Point 1 Facebook (not microsoft) screwed up and as a result, any computer configured to use IPv6 wouldn't be able to access it. If you set up your Mac or Linux box to use IPv6, you wouldn't be able to access facebook.
Somehow, this is evidence of Vista's suckiness.
Point 2 I am proud of myself for knowing the word banal and wish to let you know.
Point 3 Three years ago I found an obscure feature that I happen to like, but since it's obscure my linux distro didn't implement it *exactly* the same way that Microsoft implements it. Mac's don't implement it that way either, but no matter, this is somehow proof of linux's suckiness.
A linux user tried to help me, but he stopped short of driving out to my house and typing the command for me, so I take this as evidence of linux's suckiness.
personally, I'd wonder if your hardware indicated you had a 40 Gig disk but all the partitions I could see added up to only 10 Gig.
You must think the people who created truecrypt are complete idiots.
If you have a 40G disk, you put a 40G encrypted partition on it. You can then put a hidden 10G partition inside that. If the hidden partition isn't mounted, then it cannot be seen. It doesn't appear to take up any space. When you mount the primary parttion, it will have 40 gigs of free space, and you can write 40 gigs of files into it.
Of course, if you actually wrote 40 gigs into it then you would have just overwritten the 10 gig hidden partition. For that reason, if you know there is a hidden partition then you need to mount it as well in order to protect it. When you mount the 10G hidden partition, then the primary would show only 30G.
Like I said, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to tell that a hidden partition is there. You haven't even read the manual for truecrypt, but you just assume that you're so smart, that you've thought of something the truecrypt programmers aren't able to think of? That's fairly arrogant of you. If your intention wasn't to be arrogant, then your post should read, "I'm not familiar with truecrypt, how does it hide a 10G partition on a 40G disk without it being obvious because it takes up 10G of space?" See, that a question that isn't presented in a way that assumes you're smart and everybody else is stupid.
This is *exactly* why truecrypt has hidden volumes. And there is no way - I mean, mathematically no way - to tell if a hidden volume is actually there. So you give them the password to the parent volume, which (if you're smart) you've filled with innocent-looking data.
If the US Military wants to cut off your internet, they're not going to give you a lead time of several days; they're going to cut off all your links within minutes, possibly seconds of each other.
Agreed. There's basically no military advantage to this. Neither is there any logic in the claims that this has something to do with Iran selling oil in Euros. As if the Iranians are so dumb that they can't colo their servers in Europe (they probably already do).
Are extremist Middle Eastern groups cutting off the cables to cut off Western influences? They would lack the capabilities to cut all cables at once, but I also suspect they'd know this was a brutally short-term situation.
The thing about terrorist groups is that there are so damn many of them, and they all want to make a name for themselves. If one of them figured out a way to grab a cable and hoist it to the surface to be cut, they'd probably do it, just because they can. It's not like there's one guy who's the king of terrorists and gets to set policy for all the rest, and would say, "wait guys, don't do this. We like Iran." Rather, for any level of extremism, there is *always* a group of people at that level. So I promise you, there is one or two or three groups out there who think that Allah is withholding his blessing because his chosen people have polluted themselves with Internet access.
So there's a motivation that seems a lot more likely than the "omfg its Bush" conspiracy theory du joir.
I read the entire article and still don't know what the guy is accused of doing.
Thank you. I came here to say the exact same thing. The article pissed me off by being needlessly obtuse. "I met with people and they told me stuff. But later, the bigger picture changed. Oh sure, different people disagreed and some of them would prefer to play golf. I went to paris and drank coffee."
If a house has five rooms, and after throughly searching one of the rooms you find two spiders, it's a reasonable guess that there are 10 spiders in the house. This is based on the assumption that the room you searched isn't "Jesus's magical spider room" but is in fact an average, typical room. The average number of spiders per room might be a little higher or a little lower than the one room you searched, but it wont be off by far. It's very unlikely that there are 100 spiders in all the other rooms, for example.
We know what area of the sky has been throughly searched for asteroids. QED.
If I run FF and keep it patched, am I safe? If I did get compromised, what would the symptoms be?
I tend to think that keeping my OS patched keeps me pretty safe, but there's always a delay after a new vulnerability is discovered before the patches come out (the zero day) and what concerns me is that if someone has a very large network of compromised web servers, they can roll out a zero day vulnerability to all of them and do a lot of damage.
As to symptoms, I think spyware used to be the big problem, and infected computers would have popups and such. But now I think that infected machines will be used primarily to send spam. Is that correct?
Are either of those two examples situations where someone took a word in common usage and prepended a possessive pronoun? No. So in that case, your post doesn't make much sense at all.
