I loved Ultima IV and Ultima V. Those were games that could send you all over the map repeatedly gathering up information. Things like "ask the three brothers anthos about the riddle". Two (real time) days later you might actually have gotten to find them. Forced you to explore the land and get to know the inhabitants. If Ultima V was re-released in its original form for a modern computer I'd buy it just to play it again.
For the Apple II there was an unexpected challenge. Due to an oversight, the Apple release of Ultima IV could not be won by anything but luck or cheating. The "Water" character in the castle you were supposed to ask for the answer to the riddle. (the riddle was THE VERY LAST question you had to answer, to beat the game) They forgot to program Water's dialog. You speak to Water and it says "A". Then it asks you "A?". If you reply yes, it responds "A". (oops!)
In Ultima V, Water is still there, and if you talk to him he will apologize for his mistake in IV. "way back. way waaay back, I forgot to tell you something!" Gotta love that. That's back from the days before patches too. In case anyone was wondering, it's "infinity". For the longest time I didn't know the answer to the riddle. I found where some of those things were stored, but Ultima only parsed the first four characters of the codec's questions, so I knew the answer started with "INFI" and didn't realize what it truly was until much later.
Wizardry on the other hand, never interested me. Unlike Ultima, it lacked the scenic variety of walking around on the main map, the animation of the monsters, and the interaction with the populace. (and for the most part, color in general) Despite seeming to be lacking in most respects, Wizardry was still amazingly popular around that time. Ultima's animation also helped you forget that it was still a turn-based game.
each passing day will feature a previously undocumented security hole in Apple's OS X operating system or in Apple applications that run on top of it.
Is it fair to say you are testing the operating system, and then discuss bugs in say, safari? Do we beat on Word bugs when we are discussing Windows security?
Applications run in userland, a bug in a user application is not likely to compromise the machine nearly as far as a bug in the OS. For the purposes of this January test, I will be discounting anything that is not an actual OS bug. (now if a bug in an app is allowed to escallate into the os through a hole in the OS or a bad design of the os's API, then yes we can beat on that all day long, and should)
I wonder what microsoft or apple would think of entertaining the idea of giving out a free live CD? That would be an easy way for them to get their system into the hands of potential customers, to give it a taste.
Two questions. First, "increasing scarcity of water"? What, 72% of the planet's surface is water. I don't see that changing too dramatically in the next few centuries. I wonder if OP means "scarcity of FRESH water"? Desalinization is expensive and energy-intensive, and that would mesh with his statements better.
Second, energy efficiency. There seems to be some confusion or lack of clarity as to where the inefficinecy is at. Is it in the process of creating the hydrogen (from water, presumably), the storage of hydrogen, or in converting the hydrogen back to energy? Electrolysis is a very easy way to make hydrogen from water, and I thought it was fairly efficient, generating very little heat and no waste products. (unless you count oxygen as a waste, you could keep it for later use in making the hydrogen burn better anyway) Converting back to water is just igniting it. Internal combustion engines are not terribly efficient even though they have been around forever, I can see that, but it's no worse than the efficiency of burning gas, is a renewable resource, and is more environmentally friendly so all other things being equal I don't think we care that it's not all that efficient, since efficiency is basically the same as a lot of otherwise worse alternatives.
The main problem I see is the storage of the fuel. Hydrogen is very low density except under very high pressures, and this makes it hazardous. Gas stores its energy in liquid form making it a reasonably high density and reasonably safe form of energy transport. Batteries store their energy through chemical change, and have the advantage of not generating problematic waste products since there is no "exhaust", but their storage density is not as high. Hydrogen can have very high storage density if it is under very high pressure, but in that case the energy actually exists in two forms. First there is the hydrogen which can be burned to release energy while transforming to water, and second there is the pressure itself. Pressure is a form of stored energy too. But as with most forms of stored energy, accidental release can be dangerous. Gas burns easily and can explode, batteries can burn things with spilled acid and also have an explosion risk, even fertilizer has been known to explode. So hydrogen is probably nothing new from the danger standpoint, it's just a different sort of hazard, and we will have to get good at safely handling it.
here is is "why are you having to reboot your computer all the time?" I regularly go weeks without a restart on my main machine, and the workhorse and server computers don't see a reboot more than every few months. It's almost always a security update that forces me to restart. It takes maybe 2 minutes to restart to the login window and another minute so to finish its background loads after login, but even if it took 20 minutes to boot it's not like it would affect me that much. If boot time is bothering you then you are either very impatient or you have a stability problem?
it's possible the hibernate mode is set by the OS installer, and is not touched by the OS update. My MBP isn't that old, so the newer installers may set it that way.
