Abundant power plus abundant fresh water has the potential to completely remake the countries in the equatorial region...
For 20 years. Then the population will have had time to exceed the newly available resources, and they'll be in the same condition they are now, except there will be 5x more of them. The third world doesn't need energy, medicine, water, or food. Not the long run, as no matter how great the supply much of it will be stolen or ruined, and the population will just grow to exceed the supply. The third world needs education and the rule of law. Until they are able to form governments which aren't just 'top strongman of the week' they will never be able to harness resources for the good of the populace, and if they DO form such a government that can enforce laws and reduce corruption they will have no need for all these things, as they will be able to produce them rather easily. They have plenty of resources and mineral wealth. They just need to keep strongmen from stealing it long enough to harness what they have.
You're right. Virtually every scientist and expert is talking out their ass. Thankfully, we have your well thought out (and backed by evidence and years of careful study, not to mention data, I'm sure, or otherwise you wouldn't put it forward) analysis.
It really isn't easier to install a supported printer in Windows than in linux, especially with kprinter.
Windows has a good multimedia system.
The fact is that Windows also has 10000x more money spent on it, in the form of driver development and third party apps.
How good is Windows for Word Processing? Pretty poor. Now, you might say that this is comparing apples to oranges, but I don't think it is that simple. You can buy Windows for $180. Or you can have an Ubuntu dvd delivered for free. Now, Ubuntu has far and away better security than Windows. And Ubuntu has Openoffice INCLUDED. For windows you have to spend another $300 to get an office suite. Who cares? Well, if Ubuntu can deliver better security for free than Windows can deliver for $180, how much of that $180 is actually going towards development? If it were more than, say, $0, then MS should be kicking everyones ass as far as security is concerned, since they are taking in money hand over fist. However, they don't improve security, and continually ignore it. They stopped development on IE, despite it's completely insecure nature.
They don't give a shit as long as people keep giving them that $180. Their goal is not to produce secure software, or even good software. Their goal is to collect cash.
Now that firefox is allowing web designers to create pages which are viewable on more than one OS, MS is going to release IE7. The goal if this IS, WAS, and WILL ALWAYS BE to lock all users into IE in order to use the WWW. Otherwise it serves no purpose, as there are already several web browsers available for free on windows which are fantastic. (and they are giving away IE for free to windows users)
Take this as a prediction: IE7 will be a fast, streamlined, secure browser which forces web designers into the following choices: 1. Develop only for IE, 2. Develop only for non-IE, 3. Spend a huge amount of resources designing a system to serve browser specific content, and then Develop the site twice.
No, I would reply with the fact that those aren't DESIGN flaws... they're implementation flaws.
How is running the screen saver as the administrator, and then allowing users to change the screen saver an implementation flaw? And what is the difference between an implementation flaw and a design flaw?
Are you saying that because somewhere in Microsoft there is a document which lays out how the screen saver system should work, and it doesn't say "run screen saver as administrator, and allow users to change the screen saver", that anyone should give a shit?
And you just killed your good Q/A argument. If their Q/A was even remotely decent, they would have noticed this huge gaping hole in the security of their OS. Apparently you are claiming they designed it correctly and then implemented it incorrectly. Isn't the definition of Q/A to catch these things?
Face it, you're a Microsoft apologist. No matter how many times Windows has a critical security flaw which allows remote execution of code, which is about once every 5 months (or more), you will keep claiming that it is not Windows at all!
A windows machine, connected to the internet, created with XP SP2 installation media will be rooted without any user intervention. Your machine will be part of a zombie army, even if you just got it from Dell, plugged it in to the cable modem, and NEVER LOGGED IN. And tests show that this happens within minutes. You can't say this about OSX or Linux, and certainly not the BSDs. Windows Sucks Shit, face the facts.
Let's see... How about forcing you to run even much of microsoft's own software as local admin in order to get it to work?
How about running active X code with the same privileges as the current user? Hundreds of exploits have depended on this... clearly bad design.
Instead of closing these ongoing and massive security holes, they have now released anti-spyware as a solution. So MS's idea of security is to have a daemon which can recognize and kill any known threat (which will always be one step behind), instead of just closing the holes those threats make use of.
Of course, I could just point out the huge insane flaws in previous versions of windows, such as the screen saver running as local administrator, and so changing the screen saver to cmd.exe would give one administrator access in NT, or a malformed packet to a certain port bluescreening 98, but you would just reply that "they are better now!". Which is hard to dispute, not because it is true, but because we don't know of all the huge holes that may still be discovered in Windows. You might claim that they aren't there, but that is just arguing from ignorance, and the fact is we don't know. Every single piece of evidence and experience says that they are there and that they are potentially killer threats.
Now I'm going to appeal to my own lying eyes. I rarely surf the web for more than 5 or 6 hours before explorer.exe mysteriously dies and has to restart itself. You'll notice when this happens because everything on your screen goes away except your desktop wallpaper, and about 8 seconds later your desktop and programs reappear (sometimes) and every instance of explorer or internet explorer is missing. Sometimes this will happen repeatedly in a short period of time, other times it won't.
