Users and administrators must remain exposed to this exploit for 30 days while we have meetings to discuss cost-benefit analyses of fixing the problem. If this is violated, we will sue you.
Kudoes to HP for backing down, but this should lend some perspective on the viability of open source software.
I haven't stepped on a troll in awhile. Hold still...
I shoot 30 degrees to the left of the target. Then I shoot 30 degrees to the right. I must have hit the target.
A fascinating analogy. I challenge you to demonstrate its meaningfulness with regard to software development. You may begin by providing evidence of "political ideology" having brought about a problem in open source software. Please do so without the use of the usual long haired evil hacker/terrorist stereotype.
It is interesting to note that democracy functions in precise accordance to your analogy. I vote one way, you vote another, and public policy becomes the compromise between our views. To date, democracy seems to have outdone totalitarianism as a governmental system, despite the very accurate gunfire produced by most of history's despots.
You know, before coming to Slashdot, I didn't know that there were religiously fanatical computer users.
So you know nothing about computers. Fair enough.
Any company that goes with "Planned obsolescence" will go out of business. MS may be many things, but it isn't obsolete.
It's interesting to me that you've narrowed the discussion to Microsoft(tm). Tell me about those political ideologies again? Further interesting is that you don't seem to know what planned obsolescence is. It has nothing to do with anything actually being obsolete. As pertains to software, it's a method of forcing consumers to buy new stuff by making the old stuff not work, either technologically or through opressive licensing.
But since we're on the subject of Microsoft(tm), explain how something like this is not planned obsolescence.
This shows why:
1. Businesses can choose to trust software developed by random volunteers whose 'peer group' contains people of all sorts, with all sorts of political ideologies.
Rendering the group aggregately free of all of the biases and ulterior motives those political ideologies may bring to the project.
or
2. Businesses can choose to trust software developed by managed teams of developers.
Whose motives are clearly defined as breaking everyone else's stuff and planned obsolescence, to name a few.
Do the math. The fact that the entire SNMP protocol was a gaping security hole was known for MONTHS to the likes of Cisco and Nortel, and we were allowed to go on ignorantly using insecure technology while their managed teams of developers came up with patches. If you'd rather not know when something is insecure, I suppose closed source is for you. I choose to be aware of how my systems operate.
moderators, the previous post deserves some points. mod parent up.
You hit on some of the reasons why I don't do "tiger team" security audits. The only way I'd consider doing it is if a company officer is present AND presses the enter key after I set up the script which breaks into their accounting system.
To broaden upon your very good points, I know from personal experience that retail stores do have loss prevention audits which involve agents actually committing shoplifting in order to test the staff's ability to prevent theft. This would seem to me to be several orders of magnitude more illegal than either the case you described or the article which started this thread.
The thing which keeps me up at night (as someone who does IT security work) is the legal weight of permission from your client do perform what are, in fact, criminal acts. You can waive your legal rights to civil recourse, but can you waive criminal liability in similar fashion? This gets back to your question:
1. Is it legal if someone hires you to kill them?
Despite the intricacies of the Kevorkian debate, I suspect the legal answer to both our questions is no, which brings me to the point in my previous post. If the fear and loathing of general society toward people who possess our skills is so great that we cannot make a legitimate living, then we will be driven underground.
While my "black hat" jab was intended as a joke, there is a very real social problem which this fear poses. There are many organizations in this climate of the beginning of the American police state who would go to almost any length to secure their information from the eyes of those hostile to them. Although I personally would never consider such a career move, it would be a shame if the country's most brilliant security minds were forced to work against the interests of the U.S. government.
Cyberphobia strikes again
on
WarTalking Arrest
·
· Score: 5, Interesting
So, let me get this straight. You happy people (non-tech) will put us in jail for attempting to help you use technology in a secure way, because you hate and fear us so much. You actually are prepared to alienate all of us (and imprison some of us) rather than deal with the embarassment of your own inability to use technology, and to willingly make it impossible for anyone to conduct IT security work in good faith. You want to make enemies of all of us, do you?
This banner is copyright (c) 2002 by Stinky Wizzleteats all rights reserved. Any posession of the materials within this banner makes you subject to the provisions of the Berman Act.
I'm going to boldly risk some bad karma here in what some will interpret as flamebait. I admit I am venting here, but I think it's appropriate and needs to be said.
RTFM? A Linux newbie has ISOs and a command prompt. Which FM would that be?
