And largely worthless, since many email systems won't allow you to use all the possibilities that RFC 822 actually allows. Some won't let you sign up with many characters that are technically legal. Some won't send mail to addresses that contain characters that are technically legal. Not to mention it's specific to Perl.
All virus scanners are band aids for design flaws in the Windows* that allow the things in the first place - such as running as an admin. And they're all imperfect at best since none of them can stop 0 day attacks. Which is when you need them to work the most.
Think about that for a second. The time when you're most vulnerable is precisely the same time when your virus scanner is least effective.
It's ok, you can uninstall all the "always running" components now, never look back. Sure you can still run periodic scans to make sure.
After over a decade of windows usage I've learned to work around most of its shortcomings. You can do these few things and remain relatively safe:
run questionable software as a user that only has read privileges to the directory the executable is in - and no other permissions of any kind, anywhere
only, ever use your own bookmarks to get to sites with financial or other important info like your bank or paypal, regardless of the convenience of links sent via email
don't use Internet Explorer
don't use Outlook Express
If you these few things, and are cautious with anything downloaded or executed, you don't really need a virus scanner.
*Come on, is there even a market for commercial non-Windows virus scanners?
The year of the linux desktop will never come until "making everything work" for 80% of the population requires precisely zero command line interactions, and precisely zero edits of obscure text files. And that most google searches for help end with instructions telling the user how to fix their problem or get their whatever working must also use precisely zero command line interactions, and precisely zero edits of obscure text files.
This includes hardware, common to obscure applications, common customizations etc.
If you have to edit a text file, your software is not ready for (l)users.
Since when is this type of behavior for us restricted to our fields of interest?
To me, we're monkeys to the monkey power. Curious as all hell and our biggest weakness is a problem to solve.
To make matters worse, we subconsciously define almost everything interesting as a problem. And once we've done that...well, you might as well go make tea, cause we're not letting go until we've solved it.
The two brands been nearly merged in my mind since I recently switched from a D-Link to a Linksys and spent a few days router shopping.
My old D-Link router started inexplicably blocking torrent traffic. Everything else worked fine - connecting my computer directly to the LAN jack in the wall (I have fiber to the house, not cable or DSL) proved that my ISP wasn't muddling with the traffic.
I love Google as much as the next nerd, but exactly what rules are you talking about?
FTP, SMTP, HTTP, UDP, and TCP/IP still work pretty much as their respective RFCs dictated prior to Google. So do ping, tracert, and a whole host of other things.
No, the point is not "we should give a shit". I don't know where you got that. The point I was I was responding to was, "man may or may not be responsible for killing off amphibians" with a somewhat tangential and academic comment to the effect that nature doesn't care if we care. It was intended as an academic aside, not an opposition towards or preventative action against taking preservative action.
I made no comment as to whether or not we should care or whether or not species dying off was good or bad. It simply is.
It really wasn't necessary to go spouting off and saying we should care. How do you know if the amphibians are even beneficial? Maybe they're holding back some form of life that would improve the live for every other living species. Sure, biodiversity is a generally a good thing, but like all generalizations it's less useful in practice than in vehement speeches. The fact is we simply don't understand the full implications of the loss of a species. The interactions are far too complex to even model (when you include everything from radiation to cars to viruses), let alone predict.
It's easy to go with our gut reactions to protect things that are dying, but I would prefer we take a more rational approach and first ascertain why before we go mucking with things more than we already are.
As for this all too emotional statement, "no other species on earth as of yet was capable to make use of massive amounts of energy to influence their environment" I call bullshit. Or did you think that the oxygen you're breathing was just magically freed from carbon or hydrogen atoms? I would contend that we as humans cannot hold a candle to the energy utilization of our green oxygen producers in the ocean and on land.
To me, taking up arms against humans "polluting the environment" (even with man made chemicals) is just as rational as taking up arms against prehistoric plans for "polluting the environment" with oxygen. To many species, and even to us in the wrong quantities, oxygen is actually a poison. It's an extremely corrosive chemical too. Does that make it bad too?
Just imagine if someone had stopped all those nasty plants back then from polluting the environment with oxygen. You wouldn't be around to imagine. Neither would any other oxygen breather.
This is why I hold any attempt to intervene with man's actions as contemptible. Only someone who was omniscient could truly understand the implications of our actions or non actions. Are you omniscient? No, and additionally, you lack the proper perspective, and objectivity (IMHO). You seem to see it as man screwing up nature. I see nature as a whole system that we're merely a member of. Maybe you're right and we should be more preservative. Maybe you're not. I can't be "wrong" because I'm not taking a side to be right or wrong about here. I'm only pondering out loud. The subject of my original post read "So?" not "So what?"
