It would seem that the catalyst for every major social, economic, or political change revolved around men wanting sex, men being chauvinists, food, or any combination of those three things.
Well, it's nice to see that humanity has been consistent if nothing else. The more things change, the more things stay the same...
Unfortunately for the geeks, our profession has not embraced these driving mechanisms, or I'd get a hell of a lot more sex and I wouldn't be eaten these $1.00 frozen dinners from Swanson every night...
Never underestimate the power of technology! There is all the pr0n you will ever need on usenet, and if that gets tiresome, you could always invest in one of these
Not sure what the technological solution to frozen dinners is, other than cooking for yourself though...
Did anyone get the feeling the author still knows absolutely nothing about systems administrators after writing this?
"Many large organizations silo the systems-administration skill set, explains Phillips, and systems administrators at these companies tend to remain focused on very specific systems-administration skills and job responsibilities."
Actually, in the large organization I work for (>70,000 staff), SysAdmin skills are totally separate from each other. The people who manage the hardware have nothing to do with the OS or the applications, the people who manage the OS have nothing to do with the hardware or the applications, and the people who manage the applications have nothing to do with the hardware or the OS. The people who monitor the alerts from the distributed management tools have nothing to do with the OS, hardware or application. The people who are responsible for network and host-based security do not actually make any changes to the OS or the application, but merely dictate the requirements and audit the results.
In a smaller shop, one team of SysAdmins would do all of these tasks
Not many I'd think. Most sysadmin types need to be able to lay hands on the systems they're supporting.
I work for a large US multinational, and the current strategy is to centralize all SysAdmin functions in one location, to take advantage of the economy of scale.
Yes, a token staff of locals are still required to press the reset button occasionally, or load a tape in the tape drive, but the real work will be done remotely.
we need better solutions for security that automatically adapt and defend the end user or system they are on.
The promise of m$ applications is that they interact with each other and the OS better than the competition. The trade-off is that your spreadsheet/email client/browser has hooks into the OS that those sorts of applications really don't need and no users ever asked for, but ones that can be readily exploited.
People ask me what I think about outlook, and I must admit it is quite possibly the most efficient means of distributing trojans that has ever been devised. Even on 2000, outlook has root-access to the operating system. Given that older versions of their operating systems only had one level of privilege for all userids, such security problems could and ought to have been expected, but there is no need for outlook (or ie) to have that sort of privileged access to the OS as it does on 2000/xp.
Maybe Tannenbaum is right, and a microkernel is the way to go? Maybe we should take it one step farther and run all applications in jails to effectively limit their access to system resources and one another?
I just don't see how only 5% of patents are rejected if the emphasis at the patent examination level is to reject, reject, reject.
I honestly don't know either way, but perhaps the patent examiners are rated on how many patents are granted? The 95% figure would make perfect sense in that case...
you, like all armchair intellectuals, have no idea what it's like to make real decisions about life and death.
Abusive ad homenim attack. The character or actions of a person do not have any bearing on the truth (or lack thereof) of the claim being made, or the quality of the argument being made.
Until you understand what you're talking about, you will therefore please stop criticizing those who make such decisions.
An excellent example of "poisoning the well". An argument stands or falls on it's own merit regardless of who makes it.
Please consider reading a book or taking a course in critical thought. You need to be able to construct a valid argument if you want to debate.
BTW forgive me for responding to myself, but I pressed submit and not preview.
I would like to think that I possess both decency and intellectual honesty, even though I am not going to respond to your loaded example. You may of course draw whatever conclusion you wish.
You are mistaken. You are speaking about a subject with which you have no personal experience. you've never actually faced that kind of threat. You've never internalized your own responsibility to your people or your country. You are, in short, untested
All you know about me is what I have posted here on slashdot. You do not know me or anything about me, yet somehow you feel entitled to draw significant conclusions about my life experiences ?
Your ad homenim attacks aside, it is clear to me that there is little point in continuing this argument as you pretty much side-step any points I make that you cannot refute by dismissing it as empty rhetoric.
Please feel free to declare yourself the victor. Add me to your foes list, if you like. This discussion thread is way off topic now as it is.
That's where your reasoning starts and stops? You don't bother taking a moment to contemplate whether there really is a greater good?
From my perspective, there is not. But from the terrorist's perspective there certainly is and it does not matter to that individual whether you or I or anyone else who does not subscribe to the terrorists's beliefs agree. That would be the point *you* are missing. Evil people by and large do not consider themselves or their actions to be evil you know. Psychotic individuals see their actions as being in their own best interests and disregard the impact those acts have on others.
