Good idea, actually... just find a friend with a seeing eye dog and have them try to enter the area. That would then involve all kinds of equal access laws, to your benefit. And my cats and dogs hated that sound, even just coming from my headset.
Captain, I fail to see how f*cking your maternal parent is applicable to exploring the fringes of a black ho... never mind, I think I see the relevance now. Perhaps being the first motherf*cker to explore a strange swirling anomaly is a worthwhile endeavor.
If I may make a suggestion, however, Captain; I reccomend that you engage the defensive shields before motherf*cking entering the darkness.
Re:Bad Idea would be
on
Output Mouse
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Actually, why not add a thermometer (thermal sensor) to the palm rest of the mouse. Maybe have it sense when a hand is on it and display the pointer only then, hiding the pointer otherwise?
Every time I see someone go over rules like your suggestion, I wonder why everyone suggests to limit the keyspace and provide a clear logic for attack? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that those rules (easily learned through minimal social engineering) would make it easier to crack, despite the length minimums. For example:
Given a 6 character password from that scheme, I know the following always holds true: Minimum of 1/3 of the password is uppercase, dictionary attacks are weak, limiting to non dictionary words means that users will most not use a symbol.
So I have a good chance using a list of names, months, and years against them and finding at least one match. More than likely several users are using the initial capital form of a family member's name and a month or year from a birthday as a password.
The thing I have a hard time grasping with all of this is why? No matter what the complexity rules, no matter how often the changes, it still relies on a single point of failure. And then there are all the shortsighted corporate rules, like not allowing connections to the company data source without a user password, which means someone somewhere has saved that password in a Microsoft Access or Excel file.
And the most fun thought is that no matter how secure your system is, no matter how well you lock everything from the wireless to the terminals down, some person is going to e-mail confidential data outside the company, and blow the whole door wide open. Even the military cannot 100% prevent that, and they are about as paranoid as possible about leaks.
I was under the impression that Bubo was ancient greek for "mechanical device used to please females and annoy dieties" and that the term came from the name for Hera's favourite pet...
That's part of building code here, actually. Anything over a certain height has to have them. That doesn't stop the nearby power pole, phone interface, cable demark, interchange, or whatever from a strike. And I know from experiance, a strike on the pole near a building can and does blow everything inside.
Never underestimate the power in a lightning strike to travel.
Not so much a confusion as to the purpose of a UPS, but more as to the duration of a bad thunderstorm. On an average summer afternoon here, there is a thunderstorm with the lightning danger lasting from 10-30 minutes. These are why we use a UPS on everything from the servers to the phone system.
Some days, however, especially during the hurricane season, the lightning danger can last for hours. Power outages can last from minutes to days. These are the times we need to be able to do an orderly shutdown and disconnect. While sleep mode does extend the life of the UPS, I cannot see using sleep mode for extended periods.
Honestly, I love sleep on my laptop. But I also prefer that there is a clear distinction between putting it to sleep and powering it down (e.g. I close the lid for sleep and press the power button for off).
In addition, I am thinking of all the family members who have fried machines who will wonder why not following my simple advice to power down for the storm and unplug ALL cables did not work with their brand spanking new way too expensive brand name computer. Or the manager who doesn't understand the same issue, based on the corporate guidelines that should protect his machine and data.
Having a sleep mode in itself is great. Having a sleep mode disguising itself as a power down just to make the machine seem faster, on the other hand, is just asking for more support troubles.
Some users, like those of us who live in Florida, need a simple, clear way to turn off our personal machines in the event of a severe thunderstorm (daily during the summer), or other similar event. Why? Because I have in the course of five years blown through three Uninterruptible Power Supplies, two whole networks of gear, and three machines. No matter how good the UPS is, nothing beats pulling the plugs from the wall for stopping a lightning strike.
Even where I work, we have had shutdown calls because the power was too unstable for even our high grade UPSs to handle. It does happen.
And I, for one, want to be absolutely sure that when I tell my computer to power down it does so BEFORE I yank the plugs.
Ok, here's how to hack it to run linux (assuming mod chipping is considered hacking)
1) Obtain a Shuttle PC 2) Attach to the limestons using a combination of soldering and Duck Tape 3) Insert Linux CD 4) ??? 5) Profit
Of course, this technically is not hacking the rock, but given the way the word is bruited about for anything from mod chips to BIOS replacements to a paperclip in the CD-ROM, it works well enough. Actually, Limestone is a decent conductor of heat, so might be useful as a heatsink. Maybe.
