Wow, you take a hypothetical scenario meant to make a point and then without the slightest sense of irony draw in a sex scandal into a discussion about how the war has been waged to show how conservatives try and muddy the waters
No, I show how the posters point is totally irrelevant and illustrates how many Republicans would rather just dig up issues long past than address real problems that exist right now. Clue, meet less.
To play devil's advocate here, if Clinton had went to war in Afganistan in 1999...
Nice distraction. It's interesting that whenever someone points out something undeniably true about the Bush administration or a Republican in congress (Foley), Republicans have to try to distract the issue by pulling out something Clinton did or didn't do (who last I checked hasn't been in office for almost 6 years), or in the case of Foley some long forgotten democratic. Hey, I hear you could dig up former president James Buchanan for a few poundings. He was a Democrat and failed to prevent the civil war. (Carefull when you take your licks though, his bones are probbably mostly rotted).
Sadly, this doesn't change the fact that the Bush administration is completely incompetent, and the Republicans covered for Foley's paige behaviour for years. Oh yah, that's right, we were talking about the Iraq war in relation to the war on terror, weren't we?
Does anyone think that had someone else been in charge they would have brought western style democracy to Iraq?
No, but there's a good chance that Iraq would at least be secure. You can't really have democracy in the middle of a damn war where civilians are being killed every day (somewhere around 50,000 total so far). The Bush administration REALLY screwed up the war in the first year, and hasn't done much to of anything to fix things since. There was an excellent Frontline documentary called "The Lost Year in Iraq" that aired not long ago. It's currently available for online viewing. Militaries aren't designed for nation building. they are designed to kill thus the crux of the entire problem.
Man, if only it were that easy. Killing people is really really easy. If all you had to do to win in Iraq was kill some people, we'd have won long ago. The job of the military is to retain, or take control of an area, not kill people. Obviously that's partially achieved through killing people, but that's not the goal at all. So far the military hasn't been able to achieve the goal of controlling the region. There's still roadside bombs going off, if not a civil war going on on a daily basis. Shit, it'd be wonderfull if we actually GOT to the "nation building" stage and the military could withdraw, but we're nowhere near that stage now.
Assuming for the moment that the email was stored on the plaintiffs HD (it isn't), then it's the defendants job to find any evidence that still exists on the HD. It's true that there will likely not be anything on it that's relevant to the case, but the defendant should have a right to determine that.
There is no such thing as an uninformed vote. You cannot be TOTALLY ignorant. You will know something.
Pure nonsense. You're trying to tell me I'm supposed to know something about the local school board election which had almost no media coverage, or the park board election, or the "soil and water conservation" election? They don't list incumbants, they don't have party affiliations, it's hard to even FIND information on these races even if you look. The only thing I know about these people is the name. Unless they decided to change their name to something insane like "Vlad the Impaler", it means nothing.
So I don't vote in those races because I know zip about them.
Oh, and if you think the name means something, a number of years ago there was a woman with no qualifications, now law education, etc running for a Judge position that had the same name as local celebrity. A lot of people voted for her because they thought it was the local celebrity. She almost won.
Incorrect. Both deffinitions are as accurate today as they ever were since both are still part of accepted use.
I didn't say that the old-school definition of hacker was incorrect, only that 99% of the populace only knows the computer breakin definition. There is no 'fight' here, it's just the usage functions in the English language.
Obviously you're wrong, since there's so many people upset by the computer breakin definition and actively resist it. My point is that it's useless to try to change the definition when the battle is already lost. You might as well be pissed off that for the vast majority of people would say "vandal" no longer refers to the east germanic tribe, but refers to people destoying property. Find a new language to police, or learn the rules in this one
Who's policing this language? I'm merely stating the reality that the only "rules" of a language are the ones that people agree on. If 99 out of 100 people think hacker means person who breaks into computers, you're only going to be confusing and sound like a putz when you try to claim otherwise. Sure there are specialized environments where hacker can mean the old-school definition, just like there are specialized environments where vandal can mean the east germanic tribe but this is mainstream media article, not that specialized environment.
