Please read the security advisory itself: this is
a bug for which no exploit is yet known and for which,
quite possibly, no exploit is possible. From the
SA:
It is uncertain whether this error is
potentially exploitable, however, we prefer to see bugs
fixed proactively.
So, no exploit now, perhaps none even possible.
Does anyone out there claim actually to have a working
exploit?
Is a used book a "licensed copy"? Can you sell a used book without the copyright owner's permission? If the answers to those aren't obvious, please remember that licensing of software was a mechanism invented by vendors to avoid the usual provision of copyright law that the buyer of the object (book, record, etc.) owns it and can resell it: the only thing copyright prevents the buyer from doing is copying it.
"Liberate tutemet ex inferis" isn't quite coherent Latin (second person plural imperative,
but second person singular nominative "tutemet"). It might
be marginally better as "Libera te tutemet..." ("Save you you...", where
the second "you" is accusative and intensive). I think
what they were trying to say is "Libera temetipsum ex inferis", or maybe
"Libera tu temetipsum ex inferis" ("Save yourself
from the underworld [i.e. hell, in Christian usage]". I'm no
Latinist, and especially no medieval Latinist, but it
seems to me "ab inferis" would be more idiomatic.
If you wanted to say "Save yourselves from hell",
"Liberate vos ex inferis" would do.
J. S. Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel were not 15th century composers but 18th-century composers (the 15th century began in 1400, or 1401 if you care, and continued through 1499; as it happens, all three of the composers mentioned were born in 1685). Handel was a considerable success and a celebrity, but that can't quite be said about Vivaldi and J.S. Bach, who were not that widely known during their lives. As for 15th-century composers: among the more famous are John Dunstable, Guillaume Dufay, Jehan Ockeghem, Ockeghem's students (Josquin Desprez, Pierre de la Rue, Loyset Compere). And Jacob Obrecht. Of course, several of these were active well into the 16th century.
The problem with circular slides was accuracy. Especially
on the internal scales (which effectively get shorter
and shorter, since the perimeter decreases), you are
in effect working on a shorter slide rule and thus
can't read with as much accuracy. If all you need
is a couple of scales (say C and D, or some specialized
scales), this isn't as much of a problem.
I was an undergraduate
in 1964-68; electronic calculators (let alone
pocket calculators) didn't exist. In 1969, I was
for a short time employed by a division of a large
California corporation under the rather vague title
'business analyst'. Part of my job was evaluating
and recommending office equipment. There were
computers enough (ever hear of an IBM 1130?), but
the accounting folks did their daily work on mechanical
desk calculators (Marchants and Monroes). A good one
of those cost $1200-$1400 US in 1969 dollars (a VW beetle
at the time was around $1800, IIRC). I decided we
needed to check out the new electronic desk calculators and
decided eventually on a thing from Burroughs ($1350 or so)
that did the four basic functions and had a single
memory register. A month after I did, prices were
below $1000 for such things. Why calculators in the
age of slide rules? (1) A 10-inch slide rule's good for about
3 significant digits, and accountants know nothing of
significant digits; (2) slide rules can't add.
I continued to use my slide rule well into the 1970s (even
for things like compound interest calculations). I haven't
used it in the last 25 years, of course.
An embezzeler who has stolen cash (presumably at least with some success, otherwise he'd
be "petty thief," and not "embezzeler,") knows how other embezzelers work, and can help
guard against them.
Apart from the fact that embezzlement is a matter
of how you steal, not how much, this all seems to
suppose that the only thing that counts is technical knowledge or skill. But surely the
point is that you have to be able to trust
people to whom you give control of, say, your
accounts, or your system. Past behavior may be
far from perfect as a predictor of future behavior, but it's surely relevant; and past dishonesty is surely at least relevant to the question of trustworthiness. Aren't you just a
little less inclined to believe people who
have lied to you in the past? If you were to discover that the financial manager you'd entrusted your life savings to had a history of embezzlement, would that make you feel reassured?
As for the child-molester example: I don't think you've thought this through. Even assuming that
child molesters are particularly adept at spotting
other child molesters, what importance would such an ability have as a criterion for hiring day-care employees?