Depends on the amount of RAM installed, it's probably simpler to snapshot 100% of the RAM rather than try to figure out what needs to be saved and what does not. If you have 512 it goes fast (4 sec?) but I have 2gb so it takes a little while to go into or out of hibernation. Doesn't happen though unless you pull the battery, if it is kept powered while asleep it just wakes up normally in a couple sec.
Mine seems to operate in mode 3 from the factory? When I close the lid, the sleep light goes on solid for 20 seconds while it writes the hibernate file. Then click goes the HD and the sleep light pulses. If I open the lid it wakes up almost instantly, but if I pull the battery the sleep light goes out and stays off when I plug the battery back in. (the macbook is OFF) press power, and it wakes from hibernation, takes about 20 seconds.
So I think that mode 3, at least for the laptops, is the default?
VirtualBook:~ virtual1$ pmset -g Active Profiles: Battery Power -1 AC Power -1* Currently in use:
womp 1
sms 1
hibernatefile/var/vm/sleepimage
acwake 0
sleep 0
autorestart 0
halfdim 1
hibernatemode 3
disksleep 0
displaysleep 0
lidwake 1
Indeed mode 3 is default for the laptops. Probably not for the desktops tho? This is the way all the MB/MBP opwerate that I have seen. Will have to test the MP tomorrow.
And only after another virus was circulating that affects Excel for mac as well as Excel for windows.
The ONLY thing on my mind when I am worrying about computer viruses is Microsoft Office. I wonder how MS feels about my making that mental connection with their brand?
I could see them doing unmanned vehicles in the desert, but city traffic? I don't think we are ready to travel on unused city streets yet let alone with other cars. Wherever they're going to hold this, I will be avoiding. I have enough tension following a car with that "student driver" placard on the roof to be dealing with a blender driving in the lane to my left.
I realize part of this challenge is to force the evolution of the technology and give it a push, but there are limits, and I think this next one exceeds them in a dangerous way. "learn to walk before you try to run".
when you sleep a mac laptop it auto creates a hibernation file and actually does not go to sleep for about 30 seconds. Then if power is pulled or lost while it's sleeping, it dehibernates instead of waking up. So you can wake from sleep (4 seconds) wake from hibernation (25 seconds) or reboot. (3 minutes) No more having to reboot for any reason short of installs that require reboots.
I've owned my macbook for 3 months and have rebooted about seven times, six of which were for security updates. It's been awake or asleep for most of that time.
I was thinking about that, and it's actually pretty surprising how well some systems sleep. Mac OS X can sleep through anything short of a disk burn. I have seen very rare cases where vendor specific hardware didn't wake up properly, but that's probably a vendor driver issue. The OS seems to have its act together.
The new intel mac laptops now support hibernate instead of sleep. There is no longer a backup battery in the mac laptops. When you sleep them, they appear to go to sleep instantly, but they are not asleep yet. Display is off, sleep light is on (solid), but it is now paging memory off to disk, and will take my 2gb mbp about 25 seconds to do it. Then you hear the HD park and the sleep light begins pulsing. I try not to stuff it in the bag or jolt it around until it actually parks the HD.
This means you can pull the battery even, and power it back up later and instead of the usual 4 second wakeup time, you get about 20 seconds of watching a washed out image of the last screen, with a dotted progress bar. (looks a bit like a firmware update in progress) When the dots get to the right it's awake again. It has done this from a complete power-down and memory clear. Impressive. I have not noticed anything that fails to wake up properly even from this mode.
Another nice perk is that if you sleep it, and it loses power, (battery is removed by accident, someone kicks out the power cord etc) it simply appears to have shut off. (no sleep light) Then when you try to turn it back on, it just wakes from hibernation with the usual washed out screen and 20 second progresssbar instead of the quick wakeup.
I don't think the mac pro (the desktop) supports hibernate though, but it couldn't be that hard for them to add support for?
