And I thought, teaching "Intelligent Design" in school WAS a sure-fire sign of schools posing a danger to Teens...;-)
Seriously, though, the comparison in the article (MySpace vs California) isn't quite as good as it may sound - the "population density" of MySpace certainly is a lot lower than that of California, as people are spaced out further; hence the potential for actual rape to happen would be higher in California, wouldn't it? (i.e. if a guy on MySpace, who lives in russia, makes contact to an underage girl in south africa, the chances of the girl getting raped by him are rather small, since they cannot easily get "close enough" of each other for that to happen...
I've lived in Switzerland - and the SWISS can claim to have a democracy, which is something I quite envy them for - any other nation I've been to would, if compared to Switzerland, come out as an electoral dictatorship at best.
Besides, some (Republican) Americans I've met pointed out to me that the US isn't a democracy, but a federal state (if you would have had a democracy, the 43rd president would have been called GORE) - since you have a federal state and a rather antiquated electoral system, you got stuck with Bush that time round.
I guess the US freed Germany from fascism and communism, but neglected to light the beacons of logic and reason. How the hell is Pat Robertson as big a threat as Mahmoud Ahmadinejad??
A few things on that:
a) How much of an actual threat is Ahmadinejad to the US? (Compare: How much of an actual threat has Saddam Hussein and his government been in its last 4-5 years).
b) In some free countries I know, if Pat Robertson would have made a comment like that, he'd already face prison time for trying to incite murder.
c) In an interesting twist of events - it was the US that put very tough restrictions on how courts handle "evidence" in Germany, to prevent the return of show-trials the likes of which the Nazis had. But in the case of Germany vs. the suspected people behind the 9/11 bombings - the Americans did not give German prosecutors access to a witness in Guantanamo, simply claiming that the defendant was guilty as charged. This in the end caused the entire trial to be thrown out because there was no proof at all - much to the dismay of the US government, but they left the German courts no other choice. (So: the logic the US government operates under must be something along the likes of "If we deem someone unworthy, then he is guilty".)
You know - "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity" was kind of cute.
Fighting wars to prevent wars - is just plain idiocy.
If the US "one day" will no longer have the money to afford a large military, a new opponent will show up RIGHT THEN. No matter which "bronze"-age countries you're bombing back to the stone age before then.
The US *government* (note: not the PEOPLE) are a bunch of fairly dangerous hippocrites at best.
"We want free trade!" (unless of course, we're talking subsidising our farmers so
that they can produce "cheaper" than 3rd world countries.
"We believe in patents (hence we should not allow third world countries to make
cheap AIDS drug knockoffs purely for THEIR OWN use."
(At the same time, if someone sends out a couple of bags of white powder, threaten
a German pharmaceutical company to massively cut its price for Cipro, or lose the
patent. - and this on an order where your country eventually saved a couple
hundred million, which is peanuts to the US - while 3rd world countries should
cough up billions they can ill afford for their AIDS drugs).
"We believe in justice!" (unless of course, we are charging another country -
"Innocent until proven guilty" only goes for Americans, not for 3rd world
dictators ("Saddam! Prove your innocence!") - It might be noteworthy that
at the same time, the US alleged Saddam was working on nukes - despite not
having any proof for that - North Korea was openly touting the fact that they
were working on nukes, and THEM your government chose not to attack.
When an Iranian president calls out for wiping Israel off the map - "What an
outrage". When Pat Robertson calls for the US to assassinate Robert Chavez "He's
just a loony"
Your government, unfortunately, seems to think the world is just there to solve its problems - not the other way around. Which is kind of sad, because most Americans I've met really are a friendly a gentle people. And while I AM absolutely grateful that the US helped free Germany 60 years ago, I don't think that this would make today's US government infallible. (Note - again, before any US reader takes this the wrong way - I'm critisising the way your GOVERNMENT deals in those matters, I'm not judging the people living in the US).
around 40 already deployed in NZ... (was: Re:haha)
on
Hacking Santa
·
· Score: 5, Funny
Apparently around 40 of them have already been sighted:
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Forty drunken Santas rampaged through central Auckland, stealing from stores and assaulting security guards, the New Zealand Herald reported on Sunday, in a protest against the commercialisation of Christmas.
Police said some of the Santas threw beer bottles, one tried to climb the mooring rope of a cruise ship and a security guard was punched during the fracas.
If you say so. You do come across as the type who has the necessary experience of doing exactly that.
My post was intended to point out that we give time and publicity to someone coming up with a remark about the dangers of Seti signals, while at the same time ignoring something that a hell a lot more scientists regard as a real danger to mankind.
