Microsoft made it easy for commercial applications to refuse a debugger's attempt to attach to a process or thread. Attackers use this same mechanism to cloak malware. A privileged user must never be denied access to a debugger on any system. My right to track down malware on my computers trumps vendors' interests in preventing piracy or reverse-engineering. Maintaining that right is one of the reasons that open source commercial OS kernels are so vital.
That right there is the most compelling point for me. If I install a copy of Windows, that copy of Windows isn't working for me. It's working for other people who want to control the machine. Whether these folks are software vendors or blackhats doesn't change the basic architectural issue.
Yes, of course, the exception proves the rule.:rollseyes
Let's review. The original claim:
HIV is an INCURABLE disease, which kills %100 of it's victims.
The response (paraphrased):
It didn't kill this guy. Or this guy. If people with the disease die of old age first, the disease didn't kill them.
To break it down a little further, the original claim made was universal. A universal claim can be disproven by a single counterexample; e.g., if you claim that there's no such thing as a black sheep, I can present a black sheep as disproof of that claim. On the other hand, if you'd claimed that there are very few black sheep (or the grandparent poster had claimed that HIV kills nearly all of its victims), then I'd have a considerably tougher time disproving this weaker claim.
But as it stands, your attempt at eye-rolling fails it.
You ever get an ingrown toenail? Not terribly frightening, right? I can show you pictures of ingrown toenails gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Not to say that genital sores aren't unpleasant, but what you find via google is likely to be a worst-case scenario. Medical journals have a whiff of "hey, Bob, you gotta see this!" to them, despite their scholarly diction.
for some odd reason, I'm having a very hard time thinking up a non-C based language that's compiled to an actual binary and not interpretted or run by a virtualmachine...
Typically compiled languages include Ada, ALGOL, BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, ML, Pascal and others. I think those mostly qualify as being non-C based.
I was turned down for my first credit card because I had no credit history. However, once I called the number on the card, explained that I had a job and how much I made, they accepted the application. So yeah, they turned me down, but it wasn't like I had to walk over hot coals to get the card.
Out of curiosity, which features did you want that didn't get added? I ask because the bugtracker they use supports feature requests, and I've been looking for some good ideas to request.
Either they were telling you terrible lies, or you phrased the question oddly when you asked then. Highlighting a transaction and hitting 'Split', you can add line items to one side of the transaction as easily as the other.
I do. I started at the beginning of the year, and have kept it up since then. I keep receipts from everything I can and key them in every few days. My expenses aren't huge, but they include the basics--gas, apartment, groceries, the occasional eBay or Books-A-Million order--using relatively few scheduled transactions. My main.gnucash file is currently 483k, only slightly bloated by near-daily price reports on a few commodities. Every week or two, I reconcile against my bank statements. So far, it's helped me find out that my local newspaper double-charged me last month (which they apologized for and fixed as soon as I called, before doing it again this month; time to call again), and that Hooters apparently forgot to process my credit card, because I went there for a birthday party several months ago, and the charge never appeared.
It's not much more time than you'd spend balancing your checkbook, for instance, and it provides a lot more expense-tracking for the effort spent.
There are a few reports I wish it had (graph the value of an investment over time, not just the price of the commodity and not just at the times when an actual transaction occurred) but I have no major qualms with the software.
A friend of mine has some kind of personality disorder which he and his family thought for a long time was Asperger's. It's like he never learned quite how to act around other people, or to realize when he's talking a bit too loudly. But no, when he got diagnosed, it turns out that yes, he does have *something*, but it's not Asperger's. (I think it was PDD-NOS; they gave him drugs, which seem to have helped him quite a bit.)
It's ridiculous to remotely diagnose historical figures with these things, which aren't even that rigorously defined for people living now, being seen in person by an actual psychiatrist. I'm not quite of the encyclopedia dramatica school of thought, but I do think that the syndrome has been overly romanticized, and it feels pretty tasteless.
im not necessarily saying every little whore should be able to go down to the abortion clinic and sort of use it as a form of contraception, but it should be available for necessary cases.
Your generosity knows no bounds. I may cry, I'm so glad to have you around to tell us when it's "necessary" and when it's not.
People use those sticky-paper traps and let the rats starve/dehydrate there because they'd be too freaked out to see a rat with a broken neck. It's not for the rats' benefit, it's for theirs.
