Yes, you're absolutely right. It *couldn't* have had *anything* to do with *your* own neglegence regarding security, could it?
In the end, securing your box is your responsibility, and not anyone else's.
I keep up-to-date on OS patches, use Norton AntiVirus, run Ad-Aware regularly, and have a hardware firewall. What's your point? Are you saying that I shoud be thrown in jail on kiddie porn charges for not spending even more of my valuable time worrying about the security of my home computer?
You can't download kiddie porn from the internet. How long do you think a web site hosting genuine k-porn would last? People get a little common sense please.
Yes you can. Read my other post in this thread for proof of this. The hosts in question were in Russia, or somesuch.
I had something like this happen to me, but fortunately I wasn't arrested or fired: One day a while back I decided to clean up my Windoze computer a bit and logged into the default account, which I hadn't logged into in a long, long time -- typically I log into my own account. There were a few shortcuts on the desktop that I hadn't remembered puting there, so I double clicked on one of them and it took me to a kiddie porn site. I was not amused. The other shortcuts were also to kiddie porn sites.
I called up my ex-girlfriend, since she was the only other person who had ever used this computer, and I started ranting at her about how could she have been so cruel as to play that kind of practical joke on me. She clearly had no idea, however, what I was talking about.
So, it must have been some sort of virus, worm, trojan horse, or web-based vandalism that put those links there. Thank goodness I found them before letting a guest use the default account!
Actually, modern operating systems such as any modern operating system are not affected by this flaw.
Actually, in my experience, Red Hat Linux has indeed been quite affected by this flaw. Perhaps they have finally made up their minds, but in the past, they kept changing various default settings so that with every new release of Red Hat, what you previously had configured for doing rubouts would break. Also, how Red Hat configured things was typically not compatible with how Sun had things configured, so if you lived in a Red Hat/Sun hetergenous workplace, it was quite a challenge to get rubout to work consistently with all the possible combinations of platform and terminal emulator in use via remote X invocation.
And let me tell you, it's quite frustrating to ssh to another computer or bring up a remote X window and get ^H or ^? or worse when you try to rubout a typing mistake!
Wouldn't it be better if the cost of the average computer came down instead of the minimum hardware spec going up?>
Well, that's just un-American! Corporate Uncle Sam needs you to spend all your savings and fuel the economic gears that have made our nation the greatest the world has ever seen. God bless.
Perhaps the MIT scientist wasn't joking about paramecium after all.... I just did a search on Zeilinger, and apparently he is planning on doing the two-slit experiment with viruses next!
Has anyone done it with buckyballs? The MIT scientist who did it with sodium atoms claimed that it would work even for paramecium, if only he had graduate students patient enough to wait two years for each paramecium to travel down the vacuum tube at the slow velocity it would have to be going to have a big enough wavelength.
I think he was joking, of course. But you never know....
Here's the spooky quantum-mechanical part - the same interference effect happens even if the projector is designed to only emit one photon at a time, then wait until it has hit the wall (or the board) before sending another. You will still get the bands of dark and light.
What's even spookier is that the experiment turns out the same if you replace the photons with sodium molecules!
Your transaction number has a 90% probability of being between 8765432 and 8765478.
That's assuming the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. Using the Many Worlds interpretation, your bank account will be in a superposition of these different values, and then when you go to check your bank balance, your brain in will in a superposition of being rich and being poor.
I think that in the future fetching my money from the bank is going to give me a headache.
Clearly you just didn't get the aesthetic -- it wasn't supposed to be believable. Snowcrash was originally supposed to be a graphic novel -- i.e., a comic book -- but the artist bailed or flaked out, so Stephenson decided to make it into a text novel instead, while keeping the comic book sensibility. That's one of the reasons why the book is so interesting and groundbreaking. This crossbreeding of mediums had not been attempted much previously. Or at least not so successfully.
I've lived near Boston for the last 23 years, and I love it. It has a fantastic music scene, incredible food, plenty of art-house film venues, and there's always something interesting going on. The pretty 'burb I live in is only fifteen minutes away from the city (if you don't drive during rush hour.) Montreal, NYC, and beautiful countryside are just a car-ride away, and did I mention that it has incredible food?
On the other hand, the cost of housing is ridiculously expensive, and sitting in the traffic really sucks.
but after years of working across the street from this location, I can absolutely attest that indiscrimnately letting people in the building out of some doctrinaire "hacker" ideal is a poor idea. Not because of secrecy but because they'll steal my CDs or computer peripherals.
I work at MIT half a block from the new building. During the day, my building is unlocked and anyone can enter and walk around in it. The vast majority of MIT is operated this way, and it is a good thing. No one has ever stolen my CD's or my computer periperhals, though I do have to be careful to lock my office door when I leave it, even to go to the bathroom.
MIT just has a different security model than most businesses. At MIT, the security is usually at the office door, rather than at the front door. I consider this to be a good thing, since it allows students to more easily interact with professors and researchers, and for researchers and professors who work in different buildings to more easily interact with each other.