MySQL is great, don't get me wrong. I used to poopoo it when they didn't have foreign keys, but now it seems fairly mature.
But the name. Oh my god, the name. Anything with "my" in front of it sounds like the intended audience is a four year old. "it's mine! my computer. my space. my toybox! I'm special. This is mine!"
Why is it somehow better to have to go down to a local library and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
You have to be very careful. It's easy to imagine a situation where there are two opposing views, but only one of them is put on the web. So you only get to read that view. So now your research echos that view, and it's put on the web too. Now the next person who comes along reads your view and the original. You get the idea.
The same thing can happen in a world without any computers at all. One book is published in volume and every library has it. Another book is rare. So this problem isn't a unique internet phenomenon. But you asked, "why is it better to go to the library" and this is my answer: because it's important to you find that opposing view that nobody has yet bothered to put on the web.
Let's think about all the things that would have to happen for this story to be true:
1. Microsoft must have no mechanism for tracking work order/help requests. Come on. Every manager has daily/weekly/monthly reports that show the number of requests opened/closed/carried over and it flags old requests, and it sorts by age, so the oldest issue shows up at the top of the list. A manager would have seen this.
2. When the help desk guy was assigned to make the followup call, he didn't notice and find it odd that the original call came in 10 years ago? He didn't call his supervisor over and say, "hey I think somebody made a mistake here! Maybe we should just close this out."
3. Somebody has the same phone number of 10 years.
Or we could go with theory B: a blogger made up a funny story.
What he's describing is not a way of keeping your computer safe, it's a way of hiding porn from your girlfriend. You use some browser that she's never heard of for all your illicit surfing. Then, she fires up your computer and starts running IE, she looks in your history and sees slashdot and CNN or whatever and doesn't think you're a pervert (which you are).
It's also a good idea to have "honeypot porn" which is basically, a few very innocuous sites that you vist in IE that you intentionally want her to find - because once she starts looking, she's going to keep looking until she finds something. Best to give her something to find. Let her think you go to maxim.com or something.
This article is worthless to me because it doesn't give information in standard astronomical units of measure. I need to know how many hiroshimas and how many school buses this thing represents!
For Orion, they plan to use a skip back into space to bleed off some of the speed coming back from the moon,
I've always wondered why they didn't do that with the shuttle. The shuttle does S-turns and stays in the atmosphere the whole time. Why not pitch up to go back into space and cool down a bit? I'm sure the engineers thought of it and I'm sure there's a good reason, I just don't know what it is. Maybe the S-curves give them more downrange control.
Speaking of apollo though, I read somewhere that apollo's heat shield was good enough for a Mars mission. Meaning, with a different entry profile (obviously) they would have been able to bleed off *a lot* more speed than was built up comming back from the moon, enough that they could have used the same capsule for a Mars mission.
watch people's use of it to see what people have trouble with and what they can improve..
And their philosophy is, there is nothing that cannot be improved through the liberal application of animated paperclips or dogs, or annoying popup balloon tips.
His hyperventilation amounts to ignoring SCO's inflated claims of ownership to everything, failure to prove they owned what they claimed
Have to agree with you there. And I would add that he starts off the article by attempting to tie it all in to linux, then he does the bait and switch and talks about Unix trademarks and never again mentions linux in his article.
ok, so let's assume that SCO purchased and now owns everything unix. What does that have to do with linux? linux is not unix. Even if SCO owned unix, they *still* don't have the right to collect royalties on linux. This article makes the unix-to-linux switch in the first paragraph and never looks back.
uh huh. See, when the chimpanzees perform a task they're given a little treat. M&M's are popular. The treats are colloquially called "reward pellets" - a reference to Pavlov's work.
So, my joke is to pretend that I misunderstood, and that you are not actually teaching human students, but are instead a researcher working with chimpanzees. I suggest that you increase motivation by getting better reward pellets.
That's funny, you see, because in real life, you *aren't* using reward pellets. Because we don't actually gve reward pellets to humans. So my staged misunderstanding of your situation leads to a comically misplaced suggested remedy.
If they see a slight variation on the pattern that you give them and ask them to deduce something, they don't even bother trying and have a good laugh at how you are such a bastard.
maybe the reward pellets you're using aren't tasty enough.
How can a DNA mutation make the wasp know how to locate the brain and lodge the stinger directly into it?
A common tactic among people who don't believe evolution, is to use phrases like "DNA mutation" as if to imply that there was no brain locating behavior, and then a single mutation happens and (like magic) a fully-formed brain locating behavior exists. As if this one wasp named Neo was born and he was their savior. That's a straw man. You're arguing against something that no evolutionary scientist claims.
