That's why I never buy into those future-world scenarios where people are banned from breeding and you're genetically screened (or planned) from before birth. People would never accept it, and "just kill (or even just sterilize) those who dissent" is far easier.
I have a vague idea bouncing around in my skull about a Standard Dystopian Future, where so much of the human genome is patented that prospective parents must purchase a licence to combine their owned genes from a government agency formed to distribute the fees to all the patent holders. This, of course, would rely on an extension of patent terms, but since copyright terms are extended on a regular basis, I'm sure some enterprising IP lawyer is preparing the arguments to support legislation extending the terms of other types of IP protection.
"People would never accept it" is a dangerous assumption, especially in hierarchical societies where authorities of various sorts can wield undue influence through the exercise of power. China during the Cultural Revolution might be a good example, where the situation only changed when control of the state system switched from one set of oligarchs to another group who decided to stop the disasters. In a hierarchical society, such as most on Earth, few people would dare consider taking actions that oppose the will of the leaders, who are now often seen as those chosen by the will of the majority--itself a dangerous concept.
Any scriptwriters out there want to help develop a concept?
People can be forced into not having any choices that they would ever take, by others and by circumstance. Freewill still exists however.
I think you misunderstood what I was stating.
What if free will itself is nothing more than a biological construct, a genetic change that allows people to make choices based purely on internal brain operations, rather than as purely a reaction to external stimuli? The main article is about a discovery regarding how biology may influence the intellectual choices made by people. How far does that biological influence go? I'm pretty much playing a devil's advocate here, trying to shoehorn what's normally a philosophical question into a biological framework for the sake of creating an argument. What if I'm programmed to do that whenever possible, though?
I'm not asking you to accept it. I just want to consider the implications for a moment.
categorizing political idealology into two groups is really the mistake you've made.
Agreed. This seems to be the mistake made by the submitter as well. The scientists involved seem to be saying that certain brain structures predispose certain people toward reluctance or caution. It's a pretty big leap to say that this makes some people wimpy liberals or patriotic conservatives, especially considering how little such labels mean in reality. A liberal in the US could be considered a right-wing conservative in Canada or Europe, for one example. Even trying to shoehorn all political philosophies into a simple single-axis spectrum is pointless--where do militant anarchists fit in? How about pacifist individualists, or authoritarian capitalists?
I like learning how these things operate, but the idea that people might try modifying these things to "better the species" scares the shit out of me. The thought that we may try to engineer a political and social monoculture forces me to consider what would be required to maintain the integrity of that artificial consciousness. It would certainly require a greater amount of resources than that already used to ensure the survival of plant and animal monocultures we've engineered for the food supply in some parts of the world!
Better we simply watch these things and allow natural processes to operate as they have for a few hundred million years, observing and learning so we can deal with the less desirable effects (such as my near-blindness, for one tiny example) in a humane, sustainable fashion.
Nice logic there. If the guy who discovers his biology determines his behavior, and he's sophisticated enough to change the biology... what does it mean when he chooses to do that?
Perhaps that simply means that person is programmed to be predisposed toward making such choices, whereas another person would be programmed toward reluctance.
I can't find the bloody article, but I'm almost positive that this is not the first Olympics where the organizers decided sponsors had to be protected from the threat of a competing brand coming into the view of a camera or a visitor's eyes. I even think it was covered here on/., relating to either Sydney 2000 or Salt Lake City 2002. Someone with better search engine-wrangling skills than me want to help?
For spending 70% of his time worrying about what his boss was doing.
Errrr... isn't that why he installed the spyware in the first place? So he wouldn't have to spend 70% of his time worrying about what his boss was doing?
Microsoft is likely to agressively start publishing TCO comparisons in various media outlets.
I'd say they've already started, or am I hallucinating when I see a Microsoft ad on Slashdot claiming Windows XP has a lower TCO than Linux? Never mind the differences in hardware; all MS hopes is that PHBs will see "Windows" "lower TCO" and "Linux", and immediately pick up the phone to reach an MS salesdroid.
But on Windows I don't believe there is some way for the malicious site to "install" a program unless it actually runs some software.
