It's the most important cosmological question...
on
Lonely Planets
·
· Score: 1
..."are we alone, as intelligent beings, in the Universe?"
Well, we really only have a couple of possibilities:
(1) No, there are more intelligent beings than just us; (2) Yes, we're all there is of the intelligent beings in the whole Universe.
I believe that we are not alone, but none have made it here (physically) nor have they found a method to communicate that is more advanced that perhaps we have now (radio, light beam communications, etc.) But my belief is based on very little fact and a lot of hope. One can construct models of the Universe with simple questions to support any hypothesis you want, but the real Universe isn't a simple construct. It's vast, and difficult terrain to traverse. The laws of physics seem both for and against us at every turn.
I don't think we'll see little green men on the lawn of the White House anytime soon, but they very well may be out there, unable to reach us...and we all know radio's limitations. Also, life could be no more than fungus and bacteria on some alien worlds--hardly known to communicate with anything at all. But this alone raises the question that my father keeps raising: is the expenditure of money, time, and resources to find something or someone out there worth it when we have barely plumbed the depths of our own world?
I think it is worth it. Every little step we take, we learn something. We went to the Moon--we learned that we could go there, and that it wasn't made of cheese, nor was there any life we could detect. We sent probes to Mars, proving that the slightly larger distances could be successfully navigated by remote proxy; and we learned that so far there's nothing on Mars except dust and rock. We've sent probes that only recently have gone past the furthest planet in our system, proving that we can make a device that can live longer on limited power than we had even hoped possible, and its journey continues.
So far, we're 0 for 3 (at least), and SETI hasn't given us any good leads yet; but the struggle, the search, is worth it.
Perhaps, just perhaps, one morning we'll wake up, look to the horizon, and know that there are beings out there--they may not be much like us--but the're intelligent and want to know about us, just as we want to know about them. And when that day comes, the nay-sayers will be made silent. Along the road to that great day, I hope we manage to eliminate fear, hate, and paranoia amongst our own kind--making it all the better to be worthy of the day of contact with beings that, for lack of a better term, are our most distant relatives, and I hope they've done the same. But if the final tally comes in, and we find ourselves alone in the void of space, we still will have learned something--something about ourselves, the nature of the universe, and the massive odds we overcame just to get to the point of being able to ask the very question that launched the search in the first place.
Just right-click on the link and select "Open in new Window", this will take you not to the spoofed site but to the site that is displayed on screen. This vulnerability is over-rated and nowhere near as critical as one might think. Plus if you install this "patch" and it fux0res your boxen who are you going to complain to? MS won't help as you screwed the pooch yourself; the author of the patch is under no compulsion to fix anything or even help.
Sure, ISPs get protection, provided they can prove "harm," defined very narrowly by law; what about end users who are receiving the brunt of the spam? When do we get our protection? Apparently, we don't, and now state laws, that might have been better, are shot. They should have just ammended 47USC227 to cover spam and the whole damn thing would have been fixed better than this stupid piece of filth.
Hmmm, interesting, your link works. But strangely, if I right-click on the link and select "Open in new window" it takes me to the site that is displayed (I.E.: www.microsoft.com)
Odd behavior, that's for sure. (And thankfully, you didn't redirect to tubgirl as I'm at work.)
Don't know why, exactly... but every exploit listed here (on good ol' Slashdot) doesn't affect this system. The URLs match and there's no redirection. Must be one of the previous patches I have on here.
If any of you are so bored as to research (as I am not), here's the patches on this system:
I bet this is just a move on MS' part to get everyone to migrate to the new WinFS. FAT, after all, is old and losing its value more and more every day.
Hell, I would have just Public Domained that thing and be done with it. Some patents aren't even worth defending after 20 years....
I came up woth those numbers for the simple reason that (a) some companies [like MS] are large, and it takes a while to regression test something. This method benefits others like GNOME and KDE as well. It's just enough time to do the job; and (b) 2 business days is far too quick for something to be properly tested by anyone. If I have a flaw in GCC or another package on my Slackware boxen I need more than 2 days to make sure all the other stuff isn't FUBAR because of it--some boxes do more than just one thing--so I need time to test (assuming I'm in the test group.) Plus, I've emailed many vendors in the past, from MS, to Patrick Volkerding and others and 2 days is way too soon to expect a patch or even a return reply saying "I got your email, but I'm out of the office at the moment."
