> SCO is simply lacking a good corporate strategy.
Actually they've adopted a consistent strategy of "say whatever sounds best at the moment", without the least concern for internal consistency. This is a common symptom among the advocates of pseudoscience, and IMO is the most revealing evidence we have that their case is entirely bogus. If they had a leg to stand on they'd stand on it.
> Try going to court sometime without a lawyer. I just got a divorce recently, and it was about as simple a divorce as possible really (no children, mostly separate assets, etc) - and it was still very difficult figuring out courtroom procedure on my own. I had read a damn book on divorce law before I went, too.
> Finally, I paid a lawyer $50 and he told me exactly what to say and when to say it, and he fixed my fucked up documents. Everything went great. My point is, YES, you DEFINITELY need a lawyer to go to court for pretty much anything.
In the general case you're surely correct, though you get rare counterexamples such as the the current one where a fuckwit named Moussaui is singlehandedly making the entire Justice Department look like asses in a tarpit.
> You know, I thought their stock price was getting a little low.
Yeah, but the proximate cause was surely yesterday's revelations. It has become very predictable that every time a news story, press release, or new lawsuit that reflects poorly on their position, they emit a new fr3sh f4rt of even more pompous claims than before.
I was tempted to submit a faux story on this yesterday, knowing darn well that it was coming today, despite not knowing what particular form it would take. Keep this in mind next time there's a big Slashdot story about a new countersuit, a developer/team speaking out, or facts unveiled about the purportedly copied code; you can make the same prediction then.
> antibiotic resistance need not come from mutation. If we kill off all the non-resistant bacteria, then only the resistant are left to propagate, but they haven't developed any new DNA or anything. No evolution, no mutations, so, yes, it happens very quickly. (As soon as you kill off all the non-resistant bacteria.)
Yes, but you can compare the DNA of the resistant strain to your samples of earlier strains and see whether the resistant strain is merely a subset of the old or is actually something new.
> We got this crap at work. Firewalls didnt help because someone in the office took his notebook home, got infected and then brought notebook into work. Silent infection. You can build multiple firewalls but it is worth nothing if your users dont protect their networks at home.
> The article states that the "scientists" calculated one metronome per 30,000 years and thus concluded that body lice branched off from head lice about 72,000 years ago. What?!?!? How likely is it that mutations really occur on average without much of a deviation from the mean that regularly?
You do have to be careful about that sort of thing. For example, attempts to apply the same logic to language (glottochronology) are not generally accepted by linguists because so much of language change is driven by social factors rather than blind mechanistic processes.
> For all we know, mutations occur in leaps and bounds. It might be very similar to those annoying studies of amortized cost in my algorithms classes. Sure, great, probability theory is great and all, but what about reality?
I'm certainly no expert on this, but there are several things that appear to be working in favor of using mutations as a biological dating system. For one the molecular mutations that form the basis of the method do appear to be the result of blind mechanistic processes - at least if you can avoid the error of measuring parts of the genome that are subject to pressures for or against preservation or change. For another you've got the Law of Large Numbers working in your favor, both in terms of the size of the DNA molecule and the number of generations. Unless we're missing something these factors should conspire to give us an expected value for the mutation rate and an opportunity to average it over a very large number of events (length of DNA * number of generations), allowing us to apply standard statistical methods to calculate an expected value for the number of mutations and a confidence range for it.
Also, we live plenty long enough to measure mutation rates between generations of organisms today, including humans as well as lice and other species. It should be pretty easy to calculate an expected value of number of mutations per unit length of DNA per generation, and see how much variance there is in that number today, and compare that to what our calculations suggest for the evolutionary timescale. (I'm not familiar with the literature on the actual numbers but I know at least some of it has been done, because a few years ago I read something about the typical number of mutations observed in human babies. I'm not citing the number because I don't trust my memory on it. But the fact that they could even name a number goes far toward establishing the kind of model you need for this kind of dating.)
A big problem for the method would be if mutation rates have changes significantly over time, e.g. due to radiation or environmental chemistry, and this kind of stuff is hard to check directly. However, science is "convergent" in the sense that we expect our various theoretical approaches to give the same answer if they are in fact correct, so the fact that this study produces a number that matches the previously established number for when our ancestors left Africa and moved into regions where clothes would be necessary, all adds up to a satisfyingly consistent model of what happened to cause all the relevant observations.
There is of course the epistemological problem of the inability to prove anything in the empirical sciences, but since that problem is unsurmountable we more or less ignore it and take our supportable results as "true" - but not as "Truth" - so long as the explanation seems to work and converges with all our other models for what's going on in the universe. If we discover later that we did something wrong we simply have to revise our results when that time comes, but that's an unavoidable risk we have to take; the only other alternative is to throw up our hands in despair and not try to understand the world at all.
