You must be freaking stupid or just one of those "Pop-Culturally Correct". You obviously did not read the story. Let's take this point for point...
Wow, name calling. How adult of you.
Selling oneself into "bonded" labor is no different than indentured servitude. Slavery is slavery even if you sell yourself. That you could call it "a business contract" doesn't change that is is both unethical and illegal. In many cases, it is the family of the slave that is paid (especially in the case of girls sold for the sex trade.)
"Bonded" laborers are often forced to live in housing owned their "employers" and are charged rates for food and rent that extend the term of the servitude indefinitely.
There's more than just a difference of degree.
Yes, I have a home loan. No, I don't work for the bank without pay. The bank may be able to take the house should I fail to pay, but they aren't entitled to my labor, or that of my children. The bank has no say in where I live, what I eat, where I work, or even if I work.
Not that the U.S. doesn't haved a debt problem and a financial education problem. It does. That doesn't make it slavery.
I always wondered when seti@home would become multithreaded...
The preferred model in BOINC is actually multiprocessed (i.e. working on two workunits simultaneously) rather than multithreaded (running multiple process threads on a single workunit) because it's easier to divide resources among projects that way.
What, dishonest? You mean like running out of data to process, but lying to all your users and feeding them the same data over and over, while their systems burn energy by the megawatts, running useless calculations?
For those of you haven't heard this idiocy before, shortly after the project began, a bug in the server code caused the same 100 workunits to be sent to everyone many times over. Of course the bug arose on a weekend, while I was in Chicago for a conference, and David Anderson was on vacation. The rest of the crew didn't notice until Monday.
At any rate, for a whole weekend we were sending out bogus work. Of course, to some people, this meant we were "lying to all [our] users and feeding them the same data over and over." Some of those people are still living in 1999.
While we currently do have an overcapacity of processing resources, I think we've been fairly up front about using the overcapacity to check validity of results. BOINC is, to some extent, a reaction to that overcapacity. It gives our volunteers (I hate the term users in this context) an easy way to join multiple projects in a way that will allow more productive use of excess computing capacity.
No, but greed, incompetence, short term thinking, and the outsourcing of everything does. Having no real authorities to answer to surely helps as well.
Unfortunately greed and short term thinking are often the result of an unregulated market. Even in a properly functioning (read regulated) power market there is a trade off between profit and reliability. A for-profit enterprise will always choose profit over reliability. Redundant power lines are unproductive assets and it's less expensive to replace old components after they fail than before. Right now U.S. power company executives aren't thinking "How can we avoid another major power failure?" They are thinking "How many days a year can our customers go without power before it affects our profit margin?"
Any properly functioning market requires regulation. Period. The libertarian ideal of the "free market" is not a beast that exists in nature.
"Free markets" don't stay free without regulation. Any market will have winners and loosers. The loosers sell out to the winners until the remaining winners start using their market muscle to fix prices and to keep out new competitors. Prices aren't high enough? Let's cut production. New startup trying to get in? Let's give our product away for a while. A market with monopolists isn't any more free than one with prices fixed by the government.
Certain critical parts of the national infrastructure must be kept out of the commercial arena primarly because there is no incentive for a commercial entity to serve the interest of the nation if it might cut into their profit margin.
I'd love to see how some of you people live. I can picture it now. I'd walk in to the kitchen, see a mesh of coat hangers with some bread stuck to them jammed into an electric socket. I'd ask what the hell it was and recieve the reply, "Oh, that's my Open Source Toaster"
Well, I wouldn't NEED a damn open source toaster if the license agreement on my closed source toaster didn't prevent me from using anything but "Wonder Bread(TM)."
Even better were the pre-web Prodigy style line graphics which, IIRC were based on a "standard" that came from AT&T. I wish they had been included in HTML 1.0. Makes for much smaller line drawings than the equivalent in GIF, especially as the drawings get large.
Why so many content providers aren't using gzip compression? The cpu time required is MUCH cheaper than the bandwidth, AND it makes users happiers because they get it faster. Oh, and it's free (for Apache anyway) and easy to set up. It even works with 99% of browsers these days.
