If this is the keystone to his conviction, he could choose to tell the court to go fuck itself and just take the contempt of court charge that would inevitably result, which should be substantially less than whatever you get for smuggling encrypted child pornography across the border.
Its the decision to allow the macro script do other things outside of a word doc that is the problem.
Who cares if accountants have macros that autosum three pages of figures. I just want to punch the idiot who thought that its ok to have a macro alter/save files other than the active file, or connect to outside data sources (e.g. teh intarwebz) without a big freaking' popup asking for a manual confirmation.
What probably happened is some clever punk thought it would be smart to just tie it to the VBScript engine, and let anything happen, rather than developing a special macro language for office.
As I've pointed out before, the reason many organizations use VMWare is because it just works.
Just don't try to uninstall it. I have a box that I had been using since 2002 completely melt down after I uninstalled a copy of VMWare. It required a full nuke and pave to rebuild the OS...
Another take on this is to let a wider sympathetic audience know that there is hacking going on. By giving more people the idea, they are probably insuring that a new wave of attacks on the plaintiffs' internet assets will occur.
By stating this as a plea to cease, they also get to claim that they have no control or involvement in any illegal hacking that is occurring. The can adopt the moral high ground and demonstrate that they are trying to curtail illegal activity being perpetrated by less savory individuals.
"illini1022" *is* his real name. He had hacker parents.
Me, I'm naming my kids 1AAAAAAA and 1AAAAAAB. They will probably be teased and get funny looks throughout life, but they will always be at the front of any line in elementary school. This will ensure that they always get a hot lunch in the cafeteria.
...maybe it's a form of virus protection? You know, virus modifies dlls, OS detects that the dll is not what was installed, and blocks it.
This is just what I would expect to happen if you try to modify a signed.dll. Suddenly, the.dll doesn't match its checksum, so the OS prevents it from doing any damage to the system.
While reading this article (yeah, yeah, I won't do it again), it occurred to me that if Jack Thompson were to be shot into Rod Blagojevich at high velocity, that this would achieve a critical 'ego mass' and cause an massive release of energy that would destroy 2/3 of the solar system.
If only there were a way to harness this power for the good of humanity...
While I was working at MS, I had my desktop machine named 'BillG', and a good friend of mine had his box name 'SteveB'. We got some funny looks from co-workers when the subject came up, but never a single complaint from corp security or the suits. I was tickled that nobody up to that point has thought to do something like that. At one point, I was planning on installing MS-Bob on 'BillG', but I never got around to it. For shame...
...Bill Gates is in my house pointing a gun at me and making me use windows. I am typing this while he is using the rest room. OH GOD HES COMING BACK, AM I THINK HES GOING TO MAKE ME TURN ON OFFICE ASSISTANT...
...of being just are-branded? It isn't a secret that it is just Vista server. MS isn't trying pull a fast one here, pay attention to their business model.
XP -> Home version. Win2k3 -> XP server.
Vista -> Home version. Win7 -> Vista server.
Why is it being released so quickly? Because they have be doing internal testing on the server components of the OS since before Vista was released. Also, they are supposedly stripping down a lot of the unneeded crap in Vista to make it run faster and smoother. How much additional testing do you need if you remove 30% of the code base?
...They attract the crappy writers and keep them busy so they cannot pollute good original works when the Hollywood suits want to do a quick rewrite of a good screenplay.
If you were to create a black hole on earth, that for some reason didn't evaporate almost instantly, then, yes it could fall to the enter of the earth. It wouldn't likely leave any holes though, or even pick up mass. Because the amount of energy we could put into it would be so minuscule that it would probably pass right through atoms without colliding with a electron. Also, it would fall very slowly, more like a slowly drifitng mote of air. Gravity acts proportional to mass and inversely by distance, so something that small wouldn't have much mass to draw to the center of the earth, even at the incredible density of a black hole.