A variant of moore's law applies here I think, where the amount of information available goes up at a geometric rate just like processor speed and memory requirements. Ten years ago we would have laughed at someone that said we could get 15ft resultion sat pictures of most anywhere in 10 seconds, but we have had that for what, four years now. What's next? In 20 years will I be getting calls from the local contractor advising me that I need my shingles replaced because they're starting to crack?
I'm no astrophysicist, but I see a basic problem with the "scoop theory" you present. First yes spores can exist at high altitudes, and you might even find a few hardy enough to survive on another planet. The concentration at those elevations would have to be incredibly small. But then life is so unlikely in the first place we'll just give it that. Second problem is heat, and that's a hard one to argue against. If said meteor was going far enough into the atmosphere to pick up a hitchhiker, AND is going fast enough to maintain escape velocity as it begins to vector away, it's going to be cooking. Really really cooking. Anything on the outside of the meteor will be vaporized, and it's going to go on quite a diet as it passes by. The odds of a spore or anything else organic surviving the heat of reentry/exit is beyond even the incredible odds that brought about the start of life. If you look around you will find video of meteors doing a "fly by" of earth taken by amateur photographers. You'll notice the meteor is glowing and is letting off quite a cloud trail behind it, the stress is often enough to cause them to break up, and the heat is incredible. Can anything on the surface of that meteor survive? Even if it managed to survive the thousands of degrees of heat, the top layer of the meteor is going to get blasted right off, so any hitchhikers are going to be left behind in the atmosphere. Maybe if it's packed in the middle, but the scoop theory places these spores on the surface, and there's just no surviving that.
Life is found most everywhere that it can reach. The only reason we have not found life in space yet is because gravity does a good job of keeping life on the planet and out of space. If there were a place on earth where life could encouter vacuum, it would be a very good bet that life would evolve to cope with it. Trees split water and create sugar using sunlight, animals create water and eat sugar. If you can conceive of a lifeform that can do both of these things, vacuum is a perfectly acceptable environment. In fact there are quite a few "anaerobic" microbes that prefer to not be around oxygen - if they could evolve to handle lower pressures they could make a good candidate for interstellar life travel.
Assuming the malware was written properly, it has already jacked your OS before you can intall your defenses (norton, spybot, etc) since it's there as part of the initial installation. Your tools may as well be running in a virtual machine at that point, the rootkit could have already made it virtually impossible to detect the bundled malware after the fact.
Isn't OS X using "signed binaries" for their critical apps like the dock and Finder? I assume those would not be so easy to subvert or even modify in the installer?
It's not apple's job to help the riaa and their artists recoup their losses due to piracy. That's like placing a tax on crowbars because people break into cars with them.
If you are trying to covince the RIAA of anything you are wasting your time. "follow the money". They are not doing what they are doing because they want to, because they think it is moral, or because they think it is legal. There is only one motivation, and that is money. They are being paid to do what they are doing. Money is one of the best motivators. So if you want to change their behavior, the pocketbook is the only thing you should be attacking.
In the case of the RIAA, they receive money from artists and owners of copyright on works. (a bit like membership dues?) In exchange for this money, they gain benefits, which include the RIAA "looking out for their interests".
Whether or not they are actually doing this is irrelevent. What matters is what the people writing the checks believe. And right now, a good portition of the artists and record companies believe the RIAA is doing the right thing, doing something that benefits them in some way, probably monitarily. If you want to change how the RIAA behaves, forget trying to change the RIAA, that's impossible. You have to change the views of the artists and distributors that are funding the RIAA.
If you look at how the RIAA operates it's easy to see why they are always trying to get into the news and do things that make them look like they are going after filesharers. The more publicity they can get that makes them look like they are doing something constructive with the artists' money, the more money they will continue to collect.
There's another interesting take on the whole RIAA situation also. Remember the axium of consulting - "You may not proffit in solving the issue, but there's plenty of money to be made in prolonging the problem." The RIAA is not trying to stop filesharing. If they actually succeeded, say through litigation that made filesharing completely illegal, they would lose one of the primary reasons the artists are paying them. Their purpose is to fight filesharing in a very public way so as to entertain the artists, but not so much as to destroy it.