Besides, I'm not saying that the US would be stupid. I'm more likely to get ticked over people that immediately go "you criticise a thing about us, you are anti-". This particularly is true whenever an outsider criticises either the US or Israel. Note: I don't have a quarrel with either of the two countries; I just find it interesting how you can criticise the British/German/French/Russian/South African/Chinese/other governments without being immediately labelled Anti-UK, Anti-Germany, Anti-French,...
But even hint that a particular thing might not be handled too well by either the US or Israeli governments, you're running the immediate danger of being labelled "Anti-American" or "Anti-semitic".
Where's the culture of discussing arguments in those cases?
And - what about Americans who disagree with what their own government does? Or those "Anti-American", too?
To sum up: My question is more, why are we even giving the publicity to a guy going on how dangerous these Seti signals would be to us, while at the same time ignoring / blocking progress on issues that are more widely regarded as problematic? Aren't some people just losing their sense of priorities here?
It's interesting how scientists in the US are really pondering something that has such a remote chance of success - while at the same time going completely against Kyoto targets.
I think the climate change has a higher chance of causing us major pain, than that we'll catch the "alien virus" through Seti@home any time soon.
Oh - and even if the current US government should be right that the Kyoto targets aren't far reaching enough - but that shouldn't be ANY excuse not to start off trying to at least achieve THOSE. If the US really thinks Kyoto wouldn't be enough - then DO MORE instead of procrastinating while doing (next to?) nothing...
Since mankind came about through "Intelligent Design", so will the aliens. And hence it's natural that their Intelligent Design also led them to having Windows (completely independently developed - but still the same thing - it's in our eternally unchangeable intelligently designed genes, remember?)
*smile*
Somehow I wouldn't be quite so surprised if it really turned out the guy would be a creationist...;-)
Granted - once we had contact any alien civilisation could also get into a situation where they could potentially send malware to Earth.
But - isn't Seti right now looking at data from stars a good number of lightyears away? How likely is it that aliens on the off chance of infecting a computer would send out virusses and/or worms that would run on current CPUs and chipsets, using security holes that are current NOW? (Remember - if aliens 10 lightyears away would get hold of enough Earth signals to decode Intel assembly language and to understand Windows security holes, even if they could decipher all that overnight and write a terminal computer virus in another hour - it still took them 10 years to receive the signals from us and it would take another 10 years for them to come back). How likely is it that a virus working on 20 year old hard-/software (including OS and everything) would still work on a large portion of critical infrastructure today?
Given that Seti only checks data, but doesn't try to execute it, shields us even further from the whole thing...
Or - is Mr. Carrigan now assuming that there is an imminent threat of an attack by Bin Laden against the Internet - through Seti@home ? Now that would make even Bush sound perfectly sane...;-)
I can see the added bonus of the gibberish box over background music - you don't have much problems picking out the singer over most music, do you? Simply because his/her voice is so different from the music, the brain doesn't have much of a problem separating it.
If it's just random gibberish made up from your own voice, it makes it harder for you to decipher the actual words spoken.
What I might think could possibly be a weakness, though, is the fairly limited base of gibberish it's taking into account (namely - what you read in a script). I wonder whether it would be possible to write a computer program recording the whole thing analysing the repetitive parts of the gibberish and trying to extract the rest...? Also, some conditions might actually change your voice pattern - e.g. colds. If your voice becomes sufficiently different from the gibberish - would it become easier to listen to you again?
In that sense, wouldn't it be "better", if the machine constantly updated its own gibberish? (i.e. the machine would record your part of the conversation, always keeping say the past 5 minutes [including time from previous calls] in its memory and then starts garbling up data picked from random time windows in it (plus maybe even with some transformations - reversing parts of the sounds it plays,...). Granted - it will likely be more complex to achieve - but in the end, depending on how many products you'd expect to sell, there shouldn't be much of a problem.
It could be some experimental product - posting old junk on slashdot to divert attention from the fact that samzenpus is on IRC / chatting with office-mates / on the phone / ?;-)
Unfortunately, it won't solve the global warming problem - because if everyone switched their web servers to the Sun machines, that would only be used as an excuse to log another million trees for some short-sighted profit...
He also equated the open-source development model with 'Intellectual property [IP] socialism,' which he says 'is the worst that can happen to any IP-based society.'
I agree with SAP in so far that "IP socialism" is the worst that can happen to any IP-based societies.
What SAP is missing out here, is that their comment, much like yours is actually beside the point - shouldn't the question be, whether the type of "IP-based society" we live in is actually a good thing in the first place.
The statement, in a sense, reads more like "revolution is the worst thing that can happen to any tyranny". The comment is absolutely correct - but it doesn't mean that revolution (or in the case of this post "IP socialism" is a bad thing).