Who needs mod-gzip?
Back in the old days (when I was using xmosaic or
netscape and a 14.4 kbps modem) I tried an experiment. I made shadowed gzipped versions of my web
pages (including some generated daily) and accessed them directly (*.html.gz). Worked fine on netscape if you had your mime types set up correctly. I made minimal efforts to get it to catch on. I don't think anyone else ever used it at a large site.
Worked great when serving big html files. Haven't tried it in years. I would assume it still works.
They want companies selling Linux to license their technology...
SCO's lawyers are missing an important point. Should companies selling Linux buy a license from SCO for some code and include the code in Linux, they lose the right to distribute Linux. Paying a license to SCO would be the equivalent of closing up shop.
The GPL states in fairly clear language that a product under GPL must stay under GPL. If closed source ends up in the kernel, the kernel cannot be distributed under the GPL. If it's not distributed under the GPL, it can't be distributed at all unless ALL of the contributors agree to an alternate license. That's not going to happen.
This is really a lose-lose situation for SCO. The best outcome for them would only force a rewind to a 2.2 kernel. It's more likely they will lose all claim to any code they distributed in their Linux distribution. They're not going to see any money from the suit regardless.
Yes, the technology they give away benefits society, but his quote was that the money NASA spends is hughly inefficient compared to the private sector. This is true. I did contract work at JSC and I can attest to 50$ lunches and paying people $138 an hour to sit around in the break room and talk ALL DAY.
I have some experience with this, too. The people eating the $50 lunches and getting paid $138 an hour to sit around and do nothing are called "contractors." In their spare time they complain about how private sector contractors are more efficient than the government workers.
Unfortunately we're not included in this one. We're not part of the SETI institute. We've had a proposal for our next generation instrument (SERENDIP V, the source of SETI@HOME II data) pending at NASA for more than a year. The word has been that it's been recommended for funding (as of last October) but thus far we have not received any official notification. It's hard to tell whether the delay in funding is financial difficulty at NASA or pollitical difficulty.
We recently got a moderate grant from NSF to persue our hydrogen survey and a search for giant pulses from ETs, evaporating black holes and/or pulsars.
Right now we only have a small quantity of gift funds to use toward developing SETI@HOME II and SERENDIP V.
Of course there's always the chance that gift funds pot will get larger.
The rules will change again.. trapping the code inside the borders.
It's even worse than that. The change is an administrative change, not a change to the law. (IANAL, but I have worked under ITAR exemptions in the past and so have made myself familiar with the implications.) Should the administrative change be reversed at some time, and you have exported encryption technology, you have suddenly become guilty of a crime.
Because the law didn't change, it's not a case of ex post facto. It's uncertain whether the appeals courts would uphold a conviction in such a case. However, the DOJ could make your life unpleasant for quite some time.
In other words, if you choose to export, don't get on Ashcroft's bad side.
I think the "bad thing" is that it's being seen by many as a big "Fuck you" to the US - essentially "We don't trust you cowboy arseholes, so we're building our own system, so:-P" or something...
I think the "bad thing" is that the rest of the world hasn't been saying "fuck you" loud enough.
Unfortunately my fellow countrymen and women apparently don't seem to see there is a difference between saying it to the U.S. versus saying it to the current administration.
Even worse, my fellow citizens apparently haven't paused long enough in handing over their freedoms to consider that they should be saying the same thing.
Look - the authors have a right to put their code under ANY license requirement they like. If they choose to do this - well, I just don't think the software would then qualify as either Free or Open Source software in my mind.
Remember that free software is like free speech, not free beer. If I write an article, free speech means you can quote from it (with attribution) and you can use ideas from it (without attribution). I would be likely to allow you to redistribute it in whole (with attribution). Nothing in the term "free speech" means that you can claim authorship of it.
I don't see why "free software" should be any different. There is nothing in the term "free software" that can be construed to allow you to claim authorship for code you didn't contribute to.
If lack of attribution is reducing the number of developers of free software, then that is a problem that should be resolved to ensure the future growth of free software.
