Touche`. But then again, I hear that has a lot to do with their vendor notification policy on security issues. They are at least in the business of doing the Right Thing, even if they take their sweet time about it.
And I just thought of another good, centralized repository of virus and security info: Bugtraq. I don't know that they're largest or most authoritative in the world, but I think they're certainly worthy of notice.
Anyone else have a favorite repository of security info that the original poster in this thread missed?
They were the first ones to provide what the industry needed for so many years: a centralized repository of information and knowledge about malicious code -- one that hasn't been replicated...
Um... Not sure if you meant that to be a troll or not. But how about CERT?
And by the way, Symantec isn't doing these things out of the goodness of their hearts. They're a business, and they do it because (directly or indirectly) it brings in money. Crow about their accomplishments if you like, but don't make them out like they're Mother Teresa's Sisters of Digital Mercy - they're a large business, and therefore (practically by definition) almost certainly amoral.
Troll point number 2: I don't know why you think it takes more or less skill to detect a virus not in the wild than one in the wild. That's inane. I'd actually think that figuring out the ones in the wild would be harder, since they're the ones original enough to get through emplaced defenses in the first place.
As soon as people start organising in this perfidious fashion, we become less like the bazaar, and more like the Cathedral.
I think you're confusing chaos with self-organization. What makes the bazaar model interesting is not that it is chaotic - I've worked in places where chaos drives software development, and the results are decidedly not the sort of quality you see in Linux and GIMP.
What makes the bazaar model interesting is that it is self-organizing (as opposed to order imposed by authority and hierarchy, as in the cathedral model). A central repository for projects would not (and indeed, could not) be "central" in the sense of being an authority or a single access point, but could increase effeciency by reducing redundant effort and by acting as a one-stop-shopping site - archive, documentation, and "help wanted" all together. And, in fact, bazaar-model projects commonly evolve such central repositories as they scale - including various famous FTP archives, gnu.org, sourceforge.net, and the Gutenberg Project.
An input device such as this could lead to unprecedented speed and accuracy for first posters! You could set a "Twitch Macro(tm)" to type "FP!" and hit the "Submit" button.
As for actual piloting or other safety-critical applications, though, I have to admit skepticism. Anything where fidgeting could actually result in death should probably be discouraged.
For that matter, what happens if he has a clonic seizure? Or too much coffee? Or Tourette's? All kinds of weird disaster scenarios you could attach to this one...
"Tonight at 11, the story of how 438 people died aboard an airliner when the pilot moved to swat a gnat."
More on topic: It's apparent that some people don't see the value in a formal methodologies. Not that you can blame them; some of the more popular OO methodologies, for example, are too cumbersome for any but the largest companies that can afford to subsidize the related management overhead.
OTOH, it strikes me as sheer laziness to dismiss all methodologies out-of-hand. I'll have to express doubt that the original poster in this thread has worked on a non-trivial project involving more than two coders - it's possible, but it seems unlikely. Even the most coherent thinkers, when working in teams, need to have some guidelines to keep the code readable, the object design coherent, and the work on track toward well-defined business goals.
Of course, that doesn't mean you have to Get Religion and follow Booch or XP or pure structured programming, but it does mean implementing and enforcing things like coding standards, code reviews, estimates, and some measurement of the progress against the goals.
Despite the fact that it's a legal document, that has to be one of the most lucid and ironclad expositions of the software-as-free-speech argument that I've ever seen. Add to that the huge body of legal support cited, and the bona-fides of the participants, and this is a mighty big stick.
Now we just have to hope that the appeals court can connect enough brain cells to comprehend it.
Well, unlike your oh-so-carefully-constructed example, there could actually be a cause and effect. Our new Nitwit-in-Chief has control over appointments at the FTC, and with a cudgel like that can probably pretty much get them to behave as he pleases. Given that his party is generally the more friendly of the two toward predatory businesses, it doesn't seem so far out.