If that were true, torture, whether psychological or physical, would be useless. It's not. It's a highly effective means of gathering intelligence.
As I said before, the "effectiveness" or torture is not the impact it has on any one individual. It is useful for the impact it has on the greater population. Torture is *not* an effective means of "making people talk". Naturally those who use and advocate torture are disinclined to agree, quite possible out of self interest. But the notion that torture is effective for gathering information was rejected more than 20 years ago. Check out some whitepapers at the international red cross or amnesty international if you would like some justification for those claims.
We're not talking about violence. We're talking about torture.
LOL!! One of the greatest problems of American society is the desensitization of the general population to violence. If you don't consider torture to be an act (or acts, as per your example) of violence against another human being (regardless of what "greater good" is being served") than I see no further point in continuing this discussion!
We're not talking about violence. We're talking about psychological torture. We're talking about the complete destruction of a person's will.
I also understand that no decent human being would ever commit such acts of violence towards another human being. If you believe otherwise, you have my sympathy and pity. There are animals that exhibit signs of empathy, how regrettable that humanity chooses not to.
How ironic that you request something from me that you refuse to do yourself!
False moral equivalence? Let's see, you advocate acts of violence against people who commit acts of violence. Both you and the terrorist would claim to be acting towards some greater good. I fail to see how you would automatically occupy the moral high ground here.
The war on terror will not be won by adopting the practices and methods of the terrorists.
it's basically impossible to lie once you've reached the breaking point
Citation? Proof of any kind? I expect that someone being tortured would insist that their grandmother was really Hitler in drag if that is what they thought the torturer wanted to hear. Coerced confessions will not make you any safer because you have no guarantee of the veracity of the information that is extracted. If anything, the purpose of state-sponsored torture is the effect it has on the general population rather than the effect on any one individual. But you need not take my word for it, check the research.
By the way, there is a great deal of psychological research to back up my aphorism that is devoid of truth about the effects of violence. apa.org is a good starting point. Search on "effects of violence"
Reply if you wish. but please add some content to the discussion this time.
Not when reading Nietschze. You can read the fragments from back to front, or skip a few pages if it isn't interesting. So I was told by a leading scholar of Nietschze. Rather suitable, given Niethschze's nihilism...
In fact, the only moral/ethical decision calculus under which torture isn't justified in that situation is the naive absolutist one.
Or not. You may of course believe what you want, but it seems to me that if you espouse such ideals you are no different than the villains you oppose!
Tortured the living hell out of any Americans who could have given me information about the bombings before the fact.
I respect your honesty. Not many would choose to extract information from their own countrymen in such a manner.
Not that the information would necessarily be of any value. Information extracted via physical torture is notoriously inaccurate. People will say anything to make it stop.
There is also the cost to one's own humanity. As we brutalize other people, so do we brutalize ourselves.
But, as you say, the end justifies the means and apparently we must have victory at any cost.
He said a lot more than that. Please don't pull pithy aphorisms out of context and use them to try to sound insightful.
Indeed Nietschze wrote many things. Did you know that he wrote in fragments, and the context of those fragments is not relevant to understanding his philosophical position?
Couldn't care less. If it were my choice, and I were faced with having to decide between complying with the Geneva Convention and saving the lives of innocent people, man, I don't even have to think about it.
Whatever. If you apply reason to your stated opinions, you will find that it is not ethically or morally possible to defend the argument that the ends justify the means. If ethics and morality are of no consequence to you, you may continue the argument as you wish.
If US troops were planning to blow up an enemy city filled with noncombatants, I'd insist on it. Hell, out of the way, I'll do it myself.
So, my dear troll, what would you have done during WWII when the US destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
The truth is Pres. Bush said Saddam had tried to buy uraniam from Niger.. AFTER being told it was NOT true
Except it was true.
If you are right, why did Colin Powell, George Tenet, George Bush acknowledge that the statements made in the State of the Union address were not true? Dude, what are you smoking and where do I get some?
There is plenty of evidence that Sadam had WMD programs and could make batches of the stuff at whim. There is strong evidence that shows he was at least harboring Al-Qaeda members if not providing training and support.
Uh, no. There is no credible evidence that there were WMD in Iraq prior to the recent invasion. They could not, as you claim, make as much as they want, whenever they wanted. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please contact the government ASAP, as they are politically desperate to find such evidence.
