...now a whole mess of us, in the affected states simply need to copy this letter, alter some words and attach checks to those letters and send them off to our state senate...
Of course, a line should be added with something along the lines of... "I know and understand that in our modern political system the only way to truly get the ear of our elected leaders is by providing them with cash incentives. Please accept the remainder of my personal expense money for this month in order for you to look at my letter and consider its ramifications."
Honestly though, with or without my suggested addendum, it's not very likely that anything will be done through individual citizen actions.
Seriously, the Michigan legislature passed a patronizing law regarding ex-house and ex-senate members becoming lobyists after they leave office. They put a limit of 6 months on the time between being a legislature and a lobyist, if they were really serious about defeating that conflict of interest, they would have made the period 6 years.
...the Slashdot article about a month ago that depicted a similar honeypot test that included unpatched versions of Operating Systems.
That's not surprising.
Anyway, that honeypot test that I am talking about put several older versions of Red Hat up, which I believ included Red Hat 7.3 (Which, if I am not mistaken was released around the same time as Windows XP was...)
In that test, the default installation, no pathed version of Red Hat 7.3 was secure for 6 months, before it was cracked with a brute force password crack. The Windows XP Machines were cracked on average 6 minutes after being hooked up.
Perhaps you should look up that past Slashdot article, it has far more detail then what I recall and offer here.
I completely agree. I would much rather have the high quality, commercial free, logo free and scrolling text free as well as interuption free versions of a television show on a store bought DVD.
Not more then a month back, I was attempting to watch the new Battlestar Galactica and several times during the show the cable company had to put up a 'Weather Storm Watch Advisory' that destroyed the show. The white block text scrolled across the screen and the audio was switched to some overly loud voice proclaiming the national weather service has accounced a winter storm advisory for my area. This interrupted important dialog from the show for nearly 30 seconds and they did it at least 5 times durring the show.
I had it in my to see if I could locate an uninterupted version of the show on the Internet, but thankfully they always rebroadcast that particular show a few days later.
Listed as an affected App is Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. It states that Virtual PC runs much slower then it would on the same system without Service Pack 2.
As someone else said, that's the Vendor's fault. In this case, the vendor is Microsoft.
Adobe Photoshop CS is still a brand spanking new version of Photoshop...
A number of the other applications/games are still fairly new as well.
This is incredibly obnoxious. MS should provide some method of still operating those older programs within some kind of better 'sandbox' then just to permanently stop the function of those applications/games.
You should stop listening to stories about them 'eating babies' and actually read the news that explains what they actually are doing. It's patriotic to know what your government is doing, to question them about what they are doing and to hold them accountable for what they do, in regards to government and ruling the people matters.
...that the Bush Administration just pushed into law some new law that may very well make building a class action lawsuit against Choicepoint very difficult.
...doesn't have an OpenLDAP *Server* module within YaSt, at least the 9.2 Professional version doesn't have that.
What is within Yast is an OpenLDAP Client component.
If you are setting up an OpenLDAP server, you still need to do everything 'by hand' in order to get it setup and running. I have only started looking into this myself and I have to say that it isn't something you can just fire up and get running in just a few minutes.
...the differences inherent in collecting data on overall climate through a long period of time and predicting the prevailing weather condition of a particular area in the next handful of hours.
The difference is very simple to understand, based upon fairly commonly understood principles.
For instance, most people understand that trees have 'growth rings' that can be used to count the age of a tree. Some people understand that the difference in thickness between one ring and another ring, on the same tree, has something to do with the condition of the year that growth ring was formed. Even fewer people understand that not only does the thickness of the ring, but the density of the wood material within that ring further demonstrate the conditions that the tree grew in that year.
Using that generally accepted information, it is possible for a scientist to very accurately describe the general weather throughout a particular tree's life. This would include a rough estimate of average yearly temperature and precipitation.
The same can be said for scientists that drill up those arctic ice core samples. The data taken from those samples, coupled with information taken from other sources, such as information from the rings of very long lived trees (think Californian Red Woods) provides these scientists with the ability to very accurately describe the general climate of the globe.
There is also a significant different between the terms climate and weather that you are misrepresenting.