All it has to do is get the.exe on the hard drive, and I ran across some nasty, recalcirant spyware that managed to slip on to some computers without user interaction while cleaning up machines at my old workplace. There are a couple dialer-type programs that seem to infect a computer in this fashion, usually found on the less reputable pr0n sites.
However, the vulnerability does not allow attackers to pass instructions to the programs..." Now call me crazy, and I know i'll probably piss off the microsoft hating people here, but what harm is there really?
Malicious web site quietly downloads executable that is the Son of Back Orifice, in a way similar to how your favourite spyware and malware installs itself.
Malicious website contains shell: URI referencing location of said executable, which does not require arguments to start.
Victim is tricked into clicking on dangerous link, or.exe is automatically executed via a script that passes a shell: URI.
Pwn3d!!1!!1!11!!!11
This is just off the top of my head--I'm sure someone more knowledgable about Windows exploits could have great fun with this.
It's not reasonable at all, if I understand the nature of the shell: exploit in Mozilla.
shell: is handled by Windows itself. The browser simply passed the URI on to be dealt with, as Microsoft programmers intended.
Although there were concerns about allowing the browser to hand off unrecognized URIs to the underlying operating system two years ago, this particular exploit was recognized and patched within a day, by preventing Mozilla from passing shell: stuff on.
Basically, it's an exploitable Windows function that could be accessed through Mozilla and other programs written to allow such things.
This program was once available for Red hat, and did what rpmdrake seems to do now. For some reason, it was never updated for Gnome2, and the Fedora teams seems to have more interest in forcing people to use only Fedora-built packages--at least, this is what I can determine from the horribly limited "Add/Remove Applications" interface.
This may very well get me to switch to Mandrake during my next upgrade, assuming I don't go crazy and just switch to Gentoo instead. Losing GNOrpm, in my opinion, was a huge step backwards for maintaining a Red Hat/Fedora-based system, and I see no reason why its functionality couldn't be combined with yum's retrieval and dependency-resolution capabilities.
He might have the 960, which allows for direct printing on CDs.
There is a bootstrapping problem here. Detractors argue that Linux won't be considered by many people for use as a personal desktop OS until the hardware support is there--but the hardware support won't come from manufacturers until they notice many people demanding support for their Linux-based systems!
I think we'll have to deal with a long, slow process of building a userbase, slowly gathering notice from hardware makers until, without realizing it, hardware is guaranteed to work in Linux because the userbase kept growing to a significant fraction of the desktop population.
I realize this isn't a quick-n-dirty solution, one that won't have the entire world compiling kernels and playing with FreeBSD tomorrow, but quite frankly this is exactly what has driven the use of Linux so far. Five years ago, there was no alternative to IE in the eyes of most people. Now, Mozilla derivatives, KHTML-based browsers, and Opera are being actively promoted as an alternative to the buggy, compromised IE--Microsoft sat on its laurels, and is about to get burned as a result. In that time, Mozilla went through a long, slow development and adoption process. How many complaints were there about the time required to write a browser at least equal to IE? How many people argued that Mozilla would be crushed by the next IE release anyway, and there was no point to all of this coding?
Look at it now.
We can't get discouraged by our lack of a blitzkrieg across the desktop. Slow, steady progress has brought us this far, and continued steady progress will keep the movement alive.
I also think that a major manufacturer or two giving up the cheap MS preinstall licences and preinstalling LInux would go a long way to dealing with the installation and configuration issues that so many detractors complain about. Windows can be just as difficult as Linux when it comes to installing and configuring devices--worse, because the source is closed and the stuff underneath the pretty GUI is just as arcane as any configuration file that can be found on a Linux-based system, sometimes even more so. Gates forbid you have to do anything beyond what the standard graphical configuration dialogs allow...
I don't see Linux as replacing MS as the desktop monopoly, but I do see it as taking away that monopoly position within the next few years, making room for other operating system competitors.
I think things are about to get interesting again.
Nemesis was a steaming pile of crap. Everything Trek since the death of Rodenberry has been crap (last 2 seasons of Next Generation on).
The middle seasons of DS9 were watchable, mainly because it looked and felt like some ideas were being taken and modified from Babylon 5.
