... 2 Palestinians in Nablus were killed and 20 injured as Israeli tanks shelled a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin...
"Two Israeli soldiers were slain by Palestinian snipers.... Shortly afterward, Israeli tanks ringing Jenin, also in the West Bank, began shelling Palestinian security positions just outside the town... Israeli security officials say an Israeli Arab suicide bomber who killed himself and three others on Sunday had earlier taken shelter in Jenin."
The New York Times
Funny how the emotional impact changes when you have all the facts. Shelling a refugee camp versus shelling Palestinian security positions just outside a town which sheltered terrorists and attacked Israelis.
This article provides more information on the subject, including potential benefits of this technology: infusing a patient with blood cells from a stem cell line could improve the chances that their body would accept organ transplants from the same source.
It would be trivial to reroute the optic nerve to remove our blind spot, and this happened for some animals. Why not for us?
That's bug #1486950. Currently it is classified as a low-level bug, and is awaiting test cases. We hope to it have corrected in the next major release.
Actually not all that clear, at least according to "former U.S. Attorney John Gibbons", as quoted in a Time magazine article, which explains the charge this way:
The charge filed by the government against Sklyarov is confusing enough: it is for "trafficking" software prohibited by the DMCA. This does not mean he went around selling it himself, but rather that Adobe was able to buy it through a third party--and his name was listed on that software's copyright page. Yes, that is as tenuous as it sounds. "I hope the government knows something we don't," says former U.S. Attorney John Gibbons, "because it looks like they haven't done their homework."
Occam's Razor says that you're wrong, and that Mozilla is getting buggier.
So I guess Occam's Razor would also say the the amount of gold ore in California exploded at the start of the gold rush and the number of stars increased dramatically with the invention of the telescope.
If you start with the statement, "The discovery of X has increased", there are a number of explanations that meet Occam's rule, including:
More people are looking for X.
Methods for finding X have improved.
The total amount of X has increased.
Sorry for the cold glass of reality thrown in your face. Of course, now I get downvoted.
Ms.Taken's Lady Schick: Having an unpopular opinion doesn't make you right.
Interesting questions. Clearly if I add a hyperlink to my personal copy of your web page, I'm modifying your work for my own use (not a problem). Also, clearly, if I get onto your webserver and add hyperlinks to the original, I'm "defacing" your published work (a big problem).
But what if I'm an ISP, delivering cached (and altered) copies of your work? Does it matter if my customers give me permission to do this (after all it's your copyright, not theirs)? Does it matter if my ISP only has one customer? Does it matter whether I change the page before I send it to you (on the cached copy) or after (through a link-adding browser)?
I don't know what the courts will decide, but it seems to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of copyright law to for anyone to modify your words before they reach the reader, whether they have the reader's permission or not.
who is the "site owner" to tell them how to render the HTML she sends them?
The copyright holder, that's who. The copyright grants, among other things the exclusive right to create derivative works, except in the case of parody.
There is no basis to conclude from that data that playing video games interferes with frontal lobe development.
Actually, there is. From the article:
"it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement." [emphasis mine] Assuming that normal activity produces at least some stimulation and that stimulation causes development, that conclusion seems completely reasonable.
Even if it were conclusively demonstrated that the frontal lobes in people who play video games are less developed, whether there is causation and which way it goes would be very hard to decide
I think you got that backwards. The study does provide a plausible basis for causality. What it doesn't do is show that development is impaired in any significant (or even measurable) way.
And any of this assumes that the study was done correctly.
True. Without any mention of independent studies producing similar results, or even of this study being subject to any peer-review, I'm wary of taking its conclusions too seriously.
From a NY Times article, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/technology/19WIR E.html, about a man who inadvertantly 'cracked' a hospital 's wireless network:
On the other hand, he also knew that with "sniffer" software that he uses to analyze computer networks, he could monitor every message and file passing through the hospital's wireless system, presumably including sensitive patient data entered by nurses via the wireless-equipped laptops they carried from room to room.
"Fortunately, I'm married to a lawyer, who advised me against looking," he said.
I think the moral here, is not, as some cynics have suggested, "If you find a security hole, don't report it", but "If you find a security, don't 'test' it".