What scientists do say is that there is variability in every generation. Wasps don't just sting at random. In their tiny brain, they have the ability to make choices, and they prefer some things over others. Think of it this way: Your favorite flavor of ice cream is in part an inherited trait. If your mom and dad both liked strawberry, then you are more likely to prefer strawberry. There is variability in every generation, so there's a chance you like vanilla. It's not accurate to say, "omfg you have a mutation that makes you like vanilla!" In fact, it's disingenuous to say it that way. It's a straw man argument. It's just variability.
A wasp likes to sting a roach in a certain place. In part, this is due to the fact that its parents had the same peference. Eons ago, the wasp's sting was powerful enough to kill a roach. Any location preference was ok - but, any wasps that preferred an area near the brain killed the roach more quickly, were more efficient (killed more roaches), and had less chance of getting injured as the roach thrashed around. As a result, those wasps left more offspring. Even today, there is variability. In every generation (millions of wasps) a few are born that prefer to sting the roach on its ass. Today, those wasps don't leave any offspring.
this does not mean that abiogenesis can occur under such conditions.
exactly. It seems that life is very difficult to get started, even though once it does start it's very tenacious and can survive anywhere. In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins suggests that running water and clay crystals may be some of the things that are required. In other words, you have organic chemicals laying about (actually, falling from the sky due to comet bombardment) and then being eroded by water. As they travel downstream they are constrained and shaped by crystals. 99.9% of the time, you get nothing. But perhaps once every million years, this results in a molecule that can copy itself being deposited into the shallow sea at the mouth of the stream.
But here's the catch: once that happens, the newly created life starts working its way back upstream, devouring all the raw materials and thus ensuring the process cannot be repeated.
So you make one good point: genesis can only occur under specific circumstances that no longer exist. And I would just add to that this additional point: once it does occur, life eats all the stuff that could be used to make more life.
Slashdot Mirror
The article makes 3 points:
Point 1
Facebook (not microsoft) screwed up and as a result, any computer configured to use IPv6 wouldn't be able to access it. If you set up your Mac or Linux box to use IPv6, you wouldn't be able to access facebook.
Somehow, this is evidence of Vista's suckiness.
Point 2
I am proud of myself for knowing the word banal and wish to let you know.
Point 3
Three years ago I found an obscure feature that I happen to like, but since it's obscure my linux distro didn't implement it *exactly* the same way that Microsoft implements it. Mac's don't implement it that way either, but no matter, this is somehow proof of linux's suckiness.
A linux user tried to help me, but he stopped short of driving out to my house and typing the command for me, so I take this as evidence of linux's suckiness.
personally, I'd wonder if your hardware indicated you had a 40 Gig disk but all the partitions I could see added up to only 10 Gig.
You must think the people who created truecrypt are complete idiots.
If you have a 40G disk, you put a 40G encrypted partition on it. You can then put a hidden 10G partition inside that. If the hidden partition isn't mounted, then it cannot be seen. It doesn't appear to take up any space. When you mount the primary parttion, it will have 40 gigs of free space, and you can write 40 gigs of files into it.
Of course, if you actually wrote 40 gigs into it then you would have just overwritten the 10 gig hidden partition. For that reason, if you know there is a hidden partition then you need to mount it as well in order to protect it. When you mount the 10G hidden partition, then the primary would show only 30G.
Like I said, there is NO POSSIBLE WAY to tell that a hidden partition is there. You haven't even read the manual for truecrypt, but you just assume that you're so smart, that you've thought of something the truecrypt programmers aren't able to think of? That's fairly arrogant of you. If your intention wasn't to be arrogant, then your post should read, "I'm not familiar with truecrypt, how does it hide a 10G partition on a 40G disk without it being obvious because it takes up 10G of space?" See, that a question that isn't presented in a way that assumes you're smart and everybody else is stupid.
This is *exactly* why truecrypt has hidden volumes. And there is no way - I mean, mathematically no way - to tell if a hidden volume is actually there. So you give them the password to the parent volume, which (if you're smart) you've filled with innocent-looking data.
If the US Military wants to cut off your internet, they're not going to give you a lead time of several days; they're going to cut off all your links within minutes, possibly seconds of each other.
Agreed. There's basically no military advantage to this. Neither is there any logic in the claims that this has something to do with Iran selling oil in Euros. As if the Iranians are so dumb that they can't colo their servers in Europe (they probably already do).
Are extremist Middle Eastern groups cutting off the cables to cut off Western influences? They would lack the capabilities to cut all cables at once, but I also suspect they'd know this was a brutally short-term situation.