Outside of that, although I question how good Roddenberry's ideas have been since the movie era, I have to agree with your assessment. I think the problem is more one of B+B running out of steam and remaking things in their image, rather than Roddenberry's exit depriving the franchise of its soul. The promise that Voyager offered was pissed away, ironically because the writers weren't willing to take risks that would have royally pissed off the Great Bird of the Galaxy. Hell, the ship was never even upgraded permanently with alien technology, and the damned thing looked like brand spanking new right up to the final episode. Come on, killing a popular character can be done--ask JMS about the whole Kosh thing./end incoherent rant
1) The problem is due to the shell: function, which passes the arguments to Windows XP for handling. The function was disabled in IE6 for the same reason it's being disabled in Moz/Fox now. In short, it's a hole in the Moz codebase caused by an insecure Windows capability. Thank you, well-paid Microsoft programmers.
2) The bug was opened on July 7. Today is July 8. One day.
While there's nothing groundbreaking about the 'inventions' themselves, the fact that he has persisted with his tinkering in the midst of an Arab culture speaks of incredible curiosity, freethinking, and persistence.
but it seems as if business interests have found that these individuals are a weak link that can easily be "bought off" and convinced to act on their own.
At least here in Canuckistan, the business interests only have to buy off the Prime Minister, and the rest of the party is forced to follow. Simpler and more efficient kakistocracy!
Fedora is an RPM based distro. Fedora's default desktop is GNOME. Fedora's GNOME does not have a default file association for *.rpm files. DUMB
Agreed.
I remember using GNOrpm back in the days of Red Hat 6.0. The best part of it was being able to see, at a glance, exactly which packages were installed on my system instead of playing "guess the package name," which is a pain in the arse if you're trying to clear unnecessary packages installed because Red Hat Knows Better Than You(tm).
This useful tool fell out of development, and now it's gone, not updated, obsolete. The Fedora package management tool is pathetically limited to Fedora-compiled packages, and doesn't let a user get down to the packages themselves. The old GNOrpm functionality could be merged into Nautilus as an additional view, or it could be updated to use Gnome 2, but I guess Fedora is too much of a bondage-and-discipline distro to allow such blasphemy.
So, I plugged a cord in to a power strip, then move to plug the other end in to the power supply, when all of a sudden you hear that familiar zap sound.
Yay, arcing!
I'm nowhere near an EE major, so I have no idea about the specifics regarding what I'm about to type, but I always plug a power connector into a device before plugging it into the wall/power strip. I think I first encountered this instruction in the manual for my cablemodem. My completely uneducated guess is that it's safer to attach a cord to the device before the cord is part of a live circuit, lest arcing or some other kind of electron-jumping nastiness take place.
..Indian's political structure? I seem to remember that a woman was just elected as Prime Minister (a big leap for India!).
Where have you been? For that matter, hit Google News--she decided not to take up the position after heavy pressure from nationalist parties, who pointed out that Sonia Gandhi was, in fact, born in Italy.
If i need a GUI-less system i would use a bsd flavor, but thats beside the point.
Actually, that's precisely the point. The writers and builders of Linux and the *BSDs allow you to customize a system to a far greater extent than the company that produces Windows. Whatever options and registry settings MS allows you to manipulate, it can always be one-upped by a capable programmer with access to the source--and not all capable programmers can afford, or work for a company with access to, a Microsoft source licence, not to mention the vicious legal baggage it carries. As it is, the open-source systems are far more flexible and configurable in their default setups than Windows--even the bondage-and-discipline Linux distributions like Fedora Core, with its craptastic GUI package management system and "we know better" updater that refuses to acknowledge later versions of packages.
Say what you will about the virtues and drawbacks of the GPL and BSD licences, they don't require you to sign an NDA and forget everything you ever saw.
Slashdot Mirror
That's why I never buy into those future-world scenarios where people are banned from breeding and you're genetically screened (or planned) from before birth. People would never accept it, and "just kill (or even just sterilize) those who dissent" is far easier.
I have a vague idea bouncing around in my skull about a Standard Dystopian Future, where so much of the human genome is patented that prospective parents must purchase a licence to combine their owned genes from a government agency formed to distribute the fees to all the patent holders. This, of course, would rely on an extension of patent terms, but since copyright terms are extended on a regular basis, I'm sure some enterprising IP lawyer is preparing the arguments to support legislation extending the terms of other types of IP protection.