I've coded in a number of languages, and I've found VB to be the most non-intuitive, unfriendly of the bunch. Once you know what += means in C++, you can probably guess what -=, *=, etc., mean too. But knowing that you close an if block in VB with 'end if' isn't going to help you close a while or for loop. Probably all languages have some quirks like this, but VB seems to have a lot more than usual.
My overall impression of VB is that language development is geared more toward PHB's who are looking for buzzwords than towards programmers. Case in point: OO inplementation. I remember my excitement when I heard that VB was finally going to implement inheritence, and my disappointment when I learned that by 'inheritence' they meant 'button to copy and rename an existing class'.
My biggest frustration with VB was that I kept running into walls, limits to the language that made it impossible to do what I wanted without some ugly kludges.
Re:Is Windows security full of holes?
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
I won't try to argue the relative dangers of Windows vs. Linux. Other respondents to this post have already made some insightful comments on that (moderators, where are you?), and I basically agree with your premise that any OS is vulnerable to attack.
However, the article was not about security problems in Windows. It was about the security problems inherent in the software monoculture that Microsoft seems bent on creating.
Ecologists have long been aware of the dangers of monoculture. Using only a single strain of a species makes that species vulnerable to decimation by a single disease or parisite. The answer they have come up with is not to create a single super-resistent strain of each crop, but to plant a variety of strains so that if a new disease exploits a vulnerability in one, it won't threaten the whole species.
Does the same hold true for software? I think it does. Imagine what a Code Red-like worm could do if 90% of all machines were running the same OS/server combination. Without the buffer of uninfectable machines, we would have a real mess on our hands.
Re:The Great Microsoft Problem
on
Windows in 2020
·
· Score: 1
Firstly, take a look at your keyboard. To the left of the 'Z' key and to the right of the '?' key are identical keys labeled 'Shift'. If you hold one of them down when typing the first letter of sentences and proper names, your posts will be much more readable. We won't have peer at tiny periods to recognize a sentence break, and phrases like "the us is not a pure capitalist state" would be clear on the first reading.
Secondly, could you quote the law that gives you "the ability to destroy competitors who improve on your product"? Hasn't Microsoft made a career out of 'improving on' competitors' products? If your statement were correct, the Microsoft trial would never have happened. Netscape would have simply 'destroyed' MS for improving on its browser.
Thirdly, RTFA. The article says, "Apple Computer continues to do well", and refers to "a team of Linux programmers". The scenario does not require Linux being "wiped off the face of the earth", only that the overwhelming number of machines run exactly the same thing.
You get into a motorcycle accident. You're still alive, but just barely. The doctors tell your parents, "We can stabilize him if you want, but he'll never regain consciousness. Or we can just wait until his heart stops beating and use his organs to save other lives."
If they take the second option, you won't technically be alive when the organs are harvested, but you'll still be revivable. Like an embryo in a petri dish, you would require medical intervention in order to survive, but you could be saved. Like that embryo, you meet none of the standard requirements for determining life: breath, heartbeat, brain activity. The only thing the embryo has that you don't is the potential for becoming a healthy, productive human being, but since "Pro-life" advocates consider aborting a fetus with serious birth defects murder, that's hardly a viable argument for them.
You're right that the embryo would be 'alive' when the cells are harvested and you wouldn't, but that's only because a much looser definition life is applied to the embryo than to you.
Thanks for the links. Definitely good for a laugh.
From the 'Martyr or criminal?' article:
Book publishers say they need a tough law like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or they'll never be able to make money selling electronic books. If programmers are allowed to crack eBook encryption, the next Napster-style trading system will be exchanging copies of "Moby Dick" instead of songs by Moby, they warn.
I once worked for an excellent manager who, when he had to interrupt a programmer, always started with the words, "Let me know when you reach a stopping point". Then he'd wait, sometimes 5 minutes or more, for the programmer to respond.
Because he didn't require our immediate attention, the stuff in short term memory wasn't lost. We could get it written down before any new input erased it from our minds. It also gave us a chance to 'bookmark' our thoughts, with a mental reminder before the switch. The result was less time wasted getting back to where we were before the interruption, better focus on the new task, and less stress associated with 'switching gears'.