Analogously, in societies that practiced infanticide (ancient Sparta, recent China), infnats are generally left to die of exposure in a jar on a hillside. Not because it's more humane for the infant, but because the people doing the killing are too squeamish to do it humanely. I think that's irony.
Also consider that this attack will only work if the attacker knows your account number. If they're both secret--the ATM card example--it's a nonissue.
Right, but my point is that during the dispute process, they have your money. In at least one case (linked to in the original comment), that process took a considerable amount of time. Had it been a credit card, Tom Tomorrow would not have been essentially making a loan of that money to the fraudster.
Of course, if you've been silly enough to use a debit card, you're out the money for six months or however long it takes until the bank gets around to deciding that you didn't really spend the money. Happened to Tom Tomorrow.
Can we put that guy in a room with the drug-control czar who says that meth will make your head rot off? I'm wondering what hoops they'll jump through to avoid saying "it's only good for you if you're buying the chemical from a large campaign contributor; otherwise, it's bad for you."
Just because it's available by prescription doesn't mean it's safer than any illegal drug. (I'm thinking marijuana for comparison here.) Remember, morphine, oxycodone and cocaine have all been legally prescribed at one point. (And are all still occasionally used in specific, rather highly controlled, circumstances.)
I scored a zipfile of all extant US SNES ROMs a while back, and it fits on one CD. Unzipped, it's much larger, but since those ROMs have only a few sizes to choose from, there's frequently a lot of air in them anyway.
Huh. I wonder how long after this we'd see some racist nutbar design a new, safer generation of landmines designed to explode only in the presence of those darn job-stealin' guest workers.
(Apologies to that guy from RISKS digest who had this idea upon hearing that the DoD was going to start chipping all of its assets...)
You're inaccurate at best in several places. Please tell me this is just stuff you picked up by reading the internet, and not the result of a formal mathematics education.
It's called Cantor sets, there are more rational numbers than there are whole numbers.
Also, there aren't more rational numbers than there are whole numbers; both are countably infinite. A bijection (one-to-one and onto mapping) can be established by considering rationals as ordered pairs of natural numbers and enumerating thusly. You're thinking of real numbers, which are not countably infinite.
For a really simple example (there are more formal ones out there) take the following series: [snip] As you can see, for every single integer there is a corresponding real number. This list is one-to-one but not onto, the list on the right will never have 1.2 in it's list, therefore there *must* be more real numbers than there are integers. In fact, it turns out that there are an infinatly greater amount of real numbers than there are integers.
Okay, now you've switched from rational to real numbers. But your example still proves nothing. The fact that the function you made up fails to be a bijection doesn't prove that no such bijection exists. By analogy:
There are more natural numbers {1, 2, 3,...} than there are positive even numbers {2, 4, 6,...}. Consider the mapping from the evens to the naturals of f(x) = x. So 2 maps to 2, 4 to 4 and so on. Now, the natural numbers 1, 3, 5 and so on don't have corresponding evens. You would, at this point, say that there are more positive even numbers than natural numbers; the argument is the same as the one you made.
You would, however, be wrong; there does exist a bijection from the evens to the naturals using the functions f(x) = x/2. So 2 maps to 1, 4 to 2 and so on. Every positive even number maps to one natural number, and vice versa.
To prove that two infinite sets do not have the same cardinality (that is, the same number of elements, though the concept is extended to include infinities), you can't just make up a bad mapping; you have to prove that no such mapping can possibly exist, like Cantor did.
Don't go to far with this though, I understand that Gregory Cantor went insane trying to find the next greater space:)
Not exactly; the unsolved problem that Cantor never found the solution to was the continuum hypothesis; he asked if there was a space with cardinality between that of the natural numbers (countably infinite) and that of the real numbers (the continuum). It turns out that there answer is independent of standard set theory; it works with it true, and it works with it false. But this is a pretty abstract question, and not as earth-shattering as the initial discovery that there are more reals than there are rational numbers.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft made it easy for commercial applications to refuse a debugger's attempt to attach to a process or thread. Attackers use this same mechanism to cloak malware. A privileged user must never be denied access to a debugger on any system. My right to track down malware on my computers trumps vendors' interests in preventing piracy or reverse-engineering. Maintaining that right is one of the reasons that open source commercial OS kernels are so vital.