To get full time checking, you are right, the software hack is capable of being everywhere all the time. On the other hand, it has a failure rate, as does the actor solution, as does any system. Provable correctness is an inverse function of complexity.
Another possibility is to have the software notify the supervision prior to the image and require acknowledgement, and notify the screener after. That way, false alarms are minimized since the management should be aware, and no test is conducted without human intervention.
Obviously, the Click to Install issue arises here, but one screw up from a person means one less lazy person supervising this.
The thing that the designers of the software apparently had trouble with was failure modes for items with seemingly low priority, like test images.
Let's play these two scenarios out, then see what changes in the asessment:
False image is displayed. System does not notify user that the image is false: As we have seen, the terminal grinds to a halt until a programmer can validate that ther really is no bomb.
Actor hired by the TSA, carrying proper ID, passes a false bomb: The actor and bomb, both easily verified by the use of ID and a trained bomb responder, are taken aside and safely dealt with. The terminal continues on business as usual in a matter of minutes.
The cost of the actor disappears in the lost revenue from the terminal shutdown.
Just a business perspective on it, which the TSA seems to lack.
Pretty soon B & co will expand it to the BATFECES - Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, Childres, Education, and Security. Then, and only then will it have reached it's ultimate evolution.
My wife (yes, I know, turn in the slashdot card etc.) is an avid player, and she is on at all times she is not doing something else (sometimes even while she is). I am a casual player, and neither of us has run into this infamous queue problem. What we did do, which was as much for ourselves as other players, was to create all new characters on a small pop server shen we decided to game together. I deleted my characters from Sivler Hand et. al. when we did, and stuck to playing on one set of servers. Our server has since become full, and has regular Monday night lag crashes, we just plan our time around those.
What I always wonder is why does Blizzard not provide what they have promised for some time, the ability to move characters between accounts and to move a whole account to another server. I for one would be delighted to pay a little extra if they set up an 18+ server. She and I are not PvPers at all, and dealing with the kiddies leaves us wishing for a cluebat based on teledildonics.
Either way, once we hit 60 we will probably seek another game for a while, until the expansion comes out (if ever).
Well, as I could definitely have taken advantage of that, as could more than the 27 people per day they quoted that I know and influence, I would say that the issue is they failed to promote it. I live in Orlando, watch the local news etc., and knew almost nothing about it.
I just described a typical day at my job:P No one said anything about robust, maintainable, or even reproducable. It's normally a matter of all the managers in a meeting, they want to see the data transformed NOW. Never said it was realistic, they are PHB's after all. Never said it was useful. But they want numbers, and they want them now.
I've been reading all the whines about this language or that language. Here is a challenge for you:
1) You have the following data sources: Oracle, Access, CSV Files, Microsoft SQL, and IBM DBase 2) You need to generate a set of reports for a management group (more than three PHB's involved) 3) One of these PHB's is the one who approves your paychecks 4) You have at your disposal the following tools:A full development environment with IDE for C++, 5) Visual Basic, Java, and (X)HTML, Microsoft Office Pro XP 5) The report has to be viewable by anyone at the company, all systems will have Office installed 6) The workstations are locked down, and installing is not an option on the user end 7) Some data will need to be gathered from other departments to complete the reports 8) The reports must be in a form that can be put into a Powerpoint, because the PHB says so 9) It is not 6:30 a.m. ***The meeting starts at 10:00 a.m.*** THIS MUST BE DONE IN TIME!
What tool and approach would you use?
I don't know about you, but I find that pumping data into Excel from Access using a bunch of linked tables and queries and doing the calculations and presentation in Excel to be a rapid way to keep receiving my paycheck. As much as I would love to have time to develop fully tested, object oriented, language of the day applications, I rarely have that option. Once I do develop something, it will change tomorrow. I am a data analyst. My job is not to build applications, it is to crunch numbers as rapidly as possible, analyze them, and explain in plain English what those numbers mean (sometimes in PHB English).
I am going to use the tools that help me accomplish my job most effectively. Given the constraints, none of the programming languages to date allow me to do the analysis as rapidly as Excel. And yes, I do write Excel code, macros, and complex formulas. I also reuse the same ones again and again. They are objects in my environment.