Another example from the lying eyes department. Windows gradually gets slower, and errors start appearing more and more often, as the uptime increases. After about a week or two of uptime on a desktop machine outlook starts to wig out, things paint slowly, applications start to grind to a halt, etc etc. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, this continues to happen even in the newest and most patched versions of windows.
In windows I have to run a virus scan daemon. If I don't I will be infected with a virus within a few days of web surfing. Unless I use Firefox, which doesn't seem to have all the gaping vulnerabilities of IE in this regard.
At work I routinely have to fix computers which are infected with spyware. These machines are fully patched, not that they should allow magic remote spyware installation by default. The user manages to get spyware, not by installing software or running an executable, but merely by clicking on links which have been emailed to them to "look at the funny movie/picture on this website". This is a FUCKING MASSIVE SECURITY CONCERN. There is nothing preventing this spyware from phoning home with lots of information, screen shots, and files from the users computer, including keylogs etc etc.
their Q/A is probably the most intensive that any software company has on the planet
A bunch of automated tests for one piece of software will prevent bugs which effect *functionality*. They cannot find bugs|vulnerabilities which are the result of poor design.
And as for MS making good software, Windows does not even come with a plain text editor which can handle UNIX line termination! Notepad shits all over it, and Wordpad is NOT a reasonable editor to edit source or shell script code. EVERY OTHER text editor in the world, from nano, vim, joe, emacs, the OSX text editor, even fucking DOS edit can handle Unix line termination properly.
MS's goal is to prevent interoperability with any other OS, and within their OS prevent the creation of software which can run on more than one platform. Beyond that they fail in everything.
Given the mess that is the registry, can you blame it?
All you have to do is install configuration files in a users "Documents and Settings" folder. Then they will have the privileges to write to it by default, and different users will have different configs. But they don't, because their idiots writing software for DBA's, who are notorious for not caring about anything beyond their DB.
As soon as Windows is dead and "insert linux distro here" gets their market share we will still be hearing about the latest and greatest worms for that distro.
Pure speculation. There is absolutely no reason to believe that market share is the cause of low security. Shitty programmers with little or no Q/A, and a huge festering codebase which is continually patched together with duck tape to keep it going, along with a refusal to force 3rd party vendors to release software which runs properly (IE doesn't require local admin to run) causes security holes. For example, TOAD, some sql development software for Oracle, requires, REQUIRES, full write privileges to the directory it is installed in, or it refuses to run. This is mainstream software, and is used probably by millions of developers. But it still places fucking ini files in the install directory.
Don't blame Windows lack of security, it's more its market share, transparency between versions to blame and the lack of brains on the end user's parts.
Why would an end user suspect that opening a picture file could cause a virus to be installed on to their computer? Windows doesn't have *bad* security, Windows has no security. In order to have a useable system you MUST run Windows as local administrator. Thus every program you run has the power to format your hard drive if it likes. Every process which is run and has a flaw has the potential to fuck your computer up.
Transparency between versions? How does that cause poor security? Shouldn't the fact that MS recycles about 90% of their code between releases give them a lot more resources to track down those HUGE, GAPING holes in their OS?
FOR CHRISTS SAKE! Windows can be infected by a virus just by having certain things displayed on the screen! What an insane piece of shit it must be.
Not only is it incredibly far fetched, it is completely and totally outside the realm of what is believable.
We are already arguing about a heavily modified and cleaned up version of the story. If we change it enough, then yes, it will be reasonable. Keep slicing that salami, and sooner or later we will have a totally plausible story, with no facts at all corresponding to the original. If we are going to do that, I'll just fabricate it now and save a bunch of trouble.
"When I was in college, the navy used to fly above our school. We decided it was very disruptive, so we tagged it with a laser pointer. I heard that it was modified to emit radar instead of light. We never found out if the pilots noticed, although sometimes they seemed to fly differently. I didn't notice them flying by the school after that."
Not such a great story when all the assumptions about the mental state of the pilots and the navy's decisions are taken out, along with the does not logically follow that since the teller didn't notice the planes -- therefore the navy must have altered it's flight path, is it?
1. Laser guided missiles are not used against airplanes. 2. A laser detector would have to have the laser directly hit it's sensor in order to detect the laser light. 3. The story is patent bullshit. There is not a single thing in the story which is even mildly reasonable.
I'll retell the story to show how retarded it is.
"In college this guy modified a laser pointer to emit radar which caused a navy base to completely change the flight patterns of its airplanes. They were bothering students since they were flying 690 feet above the ground. Also, they thought the radar-pen was a soviet missile and took evasive action to avoid being hit by the missile, and they did this for several weeks despite no missiles having been fired at them in the previous dozens of episodes of being laser-radar-penned, and the fact they were flying over Oregon."