So what? Species have been going extinct for billions of years. Those that can't hack it in the current environment don't get to live in it.
I'm not being deliberately mean or anything, but nature quite simply doesn't give a shit whether you make it or not. Our actions are in no way outside it.
The moment you consider human beings to be somehow outside natural selection in any way whatsoever, you've lost all perspective. We and everything we do are a part of natural selection. This absolutely includes contaminating environments with chemicals that don't normally occur there, and allowing our cat to hunt some birds to extinction.
It's hard to explain the tautology of natural selection here without just saying it: That which survives, survives. That's nature's only rule regarding species. There are no others and there are no exceptions or caveats.
If some monkey species develops a means to completely annihilate some insect species and does so, do we get all up in arms about it? No, we say, "well that was interesting" and write about it and document it and move on. We are no different. Even if we are causing amphibians to die out that's just as natural regardless of cause. If amphibians cannot survive in an environment that contains humans, they don't get to survive.
I don't personally think that killing off amphibians is good or anything, but nature doesn't give a flying fuck what I or anyone else thinks and it makes no distinction between us modifying the environment and some other force doing it.
Adults are no different. We get just as pissy if you shut off our intarwebs suddenly. Or there's a sudden traffic jam on the road after cruising along at highway speeds.
I remember about flipping my shit on the way home from several hundred miles away because construction jammed up the road for 45 minutes. If I'd known it was coming before I saw brake lights I probably wouldn't have been so pissed.
I see your anecdotal evidence and raise you some fairness.
I boot Ubuntu and a ruthlessly pared down Windows XP on this laptop and while Ubuntu does seem (anecdotally) faster, I'm certain that part of that is having google desktop, outlook, and a bunch of other stuff running only in windows and not Linux. Even with all autoupdating programs and extraneous background programs killed off and removed from startup, there's still more stuff running in my XP install than there is in my Ubuntu one.
So to be fair, you should kill off all of those background processes that don't ship with a vanilla (not from dell) windows install if you're going to compare the speed of the two OSes. If they're slowing the machine down, that's no more windows' fault than running folding at home on the Ubuntu machine would be Linux's fault.
I'd start with installing the sysinternals suite of windows utilities, firing up Autoruns (they're all pretty awesome, not just Autoruns) and cleaning out all the garbage that's slowing the machine down. Those utilities have made my Windows XP life a great deal better and more livable, even recently, despite XP's age.
When are the IT/network guys going to realize that among their job responsibilities are facilitating and enabling their users, not restricting them in new and inventive ways because it makes them feel useful, or is an excuse to exercise their authority. The job is to make our jobs faster, and easier. Security is secondary to getting the job done. And yes, secondary. Because if the business can't get work done, it doesn't get paid, if it doesn't get paid, it ceases to be rather quickly, and thus you don't have anything to secure.
To treat the problem you first have to locate it. Problem is it's in people's heads. It's not the whole head. Nor even the whole brain. And it's terribly difficult to reliably tell which heads have it, and which ones don't.
So you have to get inside their heads and make them restrain themselves.
How? You do horrible, horrible things to the people you're certain of being pedophiles. Publicly. Those that are left restrain themselves because you've convinced them (gotten inside their heads where the problem is!) that the consequences are so heinous that it's not worth doing it.
No, it isn't perfect, but nothing ever will be. However, it would hit a lot closer to the problem than filtering the internet.
Kiddie porn is a symptom of pedophilia, not the problem itself. People too often forget that.
Slashdot Mirror
They're not even equivalent. The $5.43 cable is two feet longer. So, per foot, the monster cable is actually 3,590% more expensive
They're too embarrassed.
What good is an RFC-valid email address that nobody will accept mail from?
Beautiful? That thing is hideous.
And largely worthless, since many email systems won't allow you to use all the possibilities that RFC 822 actually allows. Some won't let you sign up with many characters that are technically legal. Some won't send mail to addresses that contain characters that are technically legal. Not to mention it's specific to Perl.
I agree.
Copy pasting a command into a terminal has fewer transmission errors, but it's difficult to get them to know when & where to run it.
Dunno why the parent was modded troll.
But knowing my dad, I know exactly how intimidated he is by the command line.
You're not taking if far enough.