If we want things fixed *correctly* we need to give them time. There is a LOT of code that needs to be examined and a lot of testing (regression or otherwise) that will need to be done. To assume that every bit of code, Linux or otherwise, is all self contained is just plain stupid. And we all know that MS' stuff is all inter-reliant: break one thing, and something else won't work; patch one DLL and 20 other programs will be affected.
I think we need a uniformly accepted timeline for public announcement of exploits. I envision something like this:
(1) Upon discovery a possible exploit should be verified by at least one other researcher;
(2) The exploit, once verified, is reported to the appropriate vendor (in this case MS);
(3) The vendor has 7 business days to reply to the original notice, indicating receipt of the vulnerability and the status of the vulnerability (if any). Failure to reply indicates that the vendor thinks the vulnerability isn't a problem and it is assumed ignored;
(4) After the reply is generated the vendor is given 21 business days to produce an interim patch. If no reply is generated by the vendor the vulnerability may be publically published 3 days later.;
(5) If no patch is available 21 days later after reply is generated the vulnerability may be publically published immediately.
Now if only people used something like that instead of going for the throat and trying to be "leet" and cool--some of this is just ego-pumping: Hey man, look at me, I found a flaw in MS' stuff! I'm so kewl...
"It is unclear why an exploit was made public before Apple resolved the problem.
Dude this happens almost every time. It doesn't matter the vendor, if it's MS, Oracle, RedHat, or Apple...no matter. Exploit warnings always preceed the patch. It's how it is.
and BITCH up a fucking storm that ol' Orrin is in league with the businesses he wishes to protect....ask things like "how much was he paid by the RIAA/MPAA to support this bad bill?", and demand that your congressperson NOT support the bill.
Of course you could ask them to bitch-slap Orrin as well, but that's probably not going to endear you to your elected official.
People, we can take back America, but it requires you voters doing your job, knowing the issues, and screaming at your reps for doing stupid shit. Do you know how to contact them--let alone who your reps are? If not, you need to find out.
Send a nasty-gram to Orrin Hatch as well...tell him you're not happy with him selling his office like that. Even if you're not in his state, that sort of thing can make a difference as well. It is the right and duty of the populace to complain about stupid shit. This is one of those times.
I've used every one of the methods described by the author, from Ghost, or Drive Image (aka: DeployCenter), g4u, and some other wacked out ideas like getting a tftp session and dd to do the work for you.
Believe me when I say that they all suck, just in different ways. The only winning combination I have found is the one that you like the best and gives the least headaches on the supported hardware.
That's a cop out, you say? No, it's not. Look, Ghost is great--still not too Ext2 friendly (can funk some things up pretty badly); Drive Image/DeployCenter is just as good as Ghost--and has its own little issues; dd with netcat works but the source and the destination needed to be the same size or it would barf (apparently) randomly...it might work, then it might not...not a good thing there.
In a Windows environment, you can't beat Ghost. For GNU or Linux, dd is pretty nice. It's also free.
The best possible solution is for some OSS person to write an all-in-one solution that boots from a floppy or CD and works for Linux/Unix and Windows, but that just ain't happening.
Like I said, none of the solutions really work well. After all that is said and done, the best thing is to just start from scratch, taking lots of time, but at least you know you won't get bit in the ass by some random failure of a third party application that has control of your drive.
That guy's problem is he didn't know what he was doing when he did the install...that was the problem, you gotta read the documentation. Had he done so he would have seen the "unregister before upgrade" jazz and then he wouldn't have wasted a couple of days nor lost one of his tech support incidents.
...just let me say that this is just another reason why we're actually a cool state, no matter what stereotypical ideas you might have about us. I mean, who else would do this sort of thing if not some nuts from the heartland?
"Once upon a time, there was a general consensus that Unix in general, and Linux in particular, lacked good documentation."