He also said I wasn't the inspiration for "Scientist with Bad Haircut #3" but the resemblance (especially in Jill's case) must be more than coincidental.
For all that are wondering. I did some more reading and the nebula that's been illuminated is now 7 light years across (diameter) as of December 17th 2002.
Now they're saying the nebula has always been there and it just being illuminated so the nebula is not traveling faster then the speed of the light...
Ya ok fair enough but the light has traveled 3.5 light years from the center in only a single year.
You
are making the mistaken assumption that the hypernova is at the center of the nebula when, in fact, the portion of the nebula that we see is between us and the hypernova.
Think of it this way. Assume that that nebula is a flat sheet seven light years in diameter and 10 light years away from the hypernova and 1,000,000 light years away from us. (See the picture here) Light from the hypernova gets to the center of the nebula 10 years after the explosion and to us, 1,000,010 years after the nova.
Light from the explosion gets to the edge of the
nebula sqrt(10^2+3.5^2)=10.6 years after the explosion, and to us 1,000,010.6 years after the explosion. So to us, it looks like the nebula expanded to a diameter of 7 light years in 0.6 years.
The more likely geometry is that the nebula is a shell around the hypernova. From the apparent speed at which the illuminated region expands we could determine the diameter of the shell.
I cannot believe that it took them
two months to fix a bufer overflow!
Shrug. Closed source: what do you expect?
Actually, much of the delay was due to the fact that all of our non-Solaris clients are ported and tested by volunteers whose available time to put toward such things is limited. (On a properly set up SPARC solaris machine, the bug doesn't result in a vulnerability by the way.)
The primary bug was fixed by me prior to 1/25/03, at which point the code was sent to the porters of the Win32 versions. The Win32 versions continued to show a segfault on overflow. The porters eventually tracked down a more subtle bug.
Not every buffer overflow is as simple as "he used gets() rather than fgets()." The buggy was far uglier than it needed to be for the job it was doing. Given the time, I probably would have reimplemented it from scratch. I'm not going to reveal who wrote the flawed code other than to say it wasn't me.
Meanwhile, the main team was in panic mode getting ready for the trip to Arecibo. I was out of town on business for much of that two months. (2.5 weeks in Korea, 1.5 Weeks at Arecibo). Maybe we weren't pushing hard enough on our volunteers, but hell, they are volunteers with real jobs that they get paid for.
As has been said, so far as we know at this point no client has been comprimised by exploiting this hole. In order to break the client, an attacker would need to set up a machine to act as a proxy or pretend to be the server. That's not the easiest thing in the world to do without access to the local network (or a security breach at your ISP). And if an attacker has access to your local network or routers and proxies at your ISP, holes the in SETI@home client are the least of your worries.
At any rate, if you're worried, get the upgrade. Given I haven't upgraded my machines yet, you can see how concerned I am about it.
No doubt actually finding and verifying(good luck) alien signals would a great discovery. But at the same the practically speaking its a complete waste. All of these people could and should be donating to something like Folding or some other distributed effort that actually will probably help humanity by finding a cure for cancer or some other disease. But I guess actually helping your fellow humans is less glamourous then being the first nerd or geek to discover some faint signal which when discovered probably won't even be accepted by the rest of the world and will be debated forever.
Ever consider how many hours a week you spend reading slashdot, watching TV, or listening to music. Practially speaking what you spend most of your spare time doing is a complete waste of time and resources.
Why aren't you volunteering your time to something that will actually help humanity? Try volunteering in a soup kitchen. Cut all power to your house in order to reduce greenhouse emissions. Travel everywhere by bicycle. Give all of your money to charity.
There are other more practical and worthy uses of the time and resources you waste on yourself. It's time to shift those resources to tasks which will actually improve the world's quality of life.
To get real for a moment, SETI@home has about half a million machines running at the moment. That might represent at most one percent of the available resources. There's plently to go around.
Granted, I'm not unbiased, since I'm working on the observing schedule right now. Next week, Arecibo...
I'm not sure I get what the problem is. No room left in your case? No PCI slots for additional
controllers?
My current desktop setup is...
