Part of this also depends on where the attacker can upload/download files to or from. If he can upload a new file in a location that automatically runs (say a crontab entry on a 'nix system), or he can download your password info, then you're still in trouble.
I've heard a few stories of sites being compromised because a script incorrectly allowed a variable that wasn't tainted as a filename.
Indeed. The system works towards strong arguements (as in strong-of-opinion, or strong in a given direction). Those particular arguements tend to get modded up regularly, but that doesn't mean that the overall moderations are one-sided. Quite often two +5 moderated arguements will be strongly on opposite side of the fence. In fact, one thing that slashdot tends not to mod up are the fence-sitters.
By the same token, the grandparent's post about bias wouldn't have really gotten modded up if the bias were single-sided... making that a self-defeating arguement in many ways.
Well, there are quite a few people who are incapably or semi-incapable for medical rather than genetic reasons. They're born and develop perfectly able to reproduce, but do to accident. For example: getting hit in the nads too hard, or getting an inter-uterine infection, my mother was rendered incapable due to complications of a car accident (obviously after I was born).
It's also a survival method. What if some new nasty disease or bacteria, etc, rendered a large portion of the human race largely incapable of reproducing naturally. It's always a good idea to have a backup plan... it's just a matter of not abusing the ability.
I know a few people that have produced offspring through this method. Cheap in the early stages, but with all the legal issues etc that come with it, the longterm outcome can be rather costly.
Insurance should (and in many cases does) require the exercise of due caution to be valid, or for notification of regular dangerous activities to be passed on to the insurance corp.
Go ahead and drive without a seatbelt, but if you get nearly killed your insurance should be voided.
Go ahead and practice dangerous 'sports' like cliff diving and parajumping, but if it's regular (more than X times a month/year), notify your insurance company and pay the premium to account for your dangerous activity.
Obviously there should be some curb on this, but people should be responsible for their own actions and personal safety... which includes being responsible for the costs and consequences.
A lot of people sign up for 'net so that they can, among a few other things, download music etc (I'm not saying it's right, but they do). Not only that, but many ISP's advertised that you could "download music faster with broadband" etc.
If an ISP suddenly becomes known to yoink people's connections in large amounts for doing what most people do... it may well end up with a customer migration.
This is something I haven't quite understood. As electricity generally takes the quickest path to ground, when a shovel/vehicle impacts the lines underground, would the majority of the electricity not travel out of the line, through the metal shovel, and then into the ground?
The only points I could see where gravity would be cancelled would be where multiple opposing fields intersect. Alternately - it seems that gravity from our understanding diminishes based on distance. That is to say, it gets exponentially smaller, to the effect that at some point it is lower than we can read, but it still exists at minute levels over perpetuity.
At least that's my understanding, but really such a generalization could probably be applied to many things, with the diminished effect not visible to any instrumentation we might use, but possibly existing nonetheless (heat for example).
Cellphones can be used for a lot of stupid things, but they can also be used for emergencies. What happens if somebody has a medical emergency and you're not near a phone (in the field, etc), or you're being threatened with a weapon while walking home.
Cellphones can be used to used to dial 9-1-1 or other emergency numbers... not just foolish uses.
I'm going to add a second question to this. OK, so the school has a "right" to search your locker, you can't prevent that because it's not your propertly. How about a locked box in the locker. Now, constitutionally that would be your property and you could tell them to keep their hands off it. again you're probably screwed as far as being booted from the school, but it does circumvent the property issues with the locker itself.
Moral of the story: If the school can, it will. Don't keep/take evidence of crimes at/to school.
The problem isn't crimes. If they happen to catch drug-runners, great... but the problem is that there are lots of other personal details that get dredged up and improperly handled. How about if a male student's phone had something indicating his alternative sexual preference, sex life, or other very personal details?
Basically, let's allow tohse who aren't likely to become big competition. Additionally, I don't know that I'd call paypal safe, stable, or reliable given its bad history with many users.
I picked up the book "The Science of Superman" some time ago. Not a bad read, and it goes into the details of how Superman's powers might stem from the differential in intensity of the earth/krypton sun, gravity, etc.
Hmmm, well I'm torn about this. Microsoft's ventures into hardware have proven to be all over the scale. I remember back in the day when the best mice (IMHO) were made by Logitech and MS. Of course, the first wireless optical mouse I bought from MS ate batteries in three days and after set #2 was sent back, logitech continued to be a quality choice.
MS keyboards on the other hand have generally been rather utilitarian and nice to use. I've always been fond of the MS natural keyboards (with built-in USB hub).
Outside of the computer realm, the big projects would be the X-box and X-box 360. Mixed results there, but my first impression is that one should probably avoid the early models in case of bugs, but later models might actually be rather good.