Don't you just love it when someone posts an article that basically say "hey we have something really interesting to tell you but we're not telling."? Usually being a tease is considered mean.
I am very surprised we are not seeing them use public key encryption here. If the wii has microsoft's public key, it can send encrypted requests which cannot be reverse engineered unless you are able to guess microsoft's private key. The way around this would be to disasemble the code on the wii. Since they are merely using packet sniffing, the traffic must not be encrypted. If someone were to have bet me if this would have been encrypted, well, I guess I would be out some money about now. Not that it's a bad thing for us, but what is microsoft thinking?? They had to know this would happen, and I can't believe they would sit idle and let it occur.
Though I suppose in a couple months we'll see a "software update" (i.e. they drop the portcullis) and that'll be the end of the tinkering without a screwdriver.
So what it amounts to is that the tazer's purpose is to stop someone from doing something that you don't want them to do... resisting arrest, being violent toward the officers or others at the scene.
And the officers here were using the tazer instead to try to force/coerce the man to follow their instructions. So the core problem here is the officers did not know when it was appropriate to use the tazer - one wonders if they had ever been trained in the use of the tazer before they were issued it? I'm sure they don't issue guns to officers before you pass a test at the course and a written test... it should be no different for tazers?
Though watching the video I can't help but get the impression the officers were going even a little beyond that. I don't think they were outright trying to torture the man, but it does appear that they were frustrated by the man's refusal to obey them and were possibly tazing him out of sheer frustration. That's quite a bit worse than simply not knowing when it's appropriate to use the tazer.
On one hand we're being told that having CFCs and other things around the earth produces "greenhouse effect" and traps heat. Now they are telling us that things in the atmosphere don't do that, they reflect away the heat.
So which is it? Or do some things reflect while other things insulate? Do we need to mix the coctail properly to get the desired effect?
Besides, if global warming is a problem, why are they looking for ways to make it warmer?
there is also a difference from sitting in a public place analyzing customer information, and having it at your house
The most important difference being a false sense of security you get in being at home. Little consolation to the millions of people that you will be making have a "very bad day" for the next several months. Does it really matter if it gets stolen from your house, or forgotten at a rest stop on the way home, left on the roof of the car as you drive off, or forgotten in your car when you get home from work and stolen with your car that night? It's really no safer in your "protection" than it is at the keosk, the keosk just gives you a greater awarenss of your vulnerability.
furthermore chances are 9 out of 10 the person stealing the laptop will have no idea that its even on there
That flies about 32 inches when you realize that only a small percentage of the damage is done by the information getting into the wrong hands. The greatest damage is that you have exposed 3 million people to the risk of identity theft. The cost that could place on your company to have to provide free credit report monitoring for the next three years on the 1 million or so that request it is probably a lot more than all the fraud that will be cost to the people on that list. Once you lose track of the information in the first place the damage has been done.
unless you work directly in the banking industry i doubt you'd see the need for it
You are dealing with customer information. To be quite honest, I see banking as one of the lower-damage areas. If you were say, a psychiatrist or a doctor I could see much much greater damage being inflected than losing a few bucks. An extortionist with patient records could make out a lot better than a basic thief with some checking account numbers.
I would love to hear a good example or two of why someone that works at a bank needs to take live, authentic customer information home. If you are coding then you should be using test data. (really you should be doing your work at work, see below) If you are doing some number crunching, then you should be doing that at work. If you have more of that work to do than hours in the day then your business needs to hire more help, the company is turning a blind eye to your dangerous behavior and allowing you to work from home because it is saving them a buck. If you are taking work home to get more done than Bob and Julie at work trying for the same promotion as you, then you are risking customer information for your own personal gain. I don't see a single valid reason to take that data home.
I seriously hope you are not one of the people keeping track of my bank records. Sadly, your take on the situation is not at all uncommon, so I guess a lot of us are on thin ice as a result. You are relying on good luck to protect the data, just slightly lowering the odds it is stolen rather than using an appropriate amount of defensive behavior. The world is not a nice place. If you put your wallet on the front porch it is likely to get stolen. Placing a pail over it so you feel more safe is not helping much. Put it back inside where it's actually safer.