That right there is the most compelling point for me. If I install a copy of Windows, that copy of Windows isn't working for me. It's working for other people who want to control the machine. Whether these folks are software vendors or blackhats doesn't change the basic architectural issue.
Let's review. The original claim:
The response (paraphrased):
To break it down a little further, the original claim made was universal. A universal claim can be disproven by a single counterexample; e.g., if you claim that there's no such thing as a black sheep, I can present a black sheep as disproof of that claim. On the other hand, if you'd claimed that there are very few black sheep (or the grandparent poster had claimed that HIV kills nearly all of its victims), then I'd have a considerably tougher time disproving this weaker claim.
But as it stands, your attempt at eye-rolling fails it.
It's like arguing with creationists, or global warming deniers.
So, you're dancing on Isaac Asimov's grave now, then? Dick.
You ever get an ingrown toenail? Not terribly frightening, right? I can show you pictures of ingrown toenails gone terribly, terribly wrong.
Not to say that genital sores aren't unpleasant, but what you find via google is likely to be a worst-case scenario. Medical journals have a whiff of "hey, Bob, you gotta see this!" to them, despite their scholarly diction.
Or Larry Kramer. He's been HIV-positive for more than twenty years without developing AIDS.
What sort of line of C code (not using some sort of insane preprocessor macro expansion) can map to hundreds of assembler instructions?
for some odd reason, I'm having a very hard time thinking up a non-C based language that's compiled to an actual binary and not interpretted or run by a virtualmachine...
Typically compiled languages include Ada, ALGOL, BASIC, COBOL, FORTRAN, ML, Pascal and others. I think those mostly qualify as being non-C based.
I was turned down for my first credit card because I had no credit history. However, once I called the number on the card, explained that I had a job and how much I made, they accepted the application. So yeah, they turned me down, but it wasn't like I had to walk over hot coals to get the card.
Out of curiosity, which features did you want that didn't get added? I ask because the bugtracker they use supports feature requests, and I've been looking for some good ideas to request.
Either they were telling you terrible lies, or you phrased the question oddly when you asked then. Highlighting a transaction and hitting 'Split', you can add line items to one side of the transaction as easily as the other.
I do. I started at the beginning of the year, and have kept it up since then. I keep receipts from everything I can and key them in every few days. My expenses aren't huge, but they include the basics--gas, apartment, groceries, the occasional eBay or Books-A-Million order--using relatively few scheduled transactions. My main .gnucash file is currently 483k, only slightly bloated by near-daily price reports on a few commodities. Every week or two, I reconcile against my bank statements. So far, it's helped me find out that my local newspaper double-charged me last month (which they apologized for and fixed as soon as I called, before doing it again this month; time to call again), and that Hooters apparently forgot to process my credit card, because I went there for a birthday party several months ago, and the charge never appeared.
It's not much more time than you'd spend balancing your checkbook, for instance, and it provides a lot more expense-tracking for the effort spent.
There are a few reports I wish it had (graph the value of an investment over time, not just the price of the commodity and not just at the times when an actual transaction occurred) but I have no major qualms with the software.
A friend of mine has some kind of personality disorder which he and his family thought for a long time was Asperger's. It's like he never learned quite how to act around other people, or to realize when he's talking a bit too loudly. But no, when he got diagnosed, it turns out that yes, he does have *something*, but it's not Asperger's. (I think it was PDD-NOS; they gave him drugs, which seem to have helped him quite a bit.)
It's ridiculous to remotely diagnose historical figures with these things, which aren't even that rigorously defined for people living now, being seen in person by an actual psychiatrist. I'm not quite of the encyclopedia dramatica school of thought, but I do think that the syndrome has been overly romanticized, and it feels pretty tasteless.
im not necessarily saying every little whore should be able to go down to the abortion clinic and sort of use it as a form of contraception, but it should be available for necessary cases.
Your generosity knows no bounds. I may cry, I'm so glad to have you around to tell us when it's "necessary" and when it's not.
People use those sticky-paper traps and let the rats starve/dehydrate there because they'd be too freaked out to see a rat with a broken neck. It's not for the rats' benefit, it's for theirs.