Personally, I believe in some IP protection - tech research is becoming so expensive that companies need to be able to protect their findings so that they can re-coup their expenditures. Imagine - a company spends a couple of billions to develop some medicine that will eradicate most diseases - and another company just comes along offering a generica version of it really cheap, because it doesn't have to pay for the research? That would be a "not-good-thing"(TM).
On the other hand, most patents taken out nowadays seems utterly ridiculous (see for instance the plug-in patent, amazon's one-click,...) - and those seem to be there primarily to bring on multi-million/-billion US$ lawsuits, while not having any quantifyable benefit to show for it.
So, instead of attacking SAP for the statment itself, maybe we should rather alert SAP to the underlying problem in their own statement...;-)
I can believe part of his claims in that more Linux systems get hacked, compared to commercial Unices. Though I don't think this is a general problem with security on Linux, but with the fact that most home installations of Unix based systems will be on Linux boxes - and therefore in the hands of people with less security expertise than large companies have at their disposal.
Also, companies have dedicated sysadmins or even IT security people which will (hopefully) constantly check for new vulnerabilities and immediately patch their systems.
Private "Home" Unix installations that aren't Linux based will in comparison be more likely to be in the hands of the more knowledgable folks, and hence also in the hands of people that will likely be more security aware than the average home Windows/Mac/Linux user.
How many private users with their linux box on broadband seriously do that (except for those that hold IT security / admin type positions)?
I'm a developer - and I'm not in the habit of daily (or even weekly) patching of systems. I'm occasionally checking the system and I do react (i.e. patch) when I hear about some (widely publicised) security hole......but outside of that most security fixes will probably come in when it's time to update the system as a whole...
Another factor in "less" security of systems in people's homes, is that most people just stay ignorant of the situation, because they think "my box doesn't contain anything important that would make it worth hacking"; but they're often with that ignoring the danger that someone might just break into their computer just to use the computer in further attacks on more "rewarding" targets.
During my BSc (comp sci / dist systems) in Switzerland a couple of years ago, we weren't allowed calculators - neither were logarithm/trig/... tables.
Teachers expected that we knew the results for, say cos(PI/2), cos(PI/4),... and resolve those. Anything else you just calculated as far as possible, and in the end you just left the answer as far as it could be possible to calculate, e.g. 5+sqrt(2)*cos(PI*3/8). (i.e. if you got something like sqrt(2)*cos(pi/4) - they would expect you to write '1' as the answer (sqrt(2)*cos(pi/4) = sqrt(2)*(1/sqrt(2)) = 1...
The only help that was allowed during the exams were *self*-written formulae-sheets (1 two-sided sheet per exam). The reason for the latter was that writing your own formulae table helps you learn, and that it gives you the information you need for your work structured in a way you find useful.
(Note: I'm not the greatest mathematician out there (in fact - I passed maths; but I didn't exactly excel at it); but still I found this approach very good - and I am sure I did learn SOMETHING from it... My math now is definetely better than it was before the Uni...)
I don't think that outside of the Linux community anyone takes the "death of Microsoft" is a serious prediction - and I would think that even most Linux (or other OSS OS users) will judge this to be more of wishful thinking rather than a well founded serious prediction...
The end of M$ has been foretold ever so often, more often than I would care to remember. But nothing has happened as of yet, that would pose a significant threat to them. Before you go about how xyz could kill M$ - just ponder for a moment, how much cash M$ has in their pockets - they are not immediately threatened by anything - and they HAVE the kind of money to sit out minor glitches and/or buy them the neccessary time to re-adjust (or just throw humongous amounts of money at the problem to overcome it). And even if someone goes for the cheap PC option, as long as large companies aren't switching over to these devices, I guess the PC will remain a strong seller (just think about all the parents buying PCs for their kids to play with - while knowing they have a machine they can also do their regular work on)...
The likes of Atari ST / Amiga /... "could" have ended the MS monopoly - when they were released, they were faster than PCs, and cheaper; and you could get good software for them, too - still, they didn't make it because they never became widely accepted in the commercial market.
M$ is not going to be "killed" any time soon - the most realistic chance there is, is that they will eventually be (financially) ground down far enough for them to no longer be able to react quickly enough to save their own hide. But that is most likely still quite a few years away - and it depends on there being enough serious outside threats.
Also, it would be more important to engage them on more fronts - if they are only in a skirmish with google over the search engine, their income will more than pay for that. If there were more (and different) fresh new competitors to emerge in different markets where M$ is a player (or sees that the market is too important for them to neglect), that could hurt them - but a single issue (the early browser wars; search engines now; cheaper computing platforms in the future) most likely won't be enough.