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I loved Ultima IV and Ultima V. Those were games that could send you all over the map repeatedly gathering up information. Things like "ask the three brothers anthos about the riddle". Two (real time) days later you might actually have gotten to find them. Forced you to explore the land and get to know the inhabitants. If Ultima V was re-released in its original form for a modern computer I'd buy it just to play it again.
For the Apple II there was an unexpected challenge. Due to an oversight, the Apple release of Ultima IV could not be won by anything but luck or cheating. The "Water" character in the castle you were supposed to ask for the answer to the riddle. (the riddle was THE VERY LAST question you had to answer, to beat the game) They forgot to program Water's dialog. You speak to Water and it says "A". Then it asks you "A?". If you reply yes, it responds "A". (oops!)
In Ultima V, Water is still there, and if you talk to him he will apologize for his mistake in IV. "way back. way waaay back, I forgot to tell you something!" Gotta love that. That's back from the days before patches too. In case anyone was wondering, it's "infinity". For the longest time I didn't know the answer to the riddle. I found where some of those things were stored, but Ultima only parsed the first four characters of the codec's questions, so I knew the answer started with "INFI" and didn't realize what it truly was until much later.
Wizardry on the other hand, never interested me. Unlike Ultima, it lacked the scenic variety of walking around on the main map, the animation of the monsters, and the interaction with the populace. (and for the most part, color in general) Despite seeming to be lacking in most respects, Wizardry was still amazingly popular around that time. Ultima's animation also helped you forget that it was still a turn-based game.
each passing day will feature a previously undocumented security hole in Apple's OS X operating system or in Apple applications that run on top of it.
Is it fair to say you are testing the operating system, and then discuss bugs in say, safari? Do we beat on Word bugs when we are discussing Windows security?
Applications run in userland, a bug in a user application is not likely to compromise the machine nearly as far as a bug in the OS. For the purposes of this January test, I will be discounting anything that is not an actual OS bug. (now if a bug in an app is allowed to escallate into the os through a hole in the OS or a bad design of the os's API, then yes we can beat on that all day long, and should)
I wonder what microsoft or apple would think of entertaining the idea of giving out a free live CD? That would be an easy way for them to get their system into the hands of potential customers, to give it a taste.
Two questions. First, "increasing scarcity of water"? What, 72% of the planet's surface is water. I don't see that changing too dramatically in the next few centuries. I wonder if OP means "scarcity of FRESH water"? Desalinization is expensive and energy-intensive, and that would mesh with his statements better.
Second, energy efficiency. There seems to be some confusion or lack of clarity as to where the inefficinecy is at. Is it in the process of creating the hydrogen (from water, presumably), the storage of hydrogen, or in converting the hydrogen back to energy? Electrolysis is a very easy way to make hydrogen from water, and I thought it was fairly efficient, generating very little heat and no waste products. (unless you count oxygen as a waste, you could keep it for later use in making the hydrogen burn better anyway) Converting back to water is just igniting it. Internal combustion engines are not terribly efficient even though they have been around forever, I can see that, but it's no worse than the efficiency of burning gas, is a renewable resource, and is more environmentally friendly so all other things being equal I don't think we care that it's not all that efficient, since efficiency is basically the same as a lot of otherwise worse alternatives.
The main problem I see is the storage of the fuel. Hydrogen is very low density except under very high pressures, and this makes it hazardous. Gas stores its energy in liquid form making it a reasonably high density and reasonably safe form of energy transport. Batteries store their energy through chemical change, and have the advantage of not generating problematic waste products since there is no "exhaust", but their storage density is not as high. Hydrogen can have very high storage density if it is under very high pressure, but in that case the energy actually exists in two forms. First there is the hydrogen which can be burned to release energy while transforming to water, and second there is the pressure itself. Pressure is a form of stored energy too. But as with most forms of stored energy, accidental release can be dangerous. Gas burns easily and can explode, batteries can burn things with spilled acid and also have an explosion risk, even fertilizer has been known to explode. So hydrogen is probably nothing new from the danger standpoint, it's just a different sort of hazard, and we will have to get good at safely handling it.
here is is "why are you having to reboot your computer all the time?" I regularly go weeks without a restart on my main machine, and the workhorse and server computers don't see a reboot more than every few months. It's almost always a security update that forces me to restart. It takes maybe 2 minutes to restart to the login window and another minute so to finish its background loads after login, but even if it took 20 minutes to boot it's not like it would affect me that much. If boot time is bothering you then you are either very impatient or you have a stability problem?
it's possible the hibernate mode is set by the OS installer, and is not touched by the OS update. My MBP isn't that old, so the newer installers may set it that way.
