Appeal to fear, in fact, isn't a logical fallacy at all -- it's one of the central routes to persuasion.
That said, it doesn't always work. Those items specified above, almost certainly wouldn't work, because they lack many of the elements necessary to make a fear appeal successful.
There's tons of apps...SoftwareTime is one of them... http://www.softwaretime.com/ It looks pretty robust, probably takes advantage of a fair amount of the features built into Windows, by the looks of some of the interface screens.
Windows NT platforms support some amazingly granular access permissions, and permission-use auditing. Anything from changing the permissions of the audited object, to auditing mere access to it, stored in the audit's log in the Event Viewer.
Trouble is, unless this was specifically enabled, it didn't record anything -- auditing is typically not done, since it's a performance hit (think double the number of system calls every time an audited object is hit) and it makes logfiles fill up very quickly.
I bought my Canon S70 from BestChoiceDigital.com, a camera store from NY that is probably just a little storefront in Manhatten somewhere.
The site looks a bit dodgy and doesn't always render correctly, but the prices are insane. And let me tell you, they're no scam by any means. They called me to verify my shipping information since it was different from my credit card billing address, and had my camera within a week. And it works flawlessly.
I'd buy from them again in a heartbeat. Their price on a Rebel XT beats Best Buy employee pricing even, and since I know they're aboveboard, I'm happy.
I'd love for error messages to include both "user" and "professional" components, maybe something like:
[ERROR] We're sorry, but the task you tried to perform could not be completed because of an error on the network. Please try again later.
Detailed information: Method updateFromResource() returned "500 Internal Server Error" in response to an XML-RPC call to SERVERNAME. [/ERROR]
This gives a technician an idea of what is going on (the server went down, the resource doesn't exist, the network stack is broken and can't open the socket, etc.) and the usergets a friendly message saying what happened.
This approach would, in fact, not be psychologically intimidating: people, once they have obtained information one way, ignore redundancies of that information immediately following it. Thusly, for people whom "there was an error" is an informative error, they would just ignore the second part. For people that can understand the error codes, the first part gives no information, so only the second part is relevant and understood.
I bought a Tablet PC to take notes on, and I'd credit it with raising my GPA by a full point.
I also use the wifi feature to pull up Wikipedia articles on information which we are talking about in class...professor mentions antipsychotic drugs, I can raise up an article on Haloperidol and show it to the person next to me who is asking what the hell the professor is talking about, etc.
It's a great resource, although I do have to actively fight off the temptation to play solitare/winmine/pinball/inkball/mshearts actively instead of listening to the lecture like I should.
Will it still work as a regular IPv4 NAT router as well? Or just an IPv6 router? Or does Earthlink provide a 6-to-4 bridge that isn't horribly high latency so we could still play games, etc. over it?
And of those 4.3x1020 addresses, your upstream United States ISP will give you exactly one. And charge for a "Home Networking" package to give you more addresses, or make you buy a NATv6 router.
Myth, and any other F/OSS project, could easily meet the requirements for the content providers to allow for Linux support if two things happened:
(1) The Linux kernal presented a fixed, stable binary interface for the content providers and hardware designers to write against, allowing them to produce binary driver modules for the hardware and precompiled binaries for the software that wouldn't stop working every minor code revision (For comparison, Windows drivers really only stop working between OS versions, i.e. 2000 to XP, 98 to 2000, etc. XP was a break in this, with XP SP2 breaking a small subset of drivers -- several years after XP Classic was released.)
(2) The users of the F/OSS platform would allow the statement (1) to happen. Which, they won't. Without the ability to write binary modules, rather than having to distribute source code and have it mucked with and compiled to suit the user, the functionality desired will never be available on Linux -- no matter what the market forces dictate. And that ability, to have "closed up" software on Linux, is reviled by everyone who uses the platform more than casually.
In all honesty, there is something to be said for understanding the works of Shakespeare. After all, his stories have formed the basis for countless many other works, some of which are classics in their own right. There is something to be said for simple cultural literacy, which too many people are lacking these days.
I am a young adult. I'm not finished with college, but am well out of high school at this point. At the time, I absolutely hated studying works like Hamlet and Macbeth, The Great Gatsby, etc. However -- now that I've been given that knowledge, I find I am more able to understand references and gimmicks in all manner of situations. Futurama, arguably not on an intellectual plane with much of anything, has incorporated themes and story elements from recognizable classic works.
