A senior administration official, who spoke on condition he not be identified, said Kennedy was stopped because the name "T. Kennedy" has been used as an alias by someone on the list of terrorist suspects.
Bwahahaha!
Next time I go to a terrorist^w anti-war rally, I'm gonna tell everybody my name is George Bush.
"I'm sorry Mr. President, but they won't let us off the tarmac until we verify that you didn't speak at an anti-war rally at Hoboken Illinois.
None of those questions are addressed in The Bible, other than the 'what are the characteristics of this God person', which really gets only a cursory explanation with no technical details.
My point (and the point of most people who look at the kind of stuff that 'intelligent design' proponents are trying to push as 'science') is that the details of those questions aren't addressed (or meant to be properly addressed) in the bible. As such, there really is no big conflict between the bible and most science. In those (few) cases where there appears to be a direct conflict, my explanation is that the bible was never meant to be a technical manual, the transcribers were not technical writers and whatever technical details there may have been were probably horribly mangled in the translation from god's language to Hebrew (or whatever language Moses spoke), and then from the stone tablets to the various languages we now read the bible in).
Changing permissions on a file can be done (if it's your file) without being root -- chmod is your friend.
If the file isn't yours, then you shouldn't be changing permissions.
If you want people to be able to give away their own files, I believe that there's a sysctl setting that will allow that for most modern Linux boxes.
If not, then I'd be willing to write a setuid program that allows you to give away ownership of files owned by you (but only if there aren't user disk quotas, because giving away ownership of files is a really nice way of working around quotas and/or just messing around with your workmate's quotas).
Examples of what can go wrong when you allow people to arbitrarily change ownership of any file have already been given. Let's just say I wouldn't allow it either.
There's a certain kind of non-motion when you're reading slashdot -- as opposed to, say watching TV or playing with the cat. It makes a certain ammount of sense to me.
God said "Let there be light", and Whoof! there was a universe.
Simple isn't it?
Granted, I've never studied this 'formal' Intelligent design stuff, but I don't think that any of them have really answered (by using the bible), the question of just how long god's days were -- especially when the earth didn't exist for the first day.
No real reason to believe that someone as godlike as, well, God would have a day the same length as ours.
In any case, I think (like the first poster) that setting an artificial barrier between God and Science -- and then using the descriptions in the bible (which were simplified no end for people who mostly had no understanding of science, or even the general concept) as the basis for an artificial pseudo-science -- are just setting themselves up to get their heads kicked in. (metaphorically speaking).
Then again, I figure these are the same kinds of people who'd freak out at the project Guttenberg people for listing The Bible's creator as
"Anonymous".
Re:Theory and reality, explanation. engineering
on
Artificial Tornadoes
·
· Score: 1
As far as I see it, his biggest problem is going to be building a 6KM tall tower that can withstand the vortex forces that he hopes to unleash and harness. Engineering difficulties pretty much increase geometrically with height, and I think that the tallest existing towers are only a couple of KM high -- and latices at that.
I'm guessing that his tropospheric tower to increase a power plant's output by 20% would probably cost significantly more to build than the power plant itself.
That having been said, however, there are a number of very tall factory towers that he could use to test his ideas with shorter pipes. Most of those chimneys are only designed to pump (toxic) waste high into the atmosphere where it wouldn't bother local voters. If nothing else, it might be interesting to see what happens with one of those things if you add atmospheric intakes at the lower levels. I wouldn't expect energy in the megawatt range, but I woldn't be terribly shocked to find energies in the kilowatt range being economically produced from waste heat.
As far as I see it, theres as much chance of data in the recieve buffer created by background radiation being a viable 'virus' as there is a deliberate chunk of data will be
Uhm, more, actually -- Random noise doesn't know the odds it's working against -- and even has statistics on it's side. On the other hand, someone intelligent enough to know what (s)he was up against would just throw up their tentacles and roll away.
Consider the scenario: You're a CIA hacker with the job of writing a buffer overflow routine for a Russian listening station. All you know about the architecture of the remote system is that it is probably unlike any architecture you have documentation for. There is, in fact, no guarantee that it is even a binary-based architecture.
You also do not know how the data will be encoded going from the receuver to the computer. Some of your data may be lost in transmission. The very existence of the listening station is only postulated.
Turnaround time between sending a viral signal and learning of your results (if any) is anywhere between 8 and 8,000 years, during which time, the architecture may change (possibly radically).