Of course this method requires two things that are regretably rare in corporations: a manager with the humility to recognize that sometimes a programmers time is more valuable than his/her own, and upper management who are able to distinguish between the appearance of productivity and actual production. (I'm sure that in a lot of companies he would have been faulted for wasting a lot of time 'just standing around'.)
Anyone working on scripts which respond to Code Red attacks by patching the originating server should read this cnet article,
which calls that approach 'hack-back'.
From the article:
The FBI has dismissed using any hack-back tactic as well. "It is not something that we could consider," said spokeswoman Debbie Weierman. "It would basically be viewed as an unauthorized intrusion."
It's not clear from the article whether such an 'unauthorized intrusion' by a private citizen would be illegal, but it might be worth thinking about before you go riding out to do battle with the Red Worm.
There were stories on the local 11:00 news on ABC, NBC, and CBS affiliates here.
One explained that Code Red only affected servers, so home PC users had nothing to worry about. Another said that rebooting would get rid of the worm.
All three said that Microsoft had come up with a cure: a patch to eliminate the threat. Not one mentioned that the virus targeted Microsoft IIS.
This worries me more than the worm itself. The combination of increasing high speed home internet access and inaccurate, incomplete reporting sounds like a perfect recipe for future disaster.
As a contract programmer, I've worked at a wide variety of companies, and most of them had at least a few foreign programmers. I heard from a number of employers that they had been hired because they were cheaper and couldn't quit. Not one claimed it was because of a lack of available Americans. So I don't doubt that the basic premise of the article is correct.
On the other hand, I think that the author's claim that employers use narrow job requirements to artificially inflate the labor shortage has more to do with paranoia than fact.
During the dawn of the business pc, I was a dBase 'programmer'. About two or three years into it, FoxPro (a dBase clone) was becoming the PC database of choice. I had long and fruitless arguments with recruiters who refused to submit me for FoxPro jobs. One recruiter listened patiently as I explained that FoxPro and dBase differed only slightly, listing the handful of differences between them (I'd done my homework) explaining why none of them posed a problem, and why with 2+ years of dBase under my belt I was more qualified than any FoxPro person (It hadn't even been around for a year yet.) When I finally ran out of steam the recruiter said, "You're right, and I believe you are the best person for the job. But unless they see the word 'FoxPro' on your resume, they're not even going to talk to you." It wasn't that these companies were trying to exclude qualified applicants. The problem was that they were trying to hire people for a field they knew nothing about, and the word 'FoxPro' was all they had to go on.
And that's The Real Problem. Qualified applicants are out there. It's just a matter of finding a way of sifting through all the self-proclaimed Gurus to find them. And jobs are out there for qualified programmers. It's just a matter of convincing the HR people that you deserve a second glance.
Of course the people doing the hiring have become more sophisticated over the years, but unfortunately, so have the canditates. I've been fooled myself. I was totally in awe of a newly hired programmer who talked quite intelligently about things like the advantages of using COM architecture in distributed, multi-tiered applications, that is until I found out that he had no idea what a COM interface was, much less how to build one.
And that, too, is The Real Problem. Some people are great programmers. Other people are great at using high-tech buzz words. Only a lucky few are great at both. Unfortunately, it's usually the second group who get hired first, while the first group goes begging.
In India they have an interesting method for catching monkeys. They bury a small-mouthed jar up to it's neck in the ground then fill it with nuts. A monkey comes along, sticks its hand into the jar and grabs the nuts, but its nut-filled fist is too big to pull back out through the mouth of the jar. As the hunters approach, the monkey shrieks and screams, but it just can't stand to let go of the prize, and so is caught.
When I read about people living in homeless shelters because they can't stand to sell their remaining dot-com stocks or move out of Silicon Valley, I have to wonder how far human intelligence has really progressed.
Interesting article, in light of the recent special on Columbine on 60 Minutes.
Apparently the 'subtle signs' that Columbine teachers, administrators and police missed in Eric Harris' case were:
Making pipe bombs (known to police and school officials)
Repeated threats of murder (known to police, school officials, and students)
Possesion of guns (known to other students, and possibly teachers - videos shown at school)
Maybe instead of targeting kids who wear black, play Doom, or shoot imaginary guns, it would be enough just to pay attention to kids who are obsessing about mass murder and collecting enough weapons to make it a reality
From the article:
"People are covering up everything that went wrong and I want those lessons out there," says Judy Brown. "They're doing studies, they're getting profiles. Everybody's trying to get programs going and what we can do. Well guess what? All the signs were there. You know what the lessons are? Do your job."