"People would never accept it" is a dangerous assumption, especially in hierarchical societies where authorities of various sorts can wield undue influence through the exercise of power. China during the Cultural Revolution might be a good example, where the situation only changed when control of the state system switched from one set of oligarchs to another group who decided to stop the disasters. In a hierarchical society, such as most on Earth, few people would dare consider taking actions that oppose the will of the leaders, who are now often seen as those chosen by the will of the majority--itself a dangerous concept.
Any scriptwriters out there want to help develop a concept?
People can be forced into not having any choices that they would ever take, by others and by circumstance. Freewill still exists however.
I think you misunderstood what I was stating.
What if free will itself is nothing more than a biological construct, a genetic change that allows people to make choices based purely on internal brain operations, rather than as purely a reaction to external stimuli? The main article is about a discovery regarding how biology may influence the intellectual choices made by people. How far does that biological influence go? I'm pretty much playing a devil's advocate here, trying to shoehorn what's normally a philosophical question into a biological framework for the sake of creating an argument. What if I'm programmed to do that whenever possible, though?
I'm not asking you to accept it. I just want to consider the implications for a moment.
categorizing political idealology into two groups is really the mistake you've made.
Agreed. This seems to be the mistake made by the submitter as well. The scientists involved seem to be saying that certain brain structures predispose certain people toward reluctance or caution. It's a pretty big leap to say that this makes some people wimpy liberals or patriotic conservatives, especially considering how little such labels mean in reality. A liberal in the US could be considered a right-wing conservative in Canada or Europe, for one example. Even trying to shoehorn all political philosophies into a simple single-axis spectrum is pointless--where do militant anarchists fit in? How about pacifist individualists, or authoritarian capitalists?
I like learning how these things operate, but the idea that people might try modifying these things to "better the species" scares the shit out of me. The thought that we may try to engineer a political and social monoculture forces me to consider what would be required to maintain the integrity of that artificial consciousness. It would certainly require a greater amount of resources than that already used to ensure the survival of plant and animal monocultures we've engineered for the food supply in some parts of the world!
Better we simply watch these things and allow natural processes to operate as they have for a few hundred million years, observing and learning so we can deal with the less desirable effects (such as my near-blindness, for one tiny example) in a humane, sustainable fashion.
Nice logic there. If the guy who discovers his biology determines his behavior, and he's sophisticated enough to change the biology... what does it mean when he chooses to do that?
Perhaps that simply means that person is programmed to be predisposed toward making such choices, whereas another person would be programmed toward reluctance.
This can go in circles for weeks.
Anyone remember this incident?
/., relating to either Sydney 2000 or Salt Lake City 2002. Someone with better search engine-wrangling skills than me want to help?
I can't find the bloody article, but I'm almost positive that this is not the first Olympics where the organizers decided sponsors had to be protected from the threat of a competing brand coming into the view of a camera or a visitor's eyes. I even think it was covered here on
For spending 70% of his time worrying about what his boss was doing.
Errrr... isn't that why he installed the spyware in the first place? So he wouldn't have to spend 70% of his time worrying about what his boss was doing?
Should we ask what the other 10% consisted of?
It's all football. The only thing that changes is the color of the jerseys.
Then maybe the solution is refusing to support either team and walking away to play our own game.
Microsoft is likely to agressively start publishing TCO comparisons in various media outlets.
I'd say they've already started, or am I hallucinating when I see a Microsoft ad on Slashdot claiming Windows XP has a lower TCO than Linux? Never mind the differences in hardware; all MS hopes is that PHBs will see "Windows" "lower TCO" and "Linux", and immediately pick up the phone to reach an MS salesdroid.
But on Windows I don't believe there is some way for the malicious site to "install" a program unless it actually runs some software.
.exe on the hard drive, and I ran across some nasty, recalcirant spyware that managed to slip on to some computers without user interaction while cleaning up machines at my old workplace. There are a couple dialer-type programs that seem to infect a computer in this fashion, usually found on the less reputable pr0n sites.