IDE Channel 1A: 100 GB master
IDE Channel 2A: 100 GB master
IDE Channel 3A: IDE ZIP 100 (Bay 6)
IDE Channel 4A: DVD-RW (Bay 1)
IDE Channel 4B: DVD-ROM (Bay 2)
SCSI O id 4: Jaz 1GB (external)
SCSI 0 id 5: CD-RW (Bay 3)
FD0: 3.5" (Bay 5)
One 5" bay free. (Bay 4)
The additional cost to get the extra two IDE channels was $25 for a dual channel IDE RAID card.
For a home machine, IDE is perfectly adequate for the main drives. I keep SCSI around in hopes of acquiring a reasonably priced backup solution at some point. (My current backup is to copy modified files to another machine in the garage with an eventual dump to DVD). If I need more storage in the near term, I'd probably pick up a firewire drive.
"Next year or so" the arrangement I'd choose would likely be entirely different. We'll see where serial ATA and SASCSI are at that point.
Science is learning through empirical thinking. Religion is learning through transcendental thinking. Do you know the difference? Plato and Socrates taught transcendental thinking before most of the mainstream religions were conceptualized. Just because it is different than empirical thinking does not mean it is any less valid.
There is no evidence that "transcendental thinking" has any validity. Point to one demonstrably valid conclusion that has been reached by transcendental thinking.
On the contrary, religion has the capacity to explain everything in the universe all at once, science does not.
On the contrary, religion explains nothing in the universe, except occasionally explaining bizzare behavior by adherents.
Science is the statement that there exist a set of immutable rules that govern all physical processes.
You are correct and religion (at least the one I adhere to) claims the same thing.
Must be one of the few religions without omnipotent or omniscient gods.
But keep in mind that as knowledge increases, the ideas that science has given us change and new ones present themselves. The truth has always been there, we just lacked the ability to see it.
I would claim that the truth you speak about is neither sought by nor included in any religion.
Gallileo, Kepler and Newton all looked at the world with empirical minds, but were motivated by deep spiritual feelings.
And we see how well religion treated Galileo in return. At least he didn't end up like Giordano Bruno. Kepler may have been motivated by his love of astrology, but his belief in non-existant order in the cosmos led him astray. I seen no reason the we should be hobbled by the same superstitions that they were.
That some famous scientists were in part motivated by religion is only of consequence if you could also show that others weren't disuaded from scientific persuit by religion, or encumbered by religious ideas. How many hundreds of years was astronomy and physics held back because of the "transcendental knowledge" that
the heavens were perfect and only partook in perfect circular motion? (I'd guess between 700 and 1500 years.)
At some point we, as a species, have to realize that the universe isn't a story about us. I don't think we'll survive for long without coming to that realization.
At some point we have to realize, as a species, that religion and spirituality are part of our nature. I don't think we can survive for long without coming to that realization
I do understand that religion and spirituality are part of our nature. We're beginning to (scientifically) understand what brain structures are responsible for this. There are reasonable hypotheses for why animals would evolve to have a religious instinct. None of this suggests validity of regligion. I choose not to be limited by my instincts.
First of all, we have to understand each other. Science and religion are not mutually exclusive, nor are they opposite ends of a spectrum. Science is a tool used to gain knowledge. I submit that religion is similarly a tool used to gain knowledge, albeit in a different way.
I disagree that religion can be used to gain knowledge, unless you want to invent such a thing as "spiritual knowledge." Scientific knowledge has a purpose, it can be used to make predictions that can subsequently be verified.
I understand of the assumption of "spiritual knowledge" can alter human behavior. How many "martyrs" have "known" their place in paradise was assured. How do you verify that any of them had any knowledge?
I don't recall asking why they would be a bad mix, but I did wonder why they can't co-exist.
They can't co-exist because they are contradictory. Religion is the statement that the physical laws that govern the universe are arbitrary and subject to change at any time. Science is the statement that there exist a set of immutable rules that govern all physical processes. To quote Scotty, "Ye canna change the laws of physics." If we ever find a way to change the charge of an electron, it will be because the laws of physics allow it. There is no room in science for the phrase "I believe." There is only, "the evidence shows" and "according to the predictions of this hypothesis."
