You make a mildly interesting argument, and several people have claimed the same thing, namely that while religion does have negative effects on civilisation, on the net it has had a positive effect on civilisation. My question, and one that Dawkins would probably ask as well, is whether any or all of those positive effects that religion has had on civilisation were possible only through religion, of if they were attainable in any other way. I personally believe that you don't have to have religion to be a good person. None of the positive effects of religion that I have seen actually required religion to take place. But all of the negative effects of religion are directly attributable to religion.
Dawkins is the atheist analogy of a religous nut. His argumentation when it comes to religion is just as fanatically against religion as an american TV-preacher is for...donations.
Seriously, after 9/11 he went out in british media and used the terror acts as a springboard for his anti-religous campaigning, how extremist isn't that? I have no problem with people questioning faith or being agnostics, atheists or whatever, but claiming to be a rationalist and then going all atheist-jihadic like Dawkings has does not add up.
When is someone going to see through this man, he obviously has some profound issues to take care of.
Not quite. Dawkins' coming across as being fanatically against religion isn't because he's so pro-atheist or anti-religion per se. If you actually read some of ihs books, most notably The God Delusion, he provides the following thought process:
1. It is impossible to prove or disprove the existance of god/a god.
2. With the inability to prove the existance of god/a god, what is it that causes people believe in god? By default we come with no belief system, and yet somehow many people end up believing in god/gods even despite the lack of evidence of existance. He then goes into a long discussion of the psychological and evolutionary roots of belief in mysticism and gods, along with disproving most of the claims of "proof" of god.
3. What's wrong with Pascal's wager? In other words, if god can't be proven or disproven, then why not hedge your bet by believing? If it turns out that there is a god, then you're good to go, if not, no harm done. The problem with that line of thinking is you can't really believe in all gods, you have to choose one set of beliefs (monotheistic or multitheistic, etc) to the exclusion of the rest, so if it turns out that there is a god you still might have backed the wrong candidate.
4. Then he goes on to point out the tremoundous amount of hatred, division, strife, and death that religious belief is responsible for, both historically and in our present world. His position is that if people didn't believe in god/gods and have these religious dogmas then the world would be a better place.
It is point number 4 above that I think is the biggest drive in his efforts to educate the world about atheism. It's not because he hates religion, or is a nutter. It's because he honestly believes that people have deluded themselves into believing in god/gods, and that their delusions are far from being harmless to the rest of the world. Whether or not you believe that theists are deluded, it's impossible to argue with the second half of that point, namely that religious belief has a negative impact on civilisation. The events of 9/11 just put a giant exclamation point to that claim, and Dawkins was using it to say "this is what I'm talking about, there are now 5000 dead people who wouldn't have been killed had it not been for religion." When you add up the number of people who have been killed in combat in the US response to 9/11 you're looking at tens of thousands of people.
Maybe the next time you want to claim that someone has issues or doesn't add up, you ought to at least find out what it is that they're saying so that you can make a coherent argument.
Did the American Revolutionary army outnumber and out-gun the British army? Did the French citizenry have more firepower than the French army at the start of the French Revolution?
No, but the British and French armies were not significantly better equipped than the American and French citizenry. They all had muskets and rifles. The government had cannons, which were difficult to deploy and use against anything but other armies. The revolutionaries eventually captured cannons too. But in both cases they didn't have to contend with a government that could literally drop a smart bomb through their front door from 20,000 feet that levelled their house and did minimal damage to the surrounding neighborhood. Or tanks, APVs, helicopter gunships, rocket launchers, or any of a number of other lethal and non-lethal weapons systems. The gap between what weapons a civilian "revolutionary" can acquire and what weapons a government force can acquire is tremendous these days. Civilians wouldn't have a chance, armed, unarmed, or otherwise.
Hey, if you want to play suicide bomber, be my guest. I promise I won't stand in your way (literally or figuratively).
It's called a straw man and losers like you use them when you can't refute his actual point.
Fuck off now.
The last time that I checked, swearing was also used by "losers" when they can't refute the actual point. Not only that, but the inability to respond without swearing is generally taken to be a sign of a little mind. Perhaps that's why you didn't comprehend that he/she very clearly tried to equate gun ownership with not being subject to the whims of the government. I simply pointed out just how wrong he/she was.
armed = citizen
unarmed = subject
It's so simple. What do you not understand?
But I do feel better knowing idiots like you aren't carrying guns.
Uh-huh. And could you please explain exactly why it is that you think that having a collection of hunting rifles, handguns, or the occasional semi-automatic weapon somehow makes you immune to having the government impose it's will on you by force? Because if it's a pissing contest between you and the government about who has the most firepower then you'll lose every time. If the government doesn't like you and wants to take you out, your guns will be about as effective in defending yourself as nerf balls. Just ask the guys at Ruby Ridge or the Branch Davidians in Waco. I assure you, the media coverage of the events did far more to prevent the government from steamrolling both groups than their ownership of large quantities of guns ever did.
Man, it chills me to know that idiots like you are wandering around armed.
Previous reports had listed Vista as the last desktop OS to come in a 32-bit flavor. Then I saw that Windows 7 is supposed to come in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Now they're saying that Windows 7 won't be binary compatible with previous versions. If that's the case, why bother with a 32-bit version then? Just about any new PC from the last 4 years includes a 64-bit capable CPU.