Then you can take your printout to your boss at work and show him you voted the way he told you to so he won't fire you. Threw your printout away? Fired. Voted wrong? Fired.
That's the nightmare that people always talk about, but it's not very realistic. I bet what you'd see is businesses offering discounts on things if you give them a reciept says you voted the right way. "Show us your receipt that you voted for Bob Smith, and get a 10% discount for a whole year!!". Or maybe you'd see promotions or raises for people that voted the right way. Or you'd see people just selling votes (which I'd argue the promotional discount is just a form of).
All are pretty horrible, unless of course you're the boss or have a lot of money to throw around.
Personally, I'd like to see a touch-screen voting system that prints a completed ballot after the user has made their selection and that the voter then looks at to verify, and then walks over to a reader which reads the ballot and records the result.
That's actually exactly what we have in MN, though I think there's only one such machine per polling place. The ballots are all paper and you fill in circles next to your candidate (we've had this voting system for probbably 20 years). You then put the ballot into an electronic counter. Just this year they've added a machine just like you described that fills in the circles on the ballot from your choices on a touchscreen. I used one during the primary, but only because I asked the election judges about them. They seemed pleased someone was trying it out.
There's a few problems of course. The machines are horribly slow in initially loading, and eventually printing the ballot. I think there's also only one per polling place. Currently the system is really only usefull for blind or handicapped voters.
Also there's no concept of the printers counting votes. I'm not certain that's really a great idea anyway since you might introduce more errors in the system.
Word meanings change, and can have multiple meanings. Sorry if you've some personal attatchment to those 6 letters arranged in a certain, but the fight was over long ago. Find a new word for what you're talking about, because hacker now means someone who breaks into computers. You can't fight what 99% of the population accepts as the definition, no matter what some wikipedia entry says.
Obviously the poster lives in one of the 13 countries. I managed to get ahold of the uncensored version, posted below.
My fellow slashdotters, this article couldn't be more right! The censorship in China is known by everyone, and is largely effective. It's the absolute truth. Freedom and liberty are severly curtailed in China, anyone that speaks out against the government is rounded up and never heard from again. Sorry, I must go now. It took a bit of doing to get past the firewall to even read the slashdot article, but surely they'll plug the hole soon enough.
Many African nations aren't using what they've got
on
AIDS Can Fight AIDS
·
· Score: 1
A lot of the blame on the spread of AIDS to enormous numbers (in some countries something like 40% of the populace) can be put squarely on the African governments. The South African President is an HIV denier (he think's it's caused by poverty). South Africa has a prevalence of HIV of 21% Other countries like Swaziland didn't even want to try anything like education, or even talk about the disease with their people. They now have an estimated prevalance of HIV of 39%. Other countries like Uganda did use education programs and talked about using condoms. They have a prevalance of 4%.
What you've failed to realize is that the flaw isn't so much that they decided to not do a rollover, it's that the ground computers do a rollover, and the shuttle computers don't.
No, but then neither is Stern (of the Stern Report) a scientist either (unless you count Economics as a science).
I've no idea what The Stern Report is. Viscount Monckton may not be a scientist, but he is considered to be one of the strongest minds in Britain.
Well, I guess I don't understand how having a strong mind instantly qualifies you to argue on any topic. Smart people can be truly idiotic on a topic they know little, or nothing about. I think I'll stick with climate scientists over "smart guys".
So, you're saying if we wholesale give in to "science this, buy into to some analysis that says it's all over in 30 or 40 years, radically restructure our society and make sweeping changing costing billions(if not trillions) of dollars and twenty years down the road the scientific community says, "Oops, we were wrong," that's OK?
You seriously think billions, even trillions of dollars is a lot of money? If that's all it costs, it's nothing. Also, who's talking about radically restructuring our society? Radical restructuring is more like the changing role of woman in the West, or the advent of the birth control pill, not building more nuclear plants, making more efficient use of energy, etc.
