What part of "Transhumanist" don't you understand?
OF COURSE I believe all humans are assholes!
I was pointing that assholes lower in the hierarchy can't believe the assholes higher in the hierarchy are assholes - because that would be a threat to their perception of their place in the world - which is one of many things their fear of death won't let them deal with.
"Would you prefer the country with the somewhat spotty record or the country with the entirely black, blood-drenched track record?"
Uhm, exactly which countries would those be?
As far as I can see, the only two countries with even a hope in the next twenty or thirty years of "weaponizing space" are the US and the USSR - and the latter is highly questionable. China and Japan are very unlikely to do it. Nobody else has the money.
And in fact, it's unlikely the UNITED STATES has the money in reality - the spendthrifts at the Pentagon just like to think so.
You want weapons in space? Send the Pentagon a portion of YOUR paycheck every week.
Long before the US can put enough weapons in space to be a serious threat to anybody, the US government is going to be backpack-nuked by somebody who's had enough of this horseshit. And anybody who replaces them who has the same idea will end up the same way.
Empires do NOT last. I predict the US has less than fifty years - maybe much less - to go before it gets reduced to the famous cyberpunk, broken-up, third-world wannabe disaster of a country run by assholes like Bill Gates and George Bush.
They engineer an escape from a zoo, then hijack a ship to Antartica (the rest of the zoo animals end up in Madagascar where they haven't a clue.)
Best line in the movie: "The penguins are psychotic!"
When the cops show up at the zoo breakout, the penguin leader says (like Jack Nicholson in "Batman"): "We've been ratted out, boys! Cute and cuddly...cute and cuddly...!"
It has NOTHING to do with military necessity and EVERYTHING to do with paying contractors billions of dollars of taxpayer money in exchange for campaign contributions to politicians and cushy "retirement" jobs for military people.
It's completely irrelevant to the discussion whether ANY of this crap will actually work or have an actual purpose.
It's amazing how few people comprehend this simple fact. The distraction effort is nearly perfect because so few people really can bring themselves to believe that every single member of the state is a crooked asshole only out for himself.
It's a perfect demonstration of primate hierarchical social structure. The beta monkeys follow the alpha around no matter what disasters he leads them to.
Yes, we did and for the same reasons - people jumping on a particular bandwagon before that bandwagon was mature enough to handle what was being thrown at it.
Java is better now and more mature. If people start trying to rewrite enterprise apps for Ajax, they're going to find they're in a lot of trouble getting equivalent functionality.
In some cases, this might be good - maybe the functionality will be redesigned BETTER to take advantage of a new technology.
But in many cases, it will lead to project failure and then AJAX will get the same (undeserved) bad name that Java applets got.
Google Maps is not the same as an enterprise app with two thousand screens, thousands of database tables, and ten thousand procedures.
Java is a relatively mature development platform which has attempted and continues to attempt to address all necessary development and deployment issues on both the client and the Web.
AJAX simply isn't that far along yet. While I don't doubt it (and Web services in general) could get there, assuming that it's immediately a viable alternative to Java for anything other than relatively simple apps is likely to get people in the same trouble as assuming that Java applets were the solution to all problems.
We're seeing "buzzword obsession" again in IT land. This time it's AJAX and Web services.
It's just another tool, folks, nothing more. Use it where it's APPROPRIATE. Google Maps is not an enterprise app with two thousand screen forms, thousands of database tables running on Oracle, and ten thousand procedures.
I think the only reason Java applets left a bad taste was because the platform was not mature when people started trying to use it for everything - and on much slower hardware (not to mention slower network connections) than we have today, too.
The same thing could happen to AJAX and Web services - people pushing it before it's well-structured and complete enough to handle real-world application needs and the underlying Internet speed (read: 10-100Mbps to the home that's already there to the corporate desktop) is there.
Google Maps may be a nice hack, but it's not the same as doing an enterprise-level app in terms of complexity. Maps does one thing and one thing only - extract info and show you maps with minimal user interaction and minimal data capture and vetting.
It's not yet certain that something with 2,000 screen forms and thousands of database tables and requiring thousands of procedures would work as well in a browser environment. I'm not saying it can't, I just haven't seen any proof yet.