I tell ya man, you should be a television critic with the complete lack of depth with which you view something before deciding to attack it...
...as an odd coincidence (or at least as a dark omen) that less than a week after Baby Bush was installed in the Oval Office, the FTC coughs up a decision this friendly to a shitsack business interest? Maybe one really has nothing to do with the other, but it's hard not to infer a correlation.
I've seen a few posts where people seem to be getting pretty worked up over whether or not Pluto is getting what amounts to Full Member or Associate Member status in the Solar System. The question nobody seems to be asking is: Who cares?
Whether or not Pluto gets labeled with the "p" word is not, to my thinking, significant. It's still a major object in the Solar System, and should be mentioned during everyone's science education, just like more minor (but still significant) non-planetary objects such as Eros, Phobos and Deimos, or the better-known comets. The more interesting point to this story is not what someone chooses to call Pluto, but the proportion of ignoramuses who don't know it exists to begin with.
For those who can't get over the question of whether or not Pluto is a planet, I suggest that we should leave its status open to question, like a certain letter of the alphabet:
Vowels: A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.
Planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and maybe Pluto.
...but it had a couple of disappointing bits. The line about the earth being covered with people shoulder-to-shoulder and glowing red hot from electricity consumption by 2600 is exactly the sort of facile linear projection of Last Week's Best Numbers that I would not have expected from someone like Hawking - unless he was saying it to get a laugh.
Anyway, just my US$2e-2.
OK,
- B --
I tried to stop myself...
on
Stop, Light.
·
· Score: 1
Yes, but I don't think anyone's talking about an atom-for-atom copy here. Though that would certainly be interesting - instead of backing up my brain, what if I could back up my entire self? Now that has some weird implications, and would be an exception to the twin brother argument.
That's a legit perspective - the "twin brother" argument is compelling - but I maintain that subjectively I'd be alive.
(Hmm... How does one pursue this without horribly abusing the first person singular subjective pronoun? This is a sign that this would be a Very Big Development - the structure of our language can't handle it.)
Anyway, in the case of prematurely activating my clone with a copy of my memories, there would then exist two people who subjectively (and I contend legitimately) believe themselves to be me. Each would have (and feel) the full body of my experiences and memories continuous until the last backup. Certainly, they'd be diverging as individuals starting from the first picosecond, but I still say they're both (hypothetically) me.
It also brings up an interesting hypothetical question of who gets to use "my" driver's license, SSN, etc., in the case of premature clone activation...
I dunno... If it gets so I can keep a spare body or personalized organ bank around, and if someone thinks up a way for me to make weekly backups of my brain/memories/personality... Well, I can come close, now can't I?
Admittedly, it would take a whole lot of infrastructure, not a little wealth, and a number of scientific advances that nobody knows for a fact are possible (or impossible). Still, I hold out hope.
I feel certain this is just flamebait, but I can't help myself.
Kid, the fact that your attention span is too short for Clarke - and probably Heinlein, Asimov, Dick, Lem, and the century's other great writers of science/speculative fiction - is no reason to assume that Snow Crash (or whichever of Stephenson's urban dystopia stroke books is your favorite) is automatically better.
And what the hell is wrong with being a sociologist? At least such authors actually examine the human condition and comment on it, rather than the three-bong-hit gadget inventors who seem as though they must spend all day saying, "DUDE! Wouldn't it be so cool if, like, you could be on the Internet, like with swords and shit?"
<rant>
What is it with people who can't get their heads around fiction that moves at a more contemplative pace, or doesn't involve swords, guns, virtual reality, martial arts gurus, and oh-so-boringly-stereotyped, lone-wolf-with-a-cheesy-Jungian-dark-side male protagonists? I thought reading was supposed to encourage deep critical thinking, but more and more it just seems to be encouraging the TV generation in their degenerate mental habits.
</rant>
Anyway, if it's what you enjoy, get out the Vaseline and cue up Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel in your DVD player, kiddo - because that's the kind of crap cinema that comes from the flash-heavy sci-fi you think is so much better than the "old school" you like to dis.