1. Laser pointers were very rare in 1991. 2. Laser pointers work in visible light, not Radar. 3. You can't produce Radar with any sort of laser. 4. Navy pilots aren't idiots, and they wouldn't freak out by being lit up over Oregon. They would just say "Hmm, something is up with my plane" or "Seems like something must be interfering with my radar detector.". 5. Friend or Foe is based on codes encoded into the radar signal itself, and has nothing to do with frequency, especially since many many radars operate on any given frequency range. 6. It is basically impossible to only hit a single plane in a formation with radar. It is simply not that directional. 7. You suck.
How the fuck am I going to connect to the "MESH"??? Run wires under the street to my illiterate neighbor's house?
What happens when my dipshit neighbors decide to run p2p apps with idiotic setups? For example, gnutella is about the most worthless, bandwidth wasting app you can imagine.
And who is going to stop people from blocking traffic randomly, or randomly corrupting packets, just to be an asshole? OR doing wget www.bigassiso.org >>/dev/null, just to get a 6th month running average of their bandwidth?
But the main problem is, what fucking mesh are you talking about? Do you honestly expect people to spontaniously go out and purchase thousands of dollars of wire / radios and equipment, which will only be worthwhile when other people go out and do the same thing? And then have the technical expertise/time to set it up? AND that they'll do all this when cable internet costs like $40 a month, and all the problems are somebody elses?
The "enemy of my enemy..." comment is really stupid. I mean, it isn't even transitive.
For example, A, B, AND C are all pair-wise enemies. According to the "enemy of my enemy" theory, A and B are friends, because they are both enemies of C, A and C are friends because both are enemies of B, and B and C are friends because they are both enemies of A. So everyone is both friends and enemies.
A better statement is: "The enemy of my enemy is helping me so long as he causes my enemy to expend resources, which might have been used against my interests, without improving his own position with respect to myself in an amount greater than the gain in strength of my own position with respect to my enemy, although situations such as this do not lend themselves to so simple an analysis, and are often very nonlinear and chaotic in their behavior."
that Microsoft would want to prevent people from being punished for using an insecure OS...
It's because they're for choice right? I mean, every time I turn around I hear about a new Red-Hat exploit which has allowed a worm to spread into millions of computers around the world, causing massive amounts of bogus traffic and driving up costs for ISPs.
You can't become obsolete when you can pick up new technology easily. If you have understanding of fundamentals you can learn specific things in very short order. If you only know how to write within the hibernate structure then you are going to be pretty worthless once everyone else moves on. The point is that if you are well grounded you CAN learn anything you need to. If you are an expert in JSP you have great employment potential, until people start using something else, then you are seriously fucked.
You are a dumbass. Your college should have cut you early on and prevented you from degrading the image of your school and CS majors in general.
If you have a strong understanding of the fundamentals of CS then you can pick up ANY language in virtually no time. You will understand the data structures and algorithms which you need to use, and those are language independent. I'm not bragging, but I think I learned enough java to get by in about 2 weeks. It's not necessary to take a class in it, especially when the professor isn't going to tell you anything that isn't in the book already (basic programming in Java isn't on the cutting edge of research. You really don't need someone to guide you through it.)
As a someone who is well acquainted with the bottom of the barrel, you probably do need various tricks and official looking paperwork to get past the HR department, that is, if you can find one of the HR managers who has their head stuck up their ass and doesn't know anything. I think there are many other CS graduates who value the actual knowledge they gained at their school, and who apply some part of it on a daily basis, even if they didn't take your dream course -- CS103 "How to set up an Oracle 9i database and connect to it using JAVA v1.3.7 on Solaris running CDE for between 3 and 8 users who need to do basic queries using Discoverer and save the results as flat text files using clients which consist of microsoft windows 2000 SP3 running on Dells and connected to the Oracle Server through Ethernet and a Router on a Windows 2000 Server domain with Active Directory." What you will do once Java is out of style, they need to use Linux, and the windows clients are replaced with thin clients? Your fucked, because you aren't flexible enough to change with the times. You learned how to follow a checklist made for a single version of software from a single vendor and now that it is gone you will be unable to do your job at all. Meanwhile CS grads (from real schools, not backwater state degree factories) can roll right along.
The real world does care about producing good maintainable and efficient code, but most importantly reliable code. And you simply cannot do that without a grounding in the fundamentals of CS. Businesses don't care if you are an efficient employee. Especially when they realize they can hire one experienced Guru and replace a team of pimple faced "hackers" fresh out of code-monkey academy, and have software which works, and 99% less downtime. So even if you are willing to work for next to nothing, only an asshole will hire you as you actually do negative work. It takes longer for people to track down your mistakes then it would to just re implement it correctly from scratch.
That was a guesstimate. I can't imagine being able to live on less than about 12000 per year, that would be almost impossible. Rent alone is going to cost you at least 7000 per year. If you only spend 400 per month for food, clothing, transportation, and books, then you still end up needing another 4800, total 11800. It wasn't really important to the calculation so I didn't bother to look it up.