That's still the case for a lot of it. Just rummage through the LDP sometime. Plenty of that stuff is obsolete and hasn't been updated for a long time.
And considering the size of the space junk (about 1/3 the length of the whole ship (gum foil wrapper)) and that the ship isn't in a trillion pieces but rather remained in only a few, that's not too shabby. Although, the "real" Enterprise would have suffered a cascade failure of the warp core contrainment and --well-- that would be that. All things considered, I think that plastic model did pretty darned well.
You can try gtknw2, which works ok. It maps to mount points pretty well, but still has a way to go. It would be nice if it was a wee bit more configurable, in order to emulate the drive mapping that happens in Windows. You can find gtknw2 here.
Any time you pass on potentially sensitive data onto a third party there is the opening for abuse of this nature. When you outsource you are at the mercy of the contracted party and their security measures (if any) become your security measures. Add to that sub-contractors... Big freakin' mess.
Certain information should remain in the USA and not be contracted out. Ever. Looks to me that this whole fad of out-sourcing overseas has just come back to bite people in the ass. Maybe now some of the fools will learn that the old addage "Charity begins at home" is a good idea: keep those jobs here; the costs aren't in just dollars saved or wages paid.
There's an old addage I heard a long time ago that might prove useful or at the very least interesting to the discussion. And indeed this is an important discussion that's taking place.
No intelligence is artificial.
That meaning, a thing/being/person/whatever is either "intelligent" or is not--having sentience and the whole gammut or they're (as was stated in that ST:TNG episode) a toaster.
If we value intelligence and sentience as a measure of a full-fledged organism (biological or mechanical), worthy of membership in our own society as an equal, then that need be the only correct method of determination of worth. With artificial beings, growth, enhancement, desire, consumption, et. al., are not a prerequisite for being declared "living"--at least not in this case.
So, if they're an equal, with all rights and privelages, we could have a problem with all our previous assumptions about ourselves and the whole idea of "life." But if we draw a line and deny an AI's admittance to "our side," then we discriminate against our neuveau progeny as well as against any future truly living things that we may encounter. We could consign them to slavery--remember, Africans were "men," but not equal to other men. Dare we do the same again?
I can only hope this is one instance that shows our technical capacity hasn't outgrown our own emotional growth or the understanding of ethics.
Man, lemme tell you, we have some old apps floating about still. For instance, we STILL use in PRODUCTION Borland Paradox 4.5 for DOS, why? Becaseu the databases can't (for some BS reason they're telling me) be migrated. And we're still using a crappy mapping program called Maplinx 3.0k...apparently the new versions of Maplinx don't do what the old one does, or something--I wasn't involved in that (thank heavens.)
As for hardware: up until early this year we still had a 486 running very old queries on very old Dynamics data, but now that's been migrated to the new, yet still shitty, Dynamics database.
It's hideous, I tell you, and thankfully we can map LPT ports under Windows 2000 or we'd have not even begun to rollout W2K to the workstations (we'd still be stuck on 98...which was only rolled out becuase I convinced them that it might be a good idea to get away from 95)!
I would love to have seen it at 7200 or higher (although that would have meant SCSI for much higher). As it stands it's a drive that is big and hampered by slow speed of rotation. Bummer. It would have been nice to see a faster drive with an 8MB cache.
And what's up with these 1 year warranties? They're becoming more common all the time...I don't like that trend at all.
At first when I read Rob's "review" of XP I was like "WTF?! Is he retarded? Couldn't figure out mIrc or drag and drop or cut-n-paste?! WTF!?" Then I figured it out: he's trying to be funny and at the same time tell you that Windows has come a long way, baby. XP is the best Windows yet, and Longhorn will be even better. Rob isn't a retard, he's being facetious. Essentially, the way I read his report is that XP and Linux can do the same things when it comes down to the almighty desktop--choose your passion and go with it.
Whatever works for you, is what he's saying.