Likewise, your assertion that Saddam Hussein collaborated with Al Queda is also false. The truth of the matter is that Iraq was probably the most secular middle eastern nation before the US invasion, which is totally contrary to the radical fundamental Islam that Al Queda preaches.
Surely you must have noticed by now that the rationale behind the war has been quite fluid, and none of the contrived excuses Bush and Blair presented to the world held any water.
Truth certainly is the first casualty of war!
It will also provide a ready source of oil
I stand corrected. You really do know what the war was all about after all!
Of course you can justify torture. It's not even hard.
Nietschze said a couple of things you may want to ponder:
He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster.
and
if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.
BTW if you *read* the Geneva convention, you will find that pretty much every example you suggest would be considered torture.
If nothing else, would you be okay if the bad guys used any of your examples on captured US troops? If not, perhaps you should re-consider your stated opinion.
Given the subject matter of the story, would mention of Natalie Portman (grits optional, temperature variable) be in order? What about a goatse reference?
you push a button to activate a mechanical re-tensioning of the strings to any of a few hundred tunings, 'accurate to within 2 cents over the entire tuning range', in a couple of seconds. They can even refit your existing guitar.
Nothing new here folks. I saw ads for something like this in guitar magazines in the mid-90s (probably GFTPM.) Mind you, those ones could only be installed in a Les Paul, which seemed like sacrilege to me...
I totally don't understand not putting a hard drive in the system.
We know that the xbox is just a pc, no matter how much the vendor wants us to believe otherwise. What better way to make it more of a closed system than to use flash RAM instead of the hd for temporary storage. What better way to have more rights management built into the thing than to make the data that much harder to access
That is a monster step backwards.
I agree, but from the m$ perspetive, it is probably viewed as a major step forward. If they can obfuscate the internal operations of the system, it will make it that much harder to hack and mod.
What are they thinking?
This is where you will go today
Seriously though, it will probably come to pass that you only purchase a license to use this thing, and not the hardware itself. They are obligated to protect the content which of course, belongs to someone else... The end of the open PC has been written about before, and perhaps this is how m$ would like to do that?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, it's nice to see that humanity has been consistent if nothing else. The more things change, the more things stay the same...
Unfortunately for the geeks, our profession has not embraced these driving mechanisms, or I'd get a hell of a lot more sex and I wouldn't be eaten these $1.00 frozen dinners from Swanson every night...Never underestimate the power of technology! There is all the pr0n you will ever need on usenet, and if that gets tiresome, you could always invest in one of these
Not sure what the technological solution to frozen dinners is, other than cooking for yourself though...
Actually, in the large organization I work for (>70,000 staff), SysAdmin skills are totally separate from each other. The people who manage the hardware have nothing to do with the OS or the applications, the people who manage the OS have nothing to do with the hardware or the applications, and the people who manage the applications have nothing to do with the hardware or the OS. The people who monitor the alerts from the distributed management tools have nothing to do with the OS, hardware or application. The people who are responsible for network and host-based security do not actually make any changes to the OS or the application, but merely dictate the requirements and audit the results.
In a smaller shop, one team of SysAdmins would do all of these tasks
I work for a large US multinational, and the current strategy is to centralize all SysAdmin functions in one location, to take advantage of the economy of scale.
Yes, a token staff of locals are still required to press the reset button occasionally, or load a tape in the tape drive, but the real work will be done remotely.
I always thought that farming was the oldest profession ;-)
"An Ode To Spam"
by Irwin
I quiver at an early hour
Awash in electron aura:
Debating life and Godly power,
Staring at Eudora.
What is all my mail worth?
Do I risk my mind?
What if spam should issue forth,
And leave my soul behind?
And thus beside this stream of life,
From whence my mail is plucked.
I decide within my inner strife,
That spammers should be...
I can't find the link to the original comic but it's on Page 22 of "Evil Geniuses In A Nutshell"
The promise of m$ applications is that they interact with each other and the OS better than the competition. The trade-off is that your spreadsheet/email client/browser has hooks into the OS that those sorts of applications really don't need and no users ever asked for, but ones that can be readily exploited.
People ask me what I think about outlook, and I must admit it is quite possibly the most efficient means of distributing trojans that has ever been devised. Even on 2000, outlook has root-access to the operating system. Given that older versions of their operating systems only had one level of privilege for all userids, such security problems could and ought to have been expected, but there is no need for outlook (or ie) to have that sort of privileged access to the OS as it does on 2000/xp.