(public) Universities lose money on undergraduate education, period. Tuition does not even cover half the cost of an undergraduate at UMD College Park. The rest of the cost is picked up by the state, so every student they enroll takes away money from other programs that you seem to think your tuition is paying for. Add it up.
Cost of CS Professor = CP = ~$100,000 (only salary, does not include facilities, offices, electricity, water, equipment, payroll taxes, support staff, campus police, repairs due to soccer hooligans, etc) = ~$50,000 per semester. Number of Classes taught by Prof = NCP = ~3 per semester Cost of in-state tuition = CIT = ~$4000 per semester Classes taken by undergrad = CTU = ~4 per semester, minimum Students per class = SPC = Between 10 and 200, say 30 average.
so we have (CIT * SPC)/CTU = FPC = $30,000 to fund any given class, call this FPC, or Funds per Class
FPC * NCP = $90,000 in Funds per professor per semester.
After the Profs salary that leaves $40,000 per professor to run the school.
Now Consider that any given Prof is likely to have several graduate students, either on fellowship or as TA's. At a good school this will be about a 1-1 ratio, so 1 grad student for every professor. Grad students make about 18,000 per year, plus a tuition waiver. Generally there are actually more grad students than professors, but lets pretend that isn't the case.
So $40,000 - $18,000 = $22,000.
That $22,000 per professor left over certainly won't cover even the cost to maintain the facilities at the university, not to mention computer labs, libraries, shuttle bus, payrol taxes, health care, internet connection, etc etc etc.
Then there are the support staff, secretaries, grounds crew, deans, etc etc.
Next add on millions per year in renovation and new building construction. To that you can add the cost of all the University staff, such as the people who review applications, the people who work in the bursars office, and so on and on and on.
Real Bottom Line: The University wants to teach you to be a Computer Scientist, not a code monkey. If you want to learn C++ so badly pick up a book and learn it on your own. Most professors will be very glad to answer your (legitimate) questions on any subject relating to their field. If you can't manage to learn it on your own, then give up and major in PolySci or Communications, because you aren't going to make it in teh real world.
Lets see... It took me about 2 months to learn the ins and outs of python, from scratch... I'm guessing someone with YEARS of experience could have picked it up in about 3 months if they were semi-braindead.
Do you honestly believe that it is only possible to learn things in school? If so, please tell me which school you went to so I can remember to shoo people away from it.
Are you retarded? The government just doesn't require their employees to do anything at all. So just shit around and send emails to each other and hold meetings. Then, once the deadline has be blown by several years, they hire a contractor to build it, which is done at the lowest imaginable level of quality, and just move on to a new project. Then they wait 2 years and start the process from the beginning.
Have you ever actually heard of the government producing anything at all?
Well, I guess you're right, if by longer view you mean infinitely longer...
Oh, wait, did you tell me why it was not moral or not ethical? Hmmm.. No you didn't. So your theory of the world seems to be that you get to tell me that I'm wrong, and then I have to respond with proofs that I'm right.
If it's so obvious to you that this is unethical, please explain it to me. I honestly don't see why.
Technically? Technically any body in orbit is moving in a straight line through space-time. Therefore it does not require any force to act on it (including blasters), if you recall newtons three laws, to remain moving in a straight line at a constant velocity.
Since a body in orbit is moving in a straight line through space-time it is identical to moving in a straight line through open space far from any massive bodies. Ergo, No gravity.
Think about it. F=m*a. If gravity were acting on the body in orbit, the people inside would feel the acceleration due to that force. Since they aren't pinned up against one or the other walls of the space ship you must conclude that there is not a force acting on them.
You might say "but what is keeping it from going off into space then". You are confusing the force of gravity with the pseudo-force of the ground pushing up to resist you. Yes, gravity is keeping their ship from going off into space. But not by "pulling" on them. Gravity has bent space-time such that straight space-time paths around the earth are circular if you are going at the correct velocity. This is a result of the number of dimensions we live in. If you add or take away dimensions, gravity would pull as the inverse or the inverse^3 of the distance, and either no orbits would be stable, or every orbit would be stable.
Rest assured, there is no gravity from the standpoint of any body in orbit (obviously there is the gravity from other bodies in orbit and so forth, but this is small).
We are in orbit around the Sun as well.... If you are in orbit you are in freefall... you don't know anything at all about this... and no there aren't gravity generators, the paperclip in your hand has mass and therefore a gravitational pull. However, in order to 'generate' enough gravity to keep you walking around , that paperclip would have to have a mass about the same as the entire earth. I'm not sure, but I don't think that that is the sort of gravity generator I was denying existed. Perhaps they did tell these tv show people that they strapped an earth-size paperclip or computer mouse to the bottom of their space ship, but wouldn't that make them even dumber to believe it?
Slashdot Mirror
Abundant power plus abundant fresh water has the potential to completely remake the countries in the equatorial region...