Now if I'm wrong, then Rob is retarded and should get his keyboard taken away, but like I said, I think he's just messing with you...put away the spears.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, we really only have a couple of possibilities: I believe that we are not alone, but none have made it here (physically) nor have they found a method to communicate that is more advanced that perhaps we have now (radio, light beam communications, etc.) But my belief is based on very little fact and a lot of hope. One can construct models of the Universe with simple questions to support any hypothesis you want, but the real Universe isn't a simple construct. It's vast, and difficult terrain to traverse. The laws of physics seem both for and against us at every turn.
I don't think we'll see little green men on the lawn of the White House anytime soon, but they very well may be out there, unable to reach us...and we all know radio's limitations. Also, life could be no more than fungus and bacteria on some alien worlds--hardly known to communicate with anything at all. But this alone raises the question that my father keeps raising: is the expenditure of money, time, and resources to find something or someone out there worth it when we have barely plumbed the depths of our own world?
I think it is worth it. Every little step we take, we learn something. We went to the Moon--we learned that we could go there, and that it wasn't made of cheese, nor was there any life we could detect. We sent probes to Mars, proving that the slightly larger distances could be successfully navigated by remote proxy; and we learned that so far there's nothing on Mars except dust and rock. We've sent probes that only recently have gone past the furthest planet in our system, proving that we can make a device that can live longer on limited power than we had even hoped possible, and its journey continues.
So far, we're 0 for 3 (at least), and SETI hasn't given us any good leads yet; but the struggle, the search, is worth it.
Perhaps, just perhaps, one morning we'll wake up, look to the horizon, and know that there are beings out there--they may not be much like us--but the're intelligent and want to know about us, just as we want to know about them. And when that day comes, the nay-sayers will be made silent. Along the road to that great day, I hope we manage to eliminate fear, hate, and paranoia amongst our own kind--making it all the better to be worthy of the day of contact with beings that, for lack of a better term, are our most distant relatives, and I hope they've done the same. But if the final tally comes in, and we find ourselves alone in the void of space, we still will have learned something--something about ourselves, the nature of the universe, and the massive odds we overcame just to get to the point of being able to ask the very question that launched the search in the first place.
Just right-click on the link and select "Open in new Window", this will take you not to the spoofed site but to the site that is displayed on screen. This vulnerability is over-rated and nowhere near as critical as one might think. Plus if you install this "patch" and it fux0res your boxen who are you going to complain to? MS won't help as you screwed the pooch yourself; the author of the patch is under no compulsion to fix anything or even help.
I for one call this bad juju.
Sure, ISPs get protection, provided they can prove "harm," defined very narrowly by law; what about end users who are receiving the brunt of the spam? When do we get our protection? Apparently, we don't, and now state laws, that might have been better, are shot. They should have just ammended 47USC227 to cover spam and the whole damn thing would have been fixed better than this stupid piece of filth.
ARGH! Urge to kill rising.....
Hmmm, interesting, your link works. But strangely, if I right-click on the link and select "Open in new window" it takes me to the site that is displayed (I.E.: www.microsoft.com)
Odd behavior, that's for sure. (And thankfully, you didn't redirect to tubgirl as I'm at work.)
Don't know why, exactly... but every exploit listed here (on good ol' Slashdot) doesn't affect this system. The URLs match and there's no redirection. Must be one of the previous patches I have on here.
If any of you are so bored as to research (as I am not), here's the patches on this system:
Version: 6.0.2800.1106
Cipher Strength: 128-bit
Update Versions: SP1; Q328389; Q328970; Q324929; Q810847; Q813951; Q813489; Q330994; Q818529; Q822925; Q828750; Q813502; Q827667; Q826940; Q827057; Q824145
Windows 2000 SP4
making email spoof-proof, killing UCE (spam), and eliminating the whole idea of HTML email...
Gee, doesn't seem to me that they thought too hard about email at all.
I bet this is just a move on MS' part to get everyone to migrate to the new WinFS. FAT, after all, is old and losing its value more and more every day.
Hell, I would have just Public Domained that thing and be done with it. Some patents aren't even worth defending after 20 years....
How did you come up with those numbers?