In addition, knowing a lot of classic literature makes it easier to have an intellectual conversation with someone. Being able to address by reference a complex theme rather than carefully explaining it to the listener saves significant time, by drawing on the cultural commons of experience. This breaks down when the general population -- your average Joe Potsmoker who graduates from today's high schools -- doesn't know the literature, and doesn't care in the slightest about that fact. I'm thankful every day I didn't end up the typical product of the education system that I have seen (apathetic and ignorant) and instead actually retained a fair amount of my drive and motivation in life.
I believe it is very important to maintain the study of older literature, and to augment it with (but not replace it by) the study of more modern literature. I had one English class which blended studies of Hamlet and the Matrix film trilogy. And that was interesting -- I got a good dose of the older materials and a nice dose of new to balance it out and keep my interest when it got slacking a little bit.
If we don't keep up our knowledge of the older literary works, we're missing out as a society. I don't keep up to date on Tom Clancey to get a reference to him, and would be absolutely horrified if anyone made an allusion to J.K. Rowling in any serious context. Rowling may, eventually, come to be realized as writing serious literature, but that takes time and it takes a significant audience being able to draw on that body of work. Those things don't exist yet, for a great many contemporary authors.
Re:Why does Microsoft look so good here?
on
Bad Day To Be Sony
·
· Score: 1
Hooking into API calls is a way to extend OS functionality using third-party handlers. The mechanism itself, while a bit on the strange side and used for barely anything, is harmless. It is the fact that, using the built in extension functionality of the operating system, these applications are able to render themselves invisible -- by overriding filesystem handling instructions with ones which hide their presence.
It's not so much a Microsoft security hole, as an exploit of a feature which has interesting potential but is rarely used.
What are the odds of, you on your next birthday both winning the lottery and being struck by lightning, sequentially?
The probability of that happening is essentially zero. I could probably count on one finger the number of times that has happened in the entirey of human history.
That doesn't make it any less significant for the one guy it did happen to, however.
It's the same thing for evolution...just because the mathematical chance of it happening, was effectively zero, doesn't make it any less important that it did happen. And, keeping in mind that the measured age of the Universe was something like 134 billion years...that's 134,000,000,000 years at a minimum, there's that much more time for chance to take its course.
Besides, all it takes is the first reaction to go "right" and you've got the framework from which evolution could progress. There's a guy in California, who recently came to speak at the University of Central Florida, who has created working cells from raw materials. Now admittedly they don't *do* anything, just produce a single protein from raw materials until they explode, because he can't get the opposite reaction to work, but still -- this guy created, from raw chemicals, a working biological process. He artifically created biological life, in a test tube.
If this guy can do it in a few years of experimenting, what's to say it couldn't have happened naturally given 13.4 billion times the length of his experiment? When you start playing with numbers so big, they all start to mean absolutely nothing at all.
Or, look at the Apollo missions. The analogy I heard presented on the way they had to land was akin to hitting a target the width of a sheet of paper with a basketball on the ground from the top of the Empire State building. That's a very slim chance -- but they did it every time.
I do think that Facebook should crack down on any groups promoting any blatantly illegal activity that there is no grey area on...illegal drug groups, Underage Drinking Club, etc.
That aside, there's little harm in Internet talk. I strongly disapprove of any drug use, but as long as people aren't doing it on my property, it's not really my business.
There has been some research in social psychology basically proving that, for the most part, juries base their decisions on the facts very accurately, and only consider the "tricks" of each side's lawyers when the case is already so far to one side as to make it fruitless in the first place.
I don't have the name of the study at the time of writing this but I can reply to my own comment in a few hours when I get back to where my references are.
What gets me even more is certain activities, 100% legal off property of the school, become punishable offenses on their property.
Take smoking, or even posessing, tobacco or tobacco products (or, for that matter, any medication OTC or prescribed, etc.) As was, for that matter, posessing a cellular phone on your person.
An individual I was friends with a number of years ago, was caught with a pack of cigarettes in her purse by an administrator walking by. She was 18 (legal age for smoking/owning tobacco) and was not smoking them at the time, she just had them in her bag. She was not distributing them to anyone else. She was suspended for ten days and referred to some court or other for community service.
