Yep... Except in places where jury nullification is regarded as nearly criminal behaviour... whereas no one can throw contempt of court at you for being friends with a lawyer!!
Back in the late 1970s, a number of open-pit copper mines (including the largest one in the world, at Butte MT) closed due to skyrocketing costs and a flat market, despite being nowhere near mined out. While you're correct that Geology Says You Get NN Much And No More, one has to wonder whether these closed mines are figured into the "shortage" equation.
Conspiracy theorists might also wonder if those making the prediction are buying copper futures:)
[laughing] I tried disabling those Jury Points, but they just keep on a-comin'.... tho they tend to take them away again as soon as I mention that my business partner's brother is a lawyer:)
"Taco is rightly proud of the many improvements to Slashdot he's got in the pipeline, but I would contend that proper editing would be a greater improvement to the site than any of those tweaks."
Now there I agree entirely, since I don't find that technical tweaks add much (especially since I see/. in essentially textmode, thank ghod).
Well, here's a thought.. let the moderators AND the original poster flag a given post as "metadiscussion", and give readers the ability to filter out any post so flagged or modded.
I would not want to see such posts automagically shunted out, tho, because very often the most interesting discussion winds up being somewhere down a meta chain.
Personally I care much more about how interesting posts are than whether they're nominally to topic.:)
I believe you're correct about the Slashdot environment. We come here because it's like a coffeehouse, not because it's like a high school English class. Similarly, we don't expect to find ourselves in the linguistic ghetto of the average unmoderated teenage blog.
And while sound grammar and spelling are important for ease of parsing, it's also necessary to know when to bend or break the rules. Fiction that's written with exact grammatical correctness, where no character ever speaks in the vernacular, is a dusty, boring read. Likewise, Slashdot wrung dry of its naturally-casual flow would be a dry and dull place. Nitpicking over every grammatical flaw isn't interesting in slashdot's context.
(Actually, I've left other forums, even some I'd been with for years, where discussion tended to devolve into nitpicking....)
In principle I agree, BUT... those 10 seconds of boot time are in the Mac user's own house, with their own property which once they've bought, they're pretty much stuck with for several years. Conversely, we are guests in CmdrTaco's house. While I may be annoyed by some of our host's personal habits, I don't *have* to be here. So whatever he wastes of my life, I've effectively consented to.
So... while as an experienced editor I see the errors, I choose to let my text parser auto-correct those that cause no more than a trivial 0-1 gate (to, too) or can be equated (thier==their).
Now, if participles and phrases were dangling from every article, then I might complain about being forced to rewrite their spaghetti code:)
Actually, I subbed solely because I like being notified of "relationship changes" (way handier than periodically rooting thru my friend/foe lists) -- since I then look up posts by my new relatives and make an effort to 1) learn what we had in common or disagreement, and 2) enter into further discussions with 'em.
And personally, I prefer NON-random behaviour from sites like this one. I want to know when and what I'm getting, not be left wondering if, when, and WTF?
Mod points don't count as random by my lights; I know to expect 'em occasionally (where "occasionally" can mean 3 times in one week, then not again for 3 months). They're kindof like jury duty.:)
The fellow who talks about grammar, spelling, and the reading skill of pipelining is dead on; such mistakes cause reader-parsing errors, hangs, and abends:)
Even so.. it's a minor nuisance to occasionally have to reparse something, but not the end of the literate world. Fact is, most of the time I'm skimming anyway, and don't pay any attention beyond topic and links.
However, Slashdot has many readers whose first language is not English, and I have to wonder if "wrong word grammar" isn't putting them at more of a reading and comprehension disadvantage than need be.
For myself (and having been paid real money as an editor), so long as the articles aren't written in a condescending or smart-assed fashion, and I can quickly read the summary and follow the links to see if I want to read more discussion, I'm satisfied. I don't come here to exercise my command of Follett's American Usage.
BTW, I think you're absolutely right about how some people aren't happy unless they have something to bitch about. If it weren't grammar, it'd be something else.
Used to go camping when I was a kid... woke up with variously a garter snake, a toad, and lake leeches in my bag, but never a cockroach! Here it's usually either black widows or wasps in the bed.
Speaking of snakes in the night... where I used to live, twice I came down the hall in the middle of the night, stepped on something wiggly, and -- eeek! a baby snake. (I like snakes, but not underfoot in the dark!) Fortunately just gopher snakes, not rattlers!
Thank you. I've been arguing with folk elsewhere about why this can't be an intentional back door, and the only real reason they've had was the specificity of the "length==1" thing.