Depends on the amount of RAM installed, it's probably simpler to snapshot 100% of the RAM rather than try to figure out what needs to be saved and what does not. If you have 512 it goes fast (4 sec?) but I have 2gb so it takes a little while to go into or out of hibernation. Doesn't happen though unless you pull the battery, if it is kept powered while asleep it just wakes up normally in a couple sec.
Mine seems to operate in mode 3 from the factory? When I close the lid, the sleep light goes on solid for 20 seconds while it writes the hibernate file. Then click goes the HD and the sleep light pulses. If I open the lid it wakes up almost instantly, but if I pull the battery the sleep light goes out and stays off when I plug the battery back in. (the macbook is OFF) press power, and it wakes from hibernation, takes about 20 seconds.
/var/vm/sleepimage
So I think that mode 3, at least for the laptops, is the default?
VirtualBook:~ virtual1$ pmset -g
Active Profiles:
Battery Power -1
AC Power -1*
Currently in use:
womp 1
sms 1
hibernatefile
acwake 0
sleep 0
autorestart 0
halfdim 1
hibernatemode 3
disksleep 0
displaysleep 0
lidwake 1
Indeed mode 3 is default for the laptops. Probably not for the desktops tho? This is the way all the MB/MBP opwerate that I have seen. Will have to test the MP tomorrow.
And only after another virus was circulating that affects Excel for mac as well as Excel for windows.
The ONLY thing on my mind when I am worrying about computer viruses is Microsoft Office. I wonder how MS feels about my making that mental connection with their brand?
I could see them doing unmanned vehicles in the desert, but city traffic? I don't think we are ready to travel on unused city streets yet let alone with other cars. Wherever they're going to hold this, I will be avoiding. I have enough tension following a car with that "student driver" placard on the roof to be dealing with a blender driving in the lane to my left.
I realize part of this challenge is to force the evolution of the technology and give it a push, but there are limits, and I think this next one exceeds them in a dangerous way. "learn to walk before you try to run".
when you sleep a mac laptop it auto creates a hibernation file and actually does not go to sleep for about 30 seconds. Then if power is pulled or lost while it's sleeping, it dehibernates instead of waking up. So you can wake from sleep (4 seconds) wake from hibernation (25 seconds) or reboot. (3 minutes) No more having to reboot for any reason short of installs that require reboots.
I've owned my macbook for 3 months and have rebooted about seven times, six of which were for security updates. It's been awake or asleep for most of that time.
I was thinking about that, and it's actually pretty surprising how well some systems sleep. Mac OS X can sleep through anything short of a disk burn. I have seen very rare cases where vendor specific hardware didn't wake up properly, but that's probably a vendor driver issue. The OS seems to have its act together.
The new intel mac laptops now support hibernate instead of sleep. There is no longer a backup battery in the mac laptops. When you sleep them, they appear to go to sleep instantly, but they are not asleep yet. Display is off, sleep light is on (solid), but it is now paging memory off to disk, and will take my 2gb mbp about 25 seconds to do it. Then you hear the HD park and the sleep light begins pulsing. I try not to stuff it in the bag or jolt it around until it actually parks the HD.
This means you can pull the battery even, and power it back up later and instead of the usual 4 second wakeup time, you get about 20 seconds of watching a washed out image of the last screen, with a dotted progress bar. (looks a bit like a firmware update in progress) When the dots get to the right it's awake again. It has done this from a complete power-down and memory clear. Impressive. I have not noticed anything that fails to wake up properly even from this mode.
Another nice perk is that if you sleep it, and it loses power, (battery is removed by accident, someone kicks out the power cord etc) it simply appears to have shut off. (no sleep light) Then when you try to turn it back on, it just wakes from hibernation with the usual washed out screen and 20 second progresssbar instead of the quick wakeup.
I don't think the mac pro (the desktop) supports hibernate though, but it couldn't be that hard for them to add support for?