I was entirely disgusted when I heard about it from her.
Even worse is, the law is actually on the side of the school here in Florida, criminalizing activities which in any other context, can't even be construed as annoying, let alone criminal.
This, honestly, is one of the few good human-interest stories I've read on this site.
I think I've been reading for about 5 years now, too.
That's kind of dick that they made you change your name, but, it really wasn't in the spirit of a fantasy roleplaying world, either. I doubt you were singled out for this treatment, but were just a random sweep of names, or some GM happened to be in the same area as you and heard your chat. I've been caught for minor rules infractions in various MUD/MMORPG games when a GM was in the area investigating bugs or responding to player disputes, and they overheard me plotting, and such.
I don't really have any insightful commentary into this story beyond what I wrote, since I despise World of Warcraft with all my heart, and have renounced all MMORPG games many years ago. Just thought I'd share my opinion.
End to end encryption with a negotiated session key (as opposed to a previously known and never transmitted shared key) is useless: a man in the middle will intercept the key exchange and all bets are off with respect to security.
The only real way to do end-to-end encryption is with a preshared key (a long one), or failing that, a long, randomly generated session key protected by a simple password (not so good but okay.) People always think that end to end encryption on an insecure link is the answer to it, but if the middleboxes are the people you have to worry about, you have to make sure they can't sniff the keys.
I certainly am a fan of end-to-end encryption (I encrypt by default, IM conversations, but they would still fall prey to the weakness I discussed) for preventing bystanders from reading too much...but I don't have anyone else who is willing to use end-to-end crypto for normal transactions.
NAT in place of a Firewall is a terrible, terrible solution.
All IPv6 will mean is that each device will be responsible for its own security, or will have an actual firewall at the network border, rather than having a protocol hack which as a byproduct, blocks packets inbound for which there are no mappings.
Even consumer-grade (Linksys et al.) equipment, running a proper IPv6 setup, could easily have basic firewall functionality built in, for each device MAC attached, allow all traffic/block all traffic/allow traffic only in response to outgoing connections/port forwarding/port triggering.
Of note, my $110 Toshiba HDMI-Upconvert DVD player is less functional than my $30 Apex DVD player from Christmas Past 4 Years Ago.
Skips to shit or blocks while playing any sort of burned disc. Doesn't play MP3 files or JPEG burned to a directory structure as my old player did. Does honor region-coding, unlike that little player. Does honor required sections (the no-skip parts) whereas the Apex player did not.
I don't have an HDTV, I bought the player in expectation, but I am thinking it was a mistake to go for the more expensive, above-board model: for playing DVDs on my standard-defitinion television, it is less functional than my Playstation 2 is. That one, at least, reads all burned DVDs perfectly.
I got hardcore involved with WREK, but that wasn't quite enough, unfortunately. (Ever see anyone with a black hoodie with the station logo on the front and "Music you don't hear on the radio." on the back? That was me.)
Your portrayal of the two flip-sides is 100% my impression, actually.
I don't regret my choice to go to that school, or my choice to leave. It was a learning experience, without a doubt.
I originally started out as a Computer Science major at Georgia Tech. I, however, left that school after my first year, and am studying Psychology at a state university. (I didn't leave because of grades either -- I left with a 4.0 GPA)
I'm way too social of a person for my own good sometimes, and I had a terrible time finding friends who were interested in anything that I liked. Nobody to go to concerts with at the various great venues in Atlanta. Plus, the school was fairly "greek or die" with respect to socialisation, and I despise the Greek system by and large (and I did, in fact, pledge a fraternity despite that) so my options were a bit limited. My impression of most of the other engineers/science majors there was that they were very antisocial, introverted people, whereas I was not.
Having switched to a school with few engineers, and changed my major to an outwardly-focused one, I'm so much happier.
I would bet there are other engineers/computing majors like myself who are smart enough to "hack it" in the program, but for one reason or another, simply cannot deal with the lifestyle that goes along with it.
I don't know about a transistor radio, but until I moved and threw them out, I owned both a 1947-era tube radio, and a 1960s-era tube clockradio, and both still worked reasonably well.
Slashdot Mirror
Appeal to fear, in fact, isn't a logical fallacy at all -- it's one of the central routes to persuasion.
