Of course not. Then why expect perfection from Mensa? Straight from their web page, "Membership in Mensa is open to persons who have attained a score within the upper two percent of the general population on an approved intelligence test that has been properly administered and supervised. There is no other qualification or disqualification for membership eligibility."
There's nothing in there about being good with people, trivia, cooking, art, blah blah.. They know exactly what they are and don't pretend to be more. Why get upset with them because your perception of their charter is incorrect? Look at Slashdot. "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." The top headline is "Firefox Continues to Bite into IE Usage." How much of the world population think "Firefox Continues to Bite into IE Usage" matters?
I'm sure there arrogant members within Mensa, just like any other group of people (just look at Slashdot, or the IT field). Do you think the arrogant members became arrogant when they joined Mensa? Of course not. They know they were "God's gift to the (insert any field/group/etc here)" from the very beginning.
Well, I can think of situations where a person no longer qualifies for your definition of human. Quick example - someone in a coma. An infant probably wouldn't qualify either.
And this portion, ability to be part of a society, probably disqualifies half of the people reading this message.
How many scientific advances were due to people in their teens? You're assuming that programmers can't do their best work in their teens. Best not meaning 'best for mankind', but best meaning their most elegant, 'out of the box' or advanced work.
Keith
Re:Maybe no security at all
on
Real Security?
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
The problem with that train of thought is you are assuming people are hacking the box to get to the *data*. My guess is 'access to data' is not at the top of the 'reasons to hack' list. It probably falls below 'because it was there', 'bragging rights', 'a node to cover ones tracks', 'zombies for DOS attacks', and the list goes on...
Keith
The incident mentioned dealt with a car that is TEN years old. I think that predates Windows CE.
From the story - "Thai Rath said Suchart got the 10-year-old car two days ago as a replacement for his regular Mercedes Benz, which was in the garage for repairs."
Here's the google cache link for the article from the "Eye on Thai Press" website - cached news story
Someone posts a link to a news story. Said news story discusses failure of major comm link between US and UK resulting in loss of Net connection. Said link points to server that is located *IN* the UK. Brilliant.
I know that not *all* slash dotters are in the US - but the majority probably are.
but yet if there is something as blatent as the RPC exploit in OSS, we tend to see fixes for rather quickly (again history backs me up here)
What's your explanation for Sendmail? It brought us the very first worm back in 1988 and they're still finding major security problems in it 15 YEARS later. Sendmail has a long history of security holes - Seen on Slashdot earlier today.
Outlook doesn't come with Windows. Outlook Express does. And does your same logic apply to other operating systems? As in, since these 1200 apps came with the distribution cds, any vulnerability in them would be the OS makers responsibility? After all, they were all made by the same "company" (the open source community).
Curing disease is great at the micro level, but what about the macro level? You always hear about people wanting to cure world hunger, or completely eliminating AIDS (and other diseases). What happens if they all succeed? Has anyone done the math to see what population the Earth can support and how quickly we would reach that population if all diseases were removed from the equation?
I'm not suggesting we stop medical research or anything like that - but we do need to be careful what we wish for. And hopefully, someone is trying to figure out what would happen if we did succeed in removing disease.
At the risk of sounding horribly insensitive...
If someone were to develop a "vaccine" to cure all diseases and hunger, how long do you think the Earth could support the population increase? How about the impact of an immortality pill?
And, IIRC, about 42,000 people died on the highways in 2001. That's about 3 times more people than American soldiers lost in the deadliest year of the Vietnam war (from the US viewpoint, I'm not sure what the non-US losses were).
Some people complain about the amount of money the US government spends. But, if they stop spending that money, how many people will lose their job?
Re:another sighting of a slashdotting
on
BitTorrent Guide
·
· Score: 1
This isn't the first time torrentse.cx has been slashdotted. They were brought down sometime within the last two-three weeks due to a mention on slashdot.
Copied directly from Redhat's website...
"Red Hat Network Basic service level: $60/year per system subscription"
If MS tried to do charge for Windowsupdate, Bill would be crucified.
They'll jump up and down screaming about how many patches IIS needs to remain secure, while not mentioning that Apache has four security patches in the last six months while IIS only has two. And if you remind them of that, they'll scream "It's because open source is better, it allowed the bugs to be found and fixed quicker."
Whatever...