I also feel that trying to answer religous questions with science is a farce.
Of course, but then again the definition of a "religious question" would be "one without a valid answer." The answer to most of them is "what makes you think there would be an answer to that?" At some point we, as a species, have to realize that the universe isn't a story about us. I don't think we'll survive for long without coming to that realization.
There's a large difference between "capable of having planet with a stable orbit in the habitable zone" and "having an earthlike planet with a stable orbit in the habitable zone."
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of looking for extraterrestrial life and earthlike planets. (Who would have guessed?) That there are stable orbits in the habitable zone of many stars is not a surprise. It really says very little about the number of earthlike planets out there.
I'm not the biggest fan of splashy press releases for unsurprising results. (I think the "more than anyone expected" comment is well overstated.) But it's AAS meeting time, so we'll be seeing a few of those this week. The usual ones are:
the best evidence ever for existence of black holes.
it looks like life could be common in the universe, but we still have no evidence of this.
more planets have been found.
the first time "blank" has been observed, where "blank" is something that has been announced as being observed for the "first time" at the previous 10 AAS meetings.
a controversial mars "result" that will be argued about for years.
look at the pretty pictures a half billion dollar space mission can give you.
These are the ones you will hear about because we astronomers tend to think that this is all the press would be interested in hearing about. Maybe we're right, maybe we're not. At any rate, AAS meetings are a good time to think about whether the way we sell science to the public is the best way. Any suggestions?
Hidden among these press conferences will be one surprising result that is wrong, one surprising result that is correct and interesting, and the correction of a surprising result released at the previous meeting. And there will be a lot of interesting research presented by people who don't schedule press conferences. It will, for the most part, be ignored by the press.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, name calling. How adult of you.
Selling oneself into "bonded" labor is no different than indentured servitude. Slavery is slavery even if you sell yourself. That you could call it "a business contract" doesn't change that is is both unethical and illegal. In many cases, it is the family of the slave that is paid (especially in the case of girls sold for the sex trade.)
"Bonded" laborers are often forced to live in housing owned their "employers" and are charged rates for food and rent that extend the term of the servitude indefinitely.
There's more than just a difference of degree. Yes, I have a home loan. No, I don't work for the bank without pay. The bank may be able to take the house should I fail to pay, but they aren't entitled to my labor, or that of my children. The bank has no say in where I live, what I eat, where I work, or even if I work.
Not that the U.S. doesn't haved a debt problem and a financial education problem. It does. That doesn't make it slavery.
Not that I agree with LA county on this one, but I think you are assuming that human slavery has been eradicated. It has not. Not even in the U.S.
Yes, we do.
I can't tell you about the secret launch facility or the antimatter weapons. Soon all your base are belong to hippies.
The preferred model in BOINC is actually multiprocessed (i.e. working on two workunits simultaneously) rather than multithreaded (running multiple process threads on a single workunit) because it's easier to divide resources among projects that way.
For those of you haven't heard this idiocy before, shortly after the project began, a bug in the server code caused the same 100 workunits to be sent to everyone many times over. Of course the bug arose on a weekend, while I was in Chicago for a conference, and David Anderson was on vacation. The rest of the crew didn't notice until Monday.
At any rate, for a whole weekend we were sending out bogus work. Of course, to some people, this meant we were "lying to all [our] users and feeding them the same data over and over." Some of those people are still living in 1999.
While we currently do have an overcapacity of processing resources, I think we've been fairly up front about using the overcapacity to check validity of results. BOINC is, to some extent, a reaction to that overcapacity. It gives our volunteers (I hate the term users in this context) an easy way to join multiple projects in a way that will allow more productive use of excess computing capacity.
Unfortunately greed and short term thinking are often the result of an unregulated market. Even in a properly functioning (read regulated) power market there is a trade off between profit and reliability. A for-profit enterprise will always choose profit over reliability. Redundant power lines are unproductive assets and it's less expensive to replace old components after they fail than before. Right now U.S. power company executives aren't thinking "How can we avoid another major power failure?" They are thinking "How many days a year can our customers go without power before it affects our profit margin?"