Your first job is to calculate the probability of success -- without giving up.
If someone else installed the keylogger on my computer I haven't signed or read the EULA. When I find this 'unwanted gift', I'm free to forward it on to an anti-virus company after (or as part of the process of) removing it from my computer.
In other words, I think that RetroCoder is going to have to prove that the people on who'se computers this stuff is running have seen the EULA. Then, of course there's the fact that RetroCoder is engaged in contributory violation of people's privacy, which means that they're coming to court with 'Unclean Hands".
Of course Retro Coder could avoid this condrom if they always make sure that, whenever the progam starts up, it displays the EULA, notifying a 'user' that the software is running, how they can identify it (so that they can avoid 'infringement'), and automatically (and safely) removing itself from the computer it the end-user does not accept the EULA....
Under any other conditions, I'd say that it's Retro that would be toast in court.
The BBC article is datged Nov. 13. The timesonline article is dated Nov. 14 and says that
Clinicians and other sexual health specialists said yesterday that Mr Stimpson's decision to undergo further tests could reveal more about the workings of the disease.
It's probable that he decided to undergo testing inbetween the BBC and the TimesOnline articles.
Most arguments are the result of missing a critical piece of information that links two apparently disparate stories.
WHQL just means that the manufacturer is giving Microsoft as much as $10/unit so that users don't get a nasty message saying that their driver may blow up their screen and make their children infertile (or something like that).
To justify this payment, microsoft has to do some sort of testing, but (as many people have pointed out) there are all sorts of ways to game the test. == and: No. Microsoft doesn't take responsibility for any of this... Read your EULA.
Ultimately, Microsoft certification means Microsoft got their money, and digitally signed it. The rest is just PR foddeer (although it sometimes actually catches real bugs, that's just a pleasant side effect).
WHQL certification might also be how Microsoft prevents manufacturers from releasing their specs to the Open Source community -- If you release your specs, It may mysteriously take an extra 6 months to get your certification as they add test cases seemingly almost designed to break your unit during testing.
The Osbourne was, in fact, a new product for most of his would-be purchasers
Osbourne's doom was because (1) he announced the new version too close, and (2) he hadn't already cornered the market -- he was looking for *new* customers who hadn't already committed to a computer of any sort, so they could afford to wait for what they didn't already have an attachment to.
In other words, a different model
and, not having committed, they could just as easily wait for a competitor's model as osbourne's newer model.
For microsoft, most of their customers are already locked in -- some because they're traumatized by dealing with Microsoft (( it's such a pain dealing with this syetem, I don't want to have to deal with yet another -- Yeah, I know they promise to be soooo much better, but Microsoft tells me that with every new version, and we all know how that's turned out. ))
Trusted computing means that other companies (e.g. Sony) can trust your computer to do what they want it to do -- whether you're happy with that idea or not.
Sony just jumped the gun. They weren't willing to wait until Microsoft put a formal system for this kind of bullshit to take place. The only difference between this and 'trusted' computing is that there's no formalized mechanism in place.... yet.
I think that a better question is:
Now that this hack is known, will anti-virus software makers be flagging this software as 'hostile'? Right now there are tens of thousands (if not millions) of machines out there that have software secretly installed that can help hackers to hide their own code and, generally, make life hell for users. It's also code that, if removed in a straightforward manner, can make important part sof the system unusable.
I'm wondering if Sony is liable to be charged under sine if the 'spyware' statutes that have been recently passed in various states.
why don't Antivirus Software remove the Sony Virus(TM) in the first place?
I can think of two reasons:
They didn't know about it.
The nature of rootkits is that they're hidden. This may be the first time that someone bothered to look
They didn't consider it a virus.
Even if they did know about it, Sony may have 'convinced' a company that found the code that their software wasn't really a virus. Remember the upset about some commercial anti-virus makers deciding not to recognize some spyware as viral because it was from 'friendly' companies.
A charge of Mischeif covers just about anything nasty you can think of. The reference pointed to is Canadian law, but I presume that British law contains an equivalent (since Canadian and British law were only disconnected in the last century or so).
430. (1) Every one commits mischief who wilfully
(a) destroys or damages property;
(b) renders property dangerous, useless, inoperative or ineffective;
(c) obstructs, interrupts or interferes with the lawful use, enjoyment or operation of property; or . . . . .