All they would have to do is use the big-box store method. More in, sell at a hugely underinflated rate at a loss (or much lower profit), thus undercutting the competitors and forcing them out of business. Once they're gone, jack up the prices and gouge the consumer again.
Not something I'd support, but I'm surprised it hasn't occurred to the ??AA, or likely it has but they wouldn't want to compromise their more immediate profits which are hardly affected by downloading (legit or non) as much as they'd like us to think.
I'm not for filtering or blocking any content, but the arguement that blocking/filtering 'material X' means one can block 'material Y' is silly and untrue.
You can use a sift to 'filter' gold from grains, but that doesn't mean you catch all the gold, and it doesn't mean that you can filter out any other minerals/material with the same method, with the same accuracy, or for the same cost.
Pictures are by nature dynamic, moreso than P2P traffic or other material that might commonly be filtered. Pr0n of any type uses the same protocol as regular web-material. Illegal pr0n, I would imagine, is even difficult to sift by hand. Take a TV actress and try to guess her age. Is a girl *really* young or just trying to look thus? When a human cannot even attain a strong accuracy in such material, how could anyone program a machine to do so (since the machine must, ultimately, be programmed by humans)? Yes, some stuff is going to be obvious to a human, but some isn't, and neither is going to be good for a computer. The best you could probably do is gauge flesh-tones Vs non-flesh-tones to ascertain whether an item is in fact pornographic or not, and even that isn't very effective and still doesn't deal with whether something is illegal or not.
Again, it's probably good for us that the community at large - including the legal community - is rather clueless about what 'magic' computers can and cannot perform, since filtering in general sucks. However I hardly see how an arguement that one could do (a) would qualify that one can also accomplish (b).
OK, so they can easily search out sites with warez MP3's. With the exemption of sites like the pirate bay, wouldn't this make it easier (with government co-operation) to shut down said sites... at least a bit easier than tracking down P2P users with dynamic IP's. I suppose that there is likely little co-operation from the Chinese gov't on Chinese sites, but I had heard previously that there had shut down a few users here and there already.
Keeping him on support all this time must have been (or will be) an incredible financial drain on his family. I'd imagine that the medical bill was ludicrous, so hopefully he comes from a family with money. Being alive is great, but life sure isn't going to be easy considering:
a) When he looks into a mirror his face will be 19 years older... from 19 to 38 kinda sucks
b) His muscle mass will be negligable. After being in a cast for only 3-4 weeks after an ankle break my leg muscles had shrunk and strength decreased noticably
c) He's got a lot of educational catching up to do. Hopefully he worked as a carpenter, plumber, or some other job where old skills are still useful with some upgrading (if he was into computers 19 years ago he's gonna be way behind)
d) Likely there's still a bit of other funkiness with his body after 19 years and major brain damage.
e) Scientists are going to poke and prod him to research this regeneration.
On the plus side:
a) Medicine should be a bit better than it was then
b) Technology in many cases will be pretty cool. Even if he's bedridden for a long time it'll likely be a wonder for him to try out a modern console
c) That first post-vegetitive shower is going to be really nice
d) Add to that a real dinner after being on hospital food and drips for 19 years...
e) Somebody with a brain that regenerates that well will be of interest to science, which is annoying but possibly good for paying the bills.
OK, how about if he had a webpage full of icons, or whatever. Why should an icon be any different than anything else?
The point isn't so much how the threat was presented, it's that the behavior was completely innappropriate. There's a line between 'cute' and 'stupid', and this falls under stupid. Depictions in any form of a gun to somebody's head, not to mention the text, shows that the kid need to get his head checked.
Not perhaps an animated icon of the teacher being hit by an anvil would be more amusing... as it lacks the realistic consequence and threat of a gun to the head. But in either case the "kill Mr Teacher" has enough of a sinister ring that it required a penalty to discourage other such idiocy.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why the make the OEM and non-OEM licenses incompatible. Spending 30-60 minutes on the phone to fix a work machine because the user needs a reinstall (hard disk crash) and doesn't have the original disc is a pain that I could do with out, and I'm sure that if you multiply it by the number of home users/technicians that have to do this then it becomes an even bigger pain in the ass.
Or boot from a bootCD and investigate from there. You'd have to have the machine down, but a downed machine to catch a rootkit is often better than an infected machine doing who knows what.
Slashdot Mirror
Part of this also depends on where the attacker can upload/download files to or from. If he can upload a new file in a location that automatically runs (say a crontab entry on a 'nix system), or he can download your password info, then you're still in trouble.