Seems like a fairly flawed study then, since most of the time the only way to interpret non-verbal communications correctly is by studying a series of expressions and body language positions. A single snapshot isn't going to do it.
I suspect that if they performed the same study on women they would also get similar results. It's not that I don't think that humans are that unclear in their communications, as there are clear signs of sexual interest in both genders. It's just that usually the object of those non-verbal signs of interest has difficulty interpreting those cues correctly, even when they are immediately obvious to a third-party observer.
If this does get too many false positives, then they would stop doing it, wouldn't they? The fact that they are still doing it is irrefutable proof that they aren't getting too many false positives to handle.
That is absolutely the most stunning example of false logic that I've seen in a long time. If you want an examples of when getting too many false positives DOESN'T result in our government stopping its security charades, take a look at the no-fly list.
Ok, point taken. But what about deterence? Akmed Jackoff and his small crew of would-be terrorists know that they will very likely be caught before carrying out this type of attack.
Will they? Or will they just put the dirty bomb into a lead lined box? Or perhaps send a car ahead with a radioactive cat in it, then sneak in while TSA/INS is investigating the cat? Or perhaps they'll conceal the material in some other way, like in a shipment of medical-use radioactive material. There are many, many ways to defeat this system with a trivial amount of effort. So we spend millions on a security scheme that does nothing to enhance security and in fact gives a false sense of security.
If a group wants to hit us, it's going to happen. But throwing up the white flag and not even trying to defend against substantial attacks is ludicrous.
I agree. But I also think that "doing something that gives us a false sense of security" is far less preferable and far more dangerous than "doing something that gives us real security." Doing "something" isn't always better than "doing nothing," and "doing nothing" is not the same as throwing up the white flag.
Situations like these are why these sorts of systems will never work. There are just far too many false positives. Not false positives in the sense that they detect radiation where there is none, but false positives in the sense that they detect legitimate and harmless sources of radiation but have to respond as if they found a dirty bomb. I wonder how many of the other sort of false positives they get, where the detector is tripped but they can't find any source of radiation. And how many hundreds of millions of dollars are bing spent on this monitoring?
The worst part is, this post-9/11 monitoring has caught exactly zero dirty bombers. Sure, the article says:
Giuliano says the point really is to catch terrorists. He says it's true that the odds of catching one here may be "a billion to one. But despite that, we have caught two." (Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, who tried to sneak in at Blaine in 1997 to blow up the New York subway; and Millennium Bomber Ahmed Ressam, nabbed at Port Angeles in 1999.)
But don't you find it odd that the only justification that the heightened surveillance post-9/11 works is based on two arrests that were made in 1997 and 1999, before the current surveillance was enacted? While we're at it, what kind of a hack journalist is the guy who wrote the article that he couldn't do some simple math with the dates and figure that out? So what we're left with is spending piles of taxpayer money to monitor and harrass our citizens with no proof whatsoever that it has a demonstrable benefit besides helping employment.
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
No. It's not unusual at all, especially if those hard drives have held confidential information like people's medical or financial info. If there's a chance that they once held state secrets, then definitely. Anything less would be incompetence.
The only real question is what constitutes "destroyed." At medical or financial facilities a disk wiping utility that overwrites the disks with 1s and 0s ten or twenty times is usually secure enough to do the job. If you're dealing with state secrets, then shredding the disk platters is more appropriate.
So here's a way to think of it. The phone company is a utility. What would your company do with no phone service? The electric company is a utility. What would your company do with no electricity? The water company is a utility. What would your company do with no water? Now if you think of Information Technology as a utility, how would your company survive without information?
To an extent I understand the "IT as a utility" mindset. C-levels want utility-grade reliability. They want utility-grade predictability when it comes to costs. They want IT to be so integrated into the company that people think of it like water/electricity/phone service, i.e., they use it without even thinking. The problem is, information as a resource is far more complex than electricity, water, or phone service. You don't need to understand electricity or water to be able to use it. You do need to understand information, and information technology.
Awhile back the company that I was working for was interviewing for a Linux/Unix admin position. One of the candidates was a recent immigrant from India who had been working in a similar capacity for another large company in town. He mentioned that there had been widespread layoffs in the IT area at his former employer, and that's why he was looking for a job. We asked him what prompted the layoffs, and he said that they had outsourced his entire department to India. How's that for irony?
Kentucky state lawmaker Tim Couch wants to ban anonymous posting on the internet in order to 'cut down on online bullying', which he says has been 'a particular problem in eastern Kentucky.'
Other things that have been a 'particular problem in eastern Kentucky':
incest
illegal moonshine stills
poor dental hygiene
lack of education
lack of footwear
Just a little nitpick, but no it doesn't. You never 'see' the hypervisor (vmkernel), you see a local console that pretty much runs like a guest. That is based on a Red Hat release, vmkernel is not.
You can tell who drinks the VMWare kool-aid around here. Not for nothing, but the console looks like Red Hat. The commands used to configure the kernel are linux commands. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you're going to have to do some pretty fast talking to convince me that it isn't a duck.