For 20 years. Then the population will have had time to exceed the newly available resources, and they'll be in the same condition they are now, except there will be 5x more of them. The third world doesn't need energy, medicine, water, or food. Not the long run, as no matter how great the supply much of it will be stolen or ruined, and the population will just grow to exceed the supply. The third world needs education and the rule of law. Until they are able to form governments which aren't just 'top strongman of the week' they will never be able to harness resources for the good of the populace, and if they DO form such a government that can enforce laws and reduce corruption they will have no need for all these things, as they will be able to produce them rather easily. They have plenty of resources and mineral wealth. They just need to keep strongmen from stealing it long enough to harness what they have.
You're right. Virtually every scientist and expert is talking out their ass. Thankfully, we have your well thought out (and backed by evidence and years of careful study, not to mention data, I'm sure, or otherwise you wouldn't put it forward) analysis.
It really isn't easier to install a supported printer in Windows than in linux, especially with kprinter.
Windows has a good multimedia system.
The fact is that Windows also has 10000x more money spent on it, in the form of driver development and third party apps.
How good is Windows for Word Processing? Pretty poor. Now, you might say that this is comparing apples to oranges, but I don't think it is that simple. You can buy Windows for $180. Or you can have an Ubuntu dvd delivered for free. Now, Ubuntu has far and away better security than Windows. And Ubuntu has Openoffice INCLUDED. For windows you have to spend another $300 to get an office suite. Who cares? Well, if Ubuntu can deliver better security for free than Windows can deliver for $180, how much of that $180 is actually going towards development? If it were more than, say, $0, then MS should be kicking everyones ass as far as security is concerned, since they are taking in money hand over fist. However, they don't improve security, and continually ignore it. They stopped development on IE, despite it's completely insecure nature.
They don't give a shit as long as people keep giving them that $180. Their goal is not to produce secure software, or even good software. Their goal is to collect cash.
Now that firefox is allowing web designers to create pages which are viewable on more than one OS, MS is going to release IE7. The goal if this IS, WAS, and WILL ALWAYS BE to lock all users into IE in order to use the WWW. Otherwise it serves no purpose, as there are already several web browsers available for free on windows which are fantastic. (and they are giving away IE for free to windows users)
Take this as a prediction: IE7 will be a fast, streamlined, secure browser which forces web designers into the following choices: 1. Develop only for IE, 2. Develop only for non-IE, 3. Spend a huge amount of resources designing a system to serve browser specific content, and then Develop the site twice.
Fuck Microsoft.
No, I would reply with the fact that those aren't DESIGN flaws... they're implementation flaws.
How is running the screen saver as the administrator, and then allowing users to change the screen saver an implementation flaw? And what is the difference between an implementation flaw and a design flaw?
Are you saying that because somewhere in Microsoft there is a document which lays out how the screen saver system should work, and it doesn't say "run screen saver as administrator, and allow users to change the screen saver", that anyone should give a shit?
And you just killed your good Q/A argument. If their Q/A was even remotely decent, they would have noticed this huge gaping hole in the security of their OS. Apparently you are claiming they designed it correctly and then implemented it incorrectly. Isn't the definition of Q/A to catch these things?
Face it, you're a Microsoft apologist. No matter how many times Windows has a critical security flaw which allows remote execution of code, which is about once every 5 months (or more), you will keep claiming that it is not Windows at all!
A windows machine, connected to the internet, created with XP SP2 installation media will be rooted without any user intervention. Your machine will be part of a zombie army, even if you just got it from Dell, plugged it in to the cable modem, and NEVER LOGGED IN. And tests show that this happens within minutes. You can't say this about OSX or Linux, and certainly not the BSDs. Windows Sucks Shit, face the facts.
How about an example of bad design in Windows?
u lt.asp
Let's see... How about forcing you to run even much of microsoft's own software as local admin in order to get it to work?
How about running active X code with the same privileges as the current user? Hundreds of exploits have depended on this... clearly bad design.
Instead of closing these ongoing and massive security holes, they have now released anti-spyware as a solution. So MS's idea of security is to have a daemon which can recognize and kill any known threat (which will always be one step behind), instead of just closing the holes those threats make use of.
Of course, I could just point out the huge insane flaws in previous versions of windows, such as the screen saver running as local administrator, and so changing the screen saver to cmd.exe would give one administrator access in NT, or a malformed packet to a certain port bluescreening 98, but you would just reply that "they are better now!". Which is hard to dispute, not because it is true, but because we don't know of all the huge holes that may still be discovered in Windows. You might claim that they aren't there, but that is just arguing from ignorance, and the fact is we don't know. Every single piece of evidence and experience says that they are there and that they are potentially killer threats.
Now I'm going to appeal to my own lying eyes. I rarely surf the web for more than 5 or 6 hours before explorer.exe mysteriously dies and has to restart itself. You'll notice when this happens because everything on your screen goes away except your desktop wallpaper, and about 8 seconds later your desktop and programs reappear (sometimes) and every instance of explorer or internet explorer is missing. Sometimes this will happen repeatedly in a short period of time, other times it won't.