Keith
This is all about the media and it's tendency to sensationalize, not do research, no perspective, etc, etc. Just this morning, I looked at CNN's website and saw the headline "Snow, ice leave at least 14 dead in central U.S.".. I thought to myself, I wonder how many people died in car wrecks today. Why do they never have the "x people die in car wrecks every day" headlines. I'm just using car wrecks as an example, there are many others. According to NHTSA, about 41,730 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2001 (in the US). That's 115 per day. During the Vietnam war, the year the US had the most casualties was 1968, with 14,594 soldiers killed in action. Almost THREE times as many people died in car wrecks in 2001 than US soldiers killed during wartime in 1968!
The media has their head up their collective asses. The truly horrifying part is that the masses believe them. When enough people believe something, is it true? If so, the media can make anything true.
Be careful! You know what they say about eating genetically altered food. Although it could get you a spot in a Rolaids commercial - "I ate a steak made from 10,000 year old dna and got the worst case of heartburn known to man. A couple of Rolaids and I'm all better."
Keith
I haven't seen retail stores, but I have seen tables full of obviously pirate CDs at flea markets. Down to the default background images/font used by the cd label portion of Roxio Ez CD Creator. I don't remember seeing any legitimate Michael Jackson CDs released on CDR discs, but this guy sure had 'em for sale.
Keith
Some states use the SSN as your driver license number (VA does). The stores get away with it by asking for your driver license number. I believe you can now ask that your driver license number be something other than your SSN, but I don't think it's the default.
As other people have mentioned, sensitive but unclassified is NOT new. But, no one has mentioned the checks and balances in place - namely the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It's a tool for use by citizens who can request information the federal agencies have not made public. The information is reviewed and some information is not released.
I'm guessing that one of the reasons for this category is the additional costs for something to be handled as classified (assumption on my part).
Relating it to something most people here are familiar with, computer networks. Would you want someone to have a list of all of your users, their habits, background information on their family, etc? The passwords could be considered "secret", but the other information isn't. An attacker could definitely use the other information to break into your network. It isn't practical to keep the other information "secret", but you can at least tell people not to make a directory containing all that information and send it to the NY Times.
Other good examples of sensitive information are unlisted phone numbers, SSNs, etc. This story is just more media hype.
Keith
I understand prices go up, don't necesarily like it but I understand it. $7 or 8 per movie ticket, $3.50 for a drink, $4 for some popcorn and $4 for the little box of m&m's... And don't even think about bringing your own food/drinks.
If I remember correctly, I have gone to see *one* movie in the theater in the last 3 years. The biggest reason? The viewing experience. Sure, we've got umpteen gazillion watts of sound coming from almost as many different directions and digital video, etc, etc... But damnit, if half the audience won't shut the hell up, I can't enjoy the movie!! And damned if I'm going to fork out $30-40 for 2 people to sit through a movie we can't enjoy.
If there's a movie I want to see, I'll download it or rent it - but I'm not going back to the theater unless they make *major* improvements.
Overclockers everywhere are forming class action lawsuits against all major chip manufacturers because the chips aren't running at the advertised speeds...:)
Someone needs to start a class action lawsuit against lawyers for promoting frivolous class action lawsuits.
If you're going to make it into a metallic sphere, you can't miss out on the oppurtunity of turning it into a Van Der Graaf generator! Have the only computer working inside a 200kV "force field" at the lan party. Of course you'd have to figure out how to attach all the peripherals. Hmm..
Deleting the files from your hard drive is one thing. Since this is targeted at wireless, I would think it would be embedded in hardware.
Talk about a forced upgrade. After a year of owning the acclaimed all in one cell phone, pda, audio player, etc - you must destroy it's firmware because it contains the KT Tech sound codec.
Ouch.
I don't think the US government is in the business of saving money, especially in a downturn in the economy. Economists say the government should spend more money when the economy is on a downswing (at least thats what they said when I took economics).
Let's say you do convince your management to let you change to Linux in your building/branch/whatever. All the computers are reconfigured for Linux, all the users are retrained on new desktop apps, all the support personnel are retrained to support Linux, the Sysadmins and developers are retrained. All the software is replaced with linux equivilants. Then top level management in the IRS decides everyone will use this brand new app written for the MS platform.
Or anything along those lines. Here's one - All IRS computers will be listed in the IRS Active Directory so we stop losing them!:) I know, bad example.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course not. Then why expect perfection from Mensa? Straight from their web page, "Membership in Mensa is open to persons who have attained a score within the upper two percent of the general population on an approved intelligence test that has been properly administered and supervised. There is no other qualification or disqualification for membership eligibility."