That said, it doesn't always work. Those items specified above, almost certainly wouldn't work, because they lack many of the elements necessary to make a fear appeal successful.
There's tons of apps...SoftwareTime is one of them... http://www.softwaretime.com/
It looks pretty robust, probably takes advantage of a fair amount of the features built into Windows, by the looks of some of the interface screens.
Windows NT platforms support some amazingly granular access permissions, and permission-use auditing. Anything from changing the permissions of the audited object, to auditing mere access to it, stored in the audit's log in the Event Viewer.
Trouble is, unless this was specifically enabled, it didn't record anything -- auditing is typically not done, since it's a performance hit (think double the number of system calls every time an audited object is hit) and it makes logfiles fill up very quickly.
I have a Seagate 103MB (or thereabouts) hard drive from my first PC ever, which still spins up and still has all the original data on it, bit-perfect.
Seagate gets my vote by a wide margin, for that feat.
Wow.
I guess I won't be buying there again.
I bought my Canon S70 from BestChoiceDigital.com, a camera store from NY that is probably just a little storefront in Manhatten somewhere.
The site looks a bit dodgy and doesn't always render correctly, but the prices are insane. And let me tell you, they're no scam by any means. They called me to verify my shipping information since it was different from my credit card billing address, and had my camera within a week. And it works flawlessly.
I'd buy from them again in a heartbeat. Their price on a Rebel XT beats Best Buy employee pricing even, and since I know they're aboveboard, I'm happy.
I'd love for error messages to include both "user" and "professional" components, maybe something like:
[ERROR]
We're sorry, but the task you tried to perform could not be completed because of an error on the network. Please try again later.
Detailed information:
Method updateFromResource() returned "500 Internal Server Error" in response to an XML-RPC call to SERVERNAME.
[/ERROR]
This gives a technician an idea of what is going on (the server went down, the resource doesn't exist, the network stack is broken and can't open the socket, etc.) and the usergets a friendly message saying what happened.
This approach would, in fact, not be psychologically intimidating: people, once they have obtained information one way, ignore redundancies of that information immediately following it. Thusly, for people whom "there was an error" is an informative error, they would just ignore the second part. For people that can understand the error codes, the first part gives no information, so only the second part is relevant and understood.
Brilliant, really.
I bought a Tablet PC to take notes on, and I'd credit it with raising my GPA by a full point.
I also use the wifi feature to pull up Wikipedia articles on information which we are talking about in class...professor mentions antipsychotic drugs, I can raise up an article on Haloperidol and show it to the person next to me who is asking what the hell the professor is talking about, etc.
It's a great resource, although I do have to actively fight off the temptation to play solitare/winmine/pinball/inkball/mshearts actively instead of listening to the lecture like I should.
The Earthlink link is amazing.
Will it still work as a regular IPv4 NAT router as well? Or just an IPv6 router? Or does Earthlink provide a 6-to-4 bridge that isn't horribly high latency so we could still play games, etc. over it?
And of those 4.3x1020 addresses, your upstream United States ISP will give you exactly one. And charge for a "Home Networking" package to give you more addresses, or make you buy a NATv6 router.
Myth, and any other F/OSS project, could easily meet the requirements for the content providers to allow for Linux support if two things happened:
(1) The Linux kernal presented a fixed, stable binary interface for the content providers and hardware designers to write against, allowing them to produce binary driver modules for the hardware and precompiled binaries for the software that wouldn't stop working every minor code revision (For comparison, Windows drivers really only stop working between OS versions, i.e. 2000 to XP, 98 to 2000, etc. XP was a break in this, with XP SP2 breaking a small subset of drivers -- several years after XP Classic was released.)
(2) The users of the F/OSS platform would allow the statement (1) to happen. Which, they won't. Without the ability to write binary modules, rather than having to distribute source code and have it mucked with and compiled to suit the user, the functionality desired will never be available on Linux -- no matter what the market forces dictate. And that ability, to have "closed up" software on Linux, is reviled by everyone who uses the platform more than casually.
In all honesty, there is something to be said for understanding the works of Shakespeare. After all, his stories have formed the basis for countless many other works, some of which are classics in their own right. There is something to be said for simple cultural literacy, which too many people are lacking these days.