If you want a more expert analysis of any of this you might want to post it as a question on talk.origins, which is inhabited by all manner of biologists, mathematicians, etc., who can daze you with more than you want to know about virtually any topic.
> The logic in the link is that since we can prove lice that live on clothes evolved 100,000 ago, then clothing must have emerged about 100,000 ago.
> Wrong - evolution is _slow_. It could as easily have taken a million years for the lice to make the jump from hair to cloth. In the intervening period, man would have had clothing without clothing-specific lice. So the 100,000 guessat at in the article cannot be right.
Antibiotic resistance happens pretty fast. We've only had antibiotics for about half a century, but we've already got lots of ABR strains, and more keep coming.
Your argument appears to be based on a mistaken assumption about the speed of evolution.
You might also want to consider how many generations of cooties have lived in the past ~70K years.
> Well, according to an article I read yesterday the MSBlast theory of the power blackout in the US and Canada isn't dead just yet. They don't think MSBlast was the reason of the blackout anymore, but that the worm slowed down and crashed monitoring systems. In that way the worm worsened the problem and didn't stop it where it could have been stopped.
Supposedly there are "thousands" of people/organizations already working up lawsuits against that one energy company that's starting to pick up the stink. If it turns out that Blaster had anything to do with it at all, someone's going to get creamed for it.
And you can bet that they'll go after $omebody with deeper pocket$ than whatever punk-ass kiddie it was who released it. With 50,000,000 people inconvenienced and a reported $6,000,000,000 dent in business, we're talking about a sum that would be a concern even to $DEEPPOCKETS.
"The system is under attack from the virus, and we've had more problems with this particular virus this afternoon than any other previous virus in Ontario," said Terry Young, a spokesman for the Ontario's Independent Electricity Market Operator.
> So basically they haven't yet learned how to block port 135 on their networks? And they refer to a worm as a virus. I'm glad I don't live in Ontario right about now.
One suspects that the power companies in that corner of the world are oh-so-glad to have any random excuse right now.
> My cable went out for about 2-3 hours earlier, and even before it went out everythings been slow, and still is.
Yes, due to the state of emergency we'll all have to shoot for "second post" until this dies down, since the internet isn't physically fast enough to let anyone get a "first post" in right now.
> Every time I hear about a huge new worm, I wonder how long until someone finds some huge exploit or something that will wreak major havoc over the entire 'net. What would the effects of that be, in the end? Seems like that would have a major effect on world economy.
Yeah, people would start getting their work done out of sheer boredom.
> MS exploit virus comes out. mysterious patching virus starts making the rounds. massive consequences. we should be doing this more often, kids.
Yeah, I'm working on a worm to kill off the worm that was supposed to fix Blaster, but I've been busy and haven't gotten it out yet. Look for it in your mailboxes tomorrow!
I agree. Too many movies are "about" the special effects these days, which means they are more suitable for use as screensavers than for showing in the cinema.
FWIW, I thought the CGI was the weakest part of Pirates, but since it wasn't the center of attention the film was very enjoyable anyway.
Hopefully within a few years the "newness" of CGI will wear off and producers/directors will go back to making movies rather than extended CGI demos. And maybe text messaging will help speed that day.
> This same thing could happen on Linux, there is nothing stopping a Linux user from running a file attachment. This isn't a MS problem, it is a user education problem.
The difference being that Linux applications don't go out of their way to make it easy for idiots to do what idiots do best.
The general public is never going to be computer savvy, any more than 100 years of experience and probably a few million lost lives has made them automobile savvy. Designing general-use software that requires a high level of user sophistication in order to be rudimentarily secure is as much a design error as designing software that requires three arms to use would be, because the human capability isn't there and never will be.
The fact that it "could" happen on other OSes but isn't, is the best argument that it is MS's fault.
Slashdot Mirror
> Given the Terminator's capabilities it/he is clearly a derivative of Emacs, not Vi.
So we'll keep seeing Terminator sequels until they come out with a model that you can use to read your e-mail?
> Oh no, it's the invasion of the cloned trees!!!!!!! Run for your lives!!!!!!
Gee, I wish I could think of a Standard Slashdot Joke to post in reply to that one.
> SCO is simply lacking a good corporate strategy.
Actually they've adopted a consistent strategy of "say whatever sounds best at the moment", without the least concern for internal consistency. This is a common symptom among the advocates of pseudoscience, and IMO is the most revealing evidence we have that their case is entirely bogus. If they had a leg to stand on they'd stand on it.