But more to the point, I can take a Linux kernel and modify it however I want and call it something else entirely...vmkernel, bobskernel, whatever. That doesn't mean it's not a Linux derivative. To this day I've never heard a VMWare representative explain how their vmkernel isn't linux-based, or how it differs. All I've ever heard them say is that it's not linux. Methinks the company doth protest too much, but regardless, when I talk about it I always say that it's not linux. But I do so with a nudge and a wink.
Powershell requires the.NET Framework, which won't run on Server Core. IIS will run on Server Core, but only static pages because (guess why!).NET Framework won't run on Server Core. The single biggest reason for Server Core's existence is to provide a slimmed-down platform for Hyper-V to run on, much like VMWare uses a slimmed down "custom kernel" that looks suspiciously like a stripped down RedHat install to run their virtualization on. Anything else is being discouraged.
BTW, it's not as stripped down as they would lead you to believe. You still have the graphical login screen, which dumps you to a screen witha blue background and a little CMD.EXE box in the middle of it. The Remote Terminal Services management that they talk about for Server Core does the same thing. And while you can configure it completely from the command line, if you're clever enough to know the names of the control panel applets (they end in.CPL) you can invoke them from the command line. So instead of using DATE and TIME to set the time and date, you can use CONTROL DATETIME to get a nice GUI for it. Same goes with setting language and regional/keyboard settings, and many other settings. NOTEPAD.EXE still gets you the same GUI notepad application too, and I'm sure that there are plenty more.
well, seems like your logic is super flawed. I wouldnt go around with your logic, one because yahoo has millions of dollars to turn around their operations. As far as I know, yahoo still makes money, so they fired 700 employees to breakeven maybe or to satisfy shareholder desire for higher returns. My advice would be to wait and see what yahoo does, then decide whether what they decided would be profitable.
Nobody said Yahoo was broke. All I said was that it is unlikely that they will ever be able to turn around their slide. In the markets where Yahoo competes they basically have two main competitors, Google and Microsoft. They're not going to catch up to Google, that much is clear. They're clearly ahead of Microsoft, but Microsoft has many other revenue streams unrelated to search and advertising so they can subsidize their operations for quite some time. Yahoo has been on a slide for several years, and there's nothing that looks like it can turn it around (at least from a shareholder perspective).
The thing that you have to remember here is that it's all from the shareholder perspective, because ultimately they run the company. Look at the stock prices. In January of 2006 they were at their highest point in the last 4 years, around $44 a share. When Microsoft made the offer they were around $19. Anyone who has owned Yahoo stock for the past couple of years has lost significant money, and a buyout offer is probably their best hope of cutting/recouping their losses. In this case getting shares in MSFT for part of the buyout is a bonus, because they'll be getting a) cash and b) the chance to make up their losses with shares in a company that is in a much stronger financial position, long-term.
The offer was part cash and part Microsoft shares (50/50, I think).
It was part stock, but if they accepted the offer then former Yahoo shareholders would be shareholders in Microsoft at that point, not Yahoo. Microsoft has far more prospects for continued growth than Yahoo could even dream about. Shorting MS stock might be a good call in the short term, but long-term they're still going to generate enormous amounts of value relative to what Yahoo could produce alone.
How does the board control this anyways? If Microsoft simply kept buying Yahoo stock on the market until they owned 51%, it would be over wouldn't it?
Yes and no. As others have pointed out, doing a buyout like that would most likely result in skyrocketing stock prices, making the entire process much more expensive. But on top of that most publicly traded companies have a "poison pill" provision to protect against those takeovers. Basically, if any single shareholder accumulates a certain percentage of the total outstanding shares then the board of directors can release more shares into the markets, resulting in the dilution of shares already owned. That ends up making it even more expensive to do a takeover.
AV vendors have been claiming antitrust for eight months. SP1 causes great inconvenience to their customers, what a suspicious coincidence. If the vendors were really cooperating SP1 would have contained their improvements, not a little note or a lock out.
Well, speaking as a customer of one of the affected vendors who uses Vista SP1, I'd have to disagree with you. I've been running Trend Micro Internet Security 2008 since December, and when I upgraded to Vista SP1 2 days ago I had no problems. Trend starts and runs just like it should. From everything that I've read, all it takes to fix the issue is for the affected vendors to release an update to their application. Since most of the applications in question are security applications that should (if installed correctly) be downloading regular definition updates anyway, it's likely that the vast majority of users will get their applications patched before they are able to download SP1. In my example, Trend Micro apparently released the fix before I downloaded SP1. Since SP1 wasn't available from Windows update at the time (the only way I know of to get a legit copy is via MSDN), then it's doubtful that many people have seen the problem at all.
I know that this particular KB article has gotten a lot of press lately, but I haven't seen one case of a user complaining that they've had the problems described. All of the press seems to be based on the fact that Microsoft found a potential issue and made a KB article about it. That hardly constitutes "great inconvenience to their customers".
As an individual shareholder I probably would not sue, at least if I'm interested in long-term profit. I personally don't see how Yahoo can generate more wealth if they belong to a company which has managed to gain around 6% market share by investing billions. The logic behind it seems to be very flawed.