(And - no - the "new browser wars" I won't even count as a secondary issue - M$ already has the expertise to deal with that - it will cost them money, but it isn't something new they have to worry about - they need to be challenged on new frontiers - just look how long it took for them to catch up with netscape in the first place; and I would be prepared to bet that google is going to last for a few years yet, before M$ can kill them off - it will still be a while since M$ still need to build up a good deal more expertise in this market.
I think, this proposal is a bit of a lame duck - much like other laws.
If I am under the danger having to face $10.000 for installing spyware on a PC in my own country - then I'll do it in another country. Do you really think there will be extradition for installing Spyware?
As long as I am willing NOT to visit the country where I hijacked some PCs, where's the problem? I can still do an awful lot of damage anyway...
I think, such laws will only become effective, once we will have international agreement on such laws to make them easily punishable across country borders. Internet criminals have the big advantage that they can BE in a non-extradition country even at the time they commit the crime in an entirely different country.
Even then they would probably try and sabotage it - be slightly incompatible (make sure that the exported data has some "extra bits" in that only M$ can really make heads or tails of - or introduce other little incompatibilities...
What a brilliant example of farsightedness on behalf of the Bush administration; or better, a brilliant example of the lack thereof.:-(
We want to have a manned mission to Mars, but we don't want any exploration of what else is out there in our solar system...
Spending billions of Dollars in the hunt for non-existent WMDs, instead of spending a couple of millions on the exploration of something that DOES exist. (I would think that all the extra congressional and presidential work in the Schiavo case probably cost more than what Voyager would cost for a year)
On the other hand - being European, I would wish ESA *had* funds like for the number of projects that NASA still has the money for...
I wish, someone would try and clue in politicians on both sides of the Atlantic!
I think, the Indians might be the ones doing it right - they are trying their first space missions, but unlike the others before, they are from the start trying to keep them on a tight budget (given that the country has a huge growth, but not too much "left-over" money for things like space programs). In a couple of decades, when India might be in a position to seriously fund space programs, their "budget" experience might really come in handy to make the most of their money for the space projects... Will they be the next big space nation and out-do the "modern" world (US, Europe, Russia,...) in a decade or two?
Only those, who follow enough news to "know" M$ tactics.
Unfortunately, there are enough middle/upper management people who don't look into matters that closely and are simply "swayed" by knowing that M$ has market dominance -- and just tell themselves that "M$ wouldn't have it if their products sucked so badly, now would they?".
As long as there is enough ignorance or even indifference on (non-technical) management levels, M$ *will* see benefits from each time they're doing that.
(Besides, there is also the issue that you can't really go on to sue them for bad security if so many security companies openly tell of Microsoft's great security and the lack of security in competing OS's.).
The fact is, M$ OS's aren't "safe", and neither is a run-of-the-mill linux installation. Both need updates and security-conscious people administrating them to keep them shut. I've had people break into my (linux) servers once or twice , and managed to evict the attackers both times and plugged the holes they used that I had been unaware of before - but by now there are so many software packages that it's hard to keep track of security issues in all of them.
But, yes, despite those experiences, I'd still run a linux box over a windows box any day, because I think that in general my linux box is safer.
That was indeed one of the nice things having lived in Switzerland -- for your income tax declaration, you can freely download a program using which you can do the taxes; and that program (TaxMe) had been written in Java, so it runs perfectly on Linux...
And when you're finished, it will just generate a pdf with your full tax declaration that you can print and send to their "IRS"......for all the common prejudice about the Swiss being backwards - they're incredibly forward thinking in a few areas!:-)
So, what is the advantage of genetically modified food?
I see the following "advantages":
- genetically modified food increases revenue for the companies creating the genetically modified seeds... Farmers in the 3rd world won't be able to afford the seeds... (Especially bearing in mind that, like in Iraq, farmers will be forced to pay yearly royalties to the original manufacturers instead of being able to just keep back part of the seeds to bring out again next year) The amount of grains, milk, and other produce going to waste (because of over-manufacturing) in the EU alone are just plain obscene -- why aren't these shipped of to starving nations? This seems something we only consider in really bad droughts in those countries...
- genetically modified food increases crop yield. The advantage being that countries that already produce far more than they need can produce even more. (Which doesn't help people starving in the third world). Or - alternatively, fewer farmers will be able to manufacture the same amount of food - eventually contributing to more unemployment, especially among unskilled labour).
- genetically modified food doesn't offer nutrional advantages over regular non-GM food. (At least, no noteworthy ones - otherwise their virtues would be extolled by the manufacturers at every street corner). So the only thing left would be that it might actually pose risks in the long run -- (Why should only medicine carry risks?)
So, where are the advantages, except for the cashflow of the pharma companies manufacturing the seeds?