The reasons I have against the idea are:
-- Back when the spec was designed, Windows PCs almost never spoke to another PC by any means other than a floppy disk, and Windows internet access didn't exist outside of closed services like AOL and CI$.
-- WMF files were never widely used (hardly at all outside of page-layout apps), partly because the average printer of the day couldn't handle graphics.
So... explain to me what USE such a backdoor would have been at the time the WMF spec was designed??
Side thought: has anyone checked whether the vulnerability might inherit from the older CGM spec??
Even allowing all that -- what GOOD was it in an era when for all Windows purposes, the Internet didn't exist? Why code in a backdoor that you can't use and have no reasonable expectation of ever even existing?? Remember this is a very old function.
All of us who are not programmers have no choice. We MUST "trust" any code, open or closed, because we have only its programmers' word that it's clean, or the word of other programmers, who may or may not have the competence and meticulous investigative skills to determine it's safe. (And in my observation, opensource coders are more likely to be nutjobs with an agenda, than are commercially-employed programmers.)
I'd say 20 years without the discovery of a demonstrably deliberate backdoor is a fairly good indication that overall, Windows' code is reasonably "safe" in that dept. One could doubtless say much the same of *NIX. As to flaws that can be *used* as backdoors, or phone-home behaviour, that's another problem entirely.
By the same token, how do you know that all opensource code is clean and safe? Has everything you use been reviewed by someone who is so expert that no exploitable bug can get past them? Are you sure there isn't some such backdoor that's in two parts, thus impossible to find if you only examine one part (say, half in the OS and half in a common app)?? Are you sure everyone who worked on various parts of all those opensource OS/apps are sane and well-meaning individuals?
Can't happen, you say? I personally know of a malicious bug (exploitable as a virus dropper) that a disgruntled coder deliberately left in an opensource app, and it was some time before anyone found it (in fact of dozens of folks working from the same codebase, only one person noticed it. Fortunately, it was about as useful in the real world as the WMF exploit.)
A WMF-based backdoor was of absolutely no use in an era when "the internet" meant gopher and @! email routing, the web didn't yet exist in any meaningful way, and there was no such thing as a graphical online app. "Backdoors" in that era meant illicit mainframe logins, not the small percentage of the personal computer market that was running Windows 3.x and using BBSs, if they had a modem at all. And back then, PC-based networks mostly ran Netware plus DOS.
And that is why I don't believe it's designed as a backdoor. At the time there was nowhere for it to GO, nor any serious indication that there ever would be.
True, and I don't dispute that it *could* be used as a remote exploit, all conditions being right. All sorts of ordinarily-innocuous bugs and deficiencies are doubtless exploitable for evildoing, given sufficiently, ah, creative thinking.
What I do dispute is whether it was *designed* as a backdoor for remote code execution, as some of our conspiracy theorists believe.
And I want to see the time machine that gives 'em a graphical internet back in the Win3.0 era:)
"Wagonsmithing"... the word you wanted was "wainwright". It's such an obsolete profession that hardly anyone even remembers the correct term for it.
And back to topic.. as has been pointed out before, it's all about controling distribution, and preventing independents from bypassing the big labels (here conveniently lumped as the RIAA). Downloading (legal or otherwise) can cut the labels out of the financial picture. Since the RIAA can't stop indie artists from distributing their songs over the internet, they do the next best thing and try to frighten consumers away from downloading (legal or otherwise), hence the Scary Lawsuits.
To quote the aforementioned Bowie... "Scary monsters, running scared..."
Actually, I don't doubt that there are a number of obscure and as-yet undiscovered backdoors coded by disgruntled, egofreak, or just plain psycho programmers, both at M$ and elsewhere (including opensource packages -- are you SURE you know *exactly* what all that obfuscated code is doing??)
Anyway, for the purposes of discussion, let's say the WMF thing *was* designed as a backdoor....
The graphics world didn't standardize on.WMF; indeed, it's probably the least-used of all major image formats, and no commonly-used software has routinely used.WMF since the Win3.1 era. Very few Win32 apps can even read them at all.
Given that... WHAT GOOD IS THE BACKDOOR??
ISTM it's about as useful as a space virus that's intended to take over the Earth... by infecting dodo birds.
Spitzbergen isn't exactly the most accessable location if you don't have either pretty good winter transport tech, or people experienced with sled dogs (where is Roald Amundsen when you need him??) Tho if anyone is likely to be able to get to it after the world crashes, it's the Norse.