I've heard a few stories of sites being compromised because a script incorrectly allowed a variable that wasn't tainted as a filename.
What's the likelyhood of a missile vs an in-airport bomb? Seems like the latter method tends to be a little more common and gets past this one.
For cellphones, etc... how hard would it be to mass-mail a spoofed message for those phones capable of recieving email-to-SMS messages?
Indeed. The system works towards strong arguements (as in strong-of-opinion, or strong in a given direction). Those particular arguements tend to get modded up regularly, but that doesn't mean that the overall moderations are one-sided. Quite often two +5 moderated arguements will be strongly on opposite side of the fence. In fact, one thing that slashdot tends not to mod up are the fence-sitters.
By the same token, the grandparent's post about bias wouldn't have really gotten modded up if the bias were single-sided... making that a self-defeating arguement in many ways.
Well, there are quite a few people who are incapably or semi-incapable for medical rather than genetic reasons. They're born and develop perfectly able to reproduce, but do to accident. For example: getting hit in the nads too hard, or getting an inter-uterine infection, my mother was rendered incapable due to complications of a car accident (obviously after I was born).
It's also a survival method. What if some new nasty disease or bacteria, etc, rendered a large portion of the human race largely incapable of reproducing naturally. It's always a good idea to have a backup plan... it's just a matter of not abusing the ability.
I know a few people that have produced offspring through this method. Cheap in the early stages, but with all the legal issues etc that come with it, the longterm outcome can be rather costly.
Insurance should (and in many cases does) require the exercise of due caution to be valid, or for notification of regular dangerous activities to be passed on to the insurance corp.
Go ahead and drive without a seatbelt, but if you get nearly killed your insurance should be voided.
Go ahead and practice dangerous 'sports' like cliff diving and parajumping, but if it's regular (more than X times a month/year), notify your insurance company and pay the premium to account for your dangerous activity.
Obviously there should be some curb on this, but people should be responsible for their own actions and personal safety... which includes being responsible for the costs and consequences.
A lot of people sign up for 'net so that they can, among a few other things, download music etc (I'm not saying it's right, but they do). Not only that, but many ISP's advertised that you could "download music faster with broadband" etc.
If an ISP suddenly becomes known to yoink people's connections in large amounts for doing what most people do... it may well end up with a customer migration.
This is something I haven't quite understood. As electricity generally takes the quickest path to ground, when a shovel/vehicle impacts the lines underground, would the majority of the electricity not travel out of the line, through the metal shovel, and then into the ground?
The only points I could see where gravity would be cancelled would be where multiple opposing fields intersect. Alternately - it seems that gravity from our understanding diminishes based on distance. That is to say, it gets exponentially smaller, to the effect that at some point it is lower than we can read, but it still exists at minute levels over perpetuity.
At least that's my understanding, but really such a generalization could probably be applied to many things, with the diminished effect not visible to any instrumentation we might use, but possibly existing nonetheless (heat for example).
It's a stupid reason, but it's basically that and the lack of other appropriate categories...
Cellphones can be used for a lot of stupid things, but they can also be used for emergencies. What happens if somebody has a medical emergency and you're not near a phone (in the field, etc), or you're being threatened with a weapon while walking home.
Cellphones can be used to used to dial 9-1-1 or other emergency numbers... not just foolish uses.
I'm going to add a second question to this. OK, so the school has a "right" to search your locker, you can't prevent that because it's not your propertly. How about a locked box in the locker. Now, constitutionally that would be your property and you could tell them to keep their hands off it. again you're probably screwed as far as being booted from the school, but it does circumvent the property issues with the locker itself.
Moral of the story: If the school can, it will. Don't keep/take evidence of crimes at/to school.
The problem isn't crimes. If they happen to catch drug-runners, great... but the problem is that there are lots of other personal details that get dredged up and improperly handled. How about if a male student's phone had something indicating his alternative sexual preference, sex life, or other very personal details?
For a google search on "ebay" "auction" or "paypal" to come up with links to this article, and others in regards to the forthcoming lawsuit :-)
Basically, let's allow tohse who aren't likely to become big competition. Additionally, I don't know that I'd call paypal safe, stable, or reliable given its bad history with many users.
I picked up the book "The Science of Superman" some time ago. Not a bad read, and it goes into the details of how Superman's powers might stem from the differential in intensity of the earth/krypton sun, gravity, etc.
Hmmm, well I'm torn about this. Microsoft's ventures into hardware have proven to be all over the scale. I remember back in the day when the best mice (IMHO) were made by Logitech and MS. Of course, the first wireless optical mouse I bought from MS ate batteries in three days and after set #2 was sent back, logitech continued to be a quality choice.