Yes, the logic is flawed, but it's your logic. It doesn't matter what sort of wealth Yahoo can generate long-term if they are owned by Microsoft because the current Yahoo shareholders will not be shareholders at that point. Basically the logic to the lawsuit goes like this:
Yahoo was trading around $19 a share, with little prospect of going up and a high likelihood that they will continue their slide.
Microsoft offered $31 a share for Yahoo.
Yahoo is unlikely to hit $31 a share in any situation other than a buyout offer.
Yahoo shopped around and played coy to see if they could get a comparable or better offer from anyone else, and they didn't.
Therefore, in order to maximize their investment a Yahoo shareholder should take the $31 offer and run.
After that, Yahoo is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft and the current shareholders own none of it, so how much value Yahoo can generate at that point becomes irrelevant.
Now it's true that since the offer Yahoo's share price has jumped up to around $28 a share. But since Yahoo has done nothing to improve their outlook in the past month it's safe to assume that this jump is due to Microsoft's offer. If Yahoo were to ultimately reject the offer and Microsoft would back down, you'd probably see Yahoo's stock price drop to a level even lower than it was at the time the offer was made as many investors will probably write the company off as a lost cause.
At any rate, it's all proceeding according to plan. Yahoo will ultimately accept the offer, or they will face even more shareholder lawsuits. If they still refuse to sell they will most likely face the replacement of their board of directors with a group who are MS-friendly. As I said here, it's the shareholders who have the final say on this deal, and they'll say yes.
I think I remember reading an article on Tomshardwareguide where they tried running one dual core, and a single core CPU in the same system for 3 cores. While they got it to boot the OS, a lot of applications failed to run.
I'm guessing there is a lot of code out there that's looking for power of 2 number of cores. A program might run fine with 1,2,4,8, or 16 cores, but if you do some kind of odd number I wouldn't be surprised if several applications just refused to run. It will be interesting to see what kind of compatibility testing AMD has done with this new processor.
Wow, you're an idiot. You obviously aren't aware of this, but from a hardware perspective you should only use a multi-socket configuration when you have the same model CPUs installed in all sockets. Otherwise you are going to get all sorts of errors, much like Tom's did in their test. They even say right in the article that you shouldn't run two different CPUs in a dual socket config. The motherboard was throwing errors about CPU mismatches. They couldn't even get the motherboard to post with two different CPUs installed without re-jiggering things, so you can be sure that the issues weren't related to the OS or applications.
Everyone together now, "The applications don't care how many cores are installed. The applications just pass off threads to the OS, and the OS schedules those threads across all available cores." If you don't know what you're talking about then don't waste our time with your ignorant posts.
They say they simply don't care that the data they share on social networks may be accessible by others, that some laws passed by governments today might be privacy-infringing and dangerous, or that they shouldn't use on-line banking without a virus scanner and a firewall.
Install a keylogger on their PC. Get their account credentials. Post threats on their MySpace/Facebook page and then drain their bank account. They'll very quickly gain an appreciation for privacy.
The problem with truecrypt is that, if they can compel you to give up your first password and the means of unencrypting the data (i.e that you used TrueCrypt), they can easily find out that TrueCrypt supports hidden volumes. They will then use the same method to compel you to give up the second password. Unfortunately, if you don't have a second volume, there is no way to prove it to them, so they will continue to "compel" you until you're no longer any use to them.
Knowing that you used TrueCrypt and that TrueCrypt supports hidden volumes is irrelevant. It's still not possible to tell whether there is a second encrypted volume hiding inside the first volume, or if it is just whitespace unless you have the key for the hidden valume and are trying to actively "unencrypt the whitespace."
The Supreme Court disagrees with you.
The Government's interest in preventing the entry of unwanted persons and effects is at its zenith at the international border. Time and again, we have stated that "searches made at the border, pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border." United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 616 (1977). Congress, since the beginning of our Government, "has granted the Executive plenary authority to conduct routine searches and seizures at the border, without probable cause or a warrant, in order to regulate the collection of duties and to prevent the introduction of contraband into this country." Montoya de Hernandez, supra, at 537 (citing Ramsey, supra, at 616--617 (citing Act of July 31, 1789, ch. 5, 1 Stat. 29)). The modern statute that authorized the search in this case, 46 Stat. 747, 19 U.S.C. 1581(a),1 derived from a statute passed by the First Congress, the Act of Aug. 4, 1790, ch. 35, 31, 1 Stat. 164, see United States v. VillamonteMarquez, 462 U.S. 579, 584 (1983), and reflects the "impressive historical pedigree" of the Government's power and interest, id., at 585. It is axiomatic that the United States, as sovereign, has the inherent authority to protect, and a paramount interest in protecting, its territorial integrity.
Stopping people from entering the country or bringing in contraband is one thing, but if you're on the US side of the border then you're already in the country, aren't you? And then those rules probably wouldn't apply. More importantly, many of the cases that I have heard about have involved people's laptops being searched or confiscated as they were leaving the country, not entering it.