Let's think of this whole thing in computer terms, the Earth is the hardware, the Climate is the Operating System and Weather are child processes of the Climate. Currently, it appears that we humans have radically altered the Climate OS and we are beginning to see that the changes will begin to spawn new weather processes.
...enough information to lend credibility to the study.
Quite frankly, it is 'correct', although misleading, to state that the criteria "included" the number of vulnerabilities, even if that is all the study was based upon. If that line was followed up with some other criteria that was also included in the study, then it would be much more difficult to dismiss this study.
Of course, at this moment, I am not aware of any other criteria being included in the study. If they publish the study and it also happens to include additional criteria, then the study can be accepted upon its merits.
I wasn't entirely 'awed' by the special effects. Granted, for the time, they were the best commercially available for the price they were willing to pay, they still looked less real then the 'old-school' work done on the Star Trek series of the time.
I did my best to watch the entire first season and watched a portion of season two. It couldn't hold my interest. Regardless of that, a science fiction, or any television series, even with a large scale story-arc, needs to make it possible for someone new to slide into the story without being so lost that they can quickly lose interest.
The X-Files did an excellent job of that, Enterprise Season Three did a decent job of that, Star Trek:DS9 did a good job of that and even though I am not so hip to Stargate SG-1, that show even does a decent job of that.
...those shows don't really lend themselves to video games as much as most every other Cartoon Network license does...
I can see a "Dexter's Laboratory Game" wherein Dexter must do battle with Mandark(sp?) and keep his sister from his lab.
I can see a 'Big O' or 'Megas XLR' based giant robot fighting games.
Teen Titans, Justice League and the Power Puff Girls lend themselves to an action/adventure platform type game.
The Adult Swim shows? Nope, not when some of the most funny parts is when a character sits in one place, the scene appears to pause and all you see for something like 5 to 30 seconds is the character's eyes scooting back and forth, with an occasional 'Er.. uh..' noise being issued from the character.
When I first read about Babylon 5 all those years ago, about how it was going to be a different Science Fiction series with a clear beginning, middle and end, I was blown away.
I thought it was going to be the most impressive thing that I would ever end up seeing on television. I waited with intense anticipation...
Then... the first episode came and went, the second one came and went, the third came and went...
I watched it a bit, on and off for a season or two, the stories, the characters, they just weren't anything overly impressive. The whole thing seemed incredibly forced.
So, you have these technology primitive humans building a massive 'UN in Space' space station and they somehow get all of these more advanced and terribly militaristic civilizations to live 'peacefully' with one another....then there was the special effects. Granted full CGI was an impressive goal, but the technology of the day was severly lacking and put a serious damper on the believability of the series. They would have been better off building scale models of everything and filming it all 'old-school', like the Star Trek series of the time.
In my not-so humble opinion the "Reimagined Battlestar Galactica" is a much better implementation of this idea then Babylon 5 was.
You mean from the same guy that brought us "Jurasic Park" and other great techno-thrillers?
You know, when you write Fiction, like a Techno-Thriller, you are allowed to take IMMENSE liberties with the material and even make up things entirely!
If you can take a Michael Chrichton novel as fact, you might as well believe that there are blue 3 apple tall little humanoids called 'Smurfs' that you can turn into gold with an alchemical formula...
I hope they don't address this aspect of the show.
We really do not need in depth explanations about how the technology works in Battlestar Gallactica, that is not what BSG is all about. BSG is about the story, the characters and the Drama.
Enterprise and Star Trek in general is a vastly different beast, one that now requires the explanation of all the technology simply because that is what the fans have grown used and what the writers are used to writing. Honestly, when they started up the series, it would have been far better for them to simply cut back or nearly eliminate the explanation about how all the technology works.
That one single action could have been extremely helpful in strengthening Enterprise in the minds of many Star Trek fans. Personally, I enjoy Star Trek either way, as I see the show as a wonderful escape for an hour a week. There's just many other people that see much more in it then I do and they would have been helped with fewer tech solution of the week type stories.
What they needed was more tactics, more human answers and less rehashes of old stories, like the recent one with the Romulan Drone ship, great story, but it is straight out of TNG, with minor redresses.