Maybe Tannenbaum is right, and a microkernel is the way to go? Maybe we should take it one step farther and run all applications in jails to effectively limit their access to system resources and one another?
I honestly don't know either way, but perhaps the patent examiners are rated on how many patents are granted? The 95% figure would make perfect sense in that case...
Actually I made several, but you ignored what I had to say...
Second, have you ever heard the phrase "consider the source?"Heard it, but it simply does not matter as far as valid argumentation goes.
No, it does notThe previous link should give you access to a number of pages that clealy refute that claim.
If by "debate" you mean sling around remarks like "Abusive ad homenim attack," then forget it"Abusive Ad Homenim" is a sub-class of the Ad Homenim fallacy, and is not a derogatory comment.
You may of course use whatever fallacious arguments you like, but please do not become offended when called out for it.
Kind regards,
Abusive ad homenim attack. The character or actions of a person do not have any bearing on the truth (or lack thereof) of the claim being made, or the quality of the argument being made.
Until you understand what you're talking about, you will therefore please stop criticizing those who make such decisions.An excellent example of "poisoning the well". An argument stands or falls on it's own merit regardless of who makes it.
Please consider reading a book or taking a course in critical thought. You need to be able to construct a valid argument if you want to debate.
Thank you so very little, it's been a slice.
BTW forgive me for responding to myself, but I pressed submit and not preview.
I would like to think that I possess both decency and intellectual honesty, even though I am not going to respond to your loaded example. You may of course draw whatever conclusion you wish.
:-)
you've never actually faced that kind of threat. You've never internalized your own responsibility to your people or your country.
You are, in short, untested
All you know about me is what I have posted here on slashdot. You do not know me or anything about me, yet somehow you feel entitled to draw significant conclusions about my life experiences ?
Your ad homenim attacks aside, it is clear to me that there is little point in continuing this argument as you pretty much side-step any points I make that you cannot refute by dismissing it as empty rhetoric.
Please feel free to declare yourself the victor. Add me to your foes list, if you like. This discussion thread is way off topic now as it is.
From my perspective, there is not. But from the terrorist's perspective there certainly is and it does not matter to that individual whether you or I or anyone else who does not subscribe to the terrorists's beliefs agree. That would be the point *you* are missing. Evil people by and large do not consider themselves or their actions to be evil you know. Psychotic individuals see their actions as being in their own best interests and disregard the impact those acts have on others.
If that were true, torture, whether psychological or physical, would be useless. It's not. It's a highly effective means of gathering intelligence.As I said before, the "effectiveness" or torture is not the impact it has on any one individual. It is useful for the impact it has on the greater population. Torture is *not* an effective means of "making people talk". Naturally those who use and advocate torture are disinclined to agree, quite possible out of self interest. But the notion that torture is effective for gathering information was rejected more than 20 years ago. Check out some whitepapers at the international red cross or amnesty international if you would like some justification for those claims.
We're not talking about violence. We're talking about torture.LOL!! One of the greatest problems of American society is the desensitization of the general population to violence. If you don't consider torture to be an act (or acts, as per your example) of violence against another human being (regardless of what "greater good" is being served") than I see no further point in continuing this discussion!
We're not talking about violence. We're talking about psychological torture. We're talking about the complete destruction of a person's will.I also understand that no decent human being would ever commit such acts of violence towards another human being. If you believe otherwise, you have my sympathy and pity. There are animals that exhibit signs of empathy, how regrettable that humanity chooses not to.
How ironic that you request something from me that you refuse to do yourself!
False moral equivalence? Let's see, you advocate acts of violence against people who commit acts of violence. Both you and the terrorist would claim to be acting towards some greater good. I fail to see how you would automatically occupy the moral high ground here.
The war on terror will not be won by adopting the practices and methods of the terrorists.
it's basically impossible to lie once you've reached the breaking pointCitation? Proof of any kind? I expect that someone being tortured would insist that their grandmother was really Hitler in drag if that is what they thought the torturer wanted to hear. Coerced confessions will not make you any safer because you have no guarantee of the veracity of the information that is extracted. If anything, the purpose of state-sponsored torture is the effect it has on the general population rather than the effect on any one individual. But you need not take my word for it, check the research.
By the way, there is a great deal of psychological research to back up my aphorism that is devoid of truth about the effects of violence. apa.org is a good starting point. Search on "effects of violence"
Reply if you wish. but please add some content to the discussion this time.