A black hole isn't a particular mass or size, its just a ratio of density. And that number is huge. Really huge. From the wikipedia entry on 'Schwarzschild radius': 'A mass similar to Mount Everest has a Schwarzschild radius smaller than a nanometre.'
We aren't working with large masses at the LHC, but small masses imbued with large amounts of kinetic energy, and as I pointed out (e=mc^2), mass has a huge amount of energy in it. So, loosly put, creating a black hole a nanometer in size might take the equivalent energy as produced by hydrogen bomb THE SIZE OF FREAKIN' EVEREST going off. I felt the need to capitolize that last sentence, because I thought it would look cooler to people starting to get bored reading this.
A hydrogen bomb that detonated that much fuel would ignite the atmosphere, instantly kill half of life on earth with hard radiation, and fragment a good portion of the planet, killing the rest off. So, no, we really don't have to worry much about
But if you really want to fret about it, here s the upside: If we created a Black hole on the earth's surface that managed to 'chain react' with the rest of the earth's mass, it would likely do so in such a rapid fashion, that you wouldn't even know what killed you. You would just get instantly crushed into quantum foam. Beats dying of cancer any day...
Even if you shell out some bucks, their os is still worthless. Case in point:
Go out an grab a copy windows server 2k3, enterprise edition. Sounds like it is just like the ship, right? Tons of phasers, holodecks, and fun toys. It will have everything you need.
Set it up as an application server, and see how many connections they allow. You have to buy a friggen extra license if you want to say set it up to allow more than a couple of people to log on. AND...you have to install a special service somewhere on the network to manage it.
Just think of that: it actually takes writing extra code once you set up the service protocols to limit the number of connections, and make sure that you aren't exceeding the number of connections you have paid for. They paid programmers to limit the number of connections that the OS would allow, to make more money off licenses. If I set up a Linux server, I could open connections (for free) until my RAM exploded.
Even when you try to play the game their way, and buy the biggest, most expensive OS on the shelf, they will still try to fuck you over with an incomplete product.
Go read my old posts. I am generally easy going in regards to MS overall, and I will not advise anyone to buy their operating systems. They are utter garbage.
I read a few of the comments following this story, and they all seem to have a similar theme of having a fairly negative POV about Obama's stand on this issue.
Rather than simply bitch about your spin on this, lets look at why he is doing this. IANAL, but it seems to me that he is holding on to secret information pending the outcome of legal process to determine if it is admissible evidence. This would seem to be prudent, as if it is admitted as evidence, it is no long really secret. Any lawyers out there, please jump if I am getting this wrong.
People have this amazing misunderstanding of black holes generated by Hollywood. If you take the moon, and crush it into a black hole, it will still follow the same orbital path, and have the same effect on the tides as it does currently. It will just occupy a much smaller space. Its event horizon with be incredibly small, and the amount of mass that would be added to annually would be about the same as it gains now through occasional collisions of small objects in space (i.e.,just about 0)
Since they will not have immense mass to apply to the particles, they will have to apply truly immense amounts of energy (E=mc^2). Should they actually achieve a 'black hole', it will have the same amount of gravitational attraction as it did before.
I think I will spend my time worrying about more likely problems, like cholesterol and cancer.
the reason why this needs to be investigated is for Justice. Justice is a simple promise that when someone breaks the law, and attempt will be made to punish them according to the rules laid down by society.
Because he is the president, it is all that much more important that a crime that he might have comitted be investigated and if needed, prosecuted. America was founded on the ideal that all men are equal, that there are no kings that are above the law, and the rules will be applied fairly.
One might suggest that dealing with a potential criminal in the highest office in a just fashion could be our greatest affirmation of that idea.
I saw some of the testing going on on vista at MS. It looked like they moved all their unmanaged system code to managed code, and then loaded it in the GAC to speed up performance. I suspect that this is the reason that vista's memory footprint being so much larger that XP. The question I have, is why are they loading everything in managed code? Sure, you get some more stability but these are the low level assemblies that we are talking about.