I came up woth those numbers for the simple reason that (a) some companies [like MS] are large, and it takes a while to regression test something. This method benefits others like GNOME and KDE as well. It's just enough time to do the job; and (b) 2 business days is far too quick for something to be properly tested by anyone. If I have a flaw in GCC or another package on my Slackware boxen I need more than 2 days to make sure all the other stuff isn't FUBAR because of it--some boxes do more than just one thing--so I need time to test (assuming I'm in the test group.) Plus, I've emailed many vendors in the past, from MS, to Patrick Volkerding and others and 2 days is way too soon to expect a patch or even a return reply saying "I got your email, but I'm out of the office at the moment."
If we want things fixed *correctly* we need to give them time. There is a LOT of code that needs to be examined and a lot of testing (regression or otherwise) that will need to be done. To assume that every bit of code, Linux or otherwise, is all self contained is just plain stupid. And we all know that MS' stuff is all inter-reliant: break one thing, and something else won't work; patch one DLL and 20 other programs will be affected.
It's all about fairness and time.
"It is unclear why an exploit was made public before Apple resolved the problem.
Dude this happens almost every time. It doesn't matter the vendor, if it's MS, Oracle, RedHat, or Apple...no matter. Exploit warnings always preceed the patch. It's how it is.
and BITCH up a fucking storm that ol' Orrin is in league with the businesses he wishes to protect....ask things like "how much was he paid by the RIAA/MPAA to support this bad bill?", and demand that your congressperson NOT support the bill.
Of course you could ask them to bitch-slap Orrin as well, but that's probably not going to endear you to your elected official.
People, we can take back America, but it requires you voters doing your job, knowing the issues, and screaming at your reps for doing stupid shit. Do you know how to contact them--let alone who your reps are? If not, you need to find out.
Send a nasty-gram to Orrin Hatch as well...tell him you're not happy with him selling his office like that. Even if you're not in his state, that sort of thing can make a difference as well. It is the right and duty of the populace to complain about stupid shit. This is one of those times.
I've used every one of the methods described by the author, from Ghost, or Drive Image (aka: DeployCenter), g4u, and some other wacked out ideas like getting a tftp session and dd to do the work for you.
Believe me when I say that they all suck, just in different ways. The only winning combination I have found is the one that you like the best and gives the least headaches on the supported hardware.
That's a cop out, you say? No, it's not. Look, Ghost is great--still not too Ext2 friendly (can funk some things up pretty badly); Drive Image/DeployCenter is just as good as Ghost--and has its own little issues; dd with netcat works but the source and the destination needed to be the same size or it would barf (apparently) randomly...it might work, then it might not...not a good thing there.
In a Windows environment, you can't beat Ghost. For GNU or Linux, dd is pretty nice. It's also free.
The best possible solution is for some OSS person to write an all-in-one solution that boots from a floppy or CD and works for Linux/Unix and Windows, but that just ain't happening.
You could try this, but I can't vouch for it.
Like I said, none of the solutions really work well. After all that is said and done, the best thing is to just start from scratch, taking lots of time, but at least you know you won't get bit in the ass by some random failure of a third party application that has control of your drive.
That guy's problem is he didn't know what he was doing when he did the install...that was the problem, you gotta read the documentation. Had he done so he would have seen the "unregister before upgrade" jazz and then he wouldn't have wasted a couple of days nor lost one of his tech support incidents.
No sympathy for the retarded user.
...just let me say that this is just another reason why we're actually a cool state, no matter what stereotypical ideas you might have about us. I mean, who else would do this sort of thing if not some nuts from the heartland?
Now, on to making our heads into bongs...
I wated the teaser (it's really not a trailer) and said to myself "Is that it?"
Maybe if we learned more about it in the ad that would be cool, but until then I'm going to place my hype machine on low simmer mode.
"Once upon a time, there was a general consensus that Unix in general, and Linux in particular, lacked good documentation."
That's still the case for a lot of it. Just rummage through the LDP sometime. Plenty of that stuff is obsolete and hasn't been updated for a long time.
It's just that simple.
Call this redundant, trollish, flamebait, whatever you like, but you know that's the only way to deal with them. Fight fire with fire, goddamnit.