Let's see - 5M messages at 10k each = 50GB. If it were a small company, they may have only had a 1.5Mb line, so that 50GB would take about 50GB/150K/3600 = 92 hours to complete. Any mail server can handle that, and any competent admin should be able to block the messages within four days!
If, on the other hand, they have a 10 megabit line (possibly shared with other companies in the building), it would only take about 4 hours to fill a 20GB hard disk (i.e. overnight -- even for a 60GB drive) -- which isn't unreasonable for a small company with a 4 year old server that's been serving them fine (with only software updates needed).
50 Gig worth of email would also make the server useless for most users of the system... If you've got 200,000 emails in your mailbox, it could take your email program a few hours to download, store and index before it shows you a screen. Even if the email server actually survived, it would look like it was down when nobody managed to open their email box after 1/2 hour of waiting.
And, of course, with 20 users each trying to index a mailbox with 1/4million emails, the server is going to thrash itself into oblivion -- making the process take even longer.
Even for a small to medium company (or division) with a reasonably well set-up email server, 5 million unexpected emails are likely to turn most reasonable email servers into an unusable pig for the next couple of days.
That's not to say that I couldn't build a server that could eat 5 million emails, burp and wait for more, but I'd have a hard time justifying building it for most small - to -medium size businesses with mimimal email requirements.
And, it's not just large businesses that will hire a kid for work experience. Sometimes a company with 10-20 workers will hire a summer or work experience student out of a sense of community comittment and/or to get a bit of extra work done for cheap.
Which means that when MS comes out with a new version in 3 years, you're not paying another $300 to get it. You're paying $50.
Plus $300 for the new version of Windows that you'll need to run it on.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that they're charging people $100-$200/year for Office. Yeah, it's highway robbery, but most people don't think that they have a choice, so they'll bend over and pony up.
Yet more proof that English was created by a fleet of drunk monks.
Actually, it was a bunch of drunken aristocrats. Some of the junk that's in Englist just started out as a junken joke (like 'murder of crows' vs 'flock of geese' vs 'herd of cows').
If it was a bunch of drunk monks it might actually make more sense.
As nik13 pointed out, it can be very relieving to have somebody to talk to who understands what you're going thru....
Sometimes it's nice to be able to say to somebody "man, it took me 1/2 an hour to get the feeling back in my left leg this morning", and people understand exactly what you mean -- You don't have to take 5 minutes to explain why, or worry about people looking at you like you grew an extra arm. The expectation of a common experience releases some of the stress.
There's also an issue in that the doctors don't have the committment to the problem that the patients do. Even a specialist in the field has dozens (if not hundreds) of patients to deal with with a wide mix of illnesses. It's not as worthwhile for them to try every different non-pharmecutical solution out there, and pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to tell you if drinking water a certain way every morning is just as good as spending $45/day on phalanxomil. (and a doctor mentioning something like that could be at risk of a lawsuit -- either from a patient for whom the treatment didn't work, or from a parmaceutical company pissed off about dropping sales of phalanxomil)
And for those psychologists who don't believe that online 'socializing' is even comparable to the live version, a chat line can help you to link up with the 4 fellow sufferers who live withing a 1/2 hour's travel of your home.
Please remember that there are some people who haven't seen Serenity, and may still be planning to (Yeah, it does happen). Spoiler warnings (in the subject line) are standard to allow people to avoid plot suspense spoilage.
Slashdot Mirror
Next time I go to a terrorist^w anti-war rally, I'm gonna tell everybody my name is George Bush.
"I'm sorry Mr. President, but they won't let us off the tarmac until we verify that you didn't speak at an anti-war rally at Hoboken Illinois.
My point (and the point of most people who look at the kind of stuff that 'intelligent design' proponents are trying to push as 'science') is that the details of those questions aren't addressed (or meant to be properly addressed) in the bible. As such, there really is no big conflict between the bible and most science. In those (few) cases where there appears to be a direct conflict, my explanation is that the bible was never meant to be a technical manual, the transcribers were not technical writers and whatever technical details there may have been were probably horribly mangled in the translation from god's language to Hebrew (or whatever language Moses spoke), and then from the stone tablets to the various languages we now read the bible in).
If the file isn't yours, then you shouldn't be changing permissions.
