Walking around drunk with poor judgement isn't inherently dangerous to others. Driving a car with poor judgement is and yet the US has no problem with underage driving (from a European perspective).
When you call a Black person "nigger", you are referring to a long history of abuse, often lethal (and worse) of Black people.
"Black people" can be perceived as derogative as well. And so can "negroid", "coloured", and so on. Take offense to the "I hope he's not a" part. That is the racist element.
If I said "look at Obama, there might be a nigger in charge of the USA soon, that'd be so cool".. how would that be racism, let alone terrorism? Context means a lot in communication.
Most people I know couldn't WAIT to leave home the minute they turned 18 and, now, might be making more than me, but are pocketing LESS.
Less money perhaps. They do however quite likely pocket a lot more freedom, alcohol, pot, slutty sixteen year olds, social contact with peers, random trips, and so on. Are those worth it? You bet. And I bet things would have to go seriously wrong before any of your friends would even consider moving back home. Living on your own might cost more, but some benefits are simply priceless.
Is one of the implications that solar systems could at one point be similar to ours? Gas giants far away with smaller planets towards the sun? And then the gas giants slowly creep towards the sun, wiping out the smaller planets that get in the way?
That's a possibility, although I would turn around your phrasing: our solar system could at one point be like the ones we're detecting far away, with Jupiter sweeping away Earth and our small neighbourhood friends.
Additionally, any news source can air this without fear, as news is generally held to have a rather broad exception to copyright laws.
Which is one of the reasons I am considering to get a press card. Here in Holland it's not too expensive and it seems like it is a good step to safeguard my freedom of speech. I actually would recommend it to anyone who regularly writes (blogs?) about any serious topics.
Cut the phone lines and to hell with any nation that persecutes people over religion.
Or persecutes people period. But I disagree with cutting the phone lines. Isolating the bad guys has never worked over the course of history. Engaging them might be tedious and without immediate or noticable results, but isolation is guaranteed to accomplish nada.
Sorry Kirk, we can't win this battle. Back in the day only professionals, nerds and skilled technicians visited Slashdot. These days the site (for monetary reasons, I'm sure) has to cater to a much larger audience and we have to accept that we, the low-digit-UID crowd, are no longer representative for Slashdot.
The only problem is, our chances are not much better anywhere else. I miss the days when the Internet consisted mostly of early adopters. (Then again, we need the masses because they make it feasible to have actually useful things like Internet banking and on-line pizza orders.)
This might surprise people relatively new to technology, but it should be obvious to anyone who's been in the field for a while.
If you can hijack DNS, you can of course replace any networked service with your own (as man-in-the-middle attack or otherwise). If you change the road signs on an intersection in the countryside, not just cars are vulnerable - all traffic is.
This would have been an interesting and informative story in the early days of Slashdot when we were all still new to the concepts of Internet. Anno 2008, I would have expected more from the editors (maybe not the new recruit, but timothy has been around for a long time). News for nerds has become news for the masses, it seems.
Maybe I should stop reading the main page and start checking only Science, Mobile and YRO.
You have no idea how much that increases your value as a spam target!
Most spammers really don't bother to check this. It's one of the reasons I stopped using catch-all aliases: I still got spam on addresses on my domain which had been inactive for a decade (for a domain I've had since 1996) and even more on random first and last name combinations for addresses which have never, ever existed.
I must admit I never click on unsubscribe links for the exact reason you give, but I would definitely let a spam filter do so for me. What training would be more accurate for spam filters than learning whether the sender honours opt-out?
It gives trust to senders who play nice, it's a honeypot for those who don't.
The only problem I see with it is what happens when you resubscribe.
It would be nice if e-mail clients would support a List-Subscribe header. In an incoming e-mail it would give a one button option to send a small reply with a List-Subscribe header itself, so the MTA and spam software could track valid subscriptions as well. Like most solutions this would take time to gain adoption, but it might just be trivial enough to work.