Another example from the lying eyes department. Windows gradually gets slower, and errors start appearing more and more often, as the uptime increases. After about a week or two of uptime on a desktop machine outlook starts to wig out, things paint slowly, applications start to grind to a halt, etc etc. Despite repeated claims to the contrary, this continues to happen even in the newest and most patched versions of windows.
In windows I have to run a virus scan daemon. If I don't I will be infected with a virus within a few days of web surfing. Unless I use Firefox, which doesn't seem to have all the gaping vulnerabilities of IE in this regard.
At work I routinely have to fix computers which are infected with spyware. These machines are fully patched, not that they should allow magic remote spyware installation by default. The user manages to get spyware, not by installing software or running an executable, but merely by clicking on links which have been emailed to them to "look at the funny movie/picture on this website". This is a FUCKING MASSIVE SECURITY CONCERN. There is nothing preventing this spyware from phoning home with lots of information, screen shots, and files from the users computer, including keylogs etc etc.
An since you are accusing me of changing the subject, how does 4 hundred bajillion automated tests have anything to do with Q/A in the sense of vulnerabilities? See: http://www.asp101.com/articles/john/kb887289/defa
their Q/A is probably the most intensive that any software company has on the planet
A bunch of automated tests for one piece of software will prevent bugs which effect *functionality*. They cannot find bugs|vulnerabilities which are the result of poor design.
And as for MS making good software, Windows does not even come with a plain text editor which can handle UNIX line termination! Notepad shits all over it, and Wordpad is NOT a reasonable editor to edit source or shell script code. EVERY OTHER text editor in the world, from nano, vim, joe, emacs, the OSX text editor, even fucking DOS edit can handle Unix line termination properly.
MS's goal is to prevent interoperability with any other OS, and within their OS prevent the creation of software which can run on more than one platform. Beyond that they fail in everything.
Given the mess that is the registry, can you blame it?
All you have to do is install configuration files in a users "Documents and Settings" folder. Then they will have the privileges to write to it by default, and different users will have different configs. But they don't, because their idiots writing software for DBA's, who are notorious for not caring about anything beyond their DB.
As soon as Windows is dead and "insert linux distro here" gets their market share we will still be hearing about the latest and greatest worms for that distro.
Pure speculation. There is absolutely no reason to believe that market share is the cause of low security. Shitty programmers with little or no Q/A, and a huge festering codebase which is continually patched together with duck tape to keep it going, along with a refusal to force 3rd party vendors to release software which runs properly (IE doesn't require local admin to run) causes security holes. For example, TOAD, some sql development software for Oracle, requires, REQUIRES, full write privileges to the directory it is installed in, or it refuses to run. This is mainstream software, and is used probably by millions of developers. But it still places fucking ini files in the install directory.
Don't blame Windows lack of security, it's more its market share, transparency between versions to blame and the lack of brains on the end user's parts.
Why would an end user suspect that opening a picture file could cause a virus to be installed on to their computer? Windows doesn't have *bad* security, Windows has no security. In order to have a useable system you MUST run Windows as local administrator. Thus every program you run has the power to format your hard drive if it likes. Every process which is run and has a flaw has the potential to fuck your computer up.
Transparency between versions? How does that cause poor security? Shouldn't the fact that MS recycles about 90% of their code between releases give them a lot more resources to track down those HUGE, GAPING holes in their OS?
FOR CHRISTS SAKE! Windows can be infected by a virus just by having certain things displayed on the screen! What an insane piece of shit it must be.
Not only is it incredibly far fetched, it is completely and totally outside the realm of what is believable.
We are already arguing about a heavily modified and cleaned up version of the story. If we change it enough, then yes, it will be reasonable. Keep slicing that salami, and sooner or later we will have a totally plausible story, with no facts at all corresponding to the original. If we are going to do that, I'll just fabricate it now and save a bunch of trouble.
"When I was in college, the navy used to fly above our school. We decided it was very disruptive, so we tagged it with a laser pointer. I heard that it was modified to emit radar instead of light. We never found out if the pilots noticed, although sometimes they seemed to fly differently. I didn't notice them flying by the school after that."
Not such a great story when all the assumptions about the mental state of the pilots and the navy's decisions are taken out, along with the does not logically follow that since the teller didn't notice the planes -- therefore the navy must have altered it's flight path, is it?
1. Laser guided missiles are not used against airplanes.
2. A laser detector would have to have the laser directly hit it's sensor in order to detect the laser light.
3. The story is patent bullshit. There is not a single thing in the story which is even mildly reasonable.
I'll retell the story to show how retarded it is.
"In college this guy modified a laser pointer to emit radar which caused a navy base to completely change the flight patterns of its airplanes. They were bothering students since they were flying 690 feet above the ground. Also, they thought the radar-pen was a soviet missile and took evasive action to avoid being hit by the missile, and they did this for several weeks despite no missiles having been fired at them in the previous dozens of episodes of being laser-radar-penned, and the fact they were flying over Oregon."
Too bad your story is bullshit.