Slashdot Mirror
And I thought, teaching "Intelligent Design" in school WAS a sure-fire sign of schools posing a danger to Teens... ;-)
Seriously, though, the comparison in the article (MySpace vs California) isn't quite as good as it may sound - the "population density" of MySpace certainly is a lot lower than that of California, as people are spaced out further; hence the potential for actual rape to happen would be higher in California, wouldn't it? (i.e. if a guy on MySpace, who lives in russia, makes contact to an underage girl in south africa, the chances of the girl getting raped by him are rather small, since they cannot easily get "close enough" of each other for that to happen...
Since when?
I've lived in Switzerland - and the SWISS can claim to have a democracy, which is something I quite envy them for - any other nation I've been to would, if compared to Switzerland, come out as an electoral dictatorship at best.
Besides, some (Republican) Americans I've met pointed out to me that the US isn't a democracy, but a federal state (if you would have had a democracy, the 43rd president would have been called GORE) - since you have a federal state and a rather antiquated electoral system, you got stuck with Bush that time round.
A few things on that:
a) How much of an actual threat is Ahmadinejad to the US? (Compare: How much of an actual threat has Saddam Hussein and his government been in its last 4-5 years).
b) In some free countries I know, if Pat Robertson would have made a comment like that, he'd already face prison time for trying to incite murder.
c) In an interesting twist of events - it was the US that put very tough restrictions on how courts handle "evidence" in Germany, to prevent the return of show-trials the likes of which the Nazis had. But in the case of Germany vs. the suspected people behind the 9/11 bombings - the Americans did not give German prosecutors access to a witness in Guantanamo, simply claiming that the defendant was guilty as charged. This in the end caused the entire trial to be thrown out because there was no proof at all - much to the dismay of the US government, but they left the German courts no other choice. (So: the logic the US government operates under must be something along the likes of "If we deem someone unworthy, then he is guilty".)
You know - "Fighting for peace is like fucking for virginity" was kind of cute.
Fighting wars to prevent wars - is just plain idiocy.
If the US "one day" will no longer have the money to afford a large military, a new opponent will show up RIGHT THEN. No matter which "bronze"-age countries you're bombing back to the stone age before then.
The US *government* (note: not the PEOPLE) are a bunch of fairly dangerous hippocrites at best.
"We want free trade!" (unless of course, we're talking subsidising our farmers so
that they can produce "cheaper" than 3rd world countries.
"We believe in patents (hence we should not allow third world countries to make
cheap AIDS drug knockoffs purely for THEIR OWN use."
(At the same time, if someone sends out a couple of bags of white powder, threaten
a German pharmaceutical company to massively cut its price for Cipro, or lose the
patent. - and this on an order where your country eventually saved a couple
hundred million, which is peanuts to the US - while 3rd world countries should
cough up billions they can ill afford for their AIDS drugs).
"We believe in justice!" (unless of course, we are charging another country -
"Innocent until proven guilty" only goes for Americans, not for 3rd world
dictators ("Saddam! Prove your innocence!") - It might be noteworthy that
at the same time, the US alleged Saddam was working on nukes - despite not
having any proof for that - North Korea was openly touting the fact that they
were working on nukes, and THEM your government chose not to attack.
When an Iranian president calls out for wiping Israel off the map - "What an
outrage". When Pat Robertson calls for the US to assassinate Robert Chavez "He's
just a loony"
Your government, unfortunately, seems to think the world is just there to solve its problems - not the other way around. Which is kind of sad, because most Americans I've met really are a friendly a gentle people. And while I AM absolutely grateful that the US helped free Germany 60 years ago, I don't think that this would make today's US government infallible. (Note - again, before any US reader takes this the wrong way - I'm critisising the way your GOVERNMENT deals in those matters, I'm not judging the people living in the US).
Apparently around 40 of them have already been sighted:
a s-run-amok-nz.html
http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18122005/80/drunken-sant
Drunken Santas run amok in NZ
WELLINGTON (Reuters) - Forty drunken Santas rampaged through central Auckland, stealing from stores and assaulting security guards, the New Zealand Herald reported on Sunday, in a protest against the commercialisation of Christmas.
Police said some of the Santas threw beer bottles, one tried to climb the mooring rope of a cruise ship and a security guard was punched during the fracas.
If you say so. You do come across as the type who has the necessary experience of doing exactly that.
...
My post was intended to point out that we give time and publicity to someone coming up with a remark about the dangers of Seti signals, while at the same time ignoring something that a hell a lot more scientists regard as a real danger to mankind.