Assuming the mailing list includes a List-Unsubscribe header, it would be nice for anti-spam software to use this header and avoid false positives.
Of course that could be used as a spammer to verify e-mail addresses, then again a better filter is more useful on the long run than assuming no malicious party will ever put your e-mail in a database.
I knew somebody would flame me for my opinion, but look at the facts.
File extensions are, currently, the sole determining factor that Windows machines use to determine what a file is.
That's a shortcoming of Windows, it's not a shortcoming of other systems such as the magic database.
Yes, but extensions aren't interchangeable. Your malicious.exe won't run if you rename it.pdf. It's a safety feature, and it's very useful.
Then why does malicious Java archive run when you rename it.gif? I thought they weren't interchangable?
Furthermore, on the internet, the extension is the only way a user can tell what a file is.
You can't trust something as arbitrary as a filename, extension or content-type given by a remote server. You have to check the file itself. Now I won't expect an end user to do this manually, which is why the magic database is so useful.
Since TFA states that the server thinks the so-called GIFAR is a.gif, it'll send a content-type: image/GIF header. It's dangerous and stupid for the browser to ignore (1) the.gif extension AND (2) the image/GIF content-type and launch Java.
It's fine for the browser to ignore them because the server cannot be trusted to supply the correct information. It's dangerous and stupid for the browser to run Java code without warning, especially if it allows it to be done from inside the img tag because it can know the data is not a valid image by simply checking it first.
I do think it's a flaw of the server to not verify this itself when storing the so-called image, but it's a bigger flaw of the client to trust every server will do this and no single server will abuse it.
Plenty of people in Europe have subsidised phones on contract. Of course you can also go pre-paid, or buy a phone seperately, or get a SIM-only contract.. but there's no system in Europe in place which prevents subsidised phones.
The big difference is probably that we can get any phone from any store with basically any out of half a dozen different operators while in the US in most areas you have fewer choices of providers, if what I've been hearing here is correct.
I've never been sure why there was much controversy. The various announcements around the time of the 4.0 release and in advance made it clear that KDE 4 was the entire new desktop (in all its future versions) with new core technologies like Phonon and Plasma, whereas KDE 4.0 was the very first release of said desktop, wherein the underlying technologies were frozen so that developers could start using them, but the apps and desktop were incomplete.
The controversy is that it redefines what.0 means to most computer users and has meant throughout the release history of KDE.
It only occurred to me today, but I actually think KDE should do it again for KDE 5. If consistently used, there's nothing wrong with the following version numbering:
[b].0[/b] is the [i]zeroeth[/i] release set of a new product or technology generation. It could be used instead of silly names such as alpha, beta, preview and technology release alltogether and would indicate incompleteness.
[b].1[/b[ would be the [i]first[/i] release and would be complete.
This would probably also be more intuative to end users because only developers use zero-indexed lists.
Then again, it would not have provided the KDE release team with a way to push forward their new platform the way they did now. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I wouldn't say anything was distributed at all, when no additional person/entity gains access.
If you and me were to throw dollar/euro bills to each other in Africa, we wouldn't be able to call it distribution of money. Not even if we threw around zero-cost copies of those bills.
Dear neighbour, could you please tell me which laws from Brussels take precedence over national laws and which do not? The balance between state and federal government in the US might be unhealthy, but I'm not very reassured the EU is turning out to be any better.
Your pot smoking neighbour from the west coast (Holland, not California).
You could consider settled areas to be derivative works of art with their own copyright. And although I don't know who worked the first week, I know that on the eighth day the Dutch created the Netherlands.
There are no money paying customers who are going to complain that your product is late.
Some core developers of KDE are employed by distributions. Because of their full-time contributions they carry a lot of weight in the project. This is not specific to KDE, but it does put some external pressure on project features and deadlines.
Still, you would expect that they would have made sure a usable product exists for whatever company they represent. I'm so glad Slackware is still on 3.5.x and I trust that Patrick will not switch until KDE 4.x is actually useful. Don't even see it in -current yet.