Call me back when they produce something as interesting as 2001
Yowza! But what about...
on
Space Diving
·
· Score: 1
...the amount of training this would require? I should think that participants would have to be accomplished skydivers, and would have to learn a long list of both obvious and non-obvious DON'T-DO-THIS rules to keep from burning up or hitting a mountainside at terminal velocity.
Anyone know any more about the details?
ObBowieReference: "Ground control to Major Tom..."
...but it does point up in the strongest terms what many/. readers already believe: To maintain the vitality of the 'Net, we must continue to increase our use of strong end-to-end crypto in both communications and storage (PGP/GPG and encrypted filesystems), keep using and inventing tools that thwart jurisdictional boundaries and draconian search-and seizure rules (eternity services, encrypted filesystems again) and most importantly, keep up the social and political activism to raise public awareness and pressure governments to respect individual privacy and free speech.
This is probably one of the more relevant and interesting posts here in a long time. Kudos to the moderators.
Slashdot Mirror
And I just thought of another good, centralized repository of virus and security info: Bugtraq. I don't know that they're largest or most authoritative in the world, but I think they're certainly worthy of notice.
Anyone else have a favorite repository of security info that the original poster in this thread missed?
OK,
- B
--
Um... Not sure if you meant that to be a troll or not. But how about CERT?
And by the way, Symantec isn't doing these things out of the goodness of their hearts. They're a business, and they do it because (directly or indirectly) it brings in money. Crow about their accomplishments if you like, but don't make them out like they're Mother Teresa's Sisters of Digital Mercy - they're a large business, and therefore (practically by definition) almost certainly amoral.
Troll point number 2: I don't know why you think it takes more or less skill to detect a virus not in the wild than one in the wild. That's inane. I'd actually think that figuring out the ones in the wild would be harder, since they're the ones original enough to get through emplaced defenses in the first place.
In the future, remember: Think, then post.
OK,
- B
--
I think you're confusing chaos with self-organization. What makes the bazaar model interesting is not that it is chaotic - I've worked in places where chaos drives software development, and the results are decidedly not the sort of quality you see in Linux and GIMP.
What makes the bazaar model interesting is that it is self-organizing (as opposed to order imposed by authority and hierarchy, as in the cathedral model). A central repository for projects would not (and indeed, could not) be "central" in the sense of being an authority or a single access point, but could increase effeciency by reducing redundant effort and by acting as a one-stop-shopping site - archive, documentation, and "help wanted" all together. And, in fact, bazaar-model projects commonly evolve such central repositories as they scale - including various famous FTP archives, gnu.org, sourceforge.net, and the Gutenberg Project.
OK,
- B
--
As for actual piloting or other safety-critical applications, though, I have to admit skepticism. Anything where fidgeting could actually result in death should probably be discouraged.
OK,
- B
--
"Tonight at 11, the story of how 438 people died aboard an airliner when the pilot moved to swat a gnat."
OK,
- B
--
Maybe I'm just slow... Please explain the difference for me?
OK,
- B
--
Stroustrup,
Bentley,
etc...
Somebody PLEASE mod that up...
More on topic: It's apparent that some people don't see the value in a formal methodologies. Not that you can blame them; some of the more popular OO methodologies, for example, are too cumbersome for any but the largest companies that can afford to subsidize the related management overhead.
OTOH, it strikes me as sheer laziness to dismiss all methodologies out-of-hand. I'll have to express doubt that the original poster in this thread has worked on a non-trivial project involving more than two coders - it's possible, but it seems unlikely. Even the most coherent thinkers, when working in teams, need to have some guidelines to keep the code readable, the object design coherent, and the work on track toward well-defined business goals.
Of course, that doesn't mean you have to Get Religion and follow Booch or XP or pure structured programming, but it does mean implementing and enforcing things like coding standards, code reviews, estimates, and some measurement of the progress against the goals.