Man page? What's a man page? Typing "man" on a command prompt is not intuitive. Who has ever learned of the existence of man pages without human intervention? Furthermore, who has learned to use tar, find, or grep using the documentation in man pages? It gets even more fun when you discover that man pages are depreciated (according to some), and that you must use info. Still other packages have docs in tex.
Readme? What readme? Well, a simple rpm -q --whatprovides (filename) shows that the command I'm wondering about, bliffd, is in the package bliffblarf-1.2.3.6-2.3.4, and it's docs are located in/usr/share/doc/bliffblarf-1.2.3.6-2.3.4 in tex format. Now all I have to do is set up a postscript printer, and get tex to spew a postscript document to the printer, and then I can read the docs. So tell me again how this is not a hazing ritual?
And for HOWTOs, the next thing on my provided list of potential documentation sources I would not have known about without being told, a google on grep, find, or tar howto yields no useful information on these very basic Linux commands. The closest you come is a few examples of grep in a VMS to linux howto. Indeed, examples of any basic linux command appear to occur in inverse proportion to the likelihood of their daily use.
Furthermore, I've found that documentation is often incomplete and/or outdated. Most of the advanced features of some of the packages I use professionally are known only to those on the mailing list.
I know why Linux documentation is in its current state. I understand the problems of rapidly changing software, maintained by a large number of programmers, and that documentation is impossible to maintain effectively. None of these things prevent me from using Linux or from advocating it. But the state of affairs is hardly one where a complete newcomer could be expected to RTFM.
Heated hyperbole will not help to advance your cause; only a reasoned consideration of the issues will.
Your point is well formed (and right), but as someone who does expert witness testimony in criminal defense cases, I feel compelled to point out that if you change the sentence to "..use a computer the way 99% of Slashdotters use computers", it would be dead on.
As for changing the gravitational constant of the universe, I've never quite understood how Q could have suggested that. I mean, talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The mass destruction that would ensue is beyond all possible imagination.
For real! You're about the only other person I've come across who realizes the... gravity... of what he said.
The article is a bit heavy on the space-junk media hype. The practical answer is to let nature take its course and work toward prevention.
Any method of attempting to destroy debris isn't going to be practical. Giant debris collectors deliberately placed in dangerous orbits are likely to simply be smashed to pieces rather than gather any meaningful quantity of debris. Laser systems could vaporize metal fragments, but this vapor will simply congeal into globlets and cool into the space equivalent of bird shot. Until we develop gravity disruption fields, there is no effective way to affect the orbits of debris. The best bet is to wait the problem out. LEO is unstable. The Earth's atmosphere bulges significantly during solar maximums, and this drag has the effect of cleaning out the spacelanes within a reasonable period of time. In time, the problem (at least at LEO) will take care of itself if we can stop adding to it.
I'm pretty sure the following is being done, but there should be restrictions on any mass accelerated to orbital speeds. Specifically:
Upper stages, shrouds, and other spacecraft assemblies accelerated to orbital speeds must include a system to deorbit once the payload has been delivered.
All payload devices must have an end-of-life deorbit procedure so that 100% of the mass accelerated at the start of the project is safely deorbited.
Spacewalks and other activities involving the manipulation of assemblies/parts at orbital speed must include some sort of recovery system for parts that "get away". A bolo-style net gun comes to mind, as does a retaining net set up around the perimeter before the procedure begins. Indeed, small robotic spacecraft interceptors could be designed to chase down the odd foot clamp, grab it, and return the item to the work area.
Or, we could just use the Q solution. Simply change the gravitational constant of the universe.
The Russians not only landed on the moon, but explored it with their unamnned "lunakhod" rovers, and also brought back rock samples (all unmanned).
Here's a good case in point of the differences between the US and Russian space programs. The Russian(Soviet) program, was, from a scientific perspective, smoke and mirrors. Luna 16 landed in 1970 and recovered 110 grams of lunar soil. By that time, Apollo 11 and 12 had recovered a total of 56000 grams of lunar material, and geologically trained Apollo 15 astronauts were able to find and recover the famous "genesis rock" - a feat beyond even today's robotic vehicles.