People in IT have a tendency to grab every buzzword that comes down the pike and treat it as the answer to all their problems. It never is.
And you can do the same in Java - run stuff on the server side as well as run perfectly complementary stuff on the client side - since they're both in the same language.
I think the important point is that Java has a HUGE amount of classes that handle things that AJAX and Web technologies are still struggling to deal with.
While there are tons of JavaScripts around to do things as well, they don't hang together as well as Java classes based on the foundation classes.
The only possible negative for Java is the steep learning curve to take FULL advantage of all the stuff that's out there.
As an example of this sort of problem, I'm doing stuff with Oracle Forms Developer at the moment. This thing is a nightmare - tons of features and new terminology. You need to read at least a couple 800-page books to get any kind of handle on it. And the user interface is horrible. And it's virtually impossible to document anything except by dumping the whole form into a SEVEN MEGABYTE TEXT FILE which you can't print or do anything else to except search it for text strings!
I often think about my small exposure to Java so far and how it seems it would be far easier to grab some Java classes and create a form-based app which would be a HELL of a lot easier to document than this Oracle crap. But you still need to spend some time studying AWT and Swing as well as JDBC to get a handle on all the issues.
Still, for someone who's done it, Java-based apps have GOT to be easier that Oracle Forms-based apps.
And I suspect that will apply to AJAX apps as well until some organization and structure are applied to the AJAX tools and concepts.
"Thompson, now a director of Applied Digital Solutions, the company that makes the chips"
If you can invade Iraq so your cronies in Halliburton can clean up, why not force everybody in the world to have a chip in your arm so your company can clean up?
Is there any doubt that the cyberpunk sci-fi vision of corporations running the world is now a reality?
What we need now are the cyberpunks, shadowrunners, and heavily armed street gangs to keep the corps honest - or dead.
Yup - that's pretty much the process I use for cleaning client machines.
The only problem is when the client machine is so hosed you can't run anything without booting from a CD using Bart's PE or Windoes Ultimate Boot CD. I usually have to try that first, running Ad-Aware from Bart's to get enough spyware off that I can then boot the machine and install the rest of the anti-spyware stuff and run it.
If necessary, I boot into Safe Mode as well and run a scan.
Neither of those catches running processes, though, so a scan with the machine in normal mode is usually necessary.
I intend to help with that problem by setting up a system to boot Windows 98 from a USB HD and running from there if I can. I specifically want Windows 98 because some client machines are too weak in RAM or CPU to boot Windows XP from Bart's.
After I clean off the majority of spyware with Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy, I run HijackThis, a full AV scan AND a trojan scan using TDS-3. That leaves only the crap that NONE of these things can get rid of, which entails manually inspecting running processes, identifying the crap and killing them and then removing their keys from the Registry manually - usually only a couple malware need this treatment.
When I get done, the system is clean. Then I install SpywareBlaster and Kerio Personal Firewall, and tell the client to use Firefox and Thunderbird from now on, and keep the spyware stuff updated and run it once a week and just default to removing everything they find (except HijackThis - I don't let the client run that.)
Haven't had to do a reinstall yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has to be done on somebody's machine sooner or later. Some of these people have literally hundreds or even thousands of spyware and dozens of - up to over a hundred - trojans.
According to an article I read, if you try to view video media on a monitor that doesn't have DRM enabled, Windows Vista will actually DEGRADE the image so you can't see it (or see it properly, I forget which.)
This is pathetic - but good. Microsoft is dooming itself with this nonsense.
Vista is the death knell of Microsoft. When this POS comes out, the entire IT and consumer market is going to say, "Oh, hell no!" and switch to Mac and Linux (mostly Linux.)
This is what happens when you have a greedy, unprincipled asshole running your company - it self-destructs sooner or later.
"currently US genre writers are mirroring the 'deep trauma' that 9/11 wrought on America."
Bullshit.
They're mirroring the "deep trauma" that being unable to write anything except "Lord of the Rings" ripoffs has inflicted them with.
Enough of this fantasy shit.
If you can't write worth a shit because somebody flew a plane into a building and killed a couple thousand people, then you couldn't write for shit before.