The Computer Science labs at MIT, as opposed to the main campus of MIT, for a long time have used the front-door security model because they've been in rented space, rather than on the MIT campus proper. Now that they've moved to the campus, where they belong, I should think that they would want join the main MIT culture in their security model too.
Another book that folks interested in the topic of infinity might want to read is the book Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker. He's a great popular math/science writer, a math professor, and a seminal science fiction author. This book is easy to read, yet is accurate and informative enough to have been used as a textbook in MIT's Infinity and Paradox course. The book is a bit heavy on Rucker's Buddhist philosophy, but it is easy to ignore that stuff if you don't go for it and stick to the math.
I'm not sure why you would think that time is any less real than space. By your own argument, how can you prove that space has any physical reality? To many quantum gravity theorists, neither time nor space are fundamental -- the only fundamental things are certain sorts of events. Everything else, including both time and space, are just convenient representations for the human mind to perceive the patterns that occur among those events.
I'm not saying that your argument is wrong -- I'm just saying that you haven't taken it far enough, and once you take it to its logical conclusion, you quickly come to realise that time is just as real (or unreal) as everything else that we typically consider to be real.
Yes, sometimes Slashdotters amaze me. Back when the mini iPod was first announced, I modded down a Score 5 post as flamebait which said that someone at Apple was going to lose their job over this product. My moderation was then meta-moderated as unfair.
The fact that the original poster could be so out of touch with reality, and that then so many moderators could be so out of touch was reality, and then that the meta-moderator could so out of touch with reality just stunned me. This clearly was going to be a HUGE product because it is small, light, and cute, while preserving the wonder iPod interface. And most people (unlike me) don't need to carry around more than 100 CD's in their pocket at any given time. Personally, I want a 500 gig iPod, but I'll settle for my 20 gig one for the time being.
In any case, I have the last laugh: original poster who was so cocky and sure of himself, and meta-moderator, don't you feel silly now!
If the law said people which commited copyright infringement should have their fingers cut off, a judge would pronounce that sentence on violators. And I don't think there would be anything in the constitution against that either.
Yes there is: the eighth amendment, which bans "cruel and unusual punishment".
|>oug
Is post-Singularity the next big thing in SF?
on
Singularity Sky
·
· Score: 1
He fills this somewhat slim book with more ideas than any 10 other books from the section his work inhabits at the bookstore.
Clearly you are referring to a bookstore that does not carry the works of Greg Egan, whose books are often dizzying in the density of ideas they contain.
But that's not what I wanted to talk about. Instead, your post reminded me that at the recent Arisia con, I was in a discussion group that was trying to decide what the next big thing in Science Fiction would be, now that all the previous big things seem to have died out or ossified. I suggested post-Singularity works.
Of course, on the other hand, writing about the unimaginable can, I imagine, be quite difficult at times, and also, since the nature of humanity may change radically, readers of today may not be able to identify very well with what we are likely to become.
To this day it is not clear that the physical world is at all truly probabilistic. Bohm's interpretation of QM is completely deterministic, as is the Many Worlds interpretation. As I understand it, the Many Worlds interpretation is gaining a lot of ground among physicists and philosophers, as the Copenhagen interpretation is not a complete theory, since it never defines just what an "observation" is supposed to be, exactly, or to explain why such a thing should be enshrined into our fundamental laws of physics.
|>oug
Re:In case of slashdotting....
on
Paranoia
·
· Score: -1, Redundant
Perhaps you will cite the appropriate passages. I did skim the FA and all I saw was a bunch of whining about how their "national asset" of.nu had been stolen from them and used to hawk pornography.
They should have thought about all this before they sold the domain, and if they want a domain that is under their control, they should get a new one assigned to them.
By all accounts, it seems that they would not be interested in the.nu domain if someone else hadn't first proven that there is money to be made in it.
Slashdot Mirror
|>oug
|>oug
|>oug
I had something like this happen to me, but fortunately I wasn't arrested or fired: One day a while back I decided to clean up my Windoze computer a bit and logged into the default account, which I hadn't logged into in a long, long time -- typically I log into my own account. There were a few shortcuts on the desktop that I hadn't remembered puting there, so I double clicked on one of them and it took me to a kiddie porn site. I was not amused. The other shortcuts were also to kiddie porn sites.
I called up my ex-girlfriend, since she was the only other person who had ever used this computer, and I started ranting at her about how could she have been so cruel as to play that kind of practical joke on me. She clearly had no idea, however, what I was talking about.
So, it must have been some sort of virus, worm, trojan horse, or web-based vandalism that put those links there. Thank goodness I found them before letting a guest use the default account!
|>oug
And let me tell you, it's quite frustrating to ssh to another computer or bring up a remote X window and get ^H or ^? or worse when you try to rubout a typing mistake!
|>oug
|>oug
Perhaps the MIT scientist wasn't joking about paramecium after all.... I just did a search on Zeilinger, and apparently he is planning on doing the two-slit experiment with viruses next!
|>oug
Has anyone done it with buckyballs? The MIT scientist who did it with sodium atoms claimed that it would work even for paramecium, if only he had graduate students patient enough to wait two years for each paramecium to travel down the vacuum tube at the slow velocity it would have to be going to have a big enough wavelength.