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You make a mildly interesting argument, and several people have claimed the same thing, namely that while religion does have negative effects on civilisation, on the net it has had a positive effect on civilisation. My question, and one that Dawkins would probably ask as well, is whether any or all of those positive effects that religion has had on civilisation were possible only through religion, of if they were attainable in any other way. I personally believe that you don't have to have religion to be a good person. None of the positive effects of religion that I have seen actually required religion to take place. But all of the negative effects of religion are directly attributable to religion.
Dawkins is the atheist analogy of a religous nut. His argumentation when it comes to religion is just as fanatically against religion as an american TV-preacher is for...donations.
Seriously, after 9/11 he went out in british media and used the terror acts as a springboard for his anti-religous campaigning, how extremist isn't that? I have no problem with people questioning faith or being agnostics, atheists or whatever, but claiming to be a rationalist and then going all atheist-jihadic like Dawkings has does not add up.
When is someone going to see through this man, he obviously has some profound issues to take care of.
Not quite. Dawkins' coming across as being fanatically against religion isn't because he's so pro-atheist or anti-religion per se. If you actually read some of ihs books, most notably The God Delusion, he provides the following thought process:
1. It is impossible to prove or disprove the existance of god/a god.
2. With the inability to prove the existance of god/a god, what is it that causes people believe in god? By default we come with no belief system, and yet somehow many people end up believing in god/gods even despite the lack of evidence of existance. He then goes into a long discussion of the psychological and evolutionary roots of belief in mysticism and gods, along with disproving most of the claims of "proof" of god.
3. What's wrong with Pascal's wager? In other words, if god can't be proven or disproven, then why not hedge your bet by believing? If it turns out that there is a god, then you're good to go, if not, no harm done. The problem with that line of thinking is you can't really believe in all gods, you have to choose one set of beliefs (monotheistic or multitheistic, etc) to the exclusion of the rest, so if it turns out that there is a god you still might have backed the wrong candidate.
4. Then he goes on to point out the tremoundous amount of hatred, division, strife, and death that religious belief is responsible for, both historically and in our present world. His position is that if people didn't believe in god/gods and have these religious dogmas then the world would be a better place.
It is point number 4 above that I think is the biggest drive in his efforts to educate the world about atheism. It's not because he hates religion, or is a nutter. It's because he honestly believes that people have deluded themselves into believing in god/gods, and that their delusions are far from being harmless to the rest of the world. Whether or not you believe that theists are deluded, it's impossible to argue with the second half of that point, namely that religious belief has a negative impact on civilisation. The events of 9/11 just put a giant exclamation point to that claim, and Dawkins was using it to say "this is what I'm talking about, there are now 5000 dead people who wouldn't have been killed had it not been for religion." When you add up the number of people who have been killed in combat in the US response to 9/11 you're looking at tens of thousands of people.
Maybe the next time you want to claim that someone has issues or doesn't add up, you ought to at least find out what it is that they're saying so that you can make a coherent argument.
Did the American Revolutionary army outnumber and out-gun the British army? Did the French citizenry have more firepower than the French army at the start of the French Revolution?
No, but the British and French armies were not significantly better equipped than the American and French citizenry. They all had muskets and rifles. The government had cannons, which were difficult to deploy and use against anything but other armies. The revolutionaries eventually captured cannons too. But in both cases they didn't have to contend with a government that could literally drop a smart bomb through their front door from 20,000 feet that levelled their house and did minimal damage to the surrounding neighborhood. Or tanks, APVs, helicopter gunships, rocket launchers, or any of a number of other lethal and non-lethal weapons systems. The gap between what weapons a civilian "revolutionary" can acquire and what weapons a government force can acquire is tremendous these days. Civilians wouldn't have a chance, armed, unarmed, or otherwise.
Yeah, like those stupid Iraqis.
Hey, if you want to play suicide bomber, be my guest. I promise I won't stand in your way (literally or figuratively).
It's called a straw man and losers like you use them when you can't refute his actual point.
Fuck off now.
The last time that I checked, swearing was also used by "losers" when they can't refute the actual point. Not only that, but the inability to respond without swearing is generally taken to be a sign of a little mind. Perhaps that's why you didn't comprehend that he/she very clearly tried to equate gun ownership with not being subject to the whims of the government. I simply pointed out just how wrong he/she was.
armed = citizen
unarmed = subject
It's so simple. What do you not understand?
But I do feel better knowing idiots like you aren't carrying guns.
Uh-huh. And could you please explain exactly why it is that you think that having a collection of hunting rifles, handguns, or the occasional semi-automatic weapon somehow makes you immune to having the government impose it's will on you by force? Because if it's a pissing contest between you and the government about who has the most firepower then you'll lose every time. If the government doesn't like you and wants to take you out, your guns will be about as effective in defending yourself as nerf balls. Just ask the guys at Ruby Ridge or the Branch Davidians in Waco. I assure you, the media coverage of the events did far more to prevent the government from steamrolling both groups than their ownership of large quantities of guns ever did.
Man, it chills me to know that idiots like you are wandering around armed.
Previous reports had listed Vista as the last desktop OS to come in a 32-bit flavor. Then I saw that Windows 7 is supposed to come in both 32-bit and 64-bit flavors. Now they're saying that Windows 7 won't be binary compatible with previous versions. If that's the case, why bother with a 32-bit version then? Just about any new PC from the last 4 years includes a 64-bit capable CPU.