Am I supposed to claim I'm "traumatized" because 150,000 people got killed in the tsunami, or 100,000 Iraqi civilians got blown up by our illustrious warriors (over 1,800 of whom in turn got their asses waxed)? Is that why I can't make a buck?
Where is Thomas Harris - who can write wonderful satire about psychiatrists and cops urning into cannibals - when we need him?
Somebody needs to write a "Catch-22" or "M.A.S.H." or "Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal" about Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
I guess I need to get cracking on my "Transhuman" series of novels - more rabid sex and merciless gunning down of monkeys than anybody has seen since the Marquis de Sade...
It's been common knowledge for some time now that Monad would NOT be included in Vista, but either in a later version or in Exchange Server or some other Microsoft server product.
All this article says is that some bozo at Microsoft has said the same thing vis-a-vis the virus concepts being reported in some hacker zines (see related/. story lower down.) In other words, Microsoft spin time is back in town...
This article should be treated as nothing more than an "update" of the Monad virus article - and not much of an update at that given it's old news.
Well, I found the article and I WOULD have included it here, but the FUCKING LAME-ASS/. LAMENESS FILTER WON'T LET ME!
The stupid POS/. uses is telling me the CODE lines are too fucking SHORT!
Morons!
WARNING: The below zine will show up on your virus scans with a half dozen viruses and a trojan. Apparently there are numerous virus samples in the zine's files which come RAR'd. You have been warned!
So go here here to download the zine that had the article in it.
More importantly,/. does not distinguish between a reply to a reply and an actual post.
So if someone replies to my post tomorrow, and I reply to it after I've replied to some other reply to another of my posts, I still have to wait - even though nobody is posting any more to the particular discussion.
So, in effect, answering your "/. email" basically requires waiting two minutes between each reply.
Which is a PITA,/.!
Since nobody is posting to the discussion a day later, why the hell does it matter how frequently one replies to replies to one's own posts from that discussion?
Start coding,.,! Fix this crap! Keep track of the frequency of posts to a discussion and when it dies down, remove the two-minute wait so people can make individual replies without eating up their day.
And they can be used to track you between sites, so they ARE spyware in that sense, even if they're not executable, so they go if my antispyware tool sees them.
Humph, I didn't get the message. Somebody must have submitted it to/. and it got rejected...:-)
Anyway, this is not encouraging:
The source says Microsoft will likely consider buying other companies with behavioral targeting technology, but no one is "officially in scope at this time."
BTW, I love the euphemism for spyware - "behavioral targeting technology."
I don't know which SPECIFIC sites intall spyware because I DON'T GET SPYWARE because I use Firefox (not to mention three anti-spyware products.) And I don't ask my clients specifically which sites they got the spyware from, obviously.
Going to the main Nike site is braindead - major commercial corporations don't do spyware (for the most part, anyway) because it's too legally dangerous for them. It's the sleazier commercial sites that do this. I had a client whose kids constantly go to sports and sports shoes sites; I had another client whose husband constantly goes to "fantasy sports" sites. Neither of these people use P2P systems. Both were riddled with spyware. And they were on DIALUP, not even DSL or cable.
Spyware PROMPTS TO INSTALL? Are you fucking nuts? The few times I've had spyware, it NEVER prompted me for anything. Sure, SOME of them do because they're offering some crappy piece of "consumer" software to cover the spyware. But many don't - they just need an IE browser not set to disable ActiveX controls and they're off to the races. And most users don't have a clue about ActiveX.
You're an idiot. Try doing a Google on spyware and visiting some of the antispyware sites that list spyware before you run your mouth any more. Everybody on/. by now probably thinks you're an idiot or a nut - or a spyware author.
Slashdot Mirror
What part of "Transhumanist" don't you understand?
OF COURSE I believe all humans are assholes!
I was pointing that assholes lower in the hierarchy can't believe the assholes higher in the hierarchy are assholes - because that would be a threat to their perception of their place in the world - which is one of many things their fear of death won't let them deal with.
"Would you prefer the country with the somewhat spotty record or the country with the entirely black, blood-drenched track record?"
Uhm, exactly which countries would those be?
As far as I can see, the only two countries with even a hope in the next twenty or thirty years of "weaponizing space" are the US and the USSR - and the latter is highly questionable. China and Japan are very unlikely to do it. Nobody else has the money.