So the response to your point would be that it all depends on what job you want done. If you want a handful of dirt, the Russians have the technology. If you want geological findings which shape the way we understand the formation of the solar system, the US has the technology. The approaches are different, and the goals are different. Putting crap in Earth orbit is 50 year old technology. The Russians have it down pat. But they could not have put something like Hubble in orbit, nor maintained and updated it through the years as the US has done, with R7 boosters and Soyuz spacecraft.
In summary, then, the legacy of the Russian space program can be found largely in the Guinness Book of World records and in impact craters in the Siberian countryside, and that of the US program consists of items such as the genesis rock, and photos of IO volcanoes, the eagle nebula, etc.
The Russians are certainly capable spacefarers, and I welcome their participation in future exploration efforts, but that doesn't mean we need to rewrite history in our exuberance to work with them.
I am sure the Russians were the first to have a manned flight orbit the moon.
I frankly don't understand how you can say something so incorrect. The Russians were never able to put a manned spacecraft in lunar orbit. A comprehensive history of the N1 program can be found at astronautix. There you will find that the closest the Soviets came to putting a manned spacecraft in lunar orbit was the November 1968 Zond 6 mission, an unmanned test run of the Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft. A seal failed during the return to Earth, resulting in immediate cabin depressurization. The main parachute also failed, and the spacecraft crashed. Apollo 8 successfully orbited the moon (first) with 3 crew on board and returned them safely in December of 1968. The only manned flight of the N1 succeeded only in demonstrating the effectiveness of the crew ejection system. It never made it into Earth orbit.
I agree with your conclusions, but I question some of your statements.
Russia has the know-how.
While not necessarily incorrect on its face, the exclusive connotations of this statement just don't stand up to the facts. Your following comments seemed to suggest that you equated this to man-hours in space, but there's more to space travel than humans in pressurized capsules for extended periods of time. The United States has always had the technological edge in virtually every element of spacecraft design, construction, and operation. The United States has also been the only nation to successfully navigate a manned spacecraft beyond the orbit of the Earth. I know the "but we landed on the moon" argument has been probably heard so much that the actual technical details of that acheivement are lost, but the fact remains that it was an amazing accomplishment which did in fact far exceed the capabilities of the Soviet space program. The Russians will be bringing knowledge and experience, no doubt, but to suggest that "they have the know-how", as if this were an exclusionary state, is a disservice to what NASA has accomplished.
I do agree, however, that the Russian contribution to the project is pivotal. The Russians have always excelled at solving complex problems with simple, cheap, and reliable solutions. The famous "write with pencils in zero G" thing is a good example (we spent millions coming up with pens which could write in a microgravity environment). In the days of decreasing budgets we now face, such simple ingenuity could make the difference between whether or not we ever make the attempt, but we won't be getting there with the N1 or Buran.
I'd like to see him circumnavigate the globe at the equator.
That should be possible in a balloon equipped with a missile defense system. Times are different now than they were when the Breitling Orbiter made its trip.
Somehow we must devise incentives for organizations such as the RIAA to stop opposing the advance of technology.
Um, that's not our problem. One of the biggest lies we have bought from the Hollywood crowd lately is that it is.
If an industry cannot adapt to changing technology, then the industry will fail. That is what the free market is all about. Nobody told steamboat operators they had to solve the business problems of canal operators, and nobody told the railroaders they had to solve the business problems of the steamboat operators. The change in the way the industry solved the consumer's problem of transportation happened, and those who couldn't adapt died off.
We no longer need the RIAA to distribute high quality media to us. Rather than adapt to this changing situation, they have sought to outlaw the essence of open source software, the Internet, and the personal computer itself. I admit that the free exchange of information poses a fundamental threat to their existence, but I guess I kind of think that raises the question of why they should continue to exist.
Our only problem is to make sure that their death throes don't take out our freedoms.
In all fairness, the article states that the path of the asteroid was on a line with the sun.
WTF? It wouldn't have been coming from the sun during its entire orbit.
Re:Pure Laziness
on
Version Fatigue
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
This is pure intellectual laziness. What is wrong with being in a "learning mode?" We do it our entire lives! Why should someone want to actually stop learning?
Well, as a technology person, I can understand the sentiment. I too have been frustrated by the dangerous and ridiculous fear most users have of change. But you need to look at things from their perspective.