Seems like a fairly flawed study then, since most of the time the only way to interpret non-verbal communications correctly is by studying a series of expressions and body language positions. A single snapshot isn't going to do it.
I suspect that if they performed the same study on women they would also get similar results. It's not that I don't think that humans are that unclear in their communications, as there are clear signs of sexual interest in both genders. It's just that usually the object of those non-verbal signs of interest has difficulty interpreting those cues correctly, even when they are immediately obvious to a third-party observer.
If this does get too many false positives, then they would stop doing it, wouldn't they? The fact that they are still doing it is irrefutable proof that they aren't getting too many false positives to handle.
That is absolutely the most stunning example of false logic that I've seen in a long time. If you want an examples of when getting too many false positives DOESN'T result in our government stopping its security charades, take a look at the no-fly list.
Ok, point taken. But what about deterence? Akmed Jackoff and his small crew of would-be terrorists know that they will very likely be caught before carrying out this type of attack.
Will they? Or will they just put the dirty bomb into a lead lined box? Or perhaps send a car ahead with a radioactive cat in it, then sneak in while TSA/INS is investigating the cat? Or perhaps they'll conceal the material in some other way, like in a shipment of medical-use radioactive material. There are many, many ways to defeat this system with a trivial amount of effort. So we spend millions on a security scheme that does nothing to enhance security and in fact gives a false sense of security.
If a group wants to hit us, it's going to happen. But throwing up the white flag and not even trying to defend against substantial attacks is ludicrous.
I agree. But I also think that "doing something that gives us a false sense of security" is far less preferable and far more dangerous than "doing something that gives us real security." Doing "something" isn't always better than "doing nothing," and "doing nothing" is not the same as throwing up the white flag.
Situations like these are why these sorts of systems will never work. There are just far too many false positives. Not false positives in the sense that they detect radiation where there is none, but false positives in the sense that they detect legitimate and harmless sources of radiation but have to respond as if they found a dirty bomb. I wonder how many of the other sort of false positives they get, where the detector is tripped but they can't find any source of radiation. And how many hundreds of millions of dollars are bing spent on this monitoring?
The worst part is, this post-9/11 monitoring has caught exactly zero dirty bombers. Sure, the article says:
Giuliano says the point really is to catch terrorists. He says it's true that the odds of catching one here may be "a billion to one. But despite that, we have caught two." (Gazi Ibrahim Abu Mezer, who tried to sneak in at Blaine in 1997 to blow up the New York subway; and Millennium Bomber Ahmed Ressam, nabbed at Port Angeles in 1999.)
But don't you find it odd that the only justification that the heightened surveillance post-9/11 works is based on two arrests that were made in 1997 and 1999, before the current surveillance was enacted? While we're at it, what kind of a hack journalist is the guy who wrote the article that he couldn't do some simple math with the dates and figure that out? So what we're left with is spending piles of taxpayer money to monitor and harrass our citizens with no proof whatsoever that it has a demonstrable benefit besides helping employment.
Is it unusual in your experience for, say, a corporate IT department to destroy hard drives by policy?
No. It's not unusual at all, especially if those hard drives have held confidential information like people's medical or financial info. If there's a chance that they once held state secrets, then definitely. Anything less would be incompetence.
The only real question is what constitutes "destroyed." At medical or financial facilities a disk wiping utility that overwrites the disks with 1s and 0s ten or twenty times is usually secure enough to do the job. If you're dealing with state secrets, then shredding the disk platters is more appropriate.
So here's a way to think of it. The phone company is a utility. What would your company do with no phone service? The electric company is a utility. What would your company do with no electricity? The water company is a utility. What would your company do with no water? Now if you think of Information Technology as a utility, how would your company survive without information?
To an extent I understand the "IT as a utility" mindset. C-levels want utility-grade reliability. They want utility-grade predictability when it comes to costs. They want IT to be so integrated into the company that people think of it like water/electricity/phone service, i.e., they use it without even thinking. The problem is, information as a resource is far more complex than electricity, water, or phone service. You don't need to understand electricity or water to be able to use it. You do need to understand information, and information technology.
Awhile back the company that I was working for was interviewing for a Linux/Unix admin position. One of the candidates was a recent immigrant from India who had been working in a similar capacity for another large company in town. He mentioned that there had been widespread layoffs in the IT area at his former employer, and that's why he was looking for a job. We asked him what prompted the layoffs, and he said that they had outsourced his entire department to India. How's that for irony?
Kentucky state lawmaker Tim Couch wants to ban anonymous posting on the internet in order to 'cut down on online bullying', which he says has been 'a particular problem in eastern Kentucky.'
Other things that have been a 'particular problem in eastern Kentucky':
incest
illegal moonshine stills
poor dental hygiene
lack of education
lack of footwear
Just a little nitpick, but no it doesn't. You never 'see' the hypervisor (vmkernel), you see a local console that pretty much runs like a guest. That is based on a Red Hat release, vmkernel is not.
You can tell who drinks the VMWare kool-aid around here. Not for nothing, but the console looks like Red Hat. The commands used to configure the kernel are linux commands. If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, you're going to have to do some pretty fast talking to convince me that it isn't a duck.