1. Laser pointers were very rare in 1991.
2. Laser pointers work in visible light, not Radar.
3. You can't produce Radar with any sort of laser.
4. Navy pilots aren't idiots, and they wouldn't freak out by being lit up over Oregon. They would just say "Hmm, something is up with my plane" or "Seems like something must be interfering with my radar detector.".
5. Friend or Foe is based on codes encoded into the radar signal itself, and has nothing to do with frequency, especially since many many radars operate on any given frequency range.
6. It is basically impossible to only hit a single plane in a formation with radar. It is simply not that directional.
7. You suck.
You can only make things as simple as they are.
How the fuck am I going to connect to the "MESH"??? Run wires under the street to my illiterate neighbor's house?
/dev/null, just to get a 6th month running average of their bandwidth?
What happens when my dipshit neighbors decide to run p2p apps with idiotic setups? For example, gnutella is about the most worthless, bandwidth wasting app you can imagine.
And who is going to stop people from blocking traffic randomly, or randomly corrupting packets, just to be an asshole? OR doing wget www.bigassiso.org >>
But the main problem is, what fucking mesh are you talking about? Do you honestly expect people to spontaniously go out and purchase thousands of dollars of wire / radios and equipment, which will only be worthwhile when other people go out and do the same thing? And then have the technical expertise/time to set it up? AND that they'll do all this when cable internet costs like $40 a month, and all the problems are somebody elses?
You fucking asshat.
The "enemy of my enemy ..." comment is really stupid. I mean, it isn't even transitive.
For example, A, B, AND C are all pair-wise enemies. According to the "enemy of my enemy" theory, A and B are friends, because they are both enemies of C, A and C are friends because both are enemies of B, and B and C are friends because they are both enemies of A. So everyone is both friends and enemies.
A better statement is: "The enemy of my enemy is helping me so long as he causes my enemy to expend resources, which might have been used against my interests, without improving his own position with respect to myself in an amount greater than the gain in strength of my own position with respect to my enemy, although situations such as this do not lend themselves to so simple an analysis, and are often very nonlinear and chaotic in their behavior."
that Microsoft would want to prevent people from being punished for using an insecure OS...
It's because they're for choice right? I mean, every time I turn around I hear about a new Red-Hat exploit which has allowed a worm to spread into millions of computers around the world, causing massive amounts of bogus traffic and driving up costs for ISPs.
You can't become obsolete when you can pick up new technology easily. If you have understanding of fundamentals you can learn specific things in very short order. If you only know how to write within the hibernate structure then you are going to be pretty worthless once everyone else moves on. The point is that if you are well grounded you CAN learn anything you need to. If you are an expert in JSP you have great employment potential, until people start using something else, then you are seriously fucked.
You are a dumbass. Your college should have cut you early on and prevented you from degrading the image of your school and CS majors in general.
If you have a strong understanding of the fundamentals of CS then you can pick up ANY language in virtually no time. You will understand the data structures and algorithms which you need to use, and those are language independent. I'm not bragging, but I think I learned enough java to get by in about 2 weeks. It's not necessary to take a class in it, especially when the professor isn't going to tell you anything that isn't in the book already (basic programming in Java isn't on the cutting edge of research. You really don't need someone to guide you through it.)
As a someone who is well acquainted with the bottom of the barrel, you probably do need various tricks and official looking paperwork to get past the HR department, that is, if you can find one of the HR managers who has their head stuck up their ass and doesn't know anything. I think there are many other CS graduates who value the actual knowledge they gained at their school, and who apply some part of it on a daily basis, even if they didn't take your dream course -- CS103 "How to set up an Oracle 9i database and connect to it using JAVA v1.3.7 on Solaris running CDE for between 3 and 8 users who need to do basic queries using Discoverer and save the results as flat text files using clients which consist of microsoft windows 2000 SP3 running on Dells and connected to the Oracle Server through Ethernet and a Router on a Windows 2000 Server domain with Active Directory." What you will do once Java is out of style, they need to use Linux, and the windows clients are replaced with thin clients? Your fucked, because you aren't flexible enough to change with the times. You learned how to follow a checklist made for a single version of software from a single vendor and now that it is gone you will be unable to do your job at all. Meanwhile CS grads (from real schools, not backwater state degree factories) can roll right along.
The real world does care about producing good maintainable and efficient code, but most importantly reliable code. And you simply cannot do that without a grounding in the fundamentals of CS. Businesses don't care if you are an efficient employee. Especially when they realize they can hire one experienced Guru and replace a team of pimple faced "hackers" fresh out of code-monkey academy, and have software which works, and 99% less downtime. So even if you are willing to work for next to nothing, only an asshole will hire you as you actually do negative work. It takes longer for people to track down your mistakes then it would to just re implement it correctly from scratch.
Public schools rarely have endowments which produce substantial income.