So if you have the time to leisurely tell your PHB that sure, the report he needs in three hours will take you six months to develop a solution for, we can certainly trade jobs!
As someone else pointed out, Bunnicula was a vampire rabbit. So, in the spirit of questionable movies (e.g. Dracula vs. Wolfman) I want to see Bunnicula vs. Wererabbit!
And Category #5 - People that normally would not have gone or purchased, but after seeing/hearing a download decided they want the set and buy it.
And Category #6 - Subcategory of #3, people who download it because it's not available any other way and they still want it. (See Fansubbing communities)
Your sig is very appropriate: you are confirmed, citizen #2997 of the United States of America. Your subversive statements ahve been entered into the database. Have a Nice Day Citizen!
I don't know if it's feasable in his situation, but the Mac line has a decent voice recognition, and with training can be set up to respond fairly accurately to simple commands. It also allow scripting to add more commands, and works with the e-mail and web browser for most basic functions. Perhaps you should look into that?
The simple answer is that the data is not stored and to end - - - - - in a linear array. The data is stored in a 2 dimensional grid, using both the width of the tape as well as the linear position on the reel to store data. In many cases, the data is stored in a biased array of rows/////
Thus the data density depends on not just the size of the individual particles storing the bits, but also on the possible arrangement of the grid, be it rectangular, biased arrays, hexoganal, etc.
Additionally, most backup systems include redundancy in the written patterns, to protect against degradation due to environmentla exposure. The most common I am familiar with is the storage of a reversible cyclic redundancy check (CRC) in the written blocks. The block size varies from program to program, as does the compression algorithm chosen.
So if we assume a rectangular array of bits, with mild bias, we get a grid #. If each bit on the grid is halved in size, the data density, barring other changes, is quadrupled. Changes to the pattern made possible may increase this further, as well as advances in the heads.
Current heads can only read at a certain speed, so a trade off is made between spool speed and data density, meaning that not 100% of the space on the tape is lines of data, there is alos white space, unused on the tape. If a better head can read a more densly packed datastream, then you could very well make a 250x increase in total capacity.
It's been a long time since I worked with tape drive technology, so this is just an approximate explanation, of course.
Hate to rain on the parade, but any pattern a computer/chip can detect, it can also modify. Instead of thinking of filtering them, just introduce a secondary harmonic that alters the binary message. Since it has to be outside the human threshold of hearing, then the range available to encode the data is limited. Fill that range with additional 'noise' like the messages, change the messages.
Aside from which, I could just use the always open legacy analog hole, play it back in a sound booth with multiple mics for pickups. Isolate speakers, 2 mics cross matched to each, recreate without wiring. Filter inaudibles out, no message left.
Data cannot be configured to protect itself. It must necessarily be accesible to the user, and there are suffiecient of us in the 6 billion plus population to figure out a way around it. If the data can be accessed, it can also be changed.
Yeah, didn't anyone hear that radio documentary, "War of the Worlds"? That shows that our wonderful earth germs are stronger than anything Mars can produce! We'll just let the common cold eat em alive!
On a more serious note, as many people have stated the conditions for the bacteria/viruses to thrive are not necessarily common on earth. And many forms can survive extremes that make Jupiter look a bit mild by comparison. The real question is not wether there are some that could survive, but what the effects of those bacteria or viruses would be. Would they be able to become active in the human body, and would our immune systems be able to handle them.
Given the thousands of varieties already in or systems, the probability of them being dangerous to humans (or other animals) is minute, but not nonexistant. However, for argument's sake, say that ther is a.01% chance of reaction to one of these microbes. That gives approximately 600,000 people succeptible to that particular microbe, or 1 in every million people. Now let us presume that there are more than 1 microbe brought back. That could be very bad overall.
As we have no experimental data from which to estimate probabilities, I think caution is the best bet. But I do not think paranoia helps at all. I personally do not think NASA et al is unaware of the problem, and they generally have very good procedures in place for recovery. Accidents do happen, but I do not see any reason to get worred about a global plague yet. This is not Andromeda Strain or the Jupiter Plague, in reality we have not found anything yet that is completely foreign.
There are strange things ot there, but humans are survivors.
(I have now completely exhausted what faith I have in the species, have a nice day)
Slashdot Mirror
Good idea, actually... just find a friend with a seeing eye dog and have them try to enter the area. That would then involve all kinds of equal access laws, to your benefit. And my cats and dogs hated that sound, even just coming from my headset.