All virus scanners are band aids for design flaws in the Windows* that allow the things in the first place - such as running as an admin. And they're all imperfect at best since none of them can stop 0 day attacks. Which is when you need them to work the most.
Think about that for a second. The time when you're most vulnerable is precisely the same time when your virus scanner is least effective.
It's ok, you can uninstall all the "always running" components now, never look back. Sure you can still run periodic scans to make sure.
After over a decade of windows usage I've learned to work around most of its shortcomings. You can do these few things and remain relatively safe:
If you these few things, and are cautious with anything downloaded or executed, you don't really need a virus scanner.
*Come on, is there even a market for commercial non-Windows virus scanners?
Bingo.
The year of the linux desktop will never come until "making everything work" for 80% of the population requires precisely zero command line interactions, and precisely zero edits of obscure text files. And that most google searches for help end with instructions telling the user how to fix their problem or get their whatever working must also use precisely zero command line interactions, and precisely zero edits of obscure text files.
This includes hardware, common to obscure applications, common customizations etc.
If you have to edit a text file, your software is not ready for (l)users.
Since when is this type of behavior for us restricted to our fields of interest?
To me, we're monkeys to the monkey power. Curious as all hell and our biggest weakness is a problem to solve.
To make matters worse, we subconsciously define almost everything interesting as a problem. And once we've done that...well, you might as well go make tea, cause we're not letting go until we've solved it.
Woops, that should have been D-Link!
The two brands been nearly merged in my mind since I recently switched from a D-Link to a Linksys and spent a few days router shopping.
My old D-Link router started inexplicably blocking torrent traffic. Everything else worked fine - connecting my computer directly to the LAN jack in the wall (I have fiber to the house, not cable or DSL) proved that my ISP wasn't muddling with the traffic.
Completely agreed.
No more Linksys purchases for me.
And that ladies & gentlemen is how you deal with a company that misbehaves. You starve them to death.
Foxit FTL.
Sumatra PDF Viewer FTW.
Foxit is about as bloated and irritating as Acrobat Reader was in version 5.0 (which was much better, but still terrible).
Sumatra is to Foxit as Foxit is to Adobe Acrobat Reader.
I realize being a .info site makes it very suspicious, but if you don't trust me or it, Google it yourself
Physical access is always root access with, perhaps, a time delay.
The best way to not get caught is to look like there is nothing to catch.
No, the best way to not get caught is to convince those watching you belong.
That thing on thinkgeek is a piece of crap. It's a flimsy knife with a weird handle. This is much more effective. And cheaper (since you get three). And you can cut metal with them. They're called tin snips. AKA, the manly alternative to the overpiced ones designed by and for women.
It's just a stick of wax. Literally. It has a lower percentage of active ingredients than your average breath of fresh air has toxic chemicals.
I love Google as much as the next nerd, but exactly what rules are you talking about?
FTP, SMTP, HTTP, UDP, and TCP/IP still work pretty much as their respective RFCs dictated prior to Google. So do ping, tracert, and a whole host of other things.
No, the point is not "we should give a shit". I don't know where you got that. The point I was I was responding to was, "man may or may not be responsible for killing off amphibians" with a somewhat tangential and academic comment to the effect that nature doesn't care if we care. It was intended as an academic aside, not an opposition towards or preventative action against taking preservative action.
I made no comment as to whether or not we should care or whether or not species dying off was good or bad. It simply is.
It really wasn't necessary to go spouting off and saying we should care. How do you know if the amphibians are even beneficial? Maybe they're holding back some form of life that would improve the live for every other living species. Sure, biodiversity is a generally a good thing, but like all generalizations it's less useful in practice than in vehement speeches. The fact is we simply don't understand the full implications of the loss of a species. The interactions are far too complex to even model (when you include everything from radiation to cars to viruses), let alone predict.
It's easy to go with our gut reactions to protect things that are dying, but I would prefer we take a more rational approach and first ascertain why before we go mucking with things more than we already are.
As for this all too emotional statement, "no other species on earth as of yet was capable to make use of massive amounts of energy to influence their environment" I call bullshit. Or did you think that the oxygen you're breathing was just magically freed from carbon or hydrogen atoms? I would contend that we as humans cannot hold a candle to the energy utilization of our green oxygen producers in the ocean and on land.
To me, taking up arms against humans "polluting the environment" (even with man made chemicals) is just as rational as taking up arms against prehistoric plans for "polluting the environment" with oxygen. To many species, and even to us in the wrong quantities, oxygen is actually a poison. It's an extremely corrosive chemical too. Does that make it bad too?