And in fact, it's unlikely the UNITED STATES has the money in reality - the spendthrifts at the Pentagon just like to think so.
You want weapons in space? Send the Pentagon a portion of YOUR paycheck every week.
Long before the US can put enough weapons in space to be a serious threat to anybody, the US government is going to be backpack-nuked by somebody who's had enough of this horseshit. And anybody who replaces them who has the same idea will end up the same way.
Empires do NOT last. I predict the US has less than fifty years - maybe much less - to go before it gets reduced to the famous cyberpunk, broken-up, third-world wannabe disaster of a country run by assholes like Bill Gates and George Bush.
Oh, wait...
More penguins!
They engineer an escape from a zoo, then hijack a ship to Antartica (the rest of the zoo animals end up in Madagascar where they haven't a clue.)
Best line in the movie: "The penguins are psychotic!"
When the cops show up at the zoo breakout, the penguin leader says (like Jack Nicholson in "Batman"): "We've been ratted out, boys! Cute and cuddly...cute and cuddly...!"
It's like the nuclear weapons peace movement.
It has NOTHING to do with military necessity and EVERYTHING to do with paying contractors billions of dollars of taxpayer money in exchange for campaign contributions to politicians and cushy "retirement" jobs for military people.
It's completely irrelevant to the discussion whether ANY of this crap will actually work or have an actual purpose.
It's amazing how few people comprehend this simple fact. The distraction effort is nearly perfect because so few people really can bring themselves to believe that every single member of the state is a crooked asshole only out for himself.
It's a perfect demonstration of primate hierarchical social structure. The beta monkeys follow the alpha around no matter what disasters he leads them to.
Yes, we did and for the same reasons - people jumping on a particular bandwagon before that bandwagon was mature enough to handle what was being thrown at it.
Java is better now and more mature. If people start trying to rewrite enterprise apps for Ajax, they're going to find they're in a lot of trouble getting equivalent functionality.
In some cases, this might be good - maybe the functionality will be redesigned BETTER to take advantage of a new technology.
But in many cases, it will lead to project failure and then AJAX will get the same (undeserved) bad name that Java applets got.
Google Maps is not the same as an enterprise app with two thousand screens, thousands of database tables, and ten thousand procedures.
This is what I'm concerned about.
Java is a relatively mature development platform which has attempted and continues to attempt to address all necessary development and deployment issues on both the client and the Web.
AJAX simply isn't that far along yet. While I don't doubt it (and Web services in general) could get there, assuming that it's immediately a viable alternative to Java for anything other than relatively simple apps is likely to get people in the same trouble as assuming that Java applets were the solution to all problems.
We're seeing "buzzword obsession" again in IT land. This time it's AJAX and Web services.
It's just another tool, folks, nothing more. Use it where it's APPROPRIATE. Google Maps is not an enterprise app with two thousand screen forms, thousands of database tables running on Oracle, and ten thousand procedures.
I think the only reason Java applets left a bad taste was because the platform was not mature when people started trying to use it for everything - and on much slower hardware (not to mention slower network connections) than we have today, too.
The same thing could happen to AJAX and Web services - people pushing it before it's well-structured and complete enough to handle real-world application needs and the underlying Internet speed (read: 10-100Mbps to the home that's already there to the corporate desktop) is there.
Google Maps may be a nice hack, but it's not the same as doing an enterprise-level app in terms of complexity. Maps does one thing and one thing only - extract info and show you maps with minimal user interaction and minimal data capture and vetting.
It's not yet certain that something with 2,000 screen forms and thousands of database tables and requiring thousands of procedures would work as well in a browser environment. I'm not saying it can't, I just haven't seen any proof yet.
People in IT have a tendency to grab every buzzword that comes down the pike and treat it as the answer to all their problems. It never is.
And you can do the same in Java - run stuff on the server side as well as run perfectly complementary stuff on the client side - since they're both in the same language.
I think the important point is that Java has a HUGE amount of classes that handle things that AJAX and Web technologies are still struggling to deal with.
While there are tons of JavaScripts around to do things as well, they don't hang together as well as Java classes based on the foundation classes.
The only possible negative for Java is the steep learning curve to take FULL advantage of all the stuff that's out there.