Tho I did have the thought... what if there's a disaster that dumps a hundred feet of snow atop the seed bank??
OTOH, in that location it should be pretty well protected from the starving hordes who are foolish enough to eat all the seed that had been reserved for planting crops.
And remember kids, there are only two kinds of worlds: Those that have already crashed, and those that are going to crash! So remember to do your backups.:)
I was following a "chain of rebadges" thru some forum site and it went something like: "Some DVD drive {I forget the brand already) was really a BenQ, but BenQ isn't making any DVD burners yet, so is buying their stock from Teac..." but as I vaguely recall, Teac does some buying/rebadging too, so gods know who really made 'em! (Side note: Teac floppy drives are the only ones that are worth two cents. One could hope their other drives are at least decent...??)
In the past I've seen NEC drives that said NEC inside, and some that were.. I think it was Mitsumi inside?? So who knows! but so long as what's got their name on it is reliably good, that's what counts.
Nope, LiteOn doesn't make media, far as I know (they do make a large proportion of the drives rebadged by others, tho generally those sold under their own name get their best firmware). So far I've only used my new LiteOn DVD drive to make a few CDRs, which worked fine. Its CDRW kinfolk here haven't themselves written any coasters -- the few I've had (maybe 0.1%) have all been due to Nero screwing up. -- My older (24x) Plextor has been reliable too.
Tho you'd think blank media would be a good market, or at least a good partnership, where same-as-drive-branded media could be more than average assured of working perfectly with a given mfgr's drives. -- I did find a tool somewhere for checking mfgr code, now where did I stash it?:)
An AC says, "?!? They included the exploit before the Internet was common? You know what this means, don't you? It's a conspiracy! Microsoft must've made the Internet popular, precisely because of this!"
Hot Damn... I think this AC just proved that Bill Gates == Al Gore!!
Slashdot Mirror
Cool. One can hope it'll make the offtopic police happy, at least temporarily :)
Yep... Except in places where jury nullification is regarded as nearly criminal behaviour... whereas no one can throw contempt of court at you for being friends with a lawyer!!
Back in the late 1970s, a number of open-pit copper mines (including the largest one in the world, at Butte MT) closed due to skyrocketing costs and a flat market, despite being nowhere near mined out. While you're correct that Geology Says You Get NN Much And No More, one has to wonder whether these closed mines are figured into the "shortage" equation.
:)
Conspiracy theorists might also wonder if those making the prediction are buying copper futures
[laughing] I tried disabling those Jury Points, but they just keep on a-comin'.... tho they tend to take them away again as soon as I mention that my business partner's brother is a lawyer :)
"Taco is rightly proud of the many improvements to Slashdot he's got in the pipeline, but I would contend that proper editing would be a greater improvement to the site than any of those tweaks."
/. in essentially textmode, thank ghod).
Now there I agree entirely, since I don't find that technical tweaks add much (especially since I see
Which reminds me... since the switch to CSS, polls are no longer visible to those of us using a non-CSS browser and low-bandwidth option.
Otherwise, after a short period of breakage and confusion, everything seems to be back to working for us texties.
Well, here's a thought.. let the moderators AND the original poster flag a given post as "metadiscussion", and give readers the ability to filter out any post so flagged or modded.
:)
I would not want to see such posts automagically shunted out, tho, because very often the most interesting discussion winds up being somewhere down a meta chain.
Personally I care much more about how interesting posts are than whether they're nominally to topic.
I believe you're correct about the Slashdot environment. We come here because it's like a coffeehouse, not because it's like a high school English class. Similarly, we don't expect to find ourselves in the linguistic ghetto of the average unmoderated teenage blog.
And while sound grammar and spelling are important for ease of parsing, it's also necessary to know when to bend or break the rules. Fiction that's written with exact grammatical correctness, where no character ever speaks in the vernacular, is a dusty, boring read. Likewise, Slashdot wrung dry of its naturally-casual flow would be a dry and dull place. Nitpicking over every grammatical flaw isn't interesting in slashdot's context.
(Actually, I've left other forums, even some I'd been with for years, where discussion tended to devolve into nitpicking....)
In principle I agree, BUT... those 10 seconds of boot time are in the Mac user's own house, with their own property which once they've bought, they're pretty much stuck with for several years. Conversely, we are guests in CmdrTaco's house. While I may be annoyed by some of our host's personal habits, I don't *have* to be here. So whatever he wastes of my life, I've effectively consented to.