I am a young adult. I'm not finished with college, but am well out of high school at this point. At the time, I absolutely hated studying works like Hamlet and Macbeth, The Great Gatsby, etc. However -- now that I've been given that knowledge, I find I am more able to understand references and gimmicks in all manner of situations. Futurama, arguably not on an intellectual plane with much of anything, has incorporated themes and story elements from recognizable classic works.
In addition, knowing a lot of classic literature makes it easier to have an intellectual conversation with someone. Being able to address by reference a complex theme rather than carefully explaining it to the listener saves significant time, by drawing on the cultural commons of experience. This breaks down when the general population -- your average Joe Potsmoker who graduates from today's high schools -- doesn't know the literature, and doesn't care in the slightest about that fact. I'm thankful every day I didn't end up the typical product of the education system that I have seen (apathetic and ignorant) and instead actually retained a fair amount of my drive and motivation in life.
I believe it is very important to maintain the study of older literature, and to augment it with (but not replace it by) the study of more modern literature. I had one English class which blended studies of Hamlet and the Matrix film trilogy. And that was interesting -- I got a good dose of the older materials and a nice dose of new to balance it out and keep my interest when it got slacking a little bit.
If we don't keep up our knowledge of the older literary works, we're missing out as a society. I don't keep up to date on Tom Clancey to get a reference to him, and would be absolutely horrified if anyone made an allusion to J.K. Rowling in any serious context. Rowling may, eventually, come to be realized as writing serious literature, but that takes time and it takes a significant audience being able to draw on that body of work. Those things don't exist yet, for a great many contemporary authors.
Hooking into API calls is a way to extend OS functionality using third-party handlers. The mechanism itself, while a bit on the strange side and used for barely anything, is harmless. It is the fact that, using the built in extension functionality of the operating system, these applications are able to render themselves invisible -- by overriding filesystem handling instructions with ones which hide their presence.
It's not so much a Microsoft security hole, as an exploit of a feature which has interesting potential but is rarely used.
I'd like to bring forward the following:
What are the odds of, you on your next birthday both winning the lottery and being struck by lightning, sequentially?
The probability of that happening is essentially zero. I could probably count on one finger the number of times that has happened in the entirey of human history.
That doesn't make it any less significant for the one guy it did happen to, however.
It's the same thing for evolution...just because the mathematical chance of it happening, was effectively zero, doesn't make it any less important that it did happen. And, keeping in mind that the measured age of the Universe was something like 134 billion years...that's 134,000,000,000 years at a minimum, there's that much more time for chance to take its course.
Besides, all it takes is the first reaction to go "right" and you've got the framework from which evolution could progress. There's a guy in California, who recently came to speak at the University of Central Florida, who has created working cells from raw materials. Now admittedly they don't *do* anything, just produce a single protein from raw materials until they explode, because he can't get the opposite reaction to work, but still -- this guy created, from raw chemicals, a working biological process. He artifically created biological life, in a test tube.
If this guy can do it in a few years of experimenting, what's to say it couldn't have happened naturally given 13.4 billion times the length of his experiment? When you start playing with numbers so big, they all start to mean absolutely nothing at all.
Or, look at the Apollo missions. The analogy I heard presented on the way they had to land was akin to hitting a target the width of a sheet of paper with a basketball on the ground from the top of the Empire State building. That's a very slim chance -- but they did it every time.
I do think that Facebook should crack down on any groups promoting any blatantly illegal activity that there is no grey area on...illegal drug groups, Underage Drinking Club, etc.
That aside, there's little harm in Internet talk. I strongly disapprove of any drug use, but as long as people aren't doing it on my property, it's not really my business.
There has been some research in social psychology basically proving that, for the most part, juries base their decisions on the facts very accurately, and only consider the "tricks" of each side's lawyers when the case is already so far to one side as to make it fruitless in the first place.
I don't have the name of the study at the time of writing this but I can reply to my own comment in a few hours when I get back to where my references are.
What gets me even more is certain activities, 100% legal off property of the school, become punishable offenses on their property.
Take smoking, or even posessing, tobacco or tobacco products (or, for that matter, any medication OTC or prescribed, etc.) As was, for that matter, posessing a cellular phone on your person.
An individual I was friends with a number of years ago, was caught with a pack of cigarettes in her purse by an administrator walking by. She was 18 (legal age for smoking/owning tobacco) and was not smoking them at the time, she just had them in her bag. She was not distributing them to anyone else. She was suspended for ten days and referred to some court or other for community service.