Besides, I'm not saying that the US would be stupid. I'm more likely to get ticked over people that immediately go "you criticise a thing about us, you are anti-". This particularly is true whenever an outsider criticises either the US or Israel. Note: I don't have a quarrel with either of the two countries; I just find it interesting how you can criticise the British/German/French/Russian/South African/Chinese/other governments without being immediately labelled Anti-UK, Anti-Germany, Anti-French,
But even hint that a particular thing might not be handled too well by either the US or Israeli governments, you're running the immediate danger of being labelled "Anti-American" or "Anti-semitic".
Where's the culture of discussing arguments in those cases?
And - what about Americans who disagree with what their own government does? Or those "Anti-American", too?
To sum up: My question is more, why are we even giving the publicity to a guy going on how dangerous these Seti signals would be to us, while at the same time ignoring / blocking progress on issues that are more widely regarded as problematic? Aren't some people just losing their sense of priorities here?
It's interesting how scientists in the US are really pondering something that has such a remote chance of success - while at the same time going completely against Kyoto targets.
I think the climate change has a higher chance of causing us major pain, than that we'll catch the "alien virus" through Seti@home any time soon.
Oh - and even if the current US government should be right that the Kyoto targets aren't far reaching enough - but that shouldn't be ANY excuse not to start off trying to at least achieve THOSE. If the US really thinks Kyoto wouldn't be enough - then DO MORE instead of procrastinating while doing (next to?) nothing...
Since mankind came about through "Intelligent Design", so will the aliens. And hence it's natural that their Intelligent Design also led them to having Windows (completely independently developed - but still the same thing - it's in our eternally unchangeable intelligently designed genes, remember?)
*smile*
Somehow I wouldn't be quite so surprised if it really turned out the guy would be a creationist...
...completely out of his mind?
;-)
Granted - once we had contact any alien civilisation could also get into a situation where they could potentially send malware to Earth.
But - isn't Seti right now looking at data from stars a good number of lightyears away? How likely is it that aliens on the off chance of infecting a computer would send out virusses and/or worms that would run on current CPUs and chipsets, using security holes that are current NOW? (Remember - if aliens 10 lightyears away would get hold of enough Earth signals to decode Intel assembly language and to understand Windows security holes, even if they could decipher all that overnight and write a terminal computer virus in another hour - it still took them 10 years to receive the signals from us and it would take another 10 years for them to come back). How likely is it that a virus working on 20 year old hard-/software (including OS and everything) would still work on a large portion of critical infrastructure today?
Given that Seti only checks data, but doesn't try to execute it, shields us even further from the whole thing...
Or - is Mr. Carrigan now assuming that there is an imminent threat of an attack by Bin Laden against the Internet - through Seti@home ?
Now that would make even Bush sound perfectly sane...
I can see the added bonus of the gibberish box over background music - you don't have much problems picking out the singer over most music, do you? Simply because his/her voice is so different from the music, the brain doesn't have much of a problem separating it.
...). Granted - it will likely be more complex to achieve - but in the end, depending on how many products you'd expect to sell, there shouldn't be much of a problem.
If it's just random gibberish made up from your own voice, it makes it harder for you to decipher the actual words spoken.
What I might think could possibly be a weakness, though, is the fairly limited base of gibberish it's taking into account (namely - what you read in a script). I wonder whether it would be possible to write a computer program recording the whole thing analysing the repetitive parts of the gibberish and trying to extract the rest...?
Also, some conditions might actually change your voice pattern - e.g. colds. If your voice becomes sufficiently different from the gibberish - would it become easier to listen to you again?
In that sense, wouldn't it be "better", if the machine constantly updated its own gibberish? (i.e. the machine would record your part of the conversation, always keeping say the past 5 minutes [including time from previous calls] in its memory and then starts garbling up data picked from random time windows in it (plus maybe even with some transformations - reversing parts of the sounds it plays,
Maybe it's not a dupe...
;-)
It could be some experimental product - posting old junk on slashdot to divert attention from the fact that samzenpus is on IRC / chatting with office-mates / on the phone / ?
Unfortunately, it won't solve the global warming problem - because if everyone switched their web servers to the Sun machines, that would only be used as an excuse to log another million trees for some short-sighted profit...
I agree with SAP in so far that "IP socialism" is the worst that can happen to any IP-based societies.
What SAP is missing out here, is that their comment, much like yours is actually beside the point - shouldn't the question be, whether the type of "IP-based society" we live in is actually a good thing in the first place.
The statement, in a sense, reads more like "revolution is the worst thing that can happen to any tyranny". The comment is absolutely correct - but it doesn't mean that revolution (or in the case of this post "IP socialism" is a bad thing).