And considering the size of the space junk (about 1/3 the length of the whole ship (gum foil wrapper)) and that the ship isn't in a trillion pieces but rather remained in only a few, that's not too shabby. Although, the "real" Enterprise would have suffered a cascade failure of the warp core contrainment and --well-- that would be that. All things considered, I think that plastic model did pretty darned well.
Still a major waste of money to test, though.
You can try gtknw2, which works ok. It maps to mount points pretty well, but still has a way to go. It would be nice if it was a wee bit more configurable, in order to emulate the drive mapping that happens in Windows. You can find gtknw2 here.
Any time you pass on potentially sensitive data onto a third party there is the opening for abuse of this nature. When you outsource you are at the mercy of the contracted party and their security measures (if any) become your security measures. Add to that sub-contractors... Big freakin' mess.
Certain information should remain in the USA and not be contracted out. Ever. Looks to me that this whole fad of out-sourcing overseas has just come back to bite people in the ass. Maybe now some of the fools will learn that the old addage "Charity begins at home" is a good idea: keep those jobs here; the costs aren't in just dollars saved or wages paid.
There's an old addage I heard a long time ago that might prove useful or at the very least interesting to the discussion. And indeed this is an important discussion that's taking place.
No intelligence is artificial.
That meaning, a thing/being/person/whatever is either "intelligent" or is not--having sentience and the whole gammut or they're (as was stated in that ST:TNG episode) a toaster.
If we value intelligence and sentience as a measure of a full-fledged organism (biological or mechanical), worthy of membership in our own society as an equal, then that need be the only correct method of determination of worth. With artificial beings, growth, enhancement, desire, consumption, et. al., are not a prerequisite for being declared "living"--at least not in this case.
So, if they're an equal, with all rights and privelages, we could have a problem with all our previous assumptions about ourselves and the whole idea of "life." But if we draw a line and deny an AI's admittance to "our side," then we discriminate against our neuveau progeny as well as against any future truly living things that we may encounter. We could consign them to slavery--remember, Africans were "men," but not equal to other men. Dare we do the same again?
I can only hope this is one instance that shows our technical capacity hasn't outgrown our own emotional growth or the understanding of ethics.
Man, lemme tell you, we have some old apps floating about still. For instance, we STILL use in PRODUCTION Borland Paradox 4.5 for DOS, why? Becaseu the databases can't (for some BS reason they're telling me) be migrated. And we're still using a crappy mapping program called Maplinx 3.0k...apparently the new versions of Maplinx don't do what the old one does, or something--I wasn't involved in that (thank heavens.)
As for hardware: up until early this year we still had a 486 running very old queries on very old Dynamics data, but now that's been migrated to the new, yet still shitty, Dynamics database.
It's hideous, I tell you, and thankfully we can map LPT ports under Windows 2000 or we'd have not even begun to rollout W2K to the workstations (we'd still be stuck on 98...which was only rolled out becuase I convinced them that it might be a good idea to get away from 95)!
I would love to have seen it at 7200 or higher (although that would have meant SCSI for much higher). As it stands it's a drive that is big and hampered by slow speed of rotation. Bummer. It would have been nice to see a faster drive with an 8MB cache.
And what's up with these 1 year warranties? They're becoming more common all the time...I don't like that trend at all.
At first when I read Rob's "review" of XP I was like "WTF?! Is he retarded? Couldn't figure out mIrc or drag and drop or cut-n-paste?! WTF!?" Then I figured it out: he's trying to be funny and at the same time tell you that Windows has come a long way, baby. XP is the best Windows yet, and Longhorn will be even better. Rob isn't a retard, he's being facetious. Essentially, the way I read his report is that XP and Linux can do the same things when it comes down to the almighty desktop--choose your passion and go with it.
Whatever works for you, is what he's saying.
Now if I'm wrong, then Rob is retarded and should get his keyboard taken away, but like I said, I think he's just messing with you...put away the spears.
Fraud, Identity theft, and illegal actions by the "sign-up crew."
Personally, I'd sue; but I have a lot of free time...