Liberal bias? I suppose you could call it that, although I find that what most conservatives call a 'liberal bias', translates into 'biased toward honesty'. They seem to have problems with stories that report facts that invalidate their worldview.
In the specific case of Obama, OF COURSE THERE IS A BIAS. Republicans are pretty unpopular these days. When republicans are reviled, it stands to reason that the dems are going to get better press.
I suspect that Obama is shooting (haha) for laws that are somewhat akin to a motto that I came up with:
"Private weapons should be legal but regulated to a degree proportional to their utility and destructiveness."
That adopts a libertarian stand of anything should be legal provided that it does not harm other's rights, and yet recognises that there is an inherent risk regardless of noble intent.
This is an easy test: What is the risk to the population as a whole if it is intentionally or accidentally misused? A baseball bat is much less likely to kill or injure than say a hand grenade if misused. A baseball bat can be used for constructive purposes, while a hand grenade is pretty much only useful if you want to hurl small pieces of metal in random directions at high velocity.
Ergo, a grenade should have a much higher level of regulation than a baseball bat.
I think its a fair request to have more dangerous weapons regulated. The bill of rights wasn't written to permit you to needlessly endanger your fellow citicens while excercising your own rights. Obama's stand seems to reflect this idea.
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If this is the keystone to his conviction, he could choose to tell the court to go fuck itself and just take the contempt of court charge that would inevitably result, which should be substantially less than whatever you get for smuggling encrypted child pornography across the border.
When asked at the border what that huge suspicious file is on your laptop, do you answer..."
"I don't know, its a encryption contest. First person to decrypt the file gets $10,000."
"Its a raw rendered animation. I am preparing my portfolio to send to Pixar."
"Its a wadfile I'm assembling for an open source game file."
"It's a dump of an old VAX proprietary database that my boss wants me to port to SQL."
"Its a gig of encrypted kiddie pr0n."
Think carefully now...
Its the decision to allow the macro script do other things outside of a word doc that is the problem.
Who cares if accountants have macros that autosum three pages of figures. I just want to punch the idiot who thought that its ok to have a macro alter/save files other than the active file, or connect to outside data sources (e.g. teh intarwebz) without a big freaking' popup asking for a manual confirmation.
What probably happened is some clever punk thought it would be smart to just tie it to the VBScript engine, and let anything happen, rather than developing a special macro language for office.
As I've pointed out before, the reason many organizations use VMWare is because it just works.
Just don't try to uninstall it. I have a box that I had been using since 2002 completely melt down after I uninstalled a copy of VMWare. It required a full nuke and pave to rebuild the OS...
Another take on this is to let a wider sympathetic audience know that there is hacking going on. By giving more people the idea, they are probably insuring that a new wave of attacks on the plaintiffs' internet assets will occur.
By stating this as a plea to cease, they also get to claim that they have no control or involvement in any illegal hacking that is occurring. The can adopt the moral high ground and demonstrate that they are trying to curtail illegal activity being perpetrated by less savory individuals.
Well played, sir. Well played.
So, I should get my cat drunk before getting it to click on the EULA?
It might get me out of the EULA, but then PETA will be all over my ass.
"illini1022" *is* his real name. He had hacker parents.
Me, I'm naming my kids 1AAAAAAA and 1AAAAAAB. They will probably be teased and get funny looks throughout life, but they will always be at the front of any line in elementary school. This will ensure that they always get a hot lunch in the cafeteria.
...maybe it's a form of virus protection? You know, virus modifies dlls, OS detects that the dll is not what was installed, and blocks it.
.dll. Suddenly, the .dll doesn't match its checksum, so the OS prevents it from doing any damage to the system.