The pay scale is twice what it was (after correcting for inflation) when I went to school in the 1950's and 60's.
Yeah, the good old days when teaching was one of the few professions open to women. It's easy to get good employees for low pay when you're the only game in town. Not so easy when they have choices.
I agree that increasing pay won't fix the problem by itself, but to expect to hire and keep competent teachers for little more than what an unskilled laborer can make seems pretty unrealistic.
When I first read the problem, it seemed perfectly obvious: you can never get above 50%, because the color of other people's hats doesn't affect the color of your own. As I examined the solution, I realized I had made a false assumption (that the chances of winning are the same as the chances of each person guessing right).
That's now a part of my experience, and maybe the next time I'm faced with a novel problem that seems perfectly obvious, I look a little more closely, thus increasing my chances of finding an optimal solution.
An aikido instructor once said, "When I first started aikido, I was frustrated with all the theoretical stuff (awareness, focus, etc.). I wanted to get to the practical stuff (punching and kicking). But I finally realized that the theoretical stuff helped me enormously in everyday life, while the practical stuff was virtually useless."
Slashdot Mirror
... 2 Palestinians in Nablus were killed and 20 injured as Israeli tanks shelled a refugee camp in the West Bank city of Jenin...
"Two Israeli soldiers were slain by Palestinian snipers.... Shortly afterward, Israeli tanks ringing Jenin, also in the West Bank, began shelling Palestinian security positions just outside the town... Israeli security officials say an Israeli Arab suicide bomber who killed himself and three others on Sunday had earlier taken shelter in Jenin."
The New York Times
Funny how the emotional impact changes when you have all the facts. Shelling a refugee camp versus shelling Palestinian security positions just outside a town which sheltered terrorists and attacked Israelis.
As opposed to only appearing on an obscure, underground, news service like Reuters?
This article provides more information on the subject, including potential benefits of this technology: infusing a patient with blood cells from a stem cell line could improve the chances that their body would accept organ transplants from the same source.
That's bug #1486950. Currently it is classified as a low-level bug, and is awaiting test cases. We hope to it have corrected in the next major release.
Actually not all that clear, at least according to "former U.S. Attorney John Gibbons", as quoted in a Time magazine article, which explains the charge this way:
The charge filed by the government against Sklyarov is confusing enough: it is for "trafficking" software prohibited by the DMCA. This does not mean he went around selling it himself, but rather that Adobe was able to buy it through a third party--and his name was listed on that software's copyright page. Yes, that is as tenuous as it sounds. "I hope the government knows something we don't," says former U.S. Attorney John Gibbons, "because it looks like they haven't done their homework."
So I guess Occam's Razor would also say the the amount of gold ore in California exploded at the start of the gold rush and the number of stars increased dramatically with the invention of the telescope.
If you start with the statement, "The discovery of X has increased", there are a number of explanations that meet Occam's rule, including:
- More people are looking for X.
- Methods for finding X have improved.
- The total amount of X has increased.
Sorry for the cold glass of reality thrown in your face. Of course, now I get downvoted.Ms.Taken's Lady Schick: Having an unpopular opinion doesn't make you right.
But what if I'm an ISP, delivering cached (and altered) copies of your work? Does it matter if my customers give me permission to do this (after all it's your copyright, not theirs)? Does it matter if my ISP only has one customer? Does it matter whether I change the page before I send it to you (on the cached copy) or after (through a link-adding browser)?
I don't know what the courts will decide, but it seems to violate the spirit, if not the letter, of copyright law to for anyone to modify your words before they reach the reader, whether they have the reader's permission or not.
The copyright holder, that's who. The copyright grants, among other things the exclusive right to create derivative works, except in the case of parody.
Actually, there is. From the article: "it was found that the computer game only stimulated activity in the parts of the brain associated with vision and movement." [emphasis mine] Assuming that normal activity produces at least some stimulation and that stimulation causes development, that conclusion seems completely reasonable.