Captain, I fail to see how f*cking your maternal parent is applicable to exploring the fringes of a black ho... never mind, I think I see the relevance now. Perhaps being the first motherf*cker to explore a strange swirling anomaly is a worthwhile endeavor.
If I may make a suggestion, however, Captain; I reccomend that you engage the defensive shields before motherf*cking entering the darkness.
Actually, why not add a thermometer (thermal sensor) to the palm rest of the mouse. Maybe have it sense when a hand is on it and display the pointer only then, hiding the pointer otherwise?
Every time I see someone go over rules like your suggestion, I wonder why everyone suggests to limit the keyspace and provide a clear logic for attack? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that those rules (easily learned through minimal social engineering) would make it easier to crack, despite the length minimums. For example:
Given a 6 character password from that scheme, I know the following always holds true:
Minimum of 1/3 of the password is uppercase, dictionary attacks are weak, limiting to non dictionary words means that users will most not use a symbol.
So I have a good chance using a list of names, months, and years against them and finding at least one match. More than likely several users are using the initial capital form of a family member's name and a month or year from a birthday as a password.
The thing I have a hard time grasping with all of this is why? No matter what the complexity rules, no matter how often the changes, it still relies on a single point of failure. And then there are all the shortsighted corporate rules, like not allowing connections to the company data source without a user password, which means someone somewhere has saved that password in a Microsoft Access or Excel file.
And the most fun thought is that no matter how secure your system is, no matter how well you lock everything from the wireless to the terminals down, some person is going to e-mail confidential data outside the company, and blow the whole door wide open. Even the military cannot 100% prevent that, and they are about as paranoid as possible about leaks.
I was under the impression that Bubo was ancient greek for "mechanical device used to please females and annoy dieties" and that the term came from the name for Hera's favourite pet...
That's part of building code here, actually. Anything over a certain height has to have them. That doesn't stop the nearby power pole, phone interface, cable demark, interchange, or whatever from a strike. And I know from experiance, a strike on the pole near a building can and does blow everything inside.
Never underestimate the power in a lightning strike to travel.
Not so much a confusion as to the purpose of a UPS, but more as to the duration of a bad thunderstorm. On an average summer afternoon here, there is a thunderstorm with the lightning danger lasting from 10-30 minutes. These are why we use a UPS on everything from the servers to the phone system.
Some days, however, especially during the hurricane season, the lightning danger can last for hours. Power outages can last from minutes to days. These are the times we need to be able to do an orderly shutdown and disconnect. While sleep mode does extend the life of the UPS, I cannot see using sleep mode for extended periods.
Honestly, I love sleep on my laptop. But I also prefer that there is a clear distinction between putting it to sleep and powering it down (e.g. I close the lid for sleep and press the power button for off).
In addition, I am thinking of all the family members who have fried machines who will wonder why not following my simple advice to power down for the storm and unplug ALL cables did not work with their brand spanking new way too expensive brand name computer. Or the manager who doesn't understand the same issue, based on the corporate guidelines that should protect his machine and data.
Having a sleep mode in itself is great. Having a sleep mode disguising itself as a power down just to make the machine seem faster, on the other hand, is just asking for more support troubles.
Some users, like those of us who live in Florida, need a simple, clear way to turn off our personal machines in the event of a severe thunderstorm (daily during the summer), or other similar event. Why? Because I have in the course of five years blown through three Uninterruptible Power Supplies, two whole networks of gear, and three machines. No matter how good the UPS is, nothing beats pulling the plugs from the wall for stopping a lightning strike.
Even where I work, we have had shutdown calls because the power was too unstable for even our high grade UPSs to handle. It does happen.
And I, for one, want to be absolutely sure that when I tell my computer to power down it does so BEFORE I yank the plugs.
Ok, here's how to hack it to run linux (assuming mod chipping is considered hacking)
1) Obtain a Shuttle PC
2) Attach to the limestons using a combination of soldering and Duck Tape
3) Insert Linux CD
4) ???
5) Profit
Of course, this technically is not hacking the rock, but given the way the word is bruited about for anything from mod chips to BIOS replacements to a paperclip in the CD-ROM, it works well enough. Actually, Limestone is a decent conductor of heat, so might be useful as a heatsink. Maybe.