They even reused the Romulans as the bad guys in that rehash story! The previous one taking place in a TNG Klingon Civil War, where the Romulans were secretly giving aid to one Klingon house. Picard built a large picket fleet to 'entrap' the Romulan vessels.
...and then stating "By any 'reasonabl metric'" sort of clouds things to me.
That is very similar to the Bush Administration talking about 'Sound Science' which is viewed, by many people, to mean Science that meets the predetermined policies envisioned by the Bush Administration.
Therefor, it is important to determine what the definition of 'Reasonable Metric' actually means when being spoken by speaker taken from the original article. Just as it is important to know exactly what the Bush Administration means when it says 'Sound Science'.
Microsoft's top security honcho insisted Thursday that Microsoft "is making progress on security using any reasonable metric."
What is a 'resonable metric'? Is that one that only provides the results that one wishes to see or is that a metric provided by a reputable security organization that is known for being extremely truthful and accurate in its results?
You are attempting to draw incorrect parallels here.
A Tsunami is a very real significant threat that will cause some form of calamity that is very real and the results of which can be seen very quickly.
The Afterlife and whether or not one even exists, is open to debate, interpretation and is as amorphous as the person you happen to be speaking to at that moment. It is a theological, philosophical conundrum that humanity will most likely never be able to know the actual truth about.
The effects of a Tsunami aren't open to interpretation. The effects of the Afterlife and whether or not it even exists is so open to interpretation that it is impossible for humans to know the truth about the afterlife.
You may very well believe that your interpretation is correct and the only interpretation that is real. In the end, your interpretation could be completely wrong. When we die, we could end up in the Viking afterlife, where most of us will be nothing, as most of use arne't 'warriors'.
We could all end up in an afterlife where God asks us if we did everything we could to enjoy every hedonistic aspect that physical human life provides. If we say no, God might just send us right back with a 'Hope you figure it out this time' along with a wink and a smile. If we say, yes and God knows that is the truth, we might move on to some eternal paradise filled with sharing those experiences with others.
Whose to say I am wrong? In the end, if God really does exist, then the only being that can honestly say whether or not I am right or wrong is God. No single human being has that power and it would be incredibly arrogant for any human to assume they know God's motivations and plans.
If Christians believe they are right, that's fine for them. Just because they believe they are right does not mean they have the right to continually force those beliefs onto others. It is considered forcing those beliefs onto others by constantly and continually 'sharing' those beliefs with someone that has always said, "No thank you."
It's still debatable that the Bible is literal truth, stories meant to guide morality or fabricated entirely, just to placate and control the populace.
You just can't test those statements because it ain't science, it's theology and philosophy.
The proposed idea for attempting to 'Turn up the Heat' on Mars is called a scientific theory, based upon our existing knowledge and is something that could be tested, even if the results of the test won't be known in our lifetime. Do we know what will happen? Scientists have a good idea about what would happen, but we won't know for sure until someone gives a go at it.
Just like all other scientific advances, until it was done succesfully the first time, there is no way to know whether or not something that was never done before will work or fail. If everything science was performed simply because scientists were 'sure' of the results, our society wouldn't exist.
...however, Morrowind is what we are all aware of what comes out of Bethesda Software.
I am not saying they are going to do a bad job, I just hope they stick more to what Fallout is, then to create another Morrowind based game, which is beautifully and immersive graphically, but terrible when it comes to NPC interaction...
My fingers are crossed and I wait with baited breath...
If they mess this up, it would have been better to have let Fallout lay to rest with the death of Interplay...
So many times as to make me ill from hearing it, in that game. Almost every NPC greeted me the same way, there was a bit of a plot behind the beautiful engine, but little straight direction as to what to do and where to go to get things done.
Don't get me totally, wrong. The Morrowind, the Elder Scrolls was a great start to what could have been an amazingly awesome game. They had a level editor, they had slick graphics and some excellent opportunities for gameplay. They left out the Multi-Player bit, which ruined its long-term playability for me.
I have more fun with Neverwinter Nights then I did in Morrowind, the Elder Scrolls.