As an example of this sort of problem, I'm doing stuff with Oracle Forms Developer at the moment. This thing is a nightmare - tons of features and new terminology. You need to read at least a couple 800-page books to get any kind of handle on it. And the user interface is horrible. And it's virtually impossible to document anything except by dumping the whole form into a SEVEN MEGABYTE TEXT FILE which you can't print or do anything else to except search it for text strings!
I often think about my small exposure to Java so far and how it seems it would be far easier to grab some Java classes and create a form-based app which would be a HELL of a lot easier to document than this Oracle crap. But you still need to spend some time studying AWT and Swing as well as JDBC to get a handle on all the issues.
Still, for someone who's done it, Java-based apps have GOT to be easier that Oracle Forms-based apps.
And I suspect that will apply to AJAX apps as well until some organization and structure are applied to the AJAX tools and concepts.
Maybe I could get a date!
"video of a remotely controlled woman"
Would that be Katherine Harris, by any chance? Remotely controlled from Republican National Committee headquarters?
"Thompson, now a director of Applied Digital Solutions, the company that makes the chips"
If you can invade Iraq so your cronies in Halliburton can clean up, why not force everybody in the world to have a chip in your arm so your company can clean up?
Is there any doubt that the cyberpunk sci-fi vision of corporations running the world is now a reality?
What we need now are the cyberpunks, shadowrunners, and heavily armed street gangs to keep the corps honest - or dead.
Yup - that's pretty much the process I use for cleaning client machines.
The only problem is when the client machine is so hosed you can't run anything without booting from a CD using Bart's PE or Windoes Ultimate Boot CD. I usually have to try that first, running Ad-Aware from Bart's to get enough spyware off that I can then boot the machine and install the rest of the anti-spyware stuff and run it.
If necessary, I boot into Safe Mode as well and run a scan.
Neither of those catches running processes, though, so a scan with the machine in normal mode is usually necessary.
I intend to help with that problem by setting up a system to boot Windows 98 from a USB HD and running from there if I can. I specifically want Windows 98 because some client machines are too weak in RAM or CPU to boot Windows XP from Bart's.
After I clean off the majority of spyware with Ad-Aware and Spybot Search and Destroy, I run HijackThis, a full AV scan AND a trojan scan using TDS-3. That leaves only the crap that NONE of these things can get rid of, which entails manually inspecting running processes, identifying the crap and killing them and then removing their keys from the Registry manually - usually only a couple malware need this treatment.
When I get done, the system is clean. Then I install SpywareBlaster and Kerio Personal Firewall, and tell the client to use Firefox and Thunderbird from now on, and keep the spyware stuff updated and run it once a week and just default to removing everything they find (except HijackThis - I don't let the client run that.)
Haven't had to do a reinstall yet, but I wouldn't be surprised if it has to be done on somebody's machine sooner or later. Some of these people have literally hundreds or even thousands of spyware and dozens of - up to over a hundred - trojans.
According to an article I read, if you try to view video media on a monitor that doesn't have DRM enabled, Windows Vista will actually DEGRADE the image so you can't see it (or see it properly, I forget which.)
This is pathetic - but good. Microsoft is dooming itself with this nonsense.
Vista is the death knell of Microsoft. When this POS comes out, the entire IT and consumer market is going to say, "Oh, hell no!" and switch to Mac and Linux (mostly Linux.)
This is what happens when you have a greedy, unprincipled asshole running your company - it self-destructs sooner or later.
when the schools actually DO purchase 300,000 Linux installs, let us know THEN.
This is a pilot project.
"currently US genre writers are mirroring the 'deep trauma' that 9/11 wrought on America."
Bullshit.
They're mirroring the "deep trauma" that being unable to write anything except "Lord of the Rings" ripoffs has inflicted them with.
Enough of this fantasy shit.
If you can't write worth a shit because somebody flew a plane into a building and killed a couple thousand people, then you couldn't write for shit before.
Am I supposed to claim I'm "traumatized" because 150,000 people got killed in the tsunami, or 100,000 Iraqi civilians got blown up by our illustrious warriors (over 1,800 of whom in turn got their asses waxed)? Is that why I can't make a buck?