All it has to do is get the
However, the vulnerability does not allow attackers to pass instructions to the programs..." Now call me crazy, and I know i'll probably piss off the microsoft hating people here, but what harm is there really?
.exe is automatically executed via a script that passes a shell: URI.
Malicious web site quietly downloads executable that is the Son of Back Orifice, in a way similar to how your favourite spyware and malware installs itself.
Malicious website contains shell: URI referencing location of said executable, which does not require arguments to start.
Victim is tricked into clicking on dangerous link, or
Pwn3d!!1!!1!11!!!11
This is just off the top of my head--I'm sure someone more knowledgable about Windows exploits could have great fun with this.
It's not reasonable at all, if I understand the nature of the shell: exploit in Mozilla.
shell: is handled by Windows itself. The browser simply passed the URI on to be dealt with, as Microsoft programmers intended.
Although there were concerns about allowing the browser to hand off unrecognized URIs to the underlying operating system two years ago, this particular exploit was recognized and patched within a day, by preventing Mozilla from passing shell: stuff on.
Basically, it's an exploitable Windows function that could be accessed through Mozilla and other programs written to allow such things.
Another successful shot in the foot from Redmond.
None of the green energy sources can provide the reliable energy that modern society demands.
Then, perhaps modern society will have to adapt.
This program was once available for Red hat, and did what rpmdrake seems to do now. For some reason, it was never updated for Gnome2, and the Fedora teams seems to have more interest in forcing people to use only Fedora-built packages--at least, this is what I can determine from the horribly limited "Add/Remove Applications" interface.
This may very well get me to switch to Mandrake during my next upgrade, assuming I don't go crazy and just switch to Gentoo instead. Losing GNOrpm, in my opinion, was a huge step backwards for maintaining a Red Hat/Fedora-based system, and I see no reason why its functionality couldn't be combined with yum's retrieval and dependency-resolution capabilities.
He might have the 960, which allows for direct printing on CDs.
There is a bootstrapping problem here. Detractors argue that Linux won't be considered by many people for use as a personal desktop OS until the hardware support is there--but the hardware support won't come from manufacturers until they notice many people demanding support for their Linux-based systems!
I think we'll have to deal with a long, slow process of building a userbase, slowly gathering notice from hardware makers until, without realizing it, hardware is guaranteed to work in Linux because the userbase kept growing to a significant fraction of the desktop population.
I realize this isn't a quick-n-dirty solution, one that won't have the entire world compiling kernels and playing with FreeBSD tomorrow, but quite frankly this is exactly what has driven the use of Linux so far. Five years ago, there was no alternative to IE in the eyes of most people. Now, Mozilla derivatives, KHTML-based browsers, and Opera are being actively promoted as an alternative to the buggy, compromised IE--Microsoft sat on its laurels, and is about to get burned as a result. In that time, Mozilla went through a long, slow development and adoption process. How many complaints were there about the time required to write a browser at least equal to IE? How many people argued that Mozilla would be crushed by the next IE release anyway, and there was no point to all of this coding?
Look at it now.
We can't get discouraged by our lack of a blitzkrieg across the desktop. Slow, steady progress has brought us this far, and continued steady progress will keep the movement alive.
I also think that a major manufacturer or two giving up the cheap MS preinstall licences and preinstalling LInux would go a long way to dealing with the installation and configuration issues that so many detractors complain about. Windows can be just as difficult as Linux when it comes to installing and configuring devices--worse, because the source is closed and the stuff underneath the pretty GUI is just as arcane as any configuration file that can be found on a Linux-based system, sometimes even more so. Gates forbid you have to do anything beyond what the standard graphical configuration dialogs allow...
I don't see Linux as replacing MS as the desktop monopoly, but I do see it as taking away that monopoly position within the next few years, making room for other operating system competitors.
I think things are about to get interesting again.
Nemesis was a steaming pile of crap. Everything Trek since the death of Rodenberry has been crap (last 2 seasons of Next Generation on).
/end incoherent rant
The middle seasons of DS9 were watchable, mainly because it looked and felt like some ideas were being taken and modified from Babylon 5.