This is just what I would expect to happen if you try to modify a signed
While reading this article (yeah, yeah, I won't do it again), it occurred to me that if Jack Thompson were to be shot into Rod Blagojevich at high velocity, that this would achieve a critical 'ego mass' and cause an massive release of energy that would destroy 2/3 of the solar system.
If only there were a way to harness this power for the good of humanity...
While I was working at MS, I had my desktop machine named 'BillG', and a good friend of mine had his box name 'SteveB'. We got some funny looks from co-workers when the subject came up, but never a single complaint from corp security or the suits. I was tickled that nobody up to that point has thought to do something like that. At one point, I was planning on installing MS-Bob on 'BillG', but I never got around to it. For shame...
...Bill Gates is in my house pointing a gun at me and making me use windows. I am typing this while he is using the rest room. OH GOD HES COMING BACK, AM I THINK HES GOING TO MAKE ME TURN ON OFFICE ASSISTANT...
...of being just are-branded? It isn't a secret that it is just Vista server. MS isn't trying pull a fast one here, pay attention to their business model.
XP -> Home version. Win2k3 -> XP server. Vista -> Home version. Win7 -> Vista server.
Why is it being released so quickly? Because they have be doing internal testing on the server components of the OS since before Vista was released. Also, they are supposedly stripping down a lot of the unneeded crap in Vista to make it run faster and smoother. How much additional testing do you need if you remove 30% of the code base?
...They attract the crappy writers and keep them busy so they cannot pollute good original works when the Hollywood suits want to do a quick rewrite of a good screenplay.
They are a 'crappy writer' flypaper...
If you were to create a black hole on earth, that for some reason didn't evaporate almost instantly, then, yes it could fall to the enter of the earth. It wouldn't likely leave any holes though, or even pick up mass. Because the amount of energy we could put into it would be so minuscule that it would probably pass right through atoms without colliding with a electron. Also, it would fall very slowly, more like a slowly drifitng mote of air. Gravity acts proportional to mass and inversely by distance, so something that small wouldn't have much mass to draw to the center of the earth, even at the incredible density of a black hole.
A black hole isn't a particular mass or size, its just a ratio of density. And that number is huge. Really huge. From the wikipedia entry on 'Schwarzschild radius': 'A mass similar to Mount Everest has a Schwarzschild radius smaller than a nanometre.'
We aren't working with large masses at the LHC, but small masses imbued with large amounts of kinetic energy, and as I pointed out (e=mc^2), mass has a huge amount of energy in it. So, loosly put, creating a black hole a nanometer in size might take the equivalent energy as produced by hydrogen bomb THE SIZE OF FREAKIN' EVEREST going off. I felt the need to capitolize that last sentence, because I thought it would look cooler to people starting to get bored reading this.
A hydrogen bomb that detonated that much fuel would ignite the atmosphere, instantly kill half of life on earth with hard radiation, and fragment a good portion of the planet, killing the rest off. So, no, we really don't have to worry much about
But if you really want to fret about it, here s the upside: If we created a Black hole on the earth's surface that managed to 'chain react' with the rest of the earth's mass, it would likely do so in such a rapid fashion, that you wouldn't even know what killed you. You would just get instantly crushed into quantum foam. Beats dying of cancer any day...
Even if you shell out some bucks, their os is still worthless. Case in point:
Go out an grab a copy windows server 2k3, enterprise edition. Sounds like it is just like the ship, right? Tons of phasers, holodecks, and fun toys. It will have everything you need.
Set it up as an application server, and see how many connections they allow. You have to buy a friggen extra license if you want to say set it up to allow more than a couple of people to log on. AND...you have to install a special service somewhere on the network to manage it.
Just think of that: it actually takes writing extra code once you set up the service protocols to limit the number of connections, and make sure that you aren't exceeding the number of connections you have paid for. They paid programmers to limit the number of connections that the OS would allow, to make more money off licenses. If I set up a Linux server, I could open connections (for free) until my RAM exploded.