Where is Thomas Harris - who can write wonderful satire about psychiatrists and cops urning into cannibals - when we need him?
Somebody needs to write a "Catch-22" or "M.A.S.H." or "Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal" about Iraq and/or Afghanistan.
I guess I need to get cracking on my "Transhuman" series of novels - more rabid sex and merciless gunning down of monkeys than anybody has seen since the Marquis de Sade...
I got your "deep trauma" right here, assholes.
It's been common knowledge for some time now that Monad would NOT be included in Vista, but either in a later version or in Exchange Server or some other Microsoft server product.
All this article says is that some bozo at Microsoft has said the same thing vis-a-vis the virus concepts being reported in some hacker zines (see related
This article should be treated as nothing more than an "update" of the Monad virus article - and not much of an update at that given it's old news.
Well, I found the article and I WOULD have included it here, but the FUCKING LAME-ASS /. LAMENESS FILTER WON'T LET ME!
/. uses is telling me the CODE lines are too fucking SHORT!
The stupid POS
Morons!
WARNING: The below zine will show up on your virus scans with a half dozen viruses and a trojan. Apparently there are numerous virus samples in the zine's files which come RAR'd. You have been warned!
So go here here to download the zine that had the article in it.
More importantly,
So if someone replies to my post tomorrow, and I reply to it after I've replied to some other reply to another of my posts, I still have to wait - even though nobody is posting any more to the particular discussion.
So, in effect, answering your "/. email" basically requires waiting two minutes between each reply.
Which is a PITA,
Since nobody is posting to the discussion a day later, why the hell does it matter how frequently one replies to replies to one's own posts from that discussion?
Start coding,
Proof that we evolved from monkeys...
Or at least proof that we are TRYING to evolve from monkeys - and not succeeding.
The Christians to the disassemblers!
Check out the over 1-mile Bluetooth detection page. They got a Bluetooth connection over a mile away.
They also can run Bluetooth snarfing from a Bluetooth-enabled cell phone.
Lots of fun Bluetooth stuff there. These guys are brilliant.
I know what a fucking cookie is, okay?
And they can be used to track you between sites, so they ARE spyware in that sense, even if they're not executable, so they go if my antispyware tool sees them.
Carrier pigeons have been bred which fly at Mach 3 and carry twenty pounds of letters!
Seriously, what's the range of 802.11n - ten inches?
What's the medical risk of the 1 mega-watt this is likely to require to get any range at this speed?
When it gets close to ratification - and Belkin is making a "pre-" version available at CompUSA - let me know.
Useless troll.
Nothing you've said is even remotely accurate.
You and you alone are THE greatest expert on spyware. NOT.
Fuck off, moron.
Humph, I didn't get the message. Somebody must have submitted it to
Anyway, this is not encouraging:
The source says Microsoft will likely consider buying other companies with behavioral targeting technology, but no one is "officially in scope at this time."
BTW, I love the euphemism for spyware - "behavioral targeting technology."
Jesus, you are utterly clueless.
I don't know which SPECIFIC sites intall spyware because I DON'T GET SPYWARE because I use Firefox (not to mention three anti-spyware products.) And I don't ask my clients specifically which sites they got the spyware from, obviously.
Going to the main Nike site is braindead - major commercial corporations don't do spyware (for the most part, anyway) because it's too legally dangerous for them. It's the sleazier commercial sites that do this. I had a client whose kids constantly go to sports and sports shoes sites; I had another client whose husband constantly goes to "fantasy sports" sites. Neither of these people use P2P systems. Both were riddled with spyware. And they were on DIALUP, not even DSL or cable.
Spyware PROMPTS TO INSTALL? Are you fucking nuts? The few times I've had spyware, it NEVER prompted me for anything. Sure, SOME of them do because they're offering some crappy piece of "consumer" software to cover the spyware. But many don't - they just need an IE browser not set to disable ActiveX controls and they're off to the races. And most users don't have a clue about ActiveX.
You're an idiot. Try doing a Google on spyware and visiting some of the antispyware sites that list spyware before you run your mouth any more. Everybody on
Or just a troll.
"During this time 11,000 successful pings were made."
They were unwittingly actually connected to the McDonald's access point next door.
Now they have to do it all over again.