Personally, I believe in some IP protection - tech research is becoming so expensive that companies need to be able to protect their findings so that they can re-coup their expenditures. Imagine - a company spends a couple of billions to develop some medicine that will eradicate most diseases - and another company just comes along offering a generica version of it really cheap, because it doesn't have to pay for the research? That would be a "not-good-thing"(TM).
On the other hand, most patents taken out nowadays seems utterly ridiculous (see for instance the plug-in patent, amazon's one-click,
So, instead of attacking SAP for the statment itself, maybe we should rather alert SAP to the underlying problem in their own statement...
Finally, I small hope for the Republicans...
I can believe part of his claims in that more Linux systems get hacked, compared to commercial Unices. Though I don't think this is a general problem with security on Linux, but with the fact that most home installations of Unix based systems will be on Linux boxes - and therefore in the hands of people with less security expertise than large companies have at their disposal.
...but outside of that most security fixes will probably come in when it's time to update the system as a whole...
Also, companies have dedicated sysadmins or even IT security people which will (hopefully) constantly check for new vulnerabilities and immediately patch their systems.
Private "Home" Unix installations that aren't Linux based will in comparison be more likely to be in the hands of the more knowledgable folks, and hence also in the hands of people that will likely be more security aware than the average home Windows/Mac/Linux user.
How many private users with their linux box on broadband seriously do that (except for those that hold IT security / admin type positions)?
I'm a developer - and I'm not in the habit of daily (or even weekly) patching of systems. I'm occasionally checking the system and I do react (i.e. patch) when I hear about some (widely publicised) security hole...
Another factor in "less" security of systems in people's homes, is that most people just stay ignorant of the situation, because they think "my box doesn't contain anything important that would make it worth hacking"; but they're often with that ignoring the danger that someone might just break into their computer just to use the computer in further attacks on more "rewarding" targets.
During my BSc (comp sci / dist systems) in Switzerland a couple of years ago, we weren't allowed calculators - neither were logarithm/trig/... tables.
... and resolve those. Anything else you just calculated as far as possible, and in the end you just left the answer as far as it could be possible to calculate, e.g. 5+sqrt(2)*cos(PI*3/8). (i.e. if you got something like sqrt(2)*cos(pi/4) - they would expect you to write '1' as the answer (sqrt(2)*cos(pi/4) = sqrt(2)*(1/sqrt(2)) = 1...
Teachers expected that we knew the results for, say cos(PI/2), cos(PI/4),
The only help that was allowed during the exams were *self*-written formulae-sheets (1 two-sided sheet per exam). The reason for the latter was that writing your own formulae table helps you learn, and that it gives you the information you need for your work structured in a way you find useful.
(Note: I'm not the greatest mathematician out there (in fact - I passed maths; but I didn't exactly excel at it); but still I found this approach very good - and I am sure I did learn SOMETHING from it... My math now is definetely better than it was before the Uni...)
I don't think that outside of the Linux community anyone takes the "death of Microsoft" is a serious prediction - and I would think that even most Linux (or other OSS OS users) will judge this to be more of wishful thinking rather than a well founded serious prediction...
The end of M$ has been foretold ever so often, more often than I would care to remember. But nothing has happened as of yet, that would pose a significant threat to them. Before you go about how xyz could kill M$ - just ponder for a moment, how much cash M$ has in their pockets - they are not immediately threatened by anything - and they HAVE the kind of money to sit out minor glitches and/or buy them the neccessary time to re-adjust (or just throw humongous amounts of money at the problem to overcome it). And even if someone goes for the cheap PC option, as long as large companies aren't switching over to these devices, I guess the PC will remain a strong seller (just think about all the parents buying PCs for their kids to play with - while knowing they have a machine they can also do their regular work on)...
... "could" have ended the MS monopoly - when they were released, they were faster than PCs, and cheaper; and you could get good software for them, too - still, they didn't make it because they never became widely accepted in the commercial market.
The likes of Atari ST / Amiga /
M$ is not going to be "killed" any time soon - the most realistic chance there is, is that they will eventually be (financially) ground down far enough for them to no longer be able to react quickly enough to save their own hide. But that is most likely still quite a few years away - and it depends on there being enough serious outside threats.
Also, it would be more important to engage them on more fronts - if they are only in a skirmish with google over the search engine, their income will more than pay for that. If there were more (and different) fresh new competitors to emerge in different markets where M$ is a player (or sees that the market is too important for them to neglect), that could hurt them - but a single issue (the early browser wars; search engines now; cheaper computing platforms in the future) most likely won't be enough.
(And - no - the "new browser wars" I won't even count as a secondary issue - M$ already has the expertise to deal with that - it will cost them money, but it isn't something new they have to worry about - they need to be challenged on new frontiers - just look how long it took for them to catch up with netscape in the first place; and I would be prepared to bet that google is going to last for a few years yet, before M$ can kill them off - it will still be a while since M$ still need to build up a good deal more expertise in this market.