Just interesting stuff, but we have to remember to stop grafting our humanism on top of alien things we do not understand.
It's pointless to look for patterns we don't understand the least bit or don't even recognise. It makes sense to only look at whatever it is we do claim to understand at least a bit, from biology to chemistry to physics to sociology. Of course we are looking for life similar to our own (not just human, all of earth's lifeforms), how can we know if we found something?
Actually, tourists are the least likely candidate, because they would be proceeded by a significant amount of explorers first and entrepreneurs later. Let's suppose our race discovers to warp through the universe and gets to visit other planets.. you'd see local infrastructure long before any serious tourism and surveys long before investments in local infrastructure.
We're just monkeys so they don't feel the need to hide, wouldn't you expect them to have built a nice resort for their tourists?
If they did decide to hide, tourists would be the last aliens you'd see. Our system would be off-limits except for maybe with their governing body. Perhaps we'll meet some refugees or renegades, though.
Even if there were tourism but we're not that popular (or one of too many options), we can be sure that there has never been an incident (such as a crash) for surely they'd storm in to investigate - without caring much if the monkeys notice.
And seriously, since when are tourists the modest kind? Surely there would be at least one of them to ignore the "do not feed the animals/do not knock on the glass" signs to see our reaction. Most of our planet is not North Korea so if just one of them was craving our mass attention I'm sure they could come up with a few ideas that we couldn't possibly cover up.
After all, unless they all believe in intelligent design, they should be intelligent enough to recognise where we are in evolution.
The first aliens we'll meet are going to be explorers, just like our explorers will be the first to visit other star systems.
Slashdot Mirror
TFA is not about Titan being a candidate, but some research trying to recreate (some) of the conditions on Titan.
Of course TFA also is a long, long way away from life. But knowing the building blocks can form there is another step forward.
Walking around drunk with poor judgement isn't inherently dangerous to others. Driving a car with poor judgement is and yet the US has no problem with underage driving (from a European perspective).
European countries where bicycle traffic is commonplace have designated lanes for bicycles. Works like a charm.
When you call a Black person "nigger", you are referring to a long history of abuse, often lethal (and worse) of Black people.
"Black people" can be perceived as derogative as well. And so can "negroid", "coloured", and so on. Take offense to the "I hope he's not a" part. That is the racist element.
If I said "look at Obama, there might be a nigger in charge of the USA soon, that'd be so cool".. how would that be racism, let alone terrorism? Context means a lot in communication.
Most people I know couldn't WAIT to leave home the minute they turned 18 and, now, might be making more than me, but are pocketing LESS.
Less money perhaps. They do however quite likely pocket a lot more freedom, alcohol, pot, slutty sixteen year olds, social contact with peers, random trips, and so on. Are those worth it? You bet. And I bet things would have to go seriously wrong before any of your friends would even consider moving back home. Living on your own might cost more, but some benefits are simply priceless.
I haven't used them in 6+ months and then when I need them.... nada.
I believe that's an intended feature of Slashdot, if you're more active on the site you're more likely to get them back sooner.
Is one of the implications that solar systems could at one point be similar to ours? Gas giants far away with smaller planets towards the sun? And then the gas giants slowly creep towards the sun, wiping out the smaller planets that get in the way?
That's a possibility, although I would turn around your phrasing: our solar system could at one point be like the ones we're detecting far away, with Jupiter sweeping away Earth and our small neighbourhood friends.
Additionally, any news source can air this without fear, as news is generally held to have a rather broad exception to copyright laws.
Which is one of the reasons I am considering to get a press card. Here in Holland it's not too expensive and it seems like it is a good step to safeguard my freedom of speech. I actually would recommend it to anyone who regularly writes (blogs?) about any serious topics.
Cut the phone lines and to hell with any nation that persecutes people over religion.
Or persecutes people period. But I disagree with cutting the phone lines. Isolating the bad guys has never worked over the course of history. Engaging them might be tedious and without immediate or noticable results, but isolation is guaranteed to accomplish nada.