A variant of moore's law applies here I think, where the amount of information available goes up at a geometric rate just like processor speed and memory requirements. Ten years ago we would have laughed at someone that said we could get 15ft resultion sat pictures of most anywhere in 10 seconds, but we have had that for what, four years now. What's next? In 20 years will I be getting calls from the local contractor advising me that I need my shingles replaced because they're starting to crack?
Probably.
I'm no astrophysicist, but I see a basic problem with the "scoop theory" you present. First yes spores can exist at high altitudes, and you might even find a few hardy enough to survive on another planet. The concentration at those elevations would have to be incredibly small. But then life is so unlikely in the first place we'll just give it that. Second problem is heat, and that's a hard one to argue against. If said meteor was going far enough into the atmosphere to pick up a hitchhiker, AND is going fast enough to maintain escape velocity as it begins to vector away, it's going to be cooking. Really really cooking. Anything on the outside of the meteor will be vaporized, and it's going to go on quite a diet as it passes by. The odds of a spore or anything else organic surviving the heat of reentry/exit is beyond even the incredible odds that brought about the start of life. If you look around you will find video of meteors doing a "fly by" of earth taken by amateur photographers. You'll notice the meteor is glowing and is letting off quite a cloud trail behind it, the stress is often enough to cause them to break up, and the heat is incredible. Can anything on the surface of that meteor survive? Even if it managed to survive the thousands of degrees of heat, the top layer of the meteor is going to get blasted right off, so any hitchhikers are going to be left behind in the atmosphere. Maybe if it's packed in the middle, but the scoop theory places these spores on the surface, and there's just no surviving that.
Life is found most everywhere that it can reach. The only reason we have not found life in space yet is because gravity does a good job of keeping life on the planet and out of space. If there were a place on earth where life could encouter vacuum, it would be a very good bet that life would evolve to cope with it. Trees split water and create sugar using sunlight, animals create water and eat sugar. If you can conceive of a lifeform that can do both of these things, vacuum is a perfectly acceptable environment. In fact there are quite a few "anaerobic" microbes that prefer to not be around oxygen - if they could evolve to handle lower pressures they could make a good candidate for interstellar life travel.
Assuming the malware was written properly, it has already jacked your OS before you can intall your defenses (norton, spybot, etc) since it's there as part of the initial installation. Your tools may as well be running in a virtual machine at that point, the rootkit could have already made it virtually impossible to detect the bundled malware after the fact.
Isn't OS X using "signed binaries" for their critical apps like the dock and Finder? I assume those would not be so easy to subvert or even modify in the installer?
It's not apple's job to help the riaa and their artists recoup their losses due to piracy. That's like placing a tax on crowbars because people break into cars with them.
Why must people be so stupid?
Don't you see? music sales don't matter.
If you are trying to covince the RIAA of anything you are wasting your time. "follow the money". They are not doing what they are doing because they want to, because they think it is moral, or because they think it is legal. There is only one motivation, and that is money. They are being paid to do what they are doing. Money is one of the best motivators. So if you want to change their behavior, the pocketbook is the only thing you should be attacking.
In the case of the RIAA, they receive money from artists and owners of copyright on works. (a bit like membership dues?) In exchange for this money, they gain benefits, which include the RIAA "looking out for their interests".
Whether or not they are actually doing this is irrelevent. What matters is what the people writing the checks believe. And right now, a good portition of the artists and record companies believe the RIAA is doing the right thing, doing something that benefits them in some way, probably monitarily. If you want to change how the RIAA behaves, forget trying to change the RIAA, that's impossible. You have to change the views of the artists and distributors that are funding the RIAA.
If you look at how the RIAA operates it's easy to see why they are always trying to get into the news and do things that make them look like they are going after filesharers. The more publicity they can get that makes them look like they are doing something constructive with the artists' money, the more money they will continue to collect.
There's another interesting take on the whole RIAA situation also. Remember the axium of consulting - "You may not proffit in solving the issue, but there's plenty of money to be made in prolonging the problem." The RIAA is not trying to stop filesharing. If they actually succeeded, say through litigation that made filesharing completely illegal, they would lose one of the primary reasons the artists are paying them. Their purpose is to fight filesharing in a very public way so as to entertain the artists, but not so much as to destroy it.
It's too bad the artists don't realize this.
Don't you just love it when someone posts an article that basically say "hey we have something really interesting to tell you but we're not telling."? Usually being a tease is considered mean.