I think he was joking, of course. But you never know....
|>oug
I haven't heard of Cramer's Interpretation before. What does it buy us that Bohm's doesn't?
|>oug
|>oug
I think that in the future fetching my money from the bank is going to give me a headache.
|>oug
|>oug
Just FYI, there is a web site devote to feral children.
|>oug
I've lived near Boston for the last 23 years, and I love it. It has a fantastic music scene, incredible food, plenty of art-house film venues, and there's always something interesting going on. The pretty 'burb I live in is only fifteen minutes away from the city (if you don't drive during rush hour.) Montreal, NYC, and beautiful countryside are just a car-ride away, and did I mention that it has incredible food?
On the other hand, the cost of housing is ridiculously expensive, and sitting in the traffic really sucks.
|>oug
I came to MIT for college from New York and I stayed. (I stayed not only in Boston, but also at MIT.)
|>oug
MIT just has a different security model than most businesses. At MIT, the security is usually at the office door, rather than at the front door. I consider this to be a good thing, since it allows students to more easily interact with professors and researchers, and for researchers and professors who work in different buildings to more easily interact with each other.
The Computer Science labs at MIT, as opposed to the main campus of MIT, for a long time have used the front-door security model because they've been in rented space, rather than on the MIT campus proper. Now that they've moved to the campus, where they belong, I should think that they would want join the main MIT culture in their security model too.
|>oug
Another book that folks interested in the topic of infinity might want to read is the book Infinity and the Mind by Rudy Rucker. He's a great popular math/science writer, a math professor, and a seminal science fiction author. This book is easy to read, yet is accurate and informative enough to have been used as a textbook in MIT's Infinity and Paradox course. The book is a bit heavy on Rucker's Buddhist philosophy, but it is easy to ignore that stuff if you don't go for it and stick to the math.
|>oug
I'm not sure why you would think that time is any less real than space. By your own argument, how can you prove that space has any physical reality? To many quantum gravity theorists, neither time nor space are fundamental -- the only fundamental things are certain sorts of events. Everything else, including both time and space, are just convenient representations for the human mind to perceive the patterns that occur among those events.
I'm not saying that your argument is wrong -- I'm just saying that you haven't taken it far enough, and once you take it to its logical conclusion, you quickly come to realise that time is just as real (or unreal) as everything else that we typically consider to be real.
|>oug
Yes, sometimes Slashdotters amaze me. Back when the mini iPod was first announced, I modded down a Score 5 post as flamebait which said that someone at Apple was going to lose their job over this product. My moderation was then meta-moderated as unfair.
The fact that the original poster could be so out of touch with reality, and that then so many moderators could be so out of touch was reality, and then that the meta-moderator could so out of touch with reality just stunned me. This clearly was going to be a HUGE product because it is small, light, and cute, while preserving the wonder iPod interface. And most people (unlike me) don't need to carry around more than 100 CD's in their pocket at any given time. Personally, I want a 500 gig iPod, but I'll settle for my 20 gig one for the time being.
In any case, I have the last laugh: original poster who was so cocky and sure of himself, and meta-moderator, don't you feel silly now!
|>oug
|>oug
But that's not what I wanted to talk about. Instead, your post reminded me that at the recent Arisia con, I was in a discussion group that was trying to decide what the next big thing in Science Fiction would be, now that all the previous big things seem to have died out or ossified. I suggested post-Singularity works.
Of course, on the other hand, writing about the unimaginable can, I imagine, be quite difficult at times, and also, since the nature of humanity may change radically, readers of today may not be able to identify very well with what we are likely to become.
|>oug
To this day it is not clear that the physical world is at all truly probabilistic. Bohm's interpretation of QM is completely deterministic, as is the Many Worlds interpretation. As I understand it, the Many Worlds interpretation is gaining a lot of ground among physicists and philosophers, as the Copenhagen interpretation is not a complete theory, since it never defines just what an "observation" is supposed to be, exactly, or to explain why such a thing should be enshrined into our fundamental laws of physics.
|>oug
Umm, can slashdot itself be slashdotted?
|>oug
With LCD displays that big, why bother with windows at all? Replace all your windows with giant LCD displays, and anyone can live next to the beach.
|>oug
Perhaps you will cite the appropriate passages. I did skim the FA and all I saw was a bunch of whining about how their "national asset" of .nu had been stolen from them and used to hawk pornography.
.nu domain if someone else hadn't first proven that there is money to be made in it.
They should have thought about all this before they sold the domain, and if they want a domain that is under their control, they should get a new one assigned to them.
By all accounts, it seems that they would not be interested in the