That was a guesstimate. I can't imagine being able to live on less than about 12000 per year, that would be almost impossible. Rent alone is going to cost you at least 7000 per year. If you only spend 400 per month for food, clothing, transportation, and books, then you still end up needing another 4800, total 11800. It wasn't really important to the calculation so I didn't bother to look it up.
(public) Universities lose money on undergraduate education, period. Tuition does not even cover half the cost of an undergraduate at UMD College Park. The rest of the cost is picked up by the state, so every student they enroll takes away money from other programs that you seem to think your tuition is paying for. Add it up.
Cost of CS Professor = CP = ~$100,000 (only salary, does not include facilities, offices, electricity, water, equipment, payroll taxes, support staff, campus police, repairs due to soccer hooligans, etc) = ~$50,000 per semester.
Number of Classes taught by Prof = NCP = ~3 per semester
Cost of in-state tuition = CIT = ~$4000 per semester
Classes taken by undergrad = CTU = ~4 per semester, minimum
Students per class = SPC = Between 10 and 200, say 30 average.
so we have (CIT * SPC)/CTU = FPC = $30,000 to fund any given class, call this FPC, or Funds per Class
FPC * NCP = $90,000 in Funds per professor per semester.
After the Profs salary that leaves $40,000 per professor to run the school.
Now Consider that any given Prof is likely to have several graduate students, either on fellowship or as TA's. At a good school this will be about a 1-1 ratio, so 1 grad student for every professor. Grad students make about 18,000 per year, plus a tuition waiver. Generally there are actually more grad students than professors, but lets pretend that isn't the case.
So $40,000 - $18,000 = $22,000.
That $22,000 per professor left over certainly won't cover even the cost to maintain the facilities at the university, not to mention computer labs, libraries, shuttle bus, payrol taxes, health care, internet connection, etc etc etc.
Then there are the support staff, secretaries, grounds crew, deans, etc etc.
Next add on millions per year in renovation and new building construction. To that you can add the cost of all the University staff, such as the people who review applications, the people who work in the bursars office, and so on and on and on.
Real Bottom Line: The University wants to teach you to be a Computer Scientist, not a code monkey. If you want to learn C++ so badly pick up a book and learn it on your own. Most professors will be very glad to answer your (legitimate) questions on any subject relating to their field. If you can't manage to learn it on your own, then give up and major in PolySci or Communications, because you aren't going to make it in teh real world.
Lets see... It took me about 2 months to learn the ins and outs of python, from scratch... I'm guessing someone with YEARS of experience could have picked it up in about 3 months if they were semi-braindead.
Do you honestly believe that it is only possible to learn things in school? If so, please tell me which school you went to so I can remember to shoo people away from it.
Government can afford to take a longer view.
Are you retarded? The government just doesn't require their employees to do anything at all. So just shit around and send emails to each other and hold meetings. Then, once the deadline has be blown by several years, they hire a contractor to build it, which is done at the lowest imaginable level of quality, and just move on to a new project. Then they wait 2 years and start the process from the beginning.
Have you ever actually heard of the government producing anything at all?
Well, I guess you're right, if by longer view you mean infinitely longer...
Oh, wait, did you tell me why it was not moral or not ethical? Hmmm.. No you didn't. So your theory of the world seems to be that you get to tell me that I'm wrong, and then I have to respond with proofs that I'm right.
If it's so obvious to you that this is unethical, please explain it to me. I honestly don't see why.
Technically? Technically any body in orbit is moving in a straight line through space-time. Therefore it does not require any force to act on it (including blasters), if you recall newtons three laws, to remain moving in a straight line at a constant velocity.
Since a body in orbit is moving in a straight line through space-time it is identical to moving in a straight line through open space far from any massive bodies. Ergo, No gravity.
Think about it. F=m*a. If gravity were acting on the body in orbit, the people inside would feel the acceleration due to that force. Since they aren't pinned up against one or the other walls of the space ship you must conclude that there is not a force acting on them.
You might say "but what is keeping it from going off into space then". You are confusing the force of gravity with the pseudo-force of the ground pushing up to resist you. Yes, gravity is keeping their ship from going off into space. But not by "pulling" on them. Gravity has bent space-time such that straight space-time paths around the earth are circular if you are going at the correct velocity. This is a result of the number of dimensions we live in. If you add or take away dimensions, gravity would pull as the inverse or the inverse^3 of the distance, and either no orbits would be stable, or every orbit would be stable.
Rest assured, there is no gravity from the standpoint of any body in orbit (obviously there is the gravity from other bodies in orbit and so forth, but this is small).
We are in orbit around the Sun as well.... If you are in orbit you are in freefall... you don't know anything at all about this... and no there aren't gravity generators, the paperclip in your hand has mass and therefore a gravitational pull. However, in order to 'generate' enough gravity to keep you walking around , that paperclip would have to have a mass about the same as the entire earth. I'm not sure, but I don't think that that is the sort of gravity generator I was denying existed. Perhaps they did tell these tv show people that they strapped an earth-size paperclip or computer mouse to the bottom of their space ship, but wouldn't that make them even dumber to believe it?