Heck, the game would have been hundreds of times better if they had included the ablity to have 3 other people join in a game with you. If they put that bit of code into Morrowind, it would have a rabid following, possibly larger then the following that Neverwinter Nights currently has.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, a line should be added with something along the lines of... "I know and understand that in our modern political system the only way to truly get the ear of our elected leaders is by providing them with cash incentives. Please accept the remainder of my personal expense money for this month in order for you to look at my letter and consider its ramifications."
Honestly though, with or without my suggested addendum, it's not very likely that anything will be done through individual citizen actions.
Seriously, the Michigan legislature passed a patronizing law regarding ex-house and ex-senate members becoming lobyists after they leave office. They put a limit of 6 months on the time between being a legislature and a lobyist, if they were really serious about defeating that conflict of interest, they would have made the period 6 years.
That's not surprising.
Anyway, that honeypot test that I am talking about put several older versions of Red Hat up, which I believ included Red Hat 7.3 (Which, if I am not mistaken was released around the same time as Windows XP was...)
In that test, the default installation, no pathed version of Red Hat 7.3 was secure for 6 months, before it was cracked with a brute force password crack. The Windows XP Machines were cracked on average 6 minutes after being hooked up.
Perhaps you should look up that past Slashdot article, it has far more detail then what I recall and offer here.
A winter storm advisory in Michigan, during the winter is like telling someone that the temperature is going to be hot in Iraq.
I completely agree. I would much rather have the high quality, commercial free, logo free and scrolling text free as well as interuption free versions of a television show on a store bought DVD.
Not more then a month back, I was attempting to watch the new Battlestar Galactica and several times during the show the cable company had to put up a 'Weather Storm Watch Advisory' that destroyed the show. The white block text scrolled across the screen and the audio was switched to some overly loud voice proclaiming the national weather service has accounced a winter storm advisory for my area. This interrupted important dialog from the show for nearly 30 seconds and they did it at least 5 times durring the show.
I had it in my to see if I could locate an uninterupted version of the show on the Internet, but thankfully they always rebroadcast that particular show a few days later.
Listed as an affected App is Microsoft Virtual PC 2004. It states that Virtual PC runs much slower then it would on the same system without Service Pack 2.
As someone else said, that's the Vendor's fault. In this case, the vendor is Microsoft.
It states specifically that Adobe Photoshop CS will install, but will not run, under Windows XP SP2 on the 64-bit architecture.
There is no listing referring to the 'help' system. If only it were that simple of a problem.
Adobe Photoshop CS is still a brand spanking new version of Photoshop...
A number of the other applications/games are still fairly new as well.
This is incredibly obnoxious. MS should provide some method of still operating those older programs within some kind of better 'sandbox' then just to permanently stop the function of those applications/games.
It's not to hard to find. Just check out Google news US Section...
Then you getthis.
You should stop listening to stories about them 'eating babies' and actually read the news that explains what they actually are doing. It's patriotic to know what your government is doing, to question them about what they are doing and to hold them accountable for what they do, in regards to government and ruling the people matters.
What is within Yast is an OpenLDAP Client component.
If you are setting up an OpenLDAP server, you still need to do everything 'by hand' in order to get it setup and running. I have only started looking into this myself and I have to say that it isn't something you can just fire up and get running in just a few minutes.
The difference is very simple to understand, based upon fairly commonly understood principles.
For instance, most people understand that trees have 'growth rings' that can be used to count the age of a tree. Some people understand that the difference in thickness between one ring and another ring, on the same tree, has something to do with the condition of the year that growth ring was formed. Even fewer people understand that not only does the thickness of the ring, but the density of the wood material within that ring further demonstrate the conditions that the tree grew in that year.
Using that generally accepted information, it is possible for a scientist to very accurately describe the general weather throughout a particular tree's life. This would include a rough estimate of average yearly temperature and precipitation.
The same can be said for scientists that drill up those arctic ice core samples. The data taken from those samples, coupled with information taken from other sources, such as information from the rings of very long lived trees (think Californian Red Woods) provides these scientists with the ability to very accurately describe the general climate of the globe.
There is also a significant different between the terms climate and weather that you are misrepresenting.