Also, it's not as if we don't know that fossil fuels are going to run out, so we know we need to use alternate energy sources anyway. Sure we've got a LOT of coal, but we also know that the particle emissions are terrible for our health. We know we have to switch to alternative energy, it's not just a matter of global warming. So on the off chance that global warming is wrong (or it's not influenced by human release of CO2), it won't much matter since we'll have to switch energy sources anyway. What am I missing here?
Maybe the entire point I was trying to make. Science doesn't come up with absolute answers. You can ALWAYS be wrong on some scale in science. If you grasp onto the tiniest bit of skepticism on anything you'd never actually do anything. In 1969 how did we know for certain we weren't wrong about how gravity works, and thus the billions of dollars spent on the moon mission were all for nothing? There was some worry that the astronauts would sink into the ground like quicksand because the moon dust wasn't solid enough. Science is always a process of re-examination. How do you ever know the absolute truth?
A) There is not a complete consensus, and there is potential for abuse of science on both sides of the fence.
Well, very rarely is there complete concensus in science. Atomic theory only achieved complete concensus after a paper was published by Einstein in 1905 that could explain it using the motion of molecules. Hell, we weren't able to directly observe individual atoms until the latter part of the 20th century.
The thing is, this isn't just a nice theory that doesn't really matter if it's true or not. If there's a good chance that it's true we should be addressing it now, not in another 100 years when we fully understand everything about global warming. In a somewhat dangerous time when it seems like the average joe is willing to equate science with religion, the "entire scientific community" being completely wrong about something could be very damaging indeed.
Damaging to what? Unlike religion, it's OK for science to be wrong. It's happened time and time again and it'll happen again. Scientists were wrong about the Luminiferous aether (as proven by Michelson-Morley), they were wrong about continental drift not being real, and a host of other things. Science isn't about always being right, or even exploring every single possible explanation (there really are probbably an infinite amount of theories for any observation) it's about making the best theory from the evidence you have at the time.
The solution is clearly survey papers written in an understandable manner by trusted sources, whether it's a "Does Global Warming Exist?" article in National Geographic, or a bit in USA Today. Which brings us to the survey article at hand
That's funny. I don't see any summary of opinions by climatoligsts. I see a few mentions of scientists, but largely an opinion piece constructed by a journalist. If this had actually quoted people in the field that were refuting global warming, that'd be a bit different. But this article is basically a journalist trying to play climate scientist. Does Mr. Monckton have any training in climatology? Does he have any training in science at all even? Not that I can tell.
I'm no climate scientist, but I find it strange that the article mentions UN 36 times, as if the UN is a peer reviewed journal or scientist. The article reads more like a political speech than a critique of a scientific model. Why else would he direct his attack against the UN?
There's very few people here that are climate scientists and can have a real understanding of what this guy is talking about beyond what he claims. I do find it curious that this argument against global warming is coming from a journalist, and not a reputable climate scientist. We all rely on the a writers reputation and ability to interpret of data in things we don't understand. I guess I don't understand why Mr. Monckton has any credibility in this area, and why anyone should seriously consider what he has to say.
The wikipedia article is just a bit less emotionally charged and gives a different account of the method used:
The killing of the animals used to be done by slitting their throats which resulted in a long and painful death for the dolphin, but the Japanese government banned this method and now dolphins may officially only be killed by driving a metal pin into the neck of the dolphin, which causes them to die within seconds.
Make up your own mind, but don't rely on one source for your information (especially an animal rights group).
The first, as you said is that the computer or the internet connection is what these people are after. They don't understand that there's value (however small) in an internet connection.
The other thing that people don't understand is the automated nature of the attacks. People are used to thinking of thieves picking and choosing who they steal from with some discretion. They'd probbably think "Why would someone want MY computer? It's just a chincy $500 Walmart special, and I only have the cheapest DSL connection". They don't understand that an automated attacker doesn't care about that, he just wants the maximum number of machines possible. And with an attack spread through a virus, he can't even control that anyway.
I'm wondering if you actually know what you're talking about, of if you're just some pedantic idiot attempting to assert he's smarter in something to his parents. Example:...just simple measures like logging off of the PC when it's not in use.