> Try going to court sometime without a lawyer. I just got a divorce recently, and it was about as simple a divorce as possible really (no children, mostly separate assets, etc) - and it was still very difficult figuring out courtroom procedure on my own. I had read a damn book on divorce law before I went, too.
> Finally, I paid a lawyer $50 and he told me exactly what to say and when to say it, and he fixed my fucked up documents. Everything went great. My point is, YES, you DEFINITELY need a lawyer to go to court for pretty much anything.
In the general case you're surely correct, though you get rare counterexamples such as the the current one where a fuckwit named Moussaui is singlehandedly making the entire Justice Department look like asses in a tarpit.
> You know, I thought their stock price was getting a little low.
Yeah, but the proximate cause was surely yesterday's revelations. It has become very predictable that every time a news story, press release, or new lawsuit that reflects poorly on their position, they emit a new fr3sh f4rt of even more pompous claims than before.
I was tempted to submit a faux story on this yesterday, knowing darn well that it was coming today, despite not knowing what particular form it would take. Keep this in mind next time there's a big Slashdot story about a new countersuit, a developer/team speaking out, or facts unveiled about the purportedly copied code; you can make the same prediction then.
> Can this thing just end already? When is the US Government, or a federal judge/court system actually going to step in?
Federal judge/court: when a plaintif makes an appropriate filing and it percolates up to the top of the judge's/court's priority queue.
US government: when public outcry makes it an issue for politicians' re-electablity, i.e. never.
> IANAL, so this may be rubbish.
What has the former got to do with the latter?
> antibiotic resistance need not come from mutation. If we kill off all the non-resistant bacteria, then only the resistant are left to propagate, but they haven't developed any new DNA or anything. No evolution, no mutations, so, yes, it happens very quickly. (As soon as you kill off all the non-resistant bacteria.)
Yes, but you can compare the DNA of the resistant strain to your samples of earlier strains and see whether the resistant strain is merely a subset of the old or is actually something new.
> The article's in German, but the pictures speak for themselves.
Maybe it's like the SCO comments, and someone can translate it by substituting English letters for the German ones.
> We got this crap at work. Firewalls didnt help
because someone in the office took his notebook
home, got infected and then brought notebook
into work. Silent infection. You can build
multiple firewalls but it is worth nothing if
your users dont protect their networks at home.
Never heard a better argument for safe sex.
> The article states that the "scientists" calculated one metronome per 30,000 years and thus concluded that body lice branched off from head lice about 72,000 years ago. What?!?!? How likely is it that mutations really occur on average without much of a deviation from the mean that regularly?
You do have to be careful about that sort of thing. For example, attempts to apply the same logic to language (glottochronology) are not generally accepted by linguists because so much of language change is driven by social factors rather than blind mechanistic processes.
> For all we know, mutations occur in leaps and bounds. It might be very similar to those annoying studies of amortized cost in my algorithms classes. Sure, great, probability theory is great and all, but what about reality?
I'm certainly no expert on this, but there are several things that appear to be working in favor of using mutations as a biological dating system. For one the molecular mutations that form the basis of the method do appear to be the result of blind mechanistic processes - at least if you can avoid the error of measuring parts of the genome that are subject to pressures for or against preservation or change. For another you've got the Law of Large Numbers working in your favor, both in terms of the size of the DNA molecule and the number of generations. Unless we're missing something these factors should conspire to give us an expected value for the mutation rate and an opportunity to average it over a very large number of events (length of DNA * number of generations), allowing us to apply standard statistical methods to calculate an expected value for the number of mutations and a confidence range for it.
Also, we live plenty long enough to measure mutation rates between generations of organisms today, including humans as well as lice and other species. It should be pretty easy to calculate an expected value of number of mutations per unit length of DNA per generation, and see how much variance there is in that number today, and compare that to what our calculations suggest for the evolutionary timescale. (I'm not familiar with the literature on the actual numbers but I know at least some of it has been done, because a few years ago I read something about the typical number of mutations observed in human babies. I'm not citing the number because I don't trust my memory on it. But the fact that they could even name a number goes far toward establishing the kind of model you need for this kind of dating.)
A big problem for the method would be if mutation rates have changes significantly over time, e.g. due to radiation or environmental chemistry, and this kind of stuff is hard to check directly. However, science is "convergent" in the sense that we expect our various theoretical approaches to give the same answer if they are in fact correct, so the fact that this study produces a number that matches the previously established number for when our ancestors left Africa and moved into regions where clothes would be necessary, all adds up to a satisfyingly consistent model of what happened to cause all the relevant observations.