Even when you try to play the game their way, and buy the biggest, most expensive OS on the shelf, they will still try to fuck you over with an incomplete product.
Go read my old posts. I am generally easy going in regards to MS overall, and I will not advise anyone to buy their operating systems. They are utter garbage.
...Is that you, Ted?
I read a few of the comments following this story, and they all seem to have a similar theme of having a fairly negative POV about Obama's stand on this issue.
Rather than simply bitch about your spin on this, lets look at why he is doing this. IANAL, but it seems to me that he is holding on to secret information pending the outcome of legal process to determine if it is admissible evidence. This would seem to be prudent, as if it is admitted as evidence, it is no long really secret. Any lawyers out there, please jump if I am getting this wrong.
People have this amazing misunderstanding of black holes generated by Hollywood. If you take the moon, and crush it into a black hole, it will still follow the same orbital path, and have the same effect on the tides as it does currently. It will just occupy a much smaller space. Its event horizon with be incredibly small, and the amount of mass that would be added to annually would be about the same as it gains now through occasional collisions of small objects in space (i.e.,just about 0)
Since they will not have immense mass to apply to the particles, they will have to apply truly immense amounts of energy (E=mc^2). Should they actually achieve a 'black hole', it will have the same amount of gravitational attraction as it did before.
I think I will spend my time worrying about more likely problems, like cholesterol and cancer.
the reason why this needs to be investigated is for Justice. Justice is a simple promise that when someone breaks the law, and attempt will be made to punish them according to the rules laid down by society.
Because he is the president, it is all that much more important that a crime that he might have comitted be investigated and if needed, prosecuted. America was founded on the ideal that all men are equal, that there are no kings that are above the law, and the rules will be applied fairly.
One might suggest that dealing with a potential criminal in the highest office in a just fashion could be our greatest affirmation of that idea.
Funny, I read it as:
doomsday turbulent danger cynicism world-ending disasters apocalyptic
opening of Quantum of Solace on Friday catastrophic fear doomsday extinction-bringing
I saw some of the testing going on on vista at MS. It looked like they moved all their unmanaged system code to managed code, and then loaded it in the GAC to speed up performance. I suspect that this is the reason that vista's memory footprint being so much larger that XP. The question I have, is why are they loading everything in managed code? Sure, you get some more stability but these are the low level assemblies that we are talking about.
Liberal bias? I suppose you could call it that, although I find that what most conservatives call a 'liberal bias', translates into 'biased toward honesty'. They seem to have problems with stories that report facts that invalidate their worldview. In the specific case of Obama, OF COURSE THERE IS A BIAS. Republicans are pretty unpopular these days. When republicans are reviled, it stands to reason that the dems are going to get better press.
I suspect that Obama is shooting (haha) for laws that are somewhat akin to a motto that I came up with:
"Private weapons should be legal but regulated to a degree proportional to their utility and destructiveness."
That adopts a libertarian stand of anything should be legal provided that it does not harm other's rights, and yet recognises that there is an inherent risk regardless of noble intent.
This is an easy test: What is the risk to the population as a whole if it is intentionally or accidentally misused? A baseball bat is much less likely to kill or injure than say a hand grenade if misused. A baseball bat can be used for constructive purposes, while a hand grenade is pretty much only useful if you want to hurl small pieces of metal in random directions at high velocity. Ergo, a grenade should have a much higher level of regulation than a baseball bat.
I think its a fair request to have more dangerous weapons regulated. The bill of rights wasn't written to permit you to needlessly endanger your fellow citicens while excercising your own rights. Obama's stand seems to reflect this idea.
Personally, I'm waiting for the cypher built on Onefish, Twofish, Redfish, and Bluefish.
I do not like it encrypting my stocks,
I do not like it securing my box,
I do not like it, sam-I-am.
Wikipedia: Where persistent opinions are correct opinions.
There, fixed that for you
Don't bother, the OP will just revert it...