Sadly, I think you're right. There's a big collection of kids out there that think PCs are just one big interface, and think they're experts because they know more than mom and dad (who know nothing). They get big egos when Mom and Dad ask THEM for help on something, so they assume they're some kind of genius. Of course they have little knowledge of what actually goes on under the hood.
As I said in another post, measuring your knowledge by how much you know compared to people who know nothing is always a bad idea. A much better approach is to measure your knowledge based on how much you don't understand. Then you at least won't make foolish statements like telling people that the computer is more secure when they've logged off it (and not even turned off).
That's exactly what I worry about with them. Leaving it logged in like they do leaves it open to exploits. And I'm not talking about logging out every time you go to the bathroom or eat dinner - They leave it logged in literally all the time and leave it on 24/7. It's just asking for trouble.
Please explain why being logged on makes them "open to exploits"?
There's really very little extra running on the computer that makes the computer more vulnerable. The only thing "bad" about being logged in even as administrator is someone can walk up to the computer and do whatever they like with it. That's generally not a problem in a household.
Being logged in isn't magical. The same services are generally running whether you're logged in or not. The "security hole" comes when someone sits down and starts browsing the web with an unpatched browser, downloads trojans and viruses from email, etc.
You clearly need to learn more yourself about security before you go lecturing other people about it. You obviously have a limited knowledge of it, and think you're an "expert" because you know more than anyone in your family. That's generally a bad way to gauge your knowledge of any topic.
You seem to think that your problem is that your parents aren't technical enough to understand the threat. Your solution is to get them up to a similiar level of expertise that you're at. That's simply foolish.
The problem is you aren't communicating effectively, or your parents aren't willing to listen. I don't need to understand the reasons WHY I should change my oil in my car every 3-6 months to do it. I only need to trust that if I don't, my car will suffer. Mechanics don't give out chemical assays of oil, results of wear tests, or the breakdown of acid-inhibitors etc to convince people to change oil, they rely on communication and reputation. "Bill's a good mechanic, he always knows what's wrong with my car. If he says to change my oil every 3 months, he's probbably right". The world is too complex to try to learn EVERYTHING.
Maybe your problem is you don't really understand security yourself, so you can't explain it properly. Telling people to log off their own computer in their own household really adds no security from viruses, worms, etc. If you try to make this argument to your parents, you're just going to sound like you're (as another poster put it) "batshit insane". This destroys any credibility you have, and any sane advice like keeping up on updates, installing hardware firewalls, etc goes out the window.
So, you need to work on your communication skills, not try to get your parents to have the same amount of knowledge you do.
Listen, if you really can't trust your family members to the totally boring, non-sensitive information available on the average adults computer, you've got a lot more problems than security. Exactly what do you think you're protecting when you tell them to log off the PC when not in use?
I never log off my own computer in my home. Why? Because I trust the people I live with, and I really don't have anything on the PC that's worth protecting anyway.
Your parents are right. Why should they log off? Why should they not be able to login AT THE CONSOLE without a password? If anyone needs educating on basic security and vulnerability, it's you. EVERYONE is willing to sacrifice security for convienence. That's actually a basic guiding principle of security. There's always a tradeoff between access and security. Often times access means convienence.
The thing you need to protect from is your computer being compromised from the outside by someone intent on using it for a botnet. That's really the only value that your PC has outside of physically stealing it. That means using anti-virus software, getting email filtered for viruses, keeping up on windows updates, using firefox instead of IE, and implenting WPA security . None of those things really interfere with anyones usage of the computer, so they shouldn't have any objections.
The information on how to build an atomic bomb is already on the web.
Well, the very basic knowledge, gun method, explosive lensing, etc is well known to anyone that's read the Wikipedia entry. Detailed instructions on how to construct a nuclear trigger and fire all the charges at exactly the right time aren't. It's not a big deal in the sense that the knowledge isn't particularly hard to get. It's just kind of embarrassing for the Bush administration to have published this information themselves. Basically they look like a bunch of ass-hats and are now trying to blame the NYT for telling people about the administrations blunder.