OK,
- B
--
Now we just have to hope that the appeals court can connect enough brain cells to comprehend it.
OK,
- B
--
I tell ya man, you should be a television critic with the complete lack of depth with which you view something before deciding to attack it...
OK,
- B
--
Just my US$2e-02.
OK,
- B
--
Whether or not Pluto gets labeled with the "p" word is not, to my thinking, significant. It's still a major object in the Solar System, and should be mentioned during everyone's science education, just like more minor (but still significant) non-planetary objects such as Eros, Phobos and Deimos, or the better-known comets. The more interesting point to this story is not what someone chooses to call Pluto, but the proportion of ignoramuses who don't know it exists to begin with.
For those who can't get over the question of whether or not Pluto is a planet, I suggest that we should leave its status open to question, like a certain letter of the alphabet:
Vowels: A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y.
Planets: Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and maybe Pluto.
OK,
- B
--
Hmm. Looks like someone is running around modding down all the anit-Katz comments. Let's see if he get's this one...
--
Anyway, just my US$2e-2.
OK,
- B
--
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those!
There! I said it! Ha!
OK,
- B
--
OK,
- B
--
Wish I could mod this up as funny. ;)
OK,
- B
--
OK,
- B
--
(Hmm... How does one pursue this without horribly abusing the first person singular subjective pronoun? This is a sign that this would be a Very Big Development - the structure of our language can't handle it.)
Anyway, in the case of prematurely activating my clone with a copy of my memories, there would then exist two people who subjectively (and I contend legitimately) believe themselves to be me. Each would have (and feel) the full body of my experiences and memories continuous until the last backup. Certainly, they'd be diverging as individuals starting from the first picosecond, but I still say they're both (hypothetically) me.
It also brings up an interesting hypothetical question of who gets to use "my" driver's license, SSN, etc., in the case of premature clone activation...
OK,
- B
--
I dunno... If it gets so I can keep a spare body or personalized organ bank around, and if someone thinks up a way for me to make weekly backups of my brain/memories/personality... Well, I can come close, now can't I?
Admittedly, it would take a whole lot of infrastructure, not a little wealth, and a number of scientific advances that nobody knows for a fact are possible (or impossible). Still, I hold out hope.
OK,
- B
--
OK,
- B
--
Kid, the fact that your attention span is too short for Clarke - and probably Heinlein, Asimov, Dick, Lem, and the century's other great writers of science/speculative fiction - is no reason to assume that Snow Crash (or whichever of Stephenson's urban dystopia stroke books is your favorite) is automatically better.
And what the hell is wrong with being a sociologist? At least such authors actually examine the human condition and comment on it, rather than the three-bong-hit gadget inventors who seem as though they must spend all day saying, "DUDE! Wouldn't it be so cool if, like, you could be on the Internet, like with swords and shit?"
<rant>
What is it with people who can't get their heads around fiction that moves at a more contemplative pace, or doesn't involve swords, guns, virtual reality, martial arts gurus, and oh-so-boringly-stereotyped, lone-wolf-with-a-cheesy-Jungian-dark-side male protagonists? I thought reading was supposed to encourage deep critical thinking, but more and more it just seems to be encouraging the TV generation in their degenerate mental habits.
</rant>
Anyway, if it's what you enjoy, get out the Vaseline and cue up Johnny Mnemonic and New Rose Hotel in your DVD player, kiddo - because that's the kind of crap cinema that comes from the flash-heavy sci-fi you think is so much better than the "old school" you like to dis.
Call me back when they produce something as interesting as 2001
OK,
- B
--
Sorry, couldn't pass that one up...
OK,
-B
--
Anyone know any more about the details?
ObBowieReference: "Ground control to Major Tom..."
OK,
- B
--
This is probably one of the more relevant and interesting posts here in a long time. Kudos to the moderators.
Keep it up, y'all.
OK,
- B
--
OK,
- B
--