If you're anything like me, you are concerned with the nuts and bolts of IT. To us, new user interfaces are no big deal. We have to keep learning all the time, or we get like that old bitter, grizzled engineer who sits in the corner and talks endlessly about how great Lantastic was. This significantly divorces us from the world of those for whom IT is a tool, not their job. A lawyer who spends their life keeping up with contract law and reading 100 page briefs on a daily basis simply doesn't have the intellectual bandwidth to deal with where her fucking bullets&numbering button went in the new version of Word. This is not a reflection of her intelligence or ability to learn. It's a simple matter of not having the time.
If we can agree that the problem is unreasonable fear, then I would suggest that this notion that IT exists to serve itself is the real cause for this fear. Users think of us as self-serving elitist upstarts who don't care about their problems. Just look at this thread. Programmers bemoan the idea of writing quality code because it would put them out of a job. I guess I kind of thought quality code WAS their job. If they don't want to do it, then they don't deserve the work. This idea that IT should be a self-sustaining beast without the inconvenience of worrying about bothersome users is short-sighted and unethical.
I am no fan of Microsoft. In fact, I am a rather vitriolic critic. But if there is one reason by which their business success might be legitimately explained, it is that they look at their entire product line from the standpoint of the user. Features such as your Outlook journal automatically keeping track of when you work on Word documents, for example, are very cool toys for the user, but make a huge mess of the back end for us to deal with. They don't do this consistently, and they don't even do this well, (hell, they're the ones causing all this version fatigue!) but they are about the only people out there thinking of the user first and the server room second.
Until we can eschew our elitism, and develop some sense of a work ethic with regard to making IT work for the people who need it, we will not overcome the user fear barrier.
The creator wants people to see his/her creation, but does not automatically give visitors the right to archive and retransmit the works.
It's amazing to me how people can be so enthusiastic about using technology to spread information and yet be so capable of an unreasonable need to control that information once spread. To demand ownership of HTML, when storage and retransmission are a normal part of the operation of web browser software, and when you really don't even have control over how your page is presented by the browser, is patently absurd.
You can't have it both ways. If you want to play in a world where information is freely and rapidly exchanged, then you must be prepared for exactly that.
I thought the mainstream media was going to save us from all this Internet misinformation. After all, how can we unwashed masses be informed without their help?
I think it's funny as hell that after all the crap we've heard from the media about how the Internet is a dangerous playground of falsehood and misinformation, they were taken in by a web site well known among Internet users as being a satire site.
Slashdot Mirror
OpenSSH has a security problem:
HP has a security problem:
Kudoes to HP for backing down, but this should lend some perspective on the viability of open source software.
I haven't stepped on a troll in awhile. Hold still...
I shoot 30 degrees to the left of the target. Then I shoot 30 degrees to the right. I must have hit the target.
A fascinating analogy. I challenge you to demonstrate its meaningfulness with regard to software development. You may begin by providing evidence of "political ideology" having brought about a problem in open source software. Please do so without the use of the usual long haired evil hacker/terrorist stereotype.
It is interesting to note that democracy functions in precise accordance to your analogy. I vote one way, you vote another, and public policy becomes the compromise between our views. To date, democracy seems to have outdone totalitarianism as a governmental system, despite the very accurate gunfire produced by most of history's despots.
You know, before coming to Slashdot, I didn't know that there were religiously fanatical computer users.
So you know nothing about computers. Fair enough.
Any company that goes with "Planned obsolescence" will go out of business. MS may be many things, but it isn't obsolete.
It's interesting to me that you've narrowed the discussion to Microsoft(tm). Tell me about those political ideologies again? Further interesting is that you don't seem to know what planned obsolescence is. It has nothing to do with anything actually being obsolete. As pertains to software, it's a method of forcing consumers to buy new stuff by making the old stuff not work, either technologically or through opressive licensing.
But since we're on the subject of Microsoft(tm), explain how something like this is not planned obsolescence.
This shows why: 1. Businesses can choose to trust software developed by random volunteers whose 'peer group' contains people of all sorts, with all sorts of political ideologies.
Rendering the group aggregately free of all of the biases and ulterior motives those political ideologies may bring to the project.
or 2. Businesses can choose to trust software developed by managed teams of developers.
Whose motives are clearly defined as breaking everyone else's stuff and planned obsolescence, to name a few.
Do the math. The fact that the entire SNMP protocol was a gaping security hole was known for MONTHS to the likes of Cisco and Nortel, and we were allowed to go on ignorantly using insecure technology while their managed teams of developers came up with patches. If you'd rather not know when something is insecure, I suppose closed source is for you. I choose to be aware of how my systems operate.