How (precisely) does someone get to the point of knowing enough about developing nukes that his notes are classified as sensitive, without actually trying to build those nukes himself?
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, you take a hypothetical scenario meant to make a point and then without the slightest sense of irony draw in a sex scandal into a discussion about how the war has been waged to show how conservatives try and muddy the waters
No, I show how the posters point is totally irrelevant and illustrates how many Republicans would rather just dig up issues long past than address real problems that exist right now. Clue, meet less.
To play devil's advocate here, if Clinton had went to war in Afganistan in 1999...
Nice distraction. It's interesting that whenever someone points out something undeniably true about the Bush administration or a Republican in congress (Foley), Republicans have to try to distract the issue by pulling out something Clinton did or didn't do (who last I checked hasn't been in office for almost 6 years), or in the case of Foley some long forgotten democratic. Hey, I hear you could dig up former president James Buchanan for a few poundings. He was a Democrat and failed to prevent the civil war. (Carefull when you take your licks though, his bones are probbably mostly rotted).
Sadly, this doesn't change the fact that the Bush administration is completely incompetent, and the Republicans covered for Foley's paige behaviour for years. Oh yah, that's right, we were talking about the Iraq war in relation to the war on terror, weren't we?
Does anyone think that had someone else been in charge they would have brought western style democracy to Iraq?
No, but there's a good chance that Iraq would at least be secure. You can't really have democracy in the middle of a damn war where civilians are being killed every day (somewhere around 50,000 total so far). The Bush administration REALLY screwed up the war in the first year, and hasn't done much to of anything to fix things since. There was an excellent Frontline documentary called "The Lost Year in Iraq" that aired not long ago. It's currently available for online viewing.
Militaries aren't designed for nation building. they are designed to kill thus the crux of the entire problem.
Man, if only it were that easy. Killing people is really really easy. If all you had to do to win in Iraq was kill some people, we'd have won long ago. The job of the military is to retain, or take control of an area, not kill people. Obviously that's partially achieved through killing people, but that's not the goal at all. So far the military hasn't been able to achieve the goal of controlling the region. There's still roadside bombs going off, if not a civil war going on on a daily basis. Shit, it'd be wonderfull if we actually GOT to the "nation building" stage and the military could withdraw, but we're nowhere near that stage now.
Assuming for the moment that the email was stored on the plaintiffs HD (it isn't), then it's the defendants job to find any evidence that still exists on the HD. It's true that there will likely not be anything on it that's relevant to the case, but the defendant should have a right to determine that.
There is no such thing as an uninformed vote. You cannot be TOTALLY ignorant. You will know something.
Pure nonsense. You're trying to tell me I'm supposed to know something about the local school board election which had almost no media coverage, or the park board election, or the "soil and water conservation" election? They don't list incumbants, they don't have party affiliations, it's hard to even FIND information on these races even if you look. The only thing I know about these people is the name. Unless they decided to change their name to something insane like "Vlad the Impaler", it means nothing.
So I don't vote in those races because I know zip about them.
Oh, and if you think the name means something, a number of years ago there was a woman with no qualifications, now law education, etc running for a Judge position that had the same name as local celebrity. A lot of people voted for her because they thought it was the local celebrity. She almost won.
Incorrect. Both deffinitions are as accurate today as they ever were since both are still part of accepted use.
I didn't say that the old-school definition of hacker was incorrect, only that 99% of the populace only knows the computer breakin definition.
There is no 'fight' here, it's just the usage functions in the English language.
Obviously you're wrong, since there's so many people upset by the computer breakin definition and actively resist it. My point is that it's useless to try to change the definition when the battle is already lost. You might as well be pissed off that for the vast majority of people would say "vandal" no longer refers to the east germanic tribe, but refers to people destoying property.