The thing about terrorist groups is that there are so damn many of them, and they all want to make a name for themselves. If one of them figured out a way to grab a cable and hoist it to the surface to be cut, they'd probably do it, just because they can. It's not like there's one guy who's the king of terrorists and gets to set policy for all the rest, and would say, "wait guys, don't do this. We like Iran." Rather, for any level of extremism, there is *always* a group of people at that level. So I promise you, there is one or two or three groups out there who think that Allah is withholding his blessing because his chosen people have polluted themselves with Internet access.
So there's a motivation that seems a lot more likely than the "omfg its Bush" conspiracy theory du joir.
I read the entire article and still don't know what the guy is accused of doing.
Thank you. I came here to say the exact same thing. The article pissed me off by being needlessly obtuse. "I met with people and they told me stuff. But later, the bigger picture changed. Oh sure, different people disagreed and some of them would prefer to play golf. I went to paris and drank coffee."
JUST GET TO THE FUCKING POINT!
If a house has five rooms, and after throughly searching one of the rooms you find two spiders, it's a reasonable guess that there are 10 spiders in the house. This is based on the assumption that the room you searched isn't "Jesus's magical spider room" but is in fact an average, typical room. The average number of spiders per room might be a little higher or a little lower than the one room you searched, but it wont be off by far. It's very unlikely that there are 100 spiders in all the other rooms, for example.
We know what area of the sky has been throughly searched for asteroids. QED.
If I run FF and keep it patched, am I safe? If I did get compromised, what would the symptoms be?
I tend to think that keeping my OS patched keeps me pretty safe, but there's always a delay after a new vulnerability is discovered before the patches come out (the zero day) and what concerns me is that if someone has a very large network of compromised web servers, they can roll out a zero day vulnerability to all of them and do a lot of damage.
As to symptoms, I think spyware used to be the big problem, and infected computers would have popups and such. But now I think that infected machines will be used primarily to send spam. Is that correct?
Are either of those two examples situations where someone took a word in common usage and prepended a possessive pronoun? No. So in that case, your post doesn't make much sense at all.
I'm going to start calling it Moose yand Squirrel.
MySQL is great, don't get me wrong. I used to poopoo it when they didn't have foreign keys, but now it seems fairly mature.
But the name. Oh my god, the name. Anything with "my" in front of it sounds like the intended audience is a four year old. "it's mine! my computer. my space. my toybox! I'm special. This is mine!"
I always feel like an idiot when I say it.
Why is it somehow better to have to go down to a local library and search through books for an answer, than a quick google search?
You have to be very careful. It's easy to imagine a situation where there are two opposing views, but only one of them is put on the web. So you only get to read that view. So now your research echos that view, and it's put on the web too. Now the next person who comes along reads your view and the original. You get the idea.
The same thing can happen in a world without any computers at all. One book is published in volume and every library has it. Another book is rare. So this problem isn't a unique internet phenomenon. But you asked, "why is it better to go to the library" and this is my answer: because it's important to you find that opposing view that nobody has yet bothered to put on the web.
according to the wiki, windows 98 was released in June 1998. So this would have *had* to be windows 95 (or even windows 3.11).
You're right, the tech would have looked at this and said, "WTF?" and then looked more closely, noticed the date, had a good laugh, and deleted it.
Let's think about all the things that would have to happen for this story to be true:
1. Microsoft must have no mechanism for tracking work order/help requests. Come on. Every manager has daily/weekly/monthly reports that show the number of requests opened/closed/carried over and it flags old requests, and it sorts by age, so the oldest issue shows up at the top of the list. A manager would have seen this.
2. When the help desk guy was assigned to make the followup call, he didn't notice and find it odd that the original call came in 10 years ago? He didn't call his supervisor over and say, "hey I think somebody made a mistake here! Maybe we should just close this out."
3. Somebody has the same phone number of 10 years.
Or we could go with theory B: a blogger made up a funny story.
What he's describing is not a way of keeping your computer safe, it's a way of hiding porn from your girlfriend. You use some browser that she's never heard of for all your illicit surfing. Then, she fires up your computer and starts running IE, she looks in your history and sees slashdot and CNN or whatever and doesn't think you're a pervert (which you are).
It's also a good idea to have "honeypot porn" which is basically, a few very innocuous sites that you vist in IE that you intentionally want her to find - because once she starts looking, she's going to keep looking until she finds something. Best to give her something to find. Let her think you go to maxim.com or something.
This article is worthless to me because it doesn't give information in standard astronomical units of measure. I need to know how many hiroshimas and how many school buses this thing represents!