MS keyboards on the other hand have generally been rather utilitarian and nice to use. I've always been fond of the MS natural keyboards (with built-in USB hub).
Outside of the computer realm, the big projects would be the X-box and X-box 360. Mixed results there, but my first impression is that one should probably avoid the early models in case of bugs, but later models might actually be rather good.
All they would have to do is use the big-box store method. More in, sell at a hugely underinflated rate at a loss (or much lower profit), thus undercutting the competitors and forcing them out of business. Once they're gone, jack up the prices and gouge the consumer again.
Not something I'd support, but I'm surprised it hasn't occurred to the ??AA, or likely it has but they wouldn't want to compromise their more immediate profits which are hardly affected by downloading (legit or non) as much as they'd like us to think.
I'm not for filtering or blocking any content, but the arguement that blocking/filtering 'material X' means one can block 'material Y' is silly and untrue.
You can use a sift to 'filter' gold from grains, but that doesn't mean you catch all the gold, and it doesn't mean that you can filter out any other minerals/material with the same method, with the same accuracy, or for the same cost.
Pictures are by nature dynamic, moreso than P2P traffic or other material that might commonly be filtered. Pr0n of any type uses the same protocol as regular web-material. Illegal pr0n, I would imagine, is even difficult to sift by hand. Take a TV actress and try to guess her age. Is a girl *really* young or just trying to look thus? When a human cannot even attain a strong accuracy in such material, how could anyone program a machine to do so (since the machine must, ultimately, be programmed by humans)? Yes, some stuff is going to be obvious to a human, but some isn't, and neither is going to be good for a computer. The best you could probably do is gauge flesh-tones Vs non-flesh-tones to ascertain whether an item is in fact pornographic or not, and even that isn't very effective and still doesn't deal with whether something is illegal or not.
Again, it's probably good for us that the community at large - including the legal community - is rather clueless about what 'magic' computers can and cannot perform, since filtering in general sucks. However I hardly see how an arguement that one could do (a) would qualify that one can also accomplish (b).
OK, so they can easily search out sites with warez MP3's. With the exemption of sites like the pirate bay, wouldn't this make it easier (with government co-operation) to shut down said sites... at least a bit easier than tracking down P2P users with dynamic IP's. I suppose that there is likely little co-operation from the Chinese gov't on Chinese sites, but I had heard previously that there had shut down a few users here and there already.
Keeping him on support all this time must have been (or will be) an incredible financial drain on his family. I'd imagine that the medical bill was ludicrous, so hopefully he comes from a family with money. Being alive is great, but life sure isn't going to be easy considering:
a) When he looks into a mirror his face will be 19 years older... from 19 to 38 kinda sucks
b) His muscle mass will be negligable. After being in a cast for only 3-4 weeks after an ankle break my leg muscles had shrunk and strength decreased noticably
c) He's got a lot of educational catching up to do. Hopefully he worked as a carpenter, plumber, or some other job where old skills are still useful with some upgrading (if he was into computers 19 years ago he's gonna be way behind)
d) Likely there's still a bit of other funkiness with his body after 19 years and major brain damage.
e) Scientists are going to poke and prod him to research this regeneration.
On the plus side:
a) Medicine should be a bit better than it was then
b) Technology in many cases will be pretty cool. Even if he's bedridden for a long time it'll likely be a wonder for him to try out a modern console
c) That first post-vegetitive shower is going to be really nice
d) Add to that a real dinner after being on hospital food and drips for 19 years...
e) Somebody with a brain that regenerates that well will be of interest to science, which is annoying but possibly good for paying the bills.
OK, how about if he had a webpage full of icons, or whatever. Why should an icon be any different than anything else?
The point isn't so much how the threat was presented, it's that the behavior was completely innappropriate. There's a line between 'cute' and 'stupid', and this falls under stupid. Depictions in any form of a gun to somebody's head, not to mention the text, shows that the kid need to get his head checked.
Not perhaps an animated icon of the teacher being hit by an anvil would be more amusing... as it lacks the realistic consequence and threat of a gun to the head. But in either case the "kill Mr Teacher" has enough of a sinister ring that it required a penalty to discourage other such idiocy.
For the life of me, I can't figure out why the make the OEM and non-OEM licenses incompatible. Spending 30-60 minutes on the phone to fix a work machine because the user needs a reinstall (hard disk crash) and doesn't have the original disc is a pain that I could do with out, and I'm sure that if you multiply it by the number of home users/technicians that have to do this then it becomes an even bigger pain in the ass.
Or boot from a bootCD and investigate from there. You'd have to have the machine down, but a downed machine to catch a rootkit is often better than an infected machine doing who knows what.