All I have to do is bind Windows error events to fart noises. Nothing comes near.
moderators, the previous post deserves some points. mod parent up.
You hit on some of the reasons why I don't do "tiger team" security audits. The only way I'd consider doing it is if a company officer is present AND presses the enter key after I set up the script which breaks into their accounting system.
To broaden upon your very good points, I know from personal experience that retail stores do have loss prevention audits which involve agents actually committing shoplifting in order to test the staff's ability to prevent theft. This would seem to me to be several orders of magnitude more illegal than either the case you described or the article which started this thread.
The thing which keeps me up at night (as someone who does IT security work) is the legal weight of permission from your client do perform what are, in fact, criminal acts. You can waive your legal rights to civil recourse, but can you waive criminal liability in similar fashion? This gets back to your question:
1. Is it legal if someone hires you to kill them?
Despite the intricacies of the Kevorkian debate, I suspect the legal answer to both our questions is no, which brings me to the point in my previous post. If the fear and loathing of general society toward people who possess our skills is so great that we cannot make a legitimate living, then we will be driven underground.
While my "black hat" jab was intended as a joke, there is a very real social problem which this fear poses. There are many organizations in this climate of the beginning of the American police state who would go to almost any length to secure their information from the eyes of those hostile to them. Although I personally would never consider such a career move, it would be a shame if the country's most brilliant security minds were forced to work against the interests of the U.S. government.
So, let me get this straight. You happy people (non-tech) will put us in jail for attempting to help you use technology in a secure way, because you hate and fear us so much. You actually are prepared to alienate all of us (and imprison some of us) rather than deal with the embarassment of your own inability to use technology, and to willingly make it impossible for anyone to conduct IT security work in good faith. You want to make enemies of all of us, do you?
Have it your way.
Responding with...
This banner is copyright (c) 2002 by Stinky Wizzleteats all rights reserved. Any posession of the materials within this banner makes you subject to the provisions of the Berman Act.
Bend over.
But it fits their organization's user naming convention:
richard_synder@forgent.com
CEO, Forgent Networks
I'm going to boldly risk some bad karma here in what some will interpret as flamebait. I admit I am venting here, but I think it's appropriate and needs to be said.
RTFM? A Linux newbie has ISOs and a command prompt. Which FM would that be?
Man page? What's a man page? Typing "man" on a command prompt is not intuitive. Who has ever learned of the existence of man pages without human intervention? Furthermore, who has learned to use tar, find, or grep using the documentation in man pages? It gets even more fun when you discover that man pages are depreciated (according to some), and that you must use info. Still other packages have docs in tex.
Readme? What readme? Well, a simple rpm -q --whatprovides (filename) shows that the command I'm wondering about, bliffd, is in the package bliffblarf-1.2.3.6-2.3.4, and it's docs are located in /usr/share/doc/bliffblarf-1.2.3.6-2.3.4 in tex format. Now all I have to do is set up a postscript printer, and get tex to spew a postscript document to the printer, and then I can read the docs. So tell me again how this is not a hazing ritual?
And for HOWTOs, the next thing on my provided list of potential documentation sources I would not have known about without being told, a google on grep, find, or tar howto yields no useful information on these very basic Linux commands. The closest you come is a few examples of grep in a VMS to linux howto. Indeed, examples of any basic linux command appear to occur in inverse proportion to the likelihood of their daily use.
Furthermore, I've found that documentation is often incomplete and/or outdated. Most of the advanced features of some of the packages I use professionally are known only to those on the mailing list.
I know why Linux documentation is in its current state. I understand the problems of rapidly changing software, maintained by a large number of programmers, and that documentation is impossible to maintain effectively. None of these things prevent me from using Linux or from advocating it. But the state of affairs is hardly one where a complete newcomer could be expected to RTFM.
Heated hyperbole will not help to advance your cause; only a reasoned consideration of the issues will.
Your point is well formed (and right), but as someone who does expert witness testimony in criminal defense cases, I feel compelled to point out that if you change the sentence to "..use a computer the way 99% of Slashdotters use computers", it would be dead on.
As for changing the gravitational constant of the universe, I've never quite understood how Q could have suggested that. I mean, talk about throwing the baby out with the bathwater. The mass destruction that would ensue is beyond all possible imagination.
For real! You're about the only other person I've come across who realizes the ... gravity ... of what he said.