Looks that way.. I just watched Malcolm in the Middle.
Sorry Kirk, we can't win this battle. Back in the day only professionals, nerds and skilled technicians visited Slashdot. These days the site (for monetary reasons, I'm sure) has to cater to a much larger audience and we have to accept that we, the low-digit-UID crowd, are no longer representative for Slashdot.
The only problem is, our chances are not much better anywhere else. I miss the days when the Internet consisted mostly of early adopters. (Then again, we need the masses because they make it feasible to have actually useful things like Internet banking and on-line pizza orders.)
This might surprise people relatively new to technology, but it should be obvious to anyone who's been in the field for a while.
If you can hijack DNS, you can of course replace any networked service with your own (as man-in-the-middle attack or otherwise). If you change the road signs on an intersection in the countryside, not just cars are vulnerable - all traffic is.
This would have been an interesting and informative story in the early days of Slashdot when we were all still new to the concepts of Internet. Anno 2008, I would have expected more from the editors (maybe not the new recruit, but timothy has been around for a long time). News for nerds has become news for the masses, it seems.
Maybe I should stop reading the main page and start checking only Science, Mobile and YRO.
He might not be so lucky to be everywhere, for all we know he's spending the rest of his unlife surrounded by Whoopi Goldberg.
You have no idea how much that increases your value as a spam target!
Most spammers really don't bother to check this. It's one of the reasons I stopped using catch-all aliases: I still got spam on addresses on my domain which had been inactive for a decade (for a domain I've had since 1996) and even more on random first and last name combinations for addresses which have never, ever existed.
I must admit I never click on unsubscribe links for the exact reason you give, but I would definitely let a spam filter do so for me. What training would be more accurate for spam filters than learning whether the sender honours opt-out?
It gives trust to senders who play nice, it's a honeypot for those who don't.
The only problem I see with it is what happens when you resubscribe.
It would be nice if e-mail clients would support a List-Subscribe header. In an incoming e-mail it would give a one button option to send a small reply with a List-Subscribe header itself, so the MTA and spam software could track valid subscriptions as well. Like most solutions this would take time to gain adoption, but it might just be trivial enough to work.
Assuming the mailing list includes a List-Unsubscribe header, it would be nice for anti-spam software to use this header and avoid false positives.
Of course that could be used as a spammer to verify e-mail addresses, then again a better filter is more useful on the long run than assuming no malicious party will ever put your e-mail in a database.
I knew somebody would flame me for my opinion, but look at the facts.
File extensions are, currently, the sole determining factor that Windows machines use to determine what a file is.
That's a shortcoming of Windows, it's not a shortcoming of other systems such as the magic database.
Yes, but extensions aren't interchangeable. Your malicious .exe won't run if you rename it .pdf. It's a safety feature, and it's very useful.
Then why does malicious Java archive run when you rename it .gif? I thought they weren't interchangable?
Furthermore, on the internet, the extension is the only way a user can tell what a file is.
You can't trust something as arbitrary as a filename, extension or content-type given by a remote server. You have to check the file itself. Now I won't expect an end user to do this manually, which is why the magic database is so useful.
Since TFA states that the server thinks the so-called GIFAR is a .gif, it'll send a content-type: image/GIF header. It's dangerous and stupid for the browser to ignore (1) the .gif extension AND (2) the image/GIF content-type and launch Java.
It's fine for the browser to ignore them because the server cannot be trusted to supply the correct information. It's dangerous and stupid for the browser to run Java code without warning, especially if it allows it to be done from inside the img tag because it can know the data is not a valid image by simply checking it first.
I do think it's a flaw of the server to not verify this itself when storing the so-called image, but it's a bigger flaw of the client to trust every server will do this and no single server will abuse it.
Plenty of people in Europe have subsidised phones on contract. Of course you can also go pre-paid, or buy a phone seperately, or get a SIM-only contract.. but there's no system in Europe in place which prevents subsidised phones.