If you want people to be able to give away their own files, I believe that there's a sysctl setting that will allow that for most modern Linux boxes.
If not, then I'd be willing to write a setuid program that allows you to give away ownership of files owned by you (but only if there aren't user disk quotas, because giving away ownership of files is a really nice way of working around quotas and/or just messing around with your workmate's quotas).
Examples of what can go wrong when you allow people to arbitrarily change ownership of any file have already been given. Let's just say I wouldn't allow it either.
There's a certain kind of non-motion when you're reading slashdot -- as opposed to, say watching TV or playing with the cat. It makes a certain ammount of sense to me.
Simple isn't it?
Granted, I've never studied this 'formal' Intelligent design stuff, but I don't think that any of them have really answered (by using the bible), the question of just how long god's days were -- especially when the earth didn't exist for the first day.
No real reason to believe that someone as godlike as, well, God would have a day the same length as ours.
In any case, I think (like the first poster) that setting an artificial barrier between God and Science -- and then using the descriptions in the bible (which were simplified no end for people who mostly had no understanding of science, or even the general concept) as the basis for an artificial pseudo-science -- are just setting themselves up to get their heads kicked in. (metaphorically speaking).
Then again, I figure these are the same kinds of people who'd freak out at the project Guttenberg people for listing The Bible's creator as "Anonymous".
I'm guessing that his tropospheric tower to increase a power plant's output by 20% would probably cost significantly more to build than the power plant itself.
That having been said, however, there are a number of very tall factory towers that he could use to test his ideas with shorter pipes. Most of those chimneys are only designed to pump (toxic) waste high into the atmosphere where it wouldn't bother local voters. If nothing else, it might be interesting to see what happens with one of those things if you add atmospheric intakes at the lower levels. I wouldn't expect energy in the megawatt range, but I woldn't be terribly shocked to find energies in the kilowatt range being economically produced from waste heat.
Uhm, more, actually -- Random noise doesn't know the odds it's working against -- and even has statistics on it's side. On the other hand, someone intelligent enough to know what (s)he was up against would just throw up their tentacles and roll away.
Consider the scenario: You're a CIA hacker with the job of writing a buffer overflow routine for a Russian listening station. All you know about the architecture of the remote system is that it is probably unlike any architecture you have documentation for. There is, in fact, no guarantee that it is even a binary-based architecture.
You also do not know how the data will be encoded going from the receuver to the computer. Some of your data may be lost in transmission. The very existence of the listening station is only postulated.
Turnaround time between sending a viral signal and learning of your results (if any) is anywhere between 8 and 8,000 years, during which time, the architecture may change (possibly radically).
Your first job is to calculate the probability of success -- without giving up.
In other words, I think that RetroCoder is going to have to prove that the people on who'se computers this stuff is running have seen the EULA. Then, of course there's the fact that RetroCoder is engaged in contributory violation of people's privacy, which means that they're coming to court with 'Unclean Hands".
Of course Retro Coder could avoid this condrom if they always make sure that, whenever the progam starts up, it displays the EULA, notifying a 'user' that the software is running, how they can identify it (so that they can avoid 'infringement'), and automatically (and safely) removing itself from the computer it the end-user does not accept the EULA....
Under any other conditions, I'd say that it's Retro that would be toast in court.
Most arguments are the result of missing a critical piece of information that links two apparently disparate stories.
To justify this payment, microsoft has to do some sort of testing, but (as many people have pointed out) there are all sorts of ways to game the test. == and: No. Microsoft doesn't take responsibility for any of this... Read your EULA.
Ultimately, Microsoft certification means Microsoft got their money, and digitally signed it. The rest is just PR foddeer (although it sometimes actually catches real bugs, that's just a pleasant side effect).
WHQL certification might also be how Microsoft prevents manufacturers from releasing their specs to the Open Source community -- If you release your specs, It may mysteriously take an extra 6 months to get your certification as they add test cases seemingly almost designed to break your unit during testing.
Osbourne's doom was because (1) he announced the new version too close, and (2) he hadn't already cornered the market -- he was looking for *new* customers who hadn't already committed to a computer of any sort, so they could afford to wait for what they didn't already have an attachment to.
In other words, a different model
and, not having committed, they could just as easily wait for a competitor's model as osbourne's newer model.