There's nothing in there about being good with people, trivia, cooking, art, blah blah.. They know exactly what they are and don't pretend to be more. Why get upset with them because your perception of their charter is incorrect? Look at Slashdot. "News for Nerds. Stuff that matters." The top headline is "Firefox Continues to Bite into IE Usage." How much of the world population think "Firefox Continues to Bite into IE Usage" matters?
I'm sure there arrogant members within Mensa, just like any other group of people (just look at Slashdot, or the IT field). Do you think the arrogant members became arrogant when they joined Mensa? Of course not. They know they were "God's gift to the (insert any field/group/etc here)" from the very beginning.
If you're using a handheld, it's pushing a watt or two. Five watts, if you still use a "bag" phone.
Well, I can think of situations where a person no longer qualifies for your definition of human. Quick example - someone in a coma. An infant probably wouldn't qualify either.
And this portion, ability to be part of a society, probably disqualifies half of the people reading this message.
How many scientific advances were due to people in their teens? You're assuming that programmers can't do their best work in their teens. Best not meaning 'best for mankind', but best meaning their most elegant, 'out of the box' or advanced work. Keith
The problem with that train of thought is you are assuming people are hacking the box to get to the *data*. My guess is 'access to data' is not at the top of the 'reasons to hack' list. It probably falls below 'because it was there', 'bragging rights', 'a node to cover ones tracks', 'zombies for DOS attacks', and the list goes on... Keith
The incident mentioned dealt with a car that is TEN years old. I think that predates Windows CE.
From the story - "Thai Rath said Suchart got the 10-year-old car two days ago as a replacement for his regular Mercedes Benz, which was in the garage for repairs."
Here's the google cache link for the article from the "Eye on Thai Press" website - cached news story
Someone posts a link to a news story. Said news story discusses failure of major comm link between US and UK resulting in loss of Net connection. Said link points to server that is located *IN* the UK. Brilliant. I know that not *all* slash dotters are in the US - but the majority probably are.
but yet if there is something as blatent as the RPC exploit in OSS, we tend to see fixes for rather quickly (again history backs me up here)
What's your explanation for Sendmail? It brought us the very first worm back in 1988 and they're still finding major security problems in it 15 YEARS later.
Sendmail has a long history of security holes - Seen on Slashdot earlier today.
Outlook doesn't come with Windows. Outlook Express does. And does your same logic apply to other operating systems? As in, since these 1200 apps came with the distribution cds, any vulnerability in them would be the OS makers responsibility? After all, they were all made by the same "company" (the open source community).
Plus...who cares if Joe Billionaire flies up there? What is he going to bring back? Pictures? Whoopty-freakin-do.
How about an "I went to Mars and all I got was this lousy t-shirt" t-shirt?
Curing disease is great at the micro level, but what about the macro level? You always hear about people wanting to cure world hunger, or completely eliminating AIDS (and other diseases). What happens if they all succeed? Has anyone done the math to see what population the Earth can support and how quickly we would reach that population if all diseases were removed from the equation?
I'm not suggesting we stop medical research or anything like that - but we do need to be careful what we wish for. And hopefully, someone is trying to figure out what would happen if we did succeed in removing disease.
At the risk of sounding horribly insensitive... If someone were to develop a "vaccine" to cure all diseases and hunger, how long do you think the Earth could support the population increase? How about the impact of an immortality pill? And, IIRC, about 42,000 people died on the highways in 2001. That's about 3 times more people than American soldiers lost in the deadliest year of the Vietnam war (from the US viewpoint, I'm not sure what the non-US losses were). Some people complain about the amount of money the US government spends. But, if they stop spending that money, how many people will lose their job?
This isn't the first time torrentse.cx has been slashdotted. They were brought down sometime within the last two-three weeks due to a mention on slashdot.
Copied directly from Redhat's website... "Red Hat Network Basic service level: $60/year per system subscription" If MS tried to do charge for Windowsupdate, Bill would be crucified.