I was entirely disgusted when I heard about it from her.
Even worse is, the law is actually on the side of the school here in Florida, criminalizing activities which in any other context, can't even be construed as annoying, let alone criminal.
This, honestly, is one of the few good human-interest stories I've read on this site.
I think I've been reading for about 5 years now, too.
That's kind of dick that they made you change your name, but, it really wasn't in the spirit of a fantasy roleplaying world, either. I doubt you were singled out for this treatment, but were just a random sweep of names, or some GM happened to be in the same area as you and heard your chat. I've been caught for minor rules infractions in various MUD/MMORPG games when a GM was in the area investigating bugs or responding to player disputes, and they overheard me plotting, and such.
I don't really have any insightful commentary into this story beyond what I wrote, since I despise World of Warcraft with all my heart, and have renounced all MMORPG games many years ago. Just thought I'd share my opinion.
End to end encryption with a negotiated session key (as opposed to a previously known and never transmitted shared key) is useless: a man in the middle will intercept the key exchange and all bets are off with respect to security.
The only real way to do end-to-end encryption is with a preshared key (a long one), or failing that, a long, randomly generated session key protected by a simple password (not so good but okay.) People always think that end to end encryption on an insecure link is the answer to it, but if the middleboxes are the people you have to worry about, you have to make sure they can't sniff the keys.
I certainly am a fan of end-to-end encryption (I encrypt by default, IM conversations, but they would still fall prey to the weakness I discussed) for preventing bystanders from reading too much...but I don't have anyone else who is willing to use end-to-end crypto for normal transactions.
Just tell them to hax ::1 and it'll be a lot more leet, don't worry.
NAT in place of a Firewall is a terrible, terrible solution.
All IPv6 will mean is that each device will be responsible for its own security, or will have an actual firewall at the network border, rather than having a protocol hack which as a byproduct, blocks packets inbound for which there are no mappings.
Even consumer-grade (Linksys et al.) equipment, running a proper IPv6 setup, could easily have basic firewall functionality built in, for each device MAC attached, allow all traffic/block all traffic/allow traffic only in response to outgoing connections/port forwarding/port triggering.
It adds possibilities, it will never remove them.
Of note, my $110 Toshiba HDMI-Upconvert DVD player is less functional than my $30 Apex DVD player from Christmas Past 4 Years Ago.
Skips to shit or blocks while playing any sort of burned disc. Doesn't play MP3 files or JPEG burned to a directory structure as my old player did. Does honor region-coding, unlike that little player. Does honor required sections (the no-skip parts) whereas the Apex player did not.
I don't have an HDTV, I bought the player in expectation, but I am thinking it was a mistake to go for the more expensive, above-board model: for playing DVDs on my standard-defitinion television, it is less functional than my Playstation 2 is. That one, at least, reads all burned DVDs perfectly.
I got hardcore involved with WREK, but that wasn't quite enough, unfortunately. (Ever see anyone with a black hoodie with the station logo on the front and "Music you don't hear on the radio." on the back? That was me.)
Your portrayal of the two flip-sides is 100% my impression, actually.
I don't regret my choice to go to that school, or my choice to leave. It was a learning experience, without a doubt.
I originally started out as a Computer Science major at Georgia Tech. I, however, left that school after my first year, and am studying Psychology at a state university. (I didn't leave because of grades either -- I left with a 4.0 GPA)
I'm way too social of a person for my own good sometimes, and I had a terrible time finding friends who were interested in anything that I liked. Nobody to go to concerts with at the various great venues in Atlanta. Plus, the school was fairly "greek or die" with respect to socialisation, and I despise the Greek system by and large (and I did, in fact, pledge a fraternity despite that) so my options were a bit limited. My impression of most of the other engineers/science majors there was that they were very antisocial, introverted people, whereas I was not.
Having switched to a school with few engineers, and changed my major to an outwardly-focused one, I'm so much happier.
I would bet there are other engineers/computing majors like myself who are smart enough to "hack it" in the program, but for one reason or another, simply cannot deal with the lifestyle that goes along with it.
I don't know about a transistor radio, but until I moved and threw them out, I owned both a 1947-era tube radio, and a 1960s-era tube clockradio, and both still worked reasonably well.