When I think of someone being 'snubbed,' I think of some renegade bookie being killed by John Gotti or a murder witness being hunted by the mafia.
You're confusing 'snubbed' with 'snuffed'. 'Snub'
is exactly the right word. When you go to a party
and no one wants to talk to you, you've been snubbed.
However, CmdrTaco might want to look up the spelling of 'hypocrisy'.
By the time historical interest in ancient Greece began to resurface (a few hundred years ago), the Arab copies were the only sizeable collection of ancient Greek literature left in existence. Because of that, practically all of the Greek literature we read today has gone through several langage translations which can, unfortunately, distort the original meaning of the texts(eg. Greek>Arab>Latin>English).
Far from it. The role of Arabic-speaking scholars in preserving ancient Greek works was enormous, but the great majority of "the Greek literature that we read today" survives in Greek, and often in pretty good shape. There was indeed a time when scholars in the Latin west had access to an extremely limited range of material, and then only through (ancient) Latin translations. Beginning in about the 11th century, however, material began to filter into western Europe from the Islamic world. Much of this was initially Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek texts (or Latin translations of Arabic translations of Syriac translations of Greek texts), often done by a bilingual team of an Arabic and a Latin speaker; there were in effect various translation factories in parts of the world where Christian and Islamic civilizations came into contact, such as Spain. However, by the 13th century the Latins were beginning to learn a little Greek themselves (or at least to hire people who spoke Greek), and Latin translations made directly from Greek were becoming available Most Latin-speaking scholars still didn't know much if any Greek, but there were professional translators, typically (as you might expect) Greek speakers from the Eastern Roman empire (the Byzantine empire, which continued to exist until the 15th century). It's in Byzantium, in turn, that most of the Greek manuscripts we now rely on were produced. After Byzantium finally collapsed in the 15th century, a large number of Greek-speaking scholars migrated to Europe, taking their Greek (and their manuscripts) with them, and this gave rise to that second flowering of European interest in ancient Greece called the Renaissance.
As for original ancient Greek documents: if by that you mean physical documents from the time of, say, Archimedes, we just don't have very much of that at all. Until about 300, the principal writing material for publications was papyrus, which is not nearly as durable as parchment (unless you're lucky enough to live in an extremely dry climate, e.g. Egypt, and have a way of putting your manuscript in a really secure and very dry place, e.g. a tomb). And Archimedes wouldn't have written originally on papyrus: authors drafted their works on wax-covered tablets, writing with a stylus (you can erase wax: you turn the stylus around and smooth out the wax with the blunt end, like using a pencil eraser). A professional then copied the result out of the wax onto papyrus scrolls.
The fact that our oldest and best manuscripts of many Greek authors often date from a millennium or more after that author's time doesn't mean that we don't have good texts. We have copies, but we have a lot of copies in many cases, descending through a variety of different paths. Since the 15th century, scholars have developed techniques of textual criticism that try to recover the most likely original text from which a collection of originals descended. Those techniques are now pretty sophisticated; they're not all that distant from other methods for trying to repair damaged data (for a quick account see the article on "textual criticism" in the Oxford Classical Dictionary).
A side remark about durability: seems to me the clear winner in the durability category is the Babylonian cuneiform tablet. Really hard to damage (can be used as building material, for instance), impervious to magnetic fields, coffee, insects, water, fire. Can be stored in an enormous range of environmental parameters. Some problem with bandwidth, but you have to expect a few tradeoffs.