Even if it were conclusively demonstrated that the frontal lobes in people who play video games are less developed, whether there is causation and which way it goes would be very hard to decide
I think you got that backwards. The study does provide a plausible basis for causality. What it doesn't do is show that development is impaired in any significant (or even measurable) way.
And any of this assumes that the study was done correctly.
True. Without any mention of independent studies producing similar results, or even of this study being subject to any peer-review, I'm wary of taking its conclusions too seriously.
From a NY Times article, http://www.nytimes.com/2001/08/19/technology/19WIR E.html, about a man who inadvertantly 'cracked' a hospital 's wireless network:
On the other hand, he also knew that with "sniffer" software that he uses to analyze computer networks, he could monitor every message and file passing through the hospital's wireless system, presumably including sensitive patient data entered by nurses via the wireless-equipped laptops they carried from room to room.
"Fortunately, I'm married to a lawyer, who advised me against looking," he said.
I think the moral here, is not, as some cynics have suggested, "If you find a security hole, don't report it", but "If you find a security, don't 'test' it".
Chief Justice Renquist was quoted as saying, "I'm shocked, shocked to find that delaying tactics are going on here!"
My overall impression of VB is that language development is geared more toward PHB's who are looking for buzzwords than towards programmers. Case in point: OO inplementation. I remember my excitement when I heard that VB was finally going to implement inheritence, and my disappointment when I learned that by 'inheritence' they meant 'button to copy and rename an existing class'.
My biggest frustration with VB was that I kept running into walls, limits to the language that made it impossible to do what I wanted without some ugly kludges.
However, the article was not about security problems in Windows. It was about the security problems inherent in the software monoculture that Microsoft seems bent on creating.
Ecologists have long been aware of the dangers of monoculture. Using only a single strain of a species makes that species vulnerable to decimation by a single disease or parisite. The answer they have come up with is not to create a single super-resistent strain of each crop, but to plant a variety of strains so that if a new disease exploits a vulnerability in one, it won't threaten the whole species.
Does the same hold true for software? I think it does. Imagine what a Code Red-like worm could do if 90% of all machines were running the same OS/server combination. Without the buffer of uninfectable machines, we would have a real mess on our hands.
Secondly, could you quote the law that gives you "the ability to destroy competitors who improve on your product"? Hasn't Microsoft made a career out of 'improving on' competitors' products? If your statement were correct, the Microsoft trial would never have happened. Netscape would have simply 'destroyed' MS for improving on its browser.
Thirdly, RTFA. The article says, "Apple Computer continues to do well", and refers to "a team of Linux programmers". The scenario does not require Linux being "wiped off the face of the earth", only that the overwhelming number of machines run exactly the same thing.
Consider this situation:
You get into a motorcycle accident. You're still alive, but just barely. The doctors tell your parents, "We can stabilize him if you want, but he'll never regain consciousness. Or we can just wait until his heart stops beating and use his organs to save other lives."
If they take the second option, you won't technically be alive when the organs are harvested, but you'll still be revivable. Like an embryo in a petri dish, you would require medical intervention in order to survive, but you could be saved. Like that embryo, you meet none of the standard requirements for determining life: breath, heartbeat, brain activity. The only thing the embryo has that you don't is the potential for becoming a healthy, productive human being, but since "Pro-life" advocates consider aborting a fetus with serious birth defects murder, that's hardly a viable argument for them.
You're right that the embryo would be 'alive' when the cells are harvested and you wouldn't, but that's only because a much looser definition life is applied to the embryo than to you.
From the 'Martyr or criminal?' article:
Book publishers say they need a tough law like the Digital Millennium Copyright Act or they'll never be able to make money selling electronic books. If programmers are allowed to crack eBook encryption, the next Napster-style trading system will be exchanging copies of "Moby Dick" instead of songs by Moby, they warn.
From the Project Gutenburg website:
DOWNLOAD: moby.zip - 591 KB
Let's just hope no one alerts the FBI. ;)
Because he didn't require our immediate attention, the stuff in short term memory wasn't lost. We could get it written down before any new input erased it from our minds. It also gave us a chance to 'bookmark' our thoughts, with a mental reminder before the switch. The result was less time wasted getting back to where we were before the interruption, better focus on the new task, and less stress associated with 'switching gears'.