I am very surprised we are not seeing them use public key encryption here. If the wii has microsoft's public key, it can send encrypted requests which cannot be reverse engineered unless you are able to guess microsoft's private key. The way around this would be to disasemble the code on the wii. Since they are merely using packet sniffing, the traffic must not be encrypted. If someone were to have bet me if this would have been encrypted, well, I guess I would be out some money about now. Not that it's a bad thing for us, but what is microsoft thinking?? They had to know this would happen, and I can't believe they would sit idle and let it occur.
Though I suppose in a couple months we'll see a "software update" (i.e. they drop the portcullis) and that'll be the end of the tinkering without a screwdriver.
So what it amounts to is that the tazer's purpose is to stop someone from doing something that you don't want them to do... resisting arrest, being violent toward the officers or others at the scene.
And the officers here were using the tazer instead to try to force/coerce the man to follow their instructions. So the core problem here is the officers did not know when it was appropriate to use the tazer - one wonders if they had ever been trained in the use of the tazer before they were issued it? I'm sure they don't issue guns to officers before you pass a test at the course and a written test... it should be no different for tazers?
Though watching the video I can't help but get the impression the officers were going even a little beyond that. I don't think they were outright trying to torture the man, but it does appear that they were frustrated by the man's refusal to obey them and were possibly tazing him out of sheer frustration. That's quite a bit worse than simply not knowing when it's appropriate to use the tazer.
after waiting in line for 8 hours drinking too much mountain dew
On one hand we're being told that having CFCs and other things around the earth produces "greenhouse effect" and traps heat. Now they are telling us that things in the atmosphere don't do that, they reflect away the heat.
So which is it? Or do some things reflect while other things insulate? Do we need to mix the coctail properly to get the desired effect?
Besides, if global warming is a problem, why are they looking for ways to make it warmer?
there is also a difference from sitting in a public place analyzing customer information, and having it at your house
The most important difference being a false sense of security you get in being at home. Little consolation to the millions of people that you will be making have a "very bad day" for the next several months. Does it really matter if it gets stolen from your house, or forgotten at a rest stop on the way home, left on the roof of the car as you drive off, or forgotten in your car when you get home from work and stolen with your car that night? It's really no safer in your "protection" than it is at the keosk, the keosk just gives you a greater awarenss of your vulnerability.
furthermore chances are 9 out of 10 the person stealing the laptop will have no idea that its even on there
That flies about 32 inches when you realize that only a small percentage of the damage is done by the information getting into the wrong hands. The greatest damage is that you have exposed 3 million people to the risk of identity theft. The cost that could place on your company to have to provide free credit report monitoring for the next three years on the 1 million or so that request it is probably a lot more than all the fraud that will be cost to the people on that list. Once you lose track of the information in the first place the damage has been done.
unless you work directly in the banking industry i doubt you'd see the need for it
You are dealing with customer information. To be quite honest, I see banking as one of the lower-damage areas. If you were say, a psychiatrist or a doctor I could see much much greater damage being inflected than losing a few bucks. An extortionist with patient records could make out a lot better than a basic thief with some checking account numbers.
I would love to hear a good example or two of why someone that works at a bank needs to take live, authentic customer information home. If you are coding then you should be using test data. (really you should be doing your work at work, see below) If you are doing some number crunching, then you should be doing that at work. If you have more of that work to do than hours in the day then your business needs to hire more help, the company is turning a blind eye to your dangerous behavior and allowing you to work from home because it is saving them a buck. If you are taking work home to get more done than Bob and Julie at work trying for the same promotion as you, then you are risking customer information for your own personal gain. I don't see a single valid reason to take that data home.
I seriously hope you are not one of the people keeping track of my bank records. Sadly, your take on the situation is not at all uncommon, so I guess a lot of us are on thin ice as a result. You are relying on good luck to protect the data, just slightly lowering the odds it is stolen rather than using an appropriate amount of defensive behavior. The world is not a nice place. If you put your wallet on the front porch it is likely to get stolen. Placing a pail over it so you feel more safe is not helping much. Put it back inside where it's actually safer.
That is an obnoxious popup. Had to turn off blocking to see it in action, but that is not nice
So, can we mod Taco -1 Troll?