Let's think of this whole thing in computer terms, the Earth is the hardware, the Climate is the Operating System and Weather are child processes of the Climate. Currently, it appears that we humans have radically altered the Climate OS and we are beginning to see that the changes will begin to spawn new weather processes.
Quite frankly, it is 'correct', although misleading, to state that the criteria "included" the number of vulnerabilities, even if that is all the study was based upon. If that line was followed up with some other criteria that was also included in the study, then it would be much more difficult to dismiss this study.
Of course, at this moment, I am not aware of any other criteria being included in the study. If they publish the study and it also happens to include additional criteria, then the study can be accepted upon its merits.
I wasn't entirely 'awed' by the special effects. Granted, for the time, they were the best commercially available for the price they were willing to pay, they still looked less real then the 'old-school' work done on the Star Trek series of the time.
I did my best to watch the entire first season and watched a portion of season two. It couldn't hold my interest. Regardless of that, a science fiction, or any television series, even with a large scale story-arc, needs to make it possible for someone new to slide into the story without being so lost that they can quickly lose interest.
The X-Files did an excellent job of that, Enterprise Season Three did a decent job of that, Star Trek:DS9 did a good job of that and even though I am not so hip to Stargate SG-1, that show even does a decent job of that.
I can see a "Dexter's Laboratory Game" wherein Dexter must do battle with Mandark(sp?) and keep his sister from his lab.
I can see a 'Big O' or 'Megas XLR' based giant robot fighting games.
Teen Titans, Justice League and the Power Puff Girls lend themselves to an action/adventure platform type game.
The Adult Swim shows? Nope, not when some of the most funny parts is when a character sits in one place, the scene appears to pause and all you see for something like 5 to 30 seconds is the character's eyes scooting back and forth, with an occasional 'Er.. uh..' noise being issued from the character.
What are these video game execs smoking?
When I first read about Babylon 5 all those years ago, about how it was going to be a different Science Fiction series with a clear beginning, middle and end, I was blown away.
...then there was the special effects. Granted full CGI was an impressive goal, but the technology of the day was severly lacking and put a serious damper on the believability of the series. They would have been better off building scale models of everything and filming it all 'old-school', like the Star Trek series of the time.
I thought it was going to be the most impressive thing that I would ever end up seeing on television. I waited with intense anticipation...
Then... the first episode came and went, the second one came and went, the third came and went...
I watched it a bit, on and off for a season or two, the stories, the characters, they just weren't anything overly impressive. The whole thing seemed incredibly forced.
So, you have these technology primitive humans building a massive 'UN in Space' space station and they somehow get all of these more advanced and terribly militaristic civilizations to live 'peacefully' with one another.
In my not-so humble opinion the "Reimagined Battlestar Galactica" is a much better implementation of this idea then Babylon 5 was.
New-Kew-Lar?
New-Que-Ler?
New-Clear?
Anyway...
You mean from the same guy that brought us "Jurasic Park" and other great techno-thrillers?
You know, when you write Fiction, like a Techno-Thriller, you are allowed to take IMMENSE liberties with the material and even make up things entirely!
If you can take a Michael Chrichton novel as fact, you might as well believe that there are blue 3 apple tall little humanoids called 'Smurfs' that you can turn into gold with an alchemical formula...
I hope they don't address this aspect of the show.
We really do not need in depth explanations about how the technology works in Battlestar Gallactica, that is not what BSG is all about. BSG is about the story, the characters and the Drama.
Enterprise and Star Trek in general is a vastly different beast, one that now requires the explanation of all the technology simply because that is what the fans have grown used and what the writers are used to writing. Honestly, when they started up the series, it would have been far better for them to simply cut back or nearly eliminate the explanation about how all the technology works.
That one single action could have been extremely helpful in strengthening Enterprise in the minds of many Star Trek fans. Personally, I enjoy Star Trek either way, as I see the show as a wonderful escape for an hour a week. There's just many other people that see much more in it then I do and they would have been helped with fewer tech solution of the week type stories.
What they needed was more tactics, more human answers and less rehashes of old stories, like the recent one with the Romulan Drone ship, great story, but it is straight out of TNG, with minor redresses.