The article is a bit heavy on the space-junk media hype. The practical answer is to let nature take its course and work toward prevention.
Any method of attempting to destroy debris isn't going to be practical. Giant debris collectors deliberately placed in dangerous orbits are likely to simply be smashed to pieces rather than gather any meaningful quantity of debris. Laser systems could vaporize metal fragments, but this vapor will simply congeal into globlets and cool into the space equivalent of bird shot. Until we develop gravity disruption fields, there is no effective way to affect the orbits of debris. The best bet is to wait the problem out. LEO is unstable. The Earth's atmosphere bulges significantly during solar maximums, and this drag has the effect of cleaning out the spacelanes within a reasonable period of time. In time, the problem (at least at LEO) will take care of itself if we can stop adding to it.
I'm pretty sure the following is being done, but there should be restrictions on any mass accelerated to orbital speeds. Specifically:
Or, we could just use the Q solution. Simply change the gravitational constant of the universe.
The Russians not only landed on the moon, but explored it with their unamnned "lunakhod" rovers, and also brought back rock samples (all unmanned).
Here's a good case in point of the differences between the US and Russian space programs. The Russian(Soviet) program, was, from a scientific perspective, smoke and mirrors. Luna 16 landed in 1970 and recovered 110 grams of lunar soil. By that time, Apollo 11 and 12 had recovered a total of 56000 grams of lunar material, and geologically trained Apollo 15 astronauts were able to find and recover the famous "genesis rock" - a feat beyond even today's robotic vehicles.
So the response to your point would be that it all depends on what job you want done. If you want a handful of dirt, the Russians have the technology. If you want geological findings which shape the way we understand the formation of the solar system, the US has the technology. The approaches are different, and the goals are different. Putting crap in Earth orbit is 50 year old technology. The Russians have it down pat. But they could not have put something like Hubble in orbit, nor maintained and updated it through the years as the US has done, with R7 boosters and Soyuz spacecraft.
In summary, then, the legacy of the Russian space program can be found largely in the Guinness Book of World records and in impact craters in the Siberian countryside, and that of the US program consists of items such as the genesis rock, and photos of IO volcanoes, the eagle nebula, etc.
The Russians are certainly capable spacefarers, and I welcome their participation in future exploration efforts, but that doesn't mean we need to rewrite history in our exuberance to work with them.
I am sure the Russians were the first to have a manned flight orbit the moon.
I frankly don't understand how you can say something so incorrect. The Russians were never able to put a manned spacecraft in lunar orbit. A comprehensive history of the N1 program can be found at astronautix. There you will find that the closest the Soviets came to putting a manned spacecraft in lunar orbit was the November 1968 Zond 6 mission, an unmanned test run of the Soyuz 7K-L1 spacecraft. A seal failed during the return to Earth, resulting in immediate cabin depressurization. The main parachute also failed, and the spacecraft crashed. Apollo 8 successfully orbited the moon (first) with 3 crew on board and returned them safely in December of 1968. The only manned flight of the N1 succeeded only in demonstrating the effectiveness of the crew ejection system. It never made it into Earth orbit.
Seriously, I can't believe I haven't seen one yet. You know, Russians, red planet, get it?
I agree with your conclusions, but I question some of your statements.
Russia has the know-how.
While not necessarily incorrect on its face, the exclusive connotations of this statement just don't stand up to the facts. Your following comments seemed to suggest that you equated this to man-hours in space, but there's more to space travel than humans in pressurized capsules for extended periods of time. The United States has always had the technological edge in virtually every element of spacecraft design, construction, and operation. The United States has also been the only nation to successfully navigate a manned spacecraft beyond the orbit of the Earth. I know the "but we landed on the moon" argument has been probably heard so much that the actual technical details of that acheivement are lost, but the fact remains that it was an amazing accomplishment which did in fact far exceed the capabilities of the Soviet space program. The Russians will be bringing knowledge and experience, no doubt, but to suggest that "they have the know-how", as if this were an exclusionary state, is a disservice to what NASA has accomplished.
I do agree, however, that the Russian contribution to the project is pivotal. The Russians have always excelled at solving complex problems with simple, cheap, and reliable solutions. The famous "write with pencils in zero G" thing is a good example (we spent millions coming up with pens which could write in a microgravity environment). In the days of decreasing budgets we now face, such simple ingenuity could make the difference between whether or not we ever make the attempt, but we won't be getting there with the N1 or Buran.