:)
So... while as an experienced editor I see the errors, I choose to let my text parser auto-correct those that cause no more than a trivial 0-1 gate (to, too) or can be equated (thier==their).
Now, if participles and phrases were dangling from every article, then I might complain about being forced to rewrite their spaghetti code
Actually, I subbed solely because I like being notified of "relationship changes" (way handier than periodically rooting thru my friend/foe lists) -- since I then look up posts by my new relatives and make an effort to 1) learn what we had in common or disagreement, and 2) enter into further discussions with 'em.
:)
And personally, I prefer NON-random behaviour from sites like this one. I want to know when and what I'm getting, not be left wondering if, when, and WTF?
Mod points don't count as random by my lights; I know to expect 'em occasionally (where "occasionally" can mean 3 times in one week, then not again for 3 months). They're kindof like jury duty.
[laughing] I'd hate to see your bad days :)
:)
The fellow who talks about grammar, spelling, and the reading skill of pipelining is dead on; such mistakes cause reader-parsing errors, hangs, and abends
Even so.. it's a minor nuisance to occasionally have to reparse something, but not the end of the literate world. Fact is, most of the time I'm skimming anyway, and don't pay any attention beyond topic and links.
However, Slashdot has many readers whose first language is not English, and I have to wonder if "wrong word grammar" isn't putting them at more of a reading and comprehension disadvantage than need be.
For myself (and having been paid real money as an editor), so long as the articles aren't written in a condescending or smart-assed fashion, and I can quickly read the summary and follow the links to see if I want to read more discussion, I'm satisfied. I don't come here to exercise my command of Follett's American Usage.
BTW, I think you're absolutely right about how some people aren't happy unless they have something to bitch about. If it weren't grammar, it'd be something else.
Used to go camping when I was a kid... woke up with variously a garter snake, a toad, and lake leeches in my bag, but never a cockroach! Here it's usually either black widows or wasps in the bed.
Speaking of snakes in the night... where I used to live, twice I came down the hall in the middle of the night, stepped on something wiggly, and -- eeek! a baby snake. (I like snakes, but not underfoot in the dark!) Fortunately just gopher snakes, not rattlers!
Thank you. I've been arguing with folk elsewhere about why this can't be an intentional back door, and the only real reason they've had was the specificity of the "length==1" thing.
The reasons I have against the idea are:
-- Back when the spec was designed, Windows PCs almost never spoke to another PC by any means other than a floppy disk, and Windows internet access didn't exist outside of closed services like AOL and CI$.
-- WMF files were never widely used (hardly at all outside of page-layout apps), partly because the average printer of the day couldn't handle graphics.
So... explain to me what USE such a backdoor would have been at the time the WMF spec was designed??
Side thought: has anyone checked whether the vulnerability might inherit from the older CGM spec??
So if Gibson says it's not a mistake.. he himself can't possibly be mistaken??
Even allowing all that -- what GOOD was it in an era when for all Windows purposes, the Internet didn't exist? Why code in a backdoor that you can't use and have no reasonable expectation of ever even existing?? Remember this is a very old function.
All of us who are not programmers have no choice. We MUST "trust" any code, open or closed, because we have only its programmers' word that it's clean, or the word of other programmers, who may or may not have the competence and meticulous investigative skills to determine it's safe. (And in my observation, opensource coders are more likely to be nutjobs with an agenda, than are commercially-employed programmers.)
I'd say 20 years without the discovery of a demonstrably deliberate backdoor is a fairly good indication that overall, Windows' code is reasonably "safe" in that dept. One could doubtless say much the same of *NIX. As to flaws that can be *used* as backdoors, or phone-home behaviour, that's another problem entirely.
By the same token, how do you know that all opensource code is clean and safe? Has everything you use been reviewed by someone who is so expert that no exploitable bug can get past them? Are you sure there isn't some such backdoor that's in two parts, thus impossible to find if you only examine one part (say, half in the OS and half in a common app)?? Are you sure everyone who worked on various parts of all those opensource OS/apps are sane and well-meaning individuals?
Can't happen, you say? I personally know of a malicious bug (exploitable as a virus dropper) that a disgruntled coder deliberately left in an opensource app, and it was some time before anyone found it (in fact of dozens of folks working from the same codebase, only one person noticed it. Fortunately, it was about as useful in the real world as the WMF exploit.)