They even reused the Romulans as the bad guys in that rehash story! The previous one taking place in a TNG Klingon Civil War, where the Romulans were secretly giving aid to one Klingon house. Picard built a large picket fleet to 'entrap' the Romulan vessels.
That is very similar to the Bush Administration talking about 'Sound Science' which is viewed, by many people, to mean Science that meets the predetermined policies envisioned by the Bush Administration.
Therefor, it is important to determine what the definition of 'Reasonable Metric' actually means when being spoken by speaker taken from the original article. Just as it is important to know exactly what the Bush Administration means when it says 'Sound Science'.
Microsoft's top security honcho insisted Thursday that Microsoft "is making progress on security using any reasonable metric."
What is a 'resonable metric'? Is that one that only provides the results that one wishes to see or is that a metric provided by a reputable security organization that is known for being extremely truthful and accurate in its results?
Exactly my point.
You are attempting to draw incorrect parallels here.
A Tsunami is a very real significant threat that will cause some form of calamity that is very real and the results of which can be seen very quickly.
The Afterlife and whether or not one even exists, is open to debate, interpretation and is as amorphous as the person you happen to be speaking to at that moment. It is a theological, philosophical conundrum that humanity will most likely never be able to know the actual truth about.
The effects of a Tsunami aren't open to interpretation. The effects of the Afterlife and whether or not it even exists is so open to interpretation that it is impossible for humans to know the truth about the afterlife.
You may very well believe that your interpretation is correct and the only interpretation that is real. In the end, your interpretation could be completely wrong. When we die, we could end up in the Viking afterlife, where most of us will be nothing, as most of use arne't 'warriors'.
We could all end up in an afterlife where God asks us if we did everything we could to enjoy every hedonistic aspect that physical human life provides. If we say no, God might just send us right back with a 'Hope you figure it out this time' along with a wink and a smile. If we say, yes and God knows that is the truth, we might move on to some eternal paradise filled with sharing those experiences with others.
Whose to say I am wrong? In the end, if God really does exist, then the only being that can honestly say whether or not I am right or wrong is God. No single human being has that power and it would be incredibly arrogant for any human to assume they know God's motivations and plans.
If Christians believe they are right, that's fine for them. Just because they believe they are right does not mean they have the right to continually force those beliefs onto others. It is considered forcing those beliefs onto others by constantly and continually 'sharing' those beliefs with someone that has always said, "No thank you."
It's still debatable that the Bible is literal truth, stories meant to guide morality or fabricated entirely, just to placate and control the populace.
You just can't test those statements because it ain't science, it's theology and philosophy.
The proposed idea for attempting to 'Turn up the Heat' on Mars is called a scientific theory, based upon our existing knowledge and is something that could be tested, even if the results of the test won't be known in our lifetime. Do we know what will happen? Scientists have a good idea about what would happen, but we won't know for sure until someone gives a go at it.
Just like all other scientific advances, until it was done succesfully the first time, there is no way to know whether or not something that was never done before will work or fail. If everything science was performed simply because scientists were 'sure' of the results, our society wouldn't exist.
I am not saying they are going to do a bad job, I just hope they stick more to what Fallout is, then to create another Morrowind based game, which is beautifully and immersive graphically, but terrible when it comes to NPC interaction...
My fingers are crossed and I wait with baited breath...
If they mess this up, it would have been better to have let Fallout lay to rest with the death of Interplay...
So many times as to make me ill from hearing it, in that game. Almost every NPC greeted me the same way, there was a bit of a plot behind the beautiful engine, but little straight direction as to what to do and where to go to get things done.
Don't get me totally, wrong. The Morrowind, the Elder Scrolls was a great start to what could have been an amazingly awesome game. They had a level editor, they had slick graphics and some excellent opportunities for gameplay. They left out the Multi-Player bit, which ruined its long-term playability for me.
I have more fun with Neverwinter Nights then I did in Morrowind, the Elder Scrolls.
Heck, the game would have been hundreds of times better if they had included the ablity to have 3 other people join in a game with you. If they put that bit of code into Morrowind, it would have a rabid following, possibly larger then the following that Neverwinter Nights currently has.