For Orion, they plan to use a skip back into space to bleed off some of the speed coming back from the moon,
I've always wondered why they didn't do that with the shuttle. The shuttle does S-turns and stays in the atmosphere the whole time. Why not pitch up to go back into space and cool down a bit? I'm sure the engineers thought of it and I'm sure there's a good reason, I just don't know what it is. Maybe the S-curves give them more downrange control.
Speaking of apollo though, I read somewhere that apollo's heat shield was good enough for a Mars mission. Meaning, with a different entry profile (obviously) they would have been able to bleed off *a lot* more speed than was built up comming back from the moon, enough that they could have used the same capsule for a Mars mission.
Maybe he meant that the building itself has no walls to protect it from a fire. Maybe their server room is in a gazebo in a park somewhere.
watch people's use of it to see what people have trouble with and what they can improve..
And their philosophy is, there is nothing that cannot be improved through the liberal application of animated paperclips or dogs, or annoying popup balloon tips.
His hyperventilation amounts to ignoring SCO's inflated claims of ownership to everything, failure to prove they owned what they claimed
Have to agree with you there. And I would add that he starts off the article by attempting to tie it all in to linux, then he does the bait and switch and talks about Unix trademarks and never again mentions linux in his article.
ok, so let's assume that SCO purchased and now owns everything unix. What does that have to do with linux? linux is not unix. Even if SCO owned unix, they *still* don't have the right to collect royalties on linux. This article makes the unix-to-linux switch in the first paragraph and never looks back.
uh huh. See, when the chimpanzees perform a task they're given a little treat. M&M's are popular. The treats are colloquially called "reward pellets" - a reference to Pavlov's work.
So, my joke is to pretend that I misunderstood, and that you are not actually teaching human students, but are instead a researcher working with chimpanzees. I suggest that you increase motivation by getting better reward pellets.
That's funny, you see, because in real life, you *aren't* using reward pellets. Because we don't actually gve reward pellets to humans. So my staged misunderstanding of your situation leads to a comically misplaced suggested remedy.
and then we just laughed and laughed.
except for you, because you didn't get the joke.
Iceland has already done this
If they see a slight variation on the pattern that you give them and ask them to deduce something, they don't even bother trying and have a good laugh at how you are such a bastard.
maybe the reward pellets you're using aren't tasty enough.
How can a DNA mutation make the wasp know how to locate the brain and lodge the stinger directly into it?
A common tactic among people who don't believe evolution, is to use phrases like "DNA mutation" as if to imply that there was no brain locating behavior, and then a single mutation happens and (like magic) a fully-formed brain locating behavior exists. As if this one wasp named Neo was born and he was their savior. That's a straw man. You're arguing against something that no evolutionary scientist claims.
What scientists do say is that there is variability in every generation. Wasps don't just sting at random. In their tiny brain, they have the ability to make choices, and they prefer some things over others. Think of it this way: Your favorite flavor of ice cream is in part an inherited trait. If your mom and dad both liked strawberry, then you are more likely to prefer strawberry. There is variability in every generation, so there's a chance you like vanilla. It's not accurate to say, "omfg you have a mutation that makes you like vanilla!" In fact, it's disingenuous to say it that way. It's a straw man argument. It's just variability.
A wasp likes to sting a roach in a certain place. In part, this is due to the fact that its parents had the same peference. Eons ago, the wasp's sting was powerful enough to kill a roach. Any location preference was ok - but, any wasps that preferred an area near the brain killed the roach more quickly, were more efficient (killed more roaches), and had less chance of getting injured as the roach thrashed around. As a result, those wasps left more offspring. Even today, there is variability. In every generation (millions of wasps) a few are born that prefer to sting the roach on its ass. Today, those wasps don't leave any offspring.
If we had these things crawling around, even the Nanny State couldn't prevent idiots from surviving.
So, the nanny state prevents idiots from surviving??
this does not mean that abiogenesis can occur under such conditions.
exactly. It seems that life is very difficult to get started, even though once it does start it's very tenacious and can survive anywhere. In The Blind Watchmaker Dawkins suggests that running water and clay crystals may be some of the things that are required. In other words, you have organic chemicals laying about (actually, falling from the sky due to comet bombardment) and then being eroded by water. As they travel downstream they are constrained and shaped by crystals. 99.9% of the time, you get nothing. But perhaps once every million years, this results in a molecule that can copy itself being deposited into the shallow sea at the mouth of the stream.
But here's the catch: once that happens, the newly created life starts working its way back upstream, devouring all the raw materials and thus ensuring the process cannot be repeated.
So you make one good point: genesis can only occur under specific circumstances that no longer exist. And I would just add to that this additional point: once it does occur, life eats all the stuff that could be used to make more life.