Find a new language to police, or learn the rules in this one
Who's policing this language? I'm merely stating the reality that the only "rules" of a language are the ones that people agree on. If 99 out of 100 people think hacker means person who breaks into computers, you're only going to be confusing and sound like a putz when you try to claim otherwise. Sure there are specialized environments where hacker can mean the old-school definition, just like there are specialized environments where vandal can mean the east germanic tribe but this is mainstream media article, not that specialized environment.
Then you can take your printout to your boss at work and show him you voted the way he told you to so he won't fire you. Threw your printout away? Fired. Voted wrong? Fired.
That's the nightmare that people always talk about, but it's not very realistic. I bet what you'd see is businesses offering discounts on things if you give them a reciept says you voted the right way. "Show us your receipt that you voted for Bob Smith, and get a 10% discount for a whole year!!". Or maybe you'd see promotions or raises for people that voted the right way. Or you'd see people just selling votes (which I'd argue the promotional discount is just a form of).
All are pretty horrible, unless of course you're the boss or have a lot of money to throw around.
Personally, I'd like to see a touch-screen voting system that prints a completed ballot after the user has made their selection and that the voter then looks at to verify, and then walks over to a reader which reads the ballot and records the result.
That's actually exactly what we have in MN, though I think there's only one such machine per polling place. The ballots are all paper and you fill in circles next to your candidate (we've had this voting system for probbably 20 years). You then put the ballot into an electronic counter. Just this year they've added a machine just like you described that fills in the circles on the ballot from your choices on a touchscreen. I used one during the primary, but only because I asked the election judges about them. They seemed pleased someone was trying it out.
There's a few problems of course. The machines are horribly slow in initially loading, and eventually printing the ballot. I think there's also only one per polling place. Currently the system is really only usefull for blind or handicapped voters.
Also there's no concept of the printers counting votes. I'm not certain that's really a great idea anyway since you might introduce more errors in the system.
Word meanings change, and can have multiple meanings. Sorry if you've some personal attatchment to those 6 letters arranged in a certain, but the fight was over long ago. Find a new word for what you're talking about, because hacker now means someone who breaks into computers. You can't fight what 99% of the population accepts as the definition, no matter what some wikipedia entry says.
Obviously the poster lives in one of the 13 countries. I managed to get ahold of the uncensored version, posted below.
My fellow slashdotters, this article couldn't be more right! The censorship in China is known by everyone, and is largely effective. It's the absolute truth. Freedom and liberty are severly curtailed in China, anyone that speaks out against the government is rounded up and never heard from again. Sorry, I must go now. It took a bit of doing to get past the firewall to even read the slashdot article, but surely they'll plug the hole soon enough.
A lot of the blame on the spread of AIDS to enormous numbers (in some countries something like 40% of the populace) can be put squarely on the African governments. The South African President is an HIV denier (he think's it's caused by poverty). South Africa has a prevalence of HIV of 21% Other countries like Swaziland didn't even want to try anything like education, or even talk about the disease with their people. They now have an estimated prevalance of HIV of 39%. Other countries like Uganda did use education programs and talked about using condoms. They have a prevalance of 4%.
What you've failed to realize is that the flaw isn't so much that they decided to not
do a rollover, it's that the ground computers do a rollover, and the shuttle computers don't.
No, but then neither is Stern (of the Stern Report) a scientist either (unless you count Economics as a science).
I've no idea what The Stern Report is.
Viscount Monckton may not be a scientist, but he is considered to be one of the strongest minds in Britain.
Well, I guess I don't understand how having a strong mind instantly qualifies you to argue on any topic. Smart people can be truly idiotic on a topic they know little, or nothing about. I think I'll stick with climate scientists over "smart guys".
So, you're saying if we wholesale give in to "science this, buy into to some analysis that says it's all over in 30 or 40 years, radically restructure our society and make sweeping changing costing billions(if not trillions) of dollars and twenty years down the road the scientific community says, "Oops, we were wrong," that's OK?
You seriously think billions, even trillions of dollars is a lot of money? If that's all it costs, it's nothing. Also, who's talking about radically restructuring our society? Radical restructuring is more like the changing role of woman in the West, or the advent of the birth control pill, not building more nuclear plants, making more efficient use of energy, etc.
