may stimulate a few young minds into becoming great minds by giving them cause to be exercised. I'd say thier doing thier jobs - getting people to think and hopefullly learn something.
Soko
This also may explain why time travel seems impossible: we dont meet visitors from the future since only the present is being simulated."
IOW, branch prediction in the Great Itanium in the sky isn't working too well, is it?
Here's anoher one for your Saturday Night "Isn't that fucked up?" discussions: I've always wondered if time actually is linear. We and our physics are stuck in the current space/time continuum, and therefore we would have no idea if time actually followed say, a sine wave, since we would have no other point of reference.
Whoa.
Soko