Any properly functioning market requires regulation. Period. The libertarian ideal of the "free market" is not a beast that exists in nature.
"Free markets" don't stay free without regulation. Any market will have winners and loosers. The loosers sell out to the winners until the remaining winners start using their market muscle to fix prices and to keep out new competitors. Prices aren't high enough? Let's cut production. New startup trying to get in? Let's give our product away for a while. A market with monopolists isn't any more free than one with prices fixed by the government.
Certain critical parts of the national infrastructure must be kept out of the commercial arena primarly because there is no incentive for a commercial entity to serve the interest of the nation if it might cut into their profit margin.
Well, I wouldn't NEED a damn open source toaster if the license agreement on my closed source toaster didn't prevent me from using anything but "Wonder Bread(TM)."
Even better were the pre-web Prodigy style line graphics which, IIRC were based on a "standard" that came from AT&T. I wish they had been included in HTML 1.0. Makes for much smaller line drawings than the equivalent in GIF, especially as the drawings get large.
Who needs mod-gzip? Back in the old days (when I was using xmosaic or netscape and a 14.4 kbps modem) I tried an experiment. I made shadowed gzipped versions of my web pages (including some generated daily) and accessed them directly (*.html.gz). Worked fine on netscape if you had your mime types set up correctly. I made minimal efforts to get it to catch on. I don't think anyone else ever used it at a large site.
Worked great when serving big html files. Haven't tried it in years. I would assume it still works.
SCO's lawyers are missing an important point. Should companies selling Linux buy a license from SCO for some code and include the code in Linux, they lose the right to distribute Linux. Paying a license to SCO would be the equivalent of closing up shop.
The GPL states in fairly clear language that a product under GPL must stay under GPL. If closed source ends up in the kernel, the kernel cannot be distributed under the GPL. If it's not distributed under the GPL, it can't be distributed at all unless ALL of the contributors agree to an alternate license. That's not going to happen.
This is really a lose-lose situation for SCO. The best outcome for them would only force a rewind to a 2.2 kernel. It's more likely they will lose all claim to any code they distributed in their Linux distribution. They're not going to see any money from the suit regardless.
I have some experience with this, too. The people eating the $50 lunches and getting paid $138 an hour to sit around and do nothing are called "contractors." In their spare time they complain about how private sector contractors are more efficient than the government workers.
We recently got a moderate grant from NSF to persue our hydrogen survey and a search for giant pulses from ETs, evaporating black holes and/or pulsars.
Right now we only have a small quantity of gift funds to use toward developing SETI@HOME II and SERENDIP V.
Of course there's always the chance that gift funds pot will get larger.
It's even worse than that. The change is an administrative change, not a change to the law. (IANAL, but I have worked under ITAR exemptions in the past and so have made myself familiar with the implications.) Should the administrative change be reversed at some time, and you have exported encryption technology, you have suddenly become guilty of a crime.
Because the law didn't change, it's not a case of ex post facto. It's uncertain whether the appeals courts would uphold a conviction in such a case. However, the DOJ could make your life unpleasant for quite some time.
In other words, if you choose to export, don't get on Ashcroft's bad side.
I think the "bad thing" is that the rest of the world hasn't been saying "fuck you" loud enough. Unfortunately my fellow countrymen and women apparently don't seem to see there is a difference between saying it to the U.S. versus saying it to the current administration.
Even worse, my fellow citizens apparently haven't paused long enough in handing over their freedoms to consider that they should be saying the same thing.
Unfortunately "unit.h" is a bit too large for this message.
Remember that free software is like free speech, not free beer. If I write an article, free speech means you can quote from it (with attribution) and you can use ideas from it (without attribution). I would be likely to allow you to redistribute it in whole (with attribution). Nothing in the term "free speech" means that you can claim authorship of it.
I don't see why "free software" should be any different. There is nothing in the term "free software" that can be construed to allow you to claim authorship for code you didn't contribute to.
If lack of attribution is reducing the number of developers of free software, then that is a problem that should be resolved to ensure the future growth of free software.