Just imagine if someone had stopped all those nasty plants back then from polluting the environment with oxygen. You wouldn't be around to imagine. Neither would any other oxygen breather.
This is why I hold any attempt to intervene with man's actions as contemptible. Only someone who was omniscient could truly understand the implications of our actions or non actions. Are you omniscient? No, and additionally, you lack the proper perspective, and objectivity (IMHO). You seem to see it as man screwing up nature. I see nature as a whole system that we're merely a member of. Maybe you're right and we should be more preservative. Maybe you're not. I can't be "wrong" because I'm not taking a side to be right or wrong about here. I'm only pondering out loud. The subject of my original post read "So?" not "So what?"
So what? Species have been going extinct for billions of years. Those that can't hack it in the current environment don't get to live in it.
I'm not being deliberately mean or anything, but nature quite simply doesn't give a shit whether you make it or not. Our actions are in no way outside it.
The moment you consider human beings to be somehow outside natural selection in any way whatsoever, you've lost all perspective. We and everything we do are a part of natural selection. This absolutely includes contaminating environments with chemicals that don't normally occur there, and allowing our cat to hunt some birds to extinction.
It's hard to explain the tautology of natural selection here without just saying it: That which survives, survives. That's nature's only rule regarding species. There are no others and there are no exceptions or caveats.
If some monkey species develops a means to completely annihilate some insect species and does so, do we get all up in arms about it? No, we say, "well that was interesting" and write about it and document it and move on. We are no different. Even if we are causing amphibians to die out that's just as natural regardless of cause. If amphibians cannot survive in an environment that contains humans, they don't get to survive.
I don't personally think that killing off amphibians is good or anything, but nature doesn't give a flying fuck what I or anyone else thinks and it makes no distinction between us modifying the environment and some other force doing it.
Adults are no different. We get just as pissy if you shut off our intarwebs suddenly. Or there's a sudden traffic jam on the road after cruising along at highway speeds.
I remember about flipping my shit on the way home from several hundred miles away because construction jammed up the road for 45 minutes. If I'd known it was coming before I saw brake lights I probably wouldn't have been so pissed.
I see your anecdotal evidence and raise you some fairness.
I boot Ubuntu and a ruthlessly pared down Windows XP on this laptop and while Ubuntu does seem (anecdotally) faster, I'm certain that part of that is having google desktop, outlook, and a bunch of other stuff running only in windows and not Linux. Even with all autoupdating programs and extraneous background programs killed off and removed from startup, there's still more stuff running in my XP install than there is in my Ubuntu one.
So to be fair, you should kill off all of those background processes that don't ship with a vanilla (not from dell) windows install if you're going to compare the speed of the two OSes. If they're slowing the machine down, that's no more windows' fault than running folding at home on the Ubuntu machine would be Linux's fault.
I'd start with installing the sysinternals suite of windows utilities, firing up Autoruns (they're all pretty awesome, not just Autoruns) and cleaning out all the garbage that's slowing the machine down. Those utilities have made my Windows XP life a great deal better and more livable, even recently, despite XP's age.
When are the IT/network guys going to realize that among their job responsibilities are facilitating and enabling their users, not restricting them in new and inventive ways because it makes them feel useful, or is an excuse to exercise their authority. The job is to make our jobs faster, and easier. Security is secondary to getting the job done. And yes, secondary. Because if the business can't get work done, it doesn't get paid, if it doesn't get paid, it ceases to be rather quickly, and thus you don't have anything to secure.
HeadOn
I almost died laughing when I woman I work with bought some at lunch.
I stopped laughing when she put in charge of operations during our busiest time of year.
That is the most insidious and horrible thing to do to your (PHB) boss I've ever seen.
I love it.
Disclaimer: Lucky for me, I don't have a PHB. \o/
To treat the problem you first have to locate it. Problem is it's in people's heads. It's not the whole head. Nor even the whole brain. And it's terribly difficult to reliably tell which heads have it, and which ones don't.
So you have to get inside their heads and make them restrain themselves.
How? You do horrible, horrible things to the people you're certain of being pedophiles. Publicly. Those that are left restrain themselves because you've convinced them (gotten inside their heads where the problem is!) that the consequences are so heinous that it's not worth doing it.
No, it isn't perfect, but nothing ever will be. However, it would hit a lot closer to the problem than filtering the internet.
Kiddie porn is a symptom of pedophilia, not the problem itself. People too often forget that.
Probably more so.
You still expose your email address in merely text-obfuscated form! :-P