To get full time checking, you are right, the software hack is capable of being everywhere all the time. On the other hand, it has a failure rate, as does the actor solution, as does any system. Provable correctness is an inverse function of complexity.
Another possibility is to have the software notify the supervision prior to the image and require acknowledgement, and notify the screener after. That way, false alarms are minimized since the management should be aware, and no test is conducted without human intervention.
Obviously, the Click to Install issue arises here, but one screw up from a person means one less lazy person supervising this.
The thing that the designers of the software apparently had trouble with was failure modes for items with seemingly low priority, like test images.
Oh well, another day another downtime.
Let's play these two scenarios out, then see what changes in the asessment:
False image is displayed. System does not notify user that the image is false:
As we have seen, the terminal grinds to a halt until a programmer can validate that ther really is no bomb.
Actor hired by the TSA, carrying proper ID, passes a false bomb:
The actor and bomb, both easily verified by the use of ID and a trained bomb responder, are taken aside and safely dealt with. The terminal continues on business as usual in a matter of minutes.
The cost of the actor disappears in the lost revenue from the terminal shutdown.
Just a business perspective on it, which the TSA seems to lack.
Pretty soon B & co will expand it to the BATFECES - Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, Explosives, Childres, Education, and Security. Then, and only then will it have reached it's ultimate evolution.
My wife (yes, I know, turn in the slashdot card etc.) is an avid player, and she is on at all times she is not doing something else (sometimes even while she is). I am a casual player, and neither of us has run into this infamous queue problem. What we did do, which was as much for ourselves as other players, was to create all new characters on a small pop server shen we decided to game together. I deleted my characters from Sivler Hand et. al. when we did, and stuck to playing on one set of servers. Our server has since become full, and has regular Monday night lag crashes, we just plan our time around those.
What I always wonder is why does Blizzard not provide what they have promised for some time, the ability to move characters between accounts and to move a whole account to another server. I for one would be delighted to pay a little extra if they set up an 18+ server. She and I are not PvPers at all, and dealing with the kiddies leaves us wishing for a cluebat based on teledildonics.
Either way, once we hit 60 we will probably seek another game for a while, until the expansion comes out (if ever).
Linux, of course, or the OSS OS of choice
I watch Local 6 and barely heard of this. I think that is a good illustration of their overall plan, which was well though out.
1) Put up WiFi
2) Fail to market it
3) Say it costs bundles
4) ???
5) Pocket the profit
Of course, with a Mayor who is being indited for fraud, not surprising.
Well, as I could definitely have taken advantage of that, as could more than the 27 people per day they quoted that I know and influence, I would say that the issue is they failed to promote it. I live in Orlando, watch the local news etc., and knew almost nothing about it.
I just described a typical day at my job :P No one said anything about robust, maintainable, or even reproducable. It's normally a matter of all the managers in a meeting, they want to see the data transformed NOW. Never said it was realistic, they are PHB's after all. Never said it was useful. But they want numbers, and they want them now.
I've been reading all the whines about this language or that language. Here is a challenge for you:
1) You have the following data sources: Oracle, Access, CSV Files, Microsoft SQL, and IBM DBase
2) You need to generate a set of reports for a management group (more than three PHB's involved)
3) One of these PHB's is the one who approves your paychecks
4) You have at your disposal the following tools:A full development environment with IDE for C++, 5) Visual Basic, Java, and (X)HTML, Microsoft Office Pro XP
5) The report has to be viewable by anyone at the company, all systems will have Office installed
6) The workstations are locked down, and installing is not an option on the user end
7) Some data will need to be gathered from other departments to complete the reports
8) The reports must be in a form that can be put into a Powerpoint, because the PHB says so
9) It is not 6:30 a.m. ***The meeting starts at 10:00 a.m.*** THIS MUST BE DONE IN TIME!
What tool and approach would you use?
I don't know about you, but I find that pumping data into Excel from Access using a bunch of linked tables and queries and doing the calculations and presentation in Excel to be a rapid way to keep receiving my paycheck. As much as I would love to have time to develop fully tested, object oriented, language of the day applications, I rarely have that option. Once I do develop something, it will change tomorrow. I am a data analyst. My job is not to build applications, it is to crunch numbers as rapidly as possible, analyze them, and explain in plain English what those numbers mean (sometimes in PHB English).
I am going to use the tools that help me accomplish my job most effectively. Given the constraints, none of the programming languages to date allow me to do the analysis as rapidly as Excel. And yes, I do write Excel code, macros, and complex formulas. I also reuse the same ones again and again. They are objects in my environment.