No, they need new producers. Berman and Braga have gotten into a "well, it got us ratings in the past, so it's gotta work this time, too" mentality.
I can pretty much guarantee that I won't be watching any more episodes of Enterprise unless those two become rapidly gone.
He also said I wasn't the inspiration for "Scientist with Bad Haircut #3" but the resemblance (especially in Jill's case) must be more than coincidental.
Ya ok fair enough but the light has traveled 3.5 light years from the center in only a single year.
You are making the mistaken assumption that the hypernova is at the center of the nebula when, in fact, the portion of the nebula that we see is between us and the hypernova.
Think of it this way. Assume that that nebula is a flat sheet seven light years in diameter and 10 light years away from the hypernova and 1,000,000 light years away from us. (See the picture here) Light from the hypernova gets to the center of the nebula 10 years after the explosion and to us, 1,000,010 years after the nova.
Light from the explosion gets to the edge of the nebula sqrt(10^2+3.5^2)=10.6 years after the explosion, and to us 1,000,010.6 years after the explosion. So to us, it looks like the nebula expanded to a diameter of 7 light years in 0.6 years.
The more likely geometry is that the nebula is a shell around the hypernova. From the apparent speed at which the illuminated region expands we could determine the diameter of the shell.
Shrug. Closed source: what do you expect?
Actually, much of the delay was due to the fact that all of our non-Solaris clients are ported and tested by volunteers whose available time to put toward such things is limited. (On a properly set up SPARC solaris machine, the bug doesn't result in a vulnerability by the way.)
The primary bug was fixed by me prior to 1/25/03, at which point the code was sent to the porters of the Win32 versions. The Win32 versions continued to show a segfault on overflow. The porters eventually tracked down a more subtle bug. Not every buffer overflow is as simple as "he used gets() rather than fgets()." The buggy was far uglier than it needed to be for the job it was doing. Given the time, I probably would have reimplemented it from scratch. I'm not going to reveal who wrote the flawed code other than to say it wasn't me.
Meanwhile, the main team was in panic mode getting ready for the trip to Arecibo. I was out of town on business for much of that two months. (2.5 weeks in Korea, 1.5 Weeks at Arecibo). Maybe we weren't pushing hard enough on our volunteers, but hell, they are volunteers with real jobs that they get paid for.
As has been said, so far as we know at this point no client has been comprimised by exploiting this hole. In order to break the client, an attacker would need to set up a machine to act as a proxy or pretend to be the server. That's not the easiest thing in the world to do without access to the local network (or a security breach at your ISP). And if an attacker has access to your local network or routers and proxies at your ISP, holes the in SETI@home client are the least of your worries.
At any rate, if you're worried, get the upgrade. Given I haven't upgraded my machines yet, you can see how concerned I am about it.
Ever consider how many hours a week you spend reading slashdot, watching TV, or listening to music. Practially speaking what you spend most of your spare time doing is a complete waste of time and resources.
Why aren't you volunteering your time to something that will actually help humanity? Try volunteering in a soup kitchen. Cut all power to your house in order to reduce greenhouse emissions. Travel everywhere by bicycle. Give all of your money to charity.
There are other more practical and worthy uses of the time and resources you waste on yourself. It's time to shift those resources to tasks which will actually improve the world's quality of life.
To get real for a moment, SETI@home has about half a million machines running at the moment. That might represent at most one percent of the available resources. There's plently to go around.
Granted, I'm not unbiased, since I'm working on the observing schedule right now. Next week, Arecibo...
My current desktop setup is...
The additional cost to get the extra two IDE channels was $25 for a dual channel IDE RAID card. For a home machine, IDE is perfectly adequate for the main drives. I keep SCSI around in hopes of acquiring a reasonably priced backup solution at some point. (My current backup is to copy modified files to another machine in the garage with an eventual dump to DVD). If I need more storage in the near term, I'd probably pick up a firewire drive.
"Next year or so" the arrangement I'd choose would likely be entirely different. We'll see where serial ATA and SASCSI are at that point.