For microsoft, most of their customers are already locked in -- some because they're traumatized by dealing with Microsoft (( it's such a pain dealing with this syetem, I don't want to have to deal with yet another -- Yeah, I know they promise to be soooo much better, but Microsoft tells me that with every new version, and we all know how that's turned out. ))
Or, even better yet -- a Sony music CD!
Sony just jumped the gun. They weren't willing to wait until Microsoft put a formal system for this kind of bullshit to take place. The only difference between this and 'trusted' computing is that there's no formalized mechanism in place .... yet.
I really do hope that someone takes on suing these creeps.
Now that this hack is known, will anti-virus software makers be flagging this software as 'hostile'? Right now there are tens of thousands (if not millions) of machines out there that have software secretly installed that can help hackers to hide their own code and, generally, make life hell for users. It's also code that, if removed in a straightforward manner, can make important part sof the system unusable.
I'm wondering if Sony is liable to be charged under sine if the 'spyware' statutes that have been recently passed in various states.
I can think of two reasons:
The nature of rootkits is that they're hidden. This may be the first time that someone bothered to look
Even if they did know about it, Sony may have 'convinced' a company that found the code that their software wasn't really a virus. Remember the upset about some commercial anti-virus makers deciding not to recognize some spyware as viral because it was from 'friendly' companies.
If, on the other hand, they have a 10 megabit line (possibly shared with other companies in the building), it would only take about 4 hours to fill a 20GB hard disk (i.e. overnight -- even for a 60GB drive) -- which isn't unreasonable for a small company with a 4 year old server that's been serving them fine (with only software updates needed).
50 Gig worth of email would also make the server useless for most users of the system... If you've got 200,000 emails in your mailbox, it could take your email program a few hours to download, store and index before it shows you a screen. Even if the email server actually survived, it would look like it was down when nobody managed to open their email box after 1/2 hour of waiting.
And, of course, with 20 users each trying to index a mailbox with 1/4million emails, the server is going to thrash itself into oblivion -- making the process take even longer.
Even for a small to medium company (or division) with a reasonably well set-up email server, 5 million unexpected emails are likely to turn most reasonable email servers into an unusable pig for the next couple of days.
That's not to say that I couldn't build a server that could eat 5 million emails, burp and wait for more, but I'd have a hard time justifying building it for most small - to -medium size businesses with mimimal email requirements.
And, it's not just large businesses that will hire a kid for work experience. Sometimes a company with 10-20 workers will hire a summer or work experience student out of a sense of community comittment and/or to get a bit of extra work done for cheap.
Plus $300 for the new version of Windows that you'll need to run it on.
And I wouldn't be at all surprised to find that they're charging people $100-$200/year for Office. Yeah, it's highway robbery, but most people don't think that they have a choice, so they'll bend over and pony up.
Actually, it was a bunch of drunken aristocrats. Some of the junk that's in Englist just started out as a junken joke (like 'murder of crows' vs 'flock of geese' vs 'herd of cows').
If it was a bunch of drunk monks it might actually make more sense.
I was going to make a flippant comment about you not trusting my answer, but you should look at the AC's comments about http://schizophrenia.com/
Sometimes it's nice to be able to say to somebody "man, it took me 1/2 an hour to get the feeling back in my left leg this morning", and people understand exactly what you mean -- You don't have to take 5 minutes to explain why, or worry about people looking at you like you grew an extra arm. The expectation of a common experience releases some of the stress.
There's also an issue in that the doctors don't have the committment to the problem that the patients do. Even a specialist in the field has dozens (if not hundreds) of patients to deal with with a wide mix of illnesses. It's not as worthwhile for them to try every different non-pharmecutical solution out there, and pharmaceutical companies have no incentive to tell you if drinking water a certain way every morning is just as good as spending $45/day on phalanxomil. (and a doctor mentioning something like that could be at risk of a lawsuit -- either from a patient for whom the treatment didn't work, or from a parmaceutical company pissed off about dropping sales of phalanxomil)
And for those psychologists who don't believe that online 'socializing' is even comparable to the live version, a chat line can help you to link up with the 4 fellow sufferers who live withing a 1/2 hour's travel of your home.
By that definition, I'd ask if MS-Windows has ever been out of an Alpha development state.
Please remember that there are some people who haven't seen Serenity, and may still be planning to (Yeah, it does happen). Spoiler warnings (in the subject line) are standard to allow people to avoid plot suspense spoilage.