So if you have the time to leisurely tell your PHB that sure, the report he needs in three hours will take you six months to develop a solution for, we can certainly trade jobs!
As someone else pointed out, Bunnicula was a vampire rabbit. So, in the spirit of questionable movies (e.g. Dracula vs. Wolfman) I want to see Bunnicula vs. Wererabbit!
The penguin will rule them all!
And Category #5 - People that normally would not have gone or purchased, but after seeing/hearing a download decided they want the set and buy it.
And Category #6 - Subcategory of #3, people who download it because it's not available any other way and they still want it. (See Fansubbing communities)
Your sig is very appropriate: you are confirmed, citizen #2997 of the United States of America. Your subversive statements ahve been entered into the database. Have a Nice Day Citizen!
I don't know if it's feasable in his situation, but the Mac line has a decent voice recognition, and with training can be set up to respond fairly accurately to simple commands. It also allow scripting to add more commands, and works with the e-mail and web browser for most basic functions. Perhaps you should look into that?
The simple answer is that the data is not stored and to end - - - - - in a linear array. The data is stored in a 2 dimensional grid, using both the width of the tape as well as the linear position on the reel to store data. In many cases, the data is stored in a biased array of rows /////
Thus the data density depends on not just the size of the individual particles storing the bits, but also on the possible arrangement of the grid, be it rectangular, biased arrays, hexoganal, etc.
Additionally, most backup systems include redundancy in the written patterns, to protect against degradation due to environmentla exposure. The most common I am familiar with is the storage of a reversible cyclic redundancy check (CRC) in the written blocks. The block size varies from program to program, as does the compression algorithm chosen.
So if we assume a rectangular array of bits, with mild bias, we get a grid #. If each bit on the grid is halved in size, the data density, barring other changes, is quadrupled. Changes to the pattern made possible may increase this further, as well as advances in the heads.
Current heads can only read at a certain speed, so a trade off is made between spool speed and data density, meaning that not 100% of the space on the tape is lines of data, there is alos white space, unused on the tape. If a better head can read a more densly packed datastream, then you could very well make a 250x increase in total capacity.
It's been a long time since I worked with tape drive technology, so this is just an approximate explanation, of course.
Hate to rain on the parade, but any pattern a computer/chip can detect, it can also modify. Instead of thinking of filtering them, just introduce a secondary harmonic that alters the binary message. Since it has to be outside the human threshold of hearing, then the range available to encode the data is limited. Fill that range with additional 'noise' like the messages, change the messages.
Aside from which, I could just use the always open legacy analog hole, play it back in a sound booth with multiple mics for pickups. Isolate speakers, 2 mics cross matched to each, recreate without wiring. Filter inaudibles out, no message left.
Data cannot be configured to protect itself. It must necessarily be accesible to the user, and there are suffiecient of us in the 6 billion plus population to figure out a way around it. If the data can be accessed, it can also be changed.
Yeah, didn't anyone hear that radio documentary, "War of the Worlds"? That shows that our wonderful earth germs are stronger than anything Mars can produce! We'll just let the common cold eat em alive!
.01% chance of reaction to one of these microbes. That gives approximately 600,000 people succeptible to that particular microbe, or 1 in every million people. Now let us presume that there are more than 1 microbe brought back. That could be very bad overall.
On a more serious note, as many people have stated the conditions for the bacteria/viruses to thrive are not necessarily common on earth. And many forms can survive extremes that make Jupiter look a bit mild by comparison. The real question is not wether there are some that could survive, but what the effects of those bacteria or viruses would be. Would they be able to become active in the human body, and would our immune systems be able to handle them.
Given the thousands of varieties already in or systems, the probability of them being dangerous to humans (or other animals) is minute, but not nonexistant. However, for argument's sake, say that ther is a
As we have no experimental data from which to estimate probabilities, I think caution is the best bet. But I do not think paranoia helps at all. I personally do not think NASA et al is unaware of the problem, and they generally have very good procedures in place for recovery. Accidents do happen, but I do not see any reason to get worred about a global plague yet. This is not Andromeda Strain or the Jupiter Plague, in reality we have not found anything yet that is completely foreign.
There are strange things ot there, but humans are survivors.
(I have now completely exhausted what faith I have in the species, have a nice day)