Not when reading Nietschze. You can read the fragments from back to front, or skip a few pages if it isn't interesting. So I was told by a leading scholar of Nietschze. Rather suitable, given Niethschze's nihilism...
In fact, the only moral/ethical decision calculus under which torture isn't justified in that situation is the naive absolutist one.Or not. You may of course believe what you want, but it seems to me that if you espouse such ideals you are no different than the villains you oppose!
Tortured the living hell out of any Americans who could have given me information about the bombings before the fact.I respect your honesty. Not many would choose to extract information from their own countrymen in such a manner.
Not that the information would necessarily be of any value. Information extracted via physical torture is notoriously inaccurate. People will say anything to make it stop.
There is also the cost to one's own humanity. As we brutalize other people, so do we brutalize ourselves.
But, as you say, the end justifies the means and apparently we must have victory at any cost.
Indeed Nietschze wrote many things. Did you know that he wrote in fragments, and the context of those fragments is not relevant to understanding his philosophical position?
Couldn't care less. If it were my choice, and I were faced with having to decide between complying with the Geneva Convention and saving the lives of innocent people, man, I don't even have to think about it.Whatever. If you apply reason to your stated opinions, you will find that it is not ethically or morally possible to defend the argument that the ends justify the means. If ethics and morality are of no consequence to you, you may continue the argument as you wish.
If US troops were planning to blow up an enemy city filled with noncombatants, I'd insist on it. Hell, out of the way, I'll do it myself.So, my dear troll, what would you have done during WWII when the US destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki?
Except it was true.
If you are right, why did Colin Powell, George Tenet, George Bush acknowledge that the statements made in the State of the Union address were not true? Dude, what are you smoking and where do I get some?
Uh, no. There is no credible evidence that there were WMD in Iraq prior to the recent invasion. They could not, as you claim, make as much as they want, whenever they wanted. If you have any evidence to the contrary, please contact the government ASAP, as they are politically desperate to find such evidence.
Likewise, your assertion that Saddam Hussein collaborated with Al Queda is also false. The truth of the matter is that Iraq was probably the most secular middle eastern nation before the US invasion, which is totally contrary to the radical fundamental Islam that Al Queda preaches.
Surely you must have noticed by now that the rationale behind the war has been quite fluid, and none of the contrived excuses Bush and Blair presented to the world held any water.
Truth certainly is the first casualty of war!
It will also provide a ready source of oilI stand corrected. You really do know what the war was all about after all!
Nietschze said a couple of things you may want to ponder:
and
BTW if you *read* the Geneva convention, you will find that pretty much every example you suggest would be considered torture.
If nothing else, would you be okay if the bad guys used any of your examples on captured US troops? If not, perhaps you should re-consider your stated opinion.
Time to feed the trolls...
I suppose that the only thing holding you back from perfection would be arrogance and an apparant lack of humility...
Given your obvious superiority, why did you feel the need to post anonymously?
It was interesting, but I found his underlying premise that the ends justify the means to be rather immature and more than a little offensive.
Obviously he hasn't seen Rocketeer.
Did anyone?
Given the subject matter of the story, would mention of Natalie Portman (grits optional, temperature variable) be in order? What about a goatse reference?
you push a button to activate a mechanical re-tensioning of the strings to any of a few hundred tunings, 'accurate to within 2 cents over the entire tuning range', in a couple of seconds. They can even refit your existing guitar.
Nothing new here folks. I saw ads for something like this in guitar magazines in the mid-90s (probably GFTPM.) Mind you, those ones could only be installed in a Les Paul, which seemed like sacrilege to me...
Did anyone patent OSQ (Obligatory Simpsons Quote) already? Someone should, there will be a lot more of them on /. once the movie comes out.
What would be the point? There is too much prior art...
I totally don't understand not putting a hard drive in the system.
We know that the xbox is just a pc, no matter how much the vendor wants us to believe otherwise. What better way to make it more of a closed system than to use flash RAM instead of the hd for temporary storage. What better way to have more rights management built into the thing than to make the data that much harder to access
That is a monster step backwards.
I agree, but from the m$ perspetive, it is probably viewed as a major step forward. If they can obfuscate the internal operations of the system, it will make it that much harder to hack and mod.
What are they thinking?
This is where you will go today
Seriously though, it will probably come to pass that you only purchase a license to use this thing, and not the hardware itself. They are obligated to protect the content which of course, belongs to someone else... The end of the open PC has been written about before, and perhaps this is how m$ would like to do that?