Of course this method requires two things that are regretably rare in corporations: a manager with the humility to recognize that sometimes a programmers time is more valuable than his/her own, and upper management who are able to distinguish between the appearance of productivity and actual production. (I'm sure that in a lot of companies he would have been faulted for wasting a lot of time 'just standing around'.)
Sorry that link should have been to the FAQ referenced in the article. The FAQ's old (July 31), but the basics still apply.
From the article:
The FBI has dismissed using any hack-back tactic as well. "It is not something that we could consider," said spokeswoman Debbie Weierman. "It would basically be viewed as an unauthorized intrusion."
It's not clear from the article whether such an 'unauthorized intrusion' by a private citizen would be illegal, but it might be worth thinking about before you go riding out to do battle with the Red Worm.
One explained that Code Red only affected servers, so home PC users had nothing to worry about. Another said that rebooting would get rid of the worm.
All three said that Microsoft had come up with a cure: a patch to eliminate the threat. Not one mentioned that the virus targeted Microsoft IIS.
This worries me more than the worm itself. The combination of increasing high speed home internet access and inaccurate, incomplete reporting sounds like a perfect recipe for future disaster.
On the other hand, I think that the author's claim that employers use narrow job requirements to artificially inflate the labor shortage has more to do with paranoia than fact.
During the dawn of the business pc, I was a dBase 'programmer'. About two or three years into it, FoxPro (a dBase clone) was becoming the PC database of choice. I had long and fruitless arguments with recruiters who refused to submit me for FoxPro jobs. One recruiter listened patiently as I explained that FoxPro and dBase differed only slightly, listing the handful of differences between them (I'd done my homework) explaining why none of them posed a problem, and why with 2+ years of dBase under my belt I was more qualified than any FoxPro person (It hadn't even been around for a year yet.) When I finally ran out of steam the recruiter said, "You're right, and I believe you are the best person for the job. But unless they see the word 'FoxPro' on your resume, they're not even going to talk to you." It wasn't that these companies were trying to exclude qualified applicants. The problem was that they were trying to hire people for a field they knew nothing about, and the word 'FoxPro' was all they had to go on.
And that's The Real Problem. Qualified applicants are out there. It's just a matter of finding a way of sifting through all the self-proclaimed Gurus to find them. And jobs are out there for qualified programmers. It's just a matter of convincing the HR people that you deserve a second glance.
Of course the people doing the hiring have become more sophisticated over the years, but unfortunately, so have the canditates. I've been fooled myself. I was totally in awe of a newly hired programmer who talked quite intelligently about things like the advantages of using COM architecture in distributed, multi-tiered applications, that is until I found out that he had no idea what a COM interface was, much less how to build one.
And that, too, is The Real Problem. Some people are great programmers. Other people are great at using high-tech buzz words. Only a lucky few are great at both. Unfortunately, it's usually the second group who get hired first, while the first group goes begging.
When I read about people living in homeless shelters because they can't stand to sell their remaining dot-com stocks or move out of Silicon Valley, I have to wonder how far human intelligence has really progressed.
Apparently the 'subtle signs' that Columbine teachers, administrators and police missed in Eric Harris' case were:
Maybe instead of targeting kids who wear black, play Doom, or shoot imaginary guns, it would be enough just to pay attention to kids who are obsessing about mass murder and collecting enough weapons to make it a reality
From the article:
"People are covering up everything that went wrong and I want those lessons out there," says Judy Brown. "They're doing studies, they're getting profiles. Everybody's trying to get programs going and what we can do. Well guess what? All the signs were there. You know what the lessons are? Do your job."
Yeah, the good old days when teaching was one of the few professions open to women. It's easy to get good employees for low pay when you're the only game in town. Not so easy when they have choices.
I agree that increasing pay won't fix the problem by itself, but to expect to hire and keep competent teachers for little more than what an unskilled laborer can make seems pretty unrealistic.
That's now a part of my experience, and maybe the next time I'm faced with a novel problem that seems perfectly obvious, I look a little more closely, thus increasing my chances of finding an optimal solution.
An aikido instructor once said, "When I first started aikido, I was frustrated with all the theoretical stuff (awareness, focus, etc.). I wanted to get to the practical stuff (punching and kicking). But I finally realized that the theoretical stuff helped me enormously in everyday life, while the practical stuff was virtually useless."