I'd like to see him circumnavigate the globe at the equator.
That should be possible in a balloon equipped with a missile defense system. Times are different now than they were when the Breitling Orbiter made its trip.
Somehow we must devise incentives for organizations such as the RIAA to stop opposing the advance of technology.
Um, that's not our problem. One of the biggest lies we have bought from the Hollywood crowd lately is that it is.
If an industry cannot adapt to changing technology, then the industry will fail. That is what the free market is all about. Nobody told steamboat operators they had to solve the business problems of canal operators, and nobody told the railroaders they had to solve the business problems of the steamboat operators. The change in the way the industry solved the consumer's problem of transportation happened, and those who couldn't adapt died off.
We no longer need the RIAA to distribute high quality media to us. Rather than adapt to this changing situation, they have sought to outlaw the essence of open source software, the Internet, and the personal computer itself. I admit that the free exchange of information poses a fundamental threat to their existence, but I guess I kind of think that raises the question of why they should continue to exist.
Our only problem is to make sure that their death throes don't take out our freedoms.
it burns so efficiently that rockets make no smoke and are hard to track,
I am profoundly fascinated. Do you have any numbers on the specific impulse of this configuration?
In all fairness, the article states that the path of the asteroid was on a line with the sun.
WTF? It wouldn't have been coming from the sun during its entire orbit.
This is pure intellectual laziness. What is wrong with being in a "learning mode?" We do it our entire lives! Why should someone want to actually stop learning?
Well, as a technology person, I can understand the sentiment. I too have been frustrated by the dangerous and ridiculous fear most users have of change. But you need to look at things from their perspective.
If you're anything like me, you are concerned with the nuts and bolts of IT. To us, new user interfaces are no big deal. We have to keep learning all the time, or we get like that old bitter, grizzled engineer who sits in the corner and talks endlessly about how great Lantastic was. This significantly divorces us from the world of those for whom IT is a tool, not their job. A lawyer who spends their life keeping up with contract law and reading 100 page briefs on a daily basis simply doesn't have the intellectual bandwidth to deal with where her fucking bullets&numbering button went in the new version of Word. This is not a reflection of her intelligence or ability to learn. It's a simple matter of not having the time.
If we can agree that the problem is unreasonable fear, then I would suggest that this notion that IT exists to serve itself is the real cause for this fear. Users think of us as self-serving elitist upstarts who don't care about their problems. Just look at this thread. Programmers bemoan the idea of writing quality code because it would put them out of a job. I guess I kind of thought quality code WAS their job. If they don't want to do it, then they don't deserve the work. This idea that IT should be a self-sustaining beast without the inconvenience of worrying about bothersome users is short-sighted and unethical.
I am no fan of Microsoft. In fact, I am a rather vitriolic critic. But if there is one reason by which their business success might be legitimately explained, it is that they look at their entire product line from the standpoint of the user. Features such as your Outlook journal automatically keeping track of when you work on Word documents, for example, are very cool toys for the user, but make a huge mess of the back end for us to deal with. They don't do this consistently, and they don't even do this well, (hell, they're the ones causing all this version fatigue!) but they are about the only people out there thinking of the user first and the server room second.
Until we can eschew our elitism, and develop some sense of a work ethic with regard to making IT work for the people who need it, we will not overcome the user fear barrier.
The creator wants people to see his/her creation, but does not automatically give visitors the right to archive and retransmit the works.
It's amazing to me how people can be so enthusiastic about using technology to spread information and yet be so capable of an unreasonable need to control that information once spread. To demand ownership of HTML, when storage and retransmission are a normal part of the operation of web browser software, and when you really don't even have control over how your page is presented by the browser, is patently absurd.
You can't have it both ways. If you want to play in a world where information is freely and rapidly exchanged, then you must be prepared for exactly that.
This is particularly interesting since the legislation they are pushing may make Linux illegal in the United States.
to my three-year-old: "You better be good boy, or Daddy's going to destroy the sun!"
Yeah, this is all fun and games until he runs screaming down the hallway at 3 am screaming for you to put the sun back.
I thought the mainstream media was going to save us from all this Internet misinformation. After all, how can we unwashed masses be informed without their help?
I think it's funny as hell that after all the crap we've heard from the media about how the Internet is a dangerous playground of falsehood and misinformation, they were taken in by a web site well known among Internet users as being a satire site.