Also, it's not as if we don't know that fossil fuels are going to run out, so we know we need to use alternate energy sources anyway. Sure we've got a LOT of coal, but we also know that the particle emissions are terrible for our health. We know we have to switch to alternative energy, it's not just a matter of global warming. So on the off chance that global warming is wrong (or it's not influenced by human release of CO2), it won't much matter since we'll have to switch energy sources anyway.
What am I missing here?
Maybe the entire point I was trying to make. Science doesn't come up with absolute answers. You can ALWAYS be wrong on some scale in science. If you grasp onto the tiniest bit of skepticism on anything you'd never actually do anything. In 1969 how did we know for certain we weren't wrong about how gravity works, and thus the billions of dollars spent on the moon mission were all for nothing? There was some worry that the astronauts would sink into the ground like quicksand because the moon dust wasn't solid enough. Science is always a process of re-examination. How do you ever know the absolute truth?
A) There is not a complete consensus, and there is potential for abuse of science on both sides of the fence.
Well, very rarely is there complete concensus in science. Atomic theory only achieved complete concensus after a paper was published by Einstein in 1905 that could explain it using the motion of molecules. Hell, we weren't able to directly observe individual atoms until the latter part of the 20th century.
The thing is, this isn't just a nice theory that doesn't really matter if it's true or not. If there's a good chance that it's true we should be addressing it now, not in another 100 years when we fully understand everything about global warming.
In a somewhat dangerous time when it seems like the average joe is willing to equate science with religion, the "entire scientific community" being completely wrong about something could be very damaging indeed.
Damaging to what? Unlike religion, it's OK for science to be wrong. It's happened time and time again and it'll happen again. Scientists were wrong about the Luminiferous aether (as proven by Michelson-Morley), they were wrong about continental drift not being real, and a host of other things. Science isn't about always being right, or even exploring every single possible explanation (there really are probbably an infinite amount of theories for any observation) it's about making the best theory from the evidence you have at the time.
The solution is clearly survey papers written in an understandable manner by trusted sources, whether it's a "Does Global Warming Exist?" article in National Geographic, or a bit in USA Today. Which brings us to the survey article at hand
That's funny. I don't see any summary of opinions by climatoligsts. I see a few mentions of scientists, but largely an opinion piece constructed by a journalist. If this had actually quoted people in the field that were refuting global warming, that'd be a bit different. But this article is basically a journalist trying to play climate scientist. Does Mr. Monckton have any training in climatology? Does he have any training in science at all even? Not that I can tell.
I'm no climate scientist, but I find it strange that the article mentions UN 36 times, as if the UN is a peer reviewed journal or scientist. The article reads more like a political speech than a critique of a scientific model. Why else would he direct his attack against the UN?
There's very few people here that are climate scientists and can have a real understanding of what this guy is talking about beyond what he claims. I do find it curious that this argument against global warming is coming from a journalist, and not a reputable climate scientist. We all rely on the a writers reputation and ability to interpret of data in things we don't understand. I guess I don't understand why Mr. Monckton has any credibility in this area, and why anyone should seriously consider what he has to say.
Make up your own mind, but don't rely on one source for your information (especially an animal rights group).
The first, as you said is that the computer or the internet connection is what these people are after. They don't understand that there's value (however small) in an internet connection.
The other thing that people don't understand is the automated nature of the attacks. People are used to thinking of thieves picking and choosing who they steal from with some discretion. They'd probbably think "Why would someone want MY computer? It's just a chincy $500 Walmart special, and I only have the cheapest DSL connection". They don't understand that an automated attacker doesn't care about that, he just wants the maximum number of machines possible. And with an attack spread through a virus, he can't even control that anyway.
I'm wondering if you actually know what you're talking about, of if you're just some pedantic idiot attempting to assert he's smarter in something to his parents. Example:
Sadly, I think you're right. There's a big collection of kids out there that think PCs are just one big interface, and think they're experts because they know more than mom and dad (who know nothing). They get big egos when Mom and Dad ask THEM for help on something, so they assume they're some kind of genius. Of course they have little knowledge of what actually goes on under the hood.