In the hopes of putting an end to discussions of the correct Latin plural of 'virus' (as far as I'm concerned, the only plural of 'virus' is viruses): 1. No plural forms of virus ever occur in Classical Latin (i.e. in any text that we have): all that occurs is the nominative singular (virus), the accusative singular (also virus: this is a neuter noun), one occurence of the genitive singular (viri), and one occurrence of the ablative singular (viro). Check the Oxford Latin Dictionary (the standard source) for details. 2. There are two other Latin words that may be confusing some folks: vis, 'force' (plural vires, gen. sing. vis), and vir, 'man' (plural viri, gen. sing. viri). Vir is second declension masculine, so its nom. plural and its gen. sing. are the same. In Latin, the only things viri could mean are 'men' or 'of a man' (from vir and 'of a virus'. 3. Virus in Latin is indeed grammatically unusual. You would expect a neuter ending in -us to be a contracted form, with the real stem revealed only in the oblique cases (e.g. stercus, gen. stercoris: the stem is thus stercor-). We've got only two instances of oblique cases, one each of the genitive and the ablative, and they look like second-declension forms. With such a very limited base of evidence, it;s hard to know what conclusions to draw. We sometimes find more than one declensional pattern for the same Latin noun (e.g. vir occasionally has the third-declension gen. pl. virum as well as the more regular second-declension virorum. For all we know, the two oblique forms we have of virus are themselves atypical. Personally, I find 'virii' rather silly; 'viruses' works just fine in English, everybody understands it, and nobody needs to berate anyone else about correctness. I also say 'indexes' and 'syllabuses'. I don't have much sympathy with the notion that we ought to use foreign declensional forms in English; applied consistently, it would give some surprising results (what's the plural of 'nexus'? How about 'kudos'?).
Slashdot Mirror
Does anyone out there claim actually to have a working exploit?
Is a used book a "licensed copy"? Can you sell a used book without the copyright owner's permission? If the answers to those aren't obvious, please remember that licensing of software was a mechanism invented by vendors to avoid the usual provision of copyright law that the buyer of the object (book, record, etc.) owns it and can resell it: the only thing copyright prevents the buyer from doing is copying it.
If you wanted to say "Save yourselves from hell", "Liberate vos ex inferis" would do.
Read your Microsoft EULA lately? Whom do you sue when Windows goes wrong?
J. S. Bach, Vivaldi, and Handel were not 15th
century composers but 18th-century composers (the
15th century began in 1400, or 1401 if you care,
and continued through 1499; as it happens, all
three of the composers mentioned were born in 1685). Handel
was a considerable success and a celebrity, but
that can't quite be said about Vivaldi and J.S.
Bach, who were not that widely known during their
lives. As for 15th-century composers: among the
more famous are John Dunstable, Guillaume Dufay,
Jehan Ockeghem, Ockeghem's students (Josquin
Desprez, Pierre de la Rue, Loyset Compere). And
Jacob Obrecht. Of course, several of these were
active well into the 16th century.
The problem with circular slides was accuracy. Especially on the internal scales (which effectively get shorter and shorter, since the perimeter decreases), you are in effect working on a shorter slide rule and thus can't read with as much accuracy. If all you need is a couple of scales (say C and D, or some specialized scales), this isn't as much of a problem.
I continued to use my slide rule well into the 1970s (even for things like compound interest calculations). I haven't used it in the last 25 years, of course.
This article is a reference you may miss.
Apart from the fact that embezzlement is a matter of how you steal, not how much, this all seems to suppose that the only thing that counts is technical knowledge or skill. But surely the point is that you have to be able to trust people to whom you give control of, say, your accounts, or your system. Past behavior may be far from perfect as a predictor of future behavior, but it's surely relevant; and past dishonesty is surely at least relevant to the question of trustworthiness. Aren't you just a little less inclined to believe people who have lied to you in the past? If you were to discover that the financial manager you'd entrusted your life savings to had a history of embezzlement, would that make you feel reassured?
As for the child-molester example: I don't think you've thought this through. Even assuming that child molesters are particularly adept at spotting other child molesters, what importance would such an ability have as a criterion for hiring day-care employees?
You're confusing 'snubbed' with 'snuffed'. 'Snub' is exactly the right word. When you go to a party and no one wants to talk to you, you've been snubbed.
However, CmdrTaco might want to look up the spelling of 'hypocrisy'.