They'll jump up and down screaming about how many patches IIS needs to remain secure, while not mentioning that Apache has four security patches in the last six months while IIS only has two. And if you remind them of that, they'll scream "It's because open source is better, it allowed the bugs to be found and fixed quicker." Whatever... Keith
This is all about the media and it's tendency to sensationalize, not do research, no perspective, etc, etc. Just this morning, I looked at CNN's website and saw the headline "Snow, ice leave at least 14 dead in central U.S.".. I thought to myself, I wonder how many people died in car wrecks today. Why do they never have the "x people die in car wrecks every day" headlines. I'm just using car wrecks as an example, there are many others. According to NHTSA, about 41,730 people died in motor vehicle crashes in 2001 (in the US). That's 115 per day. During the Vietnam war, the year the US had the most casualties was 1968, with 14,594 soldiers killed in action. Almost THREE times as many people died in car wrecks in 2001 than US soldiers killed during wartime in 1968! The media has their head up their collective asses. The truly horrifying part is that the masses believe them. When enough people believe something, is it true? If so, the media can make anything true.
Be careful! You know what they say about eating genetically altered food. Although it could get you a spot in a Rolaids commercial - "I ate a steak made from 10,000 year old dna and got the worst case of heartburn known to man. A couple of Rolaids and I'm all better." Keith
I haven't seen retail stores, but I have seen tables full of obviously pirate CDs at flea markets. Down to the default background images/font used by the cd label portion of Roxio Ez CD Creator. I don't remember seeing any legitimate Michael Jackson CDs released on CDR discs, but this guy sure had 'em for sale. Keith
Some states use the SSN as your driver license number (VA does). The stores get away with it by asking for your driver license number. I believe you can now ask that your driver license number be something other than your SSN, but I don't think it's the default.
As other people have mentioned, sensitive but unclassified is NOT new. But, no one has mentioned the checks and balances in place - namely the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). It's a tool for use by citizens who can request information the federal agencies have not made public. The information is reviewed and some information is not released. I'm guessing that one of the reasons for this category is the additional costs for something to be handled as classified (assumption on my part). Relating it to something most people here are familiar with, computer networks. Would you want someone to have a list of all of your users, their habits, background information on their family, etc? The passwords could be considered "secret", but the other information isn't. An attacker could definitely use the other information to break into your network. It isn't practical to keep the other information "secret", but you can at least tell people not to make a directory containing all that information and send it to the NY Times. Other good examples of sensitive information are unlisted phone numbers, SSNs, etc. This story is just more media hype. Keith
I understand prices go up, don't necesarily like it but I understand it. $7 or 8 per movie ticket, $3.50 for a drink, $4 for some popcorn and $4 for the little box of m&m's... And don't even think about bringing your own food/drinks. If I remember correctly, I have gone to see *one* movie in the theater in the last 3 years. The biggest reason? The viewing experience. Sure, we've got umpteen gazillion watts of sound coming from almost as many different directions and digital video, etc, etc... But damnit, if half the audience won't shut the hell up, I can't enjoy the movie!! And damned if I'm going to fork out $30-40 for 2 people to sit through a movie we can't enjoy. If there's a movie I want to see, I'll download it or rent it - but I'm not going back to the theater unless they make *major* improvements.
Overclockers everywhere are forming class action lawsuits against all major chip manufacturers because the chips aren't running at the advertised speeds... :)
Someone needs to start a class action lawsuit against lawyers for promoting frivolous class action lawsuits.
If you're going to make it into a metallic sphere, you can't miss out on the oppurtunity of turning it into a Van Der Graaf generator! Have the only computer working inside a 200kV "force field" at the lan party. Of course you'd have to figure out how to attach all the peripherals. Hmm..
Keith
Deleting the files from your hard drive is one thing. Since this is targeted at wireless, I would think it would be embedded in hardware. Talk about a forced upgrade. After a year of owning the acclaimed all in one cell phone, pda, audio player, etc - you must destroy it's firmware because it contains the KT Tech sound codec. Ouch.
I don't think the US government is in the business of saving money, especially in a downturn in the economy. Economists say the government should spend more money when the economy is on a downswing (at least thats what they said when I took economics). Let's say you do convince your management to let you change to Linux in your building/branch/whatever. All the computers are reconfigured for Linux, all the users are retrained on new desktop apps, all the support personnel are retrained to support Linux, the Sysadmins and developers are retrained. All the software is replaced with linux equivilants. Then top level management in the IRS decides everyone will use this brand new app written for the MS platform. Or anything along those lines. Here's one - All IRS computers will be listed in the IRS Active Directory so we stop losing them! :) I know, bad example.