Analogously, in societies that practiced infanticide (ancient Sparta, recent China), infnats are generally left to die of exposure in a jar on a hillside. Not because it's more humane for the infant, but because the people doing the killing are too squeamish to do it humanely. I think that's irony.
Also consider that this attack will only work if the attacker knows your account number. If they're both secret--the ATM card example--it's a nonissue.
I suppose a psychopath will say lots of wacky things, but do you know which one this was?
Right, but my point is that during the dispute process, they have your money. In at least one case (linked to in the original comment), that process took a considerable amount of time. Had it been a credit card, Tom Tomorrow would not have been essentially making a loan of that money to the fraudster.
You're right; it's not identity theft, it's identity fraud. Which, guess what, has its victims.
Is this some sort of natural outgrowth of MP3 downloading and software piracy? What are we going to pretend is "victimless" next?
Of course, if you've been silly enough to use a debit card, you're out the money for six months or however long it takes until the bank gets around to deciding that you didn't really spend the money. Happened to Tom Tomorrow.
These psychotropics seem fairly safe
Can we put that guy in a room with the drug-control czar who says that meth will make your head rot off? I'm wondering what hoops they'll jump through to avoid saying "it's only good for you if you're buying the chemical from a large campaign contributor; otherwise, it's bad for you."
Just because it's available by prescription doesn't mean it's safer than any illegal drug. (I'm thinking marijuana for comparison here.) Remember, morphine, oxycodone and cocaine have all been legally prescribed at one point. (And are all still occasionally used in specific, rather highly controlled, circumstances.)
Hey, that pricing model works for Allofmp3.com...
I scored a zipfile of all extant US SNES ROMs a while back, and it fits on one CD. Unzipped, it's much larger, but since those ROMs have only a few sizes to choose from, there's frequently a lot of air in them anyway.
Huh. I wonder how long after this we'd see some racist nutbar design a new, safer generation of landmines designed to explode only in the presence of those darn job-stealin' guest workers.
(Apologies to that guy from RISKS digest who had this idea upon hearing that the DoD was going to start chipping all of its assets...)
You're inaccurate at best in several places. Please tell me this is just stuff you picked up by reading the internet, and not the result of a formal mathematics education.
...} than there are positive even numbers {2, 4, 6, ...}. Consider the mapping from the evens to the naturals of f(x) = x. So 2 maps to 2, 4 to 4 and so on. Now, the natural numbers 1, 3, 5 and so on don't have corresponding evens. You would, at this point, say that there are more positive even numbers than natural numbers; the argument is the same as the one you made.
:)
It's called Cantor sets, there are more rational numbers than there are whole numbers.
First, the Cantor set is a fractal. You're thinking of Cantor's diagonal argument.
Also, there aren't more rational numbers than there are whole numbers; both are countably infinite. A bijection (one-to-one and onto mapping) can be established by considering rationals as ordered pairs of natural numbers and enumerating thusly. You're thinking of real numbers, which are not countably infinite.
For a really simple example (there are more formal ones out there) take the following series: [snip] As you can see, for every single integer there is a corresponding real number. This list is one-to-one but not onto, the list on the right will never have 1.2 in it's list, therefore there *must* be more real numbers than there are integers. In fact, it turns out that there are an infinatly greater amount of real numbers than there are integers.
Okay, now you've switched from rational to real numbers. But your example still proves nothing. The fact that the function you made up fails to be a bijection doesn't prove that no such bijection exists. By analogy:
There are more natural numbers {1, 2, 3,
You would, however, be wrong; there does exist a bijection from the evens to the naturals using the functions f(x) = x/2. So 2 maps to 1, 4 to 2 and so on. Every positive even number maps to one natural number, and vice versa.
To prove that two infinite sets do not have the same cardinality (that is, the same number of elements, though the concept is extended to include infinities), you can't just make up a bad mapping; you have to prove that no such mapping can possibly exist, like Cantor did.
Don't go to far with this though, I understand that Gregory Cantor went insane trying to find the next greater space
Not exactly; the unsolved problem that Cantor never found the solution to was the continuum hypothesis; he asked if there was a space with cardinality between that of the natural numbers (countably infinite) and that of the real numbers (the continuum). It turns out that there answer is independent of standard set theory; it works with it true, and it works with it false. But this is a pretty abstract question, and not as earth-shattering as the initial discovery that there are more reals than there are rational numbers.