As I said in another post, measuring your knowledge by how much you know compared to people who know nothing is always a bad idea. A much better approach is to measure your knowledge based on how much you don't understand. Then you at least won't make foolish statements like telling people that the computer is more secure when they've logged off it (and not even turned off).
That's exactly what I worry about with them. Leaving it logged in like they do leaves it open to exploits. And I'm not talking about logging out every time you go to the bathroom or eat dinner - They leave it logged in literally all the time and leave it on 24/7. It's just asking for trouble.
Please explain why being logged on makes them "open to exploits"?
There's really very little extra running on the computer that makes the computer more vulnerable. The only thing "bad" about being logged in even as administrator is someone can walk up to the computer and do whatever they like with it. That's generally not a problem in a household.
Being logged in isn't magical. The same services are generally running whether you're logged in or not. The "security hole" comes when someone sits down and starts browsing the web with an unpatched browser, downloads trojans and viruses from email, etc.
You clearly need to learn more yourself about security before you go lecturing other people about it. You obviously have a limited knowledge of it, and think you're an "expert" because you know more than anyone in your family. That's generally a bad way to gauge your knowledge of any topic.
You seem to think that your problem is that your parents aren't technical enough to understand the threat. Your solution is to get them up to a similiar level of expertise that you're at. That's simply foolish.
The problem is you aren't communicating effectively, or your parents aren't willing to listen. I don't need to understand the reasons WHY I should change my oil in my car every 3-6 months to do it. I only need to trust that if I don't, my car will suffer. Mechanics don't give out chemical assays of oil, results of wear tests, or the breakdown of acid-inhibitors etc to convince people to change oil, they rely on communication and reputation. "Bill's a good mechanic, he always knows what's wrong with my car. If he says to change my oil every 3 months, he's probbably right". The world is too complex to try to learn EVERYTHING.
Maybe your problem is you don't really understand security yourself, so you can't explain it properly. Telling people to log off their own computer in their own household really adds no security from viruses, worms, etc. If you try to make this argument to your parents, you're just going to sound like you're (as another poster put it) "batshit insane". This destroys any credibility you have, and any sane advice like keeping up on updates, installing hardware firewalls, etc goes out the window.
So, you need to work on your communication skills, not try to get your parents to have the same amount of knowledge you do.
Listen, if you really can't trust your family members to the totally boring, non-sensitive information available on the average adults computer, you've got a lot more problems than security. Exactly what do you think you're protecting when you tell them to log off the PC when not in use?
I never log off my own computer in my home. Why? Because I trust the people I live with, and I really don't have anything on the PC that's worth protecting anyway.
Your parents are right. Why should they log off? Why should they not be able to login AT THE CONSOLE without a password? If anyone needs educating on basic security and vulnerability, it's you. EVERYONE is willing to sacrifice security for convienence. That's actually a basic guiding principle of security. There's always a tradeoff between access and security. Often times access means convienence.
The thing you need to protect from is your computer being compromised from the outside by someone intent on using it for a botnet. That's really the only value that your PC has outside of physically stealing it. That means using anti-virus software, getting email filtered for viruses, keeping up on windows updates, using firefox instead of IE, and implenting WPA security . None of those things really interfere with anyones usage of the computer, so they shouldn't have any objections.
The information on how to build an atomic bomb is already on the web.
Well, the very basic knowledge, gun method, explosive lensing, etc is well known to anyone that's read the Wikipedia entry. Detailed instructions on how to construct a nuclear trigger and fire all the charges at exactly the right time aren't. It's not a big deal in the sense that the knowledge isn't particularly hard to get. It's just kind of embarrassing for the Bush administration to have published this information themselves. Basically they look like a bunch of ass-hats and are now trying to blame the NYT for telling people about the administrations blunder.
How (precisely) does someone get to the point of knowing enough about developing nukes that his notes are classified as sensitive, without actually trying to build those nukes himself?
Maybe some dumb country posts it to a website?