But more to the point, I can take a Linux kernel and modify it however I want and call it something else entirely...vmkernel, bobskernel, whatever. That doesn't mean it's not a Linux derivative. To this day I've never heard a VMWare representative explain how their vmkernel isn't linux-based, or how it differs. All I've ever heard them say is that it's not linux. Methinks the company doth protest too much, but regardless, when I talk about it I always say that it's not linux. But I do so with a nudge and a wink.
Powershell requires the .NET Framework, which won't run on Server Core. IIS will run on Server Core, but only static pages because (guess why!) .NET Framework won't run on Server Core. The single biggest reason for Server Core's existence is to provide a slimmed-down platform for Hyper-V to run on, much like VMWare uses a slimmed down "custom kernel" that looks suspiciously like a stripped down RedHat install to run their virtualization on. Anything else is being discouraged.
.CPL) you can invoke them from the command line. So instead of using DATE and TIME to set the time and date, you can use CONTROL DATETIME to get a nice GUI for it. Same goes with setting language and regional/keyboard settings, and many other settings. NOTEPAD.EXE still gets you the same GUI notepad application too, and I'm sure that there are plenty more.
BTW, it's not as stripped down as they would lead you to believe. You still have the graphical login screen, which dumps you to a screen witha blue background and a little CMD.EXE box in the middle of it. The Remote Terminal Services management that they talk about for Server Core does the same thing. And while you can configure it completely from the command line, if you're clever enough to know the names of the control panel applets (they end in
well, seems like your logic is super flawed. I wouldnt go around with your logic, one because yahoo has millions of dollars to turn around their operations. As far as I know, yahoo still makes money, so they fired 700 employees to breakeven maybe or to satisfy shareholder desire for higher returns. My advice would be to wait and see what yahoo does, then decide whether what they decided would be profitable.
Nobody said Yahoo was broke. All I said was that it is unlikely that they will ever be able to turn around their slide. In the markets where Yahoo competes they basically have two main competitors, Google and Microsoft. They're not going to catch up to Google, that much is clear. They're clearly ahead of Microsoft, but Microsoft has many other revenue streams unrelated to search and advertising so they can subsidize their operations for quite some time. Yahoo has been on a slide for several years, and there's nothing that looks like it can turn it around (at least from a shareholder perspective).
The thing that you have to remember here is that it's all from the shareholder perspective, because ultimately they run the company. Look at the stock prices. In January of 2006 they were at their highest point in the last 4 years, around $44 a share. When Microsoft made the offer they were around $19. Anyone who has owned Yahoo stock for the past couple of years has lost significant money, and a buyout offer is probably their best hope of cutting/recouping their losses. In this case getting shares in MSFT for part of the buyout is a bonus, because they'll be getting a) cash and b) the chance to make up their losses with shares in a company that is in a much stronger financial position, long-term.
The offer was part cash and part Microsoft shares (50/50, I think).
It was part stock, but if they accepted the offer then former Yahoo shareholders would be shareholders in Microsoft at that point, not Yahoo. Microsoft has far more prospects for continued growth than Yahoo could even dream about. Shorting MS stock might be a good call in the short term, but long-term they're still going to generate enormous amounts of value relative to what Yahoo could produce alone.
How does the board control this anyways? If Microsoft simply kept buying Yahoo stock on the market until they owned 51%, it would be over wouldn't it?
Yes and no. As others have pointed out, doing a buyout like that would most likely result in skyrocketing stock prices, making the entire process much more expensive. But on top of that most publicly traded companies have a "poison pill" provision to protect against those takeovers. Basically, if any single shareholder accumulates a certain percentage of the total outstanding shares then the board of directors can release more shares into the markets, resulting in the dilution of shares already owned. That ends up making it even more expensive to do a takeover.
AV vendors have been claiming antitrust for eight months. SP1 causes great inconvenience to their customers, what a suspicious coincidence. If the vendors were really cooperating SP1 would have contained their improvements, not a little note or a lock out.
Well, speaking as a customer of one of the affected vendors who uses Vista SP1, I'd have to disagree with you. I've been running Trend Micro Internet Security 2008 since December, and when I upgraded to Vista SP1 2 days ago I had no problems. Trend starts and runs just like it should. From everything that I've read, all it takes to fix the issue is for the affected vendors to release an update to their application. Since most of the applications in question are security applications that should (if installed correctly) be downloading regular definition updates anyway, it's likely that the vast majority of users will get their applications patched before they are able to download SP1. In my example, Trend Micro apparently released the fix before I downloaded SP1. Since SP1 wasn't available from Windows update at the time (the only way I know of to get a legit copy is via MSDN), then it's doubtful that many people have seen the problem at all.
I know that this particular KB article has gotten a lot of press lately, but I haven't seen one case of a user complaining that they've had the problems described. All of the press seems to be based on the fact that Microsoft found a potential issue and made a KB article about it. That hardly constitutes "great inconvenience to their customers".
As an individual shareholder I probably would not sue, at least if I'm interested in long-term profit. I personally don't see how Yahoo can generate more wealth if they belong to a company which has managed to gain around 6% market share by investing billions. The logic behind it seems to be very flawed.