Far from it. The role of Arabic-speaking scholars in preserving ancient Greek works was enormous, but the great majority of "the Greek literature that we read today" survives in Greek, and often in pretty good shape. There was indeed a time when scholars in the Latin west had access to an extremely limited range of material, and then only through (ancient) Latin translations. Beginning in about the 11th century, however, material began to filter into western Europe from the Islamic world. Much of this was initially Latin translations of Arabic translations of Greek texts (or Latin translations of Arabic translations of Syriac translations of Greek texts), often done by a bilingual team of an Arabic and a Latin speaker; there were in effect various translation factories in parts of the world where Christian and Islamic civilizations came into contact, such as Spain. However, by the 13th century the Latins were beginning to learn a little Greek themselves (or at least to hire people who spoke Greek), and Latin translations made directly from Greek were becoming available Most Latin-speaking scholars still didn't know much if any Greek, but there were professional translators, typically (as you might expect) Greek speakers from the Eastern Roman empire (the Byzantine empire, which continued to exist until the 15th century). It's in Byzantium, in turn, that most of the Greek manuscripts we now rely on were produced. After Byzantium finally collapsed in the 15th century, a large number of Greek-speaking scholars migrated to Europe, taking their Greek (and their manuscripts) with them, and this gave rise to that second flowering of European interest in ancient Greece called the Renaissance.
As for original ancient Greek documents: if by that you mean physical documents from the time of, say, Archimedes, we just don't have very much of that at all. Until about 300, the principal writing material for publications was papyrus, which is not nearly as durable as parchment (unless you're lucky enough to live in an extremely dry climate, e.g. Egypt, and have a way of putting your manuscript in a really secure and very dry place, e.g. a tomb). And Archimedes wouldn't have written originally on papyrus: authors drafted their works on wax-covered tablets, writing with a stylus (you can erase wax: you turn the stylus around and smooth out the wax with the blunt end, like using a pencil eraser). A professional then copied the result out of the wax onto papyrus scrolls.
The fact that our oldest and best manuscripts of many Greek authors often date from a millennium or more after that author's time doesn't mean that we don't have good texts. We have copies, but we have a lot of copies in many cases, descending through a variety of different paths. Since the 15th century, scholars have developed techniques of textual criticism that try to recover the most likely original text from which a collection of originals descended. Those techniques are now pretty sophisticated; they're not all that distant from other methods for trying to repair damaged data (for a quick account see the article on "textual criticism" in the Oxford Classical Dictionary).
A side remark about durability: seems to me the clear winner in the durability category is the Babylonian cuneiform tablet. Really hard to damage (can be used as building material, for instance), impervious to magnetic fields, coffee, insects, water, fire. Can be stored in an enormous range of environmental parameters. Some problem with bandwidth, but you have to expect a few tradeoffs.
In the hopes of putting an end to discussions of the correct Latin plural of 'virus' (as far as I'm concerned, the only plural of 'virus' is viruses): 1. No plural forms of virus ever occur in Classical Latin (i.e. in any text that we have): all that occurs is the nominative singular (virus), the accusative singular (also virus: this is a neuter noun), one occurence of the genitive singular (viri), and one occurrence of the ablative singular (viro). Check the Oxford Latin Dictionary (the standard source) for details. 2. There are two other Latin words that may be confusing some folks: vis, 'force' (plural vires, gen. sing. vis), and vir, 'man' (plural viri, gen. sing. viri). Vir is second declension masculine, so its nom. plural and its gen. sing. are the same. In Latin, the only things viri could mean are 'men' or 'of a man' (from vir and 'of a virus'. 3. Virus in Latin is indeed grammatically unusual. You would expect a neuter ending in -us to be a contracted form, with the real stem revealed only in the oblique cases (e.g. stercus, gen. stercoris: the stem is thus stercor-). We've got only two instances of oblique cases, one each of the genitive and the ablative, and they look like second-declension forms. With such a very limited base of evidence, it;s hard to know what conclusions to draw. We sometimes find more than one declensional pattern for the same Latin noun (e.g. vir occasionally has the third-declension gen. pl. virum as well as the more regular second-declension virorum. For all we know, the two oblique forms we have of virus are themselves atypical. Personally, I find 'virii' rather silly; 'viruses' works just fine in English, everybody understands it, and nobody needs to berate anyone else about correctness. I also say 'indexes' and 'syllabuses'. I don't have much sympathy with the notion that we ought to use foreign declensional forms in English; applied consistently, it would give some surprising results (what's the plural of 'nexus'? How about 'kudos'?).