Well, if it will turn out to be a preprequel-trilogy, shouldn't it start of at "Episode -2"?
I think, this proposal is a bit of a lame duck - much like other laws.
If I am under the danger having to face $10.000 for installing spyware on a PC in my own country - then I'll do it in another country. Do you really think there will be extradition for installing Spyware?
As long as I am willing NOT to visit the country where I hijacked some PCs, where's the problem? I can still do an awful lot of damage anyway...
I think, such laws will only become effective, once we will have international agreement on such laws to make them easily punishable across country borders. Internet criminals have the big advantage that they can BE in a non-extradition country even at the time they commit the crime in an entirely different country.
So?
Even then they would probably try and sabotage it - be slightly incompatible (make sure that the exported data has some "extra bits" in that only M$ can really make heads or tails of - or introduce other little incompatibilities...
Big deal...
What a brilliant example of farsightedness on behalf of the Bush administration; or better, a brilliant example of the lack thereof. :-(
...) in a decade or two?
We want to have a manned mission to Mars, but we don't want any exploration of what else is out there in our solar system...
Spending billions of Dollars in the hunt for non-existent WMDs, instead of spending a couple of millions on the exploration of something that DOES exist. (I would think that all the extra congressional and presidential work in the Schiavo case probably cost more than what Voyager would cost for a year)
On the other hand - being European, I would wish ESA *had* funds like for the number of projects that NASA still has the money for...
I wish, someone would try and clue in politicians on both sides of the Atlantic!
I think, the Indians might be the ones doing it right - they are trying their first space missions, but unlike the others before, they are from the start trying to keep them on a tight budget (given that the country has a huge growth, but not too much "left-over" money for things like space programs). In a couple of decades, when India might be in a position to seriously fund space programs, their "budget" experience might really come in handy to make the most of their money for the space projects... Will they be the next big space nation and out-do the "modern" world (US, Europe, Russia,
Okay, who didn't see this coming?
Only those, who follow enough news to "know" M$ tactics.
Unfortunately, there are enough middle/upper management people who don't look into matters that closely and are simply "swayed" by knowing that M$ has market dominance -- and just tell themselves that "M$ wouldn't have it if their products sucked so badly, now would they?".
As long as there is enough ignorance or even indifference on (non-technical) management levels, M$ *will* see benefits from each time they're doing that.
(Besides, there is also the issue that you can't really go on to sue them for bad security if so many security companies openly tell of Microsoft's great security and the lack of security in competing OS's.).
The fact is, M$ OS's aren't "safe", and neither is a run-of-the-mill linux installation. Both need updates and security-conscious people administrating them to keep them shut. I've had people break into my (linux) servers once or twice , and managed to evict the attackers both times and plugged the holes they used that I had been unaware of before - but by now there are so many software packages that it's hard to keep track of security issues in all of them.
But, yes, despite those experiences, I'd still run a linux box over a windows box any day, because I think that in general my linux box is safer.
We had that story three days ago: here...
That was indeed one of the nice things having lived in Switzerland -- for your income tax declaration, you can freely download a program using which you can do the taxes; and that program (TaxMe) had been written in Java, so it runs perfectly on Linux...
...for all the common prejudice about the Swiss being backwards - they're incredibly forward thinking in a few areas! :-)
And when you're finished, it will just generate a pdf with your full tax declaration that you can print and send to their "IRS"...
So, what is the advantage of genetically modified food?
I see the following "advantages":
- genetically modified food increases revenue for the companies creating the genetically modified seeds... Farmers in the 3rd world won't be able to afford the seeds... (Especially bearing in mind that, like in Iraq, farmers will be forced to pay yearly royalties to the original manufacturers instead of being able to just keep back part of the seeds to bring out again next year) The amount of grains, milk, and other produce going to waste (because of over-manufacturing) in the EU alone are just plain obscene -- why aren't these shipped of to starving nations? This seems something we only consider in really bad droughts in those countries...
- genetically modified food increases crop yield. The advantage being that countries that already produce far more than they need can produce even more. (Which doesn't help people starving in the third world). Or - alternatively, fewer farmers will be able to manufacture the same amount of food - eventually contributing to more unemployment, especially among unskilled labour).
- genetically modified food doesn't offer nutrional advantages over regular non-GM food. (At least, no noteworthy ones - otherwise their virtues would be extolled by the manufacturers at every street corner). So the only thing left would be that it might actually pose risks in the long run -- (Why should only medicine carry risks?)
So, where are the advantages, except for the cashflow of the pharma companies manufacturing the seeds?