Yes, the logic is flawed, but it's your logic. It doesn't matter what sort of wealth Yahoo can generate long-term if they are owned by Microsoft because the current Yahoo shareholders will not be shareholders at that point. Basically the logic to the lawsuit goes like this:
Yahoo was trading around $19 a share, with little prospect of going up and a high likelihood that they will continue their slide.
Microsoft offered $31 a share for Yahoo.
Yahoo is unlikely to hit $31 a share in any situation other than a buyout offer.
Yahoo shopped around and played coy to see if they could get a comparable or better offer from anyone else, and they didn't.
Therefore, in order to maximize their investment a Yahoo shareholder should take the $31 offer and run.
After that, Yahoo is a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft and the current shareholders own none of it, so how much value Yahoo can generate at that point becomes irrelevant.
Now it's true that since the offer Yahoo's share price has jumped up to around $28 a share. But since Yahoo has done nothing to improve their outlook in the past month it's safe to assume that this jump is due to Microsoft's offer. If Yahoo were to ultimately reject the offer and Microsoft would back down, you'd probably see Yahoo's stock price drop to a level even lower than it was at the time the offer was made as many investors will probably write the company off as a lost cause.
At any rate, it's all proceeding according to plan. Yahoo will ultimately accept the offer, or they will face even more shareholder lawsuits. If they still refuse to sell they will most likely face the replacement of their board of directors with a group who are MS-friendly. As I said here, it's the shareholders who have the final say on this deal, and they'll say yes.
I think I remember reading an article on Tomshardwareguide where they tried running one dual core, and a single core CPU in the same system for 3 cores. While they got it to boot the OS, a lot of applications failed to run.
I'm guessing there is a lot of code out there that's looking for power of 2 number of cores. A program might run fine with 1,2,4,8, or 16 cores, but if you do some kind of odd number I wouldn't be surprised if several applications just refused to run. It will be interesting to see what kind of compatibility testing AMD has done with this new processor.
Wow, you're an idiot. You obviously aren't aware of this, but from a hardware perspective you should only use a multi-socket configuration when you have the same model CPUs installed in all sockets. Otherwise you are going to get all sorts of errors, much like Tom's did in their test. They even say right in the article that you shouldn't run two different CPUs in a dual socket config. The motherboard was throwing errors about CPU mismatches. They couldn't even get the motherboard to post with two different CPUs installed without re-jiggering things, so you can be sure that the issues weren't related to the OS or applications.
Everyone together now, "The applications don't care how many cores are installed. The applications just pass off threads to the OS, and the OS schedules those threads across all available cores." If you don't know what you're talking about then don't waste our time with your ignorant posts.
They say they simply don't care that the data they share on social networks may be accessible by others, that some laws passed by governments today might be privacy-infringing and dangerous, or that they shouldn't use on-line banking without a virus scanner and a firewall.
Install a keylogger on their PC. Get their account credentials. Post threats on their MySpace/Facebook page and then drain their bank account. They'll very quickly gain an appreciation for privacy.
The problem with truecrypt is that, if they can compel you to give up your first password and the means of unencrypting the data (i.e that you used TrueCrypt), they can easily find out that TrueCrypt supports hidden volumes. They will then use the same method to compel you to give up the second password. Unfortunately, if you don't have a second volume, there is no way to prove it to them, so they will continue to "compel" you until you're no longer any use to them.
Knowing that you used TrueCrypt and that TrueCrypt supports hidden volumes is irrelevant. It's still not possible to tell whether there is a second encrypted volume hiding inside the first volume, or if it is just whitespace unless you have the key for the hidden valume and are trying to actively "unencrypt the whitespace."
The Supreme Court disagrees with you. The Government's interest in preventing the entry of unwanted persons and effects is at its zenith at the international border. Time and again, we have stated that "searches made at the border, pursuant to the longstanding right of the sovereign to protect itself by stopping and examining persons and property crossing into this country, are reasonable simply by virtue of the fact that they occur at the border." United States v. Ramsey, 431 U.S. 606, 616 (1977). Congress, since the beginning of our Government, "has granted the Executive plenary authority to conduct routine searches and seizures at the border, without probable cause or a warrant, in order to regulate the collection of duties and to prevent the introduction of contraband into this country." Montoya de Hernandez, supra, at 537 (citing Ramsey, supra, at 616--617 (citing Act of July 31, 1789, ch. 5, 1 Stat. 29)). The modern statute that authorized the search in this case, 46 Stat. 747, 19 U.S.C. 1581(a),1 derived from a statute passed by the First Congress, the Act of Aug. 4, 1790, ch. 35, 31, 1 Stat. 164, see United States v. VillamonteMarquez, 462 U.S. 579, 584 (1983), and reflects the "impressive historical pedigree" of the Government's power and interest, id., at 585. It is axiomatic that the United States, as sovereign, has the inherent authority to protect, and a paramount interest in protecting, its territorial integrity.
Stopping people from entering the country or bringing in contraband is one thing, but if you're on the US side of the border then you're already in the country, aren't you? And then those rules probably wouldn't apply. More importantly, many of the cases that I have heard about have involved people's laptops being searched or confiscated as they were leaving the country, not entering it.