Outside of that, although I question how good Roddenberry's ideas have been since the movie era, I have to agree with your assessment. I think the problem is more one of B+B running out of steam and remaking things in their image, rather than Roddenberry's exit depriving the franchise of its soul. The promise that Voyager offered was pissed away, ironically because the writers weren't willing to take risks that would have royally pissed off the Great Bird of the Galaxy. Hell, the ship was never even upgraded permanently with alien technology, and the damned thing looked like brand spanking new right up to the final episode. Come on, killing a popular character can be done--ask JMS about the whole Kosh thing.
And if you read that bug #, it reveals that:
1) The problem is due to the shell: function, which passes the arguments to Windows XP for handling. The function was disabled in IE6 for the same reason it's being disabled in Moz/Fox now. In short, it's a hole in the Moz codebase caused by an insecure Windows capability. Thank you, well-paid Microsoft programmers.
2) The bug was opened on July 7. Today is July 8. One day.
Nice.
While there's nothing groundbreaking about the 'inventions' themselves, the fact that he has persisted with his tinkering in the midst of an Arab culture speaks of incredible curiosity, freethinking, and persistence.
Errrrr... since when is Afghanistan "Arab"?
but it seems as if business interests have found that these individuals are a weak link that can easily be "bought off" and convinced to act on their own.
Hey, sounds like something else I've heard of.
At least here in Canuckistan, the business interests only have to buy off the Prime Minister, and the rest of the party is forced to follow. Simpler and more efficient kakistocracy!
What? Members of a legislative body voting against the wishes of the body/ies they're supposed to represent?
In other news, the sun rises.
Fedora is an RPM based distro. Fedora's default desktop is GNOME. Fedora's GNOME does not have a default file association for *.rpm files. DUMB
Agreed.
I remember using GNOrpm back in the days of Red Hat 6.0. The best part of it was being able to see, at a glance, exactly which packages were installed on my system instead of playing "guess the package name," which is a pain in the arse if you're trying to clear unnecessary packages installed because Red Hat Knows Better Than You(tm).
This useful tool fell out of development, and now it's gone, not updated, obsolete. The Fedora package management tool is pathetically limited to Fedora-compiled packages, and doesn't let a user get down to the packages themselves. The old GNOrpm functionality could be merged into Nautilus as an additional view, or it could be updated to use Gnome 2, but I guess Fedora is too much of a bondage-and-discipline distro to allow such blasphemy.
So, I plugged a cord in to a power strip, then move to plug the other end in to the power supply, when all of a sudden you hear that familiar zap sound.
Yay, arcing!
I'm nowhere near an EE major, so I have no idea about the specifics regarding what I'm about to type, but I always plug a power connector into a device before plugging it into the wall/power strip. I think I first encountered this instruction in the manual for my cablemodem. My completely uneducated guess is that it's safer to attach a cord to the device before the cord is part of a live circuit, lest arcing or some other kind of electron-jumping nastiness take place.
Anyone want to confirm or correct me on this?
Maybe we can travel around ON our weapons, that way fusing two ideas in one!
Ever heard of Project Orion?
..Indian's political structure? I seem to remember that a woman was just elected as Prime Minister (a big leap for India!).
Where have you been? For that matter, hit Google News--she decided not to take up the position after heavy pressure from nationalist parties, who pointed out that Sonia Gandhi was, in fact, born in Italy.
Back on topic... enjoy.
If i need a GUI-less system i would use a bsd flavor, but thats beside the point.
Actually, that's precisely the point. The writers and builders of Linux and the *BSDs allow you to customize a system to a far greater extent than the company that produces Windows. Whatever options and registry settings MS allows you to manipulate, it can always be one-upped by a capable programmer with access to the source--and not all capable programmers can afford, or work for a company with access to, a Microsoft source licence, not to mention the vicious legal baggage it carries. As it is, the open-source systems are far more flexible and configurable in their default setups than Windows--even the bondage-and-discipline Linux distributions like Fedora Core, with its craptastic GUI package management system and "we know better" updater that refuses to acknowledge later versions of packages.
Say what you will about the virtues and drawbacks of the GPL and BSD licences, they don't require you to sign an NDA and forget everything you ever saw.