There is of course the epistemological problem of the inability to prove anything in the empirical sciences, but since that problem is unsurmountable we more or less ignore it and take our supportable results as "true" - but not as "Truth" - so long as the explanation seems to work and converges with all our other models for what's going on in the universe. If we discover later that we did something wrong we simply have to revise our results when that time comes, but that's an unavoidable risk we have to take; the only other alternative is to throw up our hands in despair and not try to understand the world at all.
If you want a more expert analysis of any of this you might want to post it as a question on talk.origins, which is inhabited by all manner of biologists, mathematicians, etc., who can daze you with more than you want to know about virtually any topic.
> The logic in the link is that since we can prove lice that live on clothes evolved 100,000 ago, then clothing must have emerged about 100,000 ago.
> Wrong - evolution is _slow_. It could as easily have taken a million years for the lice to make the jump from hair to cloth. In the intervening period, man would have had clothing without clothing-specific lice. So the 100,000 guessat at in the article cannot be right.
Antibiotic resistance happens pretty fast. We've only had antibiotics for about half a century, but we've already got lots of ABR strains, and more keep coming.
Your argument appears to be based on a mistaken assumption about the speed of evolution.
You might also want to consider how many generations of cooties have lived in the past ~70K years.
> Or maybe some people actually have a local network that uses port 135!
Argh! My pacemaker!!!
> Two worms enter, one worm leaves!
Heh, just after I clicked "submit" it occured to me that one guy in the Thunderdome was named "Blaster".
> Send a worm to kill a worm!
Two worms enter, one worm leaves!
> Well, according to an article I read yesterday the MSBlast theory of the power blackout in the US and Canada isn't dead just yet. They don't think MSBlast was the reason of the blackout anymore, but that the worm slowed down and crashed monitoring systems. In that way the worm worsened the problem and didn't stop it where it could have been stopped.
Supposedly there are "thousands" of people/organizations already working up lawsuits against that one energy company that's starting to pick up the stink. If it turns out that Blaster had anything to do with it at all, someone's going to get creamed for it.
And you can bet that they'll go after $omebody with deeper pocket$ than whatever punk-ass kiddie it was who released it. With 50,000,000 people inconvenienced and a reported $6,000,000,000 dent in business, we're talking about a sum that would be a concern even to $DEEPPOCKETS.
One suspects that the power companies in that corner of the world are oh-so-glad to have any random excuse right now.
> My cable went out for about 2-3 hours earlier, and even before it went out everythings been slow, and still is.
Yes, due to the state of emergency we'll all have to shoot for "second post" until this dies down, since the internet isn't physically fast enough to let anyone get a "first post" in right now.
> Every time I hear about a huge new worm, I wonder how long until someone finds some huge exploit or something that will wreak major havoc over the entire 'net. What would the effects of that be, in the end? Seems like that would have a major effect on world economy.
Yeah, people would start getting their work done out of sheer boredom.
> MS exploit virus comes out. mysterious patching virus starts making the rounds. massive consequences. we should be doing this more often, kids.
Yeah, I'm working on a worm to kill off the worm that was supposed to fix Blaster, but I've been busy and haven't gotten it out yet. Look for it in your mailboxes tomorrow!
> When the power went, ham radio operators, using battery backup power, were able to help coordinate emergancy workers
Now that that emergancy is over, maybe they can pitch in and help with Slashdot's spelling emergancy.
Here, eat some of this shit. Don't tell anyone that it tastes like... well, shit. Our business model, you ask? As follows:
1. Produce crap.
2. Hope enough suckers buy it before it's categorized as crap.
3. Profit!!!
I think #3 has to be revised to -
3. Profit | blame modern communications technology !!!
Of course that might infringe on a RIAA business method patent.
> Personally, I blame it all on CGI.
I agree. Too many movies are "about" the special effects these days, which means they are more suitable for use as screensavers than for showing in the cinema.
FWIW, I thought the CGI was the weakest part of Pirates, but since it wasn't the center of attention the film was very enjoyable anyway.
Hopefully within a few years the "newness" of CGI will wear off and producers/directors will go back to making movies rather than extended CGI demos. And maybe text messaging will help speed that day.
> > SoBig.F
> Wow, this must be an old virus if it is written in Fortran.
Either that, or they're trying to tell you what kind of -ing deal it is.
> This same thing could happen on Linux, there is nothing stopping a Linux user from running a file attachment. This isn't a MS problem, it is a user education problem.
The difference being that Linux applications don't go out of their way to make it easy for idiots to do what idiots do best.
The general public is never going to be computer savvy, any more than 100 years of experience and probably a few million lost lives has made them automobile savvy. Designing general-use software that requires a high level of user sophistication in order to be rudimentarily secure is as much a design error as designing software that requires three arms to use would be, because the human capability isn't there and never will be.
The fact that it "could" happen on other OSes but isn't, is the best argument that it is MS's fault.