The big difference is probably that we can get any phone from any store with basically any out of half a dozen different operators while in the US in most areas you have fewer choices of providers, if what I've been hearing here is correct.
We should collect the home addresses of Google employees (preferably at the top level) and install some webcams ourselves.
Or hire some papparazi to annoy them.. would finally give Britney a break as well.
I've never been sure why there was much controversy. The various announcements around the time of the 4.0 release and in advance made it clear that KDE 4 was the entire new desktop (in all its future versions) with new core technologies like Phonon and Plasma, whereas KDE 4.0 was the very first release of said desktop, wherein the underlying technologies were frozen so that developers could start using them, but the apps and desktop were incomplete.
The controversy is that it redefines what .0 means to most computer users and has meant throughout the release history of KDE.
It only occurred to me today, but I actually think KDE should do it again for KDE 5. If consistently used, there's nothing wrong with the following version numbering:
[b].0[/b] is the [i]zeroeth[/i] release set of a new product or technology generation. It could be used instead of silly names such as alpha, beta, preview and technology release alltogether and would indicate incompleteness.
[b].1[/b[ would be the [i]first[/i] release and would be complete.
This would probably also be more intuative to end users because only developers use zero-indexed lists.
Then again, it would not have provided the KDE release team with a way to push forward their new platform the way they did now. But that's not necessarily a bad thing.
I wouldn't say anything was distributed at all, when no additional person/entity gains access.
If you and me were to throw dollar/euro bills to each other in Africa, we wouldn't be able to call it distribution of money. Not even if we threw around zero-cost copies of those bills.
Dear neighbour, could you please tell me which laws from Brussels take precedence over national laws and which do not? The balance between state and federal government in the US might be unhealthy, but I'm not very reassured the EU is turning out to be any better.
Your pot smoking neighbour from the west coast (Holland, not California).
You could consider settled areas to be derivative works of art with their own copyright. And although I don't know who worked the first week, I know that on the eighth day the Dutch created the Netherlands.
There are no money paying customers who are going to complain that your product is late.
Some core developers of KDE are employed by distributions. Because of their full-time contributions they carry a lot of weight in the project. This is not specific to KDE, but it does put some external pressure on project features and deadlines.
Still, you would expect that they would have made sure a usable product exists for whatever company they represent. I'm so glad Slackware is still on 3.5.x and I trust that Patrick will not switch until KDE 4.x is actually useful. Don't even see it in -current yet.
Just interesting stuff, but we have to remember to stop grafting our humanism on top of alien things we do not understand.
It's pointless to look for patterns we don't understand the least bit or don't even recognise. It makes sense to only look at whatever it is we do claim to understand at least a bit, from biology to chemistry to physics to sociology. Of course we are looking for life similar to our own (not just human, all of earth's lifeforms), how can we know if we found something?
Actually, tourists are the least likely candidate, because they would be proceeded by a significant amount of explorers first and entrepreneurs later. Let's suppose our race discovers to warp through the universe and gets to visit other planets.. you'd see local infrastructure long before any serious tourism and surveys long before investments in local infrastructure.
We're just monkeys so they don't feel the need to hide, wouldn't you expect them to have built a nice resort for their tourists?
If they did decide to hide, tourists would be the last aliens you'd see. Our system would be off-limits except for maybe with their governing body. Perhaps we'll meet some refugees or renegades, though.
Even if there were tourism but we're not that popular (or one of too many options), we can be sure that there has never been an incident (such as a crash) for surely they'd storm in to investigate - without caring much if the monkeys notice.
And seriously, since when are tourists the modest kind? Surely there would be at least one of them to ignore the "do not feed the animals/do not knock on the glass" signs to see our reaction. Most of our planet is not North Korea so if just one of them was craving our mass attention I'm sure they could come up with a few ideas that we couldn't possibly cover up.
After all, unless they all believe in intelligent design, they should be intelligent enough to recognise where we are in evolution.
The first aliens we'll meet are going to be explorers, just like our explorers will be the first to visit other star systems.