There is no evidence that "transcendental thinking" has any validity. Point to one demonstrably valid conclusion that has been reached by transcendental thinking.
On the contrary, religion has the capacity to explain everything in the universe all at once, science does not.
On the contrary, religion explains nothing in the universe, except occasionally explaining bizzare behavior by adherents.
You are correct and religion (at least the one I adhere to) claims the same thing.
Must be one of the few religions without omnipotent or omniscient gods.
But keep in mind that as knowledge increases, the ideas that science has given us change and new ones present themselves. The truth has always been there, we just lacked the ability to see it.
I would claim that the truth you speak about is neither sought by nor included in any religion.
Gallileo, Kepler and Newton all looked at the world with empirical minds, but were motivated by deep spiritual feelings.
And we see how well religion treated Galileo in return. At least he didn't end up like Giordano Bruno. Kepler may have been motivated by his love of astrology, but his belief in non-existant order in the cosmos led him astray. I seen no reason the we should be hobbled by the same superstitions that they were.
That some famous scientists were in part motivated by religion is only of consequence if you could also show that others weren't disuaded from scientific persuit by religion, or encumbered by religious ideas. How many hundreds of years was astronomy and physics held back because of the "transcendental knowledge" that the heavens were perfect and only partook in perfect circular motion? (I'd guess between 700 and 1500 years.)
At some point we have to realize, as a species, that religion and spirituality are part of our nature. I don't think we can survive for long without coming to that realization
I do understand that religion and spirituality are part of our nature. We're beginning to (scientifically) understand what brain structures are responsible for this. There are reasonable hypotheses for why animals would evolve to have a religious instinct. None of this suggests validity of regligion. I choose not to be limited by my instincts.
I disagree that religion can be used to gain knowledge, unless you want to invent such a thing as "spiritual knowledge." Scientific knowledge has a purpose, it can be used to make predictions that can subsequently be verified. I understand of the assumption of "spiritual knowledge" can alter human behavior. How many "martyrs" have "known" their place in paradise was assured. How do you verify that any of them had any knowledge?
I don't recall asking why they would be a bad mix, but I did wonder why they can't co-exist.
They can't co-exist because they are contradictory. Religion is the statement that the physical laws that govern the universe are arbitrary and subject to change at any time. Science is the statement that there exist a set of immutable rules that govern all physical processes. To quote Scotty, "Ye canna change the laws of physics." If we ever find a way to change the charge of an electron, it will be because the laws of physics allow it. There is no room in science for the phrase "I believe." There is only, "the evidence shows" and "according to the predictions of this hypothesis."
I also feel that trying to answer religous questions with science is a farce.
Of course, but then again the definition of a "religious question" would be "one without a valid answer." The answer to most of them is "what makes you think there would be an answer to that?" At some point we, as a species, have to realize that the universe isn't a story about us. I don't think we'll survive for long without coming to that realization.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of looking for extraterrestrial life and earthlike planets. (Who would have guessed?) That there are stable orbits in the habitable zone of many stars is not a surprise. It really says very little about the number of earthlike planets out there.
I'm not the biggest fan of splashy press releases for unsurprising results. (I think the "more than anyone expected" comment is well overstated.) But it's AAS meeting time, so we'll be seeing a few of those this week. The usual ones are:
- the best evidence ever for existence of black holes.
- it looks like life could be common in the universe, but we still have no evidence of this.
- more planets have been found.
- the first time "blank" has been observed, where "blank" is something that has been announced as being observed for the "first time" at the previous 10 AAS meetings.
- a controversial mars "result" that will be argued about for years.
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look at the pretty pictures a half billion dollar space mission can give you.
These are the ones you will hear about because we astronomers tend to think that this is all the press would be interested in hearing about. Maybe we're right, maybe we're not. At any rate, AAS meetings are a good time to think about whether the way we sell science to the public is the best way. Any suggestions?Hidden among these press conferences will be one surprising result that is wrong, one surprising result that is correct and interesting, and the correction of a surprising result released at the previous meeting. And there will be a lot of interesting research presented by people who don't schedule press conferences. It will, for the most part, be ignored by the press.