A WMF-based backdoor was of absolutely no use in an era when "the internet" meant gopher and @! email routing, the web didn't yet exist in any meaningful way, and there was no such thing as a graphical online app. "Backdoors" in that era meant illicit mainframe logins, not the small percentage of the personal computer market that was running Windows 3.x and using BBSs, if they had a modem at all. And back then, PC-based networks mostly ran Netware plus DOS.
And that is why I don't believe it's designed as a backdoor. At the time there was nowhere for it to GO, nor any serious indication that there ever would be.
True, and I don't dispute that it *could* be used as a remote exploit, all conditions being right. All sorts of ordinarily-innocuous bugs and deficiencies are doubtless exploitable for evildoing, given sufficiently, ah, creative thinking.
:)
What I do dispute is whether it was *designed* as a backdoor for remote code execution, as some of our conspiracy theorists believe.
And I want to see the time machine that gives 'em a graphical internet back in the Win3.0 era
"Wagonsmithing" ... the word you wanted was "wainwright". It's such an obsolete profession that hardly anyone even remembers the correct term for it.
And back to topic.. as has been pointed out before, it's all about controling distribution, and preventing independents from bypassing the big labels (here conveniently lumped as the RIAA). Downloading (legal or otherwise) can cut the labels out of the financial picture. Since the RIAA can't stop indie artists from distributing their songs over the internet, they do the next best thing and try to frighten consumers away from downloading (legal or otherwise), hence the Scary Lawsuits.
To quote the aforementioned Bowie... "Scary monsters, running scared..."
I'm reminded that Bowie had one of the first subscription-only websites. Maybe his predicting the death of copyright is merely karma. ;)
Actually, I don't doubt that there are a number of obscure and as-yet undiscovered backdoors coded by disgruntled, egofreak, or just plain psycho programmers, both at M$ and elsewhere (including opensource packages -- are you SURE you know *exactly* what all that obfuscated code is doing??)
.WMF; indeed, it's probably the least-used of all major image formats, and no commonly-used software has routinely used .WMF since the Win3.1 era. Very few Win32 apps can even read them at all.
Anyway, for the purposes of discussion, let's say the WMF thing *was* designed as a backdoor....
The graphics world didn't standardize on
Given that... WHAT GOOD IS THE BACKDOOR??
ISTM it's about as useful as a space virus that's intended to take over the Earth... by infecting dodo birds.
If you ask in rec.gardens.edible, you'll get a lot of recommendations for sources of heirloom seeds.
When I do the garden thing again, I'll probably go that route, as the newer varieties just don't taste the same...
Spitzbergen isn't exactly the most accessable location if you don't have either pretty good winter transport tech, or people experienced with sled dogs (where is Roald Amundsen when you need him??) Tho if anyone is likely to be able to get to it after the world crashes, it's the Norse.
:)
Tho I did have the thought... what if there's a disaster that dumps a hundred feet of snow atop the seed bank??
OTOH, in that location it should be pretty well protected from the starving hordes who are foolish enough to eat all the seed that had been reserved for planting crops.
And remember kids, there are only two kinds of worlds: Those that have already crashed, and those that are going to crash! So remember to do your backups.
I was following a "chain of rebadges" thru some forum site and it went something like: "Some DVD drive {I forget the brand already) was really a BenQ, but BenQ isn't making any DVD burners yet, so is buying their stock from Teac..." but as I vaguely recall, Teac does some buying/rebadging too, so gods know who really made 'em! (Side note: Teac floppy drives are the only ones that are worth two cents. One could hope their other drives are at least decent...??)
:)
In the past I've seen NEC drives that said NEC inside, and some that were.. I think it was Mitsumi inside?? So who knows! but so long as what's got their name on it is reliably good, that's what counts.
Nope, LiteOn doesn't make media, far as I know (they do make a large proportion of the drives rebadged by others, tho generally those sold under their own name get their best firmware). So far I've only used my new LiteOn DVD drive to make a few CDRs, which worked fine. Its CDRW kinfolk here haven't themselves written any coasters -- the few I've had (maybe 0.1%) have all been due to Nero screwing up. -- My older (24x) Plextor has been reliable too.
Tho you'd think blank media would be a good market, or at least a good partnership, where same-as-drive-branded media could be more than average assured of working perfectly with a given mfgr's drives. -- I did find a tool somewhere for checking mfgr code, now where did I stash it?
An AC says, "?!? They included the exploit before the Internet was common? You know what this means, don't you? It's a conspiracy! Microsoft must've made the Internet popular, precisely because of this!"
Hot Damn... I think this AC just proved that Bill Gates == Al Gore!!